Cosa Nostra (12 page)

Chief of Police Albanese, Tajani asserted to parliament, was more than an isolated corrupt policeman. In 1869, in the course of his duties as chief prosecutor, Tajani had learned that crimes in Monreale near Palermo were committed with the approval of the commander of the National Guard. Soon after the story emerged, two criminals who seemed prepared to give evidence about the case were ambushed and murdered. Albanese himself, despite being Chief of Police, not only discouraged an investigation into why and how the two men had died, he even told the magistrate responsible that ‘reasons of public order had induced the authorities to order their deaths’. In 1871, on Tajani’s orders, Albanese was charged with the murder of the informants in the Monreale case. It was when the Chief of Police was released for lack of evidence that Tajani resigned in disgust and stood for election under the Left banner.

Before Tajani could finish his speech to parliament, he was angrily interrupted by Giovanni Lanza, a gaunt man in his mid-sixties. Lanza had been Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior at the time of the alleged policy of collusion with the mafia. The austere, self-made son of a blacksmith, he embodied the Right’s claims to moral superiority over the Left. But he had hardly begun to vent his rage in response to Tajani’s accusations when his words were drowned out by shouts, boos, and whistles. What had already been a rowdy sitting descended into chaos as supporters of the two men jostled each other and traded insults. Tajani remained motionless, his cold smile still fixed on his face as he watched four of Lanza’s friends drag the former Prime Minister from the chamber for his own good. The turmoil spilled out into the corridors of parliament and the session had to be abandoned.

It was only the following day that Tajani was able to bring his speech to its stark conclusion: ‘The mafia in Sicily is not dangerous or invincible in itself. It is dangerous and invincible because it is an instrument of local government.’ Having recovered his calm, Lanza tabled a demand for an inquiry into the accusations, but the political damage to the government was already done. The Right’s law-and-order platform had collapsed. Nobody could now believe that parliament was divided between pro-mafia and antimafia politicians. It would prove easier for both sides to just drop the whole subject. So, when the repressive laws were passed (they were destined to remain a dead letter), both Left and Right agreed on what for politicians the world over is the preferred means of smoothing over a controversial issue: they set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The mafia was included within the inquiry’s terms of reference, but so much else about Sicilian society was also included that the real contours of the mafia issue would almost certainly be blurred.

It is no wonder that the two ‘English’ intellectuals Franchetti and Sonnino did not trust the parliamentary inquiry to be incisive and they subsequently decided to mount their own private one instead. The people to whom Franchetti and Sonnino spoke, after the parliamentary inquiry had finished gathering evidence in Sicily, would confirm the account of events that Tajani had given to parliament. It is also now known that, with Tajani’s arrest warrant hanging over him, Chief of Police Albanese fled Sicily and was only persuaded to return by the then Prime Minister Lanza, who received him in his house and assured him of the government’s support. It is also thought that an attempt to assassinate Tajani was being prepared just before he left office.

The nine members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry made their way round Sicily in the winter of 1875–6. Each town welcomed them warmly—municipal or military bands would accompany them to their hotels—and they held their interviews in the town hall. Various Senators and members of parliament used their interviews with the commissioners as a chance to explain away the crime problem: ‘What is this maffia then? First of all, there is a benign maffia. The benign maffia is a kind of spirit of defiance … So I too could be a benign
maffioso.
I am not one, of course. But anyone who respects themselves could be.’ Less cynical politicians, lawyers, police officers, and administrators, as well as ordinary citizens like Dr Gaspare Galati, also submitted evidence. Plenty of witnesses spoke of the mafia’s role in the citrus fruit industry and in the revolts of 1860 and 1866. Together all these testimonies provided a confused but deeply worrying portrait of organized crime and political corruption. Italian politicians now had at their disposal even more evidence about the mafia.

The papers of the inquiry were never published. When the time came for the commission to submit its findings to parliament early in 1877, the Right coalition had already fallen. What little will there had been to make political use of the mafia issue was now gone. Neither the Right nor the Left had much interest in a serious understanding of organized crime in Sicily. (Hence also the poor reception given at the same time to Franchetti’s work on the violence industry.)

The parliamentary commission’s final report was delivered to an almost empty Chamber of Deputies. The conclusion it reached was both bland and wrong: the mafia was defined as ‘an instinctive, brutal, biased form of solidarity between those individuals and lower social groups who prefer to live off violence rather than hard work. It unites them against the state, the law and regular bodies.’ In short, the mafia was conveniently dismissed as a disorganized bunch of poor, lazy crooks—enemies of the state rather than ‘instruments of local government’. By 1877, Italy’s politicians had most of the knowledge they needed about the mafia in order to fight it, and all of the reasons they needed to forget what they knew. The first stage of the process by which the mafia entered the Italian system was complete.

*   *   *

The second stage began when a Left coalition government was formed in March 1876. It was joined, cautiously, by the Sicilian parliamentarians who had been elected with the opposition in 1874. The new Minister of the Interior was Giovanni Nicotera, a lawyer who had fought with Garibaldi and who understood southern Italian boss politics better than anyone—for the simple reason that he was its leading exponent. Nicotera set about turning the Ministry of the Interior building off Piazza Navona into a formidable vote-farming machine for the Left. Opposition supporters were cut from the electoral roll or harassed by the police; government funds and jobs were placed at the disposal of friendly candidates. In November 1876, Nicotera managed the elections so successfully that the Left won 414 parliamentary seats, leaving only 94 to the Right. He was returned in his own Salerno constituency with 1,184 votes to his opponent’s 1; it is to be hoped that the poor man’s relatives were at least allowed to abstain.

Nicotera approached the crime issue with the same gusto. The state of law and order in Sicily was still intolerable in 1876. For one thing, it was an international embarrassment. On 13 November, the young English manager of a sulphur company, John Forester Rose, was kidnapped just outside the mining town of Lercara Friddi.
The Times
reported that he was treated well before a ransom was surrendered and he was freed, although the American press subsequently said that his wife received his ears in the post before she was persuaded to pay up. It was clear, all the same, that the kidnappers had informers among the well-to-do Palermo circles that Mr Rose frequented, and that the ransom was paid through a mafia intermediary.

Nicotera knew that something had to be done. He was clearly no political ingénu: the sources of support that he drew on in his own fiefdom included the Freemasons and—it is suspected—the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the mafia. But he did not know Sicily well and did not have a power base there. So when he took office even he was genuinely taken aback by what his civil servants told him about the mafia’s ties with the most powerful people in Sicily and about its far-reaching influence over the police and magistrature. He concluded that the wealthy classes in Sicily were ‘heavily compromised with the mafia’.

A month after the Rose kidnapping, and without bothering to propose authoritarian legislation along the lines that the Right had wanted two years earlier, Nicotera appointed yet another tough prefect of Palermo and gave him instructions to implement yet another brutal crackdown on crime. Just as had happened under the Right, towns were encircled at night and suspects deported en masse. Just as they had done under the Right, the police colluded with some criminals against others. Just as under the Right, the repression produced howls of protest from some Sicilian politicians—including the friend of the ‘sect’, Baron Turrisi Colonna—about the illegal means used by the police. And, just as his Right predecessor Lanza had done, Nicotera used the repression to hit anyone he regarded as subversive and to bring potential allies to heel. When one Sicilian landowner who was heavily suspected of links with mafiosi wrote a newspaper article critical of Nicotera’s antimafia campaign, the brother of the newspaper’s editor was arrested and only freed in return for a promise to change the paper’s uncooperative line.

But unlike the Right’s campaigns of repression, Nicotera’s proved to be successful. In November 1877, a year after his electoral triumph, he was able to announce the total defeat of the ‘bandits’ who had terrorized the countryside in Sicily since 1860. Even the man who had kidnapped the unfortunate Mr Rose was shot down. Nicotera’s secret was that he had offered politicians in Sicily an implicit bargain: they would be looked on favourably by the government as long as they handed over the bandits. ‘Bandits’, in this case, often meant mafiosi who created problems for the government or who did not have the right political protection. The politicians were being asked to make sure that their friends in the violence industry kept crimes like kidnapping down to politically acceptable levels. Only the most flagrant aspects of the deep-seated crime issue were to be addressed in the process of, finally, making the island governable. To demonstrate that the bargain had been accepted, seventy town councils in the province of Palermo sent letters and petitions in support of Nicotera and the police. This warm demonstration of loyalty was probably orchestrated by Nicotera’s prefect, but it did at least show that, seventeen years after Garibaldi invaded Sicily in the name of the Italian nation, some sort of political consensus between Rome and Sicily was finally taking shape.

A month after proclaiming the total defeat of Sicilian ‘banditry’, Nicotera was removed from office. His shameless authoritarianism had made him both a threat and an easy target for rival faction leaders on the Left. Before then, his dragnet had hauled in some mafia-like criminal associations, and operations against them did not stop with Nicotera’s departure. Over the coming years, a series of high-profile trials followed investigations into groups like the ‘Stuppagghieri’ (‘Fuse Burners’) in Monreale, the ‘Brothers’ in Bagheria, the ‘Fontana Nuova’ in Misilmeri, and a gang of extortionist millers in Palermo. (The story of one such association, the ‘Fratellanza’—or ‘Brotherhood’—from Favara, is told in the next chapter.)

The picture of organized crime that emerged from these trials was predictably murky. Some
pentiti
came forward, and one or two were murdered. But for every witness whose credibility was confirmed posthumously in this way, another turned out to be too close to the authorities to be reliable, and still another turned out to have important political friends shielding him from prosecution. Whereas some policemen were overzealous in their hunt for evidence of secret societies, others were themselves linked to gangs. Accordingly the verdicts varied from complete acquittal on appeal, as in the case of the ‘Stuppagghieri’, to the twelve death sentences handed down in 1883 to the Piazza Montalto
cosca,
which was based on the south-eastern edge of Palermo. The few high-level suspects arrested for their connections with organized crime escaped conviction. Many mafiosi were left untouched by the repression—as long as they had the right political cover.

As the trials followed one another in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it became clear that the bargain pioneered by Nicotera was proving to be a turning point. Governments in Rome were resigning themselves to working with Sicilian politicians who had mafia support. Mafiosi were gradually becoming part of a new political normality. The men of honour built up their extortion rackets and other business interests, but they also learned that political friendships had become more important than ever to their survival. For their part, Sicilian politicians were given the opportunity that the Right had denied them for so long: they could now launch themselves into the national arena, into the mysterious dance of coalition partners that determined how power and resources were distributed from Rome. There was a bonus in that the Left spent much more public money in Sicily than the Right had done—on roads, bridges, harbours, hospitals, schools, sanitation, slum clearance, and asylums. All of these were potential sources of income and power for politicians and criminals alike. Thus mafiosi found that the Left was willing to use them as ‘an instrument of local government’, just as the Right had done, only in a slightly different way. Whereas the Right had tried to run Sicily by oiling guns, the Left preferred to grease palms. Under the Left, the mafia and the politicians it dealt with began to sink their arms deep into the Roman pork barrel.

Nicotera’s bargain thus created a blueprint for governing Sicily that would remain more or less in place for the next forty years. Indeed, even today, the mafia aims to be an ‘instrument of local government’ of the kind that it became under the Left. And today, as during the critical years of 1875–7, men of honour do not set the political agenda; only very rarely do they have either the inclination or the power to turn the tide of Italian politics. They merely adapt to circumstances by striking bargains with politicians of all colours.

THE FAVARA BROTHERHOOD: THE MAFIA IN SULPHUR COUNTRY

In the early nineteenth century blemishes of a more sickly shade of yellow began to appear in the grain-coloured highlands of the Sicilian interior. The island had a virtual natural monopoly in an element that was an essential raw material of the industrial revolution: sulphur, used in the production of a host of things from fungicides and fertilizers to paper, pigments, and explosives. The plains and hillsides of the south-western and central provinces of Agrigento and Caltanissetta were torn open to expose the precious element that lay in thick seams below the surface. It was as if a congenital geological illness were finally beginning to make its symptoms manifest. In the mining regions, unearthly bluish smoke could often be seen emanating from the
calcaroni,
huge buried mounds of sulphur-bearing rock that were slowly burned to release a brown liquid. The fumes poisoned the countryside around and ruined the health of men and animals alike. And life in the sulphur mines was more infernal even than the landscape: collapses were common, and any fire would create lethal sulphur dioxide fumes. One hundred men were killed in 1883—by no means an untypical year.