The Mafia at War: Allied Collusion with the Mob

By Tim Newark

Greenhill Books £19.99, 320 pages

FT bookshop price: £15.99

According to a story familiar to Sicilians, on July 14 1943 a US fighter plane flew low over the village of Villalba. The Americans, British and Canadians had invaded Sicily four days earlier. They expected resistance from the island’s Nazi German occupiers, but little trouble from the Nazis’ demoralised Italian allies.

A golden flag is said to have fluttered from the aircraft, with a large black L in its middle. The L stood for Charles ”Lucky” Luciano, the Sicilian-born mafia boss who was the paramount US gangster of the early 1930s.

According to the story, the L signalled to local mafiosi that the US invasion had Luciano’s blessing. Sure enough, with the help of Don Calogero Vizzini, mafia boss of Villalba, US forces met virtually no opposition as they swept through Sicily.

Such tales, according to which the US relied on the mafia to conquer Sicily and then let mobsters take control, may appeal to Italians desperate to account for the mafia’s power. But Tim Newark’s book demolishes the ”Villalba incident”. Having trawled through field records he shows that US forces had moved beyond Villalba by the time of Don Calogero’s supposed intervention.

Moreover, Newark argues that the lack of resistance to the US advance owed nothing to the mafia. Italian forces simply gave up, and the retreating Germans put up a fight only on Sicily’s east coast.

The source of the Villalba incident myth was Michele Pantaleone, a leftist anti-mafia Sicilian politician whose family were bitter rivals of Don Calogero’s family. He recounted the tale in a 1962 book. It was repeated in The Honoured Society (1964) by Norman Lewis, who had served in Italy as a wartime British intelligence officer. For English-speaking readers, the damage was done.

Still, the US authorities did have some contacts with the mafia, as is demonstrated in the 1954 Herlands Report, an inquiry ordered by Thomas Dewey, the New York state governor and the Republican presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948. The report shows that US naval intelligence struck a deal with Luciano in 1942, hoping to exploit the New York mafia’s influence over parts of the eastern seaboard to help the navy prevent Nazi sabotage, espionage and U-boat attacks.

Certainly, this was a case of supping with the devil. But as Lieutenant Anthony Marsloe, a naval intelligence officer, testified to the Herlands inquiry: ”Every available source of information which can be used to prevent, as well as to apprehend, those who are a potential or actual danger during an emergency or outbreak of hostilities is warranted by the unusual circumstances.”

Later on numerous Sicilian-Americans, including East Coast mobsters, provided the US armed forces with information about Sicily’s harbours and terrain to help the 1943 invasion. But it surely made little difference.

Newark’s emphasis on the mafia’s minor role in the US war effort is justified. A pity, then, that he has spiced up his material with direct quotations attributed to Luciano from an unreliable 1975 book The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano.

Otherwise The Mafia at War is an interesting read - and a good example of how proper use of original sources can illuminate the truth and destroy historical myths.

Tony Barber is the FT’s Rome bureau chief.