Sicily '43. James Holland

humiliating men of honour publicly with parades and show trials to try to dispel their mystique. Not for nothing was he known as the ‘Iron Prefect’. By the time he was brought back to mainland Italy by Mussolini in June 1929, he had arrested more than 11,000 mafiosi, most of whom continued to languish in prison without having ever had a trial. Very publicly, it was announced the Mafia had been destroyed.

      That had been something of an overstatement. Still, rampant banditry, cattle rustling and small-time mafiosi had definitely been crushed. Mori’s successors in the 1930s turned away from show trials, preferring to send many mafiosi into internal exile on Sicily with the threat of further strong-arm tactics if they erred. What remained were a handful of Mafia groups, now operating more quietly and subtly. Perhaps a better way of describing matters would be to say the Mafia were lying dormant in Sicily; but there was definitely a sense that by the outbreak of war in 1939, their era of dominance was over.

      In fact, the Mafia had rebooted itself into the United States, profiteering first from dominating the lemon trade and then from prohibition and a host of other protection rackets, and while there were plenty of Italian-American gangsters who did not hail from Sicily – Al Capone and Vito Genovese, to name but two – a large number of Sicilian mafiosi not only moved to and began operating in the United States, they also maintained firm links with the old country. Mafiosi always thought of themselves as a breed apart, and as men of honour that meant living and operating outside the normal rule of law. And yet the normal rule of law did exist; and having a foot in two different countries could be extremely useful.

      In the central west of Sicily, lying on the edge of the province of Caltanissetta between Palermo to the north and Agrigento to the south, stood the small town of Villalba, home to around three thousand people. This was particularly harsh countryside, surrounded by low mountains, connected to the outside world by remote winding tracks, its thin, stony soil baked the colour of sandstone in the long summer. The town itself was built on a slope, looking northwards towards the Madonie Mountains, and laid out on a grid of thirteen streets by six around a town square, the Piazza Madrice, dominated by the Chiesa Madre – the Mother Church. Away from the church, the handsome stone houses around the piazza and along the central streets very quickly gave way to hovels and squalid one-room dwellings, or bassi, with compacted mud floors, effluent in the gutters and no running water.

      This small, unremarkable and impoverished town was home to Calogero Vizzini, a 65-year-old man whose only sign of wealth was his paunch, a conspicuously rare feature on an island where very few fat people existed. With his spectacles, moustache and greying, receding hair, he looked otherwise nondescript; there were certainly no bespoke clothes, his usual outfit being a short-sleeved shirt and trousers with braces.

      Born in the town back in July 1877, Vizzini had been the first son of a labourer and contadino, although his mother was slightly higher in the social hierarchy with the additional prestige that came from having a member of her family in the priesthood. While Vizzini’s two younger brothers took to their studies and later went into the Church, he had remained illiterate, deciding instead to make his way in the world in a different manner by trading in the cancia, the barter of wheat for milling into flour, which enabled him to take a cut at both ends as well as demand a transport fee. The men in this trade effectively acted as intermediaries between the peasants who needed their wheat milled and the mills that produced the flour – and the mill, in the case of Villalba, was 50 miles away along tracks that were impossibly dangerous and controlled by bandits.

      Vizzini got around the travel risk by coming to an arrangement with the biggest bandit in the region, Paolo Varsalona. Together they ran the cancia very much to their own profit. Along the way, Vizzini was accused of robbery and murder and twice arrested, but acquitted on both occasions for lack of evidence, protected by the barrier of omertà – the Mafia’s sacred code of silence. Through a combination of guile, intelligence, ruthlessness and daring, by the outbreak of the First World War Vizzini had won respect and authority and had become a gabellotto. Unsurprisingly, he managed to duck war service and instead made a packet through the black market, supplying horses and other animals for the army through a combination of theft, bribery and threats. When he was eventually investigated, all those who had originally testified against him suddenly retracted. Nine of them were then accused of perjury and imprisoned; all nine took their sentences without so much as a further squeak. The episode only served to enhance Vizzini’s prestige as a man of honour.

      Vizzini had become a gabellotto more powerful than the landowner, and so was able to buy his own feudo at auction at a ludicrously low price because there were no other bidders. Such was his rising influence and power. On another occasion, a young mafioso from Villalba named Lottò committed a very badly planned murder, so blatantly that his arrest and conviction seemed to be foregone conclusions. Not so. Certainly, men of honour did not simply murder people – there was a process to be gone through, and authority had to be given; and Lottò had breached the rules. And yet, for men of honour it was unthinkable that punishment should be left to the state. To have allowed this to happen would have caused Vizzini a loss of respect, and so he took matters into his own hands. First, Lottò was transferred to an insane asylum where, soon after, he ‘died’. His ‘corpse’ was then removed in a specially ventilated coffin and ‘buried’. Meanwhile, the very much alive Lottò was given false documents and some money and smuggled to the United States. Arriving in New York, he was met by ‘friends’, and identified himself by producing a yellow silk handkerchief on which was embroidered a single ‘C’ – C for Calò.

      Vizzini continued to accumulate wealth and expand his interests, entering into a partnership with some Fascists to develop sulphur mines in the Caltanissetta region. Although he was strongly anti-Fascist, it suited him to keep in with the Church and the Fascist Party, and he skilfully managed to do so without the slightest loss of prestige as a man of honour – which was one of the reasons he escaped the fate of many other mafiosi during the regime of Cesare Mori. This didn’t stop him from repeatedly being charged with criminal conspiracy, but every time, without fail, he was acquitted due to lack of evidence, either because key witnesses clammed up or because vital papers mysteriously disappeared. In 1935 he declared himself bankrupt and from then on the authorities left him in peace; but by June 1943 he was as rich, powerful and unscrupulous as he had ever been, and while the Mafia might have been lying low, Don Calò, as he had become, was the most senior mafioso in all of Sicily, with contacts not just across the island but in the United States as well.

      Don Calò had every interest in making sure Mussolini and the Fascist regime came to an end, because the Fascists had waged war against the Honourable Society and that needed to be avenged. Moreover, whenever there was political chaos there was opportunity, and that needed to be exploited too. Another Sicilian who was every bit as eager to see the back of Mussolini and Fascism, but for somewhat different reasons, was Lieutenant Max Corvo, now a citizen of the United States of America, who until the age of nine had lived in Melilli, a town perched in the hills overlooking Augusta and Syracuse in the east of the island. His father, Cesare, an outspoken critic of Fascism, had been forced to emigrate to the States ahead of the rest of his family, a separation that affected Max deeply. A keenly intelligent and determined young man, Max Corvo grew up fired by the same strong liberal political views as his father and, with the onset of war, was determined to play his part both for his adopted country and for the island of his birth.

      While still in training as a conscript, Corvo wrote a paper he called his ‘Plan to Overthrow the State in Sicily’, outlining the kind of work US intelligence might carry out to undermine the Fascist regime. Managing to get it into the hands of the right people, Corvo eventually caught the attention of Earl Brennan, then head of the Italian Section of Secret Intelligence, a department of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS, which had been established in June 1942 to train and deploy secret agents to gather intelligence and operate behind enemy lines, and to work alongside army and navy intelligence as well as the Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC). Corvo’s theory was that the dissatisfaction many Sicilians felt with the war and with their lot in general could be exploited and that, as someone who could speak the local dialect and had an intimate knowledge of the island’s customs and cultural quirks, he was well placed to help with this.

      Brennan