The Sacco Gang Read online

  Here, too, Alfonso neglects to name the men lying in wait.

  But he does name the two mafiosi, one of whose brother, Giovanni Terrazzino, having taken command after Salvatore ended up in prison, would later be shot, with people believing, beyond any doubt, that it was the Saccos who’d done it.

  But if the story of the boy seeing masked men behind the rocks, and the men signaling him to keep on going, is true, then this means that the group lying in ambush were not waiting for the first group, the one with the Mangiones, but the second one, with the two Mafia bosses.

  *

  Years later, Alfonso, now 87, is interviewed by a journalist by the name of Giuseppe Pirrello.

  Here is his account of this killing, as related by the journalist:

  “It was the day of the annual livestock fair at Cattolica, and everyone was going there to do some kind of business or other. Even the overseers went. Around sunset, as everyone was heading home, the overseers started worrying about a possible ambush by the Sacco brothers. And so they told our two cousins, whose name was Mangione, to walk a few hundred yards ahead of them and tell them if they noticed anything unusual. When the Mangiones got to the well at ‘Da li ciciri,’ they saw some suspicious faces. They started running back towards the overseers, but the Saccos started shooting, and the two cousins were killed.”

  This makes no sense whatsoever, with respect to the first and second accounts of the event.

  Now it’s two of the three Mangiones who walk on ahead, but no longer the boy.

  And the overseers who’d figured in the Biography reappear in the group.

  The men behind the rocks are now the Saccos.

  And it’s the Saccos who shoot first.

  These are very grave admissions.

  Why didn’t the two Mangiones recognize their cousins, the Saccos?

  Apparently because the Saccos had covered their faces with shawls.

  And it’s possible they were behind the rocks with their faces covered because they were waiting for the overseers to pass in order to shoot them—though there is no mention whatsoever of them in the Memorial.

  But there surely had to have been some kind of mistake, since the Saccos would never have fired first against a brother-in-law and cousin.

  The point of it all is that Alfonso is acknowledging the fact that it was they who killed the two unlucky cousins caught between the overseers and the Saccos.

  And this raises a great many doubts about what actually happened, apart from the double murder at the drinking trough.

  *

  So, to conclude, four murders are placed on the Saccos’ account: those of Cuffaro, Terrazzino, Plano, and Mangione.

  And then there’s the firefight before the Saccos’ capture.

  And the collection labeled an ongoing extortion.

  Then the escape from the first attempted arrest.

  Then there was the conviction in the first instance, but just for Vanni, for that fake theft of livestock, which Vanni appealed.

  And there should also be the prison escape, but nobody’s talking about that.

  6Italian law has no “double jeopardy” provision, a fact that made it even easier for the Fascist regime to bend the legal system to its whims. (t.n.)­­

  XV

  THE TRIAL

  The Saccos’ trial begins in late March 1928.

  Vanni, Alfonso, and Salvatore are charged with two counts of murder, Vincenzo and Girolamo with “aggravated criminal association.”

  Inside the prison the five men are not only handcuffed, but chained one to the other in such a way that they can’t even move. Loaded then onto a covered truck along with some ten armed carabinieri, they come out of the prison.

  But right outside the main entrance they find two rows of carabinieri for the truck to pass between. The double row of carabinieri continues uninterrupted all the way to the main entrance to the courthouse.

  That’s almost two kilometers’ worth of carabinieri, to form a protective cordon.

  Never had anyone seen such a display of force.

  The whole thing was staged to underscore just how dangerous “the notorious Sacco gang” really was, and to foreground the triumph of Prefect Mori and his men.

  The defendants plead not guilty.

  The first thing the presiding judge wants to know is what happened during the firefight that led to the capture of the Sacco brothers, and so he calls Lieutenant Giovanni Nuvoletti to testify.

  The lieutenant says that once they’d surrounded the cottage, he ordered the Saccos to surrender and began to approach the door, when he was shot at twice, the bullets whistling past his head.

  “Where did these shots come from?”

  “From the half-closed door.”

  Since the judge wants to be certain it was the Saccos who fired first, he calls Sergeant Dascoli to the stand.

  “Did the Saccos shoot first?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “From where?”

  “From the roof of the cottage.”

  “Are you sure? The lieutenant says they fired from the door.”

  “No, sir, the door was closed. They fired from the roof.”

  The presiding judge attempts to reconcile the contradiction between the two testimonies.

  “Maybe the shots came diagonally, and so you merely thought they came from the roof.”

  “No, your honor, I actually saw the tiles flying in the air!”

  At this point, everyone becomes utterly confused.

  Because if the tiles were flying in the air, it means that the shots were fired at the roof, not from the roof.

  Therefore, if the Saccos ever even did fire, they fired in the air. Then how was it that the lieutenant heard the bullets whistling past his head?

  At this point the presiding judge, seeing that the situation could take a dangerous turn, calls Nuvoletti back to the stand, but asks him no further questions as to who fired first.

  “How long did the firefight last?”

  “Two hours, without interruption.”

  “Do you have any idea how many shots were fired on both sides?”

  “I had all the shells collected.”

  “And how many are there?”

  “Eighty.”

  Everyone is taken aback.

  What? Only eighty shots fired in a firefight that lasted two hours? Isn’t that a rather small amount?

  “How much ammunition did the Saccos have?”

  “A great deal. If we hadn’t broken into the house, they could have held out for hours longer.”

  “And how many of you were there in the special forces?”

  “More than two hundred.”

  “Why did the Saccos never use the Mauser?”

  “I can’t answer that question.”

  At this point the public prosecutor, seeing the question of the firefight on shaky ground, stands up.

  “I would point out,” he says, “that if we disprove the firefight, we end one game and we begin a new one!”

  These words are uttered in a threatening tone that means nothing and everything.

  The prosecutor goes on to explain to the court that a firefight was ideologically inevitable in as much as the Saccos, given the political ideals they embraced, were subversives who hated the forces of order.

  And he said he was sorry that Paolo Tuttolomondo wasn’t also behind bars.

  “And who’s that?” asks the presiding judge, who has never seen that name mentioned in the trial documents.

  “He’s the Saccos’ cousin! Their political inspiration, who unfortunately has escaped to America! Tuttolomondo is a passionate follower of the Bolshevik Antonio Gramsci!”

  The defense asks how it could be that, in a firefight lasting two hours, there were one death and two grave injuries on
the Saccos’ side, whereas not a single man among the special forces sustained even the slightest wound, despite the deadly aim of Vanni Sacco?

  And so everyone becomes convinced that the famous firefight never happened.

  And, as a result, the charge is changed to simply “resisting arrest.”

  But if they were only resisting arrest, how did someone actually get killed?

  For now, however, it’s best to drop the whole thing, and to go no further down that path.

  The Saccos are sentenced to a mere two years.

  *

  They then move on to the murder of Cuffaro, the Mafia boss.

  Since the D’Annas have retracted their confession, there is only one remaining witness, Vincenzo Galvano, eighty years of age, in rather poor health and almost totally blind, to the point that he has to be carried bodily to the witness stand.

  Galvano says he was unable to recognize the two who fired the shots because they were too far away, and he didn’t see very well because of his trachomatous conjunctivitis.

  The prosecutor bolts to his feet and starts speaking in dialect, threatening the old man:

  “Zù Vicè, yer gonna spend the night tonight at Santo Vito prison!”

  Santo Vito is the official name of Girgenti Prison.

  But the old man stands firm in his declaration.

  The judge intervenes:

  “Are you reneging? You told the Carabinieri you recognized Giovanni and Alfonso Sacco, and then you reconfirmed it to the investigating magistrate!”

  “Yessir, tha’ss wha’ they made me say now, but when I was quessioned the first time, I told the truth.”

  “You were questioned earlier?”

  “Yessir, I was, in 1923, an’ I said azackly what I’m sayin’ now.”

  The prosecutor stands up, claiming Galvano is trying to reshuffle the deck, and that he was never questioned in 1923.

  The judge picks up a sheet of paper and says:

  “Galvano, it’s written here that ‘when asked, the subject reports never having been questioned earlier in connection with this trial.’ Why didn’t you tell us you’d already been interrogated?”

  “’Cause tha’s what they tol’ me to say.”

  The defense digs in its heels and demands to see all the minutes of the 1923 trial. And it succeeds in overcoming the protests of the prosecution.

  At this point the defense, waiving its own right to an expert opinion, asks the court to arrange a medical examination to establish to what degree Galvano could actually see five years earlier, given the current grave condition of his eyes.

  The presiding judge holds a hearing in camera and then rejects the request.

  The Saccos are given life sentences on the basis of Galvano’s second testimony, the one clearly extracted from him by force.

  *

  Midway through the trial, something curious happened.

  The public prosecutor, in the course of his harangue, brought to the court’s attention that the trial could not be allowed to end with everyone kissing and making up.

  Among other reasons given, he said that the hunt and capture of the Saccos had cost the state nine million lire.

  At this point the Saccos realized they were finished.

  With nine million—writes Alfonso—you could, in those days, build an entire city. A shocking, impossible figure!

  Only a conviction, in the end, could justify such a waste, such a drain on the public purse. That was why they’d had them escorted through two kilometers of carabinieri! That was why Lieutenant Nuvoletti said that there were two hundred men in his contingent of special forces, when the Saccos saw barely a hundred!

  As of that moment, and until the end of the trial, the Saccos refused to return to the courtroom.

  *

  The trial for the killing of Terrazzino was even worse.

  In the courtroom the written testimony of the Galvano boy was read aloud.

  The lad himself didn’t come in person because he’d been sent to America, in case he decided to change his mind.

  And on the basis of that single testimony, the three Saccos each got another life sentence.

  *

  For the killing of Plano and Mangione, they couldn’t find a single witness for the prosecution. The Saccos were convicted solely on the basis of the results of the Carabinieri’s own investigation.

  *

  The verdict also specified that the Saccos must spend the first twelve years of their life sentences in “silent segregation”—that is, in solitary confinement, in a single cell, without being allowed to speak to the prison guards, and with no right to one hour a day in the open air.

  *

  Vincenzo was sentenced to ten years for aggravated criminal association, and to another twelve for having organized a collection in town for those innocent parties who’d been unjustly imprisoned, the same collection that had been labeled “ongoing extortion.”

  *

  Girolamo got four years for simple criminal association.

  *

  While Vanni was already serving his life sentence, the trial that had begun seven years earlier, the one in which he’d been found guilty of armed animal theft, the one that had started everything, finally, between appeals and repeals, reached its ultimate conclusion.

  On October 12, 1929, Vanni was fully acquitted on all counts.

  Nobody said a word about the prison escape, because there was no mention of it in the trial documents.

  PRISON AND PARDON

  Salvatore, Vanni, and Alfonso begin to make the hellish rounds of Italy’s prisons and penitentiaries: Agrigento, Palermo, Noto, Portici, Poggioreale, Campobasso, Portolongone, Ventotene, Turi, Saluzzo.

  *

  They meet some important people.

  “At Ventotene,” writes Alfonso, “they allowed me to read, at first. I met many victims of Fascist persecution and was able to study and gain a better grasp of the social and political situation of the age. I met Umberto Terracini, who was also in jail at the time. Then, by order of the Fascists, the prison authorities took my books away. I couldn’t read, but I could still think. My family was socialist, and we have remained socialist. Indeed, our ideas grew stronger in prison. Vanni and Girolamo managed to end up in the same prison as Antonio Gramsci.”

  *

  At Turi Prison, Gramsci nourishes a certain sympathy for the two Sacco brothers. Who in turn are literally overwhelmed by the man’s learning and humanity.

  At the same prison there’s a poor wretch of limited intelligence who bears a striking resemblance to Gramsci: the same body type, the same physical deformities. Kidding around with Gramsci one day, Vanni suggests a plan of escape from the prison based on his strong resemblance to the other inmate. They often laugh about it.

  When Girolamo, having served his sentence, is later released, Gramsci gives him some papers to take out of the prison.

  *

  Girolamo returns to Raffadali, gets married, and eventually has six children.

  Immediately after the fall of Fascism, he devotes himself heart and soul to obtaining a pardon for his three brothers. He becomes friends with the Christian Democratic politicians of the time, who promise to help him in exchange for votes.

  But all his requests are routinely rejected.

  And to think that in 1960, Girolamo managed to get no less than 5000 signatures supporting a pardon.

  Which means that, since Raffadali had 12,294 inhabitants at the time, everyone had signed except for the children, the illiterates, and the emigrants.

  Salvatore, Vanni, and Alfonso don’t want to be pardoned, however, and indeed they do not support Girolamo’s efforts.

  They want a retrial.

  According to Alfonso, the spokesman for the three, the trial was unfairly conducted and vitiated by an a pri
ori will to convict. The judges, in short, surrendered to Fascist pressures and came up with the three life sentences out of pure and simple political obedience.

  *

  None other than the chief prosecutor of Saluzzo, in his capacity as prison warden, requests a pardon on his own initiative, in view of the Saccos’ exemplary conduct.

  But the fact that the three brothers will not countersign the initiative dooms it to failure.

  *

  In the meantime Salvatore Di Benedetto, son of the former mayor of Raffadali, after a long sojourn in Milan as an organizer for the clandestine Italian Communist Party—which brought him into close contact with intellectuals such as Vittorini, Treccani, and Steiner—and then a valorous stint as a partisan fighter, becomes mayor in turn and is later elected senator.

  He suggests that Vanni write a letter to his fellow senator, Umberto Terracini, asking him to take an interest, as a lawyer, in their case. And in the meantime he tells Terracini the story of the Sacco brothers.

  Terracini replies to Vanni in a letter dated February 15, 1962.

  He states that he has been “deeply affected” by the whole story, adding that “the fate that has struck your family is indeed tragic, leading as it has to a harsh, ruthless life sentence for three brothers at once.” He goes on: “I think it may be the only case of its kind in the history of Italian justice, which yet has known a great many other iniquitous episodes.”

  He concludes by saying that he is willing to try to set things right.

  *

  And so Alfonso writes to him, giving him all the necessary information for locating the trial minutes, and tells him that the Saccos want a retrial.

  Terracini’s reply is immediate, and specific.