Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Lo Schiavo was among the most enthusiastic instruments of the Fascist repression. In 1930, one of the mobsters’ defence lawyers, Giuseppe Mario Puglia, published an essay claiming that the mafia was not a secret criminal society. Indeed mafiosi were not even criminals. Rather the mafioso was an incorrigible individualist, ‘a man who instinctively refuses to recognise anyone superior to his own ego’. What is more, the mafioso was a typical Sicilian, because this exaggerated pride and self-containment had seeped into the island’s psyche as a form of resistance to centuries of foreign invasions. Therefore to repress the mafia was inevitably to repress the Sicilian people. Puglia’s essay, in short, reads like the words uttered by countless other mafia apologists since the 1870s, and indeed like the words Lo Schiavo would later put into the mouth of mafia boss Turi Passalacqua in In the Name of the Law.

  Lo Schiavo refused to let the defence lawyer’s claims pass unchallenged, responding to them in a pamphlet that is a little masterpiece of controlled anger. The mafia, Lo Schiavo argued, was ‘a criminal system’; it was not just illegal, it was an ‘anti-legal organism whose only aim was getting rich by illicit means’.

  Lo Schiavo went on to give the mafia lawyer a lesson in mafia history. He explained how the Sicilian mafia first emerged from the political violence of the Risorgimento, when patriotic conspirators found the revolutionary muscle they required among the fearsome wardens, overseers and bravoes of the Sicilian countryside. From those conspirators, the criminals learned to organise themselves like the Freemasons. Lo Schiavo had also delved into the economic history of the mafia. His research showed that it had first grown rich by establishing protection rackets over the valuable lemon and orange groves surrounding Palermo.

  Fear of the mafia pervaded society in western Sicily, reaching right up into parliament. Anything unfavourable said about the mafia would inevitably reach hostile ears. And that, argued Lo Schiavo, is why so many Sicilians could be found spouting the same drivel, along the lines that: ‘the mafia does not exist; at worst, mafiosi are local problem solvers who embody the typically Sicilian pride and truculence towards authority’. Even the landowners who were, in theory, the mafia’s most prominent victims, had bought into this fiction and espoused the belief that the mafia was somehow good for social peace, for law and order. On the contrary, Lo Schiavo asserted, the mafia was ‘a programme to exploit and persecute honest members of society while hiding behind a reputation for courage and welfare that was only so much lying garbage’.

  So, in the early 1930s, the man who would later inspire In the Name of the Law was an anti-mafia crusader with the bravery to engage in a public spat with the crime bosses’ own defence lawyers. By 1948, Lo Schiavo had become one of the country’s most senior magistrates, a prosecutor at the Supreme Court in Rome. In that year he published his novel, which was immediately adapted into a film.

  Both novel and film tell a simple story about a young magistrate, Guido Schiavi, who is posted to a remote town deep in the arid badlands of the Sicilian interior. In this lawless place, the mafia rules unchecked, and runs a protection racket over the estate of the local landowner. When bandits kill one of the landowner’s men, capomafia Turi Passalacqua hunts them down: the bandits are trussed up and tossed into a dried-up well, or simply shot-gunned in the back in a mountain gully.

  The young magistrate investigates this series of slayings, but he is frozen out by the terrified townspeople. When the courageous Schiavi confronts capomafia Turi Passalacqua on his white mare, he resists the boss’s attempts to win him over to the mafia’s way of thinking (the scene with which I began this chapter).

  Eventually, Schiavi narrowly survives an assassination attempt. Resigned to defeat, he decides to abandon his post. But just as he is about to board the train to safety, he learns that his only friend in town, an honest seventeen-year-old boy called Paolino, has been murdered by a renegade mafioso. Indignant and distraught, Schiavi strides back into town. He rings the church bells to summon the whole population into the piazza for a do-or-die engagement. The state and the mafia are set to have their high noon—in what turns into perhaps the most bizarre climactic scene in the long history of gangster movies.

  The church bell clangs out a continuous, urgent summons across the dust of the piazza, over the sun-weathered rooftops, and out into the surrounding fields. We are shown the unemployed sulphur miners, sitting and dozing in a line at the kerb, who raise their heads to listen. The camera then cuts to the women, young and old, who come out into the street wrapped in their black shawls; and then to the elegant club where the mayor and his cronies forget their game of baccarat and turn towards the source of the alarm.

  Without discussion, everyone ups and walks towards the bells. The mule drivers scarcely pause to tether their beasts. Labourers drop their mattocks in the furrows. Soon streams of people are converging on the piazza. Led by Turi Passalacqua on his white mare, even the mafiosi–accompanied as always by the rhythmical trumpets of their signature theme–gallop into town to join the crowd gathering before the church steps.

  There are loud murmurs of anxious curiosity as the young magistrate Guido Schiavi emerges from the church doors. Silence falls as he begins his address:

  Now that you are all here, I declare that this is a trial. Half an hour ago we found Paolino’s body, blasted by a double-barrelled shotgun. He was seventeen years old and he had never harmed anyone.

  Schiavi scans the crowd as he speaks, seeking to look directly into the eyes of every person there. Then, staring with still greater intensity, the magistrate hails the group of stony-faced men on horseback.

  You there, men of the mafia. And you, Turi Passalacqua. Your bloody and ferocious brand of justice only punishes those who give you offence, and only protects the men who carry out your verdicts.

  At these words, one of the mafiosi levels his shotgun at the magistrate. But with a firm but gentle hand his boss pushes the barrels downwards again.

  Guido Schiavi does not hesitate for an instant:

  And you chose to put your brand of justice before the true law–the only law that allows us to live alongside our neighbours without tearing one another to pieces like wild beasts.

  Isn’t that true, massaro Passalacqua?

  Everyone in the piazza cranes to see how the capomafia will react to this breathtaking challenge. A subtle change in his expression shows that he is troubled: his habitual composure is gone, replaced by solemnity. Silhouetted once more against the sky, Turi Passalacqua begins to make a speech of history-making gravity:

  Those were tough words, magistrate. Until now, no one had ever spoken such tough words to us.

  But I say that your words were also just. My people and I did not come into town today to listen to your speech . . . But listening to you made me think of my son, and made me think that I would be proud to hear him talk in that way.

  So I say to my friends that in this town the time has come to change course and go back within the law. Perhaps everyone here did kill Paolino. But only one person pulled the trigger. So I hereby hand him over to you so that he may be judged according to the state’s law.

  He turns and, with a mere flick of his head, gives the order to his crew. Amid clattering hooves, the Men of Honour corner the murderer before he can run away: it is the renegade mafioso, Francesco Messana.

  The magistrate advances, flanked by two Carabinieri:

  Francesco Messana, you are under arrest, in the name of the law.

  The murderer is led away. The magistrate then turns, and with a look of glowing appreciation, gazes up towards the mafia boss to utter the film’s final words:

  In the name of the law!

  And with that we cut to yet another shot of Turi Passalacqua silhouetted against the sky. His serenity has returned, and the suggestion of a smile plays on his lips. The mafia cavalcade music rises yet again. As the credits begin to roll, the boss turns his white mare to lead the mafiosi in their heroic gallop towards the sunset.

  Mafios
i are not criminals, In the Name of the Law tells us. Turi Passalacqua is a man devoted to living by a code of honour that, in its own primitive way, is as admirable a law as the one Magistrate Guido Schiavi is trying to uphold. If only mafiosi like him are addressed in the appropriately firm tone of voice, they will become bringers of peace and order. The mafia finds its true calling at the end of the film, the best way to live out its deeply held values: it becomes an auxiliary police force. If Sicily were really Arizona, and In the Name of the Law were really a cowboy film, then we would not know which of the two men should wear the sheriff’s badge.

  In the Name of the Law is not about the mafia; rather it is mafia propaganda, a cunning and stylish variant of the kind of ‘lying garbage’ upon which Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo had poured vitriol in the 1930s. In the 1940s, each day of chaos in Sicily was adding to a mountain of proof that mafiosi were anything but friends to the rule of law. Yet this was precisely the time that Lo Schiavo’s views on the mafia underwent an astonishing reversal. Lo Schiavo became a convert to the mafia’s lies.

  Now, anyone inclined to be generous to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo might suppose that Pietro Germi’s movie had twisted the meaning of the magistrate’s novel by grafting a happy Hollywood ending onto a grimmer Sicilian tale. And it is certainly true that, in 1948, it would have been tough to create a genuinely realistic portrayal of the mafia. Rumours circulated during production that, when director Pietro Germi first arrived in Sicily, he was approached by several senior mafiosi who would not allow him to begin work until they had approved the screenplay. After the movie’s release, during a press conference, a young Sicilian man in the audience argued with Germi about how true to life the Men of Honour in the film were: was the director not aware that the real mafia had killed dozens of people? Germi could only give a lame reply, ‘So did you expect me to meet the same end?’

  But the local difficulties that Germi faced in Sicily actually do nothing to excuse Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo. Indeed, his novel is even more pro-mafia than In the Name of the Law. In Lo Schiavo’s tale, mafia boss Turi Passalacqua is ‘the very personification of wisdom, prudence and calm . . . pot-bellied, shaven-headed and smiling like a benevolent Buddha’.

  The conclusion is unavoidable: a magistrate who was a scourge of the mafia in the early 1930s was, by the mid-1940s, an enthusiastic mouthpiece for mystifications that could easily have been voiced by the mafia’s slyest advocates. Once Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo had been scornful about the way ‘literature and drama glorified the figure of the mafioso’. Now he was himself writing fiction that did precisely that.

  But why? What caused Lo Schiavo to upend his views so shamelessly?

  Lo Schiavo was a conservative whose political sympathies had made him a supporter of Mussolini’s regime in the 1920s and 1930s. After the Liberation, his conservatism turned him into a friend of the most murderous criminals on the island. The magistrate-novelist’s bizarre rewriting of the mafia records in Local Prosecutor’s Office testified to an unspoken and profoundly cynical belief: better the mafia than the Communists. This simple axiom was enough to drive Lo Schiavo to forget his own hard-won knowledge about Sicily’s ‘criminal system’, and to relinquish the faith in the rule of law that was the grounding ethos of his calling as a magistrate.

  Turi Passalacqua, the heroic bandit chieftain of In the Name of the Law, was laughably unrealistic. But, in a peculiarly Sicilian paradox, he was also horribly true to life. In the Name of the Law may have been a cinematic fantasy, but it nonetheless glorified a very real deal between the mafia and the state in the founding years of the Italian Republic.

  Sicily is a land of strange alliances: between the landed aristocracy and gangland in the Separatist movement, for example. And once Separatism had gone into decline, the political and criminal pressures of 1946–8 created a still stranger convergence of interests: between conservatives, the mafia and the police. It is that alliance that is celebrated by In the Name of the Law, through the fictional figure of mafia boss Turi Passalacqua, sermonising from the saddle of his thoroughbred white mare.

  In 1946, the police and Carabinieri were warning the government in Rome that they would need high-level support to defeat the mafia, because the mafia itself had so many friends among the Sicilian elite—friends it helped at election time by hustling votes. But these warnings were ignored. It may have been that conservative politicians in Rome were daunted by the prospect of taking on the ruling class of an island whose loyalty to Italy was questionable, but whose conservatism was beyond doubt. Or more cynically still, they may have reasoned that the mafia’s ground-level terror campaign against the left-wing peasant movement was actually rather useful. So they told the police and Carabinieri in Sicily to forget the mafia (to forget the real cause of the crime emergency, in other words) and put the fight against banditry at the top of their agenda.

  The police knew that to fight banditry they would need help—help from mafiosi prepared to supply inside information on the movement of the bands. For their part, mafiosi appreciated that farming bandits was not a long-term business. So when outlaws outlived their usefulness, mafiosi would betray them to the law in order to win friends in high places. Thus was the old tradition of co-managing crime revived in the Republican era.

  Through numerous occult channels, the help from the mafia that the police needed was soon forthcoming. In the latter months of 1946, the bandits who had made Sicily so lawless since the Allied invasion in 1943 were rapidly eliminated. Until this point, police patrols had ranged across the wilds of western Sicily without ever catching a bandit gang. Now they mysteriously stumbled across their targets and killed or captured them. More frequently outlaw chiefs would be served up already dead. Just like the bandits of In the Name of the Law, they would be trussed up and tossed into a dried-up well, or simply shotgunned in the back in a mountain gully.

  So at the dawning of Italy’s democracy, the mafia was exactly what it had always been. It was exactly what the anti-mafia magistrate Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo and any number of police and Carabinieri had described it as: a secret society of murderous criminals bent on getting rich by illegal means, a force for murder, arson, kidnapping and mayhem.

  Yet at the same time, give or take a little literary licence, the mafia was also exactly what the novelist Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo and the film director Pietro Germi portrayed it as: an auxiliary police force, and a preserver of the political status quo on a troubled island. Without ceasing to be the leaders of a ‘criminal system’, the smartest mafia bosses were dressing up in the costume that conservatives wanted them to wear. Hoisting themselves into the saddles of their imaginary white mares, mafiosi were slaughtering bandits who had become politically inconvenient, or cutting down peasant militants who refused to understand the way things worked on Sicily. And of course, most of the mafia’s post-war political murders went unsolved—with the aid of the law.

  The Cold War’s first major electoral battle in Italy was the general election of 18 April 1948. One notorious election poster displayed the faces of Spencer Tracy, Rita Hayworth, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Tyrone Power, and proclaimed that ‘Hollywood’s stars are lining up against Communism’. But it was predominantly the Marshall Plan—America’s huge programme of economic aid for Italy—that ensured that the Partito Comunista Italiano and its allies were defeated. The PCI remained in opposition in parliament; it would stay there for another half a century. The election’s victors, the Christian Democrats (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), went into government—where they too would stay for the next half a century. Like trenches hacked into tundra, the battle-lines of Cold War Italian politics were now frozen in place.

  A few weeks after that epoch-making general election, the most senior law enforcement officer in Sicily reported that, ‘The mafia has never been as powerful and organised as it is today.’ Nobody took any notice.

  The Communist Party and its allies were the only ones not prepared to forget. In Rome, they did their best to den
ounce the Christian Democrat tolerance for the mafia in Sicily. Left-wing MPs pointed out how DC politicians bestowed favours on mafia bosses, and used them as electoral agents. Such protests would continue for the next forty years. But the PCI never had the support to form a government; it was unelectable, and therefore impotent. In June 1949, just a few weeks after In the Name of the Law was released in Italian cinemas, Interior Minister Mario Scelba addressed the Senate. Scelba had access to all that the police knew about the mafia in Sicily. But he scoffed at Communist concerns about organised crime, and gave a homespun lecture about what mafia really meant to Sicilians like him:

  If a buxom girl walks past, a Sicilian will tell you that she is a mafiosa girl. If a boy is advanced for his age, a Sicilian will tell you that he is mafioso. People talk about the mafia flavoured with every possible sauce, and it seems to me that they are exaggerating.

  What Scelba meant was that the mafia, or better the typically Sicilian quality known as ‘mafiosity’, was as much a part of the island’s life as cannoli and cassata—and just as harmless. The world should just forget about this mafia thing, whatever it was, and busy itself with more serious problems.

  For over forty years after the establishment of the Republic, Scelba’s party, the DC, provided the mafias with their most reliable political friends. But the DC was by no means a mere mafia front. In fact it was a huge and hybrid political beast. Its supporters included northerners and southerners, cardinals and capitalists, civil servants and shopkeepers, bankers and peasant families whose entire wealth was a little plot of land. All that this heterogeneous electorate had in common was a fear of Communism.

  Friends in politics. Mafioso Giuseppe Genco Russo stands as a Christian Democrat (DC) candidate (late 1950s).

  In Sicily and the South, the DC encountered a class of political leader who had dominated politics since long before Fascism: the grandees. The typical southern grandee was a landowner or lawyer who was often personally wealthy, but invariably richer still in contacts with the Church and government. Patronage was the method: converting public resources (salaries, contracts, state credit, licences . . . or just help in cutting through the dense undergrowth of regulations) into private booty to be handed out to a train of family and followers. Through patronage, the grandees digested the anonymous structures of government and spun them out into a web of favours. Mafiosi were the grandees’ natural allies. The best that can be said of the DC’s relationship with the mafias is that the party was too fragmented and faction-ridden to ever confront and isolate the grandees.