Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Fascism’s legacy was indeed a damaging one. Amid the chaos of war and Liberation, the country was immediately faced with the reality of endemic criminal power that lay behind the dumb bluster of the regime’s propaganda.

  When the Second World War ended, Italy quickly became a democracy. Not long afterwards, it would develop into a major industrial power. Here was a very different country from the Italietta—the ‘mini Italy’—that had first confronted the mafias after 1860, or from the deluded, strutting Italy of the Blackshirt decades. The transition of 1943–48 was the most profound in the country’s entire history: from war to peace; from dictatorship to freedom. Yet some things about Italy did not change—and the history of organised crime in the post-war period is the most disturbing measure of the continuities. The same political vices that had helped give birth to the mafias would propel them to even greater power and violence during the era of democracy and prosperity. After 1945, just as it had done since 1860, Italy’s political class settled into a messy accommodation with the mob.

  Fascism can be blamed for many things, but certainly not for that accommodation. The Zone Handbooks did not represent the full extent of the knowledge about the mafias that Mussolini’s regime bequeathed. The police and magistrates who had spent much of the 1920s and 1930s fighting organised crime knew exactly how dangerous the gangland organisations of Campania, Calabria and Sicily were: theirs was a bank of experience and understanding from which a fledgling post-Fascist Italy had a great deal to learn. Yet almost everything they knew was ignored or repressed. The new Italian state proved itself more reluctant than Fascism to stand up to the mafias, and even keener than Fascism to unlearn the lessons of the past. Once the Second World War was over, mafia history began all over again—with an act of forgetting.

  PART VII

  FUGGEDABOUTIT

  34

  SICILY: Banditry, land and politics

  TODAY’S ITALY CAME INTO BEING ON 2 AND 3 JUNE 1946, WHEN A PEOPLE BATTERED BY war voted in a referendum to abolish a monarchy that had been profoundly discredited by its subservience to Fascist dictatorship. Here was a clean break with the past: Italy would henceforth be a Republic. In the same poll, Italians elected the members of a Constituent Assembly who were charged with drafting a new constitution for the Republic based on democracy, freedom and the rule of law.

  The camorra, the ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra are a monstrous insult to the Italian Republic’s founding values—the same values that underpin Italy’s, and Europe’s, post-war prosperity. But in Italy, alone among Western European nations, mafia power has been perfectly compatible with the day-to-day reality of freedom, democracy and prosperity. The story of how that happened began as soon as Italy embarked on the difficult transition from war to peace.

  AMGOT came to an end in February 1944: Sicily and much of the South came under the authority of the coalition of anti-Fascist forces making up the new civilian government. So it was southerners, people from the traditional heartlands of organised crime, who were the first Italians to reacquire the power to shape the country’s future. The path towards that future was marked by four milestones:

  >April 1945: the war in Italy came to an end, only a few days before Hitler’s suicide.

  >June 1946: the monarchy was abolished and the Republic was born.

  >March 1947: President Harry S. Truman announced that the United States would intervene to check Soviet expansion across the globe. In Italy, the Partito Comunista Italiano had won great prestige from its role in the Resistance, and was promising to create a Communist Party branch for every bell tower. The peninsula found itself right on the front line of the newly declared Cold War.

  >April 1948: Italy’s first democratic parliamentary election was decisively won by the American-backed Democrazia Cristiana (DC—the Christian Democrats) and decisively lost by the Communists.

  Nowhere in Italy was the post-war transition more turbulent than in Sicily. Nowhere was organised crime more profoundly involved in the turbulence. In southern Calabria and Campania, as we will see, ’ndranghetisti and camorristi carved out their own niche in the post-war settlement. But in Sicily, the mafia had grander designs. Many Sicilians are inclined to express doubts when the label ‘organised crime’ is applied to the mafia. Mafiosi are all criminals, and they always have been. But ordinary criminals, however organised they may be, do not have remotely the kind of political friendships that senior mafiosi have always enjoyed. It would be far, far beyond the mental horizon of any common-or-garden crook to try and shape the institutional destiny of his homeland in the way Sicilian mafiosi tried to do.

  The most clamorous and bloody crime in which the mafia was involved was banditry. At the peak in 1945, hundreds of bandit bands roamed the Sicilian countryside, many of them well armed enough to best the police and Carabinieri in a firefight. Robbery, extortion, kidnapping and the black market gave these outlaws a rich income stream. As was traditional, rather than joining the bandits, mafiosi preferred, wherever they could, to ‘farm’ them through an exchange of favours. For example, the bandits might kick back a percentage of their earnings to the mafiosi, who in return offered tips on lucrative kidnapping or robbery targets, advance news on police roundups, and mediators who could broker ransom payments with the necessary discretion.

  Soon after the Allied invasion, mafiosi set about re-establishing their time-honoured stranglehold over the ‘protection’, rental and management of agricultural land in western Sicily. Many of Sicily’s biggest landowners lived in decadent splendour in Palermo while leaving the running of their vast farms to brutal mafia middlemen. Hence, after the war, the landowners appointed men who would become some of the most notorious bosses of the 1950s and 1960s as leaseholder-managers of their land: like Giuseppe Genco Russo from Mussomeli, and the twenty-year-old killer Luciano Liggio from the agricultural town of Corleone, in the province of Palermo. (Liggio already had an arrest warrant out against his name when, after his predecessor’s mysterious death, he became manager of the Strasatto estate in 1945.)

  The business of land inexorably drew the mafia into politics. At every moment of political upheaval in recent Sicilian history, peasants had made loud claims to fairer contracts or even a share of the estates owned by the Sicilian aristocrats. In the end, mafia shotguns always voiced the definitive response to the peasants’ demands.

  The land issue was bound to resurface after the war and, when it did, the landowners and mafiosi turned terror into a political tool. With the pistol, the machine gun and the hand grenade, mafiosi went all out to eliminate peasant militants and intimidate their supporters into passivity. The appalling roll call of murdered trade unionists and left-wing activists began in the summer of 1944 and had not run its course a full decade later. For example, in the autumn of 1946, at Belmonte Mezzagno near Palermo, the peasants formed a cooperative to take over the management of land from a nearby estate. On 2 November, a death squad of thirteen men turned up in a field where many ordinary members of the cooperative were labouring. The brothers Giovanni, Vincenzo and Giuseppe Santangelo were led away to be executed one after another with a single shot to the back of the head.

  Both the landowners and the mafia feared that a new, democratic Italian government would be forced to make concessions to the Communists, and therefore to the left-wing peasants in Sicily. Accordingly, from as early as 1943, the landowners and the mafia sponsored a movement to separate the island off from the rest of the peninsula. The road to Sicilian independence was plotted at a series of meetings held over the coming years. Scions of some of the oldest family lineages in Sicily welcomed the island’s most senior mobsters to their luxurious country villas. At one of those meetings in September 1945, the bosses negotiated a deal to integrate some bandits into the Separatist movement’s army. Salvatore Giuliano, the leader of the most notorious bandit gang of all, was offered a large sum of money, the rank of colonel, and the promise of an amnesty once the flag of a free Sicily was raised. There followed a ser
ies of assaults on Carabinieri barracks that were intended to prepare the ground for an insurrection.

  In the end, there was no Separatist insurrection. The movement’s ramshackle military wing was dispersed. More importantly, its political leadership was outmanoeuvred: in May 1946 Sicily was granted autonomy, and its own regional parliament, while remaining within Italy. Mafiosi who had supported Separatism began the search for new political partners.

  If Separatism was in decline in 1946, Sicily’s criminal emergency had become more serious than ever. Bandit gangs, often operating under the mafia’s wing, were robbing and kidnapping at will. The police and Carabinieri in Sicily were sending information aplenty to Rome. Many of them had taken a leading role in Fascism’s secret war on the mafia in the 1930s. For that reason they were under no illusions about what the mafia really was, as this report from October 1946 makes clear:

  The mafia is an occult organisation that traverses Sicily’s provinces and has secret tentacles that reach into all social classes. Its exclusive objective is getting rich by unlawful means at the expense of honest and vulnerable people. It has now reconstituted its cells or ‘Families’, as they are referred to here in the jargon, especially in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani, Caltanissetta, Enna and Agrigento.

  So these were the violent years that decided Sicily’s future. Not coincidentally, these were also the years when Italy’s rulers decided to forget everything they knew about Sicily’s notorious ‘occult organisation’. The most revealing illustration of that process of forgetting is not a mafia massacre or a secret report. To understand how the Sicilian mafia really worked in the late 1940s, to understand its unique ability to vanish into thin air, while at the same time seeping into the state apparatus, we need to watch Italy’s first-ever mafia movie.

  35

  SICILY: In the Name of the Law

  It is September 1948, but the scorched expanses of the Sicilian interior that stretch out before the camera seem timeless. A young man in a double-breasted jacket, his chiselled face shaded by a fedora, sits erect in the saddle. Suddenly, he swivels to look out across a lunar landscape of dust and rock. He sees eight figures on horseback emerge over a hilltop to stand silhouetted against the sky.

  ‘The mafia.’ The young man speaks the dread word aloud to himself, and his jaw sets with determination. His name is Guido Schiavi, and he is a magistrate, a champion of the law. This is the confrontation he has been expecting.

  The mafiosi, riding beautifully curried thoroughbred mares, come down the hill towards the magistrate at a stately canter. The soundtrack provides an accompaniment of stirring trumpets and driving strings to their cavalcade. As they approach, Schiavi sees that each is dressed in corduroy and fustian; each has a flat cap pulled down over a craggily impassive face; and each has a shotgun slung over his shoulder.

  The mafiosi come to a halt on a low bridge. Their boss, who goes by the name of Turi Passalacqua, is unmistakeable on his statuesque white mount. He raises his cap courteously to address the magistrate.

  Good day to you, voscenza. Welcome to our land. You do us a great honour.

  You are very young, sir. And my friends and I are very happy about that. Because we know that the young are pure of heart. You are intelligent, and I’m sure you have already understood the way of the world here. Things have been like this for more than a hundred years, and everyone is content.

  The magistrate Schiavi is not impressed by this homily. He objects that there are plenty of people who are far from ‘content’ with this ‘way of the world’: the victims of murder and blackmail and their families, for example; or the brutalised farm labourers and sulphur miners. But his words fail to provoke even a flicker of irritation on the mafioso’s serene countenance:

  Every society has its defects. And besides, it’s always possible to reach an agreement between men of honour . . . You need only express your desires.

  Now it is the magistrate’s turn to remain unmoved. In tones of measured defiance he affirms that he has only one desire, only one duty: to apply the law.

  Clearly, there can be no compromise. Two opposing value systems have deployed their forces in the field. A great clash between the state and the mafia is inevitable. All that remains is for the capomafia Turi Passalacqua to restate his credo:

  You are a brave man, but we make the law here, according to our ancient traditions. This is an island. The government is a long way away. And if we weren’t here, with our own kind of severity, then criminals would end up spoiling everything, like rye-grass spoils the wheat. Nobody would be safe in their own home any more. We are not criminals. We are honourable men: as free and independent as the birds in the sky.

  And with that, the trumpets and strings swell once more. We watch as the posse of Men of Honour wheels round and gallops off into the distance.

  In 1940s Italy, the movies meant much more than just entertainment. The US studios had boycotted the Italian market in protest at Mussolini’s attempts to control imports. During the last five years of Fascism, Italians were denied their weekly dose of Californian celluloid. When the theatres were reopened after the Liberation, and the supply from Hollywood resumed, Italians were soon going to the movies in greater numbers than ever—greater than in any other European country. The glamour of Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford held out the promise of what freedom and democracy might bring to a country racked by war and demoralised by the debacle of Fascism.

  Yet no country that had lived through such traumatic changes could ever be entirely satisfied with the products of the US studios. So, in the cinema, the years 1945–50 have come to be defined by the gritty homegrown poetry of Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City or Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Neorealism (‘new realism’) was the cultural buzzword of the day. Neorealist directors took their cameras out into the bomb-shattered streets; they found moving dramas among the peasants toiling on the terraces or wading through rice paddies. Neorealist cinema seemed so true to life that it was as if the skin of history had peeled off as film (to quote what one critic evocatively wrote at the time). There has never been a moment when the movie screen was more important to how Italy imagined the light and the dark within itself.

  Released in Italian cinemas in March 1949, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law) was Italy’s first mafia film. It is a strange muddle of a movie: it has many of the accoutrements of Neorealist cinema, notably in its use of the sun-blasted Sicilian landscape; but it also straddles the divide between Neorealism and Hollywood. The film’s director, Pietro Germi, had never been to Sicily before his film went into production in 1948. Then again, his ignorance mattered little. Because when he got off the ferry and set foot on the island for the first time, he already knew exactly what he was going to find: Arizona. In the Name of the Law stages a shotgun marriage between Neorealism and the cowboy movie genre. Germi’s Sicily is Tombstone with Mediterranean trimmings: a place of lone lawmen, long stares, and ambushes in gulches. Here trains pull into desert stations, gunshots echo across vast skies, and men stride into bars and drink glasses of Sicilian aniseed liqueur as if they were knocking back fingers of hooch whiskey.

  Germi’s reasoning was that the quasi–Wild West setting would dramatise the head-to-head between the lone lawman and his criminal foe. Muscular heart-throb Massimo Girotti, playing the young magistrate Guido Schiavi, was to be Italy’s answer to John Wayne. But Germi’s camera is even more obsessed with mafia boss Turi Passalacqua, played by French veteran Charles Vanel: he is always framed from below, cut out against a pale sky—as if he were part craggy rancher, and part Apache sage.

  The cowboys-cum-capos formula clearly worked. ‘Frenetic applause’ was reported at the first public screenings. In the Name of the Law went on to become the third most popular movie of the 1948–9 season in Italy, taking a bumper 401 million lire (roughly $9.3 million in 2011 values) at the box office, and standing toe-to-commercial-toe with such Hollywood classics as Fort Apache and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
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  As mob movies go, In the Name of the Law may seem quaint at first glance—now that our tastes are attuned to GoodFellas and Gomorrah. Yet Germi’s film is sinister too: it has a back-story full of dark surprises, and a context of unprecedented mafia violence and arrogance. More recent classics of the mafia movie genre, like The Godfather, are often criticised for glamourising organised crime. But in this respect Coppola’s film has nothing on In the Name of the Law. The opening credits display a familiar disclaimer: ‘Any reference to events, places and people who really exist is purely coincidental’. But that is some distance from the truth.

  In the Name of the Law was based on a novel, and inspired by the example of the novel’s author. Written in the early months of 1947, Piccola Pretura (Local Magistrate’s Office) was the work of Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Sicilian mafia. Born and brought up in Palermo, Lo Schiavo was a hero of the First World War who, when the war ended, went into the front line of the fight against organised crime on his island home.

  Lo Schiavo’s life was closely intertwined with the history of the Sicilian mafia under Fascism. In 1926 he was himself a young magistrate, like the hero of his novel. (The similarity between the names of author and protagonist—Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo/Guido Schiavi—is no accident.) In that year, Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship launched a long overdue attack on the mafia. The ‘cancer of delinquency’ was to be cut out of Sicily by the Fascist ‘scalpel’, the Duce boasted. The police and Carabinieri led the assault, and prosecuting magistrates like Lo Schiavo had the job of preparing the evidence needed to convert thousands of arrests into convictions.