Honoured Society (23 page)

The verdict was, of course, grotesque. A state of duress, as defined under Italian law, is ruled out by the circumstances of the crimes
committed by the monks of Mazzarino. Duress, as pointed out by the Public Prosecutor in presenting the arguments for a retrial, involves a physical impossibility of escape. If a man in the middle of a desert covers another with a gun and orders him to commit a crime, there is duress. In this instance, even supposing that an illiterate gardener could have imposed his will on the sophisticated men who employed him, nothing would have been easier than to escape from his clutches by asking to be transferred to some convent in another part of Italy, or even abroad.

What this verdict reflected, in fact, was the condition of the Sicilian mind – the state of mass hypnosis under which it lay. Sicilians accepted these men – even if not as mafiosi themselves – as protected by the Mafia. But there was one other factor in the composition of their invulnerability – and this was their appeal to an atavistic layer in the Sicilian subconscious. To this, the fact that the monks were immoral would be unimportant. What was important was that they were the human vehicles of magic power. The supernatural offices they
performed
were in no way lessened in their efficacy by the monks’ own extreme human fallibility. The Medicine Man or the African Head of Bush Society is not expected to be virtuous, but to be a successful practitioner in the art of compelling rainfall or driving away devils. This is the survival of the primeval mentality which carved the ferocious lions on the front of the Cathedral of Cefalù, created in mosaic the severe Norman-faced Christ that stares down on the worshippers in the same cathedral, and covered the pillars of the Palatine Chapel of Palermo with its mouthing gargoyles. It was, and still is, the power of exorcism that counts. The monks were not good men, but they were powerful men, and it was their power to which the Sicilian subconscious automatically responded.

T
HE FACT THAT
an appeal by the prosecution was allowed, and that when a year later the monks of Mazzarino appeared once again in court at Messina they were hastily found guilty and sentenced to thirteen years apiece, is to be ascribed to an extraordinary new circumstance. Suddenly an urgent adjustment of the local scene was called for. After years of obstruction by Right-wing politicians, a Parliamentary
Commission
had been formed to investigate the Mafia, and this was about to arrive in Sicily to begin its work.

The line consistently taken by the Commission’s opponents, and by the thirty Demochristian members who had voted against it in the Sicilian Regional Assembly, had been that the Mafia was a myth – a defamatory legend invented by the Italians of the north in their contempt for the ancient, mellow, but little understood civilisation of the country’s deep south. It was considered advisable, therefore, that such family scandals as that of the monks should be cleaned up as quickly and quietly as possible. No doubt it was hoped, too, that the members of the
Anti-Mafia
, as it was called, would be given the chance to conclude that the lurid side of the island life had been much exaggerated. Consequently, with the Commission’s imminent appearance, an extraordinary peace fell upon Sicily. For weeks and months on end, almost every case of a life being suddenly cut short by the brusque double blast from the
lupara
proved, on investigation, to have respectable motivation in some story of love betrayed. In Palermo, a winter of tranquil nights came and went. An embarrassing discovery was made of a whole collection of skeletons in a disused well near Marsala, but the local doctors who examined them soon agreed that they belonged to the victims of a hardly remembered typhus epidemic. The fact that there were holes in every skull was passed over as the result of accidental
post-mortem
damage.

Then, suddenly, the almost wistful serenity of the city of Palermo was disrupted by an assassination so elaborately and expensively prepared as to be quite evidently an act of war between men or factions of exceptional power. The dead man, Cesare Manzella, was a capo-Mafia of a rather special kind – a mafioso of the stamp of Don Antonio Cottone, shot to death in 1949, whose eccentric generosity had won for him the affectionate nickname
U Patre Nostru
(Our Heavenly Father). Manzella’s prickly conscience and his desire to perform good works had survived thirty years spent as an organiser of gambling houses in Chicago. His weakness was children. He found it difficult to pass one in the street without stopping to pop a sweet into its mouth, and he had devoted a high proportion of the wealth gained in recent years from the traffic in narcotics to the building of an orphanage. It was in acknowledgment of his many benefactions that he had been almost unanimously elected President of the Catholic Action of Cinesi – the suburb of Palermo where he had established himself. In his activities in the Honoured Society, however, Manzella had shown himself a disciplinarian.

In January 1962, Lucky Lucanio, then living in princely style in Naples and allegedly supreme organiser of the world traffic in narcotics, died at the Naples Airport restaurant. It was the time and place chosen by the narcotics bureau of Interpol to swoop on their most slippery adversary, but by the time they reached him, he was dead. Officially death was due to heart-failure, but rumour had it that his associates, fearful of the revelations that might follow their chief’s arrest, had quickly poisoned his coffee. Manzella stepped into the breach left by Luciano’s disappearance from the scene. In the office he now held he was served by a spirited following that could only be kept in control by a man with a flair for dictatorial methods.

One evening in April 1963, Manzella returned home with a
henchman
, but found it impossible to drive his car into the courtyard of his villa as another car – a brand-new Alfa-Romeo – had been parked there, inside his ornamental wrought-iron gates. Manzella and his man went to investigate, opened the door of the Alfa-Romeo, and there was an explosion of the kind produced by a one-hundred-pound bomb in the
last war. Of Manzella, all that was discovered was his wide-brimmed, American-style hat and a single shoe, and these in due course were placed in the sumptuous coffin subscribed for by his friends and enemies, together with a dummy dressed in one of his suits. Nothing at all of significance was found of his companion. The details of the interlocking histories that led to Manzella’s death were unravelled by the police after they had found a satchel containing his papers in the branches of a tree some twenty yards from the explosion.

From these documents, and from the further investigations they inspired, the police learned that with the threat of the Anti-Mafia looming ahead, the Honoured Society had taken its dispositions in an intelligent manner. A General Council had been called which had immediately ordered a truce covering all dissensions between the various Mafia families. A standing committee was created to which disputes were to be submitted for arbitration, and crimes of violence were forbidden. The Mafia now stood back and took a look at its recent history, and examined certain
causes célèbres
that might conceivably be of interest to the
Commission
in the light of the possibility of strengthening defences by newly confected evidence and alibis. Political ties were to be strengthened by all possible means, and prominent persons who might come under attack as accomplices of the Honoured Society were to receive all possible
assistance
. For the organisation of its resistance the Mafia wanted, above all, a long interim of peace, and no publicity. But this, to its wrath, had been denied by an unhappy incident, also alluded to in the dead Manzella’s papers.

The chain-reaction of preposterous violence that in the end was to nullify all the forethought and planning of the Mafia Grand Council was provoked by a misunderstanding arising from the purchase and resale of a valuable parcel of heroin. This had been acquired by the Manzella organisation from its normal suppliers in the Middle East, but a difficulty had arisen over its delivery. Previously the heroin had been shipped across to Sicily by a well-known and highly-thought-of specialist, Joseph Molinelli, known as ‘Richard’, who was quite prepared to bring his yacht in to within a mile or two of the port of Palermo for the transfer of the
heroin to one of the Mafia’s fishing-boats. This time Richard had an objection. It seemed that somebody in authority had baulked at the blatancy of these deliveries of contraband being made within sight of the lights of the capital, and in future arrangements would have to be made to take over the heroin at some point at sea on the south side of the island.

A suitable person had to be found to carry out this operation, and Manzella put forward the name of Calcedonio Di Pisa to the syndicate who had purchased the heroin. Di Pisa was a garish young freebooter, habitually be-gloved, shirted in puce silk, and with a coat of the palest of camel hair – a kind of latter-day George Raft. He drove a
butter-coloured
, gadget-festooned Alfa-Romeo, and in his dandified presence he was anathema to the mafiosi of the old school, whose minds had not been broadened by travel. Di Pisa was a contrabandist by profession but had recently moved into the even more flourishing real estate racket, thereby making a number of enemies. He was given the job, went down to Agrigento, hired a boat, met the scrupulous Richard at sea, and a few hours later reported back to his employers at Palermo with the heroin. This was in due course handed over to a member of the crew of a transatlantic vessel, who smuggled it safely into the United States through the port of New York. Shortly afterwards the Mafia syndicate in Palermo received their payment, but the sum remitted was far below the agreed amount. Manzella promptly put through a transatlantic call to his friends and was told that a short-weight package had been delivered. Both parties agreed there and then to investigate at their own ends. In New York the member of the ship’s crew was kidnapped, and, succeeding in convincing his interrogators of his innocence, was released. Manzella and company believed Richard to be above suspicion, so Di Pisa, as the only other man who had handled the parcel since it left the Middle East, was picked up and tried before a Mafia court.

In finding Di Pisa not guilty, this tribunal may have been influenced by the recent decision of the Grand Council, realising too well that a death sentence imposed at this delicate moment might jeopardise the general truce. The verdict exculpating Di Pisa was bitterly contested by two members of the court – the brothers La Barbera, leaders of an
immensely powerful minority faction of the New Mafia. Their
reluctance
, and as it subsequently turned out, their refusal to accept the ruling of the majority, epitomised the struggle between the divergent Mafias: a struggle which was on the verge of becoming – truce or no truce – a war to the knife.

Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera were the chief and vice-chief
respectively
of the Mafia of ‘Palermo-Central’, the richest of all the Mafia ‘families’ through its control of most of the city’s building expansion. They were business operators of genius; ex-slum-urchins who had made huge fortunes in fifteen years, and – as the picturesque Sicilian expression goes – they had put the city through their winepress. At the same time they were craftsmen of death, killing with the forethought and intellectual concentration of chess players, in observance of the Machiavellian
principle
of never allowing an enemy to live – to which they added a corollary of their own, which called for the extermination even of friends of enemies. They lived in the select suburb known as Rose Garden City, populated by the cream of Palerman bourgeois society, and were highly respected by the High Court judges, the medical consultants, and the titled landowners who were their neighbours. The opinion of one of these – who had never dreamed that Angelo La Barbera was anything other than a successful building contractor – suggests that ‘the man in the flat above’ had a chameleon-like personality. ‘Capo-Mafia? Killer? … Personally I couldn’t even imagine him lifting his hand to anyone. I always regarded him first and foremost as a
considerate
man. In fact, he carried his kindness to others almost to the point of exaggeration. Not only with the big people he used to go round with, either. He was the same with everybody, it didn’t matter how unimportant they happened to be. As for money, he quite obviously didn’t care about it. He simply threw it away. La Barbera was a soft touch if ever there was one. Never heard of any poor devil going to him and being sent away empty-handed.’

Di Pisa was shot down by La Barbera’s killers. It is unlikely that the missing heroin was his undoing, although it provided the excuse. By La Barbera’s severe standards Di Pisa was a brash and noisy fellow, lacking in proper respect. He had tried to force his way into the building expansion
racket, the preserve of the highest level of the Mafia hierarchy, ‘
prima di aversi fatte le ossa
– before making his bones’. (La Barbera had made his bones at the age of twenty-five, in a bloody episode straight out of the Pentateuch, by killing the famous capo-Mafia who had been his
protector
.) Getting out of his car in a main square of Palermo and making for a tobacco kiosk, Di Pisa found himself suddenly in the company of two silent strangers. He made no attempt to escape. Among the many people questioned by the police was a garage-hand who had been filling up a car’s tank on the other side of the road when Di Pisa had met his end. The pressmen were fascinated to discover that this was none other than the bandit Giuliano’s brother. He had not heard the shots.

In this assassination the verdict of the Mafia Court had been ignored, and the truce broken. This was the moment, if ever, in the Mafia’s history when the cool counsels and the statesmanship of Don Calò Vizzini were called for to avert the threat of anarchy and civil war. But Don Calò was no longer there, and his successors could no more dominate the dynamic and explosive young Mafia of Palermo than an ageing bomber pilot of the last war could be expected to take over the controls of a modern jet airliner.

The old Mafia had had all they could take of high-handedness of this kind. Compared to the newcomers who had appropriated the city of Palermo, they were an unimaginative and poverty-stricken collection, but they could still fight their own battles in their own way. Salvatore La Barbera simply vanished and only the charred remains of his car were found. His brother Angelo left Sicily and got as far as Milan, and was there ambushed – ineffectively – as, although severely wounded, he survived. It was the benevolent Manzella who was held responsible by the La Barbera faction for ordering the elimination of the two irksome brothers. It was for this that he was called to account in so macabre a fashion when, returning on that April evening from a visit to the nuns of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, he discovered the unfamiliar car in his courtyard.

Now the war was on in earnest, and it was fought on two levels: the ideological conflict of the ancient blood-feud, and the battle for the
material rewards offered by the succession to the chieftainship of Palermo-Central. The struggle for the seizure to high office of any kind where no official successor has been appointed is likely to be ruthless, but in more polite spheres of society blow and counterblow are delivered behind a screen of outward sanctity. In Palermo at war, the passions engaged are identical, but the contestants are a law unto themselves – therefore they simply kill each other in the confident belief that they can do so with impunity.

The manner of Manzella’s death had set a new fashion in
assassination
, and within a few weeks several more Alfa-Romeo cars exploded with murderous results in various parts of the city of Palermo and its suburbs. This particular
marque
, sleek, speedy and outstandingly manageable in a getaway dash through traffic, has always been the favourite of the mafioso owner-driver, and it possessed an additional advantage where death by a dynamited car was planned. This lay in the placing of the car’s battery in the boot, which much facilitated the wiring called for in rigging up any engine of destruction. When the men of the New Mafia packed a hundredweight of dynamite into the boot of a Giulietta and arranged for it to be blown to smithereens, the attack was not only on life, but on property, and it was not long before the mere leaving of a car of this type unattended for a suspiciously long time was enough to panic the police into cordoning off the street and evacuating nearby buildings. The old Mafia could not afford this expensive modern version of the assassin’s dagger, but retaliated in the traditional manner, and with considerable success. Quietly and economically, the friends and relations of the brothers La Barbera, as well as the pressing candidates for their office, began to disappear. Among them was the supposedly invulnerable Don Mommo Grasso, capo-Mafia of Miselmeri. For many years in the past Don Mommo had played the part of Our Lord in the annual Good Friday mystery-play performed in his town, but even the great prestige based on this additional count was insufficient to outweigh a fatal relationship with the La Barberas, and he and his son vanished, to be seen no more.