Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  In the last free election to be held in Italy before the installation of Fascism, the Mafia, departing from its usual practice of supporting the party most likely to succeed and then getting a stranglehold on it, had decided on a two-way bet. There had been a division of opinion on the Fascists’ chances of coming to power, so it was arranged that, with Mafia backing, an equal number of candidates from the democratic and Fascist lists should be returned to Parliament. Allegra had been flattered by the suggestion that he should stand as a democratic candidate, but to his mortification his candidature turned out to be a dummy one, and the full organisational support was given to his Fascist opponent who defeated him with an insultingly large majority.

  A worse blow to his prestige was to follow. A vacancy occurred for the post of medical superintendent of a group of hospitals, and Allegra applied to the counsellor of his particular ‘family’ to assist him in obtaining the appointment. He mentions this in his confession quite flatly, and with almost a kind of innocence. After all, it was taken for granted that such appointments went to the mafioso applicant. Unfortunately for Allegra, there happened to be a second man of honour who had his eye on this particular plum, and although Allegra says that his rival’s qualifications were faked to the extent that he did not even have a medical degree, he was senior to Allegra in the Mafia, so he got it.

  Allegra’s last exploit before he vanishes from sight is an exceptionally grubby one, but it illuminates the limbo into which Sicily fell after Mori had smashed the Mafia, but had failed to substitute law and order for the lopsided Roman peace imposed by the Honoured Society.

  The Mafia had never objected to banditry, but had kept it strictly under control, turning it on and off like a tap as Mafia strategy demanded – and, of course, sharing in the profits of the bandits. But the new crop of bandits – coming up like mushrooms in the compost of a social environment which Mussolini had left unchanged – were unmanageable in the Mafia’s punch-drunk condition.

  A bandit called Ponzio – a petty Giuliano of his day – was terrorising the countryside of Castelvetrano and had even begun to carry out his depredations in the doctor’s home town itself. He was a daring fellow, who went about armed to the teeth, and, surrounding himself with a gang of young ruffians, was ready to turn his hand to any form of criminality from sheep-stealing in the streets of Castelvetrano to kidnapping a carabinieri captain. This last achievement brought on unwelcome police reprisals. As Allegra puts it, ‘Ponzio was a grave nuisance to people’ – such as himself, he suggests – ‘who only asked to be allowed to live in peace.’

  Ponzio’s hide-out was in the neighbouring village of Ghibellina, and Allegra received a visit from a member of the Mafia ‘family’ of that area, who discussed the problem with him. The trouble was that Prefect Mori had left the ‘family’ so weakened that there was little it could do about Ponzio – at least without calling in help. The man from Ghibellina mentioned that they had even been bereft of their chief: ‘He had retired into private life.’ It seems, although Allegra does not say so, that a Mafia court was held in his clinic, at which Ponzio was formally sentenced to death. The question that arose was how the sentence was to be carried out.

  Mafia death sentences are normally executed only by the very lowest grades of probationer-members of the association – the picciotti (boys) – who gain the ‘respect’ requisite to their advancement in the society by offering their services for such unpleasant jobs. When no picciotto is at hand to kill for honour’s sake, the Mafia casts around to find a sicario, a hired killer who is a specialist in the use of the sawn-off shotgun, known as the lupara. In this case a difficulty arose because Ponzio would normally be in the company of his henchmen, thus making him a difficult and risky target. One of the Ghibellina members had a bright idea. He knew of just the man for the job, a certain Gandolfo, a close friend of Ponzio’s, who might be persuaded, for a price, to lead him into a trap.

  Gandolfo was called to the clinic and the proposition put to him. Allegra says he seemed very angry at first, but – although Allegra does not say this – pressure must have been brought to bear, because the next day he agreed. Allegra set out for Ghibellina in his Fiat Topolino, with Gandolfo and two other doctors – who were probably brought along as components of a prefabricated alibi – and the lupara wedged uncomfortably behind the knees of the two men squatting in the back. At Ghibellina, Gandolfo was left to do his work, while Allegra and his friends called on a patient. Later Gandolfo was picked up again on the outskirts of the village, and Allegra learned, to his anger and disappointment, that nothing had happened. Gandolfo made lame excuses for not having kept his promise, but to Allegra it was clearly a case of cold feet.

  It took another week’s work on Gandolfo before it seemed quite certain that he had finally swallowed his scruples. To use a Mafia technical expression, ‘the spur was applied’. This time, surrounded in Allegra’s clinic by the men of honour of Castelvetrano and Ghibellina, Gandolfo was compelled to swear to carry through his mission. In what is described with macabre understatement as the ‘usual little speech’, Allegra explained to him what happened to those who failed in their obligations to the Mafia. Then the question of the thirty pieces of silver came up again. The Mafia ‘brothers’ assured Gandolfo that he would be found a job for his pains, and thus be given the means of starting a new life. This time the assassin saw that there was no escape, and he went off to Ghibellina for his last meeting with his friend.

  ‘I never saw him again,’ Allegra says. He adds: ‘Things had reached such a pitch with the Ponzio nuisance that had we not been able to make this arrangement, it might even have meant breaking the association’s rules and turning him over to the police.’ Rarely can the mentality of the Mafia have been exhibited so effectively in a single sentence.

  6

  VILLALBA, classic capital of the Mafia’s state-within-a-state, turns out to be a small bleached town, carved from the bone of its own landscape. In winter, rancid water from the cold rains lies in its cobbled streets, and in summer an ochreous bloom of dust covers the stumpy buildings. A few wilted hollyhocks, self-sown in the angles of walls, curl down like flower-decorated shepherds’ crooks. Piglets and chickens scuffle among the black refuse piled up in the side-streets. Many of the houses on the outskirts of the town are bassi, Neapolitan style, consisting of a single windowless room into which light and air enter only through the door, and in which the members of the family sleep in bunks. Blue paint daubed on door jambs and on window surrounds – when windows exist – testifies that the Moors were here, blue being sacred, the colour of heaven. The name of the feudal estate Villalba was built to serve – Miccichè – derives from the Arabic Mikiken. The town has a saint with a grimacing, anguished face, padlocked into a shrine like an ancient strongbox. In its heyday, twenty years ago, Villalba had a population of about six thousand, a figure now halved by emigration.

  The feudal lands that surround Villalba, rolling away to the horizon in all directions, seem un-European. Central Asia must be like this, one imagines. There are no boundaries, hedges, walls, trees, windmills, buildings of any kind. The landscape, green for the weeks of spring and thereafter whitish under the sun, heaves gently like a carpet with the wind under it. Distantly to the north the mountains of Cammarata are traced on the sky, with a faint scar-tissue of forest. Miccichè is soundless, apart from the dry chatter of bells echoed off some bony hillside and the high-pitched, creaking squeal of falcons. It is a place, too, of unbroken distances, and the peasants who pass down into these empty, vitreous immensities to their work seem to vanish as soon as they leave the town. This feudal estate is dedicated to the cultivation of the lentil.

  Danilo Dolci, in his book Waste, which is a closely documented study of the social conditions of western Sicily, gives some idea of what it was like to live in such a town five or six years ago. He found that the day labourers composing the majority of the working population were employed on average for ninety days a year. The average pay wa
s 600 lire (seven shillings) per day. Day labourers offered themselves for hire at a kind of human labour auction held each day before dawn, when, as work might be available for only one man out of three, the peasants were encouraged to bid against each other to bring down their terms. Children as young as eight years of age were taken on as labourers for as little as 150 lire a day, and their competition in the labour market further undercut prices. Men who went home without work had to face scolding wives and weeping children. Enormous families were the order. Elsewhere, one reads of visits paid by priests to women who fail to produce a child a year to ask them ‘why they are denying souls to God’.

  Probing into the threadbare medieval fabric, Dolci describes the uses of the leech, when the cost of calling in a doctor – even if one were to be had – would be unthinkable. After employment the leeches are thriftily ‘milked’ of the human blood they have gorged, and kept for use again, only being discarded in cases of typhus. The typical small town or village community includes individuals driven by necessity to practise strange livelihoods: gatherers of seasonal foodstuffs such as frogs, snails and wild asparagus. An inevitable ingredient is the big-town usurer’s agent, who is of necessity an ex-gaolbird, chosen for his known capacity for violence to intimidate defaulters who fall behind in their one hundred per cent per annum interest payments. Above all, indispensable to this small rustic community, is the strega, or witch, who arranges marriages, concocts potions, dabbles a little in black magic, clears up skin conditions, and casts out devils. These witches, since the Inquisition has ceased its drownings and defenestrations, flourish mightily. Since Danilo Dolci carried out his study, a sharp decline in population due to emigration has modified this picture, but the basic misery is little changed.

  In 1944, when Don Calogero Vizzini had held the office of mayor for eighteen months, the situation in Villalba was desperate indeed. There were many urgent tasks to distract the Mayor from interesting himself in the welfare of his community. Surrounded by his cohort of tried ‘anti-Fascists’, all of them armed by special licence of the Allied Military Government, Don Calò dedicated himself to a flourishing black market in olive oil. The old interfering police chief of Villalba, Maresciallo Purpi, had been killed off, and his successor knowing what was good for his health, Don Calò’s operations could be conducted without concealment. Moreover, the Allies had facilitated his work almost as though the creation of an impregnable black market had been their first consideration after completing their occupation of Sicily.

  One of AMGOT’s first measures was the freezing of all prices at the level existing when Military Government took over. The measure was unrealistic, because concurrently the lira was devalued to a quarter of its original rate of exchange against the pound and the dollar, and Sicily was flooded with special occupational currency. It became impossible for a citizen, however good his intentions, to avoid dealings with the black market, for the simple reason that the ‘white’ market ceased to exist. But from Don Calò’s point of view the valuable fact was that it existed as a legal fiction, and this permitted him when buying his oil to extort it from its producers at the fixed price of 25 lire per litre, while his selling price on the Naples black market was 500 lire. When it is said that in this way the Mayor of Villalba squeezed Sicily dry of its olive oil, it should be remembered that bread and olive oil were always the staple diet of the Italian peasantry, and that the usual supplement of pasta was at that time unprocurable.

  A government official was sent down in an attempt to persuade Don Calò to fall into line. He explained that the legal position was that all oil must go into the government pool.

  ‘The legal position, the laws? … What’s all this about laws? What laws?’ Don Calò finally asked.

  ‘The laws passed by the government,’ the official explained.

  ‘But that’s just the point, what government?’

  The official found this obtuseness puzzling in a man of Don Calò’s reputation for shrewdness. ‘The Central Government. The Government of Rome.’

  Don Calò accompanied his retort, as he often did, with an emphatic ejaculation of spittle. ‘Let the Romans keep the laws they make. In this part of the world we have our own way of doing things.’

  Don Calò received the loyalist co-operation in these manoeuvres from his friends in AMGOT, who supplied all the passes necessary for his caravans of trucks to travel without impediment up and down the roads of Sicily and Italy. At about that time AMGOT in Sicily had fallen under the sway of its unofficial adviser, Vito Genovese, an American gangster – later named as the head of the Mafia offshoot, Cosa Nostra – who had disappeared after his indictment on a charge of murder and turned up in Italy. Don Calò found Genovese most accommodating. From AMGOT came all the petrol he required, and sometimes, when he ran short of transport for an exceptionally large shipment, his friends helped out with a military vehicle or two. In 1944 I happened to be in the town of Benevento through which Don Calò’s black market caravans were obliged to pass on their way northwards, and although at times there were more trucks loaded with Don Calò’s oil on the roads of southern Italy than there were army vehicles, there was nothing that could be done to put a stop to this situation. All papers were always in order. Don Calò’s friends were powerful, and the only possibility of remonstrance was when one of Don Calò’s drivers, or the escorts provided for his merchandise, sometimes got tired of questions and reached for his gun or a hand-grenade.

  * * *

  In those days Don Calò was dividing his time between the black market at Villalba and certain important and most secret discussions that took him frequently to Palermo. At Palermo he occupied his old suite in the Albergo Sole, a remarkable privilege considering that the hotel had been requisitioned by the military authorities, and, with the exception of the Mayor of Villalba, was off-limits to all civilians. The fact is that Don Calò and certain other leading citizens had been called in by the Allied authorities to discuss the future of Sicily. Don Calò and his friends, all of them members of the Sicilian aristocracy, wanted to detach Sicily from Italy. They were divided in their opinion over the form the separate Sicilian state should ideally assume. Some of the nobles were in favour of choosing one of their number to rule as king in the good old-fashioned way, without any nonsense about a parliament. The more moderate voices, supported by the hard-headed Don Calò and the Mafia, were in favour of the country’s becoming either a British colony or an American state. All were agreed on the necessity of severing the link with Rome. What was then called ‘the wind from the North’, a gusty political mistral from the great industrial towns of Lombardy, had begun to blow. The Allies had allowed political parties to register themselves, and Italy north of Rome had immediately and disturbingly swung to the left. Don Calò and his allies remembered, too, that almost every new government from Garibaldi’s time on had promised to do something about turning over the uncultivated estates to the Sicilian peasants, and there was always the chance that the one about to be elected in Rome might do just this. The last upheaval in Sicily had followed the end of the First World War when peasants who had fought in the army and rubbed elbows with enlightened northern Italians showed little inclination to buckle down again to the old servitude of the feudal estate. Now, with the forming of the first trade unions in Mafia areas, the outcry for land was louder than ever before and the would-be Separatists, led by the Mafia, asked for the chance to deal with the situation in their own way and without bureaucratic interference from Rome.

  There is no doubt that, with their eye on a war situation that was still far from resolved, the Allies encouraged the Separatists – at least for a time. Moreover, Intelligence reports upon the strength of the emergent Italian Communist Party already suggested that this was likely to be the strongest in Western Europe, and that a Socialist-Communist coalition in Italy, should this ever happen, would be able to take over power. Some Allied political observers said quite openly that if when election time came Italy should take a disastrous plu
nge to the left, it might not be at all a bad thing to know that Sicily, with its excellent naval bases, remained in friendly hands. It is highly unlikely that proof will ever be forthcoming that part of the deal put through with the good offices of Lucky Luciano included a promise of all-out backing for the Separatists (and therefore the Mafia), but this has been widely alleged in the Italian and Sicilian press.

  In that troublesome part of the war’s aftermath that was the other side of the bright coin of Don Calò’s thriving black market, the threat offered by trade unionism may have seemed the most dangerous. In his handling of a prickly situation Don Calò showed, at first, his usual mental pliability. Trade unions were all part of the disease that young Sicilian peasants had picked up by contagion while in the Services. Like a practised judo exponent, Don Calò relaxed his muscles and rolled on the mat with his opponent, while preparing a better hold. To the amazement of the other politically less gifted Mafia leaders, he offered to permit, first the establishment of a trade union centre in Villalba, and later, even, a Communist Party headquarters. The only stipulation he made in each case was that the activities of both these groups should be directed by one of his lieutenants. When both these offers, to his great astonishment, were turned down, he realised – probably with real regret – that a shooting war was inevitable.

  After twenty years the gag of Fascism had been removed, and thirty-two political parties, great and small, were almost hysterically preparing for the elections. Some idea of the political temperature of the time can be gathered from the fact that when Don Vanni Sacco, the terrible capo-Mafia of Camporeale, who was subsequently converted to the Christian Democrat cause, announced that largely from sentimental reasons and as a tribute to his father’s memory he proposed to see to it that his constituency was represented by a Liberal candidate, the parish priest of Camporeale denounced him from the pulpit for atheism. Don Vanni replied in a letter apparently courteous but so charged with obscure Mafia symbolism that the priest had to have it interpreted by an expert before realising that it contained a threat to hang him from his own church tower. Sicilians were confidently expected to vote en masse for the parties of extreme reaction: the Monarchists or the Separatists. The Christian Democrat party had not yet been tailored to fit the needs of the alliance between the Church and the bouncing new capitalism that would shortly be born.