Sicily in the early nineteenth century

All the conditions discussed above were present in Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century. After the Sicilian parliament had formally proclaimed the end of feudalism in 1812, the increasing private acquisition of common land and land belonging to church bodies and the corresponding elimination of their public use faced many obstacles and much opposition, not least from those who were being deprived of the minor privileges of the feudal system that had been essential for their survival. The new owners of former common land struggled to establish the legitimacy of their rights, generating conflict and alienating the peasant masses from a state that now guaranteed and protected these rights; the state was unable to regulate the clashes between groups and classes, and the landowners themselves did not have the capacity to assert their supremacy, which had also been thrown into question by the speed of change.

The state structure, although modern in form, was very weak: it had widespread recourse to semi-private policing bodies such as the Compagnie d’Armi (Armed Companies), and abandoned any attempt to maintain an effective presence in outlying areas. It was in these circumstances that the first groups in a mafia mould appeared, although they had not yet developed all of the phenomenon’s characteristic features. These elements emerged from the lower classes, initially operated in the service of aristocrats, and subsequently sought and acquired autonomy from the latter in their development of a violent power, a field that suited them: they achieved dominance over the poorer classes and sold their services to the landowners, who used them as a deterrent in the competition for control of limited resources such as land and water, or for control of the labour force, or as providers of the sort of protection that the state was unable to offer.

Not everyone could organise themselves around the capacity to use violence: this needed specific personal qualities (courage, lack of scruples and ruthlessness), contacts and suitable protection, as well as entrepreneurial skills in this particular field. These considerations cut across the boundaries of social class: both those using violence and their victims often belonged to the same social group. There were peasants subjected to abuses by mafiosi who came from the same background, just as there were some landowners who could buy mafia protection and others who were instead subjected to mafia extortion.

The research highlights the widespread use of violence during this period: the barons often continued to retain armed men in their service for defending the great estates; the local administrative bodies were the focus of factional struggles that sometimes spilled over into the physical elimination of opponents; clashes over common land and disputes over its public use were often prolonged by the opposing parties’ capacity to resort to violence; and periods of revolutionary crisis provided the opportunity for killings whose motivation was rather more than just the political struggle between Bourbon and liberal forces.Footnote ³

Mafia violence is violent action deployed with the objective of controlling a territory; if we were to trawl through the police papers or court archives of the early nineteenth century, we would probably find many traces of this kind of violence, thus illustrating the presence of the mafia during a period in which the word was not yet in use. Meanwhile, we have to make do with circumstantial evidence, the most substantial of which is the well-known passage from a report of 1838 by Pietro Calà Ulloa, a magistrate and prominent political figure in Bourbon Sicily (and later, after Italian unification, president of the Central Bourbon Committee for Sicilian Affairs, established in Rome):

This passage has come to be seen as the first description of mafia groups: the ‘partiti’, who described themselves as ‘fratellanze’ (following models of sectarian and masonic origin), managed the trade in rustled livestock (an activity typical of Sicilian organised crime), offered themselves as mediators to have stolen property returned (another typical mafia activity, known as ‘componende’ [negotiated settlements]), corrupted officials, and gave assistance to members subjected to judicial proceedings. We have here some of the key identifying features of a mafia group in operation; the description given by Calà Ulloa, of ‘small governments within the government’, in fact reminds us of the characterisation of the mafia as a ‘state within the state’, a phrase often still employed today. However, there has still not been a thorough analysis of the membership of these partiti, with their allegiance to leaders whose social status remains poorly defined: the description as a landowner, in nineteenth-century Sicily, might have applied to someone from a lower-class background who had made money, while the local priest had often come from the town’s petit bourgeoisie.

Calà Ulloa’s real concern was to offer the government of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies a description of the corruption both within public bodies, especially the judicial system, and within the Sicilian aristocracy, which was protecting criminals; it was only as a by-product that he became interested in the presence of associations – or ‘parties’ without any ‘political’ nature – that were intent on pursuing multifaceted criminal activity.

From 1848 to 1860

To fully understand how violent men of lower-class origin gradually managed to achieve their autonomy from the ruling classes, we need to take into consideration the involvement of armed groups in the episodes of revolutionary unrest. Consisting of peasants and other manual workers and answering to a local leader, these groups were ready to sell their services to the revolutionary authorities, which were usually poorly endowed in military terms. During the Sicilian revolution that started on 12 January 1848, in which a new kingdom of Sicily independent from the Bourbon monarchy was declared, the most prominent popular leaders, such as Salvatore di Miceli and Giuseppe Scordato, acquired a previously unimaginable degree of fame and power; the groups they led were often ungovernable, exercising the functions of a police force and practising extortion or protection in relation to landowners, with disastrous consequences for public security.

Such a presence, which had already been evident in the revolution of 1820–1 and would reappear during Garibaldi’s Sicilian campaign, allows us to conclude that the subaltern classes in the central western part of the island were accustomed to armed mobilisation; the areas where the groups emerged correspond with those from which the mafia phenomenon spread. The overlap of Sicily’s revolutionary crisis and criminal violence created an explosive situation; in fact, some of the protagonists later maintained that the key factor in this crisis had been the authorities’ inability to guarantee order and the safety of the inhabitants and their property (Pezzino Reference Pezzino1990b). The liberation of prison inmates and the repatriation of Sicilian prisoners who had been serving sentences in penal colonies on the mainland put a large number of criminals back into circulation. Even in the cities, serious offences were committed in broad daylight, especially thefts, ‘scrocchi’ (acts of extortion) and kidnappings. The inability of the revolutionary authorities to organise an adequate policing body heightened the unreliability of the many other bodies that were entrusted from time to time with responsibility for public order, such as the Guardia Municipale, the Compagnie d’Armi and the National Guard. Often, criminals were enlisted in these bodies in the mistaken belief that they could thus be kept under control, and the result was to strengthen the sense of institutional collapse felt at the time by many Sicilians, irrespective of whether they held pro-Bourbon or pro-liberal political views.

There was an inadequate response to this situation from the Sicilian parliament, which had been suppressed in 1816 by Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies, re-established for just a few months during the rebellions of 1820, and then reconvened on 25 March 1848. On the one hand, there were sterile debates on public safety legislation, in which people held forth on the great principles of liberty and devolution that were supposed to pervade the constitution, but failed to identify any decisive way forward. On the other, there were regular calls for laws on exceptional measures, some of which were even passed, although they remained ineffective because there was no one in place who could properly implement them.

The revolutionary crisis created space in the various localities for men of working origins who stood out for their capacity to use violence, not only by organising thefts and livestock rustling but also by mediating between landowners and criminals. Unexpected opportunities opened up for these men within the institutions, as is illustrated by an army officer’s account of events in Castellammare del Golfo in 1849:

The town made a formal declaration of its gratitude to Ferrantelli.Footnote ⁵

The members of the Ferrantelli family epitomised the figure of the mafioso, in view of both their social origins and the functions they took on in their relationships with landowners, covering both extortion and protection. After the end of the revolutionary episode, in May 1949, they were still able to negotiate their own fate with the Bourbon authorities, by offering to hand over a well-known bandit whose trust they alone enjoyed; their proposed exchange was accepted, and members of the Ferrantelli family thus managed to avoid being sent off to internment on the island of Ustica (Costanza Reference Costanza1989, 257–258). As discussed below, this sort of negotiation would often be replicated after Italian unification.

1860

The mobilisation of armed bands from the general Sicilian population took place again in 1860, but the revolutionaries exercised much tighter political control over the ‘picciotti’, as their members were known. Francesco Crispi, the real political brain behind Garibaldi’s operations in Sicily, mindful of the events of 1848, ensured that these bands were dispersed and the men sent home straight after the conquest of Palermo. The barriers to legitimising their function as dispensers of violence, with political recognition of their role, pushed the violent and bullying ‘facinorosi’ (as they were also referred to) towards the field of organised crime. Obviously, this process took some years – 15 or so after Italian unification – to be completed and had nothing to do with the development of mythologising accounts of the Garibaldian venture that depicted its success as dependent on the mafia’s protection.Footnote ⁶

A statement made in 1875 by Gabriele Colonna, Duke of Cesarò and a representative of Sicilian liberalism, gave a lucid explanation of the development of an armed force independent of the state machinery, and of its use by Sicily’s aristocracy during the revolutionary events of the nineteenth century:

Colonna unequivocally identified this force as the origin of the mafia, the names he specified in fact being those of well-known mafiosi, and offered a forthright assessment of its subversive role in relation to state authority. He also clearly identified the process whereby these violent men gained increasing independence from Sicily’s ruling classes once Italian unification had been achieved, and their disenchantment. What Colonna concealed, however, was that members of the ruling classes, acting individually, continued to make use of this subversive potential, although more covertly: no longer as armed bands to throw into the fray, but as protectors to turn to for the defence of their land and promotion of their interests.

The immediate post-unification period

After proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in March 1861, Sicily quickly became the site of a political clash between the democrats and moderates.Footnote ⁸ The former, who had been a driving force in the events relating to unification, accused the latter of, first, betrayal of the struggle’s ideals, and, second, rejecting their request for involvement in the management of the new state, as representatives of the popular masses that in Sicily, more than in other parts of the former Bourbon kingdom, had observed Garibaldi’s exploits with sympathy, although without actually becoming involved. The moderates, now in government, emphasised the irresponsibility of revolutionary fringe groups within the democratic ranks, and instead stressed the constraints of an international climate in which the new Italian state could achieve acceptance only by presenting itself as a guarantor of order, and not by disrupting international stability through continuation of the wars of independence until Rome had also been captured.

The new Kingdom of Italy had brought together seven distinct state units, and while the sense of belonging to one and the same nation was strong among intellectuals and some sections of the ruling classes, it could certainly not have been described as widely shared. According to the liberals of the Right, the need for rapid integration of the country’s governmental and military institutions and systems, which had to play their part in building the nation from populations and traditions that were profoundly different, justified a policy of centralisation.

In Sicily, this meant offending autonomist sensibilities that were undoubtedly more widespread than elsewhere. The limited inroads made by pro-unification liberals; the struggle against the democrats, and especially the followers of Crispi; a populace that was dangerously susceptible to being influenced by ‘enemies’, whether that meant the pro-Bourbon reactionaries or the democrats – all these factors ensured that the island became one of the locations of greatest friction between the government and the opposition. The Right was totally against any concession that might be interpreted as surrendering to demands for decentralisation, while it acted to oust the democrats from the spaces that they had occupied within the island’s administrative structure during Garibaldi’s rule of Sicily from May 1860, as ‘dittatore’ on behalf of Victor Emmanuel II, until the island’s annexation by the Kingdom of Italy in December. This was a consequence, and to some extent a continuation, of the all-out struggle that had pitted members of the Action Party against Cavour’s followers while Garibaldi was pursuing his expedition to southern Italy.

In addition, a series of legislative measures – ranging from the reorganisation of public administration, which jettisoned thousands of white-collar employees, especially in Palermo, to military conscription, hitherto unknown to southern populations, and from the dissolution of religious orders and congregations to the sale of their goods – had damaging consequences for the general population and gave rise to a general sense of discontent towards the government, which was increasingly described as ‘Piedmontese’.

In the sphere of national government, the image spread of a ‘dangerous’ Sicily, teeming with adversaries and conspirators ready to develop plots aimed at subverting the institutions of unified Italy and changing the form of administration: reactionary and pro-Bourbon plots, Mazzinian and republican plots, and autonomist plots. Members of the government, especially after Garibaldi’s ill-fated march towards Rome and defeat at Aspromonte in August 1862, went as far as to imagine the unification of all opposition forces and preparation for a rebel movement through the efforts of Bourbon supporters, clericalists, republicans and autonomists, all bound together by the mafia, which was seen as a force that cut across the other groups of conspirators (Pezzino Reference Pezzino1990a).

The government responded with harshly repressive measures directed at the forces of political opposition, including serious restrictions on the freedoms of association and the press allowed for in the Italian constitution, and repeated military campaigns against army deserters and draft-dodgers. It also resorted to a genuine ‘strategy of tension’, whose most sensational expression was the alleged ‘Pugnalatori’ (stabbers) plot of October 1862, when a number of people were attacked with knives at much the same time on the same evening, but in different locations; these events were probably staged by the Palermo police headquarters, and provided the authorities with the pretext for decreeing a general disarmament and for throwing opposition leaders into prison (Pezzino Reference Pezzino1992).

Furthermore, quite apart from the bitterness of the political clash under way both in the country as a whole and on the island, the situation was truly difficult: in Sicily, state officials found themselves faced with an environment that seemed to them incomprehensible, uncontrollable and averse to the new arrangements. The development of a regular army, standardised judicial machinery and a tax system suited to the expenditure needs of the new state, especially for the road and rail networks, were all urgent and unavoidable demands, for which the government realised that it did not have appropriate operational tools. In Palermo and its surrounding towns and villages, moreover, the dormant presence of bands of skilled and unskilled workers, peasants and woodsmen became apparent: these were the remnants of the groups that in 1848 and 1860 had merged with the rebel movements. The protective shield provided by the liberals had faded away, and in consequence they seemed increasingly dangerous, because they were ready to engage in any revolutionary venture or criminal enterprise.

The new rulers were discovering environments particular to Sicily, featuring characters who were self-assured in employing violence, and a worrying acceptance by civil society of its unrestrained use. The authorities responsible for the protection of citizens’ lives and property were ill prepared for dealing with this alien associative phenomenon and were constantly complaining about their isolation and the lack of co-operation from the local population; the state of public safety, in both the countryside and the towns and cities, became very poor, while criminals operated with almost complete impunity. According to a statement by Francesco Crispi on 10 December 1861 to a session of the Chamber of Deputies, 200 murders and violent assaults had been recorded in less than a year in Palermo alone, and in five out of six cases the perpetrator had not been identified.

In brief, Sicily’s ‘disorder’ was not just a political invention by the Right, and while the mafia was not a political party, it was still a reality: during that period, criminal groups demonstrated an increasing ability both to defend their own particular interests by skilfully using violence, and to put this at the disposal of those ready to buy their services. The latter were very soon to include officials and representatives of the new institutions, who complained about people’s general unwillingness to co-operate with the authorities, as anyone who reported a crime was deemed ‘un infame’ (a disgrace). Moreover, fingers were pointed at corruption within police bodies, specifically the mounted militias – heirs of the Bourbon armed companies – and the municipal guards. In these circumstances, the absence of an effective police force increased the extent to which people adopted attitudes of non-collaboration with the authorities.

This absence of collaboration was also, however, the consequence of what suited various individuals, at least among some sectors of the population. This was emphasised by a report from the procuratore generale (chief public prosecutor) for Palermo in 1863:

In circumstances of widespread insecurity, the consequences were therefore not the same for all people: those able to acquire the ‘services’ that the criminals offered – not only the wealthy but sometimes also the well-to-do peasant classes – thereby obtained an advantage, the greater insofar as it was more exclusive, meaning that it was not available to all.Footnote ¹⁰

In the provinces of southern Italy, the widespread phenomenon of pro-Bourbon ‘brigantaggio’ (brigandage) was raging. Constant condemnation of this serious disturbance of public order, discussed in numerous parliamentary debates, was addressed by the government with exceptional legislation and military campaigns; the provisions of the ‘Pica Law’ (as it became known) of August 1863, which aimed at ‘the repression of brigandage and camorristi’, included the establishment of military tribunals and extensive recourse to police measures such as ‘domicilio coatto’ (obligatory residence in a specified location far from home) for idlers, vagabonds, Camorra members and their ‘manutengoli’ (accomplices).Footnote ¹¹ In Sicily, where the great political brigandage was entirely absent, the preventative measures provided for by the law were applied just the same (Tessitore Reference Tessitore1985), and successive campaigns were planned against bandits, fugitives from justice, draft-dodgers and mafia suspects. In the summer of 1863, General Giuseppe Govone oversaw full-blown military operations in the island’s western provinces, using roundup methods that involved whole villages being sealed off and even deprived of water to force the draft-dodgers to give themselves up; this approach drew protests from the populations affected and indignation from the political opposition.

In the parliamentary debate that followed, members of the government emphasised the need to bring order back to the island, giving detailed descriptions of its intolerable conditions of public safety. In contrast, the opposition parties argued that the repression had a political nature, being directed at their own heartlands of mass support, which was rooted in the South especially, and they denounced the illegality of the measures taken by the government.

These events gave added strength to the mafia and to the local ruling classes that gave it support, who were very adept at lining up first on one side and then on the other, depending on the events, expediencies and alignments particular to specific historical circumstances. First they would clamour for exceptional measures, only then to accuse the government of authoritarianism when these were formally put forward or approved. As an anonymous adviser had reported to the Italian prime minister Bettino Ricasoli in January 1862, ‘the custom in Sicily is to cry out for firmness and, if possible, an emergency regime, but a day later people cry for mercy and criticise every step taken’ (Scichilone Reference Scichilone1952, 121).

Filippo Gualterio, a member of the Italian Senate from 1861 and the prefect of Palermo from 26 March 1865 to 9 April 1866, advocated major military operations against mafia members and draft-dodgers; he believed that opposition forces of all political persuasions had been tainted by their links to criminals and mafiosi, and a potentially explosive mixture had thus been created.

Gualterio’s assessment was shared by General Giacomo Medici, commander of the Italian army division in Palermo and previously a prominent figure in the Risorgimento. Working together, they organised military operations in the provinces of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento involving both the army and the National Guard, aimed at finding and capturing draft-dodgers, deserters and criminals subject to arrest warrants. These were carried out between 1 May and 15 October 1865, employed 15,000 men, and led to the arrest of about 2,500 wanted individuals; however, they left a trail of controversy and resentment among local populations, just as Govone’s operations had done two years earlier.

The mafia: myth and reality

In a report for the minister of internal affairs written by Gualterio not long after his arrival in Palermo, the word ‘Maffia’, written with a capital letter, was used to highlight its nature as a unified and well-developed organisation.Footnote ¹² Setting aside the link that Gualterio made between the mafia and political opposition, his analysis accurately identified a series of aspects of this form of criminality, which have been confirmed by a range of recent ground-breaking historical studies: its origins in the presence of groups of violent men who had worked for the feudal lords, and in their subsequent autonomy (the mafia had transformed itself ‘from protected into protector basing itself on fear as the cornerstone’); the establishment of an extraordinary ‘propensity for criminal activity’ in the towns and villages around Palermo; the existence of a set of rules governing conduct within criminal organisations (soon to be confirmed by the various subsequent judicial investigations); and the web of protective measures that ensured impunity for mafiosi.Footnote ¹³

Almost in confirmation of Gualterio’s analysis, during the night of 15–16 September 1866, Palermo was invaded by bands of armed men from the surrounding districts of Monreale, Bagheria, Parco and Misilmeri, who were very soon joined by rebels from the city itself. Much of the centre was occupied, and the authorities, caught by surprise despite the fact that over the preceding days numerous rumours and other indications had foreshadowed the insurrection, barricaded themselves into the royal palace. The rebels remained in control of the city until 22 September, when they were defeated by the bersaglieri and infantry units that had been dispatched from mainland Italy.

Clearly, the uprising had a social nature: the armed groups, many of which had formed around the old leaders of 1848 and 1860, consisted of members of the peasant, artisan and industrial working classes who had been hard hit by post-unification legislation and by the economic crisis that had especially affected Palermo, and who had probably been disappointed by the outcomes of the 1860 revolution, in which they had been directly involved. Its political nature was more complex. Almost all the popular leaders were republicans and followers of Garibaldi, including, supposedly, Giuseppe Badia, who was seen by the authorities as one of the men leading the revolt despite being in prison at the time. However, clericalists and Bourbon supporters had also taken part in the conspiracy: one of the bases for the rebels had been the Benedictine monastery in Monreale, there were Bourbon supporters on the provisional committee appointed by the insurgents, and the archbishops of Palermo and Monreale were accused (although without proof) of being involved.Footnote ¹⁴

The revolt highlighted the enduring presence around Palermo of a framework for popular armed mobilisation, which was then making its final appearance in the form of an openly rebellious movement. A parliamentary commission of enquiry was established to investigate these events, and this collected statements from Sicilians, officials and military personnel. The commission’s priorities were to identify the socio-economic factors that had given rise to the unrest in Palermo, and to determine why the administrative system had been unable to stifle this unrest at the outset; serious accusations of incompetence had been directed at chief of police Felice Pinna, the prefect Luigi Torelli, and the Italian army commanders based in Palermo.

Leaving aside the issue of personal responsibilities, the commission of enquiry’s hearings, minuted in a very summary fashion, provide some interesting starting points for analysis of the mafia. The involvement of fringes of the ruling classes in relationships of protection and complicity featured as a theme in almost all the contributions by those who spent any time discussing the mafia; these statements also testify to the support for emergency laws, in permanent operation, which would allow mafia leaders to be removed by consignment to domicilio coatto, given the evident impossibility of hitting them judicially with trials that would result in convictions. This position was not without its contradictions: if the protection provided by landowners guaranteed the impunity of mafiosi, as some went as far as to argue, then it would have been essential to focus on this factor rather than put forward further repressive measures, which included heavier sentences and greater administrative discretion. However, the contributions often excused landowners who engaged criminals, emphasising that they only did this out of necessity; moreover, almost all these statements were made by members of this same social class.

Other interesting points were the establishment of the relationship that linked Palermo’s prisons with the outside world; the fact that the mafia had an organisational structure, albeit a mysterious one; the connections that mafiosi had within local administrations; and the deals that the authorities made with them both before and after 1860. The practice of enlisting well-known offenders in police bodies (the rural guards, city police, mounted militias and the national police force), in the mistaken belief that the state of public order could thus be controlled, went back to the period before unification: Salvatore Maniscalco, minister of police in the Bourbon government, had pursued this approach to hold the criminals in check and to use them politically, for espionage and for repression against the liberals. After Italian unification, this practice persisted, although in a more covert form, with recourse to informers and agents provocateurs; these were routinely used by the police chiefs – five in number between 1862 and 1866 – who took their turn in charge of the Palermo headquarters.

The disastrous Pinna was accused of wilfully ignoring the information that had warned of the uprising in Palermo; some people held that he had been happy to let this break out, believing that he would then have no difficulty repressing it, and would thereby gain credit with the government. His replacement as Palermo’s chief of police was Giuseppe Albanese, who came from a well-known family of liberals and Garibaldians. Appearing before the commission of enquiry, Albanese not only reiterated the usefulness of straying outside strict observance of the law, admitting that he had retained under him ‘ten or so men who had previously been arrested as very dangerous people, although released by the magistrates’, but also openly extolled the merits of the old Bourbon minister of police, arguing that ‘in regard to public safety, Maniscalco governed with good results, particularly by employing the threat of deportation, for which he used Ustica, and by involving the leaders of the Mafia to protect [public] safety’.Footnote ¹⁵ Albanese chose to take his inspiration from these methods.

Tests of the law: Tajani as chief public prosecutor

In October 1868, Diego Tajani was transferred from Catanzaro and appointed chief public prosecutor at the court of appeal in Palermo. Originally from Salerno, he was a well-known liberal who had been an honest and stern magistrate. In Palermo, Albanese was still the police chief, while the prefect was General Medici, who had already spent some time in the city, first as commander of the National Guard and then as commander of the Italian army division; Medici was inclined to make arbitrary use of all the repressive tools available to the authorities, ignoring legal restraints. Tajani, however, had no wish to adopt the approach that had been taken by the other two men; he was unwilling to allow control of investigative and repressive activity to be taken away from the judicial authority, and specifically from the chief public prosecutor’s office, and he maintained that it was his institutional prerogative to oversee the operations of both the police headquarters and the prefecture once suspects had been formally charged with a crime. It is hardly surprising that his first clashes with Medici and Albanese were over the sensitive issue of the arbitrary and irregular extended detention of suspects when it had not been possible to collect enough evidence for their cases to move forward towards court proceedings.

After a series of disagreements with the chief public prosecutor, chief of police Albanese submitted his resignation in May 1871. However, he had to withdraw this because the government had not managed to find a suitable replacement; he was asked to remain in post at least until it was clear which of the charges of irregularity and collusion against various officials and guards in the police headquarters were to be taken further. On 7 September 1871, Tajani issued an arrest warrant for the chief of police himself, who was accused of having arranged the killings of, first, the criminal Santi Termini and, subsequently, two brothers, who were on the run over a previous murder and were preparing to make a statement, in exchange for immunity from prosecution, about Albanese’s responsibility for the earlier episode.

The picture of widespread violence that emerges from the pages of Tajani’s prosecution address is striking: a chain of murders, around them an extensive network of protection and complicity, and the presence of an industry of violence whose relationships had come to involve not only the local ruling classes but also state institutions (Tajani Reference Tajani and Pezzino1993). In Monreale, where mafia membership was high, the local section of the National Guard, a military body largely recruited from the liberal bourgeoisie, had been infiltrated by mafiosi, and its commander, Salvatore Lo Biundo, a wealthy citrus farmer, was widely known to be a mafia leader. When questioned by Tajani and his subordinates, the police officers who had been working in this area under Albanese freely admitted to their contacts, protection arrangements and relationships with mafiosi and criminals. In the most charitable of interpretations, which supposes that there were no cases of unambiguous collusion or protection, the officers’ statements provide a picture of the precautions and omissions that drove state officials to stoop to agreements with a power that was not only violent, and therefore capable of intimidating and attacking people, but also had shown that it could penetrate the highest levels of the institutions.

The evidence gathered by Tajani failed to provide conclusive proof of the chief of police’s guilt in the specific episodes attributed to him. Moreover, the conduct of the chief public prosecutor was not entirely unblemished, as he had his prosecution address printed while the proceedings were still under way, thus committing a serious irregularity. Albanese, meanwhile, having evaded the arrest warrant and therefore officially an absconder, was in fact received by Giovanni Lanza, Italy’s prime minister and also minister of internal affairs.

On 26 October 1871, the prosecutions division of the court of appeal in Palermo absolved Albanese on the basis of insufficient evidence, but nevertheless had to allow that it was ‘highly likely that the chief of police, who knew that Termini had been a producer of threatening extortion letters, had shown himself to be pleased about the latter’s death, and had urged the police, having fallen under suspicion for this, to proceed [in their investigations] with the greatest care’ (Corte di Appello di Palermo 1871, 35): this suggested that a murder committed by members of the National Guard was being covered up. In response to the statements made by various landowners about being encouraged by the chief of police to kill people who disturbed public order in rural areas, the judges of the prosecutions division offered some convoluted reasoning in their conclusion:

There was clearly political embarrassment over a trial that, if ever debated in court, would have seen not only high-level officials but also members of the government itself in the dock, and it may well be that the ministry encouraged the judges of the prosecution division to dismiss the case (although there is no trace of this in the archived documents). Furthermore, it should be emphasised that the first president of the court of appeal in Palermo, Salvatore Schiavo, was personally in favour of a bold use of domicilio coatto and of provisions of an administrative rather than judicial nature; he also overtly excused the conduct of Medici and Albanese, although he distanced himself from the recruitment of mafiosi to the ranks of the police, which he explicitly acknowledged had taken place.

The approach taken by Schiavo – and by many other officials of the era, who, like him, believed that they would be unable to fight the mafia while they continued to observe the limits imposed on them by the law – needs some degree of explanation, beyond highlighting the authoritarian and illiberal traits of some, but not all, of these characters. Their encounters and clashes with the enormous and widespread power of mafia violence had convinced these men that they were fighting a crucial battle for the fate of the institutions and restoration of the law; their awareness of the extent to which the phenomenon had permeated society, with its spread to individuals and social strata previously above suspicion, heightened the sense of their own impotence and isolation, driving them to put forward repressive measures that were increasingly extreme. Furthermore, by acting in this way, the state also lost the support of people who had nothing in common with criminals and bandits, but were hit by the exceptional measures that were often adopted indiscriminately. Far from gaining in effectiveness, the institutions thus experienced further losses in prestige and authority.

The unclear, unforthcoming and sometimes complicitly silent behaviour of the central authorities in this matter helped to make the defeat of the state and the absence of a proper institutional alternative to mafia power even more obvious. After the case against Albanese had been dismissed, Tajani resigned from the magistracy, rejecting the ministry’s offer of a transfer to the Corte di Cassazione (Supreme Court) in Naples, and went back to legal practice. In 1874, he successfully stood for election to the Chamber of Deputies, joining the ranks of the Left even though his background and friendships suggested that he would have been more at home within the Right. In parliament, he contributed to the protracted debate – which ran from 3 to 16 June 1875 – on ‘Application of emergency public safety measures’ with a speech that caused a considerable stir: a lucid and relentless attack on the behaviour of officials and members of the government, well supplied with troubling episodes, corroboration and detail.

From the same period there emerged one of the most penetrating analyses of the mafia available, written by Leopoldo Franchetti at the end of an investigation into Sicily that he and Sidney Sonnino had conducted in 1876. The central argument of his findings, published the following year, was that the abolition of feudalism on the island had not brought with it a state monopoly of the use of violence; rather, in Sicilian society the exercise of law continued to be based on the material strength of particular individuals or social groups, and ‘private violence finds nothing opposing it except the private violence of others’ (Franchetti [1877] Reference Franchetti1993, 81). These circumstances had seen the establishment of a real ‘violence industry’, operated by ‘facinorosi’ (violent bullies, referring to mafiosi and criminals) with a view to ‘their own interests’, meaning that this industry had become a ‘social force in its own right’ (84). Faced with this, Sicily’s ruling classes, which had encouraged its establishment and had accepted its protection out of convenience, had neglected their true responsibilities; so too had the state authorities, which in their over-eagerness to win the approval of Sicilians had paid more attention to ‘electoral success’ than to ‘the approach that should be adopted by good government’ (213).

Franchetti perceptively identified the relationship between a violent social power, exercising hegemony over a territory to the point that it constituted an ‘extra-legal social system’ ([1877] 1993, 14), and the other powers, both economic and political, that had not chosen to contest the autonomy of the ‘facinorosi’ with an all-out war but had opted instead for a system of negotiation and collusion, thus contributing, in public perception, to the further legitimation of mafia power. Some of Franchetti’s controversial suggestions (such as his proposal that Sicilians should be excluded from public employment on the island) do not detract from the validity of his analysis and his identification of the ultimate objective of the Italian state in Sicily: ‘to replace private force with that of the law’ (206).Footnote ¹⁶