Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Little as ordinary Sicilians might know about how the Mafia was put together, they certainly knew just who the mafiosi were. There was something about a mafioso that marked him as indelibly as a facial scar or a harelip. The man who had been admitted to the Mafia saw himself as a member of an élite, of a chivalry of power, and the confidence that this bred oozed from him like a vital current.

  Some mafiosi manage to keep this godlike conviction of their superiority under sufficiently close control for it not to be apparent except in cases of exceptional emergency. Renato Candido, a retired carabinieri officer who wrote a book about his experiences with the Mafia, describes an instance where a man well known to him, whom he never suspected of being other than an ordinary law-abiding citizen, gave himself away when he happened to be travelling on a bus that was held up by bandits. The passengers were all hustled out and lined up to have their coats torn off their backs and their pockets turned inside out in the search for objects of value. When it came to the turn of the mafioso, he simply treated the bandit to the celebrated cold stare of the man of respect and said quietly, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The bandit immediately lowered his gun and passed on to the next passenger. One of the victims of this episode told Candido about the singular fellow traveller who could frighten away a gunman with a single look, and Candido put two and two together. Later he went to see the man to try to get a description of the bandits, which none of the passengers had had the courage to supply. It turned out that the mafioso considered the bandits a nuisance. As a man of honour he was prevented by his code from open collaboration with the police, but speaking with such vagueness and recourse to metaphor that what he had to say sounded to Candido more like a parable than a piece of information, he still managed to let drop a hint or two, as a result of which the carabinieri officer was able to arrest the whole band.

  The mafioso was recognisable too by his uncanny success in everything he touched. The Mafia doctor got all the patients, and could always find a hospital bed in a hurry. The Mafia advocate had all the briefs he could handle, and his clients usually won their cases. Government contracts always seemed to go to the contractor who was a man of respect, although his tenders were usually the highest and he paid lower wages than the trade union minimum. By tradition, members of the Mafia did not themselves seek election to Parliament, but everybody knew that the political boss who arranged for a candidate’s election was a mafioso. The Mafia member was the courteous but laconic stranger who recommended the candidate’s opponent not to attempt to hold political meetings in the area. He was the solitary armed horseman riding up and down the boundary of a feudal estate, whose mere presence and power-saturated glance were enough to keep at bay five hundred peasants who had come to claim uncultivated land. The mafioso was also the mayor’s right-hand man who handed out all the jobs in the municipality, contributing to the rule of the Mafia not only by fear but by hunger.

  * * *

  Then in 1962 a unique document was published by the Sicilian newspaper L’Ora, and instantly the framework in which all these privileged citizens moved and their relationship with one another was filled in. In three long instalments, and with electrifying effect, L’Ora published a confession made to the police in 1937 by a certain Doctor Allegra, who had been induced to join the Mafia and eventually been involved in a murder. The doctor told all he knew, revealing a series of new facts about the Honoured Society and its doings. There can be only one explanation of the circumstance that he died peacefully in his bed: that his confession was mislaid in the police record office, probably through being placed by mistake in the file of another Allegra – the name being a not uncommon one. If this supposition is correct, the confession was safely buried in this way until it came to light twenty-four years later and found its way into the newspaper’s possession.

  It is obvious that on other occasions – particularly during the Mori terror – similar confessions must have been obtained by the police. Such documents would have been quickly got rid of through police collusion with the Mafia. Nothing would have been simpler than for any police official having, say, the equivalent rank of captain, to visit the records office in the Questura, abstract the dossier containing the confession ‘for study’, and either to remove the confession altogether or to exchange it for some less compromising document. That nothing is easier than such a manoeuvre is demonstrated by the case of Don Calò Vizzini, whose dossier disappeared from the Questura of Palermo within days of his becoming Mayor of Villalba and an honorary colonel in the US Army. Criminologically, the Mafia confession represents an advance in our knowledge as important as the deciphering of a letter in Etruscan script, but up to even twenty years ago no newspaper editor would have dared to look at it. But the offices of L’Ora have twice withstood Mafia attacks, the latest in 1958 when the paper started its own investigation of the Mafia and a bomb explosion destroyed part of L’Ora building. Since the principal result of these outrages was the great increase in fame and in circulation of the newspaper, it has thereafter lost no opportunity to press home its attacks on the Mafia, which may well realise by now that short of massacring the whole editorial staff, there is very little it can do.

  * * *

  Dr Melchiorre Allegra, the mafioso doctor whose most detailed and largely verifiable confession sheds light on so much of what before was dark, was a medical officer in a military hospital in Palermo when the Mafia approached him. It was 1916, the war was beginning to go badly, and an epidemic of malingering and self-inflicted wounds was occupying far too much of the time of the hospital staff. Some of these simulated pathological conditions were artfully contrived, and Dr Allegra seems to have been amused despite himself by one man who had successfully produced a condition of erysipelas of the knee by injecting himself with a mixture of turpentine and iodine. Allegra threatened to report the man, but within hours, and before he had time to do so, he received the visit of a Giulio D’Agate, whom he instantly recognised from his unmistakable manner as a man of respect. There was nothing of the bully about D’Agate, who merely appealed to the doctor to show mercy to a man who was the father of a large and necessitous family. There was little the doctor could do but fall into line, the mild-mannered Mafia approach being considered potentially even more dangerous than the blustering kind. Allegra cured his patient and got him several months’ convalescent leave. In his confession he says that D’Agate later persuaded him to perform another similar favour. This was a time of great Mafia activity on behalf of Sicilians who had lost patience with the First World War.

  Some days later Allegra found D’Agate waiting for him outside the hospital. He had two companions, also obviously men of respect. Understandably, the encounter made Allegra feel nervous, but the three men of respect were most friendly and genial, so he decided he had nothing to fear. D’Agate asked him to go with them, as he had something of great importance to tell him. Allegra’s attack of the jitters promptly returned, but he says in his statement that he dared not refuse the invitation. He was taken to a fruit shop owned by one of the men, and here, after a fulsome exchange of compliments and after D’Agate had praised him in particular for the ‘seriousness of his outlook’, other matters were touched upon. ‘They explained to me that they belonged to a very important association, which included people in all ranks of society, not excluding the highest; all of whom were called “men of honour”. The association was what in fact was known to outsiders as the Mafia, but understood by most people only in a very vague way because only members could really be sure of its existence.’ One pictures the three sinister men in the fruit shop explaining these self-evident facts to the fourth (who was also to become a sinister man), while Allegra pretends suitable surprise.

  ‘Continuing their explanation, they told me that infractions of the association’s rules were severely punished. Members were not allowed, for example, to commit thefts, but in certain circumstances homicide was permissible, although always by licence of the chiefs. Breaking the rules in this case, that i
s by taking the law into one’s own hands, was punishable by death.’ D’Agate hastened to add, by way of encouragement, that when high-level approval for a killing had been secured, a member could call on the assistance of the association, if required, to help him carry it out.

  The confession continues with some important new material on Mafia organisation. ‘Dealing with the administrative structure, it was explained to me that the association was split up into “families”, each one headed by a chief. Usually a family was made up of small groups from neighbouring towns or villages, but when a “family” became too numerous for convenient administration, it was split up into groups of ten, each with its subordinate chief. In the matter of relationship between the different provinces, the rule in the main was independence. However, the provincial heads kept in close touch with each other, and in this way an informal working inter-provincial liaison was maintained. The association had powerful overseas offshoots in both North and South America, Tunisia, and in Marseille.

  ‘Chiefs were elected by the members of their “families” or groups, and they were assisted by counsellors’ – this had been quite unheard of – ‘who could act as their substitutes in case of absence. In matters of high policy it was absolutely necessary for a chief to consult his counsellor before taking action. They then added that, in general, the association was not interested in politics, but that from time to time a “family” might decide to support the candidature for Parliament of a politician whom they could count on to recompense them by exerting his parliamentary influence to the maximum in their favour. Such protection could take various forms; for example, in the matter of “recommendations” which (from a member of parliament) were very effective with prison officials, the police, the inland revenue authorities, and the administration at all levels, and could be used to obtain firearms permits, bail for prisoners awaiting trial, to smooth out cases arising out of taxation difficulties, and even to obtain passports in delicate circumstances.’

  This information was confirmed and amplified in September 1963 in disclosures made to the Italian Press by Nicola Gentile, ex-American gangster and head of the Mafia in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Kansas City, who had vanished from the United States when about to stand trial on a narcotics charge and turned up in his native Sicily. Gentile described the Mafia organisation as ‘very democratic’. Elections were held regularly. The group of ten elected its chief; these in turn elected the head of the family (capo-famiglia); and the heads of families, their deputies and counsellors elected the head of all the Mafia, known in Sicily as the Capo dei Capi, and in America as the ‘King’. The Sicilian and American systems were identical.

  Having listened with growing uneasiness to this dangerous information, Allegra says he was now asked for the first time if he would agree to become a member of the association, and he could see that things had already been allowed to go too far for him to draw back. If Allegra was telling the truth, we may assume that the heads of the Mafia ‘family’ who had approached him urgently needed the permanent services of an intelligent and pliable young doctor, and that Allegra was virtually press-ganged into the Mafia.

  ‘I realised that I was already the recipient of too many secrets to have been allowed to leave that meeting alive, had I refused. My only course was not only to accept on the spot, but to accept with apparent enthusiasm.’

  After this the ritual of admission was administered.

  ‘The tip of my middle finger was pierced by a needle, and blood was squeezed from it to soak a small paper image of a saint. The image was burned, and holding the ashes in my hand I was called upon to swear an oath more or less as follows: “I swear to be loyal to my brothers, never to betray them, always to aid them, and if I fail may I burn and be turned to ashes like the ashes of the image.”’

  This one archaic touch apart, the Mafia showed no interest in mumbo-jumbo. There were no secret hand clasps, signs or passwords. Allegra’s sponsors took him on a brisk tour of the neighbourhood of Palermo and introduced him to anyone in the organisation he needed to know. He might have been a junior sales representative who had just been taken on by a go-ahead firm. Allegra says that he was embarrassed by the fact that most of his new friends seemed to think that he was just the man they had been looking for to concoct some ruse to get a friend out of the army on medical grounds. He met all the Mafia personalities of the day, and among his lists of rank-and-file members one recognises some of the great names to come, the manipulators of power in the era of the Mafia renaissance that was to follow the Allied occupation of Sicily. Of all the names Allegra supplied, perhaps the most surprising is that of a prominent monk – the Father Superior of the Convent of Tagliava: a forerunner of the notorious so-called mafiosi monks of Mazzarino whose trial, lasting three years, was only concluded in 1963.

  * * *

  The social meeting-place of the Mafia élite was the Birreria Italia in Palermo, a café where any Mafia notables who happened to be in the capital often dropped in to talk shop at about eleven in the morning. This is the hour when, after a thousand years, Palermo still turns its face daily towards the East. A baroque façade of dimpled statuary has been built over the wall-eyed old Saracenic town with its pink-domed kubbas and its stumps of minarets, but the relaxation of Palermo remains oriental in style. At eleven work peters out for a long interval, while the streets fill up with a pleasantly aimless crowd. The aroma of roasting coffee covers the whole town. Men in darkly discreet clothes file into the cafés and fill them standing, until the only possible movement is that of the hand holding a tiny coffee cup in a cubic foot of space. This is the public display of leisure inherited from turban-wearing ancestors – a dignified setting-aside of the trivial concerns of the day, when every Palerman becomes a pasha for an hour.

  Members of the Sicilian aristocracy favoured the birreria, going there to ogle the lords of the underworld, so that there were times when every second customer crowded along the counter clutching his minuscule cup was an internationally famous criminal or a duke. Here Allegra saw Don Ciccio, the absurd and publicity-hungry mayor of Piana dei Greci, shoving his way to the front to talk to the reporters. Don Vito Cascio Ferro, head of all the Mafia in those days, appeared briefly, a prophet dressed up as a Mississippi gambler, to have his hand kissed by the hangers-on. Don Calò Vizzini, now portly from the digestion of his war profits and hardly to be recognised by those who had known the young bandit of Cammarata, put in an appearance. Allegra had lunch with him, and Don Calò brought along a pearl-encrusted mistress, a woman of the old nobility who had persuaded him to make her the first female member of the Mafia. Conversation with the laconic Don Calò seems to have been heavy going.

  The doctor had sold his soul to the devil for a fairly good price. He was able to buy a practice in Castelvetrano, and did well enough with it to open his own clinic shortly afterwards, which also prospered exceedingly. Naturally enough, the association expected and got its quid pro quo. As this meant helping out from time to time with illegal operations and the clandestine treatment of patients suffering from gunshot wounds, the doctor had some brushes with the law, from all of which, through alibis fabricated by his friends, he escaped unscathed. One attempt, too, was made by the Medical Association to remove his name from the register; but in the case of a man of honour such an attempt could never succeed. Dr Allegra, almost weighed down by now with ‘respect’, began in the usual way to be more than just the most successful doctor in the community. As an established mafioso, he would be regarded not only as above the law but in some measure as supplanting it, and people would come to him to settle their disputes. He also kept juniors in the association in order, with a sharp reprimand when called for, for wild schemes. ‘Cammarata Carmeli, a mafioso of Palermo, came to see me about a baron of the district of Le Madonie who had approached him for help in abducting the fiancée of Professor Stella Pietro. I immediately vetoed this absurd project and it was dropped, so the professor was left in peace.’

  * * *


  But amazingly enough, even within the Mafia itself, according to this inside chronicle, things rarely go smoothly for long. A wide rift, not entirely healed to this day, was provoked by a quarrel over payments made to the organisation by the contractors for the development of the port of Palermo. Relations with the Mafia overseas were still close and cordial enough for three separate Mafia Commissions to be sent by the disquieted brothers in New York, Chicago and Kansas City in an attempt to heal the breach. To the American Mafia, the Sicilian parent had always been the ‘madre nobile – the noble mother’, custodian of the ancient tradition and fountainhead of doctrinal purity. A request from Sicily to execute the sentence of a Mafia court on a Sicilian who had fled to America would be unhesitatingly carried out – and vice versa. Sicilian emigrants were still handed a clean bill of health by the Honoured Society in Sicily and given the address of the mafioso to whom they should report as soon as arriving in the United States; while leading American Mafia chieftains made frequent sentimental pilgrimages to their home towns back in Sicily. But despite the strength of the ties uniting both organisations, all attempts by the American brothers to bring about a reconciliation failed. Allegra claims to have been disillusioned by the unseemly brawling over the division of loot. It was about this time, too, that his personal interests seemed not to have been fostered by his Mafia connections as well as he would have wished.