The Sacco Gang

by Andrea Camilleri

  They are, in short, in the exact situation Sergeant Jannuzzo had lucidly foreseen.

  “Save your own lives and surrender!” shouts the same voice as before.

  Vanni then looks at each of his comrades one by one, and each of his comrades, one by one, nods “yes.”

  The only choice left to them is to obey the order.

  But they don’t manage in time.

  The shooting resumes and lasts five eternal minutes.

  Then it ends, and the same voice as before commands:

  “Throw your weapons outside the door!”

  The five men look at each other. Vanni gestures to Alfonso.

  Alfonso cautiously opens the door only as much as necessary, and throws out, as far as possible from the house, almost with anger, the weapons his mates pass to him.

  “Are you unarmed? Throw out your knives as well.”

  They’d forgotten about the knives. They throw these out too.

  “Do you have any other weapons?”

  “No,” Vanni answers.

  “Come out one by one with your hands in the air!”

  Who should go out first? The five men have a moment of hesitation. Then Vanni starts to head for the door.

  “No, I’ll go out first,” says La Porta, stopping him. “I haven’t done anything wrong, after all.”

  And he goes out, hands raised.

  “Stop right there!”

  La Porta stops barely two steps away from the cottage, as Alfonso is coming out.

  “Stop right there and stand beside your comrade!”

  Before them is a row of special forces troops, one knee to the ground, rifles pointed.

  Quickly all five men are lined up, shoulder to shoulder, in front of the cottage, their hands in the air.

  “Is there anyone else still inside?”

  “No, nobody,” replies Vanni.

  For thirty seconds the scene freezes: five men in a row, and some ten soldiers with rifles aimed. All around them, a sea of soldiers stare on in silence.

  Nobody speaks. The dogs keep on barking.

  “Why aren’t they coming to handcuff us?” Vanni asks himself in bewilderment.

  Then, all of a sudden, the unbelievable happens.

  The kneeling soldiers open fire all at once, like an execution squad.

  Pietro La Porta is struck in the heart and falls to the ground.

  Alfonso collapses, gravely wounded in the head, then more rifle shots hit him in the forearm and the left leg.

  Salvatore takes a bullet through the chest.

  Vanni and Marzullo are only grazed by the shots and sustain no injuries. But they remain as still as statues, frozen in horror and disdain for such cowardly treachery.

  But it’s not over yet.

  Mouths drooling with rage, the soldiers who’d been standing by, watching, now let fly at the corpse, the wounded, and the two still unharmed men, unleashing a savage, animal fury amid shouts, curses, and insults.

  They start kicking Pietro La Porta’s lifeless body in the face with their hobnailed boots, rendering him almost unrecognizable.

  Salvatore, half-unconscious from his wound, has his stomach run through with a bayonet.

  They break Alfonso’s wounded arm with the butts of their rifles.

  Vanni and Marzullo, knocked down to the ground under a hail of blows to the legs from the soldiers’ rifle butts, and buried in kicks, punches, and bayonet thrusts, are quickly little more than blood-drenched dummies.

  It’s a proper lynching.

  The unit’s commander, Lieutenant Nuvoletti, arrives at a gallop and, shouting orders, manages to end the butchery.

  But at the same time Nuvoletti is worried about providing his men with an alibi for what they’ve done.

  This he does by having the weapons the Saccos surrendered fired repeatedly into the air.

  That way he can claim that the killing as well as the injuries was the result of a firefight.

  But he makes an egregious mistake. He neglects to have them fire the Mauser, the most powerful and deadly weapon in the Saccos’ arsenal, and Vanni’s personal gun.

  At the trial it will come out that in fact the weapon, though in perfect functioning order, was definitely not used in the sham shoot-out.

  Nuvoletti is a careful man, and so he has the shells of the cartridges he had his men fire with the Saccos’ guns collected and set aside.

  He’s perfectly aware that he will have to prove, in every way, that there was a firefight, otherwise how will he explain the death and the ravaged bodies of the other four?

  To be completely safe, he even has the cottage burnt down.

  All the while the injured lie on the ground, moaning and losing blood, and no one comes to their aid.

  *

  At last the dead and injured are loaded roughly onto an uncovered truck and conveyed, under the escort of the special forces that took part in the operation, to Raffadali.

  The whole town must be made to see that the “notorious Sacco gang” has been annihilated.

  The people of Raffadali are waiting for them, having already heard the news from a few peasants who had raced into town on horseback to inform them.

  The whole thing looks, in every way, like a scene from a Western.

  As the procession passes along the main street of Raffadali at a walking pace, flanked by utterly silent crowds, the bells of the Mother Church begin to toll the knell.

  It’s the parish priest himself who gave the order.

  “Why are the bells ringing?” asks Lieutenant Nuvoletti.

  “Because there’s been a death,” replies the priest.

  Yet everyone knows perfectly well what the priest’s intention was in ordering the sacristan to toll the knell: not to commemorate poor Pietro La Porta, but to say goodbye to the hope that the Saccos had awakened in the townsfolk by liberating them, for a short while, from Mafia oppression.

  Suddenly a little boy breaks away from the silent crowd and runs up and spits with scorn at the cart carrying the Saccos.

  “Don’t do anything to that boy! Don’t touch him!” Vanni shouts with the little breath he has left.

  He doesn’t want his friends to get angry with the boy and start hitting him. He is genuinely tired of violence.

  Alfonso, though wounded and utterly drained of strength, is leaning on one elbow and casting glances left and right. At last his gaze encounters what it was so desperately looking for: the eyes of the girl he loves. They are filled with tears.

  He’ll see those eyes again one day, almost forty years later.

  *

  There is still one sordid sequel to the animal rage of the special forces.

  In the courtyard of the Carabinieri compound, Captain Tomei, the commander of that particular unit, awaits the arrival of the procession.

  Vanni is helping Alfonso get down from the cart.

  At that moment the captain, who is on horseback, spurs his mount and charges the two men as if to knock them over, yelling like a madman.

  “I’ll kill you myself, you criminals!”

  In a flash, Lieutenant Nuvoletti rushes over and shunts them aside with a powerful thrust.

  Already very unsteady on their feet, the two men fall to the ground.

  Nuvoletti helps them up and personally escorts them to safety inside the compound, turning them over to the local carabinieri.

  For the entire time of their internment at the compound, these local officers, knowing the truth of the matter, treat them humanely. They summon some doctors to treat their wounds and make sure they want for nothing.

  Just a few days later, however, is the 28th of October, the anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, now a national holiday.

  A hundred or so Fascists, from Raffadali and the nearby towns, surrou
nd the compound. Among their number, wearing Fascist black shirts, are also a few powerful mafiosi who have skillfully trimmed their sails to catch the prevailing winds.

  “Give us the Saccos! We’ll show them what justice is!”

  They want to lynch them, and are armed with billy clubs and daggers.

  The marshal comes out with four officers and invites the Fascists to dissolve the assembly.

  But the crowd grows even more enraged.

  “Give them to us or we’ll come and get them!”

  The marshal then raises his arm and the four officers fire. In the air.

  The Fascists run away.

  That evening, just to be safe, the Saccos are taken to Girgenti Prison.

  On the way there, Salvatore’s and Alfonso’s wounds reopen.

  XIV

  TAKING STOCK

  Owing to the great zeal of Prefect Cesare Mori’s agents, all the killings that occurred during our time as fugitives were placed on our, the Sacco brothers’, account. The authorities did not take into consideration the torrent of criminality that had rained down on the people of Raffadali during the First World War and immediately thereafter. The people had every right to take revenge and vent their resentment against these criminals, especially knowing that it was the Sacco brothers who were taking it all on their shoulders—that is, taking on all the charges for all the crimes committed. And so, Prefect Mori got to work setting up three trials: one for four homicides attributed to us, Giovanni and Alfonso Sacco; two for homicides charged to Salvatore Sacco; and one for a murder charged to the late Filippo Marzullo, who lost his life during the terrible Second World War, from an illness caused by malnutrition.”

  So writes Alfonso.

  Just to put things in order, then, let’s see how many homicides the Saccos were accused of committing while they were fugitives.

  There were seven in all.

  A few murder charges were lost along the way, when it was shown, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the Saccos had nothing to do with them. A few of the accusations of which the Saccos had been acquitted at earlier trials were, however, expressly revived, so that the brothers would appear before the judge with serious charges hanging over them.

  However—and this is an important point to remember—at the moment of their arrest, there was only one charge in effect against them: the murder of Terrazzino. More precisely, they had in fact been previously acquitted of the charge, but the courts had appealed.6

  Then, while they were in jail, charges were brought for the killings of Cuffaro, Plano, and Mangione.

  As for La Porta, the authorities figured it was best not to charge him with anything, since they’d shot him dead as he was surrendering.

  *

  They begin with the killing of Cuffaro.

  In a “brilliant” operation (though it’s unclear why they waited three years to conduct it), the Carabinieri arrest two peasants, the D’Anna cousins.

  They are both good men, with clean records and never any run-ins whatsoever with the law. They work on the lands belonging to Commendator Alfonso Di Benedetto, who was four times mayor and was in jail during the incursion of Mori’s special forces.

  The two unlucky cousins are subjected to out-and-out torture for fifteen days, to the point that one ends up with a hernia, while the other nearly loses sight in one eye.

  But the courts get what they want in the end.

  The D’Anna cousins are so battered at this point that they would admit to anything. More precisely: they’ll say whatever their torturers want them to say.

  (Let us not forget Manzoni’s Story of the Infamous Column, where Mora, unable to stand any more torture, says to the judge: “Look, I’ll say what you want me to say.”)

  “Where were the two of you in the moments before Cuffaro was killed?”

  “We’d gone to the country house of Commendatore Di Benedetto.”

  “What did you go there for?”

  “We were supposed to talk about farming stuff.”

  “Was the commendatore alone?”

  “No, he had Vanni and Alfonso Sacco with him.”

  “What happened?”

  “As we was talkin’, Vanni Sacco tol’ me to go an’ see if Cuffaro was on his way back from the Baron’s.”

  “So to return to his home in Raffadali, Cuffaro necessarily had to go past Di Benedetto’s house?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And did you go and look?”

  “Yessir. But first I ast Vanni why he wanted to know.”

  “And what did he say?”

  “He said he wanted to kill Cuffaro.”

  “And then what?”

  “Well, seein’ that we was undecided, the commendatore said to us: ‘Didn’t you hear what Vanni said to you? Go and do it.’ An’ so we done it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “As soon as we saw Cuffaro comin’, we tol’ the Saccos, and they come runnin’ out, took up position, an’, soon as Cuffaro was in range, they shot him.”

  “Did you see or hear anything else?”

  “Yessir. After the shots, the commendatore went to have a look. An’ then Cuffaro, who was still hangin’ on, soon as he saw him, ast him to help him.”

  “And what did Di Benedetto do?”

  “He started laughin’. Then he said: ‘How can I help you? Can’t you see you’re dead?’ An’ then he came back inside.”

  This scene rings so fantastical that Alfonso comments:

  “It would take the pen of a Victor Hugo or another great writer to express the full deluge that would spring from Cuffaro’s words to Di Benedetto and from the latter’s statement.”

  A literary deluge, that is.

  At the 1923 trial, the one that acquitted the Saccos, the autopsy clearly demonstrated that the single shot that killed the Mafia boss hit him right in the middle of the forehead and allowed him no time to make so much as a peep.

  When later called before the judge, however, the D’Anna cousins retract everything, accuse the Carabinieri of having tortured them, and present expert medical reports attesting to the torments to which they’d been subjected.

  Conclusion: Di Benedetto and the D’Annas are released.

  But the killing of Cuffaro remains on the Sacco brothers’ shoulders.

  *

  The killing of the Saccos’ cousins, Plano and Mangione, resulted, as we’ve already said, from a sort of misunderstanding.

  Let’s have Alfonso tell us firsthand how things went, since it’s a rather important question:

  “On the 9th of September two of our second cousins were killed: Giovanni Plano and Stefano Mangione. Following the investigation and the interrogations conducted by Sergeant Montalbano as well as the investigating magistrate, the authorities ruled out armed robbery and murder, because whoever did the killing intended neither to kill them nor to rob them. They came to this conclusion based on where our relatives were at that moment. On their way back from selling some animals at the Ribera fair, Plano and Mangione had been sitting at that drinking trough, eating and resting, for a good while, unmolested. As they were setting off again, however, Mangione’s young son noticed there were some people behind the rocks, gesturing to him to keep on going; but the boy went back and informed the others of this, and his uncle Vincenzo, who was armed with a rifle, thinking they wanted to rob him, started shooting, triggering a firefight that ended in the deaths of those two good men, who for all their lives had never done anything but toil honestly to feed their families! This is what our cousin, Vincenzo Mangione, told my brother Giovanni and me after the painful event, which occurred in the company of his brothers, including Francesco, our sister Filomena’s husband. The person really responsible—the cause, that is, of the deaths of those two dear relatives of ours—can be said to be our own cousin, Vincenzo Mangione.”

&nb
sp; Thus, from this account, taken from the Memorial Alfonso wrote after his release from prison, it emerges that there were three Mangione brothers present at the firefight: Stefano (who lost his life in it, along with Plano), Vincenzo (who first started firing), and Francesco (the husband of the Saccos’ sister); that Vincenzo Mangione started firing for fear that the men positioned behind the rocks wanted to rob them; and that the men behind the rocks reacted to the gunfire by killing Giovanni Plano and Stefano Mangione.

  But who were these mysterious men behind the rocks?

  Why were they there?

  Who were they waiting for?

  Certainly not the Mangiones, since they’d signaled to the boy to keep on going, to walk on, to get out of the way—as though, in short, his group of people constituted a hindrance.

  In his Memorial, Alfonso never gives the names of the men hiding behind the rocks. Apparently he did not know who they were.

  However, in his Biography of the “Notorious Sacco Gang,” which he wrote and published in 1959, when still in prison at Saluzzo, Alfonso told a slightly different story.

  “On the 9th of September 1924, when returning from the fair at Ribera, Stefano Mangione, our cousin and the brother of our sister’s husband, and Giovanni Plano, husband of a cousin of ours, were killed at a drinking trough. They were both fathers, both honest farmers, both fine, upright men! They were killed when one of the Mangione brothers (Vincenzo), after seeing some malfeasants lying in ambush, started firing his rifle at them for fear of being robbed, triggering a firefight that led to the death of those two fathers. [ . . . ] Returning from the same fair were a group of mafiosi that included two big bosses: Francesco Giglione, and Salvatore Terrazzino, the butcher. Informed of the incident by a sentry of theirs, they headed out to the country, but took another route and eventually made it back into town. In order to have these further crimes blamed on us, these mafiosi spread the rumor that the malfeasants were lying in wait not for the Mangione brothers, but for them, and therefore it could only have been the Sacco brothers.”