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Authors: John Dickie

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Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily
met with a mixture of hostility and indifference on its release. Many Sicilian reviewers berated its author for ignorant prejudice. In part this poor reception was Franchetti’s own fault. For one thing, his proposals for solving the mafia problem were outlandish and authoritarian: Sicilians were not to be allowed any say at all in how their island was policed. Franchetti even thought that their whole outlook was so perverted that they gave violence a ‘moral value’ and considered it ethically wrong to be honest. He seemed not to realize that people very often went along with the mafiosi simply because they were intimidated and did not know whom to trust.

Thus a pioneering account of the ‘violence industry’ failed to make an impact during Franchetti’s lifetime. After publishing his research in Sicily, he went on to serve as a backbench member of parliament, but his political career did not take off. In the end, it was the very same grim patriotism that had impelled him to investigate the mafia in 1876 that eventually killed him. (Even friends thought there was something dark and excessive about Franchetti’s love of his country.) During the First World War he was tormented by the thought that he had not been called to an important office in the nation’s hour of need. In October 1917, when news came through of Italy’s catastrophic defeat at the battle of Caporetto, he became so depressed that he shot himself.

‘THE SO-CALLED MAFFIA’: HOW THE MAFIA GOT ITS NAME

In Palermo dialect the adjective ‘mafioso’ once meant ‘beautiful’, ‘bold’, ‘self-confident’. Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called ‘mafia’. ‘Cool’ is about the closest modern English equivalent; a mafioso was someone who fancied himself.

The word mafioso began to have criminal connotations because of a hugely successful play written in Sicilian dialect,
I mafiusi di la Vicaria
(‘The mafiosi of Vicaria Prison’), which was first performed in 1863. The
mafiusi
are a gang of prison inmates whose habits look very familiar in retrospect. They have a boss and an initiation ritual, and there is much talk in the play of ‘respect’ and ‘humility’. The characters use the term
pizzu
for protection payments as do today’s mafiosi—the word means ‘beak’ in Sicilian. By paying the
pizzu
you are allowing someone to ‘wet their beak’. If this use of
pizzu
started life as jailhouse slang, it almost certainly entered general use because of the play; an 1857 Sicilian dictionary lists only the ‘beak’ meaning; an 1868 dictionary explains the alternative sense of extortion money.

The fact that
I mafiusi di la Vicaria
is set in Palermo prison also squares with what we know about the jail, which was soon to be confirmed as Sicilian organized crime’s business school, think-tank, language laboratory, and communications centre. One observer at the time called it ‘a kind of government’ for the criminal gangs.

I mafiusi di la Vicaria
is at heart a sentimental fable about the redemption of criminals. This first ever literary representation of the mafia is also the first ever version of the myth of the good mafia, a mafia that is honourable and protects the weak. The gang’s boss stops his men picking on defenceless prisoners and kneels in prayer to beg for forgiveness after a man who had spoken to the police is killed, seemingly by mistake. In an implausible denouement, the capo leaves the gang and joins a workers’ self-help group.

Next to nothing is known about the two authors of
I mafiusi,
other than that they were members of a troupe of travelling players. Sicilian theatrical legend has it that they based
I mafiusi
on inside information given them by a Palermo tavern owner involved in organized crime. The character of the gang boss in the play is supposed to be based on this real-life mobster. There is no way of confirming this story, and
I mafiusi
is consequently destined to remain an enigmatic historical document.

The word ‘mafiosi’ is only used once, in the title of
I mafiusi di la Vicaria
(it was probably inserted at the last minute to help give the piece the kind of local flavour that a Palermo audience would expect) and the term ‘mafia’ never appears at all. All the same, it was following the great success of
I mafiusi
that the words ‘mafia’ and ‘mafioso’ began to be applied to criminals who seemed to operate in a way similar to the characters in the play. From the stage, the word’s new connotations filtered into the streets.

But a play alone was not enough to give the mafia its name. Baron Turrisi Colonna would certainly have known
I mafiusi
when he wrote his report at the end of 1864; the King of Italy’s son and heir even came to Palermo to see a gala performance in the spring of that same year. Yet Turrisi Colonna referred only to the ‘sect’, and not to either the mafia or mafiosi. The criminals and enforcers he knew did not call themselves mafiosi, or name their sect ‘the mafia’.

In fact it was only when the Italian authorities picked up on ‘mafia’ that the term entered general use and became a significant part of the sect’s own story. Although it was
I mafiusi di la Vicaria
that began to give ‘mafia’ its criminal meaning on the streets of Palermo, it was the government that turned the word into a subject of national debate.

The story of how it did so reveals what a devious and violent business ruling Sicily was in the years immediately following Garibaldi’s heroic expedition of 1860. Many Sicilians thought that the challenges of ruling their island had led the Italian government completely to abandon its liberal principles. The government’s critics pointed to two cases in particular: the ‘stabbers’ conspiracy’, and the torture of Antonio Cappello. It was cases like these that completely robbed the state of its credibility, and made many Sicilians very reluctant to trust it on any matter, let alone when it started to complain about the mafia.

Perhaps the strangest crime in Palermo’s long history of misdeeds was referred to by the press as the ‘stabbers’ conspiracy’. On the evening of 1 October 1862, in an apparently synchronized operation carried out within the same small area of Palermo, thugs emerged from the shadows to knife thirteen randomly chosen citizens, one of whom subsequently died of his wounds. Police on the spot only caught one of the perpetrators, a shoe-shiner and pedlar who also had a record as a police spy under the old Bourbon regime. His confession led to the arrest of another eleven supposed ‘stabbers’, who had apparently been paid for their work.

The attacks caused consternation in Palermo. When the stabbers’ trial took place early in 1863, there was huge public interest. Only the twelve men who were believed to have actually carried out the attacks were in the dock. The judge handed down death sentences to three ringleaders; the other nine got hard labour.

Yet the court showed a curious lack of interest in discovering who had funded the conspiracy and what its aims were. A Sicilian nobleman called Sant’ Elia who was close to the Italian royal family had been named by one of the stabbers as the man behind the plot, but he was not even questioned. Opposition newspapers were scornful: evidence weighty enough to condemn three poor wretches to death was apparently not considered sufficiently substantial to set in motion preliminary inquiries into a member of the new Italian establishment. (Sant’ Elia was also, as it happened, the head of a Masonic lodge.)

Sporadic stabbings that bore similarities to the events of 1 October 1862 continued. Whoever had set the plot in motion had clearly not yet achieved his aim. A second investigation began, and this time the nobleman Sant’ Elia was named as the chief suspect and his palace was searched. In response, the authorities rapidly closed ranks and the King pointedly chose Sant’ Elia to represent him at the Easter celebrations in Palermo. The case lost momentum, the stabbings ceased, and the investigators left Sicily.

It is still a mystery whether Sant’ Elia was really behind the stabbers’ conspiracy, although the balance of evidence currently suggests that he was not. What is certain is that the conspiracy came from within the institutions. Either it was dreamed up by interests in Palermo as a way of convincing the national government to put more power in their hands; or the national government was using terror tactics to try to create panic, accuse the opposition of the crimes, and generate the climate for a clampdown. Later in Italian history this move would be called the ‘strategy of tension’.

The year after the first stabbings, another episode cast further suspicion over the authorities. The political climate at the time—late in 1863—was fiery even by the standards of post-unification Sicily because a brutal campaign was being conducted to round up the estimated 26,000 deserters and draft dodgers at large in the island. In late October an opposition journalist went to follow up a story about a young man who was being held against his will in the military hospital in Palermo. The journalist found workman Antonio Cappello bedridden, with more than 150 small circular burns on his body. Doctors claimed that the burns were part of Cappello’s treatment, and their highly implausible theory was later backed up by a judicial inquiry.

The truth was that Cappello had entered the hospital a well man. Three military doctors from northern Italy had starved, beaten, and tortured him by placing red-hot metal buttons on his back. Their aim was to get him to confess that he was a deserter.

In the end, Cappello managed to convince the doctors that he had been a deaf-mute since birth and was not faking the condition to avoid conscription. Soon after he was released on 1 January 1864, photos of his tortured body were circulating in the streets of Palermo with a caption written by the journalist, accusing the government of being barbarians. Within three weeks, on the prompting of the Minister of War, the prison doctor was awarded the Cross of Saints Maurice and Lazarus by the King. At the end of March it was announced that the torturers would face no charges.

For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy, the authorities repeatedly lurched towards a blindly repressive response to the unruly island, only to stagger back towards decent principles that they were unable to uphold, or to sink into complicity with shady local enforcers. This toing and froing helped them pull off an extraordinary feat of political image-making: the Italian state managed to look brutal, naive, hypocritical, incompetent, and sinister all at the same time.

It is hard not to have some sympathy for the government’s plight as it faced a number of huge tasks: building a new state virtually from scratch while also dealing with a civil war on the southern Italian mainland, crippling debt, the prospect of an attack by Austria, and a population of which over 95 per cent spoke a variety of dialects and languages other than Italian. To a government so starved of credibility, the notion that there might be a devilish secret conspiracy against it was manna. So it was that a government conspiracy theorist gave the world the first written use of the term ‘mafia’.

On 25 April 1865, two years after the torture of Antonio Cappello, the recently appointed prefect of Palermo, the Marquis Filippo Antonio Gualterio, sent an alarming secret report to his boss, the Minister of the Interior. Prefects like Gualterio were key officers of Italy’s new administrative system; they were the eyes and ears of the government in the cities, with responsibility for monitoring opposition and supervising the maintenance of law and order. In his report, Gualterio spoke of ‘a serious and long-standing lack of understanding between the Country and the Authorities’. This breakdown resulted in a situation that enabled ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal association to grow more daring’. During the periodic revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century Palermo, wrote Gualterio, the ‘Maffia’ had developed the habit of offering its muscle to different political groupings as a way of increasing its leverage; now it was on the side of whoever opposed the government. Thus, with Gualterio’s report, the Palermo street rumours about the mafia reached the ears of Italy’s rulers for the first time.

Prefect Gualterio was quite explicit about what a good occasion for a clampdown the ‘Maffia’ offered. The government, he explained, could legitimately send in the army to deal with the crime emergency, and in doing so land a fatal blow against the opposition—or so it hoped. As a result of Gualterio’s report, 15,000 troops spent nearly six months trying to disarm the population, arrest draft-dodgers, round up criminals on the run, and track down the mafia. The details of this military campaign (the third in a few short years) are not important here; suffice it to say that it failed.

Gualterio was a conspiracy theorist, but he was not a fantasist. He did not conjure up the mafia out of nothing with the sole purpose of justifying repression. In some respects, his analysis of ‘the so-called Maffia’ ran along the same lines as Turrisi Colonna’s. Organized crime was an integral part of politics on the island. Gualterio’s convenient ‘mistake’ was simply to claim that all the villains were on one side of the political spectrum—the opposition’s. As the revolt of 1866 subsequently proved, some of the most important mafiosi, like Antonino Giammona, were now partisans of order and no longer revolutionaries.

From the day of Gualterio’s report, the word ‘mafia’ rapidly entered general use and simultaneously became the subject of furious controversy. For every person who used ‘mafia’ to mean a criminal conspiracy, there were others who maintained that it still meant nothing more menacing than a peculiarly Sicilian form of self-confident pride. Gualterio thus began to kick up the same dust cloud of bewilderment about what the term ‘mafia’ meant that Franchetti and Sonnino would encounter on their travels round Sicily a decade later—a dust cloud that would only finally be dispersed by Judge Giovanni Falcone.

By giving the mafia a name in these circumstances, Gualterio made a crucial contribution to its image. For since then the mafia and its politicians have frequently claimed that Sicily has been victimized and misrepresented. The government, they protest, has invented the idea that the mafia is a criminal organization as a pretext to oppress Sicilians—yet another version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ theory. One reason that these protests have won support over the past 140 years is that they have sometimes been true. Officials were constantly tempted to pin the label of mafioso on anyone who disagreed with them.

BOOK: Cosa Nostra
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