Honoured Society (16 page)

And in the meanwhile, in the absence of ambulances, the dead and the desperately wounded were being brought down on the backs of mules by volunteers who never knew when the assassins they believed to be still hidden among the rocks might choose to fire again. A father who had been absent from the meeting went up with them to look for his missing son and found him dead. Coming up to the pass, he remembers a chilling sound that warned him of what was to come. Swollen in the harsh acoustics of the rock-vaulted wilderness was a moaning that sounded as though thousands of doves had perched themselves among the crevices and ledges. It was the groans of the wounded lying among the bodies of humans and animals scattered everywhere in that narrow place.

Having carried out his orders, Giuliano made haste to withdraw from the position on the slopes of Mount Pizzuta, where he and his men had lain in waiting since shortly after dawn. Three young men who had decided to spend the holiday in their own way by taking a prostitute with them on a mountain expedition had a lucky escape. ‘We were going to the meeting,’ they said later, ‘but decided to call it off because we had an Englishwoman with us.’ (‘Englishwoman’ is the Sicilian euphemism for a whore.) Hearing the shooting, they hid themselves in a fissure among the rocks, and soon after saw twelve armed men come down the mountainside, eleven of them in American uniforms, and the twelfth – Giuliano – in a white raincoat. An estate guard who ran into the bandits
a few minutes later was less lucky, despite the fact that he was a
well-known
mafioso. He was made to turn out his pockets, and among the contents was a note from some minor police official, inviting him to call at headquarters that same evening. The man’s body was found in a ravine forty days later.

Four other men passed through the edge of the shadow of death that day. These were peasants from Piana dei Greci who had decided to play truant from the demonstration at Portella della Ginestra, and were setting snares for rabbits on the slopes of Pizzuta shortly after dawn. Suddenly they found themselves confronted by a youth who covered them with a sub-machine-gun. He asked whether they were Communists, and on receiving their energetic denial, said, ‘Lucky you. We’d have finished you off if you were.’ Other members of the band then appeared, and the hunters were marched off to a cave where one of the bandits was left to guard them, while the others went off. The bandits left their captives in no doubt about the reason for their presence on the mountain, and one man who had two sons playing in the band at the celebration begged that their lives should be spared. To this he received the reply, ‘They want the land, and we’re going to give it to them – six feet of it apiece.’

This literally seems to have been the bandits’ intention. The massacre at Portella, in which only eleven people were killed on the spot and
fifty-five
wounded (some died later), was certainly a less bloody act of terror than had been planned. As a military operation the thing was a
near-failure
. In addition to Giuliano and his nucleus of machine-gunners on Pizzuta, an unknown number of men lay in wait on the mountain Cumeta across the pass. The plan was to catch the crowd between two fires. But when the stampede took place from the fusillades poured down from the Pizzuta, the fire which was to have taken the peasant crowd in the rear was slight and ineffective. There is a theory that many of the marksmen placed on Cumeta were shepherds who had been conscripted for a task for which they felt little enthusiasm – particularly as some of them had relations in the crowd – and that their aim was intentionally ragged. The three men and the girl who had hidden in the crevice as the bandits came down the mountainside reported that they had been
arguing with each other in angry tones about something that had gone wrong.

Next day the conscientious Lieutenant Ragusa searched the mountainsides and found a position from which a Breda .38
machine-gun
had been fired. Some eight hundred empty cartridge cases were strewn about the ground. The Lieutenant thought that the range – about half a mile – was too great for accurate shooting, and to decide whether this was so, he fired a machine-gun of the same type from the same position and found it difficult even to hit the large rock from which the speaker had addressed the crowd. He carefully collected up the empty shells, believing that they might prove useful as evidence, but a few days later they were spirited away.

For days Ragusa and the police authorities occupied in carrying out investigations on the spot followed a false scent. A woman of San Giuseppe Jato had been taunted on the morning of the massacre by a mafioso landowner, and from this it was assumed that the Mafia had carried out the crime. No one seems at first to have thought of Giuliano. But Ettore Messana, head of the Public Security Police for Sicily, knew better. On the day of the shooting of the peasants, Messana sent a telegram to the Minister for Home Affairs, Mario Scelba, informing him that Giuliano was the author of the massacre. To many at the time it seemed strange that the Inspector-General should have known with such certainty a fact that was only discovered independently by his subordinates after much investigatory labour. It seemed less strange four years later at the Viterbo trial of those who had fired on the peasants, when it became known that Messana had a ‘confidant’ among the bandits who kept him aware of their intentions!

The next few weeks were filled with intense activity for Giuliano and his band. A few days after the massacre at Portella, Giuliano gave one of his many journalistic interviews. This time it was to an American, Michael Stern, who went to a rendezvous with the bandit dressed in an American officer’s uniform. Giuliano handed Stern a letter for President Truman:
a masterpiece of self-apology and persuasion, which it is unlikely he could have concocted himself. Giuliano pleaded for the President’s ‘moral support’ for his struggle to wipe out Communism in Sicily. ‘Because with a lost war we find ourselves in a hopeless state, and will easily fall a prey to foreigners – especially the Russians, who long to appear in the Mediterranean Sea. The consequences, if this should happen, would be of the greatest importance, and you know it.’
Thereafter
Stern and Giuliano kept up correspondence for some time, Stern writing quite openly to Giuliano, care of his parents at Montelepre. One letter Giuliano sent back fell into the police’s hands when they captured the courier carrying it down to Montelepre. In it, Giuliano spoke of ‘the circle closing round him’, and said that he could no longer carry on with light arms, but must have mortars and artillery. This letter has formed the basis for a belief, widespread in Italy, that Stern was something rather more than a mere scoop-hunting journalist.

On June 22nd, trade union centres and Communist Party
headquarters
were attacked simultaneously in many towns in the province of Palermo. Hand-grenades, dynamite and Molotov cocktails were used to demolish the buildings, and their occupants were machine-gunned by the bandits as they ran from the flames. Militarily the operation was on this occasion irreproachable, and as a piece of terrorism it was a
masterpiece
. With Giuliano’s gunmen now actively entering the fight on the feudal landowners’ side, few people were inclined to give much for the peasants’ chances of pressing home their claim to the uncultivated land. The imminent collapse of the Popular Front was generally predicted. In a year’s time there would be more elections, and for another year Giuliano was to remain indispensable, and to prosper accordingly.

The mortars and the artillery were never forthcoming, but the band was otherwise splendidly and abundantly equipped for the extermination of unarmed enemies. Much of Giuliano’s funds was derived from kidnappings carried out by an efficient specialised squad led by a foundation member of the band, Frank Mannino. The obscure mafiosi who now manipulated Giuliano and his band as confidently as if they had been marionettes dangling from strings, designated the most
promising victims. It was the Mafia, too, that negotiated the ransoms, arranged for their payment, and saw to the kidnapped men’s safe return to their families. Sometimes the Mafia found it desirable to temper the zeal of some young police official by doing him a favour, and in this case the policeman might be allowed to take the credit for the release. This happened in the famous case of the abduction of Baron Agnello, who was finally turned loose after a record thirty million lire had been paid over. A police commissioner called Tandoy – a northerner who had hitherto shown himself unreceptive to the special Sicilian atmosphere – was softened-up in this way. He got the credit for reducing Giuliano’s original demands from ninety million lire to the sum finally paid, and thereafter, one supposes out of gratitude, remained notably quiescent for ten years. After this period of total inactivity he gave trouble again, and was shot one day while strolling with his wife in the streets of Agrigento.

Agnello, like so many of the rich men kidnapped by Giuliano, seems on the whole to have been stimulated by the experience. He was taken in broad daylight in the middle of Palermo while leaving his mistress’s house, and carried off in a taxi which immediately broke down with a mild case of engine trouble, and then, when restarted, developed a flat tyre. The Baron, whose Sicilian aristocratic tradition compelled him to abstain from displays of vulgar emotion, sat imperturbable while the repairs were being effected. He spent several weeks with the bandits, shared their lodgings and provender, was forced to accompany them in all weathers on enormous marches, and sometimes – to his disgust – to eat rabbit. They looked after him as well as they could, and he was charmed with Giuliano – a
gentiluomo
– but found the rest of the band unattractive, and lacking in the social graces.

Another nobleman described how, the morning after his abduction, he found himself in a decent room with a bowl of fruit at his bedside. The bandits kept out of sight, but about midday a voice was heard through the shuttered window, ‘What will it be for lunch, your lordship?’ ‘
Spaghetti
and fried fish,’ was the reply. ‘Will you be taking beer or wine, sir?’ ‘Beer, I think.’ Shortly afterwards the guard was back. ‘Be so good as to
face the wall, your lordship.’ The baron complied, and the bandit came in with the tray of food. A few days later the kidnapped man had stomach trouble. He was visited by a doctor who, remaining unseen, asked him to describe his symptoms and then prescribed an efficacious remedy. Later, when confidence grew between the bandits and their captive, they tried to make him see that the money they proposed to extort from his family would be expended in the best possible of causes – Giuliano’s personal war on the Reds. ‘Don’t fret, your lordship. Just leave it to us. We’ll finish the Communists off for you.’

Some of the victims seem to have accepted Giuliano’s assurances that they were getting value for their money, for they remained on friendly terms and in contact with him after their release. Giuliano’s popularity in certain quarters was, in fact, never greater than in the twelve months that followed Portella and his attacks on the trade unionists and the
Communists
. But in 1948 there was another election, and as had been foreseen, the Popular Front was routed. Giuliano had done his work almost too well. Now there was no further use for him. He was merely a nuisance to be disposed of as soon as it could be conveniently done. Giuliano was undoubtedly pressing his claim for payment for his service. As the bandit Terranova testified at the Viterbo trial: ‘After the elections of April 18th, 1948, I saw Giuliano and asked him to keep his promises. Our orders had been to make people vote for the Christian Democrats, and we had carried them out. In return he had promised us our liberty. Giuliano replied that the instigators of the massacre had refused to carry out their side of the bargain, and they wanted to make us emigrate to Brazil. Giuliano wanted to stay in Sicily, and said to me: “We must compel these gentlemen to carry out their undertakings. Go to Castellamare del Golfo and kidnap the Honourable Bernardino Mattarella and his family.”’

The situation was taking an ugly turn and drastic remedies were called for. The Cavalier of the Crown of Italy, Santo Flores, capo-Mafia of Partinico, who had been responsible for bringing Giuliano and the Christian Democrats together, proposed quite simply to resolve the
predicament by betraying the bandit to the police. But for once
something
went wrong with Mafia planning. Giuliano got wind of the trap that had been set for him and took his revenge. Both the mafioso Santo Flores and the secretary of the Christian Democratic Party of Alcamo who had negotiated with Giuliano on behalf of the Party were shot dead. Some indication of the other personalities Giuliano believed to be involved in this deal, which was now quite clearly to be repudiated, is afforded by the names of those whom Giuliano, in his rage, ordered his men to abduct.

They included, as was revealed at the bandits’ trial, Monsignor Filippi, Archbishop of Monreale, and Don Calò Vizzini, the acknowledged head of the Mafia. But in believing that he could touch men of this calibre, Giuliano showed a loss of touch with reality. ‘Fra Diavolo’, the police spy placed by Inspector Messana in the band, was the safety valve that operated in this kind of emergency, and the intended victims received their warning. Don Calò took Giuliano’s threat seriously enough to shut himself up in the Albergo Sole in Palermo – the corridors and public rooms of which were filled with his men-at-arms – until he judged that the danger had blown over. When urgent business called him back to Villalba, he travelled hidden among the vegetable crates on a local market gardener’s truck, so that when the bandits stopped his car they captured only his chauffeur and a friend of the chauffeur’s who had begged a ride. It was months, too, before the Archbishop left the safety of his palace.

Abandoned by the Christian Democrats, just as he had been as soon as he had served their purpose by the Separatists and Monarchists in turn, Giuliano now hit on an ingenious method of staving off the fate that had overtaken so many bandit chieftains in Sicily since the end of the war. In 1946 Maresciallo Calandra of Montelepre – the local police chief whose twelve men shared six pairs of boots between them – had found that he was not to be permitted to arrest Giuliano, and when he insisted and went to his chief with a cast-iron scheme for rounding up the whole band, he was hastily transferred to another district. The problem for Giuliano was to extend this kind of immunity which he had enjoyed in his politically useful days to a time when every politician in Italy would
have been delighted to hear that he was dead. He did it by capitalising on the guilty secrets of the massacre of Portella; composing a memorial, of which several copies were kept, in which the political motives of the massacre were revealed and its instigators named. One copy of the memorial was given into the keeping of his brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, who was smuggled safely away to America. Thus, for fear of the deadly secrets in Giuliano’s possession, he could not be captured alive, nor – until it was certain that the various copies of the incriminating memorial were in safe hands – could he be killed. In the meanwhile the daily butchery went on of ordinary policemen and army conscripts engaged in farcical drives against a bandit it was never intended should be caught.