Cosa Nostra (17 page)

Ignazio Florio Jr was urbane, gifted, and raffish. The figure of a Japanese woman was tattooed on his arm. His clothes were almost exclusively from London: ties from Moulengham, hats from Locke & Tuss, suits from Meyer & Mortimer—the Prince of Wales’s tailor. A flesh-coloured carnation adorned his buttonhole in the mornings, a gardenia in the evenings. In 1893, as his father had done, Ignazio consolidated his social status by marrying a titled woman. His bride, Franca Jacona di San Giuliano, was considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe. A few months after the wedding, during Franca’s first pregnancy, Ignazio went off to Tunisia on a safari that required the services of fifty porters and tens of camels. Franca found female underwear in his luggage when he got back. She was pacified with a string of fat pearls. The same penitence ritual was to be repeated many times during their marriage; Franca is said to have accumulated thirty kilos of jewels.

Her husband’s transgressions notwithstanding, Franca quickly asserted herself as the queen of Palermo high society. She patronized the arts. Her green eyes, olive skin, and rangy figure were celebrated by the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. She caused a minor scandal by allowing the fashionable artist Giovanni Boldini to sketch her legs. An icon of Liberty style, she wore strings of pearls that almost reached her knees. Money meant display for Franca Florio. To the end of her life, she remained doggedly unmindful of the family’s worsening financial situation. When ageing threatened in the 1900s, she underwent pioneering cosmetic surgery by having her face ‘porcelainized’ in Paris.

Sangiorgi’s report relates that, one morning in the early weeks of 1897, Ignazio and Franca Florio were woken early by their servants. Ignazio was outraged to discover that a number of art objects had been stolen from the villa during the night. Nevertheless, the party most offended by this unprecedented burglary was not Commendatore Ignazio Florio Jr, but the man he bawled out and told to put the matter right: his gardener. Francesco Noto, a well-built, bald man with a sharply sloping moustache, would not have accepted this kind of dressing-down from anyone but Florio. For, as Ignazio Jr was well aware, the gardener was actually the capo of the Olivuzza
cosca
of the mafia. His younger brother and underboss, Pietro, was also employed in the Florio villa as a security guard. These lowly job titles should not fool us as to the immense strategic and symbolic importance of protecting the villa owned by the wealthiest family in Sicily, the hub of Palermo high society. The Noto brothers were the real targets of the Olivuzza villa burglary, and they knew who had carried it out.

Chief of Police Sangiorgi traced the reason for the robbery back to the moment a few weeks earlier when ten-year-old Audrey Whitaker was kidnapped by mafiosi under the command of the Noto brothers. Audrey had been out riding in La Favorita, the royal park on the north-western edge of Palermo where the idle wealthy shot quail, or attended horse races and show-jumping. Four men emerged from the bushes to set upon the groom that her family had charged with her protection. He was beaten up and tied to his horse while Audrey was taken away. Her father Joshua (‘Joss’) received a polite demand for a ransom of 100,000 lire.

Sangiorgi had no need to explain who the Whitakers were. The family belonged to the leading English business dynasty in Sicily. (Palermo’s British community had put down strong roots when His Majesty’s Forces had occupied the island during the Napoleonic wars.) Like their friends the Florios, the Whitakers were involved in the Marsala wine business. Along with the Florios, the Whitakers would be invited to London for Queen Victoria’s state funeral in 1901.

The extended Whitaker family also lent a strong dose of Englishness to the Palermo
monde.
It was they who introduced garden parties to Sicily; extravagant meals would be served in a marquee attached to the back of the villa. Whitakers also founded a charity for abandoned infants, an animal welfare society, and the Palermo Football and Cricket Club. Little Audrey’s mother Effie cultivated an eccentric image. She toured Palermo in her carriage with a parrot on her shoulder. It was fed with sunflower seeds from a silver box, and a silver trowel was kept ready for its droppings. Effie’s other passion was lawn tennis. In the Whitakers’ garden there were three courts, known as Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. A visitor’s social standing largely determined which court he or she was permitted to use. Effie’s parrot was allowed to fly free during games. It was during one such match that Ignazio Florio’s teenage brother Vincenzo, not sharing the English sentimentality about animals, shot the pampered bird out of a tree.

Audrey Whitaker’s kidnapping was not the first trouble the family had had with the mafia. They were not as well connected as the Florios. As a young man, Joss’s brother Joseph (‘Pip’) had received a series of letters, demanding money and marked with a skull and crossbones. His Harrow masters would have been quietly satisfied with his bluff reaction. ‘I knew well enough who was the head of the local
Mafia,
’ he recorded, ‘so I sent him a message saying that the letters had been deposited at the police station giving the name of the man, in case I was killed. I had no more trouble after this.’ Some years later, Joss’s sister-in-law was strolling in the garden of the family villa when a severed hand was lobbed over the boundary wall, landing at her feet. This time the family’s response was more circumspect: they kept quiet about the incident in case it was a threat. By now mafiosi were ‘protecting’ some of the family’s own property.

Joss Whitaker opted for the same approach after his daughter’s kidnapping. He paid up immediately and denied that the whole episode had even happened. Little Audrey was back home within days.

Sangiorgi’s mysterious sources not only revealed the secret of Audrey Whitaker’s abduction, they also told him that the huge ransom caused friction within the Olivuzza
cosca.
Two of its members, the carriage drivers Vincenzo Lo Porto and Giuseppe Caruso, were not happy with their share of the loot. They decided on a chancy response, a
sfregio.
As Sangiorgi explained,
sfregio
is an important piece of mafia terminology that means two very closely related things. It is a disfiguring wound and, more importantly, it is also an affront, an insulting action designed to make someone lose face. Since, for the mafia, control of territory is all, the most blatant
sfregio
possible is damage caused to property protected by another mafioso. As Sangiorgi puts it, ‘One of the mafia’s canons is respect for another man’s territorial jurisdiction. Flouting that jurisdiction constitutes a personal insult.’

It was Lo Porto and Caruso who stole the art objects from the Florios’ villa. The burglary was a
sfregio
aimed at the leadership of the Olivuzza clan. The rollicking that Ignazio Jr gave Francesco Noto was the object of the whole exercise. To quote Sangiorgi again, ‘The aim that the two carriage drivers had set themselves, that is to humiliate their boss and underboss, had been achieved.’

The Noto brothers reacted to this
sfregio
with exemplary patience. First, they ensured that the damage to their reputation in Ignazio Florio’s eyes was repaired. They promised the two thieves a larger share of the Whitaker kidnapping cash, and even a reward for the return of the booty from the Florio robbery. Thus it was that, a few days later, the Florio family awoke to another, more welcome surprise: every single missing object had been returned to exactly the same place from which it had been stolen.

With the Florios’ property restored, their gardener and guard were ready to move against Lo Porto and Caruso. The killing of any man of honour is a potentially destabilizing act that is of concern to the whole mafia organization. The Florio family’s involvement in the case heightened its importance. So when the Notos secretly denounced Lo Porto and Caruso to other bosses, the outcome was a hearing that involved all the capos of the eight
cosche.
It was held on Falde territory rather than in Noto’s own Olivuzza domain—another demonstration that the decision had implications for the whole association. The Notos clearly wanted more than a guilty verdict: as Sangiorgi asserted, they were aiming for as wide a consensus as possible for the death penalty. They got what they were after: to avoid suspicion and to make the killings as efficient as possible, the death sentences would not be carried out for several months.

When the time came to carry out the executions, on 24 October 1897, the two carriage drivers were lured to the Fondo Laganà on the pretext that they were going to take part in a robbery. They were met there by a representative firing party comprising men of honour from each of the different
cosche.
Lo Porto and Caruso were shot first by the men who had arrived with them. The other mafiosi waited until the two had pulled themselves back on to their feet before finishing them off. Their bullet-riddled bodies were tossed into the grotto. On top of them fell the fourth and final corpse: that of another young mafioso executed on the
fondo
for stealing from his boss. A week earlier he had been shot several times in the head as he sat down, he thought, to play a game of cards.

*   *   *

It was one thing for Sangiorgi to tell a story of collective executions and protection rackets that explained how the four missing men had ended up on the Fondo Laganà. It was quite another to prove it in court and turn the story into evidence of the existence of what he called the ‘shadowy fraternity’. He needed more witnesses. Soon two would come forward and significantly both were, once again, women.

When the two carriage drivers’ wives discovered that they were widows, other mafiosi spun them a story that their husbands had died heroically, killed by a rival gang for refusing to take part in a plan to kidnap Ignazio Florio’s brother, the parrot-shooting teenager Vincenzo. The widows were told, in other words, that their husbands had died in the Florios’ service, and not because they had stolen from their villa.

This fiction was exposed a few weeks later by Ignazio’s mother, the formidable Baroness Giovanna d’Ondes Trigona. On 29 November 1897—not long after the smell of rotting flesh from the Fondo Laganà had led to the discovery of the bodies in the well—the baroness set off from the Florios’ Olivuzza villa to a nunnery of which she was a benefactress. Along the way she saw Vincenzo Lo Porto’s widow approach her carriage. The widow begged the baroness for help in bringing up her son. But her hopes were dashed by the baroness’s reply: ‘Don’t waste my time. Your husband was a thief who stole from my house with Caruso.’

When both widows came forward to tell what they knew, it was immediately evident to Sangiorgi that the baroness knew the whole story behind the burglary. She believed Lo Porto had got what he deserved. At this point in time, she plainly knew more than did the widows of the murdered mafiosi. She was also better informed than the police, who had by now found the bodies but knew little else about the case of the four missing men. The likely implication is clear: the whole Florio family had been discreetly told that the two men who had stolen the art objects from their home had met with the nasty end that their outrageous impudence merited. Because order had been restored through private channels, it would not have crossed the Florios’ minds to inform the police. Indeed, their role in the murders may even have gone deeper. Sangiorgi did not know the substance of Ignazio Jr’s conversation with his mafioso gardener on the morning after the robbery. It is legitimate to wonder whether in fact Ignazio actually intimated what he thought would be an appropriate fate for the culprits.

Chief of Police Sangiorgi draws on statements from the widows of both carriage drivers to tell this story with his usual sobriety and attention to detail. He also remarks that the Baroness Florio could profitably be interviewed by prosecution lawyers. It was his duty to do so. Yet it is hard not to imagine a bitterly ironic smile on Sangiorgi’s face as he makes the suggestion:

Signora Florio is a pious, religious noblewoman. It is difficult to tell which is greater: the immense riches she has at her disposal, or the illustrious virtues of her extremely noble, well-born mind. For that reason, if she were invited to testify under oath, it is likely that she would not be willing or able to conceal from justice her encounter with the widow.

There was no hope that Sangiorgi’s wish would be granted; the power of the Florio family placed them above the law. Sangiorgi now had three witnesses who were prepared to testify, all of them women, all of them bereaved, yet none of them decisive in his attempts to prove what the mafia really was.

*   *   *

Sangiorgi continued to send in further instalments of his report up to the end of 1898 and through the early months of 1899. At each stage of his work, the mafia took countermeasures. The brother of one of the carriage drivers killed for the Florio burglary was driven to suicide because of suspicions that he had collaborated with the authorities. One mafia informer, probably Sangiorgi’s most important mafia informant on the bodies in the well, emigrated for his own protection under a passport supplied by the police. To no avail: an assassin caught up with him in New Orleans and poisoned him. Sangiorgi confessed his worries about bringing the investigation to a successful conclusion in court. He complained that the investigating magistrate handling the case was a man with ‘a pusillanimous character, extremely open to influence’. All the while the mafia war was carrying on in fits and starts. The murders and disappearances continued; fragmentary news also emerged from the underworld of negotiations, shifting alliances, failed truces.

Then on 25 October 1899 came Sangiorgi’s big chance. A known man of honour was arrested red-handed at the scene of a shooting. The would-be victim of the attack survived; astonishingly, he turned out to be none other than the mafia’s former ‘regional or supreme
capo
’, as Sangiorgi called him. Francesco Siino, a gaunt man of fifty, capo of the Malaspina
cosca
and a successful lemon trader, had until recently been at the top of the organizational tree that the police had built up from confidential sources.