by John Dickie
The chosen starting point was the province of Trapani, at the island’s western tip, where the Mori Operation had made least impact and where criminal disorder was now at its worst: here the mafia ‘reigned with all of its members in place’, the Inspectorate found. When they arrested large numbers of Trapani mafiosi, the bosses still at liberty held a provincial meeting to decide on their tactical response. A letter was sent urging everyone in the organisation to keep violence to a minimum until this new wave of repression had crested and broken.
The Inspectorate’s next round of investigations discovered a mafia livestock-smuggling network, 300 strong, that extended across the whole of the west of the island; mafiosi referred to it as the Abigeataria—something like ‘The Cattle-Rustling Department’. As they always had done, Sicilian mafiosi worked together to steal animals in one place and move them to market far away.
Then came the southern province of Agrigento. The Inspectorate’s investigations into an armed attack on a motor coach gradually revealed that the mafia had a formal structure here too. Mafiosi interrogated by the Inspectorate used the term ‘Families’ for the structure’s local cells. The Families often coordinated their activities. For example, the men who attacked the motor coach came from three different Families; they had never met one another before their bosses ordered them to participate in the raid, but they nonetheless carried it out in harmony. Even more alarmingly, the Inspectorate discovered that, just as the Mori Operation trials were coming to their conclusion in 1932, bosses in Agrigento received a circular letter from Palermo telling them ‘to close ranks, and get ready for the resumption of large-scale crimes’.
Among the most revealing testimonies gathered by the Inspectorate was that of Dr Melchiorre Allegra, a family doctor, radiographer and lung specialist who ran a clinic in Castelvetrano, in the province of Trapani. Allegra was arrested in the summer of 1937, and dictated a dense twenty-six-page confession that shone the light of the Inspectorate’s policework back into the past. Allegra was initiated in Palermo in 1916 so he could provide phoney medical certificates for Men of Honour who wanted to avoid serving in the First World War. The mafiosi who were formally presented to Dr Allegra as ‘brothers’ included men of all stations, from coach drivers, butchers and fishmongers, right up to Members of Parliament and landed aristocrats. After the Great War, the provincial and Family bosses would often come from across Sicily to meet in the Birreria Italia, a polished café, pastry shop and bar situated at the junction of via Cavour and via Maqueda, in the very centre of Palermo. For a few years, until the Fascist police became suspicious, the Birreria Italia was the centre of the mafia world, a social club for the island’s gangster elite.
The Inspectorate were well aware that the men Dr Allegra called brothers were in a permanent state of war among themselves, whether open or declared. The mafia was prone to ‘internecine struggles deriving from grudges which, whether they were recent and remote, nearly always revolved around who was to gain supremacy when it came to distributing the various positions within the organisation’. An ‘internecine struggle’ of just this kind would give the Inspectorate its route into the mafia’s very nucleus, the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro around Palermo.
When the Iron Prefect first came to Palermo in October 1925, his attention was immediately drawn to the Piana dei Colli, the northern part of the Conca d’Oro where Inspector Ermanno Sangiorgi first tussled with the mafia in the 1870s. Half a century later, the Piana dei Colli was the site of a particularly ferocious battle between two mafia factions. The conflict left bodies in the streets of central Palermo, many of them belonging to senior bosses. Some of the mafia dynasties that had ruled the area since the 1860s did not survive the carnage. Those that did, and who didn’t manage to escape to America, Tunisia or London, were rounded up by the Iron Prefect’s cops. Then Mori left, and calm returned.
The Inspectorate discovered that the mafiosi from the Piana dei Colli who had been released, or returned from exile after the Mori Operation ended, could not reorganise their Families because of the residual tensions between them. The tit-for-tat killings resumed. In 1934, a boss named Rosario Napoli was slain; the culprits tried to frame Napoli’s own nephew for the murder. This nephew was the first Palermitan mafioso to give information to the Inspectorate. His testimony slowly tipped into a cascade of confessions from other mobsters, some of whom described the initiation ritual they had undergone when they were first admitted. As so often, omertà had cracked. By bringing together these confessions, and patiently corroborating them, the Inspectorate then assembled a narrative of the war in the Conca d’Oro that shed an even more withering light on Mussolini’s portentous Ascension Day claims.
The protagonists of this new narrative were the Marasà brothers, Francesco, Antonino, and above all Ernesto—the generalissimo, as the Inspectorate dubbed him. The Marasà brothers had their power base in the western section of the Conca d’Oro, between Monreale and Porta Nuova. That is, along the road travelled by Turi Miceli and his mafia squad when they launched the Palermo revolt back in September 1866. Like Turi Miceli, the Marasà brothers had money. In fact the Inspectorate estimated that they owned property, livestock and other assets worth ‘quite a few million lire’. One million lire was worth some $52,000 at the time, and that amount in 1938 had the purchasing power of some $1.7 million today.
After the mafia’s defeat, 1937: Mussolini makes a triumphal visit to Sicily to open a new aqueduct. By this time the island’s criminal Families had returned to full operation under the leadership of Ernesto ‘the generalissimo’ Marasà.
What the men of the Inspectorate found most disturbing about the Marasà brothers was their ability to collect friendships among the island’s ruling class, to place themselves above suspicion, to cloak the power they had won through violence, and to cover the bloody tracks that traced their ascent.
By poisoning the political system under the pre-Fascist governments, they carried out their shady criminal business on the agricultural estates, in the lemon groves, in the city, in the suburban townships, in the villages. They always managed to stay hidden in the shadows cast by baronial and princely coats of arms, by medals and titles. Thanks to the shameful complaisance shown by men who are supposed to be responsible for the fair and efficient administration of the law, they always slipped away from punishment. But behind the politician’s mask, behind the honorific title, behind the all-pervasive hypocrisy and the imposing wealth, there lurked the coarsest kind of criminal, with evil, grasping instincts, whose warlike early years in the ranks of the underworld have left an indelible mark of infamy.
It is a testament to the Marasà brothers’ success in shrouding their ‘indelible mark of infamy’ that, until the discovery of the Inspectorate’s report in 2007, their names had hardly been mentioned in the chronicles of mafia history. No photographs, no police descriptions, hardly even any rumours: a criminal power all the more pervasive for being unseen and unnamed.
In the late 1920s, while the bosses of the Piana dei Colli were busy ambushing one another, and then falling victim to the Mori Operation, Ernesto Marasà and his brothers remained entirely untouched. Indeed, generalissimo Ernesto showed a breathtaking Machiavellian composure in the face of the Fascist onslaught: he actually fed incriminating information about his mafia rivals to the Iron Prefect’s investigators. Mussolini’s Fascist scalpel had been partially guided by a mafioso’s hand.
Ernesto Marasà’s rise to power continued after the Mori Operation ended. While his enemies were held in jail, seething about being betrayed, Marasà constructed an alliance of supporters across the mafia Families of Palermo’s entire hinterland, including the Piana dei Colli where he continued to undermine his enemies by passing information to the police. His plan was, quite simply, to become the mafia’s boss of all bosses. The Inspectorate spied on the generalissimo as he ran his campaign from room 2 of the Hotel Vittoria just off via Maqueda, Palermo’s main artery. Now and again, he and two or three of his h
eavies would clamber aboard a little red FIAT Balilla and set off to meet friends and arrange hits in one of Palermo’s many mafia-dominated borgate.
After five years of work, the Inspectorate could conclude its 1938 report with a chillingly clear description of the mafia’s structure that reads like a line-by-line demolition of the Iron Prefect’s own views.
The mafia is not just a state of mind or a mental habit. It actually spreads this state of mind, this mental habit, from within what is a genuine organisation. It is divided into so-called ‘Families’, which are sub-divided into ‘Tens’, and it has ‘bosses’ or ‘representatives’ who are formally elected. The members, or ‘brothers’, have to go through an oath to prove their unquestioning fidelity and secretiveness.
The oath, no one will be surprised to learn, involved pricking the finger with a pin, dripping blood on a sacred image, and then burning the image in the hands while swearing loyalty until death.
The mafia was organised ‘in the form of a sect, along the lines of the Freemasons’. Its Families in each province had an overall ‘representative’ whose responsibilities included contacts with the organisation’s branches abroad, in the United States, France and Tunisia. The Families in the provinces of Trapani, Agrigento and Caltanissetta looked to Palermo for leadership at crucial times. The mafia, declared the Inspectorate, ‘had an organic and harmonious structure, regulated by clearly defined norms, and managed by people who were utterly beyond suspicion’. At the centre of the mafia web, there was a ‘boss of all bosses’ or ‘general president’: generalissimo Ernesto Marasà.
The Inspectorate’s 1938 report was sent in multiple copies to senior figures in the judiciary and law enforcement. The forty-eight brave men who put their names to the document were desperate for their sleuthing to make a real difference in Sicily. Their desperation was evident in an indignant, impassioned turn of phrase: in the lurid talk of a ‘slimy octopus’ (as if a beast as sophisticated as the mafia could ever have just one head); and also in the conclusion, which deliberately parroted the catchphrases of Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech. Somewhere, they hoped, their plea would meet the eyes of someone determined to make Fascism’s results match up to its battle cries: there must be ‘no holding back’ against an evil that was ‘dishonouring Sicily’; the state must once again wield the ‘scalpel’ against the mafia.
The passion and insight that went into the Inspectorate’s 1938 report makes its every word chilling, for two reasons. First, because it provides the earliest absolutely indisputable evidence that the Sicilian mafia was a single highly structured organisation that extended right across western Sicily. Terms like ‘Family’, ‘representative’, and ‘boss of all bosses’ had never appeared before in the historical record. Second, because many years would pass, and the lives of many brave police, Carabinieri and magistrates would be sacrificed, before the moment in 1992 when a diagram of the Sicilian mafia that was identical to the one assembled by the Inspectorate would finally be accepted as the truth within the Italian legal system.
But in 1938 there was not the slightest hope that the Fascist state would return to a war footing against organised crime. In fact the signs that Fascism would fail to beat the mafia were there to be seen all along. In the Iron Prefect’s refusal to believe that his enemy was an Honoured Society, for example. Or in his crass view of Sicilian psychology. Or in Fascism’s preference for bundling suspects off into enforced residence on penal colonies: no noise, and no judicial process. For, as anyone with a historical memory for anti-mafia measures would have known, fighting organised crime in this way was like fighting weeds in your garden by transplanting them into your greenhouse.
The many faces of ‘Iron Prefect’ Cesare Mori, who spearheaded Mussolini’s attack on the Sicilian mafia in the 1920s.
Man of action, and scourge of the mafia.
Fascist role model.
Wannabe socialite . . .
. . . and friend to the Sicilian aristocracy.
The Mori Operation was only ever going to be a short-term measure. The aim was to draw a decisive line between the new regime and the corrupt democratic past; it was to show that Fascism was still vigorous even though the cudgels and the castor oil had been cast to one side. Fascist ‘surgery’ on Sicily was never intended to prepare the patient for a life of law and order. It was about putting on a propagandistic spectacle; it was about winning for Mussolini the support of the island’s landed elite—the very aristocrats whose ‘baronial and princely coats of arms’ had shielded the Marasà brothers, like so many other mafiosi before them.
The Iron Prefect, the orphan boy from Pavia, was besotted with the sumptuous decadence of Palermo’s beau monde. When Mori socialised in the Sicilian capital, he went out in a luxurious carriage, its lustrous black body-work bristling with gilt, intaglio, and all manner of baroque ornamentation. He was ‘on heat for the nobility’—to use an enemy’s crude phrase—as he swished from ball to ball, from salon to salon. The Iron Prefect believed, or chose to believe, that the landowners he played baccarà with were exactly what their lawyers had always said they were when, from time to time, their underworld connections were exposed: they were victims of the thugs, and not their strategic protectors.
The charges against the ‘slimy octopus’ that were meticulously assembled in the Inspectorate’s 1938 report took until 1942 to come to court. By that time the Men of Honour who had told their secrets to the Inspectorate had retracted their confessions. Before the trial most of the mafiosi named in the 1938 report were released for lack of evidence—including the generalissimo Ernesto Marasà, with his brothers. And in the trial itself, most of the fifty-three men who were eventually convicted received only short sentences. The case set out in the 1938 report had slowly crumbled until it became a comparatively minor inconvenience for the Sicilian mob. As Ermanno Sangiorgi could have told the men of the Inspectorate, many earlier anti-mafia cases had fallen apart in the same way. What was different in 1942 was that the Fascist regime, which was busy crowing about dazzling feats of bravura by the Italian army in the Second World War, completely suppressed all mention of the Inspectorate’s report and the resultant court proceedings. Once again, Italy had proved just how resourceful it could be when it came to denying the truth about the Sicilian mafia.
32
MASTER JOE DANCES A TARANTELLA
IF THERE IS A SERVANT OF THE STATE WHO ENCAPSULATES ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS of Fascism’s long fight against the Honoured Society in Calabria, but also elsewhere, then perhaps it is Giuseppe Delfino.
Delfino was a homespun hero of law enforcement. In August 1926, just as Fascism was first cranking up its clampdown, he took command of the Carabiniere station in Platì, overlooking the Ionian Coast. This was the territory where Delfino was born and he knew it as well as anyone. Both the picciotteria citadel of San Luca and the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi were on his beat. Cussed and smart, Delfino would disguise himself as a shepherd to patrol the mountain unobserved, or slip into taverns so he could overhear the picciotti as they bragged. Among the peasants he earned the respectful nickname Massaru Peppi (‘Master Joe’)—massaru being the word for a farm overseer or factor. Master Joe dismantled a cattle-rustling network centred on San Luca in January 1927, and thereby—despite the murder of his key witness—brought seventy-six mafiosi to justice. Among them were men called Strangio, Pelle and Nirta: perhaps not coincidentally, families with these surnames would much later be caught up in the blood feud that led to the massacre at Duisberg on 15 August 2007.
The Calabrian press, which was generally sparing in its coverage of the anti-organised crime campaign, said that Delfino had ‘brought honour on himself’.
Meanwhile this resourceful station commander has not even allowed himself a day’s rest, and is pressing on with his pursuit of the lawbreakers.
Shortly afterwards, once the rustlers he had arrested had their convictions confirmed on appeal, ‘Master Joe’ Delfino even earned himself a walk-on part in th
e canon of Italian literature. Corrado Alvaro, the San Luca–born author who was our witness to the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary at Polsi, also wrote a vignette about Master Joe’s relentless hunt for a small-time goat thief. Borrowing the peasants’ own spare vocabulary, Alvaro evoked the holy terror that Delfino inspired on Aspromonte throughout Fascism’s twenty-year rule.
Delfino was the Carabiniere who couldn’t hear a robber’s name mentioned without setting off in pursuit as if he’d staked money on it . . . With his short cloak, his rifle, and his sparkly eyes, he rummaged everywhere: he knew all the hiding places, he knew every renegade’s habits like he knew his own pocket—the hollow trunks, the grottoes that no one apart from the mountain folk could find, the perches high in ancient trees.
As publicity goes, this may not seem much. Indeed, compared to the Iron Prefect, the inveterate blowhard whose battle with the mafia in Sicily received glowing worldwide press, Master Joe’s profile was positively meek. But the odd line in local newspapers and the hushed respect of the peasants amounted to about as much fame as anyone could possibly hope to accumulate by serving the law in far-off Calabria, even at the height of Fascism’s short-lived enthusiasm for facing down the bosses.
Local legend and family memory are the only source we have to draw on to reconstruct much of Master Joe’s long career on Aspromonte. But that memory, however much time may have embroidered it, gives us access to a truth that the newspapers and trial documents disguise. Even Master Joe’s son, the current guardian of Delfino lore, portrays him as a man with very violent methods. This was a part of the world where there were two paths in life—‘Either you became a Carabiniere, or you entered the ’ndrangheta’—and brutality lay along both of them.