The Sixth Family

The Sixth Family Read Free

Book: The Sixth Family Read Free
Author: Lee Lamothe
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in one of those BMWs, a person to be encountered three or four more times as you walk among the graves of the town cemetery, allowing you to leave his sight only when you reach the town limits.

    The residents’ suspicions probably spring from the simple fact that the town and its surrounding province of Agrigento have, over several decades, given the world some of its most rapacious drug-trafficking clans.

    Cattolica Eraclea is a community of some 6,000 people that is missed by a wide margin on each side by the twin highways and rail lines connecting the cities of Palermo and Agrigento, infrastructures that look as if they have made considerable effort to bend around the town. This no doubt contributes to the rarity of tourists, a fact that speaks to the absence of hotels. It is as if the people just wish to be left alone. That is not to say the town is without its visual charm. The old Town Hall, for instance, and the original Borsellino palace, built in 1764, the town’s clock tower, the powerful architectural statement of the Fascist-era Palazzo Municipale and the Mother Church Dedicated to the Holy Spirit, with its lofty bell tower and double-decker stone columns, are pleasing marvels.

    Another church of some beauty is la Chiesa della Madonna del Rosario, the Church of the Madonna of the Rosary. It is a testament to the religious roots of a town named for its faith—Cattolica is Italian for “Catholic”—that a village of such size would have so many churches. The Chiesa del Rosario, as it is commonly known, features an imposing stone façade broken only by a circular window set with a stained-glass portrait of the Virgin Mary praying over the infant Jesus. Built in 1638 and topped by three bells in an open tower, the formidable exterior of the church gives way to a surprisingly bright nave inside, where rows of wooden pews lead to a sunlit apse and intricately carved altar. Parishioners still gather in this venerable church that casts its wide shadow over Via Ospedale, a narrow street near the center of Cattolica Eraclea.

    In modest homes along Via Ospedale, a short, dead-end street, the nucleus of the Sixth Family began to form. It was in a house here that Nicolò Rizzuto was born on February 18, 1924, and it was here also that Nicolò would marry and would welcome the birth of his first child, a son. Born on February 21, 1946, that beloved bambino would be called Vito, in honor of Nicolò’s long-dead father—a man who gave Nicolò his start in life as well as a criminal pedigree, but a father he would never personally know.

    Nicolò Rizzuto’s father, Vito, was born to Nicolò Rizzuto and Giuseppa Marra on April 12, 1901, and grew up in Cattolica Eraclea. And just as the names would be handed down through the ages—with the Vito Rizzuto of today being the son of Nicolò who is the son of Vito who is the son of Nicolò—a desire to move to the New World also extended through the generations.

CATTOLICA ERACLEA, SICILY, 1924

    The previous generation’s Vito Rizzuto was slim and fit, standing 5-foot-6 with a strong jaw, brown eyes, a full head of chestnut-colored hair and a modest scar low on the left side of his forehead. He decided to leave Cattolica Eraclea in 1924.

    Rizzuto had moved into a home on Via Ospedale in 1919, months after the close of the First World War. He appears to have then completed a post-war stint in the Italian army—but even there he could not resist his outlaw urgings. On June 23, 1921, he was sentenced by the Military Tribunal of Rome to two months’ incarceration in a military jail for theft. At the age of 22, on March 9, 1923, he married Maria Renda, a family friend, relative and neighbor who was three years his senior. Just 10 months before he left Sicily—never to return—he and Maria had their first and only child, Nicolò.

    There was no doubt sadness and uncertainty at leaving his young family behind, but both husband and wife must have taken some comfort in knowing

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