Authors: John Dickie
Because of this manipulation of the truth, when the Giardini Grecos emerged victorious from the war of 1946–7, they would have been able to look back on their role in it with greater tranquillity. Piddu the lieutenant could tell himself that he had reconciled his duties as a father with his duties as a capo. He is just one example of the care that mafiosi devote to managing the delicate entanglement of business and family. Much of that care is made manifest in rules. Regulations about the place of family members within the mafia organization are constantly made, bent, broken, and made again: no more than two sons of the same father may be allowed membership of any given Family; sons whose mafiosi fathers have been killed in a power struggle are barred from becoming members for fear that they will seek revenge.
By playing the rules carefully, men of honour can turn their blood families into mafia dynasties. The Grecos are the leading case in point. One of Piddu the lieutenant’s sons, Michele, was in his early twenties at the time of the war of 1946–7. Thirty years later, Michele Greco became boss of bosses. He was the very archetype of a mafia capo: unsmiling, taciturn, given to speaking only in maxims and allusive parables. VIPs, ranging from bankers to aristocrats, were invited to hunt and dine at his estate. There was also a heroin refinery in the grounds and, on one notable occasion during the mafia war in 1982, tens of mafiosi—virtually the entire Partanna Mondello Family of Cosa Nostra—were murdered there following a barbecue. Michele Greco dressed expensively and conservatively, deporting himself with an almost ecclesiastical dignity; his nickname was ‘the Pope’. His manner was not due to reticence or affectation; it was part of a professional skill-set that had been handed down by his forebears through the best part of a century.
The Greco war of 1946–7 pacified Ciaculli. But calm would not return to the rest of the island until Salvatore Giuliano, the last bandit, was shot down.
From its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s, the mafia always had an intimate and duplicitous relationship with bandits; the honoured society used and protected bandits when it needed to, and then betrayed them to the police the moment they became an inconvenience. The pattern was repeated for the last time in the 1940s with Salvatore Giuliano, the most famous and murderous bandit of them all. But the Giuliano story is more than the grisly coda to the history of Sicilian brigandage. It set the seal on the mafia’s re-emergence from under the Fascist iron fist, and it may also have marked the beginning of the democratic Italian state’s collusion with terrorist acts against its own people.
At the peak of his notoriety, Salvatore Giuliano made himself as accessible for photojournalists as he was elusive for the authorities. Consequently his features are still instantly recognizable in Italy. In one of the most familiar photographs he looks straight into the camera, his thumbs hooked inside the belt from which his holster hangs, his jacket pushed behind his hips to reveal a loose shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Giuliano had what is called an open countenance. By a recent calculation forty-one biographies of him have been written since his death—more than of any other person in post-war Italian history. Each book has promised finally to reveal the secrets hidden behind that broad, handsome face.
Despite all these books, it took cinema properly to grasp the fundamental truth that, in the Giuliano story, seeing and understanding are not the same thing. Francesco Rosi’s masterpiece
Salvatore Giuliano
was made in 1961—a decade after the bandit’s death. It was shot on the mountains around Montelepre that were Giuliano’s stronghold; the extras were peasants from the same area; a woman who had recently lost her son played Giuliano’s mother in the scene where she identifies his body; Rosi even used the real bandit’s rifle. All this care to ensure the film’s authenticity makes it even more striking that the protagonist himself is only ever shown from behind or from an oblique angle; his famous face is hidden behind binoculars or masked by his mother’s shawl. He appears most frequently in the distance, dressed in a white overcoat, as if he were a blank in the centre of the picture, an empty screen on to which the other characters each project their own version of the story. The truth about Giuliano lies not in the figure of the bandit himself, Rosi is suggesting, but somewhere in a tangle of relationships between the bandits, the peasants, the police, the army, the politicians, and the media. At the centre of that tangle was the mafia.
* * *
Salvatore Giuliano was the youngest of four children from a peasant family in Montelepre in the mountains some fifteen kilometres west of Palermo. As a boy he worshipped all things American; this love of America was also one of the few constant features of his romantic and muddled political beliefs.
Giuliano’s career in banditry began in the autumn following the Allied invasion. He was twenty-one years old and working as an errand boy for an electricity company when the
carabinieri
caught him with a sack of black-market grain. He shot his way out of trouble and took to the hills, leaving a
carabiniere
dead on the ground behind him.
He machine-gunned the second of his many victims among the forces of order three months later. A dozen members of his family were arrested on suspicion of sheltering him. Early in 1944, with his help, they staged a breakout from Monreale jail that gave a huge boost to his prestige as well as providing the nucleus of his gang.
For the next year Giuliano ran his band in the classic fashion; most of its members came together for black-market operations, robberies, or kidnappings, and then melted back into the community when the job was done. Their leader had a rough-edged charm and a gift for publicity; he made a point of cultivating a ‘Robin Hood’ fable around himself. But intimidation and bribery were more effective than corny myths in ensuring the silence and collaboration of those around him. His pitiless execution of anyone suspected of betrayal gives the lie to the ‘robber prince’ image; the number of his victims has been estimated at a staggering 430.
Giuliano’s relationship with the mafia also fits a classic pattern; he would not have been able to survive these early years and build his band into the most successful in Sicily without protection from men of honour. When he kidnapped someone, the captive’s relatives knew that they had to turn to the local boss who would ensure a safe return in exchange for a portion of the ransom. In other words, the mafia ‘taxed’ both the bandit leader and the people he persecuted.
It was later revealed by one of Giuliano’s closest collaborators that he had been through a mafia initiation ritual. Mafia supergrass Tommaso Buscetta said that he was presented to Giuliano as ‘the same thing’. If true, this does not necessarily mean that the bandit was an integral part of the association; initiating him was more likely to have been a way of reinforcing his loyalty and keeping watch on his activities.
What distinguishes the last bandit from his predecessors is the fact that he became involved in political ideology. The separatists were the first to try to recruit him to their cause. In the spring of 1945, Giuliano met with separatist leaders including the son of Tasca Bordonaro, the former mayor of Palermo under AMGOT. The bandit demanded 10 million lire in return for joining the proposed separatist army. He was beaten down to 1 million, plus the rank of colonel, and the promise of arms and uniforms. Like some other bandit leaders, Giuliano did his part in the failed separatist uprising by attacking five
carabinieri
barracks. Nor did the workaday criminal activity cease; the band also held up the Palermo–Trapani train. Despite Giuliano’s efforts, elsewhere the main thrust of the separatist revolt was crushed.
The decline of separatism looked as if it might leave Giuliano politically marooned. Things seemed bleak for him in 1946 because the state was finally organizing an effective military response to the bands, while at the same time the mafia was beginning to abandon the outlaws it had protected. One after another, bandits were either killed or captured. It was often contacts between the police and mafiosi that led to the arrests. As so often in the past, an expedient line was being drawn between bandits who could be sacrificed and mafiosi who kept close to political power. The police found some of the bandit leaders dead—dispatched by hands unknown. In the communities of western Sicily, the mafia, once again, was posing as a force for ‘order’.
Giuliano responded publicly to the crisis with his habitual panache, by announcing that he had put a price on the Minister of the Interior’s head. Yet he would also have to win new political friends if he were to achieve his aim of being pardoned when Sicily reached a definitive political settlement. He decided to offer his guns in the struggle against Communism. Through an American journalist, he sent a letter to President Truman in which he complained of the ‘intolerable baying of the Communist hounds’ and announced his commitment to fighting the red menace. The results of the elections in April 1947 for the new Sicilian regional assembly came as a shock to Giuliano, as they did to many others. The leftist parties, united in a People’s Bloc, made huge gains; they took nearly 30 per cent of the vote and became the biggest single grouping. It was the cue for the so-called ‘King of Montelepre’ to commit his most infamous crime.
Salvatore Giuliano’s name will be associated for ever in Italian memories with a place—Portella della Ginestra. Today, nowhere in Sicily seems more bleak and haunted by violence than this piece of open ground at one end of a valley between Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. It was here that peasants came together to celebrate May Day in 1947. Families assembled in their best clothes for a picnic, a song, and a dance; their donkeys and painted carts were decorated with banners and ribbons. It was to be a celebration of the freedoms that had returned after the fall of Fascism.
At 10.15
A.M
. the secretary of the People’s Bloc from Piana degli Albanesi stood up amid the red flags to open proceedings. He was interrupted by loud bangs. At first many people thought they were fireworks, part of the celebration. Then the bullets fired by Giuliano’s men began to find their mark. Ten minutes of machinegun fire from the surrounding slopes left eleven dead, among them Serafino Lascari, aged fifteen; Giovanni Grifò, aged twelve; and Giuseppe Di Maggio and Vincenzo La Fata, both seven years old. Thirty-three people were wounded, including a little girl of thirteen who had her jaw shot off.
The impact of the massacre on the local communities was profound and lasting. When Francesco Rosi came to film the Portella della Ginestra sequence for
Salvatore Giuliano,
he asked 1,000 peasants to go back and enact exactly what they, their friends and relatives had been through fourteen years earlier. Events nearly slipped out of the director’s control. When the gunfire sound effects started, the crowd panicked and knocked over one of the cameras in the rush to escape; women wept and knelt in prayer; men threw themselves to the ground in agony. One old woman, dressed entirely in black, planted herself before the camera and repeated in an anguished wail, ‘Where are my children?’ Two of her sons had died at the hands of Giuliano and his band.
* * *
Despite public outrage at the horrors of Portella della Ginestra, the ‘King of Montelepre’ remained at large for a further three years. Following the massacre, the molten lava of social conflict in post-war Sicily slowly hardened into a new political landscape dominated by the Christian Democrats. It was these political changes, rather than the fury and sorrow aroused by Giuliano’s actions, that began to make him look like a wild anachronism. The electoral victories secured by the DC slowly removed the need for his clamorous brand of anti-Communist terror.
Giuliano continued his attacks on peasant activists and institutions, but the members of his band gradually fell into the hands of the authorities—often with the help of information from the mafia. At the same time, Giuliano’s actions became more difficult to read. In the summer of 1948, he killed five mafiosi including the boss of Partinico. It is not known exactly why. Not surprisingly, many people identify this as the moment when Giuliano’s fate was sealed. Nevertheless a year later he was still powerful enough to murder six more
carabinieri
in an ambush at Bellolampo just outside Palermo.
All this time investigations into the Portella della Ginestra massacre plodded on amid growing speculation that someone—possibly the Minister of the Interior—might have ordered Giuliano to carry it out. The bandit himself wrote a public letter, taking sole responsibility for the murders and denying that there was anyone behind him. He claimed that he had only intended his men to fire above the heads of the crowd; the deaths had been a mistake. He cited the fact that children had died as evidence that it was an accident: ‘Do you think I have a stone in place of a heart?’ The 800 spent rounds of ammunition found at the scene are enough in themselves to make this denial ring dreadfully hollow.
Speaking at Portella della Ginestra on the second anniversary of the massacre, Sicilian Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi, who had become a Senator since surviving Don Calò’s grenade attack in Villalba, publicly called on Giuliano to name names. The appeal led to an extraordinary public exchange. Li Causi received a written reply from the bandit leader: ‘It is only men with no shame who give out names. Not a man who tends to take justice into his own hands; who aims to keep his reputation in society high, and who values this aim more than his own life.’
Li Causi responded by reminding Giuliano that he would almost certainly be betrayed: ‘Don’t you understand that Scelba [the Minister of the Interior, a Sicilian] will have you killed?’
Giuliano again replied, hinting at the powerful secrets that he possessed: ‘I know that Scelba wants to have me killed; he wants to have me killed because I keep a nightmare hanging over him. I can make sure he is brought to account for actions that, if revealed, would destroy his political career and end his life.’ No one was sure how much of this to believe.