Blood Brotherhoods Page 12

  Gambino had two sons, Antonino and Salvatore. Some eighteen months earlier, on 18 June 1874, Antonino had been ambushed and killed—shot in the back from behind the wall of a lemon grove as he was on his way to spray the family’s vines with sulphur. Gambino’s other son Salvatore was about to stand trial for his brother’s murder. But this ‘fratricide’ was nothing of the sort, old man Gambino explained. The mafia, in the shape of Darky Cusimano, had killed one son and framed the other: this was its last, cunning act of vengeance against his family.

  Without needing to be told, Sangiorgi understood why Gambino had come to see him now: Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano was dead, a recent victim of the semi-permanent mafia war to control the lemon groves. The bloody end to Cusimano’s reign in the Piana dei Colli left Calogero Gambino free to tell his extraordinary story.

  A story that was a stick of political dynamite with a fizzing fuse. For old man Gambino also claimed that the police had helped the mafia arrange the fake fratricide. The national scandal surrounding former Chief of Police Albanese had reached its peak only a few months earlier. If what Gambino said was true, it would prove that the corruption had not ended with Albanese; it would prove that the mafia’s infiltration of the police in Palermo was still well-nigh systematic.

  The ‘fratricide’ plot against Gambino’s surviving son was only the climactic moment of a campaign of vengeance that stretched back over fourteen years, to the time when Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily made the island part of a unified Italian kingdom. The old man said that the mafia had originally targeted him because he was a well-to-do outsider who was not born in San Lorenzo. His son-in-law, Giuseppe Biundi, was the original source of his troubles; Biundi was the nephew of Darky’s underboss. In 1860 Biundi kidnapped and raped Gambino’s daughter to force a marriage. A few months after the wedding, Gambino’s new son-in-law stole several thousand lire from his house. The young man’s family connections made old man Gambino too afraid to report the burglary to the authorities, he said.

  Then, in 1863, Giuseppe Biundi kidnapped and murdered Gambino’s own brother. The old man could no longer keep quiet: following his tip-off to the police, Biundi and his accomplice were caught and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour.

  Sitting in Sangiorgi’s office eleven years later, Gambino explained the dread consequences of his actions.

  First the mafia persecuted me for vile reasons of economic speculation. But after what I revealed to the police, there came another, much more serious reason for turning the screw on me: personal vendetta.

  But vendetta did not arrive immediately: Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano had to wait three years, until the revolt of September 1866.

  At the outbreak of the revolt, Gambino was confidentially warned that he was in grave danger, and had to leave San Lorenzo immediately. His sons threw the family’s cash, clothes, linen, cooking implements and chickens onto a mule cart, and set off to take refuge at another farm managed by a friend of theirs. On the way, they were attacked by a party of seventeen mafiosi. A fierce gun battle followed; Salvatore Gambino was wounded in the left thigh. But both brothers knew the area well, and managed to escape over the wall of a nearby estate, abandoning the family’s possessions to be ransacked by their tormentors.

  The Palermo countryside was by then almost completely in the hands of the rebellious squads. Fearing that their chosen place of safety no longer offered sufficient protection, the Gambino family went to Resuttana, the village next to San Lorenzo in the Piana dei Colli. There they were taken in by one Salvatore Licata. It was in Salvatore Licata’s house, the following day, that the Gambinos took delivery of a package from Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano: it contained a hunk of meat from their own mare. As a mafia message, the horse flesh may not have had the cinematic flair of the decapitated stallion deployed in The Godfather, but its meaning was very similar all the same: Darky had not yet concluded his business with the Gambino family.

  Inspector Sangiorgi does not tell us what his thoughts were as he listened to old man Gambino—he was far too savvy a policeman to write those thoughts down. Yet to appreciate the full drama of what Sangiorgi was hearing, and the intrigue that he was being drawn into, we have no choice but to figure out how his mind began to work when he learned who had offered sanctuary to the beleaguered Gambinos in Resuttana in September 1866. Sangiorgi was an outsider to Sicily, a northerner. But he had been in Palermo long enough to know the baleful power of the Licatas. The very mention of the Licata name told him, more clearly than any other detail, that Gambino was hiding a crucial part of the truth.

  Salvatore Licata, aged sixty-one at the time he took in the Gambinos, was one of the most venerable and best-connected mafiosi in the Conca d’Oro.

  Like many important mafia bosses, including Turi Miceli from Monreale, Darky Cusimano from San Lorenzo, and don Antonino Giammona from Uditore, Licata had led a revolutionary squad into Palermo in 1848 and 1860. But during the 1866 revolt Licata mobilised his heavies to oppose the insurgents. They formed a countersquad. Licata, in other words, was one of the smart mafiosi who realised that he had more to lose than to gain by rebelling.

  His son Andrea was an officer in the Horse Militia, a notoriously corrupt mounted police force. His three other sons were armed robbers and extortionists who were guaranteed impunity by the family’s connections.

  Like the Licatas, and like don Antonino Giammona who was a pillar of the National Guard, many Palermo bosses broke their remaining links with revolutionary politics during the revolt of 1866.

  Old man Gambino’s friendship with the fearsome Licata clan raises the very strong suspicion that Gambino and his sons were also mafiosi. Several aspects of his story stretched credulity too far. He was asking Inspector Sangiorgi to believe that he was entirely an innocent victim. Fear alone, according to Gambino, had kept him from going to the law when persecuted by Darky, even though that persecution had been going on for nearly a decade and a half. The way he described his murdered son Antonino was also suspicious.

  My son Antonino was a young man who was full of courage. He had too much respect for himself to lose his composure and allow his enemies, and his family’s enemies, to assume too much familiarity with him. That is why Darky and his allies were constantly worried, afraid that my son had in mind to take out his revenge against them.

  A man of bravado and self-respect who would not stand for being bullied. A ‘benign maffioso’, to use Marquis Rudinì’s term. This is how the mafia likes to represent itself to the outside world.

  The conclusion forming in Sangiorgi’s mind was inexorable: old man Gambino and his two sons were not being persecuted by the mafia, they were participants in a struggle for power within the mafia. It was only when they faced final defeat in that struggle that old man Gambino got his lawyer to take him to the police. Sangiorgi was to be his instrument of revenge against his former comrades; turning to the state was a vendetta of last resort.

  Fear must have honed Sangiorgi’s concentration as he listened to the rest of the story.

  Once again, after sending the hunk of horseflesh to old man Gambino, Darky Cusimano was forced to postpone his campaign against the Gambino family. When the revolt of September 1866 was subdued there was a brutal crackdown by the authorities. Fearing that they had exposed themselves with their open assault on the Gambinos, Cusimano’s people made peace overtures. Emissaries approached Gambino, who was still living with countersquad leader Salvatore Licata, to propose what Darky termed a ‘spiritual kinship’: two of his lieutenants were to become godfathers to Gambino’s grandchildren.

  Reluctantly—according to his own very selective narrative of events—old man Gambino agreed to the proposal, and decided not to report the attack he had suffered to the authorities. Much more likely, the ‘spiritual kinship’ was in reality an alliance between mafia bloodlines.

  In Sicily, and in much of the southern Italian mainland, a godfather is called a compare, literally a ‘co-father’. Comparatico (‘co-fatherhood�
��) was a way of cementing a family’s important friendships, of extending the blood bond further out into society. Often a poor peasant would ask a wealthy and powerful man to become ‘co-father’ to his child as a sign of deference and loyalty. But ever since the days of old man Gambino and ‘Darky’ Cusimano, mafiosi too have taken advantage of comparatico: senior bosses establish ‘spiritual kinships’ as a way of building their following within the sect.

  The Gambino family’s enforced stay with Salvatore Licata during the 1866 revolt produced another intriguing development: old man Gambino’s son Salvatore married one of Licata’s daughters.

  Naturally Gambino did not say as much to Sangiorgi, but this marriage was in all probability as political as the ‘spiritual kinship’ with Darky Cusimano: it bound the Gambinos firmly into the Licata clan. Mafia bosses in more recent and better-documented times have used marriages in exactly the same way that the crowned heads of Europe did for centuries: to end or prevent wars, to forge military alliances, to earn money and prestige, and to secure their power and wealth down the generations.

  Sangiorgi was learning that, through ‘co-fatherhood’ and marriage, the bosses of the Conca d’Oro were developing a dynastic strategy. Although they were profoundly immersed in short-term mafia politics, in the blood-letting and alliance building that are a constant in the mafia’s world, they were also thinking for the long term, trying to project their power into the future. Mafia patriarchs shaped their families to meet the peculiar needs of their business in a way that made their behaviour very distinct from other Sicilians. (Contrary to a widespread stereotype, in Sicily at this time the nuclear family was dominant, rather than the extended family.)

  Calogero Gambino’s story tells us that, where women and marriage were concerned, the difference between early camorristi and early mafiosi was striking and very important. Mafiosi used their wives and daughters as political pawns and by doing so built their illicit gains into patrimonies. Camorristi, by contrast, consorted with prostitutes and spent money as soon as they had stolen it.

  Marc Monnier (as always the Swiss hotelier is one of the most insightful sources on the Honoured Society of Naples) tells us that the average camorrista’s wife was ‘a power in her own right’ who had the authority to collect protection racket payments.

  Even the toughest among the common people would tremble before the petticoats of these female hoods. Everyone knew that one day their husbands would leave prison and, cudgel in hand, visit reluctant payers to demand an explanation for the outstanding debts.

  Such camorriste also ensured that their children ‘made themselves respected right from the cradle’. So the camorra was trying to use its women and to think to the future too. But they were not as strategic, either in their use of marriage as a dynasty-building tool, or in their preservation of family life from the potentially destabilising effects of contact with prostitution.

  The early crime bosses of Naples almost invariably had pimping on their criminal records, whereas profiting from the sex trade was notably absent from the biographies of the Sicilian mafia’s first bosses. Palermo certainly had its pimps, known by the revolting nickname of ricottari—literally ‘ricotta cheese makers’. But Turi Miceli, don Antonino Giammona and the other mafia chieftains of the 1860s and 1870s never had anything to do with the ricottari. In the city of Palermo, just as in Naples, many prostitutes and their pimps could be seen wearing the serpentine facial scars that were the sex trade’s ugly signature. But just outside Palermo, among the lemon groves where the mafia dominated, the sfregio, or disfiguring razor slash, was all but unknown.

  Cosa Nostra today forbids its members to profit from prostitution because, as murdered anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone explained, they have to ensure that their womenfolk ‘are not humiliated in their own social environment’. A disaffected woman, as the bearer of gruesome family secrets, is a great danger to the organisation.

  It seems that it was always thus: the Sicilian mafia of the 1860s may have brutalised and used women domestically but it did not humiliate them publicly—as any involvement with prostitution would have done—because it needed them; it needed them to keep quiet, breed sons and educate those sons in the ways of honour.

  It is noticeable that no female personality in Sicily earned the upper world fame or underworld status that surrounded some of the women in the early camorra’s orbit: like la Sangiovannara and her armed female band, or the brothel keepers who won the title of matrona annurrata—‘honoured madam’. It seems that the mafia’s women wielded less overt power because, in their domestic role, they were more important to the organisation. The mafia’s iron strategic control over women is a vital secret of its extraordinary resilience over time. A resilience that the Honoured Society of Naples, with its persistent weakness for the short-term profits of pimping, would ultimately prove unable to match.

  Old man Gambino’s tale was moving towards its conclusion. The ‘spiritual kinship’ between the Gambinos and Darky Cusimano held for six years. Then, on 17 December 1872, the Gambino brothers were once more ambushed in the Piana dei Colli. Following an initial volley of shots, they fought the six assailants hand-to-hand. Again the brothers escaped through the lemon groves. Despite receiving a head wound, Antonino Gambino managed to wrestle a rifle away from one of the attackers.

  The Gambinos knew who had waylaid them: they recognised all six attackers. Predictably, five of them were Darky’s men. Less predictably, and much more worryingly, a mafioso called Giuseppe ‘Thanks be to God’ Riccobono was also part of the firing party. Riccobono was son-in-law to Antonino Giammona, the poet-capo of Uditore. What this meant to old man Gambino was that his family now faced the combined wrath of two mafia factions based in different borgate: their old enemies the Cusimano group from San Lorenzo; but now also the Giammona group from Uditore. Gambino referred to these factions as ‘parties’ or ‘associations’. Today we would refer to them as mafia Families.

  Yet at the same time that the attack revealed a worrying new alliance ranged against the Gambinos, it also offered them a potentially devastating weapon against their enemies: the rifle that Antonino Gambino had captured. Here was concrete proof of the attackers’ identity—as long as the Gambinos could find the right person in law enforcement to offer that proof to.

  Still pretending to Sangiorgi that he was an innocent victim of mafia persecution, old man Gambino explained that he turned to the Licatas, his dynastic allies, to make the best use of the rifle captured from Darky Cusimano’s men.

  But what seemed like a smart move only exposed the Gambinos’ isolation even more cruelly. The senior police connected to the Licatas ignored the rifle. Much worse than that, they made moves that suggested to old man Gambino that they were going to try and frame him for stealing it.

  The Gambinos were now being targeted by the three most powerful mafia cosche in the Piana dei Colli. Their protection, the web of ‘spiritual kinships’ and marriage pacts, had been torn apart, isolating the family completely. Eighteen months later, at dawn on 18 June 1874, the lethal consequences of that isolation hit home, when Antonino Gambino was shot dead.

  As Sangiorgi listened, the old man described his response to his son’s death in tones that were both genuinely moving and creepily manipulative. When news of the murder reached him, grimly certain that Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano had accomplished his vendetta, Gambino hobbled as fast as he could to embrace the bleeding corpse. He then sat holding his son for hours.

  After a while, Darky himself appeared. Leaning over the corpse, he roughly pushed back an eyelid, turned to the distraught father and told him that there was nothing more to be done.

  Some time later the police arrived in the person of Inspector Matteo Ferro, Sangiorgi’s predecessor as inspector in the Castel Molo district, and the very man who had defined Darky as ‘an individual completely devoted to law and order’.

  By this time, Gambino was ‘crying out as if he was obsessed’. He heard Inspector Ferro tell him to
pull himself together, and felt Darky’s hands try to tug him to his feet. Gambino scrambled away from them, yelling ‘Get back! Don’t touch me!’ He then listened, in rage and despair, as Inspector Ferro asked him if he could ‘shed any light’ on the murder. Of course, with the mafioso who ordered the killing looking on, he could say nothing in reply.

  Inspector Ferro left old man Gambino to his grief and went to the nearby villa that was ‘rented’ by Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano. He was joined by the sergeant of the local Carabinieri who, as we know, was also a regular guest of Darky’s.

  At that point, Calogero Gambino’s other son Salvatore also came to weep for the murdered Antonino. Word of Salvatore’s arrival quickly reached the mafiosi and police in Darky’s villa. At which point, the Carabiniere sergeant came out and promptly arrested Salvatore for killing his own brother. The mafia’s fratricide plot had been set in motion—a ‘double vendetta’, the old man called it.

  Many times, through forty-eight years of service to the cause of law and order, Sangiorgi would make pleas for promotion. Many times, his superiors would give him glowing references: brave, able and tactful, they called him. These were precisely the attributes that he had to call on during his first months as a mafia-fighter when Calogero Gambino hobbled into his office on his lawyer’s arm.

  Brave. Sangiorgi knew that, even though Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano was now dead, the investigation implicated many other violent and well-connected mafiosi.

  Able. Sangiorgi needed all his investigative skills to verify what old man Gambino had told him. He quickly ascertained that the old man’s story tallied perfectly with the facts.

  And, most of all, tactful. The case took Sangiorgi deeper and deeper into the sinister nexus between the state and the criminal sect that had brought death to the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro.