by John Dickie
A letter soon came back from the prison island: Paolo Agostino wrote that the thieves were Bruno, Rocco, and Francescantonio Romeo—the men behind the ‘invisible boss’ who were now the most influential picciotti in Cirella.
Naively, the doctor passed Paolo Agostino’s letter on to the Carabinieri. Someone from inside the Carabinieri—whether a spy or an agent provocateur—told the three Romeo brothers that Paolo Agostino had tried to get them into trouble. Even before this tip-off arrived, the Romeos knew that Agostino would pose a threat to them once he was released from Ustica. So they swiftly issued a warning by burning down Maria Marvelli’s house and stealing thirty of her goats.
As Agostino’s return from Ustica neared, the Romeo brothers began to plan for more drastic action to defend their position. They introduced a motion with the Honoured Society to kill Maria Marvelli’s husband; in support of it, they cited the impeccable legal logic that he had broken the code of omertà by telling the doctor who had stolen the yearling bull.
After two years away, Paolo Agostino finally arrived home on 2 March 1936. He was immediately summoned to a meeting of the Honoured Society: how could he justify his breach of the rules? His self-defence was a desperate show of chutzpah. He said that he no longer feared anyone in Cirella, because on Ustica he had found ‘new and more powerful friendships by joining a mighty association that was represented there’.
What was this ‘mighty association’ on Ustica? A bluff? Or was Paolo Agostino hinting that he had become a member of the Sicilian mafia since last he saw Aspromonte? Ustica was more than usually full of Sicilian mafiosi at the time. Whether Agostino was bluffing or not, the Romeo brothers became even more determined to eliminate him. When Paolo Agostino flagrantly insulted the Honoured Society’s protocols by failing to turn up for a second hearing into his case, the Romeos got their motion through, and a death sentence against Agostino was passed. The problem now for the Romeo brothers became a practical rather than a political one: how to carry out the hit—a task that would require both a carefully prepared trap and a narrative to bait it.
While waiting for their opportunity, the Romeo brothers had to content themselves with insults. They broke Paolo Agostino’s gramophone at a gangland celebration to mark the engagement of his stepson, Francesco Polito. (After turning down the boss’s daughter, Maria Marvelli’s boy had finally found a suitable girl from a suitably delinquent family.) Only the presence of so many witnesses stopped the gramophone incident degenerating into a bloodbath.
If Paolo Agostino did not realise before that his time was running out, he certainly realised now. He became gloomy. Among friends he referred to himself wistfully as ‘a bird just passing through life’. He refused to spank his children, saying that he did not want to leave them with bad memories of him. His despondency was apparent to Maria Marvelli, who took charge of security at home, forcing her husband to sleep elsewhere when danger threatened.
The first attempt on Agostino’s life involved the staged theft of his ox. The Romeo brothers sent men to steal the animal, making plenty of noise as they did, in the hope that Agostino would rush out of his house. If all went well, he could then be shot down, as if by anonymous robbers. But in the event it was the redoubtable Maria Marvelli who came out of the house, gun in hand, and chased off the would-be assassins.
A far more rigorously conceived plot would be needed to do away with Paolo Agostino. The Romeo brothers called a meeting of senior mafiosi in an abandoned shack on 30 April 1936. After much discussion their plan was agreed and a ten-man firing party picked to execute it. The dummy don, Francesco Macrì, volunteered to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Romeo brothers in the upcoming action; evidently he wanted to earn the lofty rank that he had so recently been given. But the crucial figure in the scheme, the man set up to betray Paolo Agostino to his enemies, was to be Nicola Pollifroni—the man who had a ‘plausible’ affair with Maria Marvelli. Pollifroni was made to kneel before his brethren, with his arms crossed flat on his chest, and swear to help kill his friend.
On 2 May Pollifroni invited Paolo Agostino along on an expedition to raid some beehives, thereby insulting their owner with whom Pollifroni had an old beef. No member of the Honoured Society could refuse such an invitation. The raid was a success, and Pollifroni and Agostino returned along an isolated path, carrying pots of fragrant honey. The route took them through a narrow pass between two giant boulders covered in gorse. The judge would subsequently explain that the path reminded him of the ever-narrowing gulleys in an abattoir floor that isolate a single pig, forcing it to walk between two walls until it can no longer turn round or go back. By the time the butcher’s knife comes into view, there is no longer any escape. The pass had a name locally: Agonia (‘Agony’).
Just as the two honey thieves were entering the pass, Pollifroni stopped. He had to take a pee. Agostino should walk on ahead, into the narrow walls of the pass.
The last thing Agostino ever heard came from somewhere on the boulder above him: a strangled cry of warning, both sudden and familiar. Agostino’s stepson Francesco Polito was being forced to watch the murder, a dagger pressed to his throat. He had the courage and desperation to cry out a warning before a large hand was clamped over his mouth, and a shotgun chorus drowned out all other sound.
What gives an undeniably Fascist flavour to the story of the Cirella mafia was what happened to the Romeo brothers, the dummy don Francesco Macrì, and the others once they were arrested. Under interrogation, as their blood oaths dictated, they denied any knowledge of the criminal association they belonged to. So they were punched and whipped and beaten with anything that came to hand, like a heavy ruler and a blotter. They were forced to drink a clay pot full of piss. To muffle their screams, their own socks were stuffed in their mouths and secured with their own belts. Then they were pushed to the floor, and their legs chained up on chairs so that the soles of their feet could be beaten and their toenails pulled out. (Later, some would have amputations as a result.) Their wounds were doused in salt and vinegar. The most uncooperative among them were electrocuted: wires attached to a car battery were applied to their inner thighs, leaving them barely conscious. They were then hurled into damp, filthy cells in Locri jail with no food or water. All requests for medical visits were denied.
One by one, they confessed. Every time they were called on to confirm their confessions, the beatings began again. The men of Cirella’s Honoured Society had found their own place called Agony.
Only in court could the allegation of police violence finally emerge. When the judge heard of the horrors he treated them as just that: mere allegation. Somehow, he deemed it no job of his to weigh up whether what the defendants alleged was true. Not even, it seems, by checking on their amputated toes. But the sheer detail of the judge’s description, and the squirming of his logic, tell us he knew what had really happened: the accused before him had been brutally tortured by the Carabinieri.
Of course the judge had plenty of other evidence to draw on: the testimonies of Maria Marvelli and her son Francesco Polito; the suspects’ utterly unconvincing alibis; and the jumble of patently false testimonies, mostly from their womenfolk, that the mafiosi had marshalled in their defence. The prosecution could also point out that the dummy don Francesco Macrì kept a list of the Honoured Society’s members in a suitcase, and wrote down the names of the ten men chosen to kill Paolo Agostino.
The judge concluded that all of the evidence confirmed the confessions, ‘without any regard to the way in which the suspects’ initial statements were gathered’. So he felt able to ‘put his conscience to rest’, and take no further action about a blindingly clear case of police brutality. Torture or no torture, the verdict against the Lads with Attitude in Cirella was guilty.
Everything within the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state. Fascism’s totalitarian ideology clearly gave the cops a licence to go far beyond any acceptable means of interrogation. No doubt the torture used here was also deploye
d elsewhere against mafiosi and camorristi. But it is rare to find such graphic and unambiguous evidence of it as there is in the trial papers from Cirella. More often, false claims about police brutality were made by mobsters. Fascism’s battle with organised crime could be a very dirty fight indeed, but quite how frequently the authorities really abused their power is anyone’s guess.
Maria Marvelli’s story is but an isolated tableau of the piecemeal changes happening in Calabrian organised crime: the marriage politics that the picciotti were learning, and the new power behind the scenes that some women gained as a result. Marvelli was, without doubt, a loser: her house had been torched; her husband murdered. She lost her son too: despite his confession, the boy who had once been the most eligible criminal batchelor in Cirella was sentenced to six years and eight months under new, tougher Fascist laws against criminal associations. It is not known whether he was among the men who had their toenails extracted by the Carabinieri; it is not known what happened to him in prison.
But Maria Marvelli did at least have something to put in the scales to counterbalance her losses. The satisfaction of vendetta, for one thing. And even some money: she sued the defendants on her children’s behalf, and won 26,000 lire—roughly equal to the value of her house.
We do not know what happened to Maria Marvelli later. She is like thousands of other faceless mafia women in history, in that we can only wonder what became of her after the court records fall silent. If she did go back to Cirella, she would certainly have found a village still in the grip of the picciotteria. The same judge who was too timid to confront the Carabinieri about their repeated assaults on the prisoners was also too timid to pass a harsh verdict on the mafia: he acquitted 104 of the picciotti whose names appeared on the dummy don’s list, on the less than convincing grounds that ‘public rumour’ was the only evidence against them. What this amounted to saying was that everyone in Cirella had seen these men strutting around the square; everyone knew at the very least that they were in cahoots and up to no good. They were visible, in other words. But even under Fascism, visibility alone was not enough to convict.
30
CAMPANIA: The Fascist Vito Genovese
ON 8 JULY 1938 THE NEAPOLITAN DAILY IL MATTINO PUBLISHED THE FOLLOWING short notice.
FASCIST NEWSBOARD
The Fascist Vito Genovese, enlisted in the New York branch of the Fascist Party and currently resident in Naples, has donated 10,000 lire. The Roccarainola branch received 5,000 lire as a contribution to the cost of the land required to build the local party headquarters. The other 5,000 lire is for building Nola’s Heliotherapy Centre.
Vito Genovese would later reportedly subsidise the building of Nola’s Fascist party HQ to the tune of $25,000 (in 1930s values). Visitors to Nola—and there are not many—can still see the building in piazza Giordano Bruno: a white block, long since stripped of its Mussolinian badges, it houses a local branch of the University of Naples, the Faculty of Law in fact.
Genovese was born in Risigliano, near Nola, on 21 November 1897. We do not know whether his family had any connections with the Campanian underworld before they emigrated to the United States in 1912. Nonetheless, New York offered bounteous opportunities for violent young immigrants. Vito rose rapidly through the ranks of gangland, alongside his friend, the Sicilian-born Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. A now famous mug shot of Genovese from this period shows a bug-eyed enforcer with a skewed crest of black hair.
In 1936, Lucky Luciano received a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence on compulsory prostitution charges. (Which of course he would have avoided had he followed the conventions in force in the mafia’s homeland.) Vito Genovese was scheduled to take over from Luciano at the apex of the New York mafia, an organisation still dominated by Sicilians. But he was also due to face a murder charge, and was afraid that it might result in comparably harsh treatment. So in 1937 he fled to a gilded exile in the land of his birth.
In Italy, Vito Genovese’s generosity, like his Fascism, were self-interested. Strong rumours suggest that he was busy shipping narcotics back to the United States. With the profits, Genovese made his contribution to the Fascist architectural legacy in Campania and lavishly entertained both Mussolini and Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister. It is only logical to assume that Genovese had excellent top-level contacts in Nola too.
Evidently, in Campania Fascism lacked the integrity and the attention span needed to follow up on Major Anceschi’s recommendations following his operations in the Mazzoni in 1926–28. One way or another, in Campania Fascism lapsed from the crusading zeal of the Ascension Day speech into a quiet political accommodation with gangsters. As later events would prove, Vito Genovese was now part of a flourishing criminal landscape.
‘The Fascist Vito Genovese’, the New York boss who enjoyed a profitable homecoming in Campania in the 1930s and 1940s.
31
SICILY: The slimy octopus
WE HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME THAT CESARE MORI’S BOAST THAT HE HAD BEATEN the mafia would turn out hollow, and that the Mori Operation was a failure in the long-term. After all, once Fascism fell and democracy was restored, Sicily’s notorious criminal fraternity began a new phase of its history that would prove more arrogant and bloodthirsty than any yet seen. A great deal of energy has been devoted to dishing out responsibility for the mafia’s revival after the Second World War. Conspiracy theorists said it was all the Americans’ fault: the mafia returned with the Allied invasion in 1943. Pessimists put the blame on Italian democracy: without a dictator in charge, the country was just not capable of staging a thoroughgoing repression of organised crime.
Whoever was to blame for the subsequent revival in the mafia’s fortunes, most memories of the campaign to eradicate it were more or less in tune with Fascism’s own trumpet calls. Even some mafiosi recalled the alarums of the late 1920s with a shudder. One Man of Honour, despite being too young to remember the Mori Operation, said in 1986 that
The music changed [under Fascism]. Mafiosi had a hard life . . . After the war the mafia hardly existed anymore. The Sicilian Families had all been broken up. The mafia was like a plant they don’t grow anymore.
So, until recently, the historical memory of the Iron Prefect’s titanic campaign of repression in Sicily was fundamentally united: even if the mafia had not been destroyed, it had at least bowed its head before the thudding might of the Fascist state.
Until recently. Until 2007, that is, when Italy’s leading historian of the mafia unearthed a startling report that had lain forgotten in the Palermo State Archive. Because of that report—many hundreds of pages long if one includes its 228 appendices—the story of Fascism’s ‘last struggle’ with the mafia must now be completely rewritten. Some of the best young historians in Sicily are busy rewriting it. The Mori Operation, it turns out, involved the most elaborate lie in the history of organised crime.
The report dates from July 1938, and it addresses the state of law and order in Sicily since the last big mafia trial concluded late in 1932. It had no less than forty-eight authors, all of them members of a special combined force of Carabinieri and policemen known by the unwieldy title of the Royal General Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily—the Inspectorate, for short. And the majority of its members were Sicilians, to judge by their surnames.
The report begins as follows.
Despite repeated waves of vigorous measures taken by the police and judiciary [during the Mori Operation], the criminal organisation known in Sicily and elsewhere by the vague name of ‘mafia’ has endured; it has never really ceased to exist. All that happened is that there were a few pauses, creating the impression that everything was calm . . . It was believed—and people who were in bad faith endeavoured to make everyone believe—that the mafia had been totally eradicated. But all of that was nothing more than a cunning and sophisticated manoeuvre designed by the mafia’s many managers—the ones who had succeeded in escaping or remaining above suspicion during the repression
. Their main aim was to deceive the authorities and soften up so-called public opinion so that they could operate with ever greater freedom and perversity.
The mafia had sold Fascism an extravagant dummy, the Inspectorate claimed. Some bosses had used the very force and propagandistic éclat of the Mori Operation to make believe that they had gone away. The mafia had its own propaganda agenda—to appear beaten—and its message was broadcast by the Fascist regime’s obliging megaphones. The Palermo capi may just as well have ghostwritten Cesare Mori’s The Last Struggle with the Mafia.
The story of the 1938 report dates back to 1933, well within a year of the last Mori trial, when there was a crime wave so overwhelming as to make it obvious that the police structures put in place by the Iron Prefect were no longer fit for purpose. The police and Carabinieri were reorganised into an elite force to combat it: the Royal General Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily. Thus the Fascist state started the struggle with the mafia all over again. Only this time the national and international public that had lapped up reports of the Iron Prefect’s heroics were not allowed to know anything about what was going on.
The men of the Inspectorate picked up again where Mori’s police had left off in 1929. As they did, they slowly assembled proof that the mafia across western Sicily was more organised than anyone except perhaps Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi would ever have dared imagine: the ‘slimy octopus’, they called it.
