ABSTRACT: The Mafia trial being held in Palermo brings back to the author's mind experiences from his childhood which are also marked with what he heard people around him saying about the Mafia trials of the time. From that time until today almost sixty years have passed as well as the Fascist era. During the latter, while a consensus favourable to the regime grew thanks to its foreign policy initiatives and the stability of the lira - hence the cost of living too - people in Sicily applauded the arrests of Mafiosi, their trials, and the sentences inflicted on them. But they also consented without protest to the tortures said to have been inflicted on those arrested. The prefect Moro, among others, used a special technique which consisted in creating difficulties for those "gentlemen" who had been robbed or injured by the Mafia and who then managed to retake possession of the loot: these "gentlemen" when pressed to the wall sooner or later named some names on the basis of which trials were basted together wh

ich were almost entirely based on "circumstantial evidence" but which often flew "straight as an arrow to the right target". One spoke of this freely at home and rather less freely on the outside, just as happens today. But "today the advantage is this: that at last it is a democratic state which is moving against the Mafia".

(CORRIERE DELLA SERA, February 23, 1986)

An observation that I feel like making today, quite a simple and obvious one, but not lacking in significance, is that my childhood was in some way marked by everything I heard regarding the great Mafia trials which at the time were being held in Palermo and Agrigento; and that today, in my old age, I find myself following others - above all the one in Palermo with its great number of defendants - which excite the same expectations, hopes and fears. And meanwhile almost sixty years have passed. And during this time there has been a dictatorship that proclaimed its will to annihilate the Mafia, to which end it indicated its readiness to abuse power. But the fact is that Fascism only anesthetised the Mafia, and in doing so created more or less voluntary confusion between political dissent and criminal association. But as far as extirpating it goes, a great deal more would have been needed.

Perhaps more time was needed too, so that the Mafia generation Mori caught in his net could be extinguished naturally and not return to power as soon as the dictatorship fell. But mainly what was needed, to over-simplify matters, was more law: in the sense that Sicilians needed to be given a choice between law and crime and not, as was the case, between one crime and another. But law had not yet shown up, one exited from a world in which there was mighty little of it, so that one felt the lack. The world of Giolittian (1) democracy, we might call it, which I continue to see through the eyes of Salvemini (2).

In the years of my childhood, which the historian calls "the years of consensus" with the Fascist regime. There were so many reasons for giving it consensus. Aside from democracy not put into practice, especially in the South, there were those brainstorms in foreign policy which the Italians saw as prestigious. There was the re-evaluation of the fighting spirit; there was the end of strikes (inasmuch as strikes, today just like yesterday, are sacrosanct when we are the ones who are striking, but intolerable disorder when others are doing it); and above all there was the fact that the five-hundred-lire salaries of teachers and office workers, had never been as high before (in relation, obviously, to one's needs). And in Sicily this became a reason for giving consensus to the fight against the Mafia too.

In one's family circle or among close friends one spoke with satisfaction of the arrests, the trials, the sentences. And the satisfaction was so great that one spoke with a certain horror but never disapproval of the tortures which it was said were inflicted in the police barracks on those arrested. Sporadically these tortures were admitted, but then regularly retractions were made before the judges. There were repentant Mafiosi. More productive was an inquisitional technique thought up by Mori it seems. This consisted in summoning those "gentlemen" who in recent years were known to have been the victims of large thefts, prevalently of livestock, and who then had managed - certainly not through police action - to recover their stolen property. Information on such facts came mostly from the "campieri", a kind of private police force employed by the feud who, at first on friendly terms with both the Carabinieri and the Mafia, at that point decided to desert the Mafia and hold to the Carabinieri. Something

like today's penitents: and from Mori they received bonuses, recognition and decorations for civic merit. Another source of information were the concierges of apartment buildings who were almost formally called on to give police information regarding the tenants.

The "gentlemen" thus being summoned who were known to have been victims of burglary and who had then recovered the stolen goods, the police asked them whom they had applied to with such success. Obviously they were not happy to reply. Often it required several hours or days in a cell to get them to that point. But they ended by naming those names who were often "go-betweens" (that was what Pietro Ulloa called them, the King's - the Bourbon King's - procurator at Trapani, the first to have given a precise description of the Mafia "brotherhood"), "friends of friends", at times real and proper chieftains. With these names it was then easy to trace the network of dependence and interdependence, and of rivalries too, not less convincing than the friendships. Even then there were the "clans" feuding with each other. And that story of mine which is called a "cosa nostra" western, which a few years ago was diluted at length on television, was a true example, true history.

The trials of that period were almost entirely based on circumstantial evidence. But remembering what was said, the evidence flew straight as an arrow to the right target. In villages where everyone knew everyone else, those imputations that were rattled off during the trials were already prime certainties. And one spoke of it freely in the family and among friends, but very cautiously elsewhere. And it is understandable if something of the kind is happening today in a city like Palermo, capable of being divided up into villages where everyone knows everyone else. On the threshold of justice, at the point of expressing one's own true opinion, one's satisfaction about the arrests and the trials, the citizen is suddenly assailed by a doubt, a fear: is this really the time something will happen, will the fight against the Mafia really continue until it is if not annihilated once and for all, at least reduced to impotence? If after sixty years we find ourselves at the same point, or even worse off, if the M

afia has shown that it has the vitality to hold out against a tyrannical state's will to destroy it, is it possible that a democratic state will succeed with all the guarantees it offers for personal freedom and which are not difficult to change into coefficients of impunity?

But that is the very advantage (or better, hope) we enjoy today: that it is finally a democratic state which is moving against the Mafia, a constitutional state guaranteeing rights, and above all the right of not having to put up with being pushed around, with vexations, with direct or indirect exploitation, with the murky intrusions of criminals into public affairs.

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TRANSLATOR'S NOTES

1) Giolittian - refers to Giolitti, Giovanni - (Mondovi 1842 - Cavour 1928) - Liberal deputy, minister, prime minister, held government posts almost uninterruptedly from 1892 to 1911. Important reforms for industrial and social advancement were due to him. He favoured the growth of workers' and Socialist organisations even if he later joined with Catholic moderates in anti-Socialist actions such as excluding divorce from the platform of his party. He was against Italy entering the first world war. He underrated the Fascist phenomenon and was convinced of being able to reabsorb it.

2) Salvemini - refers to Salvemini, Gaetano - (Molfetta 1873 - Sorrento 1957) - Italian historian and politician. A Socialist from 1893, supporter of the South, founded the weekly review »L'Unità which soon became important for its debates. In 1925 in Florence together with the Rosselli brothers he founded the clandestine periodical anti-Fascist review »Non mollare . Later he fled abroad (USA) where he promoted anti-Fascist information campaigns.