Blood Brotherhoods (56 page)

>  April 1945: the war in Italy came to an end, only a few days before Hitler’s suicide.

>  June 1946: the monarchy was abolished and the Republic was born.

>  March 1947: President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would intervene to check Soviet expansion across the globe. In Italy, the
Partito Comunista Italiano
had won great prestige from its role in the Resistance, and was promising to create a Communist Party branch for every bell tower. The peninsula found itself right on the front line of the newly declared Cold War.

>  April 1948: Italy’s first democratic parliamentary election was decisively won by the American-backed
Democrazia Cristiana
(DC—the Christian Democrats) and decisively lost by the Communists.

Nowhere in Italy was the post-war transition more turbulent than in Sicily. Nowhere was organised crime more profoundly involved in the turbulence. In southern Calabria and Campania, as we will see,
’ndranghetisti
and
camorristi
carved out their own niche in the post-war settlement. But in Sicily, the mafia had grander designs. Many Sicilians are inclined to express doubts when the label ‘organised crime’ is applied to the mafia.
Mafiosi
are all criminals, and they always have been. But ordinary criminals, however organised they may be, do not have remotely the kind of political friendships that senior
mafiosi
have always enjoyed. It would be far, far beyond the mental horizon of any common-or-garden crook to try and shape the institutional destiny of his homeland in the way Sicilian
mafiosi
tried to do.

The most clamorous and bloody crime in which the mafia was involved was banditry. At the peak in 1945, hundreds of bandit bands roamed the Sicilian countryside, many of them well armed enough to best the police and
Carabinieri
in a firefight. Robbery, extortion, kidnapping and the black market gave these outlaws a rich income stream. As was traditional, rather than joining the bandits,
mafiosi
preferred, wherever they could, to ‘farm’ them through an exchange of favours. For example, the bandits might kick back a percentage of their earnings to the
mafiosi
, who in return offered tips on lucrative kidnapping or robbery targets, advance news on police roundups, and mediators who could broker ransom payments with the necessary discretion.

Soon after the Allied invasion,
mafiosi
set about re-establishing their time-honoured stranglehold over the ‘protection’, rental and management of agricultural land in western Sicily. Many of Sicily’s biggest landowners lived in decadent splendour in Palermo while leaving the running of their vast farms to brutal mafia middlemen. Hence, after the war, the landowners appointed men who would become some of the most notorious bosses of the 1950s and 1960s as leaseholder-managers of their land: like Giuseppe Genco Russo from Mussomeli, and the twenty-year-old killer Luciano Liggio from the agricultural town of Corleone, in the province of Palermo.
(Liggio already had an arrest warrant out against his name when, after his predecessor’s mysterious death, he became manager of the Strasatto estate in 1945.)

The business of land inexorably drew the mafia into politics. At every moment of political upheaval in recent Sicilian history, peasants had made loud claims to fairer contracts or even a share of the estates owned by the Sicilian aristocrats. In the end, mafia shotguns always voiced the definitive response to the peasants’ demands.

The land issue was bound to resurface after the war and, when it did, the landowners and
mafiosi
turned terror into a political tool. With the pistol, the machine gun and the hand grenade,
mafiosi
went all out to eliminate peasant militants and intimidate their supporters into passivity. The appalling roll call of murdered trade unionists and left-wing activists began in the summer of 1944 and had not run its course a full decade later. For example, in the autumn of 1946, at Belmonte Mezzagno near Palermo, the peasants formed a cooperative to take over the management of land from a nearby estate. On 2 November, a death squad of thirteen men turned up in a field where many ordinary members of the cooperative were labouring. The brothers Giovanni, Vincenzo and Giuseppe Santangelo were led away to be executed one after another with a single shot to the back of the head.

Both the landowners and the mafia feared that a new, democratic Italian government would be forced to make concessions to the Communists, and therefore to the left-wing peasants in Sicily. Accordingly, from as early as 1943, the landowners and the mafia sponsored a movement to separate the island off from the rest of the peninsula. The road to Sicilian independence was plotted at a series of meetings held over the coming years. Scions of some of the oldest family lineages in Sicily welcomed the island’s most senior mobsters to their luxurious country villas. At one of those meetings in September 1945, the bosses negotiated a deal to integrate some bandits into the Separatist movement’s army. Salvatore Giuliano, the leader of the most notorious bandit gang of all, was offered a large sum of money, the rank of colonel, and the promise of an amnesty once the flag of a free Sicily was raised. There followed a series of assaults on
Carabinieri
barracks that were intended to prepare the ground for an insurrection.

In the end, there was no Separatist insurrection. The movement’s ramshackle military wing was dispersed. More importantly, its political leadership was outmanoeuvred: in May 1946 Sicily was granted autonomy, and its own regional parliament, while remaining
within
Italy.
Mafiosi
who had supported Separatism began the search for new political partners.

If Separatism was in decline in 1946, Sicily’s criminal emergency had become more serious than ever. Bandit gangs, often operating under the
mafia’s wing, were robbing and kidnapping at will. The police and
Carabinieri
in Sicily were sending information aplenty to Rome. Many of them had taken a leading role in Fascism’s secret war on the mafia in the 1930s. For that reason they were under no illusions about what the mafia really was, as this report from October 1946 makes clear:

The mafia is an occult organisation that traverses Sicily’s provinces and has secret tentacles that reach into all social classes. Its exclusive objective is getting rich by unlawful means at the expense of honest and vulnerable people. It has now reconstituted its cells or ‘Families’, as they are referred to here in the jargon, especially in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, Caltanissetta, Enna and Agrigento.

So these were the violent years that decided Sicily’s future. Not coincidentally, these were also the years when Italy’s rulers decided to forget everything they knew about Sicily’s notorious ‘occult organisation’. The most revealing illustration of that process of forgetting is not a mafia massacre or a secret report. To understand how the Sicilian mafia really worked in the late 1940s, to understand its unique ability to vanish into thin air, while at the same time seeping into the state apparatus, we need to watch Italy’s first-ever mafia movie.

 
35 

S
ICILY
:
In the Name of the Law

It is September 1948, but the scorched expanses of the Sicilian interior that stretch out before the camera seem timeless. A young man in a double-breasted jacket, his chiselled face shaded by a fedora, sits erect in the saddle. Suddenly, he swivels to look out across a lunar landscape of dust and rock. He sees eight figures on horseback emerge over a hilltop to stand silhouetted against the sky.

‘The mafia.’ The young man speaks the dread word aloud to himself, and his jaw sets with determination. His name is Guido Schiavi, and he is a magistrate, a champion of the law. This is the confrontation he has been expecting.

The
mafiosi
, riding beautifully curried thoroughbred mares, come down the hill towards the magistrate at a stately canter. The soundtrack provides an accompaniment of stirring trumpets and driving strings to their cavalcade. As they approach, Schiavi sees that each is dressed in corduroy and fustian; each has a flat cap pulled down over a craggily impassive face; and each has a shotgun slung over his shoulder.

The
mafiosi
come to a halt on a low bridge. Their boss, who goes by the name of Turi Passalacqua, is unmistakeable on his statuesque white mount. He raises his cap courteously to address the magistrate.

Good day to you,
voscenza
. Welcome to our land. You do us a great honour.

You are very young, sir. And my friends and I are very happy about that. Because we know that the young are pure of heart. You are intelligent, and I’m sure you have already understood the way of the world here. Things have been like this for more than a hundred years, and everyone is content.

The magistrate Schiavi is not impressed by this homily. He objects that there are plenty of people who are far from ‘content’ with this ‘way of the world’: the victims of murder and blackmail and their families, for example; or the brutalised farm labourers and sulphur miners. But his words fail to provoke even a flicker of irritation on the
mafioso
’s serene countenance:

Every society has its defects. And besides, it’s always possible to reach an agreement between men of honour . . . You need only express your desires.

Now it is the magistrate’s turn to remain unmoved. In tones of measured defiance he affirms that he has only one desire, only one duty: to apply the law.

Clearly, there can be no compromise. Two opposing value systems have deployed their forces in the field. A great clash between the state and the mafia is inevitable. All that remains is for the
capomafia
Turi Passalacqua to restate his credo:

You are a brave man, but we make the law here, according to our ancient traditions. This is an island. The government is a long way away. And if we weren’t here, with our own kind of severity, then criminals would end up spoiling everything, like rye-grass spoils the wheat. Nobody would be safe in their own home any more. We are not criminals. We are honourable men: as free and independent as the birds in the sky.

And with that, the trumpets and strings swell once more. We watch as the posse of Men of Honour wheels round and gallops off into the distance.

In 1940s Italy, the movies meant much more than just entertainment. The US studios had boycotted the Italian market in protest at Mussolini’s attempts to control imports. During the last five years of Fascism, Italians were denied their weekly dose of Californian celluloid. When the theatres were reopened after the Liberation, and the supply from Hollywood resumed, Italians were soon going to the movies in greater numbers than ever—greater than in any other European country. The glamour of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford held out the promise of what freedom and democracy might bring to a country racked by war and demoralised by the debacle of Fascism.

Yet no country that had lived through such traumatic changes could ever be entirely satisfied with the products of the US studios. So, in the cinema, the years 1945–50 have come to be defined by the gritty homegrown poetry of Roberto Rossellini’s
Rome, Open City
or Vittorio De Sica’s
Bicycle Thieves
. Neorealism (‘new realism’) was the cultural buzzword of the day. Neorealist directors took their cameras out into the bomb-shattered streets; they found moving dramas among the peasants toiling on the terraces or wading through rice paddies. Neorealist cinema seemed so true to life that it was as if the skin of history had peeled off as film (to quote what one critic evocatively wrote at the time). There has never been a moment when the movie screen was more important to how Italy imagined the light and the dark within itself.

Released in Italian cinemas in March 1949,
In nome della legge
(
In the Name of the Law
) was Italy’s first mafia film. It is a strange muddle of a movie: it has many of the accoutrements of Neorealist cinema, notably in its use of the sun-blasted Sicilian landscape; but it also straddles the divide between Neorealism and Hollywood. The film’s director, Pietro Germi, had never been to Sicily before his film went into production in 1948. Then again, his ignorance mattered little. Because when he got off the ferry and set foot on the island for the first time, he already knew exactly what he was going to find: Arizona.
In the Name of the Law
stages a shotgun marriage between Neorealism and the cowboy movie genre. Germi’s Sicily is
Tombstone
with Mediterranean trimmings: a place of lone lawmen, long stares, and ambushes in gulches. Here trains pull into desert stations, gunshots echo across vast skies, and men stride into bars and drink glasses of Sicilian aniseed liqueur as if they were knocking back fingers of hooch whiskey.

Germi’s reasoning was that the quasi–Wild West setting would dramatise the head-to-head between the lone lawman and his criminal foe. Muscular heart-throb Massimo Girotti, playing the young magistrate Guido Schiavi, was to be Italy’s answer to John Wayne. But Germi’s camera is even more obsessed with mafia boss Turi Passalacqua, played by French veteran Charles Vanel: he is always framed from below, cut out against a pale sky—as if he were part craggy rancher, and part Apache sage.