Honoured Society (17 page)

It was the public outcry that followed the slaughter of eight carabinieri in an ambush and the wounding of thirteen more that brought about the dissolution of the special Public Security organisation under Inspector Ciro Verdiani, hitherto – at least in theory – engaged in the prosecution of the war against Giuliano. This was now replaced by the Force for the Repression of Banditry, led by the carabinieri Colonel Ugo Luca. Clearly as it was realised in high places that in the present situation Giuliano himself must remain untouchable, Luca seems, at first, not to have been made aware of this. The Colonel’s task was to be complicated by numerous difficulties, not the least being the fact that the Public Security Police and carabinieri viewed each other, at that time, with undisguised hatred.

The antipathy was a traditional one, and had been very obvious to Allied Army officials who were brought into touch with the Italian police during the war. It stemmed from the carabinieri’s pride in their status as a military organisation, and a contempt – not unsullied by envy – for a rival force that was not exposed to military discipline, and had, as the carabinieri saw it, a relatively soft time. It had proved quite impossible to draw a clear line between the functions of the two forces, so that
overlapping
took place constantly, and wherever it happened, bitter friction
was engendered. The furious hostility shown by one brand of Italian policeman for another was a source of constant astonishment to the judge trying the bandits two years later at Viterbo. When Colonel Luca arrived in Palermo to take up his duties, he made the discouraging discovery that the documents relating to the Giuliano band, and all the evidence gathered about their activities over three years, had been made to disappear. This meant he had to start from scratch with his investigations. It was the first blow struck in the private war between the carabinieri colonel and the inspector of Public Security.

Although Inspector Verdiani should have ceased at this stage to interest himself in any way in the Giuliano ‘affair’, he remained in fact in close contact with the bandit through the Miceli family, who were important mafiosi of Monreale. One of the Micelis flew to Rome to meet the Inspector there to hammer out a plan for forestalling any action Luca might be proposing to take to settle the Giuliano problem. A result of Luca’s preliminary drive in the Giuliano zone had been the arrest of several hundred of the people of Montelepre, including Giuliano’s mother and sister. Mother-attachment has been observed to be
characteristic
of every bandit, as well as the one human weakness of almost all mafiosi, and Giuliano seemed ready to agree to anything to secure his mother’s release. Verdiani offered to use his influence to arrange this in return for the bandit’s undertaking to call off the war against the police. The second part of the bargain was that Giuliano would be allowed to emigrate. Miceli made another trip to Rome to discuss how this was to be done, and soon afterwards Giuliano left the safety of his mountains to go down to Castelvetrano. It was proposed that he should be smuggled out of the country in a military plane from the airport of this town. While these negotiations were proceeding, Verdiani and Giuliano
exchanged
letters couched in terms of brotherly affection. Later Verdiani travelled from Rome to meet Giuliano in a farmhouse near Castelvetrano. The two men hugged each other, and then the Chief Inspector sat down with an intimate little gathering of bandits and mafiosi to dispose of the sweet cakes and wine that he had thoughtfully brought along in his car. At this meeting Verdiani warned his protégé
that Pisciotta, Giuliano’s second-in-command, had been drawn into the orbit of Colonel Luca and might be planning some treachery. By now Giuliano was virtually the prisoner of the Mafia, and not only Verdiani, but even the members of the band could contact him only through the good offices of the men of respect.

Meanwhile Colonel Luca had set to work to liquidate the band, a task facilitated, as it happened, by Verdiani’s manoeuvrings, which had virtually brought to an end Giuliano’s bloodily successful campaign against the police. Italian public opinion wanted action at all costs, so with the enthusiastic co-operation of an imaginative Press, it was fed with stories of last-ditch stands by trapped desperadoes against bodies of hand-picked troops supported by parachutists, reconnaissance planes, and helicopters. Behind this stage-scenery, painted with fictitious violence, Luca tackled the problem in his own singular fashion, and under the sardonic eye of his exceedingly down-to-earth senior NCO, who, in later years, furnished a description of the events of those days which was much at variance with the official story.

Colonel Luca had spent many years in Intelligence duties in the Middle East, a circumstance which inevitably encouraged the
newspapers
to call him the ‘Italian Lawrence of Arabia’. He was deeply imbued with the attitudes of cloak-and-dagger fiction, and some of his actions almost parody the most improbable doings of Somerset Maugham’s secret agent, Ashenden. Luca had the idea of importing a professional assassin from Constantinople; a hairless-Mexican sort of character, known as ‘the Turk’. The Turk was about forty-five years of age, tough, thickset and dumpy, and a little ridiculous in appearance; his fingers were covered in rings, and he habitually wore shorts and a khaki desert
forage-cap
with neck protector. This imported specialist in violent death was a shy and taciturn man, who sat for hours eating enormous quantities of spaghetti, and swilling down strong Sicilian wine. He lived by himself in a room in the carabinieri barracks, and when not eating, tinkered
endlessly
with a great collection of professional equipment he had brought with him, including pistols, guns and knives of all sorts and descriptions. On the rare occasions when he strolled outside the barracks, he was never
without a small leather case intended for a musical instrument but which actually housed a tiny sub-machine-gun of British manufacture which had been fitted with a silencer, and which enchanted all the men.
Whenever
the presence of Giuliano was notified in a particular area, the Turk was hastily taken there by night and left with his arsenal, seemingly in the remote hope that Giuliano might accidentally run into him. However the hard-bitten policemen of Luca’s command may have viewed this project, one thing about the Turk staggered them all. This was his immense resistance to fatigue. They would leave him propped in the angle of a wall with some dried emergency rations and a gallon of wine, and there he would stay day and night without moving, sometimes for as long as three or four days at a time, waiting for Giuliano to pass that way. However, the opportunity never arose for him to prove his worth as a one-man army, and in the end, he was packed off back to Constantinople.

Outside the boisterous legends concocted by the Press and the improbably heroic scenes drawn by the cover-artist of the
Corriere della Serra,
there were few armed conflicts in Sicily in those days, but there were many betrayals. Material for a macabre window-display of corpses was furnished by more than one bandit who had surrendered peaceably enough. Rosario Candela, who had managed to get away to Tunisia with several other leading lights of the band, was arrested by Interpol and handed over to the Italian police, and although the news of his arrest in Tunisia had been published, this was cynically ignored and he was ‘killed in a terrific battle’ in the Sicilian mountains. The newspapers published photographs of him lying armed to the teeth, a grenade still clenched in his hand, much, as Gavin Maxwell put it, as the weapons of the dead warriors of the past were placed round them for burial.

Torture was automatically the fate of any captured man, and one of them, Giuseppe Sapienza, in his torment let slip the fearful truths of political instigation behind the massacre of Portella della Ginestra. The report of this interrogation had to be hurriedly destroyed. Astonishing facts came to light at the Viterbo trial, when the President of the Court asked the bandit Terranova how this could have happened.

M
ARESCIALLO LO BIANCO
was the most active member of Luca’s special force, and years later, after his retirement, he supplied a newspaper with a disenchanted account of the goings-on of those days. The lack of a university education had prevented the Maresciallo from rising to commissioned rank, but like many senior carabinieri NCOs, he possessed real power. At the Viterbo trial he made a great impression, wearing his authority easily, like his dapper check suit. Most witnesses travelled by train, but the Maresciallo was flown to the trial, kept the court waiting half the morning on the day he was to appear, and when he finally arrived, had a carabiniere trotting at his heels to carry his briefcase.

Lo Bianco soon fell foul of the Machiavellian Inspector Verdiani, who was doing everything he possibly could to hamper, discredit, and cast ridicule upon Colonel Luca and the operations of his Force for the Repression of Banditry. While, for example, the two thousand men of the new special force were chasing phantom outlaws in the mountains, Giuliano was giving interviews to newspapermen whose visits had been arranged by Verdiani with the co-operation of the Mafia, and even taking a week off to make a documentary film,
A Day in the Life of Giuliano.
All Lo Bianco’s coups were based upon information supplied by confidants whom he arranged to meet in his father’s photographic studio in Palermo, so one of Verdiani’s first moves was to try to seduce these informers away. ‘A thing,’ Lo Bianco says, ‘he should have realised it was quite impossible to do. The most junior agent in his force could have told him that a confidant is like an honest woman – absolutely faithful to one man only.’ Verdiani went a step further and had one of Lo Bianco’s best informers arrested. ‘I had been cultivating him for three years.’ The man was held in a dungeon for a week, and was warned before being released that in future he must work for nobody but the Public Security Police.
‘This, of course, was quite out of the question, for the reason I have already given.’

The wrangle over the loyalty of this informer ended in a public scandal. In due course he was re-arrested by the Public Security, and induced by some agent, lacking in – as Lo Bianco put it – ‘intelligence and serenity’, to produce a statement which named a number of dignitaries, among them none other than the Cardinal of Palermo and the
Archbishop
of Monreale as accomplices of Giuliano. Horrified senior police officials immediately suppressed this document, but not before someone had been able to spirit it away for photographic copies to be made. These, in due course, fell into the hands of the Princes of the Church involved, as well as those of the Minister of the Interior, who in a fury called Verdiani to his office and hauled him over the coals. Assuming that the copies had been made in the Lo Bianco studio, the Inspector counter-attacked by having his men ransack the place and arrest Lo Bianco senior. This episode produced a sarcastic letter of condolence addressed to Lo Bianco from Giuliano, which was published in a local newspaper. It was one of the last of such letters to appear. Giuliano had been a compulsive writer to the Press, and up till then several letters had sometimes been published in a single week, but now Colonel Luca made an order cutting off this form of publicity.

While Inspector Verdiani intrigued with the mafioso Miceli, his rival Lo Bianco had succeeded in persuading someone to present him to Don Nitto Minasola, also of Monreale, and in fact the head of the Honoured Society in that small Mafia-ridden town with its stupendous Norman cathedral on the hilltop at the back of Palermo. There was never a more remarkable possessor of the not fully explicable power of the mafioso than Don Nitto, whose name could not even be mentioned in association with any of these events until twelve years later when he was safely dead – assassinated in the sombre main street of San Giuseppe Jato at high noon, while looking over the animals in a horse fair.

Minasola had started life as a poor shepherd, but he had always
possessed all the qualities demanded of a man of respect, and inevitably he became one. He was patient, self-controlled, intelligent, full of the knowledge of men, and implacable. Had he been born, say, in Milan, the son of a comfortable family, nothing could have prevented his becoming an outstanding politician, or at least a millionaire. But Minasola’s father had left him two scrawny goats, and he had never set foot inside a school. Lo Bianco says he was still a poor man at the time he knew him at the age of fifty-two, although greatly feared. A lifetime’s habit of guarding his expression had given his face an oriental quality, a mandarin’s impassivity, which Lo Bianco found disconcerting. The Maresciallo told him straightaway that he wanted his help to capture Giuliano, and Minasola shot him one of his penetrating and enigmatic looks, followed by an almost frightening smile, and said, ‘You ask me for Giuliano in the same way as one asks a friend for a cup of coffee.’

However, it turned out that Minasola was disposed to collaborate. To mafiosi such as this man, the bandits were a contemptible rabble. They were the Brownshirts of a bypassed revolution, and now that the Mafia was finally back in the saddle, a quiet and economical version of the Night of the Long Knives had to be arranged. Besides, Minasola had a special dislike of the flamboyant Giuliano, with his press conferences, his
letter-writing
, and his obvious taste for self-advertisement, all of which was distasteful to a true man of respect. In spite of his high authority in the Mafia, Minasola still looked after his own sheep, and more than once members of the Giuliano band, taking him for just another shepherd, had tried to bully him and had refused to be warned in time by Minasola’s cold mafioso stare. Now, the shepherd capo-Mafia of Monreale was induced to suggest to Maresciallo Lo Bianco how Giuliano could best be taken.

When Luca had first come on the scene with a special force of two thousand men at his back, Giuliano and the hard core of his band had prudently withdrawn into the province of Trapani in the far western corner of the island, where he was under the protection of Mafia ‘
families
’ described by Minasola as ‘unfaithful’ – in other words, they showed poor response to Don Calò Vizzini’s central authority. Minasola’s
opinion
was that it was necessary to entice Giuliano back to the Monreale area, thereby bringing him under the sway of the ‘faithful’ Mafia again – himself included. To achieve this, the first thing that had to be done was to move out all the police operating in the Monreale area. This was done, and the task of elimination proceeded smoothly enough according to Don Nitto Minasola’s plan.

At some time in the past when the Giuliano band had been a valuable military asset to powerful men, it had been reorganised by an expert in guerilla warfare and divided into a number of self-contained cells. The intention was to prevent the secret dispositions of the whole band being given away through the capture or defection of a small number of its components, or even of a single member. In practice, the Giuliano band became a total dependant of the Mafia at this point, because the Mafia volunteered to effect the liaison between the different groups, and thus the functioning of the plan became conditional upon Mafia goodwill. In the mountains the bandits were independent and self-supporting, but as soon as they were obliged for any reason to come down into the towns, it was to the local mafiosi that they were obliged to go for shelter. Also, when any bandit who had been sent on a mission wanted to return to Giuliano’s constantly shifting headquarters, he was passed from one man of respect to the next until the new hide-out could first be located, and then reached.

It was this crippling involvement with the Mafia that made
Minasola
’s task so easy once he had set his mind to it. The next step in his plan was to suggest to Giuliano, through one of Minasola’s relations who was a member of the band, a suitable victim for extortion living in the Monreale district.

After a long period of inactivity Giuliano’s funds were running low, and Minasola managed to whet his appetite with the description of an immensely rich and defenceless landowner, guaranteed to disgorge millions of lire at the mere sight of Giuliano’s well-known signature at the bottom of a letter of extortion. Giuliano took the bait. The letter was sent off, and the landowner, who was in the plot, ignored it, as instructed. Minasola had been of the opinion that such a rare act of defiance would
bring Giuliano himself on the scene, but instead Giuliano sent a member of his general staff, Frank Mannino. Mannino, as foreseen, was forced to contact Minasola, who invited him to a meeting of Mafia notabilities at the Villa Carolina, the property of the Archbishop of Monreale, just outside the town.
‘
Salutiamo gli amici,
’ was Mannino’s Mafia-style greeting as he advanced with hand outstretched towards ‘Don Peppino’, Minasola’s guest of honour. But Don Peppino turned out to be Maresciallo Lo Bianco in plain clothes, and Mannino’s hand was seized and not released, while police agents rushed in from the next room with levelled guns.

A few days later two more of the key personalities of the band, Madonia and Badalamenti, fell into the trap. A military truck had been converted into an imitation fruiterer’s van, and Madonia and
Balda-menti
, who wanted to get back to Giuliano, were invited to enter this and to conceal themselves among the piled-up fruit baskets. They were then driven, not to Giuliano’s hide-out, but to the police barracks at Calatafimi. Nino Miceli, the mafioso who had collaborated so far only with Inspector Verdiani, was dragged – most reluctantly – into this adventure. He had given way in the end to a combination of Lo Bianco’s threats of sending him to
confino
, and Minasola’s pressure as his superior in the hierarchy of the Honoured Society. Miceli admitted that the principal objection hitherto to his collaboration had been the eighty million lire promised him by Inspector Verdiani as soon as Giuliano had been smuggled, safe and sound, out of the country.

These were the great names of the Giuliano organisation, and they had been known for years to every Italian, but in addition many lesser figures were removed from circulation by the Minasola-Lo Bianco combination. With a single exception, all these men claimed to have been diabolically tortured by the
cassetta
. One, Francesco Caglia, told the judge at his trial that he had lost a testicle as a result, and Frank Mannino was roped up in an excruciating position and kept like this for a hundred and ten days after his arrest. The only man to escape the torture-chamber was the single mafioso in the band, a low-grade
member
of the Honoured Society, who was removed from prison by an order
from the Ministry of the Interior in Rome and sent to the more
comfortable
confinement of the criminal lunatic asylum at Barcellona. The Press was not informed of these captures made by arrangement with the Mafia, so for a while Giuliano too remained in the dark about what was happening to his men. It was considered of the utmost importance not to arouse his suspicions while the Mafia’s trap was still doing its work. One day the special squad guarding the house of the landowner-decoy were amazed to see a young bandit drive up in a brand-new car with a final ultimatum from Giuliano. They were obliged to arrest him, but then thought better of it, and after having devised some method of making him serve the police’s interests in future, he was released and sent back to his chief.

In the meanwhile, the rival cause of the Public Security Police had suffered a crippling blow through the loss of a confidant planted on Giuliano since the very first days of the band’s inception. This was Salvatore Ferreri, known as ‘Fra Diavolo’, a murderer who had been about to begin a life sentence when Inspector-General Messana – Don Calò Vizzini’s bosom friend – had released him with orders to join the band. On reaching Giuliano’s mountain headquarters, then near Montelepre, Ferreri had made no bones about the realities of the
situation
. Giuliano, for his part, had accepted him as a useful liaison with the police, who, through Ferreri, could be told just as much as he proposed they should know. Trapped by Luca’s men, and wounded into the bargain, Ferreri made the fatal mistake of disclosing his link-up with the Public Security and demanding to be taken to Inspector-General Messana, whose secret pass allowing him to move freely about Sicily he produced in support of his claim. There are conflicting reports as to what happened next. Officially Ferreri was killed in a gun battle that broke out in the police barracks, but most people believe that, having listened to his story, the carabinieri NCO in charge telephoned for instructions to one of his superiors, and then simply finished him off.

There was an unwelcome moment of distraction for Lo Bianco and
Minasola from the job in hand, when a certain Father Biondi made a dramatic appearance at Monreale. This silver-haired and
golden-tongued
priest had been able to persuade someone at the Ministry of the Interior to allow him to undertake a one-man hunt for Giuliano. In his pocket he carried a postdated letter of credit for fifty million lire, drawn on the Bank of Italy, which was to be his if he succeeded in his mission.

Father Biondi’s bungling amateurism caused Don Nitto Minasola the most acute distress and embarrassment and almost upset the delicately balanced mechanisms of deceit that it had taken so long to assemble. Quite clearly convinced that the most direct way to Giuliano’s
hiding-place
was through the Archbishop’s palace, Father Biondi went straight there and offered to split the fifty million with the Archbishop’s secretary, the Reverend di Giovanni, in return for his help. The proposition proved acceptable, the secretary making it clear that he intended to devote his share of the proceeds to the betterment of the condition of the poor of Monreale. Unfortunately his contact in the Giuliano band happened to be the relation of Minasola already referred to, and naturally this man went to the capo-Mafia for advice. Minasola sternly warned his relative, to keep away from this kind of dirty business – ‘out of consideration for the family honour’, as Maresciallo Lo Bianco puts it. Meanwhile,
someone
had warned Giuliano of the mission of the Roman priest and the machinations at the Archbishop’s palace and he had fallen into a terrible rage. Only three months before Monsignor Filippi’s name had had to be publicly cleansed of scandalous imputations of complicity with Giuliano, and the strange rumours current at that time were only just dying down. Now the Archbishop was compelled to find some means of making it clear to the bandit that he was not a party to any plot against him that may have been hatched in his palace. Yet another most secret meeting took place in the Archbishop’s villa at Monreale – so frequently the scene of the councils and the stratagems of the Mafia. ‘To this was called, besides the Archbishop’s secretary, Inspector Verdiani and a member of the Mafia in Giuliano’s confidence, to clear up the facts of the case and above all to make quite clear to the bandit that he, Monsignor Filippi, had nothing whatever to do with the affair.’