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  In 1860 Miceli nonchalantly changed sides once more and supported Garibaldi’s fight against the Bourbons. Naturally, he was then recruited into the National Guard. Under Miceli’s control, the National Guard in Monreale was described in an official report of July 1862 as being made up of ‘robbers, cammoristi [sic], Bourbon royalists and corrupt men’.

  Miceli did not have the same success in building his career under the Italian government as he had done under the Bourbons. And like everyone else, he could see how detested Italian government authority in Sicily was. So in September 1866, Miceli staked his fortunes on revolution for what turned out to be the last time. The revolt’s aims were confused: Bourbon restoration, or a republic—no one was very sure. That did not matter to Turi Miceli. Politics, of whatever stripe, was just a way to convert ferocity into influence, position and money.

  In September 1866, for the first and last time, Turi Miceli backed the wrong side and found an agonising death. The revolt was crushed. There were to be no more revolutions in Sicily. For good or ill, Italy was in the island to stay. Other mafia bosses understood that better than Miceli. Instead of forming squads and leading the revolt, they formed what were called ‘countersquads’ and defended the Italian status quo. Their strategy echoed the moves made by ‘redeemed’ camorra boss of Naples, Salvatore De Crescenzo: like De Crescenzo, most top mafiosi calculated that supporting the cause of Italy was now the surest way to guarantee their criminal fortunes. September 1866 was to be a crucial transitional moment in the history of the mafia.

  7

  THE BENIGN MAFIA

  IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NAPLES, NOBODY EVER QUESTIONED WHETHER THE CAMORRA existed. Of course there was occasional reticence about the contacts between the early camorra and the Masonic societies of the Risorgimento. But nobody ever tried to pretend that ‘camorra’ meant anything other than what it really was: a secret criminal sect.

  Yet for most of the Sicilian mafia’s history, most people did not believe it was a sworn criminal fraternity, a Freemasonry of delinquents. ‘Mafia’, or better, ‘mafiosity’—it was said—was a characteristic Sicilian mentality, an island syndrome. If you were mafioso you suffered from a swelling of the ego that made you reluctant to settle your disputes through official channels. The symptoms of this strange malady were probably inherited from Sicily’s ninth-century Arab invaders.

  Late-twentieth-century sociologists had their own versions of the same spurious theory. Mafiosi were affiliates of self-help groups in poor, isolated villages—who just happened to kill people occasionally. Or they were local problem solvers and mediators, judges whose courtroom was the piazza and whose law book was an ancient, unwritten code of honour. Meadow Soprano, daughter of TV mafia boss Tony, summed up the theory nicely when she said that the mafia was ‘an informal method of conflict resolution in Mediterranean societies’.

  As we shall see, this tangle of mystifications was deliberately spun by the mafia and its allies in the Sicilian ruling class. One of the main reasons why the Sicilian mafia was for so long Italy’s most powerful criminal organisation was because of its ability to perpetuate the illusion that it did not even exist. The illusion was first created in the years following the Palermo revolt of 1866.

  From the Right government’s point of view, the miserable story of the 1866 revolt did at least have a hero in Antonio Starabba, Marquis of Rudinì, and Mayor of Palermo. Like all mayors at this time, he was appointed directly by the king rather than being elected by the local people. Rudinì got the Palermo job because despite being a Sicilian, indeed one of the island’s biggest landowners, he was a man of the Right. His rectitude and courage amid the mayhem did honour to the Italian flag, and drew the admiration of the European press.

  When the squads descended on the city Rudinì mustered the members of his administration to defend the town hall from the rebels. His house at the Quattro Canti was ransacked; his father died from shock as a result; and his wife only just escaped by clambering through a window with their baby in her arms. When the town hall became indefensible, Rudinì led its occupants to the safer surroundings of the Royal Palace. There, with other beleaguered government loyalists, he survived for the rest of the week on horse meat, and shot back at the insurgents with musket balls made from melted down gas pipes. Tall, blonde and handsome, with an easy authority to his manner, Rudinì was not yet thirty years old but his political career was set on a steep, upward trajectory. He was now a poster boy for the Right’s project to civilise Sicily. Soon after the revolt he was promoted from Mayor to Prefect. In other words, he was the eyes and ears of central government in the provinces, an official with access to high-level police intelligence. When it came to the problems of Sicily, nobody could command the attention of central government more than him.

  Marquis Rudinì was given a platform for his opinions eight months after the Palermo revolt of September 1866, when a parliamentary commission of inquiry came to Sicily to learn the lessons. The commissioners assembled in the comfort of the Hotel Trinacria set back from the marina, its doors protected by a picket of troops. They heard Rudinì give a testimony that addressed the mafia issue with shocking clarity.

  The Mafia is powerful—perhaps even more powerful than people believe. Uncovering it and punishing it is very often impossible, because there is no proof, either of the crimes, or of who is to blame . . . We’ve never been able to pull together enough evidence to prepare a trial and bring it to a successful conclusion.

  Only people who have the Mafia’s protection can move around freely in the countryside . . . The lack of security has brought about the following situation: anyone who wants to go into the countryside and live there has to become a brigand. There is no alternative. To defend yourself and your property, you have to obtain protection from the criminals, and tie yourself to them in some way.

  The Ucciardone—the Palermo prison—is a kind of government. That’s where rules, orders, etc. are issued. In the Ucciardone they know everything. So that might lead us to believe that the Mafia has formally recognised bosses.

  In the countryside around Palermo criminal gangs are very widespread, and there are many different bosses. But they often act in agreement with one another and look to the Ucciardone for leadership.

  Their aim is to get rich in the disorder and bump off their enemies. Robbery and vendetta, in short.

  Rudinì was right. Or at least he was as right as he could feasibly be at this early stage in the mafia’s history. Granted, talking about the mafia was politically convenient for the young Marquis. For one thing, it saved his having to address his own share of the blame for the revolt. His high-handed policies as mayor had made him as loathed in Palermo as Silvio Spaventa was in Naples.

  Nevertheless, we can now appreciate just how far towards a full understanding of the mafia Rudinì had advanced. He was particularly astute in identifying how the property owners of the area had to ‘tie themselves’ to the mafia. The threats and promises that won the mafia such a big slice of the citrus fruit business also won them freedom from the law and friends in high places. Here lay the genuine shock effect of Rudinì’s words: the landowners who had become ‘brigands’ were also the ruling class of the province of Palermo, its political leadership.

  The self-assured young Marquis Rudinì did not have all the answers, of course. He was sensible enough to acknowledge as much: he confessed that he could not tell how many bosses and affiliates the mafia had, for instance. ‘To really appreciate the Mafia’s power and influence, we would need to get to know this mysterious organisation better.’

  A decade later, another parliamentary inquiry squinted into the murk of Sicilian affairs. In March 1876, this time in Rome (which had become the capital city in 1870), Marquis Rudinì was called to demonstrate whether he had indeed managed to get to know the mysterious mafia organisation any better.

  Rudinì’s political career had made further progress in the meantime: he became Minister of the Interior for a while in 1869. Yet the year
s seemed to have eroded his confidence. His views on the mafia were now hesitant, slippery, and confusing.

  He began by saying that, in Sicily, public opinion had been ‘led astray’ in such a way that criminals had become ‘likeable’ to the local population. Perhaps sensing that these words might not play well in Sicily, he tried to claim that the same thing ‘happens in every country in the world’. Ignoring the puzzled frowns of the commission members sitting before him, he blundered on.

  Now when public opinion and indeed the very moral sense of any population is led astray in the way I have described, the result is the maffia. The famous maffia! But what is this maffia? Let me say first of all that there is a benign maffia. The benign maffia is a sort of bravado. It is a strange inclination not to allow yourself to be bullied; instead, you bully others. It’s about striking an attitude—the attitude of the farceur, or practical joker, as the French would say. Thus I myself could be a benign maffioso. Not that I am one. But, in a nutshell, anyone who respects himself, who has a dash of exaggerated haughtiness, could be one.

  Rudinì’s waffling testimony then moved on to what he called the ‘malign maffia’, which was, he asserted, the unfortunate result of the ‘atmosphere’ created by the benign maffia. As if he had not already done enough to baffle his listeners, he further divided the malign mafia into two distinct and apparently unconnected types. First there was the prison mafia—but that had all but disappeared anyway; then there was what he called a ‘high mafia’. Unlike the prison mafia, the high mafia was not a genuine criminal association. Instead, it was what he termed a ‘solidarity in crime’.

  It was all about as clear as a glass of black Sicilian wine. No mention of an organisation. No mention of bosses or links between the prisons and criminals on the outside. No reference to landowners who become ‘brigands’ or to protection rackets. No mention of lemon groves, witnesses being intimidated, or robbery and vendetta. Not even a suggestion that there might be more to learn.

  Between 1867 and 1876, Marquis Rudinì’s views on the mafia had retreated from clarity into muddle, from forthright condemnation into woolly apologia.

  Rudinì was not the only witness to spin out such verbiage in 1876. Some flatly denied that the mafia even existed. Many others talked about a ‘good mafia’ and a ‘bad mafia’, about the islanders’ proud way of taking the law into their own hands, and so on. If the mafia did exist, it was something shapeless and hard to explain to an outsider, something that Sicilians felt in their bones. Nobody could ever hope to get to know the mafia better.

  Rudinì had very good reasons for being flustered when he came before the 1876 commission of inquiry. The commission itself had been instituted in the aftermath of a scandal involving the chief of police of Palermo, a man called Giuseppe Albanese. In 1871 Albanese went on the run to avoid being arrested for arranging several murders in concert with the mafia chief of Monreale, who was presumably Turi Miceli’s successor as boss of the town. While in hiding, Police Chief Albanese was received in Rome by no less than the Prime Minister, who promised him the government’s protection. Not surprisingly there was an outcry in Sicily when Albanese was acquitted for lack of evidence some months later. Then in June 1875 further scandalous details about the police chief emerged. His favourite underworld informer led a gang of criminals who had perpetrated a series of burglaries from aristocratic palaces, from the offices of the Court of Appeal, from a pawnbroker’s, and even from the city museum. The loot was recovered in the house of a policeman who worked in Albanese’s office.

  Rudinì was profoundly implicated in the scandal since he had appointed Albanese in the first place. Rudinì had also been Interior Minister, with direct responsibility for law and order policy, when Albanese was employing the mafia to murder people in Monreale. (Albanese’s aim, once more, was to co-manage crime with the underworld elite.)

  Rudinì also had political reasons for unlearning what he knew about the mafia. As Member of Parliament for a Sicilian constituency, he was one of only a small handful of Right MPs that the island had sent to Rome in the last general election. The Right had bludgeoned Sicily to get rid of the mafia, but then hired the mafia to help in its repressive work. Now it was paying the political price for its hypocrisy and double-dealing. Rudinì was trying desperately to fit in with the new mood, but his efforts proved futile. Eight days after Rudinì’s testimony, on 18 March 1876, the Right coalition government split over the issue of railway nationalisation and the Left entered government for the first time. Rudinì was destined for a long spell in the political wilderness.

  Like the Right, the Left was a very loose coalition: its unifying themes were the desire to extend democracy and to invest more money in the country’s backward infrastructure. The Left was also more southern than the Right, and in particular more Sicilian. With the advent of the Left, Sicilian politicians gained access to power, and the Italian state finally won consent for its authority on the island. Yet among the politicians who now represented Sicily in a Left-dominated chamber were the ‘brigands’ that Rudinì had spoken of in 1867—landowners who, willingly or not, had struck a deal with the mafiosi to protect and manage their land. The mafia was now able to offer other services to its patrons: election management, for one. Once the Left was in power, the mafia’s political sponsors enjoyed purchase with central government.

  After the Bourbons, the Right. After the Right, the Left. Whether in times of revolution or in times of peace, no government could control Sicily without going through mafiosi.

  8

  A SECT WITH A LIFE OF ITS OWN: The mafia’s rituals discovered

  ON 29 FEBRUARY 1876, ELEVEN DAYS BEFORE MARQUIS RUDINÌ PUT FORWARD HIS abstruse theories about the ‘benign mafia’, the Italian government discovered the most important piece of evidence in the entire history of Sicilian organised crime. The Palermo police chief wrote to the Minister of the Interior to describe, for the first time, the initiation ritual used by mafiosi in a settlement in the Conca d’Oro called Uditore.

  Uditore was a suburban village, a borgata, of only 700–800 souls, but there had been no less than thirty-four murders there in 1874, as rival mafia factions fought for a monopoly over the lucrative business of ‘protecting’ the market gardens. The local boss was don Antonino Giammona, described by the chief of police as ‘almost completely lacking in education, but with a natural intelligence’. Another witness described him as ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’. Giammona even fancied himself as something of a poet and wrote verse in Sicilian dialect.

  He also made each of his gang’s members-to-be undergo a kind of baptism into a new, more exalted life of crime, the chief of police explained. The aspiring mafioso was taken to a secluded spot and shown into the company of Giammona and his underbosses. The recruit offered his finger or arm to be punctured with a dagger, and then dripped blood onto a small picture of a saint. The picture was then burned and its ashes scattered to signify the total obliteration of traitors, while the recruit swore eternal loyalty to the sect.

  The Police Chief of Palermo was in no doubt about how significant this find was: it utterly discredited all the waffle about the ‘benign mafia’, the mafia as an inborn Sicilian egotism.

  It shows that the maffia is not only an individual manifestation of an instinctive tendency to bully people, but is instead a sect with a life of its own, which operates in the shadows.

  The same ritual recurs throughout the history of the mafia in Sicily and North America. But the rules by which individual mafia gangs or cosche (pronounced kos-keh) live are very rarely written down. So, because they are transmitted by word of mouth, they are susceptible to minor local variations: in the wording of the oath taken by the initiate, for example. Sometimes the bottom lip was pierced, more often the trigger finger. Most cosche use a pin to draw blood, some use the thorn from a Seville orange-tree. Different figures appeared on the sacred image that was consumed by the flames, although the Madonna of the Annunciation is by far the most frequent. There
is nevertheless a strong family resemblance between all the variants. That family resemblance is the clearest possible demonstration that the mafia is not just a haughty attitude or some vague ‘solidarity in crime’, as Marquis Rudinì would try to claim. It is an organisation. And that organisation has a history—a single line of continuity that runs from the lemon groves of the Palermo hinterland to the streets of New York and beyond.

  In the months following the first unearthing of the initiation rite, news of very similar oaths arrived from elsewhere in the province of Palermo and even across the island in the province of Agrigento. Curiously, one of the cosche using these rites was discovered in the town of Canicattì, where Marquis Rudinì had his constituency.

  The resemblances between the different mafia gangs were striking. Like the Giammona crew in Uditore, the other cosche also used a coded dialogue so that mafiosi who did not know one another personally could recognise one another as brothers in crime. The dialogue began when one mafioso complained about a toothache and pointed to one of the canines in his upper jaw. The second mafioso would reply that he too had a toothache. The two would proceed to tell one another where they were when the tooth began to hurt, who was present, and so on. The ‘toothache’ signified membership of the mafia; and the references to the time and place the toothache began recalled the moment when the mafioso was initiated.