Читать книгу The Rise of the Mafia - Martin Short - Страница 9

In 1265 Charles of Anjou, brother of the King of France, called himself King of Sicily with the blessing of the Pope. Now all he had to do to gain power was oust Sicily’s crowned King Manfred, son of the German emperor and the Pope’s excommunicated enemy. In 1266 Charles defeated Manfred’s armies and Manfred was killed. The Frenchman soon became the undisputed ruler of the kingdom which included not just Sicily but all of Italy south of Rome.

To Sicilians he was just the latest conqueror in a line 1500 years long. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Vandals, Ostrogoths, Arabs, Normans and Germans had all invaded and plundered the island. The new king slaughtered all who resisted him, seized the great estates and destroyed the power of the local barons. He taxed them so heavily that in 1282 they rebelled, supported by yet another foreigner, the Spanish King of Aragon.

For most Sicilians life went on as usual. In Palermo parishioners at the Church of the Holy Spirit observed Holy Week and then enjoyed their traditional Easter Monday festival. To their disgust they were joined by some drunken French soldiers. As people gathered for the evening service Vespers rang out all over the city. A newly married girl attracted the unwelcome attention of a Frenchman, Sergeant Pierre Drouet. He molested the bride, dragged her away and tried to rape her. She broke free but her shoe became trapped in the slate paving. She fell, hitting her head against the church wall, and died instantly.

The girl’s husband ran to help her. In a fury he stabbed Drouet to death. ‘Morte alla Francia,’ he cried, ‘Death to France.’ In the uproar which followed the local menfolk massacred every French soldier at the festival. Immediately the entire city was in revolt. The men of Palermo avenged the honour of both the girl and all Sicily by slaying the entire French garrison, to the chant ‘Death to France is Italy’s Cry’.

For three days and nights Palermitans continued their vendetta in what became known as the Sicilian Vespers. Thousands of French civilians and their families perished along with the military. Sicilian women married to Frenchmen were also slaughtered. Soon almost the entire island rebelled. The French were forced to surrender all of Sicily and the few who remained fled for their lives. In the long run the uprising made little difference since within six months Palermo was hailing the King of Aragon as the island’s new overlord. All those Sicilians who had joined together to overthrow the French, however, founded a secret society. Its password was ‘MAFIA’, from the initials of their victory: ‘Morte Alla Francia Italia Anela’. Seven hundred years later that secret society still exists.

Some people say that is how both the society and its name were born, but it is unlikely that the Mafia had such a romantic or patriotic beginning. In the thirteenth century Sicilians did not speak Italian. The rebels did not shout ‘Morte alla Francia’ but, in their Sicilian dialect, ‘Moranu li Franchiski’. The islanders did not even consider themselves Italians. Indeed the idea of Italy as a nation gained little support anywhere for another five hundred years.

‘Mafia’ is not strictly an Italian word. It is Sicilian, originating in the Palermo dialect, and probably has an Arabic root. The word has been traced back to the Ma’afir, an Arab tribe which once settled in Palermo, and to the Arabic name for the caves on the western edge of the island where for many centuries bands of rebels have sheltered from Sicily’s rulers.

In 1947 Benedict Pocoroba, an American narcotics agent born in Sicily, recalled that: ‘The word Mafia and its derivations as I have heard them used in my youth imply grace, beauty, perfection and excellence, the best that there is in any form of life. A Sicilian trying to describe the most beautiful horse he had ever seen would say “un cavaddu mafiusu” or “un cavaddu di la mafia”. A fruit vendor would chant at the top of his voice “ficu (figs) di la mafia” or “racina (grapes) di la mafia”. A handsome girl, well dressed, stylish, striking, was said to be “mafiusa”. The word “mafiusu” as applied to a man meant more than mere physical attractions. It meant a man conscious of being a man and acting a man’s part. One who could display true courage without any bravado, arrogance or truculence. A “mafiusu” did not aspire to create fear, or to rob and kill merely to satisfy his brutal instincts.”

The word mafiusu, or mafioso in Italian, only came to mean a member of a sect or secret society around 1863 when Giuseppe Rizzuto, a playwright born and raised in Palermo wrote I Mafiusi di la Vicarria di Palermu – (The Braves of Palermo Jail). In this melodrama Rizzuto portrayed the prisoners as men of courage who fought duels with knives. The piece played to packed houses and Rizzuto was lionized in his double role as author and actor. He expanded ‘I Mafiusi’ from two to four acts and, despite the Palermitan dialogue, it was performed more than 3000 times all over Italy. Only with the play’s success did the words Mafia and Mafioso/i find their way into general use and Italian dictionaries.

Whether the Mafia started as a liberation movement in medieval times or as a prison gang nearly six hundred years later, this secret society seems always to have had a criminal side. Subjected to thousands of years of foreign rule, Sicilians have learned to hate all forms of government. In a country of peasants nothing was more likely to induce lawlessness than foreign absentee landlords owning huge tracts of neglected farmland. Usually there was no such thing as justice, only the tyrannical laws of invaders arbitrarily enforced by their own secret police or by Sicilian stooges. The Bourbon kingdom of the Two Sicilies (Naples and Sicily) which lasted from 1738 to 1860 was a police state and the police were the only government employees most Sicilians ever encountered.

Bourbon rule was overthrown by a secret society of sorts: not the Mafia but Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirts. In 1860 Garibaldi conquered Sicily and proclaimed it part of the northern Italian kingdom of Piedmont. His ramshackle army of 1000 volunteers was augmented by gangs of bandits and brigands. Together they liberated Sicily from the foreign oppressor but the gangs Garibaldi had embraced now exploited the anarchy of the times to expand their traditional criminal activities. They stole crops and livestock. They extorted money by chopping down fruit trees, cutting off water supplies and setting fire to sulphur awaiting shipment at the mines. They robbed and kidnapped, they eliminated rival brigands and settled ancient vendettas by killing their enemies.

All these rackets had existed under Bourbon rule but in the new Italy crime became far more lucrative. Bourbon governors would crush the bandits from time to time with arbitrary executions but Italy’s new liberal democracy was committed to a system of fair trials. The gangs soon realized that the new judges and juries could be bought or bullied into acquitting. It was also far easier to intimidate rulers chosen by local elections than those imposed by a despot in a far-off land. The brutality and injustice of life after unification provoked two northern investigators to observe that. ‘Violence is the only prosperous industry in Sicily’: the violence of revolutionaries against the rich, of the rich against the poor, and of criminal secret societies against everyone else.

At first there was no one society called the Mafia but many separate fraternities existed. In Monreale and the province of Palermo there were the Stoppaglieri and the Fratuzzi (Little Brothers). The province of Messina was blessed with the Beati Paoli. In central Sicily around Caltanissetta the Fratellanza (Brotherhood) flourished. Each society had a code with similar rules. Poor members and their families had to be helped against rich oppressors. Each member had to aid any other member who asked for help. All members had to swear absolute obedience to the chief. Any offence committed against one member was an offence against the entire association and had to be avenged at any cost. Justice was never to be sought from the state. The secrets of the society and its members’ names were never to be revealed to outsiders.

The societies developed the techniques of rural gangsterism, practised by mountain brigands for centuries, into a continuing system of retributive justice and organized criminal revenue. They used terrorist methods to avenge the insults and injustices of the rick, kidnapping noblemen for ransom and vandalising vineyards, orchards, citrus and olive groves. They stole cattle and other livestock and transported them for sale to other parts of Sicily where the animals would not be recognized. To build the necessary underground network, societies co-operated with others in nearby provinces and eventually merged. Their members were now no longer only peasants but also sulphur miners, artisans, priests and even those landowners whom the societies had once regarded as their oppressors.

People who did not belong to the secret societies regarded them all as La Mala Vita: the evil life, the underworld. They existed not just in Sicily but throughout southern Italy. They had long since lost whatever ‘Robin Hood’ qualities they may ever have possessed and were now as oppressive as the tyrants they claimed to fight. In cities like Palermo they were nothing better than protection rackets, cosche, parasites each bleeding a specific area of urban life and killing anyone who stood in their way.

By 1886 one society had emerged sufficiently above all the others to merit investigation by Palermo’s chief of police. Commissioner Giuseppe Alongi, born and raised in Sicily, wrote a book in which he described the initiation rituals of ‘La Mafia’, based on what Mafia informers had told him over the years. A candidate would be approached to join only after his conduct and character had been scrutinized for some years. Then two members who knew him well would bring before a council of Mafia leaders for initiation.

He walks into the room and halts in front of a table on which is displayed the paper image of a saint. He offers his right hand to his two friends who draw enough blood from it to wet the effigy, on which he swears this oath:

I pledge my honour to be faithful to the Mafia, as the Mafia is faithful to me. As this saint and a few drops of my blood were burned, so will I give all my blood for the Mafia, when my ashes and my blood will return to their original condition.

The novice then burns the effigy with the flame of a candle. From that moment he is a member indissolubly tied to the association and he will be chosen to carry out the next killing ordered by the council.

For every ten members there was a group leader, a ‘capo di diecina’. This was not only for discipline but, as in any underground movement or secret society, to make sure that no one member could know the full extent of the Mafia’s illegal activities.

Alongi obviously had great experience of dealing with informers. He confessed that he could not guarantee the truth of what Mafia members had told him. Yet his account disclosed secrets identical to those which astonished American senators seventy-seven years later.

Sicily was not the only part of Italy where secret societies flourished. In the sixteenth century officials of the Spanish monarchy, which ruled Naples for 350 years, transplanted their own brotherhood, the Garduna, to Naples. Its members initiated Neapolitan collaborators, who in turn created a hybrid society, the Camorra. The Camorra’s laws were like those of the Sicilian brotherhoods: blood-initiation rituals, mutual aid until death and full membership only when a candidate had carried out a murder ordered by the society. Within the Camorra were small cells each led by a caporegima, who in turned belonged to the Camorra Grand Council. Despite its courtly origins the Camorra soon found most of its recruits in the jails of Naples.

By the nineteenth century camorristi controlled gambling and moneylending in Naples. They levied their own taxes from farmers and food shops, fishermen and ship owners, cab-drivers, factory owners and even the city’s infant stockmarket. Legitimate businessmen found they had to have Camorra protection: Bourbon police were incapable of curbing crime or recovering stolen goods. Indeed, the police subcontracted the job of controlling crime to the Camorra’s bosses, elevating their unofficial status as Naples’ second government almost to a royal command.

In 1859 the Bourbon police jailed 300 Camorra members for spying on behalf of Italian unification but in June 1860 that movement liberated Naples. Camorra prisoners were set free and clubbed to death any police they could find. They then incited Neapolitans to riot and loot. The new government was forced to follow Spain’s example and hire camorristi to police Naples and collect taxes. By 1863 the government realized the camorristi were pocketing the money themselves and sent in Italy’s new royal army to fight them. The Camorra was crushed and reduced to a small gang of extortioners. Yet by 1911 the brotherhood was again large enough for thirty-five of its leaders, including its grand master, to be jailed for murder.

In the new united Italy the criminal secret societies incited Sicilian peasants to feel that government from Rome was just as foreign and oppressive as that from Bourbon Spain had been. Life did not get any easier. Local government remained as corrupt as ever and when central government tried to clean it up the secret societies made sure it did not succeed. Their chokehold on society stemmed in part from this corruption. If the government were honest, if justice were swift and fair, no one would ever turn to the Mafia for redress. The Mafia won the respect of ordinary folk by claiming to be the only force that could fight social evils so it had to make sure those social evils did not disappear.

In November 1877 a crime was perpetrated in Sicily which brought the Mafia worldwide notoriety. John Forester Rose, a young Edinburgh banker, was travelling to visit estates and sulphur mines owned by his family. He was kidnapped 20 miles south of Palermo by one Leone, an illiterate peasant who was allegedly Sicily’s Mafia boss. Mrs Rose was sent a note demanding a huge ransom. She wrote back saying she had no such money. Leone replied that if she did not pay, her husband would lose his ears. Mrs Rose then received two letters from Sicily each containing one of Rose’s ears. The next letter contained a slice of his nose. British newspapers raised half the sum demanded which satisfied Leone who then released his mutilated victim.

By this time the British government had forced Italy to hunt down Leone by threatening to land an army of its own. It took the Italian army a year and many of its soldiers’ lives to capture Leone in a rocky citadel outside Palermo. Leone was tried in Rome and jailed for life but he soon escaped to Algeria where he died. His lieutenant, Giuseppe Esposito, had escaped even before his captors could get him out of Sicily. By 1878 he and six other fugitives were in New York. They scrutinized the big city’s rackets and the competition. Esposito decided there were easier pickings in New Orleans. The Mafia had arrived in the New World.