Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (35 page)
In the wake of the separatist debacle, Don Calò became increasingly convinced that the DC—and not the separatists—represented the best vehicle for his interests. It would be a gradual but decisive shift in his, and the mafia’s, allegiances. Some DC politicians were destined to become Sicilian organized crime’s favourite mediators with Rome for over four decades.
The DC was far from being a mafia front. At the birth of the Italian republic it stood for family values, private property, and social peace; and in Sicily it appealed particularly to peasants with small plots of land who were afraid of Communism. The DC also had the huge advantage of Vatican support. Once the Cold War began in 1947, the DC could also count on American backing against the Partito Comunista Italiano—the most powerful Communist Party in Western Europe. In the same year the DC leader excluded the leftist parties from the Italian national coalition government. In the spring of 1948, Italy held its first parliamentary election since Mussolini established his regime. The result was a DC triumph. Christian Democracy would hold power in Italy for the next forty-five years without interruption.
It was the traditional arts of favour-based politics that were at the heart of the DC’s appeal to the mafia. The Sicilian DC came to comprise a myriad of local factions based on patronage. The faction leaders could offer exactly the kind of personal relationships that mafiosi preferred. The exchanges between politicians and criminals that had become so difficult under Fascism could at last be restored: one hand washes the other, as the Sicilian saying goes.
The alliance between men of honour and DC politicians was hardly a secret. In the lead-up to the momentous polling day of 1948, Don Calò and his
compare,
the boss of Mussomeli, Giuseppe Genco Russo, attended a sumptuous DC electoral lunch in Villa Igea, a Palermo hotel that had been one of the Florio family’s old palaces. The two mafiosi sat at the same table as some of the party’s leading lights. In 1950, when Genco Russo’s oldest son married, Don Calò was a witness at the ceremony, as was the DC president of the Sicilian regional assembly. Encounters like these were not shamefaced and secret. When politicians and bosses met in this period, they often intended to be seen together because their encounters advertised the solidity of the alliance between the informal power of the mafia and the official power of the new political grandees.
It was the DC that finally, in 1950, brought the land issue in Sicily to a conclusion. The way they did it was typical of their methods. The redistribution of the remaining estates was entrusted to a quango that became a patronage engine for local DC politicians. Corruption was endemic; one third of its budget went on administrative costs. In the meantime many landowners gave in to the inevitable and began disposing of their land. They often sold it to mafiosi, including Don Calò, who then made a huge profit reselling plots to individual peasants.
In 1950, the government also announced a massive programme of investment for the backward economy of southern Italy. It was to be a major turning point in the history of the mafia. From now on, if the organization wanted access to Sicily’s major sources of wealth, it would have to turn to professional politicians and not landowners. The restoration of Italy’s democratic system—and of the mafia’s role as the island’s informal state—was nearing completion.
* * *
Still, despite all this evidence, the exact extent of Don Calò’s power within the honoured society is not known. Some later mafia turncoats denied that he was ever boss of the whole of Sicily. Indeed, it is said that Don Calò and his successor, Giuseppe Genco Russo, irritated other mafia leaders because of their high media profile. ‘Did you see Gina Lollobrigida in the newspaper today?’ one mafioso used to say, referring to the notoriously coarse and ugly Genco Russo.
We do not know how centralized the mafia was after liberation. A conservative guess is that during the pangs of its rebirth after Fascism, the mafia bosses first reestablished communications between themselves. They then sought information direct from the places where political decisions were taken, and a leader or leaders with diplomatic skill to balance their own competing interests. Don Calò was in a very good position to fulfil that transitional role.
He would never have admitted as much, of course. In a newspaper interview given just before his death, the wily old capo put about a modest account of his job. ‘The fact is that every society needs a category of person whose task it is to sort out situations when they get complicated. Generally these people are representatives of the state. But in places where the state doesn’t exist, or is not strong enough, there are private individuals who…’
Intrigued, the interviewer let slip the word ‘mafia’.
‘The mafia!’ Don Calò murmured with a smile. ‘Does the mafia really exist?’
Don Calò died peacefully in the arms of his nephew on 10 July 1954. The press recorded his last words as being, ‘How beautiful life is.’ He is said to have left a fortune of 1 billion lire, although there is no way of confirming this report; the true extent of mafia wealth for most of its history is destined to remain mysterious. At Don Calò’s lavish funeral, a slew of political and criminal dignitaries followed a hearse drawn by four black-plumed horses. Villalba town hall and the DC headquarters were closed for a week; an elegy was pinned to the church door:
Humble with the humble,
Great with the great,
He showed with words and deeds
That
his
mafia was not criminal.
It stood for respect for the law,
Defence of all rights,
Greatness of character:
It was love.
During Don Calò’s life, the peasants of Villalba had often cited a more down-to-earth couplet about him: ‘Cu avi dinari e amicizia, teni ‘nculu la giustizia’—‘He who has friends and cash, can take justice up the ass.’
The long-term future of the mafia lay not in little Villalba, but in the traditional mafia strongholds around Palermo. The mafia’s recovery from the battering it was given by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori was due in large part to the fact that its methods worked at the grass roots in these areas. And those methods worked in good measure because, in an unstable society, they enabled men of honour to bring wealth and status to their families.
The years 1946–7 saw a particularly savage mafia war in the citrus fruit village of Ciaculli, set on the sea-facing slope of a high ridge just to Palermo’s east. As a later parliamentary inquiry into the mafia discovered, the war set two related blood families against each other. From their struggle would emerge some of the most powerful mafiosi of the coming decades. At first glance the Ciaculli war of 1946–7 seems to come right out of Sicilian folklore. It is what outsiders often expect the mafia to be about: debts of honour that lock families into spiralling pagan feuds. It sounds like a case of ‘blood washes blood’, to quote an overused Sicilian saying. But some of the facts shed a different light on the story, and on what ‘family’ means to the mafia.
One surname had commanded unconditional respect in the Ciaculli area for generations: Greco. In 1946, men bearing that name ruled both Ciaculli and a neighbouring village, Croce Verde Giardini. The two Greco clans probably had a common ancestor in Salvatore Greco, named in the Sangiorgi report as
capomafia
in Ciaculli at the turn of the century. As if to show the close ties that bound them, both branches of the family chose their children’s first names from the same narrow range of options; between them there numbered three Francescos, three Rosas, three Girolamas, four Salvatores and four Giuseppes. Nicknames were essential. The good relations between the two families had been cemented when the Ciaculli boss had married the Giardini boss’s sister.
The war that set the Giardini and Ciaculli Grecos against each other began in earnest on 26 August 1946. The victims were the two patriarchs of the Ciaculli branch of the family, two brothers aged fifty-nine and seventy-seven. The ferocity of the attack on the two old mafiosi—machine-guns and grenades were used—left no doubt as to its importance.
Yet again, no one was ever convicted of the double murder. But in Ciaculli everyone suspected that the boss of Giardini, another Greco, had masterminded the assault; he was known because of his war record as ‘Piddu the lieutenant’. The Ciaculli Grecos acted on their suspicions a few months later. Two of Piddu the lieutenant’s men fell victim to the short-barrelled Sicilian shotgun they call a
lupara.
In revenge for this act of revenge, the Giardini
cosca
kidnapped two of their enemies. Only their clothes were ever found. (Sicilians refer to such disappearances as
lupara bianca
—‘white shotgun’—killings.)
The struggle between the two Greco clans came to a climax with a full-scale gunfight in the piazza in Ciaculli on 17 September 1947. First an important member of the Giardini
cosca
was cut down by a blast of machine-gun fire. Watching from a balcony were two Greco women: Antonina (fifty-one) and Rosalia (nineteen), the widow and daughter of one of the Ciaculli bosses killed the previous year. When they noticed that the man below them had not died of his wounds, they went down into the street and finished him off with kitchen knives. (It is exceptionally rare for women to take part in the military aspects of mafia activity in this way.) Antonina and Rosalia were fired on in their turn by the brother and sister of their victim; Antonina was wounded and her daughter killed. Their attacker was then himself shot and killed by Antonina’s eighteen-year-old son.
Palermo bosses began to put pressure on Piddu the lieutenant to bring an end to the carnage. Clamorous incidents like the battle in Ciaculli drew unwanted public attention towards the whole mafia system. What is more, with the deaths of the two old Greco brothers from Ciaculli, Piddu the lieutenant was expected to take on responsibility for the welfare of
both
branches of the feuding family. His status among bosses would depend in part on how he faced up to that responsibility.
Piddu sought the help of the boss of nearby Villabate, a capo who was feared and particularly respected because of his family ties to some important US mafiosi. This was a period when the comparatively extravagant wealth of many US men of honour gave them great prestige back in Sicily. One sign of this influence was that at around this time the term ‘Family’ was imported from America as a name for mafia organizations (
cosche
) whose members are by no means all related to each other. Joe Profaci, born in Villalba, was a Brooklyn waterfront gangster, later named by Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno as being the head of one of the five New York Families. At the time of the Greco war Profaci was resident in Sicily and it seems that he played a key role in bringing peace to Ciaculli.
Piddu the lieutenant followed the advice he was offered by Profaci. Two of his orphaned nephews were given posts on the fruit farm he managed; it produced the tangerines for which Ciaculli is famous. The Greco cousins who had been at war were soon co-owners of a citrus fruit export business, and also partners in a bus company. Peace brought prestige to Piddu the lieutenant. His relationship with the Villabate mafia was formalized when his son married the Villabate boss’s daughter.
The police had little idea what had caused all the bloodletting between the Grecos. Since the initial double murder, a wall of
omertà
had blocked their investigations. Police contacts in Ciaculli said that the mayhem was triggered by a desire for vendetta following a dispute seven years earlier between cousins at the Festival of the Crucifix. The festival took place every year in Ciaculli on 1 October. On that day in 1939, six young men from Giardini came to Ciaculli to watch the crucifix being exposed to the adoration of the faithful. Two of them were the sons of Piddu the lieutenant. Following the example of the locals, they went into the church and brought out a pew to sit on. An argument over the pew developed with boys from Ciaculli of a similar age, among them a cousin of the two Giardini Greco boys. On the way home later that evening, the Giardini party suddenly found themselves faced by a group of Ciaculli Grecos armed with revolvers and knives. Piddu the lieutenant’s son Giuseppe, seventeen years old, was shot dead. His Ciaculli cousin was wounded; four years later he died in prison of natural causes while awaiting trial.
So a family feud, according to the rumours in Ciaculli, was the origin of the war that would explode in 1946. But historians are now rather sceptical about this theory. What actually happened is not in question. The issue is whether this adolescent spat would really have been allowed to become the catalyst for a hecatomb that put at risk mafia interests in the whole area east of Palermo. It is also striking that six of the victims in the war did not bear the Greco name. At stake was the control of the fruit business at a time when the mafia was emerging from under the thumb of Mussolini. In other words, this was probably a war between
cosche
—or factions within a
cosca
—which was motivated by power and money, and not between blood families motivated by honour and vengeance.
The implication is that Piddu the lieutenant stored up his son’s death in 1939 and used it after the event to justify his calculated bid to control the whole Ciaculli–Giardini area in 1946–7. Once he had killed the Ciaculli bosses, he then set the mafia rumour machine to work to retell the story of the war as if it all began with the teenage cousins fighting over a church pew, as if it was all a matter of blood. When a boss is seen to look after his kin, his mafia honour and his status in the community are bolstered; he becomes known as someone whose friendship is worth cultivating. By making out that he was aggressively defending his own family, Piddu the lieutenant was simultaneously boosting his business reputation.
In other words, the likelihood is that a version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ myth was once more being used as a tool of mafia interests. There is a precedent for this kind of deception in Ciaculli itself. Back in 1916, the village priest was shot dead. The Grecos, as leading members of Ciaculli’s religious confraternity, arranged the funeral and took a prominent role in it. At the same time they put about the rumour that the priest was a philanderer who had been killed by a husband he had cuckolded—a ‘typically Sicilian’ crime of passion and family honour, it would seem. In reality the priest, an honest and courageous man, had been trying to bring to light the Grecos’ crooked management of Church property and charity funds.