Honoured Society Read Free

been approached on Luciano’s behalf by a narcotics smuggler named August Del Grazio. Del Grazio claimed he “was acting on behalf of two attorneys … and … Frank Costello who was spearheading the movement to get Luciano out of the penitentiary,” White said.
    ‘He [Del Grazio] said Luciano had many potent connections in the Italian underworld and Luciano was one of the principal members of the Mafia,’ White testified. The proffered deal, he went on, was that Luciano would use his Mafia position to arrange contacts for undercover American agents “and that therefore Sicily would be a much softer target than it might otherwise be.”’
    There have been many apocryphal versions of what followed these transactions, some of them wildly improbable. It has, for example, been reported that Luciano was secretly released from prison in 1943 to accompany the invasion force, that he was freely to be seen in the town of Gela where the Seventh Army’s first headquarters were established, and even that he was a member of the crew of the tank that picked up Don Calò atVillalba. There is no evidence of Don Calò and Luciano getting together, however, until 1946, when they occupied adjoining suites in a Palermo hotel during the formation of the Sicilian Separatist Party.
    * * *
    The day after Don Calò’s return to his capital, an intimate little ceremony took place in the barracks of the carabinieri at which he was appointed Mayor by the American Officer of Civil Affairs. A sketch made from a photograph taken at the time captures the spirit of the historic moment. It shows Don Calò, who has agreed to put on an untidy jacket for the occasion, listening while the Civil Affairs Officer, who has been told that the new Mayor is illiterate, reads out the document conferring the honour upon him. The artist shows Don Calò’s attention as incompletely held by the ceremony, an eye swivelled sideways as if distracted by something that is happening behind his back. In fact, in the square below a cheering crowd had gathered, and among the cheers Don Calò was slightly embarrassed to hear cries of ‘Long live the Allies. Long live the Mafia.’
    That evening the new Mayor gave a party for the Allied officers – ‘the sheep’ as Don Calò called them – and a number of his selected friends. The friends were the members of the Mafia of Villalba and such Mafia notabilities from the surrounding districts as could attend at short notice. Some of them wore their hair closely cropped, and their faces still bore the pallor of Mussolini’s prisons. Don Calò introduced them to the officers as victims of Fascism, as indeed they were. His enthusiastic recommendations easily persuaded the military authorities to issue firearms permits all round – ‘to guard against the possibility of any attempted Fascist coup’. Thus Don Calò had restored to him the armed bodyguard that had been taken away by Mussolini in 1924. The first of many victims of this resurgence of democracy was Pietro Purpi, the very carabinieri noncommissioned officer whose rueful task it had been to countersign the firearms permits.
    Don Calò’s next step was a more important one – so important indeed that Sicily has not yet recovered from its far-reaching effects. Hecompiled a list of suitable candidates for the office of mayor throughout the whole of western Sicily, and this too was found acceptable. Many of these partisans of democracy, as Don Calò pointed out, had spent long years in confinement. No one seems to have had time to investigate his claim that his nominees had suffered for their political ideals, rather than for crimes ranging from armed train-robbery to multiple homicide. In a matter of days, half the towns in Sicily had mayors who were either members of the Mafia or were at least closely associated with it. One or two had been bandits into the bargain. A noteworthy appointment was that of Serafino Di Peri to be Mayor of Bolognetta near Palermo. Di