Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  However, it turned out that Minasola was disposed to collaborate. To mafiosi such as this man, the bandits were a contemptible rabble. They were the Brownshirts of a bypassed revolution, and now that the Mafia was finally back in the saddle, a quiet and economical version of the Night of the Long Knives had to be arranged. Besides, Minasola had a special dislike of the flamboyant Giuliano, with his press conferences, his letter-writing, and his obvious taste for self-advertisement, all of which was distasteful to a true man of respect. In spite of his high authority in the Mafia, Minasola still looked after his own sheep, and more than once members of the Giuliano band, taking him for just another shepherd, had tried to bully him and had refused to be warned in time by Minasola’s cold mafioso stare. Now, the shepherd capo-Mafia of Monreale was induced to suggest to Maresciallo Lo Bianco how Giuliano could best be taken.

  When Luca had first come on the scene with a special force of two thousand men at his back, Giuliano and the hard core of his band had prudently withdrawn into the province of Trapani in the far western corner of the island, where he was under the protection of Mafia ‘families’ described by Minasola as ‘unfaithful’ – in other words, they showed poor response to Don Calò Vizzini’s central authority. Minasola’s opinion was that it was necessary to entice Giuliano back to the Monreale area, thereby bringing him under the sway of the ‘faithful’ Mafia again – himself included. To achieve this, the first thing that had to be done was to move out all the police operating in the Monreale area. This was done, and the task of elimination proceeded smoothly enough according to Don Nitto Minasola’s plan.

  At some time in the past when the Giuliano band had been a valuable military asset to powerful men, it had been reorganised by an expert in guerilla warfare and divided into a number of self-contained cells. The intention was to prevent the secret dispositions of the whole band being given away through the capture or defection of a small number of its components, or even of a single member. In practice, the Giuliano band became a total dependant of the Mafia at this point, because the Mafia volunteered to effect the liaison between the different groups, and thus the functioning of the plan became conditional upon Mafia goodwill. In the mountains the bandits were independent and self-supporting, but as soon as they were obliged for any reason to come down into the towns, it was to the local mafiosi that they were obliged to go for shelter. Also, when any bandit who had been sent on a mission wanted to return to Giuliano’s constantly shifting headquarters, he was passed from one man of respect to the next until the new hide-out could first be located, and then reached.

  It was this crippling involvement with the Mafia that made Minasola’s task so easy once he had set his mind to it. The next step in his plan was to suggest to Giuliano, through one of Minasola’s relations who was a member of the band, a suitable victim for extortion living in the Monreale district.

  After a long period of inactivity Giuliano’s funds were running low, and Minasola managed to whet his appetite with the description of an immensely rich and defenceless landowner, guaranteed to disgorge millions of lire at the mere sight of Giuliano’s well-known signature at the bottom of a letter of extortion. Giuliano took the bait. The letter was sent off, and the landowner, who was in the plot, ignored it, as instructed. Minasola had been of the opinion that such a rare act of defiance would bring Giuliano himself on the scene, but instead Giuliano sent a member of his general staff, Frank Mannino. Mannino, as foreseen, was forced to contact Minasola, who invited him to a meeting of Mafia notabilities at the Villa Carolina, the property of the Archbishop of Monreale, just outside the town. ‘Salutiamo gli amici,’ was Mannino’s Mafia-style greeting as he advanced with hand outstretched towards ‘Don Peppino’, Minasola’s guest of honour. But Don Peppino turned out to be Maresciallo Lo Bianco in plain clothes, and Mannino’s hand was seized and not released, while police agents rushed in from the next room with levelled guns.

  A few days later two more of the key personalities of the band, Madonia and Badalamenti, fell into the trap. A military truck had been converted into an imitation fruiterer’s van, and Madonia and Balda-menti, who wanted to get back to Giuliano, were invited to enter this and to conceal themselves among the piled-up fruit baskets. They were then driven, not to Giuliano’s hide-out, but to the police barracks at Calatafimi. Nino Miceli, the mafioso who had collaborated so far only with Inspector Verdiani, was dragged – most reluctantly – into this adventure. He had given way in the end to a combination of Lo Bianco’s threats of sending him to confino, and Minasola’s pressure as his superior in the hierarchy of the Honoured Society. Miceli admitted that the principal objection hitherto to his collaboration had been the eighty million lire promised him by Inspector Verdiani as soon as Giuliano had been smuggled, safe and sound, out of the country.

  These were the great names of the Giuliano organisation, and they had been known for years to every Italian, but in addition many lesser figures were removed from circulation by the Minasola-Lo Bianco combination. With a single exception, all these men claimed to have been diabolically tortured by the cassetta. One, Francesco Caglia, told the judge at his trial that he had lost a testicle as a result, and Frank Mannino was roped up in an excruciating position and kept like this for a hundred and ten days after his arrest. The only man to escape the torture-chamber was the single mafioso in the band, a low-grade member of the Honoured Society, who was removed from prison by an order from the Ministry of the Interior in Rome and sent to the more comfortable confinement of the criminal lunatic asylum at Barcellona. The Press was not informed of these captures made by arrangement with the Mafia, so for a while Giuliano too remained in the dark about what was happening to his men. It was considered of the utmost importance not to arouse his suspicions while the Mafia’s trap was still doing its work. One day the special squad guarding the house of the landowner-decoy were amazed to see a young bandit drive up in a brand-new car with a final ultimatum from Giuliano. They were obliged to arrest him, but then thought better of it, and after having devised some method of making him serve the police’s interests in future, he was released and sent back to his chief.

  * * *

  In the meanwhile, the rival cause of the Public Security Police had suffered a crippling blow through the loss of a confidant planted on Giuliano since the very first days of the band’s inception. This was Salvatore Ferreri, known as ‘Fra Diavolo’, a murderer who had been about to begin a life sentence when Inspector-General Messana – Don Calò Vizzini’s bosom friend – had released him with orders to join the band. On reaching Giuliano’s mountain headquarters, then near Montelepre, Ferreri had made no bones about the realities of the situation. Giuliano, for his part, had accepted him as a useful liaison with the police, who, through Ferreri, could be told just as much as he proposed they should know. Trapped by Luca’s men, and wounded into the bargain, Ferreri made the fatal mistake of disclosing his link-up with the Public Security and demanding to be taken to Inspector-General Messana, whose secret pass allowing him to move freely about Sicily he produced in support of his claim. There are conflicting reports as to what happened next. Officially Ferreri was killed in a gun battle that broke out in the police barracks, but most people believe that, having listened to his story, the carabinieri NCO in charge telephoned for instructions to one of his superiors, and then simply finished him off.

  There was an unwelcome moment of distraction for Lo Bianco and Minasola from the job in hand, when a certain Father Biondi made a dramatic appearance at Monreale. This silver-haired and golden-tongued priest had been able to persuade someone at the Ministry of the Interior to allow him to undertake a one-man hunt for Giuliano. In his pocket he carried a postdated letter of credit for fifty million lire, drawn on the Bank of Italy, which was to be his if he succeeded in his mission.

  Father Biondi’s bungling amateurism caused Don Nitto Minasola the most acute distress and embarrassment and almost upset the delicately balanced mechanisms of deceit that it had taken so long to ass
emble. Quite clearly convinced that the most direct way to Giuliano’s hiding-place was through the Archbishop’s palace, Father Biondi went straight there and offered to split the fifty million with the Archbishop’s secretary, the Reverend di Giovanni, in return for his help. The proposition proved acceptable, the secretary making it clear that he intended to devote his share of the proceeds to the betterment of the condition of the poor of Monreale. Unfortunately his contact in the Giuliano band happened to be the relation of Minasola already referred to, and naturally this man went to the capo-Mafia for advice. Minasola sternly warned his relative, to keep away from this kind of dirty business – ‘out of consideration for the family honour’, as Maresciallo Lo Bianco puts it. Meanwhile, someone had warned Giuliano of the mission of the Roman priest and the machinations at the Archbishop’s palace and he had fallen into a terrible rage. Only three months before Monsignor Filippi’s name had had to be publicly cleansed of scandalous imputations of complicity with Giuliano, and the strange rumours current at that time were only just dying down. Now the Archbishop was compelled to find some means of making it clear to the bandit that he was not a party to any plot against him that may have been hatched in his palace. Yet another most secret meeting took place in the Archbishop’s villa at Monreale – so frequently the scene of the councils and the stratagems of the Mafia. ‘To this was called, besides the Archbishop’s secretary, Inspector Verdiani and a member of the Mafia in Giuliano’s confidence, to clear up the facts of the case and above all to make quite clear to the bandit that he, Monsignor Filippi, had nothing whatever to do with the affair.’

  However, Giuliano was dissatisfied with this explanation. ‘He ordered the suppression of both the Archbishop and his secretary, and from that time, neither of them was able to visit the country, while Monsignor Filippi had to be given a strong bodyguard.’ Father Biondi, the cause of all this trouble, was quickly induced to go back to Rome. Some time later he was arrested for a spectacular fraud in the matter of company promotion, and eventually received a sentence of three years.

  At this point Lo Bianco interrupts his chronicle to exclaim plaintively, ‘How many intrigues and what extraordinary happenings!’

  There are times when one discovers defects in the carpentry of Lo Bianco’s narrative. There are too many unexplained gaps in the sequence of events, too many anonymous faces, and even after twelve years, too much has to be left unsaid.

  Giuliano was now alone with his lieutenant, Pisciotta. Nothing more is said about traps being set for him. In fact, he seems to come and go much as he pleases, and even pays unmolested visits to Monreale, where he is recognised in the streets. Lo Bianco paints an unconvincing picture of the wounded tiger at bay, as cunning, as ferocious and as unapproachable as ever. His colleague Maresciallo Calandra in his memoirs entitled I Could Have Captured the Bandit Giuliano presents a different view. He speaks of the first months of 1950 when the obscure manoeuvrings of Lo Bianco and Minasola seem no longer to have been producing results.

  Now only Pisciotta remained at Giuliano’s side, and he had decided to betray him. But even if Pisciotta had not decided on this betrayal, it would have been child’s play to capture Giuliano. And if so much time had to be taken over it, this was probably from the necessity of carrying out to the very end a plan that had been pre-arranged with the Mafia. At this period, in fact, a squad of men and an officer would have been all that was necessary to capture the two bandits that remained.

  There is a hint here at the true facts, which were that the last moves in this tragic farce had to be continually postponed until it was quite certain that the bandit’s elimination could be carried out without fear of damage to men in high political places. Two circumstances made it possible for the order finally to be given for the winding up of the Giuliano affair. One was that Inspector Verdiani persuaded Giuliano to give him a statement in which he took upon himself full responsibility for the massacre at Portella della Ginestra and denied that instigators had ever existed. The other was the news of the FBI’s arrest of Giuliano’s brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, who had got away to the States with a copy of the famous memorial upon which Giuliano believed his security depended. It has always been supposed that this news was accompanied by some message of reassurance as to the fate of this document.

  On one of his visits to Monreale, Giuliano ran into the uncle of Madonia – one of the two bandits who had been carried off to police headquarters in the spurious fruiterer’s van. After the usual exchange of courtesies, this man asked for news of his nephew, whom he had not heard from since the day he had seen him go off with Minasola – in theory to be conducted to Giuliano’s headquarters. It was then that Giuliano realised what had been the fate of all the men who had disappeared. In the early hours of next morning Miceli and Minasola were dragged from their beds by Giuliano and his lieutenant and forced to confess. They were hidden in a house in Monreale and Pisciotta was left to guard them while Giuliano went off to kidnap three more mafiosi who had been named in the confession. These, together with Miceli and Minasola, were to be publicly executed in the main square of the town. It seems that Giuliano was still able to conscript ‘occasionals’, as they were called, when an operation of this kind was projected. Minasola received permission to prepare a will, and somebody wrote it out for him on a sheet of squared-off paper from a child’s exercise book and took it to his wife. In it Minasola told her to sell off all the goats, which would otherwise be killed in the vendetta which was now certain to start.

  Meanwhile, Giuliano’s absence gave him the opportunity to work on Pisciotta, and for seven clear days the twenty-five-year-old bandit was left alone at the mercy of the acute native intelligence and the suggestive power of the head of one of the most prominent Mafia ‘families’. It was inevitable that by playing constantly upon Pisciotta’s vanity, his fears, and his obvious obsession with ‘freedom’, Minasola should win him over to his side and prepare the ground for his betrayal of his chief. In the end Pisciotta released both mafiosi, and when Giuliano got back, made the excuse that he had been worn out from guarding them night and day, and that they had got away in his sleep. Minasola later told Maresciallo Lo Bianco that Pisciotta had asked him for all the details of the capture of Madonia and Badalamenti in the fruit van, and had appeared highly amused.

  Within a few days a meeting was arranged between Pisciotta and Colonel Luca, at which some haggling went on about the price of the treason Pisciotta was to be induced to commit. Broadly, Pisciotta was offered a half of the price – fifty million lire – on Giuliano’s head (the other half was to go to Minasola), and a passport under a false name. This, unfortunately for Pisciotta, did not satisfy him, and he preferred to renounce the blood money but stuck out for a pardon, which was to be granted ‘in recognition of his special services to the State’. This, even Luca was not in a position to agree to. There was some humming and hawing, but the reward finally agreed upon has never been made clear.

  While awaiting his moment of truth, Pisciotta remained at liberty and tasted a kind of freedom he had never known even in his palmiest days, before the commission of his first crime had turned him into a bandit. At a superficial level he was probably a likeable man. One’s mental image of the criminal tends perhaps to be influenced by the cretinous psychopaths represented in gangster films, but many of the Giuliano band were handsome, and Pisciotta strikingly so in his dark Asiatic way. He could counterfeit a sincerity of manner that deluded most people, had a bold wit, and made full play with his sardonic sense of humour. Pisciotta and the police got along together swimmingly.

  The president of the court at Viterbo was to express his horrified amazement once again at the descriptions of this brief but exuberant phase of Pisciotta’s career. He was given a safe conduct from the Ministry of the Interior bearing Minister Mario Scelba’s signature (Lo Bianco coolly confides in his readers that this was forged), as well as a permit to carry firearms. When in Palermo, he stayed as an honoured guest in the flat of Captain Per
enze of Colonel Luca’s special force, who went on shopping expeditions with him and took him to a clinic to arrange for treatment of a pulmonary complaint. A famous lawyer arrived from Rome to discuss with him his defence, should he elect to remain in the country and to stand trial. As the president of the court pointed out, the Italian Government footed the bill for all this expenditure.

  Pisciotta was kept thus in readiness for about three weeks. There was a period of tension when Colonel Luca became briefly obsessed with the idea that this co-operation was part of an incredibly elaborate plot concocted with Giuliano and Inspector Verdiani, by which he, Luca, was to be kidnapped, but in the end this was resolved, and the awaited signal was received. At the end of June 1950 the last phase of the operation was prepared. Until this moment Maresciallo Lo Bianco says that he had remained unaware that it had been decided that Giuliano was not to be taken alive. His immediate superior, Colonel Paolantonio, too, showed himself scandalised at this new turn in events, and so from then on an attempt was made to keep both men in the dark about what was going on. Giuliano was at that time receiving shelter in the house of a mafioso lawyer, De Maria, in the town of Castelvetrano, where he had lived off and on for several months while the negotiations for his expatriation had been going on. Now it was arranged that Pisciotta should go to him.