The Prince

by Vito Bruschini

  The job did not present insurmountable difficulties. All he had to do was neutralize the two guards. As for the rest, the baron’s family didn’t worry him at all.

  To swing into action, however, Saro needed at least three men ready for anything. He approached a major player, a certain Vincenzo Lanzafame, who had trained him for the upcoming landing. The man was actually happy to be of use and assigned Saro three of his best men.

  The two soldiers in the outbuilding’s small kitchen were preparing a dish of spaghetti al pomodoro when they were surprised by Saro’s team. Bashed with clubs wrapped in damp cloth, they fell to the floor, unconscious. The three mafiosi looked at Saro, as if to ask for his permission. Saro thought they were waiting for him to compliment them.

  But one of the three, moving to the platter that sat there ready to eat, said, “Are we gonna let it get cold?”

  In times like those, wasting food was a sin. They divided the spaghetti up, filling two more plates, and ate silently, gobbling it down in just a few forkfuls.

  Their bellies filled, they left the small house and headed toward the villa.

  As cautious and discreet as they had been not to make too much noise, the baron had noticed the unusual commotion behind the windows. He opened the door of the villa before the mafiosi could get out their lock picks. Saro and the others were alarmed, but Giovanni Moleti was quick to reassure them. He welcomed them as liberators and asked Saro, the only one of the crew he didn’t know, if it was true that the landing was now imminent and that the bombings actually meant that it was just a matter of days.

  Saro confirmed his hunch. The baron invited him in and showed him the naval command room.

  The gabellotto’s description was fully accurate. Saro saw the painting portraying Baron Moleti’s ancestor. Beside the fireplace stood the safe. He asked if he could open it. The nobleman practically beat his breast, apologetic about not knowing the combination; he begged them to believe him.

  To speed things up Saro decided to blast it open with a small charge of dynamite he’d brought with him.

  The door flew off, and what he saw inside would have made any spy ecstatic: dossiers, maps, encrypted documents, envelopes bearing the eagle of the Third Reich. There was information about the positioning of Italian ships, and the Luftwaffe’s deployment over the Mediterranean. There were even confidential orders for the Wehrmacht’s divisions in Italy. Saro hurriedly slipped all the papers into a satchel, said good-bye to the baron, and left the villa with the three mafiosi. He separated from them shortly afterward, promising to remember them and Vincenzo Lanzafame.

  Twenty-four hours later, the satchel was in the hands of OSS agents, who delivered it at once to Vice Admiral Kent Hewitt, commander of US naval forces in European waters.

  * * *

  The bombing of the island’s main cities reduced many of them to rubble. The appointed day for the Allied troops’ landing was July 10, 1943.

  Rather than gathering at a single assembly point, the assault fleet’s ships had sailed from various ports—Port Said, Alexandria, Tripoli, Sousse, Sfax, Algiers, Oran, Bizerte—joining forces once at sea. Nothing like it had ever been seen in living memory. The imposing armada consisted of 2,590 transport vessels, 1,800 landing craft, and 280 warships.

  The Fifteenth Army Group was under the command of British general Harold Alexander, and when they neared the coast, they would be divided into two other task forces: the US Seventh Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Patton, which would land on the beach at Gela; and the British Eighth Army, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, which would come ashore south of Siracusa.

  According to the strategy devised by the British and American generals, Montgomery’s men were to head toward Messina, to close off the escape route and hem in the Italian-German forces, while Patton would keep the west side of the island in check.

  Left to oppose these shock troops was a demoralized Axis army. Nearly all the Italian infantry, artillery, and gunnery units were made up of Sicilians who feared for their families and despised the regime that had treated them like stepchildren. In addition, their outfits and equipment were in desperate shape. They had no shoes, not to mention uniforms. Some soldiers wore a regulation jacket and civvies for pants, while others wore military pants and civilian shirts. And when it came to armaments, the situation was truly pathetic. Besides numerical inferiority, since the thirty-eight Italian and nine German battalions were facing sixty-nine Allied contingents, there was the inadequacy of their weapons, which were few and in poor condition.

  Chapter 56

  With the second wave, OSS members landed in Gela, arriving in force to support the agents already present on the island. Their main task was to interrogate prisoners and civilians to obtain information about routes through the countryside, minefields, and gun emplacements. Additionally, they were to continue looking for the individuals designated by Luciano to ask for their collaboration.

  The two landings were quite successful. In particular, Patton’s Seventh Army encountered almost no resistance in Gela, while Montgomery was able to enter Siracusa the same night of the landing.

  By the end of the invasion’s first day, more than a thousand Italians had already been taken prisoner, and at least that many had thrown down their rifles and fled to the countryside to hide. After a week, the number of prisoners had grown to twenty-two thousand, half of them Sicilian. The OSS men suggested sending them home, since the fields needed laborers for the upcoming harvest. That way, American logistics operations wouldn’t be strained to the breaking point.

  The idea made headway in the commanders’ minds as well. The Allies would allow all soldiers who had surrendered to return to their villages.

  Operation Tutti a Casa—“Everybody Home”—allowed over thirty-five thousand Sicilian troops to abandon the war, and by so doing, to save their lives, thereby accelerating the collapse of the Italian army in Sicily.

  * * *

  On the morning of July 14, four days after the start of the invasion, an American fighter plane flew over the skies of Villalba, attracting the attention of farmers and the village’s few inhabitants. The pilot aroused their curiosity by making a couple of turns at low altitude over the church rectory, as if to display a yellow flag with a big black L in the center, fluttering cheerfully from the radio’s forward antenna. At the third turn, the pilot tilted the plane 45 degrees and dropped a large satchel near the residence of Monsignor Giovanni Vizzini, the village priest and brother of the famous Don Calogero Vizzini. It contained a silk scarf identical to the one waving from the plane’s antenna. The satchel was picked up by a soldier, Raniero Nuzzolese of Bari, Italy, who brought it to the carabinieri headquarters in Villalba, handing it over immediately to Lance Corporal Angelo Riccioli of Palermo.

  The following day, the same fighter plane flew over the area of Cozzo di Garbo, where Calogero Vizzini’s home was located, and dropped a second satchel right in front of his house.

  The bag was marked “zu Calò” and was picked up by one of Vizzini’s household staff and delivered to its intended recipient.

  That same evening, a local farmer known only as Mangiapane set off from Villalba at full speed, galloping toward Mussomeli. He carried a message penned in dialect by Calogero Vizzini.

  The message was top secret, and Mangiapane had instructions to swallow it if he were stopped by anyone. It was addressed to zu Peppi, Giuseppe Genco Russo, the local boss in Mussomeli.

  Couching his words in the Mafia’s colorful idiom, Don Calò had written to tell him that on Tuesday the twentieth, a certain Turi—evidently the head of a family in the Polizzi Generosa area—would accompany the armored divisions (which he called “calves”) to the “fair” in Cerda, while he himself would leave the same day with the bulk of the troops (cows), the tanks (wagons), and the commander in chief (bull). Zu Peppi was to make sure their friends prepared hotbeds of resistance and possible shelters for the troops.

  At dawn the following day, Mangiapa
ne returned with zu Peppi’s response, assuring Don Calò that the herdsman Liddu had taken care of laying the groundwork for the resistance.

  On July 20 Patton’s tanks approached Salso Inferiore. A jeep carrying two soldiers and a civilian messenger broke away from the column and headed for Villalba at top speed, thirty miles ahead of the advance guard. Fluttering on the jeep’s antenna was the yellow flag with a big black L in the center. Unfortunately, shortly before reaching the road to the village, the driver of took the wrong fork and headed for Lumera. There he ran into an Italian patrol, the rearguard of the Assietta Division. When they saw the American jeep, the Italian soldiers opened fire and hit the messenger, who fell out of the vehicle. Under fire from the Italians, the driver had no choice but to turn around and quickly return to where he had come from.

  The messenger had been killed instantly. His body lay in the road for several hours. A passing villager stopped his cart and took the leather pouch that was still slung around the man’s neck. Inside he found an envelope addressed to Calogero Vizzini. A few minutes later, the envelope was in zu Calò’s hands.

  On the afternoon of the same day, three American Sherman tanks arrived outside Villalba. The first of the three flew the yellow flag with the black L. The turret hatch opened, and a man with a Sicilian accent asked the curious onlookers to go call Don Calò, who appeared a few minutes later in shirtsleeves, his jacket folded over his arm, and a cigar in his mouth. He approached unhurriedly, not so much because of his considerable bulk but because that’s how “uomini di panza”—men of substance—walk. The don was accompanied by his grandson Damiano Lumia, who had immigrated to America but had been stuck in Villalba when the war broke out.

  Without saying a word, Calogero Vizzini took his yellow scarf out of his pants pocket and showed it to the tank’s crewman. The man signaled for him to climb in, and Don Calò, together with his grandson, who was fluent in English as well as Sicilian, disappeared from Villalba for eleven days.

  * * *

  Saro and the Italian Section team had proved invaluable in directing the tank columns. Their information turned out to be consistently accurate, clearly the result of his group’s diligence in carrying out its intelligence activities.

  William Donovan himself, the man responsible for forming the OSS, had gone to Sicily to see the work firsthand and, naturally, to accept the general staff’s compliments. Donovan also had to attend to several delicate covert missions, such as the release of about a hundred mafiosi imprisoned by the fascist regime on the island of Favignana. It was one of the promises that had been made to Luciano in exchange for his help and that of the Sicilian Mafia.

  Nonetheless, for the armies of Patton and Montgomery, the advance through the island was not easy. While many Italians chose to abandon their uniforms, many others put up a heroic fight on Sicilian soil. After the relatively easy conquest of Gela, Patton faced vigorous counterattacks from the Livorno Division and Germany’s Goering Panzer Division, while Montgomery was stopped outside of Catania, which resisted to the last man.

  * * *

  Sergeant Charles Dickey of the FBI arrived at Patton’s headquarters in the midst of this inferno, having come directly from the New York DA’s Office. He had been sent by prosecutor William Bray with a warrant for the arrest of Saro Ragusa, accused of killing Vito Pizzuto.

  Saro, returning from a mission, was immediately handed over to the sergeant. When Donovan was personally notified of this grave interference, he in turn ordered Vincent Scamporino, head of the OSS section, to resolve the matter at once and to “kick the FBI intruder’s ass back into the Mediterranean.” As a civilian, Scamporino had pleaded a million cases and was skilled in dialectics. He met with the sergeant in one of the offices of the Seventh Army command center. Saro was behind bars in a cell at the carabinieri headquarters in Gela.

  The OSS section head introduced himself and wasted no time in laying into the sergeant. “I’m Vincent Scamporino. There’s a war going on out there, see, so I don’t have much time. Let’s try to understand each other quickly.”

  “And I’m telling you right now, my friend, that I’m not afraid of either your rank or your threats. I’m here to serve justice. There are no good days and bad days where justice is concerned; every day is the same. War or no war, Saro Ragusa is accused of having killed a man. There’s an eyewitness who says so. So he has to come with me to New York to prove his innocence before a jury. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Maybe you didn’t get what I said.” Scamporino was furious and couldn’t contain himself, shaking his finger angrily at the other man. “A war means that people—or, rather, American soldiers—may live or die depending on whether I and my men, including Saro Ragusa, are able to provide them with the most reliable information possible.” He raised his voice and could be heard even on the top floors of the building.

  “Now, I want to know how the fuck you people fit into all this! What the hell do you bureaucrats, sitting there warming your chairs behind a desk, know about what’s going on here on this fucking island! That man is saving the army money, valuable time, and, above all, human lives! The lives of American young men! He should be commended by the taxpayers, by American mothers, and by you, mister pain-in-the-ass FBI nobody!”

  The sergeant’s tough shell wasn’t even scratched by Scamporino’s outburst. He replied coolly, “It’s simply a matter of fairness, Major. Justice treats everyone the same, and we cannot —”

  Scamporino didn’t let him finish his sentence: “You know where you can stick that justice of yours?”

  “Okay, I get it. Let’s try to meet halfway: I’ll let Ragusa go now so he can continue his war efforts. But as soon as all this bedlam is over and his work is no longer needed, I’ll arrest him and bring him to New York. Does that sound all right with you?”

  Vincent Scamporino accepted the compromise. The sergeant started to hold out his hand, but the major walked out without so much as a glance.

  Saro was set free at once and permitted to return to his intelligence activities, but he often found Sergeant Dickey lurking behind him. The man wouldn’t let him out of his sight, not even to go to the toilet.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, Patton’s army had branched into two sections in Agrigento. The first, commanded by Patton himself, continued around the coast to Palermo, which the swaggering American general captured on July 22. The other company headed inland, it too advancing toward Palermo. Once they were reunited, the two units would make their way toward the crossroads of Cerda, a village not far from Termini Imerese, where they would meet up with the Third Corps of Patton’s army, which had encountered fierce resistance from the Goering and Livorno Divisions.

  The operational plan described in simple terms in Don Calò’s encrypted note had been successful. The two divisions had hemmed in the Italian-German forces, closing off any possibility of their retreating to Messina, where the strait presented an escape route to the mainland. At that point, Don Calò was brought back to Villalba, accompanied by two American officers. The don had explained to them that his jurisdiction ceased at the Cerda crossroads. The boundary marked the division between the authority of the mafia dei feudi—the landowners Mafia—which he controlled, and that of the mafia dei mulini—the millers mafia—run by the ruthless families of Caccamo. Still farther on was the mafia dei giardini, the gardens Mafia, which controlled the distribution of water.

  The two officers didn’t wholly understand the reasoning behind those divisions, but nonetheless they thanked Don Calò for his help and took their leave with perfect military salutes.

  The day after Don Calò’s return to Villalba, at the carabinieri station, he was appointed mayor of the town by Lieutenant Beehr, Mussomeli’s civil affairs officer. The villagers were ecstatic and shouted, “Long live Don Calò! Long live the Mafia!”

  The Americans allowed Don Calò, his men of honor, and the mafiosi under his jurisdiction to carry firearms “in order to safeguard against possible transgre
ssions by the fascists, to carry out with authority the tasks assigned to them by Mayor Calogero Vizzini, and to serve as backup to the carabinieri if necessary.”

  Once the fascist mayors were removed, the Allies needed to appoint new local administrators. It was natural for them to turn their attention to those individuals who had always been hostile to the fascist regime, or those who enjoyed authority and prestige, without checking whether that prestige derived from unlawful activities.

  And so, many members of the Mafia, credited as antifascists, ended up filling important government positions.

  Giuseppe Genco Russo was appointed superintendent of public assistance in Mussomeli. In Raffadali, in the province of Agrigento, Vincenzo Di Carlo, the underboss of the local family, was assigned to head up the grain requisitioning office. Max Mugnaini, a known drug dealer, was chosen to manage American pharmaceutical warehouses in Italy. In Vallelunga, Turiddu Malta was appointed mayor. For the office of mayor in Racalmuto, Don Calò designated a former associate, Baldassarre Tenebra.

  For the first time in their lives, the most powerful exponents of the Mafia organization were placed in political roles. In order to quickly secure control of the island, the Allies weren’t overly fastidious, often falling for schemes hatched by local leaders, frequently instigated by Saro Ragusa himself.