The Octopus. The Rise and Rise of the Sicilian Mafia

153 Pages·2012·0.86 MB·English

by  Joe Pieri

THE OCTOPUS
JOE PIERI was born in Tuscany in 1919 but spent nearly all his life as a café
proprietor in Glasgow. He wrote most of his books for pleasure during his
retirement. His other books include The Scots-Italians, River of Memory, Tales of
the Savoy, The Big Men, Isle of the Displaced and (with Archie Morrison) Wheel
of Fortune.

First published in 2007 by Mercat Press
Birlinn Ltd, 10 Newington Road, Edinburgh EH9 1QS
www.birlinn.co.uk
Text copyright © Joe Pieri 2007
ISBN-13: 978-1-84183-127-5
eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-244-3
Contents
Prologue
1 Origins
2 Emigration
3 Il Duce and the Mafia
4 Al Capone
5 Salvatore Giuliano
6 Lucky Luciano
7 Death of a Banker
8 Death of a President
9 Death of a Pope
10 Go West
11 Hollywood
12 Meyer Lansky
13 Supergrasses
14 Murder Unlimited
15 John Gotti
Further reading
Prologue
Although I was not aware of it at the time, the seeds of my interest in the Sicilian
Mafia, ‘La Piovra’, the Octopus, as it is sometimes named in Italy, were sown
many years ago, on the last day of June 1940, to be precise, as I sat on a quay at
the port of Liverpool with thousands of other prisoners awaiting embarkation on
one of the two prison ships at anchor there, the Arandora Star and the Ettrick.
I met Pasquale Nardo on that day in 1940 as we sat cross-legged on the quay,
where we had been squatting for hours together with thousands of other
prisoners awaiting embarkation on one of the two prison ships at anchor there. It
is no part of this story to describe the series of vicissitudes that had brought us
side by side on that pier together with thousands of Germans and Italians—that
story has been told elsewhere. Suffice it to say that we struck up an immediate
friendship.
Pasquale was a short, stocky and powerfully built youth in his very early
twenties, with short curly dark brown hair and a face that reminded me of a
smaller Gilbert Roland, a film star of the day. As we sat and waited, he told me
about his capture a few weeks before, a few miles off the coast at Trapani, a
fishing port on the west coast of Sicily. On the day of Mussolini’s declaration of
war he and his three companions were going about their business of catching
fish, and as their little fishing smack emerged from a dense fog bank they
rammed the side of a British submarine which had just surfaced. Presumably to
keep his position secret, the British captain promptly took them on board as
prisoners and sank their craft. They were put ashore at Malta, then were
transferred to a ship bound for Liverpool, where they were decanted into a group
of prisoners destined for an internment camp on the St Lawrence river in
Canada. The captain of the submarine must have been a very humane man, for
he could just as easily have sunk the four without trace along with their craft.
Pasquale spoke Italian with a thick Sicilian accent, which I, with my Tuscan
brand of Italian, at first found difficult to understand. He was amazed at the fact
that I could speak both English and Italian. He plied me with questions. Where
was I from? Why could I speak English so fluently? I had lived all my life in a
place called Scotland? Where was this place? Was it near America? He had an
uncle in America, he said. Why was I a prisoner like himself? What kind of
work did I do in this place? What were the people there like? These
conversations continued for the next 14 days in the cramped hold of the Ettrick,
the ship that was taking us to what was to be our home for the next three years,
and during those 14 days a bond of friendship was formed between the two of
us, the one a Scots-Italian from Glasgow and the other a Sicilian fisherman.
If a divine hand had set out deliberately to create in microcosm the
bewildering array of different racial strains, cultures and dialects that made up
the Italy of the first half of the twentieth century, it could have done no better
than the British government had achieved accidentally in the setting up of
internment Camp S on St Helene’s Island in Montreal in June 1940, at the time
of Mussolini’s declaration of war on Britain. Imprisoned there in the old fortress,
erected by Champlain in 1611 as a protection against the English and the native
Indians, were 402 Italians, 250 of them resident throughout the UK, 148 of them
merchant seamen taken from ships docked at British ports and Pasquale with his
three fellow fishermen, all of them arrested on the day that Mussolini declared
war on Britain and France.
The Italy of Mussolini’s time had been a nation for only 50 years, and the
economic, cultural and linguistic divisions between the people who inhabited the
Italian peninsula and who now called themselves Italians were deep and well-
nigh irreconcilable. A factory worker in Turin or Milan was no more akin to a
Sicilian peasant than he was to a North African Arab. A Tuscan or a Venetian
had nothing in common with a Neapolitan or a Calabrese, and to a Sardinian all
of the above were as foreign as a visitor from Russia might have been. These
differences presented difficulties to any government trying to form a new nation
from the hotchpotch of states which had made up the Italian peninsula before
unification in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and much effort had gone
into attempts to create a homogeneous Italian state. Those efforts had not been
completely successful even towards the end of the twentieth century, and to this
day great differences still remain between the cultures and way of life of the
north and the south of Italy.
One of the measures taken by successive governments in an attempt to bring
about change was that of deliberately mixing together the populations of the
regions at every possible opportunity, so as to make the new ‘Italians’ more
aware of one another’s habits and customs, and to create a homogeneous mix in
the whole of the peninsula. Army conscripts from the north were sent to do their
military service in Calabria or Sicily, and those from the south would find
themselves in Lombardy or Tuscany for the period of their training. The crews of
merchant ships too contained a compulsory mix of ‘ethnic’ groups from all over
Italy, and this mix was evident in the make-up of the crews of the ships who
found themselves prisoners on St Helene’s Island, all of whom had been
recruited from the four corners of Italy. These seamen now found themselves
sharing a few square yards of prison compound with yet another ‘ethnic’ group,
this time made up of Italians who for years had made their home in different
parts of the United Kingdom, and who in speech and habit were more akin to
their captors than they were to their fellow prisoners.
A few months into the life of the camp, Pasquale decided to put his full trust
in me. Mail had begun to arrive for the prisoners through the good offices of the
International Red Cross, and the little Sicilian had received a letter from his
father in Trapani, written on the old man’s behalf by the local priest, for his
father could not read or write. Pasquale too was illiterate, in common with 50%
of southern Italians, that being the incidence of illiteracy in that part of Italy in
those days. Who could he get to read the letter to him? The other illiterate sailors
from the merchant ships, and they were many, as a matter of course went to their
officers to have their mail from home read out, but Pasquale had no faith in these
officers. Most were northerners, and all were Fascisti. He had a deep hatred of
the Fascisti, he told me. Too many of his friends had been arrested by them and
sent to prison or into exile on the Lipari Islands of fearsome repute. So he
approached me and asked me to read his letter, and sat attentively as he listened
to the words of his father as set down by the village priest and read to him by his
new friend from Scotland. I wrote an answer as Pasquale dictated, and was
deeply touched by the simple words of love and affection from a son to his
father. To read and write a man’s intimate mail with a parent is to see into that
man’s soul, and so I, as a mark of my appreciation of the trust that Pasquale had
put in me, would occasionally read out parts of my own intimate family letters to
my new Sicilian friend.
But I did much more. I had been bilingual from birth, so I had as good a
command of spoken Italian as I had of English, and despite my own comparative
lack of schooling I was able slowly and painstakingly to teach Pasquale to read
and then to write, using whatever Italian books were available in the camp from
the International Red Cross. A lot can be done even with basic materials as long
as there is unlimited time, and unlimited time is exactly what we had during
those long days and nights of captivity. A few hours each day were spent with
heads bent over reading books and writing paper, and at the end of the first year
of captivity Pasquale was capable of writing his own letters to his father in
Trapani and of reading the priest’s replies. New and limitless horizons had been
opened up to him. The little Sicilian read everything he could get his hands on,
and thanks to the generosity of the Red Cross there was no lack of material to
choose from. His interest in and understanding of the new world that had opened
up for him were boundless.
Then in the late summer of 1943, together with two fellow internees, I found
myself in a situation of some danger with a group of the merchant seamen in the
camp. I, together with 39 other civilians, was awaiting repatriation to the UK
following our release by the Home Office in London. The war with Italy had
ended with the removal of Mussolini from power and with the capitulation of the
Italian Army. Italy was being torn apart by what in essence was a civil war.
Mussolini had been rescued from his hotel prison on the Gran Sasso mountain
by the famous German commander of paratroopers, Otto Skorzeny, and had
formed a new Fascist state, the ‘Government of Salo’, to continue fighting on the
side of the Nazis. The new Italian government which had deposed him had
joined forces with the Allies to fight against the Germans, and as a consequence
we internees from the U.K. were no longer enemy aliens, we were now allies of
the British. While we were waiting for space to be found for us on a convoy for
the Atlantic crossing back to the UK, a group of seamen with Fascist leanings
who refused to accept Italy’s capitulation had been busy digging a tunnel from a
recreation hut in the centre of the camp to the outside of the barbed wire
perimeter fence. From experience of escapes in the past, we were only too well
aware of how the authorities would react in the event of a mass escape. A
quarantine would very likely be imposed on the camp until the escaped prisoners
had been recaptured and the matter investigated, our departure could well be
delayed, the convoy missed, and God alone knew how much time would pass
before space could be found for us on another one.
A direct betrayal of the tunnel to the authorities was absolutely ruled out, for
the idea of informing on persons who had been fellow prisoners for three years
went against the grain, no matter what the circumstances. So, one night soon
after, I, with two other prisoners, Joe Guidi from Glasgow and Louie Tontini
from London, crept into the recreation hut, found the trapdoor entrance to the
tunnel in the place where Pasquale had told me it would be, and crawled into the
excavation. The tunnel had been very skillfully dug out, was about two feet high
and broad enough for a man to wriggle his way forward. Some wooden props
sustained the roof, and at the point where it ran under the service road as it
crossed the compound, the props had been spaced very close together to
compensate for any extra overhead weight. We quickly stripped these props
away, leaving the section of tunnel under the road completely unsupported, and
returned as quietly as we could to our bunks to await developments.
Early next morning a heavily laden service lorry entered the camp, and as it
passed over the point where the props had been removed, the earth under it
collapsed and the vehicle came to a halt with its front wheels embedded in the