Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

Another nobleman described how, the morning after his abduction, he found himself in a decent room with a bowl of fruit at his bedside. The bandits kept out of sight, but about midday a voice was heard through the shuttered window, ‘What will it be for lunch, your lordship?’ ‘Spaghetti and fried fish,’ was the reply. ‘Will you be taking beer or wine, sir?’ ‘Beer, I think.’ Shortly afterwards the guard was back. ‘Be so good as to face the wall, your lordship.’ The baron complied, and the bandit came in with the tray of food. A few days later the kidnapped man had stomach trouble. He was visited by a doctor who, remaining unseen, asked him to describe his symptoms and then prescribed an efficacious remedy. Later, when confidence grew between the bandits and their captive, they tried to make him see that the money they proposed to extort from his family would be expended in the best possible of causes – Giuliano’s personal war on the Reds. ‘Don’t fret, your lordship. Just leave it to us. We’ll finish the Communists off for you.’

  Some of the victims seem to have accepted Giuliano’s assurances that they were getting value for their money, for they remained on friendly terms and in contact with him after their release. Giuliano’s popularity in certain quarters was, in fact, never greater than in the twelve months that followed Portella and his attacks on the trade unionists and the Communists. But in 1948 there was another election, and as had been foreseen, the Popular Front was routed. Giuliano had done his work almost too well. Now there was no further use for him. He was merely a nuisance to be disposed of as soon as it could be conveniently done. Giuliano was undoubtedly pressing his claim for payment for his service. As the bandit Terranova testified at the Viterbo trial: ‘After the elections of April 18th, 1948, I saw Giuliano and asked him to keep his promises. Our orders had been to make people vote for the Christian Democrats, and we had carried them out. In return he had promised us our liberty. Giuliano replied that the instigators of the massacre had refused to carry out their side of the bargain, and they wanted to make us emigrate to Brazil. Giuliano wanted to stay in Sicily, and said to me: “We must compel these gentlemen to carry out their undertakings. Go to Castellamare del Golfo and kidnap the Honourable Bernardino Mattarella and his family.”’

  * * *

  The situation was taking an ugly turn and drastic remedies were called for. The Cavalier of the Crown of Italy, Santo Flores, capo-Mafia of Partinico, who had been responsible for bringing Giuliano and the Christian Democrats together, proposed quite simply to resolve the predicament by betraying the bandit to the police. But for once something went wrong with Mafia planning. Giuliano got wind of the trap that had been set for him and took his revenge. Both the mafioso Santo Flores and the secretary of the Christian Democratic Party of Alcamo who had negotiated with Giuliano on behalf of the Party were shot dead. Some indication of the other personalities Giuliano believed to be involved in this deal, which was now quite clearly to be repudiated, is afforded by the names of those whom Giuliano, in his rage, ordered his men to abduct.

  They included, as was revealed at the bandits’ trial, Monsignor Filippi, Archbishop of Monreale, and Don Calò Vizzini, the acknowledged head of the Mafia. But in believing that he could touch men of this calibre, Giuliano showed a loss of touch with reality. ‘Fra Diavolo’, the police spy placed by Inspector Messana in the band, was the safety valve that operated in this kind of emergency, and the intended victims received their warning. Don Calò took Giuliano’s threat seriously enough to shut himself up in the Albergo Sole in Palermo – the corridors and public rooms of which were filled with his men-at-arms – until he judged that the danger had blown over. When urgent business called him back to Villalba, he travelled hidden among the vegetable crates on a local market gardener’s truck, so that when the bandits stopped his car they captured only his chauffeur and a friend of the chauffeur’s who had begged a ride. It was months, too, before the Archbishop left the safety of his palace.

  Abandoned by the Christian Democrats, just as he had been as soon as he had served their purpose by the Separatists and Monarchists in turn, Giuliano now hit on an ingenious method of staving off the fate that had overtaken so many bandit chieftains in Sicily since the end of the war. In 1946 Maresciallo Calandra of Montelepre – the local police chief whose twelve men shared six pairs of boots between them – had found that he was not to be permitted to arrest Giuliano, and when he insisted and went to his chief with a cast-iron scheme for rounding up the whole band, he was hastily transferred to another district. The problem for Giuliano was to extend this kind of immunity which he had enjoyed in his politically useful days to a time when every politician in Italy would have been delighted to hear that he was dead. He did it by capitalising on the guilty secrets of the massacre of Portella; composing a memorial, of which several copies were kept, in which the political motives of the massacre were revealed and its instigators named. One copy of the memorial was given into the keeping of his brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, who was smuggled safely away to America. Thus, for fear of the deadly secrets in Giuliano’s possession, he could not be captured alive, nor – until it was certain that the various copies of the incriminating memorial were in safe hands – could he be killed. In the meanwhile the daily butchery went on of ordinary policemen and army conscripts engaged in farcical drives against a bandit it was never intended should be caught.

  * * *

  It was the public outcry that followed the slaughter of eight carabinieri in an ambush and the wounding of thirteen more that brought about the dissolution of the special Public Security organisation under Inspector Ciro Verdiani, hitherto – at least in theory – engaged in the prosecution of the war against Giuliano. This was now replaced by the Force for the Repression of Banditry, led by the carabinieri Colonel Ugo Luca. Clearly as it was realised in high places that in the present situation Giuliano himself must remain untouchable, Luca seems, at first, not to have been made aware of this. The Colonel’s task was to be complicated by numerous difficulties, not the least being the fact that the Public Security Police and carabinieri viewed each other, at that time, with undisguised hatred.

  The antipathy was a traditional one, and had been very obvious to Allied Army officials who were brought into touch with the Italian police during the war. It stemmed from the carabinieri’s pride in their status as a military organisation, and a contempt – not unsullied by envy – for a rival force that was not exposed to military discipline, and had, as the carabinieri saw it, a relatively soft time. It had proved quite impossible to draw a clear line between the functions of the two forces, so that overlapping took place constantly, and wherever it happened, bitter friction was engendered. The furious hostility shown by one brand of Italian policeman for another was a source of constant astonishment to the judge trying the bandits two years later at Viterbo. When Colonel Luca arrived in Palermo to take up his duties, he made the discouraging discovery that the documents relating to the Giuliano band, and all the evidence gathered about their activities over three years, had been made to disappear. This meant he had to start from scratch with his investigations. It was the first blow struck in the private war between the carabinieri colonel and the inspector of Public Security.

  Although Inspector Verdiani should have ceased at this stage to interest himself in any way in the Giuliano ‘affair’, he remained in fact in close contact with the bandit through the Miceli family, who were important mafiosi of Monreale. One of the Micelis flew to Rome to meet the Inspector there to hammer out a plan for forestalling any action Luca might be proposing to take to settle the Giuliano problem. A result of Luca’s preliminary drive in the Giuliano zone had been the arrest of several hundred of the people of Montelepre, including Giuliano’s mother and sister. Mother-attachment has been observed to be characteristic of every bandit, as well as the one human weakness of almost all mafiosi, and Giuliano seemed ready to agree to anything to secure his mother’s release. Verdiani offered to use his influence to arrange this in return for the bandit’s undertaking to call off the war agai
nst the police. The second part of the bargain was that Giuliano would be allowed to emigrate. Miceli made another trip to Rome to discuss how this was to be done, and soon afterwards Giuliano left the safety of his mountains to go down to Castelvetrano. It was proposed that he should be smuggled out of the country in a military plane from the airport of this town. While these negotiations were proceeding, Verdiani and Giuliano exchanged letters couched in terms of brotherly affection. Later Verdiani travelled from Rome to meet Giuliano in a farmhouse near Castelvetrano. The two men hugged each other, and then the Chief Inspector sat down with an intimate little gathering of bandits and mafiosi to dispose of the sweet cakes and wine that he had thoughtfully brought along in his car. At this meeting Verdiani warned his protégé that Pisciotta, Giuliano’s second-in-command, had been drawn into the orbit of Colonel Luca and might be planning some treachery. By now Giuliano was virtually the prisoner of the Mafia, and not only Verdiani, but even the members of the band could contact him only through the good offices of the men of respect.

  Meanwhile Colonel Luca had set to work to liquidate the band, a task facilitated, as it happened, by Verdiani’s manoeuvrings, which had virtually brought to an end Giuliano’s bloodily successful campaign against the police. Italian public opinion wanted action at all costs, so with the enthusiastic co-operation of an imaginative Press, it was fed with stories of last-ditch stands by trapped desperadoes against bodies of hand-picked troops supported by parachutists, reconnaissance planes, and helicopters. Behind this stage-scenery, painted with fictitious violence, Luca tackled the problem in his own singular fashion, and under the sardonic eye of his exceedingly down-to-earth senior NCO, who, in later years, furnished a description of the events of those days which was much at variance with the official story.

  Colonel Luca had spent many years in Intelligence duties in the Middle East, a circumstance which inevitably encouraged the newspapers to call him the ‘Italian Lawrence of Arabia’. He was deeply imbued with the attitudes of cloak-and-dagger fiction, and some of his actions almost parody the most improbable doings of Somerset Maugham’s secret agent, Ashenden. Luca had the idea of importing a professional assassin from Constantinople; a hairless-Mexican sort of character, known as ‘the Turk’. The Turk was about forty-five years of age, tough, thickset and dumpy, and a little ridiculous in appearance; his fingers were covered in rings, and he habitually wore shorts and a khaki desert forage-cap with neck protector. This imported specialist in violent death was a shy and taciturn man, who sat for hours eating enormous quantities of spaghetti, and swilling down strong Sicilian wine. He lived by himself in a room in the carabinieri barracks, and when not eating, tinkered endlessly with a great collection of professional equipment he had brought with him, including pistols, guns and knives of all sorts and descriptions. On the rare occasions when he strolled outside the barracks, he was never without a small leather case intended for a musical instrument but which actually housed a tiny sub-machine-gun of British manufacture which had been fitted with a silencer, and which enchanted all the men. Whenever the presence of Giuliano was notified in a particular area, the Turk was hastily taken there by night and left with his arsenal, seemingly in the remote hope that Giuliano might accidentally run into him. However the hard-bitten policemen of Luca’s command may have viewed this project, one thing about the Turk staggered them all. This was his immense resistance to fatigue. They would leave him propped in the angle of a wall with some dried emergency rations and a gallon of wine, and there he would stay day and night without moving, sometimes for as long as three or four days at a time, waiting for Giuliano to pass that way. However, the opportunity never arose for him to prove his worth as a one-man army, and in the end, he was packed off back to Constantinople.

  Outside the boisterous legends concocted by the Press and the improbably heroic scenes drawn by the cover-artist of the Corriere della Serra, there were few armed conflicts in Sicily in those days, but there were many betrayals. Material for a macabre window-display of corpses was furnished by more than one bandit who had surrendered peaceably enough. Rosario Candela, who had managed to get away to Tunisia with several other leading lights of the band, was arrested by Interpol and handed over to the Italian police, and although the news of his arrest in Tunisia had been published, this was cynically ignored and he was ‘killed in a terrific battle’ in the Sicilian mountains. The newspapers published photographs of him lying armed to the teeth, a grenade still clenched in his hand, much, as Gavin Maxwell put it, as the weapons of the dead warriors of the past were placed round them for burial.

  Torture was automatically the fate of any captured man, and one of them, Giuseppe Sapienza, in his torment let slip the fearful truths of political instigation behind the massacre of Portella della Ginestra. The report of this interrogation had to be hurriedly destroyed. Astonishing facts came to light at the Viterbo trial, when the President of the Court asked the bandit Terranova how this could have happened.

  TERRANOVA: Giuliano told me personally that he had had the statement destroyed. He knew that Sapienza had talked, and told me that the confession had to be destroyed before it got into the hands of the examining magistrate.

  PRESIDENT: It seems strange to me that Giuliano could have been in a position to arrange for evidence to be destroyed.

  TERRANOVA: Giuliano had his confidants in the police, just as they had theirs in the band.

  PRESIDENT: But how could Giuliano have known that Sapienza had confessed?

  TERRANOVA: I don’t know. He was in direct contact with the police. I don’t know how he managed it.

  12

  MARESCIALLO LO BIANCO was the most active member of Luca’s special force, and years later, after his retirement, he supplied a newspaper with a disenchanted account of the goings-on of those days. The lack of a university education had prevented the Maresciallo from rising to commissioned rank, but like many senior carabinieri NCOs, he possessed real power. At the Viterbo trial he made a great impression, wearing his authority easily, like his dapper check suit. Most witnesses travelled by train, but the Maresciallo was flown to the trial, kept the court waiting half the morning on the day he was to appear, and when he finally arrived, had a carabiniere trotting at his heels to carry his briefcase.

  Lo Bianco soon fell foul of the Machiavellian Inspector Verdiani, who was doing everything he possibly could to hamper, discredit, and cast ridicule upon Colonel Luca and the operations of his Force for the Repression of Banditry. While, for example, the two thousand men of the new special force were chasing phantom outlaws in the mountains, Giuliano was giving interviews to newspapermen whose visits had been arranged by Verdiani with the co-operation of the Mafia, and even taking a week off to make a documentary film, A Day in the Life of Giuliano. All Lo Bianco’s coups were based upon information supplied by confidants whom he arranged to meet in his father’s photographic studio in Palermo, so one of Verdiani’s first moves was to try to seduce these informers away. ‘A thing,’ Lo Bianco says, ‘he should have realised it was quite impossible to do. The most junior agent in his force could have told him that a confidant is like an honest woman – absolutely faithful to one man only.’ Verdiani went a step further and had one of Lo Bianco’s best informers arrested. ‘I had been cultivating him for three years.’ The man was held in a dungeon for a week, and was warned before being released that in future he must work for nobody but the Public Security Police. ‘This, of course, was quite out of the question, for the reason I have already given.’

  The wrangle over the loyalty of this informer ended in a public scandal. In due course he was re-arrested by the Public Security, and induced by some agent, lacking in – as Lo Bianco put it – ‘intelligence and serenity’, to produce a statement which named a number of dignitaries, among them none other than the Cardinal of Palermo and the Archbishop of Monreale as accomplices of Giuliano. Horrified senior police officials immediately suppressed this document, but not before someone had been able to spirit it away for
photographic copies to be made. These, in due course, fell into the hands of the Princes of the Church involved, as well as those of the Minister of the Interior, who in a fury called Verdiani to his office and hauled him over the coals. Assuming that the copies had been made in the Lo Bianco studio, the Inspector counter-attacked by having his men ransack the place and arrest Lo Bianco senior. This episode produced a sarcastic letter of condolence addressed to Lo Bianco from Giuliano, which was published in a local newspaper. It was one of the last of such letters to appear. Giuliano had been a compulsive writer to the Press, and up till then several letters had sometimes been published in a single week, but now Colonel Luca made an order cutting off this form of publicity.

  * * *

  While Inspector Verdiani intrigued with the mafioso Miceli, his rival Lo Bianco had succeeded in persuading someone to present him to Don Nitto Minasola, also of Monreale, and in fact the head of the Honoured Society in that small Mafia-ridden town with its stupendous Norman cathedral on the hilltop at the back of Palermo. There was never a more remarkable possessor of the not fully explicable power of the mafioso than Don Nitto, whose name could not even be mentioned in association with any of these events until twelve years later when he was safely dead – assassinated in the sombre main street of San Giuseppe Jato at high noon, while looking over the animals in a horse fair.

  Minasola had started life as a poor shepherd, but he had always possessed all the qualities demanded of a man of respect, and inevitably he became one. He was patient, self-controlled, intelligent, full of the knowledge of men, and implacable. Had he been born, say, in Milan, the son of a comfortable family, nothing could have prevented his becoming an outstanding politician, or at least a millionaire. But Minasola’s father had left him two scrawny goats, and he had never set foot inside a school. Lo Bianco says he was still a poor man at the time he knew him at the age of fifty-two, although greatly feared. A lifetime’s habit of guarding his expression had given his face an oriental quality, a mandarin’s impassivity, which Lo Bianco found disconcerting. The Maresciallo told him straightaway that he wanted his help to capture Giuliano, and Minasola shot him one of his penetrating and enigmatic looks, followed by an almost frightening smile, and said, ‘You ask me for Giuliano in the same way as one asks a friend for a cup of coffee.’