Cosa Nostra (11 page)

When the Italian government acted in this hypocritical way, it boosted the mafia’s reputation. Thus, unwittingly, when Gualterio gave the mafia its name, he set in place what could be called the mafia ‘brand’s’ positioning strategy vis-à-vis its main competitor. After Gualterio, every blind crackdown that failed to prosecute the mafia—whatever the government happened to take that word to mean—served further to undermine the state’s trustworthiness, and thus to boost the real mafia’s reputation not only for being smart and immune from prosecution, but also for being more efficient and even ‘fairer’ than the state.

More than a century would pass after Gualterio’s report before anyone would write perceptively about the mafia’s own attitude to its name. The writer in question was novelist Leonardo Sciascia, whose 1973 short story ‘Philology’ has a contemporary setting and takes the form of an imagined dialogue between two anonymous Sicilians about the meaning of the word ‘mafia’. The more educated of the two, evidently a politician, is intent first and foremost on displaying his erudition, citing a century-long list of conflicting dictionary definitions, and explaining that ‘mafia’ probably derives from Arabic. With the indecision proper to a gentleman scholar—one imagines him as a portly man in his late sixties, dressed in a crumpled suit—he refuses to settle on one meaning for the word.

The younger man is much more down-to-earth—the picture in the reader’s mind is of a chunky, middle-aged, flat-faced character in Ray Bans. Despite the respect that he evidently has for his partner in discussion, he cannot disguise that all the scholarly debate just makes him edgy. He prefers to hear that ‘mafia’ is the manly swagger of someone who knows how to look after his own interests.

It turns out, of course, that both men in Sciascia’s story are mafiosi and that their dialogue is a rehearsal in case they are called before a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The older man says he is so confident that he will even ask the commission to let him make his ‘little contribution’—’a contribution to the confusion, you understand’. At some point after 1865, Sciascia is suggesting, the name ‘mafia’ became the Sicilian mafia’s own little joke at the state’s expense.

*   *   *

If the sources we have are to be believed—and, in the history of a secret society like the mafia, that ‘if’ is inevitably quite large—then the sect emerged in the Palermo hinterland when the toughest and smartest bandits, members of ‘parties’,
gabelloti,
smugglers, livestock rustlers, estate wardens, farmers, and lawyers came together to specialize in the violence industry and to share a method for building power and wealth that was perfected in the lemon business. These men extended their method to family members and business contacts. When they spent time in jail, they would also extend it to their fellow inmates. This sect became the mafia when the new Italian state made ham-fisted attempts to repress it. Thus by the mid-1870s at the very latest, and in the Palermo area at the very least, the most important components of the mafia method were firmly in place. The mafia had the protection rackets and the powerful political friends, and it also had its cellular structure, its name, its rituals, and an untrustworthy state as a competitor.

The great imponderable is whether, at this moment in history, there was one mafia or many. It is not clear how many of the ‘mafias’ referred to by the authorities in different parts of Sicily in the 1860s and 1870s were just autonomous gangs; they may have been copying methods that were widespread anyway, or may actually have recognized themselves as forming part of the same brotherhood as Uditore boss Antonino Giammona. The problem is how to interpret the historical documents. The authorities often referred to the mafia, but by no means everything that they called ‘mafia’ really was the mafia. Some policemen were evidently too keen to twist the facts to fit the conspiracy stories that their political masters needed to brandish against rivals.

Baron Turrisi Colonna’s 1864 account of the sect carries a great deal of weight on this question because of his close relationship with the mafia—and Turrisi Colonna definitely talked only of a single ‘great sect’. But this belief may derive from his Palermo-based perspective and may not be valid for the rest of western Sicily. There are also, by way of contrast, numerous police reports from the 1860–76 period that tell of different gangs locked in combat against each other in many towns and villages. But these are not a reliable indication that there were different mafias; the disputes referred to could just as easily have been generated within a single association in the same way that Cosa Nostra has internal wars today.

However all this evidence is interpreted, its very existence raises a question. If the mafia was around in the 1860s and 1870s, and if today’s historians have been able to find evidence of it, then all the information needed to understand the mafia and to oppose it must have been available to people at the time. By 1877, Italy had Turrisi Colonna’s pamphlet, the parliamentary inquiry into the 1866 revolt, Franchetti’s report on the ‘violence industry’, Dr Galati’s memorandum to the Minister of the Interior, and much more. The question is therefore why no one was able to stop the mafia. Part of the answer is that the Italian state simply had too many other troubles to cope with at the same time. But the main reason is far more sordid. For 1876 marks the point where the mafia became integral to Italy’s system of government.

TWO

The Mafia Enters the Italian System

1876–1890

‘AN INSTRUMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT’

The evidence of Dr Galati’s misfortunes at the hands of the Uditore mafia was not allowed to gather dust; it was included in papers submitted to a full-scale parliamentary inquiry into law and order in Sicily that was set up in the summer of 1875, but only delivered its findings in January 1877. The story of the parliamentary inquiry—the first explicitly to address the mafia issue—demonstrates just how much Italy’s rulers knew about the mafia problem in Sicily. It is also part of a much bigger political drama that took place between 1875 and 1877, illustrating how the Italian political system not only failed to combat the mafia in its early years, but actively contributed to its development.

The map of Italian politics after unification was a little like the map of Palermo at the time: a maze of little alleyways within the simple outlines of the main streets. Italy was ruled for a decade and a half after unification by a loose coalition called the Right; at its core were conservative landowners from northern Italy. The opposition, an even looser grouping called the Left, with strongholds in the South and Sicily, was in favour of higher government spending and more democracy. But the differences between the two coalitions were as much cultural as they were political. It often seemed to the Right—with no little justification, it must be said—that many southern and Sicilian members of parliament owed their election to boss politics, and to electoral machines that bribed supporters and bullied opponents. In the eyes of the Left, the Right seemed haughty and hypocritical; it had betrayed the ideals that had led to the foundation of the Italian state and it had badly neglected the South.

The story of the parliamentary inquiry begins in 1874 at a time when the Right coalition began to run into serious trouble. Sicily—where there had always been few Right supporters—was the primary cause of the government’s difficulties. By 1874, for a number of reasons (tax policy was top of the list), Sicily was slipping completely from the Right’s political grasp. In the November elections of that year, forty out of forty-eight Sicilian constituencies returned opposition representatives to the national parliament in Rome. And expert on the ‘sect’, Nicolò Turrisi Colonna was among the leading campaign managers for the Left. His work was assisted by Antonino Giammona—his favourite mafia boss and the persecutor of Dr Galati. Giammona had a political following that brought some fifty votes under his direct control—this at a time when only 2 per cent of the population were enfranchised and a few hundred votes were regularly enough to win a constituency.

In Rome, following the November 1874 elections, the Right clung to power. During and after the election campaign, it resorted to a tactic that it had used previously: stoking up the crime issue to discredit the opposition. In more strident tones than ever, the Right accused the Sicilian Left members of parliament of wanting to undermine the country’s unity, of being corrupt, of using bandits to rake in votes, of being mafiosi.

As part of this strategy, the government put forward some highly repressive legislation soon after the elections: it was proposed that suspected members of criminal associations and their political patrons could be imprisoned without trial for as much as five years. A wealth of compelling evidence garnered from prefects, investigating magistrates, and the police was presented to the committee examining the draft laws. It was pointed out that during 1873 there had been one murder for every 44,674 inhabitants in the northern region of Lombardy; in Sicily the figure was one murder for every 3,194 inhabitants. Official reports indicated that the mafia now reached right across western Sicily and even into some cities in the east like Messina—a major port for the citrus fruit industry. The prefects’ opinions were divided on whether the mafia was a united organization, and on what role the Sicilian mentality played in it. But most of them were clear that the mafia based its power on extortion rackets and the intimidation of witnesses, and that its recruits included Sicilians of all social classes. The prefect of Agrigento, in the south-west of Sicily, believed that mafiosi were a special ‘grade’ of man:

The grade of
Mafioso
is acquired by giving evidence of personal courage; by carrying prohibited arms; by fighting a duel through whatever pretence; by stabbing or betraying someone; by pretending to forgive an offence in order to take vengeance for it at some other time or place (to take personal vengeance for injuries received is the first canon law of the
Mafia
); by keeping absolute silence regarding some crime; by denying before all the authorities and the magistrates the knowledge of any crime he has seen committed; by bearing false witness in order to procure the acquittal of the guilty; by swindling in whatever way.

The sober and well-informed Rome correspondent of
The Times
read through some of this material and concluded in alarm that the mafia was an ‘intangible sect whose organization is as perfect as that of the Jesuits or the Freemasons, and whose secrets are more impenetrable’.

In producing all this evidence and putting forward its new anti-crime legislation, the Right was making a last-ditch bid to create the impression that it was an antimafia government facing up to a pro-mafia opposition. To the Left it seemed that the Right had overreached itself. Not only were men like Turrisi Colonna being directly targeted by the government’s proposals, but a great many Sicilian property-owners who were simply victims of the mafia also felt threatened. Since unification they had been hoping in vain that the government would help them lever themselves from the clutches of organized crime. But now that their patience was entirely exhausted and they had voted for opposition candidates, they found that they were becoming potential targets for the police. The scene was set for a crucial political confrontation between the two sides.

The confrontation came during a tense debate in parliament about the proposed reforms over ten days in June 1875. When the discussion began, one Sicilian member after another stood up to defend the island’s reputation. Some denied that the mafia existed; it was just a pretext for putting down the opposition, they claimed. They pointed to the venomous anti-Sicilian prejudices displayed by one prefect who had asserted in a leaked report that Sicilians were a ‘morally perverted’ people who could only be governed by force.

One speech finally detonated the controversy; because of it the debate would be remembered as the rowdiest since the Italian parliament was founded in 1861. During the early exchanges, various speakers from the Left began to wonder out loud why a man sitting on their own benches had not yet intervened. A wiry, balding, bespectacled member from southern Italy, Diego Tajani had been chief prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal between 1868 and 1872, and he therefore knew a great deal about how the Right itself had ruled Sicily. The Left members regarded him as their secret weapon against the government, and their asides were intended to provoke him into telling what he knew. As a former public servant, Tajani was reluctant to speak about the duties he had once performed. But eventually, stung both by the comments from his colleagues on the Left benches, and by the government’s attempts to capture the moral high ground on the crime question, he stood up to address the chamber.

Tajani’s speech began with a gibe directed at the men of the Left sitting alongside him: denying the existence of the mafia, he said, was like denying the existence of the sun. Then he turned much sharper barbs against the Right. With what one pro-government newspaper called a ‘cold smile’ on his lips, Tajani revealed that, following the revolt of 1866, the Right had encouraged the police to collaborate with the mafia. Mafiosi, he alleged, were given freedom to operate in return for supplying information to the authorities on unauthorized criminals and on anyone the government regarded as a subversive.

Tajani had been personally involved in the most scandalous cases, which centred on the figure of Giuseppe Albanese, the Palermo Chief of Police appointed in 1867. Albanese had no qualms about admitting that he was an admirer of a Bourbon official who had ‘got the mafia interested in keeping the peace’. This was what one contemporary called the ‘homoeopathic’ approach to law and order. It involved making friends with the mafiosi, using them as vote-gatherers and unofficial police agents, and in return helping them to keep their rivals in check.

In 1869, Tajani explained, Chief of Police Albanese had been stabbed by a mafioso in a Palermo piazza. It turned out that he had been attacked because he had been trying to blackmail his assailant. Albanese also had links with a criminal band that had broken into the offices of the Court of Appeal, tunnelled under a main street to rob a savings institute, and stolen a number of precious objects from the Palermo museum. All of the objects were subsequently found in the home of a man who worked in Albanese’s office at police headquarters.