by John Dickie
The story goes that Master Joe once waited until Christmas for a runaway picciotto to return home, and did not swoop until his target had hunkered down over a plate of maccheroni with goat meat sauce. Master Joe then stood below the window, disguised as a shepherd, and played a wistful song on the bagpipes. The picciotto was so moved that he stopped eating and leaned out of the window to offer the minstrel a drink of wine, only to find a pistol pointed at his face. Recognising Master Joe, he said, ‘Let me finish my maccheroni, at least’. The reply was blunt. ‘That would be pointless, because back at the barracks we’d only make you vomit them all up again anyway’. Master Joe, it is said, was as good as his word: the thief spent a week on his back being punched and forced to drink salt water. When a doctor was finally allowed in, he saw the man’s grotesquely swollen stomach, shook his head, and said, ‘You don’t need a GP here, you need an obstetrician’.
If this story sounds far-fetched then perhaps we should recall that Cirella, where the members of the picciotteria who killed Maria Marvelli’s husband were tortured until they confessed, was also part of Master Joe’s beat.
There is one more family memory of Master Joe that shows us another side of his, and Fascism’s, battle with the ’ndrangheta.
In the autumn of 1940 station commander ‘Master Joe’ Delfino was still on duty. With only one officer to help him maintain order during the annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, it is said that he took a Chief Cudgel aside and made a deal so that there would be no trouble. If there were any murders decreed at Polsi that year, then they were performed at a polite distance in time and space from the Sanctuary. Indeed Delfino’s son later recalled that, ‘for all the years my father was in charge, nothing happened’ at Polsi. The station commander would even join the celebrating crowds during the pilgrimage, taking his turn to dance a tarantella with the members of the Honoured Society. The picture Delfino’s son paints in our mind’s eye is vivid. The sanctuary set amid the chestnut trees. The hectic trilling of a squeeze box. A circle of swarthy grins, some of them traversed by ghastly razor-blade tracery. And there in the middle, the Carabiniere, kicking out the bold red stripes on his black uniform trousers.
‘Master Joe’ (seated). The Carabiniere who fought the Calabrian mafia under Mussolini.
Don ’Ntoni Macrì, the most powerful of post-war ’ndranghetisti, and Master Joe’s dance partner at Polsi.
Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato: if the picture isn’t true, it’s a very smart invention—one that historians should cherish. What official sources can scarcely ever record is just this kind of informal accord between the authorities and the mob. A cagey mutual respect. An improvised agreement to share power and territory. At Polsi, as in so many other parts of Sicily and southern Italy, after the roundups, and the beatings, and the trials, and the propagandistic speeches had passed, the Fascist state settled back into Italy’s traditional dance with organised crime.
33
LIBERATION
THE SECOND WORLD WAR WAS THE GREATEST COLLECTIVE TRAGEDY EVER ENDURED BY the Italian people. Between 1935 and 1942, Italian armies visited death and destruction on Ethiopia, Albania, France, Greece and Russia. In 1943, death and destruction came home to the peninsula with vengeful fury.
Italian territory was invaded for the first time on 10 July when seven Allied divisions launched a seaborne assault on Sicily. Up in Rome, in the early hours of 25 July, a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council voted to bring twenty years of Fascist rule to an end; Benito Mussolini was arrested the following evening. As news spread across the country, Italians tore down Fascist symbols; many people thought the war was over. But the catastrophe had only just begun.
On 17 August the last Axis troops completed their evacuation of Sicily. On 3 September the Allies crossed the Straits of Messina into Calabria, where they met only token resistance. On 8 September the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, announced Italy’s surrender. The very next day saw the beginning of Operation Avalanche—the landing at Salerno, just south of Naples. The Germans—no longer allies but invaders—rumbled down the peninsula to carry on their war. Italy’s king fled. All semblance of his government’s civil and military authority dissolved and the Italian people were left to find their own path to survival.
Naples was liberated on 1 October. But the Allied advance ground to a halt soon afterwards. For the next twenty months Italy was a battleground, as the Reich and the Allies slogged out a slow and bloody contest. Behind German lines in the north and centre, a civil war pitted recalcitrant Fascists against the Resistance. There were collective reprisals and atrocities, mass deportations of Italian workers and troops, and a campaign of racial extermination directed at Italy’s Jews.
The south scarcely fared better under Allied Military Government in the Occupied Territories, known as AMGOT. In preparation for AMGOT, the War Office had drafted Zone Handbooks on the society and mores of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. Those Handbooks are revealing in two ways. First, they tell us what the world knew about organised crime after a century of history. Second, they allow us to measure how shocked the Allies were by the chaos that followed liberation and the rapid collapse of the Italian state. Score settling, hunger, contagion, corruption, black-marketeering and banditry: these were ideal conditions in which Italy’s gangsters could announce to the world that, whatever Mussolini might claim, they still had a role to play on the historical stage.
War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.
Sicily Zone Handbook.
Secret.
The information contained herein is believed to be correct as at May 1st, 1943.
The head of the Palermo police has said that if a cross were to be placed on every spot where a victim lies buried in the plain of Palermo, the Conca d’Oro would appear as a vast cemetery.
Mafia never was a compact criminal association, but a complex social phenomenon, the consequence of centuries of misgovernment. The Mafiuso is governed by a sentiment akin to arrogance, which imposes a special line of conduct upon him. A Mafiuso is thus not a thief or a rascal in any simple sense. He desires to be respected, and nearly always he respects others. Mafia is the consciousness of one’s individuality, the exaggerated conceit of one’s strength.
All Italian governments have been anxious to suppress this scourge of Sicilian life. The Fascist regime did its best to destroy Mafia, and the ruthless efforts of Mori, the Prefect of Palermo, resulted in many arrests. However, it is difficult to change the spirit of a people by mere police measures, and the Mafia may still exist in Sicily.
Nicola (Nick) Gentile was born in 1885 in Siculiana, in the province of Agrigento, Sicily’s notorious sulphur country. In 1906 he was initiated into the Honoured Society in Philadelphia, USA. An extortionist, murderer, bootlegger and drug dealer, he spent the next three decades of his life shuttling to and fro across the Atlantic as the demands of his criminal business, and the need to avoid his enemies in the police and mafia, dictated. Arrested on a narcotics charge in New Orleans in 1937, Gentile jumped bail and fled to Sicily.
Gentile was back in the province of Agrigento in the momentous month of July 1943, in his wife’s hometown of Raffadali. When the American troops passed through, he smilingly offered them his services as a translator and guide to their commanding officer. Soon he and the officer had formed what he called ‘an administration, a government’ across many of the surrounding towns.
Thus began the Allies’ crash course in the techniques for infiltrating state authority that the mafia had refined over the previous century. Nick Gentile’s story is typical: across western Sicily mafiosi made friends with combat troops and then with the utterly bewildered military administrators who followed in behind. Amid an explosion of prison breakouts and armed robbery, AMGOT sought authority figures untainted by Mussolini’s regime to help them deal with the anarchy. As ‘middle-class villains’, Men of Honour are very good at creating the respectable façade that AMGOT was look
ing for. Nick Gentile could even pose as a victim of Fascist oppression because he had spent a couple of years on remand during the Iron Prefect’s anti-mafia drive of the late 1920s. Many of his brethren had similar tales of woe to tell. So when AMGOT looked to replace Blackshirted mayors with more friendly locals, there was often an obvious candidate to hand. As Major General Lord James Rennell Rodd, the British head of AMGOT, later admitted
With the people clamouring to be rid of a Fascist Podestà [mayor], many of my officers fell into the trap of selecting the most forthcoming self-advertiser . . . The choices in more than one instance fell on the local ‘Mafia’ boss or his shadow, who in one or two cases had graduated in an American gangster environment.
Lord Rennell had a huge amount to cope with, in an uncertain and fast-moving situation. But he was also being parsimonious with the truth. The most insidious overtures to AMGOT were those made by the members of the island’s landowning elite. Lord Rennell, the 2nd Baron Rennell, could hardly have been more patrician: a multilingual former diplomat and banker who was educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford, he was also an enthusiastic member of the Royal Geographical Society who had travelled among the Touareg in the Sahara as a young man, and was a devoted Italophile. To a man of Lord Rennell’s breeding it would scarcely have seemed credible that the suave noblemen who invited him to dinner in their grand palazzi in Palermo could have intimate connections with mafia thuggery.
One of those aristocrats was Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, Count of Almerita, who emanated a distinct odour of mafia (as the Italian phrase has it). Back in 1926–27, with the Mori Operation rounding up hoodlums by the hundreds, a mob war was raging in the Conca d’Oro and threatening to bring the Fascist axe crashing down on the very cradle of the Honoured Society. No less than three special commissions of mafiosi had come over from the United States, but failed to bring the warring factions together. The Inspectorate discovered that Count Tasca then approached the Iron Prefect on the mafia’s behalf. He promised on his honour that the violence would soon end. So what need was there to go to all the trouble of arresting everyone involved?
In the summer of 1943, Lord Rennell, unaware of Count Tasca’s record as a mafia mediator, appointed him Mayor of Palermo.
Seeing the mafia’s intimacy with the Allies, Sicilians quickly lost faith in AMGOT’s ability to impose law and order. And a state that has lost the faith of its citizens is just the kind the mafia likes.
Some American intelligence agents working for the Office of Strategic Services (or OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) came up with what they clearly thought was a smart and highly original scheme to address the crisis. Less than a week after Allied armies occupied the last corner of Sicily, in an enthusiastic bid to win more clout for his young and hitherto unimportant intelligence corps, the OSS’s man in Palermo reported as follows.
Only the Mafia is able to bring about suppression of black market practices and influence the ‘contadini’ [peasants] who constitute a majority of the population . . . We have had conferences with their [the mafia’s] leaders and a bargain has been struck that they will be doing as we direct or suggest. A bargain once made here is not easily broken . . . We lent a sympathetic ear to their troubles and assured them, however feeble our cooperation, that it was theirs for the asking.
In other words, the OSS was suggesting, the Allies should use the mafia to co-manage crime. Throughout the AMGOT period in Sicily, as former agents have since confessed, the OSS continued to lend a ‘sympathetic ear’ to mafia bosses. The understanding between them, it seems, was based on an exchange of favours: the OSS received information in return for precious little tokens of trust—like tyres, which the mafiosi needed for the trucks they deployed in black market operations. In short, with the kind of naivety of which only those most determined to be cunning are capable, the OSS had fallen for the mafia’s oldest trick. As had always been the case, robbery and smuggling did not just fill the mafia’s coffers; they also had a handy political purpose from the bosses’ point of view. A crime wave weakened the state and meant that the state had to seek help in ruling Sicily. Help from the mafia, that is.
Within weeks of the Allied landings in Sicily, much of what little Fascism had achieved against the mafia was obliterated. The AMGOT authorities had little time for the OSS’s cynicism. Once Lord Rennell realised the terrifying speed with which the mafia had reasserted its grip, he took what counter-measures he could. But it was already too late. Where a mafia mayor was dismissed, other leading citizens were often afraid to take his place. Sicily’s Men of Honour could now plot their course into a post-war world that would bring them greater power and wealth than even they had ever known before.
War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.
Calabria Zone Handbook.
Secret.
The information contained herein is believed to be correct as at May 15th, 1943.
Physically, the Calabrian has his own look and build. He is dark and whiskered, short and wiry; and in Calabria it is the man who counts. The wife is a beast of burden or a slave, the mother a nurse . . . Flirting and courting in the English manner are not understood, and may cost you your life . . . The tough natural conditions in which a Calabrian lives and works have made him hard and matter-of-fact . . . The Calabrian is a man of few words, and those straight to the point. He is scornful of comfort and luxury, which never enter his own life, and indifferent to pain and suffering . . . Public justice according to English ideals the Calabrian does not understand, never having experienced it . . . Thus no Calabrian, however well born and bred, can be expected to be on the side of the police as a matter of course.
It is natural that in a country where feelings are apt to run high, crimes committed on a sudden violent impulse are far more numerous than those arising from cool deliberate malice. Indeed the latter class of crime is almost unknown in Calabria.
The fighting between the Allies and the Germans in much of Calabria was brief. And after the fighting was over, AMGOT kept only a skeleton staff there. The Calabria Zone Handbook made no mention of a mafia in the region. No intelligence reports identified any organised criminal activity in 1943–44. Even Lord Rennell, who toured Calabria in early October 1943, failed to spot anything seriously amiss. If mayors linked to the picciotteria were appointed, which seems certain to have been the case, nobody noticed. The Honoured Society of Calabria entered the post-war era stronger than ever, and—as it had always been—far, far below the radar of public awareness.
The rise of one Calabrian Chief Cudgel gives us the measure of what the Allies could not see. Don Antonio (’Ntoni) Macrì was born in 1904 in Siderno, the economic heart of the notorious Locri region on the Ionian Coast. His career began in the late 1920s with repeated arrests for assault and carrying an illegal weapon—the classic profile of the enforcer. In 1933, with Fascism now claiming victory over the mafias, he was released from a five-year prison sentence on an amnesty. The obliging governor of his prison said that he had been ‘well behaved and assiduously hard-working’, and therefore deserved to be encouraged further along the path to complete rehabilitation. There was no rehabilitation: in 1937, he was categorised as a ‘habitual delinquent’, convicted of being the boss of a criminal association known by its members as the Honoured Society, and sent to an agricultural colony for three and a half years.
Once this ‘habitual delinquent’ was free again, the Carabinieri reports suddenly change their tone dramatically: ‘irreproachable and hard-working’, he was called. Don ’Ntoni was the boss that Master Joe danced the tarantella with in the last years of Fascism. So now we have an idea what he received in return for keeping control of his men during the pilgrimage to Polsi.
In August 1944, with the AMGOT period over and Calabria back under Italian control, don ’Ntoni was once more identified as the leader of a criminal organisation and recommended for enforced residence. The reports on him say that he was running protection rackets in the most valuable agricultural land of the
Ionian Coast. A judge wrote that he ‘dictated the price of oranges and lemons to suit his own whim and to serve his own interest as a dealer in the citrus fruit sector’.
Don ’Ntoni ‘went on the run’, but such was the control he exercised over his territory that he was able to stay exactly where he was. In April 1946 he was finally spotted and arrested in the centre of Locri, near to the Palace of Justice, with a revolver and a dagger in his pockets. In July of the same year magistrates dismissed the case against him because of ‘insufficient evidence’. Insufficient evidence: since the 1870s, this had been the proud motto beneath many a Sicilian crime dynasty’s family crest. Now don ’Ntoni Macrì had acquired the same degree of power and influence. Along with the same self-interested strain of family values. When don ’Ntoni’s wife passed away not long after, his men forced large numbers of local people to attend her funeral. In a judge’s words, the ceremony became ‘the opportunity to stage a public demonstration of the Honoured Society’s omnipotence’.
In this corner of Calabria at least, the humble picciotteria, the sect of brawlers, pimps and petty extortionists that had crawled out from the prisons in the 1880s, had completed its ascent.
By the 1960s don ’Ntoni had a criminal record—a shelf-bowing 900 pages long—that read like the bill for the decades since the 1880s in which Calabria’s gangster emergency had been ignored. He was murdered in 1975, just after finishing a game of bowls in what was the most significant hit in ’ndrangheta history. For by that time, don ’Ntoni Macrì had become the most notorious ’ndranghetista of them all—referred to by some Men of Honour as the boss of all bosses, and probably also an initiated member of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra. But then that is a story for another era.
War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.