Defiance Read Free

forces such as the Vatican, the White House and Italian industrialists had still been wary about throwing their weight fully behind them.
    Much of the local establishment were prepared to back a movement for the independence of Sicily, committed ‘to end the exploitation of Sicily by the mainland’. It was financed by big landowners, who hoped that poor people would be attracted to it out of a sense of Sicilian nationalism, thus isolating them from the class-based appeal of socialism and communism. The leaders of this movement for autonomy held at least one meeting with Mafia leader Don Calogero Vizzini, which also included an Italian general. A report was written up by the US consul in Palermo, Alfred Nester, showing once again the US government’s intimate knowledge of the Mafia. Nester’s letter, classified ‘secret’ and sent to the secretary of state in Washington, began thus: ‘I have the honor to report that on November 18, 1944 General Giuseppe Castellano, together with Mafia leaders including Calogero Vizzini conferred with Virgilio Nasi, head of the well-known Nasi family in Trapani and asked him to take over the leadership of a Mafia-backed movement for Sicilian autonomy.’
    Over the next few years big landowners increasingly turned to Salvatore Giuliano’s bandit gang. Giuliano’s criminal career had begun with him going on the run in 1943 aged just 20, after he had murdered a policeman who caught him with a black-market consignment of wheat. In the lawless climate of those years, the notion of living up in the mountains as part of a gang of bandits was tempting to significant numbers of desperate peasants. Giuliano’s gang quickly showed itself to be the most ruthless and successful, killing dozens of policemen during repeated attempts to capture him; it has been estimated his gang was responsible for an incredible 430 murders. He was an efficient killer, who ended up in a game far bigger than himself, manipulated by landowners and shady members of the police and secret services. As his deputy Gaspare Pisciotta said at a trial a few years later: ‘We are a single body – bandits, police and Mafia – like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’
    It was as part of this unstable series of alliances that Salvatore Giuliano’s gang was lying in wait on May Day 1947 at Portella della Ginestra, a pass between two mountains. Up to 15,000 peasants from San Giuseppe Jato and Piana degli Albanesi had congregated in the fields around the pass to celebrate their election victory, but when the first speaker began his speech a series of sharp cracks suddenly rang out. A few people started applauding, thinking it was fireworks. But when the outer circle of horses and mules began to fall to the ground it became clear someone was shooting. The firing lasted for twenty long minutes. During this time, on a rocky flat plain, people desperately crawled around for whatever shelter they could find, and this was why many victims were hit in the side or the buttocks rather than in the chest, arms or legs.
    It was a massacre. In total, 12 people were murdered and dozens were injured. Later, over a thousand empty bullet cases were recovered.
    The following day the whole country was at a standstill because unions called a general strike. People understood that nobody organises mass murder on such a scale without being highly motivated and highly organised. But, despite the fact that the target was a highly political one, in parliament the minister of the interior said that it had nothing to do with politics – it was just local criminals.
    The Vatican, through its newspaper l’Osservatore Romano , criticised the general strike. Indeed, soon after the massacre Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, archbishop of Palermo from 1946 to 1967, wrote to the Pope saying he ‘certainly could not approve of violence’ from any side, but that ‘resistance and rebellion were inevitable in the face of the Communists and their bullying, lies and