by Norman Lewis
But justice, put on its mettle, had not yet admitted defeat, and when all appeared to be lost, it produced an even greater surprise than Rosa Messina had been before her collapse. An inhabitant of Tommaso Natale had been found in a remote gaol who was prepared to confirm all Rosa Messina had said, and to add to it even more conclusive evidence of his own. This man, Simone Mansueto, announced that he had been on the mountainside on the evening of the killing of the Riccobono boy, had heard the gunfire, and had seen the three murderers returning from their bloody errand.
The new champion of the law had written to the President from prison, an ill-spelled and unpunctuated letter which was read out in court: ‘… and therefore I beg Your Excellency to allow me to come and declare all I know this being of the greatest importance and I shall be proud to be able to serve the cause of justice if Your Excellency will allow me to appear before the court …’
The reading of the letter was interrupted by a scream from the man’s wife, present in the public gallery. ‘He’s mad! Anybody who listens to him will go to hell!’
‘There is God in these people,’ Danilo Dolci once said, ‘like the fire beneath the ashes.’ At this moment it looked as though yet another generation might be used up before the flame could break through.
* * *
At the time when the Riccobonos and Cracolicis of Tommaso Natale were engaged in the last rabid phase of mutual extermination, a commission of experts appointed by the European Parliament in Luxembourg arrived in Sicily. The Commission had come to investigate the island’s economic predicament with a view to reporting on the feasibility of aid by the European Bank. All the members of the Commission were northerners, and the spectacle to these men from France, Belgium and the German Federal Republic of a member nation where the Middle Ages still kept a foothold was novel and disconcerting. The visitors were briefly entertained among the baroque splendours of Palermo, taken on a round of the Greek temples of Agrigento, and then without further ado plunged into the island’s austere hinterland. The harshness of the contrast evoked a heartfelt comment in the Commission’s report: ‘Sicily reminds one of a gloomy picture in a gilded frame.’
This penetration of the Sicilian interior – seeming as it did to the visiting specialists something akin to an exploration back into social history – produced a succession of surprises. The report noted the nonexistence of European- style villages. People lived as they had done a thousand years before in small townships, perched for the most part on laboriously accessible hilltops, and to these they returned at nightfall, leaving the countryside deserted. The peasants cultivated tiny holdings, often widely separated, the farthest of them located at huge distances from the town. Thus much of their working lives was taken up in sterile journeyings from one patch to another, and back to their homes. A governmental programme of land reform had set out to rectify this absurdity by building small colonies of houses for agricultural workers in between the widely spaced towns, and the Commission was invited to inspect several of these. It found that not a single house was inhabited. Observing this phenomenon through northern eyes, the experts drew what was almost certainly a mistaken conclusion. The peasants, they supposed, had rejected the houses because they lacked electricity and water and, as the report put it, were ‘too small to live in, and too large to be buried in’. No one thought fit to explain to them the grim legend of the bandit on every mountain-top who had been there throughout the centuries and might at any moment return.
The much publicised land-reform had been going now for fifteen years, but the foreign experts took a hard, professional look at its paper achievements and kept their scepticism intact. Some of the best legal brains in Italy had been employed to discover and enlarge the many loopholes in the law. Statistically the feudal latifundia had been abolished, but in reality it was in business almost as before. The great bulk of fertile acres had been put beyond the reach of expropriation by such simple devices as disposing of the land on long leases. ‘It was left to the great proprietors to decide which land they should hand over for distribution under the provisions of the land-reform law, and they did not always part with the best.’ In nine cases out of ten the Commission found that the maximum grant of fifteen acres to which a peasant was entitled consisted of land that was too arid to support a family.
It appeared to the representatives of the European Parliament that the benefits ascribed to the land reform were largely fictitious. Despite the huge and continuing wave of emigration, Sicilians who remained could be divided into the unemployed and the partially employed. Sharecropping, described by the investigators as without social or economic justification, was as widespread as ever. The report recommended the establishment of co-operatives based upon properly mechanised farming as the only remedy for the country’s economic near-prostration. They were told by their hosts that the excessive individualism of the Sicilian character made the solution difficult, but they heard nothing of these individualists’ bitter experiences of co-operatives in the past – the co-operatives organised by Don Calò and his Mafia imitators. The Mafia, indeed, is nowhere mentioned in this otherwise penetrating analysis, although – whether the members of the Commission realised it or not – they were confronted with monumental evidence of its presence. ‘We were given the opportunity of visiting two dams in construction. For the members of the delegation they offered a singular spectacle, as the dams were being constructed in zones of almost total drought, and it was logical to ask oneself if these basins would ever fill with water.’ It was evident that the dams’ builders, too, hardly expected them to fulfil their presumed function, as no plans had been made to distribute any water they collected.
The European Parliamentary Commission’s report concludes with a not unexpected verdict. ‘The unhealthy economic situation of the country must be blamed on the persistence of feudalism. Even if this is to be explained by historical causation, the delegation feels that it must not be allowed to evade censure.’ It was as much as a body of economists could say, but in reality how much the charge might have been expanded, and how many more of the sorrows of Sicily could have been laid at the door of the feudal system – that mangy but imperishable tiger.
For centuries, and as a matter of coolly considered policy, the feudalists had kept back huge areas of Sicily from cultivation. They had developed a neatly effective system for suffocating the periodic outbursts of despair this policy engendered: the desperate spirit turned bandit was enlisted in emergency in the feudalists’ private armies, employed like a prison camp trusty to quell the mutinies of his fellow sufferers, and then, the crisis past, coldly destroyed. The men who manipulated the levers of this ancient engine of oppression had stood between the King of Spain’s Viceroy and justice, had deluded the foolish Bourbons, tamed the socialism of Garibaldi, made a laughing-stock of parliamentary democracy, and done a profitable deal with Fascism. Slowly they had fused with the Mafia – detached from the peasants it once protected – as the richest men of honour became landowners and the most astute of the feudalists joined the Honoured Society. The Mafia-feudalist combination had pulled the wool over the Allies’ eyes in 1943, and the Allies had been tricked into assisting in the Mafia’s reanimation. Giuliano had been the puppet of the Mafia-feudalists, and their finger had been on the trigger of his machine-gun when he set out at Portella della Ginestra to teach the peasants what they must expect whenever they dared to vote as free men. The supporters of the feudal system had littered the streets and the waste places of Sicily with the corpses of their opponents, but the damage done by outright violence was nothing by comparison to the crushing of the Sicilian spirit and the anaesthetising of the Sicilian conscience in an artificially prolonged climate of illiteracy, ignorance and fear.
And now the final irony emerges. Sicily, dominated for all time by landlord, Church and Mafia, was to provide a reservoir of docile right-wing voters. But the reservoir had cracked open under intolerable pressures, and was fast emptying; thus the conspiracy so carefully prepared was bound to fai
l. Moreover, the Sicilians who escaped their island prison carried with them an ineradicable resentment, and in the north they were to become ardent recruits to the world’s numerically largest Communist Party outside the Eastern bloc – voting Communist almost to a man. Thus, by their stubborn mistakes, the backward-looking men who believed they could rule Sicily for ever prepared their nemesis.
The assertion on page 149 concerning the actions of Prince Alliata and his colleagues in the Christian Democratic Party are based and based only upon the testimony of Pisciotta at his trial at Viterbo. No history of the matters discussed in this book would be complete without a full account of the trial and, in particular, of Pisciotta’s evidence. However, Pisciotta’s evidence on a great many matters is almost certainly unreliable and must be treated with the greatest reserve. Prince Alliata has categorically denied the allegations made against him.
Epilogue
by Marcello Cimino
Marcello Cimino has spent the last twenty-five years on the staff of L’Ora, Palermo’s afternoon daily, known for its stand against the Mafia. He was acquainted with several of the honest men who have been eliminated by the Mafia in recent years. He was particularly close to Mauro De Mauro and Giuseppe Fava, both journalists, Cesare Terranova, judge, and Pio La Torre, member of parliament. This epilogue is dedicated to their memory.
TWENTY YEARS have passed since the appearance of the penetrating and accurate report by Norman Lewis on the Sicilian Mafia, ironically entitled The Honoured Society. To read it again today one finds little there to alter or correct; the question that remains to be answered is what happened to the personalities who featured in Norman Lewis’s story and what has happened to the Honoured Society itself?
As was to be foreseen, many mafiosi active in 1963 are dead, and not all of them peacefully in their beds. The Mafia, on the other hand, survives, and, not only that, but has grown and changed its form. It is no longer a feudal, but a capitalist organisation, based not only in Sicily but in Italy as a whole, from which it has extended the range of its operations to neigh-bouring countries, as well as retaining its strong links in the United States.
It has strengthened its defences because the antagonistic forces it faced have strengthened theirs. Its enemies now include not only the Left, but significant sectors of the Catholic and liberal world, as well as the judiciary and the forces of law and order.
The present phase of the struggle between the Mafia and the Italian state began in 1963 with the beginning of the operation of the Parliamentary Commission of Enquiry into the Mafia, mentioned by Norman Lewis in the last chapter of this book. The work of the Commission went ahead until 1976 – thirteen years of difficult navigation – encountering innumerable obstacles and thwarted by secret protection from within the governing parties, above all of the Christian Democrats, who in the past have been charged with favouring the Mafia in return for electoral support. In the end, the Commission may be said to have failed, largely through having been unable to expose the suspected collusion between the Mafia and politicians.
Today, it is possible to say that the mere fact that such a commission could operate at all has at least acted as a curb on the most brazen manifestations of criminality. It has also encouraged the servants of the state in Sicily, and in particular the police, the Carabinieri, and the judiciary in the execution of their duty.
During these years mafiosi were from time to time at least arrested and put on trial, although few were found guilty and sentenced. The few who were sentenced were often banished to other regions of Italy. The intention was to sever their connections with the criminal elements in their original surroundings. It was a wholly unsuccessful device: those who were banished not only maintained their old connections, but created new links locally, with the result that today the Mafia operates just as effectively in any part of Italy as in Sicily itself.
In the course of its thirteen-year investigations the Commission accumulated an enormous quantity of documents, only a part of which have been published. Senator Donato Pafundi, Social Democrat, who for some time was president of the body, said the archives contained material that would cause a national catastrophe if they ever came to light. This is unlikely to happen as the major parts of the material remain categorised as state secrets. Those documents published up till now fill thirty large volumes. They confirm and supplement the account given us by Norman Lewis.
In favour of the Commission it can at least be said that it has jettisoned the famous, but long outmoded, definition of the Mafia as ‘a secret society of persons sharing a pronounced sense of honour’ and all such descriptions which tend to elevate and remove it from organised criminality. Gone, too, are the romantic fallacies of those who wish to find the origin of the Mafia in the resistance of the poor against the oppression of the rich. Amazingly the Commission is unable to give us a new definition of the Mafia, and on this point it remains vague and imprecise, as if faced with a threshold across which it has feared to tread.
The decision presented by the left-wing minority in the Commission makes some attempt to arrive at a conclusion, when it describes the Mafia as ‘a great financial power’, ‘a system of power’, ‘a widespread plot, of which the roots, the terrain of financial accumulation, and the recruiting ground of its leadership, remains in Sicily.’ This is the nucleus of a definition adequate to fit the daily reality of the Mafia, the characteristics of which Norman Lewis had understood more than twenty years before the Parliamentary Commission, when he spoke of ‘an expansive and capitalistic young Mafia which had no patience with restrictive practices.’
Nobody twenty years ago could have associated the image of the Mafia with that of capitalism. Latterly, however, it has become the object of scientific investigation, not only by sociologists but by historians, jurists, and economists. They speak nowadays of a mafia economy and of mafioso enterprises. The Mafia, in fact, can be studied as a true form of bourgeois capitalism in formation.
From halfway through the Seventies an immense and rapid accumulation of capital has been achieved by the Sicilian Mafia through the international traffic in drugs. It is one that offers staggering profits, due to the disproportion between the cost of raw material, opium, and the price of the final product, the white powder that the addicts call ‘La roba’ (the stuff).
The last report worked out by an Italian expert (basing his figures on the year 1982) contains the following data: for a kilo of morphine-base the Turkish price is $3,500, the Greek $8,000, and the Milan price $12,000. The transformation of morphine into heroin is extremely simple and costs little; but this transformation is all that is necessary to produce a leap in value from $12,000 to over $120,000 on the European market, and $250,000 (at wholesale prices) on the United States market.
During the Seventies the Mafia was able to establish in Sicily a large, but unknown, number of morphine refineries, only three of which were discovered by the police. The productive capacity of Sicilian refineries has been calculated at five tons of pure heroin per annum, a quantity corresponding to about thirty per cent of American consumption.
A part of the enormous profits made in this way are being reinvested in the same trade, but another more significant part filters through into the general Sicilian economy. It is through these investments that the mafiosi traffickers in drugs are transforming themselves into capitalists.
There is nothing new under the sun. Profits on this scale were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the formative phase of English bourgeois capitalism, by the ship owners who dedicated themselves to the slave trade between Africa and America, and who, having thus enriched themselves, became paragons of social respectability.
Once in a while a newspaper story provides one with hints of what happen to the huge profits generated by heroin. There was the story of the international banker Michele Sindona, so closely involved with Roberto Calvi, who on June 17, 1982 was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge. Or the story of a well known capo-Mafia who disappeared fro
m Sicily in 1981, and turned up in 1984 in Madrid, where he had passed as a rich Brazilian, owner of a construction complex in the Costa del Sol. Frequently police investigations have led them to the discovery of Mafia capital invested in the names of private individuals, the owners of chains of hotels, businesses and famous casinos.
Violence is the method through which the Mafia promotes its business interests and settles internal disputes. After the warfare, described in the last pages of Norman Lewis’s book, there was a temporary lull in the violence. This was in part through the activities of the Parliamentary Commission, but also through a temporary stability following the drastic elimination of the young mafiosi rebels under the leadership of the La Barbera brothers.
At that time, the drug traffic had not yet become the colossal affair it is now, and the Mafia continued to extract its major profits from the construction industry and tobacco contraband. A few mafiosi who moved to North Italy involved themselves in kidnapping and extortion. A shoot-out between rival Mafia factions in the Viale Lazio, Palermo, produced five corpses. Some time in 1975 Angelo La Barbera, who in the meanwhile had been arrested, was stabbed to death in the prison of Perugia. There was, in fact, not a great deal to report.
Then a year after the killings at Viale Lazio an incident took place in Palermo that produced a sensation throughout Italy. Mauro De Mauro, an extremely brave reporter for the daily L’Ora di Palermo, was kidnapped outside his house, and of him nothing more has been heard. Two explanations for his disappearance were current: one that he had been kidnapped and killed because he was about to disclose a Mafia arrangement with high finance or politics; the other that he had stumbled across some dangerous secret in connection with the drug trade.
Hardly a year had gone since the disappearance of De Mauro when, on May 6 1971, Judge Pietro Scaglione of the Palermo court was killed. In this case, too, the investigations have produced no result, nor has there ever been any plausible explanation as to the motives of his killing. Certain strange circumstances came to light in the course of the enquiries. It is known, for example, that Mauro De Mauro had a secret meeting with Judge Scaglione shortly before being kidnapped. There are reports, too, of involvements by the Judge in episodes connecting the Mafia with banditry. He was placed in charge of investigating the death of the bandit Giuliano, and helped foster the erroneous rumour, according to which the bandit was killed in a battle with the Carabinieri. Later it was known that he was murdered in cold blood in his sleep, probably by his lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta. Pisciotta was interrogated in prison by the same Scaglione, the very day before being poisoned with the famous coffee laced with strychnine.
