Cosa Nostra (25 page)

Now the labyrinth was brightly lit and it teemed with uniformed men who were searching and occupying houses, making dozens of arrests. Many of the wanted men had retreated into secret rooms constructed by a local builder who was expert in the siting of false walls and ceilings. Only a few Gangitani risked sneaking out into the snow to take messages and victuals to the men in hiding. The rest huddled in their homes behind barred doors and windows.

The first bandit to give himself up emerged from his hideaway on the morning of 2 January. Gaetano Ferrarello, the ‘King of the Madonie’, was sixty-three years old and had been a fugitive from justice since the day when he killed his wife and her lover. That was more than half his life ago. It had taken him years to build an extensive network of cattle rustling, estate management, and extortion, and to construct the political protection needed to operate unmolested by the authorities. He let it be known that he would not give himself up to a policeman, but only to the mayor.

In the town hall, the officer commanding the besieging forces simply sat and waited for Ferrarello to appear. He found him to be a tall man with an almost military dignity of bearing and a patriarch’s beard that reached his belt. The bandit flung down his decorated stick on the desk and delivered a studied pronouncement: ‘My heart is trembling. This is the first time I have ever been in the presence of the law. I am giving myself up to restore peace and serenity to these people who have been so tormented.’ Several days later Ferrarello committed suicide in jail by throwing himself down a stairwell. No others were involved in the incident, it seems.

The operation continued. No one was allowed in or out of Gangi while the police mounted a series of stunts designed to humiliate the concealed bandits. Their cattle were confiscated; the most handsome beasts were slaughtered in the town square and offered for sale at token prices. Hostages were taken, including women and children. Policemen slept in bandits’ beds and—so strong rumours suggested—abused their women. Then the town crier was ordered to walk through the empty streets, banging a hefty drum at his hip:

Citizens of Gangi! His Excellency Cesare Mori, Prefect of Palermo, has sent the following telegram to the Mayor with the order to make his proclamation public:

I command all fugitives from justice in this territory to give themselves up to the authorities within twelve hours of the moment when this ultimatum is read out. Once that deadline has passed, the severest measures will be taken against their families, their possessions, and anyone who has helped them in any way.

Cesare Mori was the man Mussolini had chosen to lead his war on organized crime. The ultimatum was a typical gesture, demonstratively turning the Gangi operation into a man-to-man confrontation with the criminals.

Mori had been in Palermo during the siege, monitoring the press approval of his ‘Herculean labour’. On 10 January, with bandits still hiding in the town, he came to Gangi to proclaim its liberation in person. The piazza was suitably festooned and the band played military marches. Posters displayed Mussolini’s congratulatory message to his prefect. ‘I express my heartiest satisfaction and urge you to carry on until your work is done without regard for anyone, high or low. Fascism has cured Italy of many of its wounds. It will cauterize the sore of crime in Sicily—with red-hot iron if need be.’

If the Fascist-controlled press are to be believed, speeches were then made from the balcony of the town hall. The young Palermo Fascist chief Alfredo Cucco, a strutting little ophthalmologist in a black shirt and leather flying helmet, led the invited leaders as they echoed the Duce’s sentiments. Finally Mori stepped forward. He was just past his fifty-fourth birthday with regular if rather pointed features, an imposing build, and a deep voice. He relished the nicknames he had acquired during the years he had spent fighting crime in Sicily: the ‘iron prefect’, the ‘man with hair on his heart’. The heavy army boots and long thick scarf that he chose to wear with his immaculate suit were intended to reinforce the same message: here was a man of action, a personal enemy of the criminals. That very day one of the bandits still in hiding issued a threat to kill him.

Mori’s speech was characteristically far blunter than the ones that preceded it. He talked to Sicilians in what he considered to be their own rudimentary moral language.

Citizens! I will not give up the fight. The government will not give up the fight. You have a right to be freed from these villains. You will be. The operation will carry on until the whole of the province of Palermo is redeemed.

Through me, the government will do its duty to the full. You must do yours. You are not scared of guns. Yet you are afraid to be associated with the name ‘cop’. You must get used to thinking of the war on criminals as the duty of every honest citizen.

You are good people. Your bodies are sound and strong. You have all the right virile anatomical attributes. So you are men, and not sheep. Defend yourselves! Counter-attack!

Mori’s words sound as if they were meant for the ears of some higher breed of farm animal. Whether or not he actually delivered the speech that the newspapers printed is open to doubt. All the same, they typify the attitude of the man chosen to enact Fascism’s authoritarian fantasies in Sicily.

The siege was wound up a few days later; 130 fugitives from justice and some 300 of their accomplices had been arrested.

*   *   *

Militaristic, decisive, tough, spectacular: the siege of Gangi is remembered in more or less the way that Fascist propaganda wanted it to be, the way it very deliberately styled its war on organized crime. When mafia defectors began to talk to Giovanni Falcone in the 1980s, it became clear that mafiosi themselves had similar memories of the Fascist years. Catania man of honour Antonino Calderone, who turned
pentito
in 1986, revealed that, more than forty years after its fall, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime remained a scar on the mafia’s folk memory.

The music changed [under Fascism].
Mafiosi
had a hard life. Many were sent to a prison island, just from one day to the next … Mussolini, Mori, the people in charge of justice, they did this: they gave
mafiosi
five years of internal exile without trial, the maximum. And when those five years were over they issued a decree and gave them five more. Just like that. A decree! Five more years … After the war the mafia hardly existed any more. The Sicilian Families had all been broken up. The mafia was like a plant they don’t grow any more. My uncle Luigi, who had been a boss, an authority, was reduced to stealing to earn a crust.

Calderone was only a small boy when his uncle Luigi was suffering these indignities. Although the tales the youngster was told had the simplicity of all family memories, they undoubtedly had a basis in truth. The Fascist crackdown that began with the siege of Gangi allowed some policemen and magistrates who had accumulated years of experience in fighting the
cosche
to go on the offensive. The mafia suffered badly; a great many men of honour were sent to prison, with or without trial, and the rest of the organization went into hibernation.

Fascism claimed that it had solved the mafia problem. But like so much of what Mussolini said, it proved to be a hollow boast. And, although the Duce’s control over information still makes it difficult for historians to discern the truth, the real story of ‘the man with hair on his heart’—the mafia’s most feared enemy—is certainly darker and more intriguing than either Fascist propaganda or mafia memories suggest.

*   *   *

Cesare Mori’s parents only recognized his existence at the age of seven; until then he had been in the foundling hospital in Pavia, near Milan. For a bright boy from nowhere, with no contacts, in late-nineteenth-century Italy, the army and police were among the few places to make a career. The secret Interior Ministry files on Mori chart his inexorable rise and leave no doubt as to either his driving ambition—or his courage. In 1896, Mori was awarded a medal for pursuing and apprehending a pimp whom he had seen holding up a young soldier with a revolver while a prostitute tried to stab him in the back. It was to be the first of many face-to-face encounters with violent crime.

Mori’s superiors’ reports on all aspects of his work are glowing: ‘He is energetic, determined, and prudent. He knows every aspect of his job well, especially political policing duties because he knows the doctrines of all the parties and the habits and behaviour of politicians.’ Mori was already being marked out for promotion when, in Ravenna in 1903, he frisked a powerful local councillor whom he suspected of carrying a knife. (Sicily was not the only place where council politics could be a dangerous business.) A press campaign was mounted against him. The reward for Mori’s cussedness was a transfer to Castelvetrano, Sicily. From this point onwards, his life was entwined with the history of the mafia.

Electoral violence tacitly managed by the authorities, cattle rustling, and organized crime: for most of the next fourteen years Mori had the standard workload for the forces of order in the countryside of western Sicily. He applied himself to it with unstinting vigour. Local people regularly filed accusations that he had abused his authority. In 1906, he was promoted to superintendent. Three years later he was promoted again after killing a bandit during a lengthy firefight. In 1912, he distinguished himself once more by hunting down a ring of extortionists who had demanded money from an MP.

Policing in Italy was always highly politicized. Mori’s own political opinions—he was a conservative monarchist—were conventional enough to be subordinated to his ambitions. That meant conforming to the expectations of the powers that be, both in Rome and locally (at least when the two could be reconciled). In Sicily he had followed a line favourable to the most powerful interest group: the landowners.

When the Great War began, Mori was deputy chief of police in the city of Trapani on the western tip of the island. There were no military engagements in Sicily during the war, but everything that happened after Italy joined the fighting in May 1915 conspired to push the island towards an abyss of violence. Over 400,000 Sicilians—equivalent to more than the whole population of Palermo—were drafted. As had happened since the foundation of the Italian state, thousands of recruits avoided the draft by taking to the hills. Large-scale banditry made a comeback in the interior as these runaways turned to crime for survival. Without the hands to sow and harvest grain, the great estates began to convert to pasture for rearing animals. The demand for horses, mules, and meat at the front also meant increased livestock prices. Violent crime increased as competitive forces converged to cash in; cattle rustling increased dramatically, and there were frequent bloody conflicts over contracts to rent, manage, or ‘protect’ land. In places, the island came close to anarchy.

Mori was relentless in the fight against the rustlers who infested the countryside during the Great War. The horseback patrols that he led covered all terrain, at all hours, and in all weather conditions. He laid siege to villages to force out the fugitives, and on occasion even disguised himself as a monk to surprise his foes.

In 1917, Mori was promoted away from the island to become chief of police in the northern industrial city of Turin at the very time when disastrous military defeat at Caporetto threatened the country with collapse. Mori opposed the city’s militant socialist workers with his habitual resolve; many were killed. Three years later, in Rome, Mori ordered his men to charge a right-wing student demonstration; again deaths and injuries resulted.

It was in the years immediately after the First World War that Italy’s fledgeling democracy entered what would turn out to be a terminal crisis. The old patronage politicians no longer seemed able to contain the conflicting demands of the Socialists, the Catholics, and the Nationalists (who dreamed of an Italian ‘race’ devoted to imperial war). In 1918, as a desperate economic crisis took hold, hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers began to arrive back home. Many were determined to force a change, whether to the left or the right. The example of the Russian revolution excited many workers and peasants. The peninsula looked to some as if it were becoming ungovernable; revolution, or civil war, seemed imminent.

Sicily did not have a strong workers’ movement like the industrial North, but in 1919 and 1920 the island seemed to be consumed by mayhem unlike anything it had seen since the aftermath of Garibaldi’s expedition in 1860. The recruits who returned to Sicily reignited the struggle to control the land; the issues that the Fasci had first tried to address in the 1890s had not gone away. Now the ex-combatants felt that they deserved land in return for their sacrifice; in places they occupied estates by force. In Rome several political groupings made noises about helping veterans acquire plots and legalizing the forced occupation of uncultivated fields. Some landlords, feeling abandoned by Rome, began to resort to violence to defend their property. The mafia adopted the same tactics towards the peasant cooperatives that it had developed to cope with the Fasci movement: it variously infiltrated, cajoled, corrupted, and—if all else failed—terrorized and murdered.

It was also a time of numerous mafia wars. One of the most destabilizing influences was simply the return, among the veterans, of battle-hardened and ambitious young men from traditional mafia recruiting grounds. They had missed out on the profiteering and were now keen to make their presence felt—whether within the mafia or in autonomous gang operations. Mori talked of a ‘hailstorm’ of fighting among mafiosi after the war: ‘There were no rules, and no respect for anybody.’

*   *   *

The Fascist movement was founded in Milan in March 1919 by journalist and combat veteran Benito Mussolini. He aimed to institute a ‘trench-ocracy’, to bring the patriotic discipline and aggression of the front to bear on Italy’s stunted democracy. The following year, as the post-war wave of labour militancy receded, squads of Fascists began to build their movement by dishing out ferocious beatings to strikers and socialists across northern and central Italy. They attracted the favour of landowners and industrialists who were keen to assail the labour movement while it was on the retreat. Local police and other officials often turned a blind eye to the shootings, vandalism, and life-threatening doses of castor oil that the Fascist squads administered to their victims.