Cosa Nostra (34 page)

Naivety also played its part in the mafia’s re-emergence as a political force under AMGOT. The British thought that their empire offered a formula for finding reliable natives. In Sicily, as in the pink-shaded portions of the globe, landowners and aristocrats would exercise authority on behalf of London (and Washington). But Sicily was not the Raj. At the end of September 1943, the Allies nominated Lucio Tasca Bordonaro mayor of Palermo. He was a landed gentleman of just the kind that the British thought they could trust. But he lived ‘in the odour of mafia’; Nick Gentile later claimed that Tasca Bordonaro was actually a member of the honoured society. Other similar men were appointed across Sicily. Like his peers, Tasca Bordonaro sensed that the end of the war would bring a new struggle to control the land. His response was to lead the first political organization to become active in occupied Sicily: the Sicilian separatist movement. The separatists wanted Sicily to become a free country under the wing of the American eagle. That way, men like Tasca Bordonaro hoped, the authority of the old elite could be preserved and the dreaded leftists kept at bay. The separatist landowners had a natural ally in their cause: the mafiosi who guarded and managed their estates and found political protection in return.

In January 1944, political freedoms were restored in preparation for Sicily’s return to Italian rule, and the island sprang into tumultuous political life. It was then that one of the separatist movement’s leaders gave a revealing speech in the mafia stronghold of Bagheria. Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile was a frenzied, thin-lipped orator who had the habit of talking about ‘Winnie’ Churchill and ‘Delano’ Roosevelt as if he chatted with them on the telephone every day. In Bagheria he made it clear who else he included in his circle of close acquaintances: ‘If the mafia did not exist, it would need to be invented. I’m a friend of the
mafiosi,
even though I am personally against crime and violence.’ (Mafia defector Tommaso Buscetta would later claim that Finocchiaro Aprile was a member of his own mafia Family.)

In February 1944, AMGOT control ended and Sicily came under the authority of a new government, based on the liberated southern portion of the Italian mainland. By then both mafiosi and the separatists had managed to create the widespread impression that they were Uncle Sam’s favourite Mediterranean nephews. It looked to many as if Sicily’s future would be as an autonomous American protectorate and mafia fiefdom.

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With the mafia’s political wing lined up overwhelmingly behind the separatist cause, its military wing was called on to oppose a new threat from the Left. In the autumn of 1944, the Communist Minister of Agriculture in the new Italian coalition government piloted some radical reforms that were to open a new and bloody chapter in the story of the mafia’s renaissance. The reforms aimed at nothing less than a final resolution of the land question that had caused turmoil in the southern countryside for more than a century. The measures showed the influence of Bernardino Verro and the Fasci: peasants were to get a better share of the produce of land they worked and rented, and they were given permission to form cooperatives and take over badly cultivated land. The Minister of Agriculture even tried to ban middlemen from operating between the landowners and the peasants—a direct attack on the
gabelloti.

The weak Italian state was in no position to enforce these new rules quickly, but the peasants took them as a signal that those in power were finally ready to back their yearning for land and justice. The landowners sensed that their fears of the red peril were soon to be realized. So, just as they had done after the First World War, the men of property turned to mafiosi to confront the peasants with force.

Once again it was a famous episode in Don Calò’s Villalba—a true one this time—that inaugurated this new phase in the mafia’s resurgence. Like many other mafiosi, Don Calogero Vizzini’s prime concern in 1944 was land—in his case the Miccichè estate round Villalba. To gain control of it, he had to see off a particularly bothersome enemy: Michele Pantaleone—the man who would later set down the story of the American fighter plane and the yellow handkerchief. Pantaleone was from a local family of professionals whose republican traditions placed them in the opposing faction to the Catholic Vizzinis. Don Calò had tried hard to persuade Michele Pantaleone to marry his niece Raimonda, but this small-town dynastic romance failed to blossom. (Pantaleone knew what dangerous obligations such a union with the Vizzinis would bring.) For Don Calò this failure of marriage diplomacy was bad enough. Worse still was the fact that Pantaleone became a Socialist. The young rebel drew attention to the Miccichè land issue in the burgeoning leftist press and was trying to use his leverage with the left-wing parties in Villalba. In return Don Calò arranged for crops on the Pantaleone family’s land to be vandalized, and there was even a failed attempt on Pantaleone’s life.

The attempt may just have been a warning, because the
capomafioso
was also mobilizing his contacts. Ever the peacemaker, he had offered a deal to the Communist Party in the provincial capital, Caltanissetta: he would help them set up a branch in Villalba—as long as one of his own estate wardens was installed as secretary. The Communists wisely turned down the offer.

With the equanimity that befitted his calling, Don Calò also continued to draw on his long-established links with conservative landowners. Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, the separatist leader appointed as mayor of Palermo under AMGOT, was a close ally (they both owned land nearby). On 2 September 1944, on Don Calò’s invitation, Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile—‘friend’ of Winnie, Delano, and the mafia—gave a typically incendiary speech in Villalba, promising riches for all if Sicily became independent.

The temperature in the town was rising. Michele Pantaleone increased it further by inviting regional Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi to speak. The Partito Comunista in Caltanissetta, perhaps worried that Pantaleone was leading their man into trouble, contacted Vizzini. The old boss gave them reassurances; he was offering them his personal hospitality, after all. There would be no trouble as long as they did not touch on local issues. On 16 September 1944, a truck carrying Li Causi and his comrades arrived in Villalba.

Don Calò began by politely addressing the new arrivals: ‘May I have the honour of offering you coffee?’ Sensing the menace in the welcome, the left-wing militants followed the old man as he shuffled across the square towards a bar. As they walked, they noticed that thick black crosses had been painted across the posters advertising their public meeting. Don Calò tried to reason with the visitors while they drank his coffee and smoked his cigarettes. Villalba was like a monastery, he said; it would not do to disturb its tranquillity. But if they insisted on speaking, then they should be polite. When Don Calò finished his little speech, the activists turned back towards the piazza, prepared for confrontation.

Apart from some local Communists and Socialists, most of the inhabitants of Villalba had thought it wiser to listen to the speeches from behind closed shutters. When the militants emerged from the bar, a pack of Don Calò’s men stood staring, with arms folded and smirks on their faces. Among them was Don Calò’s nephew; he had recently taken over as mayor from his uncle. Don Calò himself emerged from the bar to join the group.

Pantaleone got up on a table and introduced the main speaker. Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi was not a man to be intimidated. Only a few weeks earlier, he had returned to his native island for the first time in twenty years, most of them spent as a political prisoner under Mussolini and as a leader of the resistance against the Nazis in Milan. He was a calm and charismatic orator; mixing dialect into his Italian, he spoke of the abuse of workers and peasants by industrialists and landlords. The militants who were there with him later reported hearing assenting voices from behind the shutters: ‘He’s right! What he says is Gospel.’

Don Calò became agitated. Undeterred, Li Causi began to talk about the way the peasants in Villalba were being deceived by ‘a powerful leaseholder’—a scarcely disguised reference to Don Calò. ‘It’s a lie,’ bellowed the
capomafioso.
People immediately started to leave the piazza. An old man told Don Calò to let the speaker be heard; after all, this was a time of political freedom, he said. He was cudgelled to the ground as the first shots were fired. Pandemonium ensued.

Astonishingly, with bullets fizzing past him, Li Causi stayed on the platform and tried to calm the situation, offering to engage in an open debate with anyone who disagreed. Don Calò’s nephew lobbed a grenade. When it exploded, Li Causi fell, wounded in the leg. Pantaleone took charge, dragging the Communist chief to safety and firing his pistol in the air to cover his withdrawal. More than a dozen bullet holes were found in the wall behind the spot where Li Causi made his speech. Fourteen people were wounded.

Don Calò ordered his men to calm down, and offered to help repair the leftists’ truck, which had been damaged by a grenade. A few days later, he sent an emissary to offer apologies to Li Causi as he lay in hospital. These were empty gestures; the gunfight in Villalba had already served its intimidatory purpose. Six months later Don Calò’s local power base was secured when he became manager of the Miccichè estate.

The Villalba incident created headlines across liberated Italy. More than his other misdeeds it made Don Calogero Vizzini famous. He would not have been particularly concerned. Indeed, the way he avoided paying the judicial consequences of his actions only bolstered his reputation. By pulling strings, he engineered long periods of conditional freedom while the case ground slowly on. It was not until November 1949 that Don Calò, along with his nephew, was found guilty of wounding Li Causi and was sentenced to five years in prison. He simply went on the run until granted more conditional freedom during an appeal. In 1954 the sentence was confirmed, but he was given an amnesty. The judge admitted that ‘he was indicated as being the head of the mafia’, but decided to absolve him of any punishment on the grounds of his age and his lack of previous convictions.

The events in Villalba inaugurated a long season of mafia attacks on political activists, trade unionists, and ordinary peasants that lasted into the early 1950s. Dozens were not as lucky as Li Causi and Pantaleone. Each killing was followed by the familiar judicial outcome: the suspected murderers being released for lack of evidence. In some towns and villages, the peasant movement was simply terrorized into submission.

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The great question about Don Calogero Vizzini is whether he was as dominant within the mafia as he was famous outside it. Could the lentil-capital of Villalba really be the headquarters of the honoured society as well?

American secret agents certainly seem to have treated Don Calò as the mafia’s overall ruler. When the American consulate in Palermo was set up in February 1944, it relied on the OSS for its intelligence. The OSS in turn relied partly on the mafia, and particularly on Don Calò. At one period, the chief of the OSS Palermo office, Joseph Russo, met him and other bosses ‘at least once a month’. Vizzini was known by the codename of ‘Bull Frog’ in secret communications. Russo says the mafiosi came for ‘moral support’ and truck tyres, which they needed to do ‘their good work, their beneficence. Whatever that was.’

Even if these exchanges were as trivial as Russo believes, and even if Don Calò was bluffing the OSS about his power on the island, we should not assume that events in little Villalba were a sideshow. Way back in 1922, the semi-literate Don Calò, who had extensive sulphur mining interests, went to London for high-level talks on setting up an Anglo-Italian sulphur cartel to respond to American competition. The small Sicilian delegation included a future magnate of the Italian chemical industry.

Don Calò’s Church and political contacts also gave him a formidable power base. In the few years following Operation Husky, one Angelo Cammarata occupied the jobs of prefect of Caltanissetta, administrator of property belonging to the diocese of Caltanissetta, superintendent of provisions in Sicily, and commissioner for agrarian reform. He was close to both the bishop and Don Calò.

Economic changes beyond the mafia’s control also played in Don Calò’s favour. War and Fascism had made cattle and grain more important to the Sicilian economy during the first half of the twentieth century. The inland province of Caltanissetta produced the most corn of any western Sicilian province in the harsh year of 1944. The cash-crop lemon business—so fundamental to the
cosche
of Palermo—had been paralysed by an export crisis. Don Calò’s status within the mafia probably reflects a temporary shift in the balance of power within the criminal economy: from the capital and its environs to the countryside.

Not that Don Calò was always stuck out in the hills. He kept a base in the Hotel Sole in Palermo’s Corso Vittorio Emanuele where, to the end of his life, he could be seen being watched over by two young corduroy-clad minders.

But it was Don Calò’s political influence that was his most significant contribution to the mafia’s resurgence; he was intimately involved with the creation of a mafia-friendly settlement in post-war Sicily. That settlement would see the fading of separatism and the emergence of a new pan-Italian party prepared to use the mafia in the traditional way: as an instrument of local government.

In September 1945—a year after the gun battle in Villalba—Don Calò was the only mafioso present at a secret meeting of separatist leaders at which it was decided to mount an armed insurrection. It was a move born of desperation. The separatists’ American support had evaporated after the end of AMGOT. Now they had a strong new national party to compete with: Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, or the DC). By successfully proposing a regional assembly for Sicily rather than full independence, the DC had taken much of the steam out of separatism. Don Calò was at the meeting because through him the separatists could arrange the help of the large bandit gangs that still roamed the countryside. But the insurrectionary forces were easily defeated.