Cosa Nostra (16 page)

Giuseppa’s troubles did not end there. The owner of a local tannery had been sending his sons to her for supplies. They kept trying to pay in notes and coins that she knew were false. She also knew that the businessman and his sons had dangerous friends. When she politely turned down the proffered money, the tannery owner’s sons persisted. Finally one large-denomination note got past her husband. Giuseppa sent him off, ears still ringing, to sort the matter out. The tannery owner fobbed him off with only part of the debt, protesting that his boys had not known that the money was false.

Then came the most worrying episode of all. In late December 1896, the local women suddenly began looking askance at Giuseppa and avoiding her shop. Finally a housewife came in and complained audibly about ‘cheap women’ in the neighbourhood. Giuseppa challenged the housewife to spell out what was on her mind, assuming that this gibe was aimed at her daughter. The woman replied sharply that she was talking about police spies. Giuseppa was perplexed and afraid. There was something going on that was far more ominous than the rumours about her daughter or even the dispute over the phoney money.

On 27 December two suspicious-looking men, one of them barely out of his teens, came into her store. Across the street from the entrance was a wall surrounding a lemon grove. The wall now had a small hole knocked through it not far above the ground. In retrospect, Giuseppa realized that the two men were checking that the hole offered a clear line of fire into the shop. She recalled that the older man stopped long enough to say, out loud, apropos of nothing, ‘If I do something stupid there’s always my mother who will look after me, my wife and my children.’ A statement so oblique could only be read one way, as a threat. Giuseppa’s anxiety turned to alarm.

At eight o’clock the same evening a slim, pale young stranger entered and asked for half a litre of fuel oil. Picking up the container, he went to the door. Then he stretched out his right arm and made a gesture towards the other side of the street. Through the hole in the wall two shots were fired. Giuseppa was hit in the shoulder and side. As she fell, her daughter Emanuela came towards her to help. A third shot was fired, hitting Emanuela and killing her instantly.

When Chief of Police Sangiorgi asked Giuseppa Di Sano to come in to be interviewed, he was revisiting an old crime—one of the guilty men had already been caught. But, as antimafia investigators often have to do, Sangiorgi was reinterpreting an earlier episode, looking for loose ends, fitting them into a bigger pattern of intrigue. Crucially, for the progress of Sangiorgi’s investigations, Giuseppa was prepared to testify that her daughter’s murder was a mafia affair. Her words would allow Sangiorgi to turn this isolated case into evidence that the mafia was indeed a criminal organization with its own rules, its own structure and, most important of all, its own way of killing.

Sangiorgi’s underworld sources also told him that Giuseppa’s daughter was the first victim—an incidental one—of a sequence of betrayals and murders perpetrated by men of honour in the Conca d’Oro. The sequence was set in motion two weeks before the murder when the
carabinieri
raided a counterfeit currency factory near Giuseppa’s store and caught three men at the scene. The mafia suspected a leak. Inquiries were led by man of honour Vincenzo D’Alba; his brother was one of the mafiosi arrested during the raid. He did not take long to put together the various pieces of evidence: Giuseppa Di Sano resented the local mob because of the business of the forged banknotes; she and her daughter were friendly with the
carabinieri;
what is more, Giuseppa’s brother-in-law had installed a screw press in the machine shop that was the cover for the forgers’ operation. Everything seemed to point in the same direction. Before he even presented his case to the meeting of the
cosca,
Vincenzo D’Alba instructed his mother to orchestrate a gossip campaign by the women of the area. His aim was to ruin both Giuseppa’s business and her reputation: the unpopular are less likely to be missed, their deaths less likely to be investigated thoroughly. On 26 December 1896, Giuseppa Di Sano was condemned to death by the Falde
cosca
of the mafia for a crime against
omertà
that she did not commit. Twenty-four hours later D’Alba and his accomplice attempted to carry out the sentence, but only succeeded in killing Giuseppa’s daughter.

It was Vincenzo D’Alba who came into Giuseppa’s shop both to check the line of fire from the lemon grove across the street and to utter his abstruse threat. For a mafia hit is not just about the practicalities of ending someone’s life. It is also brutal, laconic theatre. The local people would have known who controlled the lemon grove opposite, and the hole in the wall was there to be seen. News of Vincenzo D’Alba’s threat would have travelled quickly. He came to the shop on the day of the planned murder as much to show his face as to prepare the ground for the attack. Although no casual passer-by would have been able to see the two killers through the hole in the wall, their identity would probably not have been a great mystery in the community. This deliberately public murder defied anyone who saw what happened to go to the police. The Falde
cosca
was parading its dominance over the territory.

It probably needed to. Sangiorgi surmised that the loss of the forgery operation had resonated well beyond the Falde
cosca
on whose territory the phoney mint was located. Just as the counterfeiters needed a wider network to pass their ‘money’ into circulation, so income from the operation was spread among other
cosche.
As a result, the
cosca
’s prestige had been damaged by the raid; it needed a rapid demonstration to the rest of the organization that everything was still under control.

When the mafia kills, it does so in the name of all its associates. It consults, it mounts trials, it looks for consensus, it seeks to justify its actions to its supporters and show that it is in charge. This is what Chief of Police Sangiorgi sought to use Giuseppa Di Sano’s evidence to prove. Today’s antimafia investigators would put it more starkly: the mafia kills in the way a state does; it does not murder, it executes.

Giuseppa’s testimony would be crucial evidence that the mafia was far more than just a mentality. Even the way that she had been persecuted since that terrible day in December 1896 showed as much:

It is almost as if I am the guilty one. Everyone shuns me or looks at me with scorn on their faces. Now very few people come and buy things from my shop. The only ones who come are the honest ones who are not receptive to the mafia’s influence. So the disaster that struck me did not just hurt me directly, physically (which cost me a huge amount in medical bills). And it has done even more than open up an incurable wound in my heart by killing my poor eighteen-year-old daughter. To all that must now be added the economic harm that the mafia’s persecution has brought. The mafia refuses to pardon me for an offence I never committed.

A week after dictating these words to detectives, Giuseppa looked out of the window of her store and saw that a new hole had appeared in the wall opposite. Palermo’s shadow state was already taking steps to counteract the threat posed by Chief of Police Sangiorgi.

*   *   *

The murder of Giuseppa Di Sano’s daughter also had an intriguing loose end that would lead Sangiorgi to discover how the first of the four missing men met his death on the Fondo Laganà. Remarkably, Vincenzo D’Alba’s careful preparations failed to protect him from prosecution. Within days of the murder, his young accomplice, Giuseppe ‘Pidduzzo’ Buscemi, was questioned by the police. Buscemi, whom Sangiorgi describes as a cocky young man, had his alibi prepared as any mafioso would. Yet he also helped himself to freedom by saying that he had seen Vincenzo D’Alba pale and trembling in a via Falde tobacco shop ten minutes after the killing. As a result of this hint D’Alba was arrested and, with Giuseppa’s testimony counting against him, was convicted and sentenced to twenty years. For Sangiorgi, D’Alba’s betrayal by Buscemi was an astonishing and therefore highly significant breach of
omertà.

Whoever Sangiorgi’s sources within the mafia were, they told him that Pidduzzo Buscemi’s scandalous behaviour enraged mafiosi close to Vincenzo D’Alba. Antonino D’Alba, Vincenzo’s cousin, was a tavern owner and an influential man of honour in his forties with a record for fencing stolen goods. He denounced Pidduzzo’s betrayal of
omertà
to other senior bosses who agreed to hold a trial. Antonino D’Alba’s call for mafia justice was to lead eventually to his murder: he was the first of the four missing men.

Pidduzzo Buscemi’s mafia trial did not take place until September 1897; it was postponed until he returned on leave from military service. Standing before the assembled bosses, he still wore the uniform of the 10th regiment of Bersaglieri with its extravagant black plume on a broad-brimmed hat. When called on to explain why he had given evidence to the police, the young soldier nonchalantly claimed he had done so to turn suspicion away from the mafia as a whole, and that he had always planned to change his story later to favour his accomplice and confuse the investigators. Strangely, Sangiorgi learned, the mafia court found his flimsy testimony convincing and acquitted Buscemi.

Something more important than the mafia rulebook was clearly at stake. As so often in mafia wars, that something was territory. Among the ‘jurors’ at young Buscemi’s trial was the capo of the Acquasanta
cosca,
the hefty, walrus-moustached Tommaso D’Aleo, who suspected that Antonino D’Alba had orchestrated a challenge to an established protection racket over two wealthy lemon derivatives dealers; a bomb had even been detonated on the balcony of their house. Tommaso D’Aleo also happened to be Pidduzzo Buscemi’s godfather. He was almost certainly using the young soldier to manoeuvre D’Alba into a position where he could be killed.

Soon after Pidduzzo Buscemi was acquitted, another trial was called in secret—mafia justice can be very swift when it needs to be. Antonino D’Alba was found guilty
in absentia.
The sentence was death, and his execution was carefully arranged. This time it was not to be a public affair, as the shooting of Giuseppa Di Sano had been, because D’Alba’s punishment was an internal organizational matter.

A few days after the mafia trial that had acquitted him of breaking the code of
omertà,
Pidduzzo Buscemi, still in his dashing uniform, called at the tavern run by D’Alba. He found him washing out a barrel, and invited him outside into a cone of light from a street lamp to discuss their differences. The exchange was curt. Buscemi said he wanted to restore the damage to his honour caused by D’Alba’s accusations; he demanded a duel.

D’Alba agreed. But, as he may have suspected, he was being lured into a trap. According to his young son’s testimony as recorded by Sangiorgi, on the afternoon of the following day, 12 September 1897, the boss Tommaso D’Aleo and another mafioso came to D’Alba’s tavern where they ate, talked, and lingered. They offered a 100-lire note when asked to pay a 3.25 lire bill; it was a carefully pitched gesture of mistrust and hostility. At half past six in the evening D’Alba returned from the nearby shop where he had gone to change the 100-lire note. He took off his two gold rings, gold tie-pin, and other valuables, and placed them safely in a coffee cup on the shelf. Then he picked up his revolver and went out. Tommaso D’Aleo and the other mobster followed him.

Antonino D’Alba was never seen alive again. The mafia gossip mill churned out rumours of sightings in North Africa. A letter purporting to be from him was even sent from Tunis to his father. But by the time the letter arrived, the police had already found out that D’Alba had in fact been gunned down on the night of his disappearance by a large party of mafiosi on the Fondo Laganà.

*   *   *

Through his careful interviews with police informers, and his patient re-examination of evidence, Sangiorgi was beginning to piece together a complete picture of how the mafia operated; how its bitter conflicts were not merely the product of an outlaw sense of pride, but actually involved laws, legal proceedings, and a system of territorial control. The next stage of his investigation reached right from the Fondo Laganà to the domestic lives of the wealthiest and most famous families in Sicily: the Florios and the Whitakers. As Sangiorgi discovered, these two opulent dynasties lived alongside the mafia in contrasting ways. One of them was cynical, the other more resigned and put upon; but both were complicit in perpetuating the mafia’s power.

*   *   *

When European kings and princes visited Palermo, as they often did, there was one place where they were always received: a lavish villa set in a private park in Olivuzza in the Conca d’Oro. It belonged to Ignazio Florio Jr. In 1891, at twenty-three, Ignazio inherited the greatest fortune in Italy. It was said that 16,000 people in Palermo alone ‘ate his bread’. The Florios had extensive interests in sulphur, light and heavy engineering, tuna fishing, pottery, insurance, finance, Marsala wine and, above all, shipping. The house of Florio was the major shareholder in NGI, Navigazione Generale Italiana, Italy’s leading shipping concern and one of the biggest in Europe.

But when Ignazio Jr came into his inheritance, the family’s fabulous wealth had already begun to decay from the inside. NGI had grown fat on government contracts and subsidies arranged by his father’s carefully cultivated political contacts. Now it was becoming clear how uncompetitive it was. Moreover, the country’s political and economic centre of gravity was shifting inexorably northwards, to the cities of Genoa, Turin, and Milan. The Florios’ influence slipped away at increasing speed. Before he was forty, Ignazio Jr had lost control of a fortune that it had taken three generations to build. In 1908, he was forced to sell the family’s NGI holding; it is as good a date as any to mark the end of the Palermo
belle époque
that began when he became head of the family in 1891. These were the years when Sicilian high society orbited around the dying sun of Florio money. The press called Palermo ‘Floriopolis’, but this was its last flowering as a great European city.