by Norman Lewis
In finding Di Pisa not guilty, this tribunal may have been influenced by the recent decision of the Grand Council, realising too well that a death sentence imposed at this delicate moment might jeopardise the general truce. The verdict exculpating Di Pisa was bitterly contested by two members of the court – the brothers La Barbera, leaders of an immensely powerful minority faction of the New Mafia. Their reluctance, and as it subsequently turned out, their refusal to accept the ruling of the majority, epitomised the struggle between the divergent Mafias: a struggle which was on the verge of becoming – truce or no truce – a war to the knife.
Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera were the chief and vice-chief respectively of the Mafia of ‘Palermo-Central’, the richest of all the Mafia ‘families’ through its control of most of the city’s building expansion. They were business operators of genius; ex-slum-urchins who had made huge fortunes in fifteen years, and – as the picturesque Sicilian expression goes – they had put the city through their winepress. At the same time they were craftsmen of death, killing with the forethought and intellectual concentration of chess players, in observance of the Machiavellian principle of never allowing an enemy to live – to which they added a corollary of their own, which called for the extermination even of friends of enemies. They lived in the select suburb known as Rose Garden City, populated by the cream of Palerman bourgeois society, and were highly respected by the High Court judges, the medical consultants, and the titled landowners who were their neighbours. The opinion of one of these – who had never dreamed that Angelo La Barbera was anything other than a successful building contractor – suggests that ‘the man in the flat above’ had a chameleon-like personality. ‘Capo-Mafia? Killer? … Personally I couldn’t even imagine him lifting his hand to anyone. I always regarded him first and foremost as a considerate man. In fact, he carried his kindness to others almost to the point of exaggeration. Not only with the big people he used to go round with, either. He was the same with everybody, it didn’t matter how unimportant they happened to be. As for money, he quite obviously didn’t care about it. He simply threw it away. La Barbera was a soft touch if ever there was one. Never heard of any poor devil going to him and being sent away empty-handed.’
Di Pisa was shot down by La Barbera’s killers. It is unlikely that the missing heroin was his undoing, although it provided the excuse. By La Barbera’s severe standards Di Pisa was a brash and noisy fellow, lacking in proper respect. He had tried to force his way into the building expansion racket, the preserve of the highest level of the Mafia hierarchy, ‘prima di aversi fatte le ossa – before making his bones’. (La Barbera had made his bones at the age of twenty-five, in a bloody episode straight out of the Pentateuch, by killing the famous capo-Mafia who had been his protector.) Getting out of his car in a main square of Palermo and making for a tobacco kiosk, Di Pisa found himself suddenly in the company of two silent strangers. He made no attempt to escape. Among the many people questioned by the police was a garage-hand who had been filling up a car’s tank on the other side of the road when Di Pisa had met his end. The pressmen were fascinated to discover that this was none other than the bandit Giuliano’s brother. He had not heard the shots.
In this assassination the verdict of the Mafia Court had been ignored, and the truce broken. This was the moment, if ever, in the Mafia’s history when the cool counsels and the statesmanship of Don Calò Vizzini were called for to avert the threat of anarchy and civil war. But Don Calò was no longer there, and his successors could no more dominate the dynamic and explosive young Mafia of Palermo than an ageing bomber pilot of the last war could be expected to take over the controls of a modern jet airliner.
The old Mafia had had all they could take of high-handedness of this kind. Compared to the newcomers who had appropriated the city of Palermo, they were an unimaginative and poverty-stricken collection, but they could still fight their own battles in their own way. Salvatore La Barbera simply vanished and only the charred remains of his car were found. His brother Angelo left Sicily and got as far as Milan, and was there ambushed – ineffectively – as, although severely wounded, he survived. It was the benevolent Manzella who was held responsible by the La Barbera faction for ordering the elimination of the two irksome brothers. It was for this that he was called to account in so macabre a fashion when, returning on that April evening from a visit to the nuns of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, he discovered the unfamiliar car in his courtyard.
Now the war was on in earnest, and it was fought on two levels: the ideological conflict of the ancient blood-feud, and the battle for the material rewards offered by the succession to the chieftainship of Palermo-Central. The struggle for the seizure to high office of any kind where no official successor has been appointed is likely to be ruthless, but in more polite spheres of society blow and counterblow are delivered behind a screen of outward sanctity. In Palermo at war, the passions engaged are identical, but the contestants are a law unto themselves – therefore they simply kill each other in the confident belief that they can do so with impunity.
The manner of Manzella’s death had set a new fashion in assassination, and within a few weeks several more Alfa-Romeo cars exploded with murderous results in various parts of the city of Palermo and its suburbs. This particular marque, sleek, speedy and outstandingly manageable in a getaway dash through traffic, has always been the favourite of the mafioso owner-driver, and it possessed an additional advantage where death by a dynamited car was planned. This lay in the placing of the car’s battery in the boot, which much facilitated the wiring called for in rigging up any engine of destruction. When the men of the New Mafia packed a hundredweight of dynamite into the boot of a Giulietta and arranged for it to be blown to smithereens, the attack was not only on life, but on property, and it was not long before the mere leaving of a car of this type unattended for a suspiciously long time was enough to panic the police into cordoning off the street and evacuating nearby buildings. The old Mafia could not afford this expensive modern version of the assassin’s dagger, but retaliated in the traditional manner, and with considerable success. Quietly and economically, the friends and relations of the brothers La Barbera, as well as the pressing candidates for their office, began to disappear. Among them was the supposedly invulnerable Don Mommo Grasso, capo-Mafia of Miselmeri. For many years in the past Don Mommo had played the part of Our Lord in the annual Good Friday mystery-play performed in his town, but even the great prestige based on this additional count was insufficient to outweigh a fatal relationship with the La Barberas, and he and his son vanished, to be seen no more.
It began to seem now to some observers that the Honoured Society was fast sliding into a phase of self-destruction, and the impression was strengthened by the wild savageries perpetrated at the end of June 1963. On the morning of the 29th two bakers on their way to work in the small town of Villabate, near Palermo, noticed smoke coming from an Alfa-Romeo car parked outside a garage. Incredibly enough, they did not run for their lives, as they probably would had they known that the garage was the property of the Di Peri family – a notorious dynasty of mafiosi. While one of the bakers sauntered on a few paces, the other went to find the watchman in charge of the garage, and was just returning with him when the car exploded, blowing them both to pieces. The second baker was crippled for life.
Next day, with the police department in a state of rising hysteria, a telephone call was taken at headquarters from Ciaculli – also a few miles from Palermo – to say that another dubious-looking Alfa-Romeo had been found abandoned in a lane. A few minutes later a second call was received. ‘Don’t touch the Alfa-Romeo,’ the caller said, and then rang off. No one would have dreamed of touching the Alfa-Romeo in the ordinary way, but when the squad of policemen and army engineers reached Ciaculli, they were relieved to find that this was not an occasion when they would be expected to risk their lives exploring the intricacies of the wiring of an explosive charge. For once, the bomb – a primitive affair with a fuse �
�� had been left on the car’s back seat, and the fuse had been lighted and had gone out. One of the rear tyres was flat, and that, quite clearly, was why the car had been abandoned. Having removed the bomb from the back seat, somebody then opened the boot, and the real charge exploded. The bomb on the seat had been only a decoy. All seven soldiers and policemen were killed.
Thus had the Mafia played into the hands of the investigatory Commission. Or so it seemed. A wave of arrests began, only equalled before in the days of Mussolini’s Prefect Mori and his celebrated ‘Plan Attila’, and within a few days some three hundred new prisoners had been crammed into the lugubrious cells of Ucciardone. The newspapers published row after row of photographs of the arrested persons, but studying these glowering and unshaven faces, the public began to wonder just what was happening. Nobody seemed to have heard of most of these men, and people studied these almost daily rogues’ galleries in vain for any appearance of a politician-manipulating, cocktail-sipping capo-Mafia of the La Barbera type. These faces were those of the foredoomed, half-demented, gallows-fodder of François Villon – ‘rags’, as the Sicilians call them. A confident rumour spread abroad that all the mafiosi who mattered were ‘on holiday in Switzerland, and that a four-star hotel in Lugano was full of them’.
And then suddenly the public mood veered round towards hope, for once again peace returned to Palermo – and now, too, to the confounding of the cynics, the big names began to appear in the headlines: Di Peri, Passalacqua, Nicoletti. ‘Zu Tanu’ Filippone was arrested – an octogenarian man of respect of the highest rank. When Zu Tanu was approached by a subordinate the man bent to kiss his ring, and if he only had a foot on one of the lower rungs in the organisation, he actually knelt. Zu Tanu was a chronic asthmatic, and it was said of him that the sound of his laborious breathing was as comforting to his followers as that of the gentle pounding of the surf to a fisherman. Hearing that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, Zu Tanu disappeared. He was found hiding in a lavatory, and all the newspapers published pictures of him, a mountainous patriarch with a slightly oriental cast of features, like one of the old Chinese gods of good fortune caught in an unguarded moment of ill-humour. It was generally agreed that at last the police were doing their job.
* * *
The trial of the thirty mafiosi of Tommaso Natale was to be the proving-ground of the bright new millennium to be ushered in by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Activities of the Mafia, which in September 1963 presented its first proposals for anti-Mafia laws for the approbation of the Senate in Rome. By this time this case – one of the most publicised and closely followed of the century – had for several months been passing through its preliminary stages. Much of its fame, which had spread beyond the confines of Sicily, was due to the circumstance that a woman, Rosa Messina, who had lost her husband and two sons in Mafia killings, had dared to break with the tradition of omertà and had told the magistrates all she knew. Her courage had been acclaimed in the Press of five continents, and she had been photographed over and over again in her widow’s weeds, her face ravaged by grief, as she called down vengeance on those who had bereaved her of her family. And what was more to the purpose, thirty mafiosi, charged with a total of nine murders, were to appear in dock as the result of her denunciations. Here, then, the moment had clearly come for the trial of strength between a renascent and invigorated justice and a seemingly enfeebled Mafia.
Tommaso Natale is a mountain village only fifteen minutes by bus from Palermo, and its inhabitants are the inheritors of a parsimonious land supporting a few olive trees and a scraggy miscellany of animals. In these primitive places where water and pasture and fertile earth are precious, strong families arise, and in the end establish some sort of squatters’ rights to the use of a well, or to the pasturing of sheep on a mountainside. Where the central authority is able to impose little restraint, they frequently punish infringement of their privileges with death, so that the blood feud winds intricately, like a scarlet thread, through the brief moment of their history. There are a hundred places on the edges of the deserts of Africa and Asia where a comparable situation exists. The mafiosi of Tommaso Natale are Bedouins in double-breasted suits and gaudy pullovers, with nomad faces and eyes still screwed up from searching the depths of hallucinatory landscapes for their straying beasts. Without realising it, they have killed each other as far back as anybody can remember, and still kill each other, not so much out of bloodthirsty sentiment, but from economic necessity. There has never been enough to go round, so the vendetta becomes a device for keeping down the population.
By the time the new sequence of murders began, a few droplets of the industrial prosperity of Palermo had spilled over into these outlying regions. Now, with an impudent travesty of affluence, the men of the strong families drove about in worn-out Fiat cars instead of riding their mules, but nothing in their minds had changed. Scorn, previously demonstrated by stealing a man’s cow and then depositing its horns and hooves outside his door, was now translated into the slashing of tyres, or setting light to a car. The lesser families, the plebeians of wrath who were excluded from participation in the Mafia’s vengeance, still set about an enemy’s ruin by getting possession of his photograph and placing on it a lamb’s heart stuck through with skewers.
Francesco Riccobono was the head of one of the strong families, and he used his official position as forest guard to keep his neighbours’ sheep off the best grazing sites in the mountains. He was a village Esau, a huge, hairy fellow with a knack of improvising boisterous and bawdy verse with which he lampooned his enemies. One day he was found with half his head blown away. His wife, Rosa Messina, went to the police, and they listened and did nothing, so his son, Natale, decided to take the law into his own hands, shouldered his lupara, and departed to hunt down the men responsible for his father’s death. Several members of the rival Cracolici family were slaughtered by Natale before the police captured him, and locked him safely away. Now it was the turn of the surviving Cracolicis to counter-attack; Natale’s younger brother disappeared and his decomposed body was found in a crevice a month later.
But in the bookkeeping of the vendetta, accounts still failed to balance, and in their determination to see to it that they did, the Cracolici faction ran up against a minor difficulty. Four of the Cracolici clan and their allies had been killed, and there was a shortage of male Riccobonos within reach of the lupara or the sub-machine-gun. Francesco Riccobono and one of his sons were dead, two more sons were in prison, and another was a fugitive from justice, hiding out in the mountains somewhere nearby. A further adjustment in the score was made by the murder of Pietro Messina, a close relation of Rosa Messina’s, but this still left a debit balance on the Cracolici side of one life. It was therefore decided that in the absence of any accessible adult male, the thirteen-year-old Paolino, youngest of the Riccobono family, should be dispatched to even the accounts.
Pitilessness apart, only patience was required to accomplish this. Local intelligence sources were well aware that young Paolino paid occasional visits in secret to his fugitive brother, so a watch was kept on the house, and the next time Paolino slipped away along the path to the mountains he was followed and riddled with bullets, just out of sight of the village. Three men took part in this assassination, one of them bearing the baptismal name Crocefisso (Crucifix), commonly given to the child of an exceptionally devout family. On their way home the execution squad caught sight of a youth whom they feared might have heard the shooting, and who had seen and recognised them. He was chased with wild bursts of machine-gun fire, staggering and bleeding from his wounds, all the way back to the final haven of his home.
It was the death of her boy that drove Rosa Messina to do what she did. She went to the police, and to them – and thereafter to the examining magistrate – she gave the voluminous, detailed, and largely verifiable evidence that led to the arrest of the mafiosi. She was supported by Anna Galletti, the widow of Pietro Messina, whose evidence was even mor
e damaging to the Mafia’s cause. Anna Galletti was a native of the northern Italian town of Perugia, and therefore less susceptible to the intimidating climate of a Sicilian village. Both women spoke as freely to the news papermen as they did to the police, and it seemed to those who saw them that they wore their immense sorrow like an armour that not even the deadly hostility of the Mafia could penetrate.
On September 19th at the Assize Court of Palermo, Rosa Messina was called to give evidence against the men she accused of the murder of her husband and her two sons. It was a moment of supreme dramatic suspense, as this was expected to be one of the few cases in the history of Mafia trials when a witness did not retract the evidence given in hot blood, before the Mafia had had time to undermine their will to resist. The usher called Rosa Messina’s name again, but there was silence, followed by a babble of excitement. The accuser did not appear. A reporter tracked her down in Tommaso Natale a few hours later, where, through a door opened only a few inches, she told him that even if the carabinieri came for her she would refuse to testify in court. Anna Galletti, the woman of Perugia, however, did appear. Entering the witness-box, she said in a loud clear voice, which rose almost to a shriek: ‘I live alone at Tommaso Natale. I have four children. Therefore I know nothing about anything.’ The next week was spent in hearing the fifty witnesses for the defence, who were unanimous in describing the thirty mafiosi, chained together in the dock, but now relaxed and smiling, as ‘decent working men who never gave anybody any trouble’.
