night of violence occurred in the nearby town of Cinisi. At about 3am Rosa Orlando in Serughetti was blown out of her bed by an explosion on the ground floor below, where the joint branch of the Socialist and Communist parties had its premises. Yet this building was just a few yards from a police barracks, where a guard was on night duty in the street.
In all, within the space of a few hours, six towns were attacked in western Sicily, or rather six branches of the two left-wing parties. Each group launching the attacks numbered 10 to 15 men and used cars or lorries to move around. Machine guns, petrol bombs and grenades also indicated a high level of organisation. Many of these attacks were launched by the Giuliano gang, but the Mafia was directly involved in some of them, for example in Partinico the local Mafia boss was wounded in the attack. Even if all the attackers weren’t Mafiosi , at the very least the Mafia had to be consulted about attacks on its territory.
Very few of these crimes were ever punished. And the attacks continued. In October 1947 a Communist Party member and experienced peasant organiser, Giuseppe Maniaci, was murdered near Cinisi.
Immediately after the attack at Portella della Ginestra in May, most people instinctively blamed the Mafia . Indeed, following the attack on the Communist Party branch in Cinisi the police arrested two notorious local Mafiosi , Don Masi Impastato and Cesare Manzella, whom we shall meet again in the next chapter.
3
Hotel Delle Palme
A
fter 1945 the redistribution of land and the introduction of mechanisation led to a rapid increase in unemployment in the countryside. Peasants were
pushed away from infertile and poor rural areas, and pulled towards the lure of secure and well-paid employment elsewhere. Under fascism it had also been virtually forbidden to move house and change jobs, so after Mussolini’s death the floodgates opened for migration.
The social consequences were enormous: in the 1950s Italy was transformed from a mainly agricultural nation into an urban society; for the first time the majority of Italians now lived in big towns or cities rather than in the countryside. The Sicilian capital Palermo saw the biggest increase in population, between 1951 and 1961 its population rose by 20 per cent, to 600,000. These new migrants needed somewhere to live, and at the same time, many of the people who until recently had been big landowners had money they needed to invest – so a building boom began.
The Mafia moved to the towns and cities too. This was where power and money were increasingly concentrated, and some of the more sophisticated Mafiosi saw that the building trade was an area ripe for picking. After all, both for housing and public sector works there was a great demand to invest, and at that time it was an industry which didn’t require a great deal of skill.
One emblematic case was Francesco Vassallo, who began his building career by winning a contract to build new sewer systems in two fast-growing Palermo suburbs in 1951. It was odd that someone who officially defined his trade as a ‘cart driver’ could win such a contract, and odder still given the fact he had served three jail sentences. The key factor, which has subsequently become a typical warning sign of Mafia activity, is that all other bidders suddenly withdrew their offers. Vassallo then engaged in another classic trick; once he had won the contract, costs suddenly spiralled by 11 per cent. Two years later he was again the only contractor to put in a bid to build a school, and after the contract was signed the cost eventually increased by 70 per cent. The fact that he was able to receive billions in unsecured loans was a further sign that the Mafia was moving into the financial sector. Vassallo went on to become one of Palermo’s most important builders over the next thirty years, participating in the notorious ‘sack of Palermo’ when the city was brutalised by unregulated building