Honoured Society (6 page)

Mori’s intervention had one important effect: the deprivation of Don Calò and company of the enjoyment of their newly-won feudal
privileges
. When next the leases of the feudal estates came up for auction, prices reverted sharply to the original level – most of the Mafia chieftains who had escaped the worst effects of the repression having at least judged it better, for the time being, to lie low. From this time on until the coming of the Allies in 1943, the peasants had a better time of it than most of them had ever known before. At least it became possible to argue with a landlord over the terms of a contract without running the risk of being knocked on the head and thrown down some deep fissure in the earth, or into one of those disused mine-shafts favoured by the Mafia for use as a cemetery.

Mori had succeeded in landing one huge fish, and thereby unknowingly advancing Calogero Vizzini to the final pinnacle of authority in the Honoured Society. His catch was Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who had been acknowledged head of the Mafia for twenty-five years and was the most spectacular delinquent in Sicilian history.

Don Vito had emigrated in his youth to the United States, where he
had become one of the most active members of the ‘Black Hand’ – an amalgamation of fugitives from the Mafia, the Camorra of Naples, and a less-known Calabrian criminal society, who had intelligently adapted themselves to the changed social and political conditions of the New World. Quite unlike such roughcast Mafia personalities as Don Ciccio of Piana dei Greci and the slovenly Don Calò Vizzini, Don Vito was always meticulous in his appearance, affecting since his return from the States a dashing anachronism of dress, which included a frock-coat,
wide-brimmed
fedora, pleated shirt, and flowing cravat. By the time Mori came on the scene, Don Vito had added to the immense dignity of his presence by the possession of a long white beard. He was a favourite of high society who frequented Palermo’s most glittering salons. He was in demand to open exhibitions of the saccharine watercolours of the Neapolitan school, romped with dukes and duchesses in party games of musical chairs, listened with reverence to famous actors giving poetry readings from Leopardi, or to the latest long-playing cylinder of
Donauwellen
on Mr Edison’s new phonograph, dressed himself fashionably in knickerbockers and Norfolk jacket to shoot thrushes in distinguished company, and joined aristocratic parties to pelt the children of the poor with cakes and sweets on All Souls’ Eve. Women of gentle birth spoke of the strange magnetic force with which a room seemed charged when Don Vito was present, and he once administered a severe admonition to his barber for selling the clippings of his hair to a maker of amulets.

Although he had been acquitted of implication in 69 major crimes, twenty of them homicides, Don Vito only admitted to – and indeed boasted of – having taken one man’s life. ‘My action was a disinterested one,’ he used to say, ‘and in response to a challenge I could not afford to ignore.’ The victim was Jack Petrosino, an American detective engaged on an investigation into the Black Hand. Petrosino’s researches in the Chicago underworld had convinced him of a liaison existing between the American secret society and the Mafia, and this induced him in 1909 to volunteer to go to Sicily to study the methods of the most important of the parent organisations on the spot. Petrosino was accompanied by two American criminals, associates of the Black Hand, who had agreed
through their Sicilian contacts to assist the detective in his researches, and who probably disclosed his plans to the Mafia in advance.

On the evening of the day that Petrosino’s ship docked at Palermo, Don Vito was dining as usual with an influential member of Palerman society, this time a member of parliament. At a certain moment he pretended to have remembered a most important matter that he had forgotten to attend to before leaving home, and asked to be excused for a short time. Borrowing his host’s carriage, Don Vito had himself driven to the Piazza Marina, near the port. At about that time Petrosino had left his hotel nearby, clearly to go to a secret rendezvous. A few minutes later the lights of Palermo went out, and Don Vito, who was waiting for the detective, killed him with a single pistol-shot. He then returned to the waiting carriage and was driven back to the house of his friend the member of parliament, arriving in time for the port. When suspicion later fell upon Don Vito, this politician was ready to swear in court that his guest had never left the house on the night of the killing.

The old Mafia leader had to be tried on a trumped-up charge of smuggling. During the greater part of the trial he contented himself with disdainfully ignoring the proceedings of the court. A Mafia exponent of the old school, ‘respect’ was all that mattered even in this desperate emergency. When a defence counsel appeared to be pleading for lenient treatment, Don Vito rebuked him harshly for adopting tactics ‘in conflict with my principles and offensive to my authority’. Before being
sentenced
, and asked whether he had anything to say, Don Vito replied, ‘Gentlemen, as you have been unable to obtain proof of any of my numerous crimes, you have been reduced to condemning me for the only one I have never committed.’ This indeed expressed the facts of the case accurately enough.

In prison Don Vito exercised his immense and hardly-trammelled influence in the interests of reform. He organised a kind of welfare scheme by which criminals still at large were obliged to contribute to the maintenance of the families of those in captivity, and he himself, out of his own personal fortune, provided dowries for the marriageable daughters of all his fellow-sufferers. Prisoners took it in turns to clean out
his cell and make his bed. Warders whom Don Vito considered
overbearing
in their manner were discharged when Don Vito mentioned it to the governor. Until recently the motto carved for him in Sicilian dialect (Don Vito was illiterate) on one of the corridor walls was still to be seen, covered with a protective sheet of glass:
Vicaria, malalia e nicisitati, si vidi lu cori di l’amicu
– In prison, in sickness and in want, one discovers the heart of a friend. The streak of sentimentality is the final ingredient that completes the character of this fantastic old criminal.

The cell in the Ucciardone prison occupied by the old man, who died of heart-failure after a short period of incarceration, has always been used since to house prisoners of distinction. In it, Don Calogero Vizzini spent a few days of his five years’ sentence before his release through the intervention of the young Fascist he had befriended.

I
N
1962 a novel appeared on the theme of the mafia from the pen of the distinguished Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. In
Il Giorno della Civetta
an interesting passage occurs which suggests the immense success of the Mafia as a
secret
society, showing that its manoeuvrings still remain largely shrouded in a penumbra of uncertainty. It also demonstrates the use of a standard piece of trickery: an attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of the inquisitive by arguing that the whole thing is hardly more than a blown-up piece of newspaper sensationalism.

A politician in the book has taken it upon himself to have a fatherly chat with a carabinieri officer who has actually dared to arrest an important citizen – instead of one of the usual ragged scapegoats – for implication in a Mafia killing.

‘I ask you,’ says the politician, ‘is it possible to conceive of the existence of a criminal association so enormous, so well-organised, so secret, and so powerful that it can do what it likes, not only here, but in the United States? … Very well then, put it this way: can you tell me of a single trial that has ever produced the proof of the existence of a criminal association called the Mafia, which actually arranges for and carries out crimes? Has a single document ever been found – I mean real written evidence – any sort of proof, in fact, of a relationship between criminality and the so-called Mafia?’

When Sciascia wrote this in 1961 the answer would have been no, but by the time his book appeared, the missing link in the evidence had at last been found.

For a century the experts had been busy with their arguments. Rival sociological and anthropological schools had even come into being in an attempt to explain ‘the Sicilian plague’ and powdered the arguments with the dry dust of textbooks. A hundred or so books on the Mafia were
written over the century, most of them rich in theory but lacking in focus, due to the fact that so much of the evidence was missing. No one had even been able quite to define just what the Mafia was. How, for example, did one enter the Mafia? Was the Honoured Society organised on a military basis, with ranks, duties, promotions, honours and awards? Were regular meetings held? Did the Mafia possess initiation rites and ceremonies, such as those of the Carbonari and the Freemasons? Was Mafia membership hereditary? Nobody knew, for the simple reason that the fear of certain death prevented the disclosure of secrets of this kind. Meanwhile, all Sicilians could do was to put two and two together and make do with intelligent guesswork.

Little as ordinary Sicilians might know about how the Mafia was put together, they certainly knew just who the mafiosi were. There was something about a mafioso that marked him as indelibly as a facial scar or a harelip. The man who had been admitted to the Mafia saw himself as a member of an élite, of a chivalry of power, and the confidence that this bred oozed from him like a vital current.

Some mafiosi manage to keep this godlike conviction of their
superiority
under sufficiently close control for it not to be apparent except in cases of exceptional emergency. Renato Candido, a retired carabinieri officer who wrote a book about his experiences with the Mafia, describes an instance where a man well known to him, whom he never suspected of being other than an ordinary law-abiding citizen, gave himself away when he happened to be travelling on a bus that was held up by bandits. The passengers were all hustled out and lined up to have their coats torn off their backs and their pockets turned inside out in the search for objects of value. When it came to the turn of the mafioso, he simply treated the bandit to the celebrated cold stare of the man of respect and said quietly, ‘Don’t touch me.’ The bandit immediately lowered his gun and passed on to the next passenger. One of the victims of this episode told Candido about the singular fellow traveller who could frighten away a gunman with a single look, and Candido put two and two together. Later he went to see the man to try to get a description of the bandits, which none of the passengers had had the courage to supply. It turned
out that the mafioso considered the bandits a nuisance. As a man of honour he was prevented by his code from open collaboration with the police, but speaking with such vagueness and recourse to metaphor that what he had to say sounded to Candido more like a parable than a piece of information, he still managed to let drop a hint or two, as a result of which the carabinieri officer was able to arrest the whole band.

The mafioso was recognisable too by his uncanny success in
everything
he touched. The Mafia doctor got all the patients, and could always find a hospital bed in a hurry. The Mafia advocate had all the briefs he could handle, and his clients usually won their cases. Government contracts always seemed to go to the contractor who was a man of respect, although his tenders were usually the highest and he paid lower wages than the trade union minimum. By tradition, members of the Mafia did not themselves seek election to Parliament, but everybody knew that the political boss who arranged for a candidate’s election was a mafioso. The Mafia member was the courteous but laconic stranger who recommended the candidate’s opponent not to attempt to hold political meetings in the area. He was the solitary armed horseman riding up and down the boundary of a feudal estate, whose mere presence and power-saturated glance were enough to keep at bay five hundred peasants who had come to claim uncultivated land. The mafioso was also the mayor’s right-hand man who handed out all the jobs in the municipality, contributing to the rule of the Mafia not only by fear but by hunger.

Then in 1962 a unique document was published by the Sicilian
newspaper
L’Ora,
and instantly the framework in which all these privileged citizens moved and their relationship with one another was filled in. In three long instalments, and with electrifying effect,
L’Ora
published a confession made to the police in 1937 by a certain Doctor Allegra, who had been induced to join the Mafia and eventually been involved in a murder. The doctor told all he knew, revealing a series of new facts about the Honoured Society and its doings. There can be only one explanation
of the circumstance that he died peacefully in his bed: that his confession was mislaid in the police record office, probably through being placed by mistake in the file of another Allegra – the name being a not uncommon one. If this supposition is correct, the confession was safely buried in this way until it came to light twenty-four years later and found its way into the newspaper’s possession.

It is obvious that on other occasions – particularly during the Mori terror – similar confessions must have been obtained by the police. Such documents would have been quickly got rid of through police collusion with the Mafia. Nothing would have been simpler than for any police official having, say, the equivalent rank of captain, to visit the records office in the Questura, abstract the dossier containing the confession ‘for study’, and either to remove the confession altogether or to exchange it for some less compromising document. That nothing is easier than such a manoeuvre is demonstrated by the case of Don Calò Vizzini, whose dossier disappeared from the Questura of Palermo within days of his becoming Mayor of Villalba and an honorary colonel in the US Army. Criminologically, the Mafia confession represents an advance in our knowledge as important as the deciphering of a letter in Etruscan script, but up to even twenty years ago no newspaper editor would have dared to look at it. But the offices of
L’Ora
have twice withstood Mafia attacks, the latest in 1958 when the paper started its own investigation of the Mafia and a bomb explosion destroyed part of
L’Ora
building. Since the principal result of these outrages was the great increase in fame and in circulation of the newspaper, it has thereafter lost no opportunity to press home its attacks on the Mafia, which may well realise by now that short of massacring the whole editorial staff, there is very little it can do.

Dr Melchiorre Allegra, the mafioso doctor whose most detailed and largely verifiable confession sheds light on so much of what before was dark, was a medical officer in a military hospital in Palermo when the Mafia approached him. It was 1916, the war was beginning to go badly, and an epidemic of malingering and self-inflicted wounds was occupying
far too much of the time of the hospital staff. Some of these simulated pathological conditions were artfully contrived, and Dr Allegra seems to have been amused despite himself by one man who had successfully produced a condition of erysipelas of the knee by injecting himself with a mixture of turpentine and iodine. Allegra threatened to report the man, but within hours, and before he had time to do so, he received the visit of a Giulio D’Agate, whom he instantly recognised from his unmistakable manner as a man of respect. There was nothing of the bully about D’Agate, who merely appealed to the doctor to show mercy to a man who was the father of a large and necessitous family. There was little the doctor could do but fall into line, the mild-mannered Mafia approach being considered potentially even more dangerous than the blustering kind. Allegra cured his patient and got him several months’ convalescent leave. In his confession he says that D’Agate later persuaded him to perform another similar favour. This was a time of great Mafia activity on behalf of Sicilians who had lost patience with the First World War.

Some days later Allegra found D’Agate waiting for him outside the hospital. He had two companions, also obviously men of respect.
Understandably
, the encounter made Allegra feel nervous, but the three men of respect were most friendly and genial, so he decided he had nothing to fear. D’Agate asked him to go with them, as he had something of great importance to tell him. Allegra’s attack of the jitters promptly returned, but he says in his statement that he dared not refuse the invitation. He was taken to a fruit shop owned by one of the men, and here, after a fulsome exchange of compliments and after D’Agate had praised him in particular for the ‘seriousness of his outlook’, other matters were touched upon. ‘They explained to me that they belonged to a very important association, which included people in all ranks of society, not excluding the highest; all of whom were called “men of honour”. The association was what in fact was known to outsiders as the Mafia, but understood by most people only in a very vague way because only members could really be sure of its existence.’ One pictures the three sinister men in the fruit shop explaining these self-evident facts to the fourth (who was also to become a sinister man), while Allegra pretends suitable surprise.

‘Continuing their explanation, they told me that infractions of the association’s rules were severely punished. Members were not allowed, for example, to commit thefts, but in certain circumstances homicide was permissible, although always by licence of the chiefs. Breaking the rules in this case, that is by taking the law into one’s own hands, was punishable by death.’ D’Agate hastened to add, by way of
encouragement
, that when high-level approval for a killing had been secured, a member could call on the assistance of the association, if required, to help him carry it out.

The confession continues with some important new material on Mafia organisation. ‘Dealing with the administrative structure, it was explained to me that the association was split up into “families”, each one headed by a chief. Usually a family was made up of small groups from neighbouring towns or villages, but when a “family” became too numerous for convenient administration, it was split up into groups of ten, each with its subordinate chief. In the matter of relationship between the different provinces, the rule in the main was independence. However, the provincial heads kept in close touch with each other, and in this way an informal working inter-provincial liaison was maintained. The association had powerful overseas offshoots in both North and South America, Tunisia, and in Marseille.

‘Chiefs were elected by the members of their “families” or groups, and they were assisted by counsellors’ – this had been quite unheard of – ‘who could act as their substitutes in case of absence. In matters of high policy it was absolutely necessary for a chief to consult his counsellor before taking action. They then added that, in general, the association was not interested in politics, but that from time to time a “family” might decide to support the candidature for Parliament of a politician whom they could count on to recompense them by exerting his parliamentary influence to the maximum in their favour. Such protection could take various forms; for example, in the matter of “recommendations” which (from a member of parliament) were very effective with prison officials, the police, the inland revenue authorities, and the administration at all levels, and could be used to obtain firearms permits, bail for prisoners
awaiting trial, to smooth out cases arising out of taxation difficulties, and even to obtain passports in delicate circumstances.’

This information was confirmed and amplified in September 1963 in disclosures made to the Italian Press by Nicola Gentile, ex-American gangster and head of the Mafia in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Kansas City, who had vanished from the United States when about to stand trial on a narcotics charge and turned up in his native Sicily. Gentile described the Mafia organisation as ‘very democratic’. Elections were held regularly. The group of ten elected its chief; these in turn elected the head of the family (
capo-famiglia
); and the heads of families, their deputies and counsellors elected the head of all the Mafia, known in Sicily as the
Capo dei Capi,
and in America as the ‘King’. The Sicilian and American systems were identical.

Having listened with growing uneasiness to this dangerous
information
, Allegra says he was now asked for the first time if he would agree to become a member of the association, and he could see that things had already been allowed to go too far for him to draw back. If Allegra was telling the truth, we may assume that the heads of the Mafia ‘family’ who had approached him urgently needed the permanent services of an intelligent and pliable young doctor, and that Allegra was virtually
press-ganged
into the Mafia.