Honoured Society (18 page)

However, Giuliano was dissatisfied with this explanation. ‘He ordered the suppression of both the Archbishop and his secretary, and from that time, neither of them was able to visit the country, while Monsignor Filippi had to be given a strong bodyguard.’ Father Biondi, the cause of all this trouble, was quickly induced to go back to Rome. Some time later he was arrested for a spectacular fraud in the matter of company promotion, and eventually received a sentence of three years.

At this point Lo Bianco interrupts his chronicle to exclaim plaintively, ‘How many intrigues and what extraordinary happenings!’

There are times when one discovers defects in the carpentry of Lo Bianco’s narrative. There are too many unexplained gaps in the sequence of events, too many anonymous faces, and even after twelve years, too much has to be left unsaid.

Giuliano was now alone with his lieutenant, Pisciotta. Nothing more is said about traps being set for him. In fact, he seems to come and go much as he pleases, and even pays unmolested visits to Monreale, where he is recognised in the streets. Lo Bianco paints an unconvincing picture of the wounded tiger at bay, as cunning, as ferocious and as unapproachable as ever. His colleague Maresciallo Calandra in his memoirs entitled
I Could Have Captured the Bandit Giuliano
presents a different view. He speaks of the first months of 1950 when the obscure manoeuvrings of Lo Bianco and Minasola seem no longer to have been producing results.

There is a hint here at the true facts, which were that the last moves in this tragic farce had to be continually postponed until it was quite certain
that the bandit’s elimination could be carried out without fear of damage to men in high political places. Two circumstances made it possible for the order finally to be given for the winding up of the Giuliano affair. One was that Inspector Verdiani persuaded Giuliano to give him a statement in which he took upon himself full responsibility for the massacre at Portella della Ginestra and denied that instigators had ever existed. The other was the news of the FBI’s arrest of Giuliano’s brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, who had got away to the States with a copy of the famous memorial upon which Giuliano believed his security depended. It has always been supposed that this news was accompanied by some message of reassurance as to the fate of this document.

On one of his visits to Monreale, Giuliano ran into the uncle of Madonia – one of the two bandits who had been carried off to police headquarters in the spurious fruiterer’s van. After the usual exchange of courtesies, this man asked for news of his nephew, whom he had not heard from since the day he had seen him go off with Minasola – in theory to be conducted to Giuliano’s headquarters. It was then that Giuliano realised what had been the fate of all the men who had disappeared. In the early hours of next morning Miceli and Minasola were dragged from their beds by Giuliano and his lieutenant and forced to confess. They were hidden in a house in Monreale and Pisciotta was left to guard them while Giuliano went off to kidnap three more mafiosi who had been named in the confession. These, together with Miceli and Minasola, were to be publicly executed in the main square of the town. It seems that Giuliano was still able to conscript ‘occasionals’, as they were called, when an operation of this kind was projected. Minasola received permission to prepare a will, and somebody wrote it out for him on a sheet of squared-off paper from a child’s exercise book and took it to his wife. In it Minasola told her to sell off all the goats, which would otherwise be killed in the vendetta which was now certain to start.

Meanwhile, Giuliano’s absence gave him the opportunity to work on Pisciotta, and for seven clear days the twenty-five-year-old bandit was left alone at the mercy of the acute native intelligence and the suggestive power of the head of one of the most prominent Mafia ‘families’. It was
inevitable that by playing constantly upon Pisciotta’s vanity, his fears, and his obvious obsession with ‘freedom’, Minasola should win him over to his side and prepare the ground for his betrayal of his chief. In the end Pisciotta released both mafiosi, and when Giuliano got back, made the excuse that he had been worn out from guarding them night and day, and that they had got away in his sleep. Minasola later told Maresciallo Lo Bianco that Pisciotta had asked him for all the details of the capture of Madonia and Badalamenti in the fruit van, and had appeared highly amused.

Within a few days a meeting was arranged between Pisciotta and Colonel Luca, at which some haggling went on about the price of the treason Pisciotta was to be induced to commit. Broadly, Pisciotta was offered a half of the price – fifty million lire – on Giuliano’s head (the other half was to go to Minasola), and a passport under a false name. This, unfortunately for Pisciotta, did not satisfy him, and he preferred to renounce the blood money but stuck out for a pardon, which was to be granted ‘in recognition of his special services to the State’. This, even Luca was not in a position to agree to. There was some humming and hawing, but the reward finally agreed upon has never been made clear.

While awaiting his moment of truth, Pisciotta remained at liberty and tasted a kind of freedom he had never known even in his palmiest days, before the commission of his first crime had turned him into a bandit. At a superficial level he was probably a likeable man. One’s mental image of the criminal tends perhaps to be influenced by the cretinous psychopaths represented in gangster films, but many of the Giuliano band were handsome, and Pisciotta strikingly so in his dark Asiatic way. He could counterfeit a sincerity of manner that deluded most people, had a bold wit, and made full play with his sardonic sense of humour. Pisciotta and the police got along together swimmingly.

The president of the court at Viterbo was to express his horrified amazement once again at the descriptions of this brief but exuberant phase of Pisciotta’s career. He was given a safe conduct from the Ministry of the Interior bearing Minister Mario Scelba’s signature (Lo Bianco coolly confides in his readers that this was forged), as well as a permit to
carry firearms. When in Palermo, he stayed as an honoured guest in the flat of Captain Perenze of Colonel Luca’s special force, who went on shopping expeditions with him and took him to a clinic to arrange for treatment of a pulmonary complaint. A famous lawyer arrived from Rome to discuss with him his defence, should he elect to remain in the country and to stand trial. As the president of the court pointed out, the Italian Government footed the bill for all this expenditure.

Pisciotta was kept thus in readiness for about three weeks. There was a period of tension when Colonel Luca became briefly obsessed with the idea that this co-operation was part of an incredibly elaborate plot concocted with Giuliano and Inspector Verdiani, by which he, Luca, was to be kidnapped, but in the end this was resolved, and the awaited signal was received. At the end of June 1950 the last phase of the operation was prepared. Until this moment Maresciallo Lo Bianco says that he had remained unaware that it had been decided that Giuliano was not to be taken alive. His immediate superior, Colonel Paolantonio, too, showed himself scandalised at this new turn in events, and so from then on an attempt was made to keep both men in the dark about what was going on. Giuliano was at that time receiving shelter in the house of a mafioso lawyer, De Maria, in the town of Castelvetrano, where he had lived off and on for several months while the negotiations for his expatriation had been going on. Now it was arranged that Pisciotta should go to him.

On the night of July 4th, Colonel Luca gave orders that all carabinieri of his special anti-bandit force were to be withdrawn from Castelvetrano, and Pisciotta, accompanied by Captain Perenze and several picked carabinieri, set out on their mission. Lo Bianco and Colonel Paolantonio were to have met and joined forces with this expedition, and they had hired a taxi and were on their way to the meeting-place when Paolantonio suddenly suffered a
crise de conscience
, and told the driver to stop.

‘Lo Bianco,’ he said, ‘there’s no risk or glory awaiting us at the end of this trip down to Castelvetrano. It’s just a killing rigged up with the help of a bandit. The affair’s taken a bad turning, but there’s nothing you or I can do to change the course of events, so let’s go home.’

And this, so far as Lo Bianco was concerned, was the anticlimax that came at the end of the adventure. ‘I affirm,’ he says in his memoirs, ‘that we could have captured both Giuliano and Pisciotta. The plan for such an operation involved only a minimum of risk … Later it was said, “What does it matter how he died? The important thing is that he’s out of the way. With Giuliano in the dock with the others, certain things would have come out at the Viterbo trial.”’ As a rueful afterthought, the Maresciallo adds; ‘And even if he was destined to die, surely the thing could have been done with more propriety, and without all those fantastic stories that they put about.’

Castelvetrano lies fifty miles to the south of Palermo across the bare mountains. Its population has always been dependent upon the fertility of the high districts surrounding it, the property for centuries of the Dukes of Pignatelli-Monteleone. The dukes spent their revenues on palaces and parks and religious foundations elsewhere. Ten centuries after its foundation, Castelvetrano remains hardly more than a great dung-bespattered Arab village of the Middle Atlas, a mugger of walled lanes, blinkered houses, and secret courtyards, full of the dour odour of confined animals, with a single European high street driven right through its middle. It was here that the mafioso Dr Allegra had his clinic; the town where, after Mussolini had weakened the ability of the Mafia to curb petty criminality, the outlaw Ponzio came in broad daylight to seize sheep in the market, and was later tried and sentenced to death by Dr Allegra’s Mafia court.

On the night of July 4th, 1950, Pisciotta reached Castelvetrano just after nine o’clock. He told his carabinieri driver to stop about one hundred and fifty yards from De Maria’s house in the Via Mannone, walked the rest of the distance, and after being kept waiting at the door while De Maria questioned him through the keyhole, was eventually admitted. Going up to the room which he and Giuliano had often shared, he met with a cold reception from his chief. ‘What are you doing here?’ Giuliano asked him. Since their last meeting Verdiani had warned
him that Pisciotta was now working for Luca. A violent argument took place, Pisciotta vigorously refuting Giuliano’s accusations and bringing all his natural endowment of plausibility into action in the attempt to disperse Giuliano’s suspicions. It took several hours before Giuliano could be convinced of Pisciotta’s sincerity, and then the two men went to bed, but more time was spent in discussing future plans. Even when the conversation finally flagged and broke off, ‘action was held up’ – as Pisciotta put it – because Giuliano kept twisting and turning in a restless half-sleep.

Meanwhile, Pisciotta’s driver and Captain Perenze in the second car, parked a little farther down the street, had been waiting for nearly six hours. Perenze was becoming nervous. It was now just past three o’clock, with signs of the sky’s paling in the east; with the bakers – the town’s earliest risers – lighting up their ovens, and the first of the peasants starting out for the day’s work. Perenze’s men had to be mobilised to keep the street free from such unwelcome intruders. At nineteen minutes past three two muffled shots were heard, and a few moments later Pisciotta burst into the street. He was half-naked, agitated to the point of hysteria, carried a shoe in one hand and was waving a pistol in the other. Pushing his driver away from the steering-wheel, Pisciotta jumped into the car and drove off at great speed.

Perenze and his two carabinieri now ran to beat on De Maria’s door, and once again there was some delay before De Maria thought it
advisable
to let them in. The three policemen rushed up the stairs and found Giuliano lying dead on the bed, with two bullet holes under his left armpit. They dressed him with frantic haste, and as no jacket could be found, one of the carabinieri, who was in plain clothes, took off his own jacket, and this – although ridiculously small – was put on the corpse. The maid was roused, ordered to wash the bed linen, and to clean the blood from the floor of the room. The carabinieri then dragged the body downstairs and pitched it face downwards in De Maria’s courtyard, where Captain Perenze fired two bursts at it from his sub-machine-gun. Insufficient blood issued from these wounds, so one of De Maria’s chickens was quickly snatched from its coop and decapitated, so that the
deficiency could be made up. One of the many neighbours spying upon these macabre doings from behind their window casements, says that at this point Perenze went to the door of the courtyard and vomited into the street.

At six o’clock the Minister of the Interior was awakened by a phone call from General D’Antoni, Chief of Police, who told him that Giuliano was dead. The morning was a busy one for the Minister, for soon after eight o’clock the Premier himself, De Gasperi, arrived with his congratulations. Shortly afterwards Scelba called a press conference, at which he made the following announcement: ‘Last night Colonel Luca formed the opinion that the moment had come for the capture of the bandit Giuliano, and took measures accordingly. The bandit attempted to escape from a house in the centre of Castelvetrano where he had been in hiding, using firearms in an attempt to evade capture. After a long pursuit, he was finally killed in the gun battle which ensued.’ The Minister could say nothing more than this, and he took the opportunity to exhort those present to do their best to play down the Giuliano episode from that time on. Italian
newspapermen
have never forgotten this emphatic recommendation, and ten years later they were still hammering away at him with the many questions arising out of that night’s work at Castelvetrano which were never answered.