by Norman Lewis
Tasca was the Mayor of Palermo, an elderly and capricious mafioso whose appointment had confirmed Sicilians in their belief that the Allies were not only dedicated to the rehabilitation of the Mafia, but also solidly behind the Separatists. Like so many aristocrats, he was a devout believer in the divine mission of the aristocracy, and he had even elaborated his social philosophy in a treatise entitled In Praise of the Latifundia. In this he set out to show that the special spiritual qualities possessed, as he saw it, by the Sicilian peasantry – their innate nobility of soul – could be quite simply extended to Italy, and in due course to the rest of the world, if only humanity could be induced to return to primitive forms of agriculture. Tasca recommended that every tractor in the world should be scrapped in favour of the ‘nail plough’, an archaic instrument of husbandry in use in Roman times. For the tillers of the soil he advocated a low diet of maize gruel, early rising, early marriage, and prayer. They would revert to the wearing of short homespun tunics, which would both proclaim their condition and ensure the freedom of the limbs so desirable for their work. As of old, the patrician would be distinguished by his flowing robes. Agricultural production was to be improved by converting Sicilian peasant women to the Indian squaw’s method of working, more or less uninterruptedly, with her baby bound on her back. In short, the moral regeneration of mankind – with the exception of the aristocracy, who were not in need of it – was to be achieved by turning as many people as possible into peasants working under a paternal feudalism he proceeded to describe. Tasca was a great admirer of Don Calò Vizzini, and had sent him a handsome tribute of black-market grain on the occasion of the head of the Mafia’s elevation to the dignity of Mayor of Villalba. He was now to be rewarded by Don Calò’s massive and incontrovertible support.
Sweeping aside the objections of the few liberals left in the movement, Don Calò stated his absolute confidence in the success of the revolt. However, he recommended that the old Canepa idea of a popular revolution be thrown overboard. Who could say where a real insurrection would stop, and how could anybody be sure that it could be kept under control? Don Calò offered the delegates his guarantee that he in person would assume the indirect leadership of the outlaw bands. What he proposed in effect was a bogus insurrection. The bandits could be disguised as Sicilian patriots, and where necessary their numbers could be bolstered by enthusiastic university students and lads of good family with a spirit of adventure. In this way the Italian authorities could be harried quite as effectively as by an undependable rabble that might at any moment pick up the Communist virus and start to help itself to other people’s property.
It was a suggestion that found ready acceptance. Machiavelli would have been delighted by some of the realistic political thinking that found expression on this occasion – certainly by the subsequent performance of his star pupil, Don Calò, who went straight from the meeting to an appointment with Messana, Chief Inspector of Police. To Messana, Don Calò gave a detailed report of all that had taken place, omitting only the small matter of his own enthusiastic vote in favour of enlisting the bandits. In this way, and in perfect Mafia style, the ground was prepared for certain delicate and profitable manipulations, which Don Calò, as holder of the balance of power, expected to perform. He also made himself as indispensable to the police as he was to the barons, and as he shortly would be to the bandits.
A few days later the Duca di Carcaci sent a message to the bandit Giuliano, inviting him to come to Catania for consultations. Giuliano’s reply was brief but characteristic: ‘I slip on asphalt.’ Mahomet was therefore obliged to go to the mountain, and the meeting finally took place in the warehouse of one of the feudal estates, within a few miles of Giuliano’s mountain stronghold of Montelepre. Here Concetto Gallo, the commander-in-chief of the Separatists, formally offered Giuliano the command of the Separatist guerilla forces in western Sicily. In return, Giuliano was promised a free pardon for his now imposing list of crimes, plus a high government post in the new Sicilian State. Giuliano accepted and was commissioned on the spot as colonel. Gallo handed him a Separatist battle standard, and a badge showing a map of Italy and America and two American soldiers, one in the act of cutting the chain linking Sicily with Italy and the other chaining Sicily to the United States. This had been hastily confected by the ‘Bureau of Psychological Warfare’ of the organisation, in deference to Giuliano’s known belief that Separatism could not win without American military aid. It is probable that he was persuaded that this aid was about to be given.
* * *
Already, at the age of twenty-three, Salvatore Giuliano ranked as the most famous Sicilian bandit of all times, and was by then usually referred to by the Italian Press as ‘The King of Montelepre’. Montelepre is a small, mean, poverty-stricken town, lodged like the cells of a cancer in the flanks of the mountains of northwest Sicily, less than fifteen miles as the crow flies from Palermo. Behind it are the desert acres – a bony, sun-corroded African landscape of spectral peaks and whining siroccos. Below, between Montelepre and the sea, stretches the great glistening plain of Partinico. Here the civilisation of antiquity drove back the desert and filled the landscape with a brilliant filigree of gardens. There is no place in the world that reeks more strongly of the remote past than this. Any house that is more than a hovel is the ghost of a Roman villa, displaying the wasted grandeur of massive portico, cracked arch, and vaulted, sounding interior. All around, the orange orchards spread their magnificent gloom, through which the peasants move almost with stealth. Water – now the prey of the Mafia – gurgles everywhere through a complex of ancient conduits, splashing and cascading from the jaws of stone pythons into moss-rimmed cisterns and ditches. Through Partinico’s scent of dust and oranges strikes coldly a rank odour of marshes. In this plain, and to create this miraculous fertility, the voracious colonisation of antiquity consumed slaves by the thousand. They worked in chains, were housed underground, and in three years a man’s lifetime was used up by labour. The few that escaped took to the mountains behind Montelepre, and were instantly lost to their pursuers in the chalky dazzle of the rock-maze and among the ramparts of gesticulating cactus. In bad times there have always been bandits above Montelepre.
Giuliano had become a bandit two years previous to his encounter with the Separatist leaders. Two carabinieri, patrolling the mountains on the lookout for petty black-market operators, had caught him with a sack of contraband flour. It was a period when, as revealed in the memoirs of the carabinieri NCO in command of the Montelepre station at that time, the police were actually employed as escorts for large-scale transportation of black-market provisions up and down the roads of Sicily, but when such small offenders as Giuliano were vigorously prosecuted. Resisting arrest, Giuliano shot one carabiniere dead, and was himself wounded by the other. He took to the maquis, and as soon as his wound had healed, began a series of audacious coups, the first being the liberation of a number of criminals from the gaol at Monreale. It has been suggested that this operation was planned for him by the Mafia, who had already estimated his potential usefulness in any armed showdown with the peasants that it might be necessary to stage. The escaped prisoners formed the nucleus of his band. By way of reprisal for this humiliation, the police organised a mass roundup of suspects in the town of Montelepre. As the arrested persons were being led away in chains, Giuliano made a dramatic appearance in the town square and opened fire on the police escort, killing another carabiniere. Giuliano’s exploits were carried out with a feeling for the theatre that endeared him to newspapermen, and constantly provided the subject of special editions of Italian papers. On one occasion he materialised suddenly in the path of two carabinieri who were supposed to be looking for him and deprived them of their weapons and their boots. As this performance was held to reflect grave discredit upon the carabinieri as a whole, some effort was made to hush it up, and the Mayor of Montelepre, who happened to be Giuliano’s uncle, used his good offices to persuade Giuliano to return the confiscated property. Ho
wever, the restitution was accompanied by the maximum publicity – to the enormous increase of Giuliano’s prestige and the disparagement of that of the police.
The King of Montelepre showed, at the age of twenty-one, a quite extraordinary capacity for leadership and organisation. He soon involved the whole countryside in a kind of conspiratorial network to safeguard him from being taken unawares. A warning system was worked out by which the presence in the mountains not only of a policeman, but of any stranger to the neighbourhood, was immediately signalled to him by shepherds who could transmit a simple message by whistling from one to the other from hilltop to hilltop. Like all the bandits remembered by history, he was careful to cultivate the Robin Hood tradition of robbing the rich to give to the poor. To this conventional source of popularity he added another and specifically Sicilian qualification for the people’s esteem by declaring against the Mafia – which turned on him its reptilian smile and simply bided its time. In one way or another he succeeded in winning over not only the whole of the civil population of Montelepre, but a number of its authorities as well. Giuliano had the intellectual raw material of a political thinker, and although he was handicapped by his limited education and knowledge of the world, he was a master – out of sheer natural genius – of the art of guerilla warfare. He was a far abler strategist, too, than Concetto Gallo, the Separatists’ commander-in-chief. It was inevitable that his fame should go to his head. He was courted by journalists and film producers; received the diplomatic visits of such celebrities as Vito Genovese, the American gangster who was unofficial adviser to the Allied Military Government; was wined and dined in secret by politicians and high officials of the Italian police. He became a letter-writer, explaining and justifying his actions to the Press, the police, and members of parliament, in letters couched in vigorous style that had also the ring of proclamations and often began: ‘My name is Giuliano’ in the manner of Ozymandias, King of Kings.
The photographs of the Giuliano of the period show him as an athletic stripling with the kind of good looks a Northerner can understand and appreciate. He was a man of what in the old days used to be called an open countenance, with a good forehead, a firm mouth, and a certain directness of expression. Giuliano had the face of a Latin, but not that of a Mediterranean man of the deep south. His appearance, indeed, was in striking contrast with that of his henchmen – in particular Pisciotta, his egregious second-in-command, whose almond eyes and long thin nose with recurving nostrils belong to the face on an Etruscan vase, or even a Persian bas-relief.
For formal occasions, or for one of his incognito visits to the city, Giuliano dressed with the sober dignity of a true Sicilian – ‘better than a professor or lawyer’, as Cicciu Busacca, the troubadour, puts it in his ‘Ballad of Giuliano, King of the Brigands’. The touches of luxury he permitted himself were discreet: a calendar wristwatch, a golden belt-buckle, and a diamond solitaire ring which he had taken in person from the finger of the Duchess of Pratameno on the occasion when he obtained admission to her house by a trick, having arranged for a member of the band to be employed as her doorkeeper. His dramatic announcement, ‘I am Giuliano,’ appears to have fallen flat. One version has it that the Duchess took him for a rather brash young relation of one of her domestics, and, although startled by the intrusion, recovered herself to murmur politely, ‘How nice of you to come.’ In the end Giuliano convinced her that in spite of his exceedingly bourgeois appearance, he really was an outlaw, and indeed compelled her to hand over her jewels by threatening to kill her nephew. Otherwise the interview was conducted on his side with courtesy, and even gallantry. It was at the moment of leave-taking when he bent over the Duchess’s hand to kiss it that he noticed the famous ring. This episode has been made much of by the folk-singers of Sicily, and it was vivaciously described in Cicciu Busacca’s ballad – which, by the way, got him into trouble with the authorities as late as 1962, when he was placed on trial for ‘apology for crime’.
At the most, Giuliano saw himself as reduced to expedients of this kind through the force of circumstances. He would probably have admitted that – through no fault of his own – he was temporarily an outlaw, but it would have shocked him to hear himself described as a bandit. He was desperately eager for the excuse, presented in due course by the Duca di Carcaci and company, to describe himself as a political fighter. Even before the Separatists made their offer, there is evidence that Giuliano had some amorphous vision of himself as a potent force for the reshaping of the new Sicily that was bound to emerge eventually from the disorders of the day. Giuliano was no cynic. He had his own definition of righteousness. Like every one of the fantastic plotters he was to serve as cat’s-paw, he managed to equate the furtherance of his own ends with the ultimate benefit of his country. Giuliano’s Sicilian Utopia was far from the slaughtered Canepa’s Marxist state, or the medieval paradise of Tasca, the Mayor of Palermo, where the peasants were to be ennobled by endlessly scratching with their wooden implements in the soil of the feudal latifundia. But Giuliano’s Utopia had a real existence in his own mind. Its starting-point was justice for those like himself, whom he saw as having been wronged by a corrupt society, and after that he would have cleared away all the oppressors of the poor, beginning with the police and ending with the Mafia.
* * *
Giuliano, the reformer, gave the people of Montelepre a foretaste of the stern but paternalistic régime he had in mind. Common criminals, i.e., robbers who were not members of his band, were caught and executed by firing squad. Members of his own band were sometimes liquidated too; one for assaulting a woman, another for requisitioning a poor farmer’s cattle, and a third – who had stolen two barrels of wine – for ‘disrespect to the poor’. Petty dishonesty infuriated the King of Montelepre, who said on one occasion, ‘A rich man no more misses a million lire than he would his hat, but if you take a sack of wheat from a peasant, you leave him in misery.’
Having licked his own band into shape morally, Giuliano next decided to clean up some of the civic wrongdoers of his home town, and a post-office employee was promptly executed for stealing the mail, and a shopkeeper for oppressive usury. It had been the shopkeeper’s misfortune to give credit to Giuliano’s sister. When possible, executions were carried out with proper formality in the town itself, while the police cowered in their barracks. The condemned man was given time – in fact urged – to say a prayer before the volley was fired, and afterwards his body would be exposed in a prominent place bearing a notice such as ‘Giuliano Does Not Steal From the Poor’, in indication of the reason for the execution.
The Giuliano despotism, however, was not all repression. In a capricious and erratic way the bandit did succeed in distributing a fair amount of his loot among the neediest of the peasants of the area. Once he descended like a fairy godfather with a wad of bank-notes in hand on an old woman who was about to be evicted from her house, and there are many instances where he is known to have contributed from his war-chest to alleviate suffering that had been reported to him. The real trouble was that, like so many of the contenders for power in the Sicily of the immediate postwar period, Giuliano found himself obliged to make alliances of convenience with the oppressors of the poor whose protector he claimed to be. Determined as he was to strike at the Mafia when the moment came, he listened too long to the siren voice of its whispered promptings. The end, Giuliano assured himself, justified the means. But the end as seen in Giuliano’s naïve vision never came about, and before the Mafia had finished with him it had turned him into a marionette with a machine-gun, who killed mindlessly, and strictly to its order.
Already, at this early stage of his career, there was something not altogether explicable in Giuliano’s unbroken run of success. Maresciallo Calandra, who took over command of the twelve badly armed and somewhat demoralised carabinieri of the Montelepre detachment, while far from underrating the bandit’s intelligence and intuition, began to be puzzled by the fact that Giuliano seemed not only to be aware of all the p
olice’s moves, but also of their intentions. These sinister powers of augury enabled Giuliano to move his men across the mountains into position to ambush a police convoy, not merely as soon as the trucks were sighted on the road, but even before they had left police headquarters in Palermo. How also could the bandit have known in advance of an occasion when Calandra was obliged to go to Partinico on official business? Giuliano had let it be known that he proposed to be revenged on the Maresciallo for compelling his mother to come to the police station at Montelepre and then treating her with insufficient respect. At the last moment Calandra decided to go to Palermo that day and sent his sergeant to Partinico in his place. The sergeant was ambushed with his men and only narrowly escaped, and Giuliano, calling on him to surrender as the sergeant lay concealed behind a rock, hailed him as ‘Maresciallo’ – making it quite plain that it was Calandra who had been expected.
Calandra’s memoirs, entitled I Could Have Captured the Bandit Giuliano, were published seventeen years later, in 1961, when the Maresciallo was in retirement and felt himself able to dispense with some of the reticence expected of a serving noncommissioned officer. Looking back, he has the sensation that even in those early days Giuliano was being protected; that he may have been marked down to be held in reserve for the execution of some occult task, the nature of which might some day be hinted at, but never stated.
The Maresciallo’s situation in Montelepre was an uneasy one. He found himself isolated with his men by the total hostility of the local population, and the victim of pronounced logistic difficulties. There were no beds for the men, and no change of clothing when they came in from patrols carried out in the freezing winter rain. Somewhat more remarkably there were no more than six pairs of boots among the twelve, so that only half the contingent – wearing boots which fitted them only roughly – could leave the barracks at a time, while the others waited in their socks. The disparity in fire power between the bandits and the carabinieri was notable. Giuliano’s band was equipped with up-to-date machine-guns, German P60 automatic pistols, American rifles, and hand-grenades. Calandra’s men carried antique Italian revolvers based on an 1889 version of the Colt, and Italian army rifles, model 891, which to an outsider look more like a well-made toy than a weapon of offence.