Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (22 page)
More importantly, what Palizzolo called his ‘martyrdom’ galvanized a powerful coalition of conservative political and business interests behind ‘Pro Sicilia’, which was much more than a mafia front organization, and more even than an extension of the NGI lobby. The Palizzolo case had come at a time when important right-wing Sicilian politicians were no longer influential in Rome. Now the liberal government was even making overtures to the Socialist Party. ‘Pro Sicilia’ was Sicilian conservatives’ reaction to their perceived powerlessness. The pressure group did not last long, but it did manage to get the government to listen. A grouping of this kind could be an important component of any governing coalition. The quashing of the Bologna trial may well have been a peace offering to the powers organized around ‘Pro Sicilia’.
* * *
The retrial began in Florence on 5 September 1903, more than a decade after the murder on the Termini–Palermo train. Now only Fontana and Palizzolo were in the dock. (Those acquitted in Bologna, including the brake operator on the train, were not asked to face the same charges again.) Nevertheless, the Florence trial lasted only two weeks less than the previous one, which it resembled in many ways.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s lawyers did call on a new and potentially very important witness. Matteo Filippello was reputed to be the man who liaised with Palizzolo on behalf of the Villabate
cosca.
In 1896, he had been wounded in a dispute thought to have arisen from the division of the payment for Notarbartolo’s murder. Early rumours in Palermo had named him as one of the assassins.
Filippello had to be threatened with arrest before agreeing to travel to the hearing. Once in Florence, he was arrested for intimidating another witness, and pretended that he was losing his sanity. The day before he was scheduled to appear in court, he disappeared. He was found hanging from the banisters in his boarding house near Santa Croce basilica. Suicide, the inquiry decided.
But by now public opinion had grown bored and sceptical. Nearly four years had passed since Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s stunning revelations in Milan. The case had at first triggered a huge public debate on the mafia. Some valuable accounts were published, including two by Sicilian police inspectors. Yet for every useful study of the famous criminal organization, there were two or three that helped confuse the issue. There were still many voices—including prestigious witnesses—denying that the mafia existed. It was an exaggerated sense of personal pride, a product of the way the islanders had been oppressed throughout history. Others suggested that it was simply the Sicilian name for a type of underworld that could be found in every modern city in Europe and the United States.
Strikingly, even Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s advocates in Bologna followed this line. In western Sicily, they argued, there were only isolated
cosche
that sometimes shared the same protector. ‘What is the mafia today? Is it, as some people believe, an organization with bosses and underbosses? No. That only exists in the dreams of the odd Chief of Police.’ There were obvious reasons for saying this. It would have been very unwise to pin the chances of a conviction in the Notarbartolo case on Sangiorgi’s misfired efforts to mount a prosecution of the whole mafia. Nonetheless the statement stirred even more sediment into the debate.
Thus, despite the spotlight of Milan and Bologna, ‘mafia’ remained a turbid and formless concept. Mafia fatigue was bound to set in. When it did, it diminished the risk of a politically disruptive bout of public indignation following an acquittal.
With the benefit of the Bologna dress rehearsal behind them, the defence lawyers in Florence gave a much better account of themselves. Don Raffaele abandoned the mawkish oratory of his earlier performances and adopted the submissive pose of an invalid who had to be helped into the witness stand by a
carabiniere.
The prosecution case failed to gain the same momentum it had in Bologna, the same sense that all the contradiction and confusion in the defence testimonies added up to proof of guilt. On 23 July 1904, an 8–4 majority of the jury acquitted the accused for lack of sufficient evidence. Palizzolo fainted on hearing the verdict.
* * *
Despite a surprisingly rapid improvement in his health over the week following the trial, Don Raffaele swooned again on 1 August when he stepped off the gangplank in Palermo harbour as a free man. The ‘Pro Sicilia’ committee had hired an NGI steamer to bring him back in triumph from the mainland.
It was the culmination of days of celebration. The Florio newspaper
L’Ora
said the city had been liberated from a nightmare by the Florentine jury. Palizzolo supporters had pictures of him on their lapels. The festival of the Madonna del Carmine had been postponed to allow the returning hero to take part. When Palizzolo came to his senses again, he was accompanied home by a cheering, disorderly crowd. He found his house decked in lights spelling out ‘Viva Palizzolo!’ As he appeared on his balcony, a band struck up a specially composed hymn to his victory. One sycophant committed the shrill mood to paper:
After 56 months of harrowing martyrdom, Raffaele Palizzolo emerged triumphant, bathed by the light of his dazzling halo of Pain and Virtue. His Pain and Virtue were consecrated by the sublime self-denial he showed through five years of unparalleled torment. To pass the cheerless hours of imprisonment, in homage to Sicily, mistreated Sicily, he plaited Pain and Virtue like tear-sprinkled blossoms into garlands of harsh suffering.
Restraint has rarely been a strength of the mafia lobby. Many Sicilians, even those who thought that the evidence against Don Raffaele was not strong enough to merit a conviction, were disgusted.
Yet the jubilation did not last long. In the November parliamentary elections, the martyr of Bologna was soundly beaten. Despite his triumph, he was now too compromised and his powerful friends abandoned him. The bedside audiences resumed, for Palizzolo continued to hold office in local government, but his days as Sicily’s supreme clientele-builder were behind him.
A short time before Palizzolo’s apotheosis, Leopoldo Notarbartolo slipped back into Palermo aboard the postal steamer. Only a small party of friends were there to greet him in silence, hats in hands. There were tears as he was reunited with his sister. Taking on the legacy of his father’s struggle with Palizzolo had cost him dearly. The Mendolilla estate would have to be sold to pay legal costs.
Over the years that followed, Leopoldo’s naval career took him mercifully far from the island. He reached the rank of admiral, but faded from public memory. From the day of Palizzolo’s acquittal he had resolved not to lose faith in progress, not to collapse into a resigned vision of the world as evil and chaotic. The only way that he found to continue the fight for justice, to which he had dedicated the best years of his life, was to record the story of his father’s life. The long sea voyages afforded him plenty of time to write a biography that systematically understated his own role in the dramas of 1893–1904. His father would have approved of his modesty. In 1947, after a long and painful illness, Leopoldo died, childless, in his adopted home city of Florence. His wife published the biography two years later.
Giuseppe Fontana also left Sicily after the trial. Taking his four little daughters with him, he emigrated to New York to pursue his career in extortion and murder on the mafia’s new frontier.
As the crow flies, it is only some thirty-five kilometres from Palermo to Corleone. Yet when Adolfo Rossi made the journey on 17 October 1893—eight months after the Notarbartolo murder—the little train took its usual four and a quarter hours to wind a path through the treeless mountains. Much of the landscape traversed by the train was still parched by the Sicilian summer; bleached and rocky, it was marked only by the occasional ruined watchtower or the dark green of the sparsely scattered olive and lemon groves.
Adolfo Rossi was a journalist working for the liberal Roman daily
La Tribuna.
He had not long returned from the United States where he had spent a dozen years crossing the continent in search of his fortune. By the end of his time in America he had become editor of
Il Progresso Italo-Americano,
the leading organ of New York City’s growing Italian population. Rossi returned to Europe with a passionate enthusiasm for the openness and speed of life in the United States. He claimed that by comparison Italy seemed as closed and static as a cemetery.
Riding in the same compartment as Rossi was another man from the mainland, a young army officer. They began to talk about the subject on everyone’s lips: the desperate living conditions of Sicilian peasants. Rossi recorded the typical story that the officer told him:
It hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July, I remember, I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing out the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that a tear was sliding silently down from each eye.
For nearly two decades Italian reformers had in vain been denouncing the plight of the peasantry of the Sicilian interior: malnutrition, illiteracy, malaria, debt slavery, appalling working conditions, exploitation backed by mafia violence, theft justified by bought lawyers.
In Corleone, the peasants said that honest bosses were as rare as white flies. Many of the town’s 16,000 inhabitants were labourers whose meagre existence depended on the great grain farms that stretched far into the hills below its narrow streets, its tiny squares, and its baroque churches. Corleone existed to feed Palermo, yet it did not always seem able to feed its own people. One English traveller of the 1890s found the town inhabited by ‘pale, anaemic women, hollow-eyed men, ragged weird children who begged for bread, croaking in hoarse accents like weary old people tired of the world’.
Rossi had come to Corleone to interview a man who had devoted his life to changing these conditions, a man who would become a symbol of the struggle against both privation and the mafia.
* * *
The poverty of the peasants of the Sicilian interior had simple causes. The big landowners of Corleone and towns like it typically spent their time in Palermo and leased out their estates on short-term contracts to middlemen or
gabelloti.
The short leases meant that the
gabelloti
had to wring money out of the peasants quickly. The average
gabelloto
was a ruthless, self-made man; this was a job you could not do without making enemies. The
gabelloti
often had to protect themselves and their assets, notably cattle, from bandits and rustlers. Frequently the
gabelloti
were in league with or controlled the bandits. The
gabelloti
often needed friends in the legal business too; the abolition of the feudal system and the periodic auctions of church and state property had left thickets of red tape going back decades.
Gabelloti
were such pivotal figures in Sicily’s violent economy that it was often assumed that being a mafioso and being a
gabelloto
were the same thing. It is more accurate to say that joining the mafia enabled a
gabelloto
to do his job better. For one thing, the mafia had contacts in Palermo where many of the lease deals were made. For another, membership of the honoured society offered the military power needed to combat unruly peasants.
That power was to be called on when, as if from nowhere, in the autumn before Adolfo Rossi’s journey to Corleone, the oppressed peasants of western and central Sicily began to form new organizations called Fasci. The Fasci had nothing in common with the militaristic, anti-democratic Fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini a generation later. A
fascio
is simply a bundle, an image of solidarity; the Sicilian Fasci were brotherhoods that united the peasants against the landowners and the
gabelloti.
For a few months in 1893 the Fasci movement made Corleone the focus of the nation’s attention. The local
Fascio,
founded and led by Bernardino Verro, was one of the first and best-organized groups on the island. The previous year, Verro had been a lowly municipal bureaucrat with only an unfinished education behind him—he had been expelled from secondary school. There were thousands of anonymous functionaries like him across Italy, men who were forced to rely on patronage to obtain administrative jobs that barely paid enough to feed their families. Verro, infuriated by the injustices he witnessed around him, rebelled.
When he became leader of the Corleone
Fascio,
Verro was sacked for his political beliefs. By then he was past caring. He made flaming speeches to the peasants in their own dialect with examples drawn from the fables they knew. With Utopian fervour he preached cooperation, discipline, and women’s rights. The future was socialist, he explained; the capitalist system was powerful because the power of love had waned, but the time was coming when the whole of humanity would be held in one loving embrace. Travelling by mule from Corleone, Verro spread the message through the nearby towns. Fasci formed wherever he spoke. Verro and the movement’s leaders were impassioned lay evangelists. ‘Like real brothers’, they would kiss each other on the mouth when they met.
It was Verro that the journalist Adolfo Rossi had come to Corleone to interview. By the time Rossi made his journey into the Sicilian interior, Verro was at the head of the first mass peasant strike in Italian history, a leader talking on equal terms with top politicians and officials, a man who had won sympathy from almost all sections of Italian society for the peasants he led.