Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  Part of my task was to know everybody, and I knew Umberto, the restaurant’s owner. ‘What are you serving today, Umberto?’ I asked him one day, and he told me frutti di mare, based, as I knew, on such atrocious materials as sea cucumber and an obscene marine worm abundant in local waters.

  ‘What about carne alleata?” This was the Neapolitan term for any brand of black-market meat abstracted from the base depot and served up secretly at extraordinary prices. ‘Some of your customers are eating canned meat,’ I said. ‘This carries a prison sentence.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘It is brought here by an American colonel,’ he said.

  I asked him the price, and he told me.

  ‘It is very dear,’ I said. ‘Twice the price you are charging for frutti di mare. How do you explain that?’

  ‘For carne alleata we are paying very much, because is better.’

  ‘For what?’

  He oscillated his hips in a revolting fashion. ‘Per fare amore,’ he said.

  ‘Bring me one of the tins,’ I told him. He brought one in a bag, and we went into a corner together where he opened it.

  ‘Spam,’ I said. ‘Of all things. Spam, an aphrodisiac. Just imagine it. Do you personally believe this is good to fare amore?”

  He laughed. ‘They are all eating it for this purpose. But for me personally—you want I tell you straight? I don’t eat any of these things. For me is good wear a medal for San Rocco. This is OK for me. This is doing trick.’

  1995

  Alligators in the Swamp

  ON A VISIT TO Cuba in 1961 I went to see Enrique Carreras, the new air force chief, and found him at his office desk at Havana airport. He was a man in his middle forties, although perhaps in appearance a little old for his years, and there was something in his studious, concentrated expression that reminded me, until one of the frequent smiles broke through, of a friend who studied postage stamps through a magnifying glass. His secretary warned me, ‘He’s very unassuming. Don’t call him Captain. Just say “you”.’ Chaos still had the upper hand here, since a recent attack by Cuban opponents of the regime flying in from Miami. A chair for me had to be dislodged from a pile of salvaged furniture. ‘You see how we live these days,’ Carreras said with a laugh. ‘Still, things are on the upturn.’ He spoke good English, from which I noticed that the Americanisms locally in common use had been expurged.

  Carreras had agreed to talk about his personal contribution to the defeat of the invasion attempt at the Bay of Pigs earlier that year. This, as expected, he seemed determined to play down. ‘It was largely a matter of luck,’ he said. ‘They weren’t prepared for what little resistance we were able to put up, and it took them by surprise. The fact is that by the time I took over, all the best pilots had cleared off to Miami. I was sad to see them go because we were all friends together until the last moment. The worst of it was they took all the planes worth having, leaving us with the junk. I was particularly close to Rojas, who was chief here before me. He left a letter for me ending, “Goodbye sucker.” There was nothing malicious about it. Rojas was fond of a joke. He had his future to think about, but I couldn’t help seeing what was happening as the beginning of the end.’

  A secretary came in with coffee. She was one of the new kind with short hair, no make-up and flat shoes. This gave me the opportunity for a quick glance round at the surroundings and I noticed a shattered window still awaiting replacement and a door that hung askew. What could have been Carreras’s personal possessions had been shoved into a corner, including a fuzzy photograph of a woman with a child, probably his wife, and a voodoo shrine-idol of the kind people now collected, with a fat cigar stuck between straw lips.

  ‘They came over at six in the morning,’ Carreras said. ‘My first thought was that this was another earthquake. I’d taken to sleeping here to be on the safe side and I rushed out to see my personal T-33 jet-trainer burning like a hay-rick, and the best of our Sea Furies blown all over the parking bay. The bombing was very accurate and whoever planned it knew just what to leave and what to take out. I couldn’t help feeling that Rojas was in on this. Somehow or other he managed to knock out the generator and the phones. They’re working on them now. You can still smell the fused wires.’ He pushed open the nearest window just at the moment when some mechanics, believing themselves unobserved, had put aside their spanners and reached for their guitars, and I listened to the thin, sweet music of Cuba as the flutes picked their way through the background noise of riveters at work. Carreras attempted an indulgent smile.

  ‘Was it five planes you were left with? I asked.

  ‘Three,’ he said. ‘All of them ready for the scrap heap. We were down to two Sea Furies and an even older B.26. They were suffering from metal fatigue and their engines were worn out. The Sea Furies had defective brakes. The guns on the B.26 jammed and it was doubtful if it had the power to get off the ground. The next thing was that the news came through that the invasion fleet had been sighted in the Florida Straits heading south. That gave us exactly one day to get ready for them.’

  ‘God, what a problem.’

  ‘We called up every spare mechanic in the city and had them working all day and most of the night. No one was allowed to stop to eat. They took rice and beans out to them and had the base doctor mix ground-up amphetamine pills with it to keep them awake. We cannibalised old passenger planes and managed to adapt a few parts stripped from lorries and tractors. The old B.26 was practically rebuilt. I put in a few hours myself to help all I could. At about four in the morning I went to sleep in a chair under one of the Sea Furies, and just before five they called me to say that Fidel was on the phone. “Enrique,” he said, actually calling me by my first name, “the sons-of-bitches have arrived. They’re landing at the Bay of Pigs. How many planes can you get into action?” “Three, Commandante,” I told him. “Three, well, more or less. If they can be started up.”

  ‘“How soon can you get them down to Largatera?” Castro asked.

  ‘“In twenty minutes, Commandante,” I said.

  ‘“Good,” he said. For a moment he was cut off. Then he was speaking again. “And Enrique,” he said, “don’t let a single one of those sons-of-bitches get away. Don’t let them get away. I’m relying on you.”

  ‘“At your orders, Commandante,” I said. “They’ll be lucky if they do.”’

  Carreras laughed in a slightly apologetic way, as if on the verge of a damaging admission. ‘The truth of the matter is that phone call did something to me. I supported the revolution, but up to this time the leader was a kind of remote figure. I’d see him at a distance in the Plaza making his speeches, but I’d never spoken to him and he’d never set eyes on me. And here he was now, talking to me like a member of the family and calling me by my first name, as if he knew I was on his side. “Enrique,” he said, “don’t let them get away”, and I had the feeling that I really mattered to him and the revolution. “They won’t, Commandante,” I told him. “Not if I can help it.”

  ‘With all the work done on the planes I still wasn’t quite sure of them,’ Carreras said. He explained his decision to lighten the B.26’s weight and to limit the bomb-load to four 250-pound bombs, and the two Sea Furies, now in their sixteenth year of service, would carry two similar bombs apiece, plus eight five-inch rockets. No time had been left for final checks and Carreras’s persistent fear was that undetected faults would be revealed at the moment of take-off when the veteran planes were exposed to maximum strain. He absented himself, he said, for a few minutes to write a note to his wife, with recommendations for the disposal of his possessions if necessary, climbed into the cockpit of one of the Sea Furies and noted with huge relief the smoke billowing from all three planes, which proved that they were about to take off.

  Almost as soon as he had promised Castro, they were over the Bay of Pigs. The sun had just come up and the sea was patterned all over with ships. To the west the great swamp known as La Largatera began immediately at the edge of the beach, whic
h curved all round the bay and stretched unbroken, except for a single narrow road, all the way to the horizon. Tiny white puffs showed here and there along the road, and Carreras concluded that these were shell-bursts, and that invaders already ashore were under fire from the defenders. In a matter of seconds, followed by the second Sea Fury and the B.26, Carreras was over the invasion fleet. His orders were to avoid attacking any invaders already ashore and to concentrate on the incoming ships. Carreras picked for himself a large troop transport escorted by two frigates, its deck crowded with men, moving slowly towards the beach. This he identified as an 8,000-ton Liberty ship probably carrying, in addition to the maximum number of fighting troops, the key personnel of the operation. It would have been held back until the landing had been secured by commandos already ashore. It was at this juncture that, in an attempt to check his height, Carreras discovered that his altimeter had stuck at 3,000 feet.

  Even an experienced pilot found difficulty in judging altitudes when over the sea, so guesswork now took a hand. Coming in for a bombing run at an estimated 800 feet, Carreras ran through the anti-aircraft barrage of a dozen ships. He let go his bomb, missing the Liberty ship by twenty yards, and, caught in a hailstorm of iron and fire, the Sea Fury juddered over cobblestones of air, ducked, wobbled and finally climbed out of range, punctured and ripped in a dozen places in the fuselage and wings. A stray thought of Rojas forced itself on Carreras. The force’s top pilot would never have missed.

  With a single bomb left and his confidence on the verge of collapse, Carreras decided that his only hope of putting the Liberty ship out of action was a rocket attack at close range under the anti-aircraft fire and at maximum speed, whatever the risk of ending in the sea.

  He banked, turned and went into a dive known in the training school as an ‘ultra’, something he had never attempted before. For a moment he felt weightless, hanging in space; his joints cracked, blood vessels snapped in his temples, there was pressure on his eyes, and iron fingers had been thrust into his ears. At about 300 feet, as the ship rushed up to him and with the plane’s nose held steady and pointed at the centre of the cattle-stampede of human bodies, he fired the rockets, blotting out the scene with smoke, before pulling out of the dive and into a sky buttoned all over with bursting shells. His friend Mateos passed below in the second Sea Fury, blasting with machine-guns at a nearby transport, and at this moment the B.26, seen for the first time, drifted backwards into view. An arc of gunfire from which Carreras thought it was too slow to escape had followed it round the bay, and now it simply disappeared.

  Carreras turned back for a final view of the Liberty ship. ‘They must have stacked up ammunition on the deck,’ he said, ‘for it was on fire, still struggling for the shore, and dragging with it in the water a black encrustation of drowning men.’ He described this scene with no trace of satisfaction. ‘I’m squeamish by nature,’ he said, ‘I wanted to do something to save these poor men, not kill them.’ A few, he said, had reached the beach, but there was no cover from the fire of Fidel’s shock troops on the narrow road from Cienfuegos, and they were all mown down.

  ‘The swamp here,’ he said, ‘comes down to within feet of the sand, and a lot of them took the chance of hiding in it.’ He sighed. ‘I’d been there hunting in the old days, and I knew only too well that there were alligators everywhere.’

  1997

  Boris Giuliano—The Man Who Might Have Smashed the Mafia

  MY EXPERIENCE OF A Sicilian Mafia trial was extraordinary. It had attracted some international interest, having been widely advertised as designed to lay once and for all the hideous Mafia ghost. Others followed, each more spectacular than the last, with the accused men caged like animals in specially built courtrooms, and the judges escorted by armoured cars from their homes to the Palace of Justice. All foundered in boredom and disbelief, and the secret government of the Mafia behind the scenes continued as before.

  I attended this occasion in 1968 on behalf of a London newspaper, and as they had asked for photographs I went to a friend on L’Ora of Palermo, who promised to produce a photographer. ‘He’s a low-grade man of respect,’ my friend said. ‘You may not be inspired by his photography, but he knows how to handle the judge—which is what really counts.’

  Next day I went down to the courthouse where this man awaited me in surroundings that differed hardly in the matter of noise and excitement from a market place. Lo Buono was small and dynamic and bursting at the seams with a kind of genial cynicism. He carried an immense old-fashioned camera and tripod, and at the moment of entering the courtroom where the nineteenth day of the trial was about to begin, we were halted by an usher barring the way. His manner was exceedingly deferential. ‘Will you be taking photographs today, Signor Lo Buono?’ he asked. ‘That is my intention,’ Lo Buono replied, and the man smiled and bowed. As at that moment we had been standing under a notice announcing that photography was forbidden under pain of the severest sanctions, this came as a surprise.

  The court was in session with the wives and children of the accused men seated in the front row of the public benches. They were strikingly middle class in appearance, the women dressed meticulously as if for a first communion service in church. It was quiet in this room after the clamour of the antechambers and the air was heavy with a church-like odour of hassocks and varnished wood. What might have been a vestry door at the back opened and the eight prisoners filed in, led by a carabiniere with a gun. They were attached to a long chain, from which a second carabiniere freed them as soon as they had been seated in a double row in the dock, although they were still manacled at the wrists. All the prisoners wore immaculate sports clothes with open-necked shirts, and boasted impressive suntans, despite the fact that some had spent a year or two on remand in that notoriously sunless prison, the Ucciardone.

  At this point Lo Buono opened up his camera, walked over to the dock and took a series of photographs of the accused men, none of whom gave evidence of noticing his presence. Next he photographed the judge, who acknowledged what might have been a routine courtesy with the slightest of smiles.

  Now came the most extraordinary episode of the morning. One of the carabinieri, key in hand, went down the rows of prisoners releasing each man’s left hand from the small chain attaching it to his right wrist. With this, while the judge and miscellaneous court officials turned their attention to other matters, the women and children got up, left their seats and made their way in orderly fashion over to the dock where moving scenes of family reunion were enacted. While the judge wrote in a book, the two carabinieri joined each other for a whispered chat. Hugs and kisses were exchanged, and the prisoners groping in their pockets produced sweets for the children and small gift-wrapped packages that might have contained perfume for the wives. I jerked Lo Buono’s sleeve and gestured in the direction of this scene, and he shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘No one can take that picture.’

  It was the last day of a trial in which once again the Italian state had revealed itself incapable of inflicting defeat upon the Mafia opponent. The Anti-Mafia Commission had been in operation for five years (it was to struggle on for another eleven), but had achieved nothing. In all trials that had taken place it was now assumed that the verdict would be ‘not guilty’. Many were abandoned when witnesses for the prosecution retracted their evidence, went into hiding, fled the country or even committed suicide. One or two who had recklessly stuck to their guns could expect to be dealt with in exemplary fashion, such as the prosecution witness in the case of the mafioso monks of Mazzarino, found half-dead with a hand cut off. The contention of the counsel for the defence was that the victim had carried out the amputation himself.

  Since it had become pointless to call witnesses for the prosecution, a new strategy had been adopted in the case I was attending. Instead of trying prisoners for specific crimes they were known to have committed, the charge was of ‘association to commit crime’, in which the prosecution promised to furnish evidence requiring no co
rroboration by testimony in court. The FBI had worked with Italian police agencies, offering proof that three of the prisoners—the possessors of dual US and Italian nationality—were heads of Cosa Nostra ‘families’. The report was that they had gathered in Palermo at a time when the drug connection between Corsica and the States had come under police attack, with the intention of transferring the European base of the traffic from Corsica to Sicily.

  It was hard to believe that the dignified, even benign-looking men in the dock could be overlords of the world of international crime, nor did their records, according to the defence, lend credibility to this point of view. Several were known for their association with leading personalities of the Church. Two had sons training for the priesthood. Another had paid for the building of an orphanage out of his own pocket. Vicenzo Martinez, the very pattern of a Sicilian gentleman, was a war hero who had lost an arm in action and been decorated for bravery (his citation was read out in court). He reminded one newspaperman of an ‘aloof and splendid Coriolanus’. John Bonventre, one of the alleged Cosa Nostra chieftains (he had studied for holy orders in his youth), was head of a charity organisation promoting the welfare of Italian immigrants in the States. He treated the court with exaggerated respect, dropping a ‘Your Excellency’ into his interchanges with the judge sometimes twice in a sentence. He was also inclined to moralise. At one point the judge commented on the anxiety revealed in an intercepted letter sent by Bonventre to an American mafioso.

  Bonventre: ‘Your Excellency, I was worried about the times we live in. You can’t pick up a paper without reading about some terrible thing…I always say a quiet conscience is a man’s dearest possession, Your Excellency, I’m sure you would agree with me.’