The Prince (61 page)

Saro, along with a dozen other Sicilians, was dropped into the Corleone area on a moonless night.

It was not the softest of landings. He ended up hitting a stone wall, the kind used to mark the boundaries of a field, and the parachute dragged him over a large prickly pear. The cactus's sharp spines pierced the rough cloth of his pants, causing him excruciating pain. According to the instructions Saro had been given, first he was to fold up the parachute and hide it under a bush. As he painfully set about recovering the fabric, he was surrounded by two farmers pointing their shotguns at him. They asked him who he was, and Saro replied in dialect that he had come to prepare for the arrival of the Americans. Reassured by those words, the two men helped him pack the parachute back together and then led him to their nearby cabin.

There he could see firsthand the extreme poverty to which his people had been subjected. Malnourished children, undoubtedly with lice and bedbugs feasting on them; women who'd aged before their time; clothes that were coming apart at the seams; homes that could only be called hovels; malaria; and resignation in the men's eyes, crushed by a government that had left them at the mercy of those in power. But he also observed in them a proud, indomitable dignity and an awareness of their own worth.

The man made the women and children leave and told Saro to lie down on the straw mattress; he would pick out the spines of the prickly pear for him. Saro took off his shirt and pants, and the old man set about his task with infinite patience.

Saro had been dropped into the heart of the island, where US general George Patton would pass with his armored columns. Naturally, he knew nothing about the tactical plans for the invasion. His orders were to contact the Mafia bosses and persuade them to cooperate with the American troops. Saro, however, also had another assignment, given to him by Ferdinando Licata: he was to take advantage of his situation by laying the groundwork for repositioning the bosses at the top levels of the new government, while also appealing to the Sicilian Independence Movement championed by attorney Andrea Finocchiaro-Aprile. Up until the advent of fascism, Aprile had served in three legislatures as deputy from the electoral district of Corleone, considered the headquarters of the Mafia Council.

Finocchiaro-Aprile dreamed of the island's independence from Italy and was willing to make alliances with anyone in order to realize that goal: first of all, with the party of the big landowners, well represented by Lucio Tasca, who, with the motto “Sicily and Liberty,” saw separatism as the best way to safeguard privileges and fiefdoms. And then with the top Mafia bosses: Calogero Vizzini of Villalba, Giuseppe Genco Russo of Mussomeli, Greco of Croce Verde Giardini, Virgilio Nasi of Trapani, Vincenzo Rimi of Alcamo, and Vanni Sacco of Palermo. All were very much in favor of eliminating the dictatorship, which, besides sending many of them to prison, had taken control of their territory. The Mafia required democracy, not dictatorship, in order to flourish.

While Saro was busy creating a cover that would allow him to move freely in the area without arousing suspicion, Jano and his men, in their new guise as supporters of the family bosses, turned into saboteurs. Better yet, following the orders of Don Calò, whom Jano now familiarly called
zu
Calò, they began robbing supplies brought to the artillery redoubts in unescorted trucks.

For Sicilians, life became a living hell. Every day, squadrons of Allied fighter planes took off from Malta to support bombers that came from North Africa to drop their explosives on cities and military positions. The bombs were democratic; they did not discriminate. They shelled the famous Hotel San Domenico in Taormina, where German field marshal Albert Kesselring maintained his headquarters, and razed the town of Palazzolo Acreide, where the Italian army's Napoli Division was headquartered, almost completely neutralizing the unit. For nine days, the Sicilians lived in terror of the nightly bombings, which nearly always struck areas where there were clusters of troops or military commands.

The Italian Section's efforts had produced excellent results. Saro in particular had a stroke of luck. After the mission in Corleone, where he was able to obtain a promise of cooperation from the local families, he headed for Gela to await the landing and be reunited with the OSS group.

As a cover, Saro dusted off his old line of work as a barber. He went around from farmhouse to farmhouse offering to cut the farmers' hair or trim their beards and mustaches in return for some vegetables or a chicken egg.

In the countryside around Gela, he was welcomed by a gabellotto named Giovanni Scirè, who asked Saro to spruce him up. His son would be marrying a local girl in a few days. Scirè was a jovial, ruddy man who apparently hadn't suffered any hunger pangs as a result of the war, since he and his family seemed well fed and in good health overall. The son had even found time to fall in love.

As he was sharpening his razor on the leather strop, Saro asked him, “Is your son on matrimonial leave?”

“I don't know. Why are you asking?”

“Just curious. I wondered which battalion he was in. I have relatives scattered throughout most of the island.” He got ready to shave the man's beard.

“The war is over now. Too bad, because the party's over for us as well,” the gabellotto said with regret.

“Are you are a supporter of the Duce?” Saro goaded him.

“Are you kidding?” the man said angrily.

“Well then? I don't get it.”

The man lowered his voice, as if not wanting to be overheard: “The Italian naval command is nearby.”

“Not in Enna?”

“The general staff is in Enna. The naval command is here. Their rations are limited, so they ask us to supply them with all sorts of things, and we make them pay black market prices. They're used to eating well, those fine gentlemen.” Saro's antenna immediately went up, but he launched into the kind of populist claims that everyone can always agree on. “While we go hungry.”

“Have you ever seen a grand gentleman who was any different? They're all alike.” Scirè was sprawled in the chair, hands folded over his belly, eyes half closed, taking pleasure in having his beard shaved.

“Where is the command?” Saro tossed out the question casually.

“In Baron Giovanni Moleti's villa. There are generals and officials coming and going. By now it's an open secret. All of Sicily knows the naval command is there.”

“Have you ever been in there?”

For Giovanni Scirè, having come in contact with the gracious world of the upper ranks was a source of great pride. “Of course! I'm the one who brings them their chickens and hens. Inside the rooms, the walls are hung with large maps of Sicily. The tables are covered with piles of papers. There's also a large safe. I'd never seen one before.”

“Where is the safe?”

“In the central room, where they all are. They put it near the portrait of Baron Giovanni Moleti's great-grandfather. He was one of Garibaldi's Mille—the One Thousand—you know,” Scirè told him.

It wasn't difficult for Saro to locate the villa. It had been constructed in the eighteenth century, with spacious, lushly planted grounds which had not been maintained for some years. The facade was rose colored, and on one side there was a grand terrace overlooking a valley that sloped down toward the sea. To the left of the main building stood a small house, also rosy pink, with a red-tiled roof; in earlier times, it had served as the servants' quarters, but now it housed troops assigned to guard the naval command. That was all that could be seen from the road. Saro set his mind to opening the safe, but to do that, he would need some friendly help and support from Gela's Mafia. For several days, he studied the situation, noting that the command's routine worked somewhat like an office's: a soldier arrived around eight o'clock in the morning to open the command. Officers and generals got there at ten and departed around seven in the evening, leaving a couple of soldiers to stand guard outside. The Moleti family could then enjoy a little privacy, at least until eight the following morning.

The job did not present insurmountable difficulties. All he had to do was neutralize the two guards. As for the rest, the baron's family didn't worry him at all.

To swing into action, however, Saro needed at least three men ready for anything. He approached a major player, a certain Vincenzo Lanzafame, who had trained him for the upcoming landing. The man was actually happy to be of use and assigned Saro three of his best men.

The two soldiers in the outbuilding's small kitchen were preparing a dish of spaghetti
al pomodoro
when they were surprised by Saro's team. Bashed with clubs wrapped in damp cloth, they fell to the floor, unconscious. The three mafiosi looked at Saro, as if to ask for his permission. Saro thought they were waiting for him to compliment them.

But one of the three, moving to the platter that sat there ready to eat, said, “Are we gonna let it get cold?”

In times like those, wasting food was a sin. They divided the spaghetti up, filling two more plates, and ate silently, gobbling it down in just a few forkfuls.

Their bellies filled, they left the small house and headed toward the villa.

As cautious and discreet as they had been not to make too much noise, the baron had noticed the unusual commotion behind the windows. He opened the door of the villa before the mafiosi could get out their lock picks. Saro and the others were alarmed, but Giovanni Moleti was quick to reassure them. He welcomed them as liberators and asked Saro, the only one of the crew he didn't know, if it was true that the landing was now imminent and that the bombings actually meant that it was just a matter of days.

Saro confirmed his hunch. The baron invited him in and showed him the naval command room.

The gabellotto's description was fully accurate. Saro saw the painting portraying Baron Moleti's ancestor. Beside the fireplace stood the safe. He asked if he could open it. The nobleman practically beat his breast, apologetic about not knowing the combination; he begged them to believe him.

To speed things up Saro decided to blast it open with a small charge of dynamite he'd brought with him.

The door flew off, and what he saw inside would have made any spy ecstatic: dossiers, maps, encrypted documents, envelopes bearing the eagle of the Third Reich. There was information about the positioning of Italian ships, and the Luftwaffe's deployment over the Mediterranean. There were even confidential orders for the Wehrmacht's divisions in Italy. Saro hurriedly slipped all the papers into a satchel, said good-bye to the baron, and left the villa with the three mafiosi. He separated from them shortly afterward, promising to remember them and Vincenzo Lanzafame.

Twenty-four hours later, the satchel was in the hands of OSS agents, who delivered it at once to Vice Admiral Kent Hewitt, commander of US naval forces in European waters.

The bombing of the island's main cities reduced many of them to rubble. The appointed day for the Allied troops' landing was July 10, 1943.

Rather than gathering at a single assembly point, the assault fleet's ships had sailed from various ports—Port Said, Alexandria, Tripoli, Sousse, Sfax, Algiers, Oran, Bizerte—joining forces once at sea. Nothing like it had ever been seen in living memory. The imposing armada consisted of 2,590 transport vessels, 1,800 landing craft, and 280 warships.

The Fifteenth Army Group was under the command of British general Harold Alexander, and when they neared the coast, they would be divided into two other task forces: the US Seventh Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Patton, which would land on the beach at Gela; and the British Eighth Army, commanded by General Bernard Montgomery, which would come ashore south of Siracusa.

According to the strategy devised by the British and American generals, Montgomery's men were to head toward Messina, to close off the escape route and hem in the Italian-German forces, while Patton would keep the west side of the island in check.

Left to oppose these shock troops was a demoralized Axis army. Nearly all the Italian infantry, artillery, and gunnery units were made up of Sicilians who feared for their families and despised the regime that had treated them like stepchildren. In addition, their outfits and equipment were in desperate shape. They had no shoes, not to mention uniforms. Some soldiers wore a regulation jacket and civvies for pants, while others wore military pants and civilian shirts. And when it came to armaments, the situation was truly pathetic. Besides numerical inferiority, since the thirty-eight Italian and nine German battalions were facing sixty-nine Allied contingents, there was the inadequacy of their weapons, which were few and in poor condition.

W
ith the second wave, OSS members landed in Gela, arriving in force to support the agents already present on the island. Their main task was to interrogate prisoners and civilians to obtain information about routes through the countryside, minefields, and gun emplacements. Additionally, they were to continue looking for the individuals designated by Luciano to ask for their collaboration.

The two landings were quite successful. In particular, Patton's Seventh Army encountered almost no resistance in Gela, while Montgomery was able to enter Siracusa the same night of the landing.

By the end of the invasion's first day, more than a thousand Italians had already been taken prisoner, and at least that many had thrown down their rifles and fled to the countryside to hide. After a week, the number of prisoners had grown to twenty-two thousand, half of them Sicilian. The OSS men suggested sending them home, since the fields needed laborers for the upcoming harvest. That way, American logistics operations wouldn't be strained to the breaking point.

The idea made headway in the commanders' minds as well. The Allies would allow all soldiers who had surrendered to return to their villages.