Authors: John Dickie
On the afternoon of 20 July, three tanks duly rumbled up to the gates of Villalba. The turret of the first bore the same yellow flag with the large L in the middle. An American officer appeared from the hatch. In a Sicilian accent slurred by years in the States, he respectfully asked for Don Calò. Word reached the old
capomafioso
at home. He was four days away from his sixty-sixth birthday. On hearing of the Americans’ arrival, he shambled slowly across town in shirtsleeves and tortoiseshell sunglasses, his braces straining to keep a pair of crumpled trousers tethered high over the improbable protrusion of his gut. When he reached the Americans, he wordlessly proffered the silk hankerchief his butler had picked up. Along with his nephew—who spoke English because he had not long returned from the States—he then climbed up on to the tank and was driven away.
Meanwhile, back in Villalba, mafiosi began to intimate the meaning of these marvels to the townspeople. It was explained that Don Calò had contacts high up in the American government who had reached him through Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano—hence the L on the flag. Luciano had been released from prison early in return for arranging the mafia’s help with the invasion. Not only that, some said, but the famous Sicilian-American gangster was himself inside the tank that carried Don Calò away. Because of his great authority, Villalba’s own man of respect had been chosen, on Lucky Luciano’s advice, to lead the American advance.
Six days later Don Calò returned to Villalba in a big American car, his mission accomplished. A perfectly executed pincer movement had brought the calves, cows, and oxen together at Cerda, thus completing the Allied conquest of central Sicily. Now Don Calò, with his American backers, was ready to return the mafia to its rightful place in Sicilian society after the dark days of Fascism.
* * *
Most Sicilians know the tale of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief, and many still believe it. The endless retellings of the episode have painted a thick crust of apocryphal conviction over it, blurring its detail in some places, building up hardened swirls of pure invention in others. Most historians now dismiss it as fable.
The events of Lucky Luciano’s life, intriguing though they are, certainly do not support the legend. Back in the autumn of 1933, Luciano led a combined Italian-Jewish syndicate in a move to establish centralized control of bordellos in New York City. The move was a commercial failure. When the madams complained that the burden of kickbacks was too heavy and that their margins were non-existent, they were met with a wall of dumb muscle from Luciano’s enforcers. The result was widespread ‘tax dodging’ throughout the industry. Isolated acts of intimidation could do nothing to stop the fall in the extortion syndicate’s income.
This misfired business venture had catastrophic legal consequences for Luciano too. In February 1936, he and the other members of his gang were arrested by agents working for special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. The testimonies of a number of sex industry workers were crucial in securing a conviction. In June of the same year Luciano began a thirty- to fifty-year term in New York State’s maximum-security penitentiary at Dannemora. It was the harshest sentence ever handed down for compulsory prostitution.
Luciano’s luck began to turn when the USA entered the Second World War. In February 1942, the SS
Normandie,
a luxury liner that had once held the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing, caught fire and rolled over at her moorings on the Hudson River. It was probably an accident but at the time nobody was sure. To avoid further acts of sabotage, naval intelligence began to seek the help of the mobsters who controlled the waterfront. Their first contacts were with Joseph ‘Socks’ Lanza, the boss of the huge Fulton fish market. He organized false union cards for navy agents so that they could carry out investigations on the waterfront. On Lanza’s recommendation, Luciano was also recruited to help extend the navy’s anti-espionage operation. Lucky was brought from Dannemora to a more convenient (and comfortable) prison to be interviewed by intelligence officers. The rumours on the waterfront were that American mobsters had eliminated suspected German spies on the orders of naval intelligence.
That is almost certainly the full extent of Lucky Luciano’s collaboration with the Federal government. There is no evidence that Luciano was in Sicily during the war. Nor is there evidence of a deal to free him in exchange for enlisting Sicilian mafia support for the Allied invasion. Luciano was released and expelled from the USA to Italy only in 1946. There was nothing necessarily suspicious about Luciano’s release even then; ten years was still the longest anyone had served for his particular vice offence. The man who gave final approval for the decision was the Governor of New York State, Luciano’s nemesis, Thomas E. Dewey.
So there was no American plot to enlist the mafia as an ally in the invasion of Sicily. Quite simply, it is hardly likely that the Allies would entrust the secret of Operation Husky, then the largest amphibious assault in history, to hoodlums.
Yet the legend of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief persists. In June 2000, a journalist from the Rome newspaper
La Repubblica
interviewed the original source of the story, Michele Pantaleone, a well-known left-wing writer and politician who was now ninety. It was put to Pantaleone that a leading historian had expressed scepticism about his tale. ‘Why doesn’t he go and say these things in Villalba?’ he replied. ‘They’ll spit in his face. An American jeep came, took Calogero Vizzini away from the town, and brought him back after eleven days.’ Despite his haziness about certain particulars, Pantaleone’s words do at least carry the authority of experience. The Pantaleone family home stands on the downhill side of Piazza Madrice in Villalba. Michele had tangled with Don Calò in person, and he was there when the Americans arrived.
The lasting uncertainties over what happened that day in Villalba are significant in their own right; they are just one small example of the doubts over many aspects of the history of the mafia since the Second World War. To many Italians the powers that be are enveloped in a mist of suspicion. Looming somewhere in the mist, people claim to make out the outlines of corrupt politicians and judges, businessmen, Masonic lodges, the intelligence services, right-wing subversives, the police and military, the CIA and, of course, the mafia. Mistrust has contaminated Italian democracy since its birth in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many Sicilians, indeed many Italians, either do not know whom to believe, or choose to believe whom they like. Peddling conspiracy theories is a national sport; the Italians call it
dietrologia,
literally ‘behindology’. The legend of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief is perhaps the earliest instance of
dietrologia.
It tries to convince us that the US government was ‘behind’ the Sicilian mafia’s resurgence after the fall of Fascism. In other words, it tries to shift the blame.
The strongest argument against the Villalba legend is simply that the Sicilian mafia is too complex a creature to be resurrected by a mere plot. The real story of the mafia’s return to power spreads the blame for its revival more evenly than the fable of the yellow handkerchief. It is a story about Don Calogero Vizzini, the American secret services, and political violence. But it is primarily about how the mafia used its traditional strengths—networking and brutality—to engineer a place for itself within the Italian democratic system as it slowly took shape after the war. Given the opportunities that history offers, the Sicilian mafia is quite capable of determining its own fate.
* * *
Another Villalba historian provides an account of that famous day in 1943 that is almost certainly closer to the truth. He says simply that Don Calò led a celebratory delegation of local people to meet an Allied patrol whose commander had asked to speak to whoever was in charge. A few days later the old capo was proclaimed mayor. In this respect Don Calò’s story is typical. In Villalba, as in every village, people gave the invaders a joyous welcome because they were tired of the hardship that Fascism and war had brought. They also loved America; many Sicilian emigrants—they called them
americani
—had returned from the New World with savings, an education, and newfangled consumer tastes to show for their travels. And a good number of the GIs were themselves from Sicilian families that had emigrated to ‘la Merica’.
As they advanced across Sicily, Allied troops summarily dismissed the Fascist mayors of the towns like Villalba that they liberated. They replaced them with men who sometimes owed their positions to nothing more than the say-so of a Sicilian-American interpreter. To fill the power vacuum, rural centres that had spent two decades without politics often turned, or were forced to turn, to the local men of honour; after all, many men of respect could present themselves as victims of Fascist repression.
Don Calò owed his nomination as mayor to the good offices of the Catholic Church as well as the American army. In the chaos that followed the collapse of Fascism in Sicily, the Americans often looked to senior churchmen for advice on whom to trust. Don Calò was one of the people they recommended. He had a long record of involvement with a Catholic social fund and there were clergymen in his family: two of his brothers were priests; one of his uncles was an archpriest, and another was Bishop of Muro Lucano.
According to Don Calò’s own account of the day he took office as mayor of Villalba, he was carried shoulder high through the town. He claims to have acted as a peacemaker; only his intervention saved his Fascist predecessor from being lynched. What is known for certain is that the official appointment ceremony was attended by both an American lieutenant and a priest representing the bishopric of Caltanissetta. According to some sources, the old mafioso was embarrassed to hear his friends outside shouting, ‘Long live the mafia! Long live crime! Long live Don Calò!’ It is thought that his first act as the town’s foremost citizen was to expunge from the court archives in Caltanissetta, and from the police and
carabinieri
headquarters, records of previous charges against him (robbery, criminal association, cattle rustling, corruption, fraudulent bankruptcy, extortion, aggravated fraud, ordering murders). Don Calò had erased his past, but there was still much to do before his, and the mafia’s, future would be secure.
* * *
On 17 August 1943, thirty-eight days after the first landings, General Sir Harold Alexander telegraphed Churchill to say that Sicily was entirely in Allied hands. (By then the invasion of Italian soil had already precipitated the fall of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, deposed and arrested on 25 July.) For the next six months the island would be under AMGOT—Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. It was under AMGOT that the mafia made its first attempts to determine the political shape of Sicily as it emerged from the war.
AMGOT had its hands full. The island was in a dreadful state in the late summer of 1943. Even before Operation Husky, many of its 4 million inhabitants lived in penury. Now food supplies were low and the railway infrastructure had been shattered by bombing. The crime rate soared. A number of prisoners had escaped in the confusion of the invasion, and the black market, which was already widespread during the last years of Fascism, became the only means of survival for many. In October it was discovered that the reserve of ration books had been looted in Palermo; at least 25,000 illegitimate books were in circulation. The Allies ordered the compulsory purchase of all grain. Small farmers and great landowners alike preferred to avoid this obligation, so that black marketeers enjoyed considerable popular support. Just as it had done after the First World War, banditry returned once again to the Sicilian countryside.
Soon after American troops passed through, police began to pick up clear signs of mafia involvement in the crime wave. One report to police headquarters in Palermo listed a series of towns in which mafiosi had seized power:
In Villabate the mafia has taken control of the town hall; the mayor is the butcher Cottone—a man with a criminal record … It is rumoured that, after the American troops came,
maffiosi
in Marineo, Misilmeri, Cefala, Diana, Villafrate and Bolognetta ransacked the farm buildings on the Stallone estate … they got hold of the weapons and munitions left by the German troops that had camped there … Yesterday criminals attacked Gangi town hall. It is thought that there has been violence against Baron Sgadari, Baron Marciano and Baron Lidestri who cooperated with the discovery of a vast criminal association that operated in the Madonie back in 1927.
Mafiosi were evidently seeking revenge for the defeats inflicted by the ‘iron prefect’.
The Allied authorities could hardly be blamed for these episodes. But they were far from innocent in the mafia’s resurgence as a political force. Even before the invasion of Sicily, the British and Americans certainly knew about the mafia, and envisaged gleaning information from local men of honour for the purposes of governing the island after its liberation. A secret British War Office document from before the invasion listed prominent residents who might be useful. It demonstrates a relaxed attitude to relations with mafiosi. One Vito La Mantia is described as ‘the head of a mafia
cosca
… An antifascist who, if still alive, could provide important information. Not educated but influential.’
Over the six months of AMGOT rule, all party political activity in Sicily was prohibited. British and American officials found that creating a compliant interim government in the towns and villages was a messy task. Sicilian anti-Fascist groups were an unknown quantity and did not always offer an obvious new governing elite. The Allied view was that left-wing influence had to be avoided at all costs. As ever, the mafia and its politicians were ready to act as a reliable ‘instrument of local government’. So it was that during the AMGOT period there were regular contacts between the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and senior mafiosi. Joseph Russo, the Corleone-born head of the OSS’s Palermo desk, has recently said of the bosses: ‘I got to know them all. It did not take them long to re-cement their solidarity.’