by Peter Robb
American wealth and modernity had been glimpsed in the occupation, the nearness of it felt after a century when America was that dreamt-of distant land where poor Sicilian emigrants had become rich. America was the source of those monthly dollar remittances that had kept alive whole families who’d sometimes kept a framed dollar note among the icons on the hovel wall. Agitation for land in Sicily, reform in Italy, the pull of American wealth and power, historic distrust of the continent, all fed into the curious and short-lived Sicilian separatist episode at the end of the war. In 1944 there were half a million members of the separatist movement, five times as many as all the other parties together. It was not exactly independence the movement was after. Voltaire had described Sicilians a couple of centuries earlier as hating their masters and rebelling against them, but not making any real effort worthy of freedom, and separatism ran true to form. While the peasants of Sicily wanted to be owners of the land they worked, the separatists wanted new masters, not freedom. The separatist movement lurched toward extremism when the allies handed over Sicily’s administration to the new Italian government. A secret army was formed to lead a separatist uprising. The mafia, gravitating as it always does to real power, became the separatists’ close ally. Sicily would become the forty-ninth state. Sicily would be part of America. Big, rich, powerful America, where Sicilians had so many friends.
Mixed up with the mafia and the separatists were the bandits. In September 1943, a young peasant from Montelepre, Salvatore Giuliano, not quite twenty-one years old, was stopped by a patrol of carabinieri. He had a horse with a load of contraband grain. Compulsory grain stockpiles were a wildly hated measure that barely hindered the busy mafia black market and badly hurt the desperate poor of the interior. Giuliano pulled a revolver and killed a carabiniere. Caught up in a police raid near Montelepre four months later, he killed another with a machine gun. A few weeks later he organized a prison breakout whose escapees became the core of a bandit group that took to the hills behind Montelepre in January 1944. Second in command to Giuliano was his cousin Gaspare Pisciotta. This daring news commenced his wild and oddly long career.
Giuliano’s bandit gang was one of forty or so bandit groups loose in poor and lawless western Sicily by the end of 1943. As the mafia reassumed its powers under the allies most were quickly eliminated. Giuliano’s was notable for the charm and sense of theatre shown by the people’s bandit, the king of Montelepre: the florid pronouncements and the shows of populist justice, and the diamond ring he wore after removing it himself from the duchess of Pratameno’s finger in her Palermo home. And for the impunity the gang enjoyed, the uses to which this impunity was put, and the nature of his end. As a much-photographed celebrity bandit, Giuliano was sought out and visited by the national and international press and Vito Genovese, the New York mafia boss and US army advisor, and had less well-documented contacts with politicians and carabinieri. He had a little romance with a Swedish photoreporter. He also met with the chief prosecutor of Palermo. The only people unable to find him, wrote the judges of Viterbo grimly a long time later of Giuliano’s seven-year career, were the police. Some found him, however. Giuliano celebrated Christmas eve of 1949 with panettone and liqueurs brought by an inspector-general of police.
Everyone in this uncertain time was playing a double or a multiple game and there were informers everywhere. Giuliano had plants among the police, and they had informers in his band. It wasn’t clear whether Genovese, when he met Giuliano, was calling as advisor to colonel Charles Poletti of the US Army or in a less formal capacity. Around this time the honorary US colonel don Calò Vizzini was also getting to see a lot of colonel Poletti. Giuliano was asked by the separatists, now including don Calò Vizzini, to be one of their military leaders. The mafia, typically, was playing it both ways here. Its leaders were also joining the newly formed DC in case the separatist adventure failed. Giuliano’s separatist convictions, his suspicions of Rome and the communists, whom he called the vile reds, were deeper than his resentment of the mafia and the landowners, and he took the rank of lieutenant colonel in the ragtag separatist army. He expected to rise soon to general. He probably also expected American military support. After a year of sporadic armed clashes, in one of which Giuliano’s allies murdered eight ambushed carabinieri, and in which the insurrectionary leader was not always clearly distinguishable from the Giuliano following a parallel criminal career as king of Montelepre, the Sicilian insurrection fizzled. For once, an initiative from Rome headed off disaster.
In early 1946, even before the constitution of the new Italian republic had been approved, Italy’s provisional government responded to the alarm in Sicily by backing its decrees on land reform with a radical regional constitution. It granted Sicily a great autonomy and an elected parliament. A flow of funds began to arrive from Rome that would continue for thirty years. These billions of dollars were under Sicilian control. There were no strings. The landless farmers of Sicily suddenly found parliamentary politics more persuasive. The activity of trade unionists, socialists and communists was reinforced by the radical decrees coming from Rome, and made land reform through collective action seem possible. For a moment, Sicily had broken out of the archaic cycle of social distrust, political resignation and periodic violence.
It took courage to be an activist in Sicily then. Party sections and union offices were attacked and burnt by Giuliano’s bandits, and in the ten years from 1945 the mafia assassinated some fifty trade unionists and political organizers in Sicily. Don Calò had already shown reformers what to expect. As the reforms were being debated in Rome, an eloquent communist leader and a local socialist took the struggle to Villalba in September 1944, where don Calò’s brother was the priest and his nephew alternated with him as mayor and secretary of the newly-opened DC branch. Don Calò allowed a meeting in the piazza, as long as neither the mafia nor land reform were discussed and no peasant took part. It was a matter of showing respect for the hospitality they were offered. The meeting went ahead. Drawn by the arguments, peasants started appearing at windows overlooking the piazza and at corners of the cordoned-off streets. As the communist started to talk about the land, the mafia and the local big estate, they joined the discussion. The priest started ringing the church bells to drown the voices. Don Calò shouted It’s all lies. Then the mafia started shooting and throwing bombs into the crowd. Fourteen people were wounded, one of them the communist speaker. The socialist slung the speaker over his shoulder and carried him to safety.
Though demochristian opposition hobbled the land reforms, and though the communist party leaders were more interested in power manoeuvres in Rome than the struggles of southern peasants, the labourers and their families continued to occupy the untilled land that was now legally theirs. The legal challenges by the peasant cooperatives went ahead in the courts of Sicily’s hinterland. In April 1947, in the first elections for the new Sicilian parliament, the reforming left won. The DC went into a tailspin and separatist support withered. It was an evanescent and local triumph, however, in a world that was hardening into cold war blocs. The Truman Doctrine was a month old, and Harry Truman, who’d been the possibly rather startled recipient of a letter from the barely literate bandit Salvatore Giuliano on the need to stem the communist tide in Sicily, made special reference to Italy. Italy was in the front line of the fight against world communism. On May 1 the US secretary of state George Marshall wrote to the American ambassador in Rome urging that the communists be excluded from the Italian government.
That same day, happy at the left’s success in the Sicilian elections ten days earlier, fifteen hundred people from several nearby towns gathered in family groups to celebrate May Day on a rolling open piece of country at Portella della Ginestra, overlooked by a stony crag called la Pizzuta. It’d been an annual thing for a couple of decades, interrupted by fascism, and the place was near Piana degli Albanesi, in that high country just south of Palermo and not far from Montelepre. They arrived on foot or in those brightly painted
wooden carts Sicilian peasants still used then, drawn by mules and horses, bringing their food and wine. The noise, as the speeches began, was taken for celebratory fireworks and raised a festive cheer. Then we saw a horse fall, said a survivor. Then we heard people screaming. People ran and tried to hide. Only of course there was nowhere to hide. Machine guns were firing from the rocks of la Pizzuta. Hand grenades were hurled into the crowd. They were Giuliano’s men. They were all wearing white raincoats, so they all looked alike. The shooting continued for fifteen minutes and left eleven dead, some of them children, and sixty-five wounded. The bodies lay on the ground for hours, with the wounded, who were groaning until a truck arrived. There’d been another death before the massacre began. A campiere who’d noticed the bandits preparing the attack was seized and killed and thrown down an eighty-metre well.
* * *
THE ONLY sure thing about Portella della Ginestra on 1 May 1947 was the number of dead and wounded. That it had been Giuliano’s bandits who carried out the massacre was also soon agreed. Beyond that, nothing was clear. Twenty-five years later, an Italian parliamentary commission that had spent ten years examining the revival of the mafia in Sicily after the war, concluded that
the reasons why Giuliano ordered the massacre of Portella della Ginestra will long, perhaps forever, remain cloaked in mystery. After a long and thorough investigation such as the commission has conducted, it is absolutely impossible to attribute responsibility either directly or morally to this or that party or politician …
The commission stated that the origin and content of a mysterious letter delivered to Giuliano, read and burnt just before he told his men the hour of our liberation has come and ordered the killings, and
his relations with journalists and military personnel from other countries and with Italian politicians, remain obscure pages of an extremely confused and tormented period in the history of our country.
This was intended in 1972 as a summary of a disturbed unhappy time now more than twenty years past. It sounds now like a judgement on the last half century. There was a trial for Portella della Ginestra. It was held years later and miles away in Viterbo, on the continent. Looking back in 1995 on the long complicities of Italian justice, another Palermo judge who’d worked with Falcone in the antimafia pool described this trial’s findings as the first grey page in the postwar history of Italian law. The trial was bound to fail because the principal accused wasn’t there. Giuliano was dead. He’d been shot in his sleep by his cousin and lieutenant Pisciotta on 4 July 1950.
The world learnt that Giuliano had been killed in a shootout at Montelepre with the men of the Banditry Suppression Taskforce Command, a body lately and hastily created, as its name suggested, by an embarrassed government. After Pisciotta had or hadn’t killed Giuliano, as he later accused himself of doing, the carabinieri, on whose behalf the mafia had in any case arranged Giuliano’s death, dragged the body from its bed to a courtyard and shot it up, setting the scene of the fatal showdown. The summoned press who raced to the scene, and photos of that day show a crowd of them, was first awed, then suspicious, and finally derisive. The scenario fell apart. The blood, for one thing, was flowing uphill from the body. One began his report for an Italian weekly, The only thing for sure is, he’s dead … The leader of the Banditry Suppression Taskforce Command was promoted. The shootout scenario collapsed totally.
Giuliano before he died had already felt used and entrapped by his friends. He’d wanted out and would have taken an amnesty in Italy or a passage to the United States or Brazil. To his former friends in the new republic the Giuliano outlaw gang was a growing embarrassment, a primitive anachronism. Politically, Giuliano was now what Italians liked to call a mina vagante, a floating mine of deeply compromising knowledge that might at any moment blow up in the face of respectable conservatives. Not to mention the police, carabinieri, magistrates. There were obscure manoeuvres. Giuliano’s brother-in-law, one of the gang’s leaders, slipped away to the United States, where he was arrested and returned to Sicily. Another leader of the gang, who was also a police informer, was killed while under arrest in a carabinieri barracks. It was a police inspector friend he used to meet regularly who’d warned Giuliano to watch out for your cousin. Giuliano had said more than once in his last days that he knew Scelba wanted him dead, and he’d had his suspicions about Pisciotta.
Scelba was the minister for the interior, a Sicilian and a demochristian who was to become notorious for the savagery with which he put down union struggles in the newly-industrialized Italy. There’d been a letter from Scelba promising an amnesty for Giuliano. Somebody said it was forged. When Pisciotta announced during the trial at Viterbo that he and not the carabinieri had killed Giuliano, he told the court he’d killed at Scelba’s request. He said Scelba, and a group of separatist and monarchist politicians in Sicily, had ordered the massacre at Portella della Ginestra. The mafia had commissioned the crime for the politicians and the mafia had arranged Giuliano’s removal three years later, just as it was picking off individual communists, socialists, trade unionists. Another dozen were killed that same year of 1947, by the mafia directly or through the agency of the bandits. The mafia was making itself useful to its new political protectors by dispatching its enemies, establishing a pattern that was to continue for decades, until Cosa Nostra decided in the nineteen eighties that it was no longer taking orders from anyone. The court in Viterbo refused to look into this, because a second trial was to be held in Palermo of those politically responsible. Its findings, however, were such that the Palermo court later found itself unable to determine whose, if anyone’s, the political responsibility was. This was what was meant by grey. In the middle of a trial that was memorable for equivocation and contradiction on the part of the state’s witnesses and general incredulity and derision among the public, Pisciotta shouted, Bandits, police, state, they’re all one body, like father, son and holy ghost! Years later, that was all people remembered.
Pisciotta had announced at the trial that he was going to reveal all about the politicians behind the massacre and the Giuliano gang’s other activities. He’d say who’d ordered the shooting and firebombing attacks on left-wing party offices and carabinieri barracks. Pisciotta was taken back to the Ucciardone prison in Palermo. The Ucciardone had always functioned as a mafia nerve centre, the place where its politics, wars, plots, alliances and eliminations were decided. Pisciotta had hardly arrived when someone put strychnine in his coffee. After several days of agony he died. No charges were ever laid. That same day, 8 January 1954, Scelba was sworn in as prime minister of Italy.
* * *
A FLURRY of aides outside the library door roused me from my trance. The door opened a crack and a hesitant personal assistant whispered that all was ready. Behind him, against the light, I saw the fuzzy outlines of figures in wine coloured jackets carrying silver trays. Orlando seemed oblivious. Orlando was now quoting Goethe in German. And saying he’d been the first Italian politician who named names when he talked about the mafia, shocking the demochristians by naming the sinners as well as the sins, and describing himself as a Lutheran catholic or a catholic Lutheran. Southern Italy’s problem is that it lacks the ethic of individual responsibility. We had the counterreformation in the south without having had the reformation, said the man who went to university in Heidelberg.
Finally it looked as though we might be going to eat. Orlando had suddenly remembered that he had to race off to a conference of European police. He was pushing for greater integration of police activity internationally against organized crime. He was also concerned that arms were gaining on drugs as a mafia business, and that other governments were being drawn into collusion with the mafia. We’d come full circle. At the end of our long talk and the start of a new age, the cold war over, the problem was still crime and politics. He was still talking enthusiastically about the buzz of heavy Sicilian dialect you heard now in business class on flights to Moscow and how convenient enriched plutonium was to handle,
even better than refined heroin, when we walked across the hall and into another room. It was the anteroom to a vast canopied terrace, which I could see through a fluttering muslin curtain, and its sole furnishing was a long table covered by white cloth and a spread for maybe a hundred people. We seemed to be the sole partakers. The table was manned by white-gloved waiters wielding outsize silver spoons and forks in one hand and empty plates in the other. I was hungry now, and looking forward to a real Sicilian meal. Tuna, swordfish, sardines. Nearing the table, though, I found much blander fare. There were plates of salmon and ham and cold turkey. Russian salad and a big paella and lettuce and much else beside that failed to lodge itself in the memory. Everything was pastel coloured. With a tiny sigh I prepared to hoe in nonetheless, hoping the insipid international cuisine wasn’t a concession to my presumed taste. It was therefore with some dismay that I noticed Orlando was taking almost none of it. He was following a new regime. He’d been seriously ill twice in the previous year. He’d found he had cancer, and had nearly died of pneumonia, and the double assault had shocked him into change.
Out of respect for his crisis I joined him in abstinence. At least I knew why he now seemed so slight. Even the chilled bottle of Regaleali, a delicious Sicilian white wine, that I’d noticed earlier gathering dewy beads of moisture had now vanished unopened, like a mirage in the shimmering heat. I held out my glass for a little more tepid mineral water. Orlando had a sweet tooth, however, and the police chiefs of Europe waited elsewhere as he forked up a confection of chocolate and whipped cream out on the terrace. We took our coffee and he was off with his guards and assistants, in the back of an armoured Alfa Romeo with tinted windows. Its wheels spun in the deep gravel, found purchase and the car powered down the drive. Someone called me a taxi, and as I waited in the vestibule I imagined the cleaners, gardeners, waiters, handymen, gatekeepers and kitchenhands upstairs, all descending on the laden board we’d left. A scene, I thought, Lampedusa might have used for The Leopard.