Cosa Nostra (8 page)

Turrisi Colonna wrote a study titled
Public Security in Sicily
the year after he was attacked. It was the first of many books published after the unification of Italy that made the Sicilian mafia a subject of analysis, controversy, and confusion. With the benefit of hindsight afforded by the work of Judge Falcone, historians now also have a good idea of which participants in the earliest debates about the mafia to believe. Turrisi Colonna turns out to have provided a peculiarly well-informed and credible account.

Part of the reason why Turrisi Colonna is such a good witness derives from his status and the important role he played in the dramas of the early 1860s. He had an impeccable record as an Italian patriot. In 1860, through his efforts as a leader of the new Palermo National Guard, Turrisi Colonna did his bit to try and ensure that the revolution did not lead to anarchy. He was already a member of the Italian parliament when he wrote his little book on the crime issue in 1864. Much later, in the 1880s, Turrisi Colonna would serve twice as mayor of Palermo. Even today he is honoured with a marble bust in the committee room of the Palazzo delle Aquile, the seat of the Palermo city council. His stern features are adorned with one of those beards—it seems resolutely glued on below the nose—that signified ‘august’ and ‘statesman’ to his contemporaries even more clearly than the medals on his chest.

Turrisi Colonna had an equanimity equal to his status. Law and order was a burning political issue when he wrote his pamphlet in 1864. The government was trying to claim that the opposition was conspiring against the new Italian state and was bent on causing disorder to further its aims. Opposition politicians maintained that the government was amplifying the law and order crisis in an effort to brand them as criminals. Turrisi Colonna took a careful line that would have pleased neither camp: he pointed out that organized criminals were a powerful force in Sicily, and had been for many years, but he also argued that the new government’s tough measures had only made the situation worse.

Turrisi Colonna’s study hinged on a sombre observation: the newspapers were full of extortions, robberies, and murders, he explained, but only a fraction of the crimes committed around Palermo were reported because the problem went beyond ordinary lawlessness.

We should not delude ourselves any more. In Sicily there is a sect of thieves that has ties across the whole island … The sect protects and is protected by everyone who has to live in the countryside, like the lease-holding farmers and herdsmen. It gives protection to and gets help from traders. The police hold little or no fear for the sect because it is confident that it will have no trouble in slipping away from any police hunt. The courts too hold little fear for the sect: it takes pride in the fact that evidence for the prosecution is rarely produced because of the pressure it puts on witnesses.

This sect, Turrisi Colonna guessed, was about twenty years old. In each area it recruited its affiliates from the brightest peasants, the wardens who guarded estates around Palermo, and the legions of smugglers who brought grain and other heavily taxed items past the customs posts that the city depended on for its income. The sect’s members had special signals that they used to recognize each other when they were transporting stolen cattle through the countryside to city butchers. Some of the sect members specialized in rustling cattle, others in transporting the animals and removing identifying brands, still others in illegal butchery. In some places the sect was so well organized, receiving political protection from the disreputable factions that dominated local government, that it could frighten any citizen. Even some honest men found themselves turning to the sect in the hope that it might be able to bring some semblance of safety to the countryside.

Driven by its hatred of the brutal and corrupt Bourbon police, the sect had offered its services to the revolutions of 1848 and 1860. Like many men of violence, the sect’s members had an interest in revolution because it offered the chance to open prisons, burn police records, and kill off police and informers in the confusion. A revolutionary government would—the sect hoped—grant an amnesty to people ‘persecuted’ by the old regime; it would form new militias that needed tough recruits, and give jobs to the heroes of the struggle to overthrow the old order. But the 1860 revolution had brought few of these benefits, and the new Italian government’s indiscriminately harsh response to the crime wave that followed only made the sect more eager to cause trouble.

It was only four months after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s report that the sect would acquire its name when the word ‘mafia’ was written down for the first time. And given what is now known about the mafia, Turrisi Colonna’s account of the sect is strikingly familiar. He mentions the kind of kangaroo court that can be found in many later tales of mafia business; the sect members meet to decide the fate of any of their number who has broken the rules—with a death sentence a frequent outcome. Turrisi Colonna goes on to describe the sect’s code of silence and loyalty in terms that chime rather eerily with current knowledge:

In its rules, this evil sect regards any citizen who approaches a
carabiniere
[military policeman] and talks to him, or even exchanges a word or a greeting with him, as a villain to be punished with death. Such a man is guilty of a horrendous crime against ‘humility’.

‘Humility’ involves respect and devotion towards the sect. No one must commit any act that could directly or indirectly harm the members’ interests. No one should provide the police or judiciary with facts that help uncover any crime whatsoever.

Humility—
umiltà
in Italian or
umirtà
in Sicilian—is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word
omertà. Omertà
is the mafia’s code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently
omertà
was originally a code of submission.

Turrisi Colonna advised the government not to respond to the sect by ruling ‘with the scaffold and the torturer’. Instead he offered some well-thought-through reforms of policing that would, he hoped, change the behaviour of the people of Sicily, giving them ‘a second, civil baptism’. The balance, astuteness, and honesty that Turrisi Colonna demonstrated in his account of the sect was matched by his gentlemanly reserve. He was too modest even to mention the assassination attempt that he himself had suffered only the previous year; it was, after all, only one of many violent episodes in the countryside around Palermo in the difficult years that followed Garibaldi’s expedition. Turrisi Colonna’s discretion means that it is not known who ambushed him and why, or what later happened to the attackers. But reasons have now emerged for suspecting that they may not have lived for very long afterwards.

*   *   *

A dozen years later, on 1 March 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, two wealthy, high-minded young Jewish intellectuals from Tuscany, arrived in Palermo with a friend and their manservant to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. By this time—the year after Dr Galati wrote his memorandum—the word ‘mafia’ had been on everyone’s lips for a decade, but there was great confusion about what it meant, if, indeed, it meant anything at all. (There was even uncertainty about how to spell it: in the nineteenth century, mafia was sometimes written with one F, sometimes with two, without any difference in meaning.) Franchetti and Sonnino had no doubts that the mafia was a dangerous form of criminality, and intended to blow away the mist of different opinions that enveloped it.

The day after reaching Sicily, Sonnino wrote to a friend, asking her to arrange letters of introduction to Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, Baron of Buonvicino and expert on the sect:

Here they say he is linked to the mafia. But that doesn’t matter to us. We want to hear what he has to say … Mind you do not tell
anyone
what I have told you about Baron Turrisi Colonna and his supposed links with the maffia. Some friend of his could write to him about it and that would do us a nasty service.

There is a deal of evidence to suggest that Turrisi Colonna, author of the analysis of the sect, was indeed the strategic political protector of the most important and ruthless mafiosi in Palermo. Rumours of his mafia connections were widespread; even members of his own political grouping were expressing their concerns about him at court in Rome.

In 1860, Turrisi Colonna had made a leading sect member into a captain of his National Guard unit. The man was chosen because of his authority and military experience; earlier he had led one of the revolutionary gangs that descended on Palermo from the surrounding countryside as the patriotic revolution spread. The man in question was a canny thug named Antonino Giammona—the same Antonino Giammona who would later orchestrate the takeover of the Fondo Riella from Dr Galati. Turrisi Colonna was one of the landowners who supported Giammona when the Ministry of the Interior looked into Dr Galati’s allegations; it was Turrisi Colonna’s lawyers who prepared Giammona’s defence statement. According to the Chief of Police’s 1875 report, the mafia’s initiation rituals took place on one of Turrisi Colonna’s estates.

In three separate interviews with Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876, Turrisi Colonna was his usual lucid self on matters of economics. In addition to his interest in the sect, he was a forward-thinking farmer and an agronomist with a long list of academic publications on the citrus fruit business to his name. But he was uncharacteristically evasive on the crime issue. Two years previously, four of his men had been arrested on his estate near Cefalù. To Franchetti and Sonnino he protested their innocence, as, indeed, he had done at the time of the arrests. Landowners like him were the victims, he complained; out on their country estates they were forced to deal with bandits because otherwise they would be unable to protect their valuable crops and trees. He made no mention of a sect.

When Franchetti and Sonnino later interviewed the Palermo Chief of Police they found him pessimistic about a prosecution against Turrisi Colonna’s men because the baron had the political connections to undermine the trial. Other interviewees quickly changed the subject when asked for an opinion of him.

Turrisi Colonna embodies the puzzles of the violent years that saw the mafia appear. He probably based his 1864 pamphlet about the sect on inside sources—perhaps even on what he was told by Antonino Giammona himself. When he wrote it, he may also genuinely have hoped that unification with Italy could normalize Sicily. He may have been a victim of mafia intimidation, who wanted a powerful, efficient new state to help landowners like himself put the mafiosi in their place. Perhaps he saw himself as reluctantly collaborating with men like Giammona on a short-term basis, while he waited for the Italian government to take the violence out of Sicilian society. If so, these were hopes that he had lost long before he was interviewed by Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876.

A less generous interpretation is that Turrisi Colonna was never a victim at all. Giammona’s relationship with him may have been based more on deference than intimidation. Perhaps Turrisi Colonna was simply the first of many Italian politicians whose pronouncements on the mafia did not match their actions. For all the sophistication of its structure and the insidious grip of its code of honour, the Sicilian mafia would be nothing without its links to politicians like Turrisi Colonna. Ultimately, there would be little point in the mafia’s corrupting policemen and magistrates if the dignitaries to whom those officials are answerable were still intent on impartially upholding the rule of law. And in the mafia’s account book, a friendly politician is more useful the more credibility he has. If credibility has to be bought with thundering speeches against crime, or with learned diagnoses of the state of law and order in Sicily, then so be it.

The mafia deals with politicians in a currency that is rarely printed on the paper of parliamentary proceedings and law books. Rather it is stamped on the solid gold of small favours: news of government contracts or land sales leaked, overzealous investigators made to pursue their careers away from the island, jobs in local government given to friends. Thus, in public, Turrisi Colonna could take a detached, scientific interest in the sect, gazing down on it from the height of his intellectual and social prestige. In private, away from the domain of open debate, a close relationship with men like Giammona was integral to his business interests and political support.

Whatever went on between Giammona the mafia boss and Turrisi Colonna the politician, intellectual, and landowner, the Palermo revolt that took place two years after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s pamphlet was probably an important stage in their relationship. In September 1866, armed gangs once again marched on the city from the surrounding villages. Turrisi Colonna’s National Guard, captained by Antonino Giammona, opposed the revolt. Whereas Giammona, like many other men of violence, had speculated on revolution in the past, he now realized that the Italian state was a body with which he could do business. Key members of the sect like Giammona were beginning to put their revolutionary past behind them, and as they did so the sect began to enter the bloodstream of the new Italy. Like other leading defenders of order, Turrisi Colonna was interviewed during a government inquiry into the trouble of 1866, and he had no hesitation in using the new word ‘mafia’ to describe some of the troublemakers who caused the revolt: ‘Trials cannot be brought to a conclusion because the witnesses are not sincere. They will only start to tell the truth when the nightmare of the Mafia comes to an end.’ ‘Mafia’, Turrisi Colonna had evidently decided, only meant criminals he did not know personally.

*   *   *

The question that still remains is how the ‘nightmare of the mafia’ began. In 1877, the two men who interviewed Turrisi Colonna published their own research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report. In the first part, Sidney Sonnino, a profoundly melancholic character who would later become Prime Minister of Italy, analysed the lives of the island’s landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti’s half of the report bears the less than racy title,
Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily.
But it has a unique stature; it is an analysis of the mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered an authority in the twenty-first. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later.
Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily
is the first convincing explanation of how the mafia came to be.