Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  Sangiorgi found damning evidence about the Carabiniere sergeant who emerged directly from Darky’s villa to arrest Salvatore Gambino. His source within the Carabinieri explained how the mafia had entrapped the sergeant by using a two-pronged strategy it deployed frequently against law enforcement. Cusimano and other mafia bosses first buttered the sergeant up: they took him out into the countryside on what Sangiorgi referred to as ‘frequent tavulidde’. The inspector had evidently picked up some Sicilian dialect during his time on the island. A tavulidda was (and is) a languorous al fresco lunch at which men bond over roast goat, artichokes, macco (broad bean purée), and wine as dark as treacle. The mafia was introducing the sergeant to a bit of local culture.

  Mafia morality. A very rare Cosa Nostra rulebook from 2007. Among the regulations crammed onto a single, badly typed page are: ‘Respect your wife’ and ‘The following people cannot become part of Cosa Nostra: Anyone who has a close relative in the police. Anyone who has emotional infidelities in their family. Anyone who behaves very badly or does not keep to moral values.’

  The second prong involved the mafia’s womenfolk, who sidled up to the sergeant’s wife and told her

  In the Piana dei Colli, any woman who likes to keep out of all sorts of bother needs to stay close to her husband.

  An oblique threat, but a blood-freezingly clear one all the same. Over a century and a half this form of wheedling intimidation has done more to protect the mafia than any other form of corruption in its wide repertoire. There is no better way to incapacitate the state than to nullify the effectiveness of its operatives on the ground.

  Sangiorgi’s investigations then concentrated on the key prosecution witness in the fratricide case. Standing guard not far from the point where Antonino Gambino was murdered was a soldier who heard the shots and ran to the scene. When he arrived, he saw two men standing over the victim, who was still emitting his dying groans. The two men took to their heels. But the soldier got a good view of one of them, who was wearing a straw hat with a black ribbon round it. Later he picked Salvatore Gambino out of an identity parade and said that he was the man in the straw hat.

  Old man Gambino told Sangiorgi that the witness was lying, and that the identity parade was fixed. Sangiorgi soon found evidence to back up the old man’s accusations. He discovered that, when Darky Cusimano was shot dead, a receipt for a 200 lire loan was found on his body. The beneficiary of the loan was the commander of an army platoon stationed in San Lorenzo—the same platoon that the key witness came from. The loan made the framing of Salvatore Gambino look very much like one token in a murky exchange of favours between the mafia boss and the platoon commander. Sangiorgi could add the army to the long list of organisations that had been infiltrated by the mafia of the Conca d’Oro.

  Tact, indeed.

  Inspector Sangiorgi now faced the delicate task of telling the magistrates what he knew. If he exposed the Gambino case as a mafia plot, he risked trampling on some very important toes inside the Palace of Justice, because the ‘fratricide’ prosecution was already scheduled to come before the Court of Assizes.

  When Sangiorgi approached the magistrates he received a reassuring response: they told him he was right to let them know, and asked him to submit a full report. In the meantime, the fratricide case kept being adjourned because the soldier who was supposed to have recognised Salvatore Gambino in the straw hat twice failed to appear as a witness.

  During this delay, there was a change in the political weather.

  In March 1876 the Right fell from government, and the first Left administration, including Sicilian politicians, took office in Rome. A new Prefect was sent to Palermo, and the Right’s senior personnel were rapidly purged, irrespective of their competence and honesty. The chief of police under whom Sangiorgi had worked was sent to Tuscany.

  Sangiorgi was now exposed: he, more than any officer in Sicily, had been in the front line of the struggle against the mafia; he had even discovered the mafia’s secret initiation ritual. Without the backing of his superiors, his career, and possibly his life, were in danger. The corrupt elements within the Palermo police were already lobbying against him, pouring poison in the new Prefect’s ear. In July 1876 the Prefect sent an urgent telegram to the Minister of the Interior.

  Above all, I beg you, get rid of young Sangiorgi for me. He is able, but a schemer and gossiper who boasts that he has protectors in the Ministry and in Parliament. I prefer timewasters to cops like him.

  Sangiorgi put in a transfer request that was quickly granted: in August 1876 he took up a posting in Syracuse, the least crime-ridden province of Sicily, in the opposite corner of the island to Palermo. The mafia was both very well informed of this development and delighted by it: even before confirmation of the transfer came through, the news was trumpeted to the Piana dei Colli by L’Amico del Popolo, whose editor had been spotted consorting with Darky in his ‘rented’ villa. The mafia’s rumour mill spread the falsehood that Sangiorgi had been moved for disciplinary reasons.

  While Sangiorgi was in Syracuse the Gambino case dragged on in perfunctory hearings, through 1876 and into 1877. Old man Gambino got the chance to tell his story directly to the magistrates. But the new atmosphere in Palermo began to turn the case against Sangiorgi. Some of the witnesses he had interviewed lost confidence and changed their stories. Nothing was done to verify whether the soldier had really seen Salvatore Gambino in a straw hat at the murder scene. Corrupt cops, whom Sangiorgi had removed for incompetence or collusion with the mafia, seemed to get their fingers into the case again. As Sangiorgi noted wistfully

  If I were fatalistic, I would regrettably have to admit that an evil spirit, an arcane and pernicious influence overcame all the procedures I went through to investigate the deductions I had based on old man Gambino’s evidence.

  Inspector Sangiorgi had yet to experience just how pernicious that ‘evil spirit’ could be.

  A few more months passed and once again the political weather around Sangiorgi changed. The Left found that it was not as easy to enforce the law in Sicily as it had been led to believe during fifteen years of noisy Sicilian protests against the hated Right’s repressive measures. The kidnap of the English sulphur-mining company manager in November 1876 meant that something had to be done. So early in 1877 the Left reversed its policy and sent yet another new Prefect to Palermo to crack the whip. Across Sicily, a vast new anti-mafia campaign—as big as anything under the Right—was set in motion.

  Given this transformation in the Left’s official attitude to organised crime in Sicily, Inspector Sangiorgi was too valuable an asset to be parked in peaceful Syracuse. Early in 1877 he was reassigned to the province of Agrigento, home turf of yet another recently discovered mafia sect. He was given a pay raise and recommended for a decoration. Sangiorgi was back in the front line, and soon renewed his ‘open fight against the mafia’—and against one mafioso in particular: Pietro De Michele, the boss of the town of Burgio, near Agrigento, where Sangiorgi was now stationed. De Michele insisted on being called ‘Baron’, although he seems to have had no real claim on the title. His CV displayed the mafioso’s typical combination of crime and opportunistic political thuggery. More than that, it showed that the province of Palermo was not the only place where Men of Honour had used sexual violence as a shortcut to wealth and position, and indeed that there were close business links between mafiosi from different provinces.

  In 1847 De Michele kidnapped and raped the daughter of a rich landowner who had refused his advances. But the rape backfired. De Michele’s reputation was so bad that the girl’s family refused to repair the damage to her honour by conceding a wedding: family disgrace was far better than a marriage to a known hood. But De Michele would not accept defeat. In 1848, he allied himself to the revolution of that year, and took advantage of it to take back the girl, forcibly marry her and rob her family of a large dowry. He served a short time in jail after the authority of the Bourbon state was restored; and he was suspected of many
murders after being released.

  The ‘Baron’ joined the revolution again in 1860 when Garibaldi invaded. At some point during the upheaval, all the town’s police and judicial documents were burned.

  When Sicily became part of Italy, De Michele went on to manage the cattle rustlers and bandits who operated between the provinces of Palermo, Agrigento and Trapani in the 1860s and 1870s. He armed them, fed them and hid them from the authorities. Most importantly, he used his mafia connections to sell their stolen cattle in far distant cities: animals robbed near Palermo would end up butchered in Trapani, where they could never be traced.

  This was an exceptionally lucrative traffic. By the time Sangiorgi caught up with De Michele, he was the richest landowner in town and completely controlled the local council. The fearless inspector showed no deference to De Michele. Sangiorgi took away his firearms licence, placed him under police surveillance, and ordered his arrest when he went on the run. Baron or not, the boss of Burgio was to be subject to the law like everyone else.

  The bad news about the Gambino fratricide case arrived soon after 28 August 1877. In Agrigento, Inspector Sangiorgi read the report on the long-delayed trial in the Gazzetta di Palermo. It is not hard to imagine his emotions as he did so. Disappointment first: the court had not believed old man Gambino’s story; Salvatore Gambino was found guilty of murdering his brother and sentenced to hard labour for life. Then resignation: the outcome was not a surprise.

  Sangiorgi’s eyes then moved down the page to read the Gazzetta di Palermo’s admiring paraphrase of the prosecution’s summing up. As they did, his heart began to thump with shock.

  The honourable magistrate then had extremely grave things to say about the behaviour of a Police Inspector, a certain Ermanno Sangiorgi. Because he wanted to take advantage of the position that he still undeservedly holds, Sangiorgi tried to throw justice off its course by denying that Salvatore Gambino had committed the crime, and claiming instead that the culprit was someone or other called Darky Cusimano.

  This is not the first case that shows us that there are police officers who have become the maffia’s protectors. They make a big show of wanting to strike at some other, hypothetical maffia; and to do so they contrive investigations that have no basis in fact.

  Then the prosecuting magistrate said that Sangiorgi had deceived, mystified and duped justice by trying to find a way to give someone else the blame. On the eve of the first hearings Sangiorgi haughtily sent a report to the Chief Prosecutor’s Office that made out that Gambino was not guilty of his brother’s murder.

  Sangiorgi’s dishonest conduct (the word is the prosecutor’s) was motivated by his desire to pay back the dirty services that Calogero Gambino had provided to the police.

  Thus, in effect, the prosecuting magistrate’s eloquent speech to the court was making two separate accusations: the first against Salvatore Gambino, and the second against Ermanno Sangiorgi who has made himself into the maffia’s protector. He signs off gun licences for people who have police cautions hanging over them and he releases dangerous criminals from police surveillance.

  Any policing system that is represented by men like Sangiorgi is absolutely pitiful. This is government banditry—no more and no less. It is the police maffia that has imposed itself on the law.

  The presiding judge used the prosecutor’s own solemn words to bring his highly fluent précis of the case to a conclusion: ‘If the jury award the accused a verdict of not guilty, it will amount to a crown of plaudits awarded to this corrupt police officer for the dirty services performed by Calogero Gambino.’

  Dishonest. Corrupt. Deceiver of justice. Broker of dirty services. Protector of the maffia. There was an unnervingly symmetrical irony to the charges against Sangiorgi, as if the judicial system and the Gazzetta di Palermo were mocking his ‘open fight’ against the mafia. It was alleged that he had indulged in precisely the kind of shady policing that he had overturned when he first came to the Castel Molo district. That he was precisely the kind of double-dealing cop that he had expelled from among his subordinates.

  Police like Albanese and Ferro had used mafiosi by siding with the winners in the underworld’s internal power struggles; they had co-managed crime with the victorious mafia bosses. What Sangiorgi had done with old man Gambino was very different: he had sought to adopt the mafia’s losers so as to attack the very basis of the sect’s authority. The difference between these two approaches was as clear as the difference between wrong and right.

  Yet together, the judiciary and the Gazzetta di Palermo had obliterated any distinction. The new villain of the story, Inspector Sangiorgi, came out as just another scheming northern cop. Meanwhile, the real mafia, the mafia of Darky Cusimano, of the poet-boss Giammona, of Salvatore Licata and his sons, the mafia whose blood-spattered victims Sangiorgi had seen lying among the lemon trees, was dismissed as a ‘hypothetical maffia’, a mere pretext, a fiction dreamed up by a policeman in the cynical pursuit of power and influence.

  Inspector Ermanno Sangiorgi was in very serious trouble.

  The mortifying allegations made against Inspector Sangiorgi in the Palermo Court of Assizes were bound to reach the ears of his superiors. Dispatches were duly sent, reports were requested and collated: the Gambino case became the Sangiorgi case. The Minister of the Interior asked the Minister of Justice to make inquiries. On 12 October 1877 the Minister of Justice gave his verdict: ‘the accusations against Inspector Sangiorgi are, alas, true’. Sangiorgi now faced disgrace, dismissal and possibly jail.

  The principal witness against him, the man who investigated the case on behalf of the Minister of Justice, was also the magistrate to whom Sangiorgi had turned when Calogero Gambino’s testimony first raised such grave doubts about the ‘fratricide’: Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena—the same Carlo Morena who just a few months earlier had dismissed the theory that there could be any kind of ‘confederation’ between the different mafia cells across Sicily. Carlo Morena, a man with responsibility for supervising the justice system across the whole of Sicily, was exacting a vendetta on behalf of the mafia against Ermanno Sangiorgi.

  On behalf of one mafioso in particular: ‘Baron’ Pietro De Michele, the Burgio boss. Chief Prosecutor Morena knew all about the Baron’s past, but spent his credibility in spadefuls to defend him from Sangiorgi. De Michele had made a few mistakes in the past, Morena reported. But now he was a friend of the law and the government, who had become a victim of political persecution. To accuse the Baron of raping his future wife back in 1847 was unfair: the families had made peace afterwards. So the accusation of rape was based on an ignorance of Sicilian customs, Morena argued.

  Kidnap and rape of this kind constitute a primitive phenomenon that occasionally crops up even in the most civilised societies. Sometimes there are no bad consequences arising from it. Indeed sometimes the very family who were supposedly harmed by the rape actually approve of it by agreeing to a subsequent marriage. Society readily approves of such arrangements. When that happens, the state should forget about the whole affair.

  Morena went on to explain that the mafia was a local tradition of the same kind as kidnapping and raping young girls, albeit a much vaguer one.

  The word mafia is such an ill-defined concept, which is spoken much more often than its meaning is understood.

  Thanks to Chief Prosecutor Morena, the order to arrest capomafia ‘Baron’ De Michele was rescinded.

  Of course Morena knew perfectly well that the mafia was no ‘ill-defined concept’. It was a secret criminal organisation whose influence stretched right across western Sicily. At the lowest level, the network linking the local mafia gangs was held together by the long-distance business of banditry and cattle rustling. Sangiorgi discovered that the same cattle rustlers who were sheltered by De Michele were also friends with Palermo mafiosi like don Antonino Giammona, the Licatas, and Darky Cusimano. At an intermediate level, the mafia sought to control the market for buying and renting land, which had its hub in Palermo. At the
highest level, the mafia network’s strength came from the favours it could call in from ‘friends of the friends’ in politics and the legal system. Favours like persecuting policemen who had the temerity to mount an open fight against organised crime and the foolish courage to discover the Honoured Society’s secret initiation ceremony.

  There was only one Sicilian mafia.

  On 18 October 1877, the Minister of the Interior wrote to Sangiorgi’s boss, the Prefect of Agrigento, relaying the details of the case exactly as it had been set out in the Gazzetta di Palermo. Sangiorgi could and perhaps should have been prosecuted, the Minister explained. But he was still an important witness in some outstanding cases. Did the Prefect consider that a severe reprimand was sufficient punishment for his behaviour?

  Only then did Sangiorgi’s luck change. The Prefect of Agrigento urged the Minister to hear the other side of the story. Sangiorgi rapidly put together a long and precise account of the ‘fratricide’ affair. This is the documentation I have drawn on to tell his story here.

  The Prefect backed up Sangiorgi’s report by telling the Minister that Sangiorgi was one of his most intelligent and energetic officers, one who had gone beyond the call of duty to fight organised crime and to bring order to the province of Agrigento. He even recommended the supposed ‘protector of the mafia’ for a promotion.

  Meanwhile the Minister of the Interior also received alarming reports on Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena. In addition to defending the mafia boss De Michele, Morena had been sending urgent memos to magistrates around western Sicily, digging up every technicality possible to secure the release of mafiosi subject to police surveillance and ‘enforced residence’. The Minister pronounced himself ‘profoundly shocked’ by Morena’s behaviour.

  The Interior Ministry now held a compelling body of evidence. The saga of Sangiorgi’s dealings with old man Gambino exposed gangland infiltration not only of the police, but also of the magistrature; it provided new evidence that the different cosche that used the same rituals were actually part of one criminal brotherhood; it made for the most vivid picture of the mafia yet assembled by any police investigation. For a moment, it seemed that someone in power in Rome was going to take notice.