Cosa Nostra (6 page)

In the narrow, tortuous alleys off the main streets and away from the Marina, aristocratic palaces competed for space with markets, artisans’ workshops, hovels, and no fewer than 194 places of worship. Visitors in the early 1860s were often struck by the sheer number of monks and nuns in the streets. Palermo also seemed like a stone palimpsest of cultures stretching back over many hundreds of years. Like the rest of the island, it was layered with the monuments left by countless invaders. For since the ancient Greeks, virtually every Mediterranean power from the Romans to the Bourbons had made Sicily its own. The island seemed to many as if it were a fabulous display case of Greek amphitheatres and temples, Roman villas, Arab mosques and gardens, Norman cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, baroque churches …

Sicily was also imagined in two colours. It had once been the granary of ancient Rome. For hundreds of years thereafter, wheat grown on vast estates painted the imposing highlands of the interior in golden yellow. The island’s other colour had more recent origins. When the Arabs conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they brought new irrigation techniques and introduced the groves of citrus fruit trees that tinted the northern and eastern coastal strip with dark green leaves.

It was during the troubled years of the 1860s that the Italian kingdom’s ruling class first heard talk of the mafia in Sicily. Without having a clear idea of what it was, the first people to study the problem assumed that it must be archaic, a leftover from the Middle Ages, some symptom of the centuries of foreign misrule that had kept the island in a backward condition. Accordingly their first instinct was to look for its source in the golden yellow of the interior highlands, among the ancient grain-producing estates. For all its desolate beauty, the interior of Sicily was a metaphor for everything Italy wanted to leave behind. The great estates were worked by droves of hungry peasants who were exploited by brutal bosses. Many Italians hoped and believed that the mafia was a symptom of this kind of backwardness and poverty, that it was destined to disappear as soon as Sicily emerged from its isolation and caught up with the historical timetable. One optimist even claimed that the mafia would disappear ‘with the whistle of the locomotive’. This kind of belief in the mafia’s antiquity has never quite died, not least because many men of honour keep resuscitating it. Tommaso Buscetta, too, thought that the mafia began in the Middle Ages as a way of resisting French invaders.

But the mafia’s origins are not ancient. The mafia began at roughly the time when beleaguered Italian government officials first heard talk of it. The mafia and the new nation of Italy were born together. In fact, the way that the word ‘mafia’ surfaced and became widely used is a curious affair, not least because the Italian government that discovered the name also played a part in nurturing the association that bore it.

As perhaps befits the mafia’s own fiendish ingenuity, its genesis involves not just one story, but a knot of them. Untying those narrative threads and laying them out in the following chapters requires a little chronological dexterity; it means moving back and forth in the turbulent period from 1860 to 1876, and a brief loop back through the half-century before then. It also means borrowing the testimonies of the people caught up in the story, the people who were participants and onlookers in the mafia’s beginnings.

It is best to start not with the word ‘mafia’—for reasons that will become clear—but with what the early mafia did and, just as importantly, where it did it. For if the mafia was not ancient, then neither was the golden yellow of the interior the place where it was born. The mafia emerged in an area that is still its heartland; it was developed where Sicily’s wealth was concentrated, in the dark green coastal strip, among modern capitalist export businesses based in the idyllic orange and lemon groves just outside Palermo.

DR GALATI AND THE LEMON GARDEN

The mafia’s methods were honed during a period of rapid growth in the citrus fruit industry. Lemons had first become prized as an export crop in the late 1700s. Then a long citrus fruit boom in the mid-nineteenth century thickened Sicily’s dark green hem. Two pillars of the British way of life played their part in this boom. From 1795, the Royal Navy made their crews take lemons as a cure for scurvy. On a much smaller scale the oil of the bergamot, another citrus fruit, was used to flavour Earl Grey tea; commercial production began in the 1840s.

Sicilian oranges and lemons were shipped to New York and London when they were still virtually unknown in the mountains of the Sicilian interior. In 1834, over 400,000 cases of lemons were exported. By 1850, it was 750,000. In the mid-1880s an astonishing 2.5 million cases of Italian citrus fruit arrived in New York every year, most of them from Palermo. In 1860, the year of Garibaldi’s expedition, it was calculated that Sicily’s lemon groves were the most profitable agricultural land in Europe, out-earning even the fruit orchards around Paris. In 1876, citrus cultivation yielded more than sixty times the average profit per hectare for the rest of the island.

Nineteenth-century citrus fruit gardens were modern businesses that required a high level of initial investment. Land needed to be cleared of stones and terraced; storehouses and roads had to be built; surrounding walls had to be erected to protect the crop from both the wind and thieves; irrigation channels had to be dug and sluices installed. Even once the trees had been planted, it took about eight years for them to start producing fruit. Profitability followed several years after that.

As well as being investment-intensive, lemon trees are also highly vulnerable. Even a short interruption to water supplies can be devastating. Vandalism, whether directed at the trees or the fruit, is a constant risk. It was this combination of vulnerability and high profit that created the perfect environment for the mafia’s protection rackets.

Although there were and are lemon groves in many coastal regions of Sicily, the mafia was, until relatively recently, overwhelmingly a
western
Sicilian phenomenon. It emerged in the area immediately surrounding Palermo. With nearly 200,000 inhabitants in 1861, Palermo was the political, legal, and banking centre of western Sicily. More money circulated in the property and rental sectors than anywhere else on the island. Palermo was the centre for wholesale and consumer markets, and it was the major port. It was here that much of the farmland in the surrounding province and beyond was bought, sold, and rented. Palermo also set the political agenda. The mafia was born not of poverty and isolation, but of power and wealth.

The lemon groves just outside Palermo were the setting for the story of the first person persecuted by the mafia ever to leave a detailed account of his misfortunes. He was a respected surgeon, Gaspare Galati. Almost everything that is known about Dr Galati as a person—his courage most notably—emerges from the testimony he would later submit to the authorities, who subsequently confirmed the authenticity of what he wrote.

In 1872, Dr Galati came to manage an inheritance on behalf of his daughters and their maternal aunt. The centrepiece of the inheritance was the Fondo Riella, a four-hectare lemon and tangerine fruit farm, or ‘garden’, in Malaspina, which was only a fifteen-minute walk from the edge of Palermo. The
fondo
was a model enterprise: its trees were watered using a modern three-horsepower steam pump that required a specialist operator. But when he took control of it, Gaspare Galati was well aware that the huge investment in the business was in danger.

The previous owner of the Fondo Riella, Dr Galati’s brother-in-law, had died of a heart attack following a series of threatening letters. Two months before his death, he had learned from the steam-pump operator that the sender of the letters was the warden on the
fondo,
Benedetto Carollo, who had dictated them to someone who knew how to read and write. Carollo may have been uneducated, but he had attitude: Galati describes him swaggering about as if he owned the farm, and it was widespread knowledge that he creamed 20–25 per cent off the sale price of its produce; he even stole the coal intended for the steam engine. But it was the way Carollo stole that had caused most worry for Dr Galati’s brother-in-law; it showed that he understood the citrus fruit business well, and was intent on running the Fondo Riella into the ground.

Between the Sicilian groves where the lemons grew, and the shops in northern Europe and America where consumers bought them, a host of agents, wholesale merchants, packagers, and transporters plied their trade. Financial speculation lubricated every stage of the process, beginning while the lemons were still on the trees; as a way of offsetting the high initial costs and spreading the risk of a poor harvest, citrus businesses usually sold the crop well before the fruit was ripe.

Dr Galati’s brother-in-law had followed this common practice on the Fondo Riella. However, when brokers bought options on the farm’s produce in the early 1870s, they found that the lemons and tangerines that they had already paid for began to disappear from the trees. The Fondo Riella quickly acquired a very bad business reputation. There seemed no doubt that the warden Carollo was responsible for the thefts, and that the young man’s intention was to drive down the price of the business so that he could then buy it out.

Upon taking control of the Riella fruit farm from his brother-in-law, Dr Galati resolved to save himself trouble and lease it to someone else. Carollo had other ideas. When prospective tenants came to view the
fondo,
he made his views abundantly clear to them as he showed them round: ‘By Judas’s blood this garden will never be leased or sold.’ It was too much for Dr Galati; he sacked Carollo and hired a replacement.

Dr Galati soon came to know how the young warden felt about having ‘the bread taken out of his mouth’, as he was heard to say. Disconcertingly, some of Dr Galati’s close friends, men who had no reason to know anything about his business, came to him and advised him in confidence to take Carollo back. The doctor stood firm.

At around 10
P.M
. on 2 July 1874, the man whom Dr Galati had hired to replace Carollo as the warden on the Fondo Riella was shot several times in the back as he travelled along one of the narrow roads that passed between the lemon groves. The attackers had made a terraced platform out of stones inside another grove so that they could shoot him from behind the surrounding wall—a method used in many early mafia hits. The victim died in hospital in Palermo a few hours later.

Dr Galati’s son went to the local police station to report the family’s suspicion that Carollo was behind the murder. An inspector ignored this lead and arrested two men who had no connection with the victim. Subsequently they were released when no evidence was found against them.

Despite this lack of support from the police, Dr Galati hired another warden. He and his family then received a series of letters, which said he had been wrong to sack a ‘man of honour’ like Carollo and hire an ‘abject spy’ instead. They threatened that if he did not re-employ Carollo, he was going to meet the same end as his warden—only ‘in a more barbarous manner’. Looking back a year later, by which time he had found out exactly what he was up against, Dr Galati was able to explain this new terminology: ‘In the mafia’s language, a thief and a murderer is a “man of honour”; a victim is an “abject spy”.’

The doctor returned to the police with the threatening letters—seven in all. He was promised that Carollo and his associates, who included an adopted son, would be arrested. But the inspector—the same man who earlier had sent the investigation down a false trail—was not so keen. Three weeks passed before he took Carollo and his son into custody, and even then they were released after two hours on the grounds that they had nothing to do with the crime. Galati became convinced that the inspector was in league with the criminals.

As he fought to save his business, Dr Galati began to build up a picture of how the local mafia worked. The
cosca
was based in the neighbouring village of Uditore and operated behind the façade of a religious organization. A priest and former Capuchin monk known as Father Rosario ran a small confraternity in the village, the ‘Tertiaries of Saint Francis of Assisi’, ostensibly devoted to charity and assisting the Church in its work. Father Rosario, a man with a record as a police spy under the old Bourbon regime, was also a prison chaplain and took advantage of his role to ferry messages to and from inmates.

But Father Rosario was not the leader of the gang. The president of the ‘Tertiaries of Saint Francis’, and the mafia boss of Uditore, was Antonino Giammona. He had been born into a desperately poor peasant family and had started his working life as a labourer. His rise to wealth and influence coincided with the revolutions that accompanied Sicily’s integration into the Italian nation. The revolts of 1848 and 1860 gave him the chance he needed to show his mettle and win important friends. By 1875, at the age of fifty-five, Giammona was a man of status; he owned property worth some 150,000 lire, the Chief of Police of Palermo reported. He was strongly suspected of having executed several fugitives from justice to whom he had at first given shelter. Their deaths became necessary, the police thought, when they started to steal from local properties while under his protection. Giammona was also known to have received a sum of money along with instructions to carry out mysterious business on behalf of a criminal from near Corleone who had fled to the United States to escape prosecution.

Dr Galati summed up Antonino Giammona’s character as ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’. There is good reason to believe him because the two men knew each other; several members of the Giammona family were clients of Dr Galati who, on one occasion, had pulled two musket balls out of Giammona’s brother’s thigh.

The Uditore mafia based their power on running protection rackets in the lemon groves. They could force landowners to accept their men as stewards, wardens, and brokers. Their network of contacts with cart drivers, wholesalers, and dockers could either threaten a farm’s produce, or ensure its safe arrival at the market; when astutely applied, violence allowed the mafia to set up miniature cartels and monopolies. Once in control of a
fondo,
the mafiosi could steal as much as they liked, whether with the aim of raking off a comfortable parasitic ‘tax’, or in order to buy it for themselves at an artificially low price. Giammona was not just picking on Dr Galati; he was orchestrating a concerted campaign to control the citrus fruit industry of the whole Uditore area.