Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Some of the rackets sound a trifle fantastic, such as the tax imposed on lovers in Don Vito’s day when they went to carry on their courtship in the Spanish fashion with a girl who sat behind a barred window, and had to pay a Mafia concessionaire ‘the price of a candle’ for his protection.

  More fantastic was the racket – or rather the interlacing series of rackets – built up around religious devotion. The Mafia – always ready to ally itself with the Church as a matter of expediency, in the manner of Don Calogero Vizzini – moved cautiously at first. By the middle of the last century it controlled the confraternities devoted to the cults of the various patron saints, and more important, it directed the standing committees of the cults. It was the standing committees that raised the funds required for the saint’s annual feast day; for the processions, the illuminations, and the firework displays. Later a Mafia trust interested itself in the manufacture of devotional candles, and obtained a virtual monopoly. In nearly all Sicilian churches the seats are private property, and it was the Mafia that hired the seats. The Mafia took over the manufacture of religious objects of all kinds, and, being on the whole free of sentimental prejudices, attacked the problems of manufacture and distribution in an entirely dispassionate manner. With the advance of the twentieth century and the streamlining of production, its factories produced statues of saints and madonnas and religious medallions by the million. It employed the most persuasive travelling salesmen, appointed the most go-ahead retail firms as exclusive stockists, awarded bonuses and special quantity discounts, and supplied tasteful window displays to the shops in the bigger cities. Many of the faithful liked to have their religious medallions blessed by a bishop, and the Mafia had no objection to arranging that – and blessed they were, in basketfuls and by the thousand.

  Back in the last century the Mafia had turned its attention to the lucrative business of manufacturing relics. The process was a simple one, requiring only the co-operation of the sacred object’s custodian – in most cases a village priest. The relic was usually some portion of the body of a saint or a lock of his hair, or occasionally a more fanciful object of devotion such as a miniature urn full of the ashes of Abraham, or a bone from one of the fishes multiplied by Christ in the miracle of the loaves and fishes. All that was necessary to create a second relic having a large portion of the virtue of the original was to bring the new object into contact with it. Although the authorities of the Church frown upon the practice, relics were and are mass-produced by the thousand in this way. The manufacturing process is simplified by the existence of a tremendous number and diversity of saintly remnants upon which local cults are centred. In the course of a recent study of Mafia penetration of devotional practices, the Italian publication Le Ore carried out, with remarkable results, a brief numerical survey of the most important of such relics. The paper discovered the existence of seventeen arms attributed to St Andrew, thirteen to St Stephen, twelve to St Philip, and ten each to St Vincent and St Tecla. Sixty fingers belonging to St John the Baptist were in circulation, and forty heads were revered as that of St Julian.

  The Mafia seems to have decided that there were profitable pickings to be made in this direction shortly after 1870, when, as a measure of reform, the Italian Government decided to close down a number of religious institutions and the relics they contained were dispersed. Most of these were bought up by the Mafia. A number of extra copies of each were made up from materials furnished by an abandoned cemetery, and duplicates of the original seals of authenticity attached by the Congregation of Rites of the Vatican were assiduously faked. A vigorous overseas market for such spurious articles of devotion – particularly in the Americas – quickly developed. Le Ore discovered that in 1962 alone minor sales to the United States made by the organisation they had investigated included twenty suits of armour of Joan of Arc, twenty monastic gowns worn by St Francis of Assisi, fifty rosaries alleged to have belonged to Bernadette, and – as a triumphant culmination of Mafia salesmanship – the wand carried by Moses when he led the Children of Israel into the Promised Land.

  Where there was no saint, no holy relic, and consequently no flocking of pilgrims to be fleeced, the Mafia did its best with artificial substitutes. A well-publicised ‘miracle’, such as the apparition of the Madonna to a child, filled the specially-chartered buses, the shops, and the hotels, and produced an upswing – however short-lived – in the sales-curve for religious merchandise. Thus it was with Padre Pio, the ‘stigmatised’ monk of San Giovanni Rotondo, whose cult was thought important enough to justify the transfer of a Mafia commando to the Italian mainland itself.

  The appearance of a monk whose followers claimed that his hands miraculously reproduced Christ’s wounds from the Cross’s nails was enough to provoke a delirium of commercial speculation. Within a few years the remote hamlet near Foggia had turned into a sort of embryo Lourdes, with half a dozen prosperous hotels, innumerable boarding-houses, and a hospital with a helicopter landing-stage on its roof, to which rich patients were brought to be exposed to the saintly influence. Books were sold by the hundred thousand, describing Padre Pio’s miracles, and records by the million of the father saying mass or at prayer. The photographs of the monk displaying his wounds would not have convinced the hardened sceptic, as the negative had obviously been subjected to crude retouching and the prints daubed all over with a red dye, but they were happily bought by the pilgrims who poured into San Giovanni Rotondo. Such was the clamour to be confessed by Padre Pio (ninety-five per cent of the applicants were women), that confessions had to be booked, and the waiting-list grew so long that pilgrims had to spend days and even weeks in the town’s expensive hotels awaiting their turn. By arrangement with the Mafia, however, and on payment of a substantial sum, the queue could be jumped. Mafia agents waited, too, at the bus terminals, ready to carry off new arrivals to be confessed on the spot for sums varying between two and five thousand lire by false Padre Pios who awaited their prey in hastily faked-up backstreet rooms. Most impudent of all was the sale of revolting relics of the monk’s ‘stigmata’ – hundreds of yards of blood-soaked bandages displayed on market stalls outside the convent. Even when in 1960 the newspapers published analyses showing the blood to be that of chickens, the sales did not slacken.

  It is this scene of the Mafia presiding over charlatans selling cock’s blood and amulets against the evil eye that reminds us how fully the wheel has turned. The Mafia that had come into being as the peasants’ refuge against the worst abuses of the Middle Ages now gleefully resuscitated all the bagful of medieval tricks to exploit the peasants’ ignorance. The Mafia that had fought feudalism, that had lain in wait on the moonless night for the baron no officer of the law could touch, now elected and manipulated politicians who would guarantee to fight for the survival of the feudal order. But far worse was to come under the absolute rule of Don Calogero Vizzini, General Mafia of Villalba, still known as ‘Il Buonanima – the Good Soul’ to the many thousands who cherish his memory. It was Don Calò whose hired killers silenced the voices of protest when the postwar democracy turned out to be a crueller fake than Fascism itself. And when the voices crying in the wilderness of the Sicilian feudal estates swelled into a furious chorus, it was Don Calò and his feudal allies who called in Giuliano, the cleverest and bloodiest bandit in Sicilian history, to fight their battles for them.

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  CALOGERO VIZZINI, the patriarch of Villalba, was born in 1877. His father was a peasant who had been sufficiently astute, as well as personable enough, to marry into a family very slightly more elevated than his own, although still far from middle-class. The Scarlatas owned a few square yards of land – a rare distinction in a feudal community composed almost entirely of day labourers and sharecroppers. They enjoyed, moreover, exceptional prestige in Villalba from the fact that a member of the family had risen to high eminence in the Church.

  In defining these matters of social prestige, it has to be remembered that life as lived by the citizens of Villalba is sing
ularly devoid of the incentives and the rewards one takes for granted in a modern community of its size. Most foreigners who have visited Sicily carry with them a mental picture of resorts such as Taormina whose sole purpose is the gratification of the foreign visitor, of the ancient towns of Catania or Syracusa, and of the oriental brilliance and colour of the landscapes squeezed between the volcano Etna’s huge paws of lava.

  The western Sicily that so few have seen is harsh, lacking in grace, and as utilitarian in its way as the Black Country of England. There are a hundred small and shabby towns like Villalba, possessing – like Villalba – no history, but only a few oppressive memories and nightmarish legends. Their purpose has been to breed and house the labour for the great feudal estates, and to condition the minds and subjugate the bodies of that labour. In such towns as Villalba there is an almost puritanical absence of any of the apparatus of pleasure. Even for the very rich, the only satisfaction is to be derived from the wielding of power. Here, in fact, the feudal order continues astonishingly after a thousand years, rather like a mammoth preserved in ice. The absentee landlord may still rule from his palace in Palermo, through his stewards and armed guards, but more commonly, he will have leased his estate for a number of years to a gabellotto – literally a tax collector – who is traditionally mafioso and will not work the land himself but parcel it out between sharecropping small farmers on the most extortionate terms. At the bottom of this social pyramid is the day labourer, to whom the sharecropper passes down as much as he can of his inevitable misery. The only escape for the exceptionally talented boy born into this class has always been the Church, whose intelligent policy it has been to refresh its blood by accepting recruits from all social levels. When a peasant boy is transformed into a priest his old playfellows salute him respectfully – ‘bacciamo le mani – we kiss your hands.’ He now shares in the clear-cut four-way division of power with the mayor of the town, the chief of police and the local head of the Mafia.

  Don Calò’s uncle had been such an exceptional peasant boy, and had had the advantage of not having to force his way out of one of the lowest social levels. He had shot up like a comet through the hierarchy of the Church to become Bishop of Muro Lucana. The rise of a cousin – also on the mother’s side – had been even more spectacular, for he became not only Bishop of Noto, but the founder of the monastic order of Maria Santissima del Carmelo. Don Calò’s own brother was parish priest of Villalba. As a compensation for his more modest achievement, he had been able to devote more time to side interests, such as running profitable agricultural co-operatives. Such a mingling of spiritual with mundane occupations causes no surprise in western Sicily, where, for example, in 1962 the parish priest of the island’s new Mafia capital, Mussomeli, was also chairman of the local credit bank.

  The young Calogero Vizzini himself was excluded from the beginning from this traditional outlet by his lack of patience with scholarship of any kind, and a sort of bluff and perverse insistence in remaining a down-to-earth countryman in his general demeanour. Don Calò never confused the shadow with the substance of power, and saw no reason why he should ever be compelled to speak an emasculated Italian rather than the vigorous local dialect. In any case he could never have tolerated the long years of submission to others that would have been demanded of him as a religious acolyte. As it was, he remained an illiterate all his life – a state of affairs from which he seemed to derive positive satisfaction, being inclined in company to boast that he could solve problems in his head faster than other men could on paper. Although an agnostic, like most elevated Mafia personalities, he agreed with Napoleon that religion was good for the people, and when at home he liked to see priests about the house.

  The young Calogero’s first trial of strength with the law came at the age of seventeen, and with it was laid the cornerstone of the edifice of ‘respect’, which is the prerequisite of high office in the Mafia. Although even in those days unsentimental in his make-up, he was involved in some way with the pretty daughter of the well-to-do Solazzo family of Villalba. It appears that marriage was never contemplated, but none the less, Calogero imposed his veto on the girl’s association with any other male. When a promising young official from the Magistrates’ Court of Villalba began to pay her attentions, Calogero Vizzini got together a juvenile gang, burst into the Solazzo home one evening, dragged the interloper outside, and beat him nearly to death. After this demonstration the Solazzo heiress was left in peace by all potential suitors, and remained a spinster until the end of her days. Calogero was arrested and placed on trial for criminal assault, but through the powerful intercession of his uncle, the bishop, the Solazzo family agreed to the whole thing’s being hushed up and the case was quashed.

  The following year Calogero Vizzini’s career began in earnest, with his choice for a livelihood of the exciting and dangerous profession of the cancia – which in turn led to his association with a remarkable man. Practicians of the cancia acted, in effect, as intermediaries between peasants who wanted their wheat milled into flour, and the mills, located for the most part in inaccessible places along the coast – in the case of Villalba, fifty miles away. The mills were controlled by an ancient, highly specialised and extremely ferocious branch of the Mafia, which refused to tolerate the building of any competitive mills outside its own area. To take charge of the grain and get it safely to its destination across roads unceasingly infested by bandits, called for more than usual toughness and resource. Calogero Vizzini tackled this problem by coming to an arrangement with the leading bandit of the day, Paolo Varsalona, whose hide-out was, as usual, in the nearby Cammarata mountains.

  Varsalona, who was Calogero’s mentor in his most impressionable years, was too intelligent a man to have become a bandit other than through circumstances that left him no option. In this case it was a scrupulous regard for the sacred law of vendetta, the fulfilment of which was regarded by most Sicilians of his day as almost an act of piety. Varsalona’s brother had been murdered, and at the trial a witness was produced who did his best to provide the men accused of the crime with an alibi. Varsalona felt obliged to blow his head off with a blunderbuss. Once an outlaw, and however reluctant Varsalona may have been to take to the maquis, he brought to the problems of banditry the clear vision and the fresh approach of the talented outsider. Up till this time classical Sicilian brigands had organised themselves in mounted bands. They cultivated a fierce appearance, wore outlandish clothing, carried obsolete but impressive blunderbusses, and, in short, placed great reliance on terror. It was the habit, for example, of one of Varsalona’s predecessors to ride at the head of his men, carrying by way of a personal standard a skull stuck on a pole. The psychological merits of these old-fashioned tactics were offset by considerable drawbacks. By their very size and the amount of disturbance they created such bands were relatively easy to locate, and were sooner or later destroyed in pitched battles with the police.

  The novel strategy invented by Varsalona – for which the bandit Giuliano was later to receive the credit – was simply to arrange for his men to be mobilised and demobilised at will. The Varsalona band went quietly to a planned operation on foot and in their workaday clothes, and when it was over they slipped just as quietly back to their everyday occupations, if they possessed any. With these will-o’-the-wisp tactics Varsalona was outstandingly successful over a number of years, and newspapers got into the habit of calling him ‘the bandit phenomenon’. Calogero’s admiration for him was such that, while carrying on with the bread-and-butter business of the cancia, he decided also to enrol in the Varsalona band. In 1902, after several valuable years of experience gained in this way, Calogero Vizzini found himself standing trial with the rest of the band – which had finally fallen into a trap set by the police – for ‘association to commit crime’. He was one of the few to be acquitted. This was the third time he had slipped through the fingers of the law, for at the age of twenty-one he had already been acquitted for ‘insufficiency of proof’ on a charge of
complicity in a murder.

  ‘Insufficiency of proof’ is the standard formula under which cases brought against mafiosi are eventually committed to oblivion, and nine times out of ten it covers up the fact that essential witnesses have suddenly decided to retract their damaging evidence. In this case, onlookers were quick to read the signs. It was probably at about this point in his career that Calogero was invited to become a member of the ‘Honoured Society’. By the very nature of that association – the most secret, the most powerful, and the most abiding of all secret societies – the fact that one is a member can never be admitted. At the most a mafioso may allow himself to be described as ‘a man of respect’, or ‘a friend of the friends’, or accept – as did Calogero Vizzini at the age of twenty-five – the title of Zu, meaning uncle. As for the Mafia, its pretensions were far too lofty to allow of the admission to its association of a common bandit, but its scrutineers may well have recognised in the new acolyte a refined and imaginative criminality that could be turned to the service of the organisation as a whole.

  By 1914, and the outbreak of the First World War, Zu Calò was the undisputed head of the Mafia of the Province of Caltanissetta, and as such, in Mafia jargon, a pezzo di novanta – a term of honour derived from an unwieldy but impressive piece of siege artillery of the epoch of Garibaldi, firing a shell 90 millimetres in diameter (hence the translated Americanism, ‘big shot’). World War One provided Zu Calò with endless new opportunities for self-enrichment. An Army Commission sent to Sicily and charged with the requisition of horses for the cavalry and artillery suggested to him three separate sources of profit. As a preliminary, Zu Calò came to terms with the members of the Commission, who were happy to delegate their responsibilities to him. Thereafter all the infirm and broken-winded nags of the island were collected and sold to the government. Zu Calò then collected a poll-tax on animals whose owners preferred them not to be requisitioned. The third string to his bow was the sale to the Commission of a large number of horses and mules that had been rustled for the occasion and bought from the experts who conducted such operations at the very low prices that stolen animals normally fetched, although resold to the Commission at the top of the market.