Blood Brotherhoods (15 page)

By seven o’clock even the heaviest sleepers in the farthest corners of Palermo had been woken by the sound of musketry and shouting. There was confusion. But the urban masses quickly grabbed the chance to vent their frustrations.

Seven and a half days passed before troops restored order. Seven and a half days when barricades went up in the streets, when arms depots and official buildings were ransacked, when police stations and law courts were raided and criminal records burned, when respectable citizens were robbed at gunpoint in their homes, or forced to make contributions to support the insurrection.

The revolt of September 1866 came at a terrible time for Italian national morale. One of the reasons for the rebels’ initial success was that Palermo was lightly garrisoned. All available military forces had been sent to the north-eastern frontier where the Austrians inflicted humiliation by both land and sea at the battles of Custoza and Lissa. The anarchy down in western Sicily was a stab in the back.

Things could easily have been much worse. One of the revolt’s primary targets was the Ucciardone, housing two and a half thousand prisoners; many of them would have swollen the ranks of the squads. The rebels surrounded the jail and tried to blow a breach in the walls. But just in time, on the morning of 18 September, the steam corvette
Tancredi
arrived to shower the besiegers with grapeshot and grenades. One of the first men to be hit in this bombardment, his legs grotesquely mangled by shrapnel, was Turi Miceli, the fifty-three-year-old leader of the Monreale crew that had spearheaded the rebellion; he took hours to die of his injuries, and did so without uttering the slightest murmur of complaint.

Turi Miceli was a
mafioso
. He was a tall, imposing figure with a distinctive large scar on his face. Violence was his livelihood. The very sight of him, with his arquebus over his shoulder, had struck terror into the countryside around Palermo. Yet by the time Miceli died he was also a man of money and property, one of the wealthiest people in Monreale.

The camorra was, in its origins, a proletarian criminal association, incubated among the scum of the Neapolitan jails and slums.
Mafiosi
like Turi Miceli were, by contrast, ‘middle-class villains’—as one early mafia expert would term them. In much of the rest of western Europe this would have sounded like a contradiction in terms: ‘it seemed to subvert every single principle of political economy and social science’, as one bewildered observer noted. Men of property had a stake in maintaining the law—that much was surely a self-evident truth. Yet in Palermo’s environs, landowners had become criminals and accomplices. In western Sicily, violence was a profession for the upwardly mobile.

So before we retrace the path of
mafioso
Turi Miceli’s rise up the social ranks, it is worth highlighting the other striking contrasts between him and someone like Salvatore De Crescenzo, the ‘redeemed’ camorra boss. Early
camorristi
like De Crescenzo almost invariably had a long stretch inside on their underworld
curriculum vitae
. Yet prison does not appear in the documentary records that Turi Miceli left in his wake. As far as we know, Miceli did not spend a single day in jail, and the same can be said of many of the other bosses we will meet. Sicily certainly had its prison
camorristi
, and the mafia’s leaders willingly recruited such men. But some of the most important bosses perfected their skills elsewhere.

The first secret of Turi Miceli’s upward mobility lay in the business he was involved in. The land around Miceli’s hometown of Monreale was typical of the Conca d’Oro. It was divided up into smallholdings and the dominant crops were olives, vines and particularly oranges and lemons. Citrus fruit trees certainly appealed to the aesthetic senses of visitors, but they also furnished Sicily’s most important export business. From Palermo the lemons were mainly shipped across the Atlantic to the burgeoning market of the United States. There was serious money in citrus fruit: in 1860 it was calculated that Palermo’s lemon plantations were the most profitable agricultural land in Europe.

The big profits attracted big investment. To create an orange or lemon garden from nothing involved far more than just sticking a few trees in the ground; it was an expensive, long-term project. High walls had to be built to protect the plants from cold. There were roads to lay, storage facilities to construct and irrigation channels to dig. In fact, sophisticated irrigation was vital because if they were watered correctly, citrus fruit trees could crop twice a year instead of once. Yet after all this groundwork was done, it still took around eight years for the trees to start to produce fruit, and several more before the investment turned a profit.

In the Conca d’Oro, as everywhere else in the world, investment and profit came with a third indispensible ingredient of capitalism: risk. But in the Conca d’Oro, risk came dressed in corduroy.

The
mafiosi
of the Palermo hinterland learned the art of the protection racket by vandalising fruit groves, or threatening to vandalise them. Rather than extracting gold from fleas, they squeezed it from lemons. The options were many and varied: they could cut down trees, intimidate farmhands, starve irrigation channels of water at crucial moments of the season, kidnap landowners and their families, threaten wholesalers and cart drivers, and so on. So
mafiosi
wore many hats: they were the men who controlled the sluices of the precious irrigation channels; the guards who protected the groves at night; they were the brokers who took the lemons to market; the contractors
who managed the groves on behalf of landowners; and they were also the bandits who kidnapped farmers and stole their highly valuable crops. By creating risk with one hand, and proffering protection with the other,
mafiosi
could infiltrate and manipulate the citrus fruit business in myriad ways. Some of them, like Turi Miceli, could even vandalise and murder their way to ownership of a lemon grove.

Turi Miceli the
mafioso
was both a criminal and a market gardener. But, as the events of September 1866 showed, he was a revolutionary too—as were the other early mafia bosses. Sicily’s revolutions provided the other crucial propellant for the mafia’s ascent.

For when revolution came along, as it regularly did, it proved good for criminal business. The typical
mafioso
understood that fact better even than the typical
camorrista
. The inevitable confusion of revolution offered men like Turi Miceli the chance to open prisons, burn police records, kill off cops and informers and rob and blackmail wealthy people associated with the fallen regime. Then, once the bloodletting had passed, new revolutionary governments whose leaders needed enforcers would grant amnesties to powerful men ‘persecuted’ under the old order. In Sicily, much more than in Naples, revolution was the test bed of organised crime, and the launch pad for many a mobster’s rise up the social scale.

Turi Miceli’s rebel opportunism during the
Risorgimento
was breathtaking. When revolution against the Bourbons broke out in January 1848, Miceli was a known bandit—meaning that he indulged in cattle rustling and armed robbery. But he grasped the chance offered by the revolt with impressive daring: his squad, mostly comprising market gardeners, captured the Bourbon garrison in Monreale before trooping down the hill to Palermo. There, Miceli was celebrated by local poets and lauded in official dispatches for defeating a Bourbon cavalry unit near the Royal Palace. Despite disturbing reports of crimes committed by his men, Miceli was awarded the rank of colonel by the new revolutionary government, partly because his goons packed the meeting at which the officers were elected. The Monreale bandit had ‘remade his virginity’, as the Sicilian saying goes.

The following year, when the revolution began to fall apart and Bourbon troops were advancing on Palermo, Miceli promptly swapped sides: he toured the main streets and defensive entrenchments persuading the populace not to offer any resistance. His reward from the restored Bourbon authorities was yet another virginity: he was amnestied and given the chance to stuff his pockets. First he was made customs officer, paid 30 ducats a month to pick his own band of men and patrol a long stretch of coastline in eastern Sicily, presumably confiscating contraband and taking hefty bribes at the same time. Not long after that he won the tax-collecting franchise
in Lercara Friddi, a sulphur-mining town not too far from Palermo. A senior government official gave him a job reference that said—in blatant contradiction of the facts—that Miceli played no part whatsoever in the 1848 revolution.

In 1860 Miceli nonchalantly changed sides once more and supported Garibaldi’s fight against the Bourbons. Naturally, he was then recruited into the National Guard. Under Miceli’s control, the National Guard in Monreale was described in an official report of July 1862 as being made up of ‘robbers,
cammoristi
[sic], Bourbon royalists and corrupt men’.

Miceli did not have the same success in building his career under the Italian government as he had done under the Bourbons. And like everyone else, he could see how detested Italian government authority in Sicily was. So in September 1866, Miceli staked his fortunes on revolution for what turned out to be the last time. The revolt’s aims were confused: Bourbon restoration, or a republic—no one was very sure. That did not matter to Turi Miceli. Politics, of whatever stripe, was just a way to convert ferocity into influence, position and money.

In September 1866, for the first and last time, Turi Miceli backed the wrong side and found an agonising death. The revolt was crushed. There were to be no more revolutions in Sicily. For good or ill, Italy was in the island to stay. Other mafia bosses understood that better than Miceli. Instead of forming squads and leading the revolt, they formed what were called ‘countersquads’ and defended the Italian status quo. Their strategy echoed the moves made by ‘redeemed’ camorra boss of Naples, Salvatore De Crescenzo: like De Crescenzo, most top
mafiosi
calculated that supporting the cause of Italy was now the surest way to guarantee their criminal fortunes. September 1866 was to be a crucial transitional moment in the history of the mafia.

  
7  

T
HE BENIGN MAFIA

I
N NINETEENTH-CENTURY
N
APLES
,
NOBODY EVER QUESTIONED WHETHER THE CAMORRA
existed. Of course there was occasional reticence about the contacts between the early camorra and the Masonic societies of the
Risorgimento
. But nobody ever tried to pretend that ‘camorra’ meant anything other than what it really was: a secret criminal sect.

Yet for most of the Sicilian mafia’s history, most people did not believe it was a sworn criminal fraternity, a Freemasonry of delinquents. ‘Mafia’, or better, ‘mafiosity’—it was said—was a characteristic Sicilian mentality, an island syndrome. If you were
mafioso
you suffered from a swelling of the ego that made you reluctant to settle your disputes through official channels. The symptoms of this strange malady were probably inherited from Sicily’s ninth-century Arab invaders.

Late-twentieth-century sociologists had their own versions of the same spurious theory.
Mafiosi
were affiliates of self-help groups in poor, isolated villages—who just happened to kill people occasionally. Or they were local problem solvers and mediators, judges whose courtroom was the piazza and whose law book was an ancient, unwritten code of honour. Meadow Soprano, daughter of TV mafia boss Tony, summed up the theory nicely when she said that the mafia was ‘an informal method of conflict resolution in Mediterranean societies’.

As we shall see, this tangle of mystifications was deliberately spun by the mafia and its allies in the Sicilian ruling class. One of the main reasons why the Sicilian mafia was for so long Italy’s most powerful criminal organisation was because of its ability to perpetuate the illusion that it did
not even exist. The illusion was first created in the years following the Palermo revolt of 1866.

From the Right government’s point of view, the miserable story of the 1866 revolt did at least have a hero in Antonio Starabba, Marquis of Rudinì, and Mayor of Palermo. Like all mayors at this time, he was appointed directly by the king rather than being elected by the local people. Rudinì got the Palermo job because despite being a Sicilian, indeed one of the island’s biggest landowners, he was a man of the Right. His rectitude and courage amid the mayhem did honour to the Italian flag, and drew the admiration of the European press.

When the squads descended on the city Rudinì mustered the members of his administration to defend the town hall from the rebels. His house at the Quattro Canti was ransacked; his father died from shock as a result; and his wife only just escaped by clambering through a window with their baby in her arms. When the town hall became indefensible, Rudinì led its occupants to the safer surroundings of the Royal Palace. There, with other beleaguered government loyalists, he survived for the rest of the week on horse meat, and shot back at the insurgents with musket balls made from melted down gas pipes. Tall, blonde and handsome, with an easy authority to his manner, Rudinì was not yet thirty years old but his political career was set on a steep, upward trajectory. He was now a poster boy for the Right’s project to civilise Sicily. Soon after the revolt he was promoted from Mayor to Prefect. In other words, he was the eyes and ears of central government in the provinces, an official with access to high-level police intelligence. When it came to the problems of Sicily, nobody could command the attention of central government more than him.

Marquis Rudinì was given a platform for his opinions eight months after the Palermo revolt of September 1866, when a parliamentary commission of inquiry came to Sicily to learn the lessons. The commissioners assembled in the comfort of the Hotel Trinacria set back from the marina, its doors protected by a picket of troops. They heard Rudinì give a testimony that addressed the mafia issue with shocking clarity.