Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  In April 1947, Piana dei Greci went to the polls. Despite the appeals to their conscience, the ‘electoral spaghetti’, as it is called, the threats of punitive unemployment, and the gunmen lurking outside the polling stations, their hands on their pistol-butts, the Popular Front combination of the parties of the Left, Socialists, Communists and Independents, gained an astonishing and quite unexpected victory. But what the citizens of Piana dei Greci had really voted for was not Socialism nor Communism, since neither of these terms possessed any clear-cut meaning for them, but the right to wipe out the agonising spectacle of land being allowed to go to waste.

  * * *

  It had been the custom, never abandoned even in the severe days of the Mussolini dictatorship, for the people of Piana dei Greci to join forces with those of San Giuseppe Jato for the celebration of the First of May. San Giuseppe Jato is on the other side of a low mountain pass, about seven miles from Piana dei Greci, and the arrangement had always been for the festivities to take place on a conveniently open place at the top of the pass roughly equidistant from both towns. This spot had the additional advantage of being furnished with a large flat rock which served as a rostrum. As May 1st is observed in Sicily – apart from any political significance it possesses – as the religious feast of Santa Crocefisso, it was difficult for the Fascists to prohibit these gatherings, and the anti-Fascists of the two towns managed to work out a technique by which they could disparage the régime in their May Day speeches, not so much by direct attack, but by sly references.

  Often the serious purpose in demonstrations of this kind tends to be engulfed in the holiday spirit. A small responsible minority of males listen to the speeches, and do their best to shush the rest into a respectful silence, but for the majority – for the women, and for the innumerable children – this is the outing of the year, and to be enjoyed as such. Immense time and thought, therefore, go into the preparations; into the sprucing-up of holiday clothes, into the refurbishing of conveyances of all kinds, and into the baking of special feast-day bread and its moulding into decorative shapes. The men who possess them will ride their horses and mules with bells specially attached to their harness, and many of the families will travel in those extraordinary Sicilian carts, every foot of which is covered with paintings of the bloody passages of knight-errantry – scenes from the Epic of Roland, or the crusading adventures of Roger the Norman. When they arrive at their destination, stalls selling sweets will be set up, and there will almost certainly be a phrenologist, and a ballad-singer standing with his guitar in front of a kind of giant cartoon peopled with the stiff and grimacing figures his song will bring to life. For such an occasion the Sicilian is ready to allow himself to be coaxed out of his habit of silence into an almost noisy sociability. After the speechifying comes the picnic, the holiday bread, and the sausage, and the thick new wine. The women will publicly and proudly suckle their babies. There will be card-playing and perhaps horse-racing, and then naps in the shade, where it can be found, before starting home.

  This was more or less the way May Day at Portella della Ginestra had always gone, but this time the people of the two towns really had something to celebrate. Incredibly, they had beaten the seemingly invincible combination of landowner and Mafia, and now, their leaders assured them, there was no power on earth that could stop them from taking over the uncultivated land. True, the Mafia had issued its official and public warning at San Cipirrello, at an election meeting, when a mafioso called Celeste had said, ‘Vote for the Communists, and we’ll leave you without father or mother.’ But nothing had happened, and it was only later that a woman of San Giuseppe Jato remembered that early that same morning a rich citizen of the town had not been able to restrain himself from croaking at a flag-waving party of peasants as they passed, ‘Just you wait until you see how things go today.’

  But there had been no interference of any kind with the groups of peasants coming singing and playing their guitars up the winding mountain road to Portella, and by half past nine of that tranquil and brilliant morning over two thousand people, more than two-thirds of them children, had reached the open place where the celebrations would be held. At ten o’clock the first speaker, the secretary of the Popular Front, climbed on to the rock platform, and stood waiting while the stewards went off after a group of youths who were fooling with some horses, and others tried to rope in a number of women who were already boiling water for the pasta. Behind the speaker the floor of the pass sloped gently up to a white muddle of rocks topped by the ashen pinnacle of Pizzuta, and facing him, pencilled in on the grey heat mist, were the ridges and stark cliffs of the mountain Cumeta. By ten-fifteen a reasonable audience had been rounded up, the secretary held up his hand, and began his speech.

  At that moment a distant popping was heard, an unimportant sound described by those present as resembling that of rockets exploding at a great height. The speaker hesitated and turned his head, distracted, went on, and then stopped again. Francesco Liotta, a seventy-year-old peasant who was standing close to the rostrum, felt his wife tug his sleeve. ‘They’re letting off fireworks for the festa, Francesco,’ she said. But then, suddenly, she shrieked and fell down. At the same moment ten-year-old Rigotta Castrense held up her hand to her father, the fingers hanging by bloody ligaments, while her thirteen-year-old friend sprawled suddenly, the lower part of her face carried away. The speaker jumped down from the rostrum as the crowd broke into a babbling confusion, some parents throwing themselves across their children on the ground, others snatching them up to run, hardly knowing from what they were trying to escape, or where to run for shelter. Animals were screaming and kicking and spraying their blood over those who rushed to secure them. In this dolorous, keening commotion, Filippo di Salvo, pointing to something he saw on the slopes of Pizzuta, was caught in the mouth, and dropped dying. Beppino Muchetta, a boy who had been looking after the family cart, came with the news that the horse was dead. ‘We’ve something more than that to weep about, my boy,’ his father said, and then Beppino saw his mother and sister lying on the ground, his mother dead and the sister screaming in agony. Celestina Alotta, aged eleven, separated from her parents, was carried along on a human panic-wave almost to safety, when a random bullet tore through her back. A father with his dead son in his arms, running first one way and then the other, said years later, ‘All I wanted to do was to shield him from being hurt again. I didn’t realise that he was dead all the time.’ Bullets ricocheting off the rocks inflicted atrocious wounds. Sixteen years after the event a participant in this apocalyptic moment recalled the spectacle of an old man staggering past him, both hands pressed over his abdomen to push back the entrails. In ten minutes the shooting was over.

  * * *

  Down in Piana dei Greci, Lieutenant Ragusa, a straightforward young infantry officer, commanded a special anti-bandit squad of thirty-three men. Curiously enough, Lieutenant Ragusa took his orders from the senior carabinieri NCO at Piana, Maresciallo Porchera, and on the previous evening when the Lieutenant had asked whether he should make arrangements for security measures to be taken at the Portella meeting, the police NCO had put him off by saying that such measures were inadvisable. Ragusa, however, was well aware of the fact that demonstrations of any kind in this particular zone were liable to give rise to serious incidents, so, acting on his own initiative, he took what precautions he could by cancelling all leave and confining his men to barracks.

  Shortly after ten o’clock on the fateful day, the Lieutenant was coming out of the barber’s when he heard the crackle of distant small-arms fire. Running to the Piazza where he could get an unobstructed view of Portella, he soon saw a sight ‘just like something you see in a film. An enormous crowd of people was pouring down the road from the mountain. Even at that distance you could hear the women screaming. I tried without success to contact the police. There was only one carabiniere and a duty clerk at the station … The carabiniere told me about the massacre, and I got on the telephone to the Inspectorate-Gene
ral of Public Security at Palermo, to Carabinieri Headquarters, and to my own company commander to ask them to cordon off the whole of the Portella area.’ It was twenty minutes by fast car from Palermo to Piana dei Greci, but five hours before any of the reinforcements requested by Lieutenant Ragusa arrived on the scene.

  And in the meanwhile, in the absence of ambulances, the dead and the desperately wounded were being brought down on the backs of mules by volunteers who never knew when the assassins they believed to be still hidden among the rocks might choose to fire again. A father who had been absent from the meeting went up with them to look for his missing son and found him dead. Coming up to the pass, he remembers a chilling sound that warned him of what was to come. Swollen in the harsh acoustics of the rock-vaulted wilderness was a moaning that sounded as though thousands of doves had perched themselves among the crevices and ledges. It was the groans of the wounded lying among the bodies of humans and animals scattered everywhere in that narrow place.

  * * *

  Having carried out his orders, Giuliano made haste to withdraw from the position on the slopes of Mount Pizzuta, where he and his men had lain in waiting since shortly after dawn. Three young men who had decided to spend the holiday in their own way by taking a prostitute with them on a mountain expedition had a lucky escape. ‘We were going to the meeting,’ they said later, ‘but decided to call it off because we had an Englishwoman with us.’ (‘Englishwoman’ is the Sicilian euphemism for a whore.) Hearing the shooting, they hid themselves in a fissure among the rocks, and soon after saw twelve armed men come down the mountainside, eleven of them in American uniforms, and the twelfth – Giuliano – in a white raincoat. An estate guard who ran into the bandits a few minutes later was less lucky, despite the fact that he was a well-known mafioso. He was made to turn out his pockets, and among the contents was a note from some minor police official, inviting him to call at headquarters that same evening. The man’s body was found in a ravine forty days later.

  Four other men passed through the edge of the shadow of death that day. These were peasants from Piana dei Greci who had decided to play truant from the demonstration at Portella della Ginestra, and were setting snares for rabbits on the slopes of Pizzuta shortly after dawn. Suddenly they found themselves confronted by a youth who covered them with a sub-machine-gun. He asked whether they were Communists, and on receiving their energetic denial, said, ‘Lucky you. We’d have finished you off if you were.’ Other members of the band then appeared, and the hunters were marched off to a cave where one of the bandits was left to guard them, while the others went off. The bandits left their captives in no doubt about the reason for their presence on the mountain, and one man who had two sons playing in the band at the celebration begged that their lives should be spared. To this he received the reply, ‘They want the land, and we’re going to give it to them – six feet of it apiece.’

  This literally seems to have been the bandits’ intention. The massacre at Portella, in which only eleven people were killed on the spot and fifty-five wounded (some died later), was certainly a less bloody act of terror than had been planned. As a military operation the thing was a near-failure. In addition to Giuliano and his nucleus of machine-gunners on Pizzuta, an unknown number of men lay in wait on the mountain Cumeta across the pass. The plan was to catch the crowd between two fires. But when the stampede took place from the fusillades poured down from the Pizzuta, the fire which was to have taken the peasant crowd in the rear was slight and ineffective. There is a theory that many of the marksmen placed on Cumeta were shepherds who had been conscripted for a task for which they felt little enthusiasm – particularly as some of them had relations in the crowd – and that their aim was intentionally ragged. The three men and the girl who had hidden in the crevice as the bandits came down the mountainside reported that they had been arguing with each other in angry tones about something that had gone wrong.

  Next day the conscientious Lieutenant Ragusa searched the mountainsides and found a position from which a Breda .38 machine-gun had been fired. Some eight hundred empty cartridge cases were strewn about the ground. The Lieutenant thought that the range – about half a mile – was too great for accurate shooting, and to decide whether this was so, he fired a machine-gun of the same type from the same position and found it difficult even to hit the large rock from which the speaker had addressed the crowd. He carefully collected up the empty shells, believing that they might prove useful as evidence, but a few days later they were spirited away.

  For days Ragusa and the police authorities occupied in carrying out investigations on the spot followed a false scent. A woman of San Giuseppe Jato had been taunted on the morning of the massacre by a mafioso landowner, and from this it was assumed that the Mafia had carried out the crime. No one seems at first to have thought of Giuliano. But Ettore Messana, head of the Public Security Police for Sicily, knew better. On the day of the shooting of the peasants, Messana sent a telegram to the Minister for Home Affairs, Mario Scelba, informing him that Giuliano was the author of the massacre. To many at the time it seemed strange that the Inspector-General should have known with such certainty a fact that was only discovered independently by his subordinates after much investigatory labour. It seemed less strange four years later at the Viterbo trial of those who had fired on the peasants, when it became known that Messana had a ‘confidant’ among the bandits who kept him aware of their intentions!

  * * *

  The next few weeks were filled with intense activity for Giuliano and his band. A few days after the massacre at Portella, Giuliano gave one of his many journalistic interviews. This time it was to an American, Michael Stern, who went to a rendezvous with the bandit dressed in an American officer’s uniform. Giuliano handed Stern a letter for President Truman: a masterpiece of self-apology and persuasion, which it is unlikely he could have concocted himself. Giuliano pleaded for the President’s ‘moral support’ for his struggle to wipe out Communism in Sicily. ‘Because with a lost war we find ourselves in a hopeless state, and will easily fall a prey to foreigners – especially the Russians, who long to appear in the Mediterranean Sea. The consequences, if this should happen, would be of the greatest importance, and you know it.’ Thereafter Stern and Giuliano kept up correspondence for some time, Stern writing quite openly to Giuliano, care of his parents at Montelepre. One letter Giuliano sent back fell into the police’s hands when they captured the courier carrying it down to Montelepre. In it, Giuliano spoke of ‘the circle closing round him’, and said that he could no longer carry on with light arms, but must have mortars and artillery. This letter has formed the basis for a belief, widespread in Italy, that Stern was something rather more than a mere scoop-hunting journalist.

  On June 22nd, trade union centres and Communist Party headquarters were attacked simultaneously in many towns in the province of Palermo. Hand-grenades, dynamite and Molotov cocktails were used to demolish the buildings, and their occupants were machine-gunned by the bandits as they ran from the flames. Militarily the operation was on this occasion irreproachable, and as a piece of terrorism it was a masterpiece. With Giuliano’s gunmen now actively entering the fight on the feudal landowners’ side, few people were inclined to give much for the peasants’ chances of pressing home their claim to the uncultivated land. The imminent collapse of the Popular Front was generally predicted. In a year’s time there would be more elections, and for another year Giuliano was to remain indispensable, and to prosper accordingly.

  The mortars and the artillery were never forthcoming, but the band was otherwise splendidly and abundantly equipped for the extermination of unarmed enemies. Much of Giuliano’s funds was derived from kidnappings carried out by an efficient specialised squad led by a foundation member of the band, Frank Mannino. The obscure mafiosi who now manipulated Giuliano and his band as confidently as if they had been marionettes dangling from strings, designated the most promising victims. It was the Mafia, too, that negotiated the ransoms, arranged for th
eir payment, and saw to the kidnapped men’s safe return to their families. Sometimes the Mafia found it desirable to temper the zeal of some young police official by doing him a favour, and in this case the policeman might be allowed to take the credit for the release. This happened in the famous case of the abduction of Baron Agnello, who was finally turned loose after a record thirty million lire had been paid over. A police commissioner called Tandoy – a northerner who had hitherto shown himself unreceptive to the special Sicilian atmosphere – was softened-up in this way. He got the credit for reducing Giuliano’s original demands from ninety million lire to the sum finally paid, and thereafter, one supposes out of gratitude, remained notably quiescent for ten years. After this period of total inactivity he gave trouble again, and was shot one day while strolling with his wife in the streets of Agrigento.

  Agnello, like so many of the rich men kidnapped by Giuliano, seems on the whole to have been stimulated by the experience. He was taken in broad daylight in the middle of Palermo while leaving his mistress’s house, and carried off in a taxi which immediately broke down with a mild case of engine trouble, and then, when restarted, developed a flat tyre. The Baron, whose Sicilian aristocratic tradition compelled him to abstain from displays of vulgar emotion, sat imperturbable while the repairs were being effected. He spent several weeks with the bandits, shared their lodgings and provender, was forced to accompany them in all weathers on enormous marches, and sometimes – to his disgust – to eat rabbit. They looked after him as well as they could, and he was charmed with Giuliano – a gentiluomo – but found the rest of the band unattractive, and lacking in the social graces.