Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  This trial’s a defeat, Orlando proclaimed nevertheless. It’s like Nuremberg. Victor’s justice. There was something to be said for Nuremberg, I thought, with all its faults. You had to offer an accounting to history. You had to assign responsibilities, however imperfectly. It’s a political defeat, he insisted. Andreotti should’ve been dealt with when he was still in power. So should Hitler. It was hard to disagree with that. And sunk in a sofa among the duke’s family’s incunabula, Leoluca Orlando, who was once the youngest professor of law in the history of Palermo university, gave me a lesson on mafia and politics in postwar Italy. He was saying the trial would never have happened if the Berlin wall hadn’t come down, if the Soviet Union hadn’t disintegrated. I tried to demur, to qualify, to question—When Andreotti talks about an international conspiracy against him, interrupted Orlando, he’s right in a way. He no longer enjoys international protection that he had for all those years of the cold war. The Americans don’t need need him now the fear of communism’s gone.

  There was no point trying to make this thing a dialogue. Orlando was no longer even looking at me. He seemed to have forgotten my presence. His eyes were fixed on some distant imaginary point beyond the library wall. The mafia isn’t just a criminal organization. It isn’t just people with guns. It’s a system of power, and it became the formal, legal political system in Sicily at the end of the war. The Americans brought it. It all goes back to 1943 … The sun was just past its zenith outside and a blinding white light enveloped the jagged promontory and the green gardens at its foot. The air was quite still. Professor Orlando raised his voice still further, weighted his cadences and gestured somewhere over my shoulder. He was no longer speaking to me. I slumped forgotten on the low divan. Orlando was speaking to History.

  II

  A SECRET KISS

  AROUND MIDNIGHT in Sicily they started coming ashore. It was the night between the ninth and the tenth of July, summer on the southern coast between Licata and Gela. It was 1943, a year before the Normandy invasion. The allied armies were making their first European landing. Nine days later Rome was bombed for the first time and five days after that the fascist government fell. Two months after the Sicily landings the new Italian government signed an armistice with the allies and a month later declared war on Germany. As partisans fought the retreating nazis and the fascist rump regime in the north, behind allied lines the political parties of the coming republic took form. In Sicily a rather particular state of affairs prevailed.

  Disembarking on the southern coast between Licata and Gela, the US seventh army went through central and western Sicily with curious ease. It took the American troops seven days to secure the mountainous German-occupied island, a little under half the size of Tasmania with ten times the population. Casualties were negligible. General Patton exulted that it was the fastest blitzkrieg in history. The unparalleled speed and painlessness of the American operation didn’t pass without comment, especially when people compared it with the five-week slog up the east coast of Sicily by the British and Canadian forces under Montgomery, who suffered thousands of losses.

  Leoluca Orlando reminded me now of the old story about the allied invasion. The vanguard of the invading Americans, he said, carried flags and foulards of yellow silk, embroidered with the letter L. One had been dropped by a lowflying US reconnaissance plane on the hill town of Villalba, at the doorstep of the local priest, brother of don Calogero Vizzini. Don Calò was about to be made an honorary colonel in the US Army. He was already capo di tutti i capi, boss of bosses of the Sicilian mafia and had thirty-nine murders, six attempted murders, thirty-six robberies, thirty-seven thefts, sixty-three extortions on his personal charge sheet. He was heavily into black market business when the kerchief fell from the sky. As the Americans moved toward Palermo, two thirds of the defending Italian troops deserted. The L had stood for Lucky Luciano, born Salvatore Lucania in Lercara Friddi, a few miles west of Villalba. At the beginning of 1943, Luciano had been serving a thirty-to-fifty-year sentence in a US penitentiary and was considered the capo di tutti i capi of the American Cosa Nostra.

  Five months before the allied invasion of Sicily he’d appealed for a reduction of his sentence in return for services rendered to the nation. He was said to have been aboard the plane that dropped the foulard. He was certainly released and deported to Italy in 1946. An elderly lawyer once recounted to me his horror and indignation when many years earlier he’d found himself at the next table from Luciano in one of the smartest restaurants in Naples, where Luciano set up residence after the war and where he eventually died in 1962. Luciano was living off contraband in drugs and cigarettes, and a Naples police report of 1954 described how his attitude of insolent self-assurance and lack of visible income were a cause for scandal among decent people. That same lawyer, a Neapolitan with the hunched and stunted figure of one who’d lacked essential foods in the period of growth, not unlike Andreotti’s, bright wily eyes and a nose and chin that went a considerable way toward meeting at some ideal point in front of his hooked and deeply smiling mouth, knew something at first hand about the deals done by these returning native sons on the backs of starving Neapolitans and Palermitans. The lawyer had himself spent much time at the war’s end skulking around the Naples waterfront with American tinned foods secreted inside a heavy overcoat that was far too big for his malnourished frame. Sixty per cent of the food unloaded by the allies on the Naples docks went not to the starving people but directly on to the black market, with help from a lot of the military.

  Gore Vidal remarked once that Sicily had been liberated by Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese and the American army. It was certainly a matter of record that Genovese, Luciano’s man in New York and a major drug trafficker of the day, also ended up in Italy at this time, as official interpreter and advisor to the US military governor in Naples. Colonel Charles Poletti was already, in Luciano’s words, a good friend. For some reason Genovese was bundled back to the States in the summer of 1944, after less than a year of rendering services to the nation, though not before he had set up the vigorous black market operation which was then taken over by Luciano. These star turns among the returning native sons were backed up by a heavy representation among the foot soldiers. Fifteen per cent of the invading US forces were Sicilian born or of Sicilian descent.

  All of them carried a slim booklet signed by General Eisenhower outlining the island’s long and unhappy history, its primitive and underdeveloped condition, the lack of running water and sanitation in most of the houses, the illiteracy of nearly half the population, the special risks presented by typhus, dysentery, malaria and the mafia, a secret society. It may have been among these lower ranks of the occupying forces that the indigenous mafia found its closest and most useful friends. The American records are still secret that would make clear the role of the American Cosa Nostra in smoothing the allied invasion of Sicily. There is no proof … of a plot, Sicily’s modern historian has written of this time, and Orlando’s story of Luciano’s yellow silk foulard might have been a myth. What happened during the military occupation wasn’t. As they handed over the administration of the island to the locals, the military authorities found that those established figures whose records were most convincingly antifascist were, whether the allied military knew it or not, the local mafia bosses. The repression by Mussolini’s egregious iron prefect Mori had forced them for twenty years to lie low, if not in jail. In that wartime context they looked impeccably antifascist. So with a certain rapid plausibility don Calò Vizzini was installed as mayor of Villalba, and so were the heads of many other mafia families made the administrators of their localities throughout central and western Sicily. It wasn’t necessarily planned, but it set the pattern.

  The British military governor wrote later that many of my officers fell into the trap … of following the advice of their interpreters. Who were, he added, mafiosi. A US Army captain, in a worried report of October 1943 on the black market in food supplies, found that the mafia was not mere
ly a criminal organization but also a social system, a way of life, a profession. It was an acute remark, and it echoed the Tuscan observer Leopoldo Franchetti’s brilliant report on the Sicilian society of seventy-odd years before. That underdeveloped in the soldiers’ guide to Sicily had been an understatement. If the foot soldiers of the liberating army had had time and resources for more extensive and more analytical reading, they might have learnt that although feudalism had been legally abolished in Sicily in 1812, the territory through which they were passing with such suspect ease still largely consisted, despite a history of peasant agitation and uprising that had occurred regularly at least once in every generation since, of vast hereditary estates.

  These feudal estates hadn’t much changed in a couple of millennia, since the days when Greek-speaking Sicily became a Roman province two hundred years BCE, and its latifundia the Republic’s granary, as Cato wrote, the nurse at whose breast the Roman people is fed. The island then was a freshly-deforested and ruthlessly exploited domain of endless wheat-growing estates worked by slaves. Most of the following two millennia were also spent under foreign rule, and the people who worked the land lived hardly better than in slavery. It is impossible to calculate, wrote the late Moses Finley in his history of ancient Sicily, how much produce and money have been taken out of Sicily in rents, taxes and plain looting in the past two thousand years. Speaking of the damage done, Finley added

  not to all the people … for the traditional way of ruling Sicily has been through the agency of local magnates … who shared rather handsomely in the profits in return for their services in exercising the administrative and police powers.

  For centuries the latifondi had been owned by aristocratic families who were seen less and less on their land. They disported in Palermo, Naples, Rome or Paris, while their estates, guarded by armed campieri, were controlled by the tenant farmers who managed them, the hated gabellotti. These let them out in turn to sharecroppers, and the land was worked for the sharecroppers by day labourers subsisting on bread, pasta and beans in conditions of poverty and precariousness that the demure phrases of General Eisenhower’s Sicily Soldier’s Guide barely hinted at.

  One of the few extant images from the American invasion of Sicily is Robert Capa’s photo of a trimly uniformed American soldier hunkered down on muscular haunches in some dusty road of the Sicilian interior, taking directions from a bandy-legged and white-bearded old peasant with a kerchief on his head, who’s pointing the way with a knobbly stick that looks like an extension of his own limbs. The photo’s clearly posed, fake as hell and freighted with propagandistic intent. We know, said Sciascia, that he’s showing him the right road. But nothing could fake the story of the two physiques. The old Sicilian, as upright as he’s able to stand, is no taller than the squatting young soldier. You could imagine variants of the image for every invasion of Sicily back through the millennia. The allied landing of 1943, said Sciascia,

  took place in almost identical conditions to the landing of the Arabs on 16 June 827, with the Germans’ Goering division in the place of the Byzantine garrison … the island as ever without defences, crushed by a greedy and corrupt administration, terrified of the present and uncertain of the future.

  Through legal chicanery, political temporizing and a lot of down-home intimidation, Sicily’s tiny group of hereditary landowning families had in fact added to their estates in the hundred and thirty years between the formal end of feudalism and the allied invasion. Common lands, assigned in law to the peasant farmers, had been absorbed by the big estates, which took up more than three quarters of Sicily’s cultivated land. Garibaldi’s liberation brought none of the promised land reform. Sicilian peasants, the mass of the people, were worse off in unified Italy than they’d been in the eighteenth century. In huge numbers Sicilians were forced by hunger to emigrate to the Americas. By the time fascism arrived that escape route was closed off, and by the time fascism collapsed Sicilians were desperate. The key to the landowners’ continuing grip was the down-home intimidation. Which was where the mafia came in.

  * * *

  FOLKLORISTS AND etymologists played with unanswerable questions about the origins of an enigmatic word. Was mafia an Arabic word for a place of refuge, as Norman Lewis suggested? I couldn’t trace a source for this, though Italian etymologists last century proposed mahjas, the Arabic for boasting. An Arabic origin for a word whose use was first recorded late last century, some eight hundred years after the Arabs had left Sicily, seemed improbable. That it was the cry ma fille! of a mother whose daughter’s rape by French soldiery provoked the uprising of the Sicilian Vespers, almost as long ago, was fanciful. Was it a political acronym from the time of Italy’s unification? Someone else suggested a link with guappo, the figure of the young Neapolitan gangster, and that came from the Spanish. That was stretching it too. Praising a man, or a horse, or a woman, as mafiuso meant the animal was elegant, proud, vital, spirited, and a mafiuso late last century was like his Neapolitan counterpart the guappo, an elegant thug.

  The word mafia was first formally recorded by the prefect of Palermo in 1865, after the unification of Italy. It wasn’t included in the Italian penal code until 1982. The mafia until the end of the war was mainly that criminal element in rural Sicily that the landowners, and the state too, found useful in maintaining property and power. The Oxford English Dictionary was still insisting in the nineteen seventies that the mafia was

  often erroneously supposed to constitute an organized secret society existing for criminal purposes.

  When the New Shorter came out in 1993 it got its definition by removing the first five words from the phrase.

  The mafiosi were closely allied with the gabellotti, whose own name derived from the Arabic and meant tax collectors, and who administered the estates. They were often the same people. The mafia afforded a form of social control through its extortion and intimidation of the peasant families. It also, in the towns, became a fast if dangerous way of acquiring wealth and power. Even in its origins, the mafia was a parasitic presence that grew in the space between the state and the people. The mafia was outlaw but tolerated, secret but recognizable, criminal but upholding of order. It protected and ripped off the owners of the great estates, protected and ripped off the sharecroppers who worked the estates, protected and ripped off the peasants who slaved on them. The mafia ripped off everyone as it protected everyone, in the historian Paul Ginsborg’s words, above all against itself.

  The mafia soon diversified and citified. It was too good an idea to languish in the backblocks, and not long after the war had radically transformed and internationalized itself, but the essential qualities were there from the start. There were a lot of ways of making money if you were prepared to kill for it. The rural mafia had offered a social order based on violence and terror. It insinuated itself where ordinary human trust and solidarity had been worn away by poverty and exploitation. It was strong in proportion to the weakness of the state. Conservative by nature and opportunistic in its procedures, mafia criminality had always been parasitic of established political power. Its political parasitism was another face of its economic parasitism. The essence of the mafia, its criminal genius, had always been to know how to make itself needed. The mafia had always known how to cosy up to those in power.

  * * *

  A LOT of people uncertainly in power felt they needed the mafia in the mid nineteen-forties. The landowners of Sicily and their allies were anxious about the uprisings of hungry Sicilians that were going on all over the island. Crowds were demanding food in the cities and peasants were demanding land in the country. There were confrontations and deaths. In Palermo in 1944 the army fired into a hungry crowd, killing forty-four and wounding many more. The allied military government, as Ginsborg remarked, ensured the southern rural élites a painless transition from fascism and maintained a status quo based … on the most ruthless exploitation of the rural poor. A hunger-driven surge of activism was now filling the political vacuum after the
collapse of fascism. The landowners were also looking with alarm at what was going on across the water on the continent. The communist party was out of hiding and entering mainstream politics. It was formidably organized and active, reaping the political rewards of its long fight against fascism. A communist minister of agriculture in the provisional government was issuing radical decrees on land reform. The new conservative catholic party, the Democrazia Cristiana, despite the furious backing of the Vatican, didn’t yet look particularly convincing to the landowners of Sicily. Democracy was in the air, and the Sicilian élite, which had managed the transition from reaction to fascism to allied occupation smoothly enough, was now greatly disturbed. It looked around for friends.