Blood Brotherhoods (35 page)

As the trial in Milan progressed, there were more and more sensational revelations. A stationmaster turned out to have recognised one of the killers in an identity parade, but his testimony was ignored until he was frightened into retracting it. A police inspector close to Palizzolo was arrested in the witness stand for concealing evidence; some twenty other witnesses faced charges of perjury. The Minister of War was forced to resign when a Republican paper exposed that he had lobbied to have an influential
mafioso
released from jail in time for the elections. The court learned that former Prime Minister Rudinì had bestowed an official decoration on Palizzolo in 1897.

Giuseppe Fontana, citrus fruit entrepreneur,
mafioso
and alleged assassin of Emanuele Notarbartolo.

One of the men suspected of actually stabbing Emanuele Notarbartolo to death was named in the Milan courtroom too: Giuseppe Fontana was a lemon trader and a member of Palizzolo’s favourite Villabate
cosca
of the mafia. He also turned out to be the manager on an estate owned by an aristocrat and Member of Parliament.

When the order went out to arrest Fontana, his aristocratic sponsor had to have his arm twisted by Chief of Police Sangiorgi before he would agree to talk to Fontana about surrendering. In the end, the
mafioso
Fontana did give himself up to Sangiorgi; but only on his own terms, and only in a style that confirmed the wildest journalistic guesswork about the mafia’s influence in high places. Fontana came to town in a coach bearing his protector’s family crest, in the company of his protector’s lawyers. He then refused to enter Police Headquarters, insisting instead that Sangiorgi receive him in his own home. On hearing how Fontana dictated the terms of his own surrender, Leopoldo Notarbartolo acidly quipped that the
mafioso
had forgotten to demand that the guard at Sangiorgi’s gate present arms as he passed.

The whole country was shocked by what was emerging in Milan. Even Prime Minister Pelloux began to worry about how far the scandal might reach, and thought it might be necessary to call a general election early. The Notarbartolo case reeked of a cover-up, and that reek increased public
revulsion at the political system: while politicians were ordering troops to shoot at starving demonstrators and trying to quash press freedom, they were also pocketing illegal loans from banks and consorting with
mafiosi
.

Palizzolo had become a political leper. On 15 December 1899 an estimated 30,000 people filed through the streets of Palermo to show their support for the Notarbartolo cause. A hastily sculpted bust of the murdered banker was born aloft at the head of the procession and then set in a little temple opposite the Politeama theatre in the city centre; soon afterwards it was moved to the atrium of the Bank of Sicily’s headquarters. As well as the Socialists and representatives from Palermo schools and clubs, the city’s political class were out in force—even many whose conduct was called into question in the Milan hearings. Clearly there had been some shamelessly swift conversions to the cause of law and order in recent weeks. London’s
Morning Post
pinpointed the hypocrisy.

If any one of the numerous politicians who now compete in doing honour to Signor Notarbartolo’s memory had energetically set about forcing the Government to punish his murderers, justice would have been done long since.

In January 1900, two months after the Milan trial began, proceedings were halted to allow a much more far-reaching case to be prepared. Here was a significant victory for the Notarbartolo cause, and for the struggle against Sicilian organised crime. Leopoldo Notarbartolo later recalled these moments as ‘the culmination of the short-lived tide in our favour’.

In the summer of 1900 Prime Minister General Pelloux resigned. Leopoldo Notarbartolo had lost his key supporter in the Roman palaces of power. But the public indignation at the Notarbartolo cover-up was still strong. The destiny of the whole case hung in the balance.

The second important mafia trial of the day began back in Palermo in the spring of 1901. It did not arise directly from the Notarbartolo-Palizzolo affair, but from the determined policework of Chief of Police Sangiorgi: the
mafiosi
named in his reports stood accused of forming a criminal association.

Because Sangiorgi’s investigations had no direct bearing on the banking scandal he did not benefit from the public fury that still resonated from Milan. There were no foreign correspondents in Palermo when the trial began, and proceedings barely rated a mention in the mainland press. Yet in many ways the Sangiorgi trial was just as historically important as the Notarbartolo affair: this was a case that could have proved once and for all that the mafia existed.

The great enemy of the early Sicilian mafia: Ermanno Sangiorgi. A newspaper described this career cop as being ‘as alert as a squirrel, an investigator endowed with a steady perspicacity’.

Men of Honour briefly caught in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s net in 1900.

Giuseppe Giammona, boss of Passo di Rigano, and son of the venerable
capo
Antonino Giammona.

Francesco Siino, the recently deposed ‘regional or supreme boss’.

Brothers Francesco and Pietro Noto, respectively boss and underboss in Olivuzza, and responsible for ‘security’ at the home of Sicily’s wealthiest family, the Florios.

Courtroom sketches from newspapers of the day.

Sangiorgi, veteran of Sicilian affairs that he was, must have had a weary sense of inevitability about the outcome of the trial he had spent the best part of three years preparing. With General Pelloux gone Sangiorgi was once more vulnerable to the system of friendships that the mafia had created to protect itself in its capital. Most of the
mafiosi
, including the venerable
capo
Antonino Giammona, were acquitted before the case even reached court. The likely explanation for these acquittals was that, just as during the ‘fratricide’ affair in 1876–77, Sangiorgi faced insidious opposition from Sicily’s most senior magistrate. Days before proceedings began, the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, one Vincenzo Cosenza, wrote to the Minister of Justice to explain that ‘in the course of exercising my duties I have never noticed the mafia, because the mafia has no desire to ensnare the priests of Themis’. (He meant magistrates, because Themis was the ancient Greek personification of order and justice.) Any Palermo judge who was incapable of imagining why the mafia might want to corrupt the legal system was, at best, culpably naïve. But Vincenzo Cosenza was not naïve: he was identified by Leopoldo Notarbartolo as a protector of Palizzolo’s, the main obstacle in the way of bringing don Raffaele and his hit men to justice.

The trial itself went as badly as Sangiorgi feared. One after another, most of his key witnesses retracted their statements. The mafia’s protectors among the elite took the stand to give immaculate character references for their friends in the criminal sect: ‘the Giammonas are highly esteemed in the area’, one local politician explained. Another man of property was effusive.