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  The trial itself went as badly as Sangiorgi feared. One after another, most of his key witnesses retracted their statements. The mafia’s protectors among the elite took the stand to give immaculate character references for their friends in the criminal sect: ‘the Giammonas are highly esteemed in the area’, one local politician explained. Another man of property was effusive.

  The Giammonas have been very generous to anyone who has a business relationship with them, and no one has a bad word to say about them.

  An utterly implausible statement, of course, but understandable given that this particular witness owned land next to both Francesco Siino and the Giammona clan.

  The House of Florio was simply too powerful to get mixed up in the case: no one from the shipping baron’s family was called to court to explain what exactly the Florios’ relationship was with the Olivuzza mafia. Ignazio Florio limited himself to a written statement, denying everything.

  Defence lawyers portrayed the mafia war as a feud between unconnected families. One after another, they ridiculed Sangiorgi’s theory that men who had been at one another’s throats could secretly be members of the same sect. Omertà, they said, was not part of the rulebook of an organisation. As anthropologists had ascertained, it was a typically Sicilian ‘hypertrophy of individualism—something that undoubtedly has its positive side’. Mafia was a kind of cavalleria rusticana, of ‘rustic chivalry’, and as such it was merely the degenerate form sometimes taken by the most noble features of the Sicilian character; getting rid of it—if that were even possible—would mean changing Sicily entirely.

  Most of the mafiosi were acquitted, and the rest received the usual short prison terms that went with the crime of ‘associating for delinquency’. Sangiorgi had been beaten again.

  In September 1901 the second Notarbartolo murder trial opened. The city chosen to host the eagerly awaited proceedings was Bologna. With its arcades and ancient university, Bologna was one of the best-administered towns in Italy. Like Milan, it was still safely distant from the judicial snake pit in Palermo. But unlike Milan, it was conservative: a Bolognese jury was unlikely to be swayed by subversive propaganda.

  Perhaps it was an optical illusion generated by the publicity. Or perhaps it was the toll taken by months of confinement before the trial. But when don Raffaele Palizzolo stood up to give evidence just a few days into proceedings, he seemed to have shrunk. There were no rings on his fingers and for a prop he only had the back of a chair rather than his mahogany bed. Whether he was pleading with the jury, shouting to the gallery or rambling to himself, Palizzolo seemed incapable of striking the right tone. It was as if he were so habituated to the body language of pork-barrelling—the glad-hands and corridor mutters—that he could find no pose to strike for open, public discourse.

  I was the only Member of Parliament who was accessible to the voters . . . I went down and lived among the people, trying to be their adviser and friend. And the people felt grateful.

  In London, The Times commented on his uneasy performance with typical understatement, saying that Palizzolo’s testimony lacked the ‘element of simple straightforwardness which carries conviction’. Leopoldo Notarbartolo, still dressed in his navy uniform, was the same assured witness in Bologna that he had been in Milan. The Times again:

  The statement of Lieutenant Notarbartolo, with its sobriety, scrupulous attention to fact and careful separation of deduction from premise, held the Court spellbound.

  Chief of Police Sangiorgi was also called to the witness stand, although to my knowledge his testimony did not rate a single mention in any foreign newspaper. At least he was well known in Bologna, where he had served as chief of police in the mid-1890s. The local press commented that he had changed little: only a few more grey hairs in the blonde of his beard and receding hair. He was forthright in his account of the mafia’s power.

  The mafia is powerful and it has relations across five Sicilian provinces and also abroad, where there are colonies of Sicilians.

  Lawyers for the defence swept his testimony aside: the recent trial in Palermo hardly backed up this highly improbable assertion.

  Sicily’s wealthiest man, Ignazio Florio, may not have appeared in court in Palermo, but he could not avoid giving evidence in Bologna. He said that the mafia was ‘an invention created to calumny Sicily’. An ‘invention’, of course, that was protecting his luxurious villa and helping him boost the share price of his shipping line, NGI. Florio was a figure at the very heart of the prosecution case. The NGI stocks scam involving the Bank of Sicily’s money was thought to be the whole reason why Palizzolo ordered Emanuele Notarbartolo murdered. Yet Florio somehow avoided being interrogated on the whole subject. One historian has wryly called his easy ride ‘miraculous’.

  The verdict, which finally arrived after nearly eleven months of hearings, came as a surprise to most. Palizzolo folded his arms and laughed convulsively when he heard that he, like the alleged assassin Giuseppe Fontana, had been sentenced to thirty years in jail. By a majority, the jury had evidently deduced that Palizzolo’s guilt was the only possible explanation for the whole cover-up, despite the lack of positive proof against him.

  Palizzolo’s conviction marked the climax of a countrywide debate about the mafia that had been set in motion two and a half years earlier in Milan. There was a minor publishing boom, and a major outbreak of muddle. Most commentators agreed that the mafia could not possibly be a single criminal fraternity. That was surely preposterous. But if there was broad agreement about what the mafia was not, then only riddles lay in store for any Italian reader curious to know what the mafia actually was.

  The very worst book on the subject was one of the most prominent. Its author was Napoleone Colajanni, a firebrand Republican MP from central Sicily who had been the first to lift the lid on the scandal at the Banca Romana back in 1892. Colajanni explained that the mafia was a ‘particular moral criterion’ left over from feudal times, an underlying feature of the Sicilian character. The isolated gangs that cropped up in Sicilian villages from time to time were merely surface manifestations of this archaic mentality. The Arab invasions of the early Middle Ages were a factor here, probably. Poverty and illiteracy were obviously to blame, mostly. Although there were sometimes rich and well-educated mafiosi. And politicians. And aristocrats. But in any case, Colajanni mused

  The mafia does not always have evil as its aim; on occasion, indeed not infrequently, it works towards what is good and just. But the methods it uses are immoral and criminal—especially when its actions include violent crime. It would also be false to say that all mafiosi are shirkers who live an easy life based on violence, deceit and intimidation. In fact often a mafioso, in order to keep his standing as a mafioso and show it off, will deliberately stop being wealthy and embrace poverty.

  The hopelessly misinformed public debate over the Notarbartolo affair raises one of the most vexing puzzles about the mafia—one that would become more vexing over the decades as Italy’s other criminal fraternities acquired power to rival the Sicilian mafia’s. The Notarbartolo trial triggered the first organised crime scandal to take place in the era of modern media and mass politics. The vast majority of Italians did not take kindly to the murder and corruption that the word ‘mafia’ conjured up—whatever that word really meant. So why did the mafia not shrivel, like a vampire, when it was trapped by the rays of the media dawn?

  The befuddlement created by books like Colajanni’s counted for a great deal. And although Colajanni was not one of them, the mafia also had its own ideologists—lawyers and hired pens keen to spread fallacies about ‘mafiosity’ and the Sicilian mentality. Their views were eagerly amplified by one of Sicily’s most important newspapers, L’Ora, which was founded, owned and controlled by none other than Ignazio Florio.

  The mafia’s influence on the fourth estate could also be brutally direct. On the day after the Milan trial was suspended, the head of the Sicilian press association wrote to Prime Minister General Pelloux to explain
that he had twice been threatened, and challenged to a duel, by Palizzolo supporters. ‘Timid journalists are keeping quiet, and honest ones are afraid’, he warned.

  But it is the political backstory to the Notarbartolo affair that really explains why media attention does not hurt the mafia nearly as much as one might expect. The new press of the early 1900s in Italy was ideologically riven, and its divisions reflected a divided nation.

  The Notarbartolo cause had the Socialists among its most vocal supporters. Most grassroots Sicilian Socialists were inveterate enemies of mafiosi. In the 1890s the mafia had used all of its tricks—corruption, infiltration and violence—to undermine new labour organisations that recruited among the peasantry. So we should not be surprised that Leopoldo Notarbartolo, despite being a man of the Right like his father, employed a highly able Socialist lawyer.

  But other conservatives, who lacked Leopoldo’s intimate yearning for justice, were loath to reach out across the political gulf. The barricades of 1898 may have come down, but early twentieth-century Italy remained a country permanently at risk of internal conflict. For men of both Right and extreme Left, the Italian state was a ramshackle edifice that could only be salvaged by being rebuilt. Both sides thought it was naïve to invest much hope in such a state when it came to enforcing real justice. As a result, when mafia issues were at stake in the game of political power, ideology trumped the rule of law.

  And Italy’s notorious regional divisions often trumped them both. Even the bestselling newspapers, like Milan’s Corriere della Sera, spoke overwhelmingly to a local readership. There was no such thing as a ‘national’ public opinion. Prejudices were rife. In Milan, even some of the Socialist Party’s leaders viewed the whole south with open disgust, as a land peopled by aristocratic reactionaries, parliamentary pettifoggers, and racially degenerate peasant morons. All the inscrutable talk about how ‘mafiosity’ was part of Sicilians’ make-up only served to harden the stereotypes.

  Even the most open-minded Italians from the north and centre did not feel that the mafia, however dastardly it might be, had much bearing on their lives. Sure, they were indignant when they read how Sicilian politicians got into bed with toughs and crooks. But it was hard to sustain that indignation when the people they themselves voted for then got into bed with suspect Sicilian MPs. For most Italians outside the south and Sicily, the mafia lay at two removes.

  Regionalism worked in both directions. The Florio family organ, L’Ora, stuck to a consistent line throughout the Notarbartolo affair: the mafia was a fiction, a pretext for northerners to get one over on Sicily. Partly because of L’Ora’s influence, when Raffaele Palizzolo was found guilty in Bologna in the summer of 1902, a broad section of opinion in Sicily greeted the news with a show of hurt regional pride. The Notarbartolo murder verdict, they lamented, was only the latest haughty swipe that the north had taken at the island. A Pro Sicilia Committee was set up, recruiting quickly from the constituency created by Florio wealth and mafia traction, but also drawing in support from many conservatives. The Palizzolo cause became the latest excuse to crank up Sicilian indignation, and thereby lever more money and favours out of the government in Rome. As a side effect of the Pro Sicilia turn in the island’s politics, Palizzolo was cured of his leprosy and converted into a martyr to northern prejudices.

  The old regionalist ploy worked. Someone in Rome almost certainly had a quiet word with the senior judiciary, and within six months Italy’s Supreme Court quashed the whole Bologna trial on a tiny and highly questionable technicality.

  Palizzolo and the mafia cut-throat Giuseppe Fontana faced a third jury, amid the Renaissance glories of Florence this time. But by now public opinion was exhausted. Not even the death of a crucial new witness, who was found hanging from the stairs of his Florence hotel, raised many eyebrows.

  Ermanno Sangiorgi, still chief of police in Palermo, testified once more in Florence, despite the recent death of his beloved daughter Italia following a long illness. For his pains, Sangiorgi immediately became the target of a mafia smear campaign. The allegations—a convoluted yarn about bad debts, bully-boy policing, and favours to mafiosi—appeared first in a long letter published in the Florios’ newspaper L’Ora. The story was soon picked up in Naples where the Tribuna Giudiziaria, a local rag specialising in courtroom dramas, told its readers that the episode shed a disturbing light on Sangiorgi, who had attracted such attention to himself by delivering ‘a testimony against the defendants in Florence that was as fierce as it was slanderous’.

  Our conclusion? In Palermo, you won’t find the real mafia among the People, but among the police. Just like in Florence, where the real camorristi are standing outside the dock, not inside it.

  The original slurs were made by an ex-con in the orbit of organised crime. The brains behind him belonged to Palizzolo’s lawyer, and possibly also to Vincenzo Cosenza, the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo who claimed never to have noticed the mafia during his career as a ‘priest of Themis’—Cosenza was known to be close to the Tribuna Giudiziaria’s editors.

  The Florentine jury acquitted Palizzolo and Fontana in July 1904. In London, the Daily Express gave the news in a few weary lines, under the title ‘Victory for the mafia’. In Palermo, that victory was celebrated by a procession with flags and music: men wore Palizzolo’s picture on their lapels, women waved handkerchiefs from the balconies. The mafia-backed Pro Sicilia Committee hailed the verdict as a great confirmation of patriotic harmony, and sent the mayor of Florence a telegram of thanks.

  A most solemn and imposing meeting of this Committee acclaims the city of Florence, which, by giving heart to Sicily’s juridical conscience, has reunited the Italian People in the ideal of justice.

  Leopoldo Notarbartolo was almost destroyed psychologically by the outcome of his eleven-year struggle. In 1900, after the Milan trial, when Palizzolo was first arrested and Chief of Police Sangiorgi rounded up the mafiosi of the Conca d’Oro, the murdered banker’s son had been lured into believing that the mafia could be defeated in one swift strike, like a monster run through by a knight’s lance. The second and third trials ground those illusions into a bitter dust.

  What is the result of my efforts? Palizzolo free and serene. As for the mafia and its methods: the Pro Sicilia Committee proclaims and glorifies them; the government bows down to them and sustains them; and the wretched island of Sicily reinforces them ever more . . . Do I live on an earth that is watched over by God the Father, or amid a chaos of brutal forces unleashed by loathsome, wicked gnomes like the ones in Scandinavian legends?

  Leopoldo continued his naval career but spent a further seven years reflecting on his experience, and then another five pouring his anguish into a meticulous and moving account of his father’s story, and his own. He found little consolation other than in contemplating sea life, which offered him a less heroic metaphor of how the forces of good might one day defeat the mafia. He observed how, over generations and generations, tiny undersea creatures live and die, all the while creating their miniature dwellings from limestone deposits, piling them higher and higher until, following some minor seismic shift, an entirely new island appears above the waves.

  The people working humbly in the cause of good are like those ocean creatures. One day, the marvellous little island will emerge! God has written his promise in the holy book of nature.

  Back on the ‘wretched island’ of Sicily, Ermanno Sangiorgi, one of the people working in the cause of good, took until the summer of 1905, a year after the conclusion of the Notarbartolo affair, to win a libel suit against his accuser.

  Italy reserves a peculiar cruelty to those that love it the most. Soon afterwards Sangiorgi’s son-in-law, who worked in Pisa as an administrator for the royal family, the House of Savoy, committed suicide after being caught with his hand in the till. Sangiorgi was entirely blameless in the disgrace of his daughter’s widower. But the Royal Household held him liable for some of the losses, which cost him more than a month’s salary.

 
; In March 1907, Sangiorgi formally requested permission to retire from his position as chief of police of Palermo; he was showing signs of ill health, in the form of a creeping paralysis. His life in law enforcement—forty-eight years of service, eighteen of them as chief of police—had begun even before Italian unification. But passing time had not made him any coyer: he bluntly asked for a special pension and the honorary title of Prefect. He concluded the letter in a typically patriotic fashion.

  I began my career during the war of Italian Independence when Northern Italy was echoing to the cry of ‘Long live King Victor Emmanuel II!’ I now end it with another cry on my lips and in my heart, ‘Long live Victor Emmanuel III! Long live the House of Savoy!’

  Sangiorgi retired in May 1907, with his honorary title but without his special pension. The creeping paralysis that had hastened his retirement also hastened him to his death, in November 1908. The press in Naples and Palermo recalled him to readers as the police chief whose botched handling of the cab drivers’ strike in 1893 had brought anarchy to the streets.