Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (5 page)
Honour is also about loyalty. Membership of what mafiosi used to call the ‘honoured society’ brings new loyalties that are more important than blood ties. Honour implies that a mafioso must put Cosa Nostra’s interests above those of his kin. Enzo Brusca, brother of ‘lo scannacristiani’, worked for the organization, took part in killings, but was never made into a man of honour. As was appropriate, he did not ask questions. What he knew about his relatives in Cosa Nostra he gleaned from hearsay, and from the media; thus he was unaware for a long time that his father was boss of the local
mandamento
(district). So although Enzo Brusca was part of the mafia’s operations and was a member of the same
family
as men of honour, this did not entitle him to know about
Family
business.
The reverse is not true, in the sense that a mafia boss has an absolute right to keep watch over the personal lives of his men. For example, a mafioso will often have to ask his capo’s permission to marry. It is crucial that individual mafiosi make a sensible choice of marital partner and behave honourably within marriage. Mafiosi have an even greater need than other husbands to keep their spouses sweet, simply because a disgruntled mafia wife could do extensive damage to the whole Family by talking to the police. Members of Cosa Nostra have to be careful to preserve their women’s prestige; a major reason for the taboo against pimping is to ensure that the wives of men of honour, as Judge Falcone explained, ‘are not humiliated in their own social environment’. Mafiosi often marry the sisters and daughters of other men of honour, women who have lived in a mafia environment all their lives and are therefore more likely to have the kind of discretion and/or submissiveness that the organization requires of them. Women may also actively support the work of their men, albeit in a subordinate role. Women cannot formally be admitted to the mafia and honour is exclusively a male quality. Nevertheless a mafioso’s honour brings prestige to his spouse, and his spouse’s good behaviour feeds back into his stock of honour.
* * *
Judge Falcone once compared entering the mafia to being a convert to a religion: ‘You never stop being a priest. Or a mafioso.’ The parallels between religion and the mafia do not end there, largely because many men of honour are believers. Catania boss Nitto Santapaola had an altar and a little chapel constructed in his villa; according to one
pentito,
he also once had four kids garrotted and thrown in a well for mugging his mother. The current boss of bosses, Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano, communicates from his place in hiding by little notes, some of which have recently been intercepted; they always contain blessings and invocations of divine protection—‘By the will of God I want to be a servant’. One senior boss who led a death squad like ‘lo scannacristiani’ would pray before every action: ‘God knows that it is they who want to get themselves killed, and that I carry no blame.’
Sentiments like these are partly a result of the tolerance towards the mafia that was displayed for a long time by the Catholic Church. Clergymen have often treated men whose power is based on routine murder as if they were sinners of the same ilk as everyone else. They have overlooked the evil influence of the mafia because it seems to share the same values of deference, humility, tradition, and family as the Church. They have accepted donations drawn from criminal wealth for processions and charity. They have been content to see
cosche
(plural of
cosca
) disguise themselves as religious confraternities, and to entrust the administration of charity funds to dignitaries with blood on their hands. Some churchmen have even been killers. The story of the Church’s relationship with the mafia is filled with episodes like these.
But the point is not, as some would wish to claim, that the mafia is little more than a branch of the Catholic Church. A mafioso’s religion has nothing to do with the Church as an institution. In fact, the secret of mafia religion is that it serves the same purposes as the code of honour; it merely expresses the same things in a different language. Mafia religion generates a sense of belonging, trust, and a set of flexible rules by borrowing words from the Catholic creed, just as the code of honour does so by aping the chivalric terms that were still used by the nobility when the mafia began.
Like mafia honour, mafia religion helps mafiosi justify their actions—to themselves, to each other, and to their families. Mafiosi often like to think that they are killing in the name of something higher than money and power, and the two names they usually come up with are ‘honour’ and ‘God’. Indeed, the religion professed by mafiosi and their families is like so much else in the moral universe of mafia honour, in that it is difficult to tell where genuine—if misguided—belief ends, and cynical deceit begins. Understanding how the mafia thinks means understanding that the rules of honour mesh with calculated deceit and heartless savagery in the mind of every member.
So ‘honour’ translates as a sense of professional worth, a value system, and a totem of group identity for an association that regards itself as being beyond good and evil. As such, it has nothing to do with Sicilian traditions, or chivalry, or Catholicism. Whether it is expressed in religious terms, or in the pseudo-aristocratic language of ‘honour’, the code is there to ensure that every aspect of a mafioso’s life is completely subordinated to the interests of ‘our thing’.
When it is working well, the code produces a proud sense of fellowship. Catania mafioso Antonino Calderone spoke for the whole organization when he said, ‘We’re mafiosi, all the others are just men.’ But for that very reason a mafioso without honour is no one; he is a dead man. For a member of Cosa Nostra, being defeated in one of the organization’s internecine wars and losing honour can amount to exactly the same thing.
It is no wonder, then, that the decision to break the code of honour and turn state’s evidence is traumatic for some mafiosi. It means abandoning both an identity and a dense fabric of friendships and family ties; it means trying to find a way of coming to terms with a life built on murder; it means incurring an automatic death sentence. Giovanni Brusca maintains that it took more courage for him to turn state’s evidence than it did to kill.
Nino Gioè was the mafioso who shouted ‘Vai!’ to Brusca when he pressed the detonator on the Capaci bomb. Soon after being captured and placed in solitary confinement in the summer of 1993, Gioè began to feel the accumulated pressure of long years lived by Cosa Nostra’s rules. He knew that some of his conversations had been bugged by the police, and that he had probably given away evidence that would count heavily against other men of honour; unwittingly, he had broken the most sacred of Cosa Nostra’s tenets. He sensed the suspicion growing among the mafiosi held in cells on the same wing. As the pressure mounted, it began to show—he let his beard grow and neglected to clean his clothes. Men of honour are expected to maintain the dignity of their bearing in prison, so the decline in his appearance only increased the fears of those around him that he was about to break and tell what he knew to the state. Instead, on 28 July 1993, he used the laces of his tennis shoes to hang himself in his cell. Although it is very rare for men of honour to end their own lives, Gioè’s suicide note can serve as the final word on what it means to live and die by the code of honour:
This evening I will find the peace and serenity that I lost some seventeen years ago [at initiation into Cosa Nostra]. When I lost them, I became a monster. I was a monster until I took pen in hand to write these lines … Before I go, I ask for forgiveness from my mother and from God, because their love has no limits. The whole of the rest of the world will never be able to forgive me.
The historical question raised by this picture of life inside Cosa Nostra is simply: ‘Was it always like this?’ The equally simple answer is that no one will ever know for sure.
Pentiti
may have talked to the police on many occasions, but when they did, they tended to talk about specific crimes and not about what it felt like to be a mafioso. But what evidence there is does suggest that something along the same lines as this code of honour existed all along. After all, if it had not existed, then the mafia would not have survived so long; in fact, it might never even have emerged at all.
Palermo became an Italian city on 7 June 1860 when, under the terms of a ceasefire, two long columns of defeated troops snaked out from its eastern edges, and doubled back round outside the walls to await the ships that would ferry them home to Naples. Their withdrawal was the culmination of one of the most famous military achievements of the century, a feat of patriotic heroism that astonished the rest of Europe. Until that day, Sicily had been ruled from Naples as part of the Bourbon kingdom that encompassed most of southern Italy. Then, in May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi and around 1,000 volunteers—the famous Redshirts—invaded the island with the aim of uniting it with the new nation of Italy. Under Garibaldi’s leadership, this ragged but zealous force disorientated and defeated a far larger Neapolitan army. Palermo was conquered after three days of intense street fighting during which the Bourbon navy bombarded the city.
With Palermo liberated, Garibaldi then led his men—who were now growing in number and becoming an army in their own right—east towards the Italian mainland. On 6 September, the hero was welcomed into Naples itself by cheering crowds, and the following month he handed over his conquests to the King of Italy. He refused to take any reward, and headed back to his island home of Caprera with little more than his poncho, some basic supplies, and seed for his garden. A plebiscite quickly confirmed that Garibaldi had made Sicily and southern Italy into an integral part of the nation of Italy.
Even contemporaries thought Garibaldi’s achievements were ‘epic’ and ‘legendary’. But they soon came to seem like nothing more substantial than a dream, so tormented and violent did Sicily’s relationship with the Italian kingdom turn out to be. The mountainous island had a long-standing reputation as a revolutionary powder keg. Garibaldi had succeeded largely because his expedition had triggered another uprising; the Bourbon regime rapidly collapsed in the face of it. It now became clear that the revolt of 1860 had been only the beginning of the trouble. The incorporation of 2.4 million Sicilians into the new nation brought in its wake an epidemic of conspiracy, robbery, murder, and score-settling.
The King’s Ministers, mostly men from the north of Italy, had hoped to find partners in government from among the upper echelons of the Sicilian population, people who looked like themselves: conservative landowners with a sense of good government and a desire for ordered economic progress. What they found instead—they would often protest—looked like the face of anarchy: republican revolutionaries with strong links to semi-criminal gangs; aristocrats and churchmen with a nostalgia for the old Bourbon regime or a hankering for Sicilian autonomy; local politicians who were killing and kidnapping in a struggle for power with equally unscrupulous opponents. There was massive and enraged popular resistance to the introduction of conscription, previously unknown in Sicily. Many people also seemed to think that the patriotic revolution had entitled them not to pay any tax.
The Sicilians who had invested their political ambitions in the patriotic revolution were infuriated by what they saw as the government’s arrogant refusal to allow them access to power—the power they needed to address the island’s problems. In 1862, Garibaldi himself so despaired at the state of the new Italy that he came out of retirement and used Sicily as a base to launch another invasion of the mainland. His objective was to conquer Rome, which still remained under the authority of the Pope. But an Italian army stopped him in the mountains of Calabria, and he was even shot and wounded in the foot. (Rome would not become the capital of Italy until 1870.)
The Italian government responded to the crisis provoked by Garibaldi’s new invasion by declaring martial law in Sicily. In so doing it set a pattern for the coming years. Unwilling or unable to find the support to pacify Sicily politically, the government repeatedly tried the military solution: mobile columns of troops, sieges of entire towns, mass arrests, imprisonment without trial. But the situation failed to improve. In 1866, there was another revolt in Palermo, similar in some respects to the one that had overthrown the Bourbons. As they had done when Garibaldi attacked in 1860, revolutionary gangs descended on the city from the surrounding hills. There were unsubstantiated rumours of cannibalism and blood drinking by the rebels; martial law was once again the response. The 1866 revolt was quelled, but it was only after ten more years of turmoil and repression that Sicily settled into life as part of Italy. In 1876, for the first time, politicians from the island entered a new coalition government in Rome.
A constant counterpoint to the strife in Sicily between 1860 and 1876 was the impression that the island’s splendours made on the visitors who arrived in the aftermath of Italian unification. Palermo’s extraordinarily beautiful setting could not help but strike new arrivals. One
garibaldino
who approached Palermo for the first time from the sea said it looked like a city built to fit a child’s poetic vision. Its walls were enclosed by a band of olive and lemon groves, behind which lay an amphitheatre of hills and mountains. There was the same simplicity to its layout: Palermo had two straight, perpendicular main roads that met at the Quattro Canti (‘Four Corners’), a piazza built in the seventeenth century. At each corner of the Quattro Canti, an elaborate façade of balconies, cornices, and niches symbolized the four quarters of the city.
Despite the damage caused by the Bourbon shelling, Palermo in the 1860s offered numerous attractions for residents and outsiders alike; foremost among them perhaps was the famous sea front. During the seemingly endless summers, once the intense heat of the day had faded, genteel Palermitani took moonlit carriage rides along the Marina, perfumed by its flowering trees; or they sampled ice creams and sorbets while promenading to the sound of favourite opera melodies played by the city band.