Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  After Crispi the clampdown on the labour movement was relaxed, but politics continued on its reactionary course. For the next few years conservative politicians would talk openly of putting Italy’s slow and hesitant advance towards democracy into a brusque reverse. In the spring of 1898 a hike in food prices caused rioting. Cannon fire resounded in the streets of Milan as troops mowed down demonstrators. Another new Prime Minister then embarked on a long parliamentary battle to pass legislation restricting press and political freedoms.

  In the summer of 1900 a Tuscan anarchist called Gaetano Bresci returned to Italy from his home in Patterson, New Jersey; he was bent on revenge for the cannonades of 1898. On 20 July he set a suitably violent seal on the most turbulent decade in Italy’s short history when he went to Monza and assassinated the King.

  By that time, though, Italy was already striding into a very different age. An overhauled banking system, including the newly established Bank of Italy, helped the economy revive. The north-west was industrialising rapidly: in Turin, FIAT started making cars in 1899; in Milan, Pirelli started making car tyres in 1901. Over the next few years Italian cities would fill with noise and light: automobiles, electric trams, department stores, bars, cinemas, and soccer stadia. In politics, reform was the order of the day. More people became literate and thereby earned the right to vote. The Socialist Party, though still small, was strong enough to bargain for concessions in parliament. In 1913, Italy would hold its first general election in which, by law, all adult men were entitled to vote.

  A surge in newspaper readerships was another symptom of the new vitality. In 1900, the year that Bresci shot the King, the Corriere della Sera had a print run of 75,000 copies. By 1913, it was up to 350,000. So the Italy that followed the King of Aspromonte’s trial in 1902 was a country undergoing a media revolution. Indeed all three of Italy’s Honoured Societies now had to test their aptitude for brutality, networking and misinformation in a much more democratic society—one where public opinion shaped the political decisions that in turn shaped criminal destinies.

  The Neapolitan camorra would not survive the challenge.

  But in the case of the Sicilian mafia, the new media era made no more impact than the puff of a photographer’s flash powder: it illuminated a crepuscular landscape of corruption and violence for an instant, and then plunged it back into a darkness deeper than before.

  The Sicilian mafia dramas of the early twentieth century all arose from the single most sinister moment of the banking crisis of the early 1890s, a murder that would remain the most notorious of mafia crimes for the best part of the next century. Notorious partly because the victim was one of Sicily’s outstanding citizens, and partly because the killers got away with it, but mostly because the resultant scandal, known as the Notarbartolo affair, briefly exposed the mafia’s influence in the highest reaches of Sicilian society.

  Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo di San Giovanni fought with Garibaldi in 1860 but he was constitutionally averse to violence. In an age when questions of honour were often settled with swords at sunrise, Notarbartolo was only ever drawn into one duel: it lasted three hours because he only fought defensively. He was a devoted family man who wrote his wife short, tender notes every day of their life together. Notarbartolo was also a public servant of rare dedication. As Mayor of Palermo between 1873 and 1876, he tackled corruption. In 1876 he began a long stint as Director General of the Bank of Sicily, where he made himself unpopular with a policy of tight credit. The reputation for rigour that Notarbartolo earned at the Bank of Sicily would lead directly to his atrocious murder.

  Notarbartolo’s fine record found its malevolent shadow in the career of don Raffaele Palizzolo, whom the police would define as ‘the mafia’s patron in the Palermo countryside, especially to the south and east of the city’. Palizzolo’s fiefdom centred on the notorious borgate of Villabate and Ciaculli, where he owned and leased land, and where his friends exerted their characteristic control over the citrus fruit groves and coordinated the activities of bandits and cattle rustlers.

  Emanuele Notarbartolo, the honest Sicilian banker stabbed to death by the mafia in 1893.

  In the 1870s don Raffaele began amassing a fortune by installing himself in town and provincial councils and on the boards of countless charities and quangos (quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations). When Notarbartolo was mayor of Palermo, he caught Palizzolo palming money from a fund that stockpiled flour for the poor.

  Palizzolo was a master of what Italians now call sottogoverno—literally ‘under government’—meaning the bartering of shady favours for political influence. Come election time he would tour the area on horseback, flanked by the mafia bosses and their heavies. Indeed the Villabate mafia would often disguise their sect summit as political meetings in support of their patron. In 1882 Palizzolo was elected to parliament.

  At the Bank of Sicily, Emanuele Notarbartolo also found Palizzolo in his path. As Director General, Notarbartolo was supposed to be supervised in his work by a General Council of forty-eight dignitaries from local government, chambers of commerce and the like. Palizzolo was one of them, as were other notorious shysters linked to organised crime, and a number of businessmen with a manifest conflict of interests: they were among the people that owed money to the bank. No wonder Notarbartolo’s policy of tight credit was unpopular.

  In 1882 Notarbartolo was kidnapped by four men dressed as soldiers, and only released on payment of a ransom. Acting on a tip-off, the police found the kidnappers hiding out in any empty house. The ransom was never recovered, although we can make a good guess at who took a hefty share of it: both the site of the kidnapping and the kidnappers’ hideout lay on territory controlled by the same Villabate mafiosi who made Palizzolo the guest of honour at their banquets.

  In 1888 Notarbartolo found himself working alongside his great enemy day-to-day when Palizzolo was voted onto the Bank of Sicily’s board. The smouldering confrontation between the Director General and the General Council exploded when Italy’s building boom collapsed. Notarbartolo tried to persuade ministers to have the Bank of Sicily’s constitution amended so as to lessen the power of the General Council and give the Director General the power to respond to the credit crisis. But he was out-lobbied by Palizzolo et al, and lost his job in February 1890. His victorious enemies then tried to withhold his pension.

  With Emanuele Notarbartolo out of the way, the bank’s money was used illegally to inflate the share price of Italy’s biggest shipping company, Navigazione Generale Italiana, or NGI. NGI’s major shareholder happened to be the wealthiest man in Sicily. Who happened to be a great supporter of the dominant politician of the moment, the Sicilian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. Who happened to have a close ally in the Bank of Sicily’s new Director General. Who happened to have a pot of NGI shares of his own.

  Palizzolo greased the cogs of this mechanism. As a Member of Parliament, don Raffaele lobbied hard, as he had always done, for NGI’s cause. As a member of the Bank of Sicily’s board, he approved the NGI share operation. As a member of the mafia, he took some of the bank’s cash to buy more of those artificially boosted NGI shares, and made generous loans to friends of his who exported lemons and oranges for a living.

  Then, late in 1892, the sleaze at the Banca Romana (the bank that was forging its own money) was exposed in parliament. Credit institutions across the country were wobbling. The calls for a clean-up in the banking system were now too loud to ignore. Emanuele Notarbartolo was strongly rumoured to be about to return to the Bank of Sicily with a mandate to crack down on corruption once more. And if Notarbartolo regained his job as Director General of the Bank of Sicily, he would surely expose a fraud that implicated the most powerful economic and political interest group on the island—and linked them squarely with Raffaele Palizzolo and the mafia.

  At dusk on 1 February 1893 Emanuele Notarbartolo was stabbed twenty-seven times on a train heading for Palermo; his body was thrown out onto the track.

  Months la
ter, Notarbartolo’s wife was seen, still in tears, as she burned the hundreds of notes he had sent her. While she wept, and Italy descended into a financial, social and political crisis that threatened to bring the young country to its knees, the mafia and its accomplices quietly covered the murderers’ tracks, burying the story in artful layers of deceit and obfuscation.

  The reason we know all about the shenanigans at the Bank of Sicily, indeed the reason why Emanuele Notarbartolo’s murder ever came to court at all, was because of the grief-stricken determination of his son Leopoldo, a young naval officer who was a man in his father’s mould.

  Right from the outset, no one seriously doubted that Emanuele Notarbartolo was a victim of the mafia, although the mafia had never killed anyone of such status before. (Nor would it do so again until the 1970s.) Right from the outset, the authorities heard the strong rumours that the Honourable don Raffaele Palizzolo had orchestrated the murder. Leopoldo Notarbartolo, well aware of Palizzolo’s long history of run-ins with his father, had more reasons than anyone to suspect the notorious MP of being involved. Yet nothing was done. In 1894, just over a year after Notarbartolo was found lying on the trackside, a senior magistrate wrote to the Minister of Justice to explain the reasons why no one had yet been charged.

  This failure can be attributed to the following two causes: first, the high mafia planned the murder long in advance, and carried it out with the greatest of care; second, the authorities receive no help from society, because all the witnesses are either reticent or afraid.

  Knowing what we know about the mafia’s history so far, we can also add a third cause that the magistrate neglected to mention: the police and judiciary in Palermo were profoundly infiltrated.

  Leopoldo Notarbartolo witnessed the scandalously lax handling of the investigation and began to make inquiries of his own. He was one of many Italians whose quest for truth and justice was a long and solitary one: it took over a decade out of his life. Like most such quests, Notarbartolo’s was a tale of meticulous endeavour: sifting through his father’s papers, interviewing reluctant witnesses, travelling far and wide to check dubious alibis. And like most such quests, it was also a search for political help.

  Leopoldo Notarbartolo knew that his only chance of exposing the high-level intrigues that had led to his father’s death, and protected the murderers from the law, would come if he exploited high-level contacts of his own. Sometimes, in Italy, the forces for good have to operate through the same personal channels as the forces for evil.

  When Francesco Crispi—the Prime Minister close to the NGI shipping lobby—fell from power following Italy’s humiliating defeat at the battle of Adowa in March 1896, his successor as Prime Minister was another Sicilian: someone that Leopoldo thought he might just be able to talk to; someone who has already had a part to play in the history of the mafia.

  Antonio Starabba, Marquis of Rudinì, was the mayor of Palermo who made his name by defending the Royal Palace during the Palermo revolt of September 1866. Standing side-by-side with Rudinì during the siege was Emanuele Notarbartolo—indeed Notarbartolo had carved the mould from which the Royal Palace’s defenders made musket balls out of lead piping. We last saw Rudinì as he stood on the edge of the political wilderness, desperately expounding his baffling theory about the ‘benign maffia’ to the parliamentary inquiry of 1876. By the 1890s Rudinì’s trim blonde beard had become broad, grizzled and forked. The financial and political crises of the day had pushed Italy rightwards, and in doing so had revived the Marquis’s fortunes.

  Leopoldo Notarbartolo had few illusions about Rudinì: ‘slimy’ was the adjective he used to describe him. In truth Rudinì was now so powerful he could rely on someone else to wade through the slime on his behalf. His constituency campaign manager at the time was one Leonardo Avellone, a local mayor. In 1892 a Sicilian newspaper gave an unforgettable portrait of Avellone.

  Commendatore Avellone is a well-to-do man who is nearing sixty. He is chubby, friendly, with the cunning of a peasant and the polite, helpful nature of a Jesuit priest. But he is also vengeful and treacherous with everyone, especially his friends. He is ignorant, but quick-witted and equally adept in doing good as in doing harm. He makes friends with the virtuous and the wicked alike, without the slightest distinction. He is a father figure not just to his numerous children, but also to his relatives and hangers-on who, in his shadow, exercise an absolute tyrannical dominion in the Termini area. He always strikes the pose of a man of order who is extremely conservative, a classic figure of the Right. On occasion, he has given the police some excellent assistance. But then at other times he has had no scruples about helping or setting free criminals of all kinds who are either employed by him or have placed themselves under his protection.

  Avellone, in short, was the very archetype of a mafia boss; he was happy to take care of local business—both legal and criminal—while his sponsor Rudinì dealt with grand affairs of state in Rome. Avellone did very well out of Rudinì’s return to the forefront of Italian politics. He acquired a decisive influence over everything that moved in his little realm: from giving out licences to sell lottery tickets and tobacco to awarding government positions and public sector jobs; he was even said to control policing policy. This then, was what Rudinì had meant by a ‘benign maffioso’ back in 1876. There were many such benign maffiosi in western Sicily—don Raffaele Palizzolo being the most influential of them all.

  The one thing that persuaded Leopoldo Notarbartolo that it was worth talking to Rudinì was that the new Prime Minister was a sworn political enemy of the previous premier, Francesco Crispi. So Notarbartolo used his family name to get access to Rudinì’s study and then set out the gist of his case against Raffaele Palizzolo. Could Rudinì do anything to bring justice?

  Rudinì’s reply was brief, jocular and chilling: Notarbartolo should find ‘a good mafioso’, pay him well, and let him take care of Palizzolo.

  The Prime Minister subsequently called on don Raffaele’s services in Palermo when it came to ousting Crispi’s supporters from their positions in the city.

  Only in 1898, more than five years after his father’s death, did Leopoldo finally find the political help he needed. Rudinì fell from power soon after the events of May of that year, when troops fired cannons into the crowds in Milan. His successor was a military man, General Luigi Pelloux. Pelloux had no political interests in Sicily and he was also a friend of the Notarbartolos. Through General Pelloux, Leopoldo Notarbartolo got access to the documentation he needed: from inside the Bank of Sicily, from Palermo police headquarters, and even the Interior Ministry. Finally, the murdered banker’s son could look forward to his day in court.

  Within weeks of taking office, General Pelloux also opened another front against the mafia. He recruited the country’s foremost mafia-fighter to lead the most serious assault on organised crime’s territorial dominance in Sicily since the 1870s.

  18

  FLORIOPOLIS

  ON 4 AUGUST 1898 THE NEW PRIME MINISTER TELEGRAPHED A PEREMPTORY ORDER TO the Prefect of Genoa: ‘Chief Police Ermanno Sangiorgi transferred Palermo. He must go as soon as. With expenses.’

  Ermanno Sangiorgi was now fifty-eight years old and Italy’s most experienced senior police officer. Since leaving Naples following the cab drivers’ strike in 1893 he had been posted to Venice, Bologna, Livorno and Genoa. While his career resumed its upward course, he found moments of great happiness in his personal life. He had another daughter, Maria Luigia, in 1890. In 1895 he married her mother, Maria Vozza, in a civil ceremony: the two could finally live together without causing a scandal. But Sangiorgi’s older children were still a source of anguish. His daughter Italia was often unwell. His son Italo had turned out to be a ne’er-do-well: abandoning one steady job after another, roaming the Orient in search of something to do, constantly begging his father for cash to save him from what he called his ‘squalid poverty’.

  Sangiorgi’s transfer to Palermo was to be his last posting, the culmination
of nigh on four decades of service to the cause of law and order. A month after he arrived back in Sicily, a new Prefect was installed too. The Prefect announced the radical new policy that he and Sangiorgi would be implementing: an attack on the protection rackets that were the very base of mafia power.

  The crime of extorting money with menaces is the most terrible curse pervading the rural territory of the province of Palermo. The mafia has found a way to live an easy life by shaking down landowners; it has organised what amounts to nothing less than a tax system in its own favour.

  Suddenly, in the middle of Italy’s darkest political crisis, Sangiorgi had the political backing to carry through the ‘open fight against the mafia’ he had first embarked on all those years ago. His efforts would be concentrated in the Piana dei Colli, to the north-west of Palermo—the same beautiful and dangerous landscape that was the theatre of Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano’s persecution of old man Gambino and his sons in the 1860s and 1870s.

  Sangiorgi arrived in Palermo in the middle of a mafia civil war. At stake, as always, was territory in the rich citrus fruit groves of the Conca d’Oro. The trail of death and bereavement was not particularly long by the mafia’s standards: five mafiosi shot dead, another driven to suicide and a seventh poisoned when he escaped to New Orleans. There were also two innocent victims: an eighteen-year-old shop girl and a seventeen-year-old cowherd who were both murdered in case they talked. But what was historically unprecedented about the mafia war of the late 1890s was that Sangiorgi skilfully used it to recruit witnesses, among both the mafiosi and their innocent casualties. He then used their evidence to put together the most detailed and convincing description of the criminal sect’s structure that had ever been compiled. Sangiorgi set out that description in a report he sent back to Rome in instalments between November 1898 and January 1900.