by Norman Lewis
Trade unionists were regarded with a sort of amazed contempt. To the landowner and his supporters there seemed something basically un-Christian – almost diabolical – in the way they corrupted ordinary, decent labourers, put ideas into their heads, induced them to extort grossly unfair rewards for their labour by the threat of withholding it altogether. Trade unions had existed in Italy before the coming of Fascism, but down in Sicily, where five men always rushed to offer themselves for every job that was going, it was a distant calamity, something that happened to other people – discussed in the landowners’ clubs like some unreal loss of half a million Chinese lives through the flooding of the Yellow River. In the hubbub provoked by the appearance of this sinister organisation of labourers in feudal Sicily itself, there was an echo of England in 1834 and the Tolpuddle Martyrs of Dorset. In Sicily, as in the England of those days, sermons were being preached on the blessedness of poverty, as illustrated in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and peasant congregations were being exhorted to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. One remembers the public horror over the ‘ingratitude’ of the Dorsetshire labourers – the prison chaplain’s astonished outburst when he visited the accused men who had organised themselves in such a cowardly fashion, as he saw it, after their wages had been reduced from nine shillings to eight shillings a week. ‘Are you then determined to ruin your kind masters, who are worse off than you?’ he cried. (Most of the kind masters maintained lavish establishments, including stables of race horses.) Remembering that the Sicily of 1944 was less politically advanced than the England that punished trade unionists with seven years’ transportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay, it is not surprising that Sicily’s trade union leaders were quietly marked down for elimination.
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With hostile politicians, and particularly those who dared bring up the matter of the uncultivated estates, Don Calò took direct, immediate, and effective action. On September 16th, 1944, the leaders of the left-wing Popular Front had the temerity to hold a political meeting in the heart of Mafia territory, in the square of Villalba itself. Deceptively mild, Don Calò had agreed to this meeting taking place, but he had imposed his conditions. It was only the second political meeting ever held in Villalba, unless one includes in the category of meetings the periodical rounding-up of peasants for their instructions as to when, where, and for whom to vote. On September 2nd of that year, in fact, Finocchiaro Aprile, the Separatist leader, had come to Villalba and had received what was described as a ‘tempestuous ovation’. By virtue of an error, soon discovered, Aprile, the odds-on favourite of the aristocracy and the Mafia, had enjoyed a short-lived popularity with some of the peasants as well. Through a confusion arising over the party’s initials – P.S. Partito Separista – and Aprile’s habit of giving a Churchillian V sign, the Separatists became known as the Party of Spaghetti at Two O’clock, and a legend spread that Aprile’s supporters were feasted on pasta at the end of his political jamborees – a considerable inducement at that time to a half-fed peasant. The swing in the opposite direction when the rumour collapsed was inevitable.
For this occasion, when the hope of spaghetti had long been abandoned, several hundred of Villalba’s day labourers had been cleaned up and marched into the town square. Aprile described to them the way in which they and their forefathers had been exploited by the Italians, praised them for their new-found Sicilian patriotism, and for their obvious determination, if called upon to do so, to shed their blood for the new Sicily. After this, while the peasants cheered in the somewhat mechanical fashion they had picked up under Fascism, Aprile’s helpers went round pinning the Separatist emblem – a star, symbolising the Party’s desire for Sicily to become the forty-ninth State of the United States – on all chests present, including that of Don Calò Vizzini.
The atmosphere on September 16th, however, was less congenial. The conditions laid down by Don Calò had included a ban on agricultural workers being allowed to enter the square while the meeting was in progress, and a further veto on the mention by any of the speakers of the vexed questions of agrarian reform. To make quite sure that his stipulations were observed, Don Calò had the side-streets cordoned off, and the only members of the public allowed in the square were his own legally-armed bodyguards, all of them carrying shotguns. Don Calò presided over this singular political reunion, standing in the middle of the square, his Separatist badge pinned on his lapel and a cudgel in his hand.
The opening speech, which was on the historical origins of democracy, provoked no reaction from the Mayor but yawns. Then Girolamo Li Causi, the Sicilian left-wing leader, got up and went straight to the heart of the matter. Li Causi had a very powerful voice, a dramatic oratorical style, and apparently no fear of the Mafia guns, and the peasants began to appear in the windows and the doorways of the nearest houses. Inevitably the forbidden subject was broached. The distant cries of encouragement from the peasants were drowned as the Mafia opened fire. Fourteen members of the Popular Front, including Li Causi himself, dropped to the ground wounded. The meeting was at an end, and with it, all such meetings in the territory of Don Calogero Vizzini. It was fourteen years before the men who fired at Villalba were brought to trial, and although eventually found guilty, they benefited by various political amnesties that had been granted while their cases were being prepared, so that not a single one of the accused men served a day in prison. In the meanwhile some had had the opportunity to commit other important crimes. Not for nothing is the law in Mafia jargon la sonnambula – the (female) somnambulist.
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The shooting at Villalba alerted the feudal landowners to the dangers of their position. Laws had been passed under the Fascist régime in 1933, and again in 1940, by which in certain clearly-defined circumstances uncultivated or badly cultivated land could be assigned to the peasants. Nothing had ever been done to enforce these old laws, but they remained on the statute book, and now the reconstituted Board for the Colonisation of Sicilian Landed Estates was receiving demands couched in proper legal form for the long-delayed expropriations to take place.
In March 1945 the Princess of Trabia called Don Calò Vizzini and entrusted to him the management of the estate of Miccichè – the same estate which Don Calò had been able to rent for a negligible annual sum before the coming of Mussolini. This, the first move in the organisation of the defences of feudalism, was the Princess’s counter-stroke on learning that her peasantry had formed a co-operative and that the lawyers were busy drawing up their demand for expropriation. By the definition of the Acts of 1933 and 1940, the estate of Miccichè was badly cultivated, and it seemed likely that should the case be allowed to come before the courts, the peasant claimants would win the day. But now, with Don Calò’s appearance on the scene, the landowners’ spirits revived. The High Commissioner for Sicily himself sent for the papers involved and wrote in red ink across the folder, ‘Do not proceed’. Discouraged, but still not quite beaten, the peasants of Villalba sent a deputation to argue their case before a commission that had been set up at Caltanissetta, the provincial capital, to deal with the problem of the assignment of uncultivated or badly cultivated estates. On their return the members of this delegation were seen individually by Don Calò, who recommended them to remember that good health was the greatest blessing this life had to offer, and then advised them to let the matter drop. A few days later, by a unanimous vote, the Co-operative Libertà was dissolved.
Don Calò, however, had a pleasant surprise in store for the ex-members. It turned out that he had decided to console them for the loss of their co-operative by forming one himself, and he not only invited but strongly urged them all to join it. Co-operatives, as run by Don Calò, possessed one main disadvantage as compared with the normal kind, as the peasants had learned by experience back in the ‘twenties, which was that members could not expect to share in the proceeds. However, legally Don Calò’s communal venture was a co-operative, and when, shortly afterwards, the Princess of Tr
abia handed over to it the whole of her vast estate, this automatically passed outside the scope of the laws governing expropriation.
The other landowners took their cue from the Princess and simply handed over to the Mafia, although there were few Don Calòs about with the intellectual capacity for such manoeuvres as that by which the feudal estate of Miccichè had been transmuted into a co-operative. Many of the other Mafia chieftains were lacking in finesse, men like Vanni Sacco, the Liberal of Camporeale, who got his hands on the Parino estate; the terrible Barbaccia – survivor of the great Barbaccia-Lorello feud – who took the Ficuzza estate under his wing; and the outright gangster Luciano Liggio, who had fallen under the cultural influence of criminals repatriated from America. Even Giuseppe Genco Russo, considered to be the present head of the rural Mafia and the man who personally arrested Colonel Salemi, the commander of the Axis defences at Cammarata, failed to show a lightness of touch comparable to that of Don Calò. Genco Russo became protector of the Polizzello estate, and when a crowd of peasants tried to occupy it they were simply driven out with gunfire. But whether by Don Calò’s brand of artfulness or by sheer brute force, the Mafia won this first round in the fight hands down. And in this way the aristocrats whose estates had been given back to them by Mussolini, now withdrew a second time from the Sicilian countryside and left the Mafia once again in possession of their lands.
7
THE PERIOD of the transformation of the Mafia into a kind of beleaguered landed gentry produced some strange episodes. At that time 1944–6 the Mafia could call on five bandit organisations to assist it in its work (there were another twenty-five or so fairly independent bands). One of these had been organised by Salvatore Malta, Mayor of Vallelunga, a particularly inspired nominee of AMGOT dating from the time of Don Calò’s original list of recommendations. Imprisoned for banditry and murder, Salvatore had performed the feat – considerable even by Mafia standards – of remaining nominally a registered inmate of the Ucciardone prison while actually being at large and gainfully occupied in the protection of the Tudia estate. In fact, while the authorities believed Malta to be safely in prison, he was engaged in organising another band known as the Capitano, which was employed not only to terrorise the Tudia peasantry laying claim to fifty thousand uncultivated acres, but was also successful in dissuading the peasants belonging to thirteen other feudal estates from pressing any claims for land. The Capitano band installed themselves in the manorial buildings of Tudia, converted into a fortress, in which they remained for two years. They murdered, robbed and kidnapped, but unlike Salvatore Malta they were common bandits, not mafiosi. When eventually they were rounded up and tried, they received life sentences, and for them the gates of the Ucciardone would remain closed. Salvatore Malta was called only as a witness at the trial.
At this stage one or two of the more intelligent bandits even moved in with offers of protection, Mafia style, on their own account. So long as they modestly restricted themselves to the less important estates, the Mafia tolerated the competition. Trabona, leader of the first band organised by Salvatore Malta, was one of these. Known to his friends as ‘Rickets’, Trabona – like so many bandits, but quite unlike the Mafia – possessed a kind of ingrained and frustrated respect for law and order, and a hankering after respectability. This made him a stickler for legal form, and when he offered to guarantee one of the barons’ estates against molestation by troublemakers, he had a proper contract drawn up before a public notary. Being at the time a fugitive from justice, with a considerable price on his head, it would have been unsuitable for Trabona’s own name to appear on the document, so his two infant sons, aged four and five, became the beneficiaries of a tenancy contract which gave them onehalf of the total revenues of the estate. In consideration of this, Trabona undertook to keep the other sixty-five sharecropping tenants in order and to persuade them to the voluntary renunciation of any claim to a division of the produce on the basis of a new law that had just been passed in Rome.
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Some of the measures of reform hastily put through by the central government in the hope of easing Sicilian tensions proved impossible to carry out in practice, and this was a case in point. Traditionally, the landowner and his tenant had shared on a fifty-fifty basis – or rather, on what was called a fifty-fifty basis, but which, on examination, proves to have been an arrangement heavily weighted in the landowner’s favour. While the landowner kept his half-share intact, many deductions were made from that of the tenant. In the first place, he paid for the seed, plus an interest charge on the amount advanced of thirty-two per cent. He was subject to a tribute, dating from Roman times, known as ‘the land’s dowry’ and which amounted to one hundred kilograms of grain for every hectare (2½ acres). Other important deductions were for the maintenance of the armed guards, the upkeep of the roads, the annual feast of St Lucia, the Church, the monks of the local convent, and ‘for lighting the landowner’s house’. By the time all these levies had been exacted, the tenant’s share was possibly as little as one-quarter, or even less.
The new regulation, giving sixty per cent of the produce to the tenant, was intended to compensate him to some extent for these traditional exactions, and they were instantly and successfully opposed by every landowner in Sicily. The method generally adopted for negating the government’s efforts was a simple one. When the time came to divide the produce, the tenant would be summoned into the presence of the landowner, who would have with him the local carabinieri officer. The tenant would then be asked if he wanted to make the division ‘the way it’s always been done or the way the Reds do it’. If the tenant stuck out for his right to take sixty per cent of the produce, the landowner played his next card, which was to give formal notice in the presence of the police officer that he proposed to dispute the claim. It was now the policeman’s duty to impound the crop and hold it until a legal decision on the dispute had been reached. As in Italy civil cases take five years on average to settle, and as in any case the costs would have more than swallowed up any advantage the tenant might have gained, he was bound to give in. There were many instances during the six months when this law was theoretically in operation of the tenant being deliberately provoked into losing his temper and thereby committing the serious crime of oltraggio – assaulting or even insulting a police officer. In this case he would be hauled off to prison, where he might be locked up for a year or more while awaiting trial. The landowner would see to it that no bail was forthcoming.
Not only was the operation of the agrarian reforms sabotaged by the direct action of the Mafia and the Mafia’s hired bandits, but also by bureaucratic delays, many of them undoubtedly arranged by the Mafia at a high political level. Demands that fulfilled every legal prerequisites for the concession of uncultivated lands lay unattended for months and even years in the offices of the special commissions that had been set up. Meanwhile tens of thousands of fertile acres lay abandoned, covered with thistles and scrub. In some instances landowners decided to chasten a rebellious mood by actually reducing the amount of land under cultivation. This kind of reprisal produced calamitous effects in villages where the misery caused by desperate and chronic unemployment had been increased by the draining off of food supplies into the black market.
Then someone had the idea of organising what were called ‘cavalcades’, which took the form of large parties of peasants ‘symbolically’ occupying uncultivated estates. Two or three hundred peasants would usually invade the estate, mark out the plots of land they felt that they would like to possess, picnic on the spot, and then, after a certain amount of flag-waving and perhaps a little accordion music, troop off home again. Cavalcades usually started as holiday outings, but only too often ended as near-massacres. Typical of what happened at that time was the symbolical occupation of the estate of Santa Maria del Bosco.
The occasion was, once again, half political demonstration and half picnic, and an outsider would have taken it for one of those cheerful Mediterranean pilgrimages one
sometimes sees on its way to the shrine of some local saint. A thousand or more peasants had gathered from three villages, and in their painted carts, or riding horses or mules, with flags flying and religious banners held up, they made a procession half a mile long. The estate had not been cultivated for sixty years, and their first job when they arrived was to clear away the stones laid bare by soil erosion. This was done in light-hearted fashion, singing to the music of accordions and guitars. By nightfall, the symbolical occupation was at an end and everybody went home.
Nothing was easier than to deal with this kind of thing. Next day the police descended on the villages and carried off thirty-five men – their lists were ready – on charges of creating a civil disturbance. The women, as usual, rushed out into the street and did their best to prevent their menfolk’s being dragged away. Rifle butts were used, shots were fired, and blood flowed. When eventually the men came up for trial, some of them were sentenced to as little as fifteen days, but they had already spent sixteen months in prison awaiting trial. Ten years later, in 1956, this feudal estate still awaited expropriation, and today in the three villages that had formed the cavalcade it is still only the youngest and strongest who can hope to work a hundred days in a year.