Honoured Society

by Norman Lewis

  Anonymous letters began to reach the Maresciallo, and some of these contained fascinating accounts of the nature of monastic life at Mazzarino. Some of the monks carried guns. One in particular, Padre Guglielmo, delighted in blazing away at night with a heavy automatic from the window of his cell ‘at the stars’. One anonymous letter was probably from a domestic employed in the monastery, because it mentioned a monk who had been expelled after a row with Padre Carmelo, the old Prior, and who was seen to pack a sub-machine-gun away in his luggage before departing. The fathers were keen businessmen, and bought and sold property, loaned money at high interest, and in one case dealt in pigs. Vows of chastity received scant attention at Mazzarino. For years, Di Stefano discovered, women had been visiting the monastery at night, disguised in Franciscan habits. The monks were interested in pornography, too, and had established a network of correspondents with whom they exchanged obscene letters. A girl working as a servant at a school in Gela was arrested, according to Di Stefano’s testimony, with enough such material in her possession furnished by the monks to constitute an anthology of pornographic literature. These revelations of life in a religious establishment, ventilated at the preliminary hearing, were debarred by a pact established between prosecution and defence when the case came up before the assize court.

  It was two years before Di Stefano could be quite certain that the monks were carrying on an extortion racket, but even then the certainty that no witnesses could be induced to come forward prevented him from taking action. Di Stefano knew that it would have been fatal to move without overwhelming proof. The situation almost resolved itself when a member of the urban police force, who may well have been acting as a spy for the carabinieri, was ambushed and shot while prowling in the vicinity of the monastery. The three attackers took to their heels, and one of them in his panic dropped his gun. The gun was recognised, and the three men arrested. They confessed not only to the attack on the policeman, but also to the murder of Cannada, but said that they had acted under the domination of the monks’ gardener, Carmine Lo Bartolo. The news of his accomplices’ arrest reached Lo Bartolo before the police arrived. He disappeared, and it has since been proved that the monks managed to conceal him for several weeks, moving him from monastery to monastery, until he was smuggled away to Genoa, where the police finally picked him up.

  Lo Bartolo’s arrest caused great excitement back in Mazzarino, where his criminal association with the monks had been a matter of common knowledge for years, and sensational revelations were expected. Nothing of this came to pass, for Lo Bartolo’s mouth was quickly sealed by death. Within hours of his arrival in Sicily, he was found hanged in his cell of the Caltanissetta gaol. Few Sicilians were surprised when an autopsy was refused and Lo Bartolo’s brother was denied permission to see the body. Di Stefano, however, now took the bit in his teeth. He searched the monastery and found the typewriter with which he was able to prove the letters of extortion had been written. Padre Carmelo and three other fathers were arrested and brought to trial.

  At the preliminary hearing the issue was quite simple. The Franciscans blandly admitted to all charges except complicity in the murder of Cannada, but claimed, like the three men already under arrest, to have been the helpless tools of their gardener, Lo Bartolo. A witness cast some doubt on this picture of the monastery’s enslavement to an illiterate labourer by recalling a conversation he had had with Padre Carmelo. He had asked the Prior how he got on with Lo Bartolo, who seems to have been a Caliban-like creature. Replying in Mafia jargon of quite untranslatable vulgarity, the formidable old man had said something like: ‘He responds well to a good kick up the backside.’ Among the monks’ victims had been the Father Superior of the Capucines of Syracusa, who was despoiled to the tune of 600,000 lire – a sum which he was later accused of abstracting from the monastery’s funds. Apart from the typed letters of extortion, the Franciscans of Mazzarino had habitually employed the confessional box to transmit their threats, and Padre Carmelo usually suggested that it would be convenient for payment to be made in church.

  In March 1962 the monks were brought to trial, and for several weeks the Assizes at Messina offered a spectacle of entrancement and domination. What staggered the Press correspondents who attended from the Italian mainland was not so much that it was soon clear that the monks would slip through the fingers of justice – they had been warned that this was to be expected in such trials held in Sicily – but the servility and obsequiousness of the public’s attitude towards them. The atmosphere in court was fevered and ecstatic, and old Padre Carmelo acknowledged the applause that greeted his appearance by tracing the sign of the cross with a diaphanous hand. The carabinieri who escorted the fathers into the dock were cordiality and respect itself. Benefit of Clergy had seen to it that the monks were relieved of the ignominy of appearing in chains, although this privilege was not extended to the three members of the laity who were on trial at the same time. It had not been considered necessary to suspend Padre Carmelo and his fellow defendants from the exercise of their sacerdotal functions, and while awaiting trial at the Assizes, they had continued to say mass and hear confessions. The corridors and antechambers of the courthouse at Messina were full of prominent ecclesiastics who seemed on good terms with the fathers, and whose presence was therefore taken to mean that the Church was expressing its solidarity with the accused men. Maestro Francesco Carnelutti, one of Italy’s most famous counsels, had announced that he would conduct Padre Carmelo’s defence without charge. His every sally in court was greeted with a rumble of sotto voce approbation which the judges were unable to suppress, and outside the courtroom members of the public struggled for the privilege of pressing the famous advocate’s hand and thanking him for the generosity of his action.

  Later, an unnamed witness for the prosecution gave a newspaper some idea of what it felt like to stand up and give evidence against the monks in this atmosphere. He was unnerved by the concentrated hostility of which he was the target, and made almost to feel that he was a perjurer. He found that he could not stop trembling while giving evidence, and in the end, was hardly able to produce his words. When he left the court, all backs were turned as he passed. Disapproval was expressed in other ways, too. Another prosecution witness was found half-dead with a hand cut off. When the prosecution suggested that this had been an act of vengeance, counsel for the defence waved the allegation aside and supposed that the man had cut his hand off himself. The court did not seem to find this theory especially surprising.

  At an early stage in the trial the prosecution suffered a body-blow through the refusal of the murdered Cannada’s widow and her brother to give evidence – which necessitated their treatment as hostile witnesses. In conformity with the laws of omertà, the three men charged directly with Cannada’s murder blamed it all on the unfortunate Lo Bartolo, and refused to admit that the monks, of whom they spoke with the greatest respect, were in any way involved. A year’s respite had transformed the monks of Mazzarino from criminals into victims. There was not a whisper of the orgies at the monastery, or of the extorted money spent on debauchery. The secret banking accounts were forgotten. The monks were found not guilty of complicity in the murder of Cannada, and were acquitted on all charges of extortion as having acted under duress. The three lay criminals got thirty years apiece, and when the sentence was read out there were screams from them of ‘assassins’ – directed at whom, nobody could be sure. They clearly had been led to expect milder treatment. Of the trial’s outcome, the Honourable Leone, President of the Sicilian House of Deputies, wrote: ‘This verdict almost upsets the glorious legend of the Little Flowers of St Francis.’

  The verdict was, of course, grotesque. A state of duress, as defined under Italian law, is ruled out by the circumstances of the crimes committed by the monks of Mazzarino. Duress, as pointed out by the Public Prosecutor in presenting the arguments for a retrial, involves a physical impossibility of escape. If a man in the middle of a desert covers another with a gun and ord
ers him to commit a crime, there is duress. In this instance, even supposing that an illiterate gardener could have imposed his will on the sophisticated men who employed him, nothing would have been easier than to escape from his clutches by asking to be transferred to some convent in another part of Italy, or even abroad.

  What this verdict reflected, in fact, was the condition of the Sicilian mind – the state of mass hypnosis under which it lay. Sicilians accepted these men – even if not as mafiosi themselves – as protected by the Mafia. But there was one other factor in the composition of their invulnerability – and this was their appeal to an atavistic layer in the Sicilian subconscious. To this, the fact that the monks were immoral would be unimportant. What was important was that they were the human vehicles of magic power. The supernatural offices they performed were in no way lessened in their efficacy by the monks’ own extreme human fallibility. The Medicine Man or the African Head of Bush Society is not expected to be virtuous, but to be a successful practitioner in the art of compelling rainfall or driving away devils. This is the survival of the primeval mentality which carved the ferocious lions on the front of the Cathedral of Cefalù, created in mosaic the severe Norman-faced Christ that stares down on the worshippers in the same cathedral, and covered the pillars of the Palatine Chapel of Palermo with its mouthing gargoyles. It was, and still is, the power of exorcism that counts. The monks were not good men, but they were powerful men, and it was their power to which the Sicilian subconscious automatically responded.

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  THE FACT THAT an appeal by the prosecution was allowed, and that when a year later the monks of Mazzarino appeared once again in court at Messina they were hastily found guilty and sentenced to thirteen years apiece, is to be ascribed to an extraordinary new circumstance. Suddenly an urgent adjustment of the local scene was called for. After years of obstruction by Right-wing politicians, a Parliamentary Commission had been formed to investigate the Mafia, and this was about to arrive in Sicily to begin its work.

  The line consistently taken by the Commission’s opponents, and by the thirty Demochristian members who had voted against it in the Sicilian Regional Assembly, had been that the Mafia was a myth – a defamatory legend invented by the Italians of the north in their contempt for the ancient, mellow, but little understood civilisation of the country’s deep south. It was considered advisable, therefore, that such family scandals as that of the monks should be cleaned up as quickly and quietly as possible. No doubt it was hoped, too, that the members of the Anti-Mafia, as it was called, would be given the chance to conclude that the lurid side of the island life had been much exaggerated. Consequently, with the Commission’s imminent appearance, an extraordinary peace fell upon Sicily. For weeks and months on end, almost every case of a life being suddenly cut short by the brusque double blast from the lupara proved, on investigation, to have respectable motivation in some story of love betrayed. In Palermo, a winter of tranquil nights came and went. An embarrassing discovery was made of a whole collection of skeletons in a disused well near Marsala, but the local doctors who examined them soon agreed that they belonged to the victims of a hardly remembered typhus epidemic. The fact that there were holes in every skull was passed over as the result of accidental post-mortem damage.

  Then, suddenly, the almost wistful serenity of the city of Palermo was disrupted by an assassination so elaborately and expensively prepared as to be quite evidently an act of war between men or factions of exceptional power. The dead man, Cesare Manzella, was a capo-Mafia of a rather special kind – a mafioso of the stamp of Don Antonio Cottone, shot to death in 1949, whose eccentric generosity had won for him the affectionate nickname U Patre Nostru (Our Heavenly Father). Manzella’s prickly conscience and his desire to perform good works had survived thirty years spent as an organiser of gambling houses in Chicago. His weakness was children. He found it difficult to pass one in the street without stopping to pop a sweet into its mouth, and he had devoted a high proportion of the wealth gained in recent years from the traffic in narcotics to the building of an orphanage. It was in acknowledgment of his many benefactions that he had been almost unanimously elected President of the Catholic Action of Cinesi – the suburb of Palermo where he had established himself. In his activities in the Honoured Society, however, Manzella had shown himself a disciplinarian.

  In January 1962, Lucky Lucanio, then living in princely style in Naples and allegedly supreme organiser of the world traffic in narcotics, died at the Naples Airport restaurant. It was the time and place chosen by the narcotics bureau of Interpol to swoop on their most slippery adversary, but by the time they reached him, he was dead. Officially death was due to heart-failure, but rumour had it that his associates, fearful of the revelations that might follow their chief’s arrest, had quickly poisoned his coffee. Manzella stepped into the breach left by Luciano’s disappearance from the scene. In the office he now held he was served by a spirited following that could only be kept in control by a man with a flair for dictatorial methods.

  One evening in April 1963, Manzella returned home with a henchman, but found it impossible to drive his car into the courtyard of his villa as another car – a brand-new Alfa-Romeo – had been parked there, inside his ornamental wrought-iron gates. Manzella and his man went to investigate, opened the door of the Alfa-Romeo, and there was an explosion of the kind produced by a one-hundred-pound bomb in the last war. Of Manzella, all that was discovered was his wide-brimmed, American-style hat and a single shoe, and these in due course were placed in the sumptuous coffin subscribed for by his friends and enemies, together with a dummy dressed in one of his suits. Nothing at all of significance was found of his companion. The details of the interlocking histories that led to Manzella’s death were unravelled by the police after they had found a satchel containing his papers in the branches of a tree some twenty yards from the explosion.

  From these documents, and from the further investigations they inspired, the police learned that with the threat of the Anti-Mafia looming ahead, the Honoured Society had taken its dispositions in an intelligent manner. A General Council had been called which had immediately ordered a truce covering all dissensions between the various Mafia families. A standing committee was created to which disputes were to be submitted for arbitration, and crimes of violence were forbidden. The Mafia now stood back and took a look at its recent history, and examined certain causes célèbres that might conceivably be of interest to the Commission in the light of the possibility of strengthening defences by newly confected evidence and alibis. Political ties were to be strengthened by all possible means, and prominent persons who might come under attack as accomplices of the Honoured Society were to receive all possible assistance. For the organisation of its resistance the Mafia wanted, above all, a long interim of peace, and no publicity. But this, to its wrath, had been denied by an unhappy incident, also alluded to in the dead Manzella’s papers.

  The chain-reaction of preposterous violence that in the end was to nullify all the forethought and planning of the Mafia Grand Council was provoked by a misunderstanding arising from the purchase and resale of a valuable parcel of heroin. This had been acquired by the Manzella organisation from its normal suppliers in the Middle East, but a difficulty had arisen over its delivery. Previously the heroin had been shipped across to Sicily by a well-known and highly-thought-of specialist, Joseph Molinelli, known as ‘Richard’, who was quite prepared to bring his yacht in to within a mile or two of the port of Palermo for the transfer of the heroin to one of the Mafia’s fishing-boats. This time Richard had an objection. It seemed that somebody in authority had baulked at the blatancy of these deliveries of contraband being made within sight of the lights of the capital, and in future arrangements would have to be made to take over the heroin at some point at sea on the south side of the island.

  A suitable person had to be found to carry out this operation, and Manzella put forward the name of Calcedonio Di Pisa to the syndicate who had purchased the heroin
. Di Pisa was a garish young freebooter, habitually be-gloved, shirted in puce silk, and with a coat of the palest of camel hair – a kind of latter-day George Raft. He drove a butter-coloured, gadget-festooned Alfa-Romeo, and in his dandified presence he was anathema to the mafiosi of the old school, whose minds had not been broadened by travel. Di Pisa was a contrabandist by profession but had recently moved into the even more flourishing real estate racket, thereby making a number of enemies. He was given the job, went down to Agrigento, hired a boat, met the scrupulous Richard at sea, and a few hours later reported back to his employers at Palermo with the heroin. This was in due course handed over to a member of the crew of a transatlantic vessel, who smuggled it safely into the United States through the port of New York. Shortly afterwards the Mafia syndicate in Palermo received their payment, but the sum remitted was far below the agreed amount. Manzella promptly put through a transatlantic call to his friends and was told that a short-weight package had been delivered. Both parties agreed there and then to investigate at their own ends. In New York the member of the ship’s crew was kidnapped, and, succeeding in convincing his interrogators of his innocence, was released. Manzella and company believed Richard to be above suspicion, so Di Pisa, as the only other man who had handled the parcel since it left the Middle East, was picked up and tried before a Mafia court.