Cosa Nostra (7 page)

Now that he was alert to the fact that the mafia also had an influence over the local police, Dr Galati decided to report his evidence about the murder directly to an investigating magistrate. His resolve was strengthened when the police returned only six of the seven threatening letters to him—the most explicit one had been ‘lost’. From the investigating magistrate, Dr Galati heard that such ‘incompetence’ was common in that police station.

New threatening letters arrived: Dr Galati was given a week to replace his new warden with a ‘man of honour’. But he was fortified by the knowledge that his complaints had led to the removal of the police inspector whom he suspected of collusion with the mafia. Dr Galati also reasoned that the mafia was unlikely to take the risk of killing a man of property and status like himself, so he decided to ignore the ultimatum. Just after the deadline passed, in January 1875, his new warden was shot three times in broad daylight. Benedetto Carollo and two other former workers on the
fondo
were arrested on suspicion.

The attack brought Dr Galati’s first stroke of luck. Before the warden collapsed from his wounds, he was able to see and identify his attackers. At first, lying in hospital, he did not respond to police questions. Then, as his fever rose and death seemed near, he called for the investigating magistrate and gave a statement: the men who had fired on him were indeed the three who had just been arrested.

Encouraged by the magistrate, Dr Galati treated the wounded warden himself, tending him day and night. He never went out without his revolver and kept his wife and daughters at home. The family’s health had begun to suffer as threatening letters continued to arrive. Dr Galati was told that he, his wife and daughters would be stabbed, perhaps on their way out of the theatre; the blackmailers clearly knew that Dr Galati had a season ticket. The doctor learned that there was also a mafia spy in the magistrate’s office since the mafiosi let it be known that they had access to the details of his statements. Nevertheless there seemed to be a hint of desperation to these latest blackmail letters. Dr Galati became more hopeful that, with a case being prepared and a witness ready to testify, Benedetto Carollo had finally been cornered.

Then the wounded warden under the doctor’s care took matters into his own hands. As soon as he was well enough to move, he went to Antonino Giammona and asked to make peace. He was invited to celebrate the deal at a banquet, after which he changed his statement and the case against Carollo collapsed.

Without even waiting to say goodbye to his relatives and friends, Dr Galati took his family and fled to Naples, leaving behind his property and a client list that he had taken a quarter of a century to build up. All that he could then do was to send a memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in Rome in August 1875. He reported that Uditore was a village of only 800 souls yet, in 1874 alone, he knew of at least twenty-three people who had been murdered—the victims included two women and two children—and a further ten who had been seriously wounded. Nothing had been done to investigate these crimes. A war to control the citrus fruit industry in the area was going on while the police force remained impassive.

The Minister of the Interior ordered the Chief of Police in Palermo to look into the matter. A capable young police officer was put to work on the Galati case. It turned out that, like his murdered predecessor, the second replacement warden was a fearsome character. Although Dr Galati either did not know it or would not admit it, the likelihood is that
both
of the wardens he employed were also affiliated to the mafia. He was probably being used all along in a war between rival mafia
cosche.

The Uditore mafia responded to the new investigation by showing off its friends. Benedetto Carollo made an application for permission to go hunting in the Fondo Riella; his partner for the day’s shoot was to be a judge at the Palermo Court of Appeal. A series of landowners and politicians lined up behind Antonino Giammona. Lawyers prepared a statement to the effect that Giammona and his son had been persecuted merely because they ‘lived from their own means and would not let themselves be robbed or bullied’. In the end, a police caution and intensified surveillance were the only response that the authorities could muster.

Evidently Dr Galati’s problems were not just the fault of a bunch of criminals; they came in large part because he could not trust the police, the judiciary, or even his fellow landowners. Thus Dr Galati’s story picks out another important strand in the story of the mafia’s origins. As will become clear later, the origins of the mafia are closely related to the origins of an untrustworthy state—the Italian state.

*   *   *

Protection rackets, murder, territorial dominance, competition and collaboration between gangs, and even a hint of a code of ‘honour’: enough clues emerge from Dr Galati’s memoir to reach the conclusion that many of the central components of the mafia method were being employed in the lemon groves in the early 1870s. The case also produced evidence of the most distinctive component of all: the mafia’s initiation ritual.

INITIATION

Although the police did not manage to bring the mafiosi of Uditore to justice following Dr Galati’s memorandum on his unfortunate dealings with Antonino Giammona’s
cosca,
the case did bring to light the first signs that the mafia was a secret association bound by a blood oath. Remarkably, the men under Antonino Giammona’s command not only had an initiation ritual, but it was virtually identical to the one that men of honour still undergo today.

When Dr Giuseppe Galati sent his memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in 1875, he provoked the Minister into asking for a report from the Chief of Police of Palermo. It is in this report that the Chief of Police revealed the mafia initiation ritual for the first time. His source for this discovery was reliable; it was probably the police themselves who, as is apparent from Dr Galati’s story, had a close and ambiguous relationship with the mafia from the outset.

According to the Chief of Police’s account, in the mafia of the 1870s any man of honour due to be initiated would be led into the presence of a group of bosses and underbosses. One of these men would then prick the would-be mafioso’s arm or hand and tell him to smear blood from the wound on to a sacred image. Then the oath of loyalty would be taken as the image was burned and its ashes scattered, thus symbolizing the annihilation of all traitors.

A special government envoy on his way to Sicily replied to the Chief of Police on the Minister’s behalf: ‘Congratulations! Now a huge and intricate field of investigation has opened up for the authorities.’ Doubtless the envoy would have been taken aback to learn that his ‘field of investigation’ would still be huge and intricate a century later, in May 1976, when Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca was ‘made’. (The term Brusca himself uses is ‘combinato’, a vague, unexceptional Italian word that means ‘arranged’ or ‘got together’.) The ritual undergone by Brusca makes for a striking comparison with the 1875 version, and that comparison creates a better understanding of how and why it made sense for the mafia to be a secret association right from the outset.

The man who would later blow up Judge Falcone at Capaci was initiated young, at nineteen. The fact that his father was a boss had helped put him on the fast track; his first murder was already behind him. One day Brusca was taken to a house in the countryside on the understanding that one of the organization’s periodic banquets was to take place. Many men of honour were present, including the superboss, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, whom the young man already called
padrino
(godfather). Some of the men there began to ask Brusca, ‘How would you feel about killing a man? About committing crimes?’ This seemed rather odd; he had already killed, yet they were asking him how he
would
feel. He did not know it but the initiation had already begun.

At a certain point, the others gathered in a room, leaving Brusca outside. When he was called in a little while later, he saw that his father had withdrawn and that the other mobsters were sitting at a large round table which had a pistol, a dagger, and a small image of a saint placed at its centre. The men of honour began to fire questions at Brusca: ‘If you end up in jail will you be faithful and not a traitor?’

‘Do you want to be part of the association called Cosa Nostra?’

As he gained confidence, he began to reply with enthusiasm: ‘I like these friendships, I like the crimes.’

One of the men of honour then took his finger and pricked it with a pin; Brusca smeared the blood on the saint’s image, which he then held in his cupped hands while Riina himself set light to it. The godfather spoke the words, ‘If you betray Cosa Nostra, your flesh will burn like this saint,’ cupping his own hands over the flame as he did so, to prevent the initiate from dropping it.

Among the statutes of the organization that Riina set out to Brusca that day was the now famous one relating to introductions. No one is allowed to introduce himself as a mafioso, even to another man of honour. Instead, a third party, who has also been initiated, has to present one to another using a formula like ‘He is a friend of ours’ or ‘You two are the same thing as me’. This was even the phrase spoken by Riina when, after Brusca’s father was readmitted to the room to offer congratulations, he ‘introduced’ father and son as men of honour.

The rules on introductions as they were explained to Brusca betray some interesting differences from the original version contained in the Chief of Police’s 1875 report. A century before Brusca was ‘made’, mafiosi used a much more elaborate recognition system, a coded dialogue that began with a conversation about ‘toothache’:

A: God’s blood! My tooth hurts! (
pointing to one of the upper canines
)

B: Mine too.

A: When did yours hurt?

B: On the day of Our Lady of the Annunciation.

A: Where were you?

B: Passo di Rigano.

A: And who was there?

B: Nice people.

A: Who were they?

B: Antonino Giammona, number 1. Alfonso Spatola, number 2, etc.

A: And how did they do the bad deed?

B: They drew lots and Alfonso Spatola won. He took a saint, coloured it with my blood, put it in the palm of my hand, and burned it. He threw the ashes in the air.

A: Who did they tell you to adore?

B: The sun and the moon.

A: And who is your god?

B: An ‘Air’.

A: What kingdom do you belong to?

B: The index finger.

Passo di Rigano, mentioned here, is another village on the outskirts of Palermo. The references to ‘the sun and moon’, ‘Air’ and the ‘index finger’ are clearly designations of the mafia family into which mafioso B was initiated.

This original recognition ceremony is more cumbersome and less reliable than the contemporary version explained to Giovanni Brusca. (One wonders how the two mobsters know which of them is supposed to take the lead.) All the same, for the first time this strange dialogue confirms something very simple and very important about the early mafia: it was an association so extensive that its members did not always know each other. ‘Mafia’ was already more than a name for isolated local gangs, or a face-to-face criminal network.

More than anything else about the mafia, the initiation ritual bolsters widespread myths about how ancient the organization is. In reality, it is as modern as everything else about the mafia. It was almost certainly borrowed originally from the Masons. Masonic secret societies, which were imported to Sicily from France via Naples around 1820, rapidly became very popular among ambitious middle-class opponents of the Bourbon regime. The societies had initiation ceremonies, of course, and some of their meeting rooms were adorned with bloody daggers as a warning to potential traitors. A Masonic sect called the
carbonari
(‘charcoal burners’) also had patriotic revolution as its aim. In Sicily such groups sometimes developed into political factions and even criminal gangs; one official report from 1830 tells of a
carbonaro
circle involved in cornering local government contracts.

Becoming a single, secret association using Masonic-style rites of this kind offered many advantages to the mafia. Creating a sinister ceremony, and a constitution that has the punishment of traitors as its first article, helped create trust because it was a sensible way of putting up the price of betrayal among criminals who might normally betray each other without a second thought. In that way, the high risks involved in running protection rackets would be reduced for everyone who joined. The ritual was probably particularly effective in keeping ambitious and aggressive younger members in line. The secret society also offered a system of mutual guarantees with neighbouring gangs that would allow each
cosca
to operate relatively unmolested on its own patch. There were also great advantages vis-à-vis criminals outside the association, who would have to gain the mafia’s approval to operate—or face its united opposition. Many illegal activities, like cattle rustling and smuggling, involved not only travelling across territories ruled by other gangs but also finding trustworthy business partners all the way along the route. Membership of the association offered the guarantees required by all parties involved in these activities.

By the time the Minister of the Interior heard of Dr Galati’s encounter with the Uditore
cosca
in 1875, the story of the mafia’s genesis was nearly complete. Yet it still remains to explain where the mafia came from. There is more to discover about the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ Antonino Giammona, and finding it entails taking a step back into the decade before the story of the Fondo Riella.

BARON TURRISI COLONNA AND THE ‘SECT’

In the early summer of 1863—three years after Garibaldi’s expedition—a Sicilian nobleman who was soon to write the first ever study of the mafia was the target of a well-planned assassination attempt. Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, Baron of Buonvicino, was returning one evening to Palermo from one of his estates. The road he travelled ran through the prosperous countryside just outside the city walls; it was lined with lemon trees. At a point between the villages of Noce and Olivuzza, five men firing from different points at the roadside shot down the horses of his carriage before taking aim at the occupant. Turrisi Colonna and his driver were quick to pull out their revolvers and return fire while they ran for cover. The noise attracted one of Turrisi Colonna’s own wardens. A blast of his shotgun was followed by a scream of pain from the roadside greenery. The would-be assassins gave up and dragged their wounded companion away.