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  The first striking thing about Sangiorgi’s report is that it started from scratch. He had to assume that his readers (notably senior magistrates and the Prime Minister) knew nothing about the mafia because nothing had yet been proved. Accordingly he began with the basics.

  The association’s aim is to bully landowners, and thereby to force them to hire stewards, guards, and labourers, to impose contractor-managers on them, and to determine the price paid for citrus fruit and other produce.

  From these simple first steps, Sangiorgi advanced a long way. He got the chance to confirm what he knew about the mafia’s initiation ritual. And he ended by listing the bosses, underbosses and over two hundred soldiers in eight separate mafia cells. He exposed their links beyond Palermo—even as far as Tunisia, an outpost of the citrus fruit business. He explained how they came together for meetings and trials, and how they performed collective executions of any members deemed to have broken the rules—especially the rule that stipulated blind obedience to the bosses’ wishes. Sangiorgi even named the mafia’s ‘regional or supreme boss’, the fifty-year-old citrus fruit dealer and capo of the Malaspina cosca, Francesco Siino.

  The Siino name echoed in Sangiorgi’s memory. Francesco’s older brother Alfonso, now in charge of the Uditore branch of the sect, was one of the two hit men who shot dead old man Gambino’s son in 1874, and then went unpunished thanks to the ‘fratricide’ plot. Many other names in Sangiorgi’s report rang a malevolent bell: names like Cusimano, and above all Giammona. Antonino Giammona was the poetry-writing boss whose gang’s initiation ritual Sangiorgi had exposed in 1876. The old mobster was now close to eighty, but he still carried huge authority.

  He gives direction through advice based on his vast experience and his long criminal record. He offers instructions on the way to carry out crimes and construct a defence, especially alibis.

  Linking these surnames there was now much more than a shared history of murder and extortion. While Ermanno Sangiorgi, beset by the stresses of his police career, was struggling to hold his own small family together, the hoodlum clans of the Palermo hinterland had intermarried, and many had passed on their wealth and authority to their offspring: Antonino Giammona’s son Giuseppe was capo in Passo di Rigano; Alfonso Siino’s boy Filippo was underboss in Uditore. A generation on from his last encounter with the Palermo mob, Sangiorgi could see that the mafia’s marriage strategising had founded criminal dynasties. If the structure of bosses, underbosses and cosche gave the mafia its skeleton, then these kinship ties were its bloodstream.

  Sangiorgi also identified intimate ground-level contacts between this new criminal nobility and some of Palermo’s longer established dynasties, among them the richest family in Sicily, the Florios. The head of the house of Florio, Ignazio, was a fourth generation entrepreneur whose father had married into some of the bluest blood in Sicily. The fortune that Ignazio inherited included the principal stake in NGI, the shipping company whose share price was covertly pumped up with Bank of Sicily money. A man of dash and style who was not yet out of his twenties when Sangiorgi became chief of police, Ignazio set the decadent tone in the Sicilian monde. Florio turned Palermo—or Floriopolis, as it became known—into a prime destination for the European yacht set. His sumptuous villa, located in its own parkland amid the fragrant hues of the Conca d’Oro, was the epicentre of polite society. But as Sangiorgi discovered, the Florio villa was also an important place for the Sicilian Honoured Society.

  The men responsible for security at the Florio villa were the ‘gardener’, Francesco Noto and his younger brother Pietro—respectively the boss and underboss of the mafia’s Olivuzza cosca. Sangiorgi did not discover just what were the terms of the deal between the Noto brothers and Ignazio Florio. But protection was almost always how mafiosi got their foot in the garden gate. Kidnapping was a serious risk, the Notos would have explained to Ignazio Florio, deferentially. But we can make sure of your safety. And once the Florios’ safety was in the hands of the mafia, there was no limit to the turns the relationship might take—many of them mutually beneficial. Having murderers to call on can be a very tempting resource.

  One morning in 1897 Ignazio Florio woke to learn that his safety had been scandalously compromised: the villa had been broken into, and a large number of objets d’art were missing. He summoned the Noto brothers and delivered a humiliating tirade. A few days later, Florio woke up again and found that the stolen valuables had reappeared during the night—in exactly their original positions. This was a criminal gesture of astonishing finesse: both an apology, and a serene reminder of just how deeply the mafia had penetrated the Florio family’s domestic intimacies.

  Sangiorgi learned that the culprits in the Florio burglary were two of the Notos’ own soldiers, who were unhappy because they felt they had not received a fair share of some loot from a kidnapping. The Notos strung the burglars along, promising more money on condition that the Florios’ property was put back—which it duly was. Then they reported the episode to a sitting of the mafia tribunal, which ruled that it was an outrageous act of insubordination. Several months later, in October 1897, an execution squad comprising representatives from each of the eight mafia cosche lured the burglars into a trap, shot them dead, and heaved their bodies into a deep grotto on a lemon grove.

  What shocked even Sangiorgi about the whole story was that the Noto brothers had told the Florios just what they had done to the burglars. In November 1897, soon after the police had found the bodies in the grotto, but before anyone outside the mafia had the slightest idea how and why they had ended up there, Ignazio Florio’s mother was heard explaining that the dead men had been punished for the break-in earlier in the year. Justice had been done—discreetly and with due force—to the satisfaction of both the Florios and the hoodlums they sponsored. A kind of justice that could never have anything to do with the police.

  The Florios inhabited a world of garden parties and gala balls, of royal receptions and open-top carriage rides, of whist soirées and opera premieres. An inconceivable distance separated their milieu from the ratrun tenements where the Neapolitan camorra was incubated, or from the dung-strewn hovels of Africo’s picciotti. Yet between the Florios and the Sicilian mafia there was almost no distance at all. If it came to an ‘open fight’ between the state and the mafia, there was little doubt about which side the House of Florio would take.

  On the night of 27 April 1900 Sangiorgi ordered the arrest en masse of the Men of Honour named in his reports. He hand-picked his officers, trusting his judgement of their honesty and courage. Even so, Sangiorgi had to keep the operation a secret until the last minute to avoid leaks: the mafia’s spies were everywhere. By October the Prefect of Palermo reported that Sangiorgi had reduced the mafia to ‘silence and inactivity’. That silence was the reward for months of brilliant policework. But it was also the mafia’s response to what had now happened to its favourite Member of Parliament, don Raffaele Palizzolo.

  19

  FOUR TRIALS AND A FUNERAL

  BETWEEN NOVEMBER 1899 AND JULY 1904 THE MAFIA ISSUE WENT ON A NATIONAL tour. Prime Minister General Luigi Pelloux had to put direct pressure on the Palermo prosecutors’ office to make sure the Notarbartolo murder finally came to court. The case was transferred away from Palermo lest the peculiar local atmosphere influence the outcome. There would, in the end, be three Notarbartolo murder trials, each in a different Italian city, each covered in depth by the country’s growing press corps. For the first time, Sicily’s shadiest machinations became a scandal across the whole country.

  The first trial took place in the north, in foggy Milan, which was still a political tinderbox following the army massacre of the previous year. Here the ground itself seemed to throb with industry: hydroelectric power, Italy’s ‘white coal’, was cabled in from the Alps; smoke stacks were reaching skywards in the periphery; and a grand stock exchange building was taking shape in the city’s core. Milan was Italy’s shop window to the world. With its strong radical trad
itions, home of the Socialist Party and its mordant newspaper Avanti!, Milan would also turn into the perfect resonance chamber for the Notarbartolo scandal.

  Yet when the trial finally opened, only two people were in the dock: the brakeman and the ticket collector on the train where Notarbartolo had been stabbed to death more than six and a half years earlier. General Pelloux would only apply so much leverage on the Palermo judiciary. For the prosecution, the two railwaymen were accomplices to the mafia’s assassins. For the defence, they were, at worst, merely terrified witnesses. For Leopoldo Notarbartolo, they were a chance to spark a publicity firestorm that would finally drive don Raffaele Palizzolo into the open.

  Poor Sicilians summoned to chilly Milan to give evidence in the first Notarbartolo murder trial. Fourteen of them were hospitalized with bronchitis, and one died. A local newspaper took pity on them and arranged a collection.

  On 16 November 1899, from the witness stand in Milan, Leopoldo Notarbartolo gave an assured testimony of which his father would have been proud. Speaking briskly in his deep voice, Leopoldo explicitly accused Palizzolo of ordering his father’s murder and then went on to set out everything he had learned about the mafia and the Bank of Sicily. He also cast grave suspicions over the police and magistrates who had never even interviewed Palizzolo about the case.

  Calls for Palizzolo to resign began immediately. The political pressure on him intensified day-by-day, until Parliament voted in a special session to remove his immunity from prosecution. The very same evening, Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi enacted the order to arrest him.

  Leopoldo Notarbartolo got the publicity firestorm he wanted. The newspapers at home and abroad carried lurid stories about Palizzolo, real or imagined. He seemed like a satirical grotesque come to life. One American resident in Italy, who understandably chose to remain anonymous, claimed to have gained access to one of the open receptions that Palizzolo held every morning at his sumptuous house on Palermo’s main thoroughfare.

  Raffaele Palizzolo, the mafia politician strongly suspected of ordering the Notarbartolo murder. He was photographed only reluctantly, complaining, ‘We have become the object of public curiosity’.

  The American visitor explained that Palizzolo’s bed was his throne: its heavy mahogany frame was inlaid with mother of pearl and surmounted by a baldachin; it stood, surrounded by numerous gaudily ornamented spittoons and shaving mirrors on stands, at the centre of a hall hung with pink silks. A crowd of petitioners gathered round about: council commissioners in search of seats on committees, policemen who wanted to win a promotion, and former convicts still sporting their penitentiary crew cuts. One by one, Palizzolo’s major-domo would pick out the supplicants and guide them to a perch on one of the great bed’s broad, upholstered flanks. Palizzolo greeted them all effusively, sitting up in his nightgown, holding a cup of chocolate with one hand and making extravagant gestures with the other.

  Palizzolo is a small man with the short, thick neck of a bull and black, shining hair, parted in the middle. Except for his bushy eyebrows, he has few masculine features. His chin is weak and his forehead denotes cunning rather than breadth of thought and strength of character.

  The fingers of both his fat, stubby hands were covered with rings—rings of all sorts, marquis, snake and signet rings, set with diamonds, rubies and opals, a whole jeweller’s tray full. Yet under this rather vulgar display, under this half-womanish, half-foppish mask, lies hidden a shrewd personality and a calculating mind of no mean order.

  As the trial in Milan progressed, there were more and more sensational revelations. A stationmaster turned out to have recognised one of the killers in an identity parade, but his testimony was ignored until he was frightened into retracting it. A police inspector close to Palizzolo was arrested in the witness stand for concealing evidence; some twenty other witnesses faced charges of perjury. The Minister of War was forced to resign when a Republican paper exposed that he had lobbied to have an influential mafioso released from jail in time for the elections. The court learned that former Prime Minister Rudinì had bestowed an official decoration on Palizzolo in 1897.

  Giuseppe Fontana, citrus fruit entrepreneur, mafioso and alleged assassin of Emanuele Notarbartolo.

  One of the men suspected of actually stabbing Emanuele Notarbartolo to death was named in the Milan courtroom too: Giuseppe Fontana was a lemon trader and a member of Palizzolo’s favourite Villabate cosca of the mafia. He also turned out to be the manager on an estate owned by an aristocrat and Member of Parliament.

  When the order went out to arrest Fontana, his aristocratic sponsor had to have his arm twisted by Chief of Police Sangiorgi before he would agree to talk to Fontana about surrendering. In the end, the mafioso Fontana did give himself up to Sangiorgi; but only on his own terms, and only in a style that confirmed the wildest journalistic guesswork about the mafia’s influence in high places. Fontana came to town in a coach bearing his protector’s family crest, in the company of his protector’s lawyers. He then refused to enter Police Headquarters, insisting instead that Sangiorgi receive him in his own home. On hearing how Fontana dictated the terms of his own surrender, Leopoldo Notarbartolo acidly quipped that the mafioso had forgotten to demand that the guard at Sangiorgi’s gate present arms as he passed.

  The whole country was shocked by what was emerging in Milan. Even Prime Minister Pelloux began to worry about how far the scandal might reach, and thought it might be necessary to call a general election early. The Notarbartolo case reeked of a cover-up, and that reek increased public revulsion at the political system: while politicians were ordering troops to shoot at starving demonstrators and trying to quash press freedom, they were also pocketing illegal loans from banks and consorting with mafiosi.

  Palizzolo had become a political leper. On 15 December 1899 an estimated 30,000 people filed through the streets of Palermo to show their support for the Notarbartolo cause. A hastily sculpted bust of the murdered banker was born aloft at the head of the procession and then set in a little temple opposite the Politeama theatre in the city centre; soon afterwards it was moved to the atrium of the Bank of Sicily’s headquarters. As well as the Socialists and representatives from Palermo schools and clubs, the city’s political class were out in force—even many whose conduct was called into question in the Milan hearings. Clearly there had been some shamelessly swift conversions to the cause of law and order in recent weeks. London’s Morning Post pinpointed the hypocrisy.

  If any one of the numerous politicians who now compete in doing honour to Signor Notarbartolo’s memory had energetically set about forcing the Government to punish his murderers, justice would have been done long since.

  In January 1900, two months after the Milan trial began, proceedings were halted to allow a much more far-reaching case to be prepared. Here was a significant victory for the Notarbartolo cause, and for the struggle against Sicilian organised crime. Leopoldo Notarbartolo later recalled these moments as ‘the culmination of the short-lived tide in our favour’.

  In the summer of 1900 Prime Minister General Pelloux resigned. Leopoldo Notarbartolo had lost his key supporter in the Roman palaces of power. But the public indignation at the Notarbartolo cover-up was still strong. The destiny of the whole case hung in the balance.

  The second important mafia trial of the day began back in Palermo in the spring of 1901. It did not arise directly from the Notarbartolo-Palizzolo affair, but from the determined policework of Chief of Police Sangiorgi: the mafiosi named in his reports stood accused of forming a criminal association.

  Because Sangiorgi’s investigations had no direct bearing on the banking scandal he did not benefit from the public fury that still resonated from Milan. There were no foreign correspondents in Palermo when the trial began, and proceedings barely rated a mention in the mainland press. Yet in many ways the Sangiorgi trial was just as historically important as the Notarbartolo affair: this was a case that could have proved once and for all that the mafia existed.
/>   The great enemy of the early Sicilian mafia: Ermanno Sangiorgi. A newspaper described this career cop as being ‘as alert as a squirrel, an investigator endowed with a steady perspicacity’.

  Men of Honour briefly caught in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s net in 1900.

  Giuseppe Giammona, boss of Passo di Rigano, and son of the venerable capo Antonino Giammona.

  Francesco Siino, the recently deposed ‘regional or supreme boss’.

  Brothers Francesco and Pietro Noto, respectively boss and underboss in Olivuzza, and responsible for ‘security’ at the home of Sicily’s wealthiest family, the Florios.

  Courtroom sketches from newspapers of the day.

  Sangiorgi, veteran of Sicilian affairs that he was, must have had a weary sense of inevitability about the outcome of the trial he had spent the best part of three years preparing. With General Pelloux gone Sangiorgi was once more vulnerable to the system of friendships that the mafia had created to protect itself in its capital. Most of the mafiosi, including the venerable capo Antonino Giammona, were acquitted before the case even reached court. The likely explanation for these acquittals was that, just as during the ‘fratricide’ affair in 1876–77, Sangiorgi faced insidious opposition from Sicily’s most senior magistrate. Days before proceedings began, the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, one Vincenzo Cosenza, wrote to the Minister of Justice to explain that ‘in the course of exercising my duties I have never noticed the mafia, because the mafia has no desire to ensnare the priests of Themis’. (He meant magistrates, because Themis was the ancient Greek personification of order and justice.) Any Palermo judge who was incapable of imagining why the mafia might want to corrupt the legal system was, at best, culpably naïve. But Vincenzo Cosenza was not naïve: he was identified by Leopoldo Notarbartolo as a protector of Palizzolo’s, the main obstacle in the way of bringing don Raffaele and his hit men to justice.