by Norman Lewis
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Elsewhere the peasant leaders acted with less obvious and vulnerable enthusiasm, and thus managed to avoid giving the police the excuse to intervene on the side of the landowner and Mafia combination. These were the tactics adopted in Corleone.
In this world one occasionally stumbles upon a place which, in its physical presence and the atmosphere it distils, manages somehow to match its reputation for sinister happenings. Such a town is Corleone. A total of one hundred and fifty-three murders took place in Corleone in the four years between 1944 and 1948 alone, the rate of death by violence in this town with its population of eighteen thousand being probably the highest in the world. Men and women go perpetually in black, worn for old tragedies; for a father, five years; for a brother, three years; for a son, three years; a piled-up account of mourning that can never be settled. Sorrow leaks from these people into the streets. A scurf of old election posters covers the town’s walls. Among them appears the astonishing slogan, ‘Long live God! Vote Christian Democrat’.
Corleone is built under a lugubrious backdrop of mountains the colour of lead, and its seedy houses are wound round a strange black rocky outcrop jutting up from the middle of the town. Upon this pigmy mesa is built the town lockup, and from its summit the crows launch themselves in search of urban carrion. Behind the cliff-shadowed menaced streets of Corleone stretches a savage entranced landscape of rock and grizzled pasture, for centuries the setting of a bloody routine of feuds and ambuscades. A few miles away is the famous wood of Ficuzza, a place of ghosts and legends, over possession of which the two families of Barbaccia and Lorello have been slowly destroying one another since 1918. The problems of the peasants of Corleone are complicated by inheritances from history and prehistory: they are an island of agriculturists in a hostile shepherd sea, and the sayings of the local herdsmen, including such proverbs taken straight from classical Arabic as ‘With the plough came in dishonour’, enshrine the nomad’s detestation of the encroaching farmer. ‘They talk about land reform,’ a young shepherd says. ‘That means there’s less and less grazing ground – they take everything away from us poor folk. All us goatherds and shepherds are worried – soon, if they go on parcelling out the fields at this rate, there won’t be a blade of grass left for our animals.’ The shepherds, then, are on the side of the Mafia. ‘We don’t hit it off too badly with the mafiosi. The barons haven’t robbed us of our pasture-land.’*
The shepherds furnished the Mafia with most of its hired killers.
Another complication in the lives of the peasants of Corleone in the immediate postwar period was the presence of two Mafias. One of these was the classic version, commanded by the town’s leading doctor and leading citizen, Michele Navarra. The other, diffusing its schismatic terror, was something quite new at the time: a hybrid between the home product and American-style gangsterism brought back by criminals repatriated to Sicily from the United States. The ‘New Mafia’, as it came to be called, was represented in Corleone by Luciano Liggio, who at nineteen had become the youngest Mafia chieftain in Sicilian history.
Liggio had made his name as a phenomenally successful cattle thief, and he was without any of the self-delusion of the old-fashioned men of respect. A threadbare vestige of the ancient Mafia tradition of the honourable state-within-a-state still adhered to the power-corrupted persons of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, and his successor Don Calò. Nothing is more certain than that the traditional Mafia chieftains saw themselves not as delinquents but as self-made aristocracy of the intelligence, and as such, at least as much entitled to their privileges as any aristocracy by birth. The old mafioso was jealous of his ‘respect’, and of the rough justice he dealt out in his own way. He was a man of iron self-control, often an austere man, sometimes – voluntarily, since wealth was his for the taking – a poor man. Liggio, prototype of the New Mafia, was none of these things. The overlord-to-come of Corleone and the most feared and cunning criminal of modern Sicily had modelled his career on a transatlantic pattern and cleansed himself of scruples. In exile in the United States, such mafiosi as Lucky Luciano had forgotten tradition to the extent of making fortunes out of prostitution – an unthinkable vileness to an old-fashioned man of respect – and now on return, and equally to the horror of the mafioso of the old school, they would set about the organisation of the traffic in narcotics. Liggio and his followers had nothing in common with the organisation presided over by Don Calò but its iron laws of secrecy and the vendetta, and the two Mafias were soon to be at each others’ throats.
When, purely as a last sop to the old Mafia tradition, Liggio became a gabellotto and the protector of the huge Strasetta estate, his first move was to drive out all the tenants who possessed sharecropping contracts and replace them by cowed day labourers. He did this simply by burning down their houses and cutting the throats of their animals – tactics which would certainly have shocked the warped paternalism of Don Vito. Liggio, whose unprecedented rise to stardom in the new gangsterism had been assisted by material aid supplied by his mistress, a baroness, is shown in photographs of the period as a loose-lipped, smirking, dandified youth, with a slight squint. Apparently the life of a feudal seigneur on the Strasetta estate soon irked, and he began to widen the scope of his interests. Liggio believed in moving with the times, and he saw that there was ten times more to be made out of seizing control of the supplies of meat to the Palermo market, say, than by growing and selling beans. He threw overboard all the old-fashioned Mafia pretence of reasonableness and persuasion. When anybody crossed Liggio’s path, he simply shot him, and he and his strong-arm men, recruited from the nomads of the bitter pastures, filled the streets of Corleone with the dead.
One of Dolci’s informants lists a few of the killings of those days, which leaves out of count the many disappearances – men who were spirited away and never seen again, ‘so that a vendetta could not be sworn in the presence of the corpse’.
The first of them to be killed after the war was a man called Cianciana, probably for political reasons. It happened right in the middle of the square.
Then there was the man whose father was at Belvedere [a prison]. He was an employee and they were afraid he might talk and so they got him out of the way.
Michelangelo Randisio and the son of Uncle Matteo Capra, the one with the withered hand, both disappeared. Their bones were found later. Donna Calorina Saporita’s son had been thrown into the same crevice. They found a whole cart-load of bones there. Angelo Gullota’s bones were there too. Ciccio Navarra’s brother had also disappeared. This crevice is on Monte Casale.
Then there were Grisi’s three brothers. They lived here at Corleone. They found the body of one of them on the railway line. Another brother came home on leave and they bumped him off the very same night near the armourer’s. It seems that the one who came home on leave said that the Mafia here were good for nothing but toothpicks. They heard him and killed him the same day. They shot him point-blank in the street.
Then there was a man from Palermo who’d only been living in Corleone a short time. He disappeared. His name was Pietro Montesanto, and he was a bit of a pansy. He used to wear a velvet suit that must have cost between thirty and thirty-five thousand lire, with kid-leather patches. Someone said to him: ‘Lower the flame or you’ll burst the pipe.’ Meaning, ‘Don’t show off too much or you’ll come to harm.’ His mother used to work spells and concoct poisons. The town here is full of people who’ve been crippled by these spells.
Then there was Pino Orecchione, the road-sweeper’s brother. They found him in the hamlet of Frattina with an army rifle slung round his body and his head stove in. He used to go round robbing the shacks to get something for his family, as he was out of work.
Then there was Vito Capra, who was killed in the town here. They guessed who it was that was sending out extorting letters; and they shot him one night.
Then there was another man called Selvaggio who was shot while he was bringing a load of corn into the town. The peopl
e say that he was a bit on the haughty side.
A man called Mariano Governale was killed at the second crossroads in Sant’ Elena. They shot him with buckshot and then split his head open with the butt-end of the gun. It was over a question of honour, people say.
Another stranger, who was employed at Madonna di Scala, was found shot dead in front of the Madonna del Mal Passo.
They cut off Mariano Scalisi’s hands after they’d shot him in the hamlet of Bingo.
They found another man dead in the hamlet of Pozzillo; but as he didn’t come from Corleone, no one took much notice here. Here in Corleone, they shoot people everywhere, wherever they happen to be. There’s not a corner of the town where some incident hasn’t occurred.
There was Salvatore Amenda. The people called him the ‘sheriff’ because he was a retired policeman. They shot him with buckshot. Buckshot is less chancy: you’ve only one bullet with a pistol. They say he was a scoundrel. ‘Carnazza successe – Only good for the slaughterhouse,’ as they say when a mule’s on the ground: by which they mean that it’s dead meat.
There’s another road in the neighbourhood called Via Vallone. They killed Michele Scuzzulato there; no one knows why.
At Bagarella there was a shooting affray in front of the chapel of St Christopher, as a result of a row over an engagement.
The Government protects the criminals here. Supposing you were to be killed, for example, they’d let your murderer out of prison after ten days. The Government is mad. It’s terrible how many people have been murdered here since the war. It’s happening all the time. Today, for example, one man will infuriate another, and for one wrong word he’ll be bumped off. Or it may be for a dispute over cattle. They take it into their heads to murder the fellow and that’s the end of that. One word can get a man murdered, something stupid. It’s their mentality. It’s habitual here. It makes no more impression on them than killing a goat or an animal. They’ll kill you or me to show that they’re the masters, always. And after the murder they always expect to get away with it.
Dr Michele Navarra, the leader of the traditional Mafia – and a dependant, as such, of Don Calò’s – was a man cast in a more conventional mould. Navarra, like Dr Melchiorre Allegra – whose police confession has already been examined – had passed over his soul to the Mafia and the devil for an excellent price. By a skilful manipulation of the Mafia network of mutual aid and graft the doctor had risen rapidly to become Medical Officer of Health, medical officer for the smallholders’ health insurance scheme, Inspector of Health for the area, and chairman of the hospital. Outside his purely medical interests, he was chairman of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party, and President of the Cultivators’ Association of Corleone. He also had a valuable interest in an illicit slaughterhouse, where stolen cattle, kept hidden in the nearby Ficuzza wood, were slaughtered as required. The doctor’s photographs show him with a lined forehead and a sensitive, haunted expression, almost as though on the verge of tears over some unhappy memory. Despite the mildness of his appearance, he was given to arrogance – sometimes to impatience as well, as evidenced by his supposed assassination of Dr Nicolosi who preceded him in the various medical posts he held. At a later period he was to make a novel contribution to the science of faking the polls by issuing several hundred certificates of blindness or extreme myopia to the women of Corleone, who were then accompanied by Mafia bullies into the polling booths, to make certain that they voted Christian Democrat.
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It was against this composite background of the Middle Ages, and gunplay in the streets, that Placido Rizzotto set about organising the peasantry of Corleone. From the Mafia point of view, it was the story of a promising lad corrupted by army life. Placido had done an acceptable six months in prison in his extreme youth, and he came of satisfactory family. His father had been a low-grade mafioso who had been caught in Prefect Mori’s net, sent to confino, and thereafter been inactive in the organisation. But years in the army, including a period of fighting with the partisans in northern Italy, had provided Placido with new perspectives and thrown him out of step with the old life back in Corleone. For an ex-army sergeant and a partisan, he seems to have been remarkably gentle in his manner. He was slight in build and is reluctantly admitted by his friends to have been rather girlish in appearance. Placido contrived to see some good in most people, and amazed his fellow trade unionists, whose moral judgments were clear-cut and lacking in in-between shades, by arguing that even the terrible gun-slinging Mafia bullies of Corleone were the products, as well as prisoners, of a tragic environment. One of his frequently-quoted actions was the supply, at a time when paraffin was almost unobtainable, of some of the trade union centre’s stock to a Mafia-run farm. When asked to justify this eccentricity, he replied that, having had to do it himself, he knew what it was like to try and run a byre in winter with the butt-end of a candle.
Ingrained in the Sicilian mentality – beaten into it, one might almost say – is the idea that it is respectable to keep oneself strictly to oneself: not to hear the shot fired at night, not to see the figure escaping down the alleyway, to turn back at the sight of the body lying in the gutter ahead, to know nothing of what is going on, to keep one’s own counsel, to leave other people to solve their problems in their own way. To the downtrodden Sicilian peasant the parable of the Good Samaritan is almost without meaning, and the conduct of its protagonist irrational. The response to Rizzotto’s urgings to unite and organise was slow. The whole conception of peasant unity, of fixing minimum wages, of demanding the division of produce according to the new laws, and of forming a co-operative with the ultimate intention of taking over uncultivated land, was too novel, and with the invisible presence of the Black Knight, Luciano Liggio – too frightening. Moreover, the police were suspicious of trade unionists, and the Church in western Sicily condemned them outright.
Rizzotto went from hovel to hovel convincing the doubters. In his own way he showed a flexibility of character that would have done credit to Don Calò himself. To refute the charge that as a trade union leader he must be an atheist, he took over the organisation of the annual festivities of the patron saint of the town, and provided more coloured bunting, more flowers, and more fireworks for less expenditure. In the end he grew on the people of Corleone, and they were willing to overlook his lack of manly gruffness and his un-Sicilian passion for bothering himself with other people’s affairs and for prying into things that didn’t concern him. He won over those who hung back from fear of the gunmen by a kind of infective courage. His argument was that only a few dozen out of Corleone’s population were members of the Mafia, and that if people got together and faced up to them, then the Mafia would be powerless. In the end Placido had ten thousand peasants behind him. Profiting from the mistakes of others, he gave the police no trouble. There were no rabble-rousing speeches, no symbolical occupation of uncultivated land; just a quiet, steady undermining of the enemy’s positions, and always with the law at his back. He worked to such good effect that while the Mafia was busying itself with the immense opportunities for self-enrichment of the postwar period, while Liggio was occupied with marketing his stolen beef, and while Dr Navarra was consolidating his medical monopoly, the citizens of Corleone voted in a left-wing town council.
With the Mafia hold apparently broken, Placido’s next move was the logical one. His co-operative applied to the court in Termini Imerese for the redistribution of the uncultivated land of the Drago estate, and was successful. A few days later a commission was sent from Palermo to inspect the lands that were to be taken over, and Placido showed them round. A mafioso recalling this circumstance said that the only thing that surprised him from the Honoured Society’s point of view was that things had ever been allowed to get as far as this, particularly when one remembered that Placido Rizzotto’s father had been a man of respect – from which it was to be supposed that his son must be in the possession of dangerous secrets.
On March 10th, 1948, Placido
Rizzotto went out for a stroll before supper, telling his parents that he would be back in half an hour. What follows is taken from a signed statement made to an examining magistrate two years later by Pasquale Criscione, a gaballotto of the Drago estate that was to be expropriated, and a rank-and-file member of the Mafia. Criscione had begun his statement by saying that he was an old friend of Placido Rizzotto’s. They had been born in houses facing each other in the same street, had always played together as children, and in later years ‘we used to go around together quite a bit, arguing about one thing and another, just like all the other fellows of our age did – but always in a friendly sort of way.’
On the evening in question, I’d been out as usual trimming up the vines. I came home, had a clean-up, and decided to take a turn in the square. Just outside the Café Alaimo I noticed a group of three people, two of whom I recognised: Placido Rizzotto and Ludovico Benigno. I went up to them – actually, I was going past them when Benigno pulled out a chair by way of a joke and held me up. Both of them being friends, we started to chat, and the third person went off. We were walking up and down the Via Bentivegna together until about ten o’clock. After that we dropped Benigno near his house by the new bridge, and carried on together towards the Piazza Garibaldi.
Just as we were going by the Café Alaimo again I was called across the road by a certain Luciano Liggio, an acquaintance of mine. Turning round so that he had his back to Rizzotto, who was still waiting by the café, Liggio said, ‘Carry on with Placido as far as the Villa and remember, I’m behind you.’ I put up some sort of objection with the idea of getting to know what was behind it, but all he did was to pull up the right side of his jacket and put his hand on a pistol he had in his belt. He then said, ‘Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.’ Being aware of Luciano Liggio’s violent character and his reputation as a killer, there was nothing I could do but agree, so I went back to Rizzotto again.