Cosa Nostra (13 page)

Sicily’s sulphur mines were a running national scandal, and not just because of the physical risks. Italian public opinion was most concerned about the little boys, some as young as seven or eight, who were hired in small teams to carry the rock from the workface to the
calcaroni.
These children led a wretched life. Their miserable pay went straight to their parents; they often saw no more than the odd cigar or cup of wine as a reward for their efforts. The huge baskets of rock they carried deformed their bodies. Worse still, concerned observers talked darkly of their ‘wild instincts of wickedness and immorality’—pederasty was endemic in the sulphur mines.

In March 1883 in Favara, a town in the heart of sulphur country not far from the south-western coast of Sicily, a railway worker came to the police to say that he had been invited to join a secret republican society called la Fratellanza—the Brotherhood. He had been approached by a builder who told him that the society had special recognition signals that he would have to use if he wanted to avoid being attacked by other members. The railwayman felt he was being threatened, and guessed that there was a criminal intent behind the association.

The railwayman’s evidence came soon after what had been weeks of tension and violence in Favara. The trouble began on the evening of 1 February when a man was shot dead by two hooded assailants outside a tavern where a christening was being celebrated. The police assumed that the killing was the conclusion of a fight in the tavern and interpreted the guests’ blanket failure to recognize the killers as a sign that they were complicit. Everyone at the celebration was arrested.

The rumours in Favara were that the victim was a member of a criminal association. And those rumours became more credible the following day when a member of a rival gang was found dead outside the town. He had been shot in the back and his right ear was missing. Favara was suddenly on the verge of civil war. In the following days men from the two factions went about the town in groups, armed and wary. But then, just as suddenly, the tension dissipated and the threatened fighting between the two gangs failed to materialize. It was only when the railwayman told his story that the police began to reconstruct what had happened.

Between March and May 1883, more than 200 people were arrested in Favara and the surrounding area. One of the Brotherhood’s leaders was actually caught in the act of initiating two hooded brothers. Extraordinarily, he even had a written copy of the association’s statutes in his possession. He confessed, explaining that members would draw lots to decide who was to perform any killing that the leaders deemed necessary to the Brotherhood’s interests. More confessions followed. Skeletons were recovered from remote grottoes, dried-up wells, and abandoned sulphur mines. Further versions of the statutes and a diagram of the Brotherhood’s organization were recovered.

The trial of the Brotherhood took place in the specially adapted church of St Anne in Agrigento in 1885. One hundred and seven men were led in four chained lines into the dock. Many now denied the charges, claiming that they had confessed under torture. But the tactic did not work. The Brothers were convicted and imprisoned—a rare success against such a criminal association.

The case of the Favara Brotherhood gave the police a unique insight into the kind of mafia organization that grew up away from Palermo, in the sulphur regions of Agrigento and Caltanissetta provinces. But just as significant as the investigators’ discoveries, which they proved in court, is what they failed to see about the Brotherhood’s profound hold on the society around them. Historians now believe that the Brotherhood was a much more sophisticated and dangerous organization than the authorities realized. And if the mafia has survived so long in sulphur country, just as it has in the rest of western Sicily, it is partly because of the way that, like the Brotherhood in Favara, it has consistently been underestimated.

The Brotherhood was, in fact, only a few weeks old when police learned of its existence. It was formed when the bosses of Favara’s two factions met to discuss the escalating violence in the town following the murder at the christening. Remarkably, given the interests at stake and the violence of the conflict, the two sides not only agreed a peace but decided to merge and form a single association.

The Brotherhood’s rules were older than the association; they were followed by both of the gangs that came together to form it. And to anyone familiar with the story of Dr Galati and the Uditore mafia, those rules are strikingly familiar. The initiation ritual, for example: new members had their index finger pricked so that blood could be smeared on a sacred image. As the image was burned, the initiate recited an oath: ‘I swear on my honour to be faithful to the Brotherhood, as the Brotherhood is faithful to me. As this saint and these few drops of my blood burn, so I will spill all my blood for the Brotherhood. As this ash and this blood can never return to their original state, so I can never leave the Brotherhood.’ Because the Brotherhood had some 500 members recruited from several sulphur towns near Favara, a recognition ritual was also necessary. Like the Palermo version, it began with an inquiry about a sore tooth and proceeded with a similar exchange. (A report by the Palermo Chief Prosecutor to the Minister of Justice in 1877 claimed that this ritual was recognized across the island.)

The structure of the Brotherhood even bears similarities with the structure of Cosa Nostra that Tommaso Buscetta would first describe a century later. Members of the Brotherhood were divided into
decine
—groups of ten. Each
decina
had a commander known only to its members but secret from the rest of the brotherhood except for a single boss.

Investigators also learned that the Brotherhood regarded the bond between its members as more sacred than family ties. One member of the Brotherhood of Favara, Rosario Alaimo, told police how the Brothers had called him to a tavern to tell him that his nephew was a traitor; they then gave him a choice between killing his own nephew and being killed himself. When he accepted the first option, fear drove him to demonstrate his resolve with a toast: ‘Wine is sweet, but the blood of a man is sweeter.’ A few days later he helped lure his nephew into a trap so that other Brothers could murder him. As proof of his confession, Alaimo took the police to the ruined castle where his nephew’s body was hidden. On returning to his cell, he hanged himself. It was said that he wanted his own end to mirror as closely as possible the way his nephew had been killed—by garrotting.

Even today, the mafia takes great care to manage blood relationships between its members. Because kinship can help the cohesion of a Family, nephews, brothers, and sons are often brought into the organization. But affection for a relative can also be destabilizing if it interferes with the first duty of obedience to the capo. So mafiosi are sometimes forced to show in dramatic fashion where their loyalty ultimately lies. If you, as a mafioso, have a brother who is also a man of honour and he breaks the rules, you may well be offered the same stark choice as the Brothers offered Alaimo: either you kill him or you both die. In such cases the firm has to be seen to come first. The elimination of a family member may become a point of pride for some men of honour. As captive mafioso Salvatore ‘Totuccio’ Contorno boasted in the 1980s, ‘I’m the only one who can bathe my hands in my own blood.’

The similarity between the Brotherhood’s rules and the ones adopted by the
cosche
around Palermo was striking even in 1883. Yet its significance seems largely to have escaped the magistrates and criminologists of the day. Favara and Palermo are on opposite coasts. One hundred kilometres of Sicily’s mountainous interior, with its terrible roads, lie between them. That the mafia in two such distant places should share the same rules is probably explained by the fact that, before 1879, some of the leading Brothers had been confined on prison islands like Ustica with mafiosi from Palermo. It was in prison that these men were first told of the mafia and, quite possibly, initiated into it. They maintained links with mafiosi from other parts of Sicily once they were released. Being part of the early mafia meant joining a local gang; but it was also a passport to a wider world of criminal connections.

The prosecutors in the Favara Brotherhood case thought that the rituals binding the association together were merely ‘primitive’. They suggested that crude instincts for vendetta and
omertà
were the Brotherhood’s main motives. One magistrate talked of the ‘barbarous mysticism’ of the initiation ceremony; ‘pure cannibalism’ was his comment on the toast that Alaimo had drunk after agreeing to help murder his own nephew.

Words like ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ mark one of the great blind spots in nineteenth-century Italy’s understanding of the mafia, as will become apparent in the next chapter. In this case they helped turn attention away from what was almost certainly the Brotherhood’s tactically astute role within the local sulphur economy. Of the 107 men tried for membership of the gang, 72 worked in the sulphur industry. In addition to miners there were overseers and even small-time mine owners. These shared mining interests probably explain why the two rival gangs successfully united as la Fratellanza: economic rationality won out over the desire for vendetta. The trial also brought the Brotherhood’s network of protectors out into the open: landowners, noblemen, and former mayors submitted character references. No one thought to ask exactly why these notables were seeking to protect the ‘primitives’.

For all their hellishness, Sicily’s sulphur mines were operated in almost as sophisticated a way as the lemon groves. The young boys who were treated as little more than beasts of burden in the industry were at the bottom of a long chain of contractors and subcontractors. The landed gentry leased out mining rights to entrepreneurs; the entrepreneurs hired overseers on commission; the overseers in turn engaged surveyors, guards, and miners. As the chain became longer, the risks of dealing in a commodity that was traded on international markets were spread more thinly.

The miners themselves—known as ‘pickmen’—were paid piece rates. It was they who hired the teams of boys. They were a notoriously hard and quarrelsome crew known for their murderous drinking bouts. By the standards of their time and place they were far from poor; indeed, they were entrepreneurs of a kind. Some of them were in charge of three or four other miners. Many were keen to flaunt their hard-won social status. One observer, an Englishwoman who married a landowner in a sulphur region, wrote of the typical pickman: ‘He is very ambitious in his way of dressing, and is often seen on Sundays arrayed in fine black cloth, with patent-leather top-boots and a large hooded cloak of fine dark cloth lined with green.’ (It is not clear whether the hoods worn by the Brothers had a ritual significance, or were badges of the pickmen’s status, or both.)

Sulphur was a highly competitive business for everyone involved. And, as in most of western Sicily, violence could give an edge over the competition. At every tier in the hierarchy running from the landowner down to the miner, the ability to use force in an organized and tactically astute way was a key economic asset. Entrepreneurs, managers, overseers, guards, and pickmen could form cartels to force out rivals. Like the lemon groves around Palermo, the sulphur mines were a breeding ground for criminal associations.

Viewed without ‘primitivist’ preconceptions, the Favara Brotherhood case also provides an early hint of what it means to be a godfather within the mafia. It is far from incidental that the murder which ultimately led to the foundation of the Brotherhood was carried out at a christening. Killing a man at a christening was a calculated offence aimed not just at a family, but at a whole enemy gang. That is why the murder brought an equally calculated retort when the second victim had his ear cut off after being shot in the back.

In Sicily as in much of southern Italy, christenings were important less because of the child’s baptism than because the ceremony also meant welcoming a new godfather into the family. Baptizing the child made the father and godfather into
compari
—‘co-fathers’. It was a solemn undertaking: even brothers who became
compari
had to stop using the familiar ‘tu’ form of address and speak to each other with the formal ‘voi’ instead. For the rest of their lives, the two ‘co-fathers’ would be obliged to respond to each other’s requests, of whatever kind. Peasants and sulphur miners told many hair-raising folk tales about the terrible vengeance that John the Baptist, the patron saint of
compari,
wrought on any man who betrayed his ‘co-father’.

The institution known as
comparatico
was a kind of social glue; it extended the family bond further out into society, encouraging peace and cooperation. Two men at daggers drawn might decide to bury their differences and become
compari
in order to avoid a violent dispute that would only harm both of their families. A labourer might enlist a more influential man as the godfather of his child, offering him deference and loyalty in the hope of favours in return. Choosing a powerful godfather for your child could bring a job in the sulphur mine, some land to cultivate, a loan, charity.

But becoming a godfather sometimes had another side to it. The Sicilian phrase ‘fari u cumpari’ (‘to act like a co-father’) also meant to be an accomplice, to help someone commit an illegal deed. If the link between
compari
could help keep society together, it could also bind men into a criminal pact. Mafiosi frequently strengthened the bonds between them by becoming
compari.
Senior men of honour were sometimes called ‘godfather’ in imitation of the prestige with which the title was endowed in society. Even today, just as a
compare
oversees a baby’s baptism, so a mafia godfather presides over a young recruit’s initiation—his rebirth as a man of honour.

The mafia has, from the outset, been highly sophisticated in the way that it infiltrates the leading sectors of the Sicilian economy, and equally sophisticated in adopting and adapting any sources of loyalty within Sicilian culture that it can use for its own murderous purposes. The mafia, in other words, is anything but backward.