The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia (7 page)

The earliest written references to the society’s existence date only to 1865, when the prefect of Palermo warned his superiors that “the so-called Maffia” was causing problems in his district. The prefect did not know much about the group, though he thought it had existed for a while—but it was now growing more daring, he suggested, thanks largely to the new government’s failure to stamp its authority on Sicily. Over the course of the next four decades, several successive prefects and their chiefs of police shed further shafts of light on the subject without ever really tackling it head-on. The “Maffia” that emerged from these investigations was not a monolithic secret society, with a headquarters and a central leadership; it was an agglomeration of loosely allied gangs known as
cosche
, the Italian name for the tightly bundled leaves of artichokes. These groups, which later writers gave the name of “families,” might number anywhere from fifteen to several hundred men. Most towns had only one
cosca
—though there were several in the largest city, Palermo—but it was dangerously misleading to presume that they therefore coexisted peacefully. The Sicilian Mafia is better understood as a rural than as an urban phenomenon, and its families defined themselves by the territory they controlled, territory that generally included large swaths of the countryside outside their city walls. The borders of almost every
cosca’s
sphere of influence thus butted against those of other gangs, and this meant that most existed in an uneasy state of mutual suspicion and occasional violent conflict. The resultant murky swirl of shifting allegiances made it difficult for even a family’s own members to know exactly where they stood in relation to the Mafias of other towns.

It was vital, in such uncertain times, for each capo to depend upon the loyalty of his men. Many Mafia families had their roots in flesh-and-blood relationships: fathers, sons, uncles, and cousins could trust one another more than they did strangers. Recruits were also required to submit to an intimidating initiation ritual. This practice, the scattering of evidence suggests, was conducted in much the same way in every family, and its basic form was borrowed from Masonic rites. An initiate would be summoned, often at short notice and frequently at dawn, to some remote spot where his capo and several companions were waiting. There, according to a police report dating to 1880, an

oath was sworn in the presence of three members, one of whom having bound the finger [of the candidate] with a thread, pricked it and sprinkled a few drops of blood upon a sacred image [usually a picture of the Virgin]. This was then burned and the ashes thrown into the wind. The thread denoted the indissoluble bond that united each member to the others; the ashes signified that, just as it was impossible to give back the paper its original form, so it was impossible for a member to leave the society or to fail in the performance of his contracted observations.

Other bits of ritual paraphernalia served to remind the recruit that he was now a member of a secret society. Because the Mafia had numerous members in many towns, passwords and coded conversations enabled men who belonged to different
cosche
to identify each other. These might take the form of a catechism or make use of Sicilian slang. One of the most common, this one noted in a police report dating to 1875, was a dialogue that began with a complaint about a toothache:

A:    God’s blood! My tooth hurts!
[points to one of the upper canines]

B:    Mine too.

A:    When did yours hurt?

B:    On the day of Our Lady of the Annunciation.

A:    Where were you?

B:    Passo di Rigano.

A:    And who was there?

B:    Nice people.

A:    Who were they?

B:    Antonino Giammona, number 1. Alfonso Spatola, number
2 [etc.]
.

A:    And how did they do the bad deed?

B:    They drew lots and Alfonso Spatola won. He took a saint, colored it with my blood, put it in the palm of my hand, and burned it. He threw the ashes in the air.

A:    Who did they tell you to adore?

B:    The sun and the moon.

A:    And who is your god?

B:    An “Air.”

A:    What kingdom do you belong to?

B:    The index finger.

(Pasano di Rigano, it may be noted, is a small town outside Palermo, and Antonino Giammona the name of the most prominent of early Mafiosi. The peculiar references in the conversation to the sun and moon, an “Air,” and the index finger are most likely the means of identifying the family to which initiate B belonged.)

There can be no doubt that these ceremonies made newly initiated Mafiosi feel privileged and special, nor that their leaders made a conscious effort to portray themselves as men of dignity and even as defenders of the established order. “The true, authentic Mafioso almost invariably behaves modestly,” one nineteenth-century writer on the subject noted, “speaks with restraint and similarly listens with restraint, and displays great patience; if he is offended in public, he does not react at all, but he kills afterwards.” For the same reason, initiates spoke of themselves not as Mafiosi—a label imposed on them by outsiders—but as “men of respect” or “men of honor,” and talked of belonging to the Onorata Società, the “Honored Society.” This concern for law and order (at least in the
cosché
‘
s
warped interpretation of the phrase) manifested itself chiefly in alliances with landowners and the Church against the threat posed by an increasingly revolutionary peasantry—with all the disruptions to the established order that implied. Mafiosi were never merely criminals and enemies of society; they were judges, landowners, and aristocrats as well, and this lent them considerable strength. With friends in all the necessary places, the
cosche
of the nineteenth century had little difficulty in arranging for complaints to be ignored, files and depositions lost, and enemies shotgunned into silence.

Certainly new men of respect soon learned that the Mafia was large enough to have an established hierarchy. Each capo passed orders down to a subordinate, the underboss, and thence to one or more lieutenants, each of whom commanded a small group of initiates and a larger body of associates known as
cagnolazzi
—wild dogs—who were not full members of the society. This hierarchy proved effective and resilient. It protected the capo, whose identity was invariably known to the local police; since he never personally committed a crime, it was practically impossible to obtain the evidence needed to arrest him. It likewise offered incentives to the
cagnolazzi
, whose prospects of gaining admission to the society depended heavily on the loyalty and the ruthlessness that they displayed.

It is scarcely surprising, in these circumstances, that the Mafia flourished in western Sicily. According to a summary compiled in 1900 by Armando Sangiorgi, Palermo’s chief of police—a report so comprehensive that it ran to 485 handwritten pages—the eight
cosche
that divided up northern Palermo between them numbered 670 initiates and “wild dogs.” Families had been established in more than thirty towns, from Castellammare del Golfo on the northern coast to Agrigento in the south, and though Palermo remained the center of all criminal activities, home to the richest, best-connected, and most powerful of Mafiosi,
cosche
also continued to flourish in the austere hill towns of the scorched interior.

There were significant differences between the Mafia of northern Sicily and the society inland, however. The northern families grew fat on the proceeds of extortion rackets based largely on the citrus groves along the coast—wealthy districts that exported several million cases of fruit every year yet were highly vulnerable, since orange and lemon trees required both careful nurturing and constant irrigation. By the 1890s, campaigns of murder and intimidation had delivered a large number of these estates into the hands of the Mafia, and the society felt strong enough to take direct action against even the most powerful of its enemies. The brutal murder of Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo—a former governor of the Bank of Sicily whose investigations had threatened to unravel the Honored Society’s financial dealings—aroused such anger that it became the subject of two long-running trials. These proceedings were held on the mainland in an effort to minimize the risk of jury tampering, yet even so, the killers went free. Their leader, Giuseppe Fontana of the Villabate
cosca
of the Mafia, was given shelter by a prince and member of the Italian parliament whose estate he protected; when his surrender was eventually negotiated, Fontana was driven not to jail but to Sangiorgi’s private residence, and he arrived there in the prince’s finest carriage.

The families of the interior lived rather differently. For one thing, they were poorer and much less well connected; for another, they seem to have had yet more ambivalent relationships with the Sicilian police. In Monreale, south of Palermo and one of the earliest Mafia centers, there were two rival associations, which fought for control of the extortion rackets on several large agricultural estates. The older of the two groups, the Giardinieri, were known derisively to their rivals as
scurmi fituzzi
, “rotten mackerels.” They were former members of the Monreale militia who had taken part in the revolt of 1866, while their rivals, the Stoppaglieri (a name that can be roughly translated as “stoppered mouths” and thus conveys something of their fabled powers of discretion), were a newer group, founded in the early 1870s by a member of the Monreale carabinieri. The Stoppaglieri’s supposed mission was to act as agents provocateurs and help the police wipe out the existing Mafia; in practice, however, they actually took control of many of the Giardinieri’s rackets and established themselves as a family to be feared in their own right. There were other, similar examples; in Favera, in the sulfur-mining districts of the south, the local
cosca
expended considerable effort in attempting to control the miners’ union. But there were also families whose operations were far more typically rural, involving control of the water supply and cattle rustling. One of these was the Mafia into which Giuseppe Morello was initiated: a family whose income was indeed derived largely from the theft of livestock. It was the
cosca
of a small town in the mountains of central Sicily—a town whose name meant little then but which would become, in time, the most infamous of the society’s great strongholds. It was the Mafia of Corleone.

CORLEONE—”LIONHEART”—SQUATTED
, flyblown and dispirited, amid the jagged hills of western Sicily. Founded in the tenth century by Saracens, it clung to a strategic spot on bleached stone slopes above the main road to Palermo. Corleone was a fortress town with narrow streets and tiny squares, built to guard the route to the coast; by the second half of the nineteenth century, it had lost its reason for existence. The town’s chief industry, by then, was growing food for the Sicilian capital. Beneath its crumbling defensive walls, a patchwork of parched and dusty fields stretched out as far as the eye could see, dotted here and there with darker smears of color marking the location of olive groves. The fields were divided into several vast landed estates, all owned by old baronial families and leased to
gabelloti
.

The countryside around Corleone could scarcely have been less like the rolling, neatly maintained farmland found in the United States and northern Europe. It was sunburned and dusty, and the landowners’ willingness to lease their estates to rapacious tenants meant that little was invested in long-term improvements such as irrigation. The land itself was also practically deserted. Perhaps the most striking feature of the Sicilian interior was that it was devoid of villages and farmhouses. Centuries of warfare, and decades more of banditry, had compelled the peasantry to seek the shelter of walled towns; because of this, the land around Corleone was all but lifeless, a limestone fastness whose secret paths were known only to a scattering of locals. It was possible to walk for hours in any direction from the town and see no one but the occasional shepherd on a distant mountainside. One consequence was that the Sicilian hinterland became an ideal hiding place for criminals, more so in the case of Corleone because of the forest of Ficuzza, which ran almost to the walls of the town and was the largest, least-tamed wood in all of Sicily.

For most of Corleone’s twenty thousand citizens, conditions were wretchedly primitive. Only the richest of the town’s inhabitants enjoyed the luxury of pit toilets, private wells, and glazed windows. The less well off took space in small apartment buildings, most of them lacking in the most basic amenities, including running water. For the very poorest, home was still a low one-or two-room dwelling with dirt floors and no windows. Hovels of this sort were typically no more than ten feet square, a space that the occupants shared with their animals.

Corleone had its share of artisans and functionaries, but most of the town’s men labored on the great estates located outside the walls. This meant walks of up to ten miles each way in every weather, and, once there, the work was backbreaking and badly paid. Nor was life conspicuously easier for Corleone’s women. While the men toiled on the land, their mothers, wives, and daughters labored at home, cooking, cleaning, spinning, sewing, and fetching water from a nearby well or public fountain. Food was rarely more than eggs, bread, broth, and vegetables; there were elderly peasants in the town who had never tasted meat. A British visitor who passed through Corleone during the 1890s found it horribly impoverished, peopled by “pale, anaemic women, hollow-eyed men, ragged weird children who begged for bread, croaking in hoarse accents like weary old people tired of the world.”