Literature amid lies

In April, the Caltanissetta Public Prosecutor’s Office asked the investigating judge to archive the “mafia and public contracts” branch of the long-running probe into the 1992 bombings that killed anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino that marked the bloody apex of Cosa Nostra’s decades-long war on the Italian state. The dossier, first compiled in the 1990s, is seen by Borsellino’s family as the missing link that may explain why he was killed only 57 days after Falcone and who gave the orders. This decision has reignited Italy’s unresolved debate over how far the Mafia were enabled by collusion between organised crime, business, banking, the Church and the State.

The story of Sciascia’s life intertwines with the rise of the Mafia across the twentieth century

The writer Leonardo Sciascia did much to ignite that debate in the dark of the days of the mafia’s official non-existence, going on to become one of Italy’s best-known writers, yet he remains relatively unknown in the English speaking world. As the debate re-ignites, that is changing. This is mainly down to the release in February of biographer Caroline Moorehead’s A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul. The story of Sciascia’s life intertwines with the rise of the Mafia across the twentieth century. His work tells the story of that rise. Across his investigative writing, detective novels and historical fiction he explores the idea of justice, and how the powerful manufacture unrealities to enable corruption and violence against the weak. The lessons from his story and the stories he tells go beyond the specific time and place he was writing in, even if, as Moorehead claims, “Many writers make their homelands the heartbeat of their work, but none more deeply than Sciascia.” 

Sciascia, grandson of a miner, and the son of a mine accountant, was born in the sulphur-mining town of Racalmuto in 1921. He later claimed he had “known the Mafia bosses personally” as a boy. In 1935, he enrolled in a teacher-training secondary school. His weak chest meant he was not conscripted during the Second World War, instead in 1941, he took a job in Racalmuto, working at the grain collection office, witnessing firsthand the poverty of the locals. In 1944 he married Maria Andronico, an elementary school teacher. Sciascia returned to teaching, which allowed him time to write, and through his pupils exposed him to the lives of the rural poor. His first major book, 1956’s The Parishes of Regalpetra, was a story of life in a poor fictional Sicilian village and church corruption based on his experiences. 

Sciascia then turned his attention to other sources of power. Moorehead claims his writing was the cry of “a man alone against the cancer of power and poverty.” Hearing a police beating echo through the walls of a carabinieri barracks as a student, Sciascia developed an “intolerance towards all violence carried out in the name of the law.” Despite fascism promoting “order, discipline, and hierarchy”, the Mafia was already embedded in Sicilian society. Sciascia recalled seeing a mafioso intimidating a shopkeeper by stroking the hair of his daughter and saying, “She seems almost alive.” 

Centuries of invasion created a procession of weak central occupying governments who relied on feudal landowners for their policing and raising taxes, long after feudalism had disappeared elsewhere in Europe. These landowners worked their labourers as slaves, paying their taxes to successive governments who left the interior of the island wild and neglected. As the estate owners moved to the cities, to protect their incomes, they left behind a new class of powerful middlemen. These “gabellotti”, the thuggish intermediaries between the landless and their absent lords, were the origin of the mafiosi. Following Mussolini’s suppression, the Mafia found an unexpected ally who allowed them to begin their march into the cities. 

During planning for the Sicily invasion in 1943, the US military allegedly used imprisoned New York mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano to cut a deal with the Sicilian Mafia. In the popular account, a plane dropped a package over the central Sicilian town of Villalba containing a yellow silk handkerchief marked with a black “L” for Luciano, for Mafia boss Don Calogero “Calò” Vizzini. Six days later, three Sherman tanks entered Villalba flying a yellow flag with a black “L”; an officer speaking Sicilian asked for Don Calò, who left in the lead tank. While British and Canadian forces met stiff resistance in the east, supposedly, the Mafia cleared the way for the Americans who rapidly advanced in the west.

Post-invasion, the Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories (AMGOT) needed administrators to fill the vacuum. Vizzini was appointed mayor of Villalba and was asked to help fill other mayoral positions. The Mafia capitalised on this new authority delivering votes to politicians in exchange for protection from prosecution and the awarding of lucrative government contracts. The US denies making any deals, however regardless of whether handkerchiefs were dropped or flags flown, the Allies did rely on Mafia figures like Vizzini to maintain order post-invasion. This alliance of convenience had profound and lasting consequences that Sciascia spent his life documenting.

He did this most famously in his 1961 Day of The Owl, the first critical treatment of the Mafia in a literary work. Journalist Peter Robb subtly suggests that the gabellotti character, Calogero Sedara, in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 The Leopard, which chronicles changes in aristocratic Sicilian society during the unification of Italy, may have been the first, but most accept Sciascia’s primacy. He continued to attack the mafia, the politicians, the Church and the State, for almost thirty years. 

In Day of the Owl, an honest building contractor is assassinated running across the village square to catch a bus. Captain Bellodi, posted from the mainland, is assigned the case. Witnesses retreat from view behind walls of silence. A second killing follows. Through a series of carefully constructed psychological traps, Bellodi builds a case linking an out of town hitman to the local mafia boss. When word reaches Rome, two unnamed characters and a politician conspire to undermine Bellodi’s case and ensure the Mafia don walks free. The case unwinds and the widow of one of the victims and her lover are blamed. A conspiracy turns into a crime of passion. Bellodi returns to the north. There is no satisfactory resolution and the justice sought is not found. 

On an island dominated by centuries of oppression, Sciascia saw two kinds of justice: State justice, which was arbitrary, imposed by force and in which no one believed, and Mafia justice, based on omertà, bribery and cronyism, in which they did. For Sciascia, “the problems of liberty, human dignity and respect of man,” are all tied to the question of justice. His characters seek justice but rarely find it, ultimately defeated by a failure of the law brought about by powerful and ambiguous interests. Regardless, Sciascia refused to stop digging, analysing and pushing. If justice for victims and the accused were denied by the injustices of state and Mafia law, the writer could at least expose and denounce injustices. 

Sciascia’s impartial commitment to justice was demonstrated by his investigation into the kidnap of five times Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro. In 1978 a group claiming allegiance to the extreme left-wing Red Brigades, seized Moro. Sciascia regarded him as being at the heart of a party that had spent thirty years colluding with the mafia (the Christian Democrats governed in successive coalitions, from 1945 to their demise in 1994). Moro was on his way to see Giulio Andreotti be sworn in as the head of government once again (he would serve as prime minister seven times), this time, and for the first time, in a coalition with the Communists (which Sciascia opposed, as it removed any effective opposition, and Moro had orchestrated, as part of an historic compromise). 

Sixteen million protested in the streets. Thousands of police were deployed on the search, but the government stubbornly stated there would be no deal. Moro was allowed to write to the outside world, sending letters reflecting on his life, career and the state of Italy, and pleading for his release. After a month, an offer was made: he would be tried, then could be exchanged for thirteen Red Brigade prisoners. Fifty long-standing “friends” responded in an open letter that claimed Moro’s letters were clearly a product of drugs, stress, fakes or even conversion: Moro was no longer Moro. He kept writing until the day before his bullet-riven body was found in a car in central Rome.

Themes explored in Sciascia’s political thrillers, like his 1971 novel Equal Danger (made into the film Illustrious Corpses) of judicial corruption, political intrigue, and the distortion of truth by those in power were moving off the pages of his fiction to the pages of the daily newspapers. Conspiracy theories abounded. An unnamed secret service officer was quoted describing the kidnap as “so perfect as to seem almost artistic.” Some linked Moro’s death with Operation Gladio, an underground organisation set up by the Allies post-war to resist in the event of a communist coup. Others believed Moro had information on banking scandals involving the Mafia and the Vatican. 

Even if nothing substantial had been revealed, day after day, Moro had painted a vivid portrait of a chaotic, grubby, venal party, held together but constantly threatened to be torn apart by secrets. Why was Moro not saved? Sciascia set out to find out and give Moro post-mortem justice. Letter by letter, Sciascia reconstructed Moro’s time as a prisoner, tracing his sense of abandonment and frustration as the clues he planted as to his whereabouts were ignored. Sciascia concluded Moro could have been saved. He had been allowed to die by a State, which was incapable, rotten and had no moral right to be so intransigent. 

When he first read The Leopard, Sciascia accused di Lampedusa of an aristocratic detachment from Sicilian realities and found the novel’s most emblematic quote — “everything has to change so everything can stay the same” — overly pessimistic. Post-Moro he claimed: “twenty years ago I believed that the world could change: now I no longer do.” 

Sciascia’s search for justice extended back in time. In his first historical novel, The Council of Egypt, set in eighteenth-century Bourbon-ruled Sicily, Sciascia wrote that there are battles that are never won: “the past, its errors, its ills, never go away: we have continually to live them and judge them in the present.” One critic described him as a sulphur miner, like his grandfather, digging in the sub-soil of history in order to get at the hidden minerals of Sicily’s soul, which had crystallised into the island’s collective consciousness. Sciascia concluded, if the roots of modern Sicily’s Mafia-ridden present were anchored in its history, then an excavation of injustices might free Sicilians to face a more honest future. The immediate future, however, was anything but. 

1979 saw the true beginnings of the cadaveri eccellenti (illustrious corpses). The Mafia had avoided killing state employees, but during the 1970s it had changed. Having built on the profits from building contracts and the black market, by 1979 the mafia was dispatching over $1billion worth of heroin to the US having imported it from the East. As the money increased so did the violence. There was direct correlation and causation between the rising violence and the rise of Salvatore “Totò” Riina. Riina, from Corleone, sixty kilometers inland from Palermo. The Corleonesi had grown in power under Luciano Leggio. Riina, his deputy, became de facto leader as Leggio was forced into hiding. He wanted his share of his rival’s narco-dollars. In what became known as the Second Mafia War (1981-83), he eliminated entire Palermo Mafia families. Riina was less invested in maintaining peace, and less closely linked to politicians, so state interference was met with violence. The murder of police chief Boris Giuliano, killed while investigating heroin trafficking and money laundering, was a message that things were changing.

In September 1979, Cesare Terranova, a magistrate investigating Mafia drug profits was shot dead. Next August Chief Prosecutor Gaetano Costa was murdered. Both were friends of Sciascia. He again urged authorities to “follow the money,” insisting that Giuliano and Costa died for doing just that. The Italian state was forced to respond. In May 1982, General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa, who had brought those behind the Moro kidnapping to justice, was sent to Palermo to stop the violence. By September, he had been murdered. 

Asked if he felt threatened, Sciascia replied, “the Mafia doesn’t read books.” He paraphrased di Lampedusa: “In Italy you can say and write anything you like and everything remains the same.” It was likely a combination of factors that kept Sciascia alive. At different points the mafia attempted to abstain from high profile killings, which increased interest in their activities. Sciascia became one of the highest profile intellectuals in Italy as well as briefly taking up roles for the local Communist Party and later the Radical Party. He was also a Sicilian who had many friends and many admirers. Moorehead claims that the cost-benefit calculation of killing Sciascia tipped towards not doing so. Additionally, Sciascia produced literature, not evidence. He did not name names. Cosa Nostra’s threshold for killing was operational damage, not cultural critique. Sciascia urged people to follow the money but left it to the likes of Falcone and Borsellino to do so. 

When Bettino Craxi became the first Socialist prime minister in 1983 with the promise to end corruption (he would later flee to Tunisia to avoid jail for corruption in the mid-1990s), Falcone was taking evidence from the mafioso turned state witness, Tommaso Buscetta, working to map the global network of mafiosi, protectors, accomplices, and informers. Like Sciascia, he had grown up “breathing…the air of the Mafia, of violence, extortion and murder,” but it was Sciascia who had made him understand what it was to be Sicilian. “I learned to understand the Mafia from his books,” he claimed. In Sicily an association of women against the Mafia, led by the widows of their victims was growing. The high-profile killings pushed the State to move forward with new anti-Mafia legislation.

The maxi-processo (maxi trial) of 475 mafiosi, opened in 1986. It was held in a bunker on the side of Palermo central prison. Tanks were stationed outside. In December 1987 it handed down centuries of jail time for mafia bosses. Over half the over 8000 findings related to bank transactions and money laundering. Sciascia reported on the trial from the press gallery. According to Moorehead, one of the most tantalising threads emerging from the trial was Andreotti’s ghostly presence at many crucial meetings. He was later tried for murder and Mafia involvement but was eventually acquitted (although the courts acknowledged past connections). 

Falcone and Borsellino were hailed as heroes. This did not stop Sciascia criticising an early promotion for Borsellino, describing anti-Mafia magistrates as careerists and warning against the use of the anti-Mafia for political gain. Former chief prosecutor Giancarlo Caselli claimed that Sciascia argued that his comments were exploited to dismantle the legal team in Palermo. Sciascia later admitted he had been “badly informed”. Fortunately he reconciled with Borsellino before his death.

Riina’s response was violent and irreversible: he ordered the murders of Falcone, killed by a bomb under the A29 motorway in May 1992, and Paolo Borsellino, killed two months later. Borsellino’s family hoped the probe would identify who above Riina sanctioned his orders. Mafia attacks were launched on the Italian mainland in an effort to get the state to back down. Seven thousand soldiers were drafted into Sicily. At a special mass, the Pope declared that mafiosi were living in mortal sin. The effect of the murders was to encourage more pentiti (mafioso turned witness) to come forward. Networks were dismantled; billions of illicit dollars seized; and the murder rate fell. After twenty-three years on the run Riina was arrested in 1993. 

Moorehead concludes that history has judged Sciascia well. Even if his timing and his targets were sometimes ill chosen. In Italy, 25,000-27,000 copies of The Day of the Owl are still sold annually. There are lessons we can take from him and the rise of the organisation his life was entwined with. 

Power structures based on exploitation need to be held in place by threats of violence, conspiracies of silence and distortions of truth by those in power; from the rural gabellotti to the urban international drug dealers and political puppeteers who leveraged global banking systems; the mechanisms remain the same. When organised crime or a political party corrupts the judiciary, law enforcement, media, and religious authorities, violence and injustice follows. To counter this we need those who will impartially dig down through the illusions, to excavate miscarriages of justice, and others to then hold those responsible accountable. This is as true today as in Sciascia’s lifetime.

Sicily owes a debt to Sciascia for his tireless digging, however, the cynicism that made him such a clear-sighted analyst of corruption blinded him to the sincerity of those risking their lives to fight it. He could conceive of men, like Bellodi, who were brave enough to resist overwhelming power rather than surviving through compliance and silence, in his imagination but the constant loss and disappointment he faced meant he did not immediately recognise such men on the streets of Palermo. In today’s increasingly vicious and venal politics, we too face the same risk of blindness. 

Falcone and Borsellino found justice at the maxi trial but show us justice is temporary

The April archiving request by the Caltanissetta Prosecutor’s Office has reignited the debate on whether the State is willing to confront the possibility that the Mafia did not act alone in killing Falcone and Borsellino, but collaborated with powerful figures in politics and business. Specifically, through their lawyers. Like Sciascia’s in stories, for Borsellino’s family there has been no satisfactory resolution.

Falcone and Borsellino found justice at the maxi trial but show us justice is temporary, there is no ultimate victory. Gains are reversible, but so too are reverses. Our vices and vulnerabilities, and the corrosive impacts of money and unchecked power may persist from generation to generation, but the life and writings of Sciascia show us, so too, does the illogical drive in the best of us, to risk everything so that, even for a short time, and even if he himself lost faith it was possible, everything does not stay the same.