Like sex, Mafia and politics were not to be mentioned in front of the children. Until the age of 10, I was home-educated at our family estate in the south of Sicily and, as an avid listener of adults’ conversation, I became a proficient “reader” of the gestures, stares, fragments and eloquent silences that are an integral part of our language. And so I formed my own child’s view of the Mafia. More powerful than the state and cloaked in secrecy, the Mafia oppressed through fear and violence, rich and poor alike, with impunity. It was wise not to talk of it: nobody knew exactly who was a Mafioso, or an informer. Those who obeyed would be “protected”. Those who challenged it did so at their peril. They might receive “soft” warnings - anonymous letters, packages containing animal excrement, telephone threats, ambush. More likely, punishment: damage to property, slaughter of herds, theft, arson, violence, kidnapping and, in the last resort and ineluctably, death. Most killings, however, were internal, due to power struggles or punishment for breaching omerta, its code of silence.
As long as I can remember, I worried about our own safety. The servants talked of foiled abductions of cousins and friends - some relatives no longer spent the summer in their estates - and of a banditry that plagued the countryside for a decade after the Allies’ landing in 1943. I dreaded the car journeys across the island. On the mountain passes my mother would take off her necklace and earrings and hide them, without uttering a word, and a silent anxiety would choke me. In our country house we felt protected: the overseer, who was not a Mafioso, kept discreet watch, fully armed on his mare. But, suddenly, our walks would be restricted; later, without any explanation, things would return to normal. I magnified the risks and kept watch at all times; I became an acute observer, learning to recognise each car from its engine noise, each driver from the frequency of gear changes.
The Mafia struck us too: in 1956 a cousin was kidnapped. The family informed the police rather than negotiate in secret. He was released unharmed after 40 days of captivity. It was one of the last kidnappings against the Sicilian aristocracy, by then devoid of cash and in decline. I have harboured both a visceral revulsion and an insatiable curiosity about the Mafia ever since.
My father loathed the Mafia. He had hoped that it would not regain the power lost under Mussolini but, as had happened before fascism, the parties in government relied on it to be re-elected. By the early 1950s, the Mafia had secured its infiltration of both local and regional governments. Father took Cincinnatus’ stance, avoiding his peers who entertained politicians, declining offers of public appointment and refusing to corrupt public servants - a widespread and customary practice. He told me that he expected his daughters to do likewise. My father became an uncomfortable, if economically insignificant, enemy for the Mafia. But he did not yield. When I was five years old he received an anonymous warning: “Beware of leaving your house in the evening.” He went out after dinner every night. There were no more messages. A few weeks later, some of our trees caught fire. He had the same number of sheep killed, a coded act of defiance to the Mafia: I will not surrender. There were no more fires, but I feared greatly for our safety.
Those fears revisited me in July 1978. My father telephoned me in London. In coded words he told me that he had received an anonymous warning: “Be careful on the road to Palermo.” He was due to collect his grandchildren at Palermo airport for their summer holidays. Did we want to keep them in England? My English husband decided that they should go. “I knew this might happen. If we give in, you will never again send the boys to Sicily.” Our children had a happy holiday. No further messages were received.
I later learned what had shaped my father’s stance. He had inherited, with his title, an estate in central Sicily; with it came its powerful Capomafia, Zu’ Paolo. A keen agriculturalist, my father invested in machinery and brought in a farm manager - a direct threat to Zu’ Paolo, who had offered to find for him “trusted and experienced” staff. Crops and machinery were vandalised. The manager resigned. The family never visited that estate. Years later, and by then heavily indebted, my father had to sell.
Zu’ Paolo continued to report to my father, as usual. The latter would meet him in the entrance hall, both standing. Zu’ Paolo was a Mafioso to the core: he spoke sparingly, using proverbs and parables, a language that all Sicilians understand, and there was no doubt as to who was in control. Then he would mellow and assume the so-often misleading benevolent image of the caring Mafioso: he would tell me stories about my father as a child, extolling his cleverness and the beauty of his estate, and spoke with pride of his own son, who was at secondary school. On leaving, he expressed the wish that my father should bring the family to the estate. I remember my father’s inscrutable face, the neck swollen, the eyes slit, and his curt reply: “Later.”
Perverse as it was, agrarian Mafia gave a kind of stability. Sardonically, it cultivated a meek image towards the landowners. An uncle told me that once, when he was in a politician’s crowded waiting room, Zu’ Paolo walked out of the minister’s office escorted by an obsequious secretary. He stopped to ask my uncle why he was there. He then stormed back into the minister’s office, shouting that nobody should keep waiting the brother-in-law of the baron whose overseer he had the honour to be! My uncle received the bemused minister’s apologies.
Life is cheap in Sicily. Mafiosi - there are an estimated 6,000 - are initiated after they have proved their ability to kill. Provided its rules of combat are obeyed, Mafia culture tolerates, and sometimes even encourages, deadly feuds between its families - the group of Mafiosi who control a territory - as a sort of free-market competition, leading to the survival of the fittest. Misdemeanors are punished with death, by the Mafia’s own brand of “justice”.
An example: for generations, two Mafia families fought for the overall control of the territory in western Sicily in which both of them claimed a stake. Their war, dormant under fascism, resumed in the late 1940s. The eldest son of the Capomafia, who, years before, had been killed by his direct opponent, had come of age. He was groomed to avenge his father’s death, and he did so: the killing took place in the 1950s, in town. He was apprehended by a policeman who witnessed the shooting and secured his conviction. On his release seven years later, he was given a hero’s welcome by family and supporters alike - he had done his duty. While in prison, he had received literacy classes and learned basic engineering (a man of his moral standing and skills could not return to being a mere peasant!). He became the agent of an engineering company and rose to senior management. To this day, his family and supporters extol his achievements as an example of “Just rewards from the Good Lord.”
The Mafia has an army of trusted collaborators and informers in all social strata and professions. An aged single woman, a friend of my family, is nicknamed “the oracle on electoral forecasts”. The explanation for her gift is complex. Her estate is run by an equally ancient overseer: he is not Mafioso, but he and his family are an essential accessory to the Mafia - they have no criminal record and are to be trusted in a court of law. They supply false witnesses and secure acquittals. Others like them provide safe accommodation for those in hiding, or storage for stolen goods, drugs and arms. And they cast their votes as they are told. They receive, in exchange, protection. Money and jobs may also be doled out. Every month the overseer brings farm produce to the old lady and stays on to chat - he can then report to the Mafia. Before an election he inquires of her views and canvasses for “his” candidate. “I am told that this man is the only good one, the others do not count,” he said to her, before the general election of 2001, “What do you think?” “If you have been told so, you should vote for him,” is her standard reply. On that occasion the old woman, who never casts her vote, forecast a landslide for Forza Italia in Sicily, the party founded by Silvio Berlusconi, with an exactitude that astounded all (who did not know her position in society). The old lady knew what became common knowledge: that Forza Italia was now seen to stand in the same relation to the Mafia as had the previously dominant Christian Democrats.
In the 1980s, after years of public denial and indifference, the better part of the Italian state responded to the crisis. Sicilian magistrates brought some of the Mafia to justice. They were hailed as heroes by some, but not all - what the most famous of these judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, stood for was not popular in the Mafia corridors of power. Death sentences against Falcone and Borsellino were carried through. The vice-chairman of the Antimafia Commission - a respected communist parliamentarian - was murdered. Most significantly, the man widely known as the Mafia’s principal contact in the Christian Democrat party, Salvo Lima - a former mayor of Palermo, a Christian Democrat MP and MEP - was gunned down. His usefulness had ended, a new party now attracted Mafia support. More than a decade after his murder in March 1992, a Mafia boss named Antonino Giuffre, who had turned state’s evidence, told a Palermo court that “the Lima murder marks the end of an era. A new era opens with a new political force on the horizon, which provided the guarantee that the Christian Democrats were no longer able to deliver. To be clear, that force was Forza Italia.”
Personal connections work on many levels. For example, my sister manages our estate and runs a small agriturismo. Once I stood in for her while she was on holiday. I had to collect a planning consent: an easy task, I thought. For days I was shunted from office to office, without any coherent explanation. In the end, I was allowed to speak to the manager. Ah, she said, the consent has lapsed - it was not collected on time. “Shit!” I muttered in English, and quickly apologised. The woman suddenly became lively and friendly; she had realised who I was, and asked about my life in England. This worked miracles and within one hour the consent was in my hands. On parting, she said that she might contact me, her son was due to go to London and she knew I would help. I was lucky - I have not heard from her.
”Clientelism” eases all dealings with the state: a citizen’s insistence in exercising his rights and demanding a decent service is scorned and discouraged. Worn out and dejected, many honest Sicilians - and there are many - refrain from expanding their business activities. Some encourage their children to seek work elsewhere. My Sicilian friends are puzzled as to how I, a foreigner without contacts, could have started a legal-aid practice in London and made a success of it. My answer is simple: dealing with the institutions of the British state may be frustrating, but there is no need of “friends”.
Britain is my country of adoption and I feel part of it. But people here remind me that they are aware of my Sicilian origins. Some do so jokingly - are you a Mafioso? - others may hint at the Mafia with veiled sarcasm. They irritate me. Very occasionally, they hurt, and I realise that innuendos may affect my reputation. Other Sicilians who live abroad resent questions about the Mafia and take deep offence. Some, who live in mainland Italy, adopt the accent of the place in which they live, to disguise their origins.
Sicilians are resilient. They have weathered misfortunes and poverty; like the British, they are fiercely nationalist and have their own brand of humour and self-deprecation. The two novels I wrote - after more than 30 years living and working in London - are set in Sicily. The first, La Mennulara (The Almond Picker), is about an almond picker who becomes a domestic servant and winds up ruling her masters. The book begins with her death: the mystery that surrounds her life unfolds slowly, through the town’s gossip. The other book, La Zia Marchesa (My Aunt, the Marquess), is about a Sicilian aristocrat whose search for happiness and identity is hampered by her wealth and the restraints of her class. Both women are prisoners of a rigid social system and fight for their rights: they are victorious, in their own way. My novels are choral; the story is told by the people who surround the heroines. The Mafia was not intended to play any significant part in either of them, but it crept into the textual language and shaped characters and actions. I could not resist its advance.
The Mafia is no longer visible in Sicily. Some Sicilians say that the Mafia has become part of a worldwide criminal organisation and operates from abroad. The Mafia is dead - corruption, they say, is the real issue. This view is fiercely held by many Sicilians who live abroad. Earlier this year I visited Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Pietro Grasso, and put this to him. He doesn’t agree.
”Pax Mafiosa,” he says, referring to the past 10 years, “is not even a truce. For them, this is a continuing war. Never has the Mafia felt so strong as now. One must not be taken in by the absence of violence in the public arena. This is a clear sign that Cosa Nostra goes on quietly with its own business. Pax Mafiosa is essential to the operations of this ‘legal’ Mafia, which remains a unified and vertical organisation. It has adapted to the repression on the part of the state and is trying to be invisible through the strategy of immersion. It has gone back to impenetrable secrecy.”
Grasso studied law at Palermo University, as I did, and then became a magistrate. “I do my duty, no more and no less, day in and day out, an ordinary job - upholding the law, investigating and prosecuting crime, with its risks.” Quietly, he says, “I know that I may be killed, like two of my predecessors.” He points out that the Mafia has killed many more police officers than magistrates. Grasso has police protection at all times, and only two weeks before our meeting there were headlines about a foiled attempt to kill him.
Grasso’s main task is to bring to justice the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, who was born more than 72 years ago in Corleone, has been wanted by the police for 37 years and runs an expanded Mafia from a string of safe houses in Sicily. Grasso says there is only an old photograph of Provenzano as a young man, and he assumes many identities. He moves from place to place - there are thousands of Mafia collaborators ready to help - and communicates through scraps of paper using a complex numeric code to name individuals. Police resources are limited, there are many crimes to investigate and prosecute. Grasso doesn’t see Provenzano’s capture as the end of the Mafia, symbolic as it may be. He quotes the old proverb: “When a Pope dies, another is elected.”
Provenzano, it seems, is busy putting Cosa Nostra structures in order. He is rebuilding its pyramidal structures, restoring to the top the exclusive jurisdiction over foreign affairs of each territorial district and all dealings with institutions and industry; insisting on strict adherence to the Mafia’s rigid code of behaviour, such as requiring approval to kill outsiders. He looks after his proteges well: there is a tax on all Cosa Nostra income for the benefit of its prisoners and their families. He has reduced to a trickle the drain of defectors - new initiations are restricted to blood members. Smuggling and the drugs trade thrive. Cosa Nostra is laundering its money abroad in ecological businesses - such as water and sewage treatment and waste recycling plants. In Sicily, it has invested heavily in agriculture and related industries, in spas and hotels and in safe new business, such as private hospitals and EU-funded projects.
Under Provenzano’s prudent administration, “safe” activities have been consolidated. The pizzo, the name given to the small but regular deduction the Mafia takes from businesses, is thriving. In January his “collector of taxes” was arrested, and his book revealed the Mafia’s methods. The victim pays by instalment and is even eligible for a rebate if he suffers unforeseeable loss of income. The cut on public contracts awarded is kept at modest levels. And thus money flows steadily and peacefully into the Mafia’s coffers.
I asked Grasso what makes the Mafia different from other criminal organisations. “The Mafia needs to be closely related to public administration, business and politics. It needs popular consensus. If it were otherwise, it would be simply a criminal organisation with the aim of illegal profit,” he says. “But the Mafia is also about management of power, and as such it requires consensus, contacts, relationships, collusion, intimidation and violence. Infiltrating means cohabiting, rather that an outright opposition. If it were all about gain, it would not be as complex as it is.
”The Cosa Nostra in the US,” he continues, “has moved on to money laundering in the legal economy. But Cosa Nostra here wants to intervene within the system: public works, employment, through clientelism.”
Grasso believes that the Mafia can be eradicated from Sicily. “The Mafia has a beginning, and is capable of having an end,” he says, paraphrasing Falcone, and goes on: “the fight against the Mafia should be an ordinary and well co-ordinated task of all the state institutions; a slow painstaking task.”
Another Sicilian magistrate, who didn’t want to be named, told me that a senior police chief confided to him recently that his officers no longer investigate, or refer to the investigating magistrates, all suspected Mafia crimes. There are too many, and the backlog of investigations would result in acquittals under the statute of limitation, “Like,” he adds with a smirk, “Andreotti’s.” (Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister of Italy, faced two Mafia-related trials, including one for murder, but he was either acquitted or time ran out under the statute.)
The anonymous magistrate believes that the Mafia could be eradicated by prosecuting each and every petty crime: zero tolerance. Young criminals are the base for Mafia territorial power, and its breeding ground. Deprived of that, he says, “The Mafia will wobble, and then fall.” He says mass education is necessary, beginning at primary school. “We need to change people’s false perceptions of the Mafia and demonstrate that one can live and find work without its ‘protection’ and the fear of revenge.” He cites a recent school initiative throughout Sicily, promoted by Palermo’s magistrates association. Pupils wrote about Mafia killings and their research and comments are in a book, Memories Rediscovered, a moving and horrid account of 247 identified “Mafia” victims since 1943: 22 children, six women, 29 peasants, 29 trade unionists, five public employees, 95 policemen, 18 politicians, 23 businessmen, seven journalists and 13 magistrates. These are the known “civilian” victims - the list excludes the hundreds of people “disappeared”, and the thousands of Mafiosi and their families slaughtered in the war between Mafias.
There is one institution, powerful and outside the state, whose crucial support has not been forthcoming: the Catholic Church. Its hierarchy’s record on denouncing the Mafia and its crimes is dismal. Palermo’s past cardinals either denied the Mafia’s existence or equated it to common criminality. It was only in May 1993 that John Paul II, on a visit to Sicily, denounced the Mafia for the first time and urged Mafiosi to repent. This was followed by the Mafia bombing two churches in Rome and, after that, there was silence again. Isolated, individual priests have done their best, but that is not enough.
I took a different career route to that of Grasso. I came to London where I have spent my working life as a lawyer, representing children taken into care and parents caught in the battle with their own inadequacies and their desire to raise their own family - a sad and challenging job, which I love. It was not until my mid- fifties that I discovered myself as a writer. Creative writing means reflecting and deepening the knowledge of myself and the world I describe. I have thought a good deal - often, for the first time - about the Mafia’s influence on the soul of Sicilians. Leonardo Sciascia, the leftwing Sicilian writer, said that each Sicilian has something of the Mafia within himself. His assertion impelled me to make sense of the Mafia and of myself: the most painful task I have ever undertaken.
”Mafiosita” lurks within me, and it came out powerfully last summer. I was at our family estate in Sicily. My grandchild cut his hand; while I was holding him in my arms, blood flowed copiously. I rushed to the telephone and called a friend: “Whom do you know at A&E?”, I asked. Had I been in London, I would have gone straight to the local hospital.
I thought long and hard on that episode, and was shamed. Distrustful of the ability of the local health service to deliver services without an “introduction”, I had resorted to the “known ways”: personal contact. My friend is just a friend, but for people less privileged than I, the Mafia is always ready - at a price - to be the “best of all friends”, and it has friends in all places. Sciascia was right: there is “something of the Mafia” in each of us. My father would have been ashamed of me.
Many Sicilians, fatalistic, believe that the Mafia has been there since time immemorial, and is there to stay. Their pessimism is due to the fear of discovering elements of “mafiosita” within themselves. But the new generations of educated Sicilians have become Italians and Europeans, and do not accept this. They want change. There are thriving anti-Mafia organisations. Sicilians are resourceful and intelligent - the Mafia’s success, perverse as it is, bears witness to this - and they have an added strength: fear. In Sicily people still live with fear of direct threats, of extortion, of abuse, of death. The memories of the past have not been erased by Pax Mafiosa. But fear also breeds courage and determination. My father feared for our safety, yet he bravely went on his lonely way; he would have encouraged me to write about the Mafia.
The Mafia can be defeated. I agree with Grasso’s words: “I know that it can be done. If there is the will of the State.”
Simonetta Agnello Hornby’s book “The Almond Picker” has recently been published in English by Viking.
