Honoured Society (7 page)

‘I realised that I was already the recipient of too many secrets to have been allowed to leave that meeting alive, had I refused. My only course was not only to accept on the spot, but to accept with apparent enthusiasm.’

After this the ritual of admission was administered.

‘The tip of my middle finger was pierced by a needle, and blood was squeezed from it to soak a small paper image of a saint. The image was burned, and holding the ashes in my hand I was called upon to swear an oath more or less as follows: “I swear to be loyal to my brothers, never to betray them, always to aid them, and if I fail may I burn and be turned to ashes like the ashes of the image.”’

This one archaic touch apart, the Mafia showed no interest in mumbo-jumbo. There were no secret hand clasps, signs or passwords. Allegra’s sponsors took him on a brisk tour of the neighbourhood of
Palermo and introduced him to anyone in the organisation he needed to know. He might have been a junior sales representative who had just been taken on by a go-ahead firm. Allegra says that he was embarrassed by the fact that most of his new friends seemed to think that he was just the man they had been looking for to concoct some ruse to get a friend out of the army on medical grounds. He met all the Mafia personalities of the day, and among his lists of rank-and-file members one recognises some of the great names to come, the manipulators of power in the era of the Mafia renaissance that was to follow the Allied occupation of Sicily. Of all the names Allegra supplied, perhaps the most surprising is that of a prominent monk – the Father Superior of the Convent of Tagliava: a forerunner of the notorious so-called mafiosi monks of Mazzarino whose trial, lasting three years, was only concluded in 1963.

The social meeting-place of the Mafia élite was the Birreria Italia in Palermo, a café where any Mafia notables who happened to be in the capital often dropped in to talk shop at about eleven in the morning. This is the hour when, after a thousand years, Palermo still turns its face daily towards the East. A baroque façade of dimpled statuary has been built over the wall-eyed old Saracenic town with its pink-domed
kubbas
and its stumps of minarets, but the relaxation of Palermo remains oriental in style. At eleven work peters out for a long interval, while the streets fill up with a pleasantly aimless crowd. The aroma of roasting coffee covers the whole town. Men in darkly discreet clothes file into the cafés and fill them standing, until the only possible movement is that of the hand holding a tiny coffee cup in a cubic foot of space. This is the public display of leisure inherited from turban-wearing ancestors – a dignified setting-aside of the trivial concerns of the day, when every Palerman becomes a pasha for an hour.

Members of the Sicilian aristocracy favoured the
birreria
, going there to ogle the lords of the underworld, so that there were times when every second customer crowded along the counter clutching his minuscule cup was an internationally famous criminal or a duke. Here Allegra saw
Don Ciccio, the absurd and publicity-hungry mayor of Piana dei Greci, shoving his way to the front to talk to the reporters. Don Vito Cascio Ferro, head of all the Mafia in those days, appeared briefly, a prophet dressed up as a Mississippi gambler, to have his hand kissed by the hangers-on. Don Calò Vizzini, now portly from the digestion of his war profits and hardly to be recognised by those who had known the young bandit of Cammarata, put in an appearance. Allegra had lunch with him, and Don Calò brought along a pearl-encrusted mistress, a woman of the old nobility who had persuaded him to make her the first female member of the Mafia. Conversation with the laconic Don Calò seems to have been heavy going.

The doctor had sold his soul to the devil for a fairly good price. He was able to buy a practice in Castelvetrano, and did well enough with it to open his own clinic shortly afterwards, which also prospered exceedingly. Naturally enough, the association expected and got its
quid pro quo.
As this meant helping out from time to time with illegal operations and the clandestine treatment of patients suffering from gunshot wounds, the doctor had some brushes with the law, from all of which, through alibis fabricated by his friends, he escaped unscathed. One attempt, too, was made by the Medical Association to remove his name from the register; but in the case of a man of honour such an attempt could never succeed. Dr Allegra, almost weighed down by now with ‘respect’, began in the usual way to be more than just the most successful doctor in the community. As an established mafioso, he would be regarded not only as above the law but in some measure as supplanting it, and people would come to him to settle their disputes. He also kept juniors in the association in order, with a sharp reprimand when called for, for wild schemes. ‘Cammarata Carmeli, a mafioso of Palermo, came to see me about a baron of the district of Le Madonie who had approached him for help in abducting the fiancée of Professor Stella Pietro. I immediately vetoed this absurd project and it was dropped, so the professor was left in peace.’

But amazingly enough, even within the Mafia itself, according to this inside chronicle, things rarely go smoothly for long. A wide rift, not entirely healed to this day, was provoked by a quarrel over payments made to the organisation by the contractors for the development of the port of Palermo. Relations with the Mafia overseas were still close and cordial enough for three separate Mafia Commissions to be sent by the disquieted brothers in New York, Chicago and Kansas City in an attempt to heal the breach. To the American Mafia, the Sicilian parent had always been the ‘
madre nobile
– the noble mother’, custodian of the ancient tradition and fountainhead of doctrinal purity. A request from Sicily to execute the sentence of a Mafia court on a Sicilian who had fled to America would be unhesitatingly carried out – and vice versa. Sicilian emigrants were still handed a clean bill of health by the Honoured Society in Sicily and given the address of the mafioso to whom they should report as soon as arriving in the United States; while leading American Mafia chieftains made frequent sentimental pilgrimages to their home towns back in Sicily. But despite the strength of the ties uniting both organisations, all attempts by the American brothers to bring about a reconciliation failed. Allegra claims to have been disillusioned by the unseemly brawling over the division of loot. It was about this time, too, that his personal interests seemed not to have been fostered by his Mafia connections as well as he would have wished.

In the last free election to be held in Italy before the installation of Fascism, the Mafia, departing from its usual practice of supporting the party most likely to succeed and then getting a stranglehold on it, had decided on a two-way bet. There had been a division of opinion on the Fascists’ chances of coming to power, so it was arranged that, with Mafia backing, an equal number of candidates from the democratic and Fascist lists should be returned to Parliament. Allegra had been flattered by the suggestion that he should stand as a democratic candidate, but to his mortification his candidature turned out to be a dummy one, and the full organisational support was given to his Fascist opponent who defeated him with an insultingly large majority.

A worse blow to his prestige was to follow. A vacancy occurred for the
post of medical superintendent of a group of hospitals, and Allegra applied to the counsellor of his particular ‘family’ to assist him in obtaining the appointment. He mentions this in his confession quite flatly, and with almost a kind of innocence. After all, it was taken for granted that such appointments went to the mafioso applicant.
Unfortunately
for Allegra, there happened to be a second man of honour who had his eye on this particular plum, and although Allegra says that his rival’s qualifications were faked to the extent that he did not even have a medical degree, he was senior to Allegra in the Mafia, so he got it.

Allegra’s last exploit before he vanishes from sight is an exceptionally grubby one, but it illuminates the limbo into which Sicily fell after Mori had smashed the Mafia, but had failed to substitute law and order for the lopsided Roman peace imposed by the Honoured Society.

The Mafia had never objected to banditry, but had kept it strictly under control, turning it on and off like a tap as Mafia strategy demanded – and, of course, sharing in the profits of the bandits. But the new crop of bandits – coming up like mushrooms in the compost of a social environment which Mussolini had left unchanged – were unmanageable in the Mafia’s punch-drunk condition.

A bandit called Ponzio – a petty Giuliano of his day – was terrorising the countryside of Castelvetrano and had even begun to carry out his depredations in the doctor’s home town itself. He was a daring fellow, who went about armed to the teeth, and, surrounding himself with a gang of young ruffians, was ready to turn his hand to any form of criminality from sheep-stealing in the streets of Castelvetrano to kidnapping a carabinieri captain. This last achievement brought on unwelcome police reprisals. As Allegra puts it, ‘Ponzio was a grave nuisance to people’ – such as himself, he suggests – ‘who only asked to be allowed to live in peace.’

Ponzio’s hide-out was in the neighbouring village of Ghibellina, and Allegra received a visit from a member of the Mafia ‘family’ of that area, who discussed the problem with him. The trouble was that Prefect Mori had left the ‘family’ so weakened that there was little it could do about Ponzio – at least without calling in help. The man from Ghibellina mentioned that they had even been bereft of their chief: ‘He had retired
into private life.’ It seems, although Allegra does not say so, that a Mafia court was held in his clinic, at which Ponzio was formally sentenced to death. The question that arose was how the sentence was to be carried out.

Mafia death sentences are normally executed only by the very lowest grades of probationer-members of the association – the
picciotti
(boys) – who gain the ‘respect’ requisite to their advancement in the society by offering their services for such unpleasant jobs. When no
picciotto
is at hand to kill for honour’s sake, the Mafia casts around to find a
sicario
, a hired killer who is a specialist in the use of the sawn-off shotgun, known as the
lupara
. In this case a difficulty arose because Ponzio would normally be in the company of his henchmen, thus making him a difficult and risky target. One of the Ghibellina members had a bright idea. He knew of just the man for the job, a certain Gandolfo, a close friend of Ponzio’s, who might be persuaded, for a price, to lead him into a trap.

Gandolfo was called to the clinic and the proposition put to him. Allegra says he seemed very angry at first, but – although Allegra does not say this – pressure must have been brought to bear, because the next day he agreed. Allegra set out for Ghibellina in his Fiat Topolino, with Gandolfo and two other doctors – who were probably brought along as components of a prefabricated alibi – and the
lupara
wedged
uncomfortably
behind the knees of the two men squatting in the back. At Ghibellina, Gandolfo was left to do his work, while Allegra and his friends called on a patient. Later Gandolfo was picked up again on the outskirts of the village, and Allegra learned, to his anger and disappointment, that nothing had happened. Gandolfo made lame excuses for not having kept his promise, but to Allegra it was clearly a case of cold feet.

It took another week’s work on Gandolfo before it seemed quite certain that he had finally swallowed his scruples. To use a Mafia technical expression, ‘the spur was applied’. This time, surrounded in Allegra’s clinic by the men of honour of Castelvetrano and Ghibellina, Gandolfo was compelled to swear to carry through his mission. In what is described with macabre understatement as the ‘usual little speech’, Allegra explained to him what happened to those who failed in their
obligations to the Mafia. Then the question of the thirty pieces of silver came up again. The Mafia ‘brothers’ assured Gandolfo that he would be found a job for his pains, and thus be given the means of starting a new life. This time the assassin saw that there was no escape, and he went off to Ghibellina for his last meeting with his friend.

‘I never saw him again,’ Allegra says. He adds: ‘Things had reached such a pitch with the Ponzio nuisance that had we not been able to make this arrangement, it might even have meant breaking the association’s rules and turning him over to the police.’ Rarely can the mentality of the Mafia have been exhibited so effectively in a single sentence.

V
ILLALBA,
classic capital of the Mafia’s state-within-a-state, turns out to be a small bleached town, carved from the bone of its own landscape. In winter, rancid water from the cold rains lies in its cobbled streets, and in summer an ochreous bloom of dust covers the stumpy buildings. A few wilted hollyhocks, self-sown in the angles of walls, curl down like flower-decorated shepherds’ crooks. Piglets and chickens scuffle among the black refuse piled up in the side-streets. Many of the houses on the outskirts of the town are
bassi
, Neapolitan style, consisting of a single windowless room into which light and air enter only through the door, and in which the members of the family sleep in bunks. Blue paint daubed on door jambs and on window surrounds – when windows exist – testifies that the Moors were here, blue being sacred, the colour of heaven. The name of the feudal estate Villalba was built to serve – Miccichè – derives from the Arabic Mikiken. The town has a saint with a grimacing, anguished face, padlocked into a shrine like an ancient strongbox. In its heyday, twenty years ago, Villalba had a population of about six thousand, a figure now halved by emigration.

The feudal lands that surround Villalba, rolling away to the horizon in all directions, seem un-European. Central Asia must be like this, one imagines. There are no boundaries, hedges, walls, trees, windmills, buildings of any kind. The landscape, green for the weeks of spring and thereafter whitish under the sun, heaves gently like a carpet with the wind under it. Distantly to the north the mountains of Cammarata are traced on the sky, with a faint scar-tissue of forest. Miccichè is
soundless
, apart from the dry chatter of bells echoed off some bony hillside and the high-pitched, creaking squeal of falcons. It is a place, too, of unbroken distances, and the peasants who pass down into these empty, vitreous immensities to their work seem to vanish as soon as they leave
the town. This feudal estate is dedicated to the cultivation of the lentil.

Danilo Dolci, in his book
Waste,
which is a closely documented study of the social conditions of western Sicily, gives some idea of what it was like to live in such a town five or six years ago. He found that the day labourers composing the majority of the working population were
employed
on average for ninety days a year. The average pay was 600 lire (seven shillings) per day. Day labourers offered themselves for hire at a kind of human labour auction held each day before dawn, when, as work might be available for only one man out of three, the peasants were encouraged to bid against each other to bring down their terms. Children as young as eight years of age were taken on as labourers for as little as 150 lire a day, and their competition in the labour market further undercut prices. Men who went home without work had to face scolding wives and weeping children. Enormous families were the order. Elsewhere, one reads of visits paid by priests to women who fail to produce a child a year to ask them ‘why they are denying souls to God’.

Probing into the threadbare medieval fabric, Dolci describes the uses of the leech, when the cost of calling in a doctor – even if one were to be had – would be unthinkable. After employment the leeches are thriftily ‘milked’ of the human blood they have gorged, and kept for use again, only being discarded in cases of typhus. The typical small town or village community includes individuals driven by necessity to practise strange livelihoods: gatherers of seasonal foodstuffs such as frogs, snails and wild asparagus. An inevitable ingredient is the big-town usurer’s agent, who is of necessity an ex-gaolbird, chosen for his known capacity for violence to intimidate defaulters who fall behind in their one hundred per cent per annum interest payments. Above all, indispensable to this small rustic community, is the
strega
, or witch, who arranges marriages, concocts potions, dabbles a little in black magic, clears up skin conditions, and casts out devils. These witches, since the Inquisition has ceased its drownings and defenestrations, flourish mightily. Since Danilo Dolci carried out his study, a sharp decline in population due to emigration has modified this picture, but the basic misery is little changed.

In 1944, when Don Calogero Vizzini had held the office of mayor for
eighteen months, the situation in Villalba was desperate indeed. There were many urgent tasks to distract the Mayor from interesting himself in the welfare of his community. Surrounded by his cohort of tried ‘anti-Fascists’, all of them armed by special licence of the Allied Military Government, Don Calò dedicated himself to a flourishing black market in olive oil. The old interfering police chief of Villalba, Maresciallo Purpi, had been killed off, and his successor knowing what was good for his health, Don Calò’s operations could be conducted without concealment.
Moreover
, the Allies had facilitated his work almost as though the creation of an impregnable black market had been their first consideration after
completing
their occupation of Sicily.

One of AMGOT’s first measures was the freezing of all prices at the level existing when Military Government took over. The measure was unrealistic, because concurrently the lira was devalued to a quarter of its original rate of exchange against the pound and the dollar, and Sicily was
flooded with special occupational currency. It became impossible for a citizen, however good his intentions, to avoid dealings with the black market, for the simple reason that the ‘white’ market ceased to exist. But from Don Calò’s point of view the valuable fact was that it existed as a legal fiction, and this permitted him when buying his oil to extort it from its producers at the fixed price of 25 lire per litre, while his selling price on the Naples black market was 500 lire. When it is said that in this way the Mayor of Villalba squeezed Sicily dry of its olive oil, it should be remembered that bread and olive oil were always the staple diet of the Italian peasantry, and that the usual supplement of pasta was at that time unprocurable.

A government official was sent down in an attempt to persuade Don Calò to fall into line. He explained that the legal position was that all oil must go into the government pool.

‘The legal position, the laws? … What’s all this about laws? What laws?’ Don Calò finally asked.

‘The laws passed by the government,’ the official explained.

‘But that’s just the point, what government?’

The official found this obtuseness puzzling in a man of Don Calò’s reputation for shrewdness. ‘The Central Government. The Government of Rome.’

Don Calò accompanied his retort, as he often did, with an emphatic ejaculation of spittle. ‘Let the Romans keep the laws they make. In this part of the world we have our own way of doing things.’

Don Calò received the loyalist co-operation in these manoeuvres from his friends in AMGOT, who supplied all the passes necessary for his caravans of trucks to travel without impediment up and down the roads of Sicily and Italy. At about that time AMGOT in Sicily had fallen under the sway of its unofficial adviser, Vito Genovese, an American gangster – later named as the head of the Mafia offshoot, Cosa Nostra – who had disappeared after his indictment on a charge of murder and turned up in Italy. Don Calò found Genovese most accommodating. From AMGOT came all the petrol he required, and sometimes, when he ran short of transport for an exceptionally large shipment, his friends
helped out with a military vehicle or two. In 1944 I happened to be in the town of Benevento through which Don Calò’s black market caravans were obliged to pass on their way northwards, and although at times there were more trucks loaded with Don Calò’s oil on the roads of southern Italy than there were army vehicles, there was nothing that could be done to put a stop to this situation. All papers were always in order. Don Calò’s friends were powerful, and the only possibility of remonstrance was when one of Don Calò’s drivers, or the escorts provided for his merchandise, sometimes got tired of questions and reached for his gun or a hand-grenade.

In those days Don Calò was dividing his time between the black market at Villalba and certain important and most secret discussions that took him frequently to Palermo. At Palermo he occupied his old suite in the Albergo Sole, a remarkable privilege considering that the hotel had been requisitioned by the military authorities, and, with the exception of the Mayor of Villalba, was off-limits to all civilians. The fact is that Don Calò and certain other leading citizens had been called in by the Allied authorities to discuss the future of Sicily. Don Calò and his friends, all of them members of the Sicilian aristocracy, wanted to detach Sicily from Italy. They were divided in their opinion over the form the separate Sicilian state should ideally assume. Some of the nobles were in favour of choosing one of their number to rule as king in the good old-fashioned way, without any nonsense about a parliament. The more moderate voices, supported by the hard-headed Don Calò and the Mafia, were in favour of the country’s becoming either a British colony or an American state. All were agreed on the necessity of severing the link with Rome. What was then called ‘the wind from the North’, a gusty political mistral from the great industrial towns of Lombardy, had begun to blow. The Allies had allowed political parties to register themselves, and Italy north of Rome had immediately and disturbingly swung to the left. Don Calò and his allies remembered, too, that almost every new government from Garibaldi’s time on had promised to do something about turning over
the uncultivated estates to the Sicilian peasants, and there was always the chance that the one about to be elected in Rome might do just this. The last upheaval in Sicily had followed the end of the First World War when peasants who had fought in the army and rubbed elbows with enlightened northern Italians showed little inclination to buckle down again to the old servitude of the feudal estate. Now, with the forming of the first trade unions in Mafia areas, the outcry for land was louder than ever before and the would-be Separatists, led by the Mafia, asked for the chance to deal with the situation in their own way and without bureaucratic interference from Rome.

There is no doubt that, with their eye on a war situation that was still far from resolved, the Allies encouraged the Separatists – at least for a time. Moreover, Intelligence reports upon the strength of the emergent Italian Communist Party already suggested that this was likely to be the strongest in Western Europe, and that a Socialist-Communist coalition in Italy, should this ever happen, would be able to take over power. Some Allied political observers said quite openly that if when election time came Italy should take a disastrous plunge to the left, it might not be at all a bad thing to know that Sicily, with its excellent naval bases, remained in friendly hands. It is highly unlikely that proof will ever be forthcoming that part of the deal put through with the good offices of Lucky Luciano included a promise of all-out backing for the Separatists (and therefore the Mafia), but this has been widely alleged in the Italian and Sicilian press.

In that troublesome part of the war’s aftermath that was the other side of the bright coin of Don Calò’s thriving black market, the threat offered by trade unionism may have seemed the most dangerous. In his handling of a prickly situation Don Calò showed, at first, his usual mental pliability. Trade unions were all part of the disease that young Sicilian peasants had picked up by contagion while in the Services. Like a practised judo exponent, Don Calò relaxed his muscles and rolled on the mat with his opponent, while preparing a better hold. To the amazement of the other politically less gifted Mafia leaders, he offered to permit, first the establishment of a trade union centre in Villalba, and later, even, a Communist Party headquarters. The only stipulation he
made in each case was that the activities of both these groups should be directed by one of his lieutenants. When both these offers, to his great astonishment, were turned down, he realised – probably with real regret – that a shooting war was inevitable.

After twenty years the gag of Fascism had been removed, and
thirty-two
political parties, great and small, were almost hysterically preparing for the elections. Some idea of the political temperature of the time can be gathered from the fact that when Don Vanni Sacco, the terrible
capo-Mafia
of Camporeale, who was subsequently converted to the Christian Democrat cause, announced that largely from sentimental reasons and as a tribute to his father’s memory he proposed to see to it that his constituency was represented by a Liberal candidate, the parish priest of Camporeale denounced him from the pulpit for atheism. Don Vanni replied in a letter apparently courteous but so charged with obscure Mafia symbolism that the priest had to have it interpreted by an expert before realising that it contained a threat to hang him from his own
church tower. Sicilians were confidently expected to vote
en masse
for the parties of extreme reaction: the Monarchists or the Separatists. The Christian Democrat party had not yet been tailored to fit the needs of the alliance between the Church and the bouncing new capitalism that would shortly be born.

Trade unionists were regarded with a sort of amazed contempt. To the landowner and his supporters there seemed something basically
un-Christian
– almost diabolical – in the way they corrupted ordinary, decent labourers,
put ideas into their heads,
induced them to extort grossly unfair rewards for their labour by the threat of withholding it altogether. Trade unions had existed in Italy before the coming of Fascism, but down in Sicily, where five men always rushed to offer themselves for every job that was going, it was a distant calamity,
something
that happened to other people – discussed in the landowners’ clubs like some unreal loss of half a million Chinese lives through the flooding of the Yellow River. In the hubbub provoked by the appearance of this sinister organisation of labourers in feudal Sicily itself, there was an echo of England in 1834 and the Tolpuddle Martyrs of Dorset. In Sicily, as in the England of those days, sermons were being preached on the blessedness of poverty, as illustrated in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, and peasant congregations were being exhorted to render unto Caesar the things that were Caesar’s. One remembers the public horror over the ‘ingratitude’ of the Dorsetshire labourers – the prison chaplain’s astonished outburst when he visited the accused men who had organised themselves in such a cowardly fashion, as he saw it, after their wages had been reduced from nine shillings to eight shillings a week. ‘Are you then determined to ruin your kind masters, who are worse off than you?’ he cried. (Most of the kind masters maintained lavish establishments, including stables of race horses.) Remembering that the Sicily of 1944 was less politically advanced than the England that punished trade unionists with seven years’ transportation to the penal colony of Botany Bay, it is not surprising that Sicily’s trade union leaders were quietly marked down for elimination.