by Norman Lewis
Rizzotto didn’t ask me what Liggio wanted, and we started off again in the direction of the Villa. I noticed now that Liggio, having pretended to go off in the other direction, had turned round again and was following us. I made no attempt to put Rizzotto on his guard, and when he wanted to go back to the Piazza Garibaldi I went with him, but then induced him to turn back up the Via Bentivegna again. When we came to the end of the street I made out Liggio standing in the angle of a wall, and he signed to me to turn into the Via Marsala. I then suggested to Rizzotto that we should stroll on up the Via Marsala a bit and to this he raised no objection. We had just reached Triolo’s shop when Liggio came up from behind, took Rizzotto under the arm and pointed a gun into his ribs. He said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to shoot you. We’re just going to have a quiet chat, and after that you can clear off.’
When Rizzotto saw the gun he was startled and half put his hands up. We went up the street the way Liggio said, and after Triolo’s shop we turned into the Via Misericordia and after that the Via Sant’ Elena. At the end of the street last mentioned, where the straw shacks are, I saw Vincenzo Collura waiting. As soon as we came up, Collura pulled out a gun and took Rizzotto by his free arm … Liggio pointed his pistol at me and told me to go back home. He said that if I ever let a single word drop about what had happened he would finish me off. Knowing he was quite capable of carrying out his threat, I didn’t feel like arguing about it. I went back and dropped in at my brother-in-law’s house to ask how a sick cow of his was getting on.
In answer to a question, the accused replied:
After I left them I had a chance to see that Liggio and Collura with Rizzotto in the middle went off up the footpath that leads to Sant’Ippolito. I can’t say that I heard any screams. In any case, I’m deaf in the right ear.
Answering a further question, the accused man said:
Next day, I got up early as usual and went over to Frattina to load up wood. When I got back at about midday, I heard that Rizzotto’s father had been looking for me. Later Rizzotto’s mother and sister came to ask if I could give them any news of him, as they had heard that we’d been seen together the night before.
Bearing in mind Liggio’s warning, I told them I’d parted company with Placido on the previous evening at about quarter-past ten at the corner of the Via Marsala, and that before going off he’d mentioned that he might look in at Coniglio’s tailor’s shop before going home. I confess that I invented the last detail so as to make my story sound more convincing.
* * *
Nearly two years later Criscione and Collura were arrested after Placido’s father (once again, a curiously medieval touch) had formally accused them to the assembled citizens of Corleone from the balcony of his house. Collura’s confession more or less bore out Criscione’s, although he alleged that Liggio had done the actual killing. Rizzotto’s body had been thrown into a ninety-feet deep crevice in Corleone’s sinister mountain – ‘so that the crows would not be attracted by the odour of decay, and give away the place where he lay by circling overhead’. The fire brigade brought up five shoes, a pair of braces, an ankle bone, a piece of overcoat, and a head in their first sack. The head had been lying in the mud and the features had gone, but Placido’s father recognised his son’s chestnut hair, and also the piece of overcoat. He had only had it made the year before, ‘with buttons down the middle, in the new fashion’. Further searches by the fire brigade produced more sacks full of bones. For many years this had been the hiding-place of bodies of the men of Corleone who had fallen foul of the Mafia.
Inevitably, at the trial, Criscione and Collura withdrew their confessions made before the examining magistrate, alleging that their statements had been obtained by violence used by the police. In addition, Collura – an American repatriate – produced an alibi, a number of witnesses appearing to support his statement that he had not been in Corleone on the day of the killing. The two men and Luciano Liggio were then acquitted for lack of evidence. This more or less is what has happened in the thousand or so Mafia trials (outside the Mussolini period) of which records exist.
Eyewitnesses have supplied a lugubrious account of Rizzotto’s abduction and his last minutes on earth. It happened on a fine evening of early spring at about nine o’clock – a time when the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi were crowded with people out for an after-supper stroll before going to bed. Everyone knew what was happening, saw the pointed guns, knew that Placido was being led away like an animal to the slaughterhouse. What took place was a sad Gethsemane sequence of averted eyes and abandonment, of doors quickly closed and lights quickly put out. Within minutes the streets and the square of Corleone were empty, and Placido walked alone with his captors towards the crevice on the mountainside of Casale. As a man present at this scene said, ‘He was our hero, and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to have picked up a single stone from the street, and we’d have been too much for them.’
As to the fashion in which Placido met his end, there will always be a doubt. Collura, in his first statement, said that Liggio shot him three times, but a macabre occurrence that took place immediately after the abduction throws doubt on this. A shepherd boy was brought into Dr Navarra’s hospital half-dead from fright. He said that he had been on the mountainside and had seen two ‘bandits’ hang another man from a tree. Dr Navarra listened sympathetically and then administered a ‘sedative’ injection. Soon after, the boy was dead. At that time Liggio and Navarra were good friends, and it was to be exactly ten years before it was Navarra’s turn to die from a burst from Liggio’s sub-machine-gun.
After the loss of Placido, the peasants of Corleone gave in. All idea of a co-operative was given up, and in 1963, fifteen years later, the feudal land they had been allocated remained covered with brambles and stones. Placido Rizzotto turned out to be one of the first of a series of thirty-nine trade union leaders assassinated more or less in this way. The Mafia regarded them not so much as a real danger, but as a nuisance that might grow into a danger, and their elimination was seen as a tactical success. The great Mafia strategic offensive was directed elsewhere – having as its first target a Separatist Sicily, and when that failed, the demolition of the peasants’ Popular Front and its threat to the political party the Mafia supported. For this it enlisted its own private army, and as its commander-in-chief it chose the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who now comes on the scene.
* Danilo Dolci, Waste
8
THE CONDITION of Sicily at the end of the last war is hardly imaginable by anyone who has not assisted at the spectacle of a country prostrated by defeat and occupied by alien troops.
In the towns, basically honest citizens lived empty preoccupied existences full of the petty manoeuvres and shifts necessary to keep body and soul together when all commerce and industry lay in ruins and the value of the lira had dropped to a point where a small employee’s wages were worth a couple of packets of cigarettes a week. A large proportion of the feminine population supplied the family’s income, or were compelled to supplement it, by sporadic prostitution with Allied soldiers. Every Sicilian, in order to live, had been driven to become a black marketeer in his own small way, and was liable, as such, to constant harrying by the police. But immune from interference of any kind, Don Calogero’s private black market, that leech with a thousand mouths, sucked steadily at the country’s lifeblood.
In the countryside these problems were aggravated by a total collapse of security. Thirty armed bands – at least one of them led by an AMGOT-appointed mafioso mayor – were at large. Their numbers had been swollen by six hundred criminals who had escaped from Sicilian gaols damaged by Allied bombing, numerous army deserters, and a contingent of convicts – all of them lifers – who had succeeded in breaking out of the Volterra prison during the battle for the town, and had taken refuge in Sicily. The bandits were abundantly armed with weapons collected on the battlefields. They staged innumerable highway robberies, held up trains, drove
off the peasants’ flocks, kidnapped rich men by the hundred and held them for ransom, and even laid siege to the police in their barracks. The Sicilian barons had managed to come to terms with them, paid them protection money and allowed them to hide out on their estates – sometimes even to use their granaries and warehouses as headquarters. The Mafia, despite its deep distaste for uncontrolled crime, was busy with its own organisational problems, and being able to do little or nothing to straighten out the chaos, was content to watch and wait. Sooner or later it was bound to occur to someone that these roaring gangs of freebooters might be usefully harnessed to the cause of the Sicilian Separatists, and in due course this expedient was suggested at an extraordinary congress of the movement held in September 1945 at a nobleman’s villa on the outskirts of Palermo.
Present at this gathering was the Duca di Carcaci, regarded as the head of the Separatists (and a likely candidate for the throne, were a Sicilian monarchy ever to be established), as well as a miscellany of barons. Present also was Don Calò Vizzini, éminence grise of the movement since its beginnings in 1941. Don Calò, never avid for personal publicity, was known only by reputation to some of this central committee, and his rumpled suit and insistence on expressing himself in a peasant dialect which – rich in vivid metaphor and salty allusion as it was – could hardly be understood by a patrician, probably caused some surprise. However, the little that Don Calò had to say was, as usual, very much to the point, and he was soon able to impose his view at this most fateful moment in the party’s history.
The purpose of this meeting was to work out a revised plan for an armed insurrection originally scheduled to take place later in the same month. The movement had recently been thrown into severe disarray by the loss of Antonio Canepa, the man who had been the brains of the organisation, as well as its military strategist. He personally had organised activist cells throughout Sicily, and he had seen to it that there would be real mass support for the insurrection when it came. While Canepa had been there to lead them, the Separatists had felt themselves invincible. But now there were doubts and divided counsels, and it took all the weight of Don Calò’s singular authority to work out a final agreement on the course to be taken.
Like most revolutionary organisations, the Sicilian Separatist movement had brought together some strangely assorted bedfellows. In the forefront, in the full glow of the footlights, was the Duke himself and his supporting barons, all of whom hankered after an unqualified return to the Middle Ages, and who were absolutely certain that the only way to prevent Sicily from being overrun by Communist hordes was to detach it from Italy. Behind this façade of aristocrats was – for the moment – the Mafia; but only for the moment, and while it suited the Mafia’s purposes. For the rest, the movement was largely composed of young idealists and romantics who looked forward to a war of liberation from the ‘Italian Oppressors’. Each of these groups mistrusted the motives of the others, and each was quite certain of its ability to seize power as soon as separation from Italy became a fact.
Canepa was the hero of the romantic-idealist faction, as well as of such of the peasantry as had been attracted to the aims of Separatism. He was an ardent anti-Fascist as well as a Separatist, and for this reason was always viewed with some reserve by the aristocratic right wing of the movement, which on the whole had no reason to complain of the epoch of Mussolini. Canepa’s history had been an astonishing one. In 1933, when a university professor of economics and still in his late twenties, he had been seized with the implausible idea of descending with his brother and a party of student disciples on the tiny mountain state of San Marino, of declaring it an anti-Fascist Italian Republic, and holding out at least long enough to show the world that not all Italians had bowed their necks to Mussolini’s yoke. Betrayed by a police spy in his organisation, he was arrested, certified as insane, and locked up in a lunatic asylum. By 1943, he was back again in Sicily, now in the employ of British Intelligence. Early in that year he carried out a totally successful sabotage mission against the German-held airfield of Gerbini, near Syracusa, and was then parachuted into northern Italy to organise the partisans around Florence. Sixteen guerilla formations of the so-called Canepa Brigade awaited his order in July 1945 to raise the yellow Separatist flag throughout Sicily. The police showed him nothing but benevolent neutrality. The Allies had – so far – been discreetly favourable to his cause. Then the unthinkable happened. It was revealed that Canepa was a secret Communist.
One can imagine the explosion of horror in Sicilian baronial circles when they were confronted with the nightmarish fact that the war chief they relied upon to establish a feudal monarchy in Sicily had turned out to be an advocate of the dictatorship of the proletariat. An unsigned pamphlet was discovered, popularly attributed to Canepa, in which he seemed to be explaining to his Communist supporters the reasons for his dubious associations with such bloodsuckers as the baronial clique. ‘For the moment,’ the pamphlet ended, ‘we are content to follow a parallel course, but the time will come when they will give us their land or their heads.’ Canepa’s communism was unorthodox, as his support for the Separatists was in direct conflict with the Party line. The Italian Communist Party believed that a separate Sicily would inevitably be dominated by the Allies, and would therefore be anti-Communist and anti-Russian. So persuasive, however, had Canepa been in arguing his position with the Party leaders, that his relationship with them continued to remain cordial.
How was it that the barons were finally informed of the secret nature of the viper they had been nurturing in their bosoms? How can they have been provided in such detail with the account of Canepa’s conferences with Communist Party officials in northern Italy? This is where speculation comes up against the higher cynicism of international politics – the obscure treacheries and amoralities of actions taken for reasons of State. The time had come when many interests would be served by the elimination of the brilliant but complicated Canepa, and eliminated Canepa was.
The thing was not well done by the standards of political assassination, and the lack of professionalism – of careful attention to details – suggests that Don Calò had no hand in the planning. The operation was carried out by a patrol of nervous young carabinieri who panicked as soon as their task was completed. Canepa had been caught returning in a truck with his bodyguard from some night excursion and riddled with bullets by the previously well-disposed police manning a road checkpoint. The ambuscade was bungled, as two of Canepa’s companions were able to escape and later furnished an account of what had happened; nevertheless, the distracted carabinieri still went ahead with the second part of the plan, now rendered meaningless by the incompleteness of the execution.
It was clearly intended that Canepa should quietly disappear from the face of the earth, but he did not do so. That same night, in the small hours, the custodian of the cemetery of the village of Giarre – thirty kilometres from where the shooting had taken place – was awakened by the police who carried in four coffins. These they tried to persuade him to bury immediately. Their explanation was that they contained the bodies of bandits killed in a battle, but their evident nervousness and their inexplicable insistence that the burials should take place there and then, excited the custodian’s suspicions. When asked for the death certificates, the carabinieri said that they had none and that they were acting ‘on higher orders’. At this point the custodian, who seems to have been both an obstinate and indomitable fellow, insisted on prising open the coffins. Being himself a Separatist, he instantly recognised the corpse of Canepa. One of the four encoffined men turned out to be still alive, and actually survived the experience.
Thus all hope of disposing discreetly of Canepa, the man and the legend, failed through the officiousness of a village sexton, and with it failed the cause of Sicilian Separatism. Canepa’s death – by treachery, as was popularly supposed – split the organisation. His sixteen guerilla formations, left abandoned and without direction, dissolved themselves. The barons and the Mafia we
re left with their plans for an armed rising but with nobody to carry them out – and for that matter, no insurrectionists.
* * *
The Separatists, barons and mafiosi who now foregathered with some anxiety in the villa of the Palerman nobleman, had chosen as their new captain Concetto Gallo, a lawyer and small landowner from the east of the island. Gallo was not the man that Canepa had been, but he possessed all Canepa’s almost insane courage and was a gifted orator, who at a moment’s notice could unleash a rhetorical flood, behind which an absence of original thought passed unnoticed. Physically he bore a strange resemblance to Lord Kitchener, with his drooping mustachios, his severe gaze, and even – in the way of the Kitchener of the famous recruiting poster – his habit of shooting out an admonishing finger at the half-hypnotised victims of his harangues. Gallo showed none of the defunct Canepa’s inclination to tinker with the established order. At the meeting he outlined his strategic plan for the ‘tactical utilisation’ of the outlaw bands. He was particularly eager to enlist the bands of Giuliano in the west, and a heterogeneous collection of brigands led by a notorious murderer called Rizzo who operated in the east. In this way the forces of the Italian State could be harried on two widely separated fronts. One or two of the less violently reactionary delegates voiced some alarm at this proposed open association of the Separatist cause with common criminals, but were shouted down. The vice-president of the organisation, Lucio Tasca, intervened to point out, with telling effect, that even Garibaldi had consented to align himself temporarily and for the best possible motives, with the underworld of his day.