Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  There were two drawbacks to the satisfaction of Mussolini’s whim for a Balkan entertainment. The first, and more important, was the security risk involved. By mustering every policeman in Palermo and placing them back to back with loaded rifles at intervals of ten yards all along the Via Maqueda, it had been possible to guarantee the Duce’s safety during his flying visit to the capital. But Piana dei Greci, exotic folk-costumes apart, had a reputation with the police as a hive of peasant unrest and for its participation in an insurrectional movement in the ‘nineties. The second difficulty arose from the fact that the mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, who would officially welcome the Head of the Government, was a Mafia potentate, and one who was notorious for an inflamed sense of his own importance. It was seen that only the most delicate handling of this encounter, should it take place, could prevent an ugly clash of personalities.

  Don Ciccio Cuccia, a malevolent frog of a man, was famous for the fantastic exploits in which he was involved by his all-devouring ego, and his traditional Mafia passion for ‘winning respect’. The Duce’s visit to Piana dei Greci had been preceded a few years before by one by King Vittorio Emanuele. At a certain moment the King – who is said to have been in a thoroughly bad mood, bored by the Albanian dancing, and even distressed by the wild music of the pipes – found himself being led into the church, which was decorated and lit up and redolent of incense for some unfamiliar Greek Orthodox ceremony just about to begin. His Majesty tried to back out, but was artfully separated from his retinue and manoeuvred towards the font. Here, in spite of his protests, he soon found himself holding a bawling infant, with Don Ciccio at his side, and within a few moments had become godfather to Don Ciccio’s son.

  The prestige gained by this confidence trick played on the King – which had been followed automatically by the arrival of the cross of a Cavalier of the Crown of Italy – may have tempted Ciccio Cuccia to risk some sort of self-publicising exploit with Mussolini. On reaching Piana dei Greci, the Duce’s chief of police, who was not at all happy about the security arrangements, suggested that Mussolini should ride in Don Ciccio’s car for his tour of the town. The Duce took his seat at the Mayor’s side and his motorcycle escort lined up on both sides of the car. At this point Don Ciccio asked in a loud voice, ‘Excuse me, Captain, but why all the coppers? Nothing to worry about so long as you’re with me. I’m the one who gives the orders round here!’ It was then that the Duce at last realised that things had reached such a pass in Sicily that even his own chief of police had thought it advisable to place him, the Head of the Government, under Mafia protection.

  Mussolini refused Don Ciccio’s suggestion that he should dispense with his escort – a ‘lack of respect’ which Ciccio Cuccia punished to his own undoing by ordering the town piazza to be emptied when Mussolini made his speech. But where the King had been sulky, Mussolini was grim. As they stood on the balcony of the town hall together, Don Ciccio placed an arm on the Duce’s sleeve, bared a row of black fangs, and signalled to the photographers to expose their plates. When Mussolini began his harangue he found himself addressing a group of about twenty village idiots, one-legged beggars, bootblacks, and lottery-ticket sellers specially picked by Don Ciccio to form an audience. The fearful jutting of the Dictator’s jaw had not yet become a familiar danger-sign, so Don Ciccio had no warning of what was in store for him. It is unlikely that he even bothered to listen to what Mussolini had to say, although he would have been wiser to have done so, because the Duce’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the Mafia. Weeks later he repeated in substance in the Fascist Parliament what he had said at Piana dei Greci, but by that time Don Ciccio was already in prison.

  * * *

  Of all the bombastic and beribboned figures that strutted on to the Italian stage in the first years of Fascism, none outdid the Prefect Mori, who was given the task of liquidating the Mafia, in terms of pathological delusions of grandeur.

  Cesare Mori had come up in thirty years from being a policeman on a beat to the office of Chief of Police, and second only in importance in the hierarchy to the Duce himself. For all that, he remained at heart a simple policeman, who rated success in an operation such as this purely on the basis of the number of arrests he could make.

  The Prefect had been present on the fateful occasion of Mussolini’s discomfiture at Piana dei Greci, had been physically pushed aside by the preposterous Don Ciccio, and had heard himself referred to as a sbirro, a term of opprobrium sometimes applied to policemen in Sicily and roughly the equivalent of the French vache.

  Mori, a man with a strong sense of the theatre, gave himself the pleasure of carrying out Don Ciccio’s arrest in person, calling on him one day with a pressing invitation to cocktails at what turned out to be the Ucciardone prison. Thereafter, armed with the Duce’s carte blanche, he put into operation what he sometimes jokingly called his ‘Plan Attila’. Unimpeded by the legal hair-splittings of democratic justice, Mori arrested suspects by the thousand. Victims of hearsay and denunciation were put in chains and sent off by the shipload to the penal islands. The Mori terror provided a never-equalled opportunity for the settling of old personal feuds and for the elimination of rivals in business and in love. In so far as the Fascist courts administered justice at all it was rough, muddled and perfunctory, and there were many instances of two or even three persons being condemned and imprisoned for the same crime. Mori’s descent on a village sometimes meant the arrest and removal of the entire male population, and it was discovered that the only hope of mollifying him when a visit was expected was to erect a triumphal arch bearing the words AVE CAESAR.

  The investigating methods favoured by the Prefect were those employed by the Inquisition, and, although illegal for over a century, still practised in secret in the dungeons of the police. Mori is credited with the re-introduction of the cassetta, employed in hundreds if not thousands of cases, to extort confessions – both in his day and much later. The cassetta was no more than a box, roughly three feet long by two feet wide and eighteen inches deep, and in essence formed a platform to which a human body could be secured while the torturer went to work. As with all such barbarities practised on a large scale, a standardised routine had developed, and had in fact been laid down by an ancient Inquisitional manual for the use of interrogators. Brine having first been poured over the victim’s naked torso, he was scourged; it having been found that this system was more painful yet left fewer marks of violence than a normal flogging. If flogging did not produce a confession, the next stages were the forcing into the victim’s stomach of huge quantities of salt water, the removal of his fingernails, the removal of strips of skin, and the twisting and crushing of the genitals. The Inquisition had been dealing with dissenters in this way since the days of the Albigenses. Mori merely added a modern touch to the medieval procedure by introducing an electric-shocking machine into the sequence of torment. The cassetta often maimed for life.

  Mori was the subject of extravagant whims. Once, having heard that many Mafia victims had been killed by shots fired from ambush from behind walls, he ordered every wall in Sicily to be reduced to three feet in height within twenty-four hours. He was capable of striking illogicalities, making it an offence punishable with a long term of imprisonment for a man to carry a stabbing or cutting weapon, but allowing herdsmen, as they had always done, to continue to arm themselves with a weapon like a tomahawk. An epidemic followed of violent deaths caused by this instrument.

  In 1927 Mussolini assembled the Fascist Parliament to announce the end of his war against the Mafia. Holding up Mori’s arm, and to the tempestuous applause (as it was always called) of his deputies, Mussolini referred to his Prefect as the ‘incarnation of the pure white flame of Fascist justice’. The work with the butcher’s cleaver in Sicily became ‘heroic surgery, performed with a courageous scalpel’. In his enormously prolonged and detailed report of the surgical process it was noticed that the Duce dwelt with particular relish on operations in Piana dei Greci, and with the fate of
‘that ineffable Mayor who always took advantage of solemn occasions to have himself photographed’. It was clear that even after three years, Don Ciccio’s blow to his vanity still rankled. With well-trained enthusiasm the Press agreed with Mussolini’s optimistic forecast for Sicily’s future. As the Resto del Carlino put it (after a hyperbolical passage of the kind much admired at the time which claimed that ‘flowers miraculously bloomed wherever Mori’s caravan passed’): ‘The extirpation of the Mafia will open the way to the rise of a middle class, based on the modern technical development of Sicily, which feudalism, served by organised crime and its network of political corruption, has always debarred.’

  But the effect of the Mori repression could only be temporary, as at best it scythed the heads off a crop of weeds when what was needed was a change in the soil and climate that produced the crop. All the more astute members of the Mafia – professional men, who were largely lawyers or doctors – were clever enough to put themselves beyond Mori’s reach by joining the Fascist Party. Other men of influence were allowed to emigrate to the United States; still others to Tunisia – in this case in return for an engagement to stir up what trouble they could for the French in that country. It was the unimportant rank and file of the Honoured Society who went to prison.

  Mori’s intervention had one important effect: the deprivation of Don Calò and company of the enjoyment of their newly-won feudal privileges. When next the leases of the feudal estates came up for auction, prices reverted sharply to the original level – most of the Mafia chieftains who had escaped the worst effects of the repression having at least judged it better, for the time being, to lie low. From this time on until the coming of the Allies in 1943, the peasants had a better time of it than most of them had ever known before. At least it became possible to argue with a landlord over the terms of a contract without running the risk of being knocked on the head and thrown down some deep fissure in the earth, or into one of those disused mine-shafts favoured by the Mafia for use as a cemetery.

  * * *

  Mori had succeeded in landing one huge fish, and thereby unknowingly advancing Calogero Vizzini to the final pinnacle of authority in the Honoured Society. His catch was Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who had been acknowledged head of the Mafia for twenty-five years and was the most spectacular delinquent in Sicilian history.

  Don Vito had emigrated in his youth to the United States, where he had become one of the most active members of the ‘Black Hand’ – an amalgamation of fugitives from the Mafia, the Camorra of Naples, and a less-known Calabrian criminal society, who had intelligently adapted themselves to the changed social and political conditions of the New World. Quite unlike such roughcast Mafia personalities as Don Ciccio of Piana dei Greci and the slovenly Don Calò Vizzini, Don Vito was always meticulous in his appearance, affecting since his return from the States a dashing anachronism of dress, which included a frock-coat, wide-brimmed fedora, pleated shirt, and flowing cravat. By the time Mori came on the scene, Don Vito had added to the immense dignity of his presence by the possession of a long white beard. He was a favourite of high society who frequented Palermo’s most glittering salons. He was in demand to open exhibitions of the saccharine watercolours of the Neapolitan school, romped with dukes and duchesses in party games of musical chairs, listened with reverence to famous actors giving poetry readings from Leopardi, or to the latest long-playing cylinder of Donauwellen on Mr Edison’s new phonograph, dressed himself fashionably in knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket to shoot thrushes in distinguished company, and joined aristocratic parties to pelt the children of the poor with cakes and sweets on All Souls’ Eve. Women of gentle birth spoke of the strange magnetic force with which a room seemed charged when Don Vito was present, and he once administered a severe admonition to his barber for selling the clippings of his hair to a maker of amulets.

  Although he had been acquitted of implication in 69 major crimes, twenty of them homicides, Don Vito only admitted to – and indeed boasted of – having taken one man’s life. ‘My action was a disinterested one,’ he used to say, ‘and in response to a challenge I could not afford to ignore.’ The victim was Jack Petrosino, an American detective engaged on an investigation into the Black Hand. Petrosino’s researches in the Chicago underworld had convinced him of a liaison existing between the American secret society and the Mafia, and this induced him in 1909 to volunteer to go to Sicily to study the methods of the most important of the parent organisations on the spot. Petrosino was accompanied by two American criminals, associates of the Black Hand, who had agreed through their Sicilian contacts to assist the detective in his researches, and who probably disclosed his plans to the Mafia in advance.

  On the evening of the day that Petrosino’s ship docked at Palermo, Don Vito was dining as usual with an influential member of Palerman society, this time a member of parliament. At a certain moment he pretended to have remembered a most important matter that he had forgotten to attend to before leaving home, and asked to be excused for a short time. Borrowing his host’s carriage, Don Vito had himself driven to the Piazza Marina, near the port. At about that time Petrosino had left his hotel nearby, clearly to go to a secret rendezvous. A few minutes later the lights of Palermo went out, and Don Vito, who was waiting for the detective, killed him with a single pistol-shot. He then returned to the waiting carriage and was driven back to the house of his friend the member of parliament, arriving in time for the port. When suspicion later fell upon Don Vito, this politician was ready to swear in court that his guest had never left the house on the night of the killing.

  The old Mafia leader had to be tried on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. During the greater part of the trial he contented himself with disdainfully ignoring the proceedings of the court. A Mafia exponent of the old school, ‘respect’ was all that mattered even in this desperate emergency. When a defence counsel appeared to be pleading for lenient treatment, Don Vito rebuked him harshly for adopting tactics ‘in conflict with my principles and offensive to my authority’. Before being sentenced, and asked whether he had anything to say, Don Vito replied, ‘Gentlemen, as you have been unable to obtain proof of any of my numerous crimes, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I have never committed.’ This indeed expressed the facts of the case accurately enough.

  In prison Don Vito exercised his immense and hardly-trammelled influence in the interests of reform. He organised a kind of welfare scheme by which criminals still at large were obliged to contribute to the maintenance of the families of those in captivity, and he himself, out of his own personal fortune, provided dowries for the marriageable daughters of all his fellow-sufferers. Prisoners took it in turns to clean out his cell and make his bed. Warders whom Don Vito considered overbearing in their manner were discharged when Don Vito mentioned it to the governor. Until recently the motto carved for him in Sicilian dialect (Don Vito was illiterate) on one of the corridor walls was still to be seen, covered with a protective sheet of glass: Vicaria, malalia e nicisitati, si vidi lu cori di l’amicu – In prison, in sickness and in want, one discovers the heart of a friend. The streak of sentimentality is the final ingredient that completes the character of this fantastic old criminal.

  The cell in the Ucciardone prison occupied by the old man, who died of heart-failure after a short period of incarceration, has always been used since to house prisoners of distinction. In it, Don Calogero Vizzini spent a few days of his five years’ sentence before his release through the intervention of the young Fascist he had befriended.

  5

  IN 1962 a novel appeared on the theme of the mafia from the pen of the distinguished Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. In Il Giorno della Civetta an interesting passage occurs which suggests the immense success of the Mafia as a secret society, showing that its manoeuvrings still remain largely shrouded in a penumbra of uncertainty. It also demonstrates the use of a standard piece of trickery: an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the inquisitive by arguing that the whole thi
ng is hardly more than a blown-up piece of newspaper sensationalism.

  A politician in the book has taken it upon himself to have a fatherly chat with a carabinieri officer who has actually dared to arrest an important citizen – instead of one of the usual ragged scapegoats – for implication in a Mafia killing.

  ‘I ask you,’ says the politician, ‘is it possible to conceive of the existence of a criminal association so enormous, so well-organised, so secret, and so powerful that it can do what it likes, not only here, but in the United States? … Very well then, put it this way: can you tell me of a single trial that has ever produced the proof of the existence of a criminal association called the Mafia, which actually arranges for and carries out crimes? Has a single document ever been found – I mean real written evidence – any sort of proof, in fact, of a relationship between criminality and the so-called Mafia?’

  When Sciascia wrote this in 1961 the answer would have been no, but by the time his book appeared, the missing link in the evidence had at last been found.

  For a century the experts had been busy with their arguments. Rival sociological and anthropological schools had even come into being in an attempt to explain ‘the Sicilian plague’ and powdered the arguments with the dry dust of textbooks. A hundred or so books on the Mafia were written over the century, most of them rich in theory but lacking in focus, due to the fact that so much of the evidence was missing. No one had even been able quite to define just what the Mafia was. How, for example, did one enter the Mafia? Was the Honoured Society organised on a military basis, with ranks, duties, promotions, honours and awards? Were regular meetings held? Did the Mafia possess initiation rites and ceremonies, such as those of the Carbonari and the Freemasons? Was Mafia membership hereditary? Nobody knew, for the simple reason that the fear of certain death prevented the disclosure of secrets of this kind. Meanwhile, all Sicilians could do was to put two and two together and make do with intelligent guesswork.