Chapter 15

OMERTA AND THE MAFIA

When the drunken sulphur-miners quarrel and kill one another on Saturdays and Sundays, the murderers are seldom brought to justice because of Omerta; a word which is said to be derived from uomo and to signify manliness in the sense of power of endurance, the power, for example, of keeping silence even under torture; hence it comes to be used for an exaggeration of that natural sense of honour, that Noblesse Oblige or Decency Forbids, which makes an English schoolboy scorn to become a sneak. It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous, whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they may ever have had in professional justice. If one were to be involved with a Sicilian in committing a crime, one might be perfectly certain that he would never turn King's evidence, he would say, "Io son uomo, io non parlo" ("I am a man, I know how to hold my tongue") and he would rather die than betray an accomplice who is his friend and probably his compare. Nor need the criminal fear that the victim or anyone in the secret whether accomplice or not, will blab. A man with a wound on his face, made obviously by a knife, will swear to the police that in drawing a cork he fell and cut himself with the bottle. He does not intend his assailant to go unpunished, but he will not have the police interfering if he can prevent it; he means to look after his own affairs himself. If a murder has been committed a crowd will collect round the murdered man--a crowd that includes the police and also the murderer--but no one has any idea who committed the crime, not even those who saw it done, and not even the dying man, who may carry his assumption of ignorance so far as to call his murderer to his side, embrace him affectionately and give him a Judas-kiss which bears a double meaning; for the police and the general public it is evidence that there can have been no ill-feeling between the two, while for the friends of the murdered man it confirms their suspicions as to the one on whom the vendetta is to be executed. So many have told me this that I cannot help thinking that, if it really is done as often as they say, it must by now have lost some of its power of deceiving the police. Probably it was done on some occasion which took the public fancy, and they keep on repeating it because it makes a dramatic close.

Giovanni Grasso has a play called _Omerta_:_ La Legge del Silenzio_. Don Andrea has been murdered by or at the instigation of Don Toto (Salvatore), who is an overbearing bully, nevertheless Saru (Rosario) has been sent to prison for the crime and, during his absence, his girl has married Don Toto. The play opens with the return from prison of Saru, acted by Giovanni. He comes to the house of his mother, with whom Don Toto and his wife are living. The length of the play is provided by the disappointments attending his return: his setting up for himself and painting paladins on Sicilian carts; a scene of passionate tenderness with his mother, during which he convinces her of his innocence, but refuses to reveal the name of the murderer which he has learnt in prison; a beautiful interview with Pasqualino, his young brother, who shows he is the right sort of boy by declaring of his own accord that he hates Don Toto; a magnificent interrupted quarrel with Don Toto, and scenes with the police and with the priest to whom Saru refuses to give any information about the murder. Towards the end Saru staggers in wounded. They all try to make him tell the name of his murderer, but he will not. Finally, he is left alone with Pasqualino to whom he gives his revolver with these dying words:

"For Don Toto, when you shall be eighteen."

Pasqualino understands, kisses the pistol and accepts the obligation, saying:

"I will see to it."

The others return and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the Spartan boy concealed the fox, bravely answers:

"Nothing."

One may object to the play on the ground that it breaks off instead of coming to a conclusion--one is left wishing to see Pasqualino, grown up and acted by Giovanni, executing the vendetta--but it is a good play and shows what is meant by omerta. The dramatic critic of the _Times_ (2 March, 1910), on the morning after Giovanni produced it in London, opened his notice of it thus: "Omerta must make things very difficult for the Sicilian police." This is precisely what they intend.

Without omerta the mafia would hardly flourish, and the mafia is not so easy to understand. I suppose the reason why Sicilians explain it badly is that they understand it too well. The inquiring outsider cannot see the trees for the wood, and the explaining insider cannot see the wood for the trees. They labour to make clear things with which I am familiar, and take for granted things which are strange to me, treating me rather as my father treated the judges before whom he was arguing some legal point. Their lordships interrupted him:

"Yes, Mr. Jones, you say this is so and that is so, but you do not produce any authority in support of your statements."

"Authority, my lord?" exclaimed my father, as though perhaps he might have forgotten something: then, leaning over the desk, he said, in a stage whisper: "Usher, bring me _Blackstone_--or some other elementary work."

Thus we do not make much progress, but by degrees one picks up a few ideas about it.

My friend Peppino Fazio, of Catania, allowed me to copy and translate part of an article he wrote in a newspaper. He is speaking of Palermo as long ago as 1780:

The Albergheria was the quarter that harboured those men who were most ready with their hands and most quarrelsome; they were expert also in using their knives, with which they fenced by rule and according to art; they obeyed a certain code of chivalry of their own, not permitting the weak or the unarmed to be bullied, treating as criminals those who used fraud and treachery, and not brooking the intervention of the police. They were men whom an exaggerated sentiment of honour and of individual courage had decoyed from the path of social conventions, but in whom there was a fundamental notion of right conduct and a generosity at times magnanimous. They held each other in great mutual respect, free from any element of servility or cowardice, not recognising grades, nor conferring any right to command--a respect that was the more profound according as its object was the more distinguished for acts of valour and grandeur of soul. It was the tacit homage that one pays to heroes, poets, artists and to every kind of genius.

These men, slowly degenerating, have produced the mafia, which is associated with bullying, blackmailing and crime. The word mafia has been applied in this bad sense only in more recent times, as we are assured by those who have studied the subject. The ancestors of the mafiosi used to call themselves Cristiani--that is Men in the sense of men of courage and silence.

The Cristiano carried in one pocket his rosary and in the other his knife. Outside his own class he recognised the higher social distinctions and, while preserving his own self-respect and never stooping to obsequiousness, felt for the galantuomini (that is for the townspeople) and for the signori (that is for the patricians) a real submission which he displayed both in acts and words by protecting their persons and their reputations; so that no thief or evil-liver dared to commit any crime against one who was known to be protected by a Cristiano.

One recognises about this something of the chivalry of Robin Hood and of more modern highwaymen. The conditions of life in the albergheria are not identical with those of life in the open country, either in England or in Sicily, nor with those of life in the orange-groves of the Conca d'Oro round about Palermo. Both in the Conca d'Oro and in the open fields the guardians employed to protect the crops are all mafiosi and are able to prevent the employment of any who are not. The conditions in a sulphur-mine again are different. Confusion arises unless one knows which conditions are present to the mind of him who is trying to explain the mafia. Besides which, the words mafia and mafioso are still often used in a good sense.

There was something mafioso about Michelino when he was singing to us at the mine, keeping us all in order and silencing the guitar with a wave of his hand. There is something of it in a girl who is not ashamed of her beauty and does not blush to be admired. It was the mafiosita of Guido Santo, the mule, at Castellinaria, that sunny morning when he trotted up and down in his new harness before taking us to the shore, which put it into our heads to make it also his festa. There is something of it in the attitude of King Henry VIII, with his hat on one side and his arm a-kimbo, as he appears in a full-length portrait by Holbein. There was a good deal of it in the conduct of Giovanni in his Teatro Machiavelli on one occasion when a lady music-hall singer failed to please; the public hissed her and made such an uproar that she could not proceed. Giovanni was, or pretended to be, furious. He behaved to his audience as Nino Bixio behaved to his men on the Sicilian expedition. He came on and abused them with gesticulation and language; he swore and stormed at them; he appealed to their sense of chivalry; he threatened to come down among them and teach them manners; he declared that they should hear her. He made the piano-man play; he went and fetched the lady; he stood by her side, frowning, with his arms folded, ready to break out, the personification of angry determination and suppressed energy. The people acquiesced and listened. When the singer had finished, they applauded; and they were applauding not only her, but also Giovanni because he had dominated them. It is a small theatre and their numbers may have been four or five hundred--it would depend upon the programme and the kind of evening it was--but if it had been the Teatro Bellini he would have subdued them just as well, unless there had been present someone to resist him with a stronger personality, and his experience had taught him that the chances were against that.

An imposing personality is a useless possession unless there are others willing to be imposed upon, and it is this willingness to be dominated quite as much as the love of dominating that makes the mafia possible. If I may "quote from memory":

Surely the pleasure is as great Of being beaten as to beat.

Possibly the Sicilian charm contains among its many ingredients a trace of this love of being dominated which, in England, we associate more particularly with women, spaniels and walnut trees; and if it were not so, history might contain less about the misgovernment of the island by foreigners.

The mafia is not like the Neapolitan Camorra, it is not an organised society such as one reads about in books for boys, nor is it a recognised trade union with a president, secretary, officers and so on. It is rather an esprit de corps, and no more a secret society than omerta is a secret society; nevertheless, they speak of the mafia as being more highly organised in some districts than in others, and there are secret societies whose members are mafiosi, so that for a foreigner to speak of the mafia as a secret society would appear to be an excusable error.

Among every collection of men, and even in a herd of bullocks, one is always the acknowledged leader, and in a sulphur-mine it naturally happens that one man has a more dominating personality, more prepotenza, than any of the others; this capo-mafioso takes the lead and is king. When, as often happens, he is a man with a respect for law and order, willing to be useful to the managers, the mafia can and does supplement in an amateur fashion the deficiencies of professional justice. If Giovanni Grasso were really a worker in a sulphur-mine, as he sometimes appears to be on the stage, he would certainly take the lead, and no one who knows him will believe that he could ever be capable of a bad action. But few men can safely be trusted with absolute power. Sometimes this capo-mafioso is a villain who glories in a record of crime, a brow-beating bully who will stick at nothing. Here is a situation for a melodrama--the Wicked Despot. He does as he chooses with those around him, who fear lest he should treat them as Don Toto treated Don Andrea before the opening of _Omerta_, and as he treats Saru in the course of the play; and they not only fear, they also admire an unscrupulousness of which they feel themselves to be incapable. They refer their disputes to him and execute his orders. They do not pay him money for adjudicating between them, it is enough for him to have the satisfaction of being asked to arbitrate and, by giving his decision and seeing that it is carried out, he consolidates his power. But he exacts from them a percentage of their winnings at cards as tribute, and they pay it willingly so as to keep on good terms with him. Of course, under the throne of any of these tyrants, among those who have sufficient daring, conspiracies are continually surging and, sooner or later, whether he is a good or a bad man, he has to give way to a stronger--perhaps a fresh arrival, who takes the public fancy. Sometimes there are two with apparently an equal power of dominating; they agree not to quarrel openly, but, between themselves, each is on the look-out for an opportunity to annihilate the other's influence.

One Saturday, in the street at Caltanissetta, Beppe showed me marks of bullets on the wall. He said that only a week before there had been a row among a score of men with revolvers about some question of precedence among the mafiosi in a neighbouring mine arising out of the terms proposed for ending a strike. One of the men was killed and several were wounded, but the question of precedence could not be settled that day because the survivors were all put into prison.

According to the plays, the prisons are to the mafiosi what the ganglia are to the nerves, and give the prisoners an opportunity for talking matters over, thus providing an effective means of continuing the plot of the drama. And though the criminals feel secure in the knowledge that omerta will prevent their confederates from giving information, yet the police, of course, know who is who all the time, just as the police in London know who are the criminals; the law, however, is jealous of the rights of the people and does not move on suspicion. And too much of the modern police methods would not combine well with the requirements of melodrama.

Beppe assured me that in his mine the mafiosi are mostly good fellows and do not do any harm, except among themselves when they quarrel, get drunk and murder one another. He admits that the making use of them in the management of the men is like playing with fire, but he agrees with all who have gone into the matter that a stranger falling among them, wherever he might meet them, would be treated with the most extreme respect and courtesy. This is not because they are afraid of giving themselves away, distrusting the stranger's omerta, it is because they have a real self-respect and wish to pass in the eyes of the world for men of good position. The presence of a stranger among them is a challenge to their chivalry and to their oriental sense of hospitality.

Anyone wishing to study the mafia from books might begin with _La Mafia e I Mafiosi_, by Antonio Cutrera, Delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza (Palermo. Alberto Reber, 1900), and continue with _La Mala Vita di Palermo_ (_I Ricottari_), by the same author. If he will also read all the numerous books by other authors cited in the notes to these two works he ought to gain a fair knowledge of the subject.