by Norman Lewis
Whatever his defects may have been as a tactician, Gallo at least believed that a commander ought to lead his troops in action. Accordingly he had taken up his position in a hole in the ground on the lower slopes, and here he remained all day long blazing away enthusiastically for hour after hour, until his machine-gun, too, jammed. He then gave the order to the two volunteers with him to withdraw, and there was a tense and heroic moment when they refused to do so and Gallo drew his pistol and brandished it at them. As even this gesture had no effect on their determination to stay where they were and fight it out to the last round of rifle ammunition, all three men embraced in an emotional leave-taking and the fight went on. Eventually when the defenders’ last shot had been fired, Gallo was knocked out by the blast of a hand-grenade, and all three men were then captured. After a few months in prison, Gallo was amnestied.
Night fell again, and with it came the end of the battle. In two full days of fighting hundreds of shells had been fired from artillery pieces of all kinds, and tens of thousands of bullets had been discharged from pistols, rifles and machine-guns. The desperate and bloody resistance described by the newspapers had cost the Separatists six wounded, while the government forces had sustained six casualties too, one man being killed. With the loss of Gallo, the Separatists accepted the impossibility of continuing an organised resistance from their mountain redoubt, and placing themselves temporarily under the orders of a bandit leader who possessed a professional knowledge of local topography, they were able to filter safely through the cordon of surrounding troops and make their escape under cover of darkness. Three of their wounded were in a dangerous condition, and through a prearranged system of liaison they were able to get these away safely by car to the Duca di Carcaci’s villa in Catania, where it was expected they would be well looked after. The presence of three wounded rebels in his house, however, seems to have caused the Duke grave embarrassment, and the men were shuffled hastily, and without medical treatment beyond doses of aspirin, from hiding-place to hiding-place until one died. The unfortunate rebel’s naked body was tied on the back of a mule, taken up a mountainside, and thrown into a ravine. It was clear that by now the Separatist leaders had got cold feet.
The remnants of their eastern army dragged themselves miserably about the mountains throughout the bitter months of winter, chased from pillar to post by enormous bodies of soldiers and carabinieri. By early April their numbers were reduced by sickness and desertion to eight bandits and twelve volunteers. Some of the volunteers suggested calling the whole thing off, but the bandits always refused. While the volunteers stayed with them the bandits could still believe in the myth that they were the soldiers of a defeated army, with at least the possibility, when the end came, of being treated as such. Clinging to this straw of hope, the bandits refused to let the young townsmen out of their sight. Then five broken-spirited men laid down their arms, prepared even to brave the fury of the diehards rather than go on. There was a moment when the bandits surrounded them, guns in hand, and their lives seemed to hang by a thread, and then the remaining seven volunteers joined in and persuaded the bandits to let them go.
And now all contact with the headquarters of the movement in Palermo was broken. Always before, in the months of hardship spent wandering through the mountains, the handful of Separatists had been occasionally revived by a message from their chiefs assuring them that their sufferings would soon be at an end, that help was coming, that new insurrections would be announced at any moment, and that in the west Giuliano’s guerilla band had the army and the police at its mercy. But now they were encased in silence. The cold weeping mists of winter in the Sicilian mountains were behind them, spring – compressed into a single month – had come and was nearly gone, and not far ahead a burning and atrocious summer threatened. By the end of the month the remaining volunteers slipped quietly away, leaving the bandits as they had always dreaded they would be left – alone in the mountains. By the end of that year, all but two were dead.
* * *
Meanwhile, from the wings, Don Calogero Vizzini had been watching the comedy. Of the tiny handful of those who manipulated the Separatist movement from behind the scenes, he was probably the first to lose confidence in Separatism. Close as he was to the secret counsels of the Allies, this supreme realist must have realised that the Americans and the British had lost interest in this sickly political infant, and that without their succour it would never survive. It was becoming clear, also, that with Separatism gone by the board, the political party of the Right that stood the best chance in the battles ahead was the Christian Democrats, now vigorously supported by the Catholic Church. Preparing himself for a political conversion, Don Calò saw no reason to prolong the Separatists’ agony. The trifling fact that he himself was deeply compromised with them, and with what were seen at that time as their crimes, hardly troubled him in view of his intimate friendship with Messana. Now, to cement his friendship with the Chief of Police, Don Calò betrayed to him the Separatists’ plan of action for western Sicily, where, as arranged, Giuliano was engaged in attacking the carabinieri barracks. Nothing was farther from Don Calò’s intention than to bring about Giuliano’s annihilation, but he preferred him, the way things had gone, to be kept in check. When, therefore, Giuliano next attacked a police-station, he found that he was expected, and suffered a sharp reverse.
Following Don Calò’s furtive abandonment of their cause, the dukes and barons flocked back like prodigal sons to make their peace with the Italian Government. If nothing else, the faked-up popular revolt, nine-tenths of which had been banditry, had succeeded as a piece of blackmail. Meanwhile the storm clouds of real rebellion had gathered and muttered on the horizon. At Lentini and at Carletini infuriated peasants broke into the granaries of the feudal estates where corn was being hoarded against a rise in prices, and carried it away. The time had clearly arrived for conciliation and the peace of compromise.
In the negotiations that followed, the principle naturally enough was that the leading figures of the Separatist movement were to go scot-free. Writing to the Italian Premier, De Gasperi, the carabinieri commanding officer in Sicily, General Branca, said of such of the leaders as Tasca and Don Calò Vizzini: ‘There is no evidence of their direct participation in the organisation of armed bands, and certainly insufficient proof to warrant their arrest.’ De Gasperi laid down the policy to be followed in a letter to his high commissioner. Everything possible was to be done to restore normality in Sicily. He was to show ‘benevolent discrimination in the case of those who had been misled by others and who now wished to draw back from the dangerous position in which they found themselves.’ However, it was clear that somebody had to pay the penalty for the loss of life and property, so common malefactors who had exploited the emergency to commit crimes were to be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law. It was hastily agreed that Sicily should be granted autonomy within the framework of the Italian State. The Central Government recognised the very special social structure of the island. In other words, there would be no land reforms pressed through over the heads of the feudal landowners. To sum up, the barons were given almost everything they had almost had to fight to get. In return, they believed themselves able to guarantee that Sicily would remain a perpetual reservoir of voters for the Right.
Against this background of fraternal hugs, misty-eyed reconciliation, and the popping of champagne corks in honour of the new autonomous Sicily, Giuliano, Colonel of the Separatist Army, still carried on what was now a meaningless private war. His coups were increasingly audacious, bloody and successful. He blew up carabinieri barracks, massacred soldiers and policemen from ambush, disrupted all traffic by road or rail in western Sicily, and was even almost successful in an attempt to take over the Palermo radio station. Until May 1946, when Sicilian autonomy was officially announced, he managed to see himself as a soldier legitimately killing the enemy. But with the declaration of autonomy and the turning of the Separatist barons’ backs on their unruly past
, he was a criminal once again. There was to be no amnesty for Giuliano, and the violences he had been induced to commit as a result of his association with the Separatists enormously diminished any hope he may have had of eventual rehabilitation.
But even as a bandit there was still a use to be found for Giuliano’s services. De Gasperi, the Premier, had ordered that normality should be restored in Sicily without delay, but the men in his service on the spot, the army and police chiefs, asked themselves how the head of the government supposed that his orders could be carried out, with the thirty armed bands still at large, and – with the exception of the Niscemesi, who had borne the brunt of the campaign against Gallo at San Mauro – still as active as ever.
The problem was solved with brilliant economy by Don Calò himself, who, having facilitated and come to terms with the Allied occupation of his country in such a way that western Sicily at least was spared from becoming a battlefield, now took it upon himself to tidy up the litter of the war’s aftermath.
A certain Cavalier Santo Fleres, a dependent of Don Calò’s and head of the Mafia ‘family’ of Partinico – a man who had grown so fat in his latter years that he could walk only with the aid of a couple of lesser men of respect propping him up on each side – met Giuliano and put a proposition to him. Giuliano was to persuade the electorate in the area under his control to vote Christian Democrat, and he was to go to work immediately to eliminate all the rival bands within his reach. In return, the Mafia would use its influence through its tame representatives in Parliament to obtain a pardon for him and his men. By this time the Honoured Society felt itself strong enough to add a stipulation: Giuliano was to cease his depredations in country areas and leave landowners alone. In future his tribute-raising activities were to be confined to the towns.
Giuliano went to work with speed and silence. After the months and years of half-hearted footslogging across the mountains by thousands of soldiers and carabinieri, the huge encirclements that closed in on nothing, the massive cannonadings that claimed no victims, what now happened was murder reduced to clean surgery. Working in unholy trinity, Inspector-General of Public Security Messana, Don Calò and Giuliano not only cleaned up the country but deftly removed most of the unpleasant traces of what had happened.
It was a task undertaken in traditional Sicilian fashion without publicity. A handful of the condemned bandits actually met their deaths, gun in hand, in the open, but in nearly all cases they were the victims of cold-blooded betrayals by those whom they believed to be their friends. Don Calò suspended the code of omertà and death made its approach in many unexpected disguises. It was in the changed smile of the mistress waiting to signal from the window of a room where a worn-out fugitive sprawled on the bed, and in the hand clasp that become a grip from which a man could not tear himself free, while a knife struck down from behind. A new gun, the gift of an old friend, exploded in a man’s face the first time he tried it. A car crashed mysteriously into a wall, killing its driver, when the steering unaccountably failed. One simple-minded swashbuckler, grateful to receive an invitation to the house of a mafioso, was drugged with luminal tablets dropped into his wine, then carried outside and shot. Bandits were induced to come out of hiding by faked appeals from their families, or by promises that clandestine emigration had been arranged, and were then mown down from ambush. The Mafia showed no loyalty or fair play to the ‘trash’. All that counted was expediency. What had to be done was best got over with quickly.
Men who had been called to protect manorial property from the demands of land-hungry peasants were told that their services were no longer required. ‘Rickets’ Trabona, the brigand who had a legal contract drawn up by which his two infant sons received a half-share in the produce of an estate he ‘protected’, now found himself obliged to hide out in a pagliaio straw shelter, and in this he was shot dead in his sleep. The nights of Sicily were full of the stealthy comings and goings of the executioners.
Mafia orders were that none of the bandit leaders, burdened as they were with compromising secrets, were to be taken alive. Obsessed, almost, with security, the men of respect put themselves to trouble to prevent their victims’ identification, and there were hideous discoveries of assortments of corpses charred beyond recognition in country shacks destroyed by fire. Sometimes a carabinieri officer would manage to secure a recognisable body and have himself photographed beside it like a hunter with his trophy, but the dead man had always been dispatched elsewhere, and in circumstances that would have done little credit to the law. The demoralised and leaderless rank and file of the bands were now rounded up by the police. At the ‘Trial of the Rags’ as it was called, by contemptuous allusion to the prisoners’ quality, two hundred and ninety-two obscure criminals stood in the dock, round which had been built an enormous cage. Among them there was only one notable figure. This was Salvatore Malta, the man who had performed the singular feat of being on the register of the Ucciardone prison while actually at large and engaged in terrorising the peasantry of the Tudia estate. Most of the prisoners received life sentences, but Inspector Messana, Don Calò’s friend and head of Public Security, as well as three other senior police officers, spoke in Malta’s defence and he was acquitted.
* * *
This trial marked the end of the period of postwar anarchy. By the end of 1946 order returned to five-sixths of Sicily. Only one band remained, but it was as active, as numerous and as apparently invulnerable as it had ever been. This was the band of Giuliano, and as the retired policemen publish their memoirs and the grains of evidence accumulate over the years, the fantastic reason why becomes plain.
Maresciallo Calandra in charge of the carabinieri of Montelepre tells us that he could have captured Giuliano at the beginning of the bandit’s career but was not allowed to. Giuliano, he says, always seemed to know in advance when any attack on his hiding-place was contemplated. Later we read from official Italian sources of Inspector-General Verdiani of the Public Security exchanging an affectionate correspondence with the bandit, and once joining him for an intimate little meal en famille, with sweet cakes and wine. Meanwhile, and at a time when carabinieri, public security agents and soldiers were dying in ambuscades staged by the Giuliano band, Pisciotta – Giulano’s second-in-command – was out shopping for silk shirts in Palermo, accompanied by a carabinieri captain. Pisciotta carried in his pocket two genuine police passes, one permitting him to move about freely, and the other to carry arms. One of these bore the signature, whether forged or not, of Mario Scelba, Minister of the Interior.
The fact is that there was no desire whatever to destroy the Giuliano band. On the contrary, the evidence is that it was kept in readiness; an instrument to be used in a final emergency for the performance of a grim task. On May 1st, 1947, Giuliano and his men, having at last received their orders, moved to the attack – not this time on the police, but on a great multitude of peasant holidaymakers. Italian politics have never recovered from the effect of the deed that was done that day.
10
TO AN OBSERVER of the Italian – and Sicilian – political scene in the immediate postwar period, a swing to the Left seemed certain as soon as parliamentary democracy could be established. Allied Intelligence agencies were surprised, and in some cases disturbed, at the strength and vitality of the emergent Left-wing parties at a moment when, in many places, it was felt necessary to confront the Communist Eastern bloc with an undivided and anti-Communist West.
The Italian drift to the Left was the foreseeable and indeed inevitable reaction from twenty years of government by a clownish dictatorship which had finally succeeded in dragging the nation after it to disaster. The weary disgust of nearly all Italians for the Mussolini régime was extended to embrace those many ex-Fascists, or Fascist collaborators, who now offered themselves under various labels as candidates for democratic election. The only parties harbouring none of these damaged reputations or political turncoats were those of the Left, and many Socialist and Communist leaders could sp
eak of years spent in Fascist prisons in support of their political good faith. In so far as the Left attracted the Italian middle classes, it was because it promised a reversal of everything Fascism had stood for. In the Italian deep south and in Sicily, the Socialists’ and Communists’ appeal was based on their promise to assuage the peasants’ centuries-old hunger for the land. Peasants everywhere know little of and care less for the doctrinal concepts of Communism. If they are landless, and if there is uncultivated land within their reach, they will follow whoever shows them how that land can be occupied.
By 1947 the Sicilian peasantry were licking the very dregs of misery. The sparse and wretchedly-paid labour given them on the feudal estates provided hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, and they were mocked by the bitter vision of the weeds growing high on the uncultivated land that had become theirs by a law which was seemingly never to be put into force. Where they had tried to stand up for their rights, the Mafia or hired bandits had quickly browbeaten them back into submission. Killers had been hired to assassinate their leaders. Occasional mass demonstrations which had been too strong for the Mafia to break up had been dealt with by police riot-squads with tear-gas and machine-guns. It began, in fact, to look as though autonomous Sicily was to be quite indistinguishable from a peasant’s angle from the feudal paradise the Separatist barons had planned for themselves.
Then the Right made a psychological blunder. A referendum was held to decide the fate of King Umberto II, and the Monarchists adopted as their campaigning slogan, ‘Whoever votes Republican votes for the Communists’. The slogan acted as a boomerang, because by this time Don Calò Vizzini himself had become a Republican and a Christian Democrat. Umberto then appealed to the American gangster Nick Gentile, who was erroneously believed by some to have replaced Don Calò as the head of the Honoured Society, and the esteem shown this gangster chieftain by Allied Military Government was exceeded only by that accorded to Don Calò himself. The ex-American capo-Mafia discusses his cosy relationship with the occupation authorities in his autobiography, published in Italy in November 1963. AMGOT, he says, found him indispensable in his home town, Raffadali. ‘One might say that Major Monroe and I formed an administration, a government of the territory.’ Unfortunately the British moved in and took over the whole province, and a British general sent both Gentile and the Major to gaol. But he was soon at liberty again, and this time provided with a more powerful ally, a Colonel Max Brod. It was the Colonel who begged Gentile to exert what he calls his persuasive labours in favour of the royal cause. Gentile agreed, and suggested that the Freemasons be roped in, and in due course he and his friend the Grand Master were received in audience by Umberto. The King asked Gentile for the Mafia’s support ‘for a last glorious victory for the scutcheon of the House of Savoy’. ‘Our talk was carried on in very affectionate terms,’ Gentile writes, ‘and when I told the King that all Sicilians were behind him, he was deeply moved.’ An admiral and a general were ordered to work with him, and we are told of their sincere and single-minded collaboration with this dark captain of the Western underworld.