Seeking Sicily: A Cultural Journey Through Myth and Reality in the Heart of the Mediterranean

by John Keahey

  Despite the great success of the Maxi Trial, Falcone came under attack; his group was shut down as part of criminal-justice reforms. He continued to work, but funds were short; support for his efforts remained unenthusiastic.

  Then, in March 1992, all should have been well: The verdicts in the Maxi Trial were upheld by Italy’s highest court. That decision was “a dose of poison for the mafiosi, who felt like wounded animals,” write the Schneiders, quoting a pentito. “That’s why they carried out the massacres.”

  Two months after the high court ruling, the Falcone party was riding in a high-speed caravan between Palermo and the airport that today bears his and Borsellino’s names. Near the exit to the town of Capaci, a Palermo suburb, “their armored cars passed over a culvert where mafiosi had hidden five hundred kilograms [more than half a ton] of explosives, packed into plastic drums and covered by a mattress.” The explosion was set off by a remote-controlled signal triggered by a man sitting on a nearby hillside.

  In the immediate aftermath of those five deaths, a sense of hopelessness seemed to pervade Palermo and the rest of Sicily. During mass anti-Mafia demonstrations in Palermo in days that followed, Rosaria Schifani, the wife of one of the murdered bodyguards, spoke to the crowd, saying the Mafia had turned Palermo into “a city of blood. There is no love here; there is no love here; there is no love here!” Video of her tortured remarks and the sound of agony in her voice are difficult to see or hear, as are the words of Falcone’s fellow anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino.

  During a tribute to his colleague, best friend, and childhood playmate, Borsellino said Falcone’s work was “shattering the accepting attitude of living side by side with the Mafia, which is the real strength of the Mafia.”

  Fewer than two months later, on a hot July Sunday afternoon, Borsellino, with five bodyguards, climbed out of his armored car that had just pulled up in front of his mother’s Palermo house. A massive explosion from a bomb planted in a nearby parked car laid waste to the street. All six men were killed.

  Borsellino’s words—along with the cumulative effect on Sicilians of the Mafia hits on the judges, combined with years of almost weekly hits on competing mafiosi, judges, Carabinieri, police officers and, in some cases, shop owners who refused to pay protection money—finally lifted ordinary Sicilians out of their denial. Posters appeared that laid out such statements as YOU DID NOT KILL THEM. THEIR IDEAS WILL KEEP WALKING ON OUR LEGS. Or, YOU CAN KILL OUR BODIES BUT NOT OUR SOULS. The relentless violence, capped by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, became too much to bear. La cosa nostra had gone too far. And it kept going.

  Other magistrates and policemen were killed. The following year, bombs hit targets in Rome and elsewhere, including a bomb at Florence’s Uffizi Galleries. Authorities increased pressure on Mafia leaders but also started directing their efforts toward prosecuting compliant political leaders and some prominent businesspeople. This sweep was known as Operation Clean Hands. Several thousand Italian business executives and politicians were investigated. A score or more of Italy’s leading businesses were probed. More than a thousand individuals had corruption charges brought against them, many of those charges to be summarily dismissed months, even years later. A dozen committed suicide.

  The backlash to this process led prosecutors to be put on short leashes once again: Such prominent citizens, except for the most egregious offenders, are almost forbidden fruit for law enforcers in Italy. But the Mafia, if not compliant politicians, remains under siege. Now, nearly twenty years after Falcone’s death, most Mafia bosses have been arrested, along with their accountants and fellow “men of honor.”

  “Almost on a daily basis there have been arrests,” the martyred judge’s sister says. “All the biggest heads of the Mafia are in prison now. The last one who is still a fugitive is Matteo Messina Denaro … who at this moment is considered to be the capo [boss]. They are burning the ground around him because they recently arrested people who are very close to him; they are getting to him.”

  Palermo’s chief prosecutor Francesco Messineo, speaking to a reporter for the Italian news service ANSA in March 2010, said that the “aim of their strategy against Messina Denaro was to ‘dry up the water he swims in.’”

  * * *

  The history of the Mafia dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, with roots that go back even further. But it began to take form as we know it following Unification in 1861, after the northern Italian military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi and his one-thousand-strong Red Shirts drove the Bourbons out of Sicily. As Garibaldi diverted his attention to the Bourbon rulers still ensconced in Naples, banditry filled the ruling vacuum and claimed the Sicilian countryside. Brigands attacked police, kidnapped rich landowners, stole livestock, and often brutally executed their opponents.

  The term “Mafia” was not in much use in those days. But some of the individuals in the 1860s who evolved into that loosely constructed confederation were known then, as they are now, as “men of honor.” Even Lampedusa, in The Leopard, uses the euphemistic phrase. Near the end of the book, in scenes not used in the film, Father Pirrone is visiting family members and dealing with his sister Sarina’s emotions over her teenage daughter’s unwed pregnancy. If the girl’s father, Vicenzino, knew she was pregnant, he would kill her.

  “He’ll kill me, too, he will, because I didn’t tell him; he’s what they call ‘a man of honor’!” the sister laments. Lampedusa makes note of Vicenzino’s “perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife” and how this made it “obvious at once that Vicenzino was ‘a man of honor,’ one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc.”

  A Pirandello one-act play “The Other Son,” which became an episode in the Taviani brothers’ film Kaos, graphically illustrates the horror of the banditry that swept rural Sicily during the post-Unification years. In the late nineteenth century, groups that later evolved into the Mafia worked with the police to help rid the countryside of the bandits, whose presence likely threatened growing Mafia control. This further endeared the “men of honor” to the peasantry.

  As for the police, Alexander Stille writes: “In exchange, the government allowed the Mafia to continue its more subtle form of economic crime.” This set a stage for cooperation among police, politicians, and the Mafia that lasted well into the twentieth century.

  Eventually the state, in the 1870s, cracked down. Bandits were captured but, the Schneiders tell us, “crimes against property continued; indeed, animal rustling flourished with the growth of urban markets.” The reaction by landowners and civic authorities to this continued economic mayhem, then, led to the unholy alliance with the early Mafia families, whose members were made up of “an incipient entrepreneurial class of carters, muleteers, itinerant merchants, bandits, and herders … Forming themselves into fratellanze, or ‘brotherhoods,’ … they offered protection for a price.”

  From the mid-1860s on, the word “Mafia” began to enter the Italian vocabulary. There is a lot of confusion over the word’s origins. According to the Web site sicilianculture.com, some believe it

  derives from the Arabic mahias, meaning a bold man or a braggart, or from Ma ’afir, the name of the Saracen tribe that ruled Palermo. A third theory of Arab origin relates mafia to maha, a quarry or a cave in a rock. The mafie, the [tuffa] caves in the Marsala region, served the persecuted Saracens as hiding places and later provided hide-outs for other fugitives … rebellious Sicilians had hidden out in the mafie near Marsala and had therefore subsequently … been called mafiosi, the people from the mafia.

  Other sources believe differently. Historian Peppi Pillitteri believes it comes from the Arabic-based words ma ’fiu, which originally meant “I can do it.” He continues, “Like a weed, secret organizations found fertile land in the despair and suffering of Sicily, always trying to better one’s lot in life by rebelling or taking the law into one’s own hands.”

  Whatever the origins, these men were hired by beleaguered landowners to provide security i
n the fields against rustling or the stealing of crops. Banditry, under pressure from these new, increasingly powerful protectors, eventually diminished. It is from this period that the image of the field guard, which gained prominence in the first Godfather film, was of a man wearing the black pants, white shirt, black vest, and Sicilian cap and carrying a sawed-off shotgun, known as a lupara.

  Surprisingly, one of the best, most concise explanations of these early beginnings of the Mafia comes from Booker T. Washington, the American educator who visited Italy and Sicily in 1910, and who published two years later a classic book, The Man Farthest Down. Washington compared the Mafia to “the White Caps, the Night Riders, and the lynchers in our own country, as a means of private vengeance.”

  He, of course, was looking at the Sicilian phenomenon in the context of his own experience by referring to the Ku Klux Klan. In reality, the Klan had nothing much in common with the Mafia other than the brutality with which it conducted its business. Washington sums up the Mafia’s origins simply.

  In the course of time, these field guards became associated in a sort of clan or guild … No property owner dared install a guard without consent of the chief … the mere knowledge that a certain plantation was under the protection of the Mafia was in itself almost sufficient to insure it from attack.

  Rural Sicilians therefore came to rely on the Mafia, rather than the police, “to ferret out and punish the criminals.” If they needed someone to settle a dispute with a neighbor or to find out who may have rustled their cattle or sheep, they went to the head of their local family, not the authorities, and this capo decided what to do. The winning party then owed the boss a favor, to be collected at some unknown time in the future. The loser accepted the decision and kept quiet. To protest meant problems, perhaps even his death, for him and his family.

  * * *

  The close relationships among public officials, police, politicians, and mafiosi grew. “By controlling substantial blocks of votes, Mafia groups helped elect politicians who, in turn, helped them,” Stille writes. It solidified the Mafia’s unfettered control of the island and kept generations of politicians and public officials in its hip pocket.

  An autobiographical, mid-twentieth-century tale of how the Mafia worked can be found in “The Mafia at My Back,” published in an anthology, Mafia and Outlaw Stories: From Italian Life and Literature. Sicilian writer Livia De Stefani (1913–1991) describes how the capo of the local Mafia clan, midway through the twentieth century, gained control over her family estate, Virzì, near Camporeale in western Sicily.

  At one point, when she refused to replace her own trusted field guard with a person of the capo’s choosing, she arrived home to find her threshing floor and her entire harvest of straw bales and wheat in flames. De Stefani had been warned, in a letter, that such an event would happen unless she acquiesced. She had ignored it. When the fire erupted, she knew it was a direct message from the local Mafia chieftain, Vincenzo Rimi.

  The investigating Carabinieri officer, a northern Italian who had been posted to the far south and who never had been able to make a single inroad against the local Mafia, begged her to tell him that the fire was intentionally set. Both knew it was. She refused, saying only, “Spontaneous combustion, sir. Precisely that.”

  She writes, “He spread his arms open, let them drop to his sides like logs, and turned his back on me. Only as he got on the seat of his motorcycle did he make a sign of goodbye, stiffly giving me a military salute.”

  De Stefani later had a meeting with the Mafia boss and agreed that he would appoint her field guard. The one concession she got was that the capo would allow her to keep her longtime field guard through the fall harvest, several months away. Then, the crime boss’s man would take over. When that time came, her faithful guard knew exactly what would happen. He emptied the shells from his lupara, stomped them into the ground with his hobnail boots, turned the weapon over to the police authorities, and went back to being a sharecropper.

  What was her reaction to answering the Carabinieri officer about the fire’s origins the way she did? “I did it, though I felt sorrow … which gave me a sense of malaise that still comes over me to this day.” The night after the fire, she was hit by an inescapable realization.

  I was not the owner of Virzì. I was simply the one who paid the taxes, who vainly pronounced that this must be done, not that. In short, I was a pathetic puppet. Someone else was wielding the command on my land; the reins of power in the entire province—and maybe beyond—were in the hands of someone who remained unnamed.

  It is precisely this kind of acquiescence, this kind of acceptance, of the Mafia’s influence over the decades that troubles Sicilian journalist Angelo Vecchio, who has been writing about the Mafia for forty years. I met Angelo one warm afternoon at an outdoor café in Palermo. We were joined by interpreter Conchita Vecchio. They are not related, Brooklyn-born Conchita told me, although they have roots in the same town, Licata, on Sicily’s south coast. Angelo worked in Catania for the now defunct newspaper Giornale del Sud and, at the time of our meeting, in Palermo for Giornale de Sicilia.

  I tell him about a Sicilian businessman I met who claims he does not pay protection money, known in Sicily as pizzo, or euphemistically, “a beak full.” The businessman had told me he somehow befriended the neighborhood boss. They occasionally talk when they meet, say, in the local barbershop. And as a result of this, the businessman is exempted, and his business is never bothered. I did not ask this businessman if he was ever expected to return the favor.

  Angelo takes no prisoners in his view of such a “friendship.”

  “Everyone pays,” he said bluntly. “If you don’t pay [under an unspoken agreement with a capo], you are a friend of mobsters—you are one of them.”

  He recognizes that there is a movement in Palermo among business organizations, Addiopizzo, whose adherents refuse to pay. He said that businesspeople can seek police protection when they take a stand against the Mob. Journalists also can be given police protection, something authorities have offered to do for Angelo when he has written particularly hard-hitting news articles.

  He said he always refuses the offer. This despite an attack many years ago in Catania, where a man walked up to his car while Angelo was stopped at an intersection and attempted to slash him with a knife, only landing a bad cut on his arm before Angelo was able to drive off. He had published, the day before, an article about Mafia involvement in international car smuggling.

  Messages not to publish come in different ways, Angelo said.

  “Someone will make a phone call to the newspaper, quietly suggesting that the article not run. I get these every now and then. I don’t pay much attention to these things. One night, when opening the door of my house, a man I had never seen before greeted me warmly, as if he knew me. He asked me if I was ‘still writing about old things. Why do you do that?’ he said to me. That’s the way they warned me—a friendly threat.

  “If the Mafia wants to hurt you, they will simply kill you. But now there is not much killing going on; the Mafia is laying low. I just don’t worry about it.”

  * * *

  With certainty, someone will step into the shoes of the current boss of bosses, Matteo Messina Denaro, if and when he is found and arrested. Perhaps the Sicilian Mafia will splinter and become like the Neapolitan camorra—a disjointed collection of families operating independently from one another. In other words, the camorra has no capo for authorities to focus on; it is like an octopus—when one tentacle is cut off, another grows in its place.

  This, according to Maria Falcone, is what makes that criminal organization—now far more violent than the Sicilian Mafia—a harder nut to crack. The camorra is thought to have its origins in the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when southern Italy and Sicily were under Spanish rule.

  Then there is the Calabria-based organization known as the ’Ndrangheta, from a Greek word andragathía, meaning “heroism” or “honor” or “virtue”—still more
ironic euphemisms. Maria Falcone describes this group as the most violent of the southern crime organizations. Its strength is its worldwide drug operations, which have billions of dollars at stake.

  And to the east in Italy’s boot, in the region of Puglia, still another criminal organization exists, the Sacra Corona Unità, which means the “sacred united crown.” All these loosely confederated organizations continue to grow and become far more violent than the twenty-first-century Sicilian version of La Cosa Nostra (“our thing”), which grew out of the rural Sicilian landscape of the mid-nineteenth century.

  * * *

  The fact that it has taken more than a century for police authorities to make headway into Sicilian crime families undoubtedly stems from the refusal, for many generations, of ordinary citizens to acknowledge the Mafia’s existence. A Sicilian-American friend, born and raised in the United States and who visited extended family on the island in the 1960s as a teenager, tells how he asked about the Mafia. “There is no such thing!” scoffed his Sicilian aunts and uncles, who then hastened to change the subject. Such denial mirrors a typical Sicilian response: “I know nothing, I have said nothing, and if what I said is said, I didn’t say it!”

  Maria Falcone hopes that the spate of arrests of leading Mafia chieftains in recent years will work to change that attitude, but she recognizes that the fear of Mafia power is deeply entrenched among ordinary Sicilians.

  “For you Americans who take into high regard the state and the nation, it is difficult to understand the normal Sicilian,” she told me, her piercing southern eyes—her strongest resemblance to her martyred brother—pinning me to the chair. “Sicilians do not have the sense of the state within them. For centuries, Sicily has always been dominated by foreigners, even [northern Italians]. Giovanni [Falcone] was called the ‘Sicilian Anomaly’ because he had this great sense of the state within him, which his fellow Sicilians didn’t have.”