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Francesco Rosi’s masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano was made in 1961—a decade after the bandit’s death. It was shot on the mountains around Montelepre that were Giuliano’s stronghold; the extras were peasants from the same area; a woman who had recently lost her son played Giuliano’s mother in the scene where she identifies his body; Rosi even used the real bandit’s rifle. All this care to ensure the film’s authenticity makes it even more striking that the protagonist himself is only ever shown from behind or from an oblique angle; his famous face is hidden behind binoculars or masked by his mother’s shawl.
The truth about Giuliano lies not in the figure of the bandit himself, Rosi is suggesting, but somewhere in a tangle of relationships between the bandits, the peasants, the police, the army, the politicians, and the media. At the centre of that tangle was the mafia.
The Fascist movement was founded in Milan in March 1919 by journalist and combat veteran Benito Mussolini. He aimed to institute a ‘trench-ocracy’, to bring the patriotic discipline and aggression of the front to bear on Italy’s stunted democracy. The following year, as the post-war wave of labour militancy receded, squads of Fascists began to build their movement by dishing out ferocious beatings to strikers and socialists across northern and central Italy. They attracted the favour of landowners and industrialists who were keen to assail the labour movement while it was on the retreat.
The book that made Cesare Lombroso's reputation was Delinquent Man, first published in 1876. In it he argued that criminals could be identified by certain physical deformities: jug-handle ears, low foreheads, long arms, and so on. He termed these physical signs ‘criminal stigmata’. What they demonstrated, according to Lombroso, was that crooks were actually biological anachronisms, accidental throwbacks to an earlier stage in human evolution. Pushing his own logic through to breaking point, Lombroso also thought that all animals were criminal too.
No one was allowed in or out of Gangi while the police mounted a series of stunts designed to humiliate the concealed bandits. Their cattle were confiscated; the most handsome beasts were slaughtered in the town square and offered for sale at token prices. Hostages were taken, including women and children. Policemen slept in bandits’ beds and—so strong rumours suggested—abused their women.
After the Ciaculli bomb, no one could shrug their shoulders and argue that ‘they only kill each other’ or that the mafia was in its death throes. The papers rightly called it the worst crime since the days of the ‘last bandit’, Salvatore Giuliano. The police response was immediate: Villabate and Ciaculli were surrounded on the night of 2 July, their streets illuminated by rocket flares; forty people were arrested and a large quantity of arms confiscated. It was only the beginning of what would become the biggest round-up of suspects since the days of the ‘iron prefect’. Three days after the tragedy at Ciaculli, under an enervatingly hot sun, an estimated 100,000 people, including the Minister of the Interior, followed the virtually empty coffins of the seven victims to Palermo Cathedral. The political pressure to take the mafia problem seriously became irresistible.
Under its first Sicilian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, the government responded to the crisis in the worst possible way: by staging a lunatic drive for colonial glory in Ethiopia. The result was inevitable. At the battle of Adowa in March 1896, a force of 17,500 Italian troops and locally recruited askari was destroyed by a better-armed and better-led Ethiopian army numbering over 120,000. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by a European colonial power. Fifty per cent of the Italian force was killed, wounded, or led away into captivity.
Mori’s death in 1942 went virtually unreported. The following year the Fascist regime collapsed and his work was entirely undone. The mafia’s salvation came from the United States. For during the same decades in which it struggled with socialism, Fascism, and war in Sicily, the mafia had become a part of American life.