Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  On the night of July 4th, Colonel Luca gave orders that all carabinieri of his special anti-bandit force were to be withdrawn from Castelvetrano, and Pisciotta, accompanied by Captain Perenze and several picked carabinieri, set out on their mission. Lo Bianco and Colonel Paolantonio were to have met and joined forces with this expedition, and they had hired a taxi and were on their way to the meeting-place when Paolantonio suddenly suffered a crise de conscience, and told the driver to stop.

  ‘Lo Bianco,’ he said, ‘there’s no risk or glory awaiting us at the end of this trip down to Castelvetrano. It’s just a killing rigged up with the help of a bandit. The affair’s taken a bad turning, but there’s nothing you or I can do to change the course of events, so let’s go home.’

  And this, so far as Lo Bianco was concerned, was the anticlimax that came at the end of the adventure. ‘I affirm,’ he says in his memoirs, ‘that we could have captured both Giuliano and Pisciotta. The plan for such an operation involved only a minimum of risk … Later it was said, “What does it matter how he died? The important thing is that he’s out of the way. With Giuliano in the dock with the others, certain things would have come out at the Viterbo trial.”’ As a rueful afterthought, the Maresciallo adds; ‘And even if he was destined to die, surely the thing could have been done with more propriety, and without all those fantastic stories that they put about.’

  * * *

  Castelvetrano lies fifty miles to the south of Palermo across the bare mountains. Its population has always been dependent upon the fertility of the high districts surrounding it, the property for centuries of the Dukes of Pignatelli-Monteleone. The dukes spent their revenues on palaces and parks and religious foundations elsewhere. Ten centuries after its foundation, Castelvetrano remains hardly more than a great dung-bespattered Arab village of the Middle Atlas, a mugger of walled lanes, blinkered houses, and secret courtyards, full of the dour odour of confined animals, with a single European high street driven right through its middle. It was here that the mafioso Dr Allegra had his clinic; the town where, after Mussolini had weakened the ability of the Mafia to curb petty criminality, the outlaw Ponzio came in broad daylight to seize sheep in the market, and was later tried and sentenced to death by Dr Allegra’s Mafia court.

  On the night of July 4th, 1950, Pisciotta reached Castelvetrano just after nine o’clock. He told his carabinieri driver to stop about one hundred and fifty yards from De Maria’s house in the Via Mannone, walked the rest of the distance, and after being kept waiting at the door while De Maria questioned him through the keyhole, was eventually admitted. Going up to the room which he and Giuliano had often shared, he met with a cold reception from his chief. ‘What are you doing here?’ Giuliano asked him. Since their last meeting Verdiani had warned him that Pisciotta was now working for Luca. A violent argument took place, Pisciotta vigorously refuting Giuliano’s accusations and bringing all his natural endowment of plausibility into action in the attempt to disperse Giuliano’s suspicions. It took several hours before Giuliano could be convinced of Pisciotta’s sincerity, and then the two men went to bed, but more time was spent in discussing future plans. Even when the conversation finally flagged and broke off, ‘action was held up’ – as Pisciotta put it – because Giuliano kept twisting and turning in a restless half-sleep.

  Meanwhile, Pisciotta’s driver and Captain Perenze in the second car, parked a little farther down the street, had been waiting for nearly six hours. Perenze was becoming nervous. It was now just past three o’clock, with signs of the sky’s paling in the east; with the bakers – the town’s earliest risers – lighting up their ovens, and the first of the peasants starting out for the day’s work. Perenze’s men had to be mobilised to keep the street free from such unwelcome intruders. At nineteen minutes past three two muffled shots were heard, and a few moments later Pisciotta burst into the street. He was half-naked, agitated to the point of hysteria, carried a shoe in one hand and was waving a pistol in the other. Pushing his driver away from the steering-wheel, Pisciotta jumped into the car and drove off at great speed.

  Perenze and his two carabinieri now ran to beat on De Maria’s door, and once again there was some delay before De Maria thought it advisable to let them in. The three policemen rushed up the stairs and found Giuliano lying dead on the bed, with two bullet holes under his left armpit. They dressed him with frantic haste, and as no jacket could be found, one of the carabinieri, who was in plain clothes, took off his own jacket, and this – although ridiculously small – was put on the corpse. The maid was roused, ordered to wash the bed linen, and to clean the blood from the floor of the room. The carabinieri then dragged the body downstairs and pitched it face downwards in De Maria’s courtyard, where Captain Perenze fired two bursts at it from his sub-machine-gun. Insufficient blood issued from these wounds, so one of De Maria’s chickens was quickly snatched from its coop and decapitated, so that the deficiency could be made up. One of the many neighbours spying upon these macabre doings from behind their window casements, says that at this point Perenze went to the door of the courtyard and vomited into the street.

  * * *

  At six o’clock the Minister of the Interior was awakened by a phone call from General D’Antoni, Chief of Police, who told him that Giuliano was dead. The morning was a busy one for the Minister, for soon after eight o’clock the Premier himself, De Gasperi, arrived with his congratulations. Shortly afterwards Scelba called a press conference, at which he made the following announcement: ‘Last night Colonel Luca formed the opinion that the moment had come for the capture of the bandit Giuliano, and took measures accordingly. The bandit attempted to escape from a house in the centre of Castelvetrano where he had been in hiding, using firearms in an attempt to evade capture. After a long pursuit, he was finally killed in the gun battle which ensued.’ The Minister could say nothing more than this, and he took the opportunity to exhort those present to do their best to play down the Giuliano episode from that time on. Italian newspapermen have never forgotten this emphatic recommendation, and ten years later they were still hammering away at him with the many questions arising out of that night’s work at Castelvetrano which were never answered.

  All day long the correspondents came pouring into Castelvetrano from every country in western Europe. The earliest of the cameramen to arrive were fortunate enough to capture the scene of dramatic anguish when Giuliano’s mother and sister were conducted by the police to the mortuary for the routine identification of the body. Later the old mother asked to be taken to the courtyard of the De Maria house, and there, while the shutters of fifty cameras clicked, she went down on her hands and knees and kissed – some say licked – the dried blood on the flags. For latecomers of the Press, when the Giuliano family had been taken back to Montelepre, a black-shrouded crone was kept in readiness, who re-enacted the frantic scene for the payment of a few lire.

  This trivial but ugly imposture set the mood for the day. The hundreds of excited but frustrated journalists who filled the streets of Castelvetrano, debarred from access to solid fact by a strange wall of official reticence, pieced together what rumours they could uncover and joined in an orgy of imaginative reconstruction of the events of the previous night. The evening editions of Italian papers carried detailed accounts, sometimes almost shot by shot, of street battles in which – according to the Gazzetta del Popolo – five hundred and thirty carabinieri were involved. The same newspaper described the remarkable weapon with which Giuliano defended himself in this fight to the death: a sub-machine-gun of his own invention carrying an extra magazine in its butt. The reports carried next day by such papers as The Times were more sober, but almost equally fantastic. A fog of lies had been released, like a genie from its bottle, and it was many months before the genie could be squeezed back again and the cork rammed home.

  In Castelvetrano, sceptism was spreading like a contagious disease. Some of the old hands who had served a long stint as crime reporters and were familiar with all the commonplaces
of violent death shook their heads over the pièce de théâtre in De Maria’s courtyard. Somebody noticed that the blood from two wounds flowed upwards, and another reporter went round interviewing all the neighbours, who scornfully, and to a man, refuted the unofficial police story of a desperate gun battle.

  The official story was given next day – by Captain Perenze in person. He explained to the representatives of the Press that it had come to Colonel Luca’s knowledge that Giuliano had taken refuge in the Castelvetrano area, where he was awaiting an opportunity to get away to Tunis from the local airport. In an attempt to attract him into the town, and thus within reach of the police, the Colonel had hit on an ingenious idea. Knowing Giuliano’s passion for publicity, and in particular for the publicity given by film appearances, he had rigged up a van complete with a cinema projector, a loudspeaker, and a number of advertising posters, and this was kept touring the streets of Castelvetrano at night. The crew of the van were supposed to be engaged in making a documentary film, but in fact they were Perenze himself and his carabinieri, and the belief was that this would be irresistible bait for Giuliano’s vanity, and that sooner or later he would put in an appearance and allow himself to be interviewed.

  And this, Captain Perenze told his listeners, was in fact how it went. ‘After a long wait, at a quarter past three exactly, the carabiniere Renzi saw two men with sub-machine-guns on their backs passing along the Via Gaggini. Brigadiere Catalano held them up in front and Renzi cut off their retreat. The chase lasted fifty-four minutes. We recognised Giuliano because he was bareheaded. I and the carabiniere Giuffrida blocked the side turnings. For all this, one of the men succeeded in escaping, but it was not Giuliano. He in fact tried to hide in the courtyard of the De Maria house, where I was waiting for him. I opened fire and killed him.’

  That Perenze was a man of feeling was made clear in a special interview granted to Il Tempo shortly afterwards:

  Giuliano died at ten minutes to four, after a death agony lasting ten minutes. I offered him water, but he was silent, mute in his agony, as if burdened by the presage of the hereafter. I can say that it is incorrect that only twenty shots were fired, as some people of the neighbourhood have stated. Giuliano alone fired fifty-two rounds, and then he took refuge in the courtyard, where he was brought down by a fusillade of seven shots, all of which struck vital parts.

  For his part in this operation, which restored untroubled sleep to so many public persons, Perenze was promoted to major, while Luca became forthwith a general. But the climate of unbelief, far from being dissipated, seemed to grow murkier. At the end of the month, the Minister of the Interior was still sticking by his guns, and he dismissed a question in Parliament about the death of Giuliano with the reply: ‘I fully confirm the version given by Colonel Luca.’ Nearly a year later a sensational disclosure at the Viterbo trial of the bandits responsible for the massacre of Portella della Ginestra caused him to modify this view, but only slightly: ‘I tell you quite frankly that I have no reason to doubt the version given me by the carabinieri. As a matter of native intuition and from what I have been able to ascertain, I can reconstruct the scene in this way: Pisciotta told Giuliano that the police were on his track and that he had better make his getaway. Giuliano got up, dressed in a hurry and went down into the courtyard. Then Pisciotta gave a whistle and the police hiding behind the wall opened fire. Pisciotta betrayed Giuliano. There’s no doubt about it. But he didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t have had the courage.’

  The true version of what took place on that stifling July night in Castelvetrano was supplied by De Maria, the mafioso lawyer. It took the form of a confession in writing handed to an examining magistrate, and coincidentally the confession was completed on the same day that Mario Scelba, aided by his intuition, was giving his latest account of Giuliano’s end to the members of parliament in the House.

  Like the shepherd Minasola, De Maria comes as a surprise as a man of respect. He was a youngish bachelor, living modestly in a shabby little house and looked after by a maid. As a mafioso, he would have got more than a fair share of Castelvetrano’s legal business, but in such a poverty-stricken Mafia-run town this would hardly have amounted to much more than preparing a few legal documents such as leases and contracts. Disputes from which civil actions would normally arise would have been rapidly settled out of court in Castelvetrano, merely by submitting them to the arbitration of the town’s capo-Mafia. De Maria was probably left to pick up the legal scraps, and there is a whiff of respectable near-poverty about him as he details in his confession the expenses involved in feeding Giuliano for the nine months, off and on, that this unwelcome guest stayed under his roof. Being a member of the ‘Honoured Society’ was not all beer and skittles, and De Maria lived to learn – as Dr Allegra had before him – that it could sometimes involve a man in some very tricky situations. De Maria’s chief, Marotta, had simply brought Giuliano to the house one day and ordered De Maria to look after him. ‘You’re a bachelor,’ Marotta said, when De Maria risked an objection. ‘If you’d been a family man, I’d have taken him somewhere else.’ ‘It was a calvary,’ De Maria writes – the confession has a faint scriptural flavour throughout – ‘I felt myself slipping down into a bottomless pit. I searched my memory in an endeavour to discover some wrongdoing that might have justified the punishment of this cruel destiny, but could find nothing. My conscience cried my innocence aloud. I have lived for my Franciscan faith, for my books, and in the memory of the affection given me by my beloved mother … and yet I was forced to drain this bitter chalice to the dregs.’

  Of his enforced association with Giuliano, De Maria says: ‘He liked to be with me, because I spoke to him in an unknown language so far as he was concerned. Our conversations were of faith, good and evil, and redemption. He once told me that he was sure that if fate had brought our paths together earlier in his life, his destiny would have been a very different one.’ De Maria added that Giuliano spent much of his time reading Shakespeare and Descartes. At that time De Maria was charged with complicity with banditry. Six months later another warrant was issued, this time for actual participation in an armed band. He was in due course acquitted for lack of proof.

  13

  GASPARE PISCIOTTA, second-in-command of the Giuliano band, Giuliano’s cousin, his lifelong friend and his eventual assassin, remained at large for five months after Giuliano’s death. He was eventually arrested in his own home in Montelepre by Questore Marzano, Chief of Police of Palermo – ‘after months of tenacious investigation’, Marzano said at his trial. Pisciotta himself said that he went to Marzano’s office and asked to be arrested. By this time the mass trial of the Giuliano band for the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, held at the town of Viterbo, near Rome, had been dragging on for six months. Pisciotta was removed to the prison at Viterbo and kept there for three months virtually incommunicado. No attempt was made to interrogate him, and the long statement he had made to the examining magistrate at Palermo shortly after his arrest disappeared. Finally, Pisciotta was brought to court and placed in the cage with the twelve other regular members of the band. A second cage contained the picciotti, the ‘boys’ charged with sporadic association with the band, all of whom had been tortured into making some kind of damaging admission, and all of whom after spending four years in prison were found innocent.

  From the moment of Pisciotta’s first arrival in court, he dominated the proceedings. In place of the famous pullover patterned with rampant lions in which he had always been shown in his photographs, he now wore an elegant dark blue suit of imported English material. He was alert and watchful, his pale, handsome face stamped with an expression of mocking and occasionally ferocious good humour. His appearance had stirred up currents of nervous preoccupation. Pisciotta’s presence was clearly a source of embarrassment. Captain Perenze’s version of the killing of Giuliano was still officially valid, although rumours of the lurid truth of the matter were widespread, and had certainly reached the judge’s ears. Day after day
passed, and to the public’s increasing amazement no attempt was made to interrogate Pisciotta, despite the assurance given to the Press by his counsel that the bandit was ready to make important revelations.

  Matters came to a head when his defence counsel, Avvocato Crisafulli, asked the court’s leave for Pisciotta to give evidence. The application was immediately opposed by the Attorney-General on the grounds that as Pisciotta had been the last member of the band to be arrested, his examination should be left to the last. The president of the court, D’Agostino, agreed – an extraordinary and almost unprecedented ruling under Italian judicial procedure, which assumes that an accused person volunteering to make a statement shows thereby his desire to collaborate with justice.

  Avvocato Sotgiù, representing under the Italian system the interests of the persons who had suffered injury or loss in the massacre, then supported Crisafulli’s application.

  AVVOCATO SOTGIÙ: A campaign has been started in the Government Press to discredit in advance any evidence given by Pisciotta. Perhaps Giuliano signed his death warrant when he sent to you, Signor President, a declaration in which he denied the existence of instigators, but Pisciotta is here, and alive. Let us open our eyes to reality.

  PRESIDENT D’AGOSTINO [showing signs of nervousness]: I have my own views, and shall do as I think fit. When the proper time comes, I will interrogate Pisciotta. First, I propose to interrogate the others.

  AVVOCATO TINO [for the survivors]: I fully support the right of the accused to speak.

  THE PRESIDENT: The accused can keep what he has to say in his stomach. His time will come.

  ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Here we are trying those materially responsible for the crime of Portella della Ginestra. Anything irrelevant that may emerge does not concern us.