Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Domenico Albano, capo-Mafia of Borgetto, was a dumpy middle-aged man with a hooked nose and close-set eyes, who from his clothing and general appearance might have been a jobbing gardener. One newspaper even dared to describe him as having the face of an irritated rat, but his shadow fell across the court at Viterbo like that of a hawk over a brood of partridge chicks. Albano was said to have been the treasurer of the Giuliano band. It was also suggested that he had been the liaison between the Mafia and the Ministry of the Interior, and he admitted to having made several secret trips to Rome. It was Albano, too, who arranged for all the journalistic visits to Giuliano. But now, when brought face to face with Rizza in court, Rizza denied ever having seen him before. Even the President of the court seemed to be touched by the faint irradiations of menace from this man, and felt it necessary to say, as if to reassure himself, ‘I can read what you are in your face, but do not think you can intimidate me.’ Pisciotta’s supreme self-confidence, too, failed for the first time when confronted with Albano, and turning pale and stammering, he denied all knowledge of him. By the following day he had recovered his nerve, and admitted to having been in close contact with the capo-Mafia for three years.

  His alibi shaken, Pisciotta now fell back on blackmail as his next line of defence. He let it be known that he was holding in reserve far more damaging revelations than had so far been produced. In these frequent hints at the nature of the ammunition he had in store, Pisciotta clearly hoped to force his ex-collaborators in high places to find some way of extricating him from his predicament. It was a desperate manoeuvre indeed.

  PISCIOTTA: Soon after my arrest Scelba transferred Marzano [the chief of police who had arrested him] not to Rome, but to Livorno, because he had been unsuccessful in obtaining what he had been ordered to obtain. [The veiled reference here is to Giuliano’s memorial.] The Reds were at Livorno, and perhaps somebody thought that it was a good place where he could be quietly put out of the way. All these and other things I will reveal when the time comes for my trial at Palermo for the killing of Giuliano.

  A LAWYER: They’ll kill you first.

  PISCIOTTA: I am now in the hands of public opinion. It’s too late to think of killing me. Even if they killed me, the truth would come out just the same.

  But Pisciotta had every reason to fear death. His capture alive by the Pubblica Sicurezza, in the first instance, seems only to have been in furtherance of their vendetta against the carabinieri, whose man Pisciotta had become. If the powerful enemies he had made had refrained from silencing him, it may well be that he had employed some manoeuvre like Giuliano’s, encouraging them to believe that a memorial still existed in safe keeping somewhere beyond their reach. He began to be afraid that there would be attempts to poison him, and would not touch the prison food. At first his mother prepared all his meals and brought them to the prison, and when permission for her to do this was withdrawn, he tried everything that was given him on a tame sparrow before he would eat himself.

  There were certainly many attempts to buy his silence. On almost the last occasion when he gave evidence, Pisciotta said: ‘The first offer of fifty million to keep my mouth shut was made in my house by the Honourable Cusumano. I wrote to Prince Alliata after killing Giuliano, and Cusumano turned up straight away. He told me I could leave the country and that I would receive fifty million. Another offer was made in the prison of Palermo by a person whose name I don’t wish to repeat. The third offer was made in the prison of Viterbo by the first counsel that defended me – the one I got rid of. Bucciante told me that the fifty million would be paid by the Minister Scelba.’

  14

  PISCIOTTA was found guilty of participation in the massacre at Portella della Ginestra and was sentenced to imprisonment for life, with hard labour. He received the sentence in silence, and with an ironic smile. The trial at Viterbo, he had made it quite clear, he considered as relatively unimportant. Almost all the things that Pisciotta had wanted to talk about had been excluded as irrelevant, but Pisciotta believed that this legal objection would no longer hold good when the motives for his killing of Giuliano had to be discussed. It was nearly ten years before the public was to learn of his stubborn rejection of a last chance given to him to withdraw his accusations of public men, and to accept his fate in silence. A clear cold light was directed for a moment on this murky corner of the postwar Italian scene, when the news-weekly ABC published a letter from an ex-partisan, Giovanni Polacco, who had been Pisciotta’s neighbour for a short time in the prison at Viterbo. This letter, written from prison, may have cost Polacco his life, because as soon as he was released from gaol he disappeared and has never been seen again. The newspaper accepted full responsibility for the authenticity of the letter, and showed itself much impressed by the personality of the author in the respectful autobiographical note it published.

  Giovanni Polacco was shown by his history to be another man of the stamp of the ill-starred Canepa, original leader of the Sicilian Separatists, and like him, he made many powerful enemies. Polacco had been victimised by the Fascists since the time in 1922 when he had gone to the rescue of an old man who was being beaten up by a gang of Blackshirts in the Piazza Colonna in Rome, spending thereafter most of the era of Fascism in gaol or in confino. Like Canepa, he became a partisan leader, and was addicted to extravagant exploits, such as arresting a whole hotelful of Fascist hierarchs in the centre of Rome on the day the Armistice with Italy was declared. The citation accompanying his Italian Silver Medal for Military Valour gives some idea of his quality as a guerilla fighter. He took part in eighty-six actions against special SS units employed against the partisans, released one hundred and eighteen Allied prisoners, saved the lives of thirty-two Jews by hiding them in an apartment in Rome, was wounded five times, and taken prisoner. ‘Miraculously he escaped,’ the citation continues, ‘and although suffering from his wounds, took over the command of his partisan band again. He continued to sabotage the enemy’s war-potential until the arrival of the liberating forces … He set an admirable example of the highest patriotic virtue, of the disdain of personal danger, and of devotion to the national cause.’

  Unhappily the time had arrived when it was not always possible to separate the sabotaging of the enemy’s war-potential and the legitimate violences of war from actions which seemed to some onlookers to border upon criminality, and many things were being noted down for a day of reckoning. In 1944, during an operation for the capture of a war criminal, an Italian regular officer was killed, and Polacco was accused of his death. An Allied military court dismissed the case, but two years later, when the Italian civil authority had taken over, Polacco was arrested and sent for trial. He was sentenced to thirteen years.

  Polacco had been languishing six years in prison at Soriano, near Viterbo, when he was approached with a singular proposition. He was visited by a counsel who had defended him at his trial, Ivo Coccia, who in the interim had become a Christian Democrat member of parliament. Coccia told Polacco that the infamous treatment he had received had been preying on his mind, and he had been to see ‘the Minister’ to argue his case once again. After a long discussion, the Minister had agreed to see to it that justice was done immediately, provided that Polacco, in return, would agree to carry out a confidential mission. Coccia then described to Polacco the increasing state of alarm and despondency in Christian Democrat inner circles caused by Pisciotta’s revelations, ‘which had damaged the Party’s prestige and which, if allowed to continue, would jeopardise its future’. It had been decided in a discussion at Party headquarters that the only way to restore the public’s confidence in their leaders would be to discover some way of inducing Pisciotta to make a public retraction of his charges. Coccia had then put forward Polacco’s name as a ‘serious-minded man, worthy of every confidence, and capable of fulfilling a task of this kind with the utmost discretion’. The job was consequently offered him, and it was implied that the reward for its successful completion would be his freedom. As his health was now
seriously undermined, he agreed.

  Next day he found himself transferred to the Viterbo prison – officially for a radiological examination. It seems that the prison authorities at Viterbo smelled a rat, were unhappy about the whole business, and did their best to get rid of him as soon as the examination was complete. In this, however, they were blocked by ‘the Ministry’, who gave orders that Polacco was to remain where he was ‘until it was quite certain that no further radiographs were required’. But it turned out that the plan was still to be held up, because Polacco was kept in the sick bay while the bandits were held at the disposition of the Attorney-General in a separate wing of the prison. Coccia next went to work on the prison governor, who received him coldly. The Attorney-General’s attitude was also ‘negative’. However, pressure must have been brought to bear, for soon Polacco found himself in the cell next to Pisciotta’s. There was a communicating passage between the two cells, and although the two men were kept apart by a steel-barred door across the passage, they could see and talk to each other as much as they liked.

  For the first few days Polacco and Pisciotta eyed each other in silence through the door, Polacco cultivating an indifference to match what he called Pisciotta’s natural Sicilian reserve. In the end, the ice was broken and Pisciotta unburdened himself. Polacco found him ‘a person of slight culture’, yet he says it was impossible not to be impressed by the coherence of his mind. He noticed that however often Pisciotta repeated a story, there was never the slightest variation in the details, and from this he judged that he was telling the truth. Polacco formed the opinion that Pisciotta was afraid of nobody and nothing on earth but the Mafia, ‘whose tentacles could reach out and take a man in their grip wherever he hid himself’.

  Pisciotta was in a state of constantly inflamed indignation about what he described as the trick played on him by Scelba, the Minister of the Interior. He had not been prepared to accept the assurances of the police or the carabinieri without receiving confirmation from the Minister himself. This condition had been accepted and he had been taken to Rome, where Scelba had received him and had given his word that the promises made to him would be kept. Pisciotta had then returned to Sicily and killed Giuliano. ‘In killing him,’ he said, ‘I killed three birds with one stone. I obtained my free pardon, punished the man who had stained his hands with the blood of the innocent, and inherited all the explosive material that Giuliano had accumulated.’ Pisciotta assured Polacco that he had retained possession of Giuliano’s memorial – that hobgoblin of the Christian Democrats – and he would use it ‘as the instrument of his vendetta against those who had cheated him’. ‘Here I’m not on my home ground,’ he explained, ‘but back in Sicily, once my trial in Palermo starts, the earthquake will happen.’

  And none of Polacco’s blandishments nor any amount of playing on Pisciotta’s fear of the vengeance of the Mafia could shake the bandit’s resolution. It was weeks before the moment seemed propitious to sound Pisciotta on the possibility of his being prepared to eat his words. Pisciotta had been restless and depressed all day, pacing up and down in his cell, and in the evening he had dragged out a stool to sit by the gate with his head in his hands. Polacco thought that demoralisation might have set in. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said, ‘I can’t help feeling you’ve taken on something that is too big for you. It seems to me that what you’ve done is to get yourself mixed up in politics without having any idea of what politics are all about.’

  ‘What would you have done in my place?’ Pisciotta asked.

  Polacco thought he was taking the bait. ‘In your place,’ he said, ‘the first thing I’d do is to put myself right with all those people you’ve been attacking. Why not give it up, and say the Communists put you up to it? That way you’d avoid the certainty of reprisals, and you could count on a favourable verdict.’

  But Polacco had mistaken his man. Pisciotta jumped to his feet, and shouted, ‘You’re mad. Nothing will ever make me take back a word of what I said because it’s true!’

  * * *

  He had thrown away his last chance. What awaited him now was the prison of Ucciardone in Palermo, which must surely be one of the world’s most remarkable penal institutions. When Pisciotta was sent there in 1951 it was controlled to the last detail of its organisation by the Mafia, and when in 1957 the prison was the subject of one of the many enquiries instituted during its history, it still was. The 1957 enquiry found that the prison guards were under the Mafia’s orders, and even that the governor had been changed when he had not been to the Mafia’s liking. The prison had been something of a rest-home for the Mafia potentates who had been incarcerated there. Some of them were past their prime, had made too many enemies, and knowing that a violent death was otherwise not to be avoided, had had themselves arrested, arranged for a longish sentence, and ‘retired into private life’ in the Ucciardone. They had been housed in comfortably furnished cells, had their meals sent in from the best restaurants in Palermo, and been visited as often as required by wives or prostitutes. As an illustration of the ‘respect’ accumulated by these men, it was noted that when one of them was once transferred to Brindisi to give evidence at a trial there, the witnesses lined up to kneel and kiss his ring. In collusion with the prison authorities, the mafiosi had run flourishing businesses from prison, for which the guards often acted as commission agents. Sometimes, while remaining on the register of inmates, they had succeeded in absenting themselves for long periods – as in the case of Salvatore Malta, who had organised an armed band for as long as two years while nominally a prisoner in the Ucciardone.

  The prison of Palermo had in fact become almost a Mafia university, where apprentice members received refresher courses in the latest developments in crime, were rewarded for their zeal by promotion, and punished, when necessary, with ferocious beatings which often resulted in broken bones. These injuries were always entered in the hospital register as caused by a ‘slip on the stairs’, and over five hundred inmates had slipped on the stairs in twelve years. So complete, indeed, had Mafia control of the building become that it was possible to carry out the complex engineering project called for in tunnelling down to the petroleum pipeline that ran from the docks to the refinery, passing under the Ucciardone. This was skilfully tapped, and petrol pumped off for sale in the black market.

  This was the wolves’ den in which Pisciotta found himself, protected only by his own fearsome reputation and by the extreme precautions he took before eating or drinking anything that was brought to him. As part of these security measures, he was allowed to make his own coffee, and two days before he was to appear before the examining magistrate for preliminary questioning in preparation for the new trial, he did this, as usual, upon waking in the morning, but this time added a teaspoonful of vitamin concentrate prescribed for his chest trouble. Two minutes later he fell to the ground, but before the strychnine the medicine contained had had time to crush him in the constriction of his own muscles, he dragged himself to a jar of olive oil and drank it in the hope of vomiting the poison back. It was too late. Drooling blood from a chewed tongue, and screaming through the dreadful smirk of tetanus to every corner of the prison, he was rushed down to the infirmary – where the man into whose care he was committed was the very one who had poisoned his medicine. After half an hour of the most atrocious agony the human body is capable of knowing, Pisciotta died.

  As an extra measure of precaution, the Mafia decided to suppress another key member of the Giuliano band imprisoned in the Ucciardone who was suspected of knowing too much. This was Angelo Russo, who was presented with a bottle of fine wine containing hemlock – chosen this time as being less noisy and spectacular in its physiological effects. After that the poisoner himself was removed from the scene, and with this discharge of buckshot and an extinguished cry in the night, the chapter of Giuliano, Pisciotta, and the massacre of Portella della Ginestra was almost concluded. The final page was turned when Inspector Verdiani, repository of so many perilous secrets, fell to the grou
nd one day, clutching at his stomach, and was dead before he could be rushed to hospital. Suicide was the verdict, but not a Sicilian believed it.

  Now all the voices were silenced, and the Mafia cloak of invisibility fell about the shoulders of the men who had sent the bandits to fire on the peasants.

  15

  THE MAFIA flourished exceedingly, but slowly it was changing its face. A great number of mafiosi American gangsters had been deprived of their citizenship and sent back to Sicily, where they immediately assumed leading positions in the Mafia hierarchy of the island. There was little about these spectacular and exuberant deportees that recalled the old-fashioned man of respect, but their influence over a new generation of Mafia novitiates was irresistible. The new island recruits to the Honoured Society were the product of war devastation, of hunger and the universal petty criminality of the black market, and of the grim anarchy of the postwar years, and they were devoid of illusion or sentiment. These young men in their bright shirts and loud ties who killed for a fixed rate of two hundred thousand lire (£130), totally lacked the capacity for self-deception so marked in men of the calibre of Don Calò Vizzini.

  Traditionally the Mafia had lived off the scrawny monopolies based upon scarcity. It held back the land so as to create huge reservoirs of cheap labour. Rivers in their winter spate were allowed to empty into the sea – precious water that could have been dammed back and that would have transfigured a countryside, but would have damaged the interests of a few water monopolists. The mind of the old Mafia had been formed in a feudal past when there was not enough to go round, and it could never free itself from its philosophy of controlled dearth. Now it was opposed by an expansive and capitalistic young Mafia that had no patience with restrictive practices. The old Mafia vetoed dams because a hundred sleepy old villains made a fat living from water pumped up from artesian wells, but the new Mafia wanted them because of the huge profits to be made out of the contracts involved in their construction. For the same reason they wanted modern roads, bridges, transport systems, urban development and industrial expansion of any kind. Psychologically, Don Calò Vizzini and his followers were still living in the eighteenth century – when not in the Bronze Age itself – whereas the cousins just back from Buffalo, New York or Kansas City were emphatically men of our times.