A Criminal History of Mankind (85 page)

The Germans were delighted with the news, and sent the revolutionary Lenin back to Russia by sealed train. He was greeted by huge crowds and a brass band. But his own party, the Bolshevists, were not in power, and Lenin had to flee temporarily to Finland. He came back in disguise, and planned a
coup d’état
. In November 1917, the Bolshevists seized key buildings in Petrograd.

The tsar’s family were already in exile in Siberia, in Tobolsk. The tsar himself turned down a plan of escape, hoping to recover his throne. When the Bolshevists took over, they transferred the family to Ekaterinburg, in the Urals. As loyal troops were not far away, the Bolshevists ordered their execution. On 16 July 1918, the tsar and his family - the tsarina, four daughters and his thirteen-year-old son - were taken down to the cellar and shot with revolvers. They were thrown down a mineshaft. The next day, the tsar’s brother, the tsarina’s sister and four nephews were taken to the same mineshaft and thrown down alive; dynamite was tossed in after them. In the rest of the country, the civil war between loyalists and communists continued, with appalling atrocities on both sides. The whole of Russia was paying for the tsar’s delusion that he could rule like his father.

If humankind were capable of learning from history, the First World War would have taught them that war had become an absurdity.

The German general von Schlieffen had devised a plan that should have overwhelmed the allies within months. It was to hurl a huge German force into France, big enough to overrun the country within weeks, then to turn his attention to destroying the Russians. Unfortunately for the Kaiser, von Schlieffen died, and his successor, von Moltke, failed to grasp the importance of the time element. He nervously divided his forces between Russia and France, with the result that the German offensive bogged down along the Marne river. Both sides then dug trenches, and slugged away at one another for the rest of the war - four years of it - killing millions on both sides, but each failing to dislodge the other. Churchill, the British lord of the admiralty, tried to break the deadlock by launching an attack on Turkey from the Dardanelles, to open a new supply route to Russia; this also bogged down, with tremendous loss of life.

We find it hard to understand how two enormous armies could sit down opposite each other for four years, launch offensives and counter-offensives which lost and gained the same piece of ground, and kill one another by the million. When the British launched an attack in north-eastern France in 1915, they lost a quarter of a million men and gained three miles. When the Germans attacked Verdun in 1916, there were two million men engaged on both sides, and half of these were killed; Verdun was left a ruin but the Germans failed to take it.

Then why did they go on? Why did the leaders of both sides not open peace negotiations, since the failure of the Schlieffen plan had made all the Kaiser’s other aims irrelevant? Because both sides were dominated by their emotions, and national pride demanded some kind of victory to make up for the suffering. It came, eventually, only because the Germans made a second incredible blunder, and began sinking American shipping to prevent supplies reaching Britain. Sensibly, America had been determined to keep out of the war; but when American ships were sunk by German U-boats (the U standing for ‘undersea’), their national pride also demanded revenge. A telegram - probably forged - purporting to be from the German foreign secretary Zimmerman and offering Mexico large slices of American territory when Germany won the war, supplied the necessary element of indignation and outrage; America entered the war in 1917. Her weight turned the scales. The Kaiser was shocked and distressed when his generals told him there was no alternative to surrender.

Europe was a wreck. Half its young men had been killed, hundreds of its towns devastated. Three major dynasties had collapsed: the Romanovs in Russia, the Hapsburgs in Austria and the Hohenzollerns in Germany - the Kaiser was forced to abdicate, and went to live in Holland (where he died in 1942). As the world took stock of its losses, it was perhaps the most traumatic moment in the history of the human race. It was also clear evidence that there was something badly wrong with mankind. Ever since civilisation had arisen in Mesopotamia, man had been fighting his own kind about territory. Now the latest quarrel about territory had led to this shattering devastation. The situation could be compared to a household whose members constantly get drunk and squabble; then one day, the disagreements become so violent that every window is smashed, several walls are demolished, and the garden is trampled into a morass. In these circumstances, the most drunken family would recognise that something drastic has to be done. But the human problem is rather more complicated than drunkenness. The simple animal need for territory cannot be easily reconciled with civilisation. Animals merely snarl at one another at their boundaries; but armies cannot restrict their activities to snarling. The war problem is fundamentally a territorial problem, and can probably only be solved when the last vestige of the empire-building mentality disappears.

The American president, Woodrow Wilson, recognised this intuitively when he suggested the foundation of the League of Nations to deal with future ‘boundary disputes’. Europe accepted his suggestion with relief. Yet the victors failed to grasp how far these boundary disputes - ‘territory’ - had been responsible for the Great War - in fact, for all wars in history. So they proceeded to redraw the map of Europe in a way that would almost certainly guarantee another war within decades.

THE MAFIA

War is a deliberate release of the aggressions of society. Unfortunately, it is easier to let the genie out of the bottle than to induce him to go back again. This is why every war in history has been followed by an outbreak of crime. The crime wave that followed the First World War was - like the catastrophe that caused it - the most violent in history. It differed from all previous outbreaks in one ominous respect: instead of quietly receding, it gathered strength, and became the most organised system of corruption since the days of Rodrigo Borgia.

Organised crime had, of course, been a feature of civilisation since the days of the Greek pirates. But compared to the forces of law and order, the criminals lacked efficiency and foresight - which is why Pompey was able to destroy the pirates in a matter of weeks. In the London of Shakespeare and Jonathan Wild, or in the Paris of Vidocq, organised crime managed to maintain a precarious existence by keeping a ‘low profile’. This meant chiefly that violence had to be kept to a minimum; for it was violence that outraged the citizens and forced authority to take action. In countries where banditry was an accepted fact of life, it existed with the aid and approval of most citizens. That could only happen in places - such as nineteenth century Greece and Sicily - where the citizens detested their rulers and regarded the bandits as ‘freedom fighters’. Even so, violence could produce a ferocious backlash. In 1870, Greek brigands - led by the notorious Arvanitakis brothers - captured a party of distinguished English tourists near Marathon and demanded a ransom of £50,000 or, alternatively, an amnesty. (They had grown rich on banditry and wanted to return to society.) The Greek government categorically refused, and soldiers advanced on the bandit hideout. The four captives were promptly murdered as the brigands fled towards the village of Dilessi. Seven brigands were killed and six captured. The British government was outraged and threatened to invade Greece; the Russians threatened to fight on the side of the Greeks. The Greek government fell; most of the bandits who had escaped were finally killed or captured. And in Greece, kidnapping ceased to be a more-or-less acceptable custom.

Italy was another country where political unrest and foreign rule made organised crime respectable. In Sicily in the Middle Ages, the word
mafia
meant disdain for anything foreign; over the centuries it came to mean criminals who defied the foreign authorities (in the nineteenth century the letters were believed to stand for:
Morte Alia Francia Italia Anela
- Death to France is Italy’s Cry). In Naples, organised crime went under the name of the Camorra; in Calabria, the
Fibbia
; the
Stoppaglieri
in Monreale. (Anyone who wants to understand how this kind of lawlessness developed should read Manzoni’s novel
The Betrothed -I Promessi Sposi
- set in the 1620s.) The Italian tendency to indulge in blood feuds that sometimes went on for generations fostered the spirit of lawlessness. Yet, oddly enough, it was Garibaldi’s unification of Italy in 1860 that turned the Mafia into a full-scale criminal organisation. One reason was that the Mafia placed itself at the disposal of Garibaldi when he invaded Sicily (because, as one historian says, it could not afford to be on the losing side), and so achieved a kind of respectability. Besides, the Mafia constituted a sort of private army of mercenaries that could be hired by landowners - or the central government - to keep the peasants in order. And now that Italy at last belonged to the Italians, the mafiosi could forget political quarrels and concentrate on the business of extortion and intimidation. The criminal was no longer a social outcast, living in the mountains; he had become a force in society. By the late 1860s, the Mafia had organised itself into a society with its own rules and initiation rites. (On the west coast of America, the same thing was happening with the Chinese ‘tongs’.) In fact, the aim of all these criminal brotherhoods was to be a kind of secret local government. They made farmers and small landowners pay taxes (later to be called ‘protection’), destroyed the property of those who refused, and corrupted judges and police officers to prevent criminals from being successfully prosecuted. They developed the rule of Omertá - meaning the code of silence, the refusal to talk to authority, even when dying from an assassin’s bullet or a stiletto. The Mafia leaders soon discovered that crime was not the best way to make a living. It was far easier to rent an estate from an absentee landlord, then let it to peasants at an extortionate rate. By the 1890s, the Mafia had become a kind of criminal aristocracy in Sicily. By the turn of the century, the leader, Don Vito Cascio Ferro, was a kind of benevolent despot.

It is Ferro who is suspected of organising the importation of the Mafia into America. The most popular city for Italian immigrants was New Orleans, which had a climate much like that of southern Italy. It was there that one of Sicily’s best known brigands, Giuseppe Esposito, decided to settle in 1880. Esposito had also made the discovery that, even for a mafioso, violence must be used with caution. In November 1876, his gang had kidnapped an English curate named John Forester Rose and demanded a £5,000 ransom. Rose’s wife declined to pay, and Esposito sent her one of her husband’s ears. A week later, she received his other ear, and a note telling her that unless she paid up the next package would contain his nose. She paid, but there was an international scandal like the one that followed the Dilessi murders; the Italian government sent its
carabinieri
looking for the gang, and after a battle nine were killed and fourteen captured. Esposito succeeded in bribing his way out of jail, but decided that Sicily was no place for him and sailed for New York. Soon New Orleans, with its large Italian population, proved more attractive than the inhospitable north. But Esposito was filled with contempt for the relatively unambitious scale of lawlessness in New Orleans, and began to apply rules of Mafia organisation. He would undoubtedly have become America’s first ‘godfather’ if it had not been for the persistence of the Sicilian authorities, who instituted extradition proceedings. In July 1881, two police officers - Mike and Dave Hennessey - arrested Esposito, who was betrayed by a friend named Tony Labousse. A few days later, Labousse encountered a friend of Esposito’s named Gaetano Arditto, and shots were exchanged which resulted in the wounding of Arditto and the death of Labousse. It was probably America’s first Mafia killing. Arditto was tried and sentenced for the murder, and Esposito was returned to a Sicilian jail. But the Mafia organisation in New Orleans persisted, and led to many more killings before the end of the century.

After Esposito’s departure (he spent the rest of his life in prison), the New Orleans criminal fraternity - at least, its Italian section - was organised by two brothers, Charles and Tony Matranga, the latter a saloon keeper. Like their Sicilian counterparts, the Matrangas angled for political power, and expanded cautiously into ‘legitimate’ business. Apart from the Matrangas, one of the most influential Italian families in New Orleans was headed by three brothers named Provenzano; their contracts with shipping companies gave them a monopoly on loading and unloading fruit at the docks; they employed several hundred Italian workers, and paid them relatively high wages - forty cents an hour for day work and sixty cents for night work. In 1886, a new shipping firm called Matranga and Locascio appeared at the docks and began competing with the Provenzanos. With their strong-arm methods, the Matrangas took only two years to wrest control from their rivals. The Provenzanos decided to retaliate. On 5 May 1890, Tony Matranga, Tony Locascio and three other men finished supervising the unloading of a banana boat and drove off in a fruit wagon; suddenly, shots were fired from ambush, and three men, including Matranga, were wounded - Matranga’s leg had to be amputated.

The chief of police, Dave Hennessey - who had arrested Esposito nine years earlier - took charge of the case. The Provenzanos were his friends, but the evidence indicated that they were responsible for the ambush, and two of the brothers - and three of their employees - were arrested and put on trial. But Hennessey was aware that the Matrangas were just as much to blame. He determined to end the power of the Mafia in New Orleans, and wrote to the police in Rome for photographs of Esposito bandits who were believed to be members of the Matranga gang. He received an anonymous letter warning him that he would be killed if he persisted, but he ignored it. The Provenzanos were found guilty, but their lawyer succeeded in winning a retrial. Hennessey announced that he would appear as a witness in favour of the Provenzanos, and would produce evidence about the Mafia in New Orleans. (His brother Mike had been killed - allegedly by the Mafia - in Houston, and Dave Hennessey was out for revenge.) On the night of 15 October 1890, Hennessey was walking home through heavy rain, accompanied by a police captain; he and his companion said goodnight, and a few seconds later, several shots sounded. The police captain rushed back to find his chief dying. Asked ‘Who did it?’ Hennessey answered: ‘Dagoes.’ He died a few hours later in hospital.