OMERTA AND THE MAFIA
When the drunken sulphur-miners quarrel and kill one another on Saturdays
and Sundays, the murderers are seldom brought to justice because of
Omerta; a word which is said to be derived from uomo and to signify
manliness in the sense of power of endurance, the power, for example, of
keeping silence even under torture; hence it comes to be used for an
exaggeration of that natural sense of honour, that Noblesse Oblige or
Decency Forbids, which makes an English schoolboy scorn to become a
sneak. It may be false and foolish, it may be noble and chivalrous,
whatever it is, they say, it has such a firm growth among them because
the history of Sicily is the history of an island which has for centuries
been misgoverned by foreigners, and the people have lost any faith they
may ever have had in professional justice. If one were to be involved
with a Sicilian in committing a crime, one might be perfectly certain
that he would never turn King's evidence, he would say, "Io son uomo, io
non parlo" ("I am a man, I know how to hold my tongue") and he would
rather die than betray an accomplice who is his friend and probably his
compare. Nor need the criminal fear that the victim or anyone in the
secret whether accomplice or not, will blab. A man with a wound on his
face, made obviously by a knife, will swear to the police that in drawing
a cork he fell and cut himself with the bottle. He does not intend his
assailant to go unpunished, but he will not have the police interfering
if he can prevent it; he means to look after his own affairs himself. If
a murder has been committed a crowd will collect round the murdered
man--a crowd that includes the police and also the murderer--but no one
has any idea who committed the crime, not even those who saw it done, and
not even the dying man, who may carry his assumption of ignorance so far
as to call his murderer to his side, embrace him affectionately and give
him a Judas-kiss which bears a double meaning; for the police and the
general public it is evidence that there can have been no ill-feeling
between the two, while for the friends of the murdered man it confirms
their suspicions as to the one on whom the vendetta is to be executed.
So many have told me this that I cannot help thinking that, if it really
is done as often as they say, it must by now have lost some of its power
of deceiving the police. Probably it was done on some occasion which
took the public fancy, and they keep on repeating it because it makes a
dramatic close.
Giovanni Grasso has a play called _Omerta_:_ La Legge del Silenzio_. Don
Andrea has been murdered by or at the instigation of Don Toto
(Salvatore), who is an overbearing bully, nevertheless Saru (Rosario) has
been sent to prison for the crime and, during his absence, his girl has
married Don Toto. The play opens with the return from prison of Saru,
acted by Giovanni. He comes to the house of his mother, with whom Don
Toto and his wife are living. The length of the play is provided by the
disappointments attending his return: his setting up for himself and
painting paladins on Sicilian carts; a scene of passionate tenderness
with his mother, during which he convinces her of his innocence, but
refuses to reveal the name of the murderer which he has learnt in prison;
a beautiful interview with Pasqualino, his young brother, who shows he is
the right sort of boy by declaring of his own accord that he hates Don
Toto; a magnificent interrupted quarrel with Don Toto, and scenes with
the police and with the priest to whom Saru refuses to give any
information about the murder. Towards the end Saru staggers in wounded.
They all try to make him tell the name of his murderer, but he will not.
Finally, he is left alone with Pasqualino to whom he gives his revolver
with these dying words:
"For Don Toto, when you shall be eighteen."
Pasqualino understands, kisses the pistol and accepts the obligation,
saying:
"I will see to it."
The others return and ask Pasqualino whether Saru told him anything
before he died, and Pasqualino, concealing the pistol in his bosom as the
Spartan boy concealed the fox, bravely answers:
"Nothing."
One may object to the play on the ground that it breaks off instead of
coming to a conclusion--one is left wishing to see Pasqualino, grown up
and acted by Giovanni, executing the vendetta--but it is a good play and
shows what is meant by omerta. The dramatic critic of the _Times_ (2
March, 1910), on the morning after Giovanni produced it in London, opened
his notice of it thus: "Omerta must make things very difficult for the
Sicilian police." This is precisely what they intend.
Without omerta the mafia would hardly flourish, and the mafia is not so
easy to understand. I suppose the reason why Sicilians explain it badly
is that they understand it too well. The inquiring outsider cannot see
the trees for the wood, and the explaining insider cannot see the wood
for the trees. They labour to make clear things with which I am
familiar, and take for granted things which are strange to me, treating
me rather as my father treated the judges before whom he was arguing some
legal point. Their lordships interrupted him:
"Yes, Mr. Jones, you say this is so and that is so, but you do not
produce any authority in support of your statements."
"Authority, my lord?" exclaimed my father, as though perhaps he might
have forgotten something: then, leaning over the desk, he said, in a
stage whisper: "Usher, bring me _Blackstone_--or some other elementary
work."
Thus we do not make much progress, but by degrees one picks up a few
ideas about it.
My friend Peppino Fazio, of Catania, allowed me to copy and translate
part of an article he wrote in a newspaper. He is speaking of Palermo as
long ago as 1780:
The Albergheria was the quarter that harboured those men who were
most ready with their hands and most quarrelsome; they were expert
also in using their knives, with which they fenced by rule and
according to art; they obeyed a certain code of chivalry of their
own, not permitting the weak or the unarmed to be bullied, treating
as criminals those who used fraud and treachery, and not brooking the
intervention of the police. They were men whom an exaggerated
sentiment of honour and of individual courage had decoyed from the
path of social conventions, but in whom there was a fundamental
notion of right conduct and a generosity at times magnanimous. They
held each other in great mutual respect, free from any element of
servility or cowardice, not recognising grades, nor conferring any
right to command--a respect that was the more profound according as
its object was the more distinguished for acts of valour and grandeur
of soul. It was the tacit homage that one pays to heroes, poets,
artists and to every kind of genius.
These men, slowly degenerating, have produced the mafia, which is
associated with bullying, blackmailing and crime. The word mafia has
been applied in this bad sense only in more recent times, as we are
assured by those who have studied the subject. The ancestors of the
mafiosi used to call themselves Cristiani--that is Men in the sense
of men of courage and silence.
The Cristiano carried in one pocket his rosary and in the other his
knife. Outside his own class he recognised the higher social
distinctions and, while preserving his own self-respect and never
stooping to obsequiousness, felt for the galantuomini (that is for
the townspeople) and for the signori (that is for the patricians) a
real submission which he displayed both in acts and words by
protecting their persons and their reputations; so that no thief or
evil-liver dared to commit any crime against one who was known to be
protected by a Cristiano.
One recognises about this something of the chivalry of Robin Hood and of
more modern highwaymen. The conditions of life in the albergheria are
not identical with those of life in the open country, either in England
or in Sicily, nor with those of life in the orange-groves of the Conca
d'Oro round about Palermo. Both in the Conca d'Oro and in the open
fields the guardians employed to protect the crops are all mafiosi and
are able to prevent the employment of any who are not. The conditions in
a sulphur-mine again are different. Confusion arises unless one knows
which conditions are present to the mind of him who is trying to explain
the mafia. Besides which, the words mafia and mafioso are still often
used in a good sense.
There was something mafioso about Michelino when he was singing to us at
the mine, keeping us all in order and silencing the guitar with a wave of
his hand. There is something of it in a girl who is not ashamed of her
beauty and does not blush to be admired. It was the mafiosita of Guido
Santo, the mule, at Castellinaria, that sunny morning when he trotted up
and down in his new harness before taking us to the shore, which put it
into our heads to make it also his festa. There is something of it in
the attitude of King Henry VIII, with his hat on one side and his arm
a-kimbo, as he appears in a full-length portrait by Holbein. There was a
good deal of it in the conduct of Giovanni in his Teatro Machiavelli on
one occasion when a lady music-hall singer failed to please; the public
hissed her and made such an uproar that she could not proceed. Giovanni
was, or pretended to be, furious. He behaved to his audience as Nino
Bixio behaved to his men on the Sicilian expedition. He came on and
abused them with gesticulation and language; he swore and stormed at
them; he appealed to their sense of chivalry; he threatened to come down
among them and teach them manners; he declared that they should hear her.
He made the piano-man play; he went and fetched the lady; he stood by her
side, frowning, with his arms folded, ready to break out, the
personification of angry determination and suppressed energy. The people
acquiesced and listened. When the singer had finished, they applauded;
and they were applauding not only her, but also Giovanni because he had
dominated them. It is a small theatre and their numbers may have been
four or five hundred--it would depend upon the programme and the kind of
evening it was--but if it had been the Teatro Bellini he would have
subdued them just as well, unless there had been present someone to
resist him with a stronger personality, and his experience had taught him
that the chances were against that.
An imposing personality is a useless possession unless there are others
willing to be imposed upon, and it is this willingness to be dominated
quite as much as the love of dominating that makes the mafia possible.
If I may "quote from memory":
Surely the pleasure is as great
Of being beaten as to beat.
Possibly the Sicilian charm contains among its many ingredients a trace
of this love of being dominated which, in England, we associate more
particularly with women, spaniels and walnut trees; and if it were not
so, history might contain less about the misgovernment of the island by
foreigners.
The mafia is not like the Neapolitan Camorra, it is not an organised
society such as one reads about in books for boys, nor is it a recognised
trade union with a president, secretary, officers and so on. It is
rather an esprit de corps, and no more a secret society than omerta is a
secret society; nevertheless, they speak of the mafia as being more
highly organised in some districts than in others, and there are secret
societies whose members are mafiosi, so that for a foreigner to speak of
the mafia as a secret society would appear to be an excusable error.
Among every collection of men, and even in a herd of bullocks, one is
always the acknowledged leader, and in a sulphur-mine it naturally
happens that one man has a more dominating personality, more prepotenza,
than any of the others; this capo-mafioso takes the lead and is king.
When, as often happens, he is a man with a respect for law and order,
willing to be useful to the managers, the mafia can and does supplement
in an amateur fashion the deficiencies of professional justice. If
Giovanni Grasso were really a worker in a sulphur-mine, as he sometimes
appears to be on the stage, he would certainly take the lead, and no one
who knows him will believe that he could ever be capable of a bad action.
But few men can safely be trusted with absolute power. Sometimes this
capo-mafioso is a villain who glories in a record of crime, a
brow-beating bully who will stick at nothing. Here is a situation for a
melodrama--the Wicked Despot. He does as he chooses with those around
him, who fear lest he should treat them as Don Toto treated Don Andrea
before the opening of _Omerta_, and as he treats Saru in the course of
the play; and they not only fear, they also admire an unscrupulousness of
which they feel themselves to be incapable. They refer their disputes to
him and execute his orders. They do not pay him money for adjudicating
between them, it is enough for him to have the satisfaction of being
asked to arbitrate and, by giving his decision and seeing that it is
carried out, he consolidates his power. But he exacts from them a
percentage of their winnings at cards as tribute, and they pay it
willingly so as to keep on good terms with him. Of course, under the
throne of any of these tyrants, among those who have sufficient daring,
conspiracies are continually surging and, sooner or later, whether he is
a good or a bad man, he has to give way to a stronger--perhaps a fresh
arrival, who takes the public fancy. Sometimes there are two with
apparently an equal power of dominating; they agree not to quarrel
openly, but, between themselves, each is on the look-out for an
opportunity to annihilate the other's influence.
One Saturday, in the street at Caltanissetta, Beppe showed me marks of
bullets on the wall. He said that only a week before there had been a
row among a score of men with revolvers about some question of precedence
among the mafiosi in a neighbouring mine arising out of the terms
proposed for ending a strike. One of the men was killed and several were
wounded, but the question of precedence could not be settled that day
because the survivors were all put into prison.
According to the plays, the prisons are to the mafiosi what the ganglia
are to the nerves, and give the prisoners an opportunity for talking
matters over, thus providing an effective means of continuing the plot of
the drama. And though the criminals feel secure in the knowledge that
omerta will prevent their confederates from giving information, yet the
police, of course, know who is who all the time, just as the police in
London know who are the criminals; the law, however, is jealous of the
rights of the people and does not move on suspicion. And too much of the
modern police methods would not combine well with the requirements of
melodrama.
Beppe assured me that in his mine the mafiosi are mostly good fellows and
do not do any harm, except among themselves when they quarrel, get drunk
and murder one another. He admits that the making use of them in the
management of the men is like playing with fire, but he agrees with all
who have gone into the matter that a stranger falling among them,
wherever he might meet them, would be treated with the most extreme
respect and courtesy. This is not because they are afraid of giving
themselves away, distrusting the stranger's omerta, it is because they
have a real self-respect and wish to pass in the eyes of the world for
men of good position. The presence of a stranger among them is a
challenge to their chivalry and to their oriental sense of hospitality.
Anyone wishing to study the mafia from books might begin with _La Mafia e
I Mafiosi_, by Antonio Cutrera, Delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza (Palermo.
Alberto Reber, 1900), and continue with _La Mala Vita di Palermo_ (_I
Ricottari_), by the same author. If he will also read all the numerous
books by other authors cited in the notes to these two works he ought to
gain a fair knowledge of the subject.