by Norman Lewis
A clash was inevitable, and the deadly war that broke out between the exponents of the rival ideologies was epitomised by the happenings at Corleone. In this unhappy town where, as Dolci discovered, killing a man made no more impression than killing a goat, the sinister Dr Michele Navarra, head of the old Mafia, faced his young rival, Luciano Liggio, murderer of the trade union leader, Placido Rizzotto. With Dr Navarra in control in Corleone, nothing could change. A project had been under consideration for building a dam, but Navarra, the hidebound traditionalist, would not hear of it, and as he stood between Liggio and a huge fortune to be squeezed out of contractors, Liggio simply killed him. Unfortunately for that tormented population of Corleone, the numbers on both sides were about equal, so the struggle went on – and does to this day – with hardly a month going by without the news of some fresh massacre as the factions of conservatism and progress dismember each other.
In Palermo itself, the issue was less clean-cut between the several ‘families’ of the various districts of the market and of the port, but the results were the same. Violent death became a commonplace, and the city’s homicide rate soon rose to be the highest in the world – exceeding that of the whole of Lombardy in the north, a province which contains all the great industrial towns of Italy. In the face of this bloody experience, the civil population maintained a stubborn reticence. On one occasion the police managed to cordon off the whole of a busy street after a killing, and every single person was questioned without even one admitting to having heard a shot. In another instance a passer-by took to his heels when the shooting started and had practically stumbled over a corpse when a policeman stopped him. Not only did he deny having noticed the body, lying practically between his feet, but while admitting to having heard alarming sounds, said he attributed them to thunder, and was running to avoid being caught in a storm.
These maladjustments and stresses within the Honoured Society’s fabric were aggravated by the sudden death of that conciliatory genius, Don Calò, who had done so much in the cause of unity among the men of respect. Like so many mafiosi of the old school who were inclined to overeat and took little exercise, he had become increasingly sluggish and adipose in his declining years, and had suffered from a series of minor heart attacks. His end came one day while travelling home to Villalba by car. He asked to be carried out so that he could lie down in a more comfortable position on the road verge. A few minutes later he died peacefully, his last recorded words being, ‘How beautiful life is!’ When he lay in state, politicians, eminent clerics, and the heads of all the Mafia ‘families’ came to pay their respects, and there were ritual cries of wonderment at the delicacy of the fragrance the body was supposed to have exuded – ‘even in death he’s perfumed!’ And just as in 1909 Don Calò had stood by the bier of Don Pietro of Camporeale and taken the cord of the black flag covering the coffin in his left hand so that the powerful influence of the dead capo-Mafia could flow into his body, now Don Calò’s successor did the same. His memorial tablet in the church at Villalba says that he was chaste, temperate, forbearing, tireless in his defence of the weak, and that above all he was a gentleman. The nostalgic tributes of the hundreds of journalists who composed his obituaries went even further. One distinguished writer, speaking for them all, summed up: ‘In any society a category of persons must exist capable of adjusting situations that become too complicated … Simply by picking up a telephone, he could reach the Cardinal, the Prefect, the General, the President of the Region, the Mayor, or any deputy. Don Calò himself remained aloof and inaccessible, like a samurai or a German field-marshal in the exercise of his functions.’
In the political field – even after the withdrawal of Don Calò’s mesmeric influence from the Sicilian scene – things were going well for the Honoured Society. On April 10th, 1948, a conference of the heads of the Mafia of all Sicily had been held at a landowner’s seaside villa just outside Palermo, and following this the order was given for all-out support for the Christian Democrats. After the meeting some fifty cars departed, heading for all parts of the island and carrying supplies of the Party’s emblem – a cross on a shield – for distribution among the Society’s affiliates.
But comforting as it might have been to have the assurance that henceforward Sicilian voters would return to the disciplined frame of mind of old, when the time came to go the polls, it went against the grain of some Demochristian politicians to have to give what was expected of them in return. Among these was Alessi, President of the Regional Assembly. Although Alessi was a firm friend and admirer of Don Calò, and had once described the Mafia as Sicilian folklore – ‘a matter of local colour’ – the new arrangement was too much for his stomach, and he resigned. There followed seven years’ rule by the Right Wing of the party, abetted by the Mafia with its authoritarian tactics. Not only was any prominent trade union leader slaughtered in this period, but even Demochristian politicians who stood for seats for which the Mafia wished to put forward its own candidate were resolutely eliminated by the double blast from the barrels of the lupara. All these numerous crimes went unpunished. The prize was control of the Regional Assembly and of the City Councils – as glittering an el dorado as the Spanish Conquistadors of the New World had ever dreamed of.
It was the men of the new Mafia who were to possess themselves of this treasure. The city of Palermo was entering a phase of huge postwar expansion, and all that was necessary to become a multimillionaire almost overnight was to know in advance – even better, to decide – just where the new suburbs were to be built, and then buy up the land. Instances have been quoted when land bought at sixty lire (9d.) per square yard became worth thirty thousand lire (£18) per square yard a few months later. Operating at this level, a capo-Mafia could make more in one single devastating coup than Don Calò had scraped together in five years of rigging the black market in olive oil, and more than the man who cornered the water supplies in a parched countryside could hope to extort in a lifetime. There were rich pickings, too, for the lower-grade mafioso in the city’s modernisation. A man not yet big enough to pull strings at the City Hall might simply walk up to the proprietor of some half-finished block of apartments, or garage, or cinema, and say, ‘I’ve decided to go into business with you. I’ll pay for my shares out of salary – say half a million a week. I can save you money. You pay your contractors too much. They’ll work for half the price for me.’ Refusal, the man approached with this proposition knew, would almost certainly be punished by an explosion that might bring half the building down. The mafioso moved in.
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Second only to the racket in land and building development as a source of spectacular profit was the traffic in drugs. Heroin, procured in the Middle East – principally the Lebanon – was shipped with reasonable security to Sicily, where the trickier business of arranging for its passage to the United States was organised. The rewards involved were so immense that a ten-pound parcel smuggled safely through to its final destination meant a small fortune for each man through whose hands it passed. The scale of these operations first became evident in 1958 through a pure accident. A league of Sicilian fishermen had been formed to put down fraudulent fishing by the use of dynamite, and by dragnets having an illegally fine mesh. The league bought its own fast motor-launch, and this, with its crew of sworn maritime police, patrolled likely waters on the lookout for offenders. One night, when just off Palermo, it detected the presence of a suspicious craft, but as soon as the patrol vessel approached with the intention of boarding, it was received with machine-gun fire. The stranger then made off at such a speed that it was quite clear from the power of its engines that it was no ordinary fishing-boat. The Mafia immediately moved in to suppress any possible repercussions of this encounter, and to rule out any possibility of a repetition of the incident. By order of the Customs authorities, the patrol boat was taken out of service, its captain was transferred to northern Italy, two NCOs of the Maritime Guard who made up the crew were also transferred, and a third found it
necessary to resign.
Nowadays the traffic in drugs is accepted as commonplace. Everyone knows it goes on, and it is only new and ingenious methods, as they are occasionally brought to light, of concealing the heroin or cocaine on its way to the United States that excite any interest in the Press. Of these, the most celebrated involved the confection of false oranges out of wax. For some time whenever a shipment was made, every crate of selected oranges contained one of these counterfeits filled by syringe with a hundred grams of heroin. The device is supposed to have been the brainchild of Lucky Luciano – who died in 1962, with a dramatic suddenness that put many Sicilians in mind of the poisoned coffee of the Ucciardone.
For a short time after his homecoming Luciano went into partnership with Don Calò in an enterprise described as a confetti factory, but as this was protected by security measures adequate to an atomic project, it is supposed that the two men may have been engaged in processing locally the raw materials of narcotisation imported in the usual way. Luciano’s other interest – prostitution – had had to be dropped because the white slave traffic was still infamità to the authentic Sicilian men of respect. Don Calò is supposed to have asked his partner once how ever he could have allowed himself to get mixed up in such an unpleasant business. Luciano excused himself on racial grounds. Foreign women, to him, were only half-human. He couldn’t imagine them in the guise of Sicilian wives or mothers.
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While in the towns the flashy young Americanised mafioso of the new school was making his fortune out of contraband and administrative corruption, the power was slowly slipping through the fingers of the old-fashioned man of respect of the feudal estates. The fact was that the peasant had become spiritually broken-winded through a decade of too-effective terror. A law had been passed which in theory demolished the estates, as no single proprietor was permitted to retain more than five hundred acres, but it was applied at a snail’s pace, and with endless confusion. It was fifteen years, for example, after the law’s passage – only in September 1963 – that the peasants of the Brontë estate, given to Nelson and his descendants by the contemptible King of Naples, were to receive their first allotment of land. By this time many Sicilian peasants had lost the capacity for hope, and when emigration offered them a way of escape from what seemed a state of affairs that was never to be remedied, they took it.
Michele Pantaleone, in his book Mafia e Politica, describes the incident that perhaps finally broke the will to resist of the peasants in a huge area in central Sicily. A vast roundup of suspected criminals and mafiosi was carried out by a force of four hundred carabinieri and police, in the course of which 182 persons were arrested. Many stolen animals were recovered, and numerous firearms were seized, among them three sawn-off shotguns and a number of cartridges loaded with the special shot traditionally employed in Mafia killings. The peasants showed their eagerness to co-operate with the police and gave so much useful information that peace returned at last to an area where murders had been an almost daily occurrence. ‘In that zone,’ Pantaleone says, ‘the presence of the State had destroyed the myth of the Mafia’s indestructibility – a myth which unfortunately was re-established when all the persons arrested were released for “lack of sufficient proof”. This produced a wave of emigrations to the north, and abroad.’
The first batches of emigrants to leave Sicily for northern Italy or Western Germany are said to have gone reluctantly, and saw themselves as the victims of an enforced expulsion; but once the movement was under way its character changed. What followed has been called by Italian sociologists a psychological collapse. There was an almost neurotic abandonment of the land. Where land from the estates was in the end made available, in many cases it was not taken up. Between 1951 and 1961, four hundred thousand Sicilians – more than ten per cent of the population – decided to emigrate. The majority of these were males who could expect to find work, and in large areas only old people, women and children were left behind. In the province of Messina women and children now make up eighty-five per cent of the population. For the first time since their creation a thousand years ago, some of the feudal estates – which still comprise twenty per cent of the cultivable surface of Sicily – are without labour; a situation which has compelled one landowner at Catolica Eraclea to hand the whole of his land over to the Forestry Commission. Parallel to this flight from the land is a growing process of ‘dis-industrialisation’. Potential investors from the mainland have come to sniff the Sicilian atmosphere and quickly departed. Northern capitalists do not take kindly to the notion of having to pay for ‘protection’ for their enterprises. Thus the so-called miracle of Italy’s economic expansion passed Sicily by. In 1962 the per capita income remained by far the lowest of any region – only £130 per annum, as compared with £250 in northern Italy, and £350 for the town of Milan. This figure, of course, included the incomes of relatively affluent city dwellers. A peasant’s income would be very much lower.
The climate for many of those Sicilians that remain is one in which the familiar omertà has slowly deepened into a real and paralysing fear, which has finally penetrated the Sicilian subconscious. From this has developed an almost pathological aptitude for suffering in silence, incredibly illustrated in the recent case of a whole community bowing its neck in resignation under the depredations of a handful of mafiosi monks.
It was 1958 before the activities of the Franciscan fathers of Mazzarino received any publicity, although they had by that time been terrorising the neighbourhood for some years. Bandit monks and mafiosi monks were nothing new to the long-suffering inhabitants of rural Sicily. Time and again one reads of sinister Friar Tucks riding with outlaw bands to waylay travellers or attack farms. At the beginning of the century there had been a pitched battle between the peasants of Santo Stefano and robber monks from the local monastery, and in 1923 a mafioso Benedictine father who was a member of the same monastery beheaded the Abbot on the refectory table. The Abbot was capo-Mafia of the whole valley. Yet again in 1945 at Santo Stefano the Bishop of Agrigento was shot and nearly killed by a mafioso brother, while the Franciscan convent of Mazzarino had in the past sheltered a band of robbers and the monks had shared in the proceeds of their crimes.
What seems so extraordinary to the outsider is that only one man ever stood up to the monks, and even he never seems to have considered going to the authorities. This was Mazzarino’s richest citizen, Angelo Cannada, one of the many – including affluent monks in neighbouring monasteries – who received letters of extortion, but the only victim who refused to pay up. For this obduracy he paid with his life.
The principal villain in the case was Padre Carmelo, the prior of the convent, who was a personal friend of Cannada’s and had often said mass in the private chapel in the Cannada house. At this time the Prior was approaching his eightieth year, a man of exceedingly fragile appearance but possessed of a sort of macabre, skipping vitality. Padre Carmelo was considered the best preacher in the province, a great quoter in his sermons of the Divina Commedia, but off-duty habitually expressing himself in the thieves’-slang of the Mafia. Cannada had received a succession of letters demanding ten million lire and ordering him to get in touch with the Franciscans, who would tell him how the money was to be paid. In the end he rang up Padre Carmelo, who came over in a taxi to discuss the matter with him. The old Prior’s story was that the monks had been forced by some mysterious organisation to act as agents for the collection of the money. He advised Cannada to pay up, did his best to make his friend’s flesh creep with an account of the ferocity of the extortioner’s character, and offended Cannada by a blasphemous outburst when Cannada said that he put his trust in God. All the old Prior’s arguments were without avail. Cannada said that nothing would make him pay a single lira. In the end Padre Carmelo went off in a fury. Some days later four masked men called at Cannada’s house, dragged him out and shot him in his own vineyard. Padre Carmelo officiated at the funeral service and preached movingly on the theme of the tran
sience of human satisfactions, including wealth.
Now it was the turn of Cannada’s widow to receive the usual threatening letters, and the inevitable visit from Padre Carmelo. The widow’s brother was present at this meeting when ten million lire was again demanded, and he made a counter-offer of a hundred thousand lire. This produced the sarcastic suggestion from Padre Carmelo that he should keep it to buy cigarettes. However, on behalf of the extortioners he agreed to drop the asking price to three million. As a friend of the family, Padre Carmelo knew something of the Cannadas’ financial background, and he suggested to the widow that she should sell a piece of her property which he valued at seven million. If the demand were not met, he warned her that some tragic fate was likely to overtake her only son. At this point the terrified woman agreed to hand over a million lire, and Padre Carmelo, who appears to have entered with relish into the mechanics of extortion, warned her to see to it that she kept no record of the numbers of the banknotes.
Thereafter the monks continued to terrorise the cowed citizenry of Mazzarino for two full years. A witness at the preliminary hearing of their trial described the fear, almost amounting to panic, provoked by the mere appearance of Franciscans in the streets of the town. A new police chief, Maresciallo Di Stefano, called in to investigate the killing of Cannada, ran up immediately against the usual barrier of silence. Isolated as he was from the population, an occasional rumour reached him of the goings-on at the convent, and finally induced him to investigate the monks’ financial background. The result of this enquiry produced some surprises. The Franciscans of Mazzarino depended for their revenue on public charity, on the produce of a small orchard, and, he discovered, on regular but smallish subscriptions they received from political sources for persuading the citizens of Mazzarino to vote Christian Democrat – which they did, almost to a man. Despite what was in theory a somewhat meagre income, all the monks he was investigating turned out to be lira millionaires, having large sums of money held in their original lay names in banking accounts dispersed about the country.
