Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (14 page)
By the time the Favara Brotherhood was discovered, the mafia had left the headlines and entered the quieter domain of academic debate. The chief prosecutor in the Favara case sent an account of the Brotherhood’s deeds to an academic journal,
The Archive of Psychiatry, Penal Sciences and Criminal Anthropology to Serve the Study of Deranged and Delinquent Man.
It was edited by leading criminologist Cesare Lombroso who, outside Italy, was the most famous Italian intellectual of his day. The book that made his reputation was
Delinquent Man,
first published in 1876. In it he argued that criminals could be identified by certain physical deformities: jug-handle ears, low foreheads, long arms, and so on. He termed these physical signs ‘criminal stigmata’. What they demonstrated, according to Lombroso, was that crooks were actually biological anachronisms, accidental throwbacks to an earlier stage in human evolution. That is why they looked like ‘primitive’ non-European peoples and even animals. Non-Europeans were, Lombroso confidently assumed, stationed at a lower rung on the ladder of racial development and were therefore inherently criminal. Pushing his own logic through to breaking point, Lombroso also thought that all animals were criminal too.
The lunacy of what Lombroso called his ‘criminal anthropology’ is considerably more apparent today than it was then. Italians were the anxious citizens of a fragile new state and, since unification, had been the victims of an alarming crime wave. As a result, many of them found Lombroso’s ideas reassuring. The implication of his theory was that it was not Italy’s fault if it had so many wrongdoers—biology makes a good scapegoat. As well as offering political comfort, the many new editions of
Delinquent Man
(and its even racier sequel,
Delinquent Woman
) gave Lombroso’s readers a prurient thrill with their copious illustrations of criminal ears, delinquent genitalia, and so on. To the large audiences that came to his lectures at Turin University, Lombroso—a tubby, squirrel-like man—would demonstrate the presence of the stigmata of delinquency on the bodies of live felons.
Lombroso’s thinking on the mafia was more than usually muddled; he attributed it to a bundle of causes including race, weather, ‘social hybridism’—whatever that was—and the fact that monasteries had promoted idleness by doling out soup. He had plenty of critics ready to point out that his theories were contradictory and unsupported by any evidence. But many of those critics also seriously underestimated the mafia. Crime had social causes, they argued. It was poverty that led peasants and workers to form secret societies. The mafia was primitive, certainly, but it was socially primitive. It existed because Sicily was still stuck in the Middle Ages. Some left-wing thinkers saw the Favara Brotherhood as a very rudimentary trade union. They trusted that economic modernization and the advance of the working class would soon bring an end to all symptoms of backwardness like the mafia. (This illusion would hamstring left-wing thinking on the mafia for decades to come.)
In the 1880s, the new ideals of scientific criminology and social progress inspired a generation of policemen who were beginning to build up considerable expertise in fighting organized crime. One such policeman, who was a follower of Lombroso, was Giuseppe Alongi. His 1886 book,
The Maffia in its Factors and Manifestations,
lays great stress on the ethnic psychology of Sicilians. They displayed ‘an unbounded egotism’, ‘an exaggerated sense of themselves’, ‘a capacity for violent, tenacious disdain and hatred that are implacable until
vendetta
is achieved’. Alongi did not believe that such people could create a large criminal association that had fixed rules. The mafia, he maintained, was nothing more than a label for disparate, self-contained
cosche
in individual neighbourhoods and villages. He saw the Favara Brotherhood as an example. Alongi may have been right to discount the theory that the mafia was a centralized conspiracy. But he was almost certainly wrong to discount the possibility that many local
cosche
were part of a bigger network.
Despite his primitivist preconceptions, Alongi was an astute observer of the lifestyles of families who benefited from the trickle-down profits of crime in areas of mafia activity. He saw that money was spent conspicuously in the villages around Palermo. The men wore expensive hats, boots, and gloves, and had thick gold watch chains and rings. On Sundays the women donned silk dresses and little plumed hats. Feast days saw a heavy consumption of meat and desserts. The families of doctors, professionals, and bureaucrats could not compete with the sartorial display mounted by their social inferiors.
Alongi also noted that pawnbrokers did a good trade. As Dr Galati had observed of the Uditore
cosca
a decade before, only the mafia bosses became truly rich. ‘Most of them squander the fruit of their thieving. They spend it on living it up, and engage in debauchery, gluttony, and every kind of vice.’ The excess of these lifestyles was not reflected in the way the men of honour themselves talked and behaved, according to Alongi:
These people are imaginative and their villages hot; their day-to-day language is mellifluous, exaggerated, full of images. Yet the
maffioso
’s language is short, sober, clipped … The phrase
lassalu iri
(‘let him go’) has a disdainful meaning along the following lines: ‘My dear chap, the man you are dealing with is an imbecile. You only compromise your dignity by picking him as an enemy’… Another phrase—
be’ lassalu stari
(‘let him be’)—seems identical, but has the opposite meaning. It translates as, ‘That man deserves a severe lesson. But now is not the time. Let us wait. Then, when he is least expecting it, we will get him’… The true
maffioso
dresses modestly. He affects a brotherly bonhomie in his attitude and speech. He makes himself seem naïve, stupidly attentive to what you are saying. He endures insults and slaps with patience. Then, the same evening, he shoots you.
Alongi’s book helped him make an outstanding career. His insistence that the mafia was a primitive gang and the fact that he was very reticent about its connections among politicians, policemen, and magistrates probably had something to do with his success.
* * *
Italy’s fascination with its ‘primitives’ also had a softer and yet ultimately more sinister side to it. For more than four decades before the First World War, Giuseppe Pitrè, a lean, high-browed doctor, toured Palermo and its environs in a battered carriage that doubled as an office—papers and notes permanently littered its interior. As he went he collected peasant sayings, fables, songs, customs, rituals, and superstitions. Pitrè, who liked to think of himself as a ‘demo-psychologist’, was building up a vast portrait of the collective Sicilian mentality. The result was an invaluable, if sentimental, archive of a disappearing ‘primitive’ world. Almost everything that people have thought about Sicilian folklore since the late nineteenth century—and almost every stereotype about the Sicilian character—can be traced back to it.
Here is how the professor of ‘demo-psychology’ defined ‘mafia’ in 1889:
Mafia
is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or statutes. The
mafioso
is not a thief or a criminal …
Mafia
is the awareness of one’s own being, an exaggerated notion of one’s own individual strength … The
mafioso
is someone who always wants to give and receive respect. If someone offends him, he does not turn to the Law.
When
Cavalleria rusticana
met with its astounding success the year after Pitrè published these words, he could have been justified in feeling a certain pride. The opera that peddled the myth of rustic chivalry to the world is based on a short story and a one-act play by the leading Sicilian author of the era, Giovanni Verga, who drew heavily on Pitrè’s work. Although it is filtered through the words of other men, the Sicily that Mascagni set to music, and set in stone, is in good measure Pitrè’s Sicily.
Pitrè became a talisman for Sicilian gangsters and their lawyers for a long time afterwards; his cosy definition of the mafia was even quoted in court in the mid-1970s by fearsome Corleone boss Luciano Leggio. It is unlikely that Pitrè was actually a member of the mafia. Yet at the time of the first performance of
Cavalleria
in 1890, he was working closely in local government in Palermo with a member of parliament whom he gushingly proclaimed was ‘a real gentleman … an extremely upright and honest administrator’. That ‘honest administrator’ was in fact the most notorious mafioso of the turn-of-the-century era, a man who belied any notion that the mafia was backward: Don Raffaele Palizzolo. When the public came to learn more about Don Raffaele, it would also learn just how deep into Italy’s system of government the mafia had extended its power—at the very time when the country was busy convincing itself that men of honour were nothing more than primitives.
Don Raffaele Palizzolo would receive his clients in the morning in his Palermo home in the Palazzo Villarosa, in via Ruggiero Settimo. They approached him bearing flowers or other gifts as he sat up in bed with a blanket round his shoulders. Some were seeking a job with the municipality. Others might be magistrates or police officials who wanted a transfer, a promotion, a pay rise. Or they might be suspects in need of a gun licence or of protection from police harassment; councillors looking for a position of influence on a commission or committee; high-school or university students looking to be forgiven poor grades that threatened their progress.
Don Raffaele was not haughty and would listen to everyone indulgently; he would chat, ask after relatives, offer sympathy, promise help. The audiences continued as he washed, tended to the jaunty upward curls at the tips of his moustache, and slipped into the long, close-fitting, double-breasted jacket the Italians called a
redingote
(from ‘riding coat’).
In the afternoons, Palizzolo would take care of his interests and bestow favours. He was an owner of land and a holder of leases, a councillor in local and provincial government, a charity and bank trustee. He managed the merchant navy’s health insurance fund, and presided over the administration of the lunatic asylum. As a member of parliament he was a staunch supporter of the government, whoever was in power.
Palizzolo’s morning receptions, which were held throughout a forty-year political career, had a distinctively shameless style. But there is nothing exclusively mafioso, or exclusively Sicilian, about this kind of patronage and clientele building in politics. The same basic mechanisms are still found in many places in Italy, to say nothing of other countries across the world. Votes are exchanged for favours: politicians and state officials appropriate public resources—jobs, contracts, licences, pensions, grants—and reinvest them privately, in their personal support networks or clienteles.
Patronage, clientelism, and corruption are not the same thing as the mafia. In fact, the mafia would not have come into being if a modern state had not at least tried, however cack-handedly, to impose the rule of law in Sicily. In other words, the mafia does not grow naturally from a mulch of sleaze. There are plenty of places in the world where there is political corruption, and not all of them produce mafia-like organizations. Nor does the patronage factor in politics mean that the big issues like economics, democracy, and foreign policy count for nothing. That said, Palizzolo was certainly in league with the mafia, and the power of the mafia cannot be understood without grasping the patronage politics of which he came to be the most notorious exponent of his era.
Patronage is costly. Until 1882, the costs were relatively contained: only some 2 per cent of the population, all property-owning male adults, were entitled to participate in the Italian political process. The electorate in any given constituency might well consist of only a few hundred people. In those circumstances, the packet of fifty votes controlled by Antonino Giammona could make all the difference. In 1882, things changed when the franchise was extended to include one quarter of the adult male population. The era of mass politics was on its way. Elections suddenly became more expensive. It was a time of risk and opportunity both for politicians and mafiosi.
Don Raffaele Palizzolo rose to the challenge and devoted his life to brokering favours. His record was long and crooked: he defrauded charities, protected and used bandits, testified in favour of mafiosi. His domain had its nerve centre in the suburban township of Villabate, but it extended far to the city’s south-east, taking in Caccamo, Termini Imerese, and Cefalù. He was the protector of the Villabate
cosca,
the guest of honour at their banquets, the man who helped them turn their territory into an important terminal for the cattle-rustling routes leading from the great estates of the interior towards Palermo. He also had a strong enough support network in Palermo and its outskirts to get himself elected three times as member of parliament for a constituency there in the 1890s.
Gun licences are a good example of the chain of favours linking men like Palizzolo and the mafia. They could only be obtained with a reference from a leading citizen, such as a politician. This was an obvious opportunity to curry favour. In the run-up to elections the deal became more systematic. On the order of the Minister of the Interior, the prefect could withdraw all gun permits. His declared aim was to prevent the political contest spilling over into violence, but the real aim was to influence the vote. Only sponsoring letters from the central government’s favoured electoral candidate would allow the licences to be returned. The politicians would sell such letters for electoral funds, votes, or favours.
The fragmentation of the Italian political system was Don Raffaele’s great ally. For much of the history of Italy there have been few clear dividing lines within an unstable mosaic of cliques and interest groups. This has been true from the top to the bottom of the state, in the council chambers of provincial towns as in national assemblies. Amid the fragmentation, strategically placed minorities have been able to exert great leverage. In most cases, the mafia and its politicians have constituted a strategically placed minority.