Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Don Calò’s next step was a more important one – so important indeed that Sicily has not yet recovered from its far-reaching effects. He compiled a list of suitable candidates for the office of mayor throughout the whole of western Sicily, and this too was found acceptable. Many of these partisans of democracy, as Don Calò pointed out, had spent long years in confinement. No one seems to have had time to investigate his claim that his nominees had suffered for their political ideals, rather than for crimes ranging from armed train-robbery to multiple homicide. In a matter of days, half the towns in Sicily had mayors who were either members of the Mafia or were at least closely associated with it. One or two had been bandits into the bargain. A noteworthy appointment was that of Serafino Di Peri to be Mayor of Bolognetta near Palermo. Di Peri’s first task as head of the municipality was to form a band of 109 desperadoes, who thereafter terrorised the outskirts of Palermo for the next five years. Thus for the first time, due to the military authorities’ complete incomprehension of the situation in which they found themselves, the Mafia ruled directly, instead of, as in the past, exerting its influence indirectly through the control of corrupt public officials. Within days the maleficent genius of Don Calò had been able to repair much of the damage done to the ‘Honoured Society’ in the twenty years of Fascism. Now, in the absence of a constituted government, the Mafia chieftains had become the real rulers of Sicily.

  A ceremony with a strangely archaic flavour brought this period to a close. A whispered suggestion to the Allies set the ball rolling with a gift to the municipality of Villalba of two Fiat trucks and a tractor taken from an abandoned Italian depot. The trucks were usefully employed in the black market, and the tractor was sold for scrap iron. Following this lead, presents for Don Calò began to pour in from all over Sicily. Every notability contributed to this avalanche of flour, cheeses, pasta, and stolen military equipment. Under the innocent gaze of the Allied Military Government a spontaneous revival took place of an ancient custom dating back to the days of Roger the Norman. Don Calò had become, for the second time in his life, a feudal ruler, and these gifts were the tributes of vassals who accepted him as their overlord.

  * * *

  Strangely, not all those who came to press Don Calò’s hand or to present their ceremonial offering were sycophants. Aside from the natural awe they felt for him, many people genuinely admired the head of the Mafia, and even those he had victimised sometimes seemed unable to repress their grudging esteem. Don Calò was a natural artist in the control of men, through their affections as well as through their fears. His immense dignity, the Johnsonian pithiness of his rare but massive utterances, the majestic finality of his opinions, appealed to the human search for leadership. Even men of education and intellectuals admitted their susceptibility to a strange power of attraction not uncommonly possessed by a capo-Mafia, and certainly highly evident in Don Calò. The Mayor of Villalba would have shaken his head at the puerility of anyone who could really have believed he was a criminal. He almost certainly saw himself as the head of a self-created aristocracy of the intellect, to which had been committed, as if by some divine right, the arcana of government. He believed in himself as only a mafioso could and with the stolid unwavering faith of religious fanaticism – and almost as though by telepathic contact, he forced those around him to become believers too. Don Calò knew that only he, the inspired realist in command of the Mafia, could rule Sicily as it should be ruled, and had anyone dared to oppose this assumption – which he would never have bothered to claim in so many words – he would have pointed to the total ruin Mussolini had left behind after a mere twenty years of Fascist rather than Mafia rule. Such mafiosi of the old school were only criminals in the eyes of the law and of abstract justice – and in a more confused and unfocused way in those of the peasantry they exploited. To the rest of the community they were ‘men of respect’, and of sincere if inscrutable purpose.

  A conversation fifteen years later between a newspaperman and Don Calò’s chauffeur, after the old capo-Mafia’s death, illuminated a curious facet of his remarkable character.

  ‘Did Don Calò pay you well?’

  ‘He never gave me a lira.’

  ‘You mean you never had any wages? In that case, how did you live?’

  ‘I suppose you might say I robbed him. I used to tell him we needed a new set of tyres for the car. Or maybe it was petrol or oil. Once I told him we had to have a new engine. I just put the money in my pocket. He never said a word.’

  ‘But didn’t he realise what was happening all the time?’

  ‘Of course he did. Nothing ever got past him. Don Calò knew everything that was going on. He just wanted it that way. He never gave me any wages, so I cheated him and he pretended not to notice it. That was the way he wanted it.’

  2

  THE WORD MAFIA probably derives from the identical word in Arabic and means ‘place of refuge’. As such, it no doubt recalls the predicament of the relatively civilised Saracens after the conquest of Sicily by the Normans in the eleventh century. The Arabs had introduced smallholdings and scientific irrigation. Their rule by comparison with anything the island had known before (or since) was mild and beneficent. Had they remained, there is no reason why the prosperity and civilisation of Sicily should not have equalled that of Spain, but the Normans dislodged them and plunged the country back into the polar night of feudalism. Most of the Arab smallholders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia’.

  These are the dry bones of probability as unearthed by the historians. But scratch below the surface and the evidence of an even earlier origin comes to light. One discovers archaic – even Bronze Age – ingredients in the seemingly down-to-earth, devil-take-the-hindmost materialism of the men of the ‘Honoured Society’. In times of crisis, men like Don Calogero Vizzini tend sometimes to behave not so much like big-scale black-market operators of the twentieth century as like the personae of a Greek tragedy, whose motives are often so remote from our own as to be incomprehensible. This – from our viewpoint – irrational element in Mafia behaviour comes out strongly in the great feud between the Barbaccia and Lorello families of Godrano, near Palermo.

  The two families quarrelled back in 1918 over the possession of a wood. This in itself is perhaps significant, because the wood, standing unaccountably intact in a country denuded of trees since Roman times, may have survived through its supposed possession of sacred or magic attributes. The dispute over this ragged patch of stunted oaks and thorny underbrush cost these two families dozens of lives, until, it is supposed, Don Calò Vizzini – that great advocate of Mafia unity – intervened in 1942 to help repair the quarrel. Following age-old custom, the thing now would have been to arrange a marriage between two suitable members of the opposing families. This could not be done through lack of mutually acceptable candidates, and in 1944 the war flared up again with the commission by the Lorellos of what to the men of honour is considered the most odious of all crimes: Francisco Barbaccia, head of his family, was kidnapped and never seen again. It is at this point that the archaic component of the Mafia mentality – its utter separation from the outlook of the ordinary criminal of modern times – is apparent. The killing of Barbaccia was bad enough, but the final offence – held to be ten times more execrable than the killing itself – was the concealment of the body so that vengeance could not be ritually sworn ‘in the presence of the corpse’. By 1960, nearly one-tenth of the population of Godrano had become casualties as the feud developed and spread, the latest victim – in the absence of eligible adults – being a boy of twelve.

  The Mafia stands outside Christian morality, but the uncorrupted form of the Mafia found in feudal Sicily has an iron morality of its own. No mafioso sees himself as a criminal, and the Mafia has always been the enemy of petty crime – and therefore, to a limited extent, the ally of the police, both in Sicily and the United States. The organisation demands blind obedience from its members, but will defend them in return thr
ough thick and thin – and in an alien land even extends its powerful protection to all immigrants of Sicilian birth. It can be regarded as a form of primitive human society that has somehow survived in the modern Western world; its cruel laws are those of tribesmen exposed to continual danger who can only hope to survive by submitting to the discipline of terrible chieftains. The capo-Mafia considers himself a lawgiver, concerned with the welfare of his people, and prides himself on watching over the advancement of deserving juniors in the organisation with the assiduousness of the master of novices of a religious order. In his own eyes, he never steals from the community, but he can see no objection to exploiting his power over men to enrich himself. To delinquents he awards only one punishment, usually after a warning: death. He is self-righteous and full of justifications. Listen to Nick Gentile, an American capo-Mafia, discussing the ethics of eliminating an uncontrollable young criminal: ‘There was nothing we could do with him, so he had to be rubbed out. We embalmed the body and sent it back to his people in Sicily. His folks were poor – they didn’t have anything – so we put a diamond ring on his finger, the way they’d see it as soon as they opened the casket. I guess we did the right thing. We figured otherwise he’d have finished up in the chair or the gas-chamber. That way they wouldn’t even have had his body back.’

  A primeval law transcends the bonds of blood-relationship, and Mafia honour demands precedence over ordinary human loyalties. Between 1872 and 1878 there took place in the neighbourhood of the towns of Bagheria and Monreale the most calamitous vendetta known to history. The two clans involved, the Fratuzzi and the Stoppaglieri, were both active in the same area, frequently treading on each other’s toes but on the whole successful in keeping on terms of limited hostility. In 1872 Giuseppe Lipari, a member of the Fratuzzi clan, committed what the Mafia calls infamità by denouncing a Stoppaglieri to the police. The Stoppaglieri sent an emissary to their opponents describing what had happened, and calling upon the Fratuzzi to observe Mafia law and execute Lipari. This the Fratuzzi failed to do, and the feud was on. Within a short time all the close relations of the original disputants had been killed, and as more remote degrees of kinship were forced into the vendetta, the whole population began a terror-stricken rummaging back into its ancestry in search of dangerous ties of blood. By 1878 a man might be approached by some enshrouded, tragic crone he had never seen before – the female head of one of the clans – who would inform him that he was now the surviving head of the Fratuzzi, or the Stoppaglieri, and that he must consider himself in a state of ritual vendetta with some cousin he had never seen or heard of and who might even have had the foresight to take refuge in Tunisia or the USA. A case occurred of a young boy being assisted to fulfil his ritual duty by an outsider, who charitably loaded his blunderbuss for him and carried it to the place where it had been decided to stage an ambush. By the time the feud ended, fear of involvement had brought about the depopulation of the countryside. The survivors of the two clans were reconciled in characteristic fashion. A survivor of the Fratuzzi, Salvatore D’Amico, who had lost all his family, went to the police and told all he knew of the malfeasances of the Stoppaglieri. It was an act tantamount to suicide, of a man tired of life, as D’Amico made quite clear in his statement. This time the Fratuzzi did the right thing. They killed their clan member, and to make sure of his recognition, his body was displayed prominently, with an amulet of the kind worn by the Fratuzzi, made from a vestment stolen from an image of the Madonna, placed over each eye.

  There are mild and rustic men, goatherds and ploughmen, drawn without hope of escape into these ancient, tragic games whose rules were established perhaps before their ancestors reached the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1944 I was engaged in army duties in Naples which committed me to a number of lugubrious visits to the prison of Poggio Reale. There I was introduced by the head warder to a Sicilian, D’Agostino, who had committed five vendetta murders. The maximum sentence for an ‘honour’ killing in Italy is ten years, so that D’Agostino was serving a total of fifty years. He was put on display for the benefit of privileged visitors with what can only be described as a sort of modest pride. D’Agostino was treated with immense respect. He was the only prisoner, not excluding a general occupying a cell in Poggio Reale at that time, who was addressed in the third person singular, being given a courteous lei instead of the familiar and slightly contemptuous tu. D’Agostino was small, puzzled, and yet resigned. He was slightly under five feet in height, with tiny hands and feet and hardly more than the frame of a child. His crime had been committed with an axe – the tomahawk-like weapon that Prefect Mori, Mussolini’s destroyer of the Mafia, had permitted shepherds to keep – and he had wiped out a whole family. This was the end of a period of close confinement, and on the assumption that after three years the prisoner had come to a working arrangement with despair, the forty-seven years that remained would pass under a slightly relaxed prison régime. D’Agostino always expected to be asked whether he would commit his crime again could the clock be put back, and his reply was always the same: ‘Surely you don’t imagine I had any choice, one way or the other? Honour’s honour and a vendetta’s a vendetta. You might say that destiny put its big fat thumb in my neck and squashed me like a beetle.’ The warders nodded their sympathy and their agreement. That was the way it was.

  What would Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who established his image as a forward-looking man by making a pioneer trip in a balloon and was head of all the Mafia until his final arrest by Prefect Mori, have said to anyone who pointed out to him that the organisation he commanded was psychologically still entangled in the prehistory of humanity? The sophisticated Don Vito can hardly have realised, either, that Mafia symbolism – the system of graded warnings from the cutting down of a vine and the maiming of an ass or mule, to the depositing at a man’s door of his beheaded dog or a sheep with its throat cut – is shared with certain African tribes of the Republic of Mali. How strange, too, that the custom of vendetta of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily – whose peoples have presumably been separated for thousands of years – should be so similar in all its curious detail: the ritual denunciation of the slayer by the professional mourners at the funeral (ignorance of his identity will be feigned, if necessary, up till this point); the entrusting of the vendetta to the male nearest-of-kin by the senior female member of the household; the kissing, even the pretended sucking of the wounds, by close relations such as mother, wife or brother, followed by the spoken formula: ‘In this way may I drink the blood of the man who killed you’; the final consummation of the act of vengeance, which ideally should take place, after a period of ritual preparation, in full sunshine – an archaic blueprint for the mise-en-scène of High Noon.

  * * *

  The vendetta was the weapon ready to hand of the poor and otherwise defenceless in a society where law did not exist and justice meant the baron’s court and the baron’s torture chamber. Sicily – the America of the ancient world – has been a colony exploited by the use of slave labour, either openly or in a disguised form, for two thousand years. The Roman armies marched to the conquest of Gaul and Britain on bread made from corn grown by Sicilian slaves. When, with the fall of Rome, the Papacy took over the great Sicilian estates, it was the chain gangs of Sicilian peasant labourers that provided three-fourths of its wealth. Sicily was exploited by Norman, German, Frenchman, Aragonese, Spaniard, and finally the Bourbons, but nearly always from a distance. After the Germans there was no central government, no monarch, no court, no resident hierarchy. So long as the corn was shipped out of Sicilian ports each year, nothing else mattered. Defining the seemingly endless ice-age of feudalism in Sicily, Filangieri, the social historian, said that an overbearing despotism had grown up to separate the Crown from the people. As a result, Sicily was a political hermaphrodite, neither monarchy nor republic, ‘which suffered from all the dependency of the former, while lacking the advantages of a constitution, and all the turbulence of the latter, although deprived of its liberties’. />
  And then, just at the time when the first stirrings of the modern world were visible elsewhere in Europe, another tragic yoke was laid upon the Sicilian neck by the establishment of the Inquisition. And in Sicily, through the remoteness of the Crown, its effects were even more deadening than in Spain itself. More and more to the modern observer the Holy Office appears as a device concerned primarily with economic situations, and only secondarily with matters of faith. Drawing its revenues from heresy, it saw to it that heresy was abundant. In Spain heresy provided an excuse for the ruin and annihilation of a class of rich Christianised merchants of Jewish or Moorish origin. In Sicily its objectives were all-embracing, although vaguer. Heresy started as religious dissent, but as religious dissenters – understandably enough – were remarkably few, the Inquisition widened its scope to include a miscellany of bigamists, ‘philosophers’, usurers, sodomites, priests who married their concubines, and finally opponents of any kind, who automatically became classed as heretics. Membership of the Inquisition, like that of an exclusive club, was open only to the aristocracy, and in Sicily the barons enrolled themselves with enthusiasm as familiars. All convictions were accompanied by forfeiture of property, and the Inquisition gave no receipts. In procedural matters the scales were heavily weighted against those whose reputation for original thought or whose conspicuous possessions happened to attract the Holy Office’s attention. Arrests were made on suspicion, often as the result of anonymous denunciation. The accused was presumed guilty and the functions of prosecutor and judge were combined. Women, children and slaves could be called as witnesses for the prosecution, but not for the defence. Nor could the victim be allowed a lawyer to plead his case, as this would have been tantamount to opposing the Inquisition, and, as such, an act of heresy.