The Sacco Gang Read online

  It would take a long time to be granted a retrial, and they need to take into consideration that Salvatore and Vanni are by now well advanced in years. Wouldn’t it be better, Terracini asks, to gain a pardon first, and then immediately begin procedures for retrial?

  Alfonso accepts his suggestion. And Terracini gets down to work. For free.

  *

  The Saccos, in any case, have been reduced to poverty.

  They had to sell everything to pay the lawyers and support themselves during their time as fugitives. In more recent times, they’ve managed to survive on collections made by the citizens of Raffadali.

  *

  In October of 1962, the warden of Saluzzo Prison summons Alfonso in total secrecy and informs him that the President of the Republic, Antonio Segni, has approved and signed the pardon, thanks to the intelligent efforts of Terracini.

  But there’s one condition: if the three Saccos, once set free, decide to settle on the Italian mainland, they can all be released together, at once; if they plan instead to settle in Sicily, they can only come out one at a time, at six-month intervals.

  *

  But the Saccos have no family living on the mainland who might house and feed them. The one who decides the order of their release is Alfonso, who demands that the warden keep the matter secret. He must never tell his brothers that the decision was his.

  *

  On October 12, 1962, Salvatore is the first to be released. He is seventy-four years old and very sick.

  On April 12, 1963, Vanni comes out.

  On October 30 of the same year, Alfonso, the last one remaining in prison, receives a telegram from Terracini, informing him that the order for his release has arrived.

  *

  Once back in Raffadali, Alfonso marries Pina Crapanzano.

  She was the girl he last saw in 1926, when making his way through the parted crowd, wounded and handcuffed.

  Pina waited for him for nearly forty years, never once losing hope.

  The Mafia not only robbed Alfonso and Pina of forty years of life together, but also denied them the possibility of having children.

  *

  Vanni for his part already had two children, Luigi and Antonina, before the Mafia ruined his life. After his release, he obtains a passport and moves to California with his wife, to live in the home of his daughter, Antonina, where he remains until the end of his days.

  *

  His other child, young Luigi, died while his father was in prison. Mysteriously.

  Taken to Pompeii, to a boarding school for the children of parents serving life sentences, he dies in circumstances that have forever remained obscure, along with another boy, the son of the same Marzullo who accompanied the Saccos in many of their adventures and misadventures and was arrested and convicted along with them.

  Isn’t it a strange coincidence that the sons of two men who fought the Mafia together should die together, at the same time?

  The circumstances of the two boys’ deaths were never revealed to the parents.

  Some have surmised, perhaps not incorrectly, that the long arm of the Mafia reached all the way to Pompeii to complete their atrocious vendetta, through the liquidation of two innocent boys.

  *

  Sometimes history likes to play tricks. In 1943, shortly after the Allies landed in Sicily and restored power and honor to the Mafia,7 alongside such names as Vizzini and Genco Russo, now back in the limelight, we also find that of Vanni Sacco.

  But it’s just a case of two different people with the same name. This new Vanni Sacco isn’t even related to our Vanni, and he’s not from Raffadali.

  In the future, however, people will begin to confuse the two with increasing frequency.

  7Notorious Italian-American mobster “Lucky” Luciano is generally believed to have aided the Americans in the Allied landing in Sicily in 1943 by providing them with contacts among the local Mafia anxious to help defeat the Fascist government. A number of these mafiosi quickly regained prominence thereafter, some of them replacing the Fascist podestà as mayors of local governments. (t.n.)

  OBSERVATIONS ON THE CHAPTERS

  Chapter I

  Vanni’s and Vincenzo’s decision to emigrate, respectively, to the United States and Argentina in order to send money back home to get their land out of hock was an intelligent move. Farm produce, in those crisis years, in fact was never enough to pay the biannual dues to the proprietor. One alternative to emigration might have been to take out a loan from a bank. But Luigi, Vanni, and Vincenzo had seen what happened in the late nineteenth century, and continued to happen in the twentieth, to so many small landowners. De Stefano and Oddo, in their History of Sicily from 1860 to 1910 (Bari 1963), have the following to say on the matter:

  “Many small properties were confiscated by the treasury for failure to pay taxes, and numerous holdings were given over to a few credit institutions for insolvency and inability to pay installments and the interests on the mortgages; and many proprietors sold their farms, after owning them for just a few years, to individuals who already owned one or more domains.”

  *

  The Saccos are well known in Raffadali because they have never done any harm to anyone, have always respected the law, have always kept their word, and have always paid their debts. They are appreciated for their extraordinary capacity for work, and for the commitment they bring to everything they do.

  All possessed of clean records, they are always granted permission to bear arms without any difficulty.

  With the money they put aside, they do not buy public debt bonds, because they want to use the money to fund new initiatives, expand their activities, create work for others, and benefit their town. In the eyes of certain individuals, however, they have a flaw that is hard to ignore: they are all socialists.

  Chapter II

  In recent times, with the end of the bloody war declared by the Corleonese Mafia against its internal enemies and then against the state, there has been a widespread, growing reevaluation of the “old” Mafia. In reality, as this chapter amply shows, the “old” Mafia was made up of savage killers just as much as the “new” one is. The only difference between the two is that the “old” Mafia had its own deluded “code of honor.” This code, however, made no allowances for either the lives or the honor of its victims, as was seen in the appalling example of the Gallo family.

  Chapter III

  The Dantesque language Alfonso uses to describe the conditions in which the Saccos were forced to live is quite apropos. At a certain point in their peaceful, honest, industrious lives, the Saccos are compelled to abandon utterly their habits, modes of behavior, even their way of thinking. They are forced to enter “the dark wood from which they would never manage to emerge again.” But who wanted to chase them into the dark wood? Who changed the charge of their strength from positive to negative?

  The Mafia, of course.

  Had they bowed to the Mafia’s demands, the Saccos could have continued their pursuits, while ceding a large slice of their revenues. But this big cut would have necessarily curtailed any possibility of developing their initiatives.

  Moreover, the Mafia’s demands would certainly have gradually grown more onerous, aggressive, and untenable, until they finally stifled all of the Saccos’ pursuits.

  And anyway, why passively bow one’s head? Alfonso writes that he and his brothers felt their blood boiling. Their pride as free men would not allow such cowardly submission.

  But it wasn’t just the Mafia that chased them into the dark wood.

  They were also given a strong initial push by the marshal of the Carabinieri, when he admitted that the government was powerless. And the judges who acquitted the four defendants, taking their word, as prior convicts, against that of the law-abiding Sacco brothers who had spotless records—didn’t they also push them from behind, with t
he law’s full force, as deep into the wild wood as they could?

  Chapter IV

  When Salvatore Sacco manages to find out the names of those who, in trying to kill his brothers, indirectly caused his son to go blind, he doesn’t go and mete out revenge personally, he lawfully files a charge with the authorities. He still has faith in the law. But how long can such faith last in the face of a law which, for the second time, chooses to take the word of former convicts and is ready to accept false evidence, even though it is fully aware that Mafia has the Saccos in their sights?

  We must remember, however, that almost all these judicial procedures against the Mafia—ninety-nine percent of the time—were destined to end in the acquittal of the bosses, with minor convictions for a few subalterns. The reason for the acquittal was usually lack of evidence. And every acquittal for lack of evidence was a feather in a mafioso’s cap, a medal to wear on his chest. It was a public testimony of the powerlessness of the justice system, one that conferred a kind of aura of demonic cleverness around the person of the Mafia boss, as if to say: “They just can’t beat this guy.”

  On the other hand, the judges, even when they were not already predisposed to leniency in the Mafia’s regard—whether for reasons of “getting along,” family ties, friendships, collusion, blackmail, or political pressure—always found themselves, at the moment of trial, faced with legions of reluctant (due to fear or convenience) or downright false witnesses. Almost all of the alibis provided to the Mafia bosses came from witnesses paid or suborned by the Mafia. And, as the statistics of the time show, even acknowledged false testimonies were usually not prosecuted. Also:

  “The recalcitrant witness acts not only for or against the interests of others, but also, and most often, for his own sake. We see men mortally wounded who denounce their assassins, and then, when on the road to recovery, firmly retract their charges. We see others who denounce supposed killers instead of the real ones—either to avenge themselves on their enemies, or to throw law enforcement off the trail and preserve their own or their family’s honor and their obligation to take revenge.” (Relazione della Giunta d’inchiesta parlamentare 1875 (Report of the Parliamentary Investigation Commission, 1875), vol. II, Bologna 1969).

  Forty-five years after the abovementioned parliamentary investigation, nothing has changed in any way.

  Chapter V

  Of the two versions of Vanni’s escape, the one given by Alfonso is the less convincing, though it serves in a big way to shift the blame away from the prison authorities. In fact, for Alfonso, it was all merely a case of negligence on the part of the jailors, and Vanni was able to take full advantage of it. In the other version, Vanni’s getaway appears instead objectively abetted by the entire prison hierarchy. Alfonso recounts that his brother escaped, along with two other inmates, through a high window left temporarily without bars. The Carabinieri say the window was out of reach. But even assuming the three men were able to reach the window, how were they able to lower themselves down on the outside, given that they were at a considerable height? With the classic bedsheets tied together? And even supposing they had found a spool of rope conveniently left by accident in their cell, would they not have been seen by some guards or passersby while descending the rope like a group of mountain climbers, since it was early afternoon? There’s also another, not insignificant detail that adds to the mystery of the escape. Vanni was never officially charged with breaking out of prison. And this leads one to suspect that Vanni’s escape was never reported to the proper authorities by the prison management.

  But, whatever actually happened, questions remain. Who let Vanni escape, and why? It may have been someone, some powerless former victim of the Mafia, who was hoping that Vanni, once free, would resume his personal war against a common enemy, a fight that by this point, after the Saccos’ father’s violent death, would be without quarter. Or else it was a man of the law who, having witnessed the impossibility of fighting the Mafia legally, had decided to help it be fought illegally. And there’s still another possible hypothesis. By killing an old man, namely, the Saccos’ father, the Raffadalese Mafia openly and knowingly transgressed the Mafia code of honor. Indeed, by attempting to camouflage a murder by strangulation as a death by natural causes, they were hoping to evade the judgment of the other Mafias.

  The attempt fails, and thus Vanni is allowed to take revenge.

  Alfonso comments on Vanni’s newly acquired freedom as follows:

  “Was my brother’s escape a good thing? Or a bad thing? I cannot judge. All the brothers on the outside were living in constant danger. After the mysterious death of our father, we knew that one or another of us might be next; whereas after our brother Giovanni’s jailbreak we were all ruined, but we are all alive.”

  Chapter VI

  History (but also crime reporting) is not made of “ifs.” One cannot always resist, however, the temptation to speculate.

  If the marshal of the Carabinieri, in improperly revoking Alfonso’s right to bear arms, had not forced him to take to the bush (something for which he had no vocation), would the “notorious Sacco gang” have ever been born? If, in the ambush at the farmhouse, Vanni had been alone, without Alfonso at his side, would he ever have succeeded in routing the attackers? Or would he simply have been killed, and the “notorious Sacco gang” never have existed?

  Whatever the case, the first two members of the “gang” are a fugitive who is not officially a fugitive, and another man who certainly cannot be defined as a fugitive because he has not been charged with any crime. At the most, Alfonso is a man who goes about armed though stripped of his license to bear arms.

  The Sacco gang (which had not yet acquired that name at this point) is an utter anomaly. Because it is nothing more than the product of an accumulation of prevarications, and even a murder, contrived by mafiosi, and an intolerable string of abuses on the part of law enforcement and the justice system.

  Chapter VII

  There is only one witness to the Cuffaro murder, the elderly Vincenzo Galvano, who claims to have seen, right after the shot was fired, two rather young men running away. He was not able to identify them, however, because he suffers from trachomatous conjunctivitis. But his testimony is enough to put the Saccos under arrest. At the trial in 1923, the Saccos are fully acquitted of all charges. It was not merely a case of insufficient evidence.

  Chapter VIII

  Some time after the abortive ambush in Aragona, it was announced that the people who attacked the Saccos were either the Carabinieri or a handful of “honest and eager citizens tired of having to put up with the continuous abuses of the Sacco gang,” as a newspaper put it a few years later, when recalling the episode. It goes without saying that these “honest and eager citizens” were mafiosi tried and true, who had purposefully come out in large numbers for the hunting party. How had this unusual collaboration come about? At that moment, the Raffadalese Mafia hadn’t yet found a replacement for their murdered boss. But certain as they were that it was the Saccos who killed Cuffaro, they had a strong hankering for revenge. But wouldn’t such a large concentration of mafiosi in Aragona have aroused the suspicions of the Carabinieri? Couldn’t a police action on their part have thwarted the Mafia’s plan to eliminate the Saccos? That is why they decided to inform the Carabinieri of their ambush and ally themselves with them. They were offering them the Saccos’ heads on a silver platter, a prospect made possible by the treachery of the young Aragonese man. In exchange they were allowed to take part in the game.

  Chapter IX

  The Saccos never once opened fire on the Carabinieri or any other law enforcement officers (when they reacted to the Aragona ambush they had no way of knowing that representatives of the law were also present). The Saccos never stole anything from anyone (the charge of stealing livestock that landed Vanni in jail proved to be patently false). Thus one wonders: what kind of “gang” is it that does not kill honest citizens,
does not extort duty, commits no robbery or holdups, and never kidnaps anyone? It’s a one-of-a-kind “gang” accused, and with no evidence at that, of having eliminated a few savage Mafia bosses and forced a few others to flee. It’s a gang that liberated Raffadali from Mafia oppression. It’s a gang of honest men forced, by events and by a government unable to protect them, to take up arms, against their very nature as honest men.

  Chapter X

  When informed that Mori had been sent to Sicily to fight the Mafia, noted statesman and diplomat Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a native of Palermo, gave a famous speech at the Teatro Massimo in that same city, ending with the declaration quoted earlier in this book. Perhaps it’s worth presenting a more extensive excerpt:

  “Now I say to you, O fellow Palermitans, that if by the word ‘Mafia’ we mean a sense of honor taken to the point of paroxysm, a generosity that confronts the strong but indulges the weak, a loyalty in friendship stronger than anything, even death, if by ‘Mafia’ we mean these feelings and attitudes, even with all their excesses, then we are speaking of individual features that distinguish the Sicilian soul, and in that case I declare myself to be a mafioso, too, and proud to be one!”

  A Mafia of fine, manly sentiment, in short. A bit the way Tryphosa Bates-Batcheller thought of it, when, in her 1911 book Italian Castles and Country Seats, she wrote that the origins of the Mafia were to be found “in man’s primordial instinct to protect his woman.”