Honoured Society (19 page)

All day long the correspondents came pouring into Castelvetrano from every country in western Europe. The earliest of the cameramen to arrive were fortunate enough to capture the scene of dramatic anguish when Giuliano’s mother and sister were conducted by the police to the mortuary for the routine identification of the body. Later the old mother asked to be taken to the courtyard of the De Maria house, and there, while the shutters of fifty cameras clicked, she went down on her hands and knees and kissed – some say licked – the dried blood on the flags. For latecomers of the Press, when the Giuliano family had been taken back to Montelepre, a black-shrouded crone was kept in readiness, who re-enacted the frantic scene for the payment of a few lire.

This trivial but ugly imposture set the mood for the day. The hundreds of excited but frustrated journalists who filled the streets of Castelvetrano, debarred from access to solid fact by a strange wall of official reticence, pieced together what rumours they could uncover and joined in an orgy of imaginative reconstruction of the events of the previous night. The evening editions of Italian papers carried detailed accounts, sometimes almost shot by shot, of street battles in which – according to the
Gazzetta del Popolo
– five hundred and thirty carabinieri were involved. The same newspaper described the remarkable weapon with which Giuliano
defended
himself in this fight to the death: a sub-machine-gun of his own invention carrying an extra magazine in its butt. The reports carried next day by such papers as
The Times
were more sober, but almost equally fantastic. A fog of lies had been released, like a genie from its bottle, and it was many months before the genie could be squeezed back again and the cork rammed home.

In Castelvetrano, sceptism was spreading like a contagious disease. Some of the old hands who had served a long stint as crime reporters and were familiar with all the commonplaces of violent death shook their heads over the
pièce de théâtre
in De Maria’s courtyard. Somebody noticed that the blood from two wounds flowed upwards, and another reporter went round interviewing all the neighbours, who scornfully, and to a man, refuted the unofficial police story of a desperate gun battle.

The official story was given next day – by Captain Perenze in person. He explained to the representatives of the Press that it had come to Colonel Luca’s knowledge that Giuliano had taken refuge in the Castelvetrano area, where he was awaiting an opportunity to get away to Tunis from the local airport. In an attempt to attract him into the town, and thus within reach of the police, the Colonel had hit on an ingenious idea. Knowing Giuliano’s passion for publicity, and in
particular
for the publicity given by film appearances, he had rigged up a van complete with a cinema projector, a loudspeaker, and a number of advertising posters, and this was kept touring the streets of Castelvetrano at night. The crew of the van were supposed to be engaged in making a documentary film, but in fact they were Perenze
himself and his carabinieri, and the belief was that this would be irresistible bait for Giuliano’s vanity, and that sooner or later he would put in an appearance and allow himself to be interviewed.

And this, Captain Perenze told his listeners, was in fact how it went. ‘After a long wait, at a quarter past three exactly, the carabiniere Renzi saw two men with sub-machine-guns on their backs passing along the Via Gaggini. Brigadiere Catalano held them up in front and Renzi cut off their retreat. The chase lasted fifty-four minutes. We recognised Giuliano because he was bareheaded. I and the carabiniere Giuffrida blocked the side turnings. For all this, one of the men succeeded in escaping, but it was not Giuliano. He in fact tried to hide in the courtyard of the De Maria house, where I was waiting for him. I opened fire and killed him.’

That Perenze was a man of feeling was made clear in a special interview granted to
Il Tempo
shortly afterwards:

For his part in this operation, which restored untroubled sleep to so many public persons, Perenze was promoted to major, while Luca became forthwith a general. But the climate of unbelief, far from being dissipated, seemed to grow murkier. At the end of the month, the Minister of the Interior was still sticking by his guns, and he dismissed a question in Parliament about the death of Giuliano with the reply: ‘I fully confirm the version given by Colonel Luca.’ Nearly a year later a sensational disclosure at the Viterbo trial of the bandits responsible for the massacre of Portella della Ginestra caused him to modify this view, but only slightly: ‘I tell you quite frankly that I have no reason to doubt the version given me by the carabinieri. As a matter of native intuition and from what I have been able to ascertain, I can reconstruct the scene
in this way: Pisciotta told Giuliano that the police were on his track and that he had better make his getaway. Giuliano got up, dressed in a hurry and went down into the courtyard. Then Pisciotta gave a whistle and the police hiding behind the wall opened fire. Pisciotta betrayed Giuliano. There’s no doubt about it. But he didn’t kill him. He wouldn’t have had the courage.’

The true version of what took place on that stifling July night in Castelvetrano was supplied by De Maria, the mafioso lawyer. It took the form of a confession in writing handed to an examining magistrate, and coincidentally the confession was completed on the same day that Mario Scelba, aided by his intuition, was giving his latest account of Giuliano’s end to the members of parliament in the House.

Like the shepherd Minasola, De Maria comes as a surprise as a man of respect. He was a youngish bachelor, living modestly in a shabby little house and looked after by a maid. As a mafioso, he would have got more than a fair share of Castelvetrano’s legal business, but in such a
poverty-stricken
Mafia-run town this would hardly have amounted to much more than preparing a few legal documents such as leases and contracts. Disputes from which civil actions would normally arise would have been rapidly settled out of court in Castelvetrano, merely by submitting them to the arbitration of the town’s capo-Mafia. De Maria was
probably
left to pick up the legal scraps, and there is a whiff of respectable near-poverty about him as he details in his confession the expenses involved in feeding Giuliano for the nine months, off and on, that this unwelcome guest stayed under his roof. Being a member of the ‘Honoured Society’ was not all beer and skittles, and De Maria lived to learn – as Dr Allegra had before him – that it could sometimes involve a man in some very tricky situations. De Maria’s chief, Marotta, had simply brought Giuliano to the house one day and ordered De Maria to look after him. ‘You’re a bachelor,’ Marotta said, when De Maria risked an objection. ‘If you’d been a family man, I’d have taken him somewhere else.’ ‘It was a calvary,’ De Maria writes – the confession has a faint scriptural flavour throughout – ‘I felt myself slipping down into a bottomless pit. I searched my memory in an endeavour to discover some
wrongdoing that might have justified the punishment of this cruel destiny, but could find nothing. My conscience cried my innocence aloud. I have lived for my Franciscan faith, for my books, and in the memory of the affection given me by my beloved mother … and yet I was forced to drain this bitter chalice to the dregs.’

Of his enforced association with Giuliano, De Maria says: ‘He liked to be with me, because I spoke to him in an unknown language so far as he was concerned. Our conversations were of faith, good and evil, and redemption. He once told me that he was sure that if fate had brought our paths together earlier in his life, his destiny would have been a very different one.’ De Maria added that Giuliano spent much of his time reading Shakespeare and Descartes. At that time De Maria was charged with complicity with banditry. Six months later another warrant was issued, this time for actual participation in an armed band. He was in due course acquitted for lack of proof. 

G
ASPARE PISCIOTTA,
second-in-command of the Giuliano band, Giuliano’s cousin, his lifelong friend and his eventual assassin, remained at large for five months after Giuliano’s death. He was
eventually
arrested in his own home in Montelepre by Questore Marzano, Chief of Police of Palermo – ‘after months of tenacious investigation’, Marzano said at his trial. Pisciotta himself said that he went to Marzano’s office and asked to be arrested. By this time the mass trial of the Giuliano band for the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, held at the town of Viterbo, near Rome, had been dragging on for six months. Pisciotta was removed to the prison at Viterbo and kept there for three months virtually
incommunicado
. No attempt was made to interrogate him, and the long statement he had made to the examining magistrate at Palermo shortly after his arrest disappeared. Finally, Pisciotta was brought to court and placed in the cage with the twelve other regular members of the band. A second cage contained the
picciotti
, the ‘boys’ charged with sporadic association with the band, all of whom had been tortured into making some kind of damaging admission, and all of whom after spending four years in prison were found innocent.

From the moment of Pisciotta’s first arrival in court, he dominated the proceedings. In place of the famous pullover patterned with rampant lions in which he had always been shown in his photographs, he now wore an elegant dark blue suit of imported English material. He was alert and watchful, his pale, handsome face stamped with an expression of mocking and occasionally ferocious good humour. His appearance had stirred up currents of nervous preoccupation. Pisciotta’s presence was clearly a source of embarrassment. Captain Perenze’s version of the killing of Giuliano was still officially valid, although rumours of the lurid truth of the matter were widespread, and had certainly reached the
judge’s ears. Day after day passed, and to the public’s increasing amazement no attempt was made to interrogate Pisciotta, despite the assurance given to the Press by his counsel that the bandit was ready to make important revelations.

Matters came to a head when his defence counsel, Avvocato Crisafulli, asked the court’s leave for Pisciotta to give evidence. The application was immediately opposed by the Attorney-General on the grounds that as Pisciotta had been the last member of the band to be arrested, his examination should be left to the last. The president of the court, D’Agostino, agreed – an extraordinary and almost unprecedented ruling under Italian judicial procedure, which assumes that an accused person volunteering to make a statement shows thereby his desire to collaborate with justice.

Avvocato Sotgiù, representing under the Italian system the interests of the persons who had suffered injury or loss in the massacre, then supported Crisafulli’s application.

The Public Minister joined forces with the President at this point to insist that the declaration should not be read. Avvocato Crisafulli then went to the President and handed him the document, while a colleague gave a copy to the Public Minister. Finally, the statement went the rounds of the court. It said: 

Now the veil had been torn away, and the ugly truths were to be displayed like the sores on a beggar’s limbs. It was to be Pisciotta’s tactic to waste no opportunity to demonstrate that the band had acted with the connivance, the complicity – and even the urging – of high authorities, and to show that the massacre was a political crime for which its
instigators
should be compelled to accept the responsibility. One after another the high officials of the Italian police came before the court to depose, and to run the gauntlet of Pisciotta’s sardonic comments. They were old men with the grave burdened faces of the senators and bankers of Venice painted by Giovanni Bellini in the late
quattrocento
; the prisoners of a habit of subterfuge, the inheritors of minds assembled in the secret-agent
factories of the petty Italian states. Shifty and hesitant in their evidence, nervously on their guard against the escape of some new disreputable fact, the police chiefs contradicted one another and often contradicted themselves, while that monumental liar Perenze was finally committed for perjury. By contrast, Pisciotta was a model of spontaneity in all his utterances. If Pisciotta told lies he made them sound like truth, but whatever truth lay buried in the policemen’s account of these events seemed obscured by a general dingy patina of falsehood.

Inspector-General Ettore Messana was sixty-seven years of age when he appeared before the court, a man who spoke very slowly and in an absent, unconcerned manner of the recent tragedies, as if they had happened a long way back in history. In 1919 Messana had gained some notoriety and a good promotion for the bloody competence with which he had extinguished a small peasant revolt. After the Second World War he had commanded the first anti-bandit force formed in Sicily, and, working in collaboration with his old friend, Don Calò Vizzini, and the Mafia, it had taken him eighteen months to destroy some thirty bands, leaving only that of Giuliano intact. Now the Italian public was to know why. ‘We were a single body,’ Pisciotta said, ‘bandits, police and Mafia, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’ In this, perhaps the most celebrated of his utterances, he was supported by Frank Mannino, who said: ‘Messana himself informed Giuliano when a police drive was in preparation. The same people who gave us our orders, gave the police theirs.’

Luca’s rival Force for the Repression of Banditry got an equally rough handling. Pisciotta accused Luca’s second-in-command of supplying the bandits with five machine-guns which were used at the massacre of Portella della Ginestra, and then of betraying Luca’s operational plan to Giuliano.

It turned out not only that Giuliano, Pisciotta and Fra Diavolo had managed to establish a cosy
modus vivendi
with high police officials, but that most of the other leading lights of the band possessed their own protectors as well.

This was the statement already referred to by Avvocato Sotgiù when he said that in sending it to the court, Giuliano had signed his death warrant. Up till then his immunity had been guaranteed by his famous memorial, a copy of which had been smuggled away to America by Giuliano’s brother-in-law, Sciortino. It was described by Pisciotta: ‘In that memorial was all Giuliano’s life. It was written in pen and ink on twenty sheets of foolscap; the whole truth was there, even the names of the instigators.’ Pisciotta said that he had had a copy himself. He asked Giuliano to give it to him ‘because I knew what his end would be, and I wanted to have a document to defend myself and the others.’ Sciortino had been arrested in the US and his copy was presumed to be in safe hands, but there was no way of deciding whether or not Pisciotta too had possessed a copy of the memorial, and, if so, whether it was still in existence. The court seemed obsessed with the fear that the highly incriminating document might still be produced. There was some suggestion that De Maria might have quietly abstracted it from Giuliano’s papers in the hubbub that followed the killing. Evidence was given that he had promised to hand it over to the carabinieri for the payment of three million lire, but had taken the money and said that he had burned the memorial. There was nothing either conclusive or comforting in this.

Pisciotta was the most complex and the most interesting of the bandits – far more so than Giuliano himself. He boldly admitted to having killed by treachery the leader whom most of the bandits would have followed to their death, and yet he had been able, without the slightest difficulty, to replace Giuliano in their affections. More than that, he had
established
the legend of an untarnished personal honour. Those who dared to attack him in court, whatever their rank or position, inevitably came off worse, and as they beat a retreat the guilty secrets exploded like firecrackers round their ears. There were hard facts in writing, and the stamps, seals and signatures of men in high government office to prove most of Pisciotta’s allegations. He produced in court permits and
safe-conducts
provided by every police authority in the country, plus a certificate of meritorious service issued by the Ministry of the Interior – a document that the most respectable citizen would have been proud to possess. Pisciotta had also come by a long and affectionate letter written by Inspector Verdiani to Giuliano, and this was exhibited in court. ‘Dearest,’ it began, and after some desultory intimacies, came to the point: ‘As I wrote to our friend, in view of the loftiness of the ends we aim at, in the ultimate interests of Italy, I tell you that I can even settle the monetary questions on which your urgent decisions depend. In the national interest my word had been enough to procure adequate funds for you wherever you go. Just let me know what your requirements in cash are likely to be.’ Speechless after the perusal of this, the judge passed on to shake his head sadly over a permit to carry firearms. ‘Were automatic weapons included?’ he asked. ‘Even a cannon,’ Pisciotta replied, with his sardonic grin.

Meanwhile, the earlier antagonism of public opinion towards the bandit was calming, and eventually gave place to something like a bewildered respect. Pisciotta could even attempt with some success to represent himself as a devoted servant of the State – the instrument for the destruction of the banditry of which he had been a principal exponent. ‘It is I, not Paolantonio, who put an end to banditry!’ he cried from the cage, and the claim did not seem extraordinary. And again: ‘I have done nothing but good in Sicily. The Giuliano band was the shame of the island, but it was not even the fault of Giuliano, but of the men of politics.’

Pisciotta was listened to in attentive silence, but when the police officers, those sad-eyed men of managed passions and the long years of distinguished service, gave their testimony, it was only too often greeted by ironic laughter from the body of the court. The public had been made the dupes of a foolish lie, and the lie had been abetted by a Minister of State. The police had lost face with Italians, and as a result the most improbable of Pisciotta’s charges carried weight.