In 1986 the Sicilians built a fortified bunker in the grounds of Ucciardone prison in Palermo. Inside were 471 men and four women accused of running a criminal empire. Held in cages, they rattled the bars and hurled insults. Outside tanks and soldiers were stationed. The Maxiprocesso (“Maxi Trial”) was the largest mafia trial in history.
In the press gallery was Leonardo Sciascia, a Sicilian public intellectual and writer who was a lifelong crusader against Italy’s rampant corruption. “I learnt to understand the mafia from his books,” Giovanni Falcone, one of the leading prosecutors at the trial, said. The sentiment was true for most Italians. When many wanted to dismiss the Mob as a myth, a product of northern Italian prejudice, Sciascia’s detective novels (gialli) and historical investigations (inchieste) showed the mafia as alive and kicking. And his books sold ridiculously well.
At the Maxiprocesso too was Caroline Moorehead, there to cover the trial for The Times. She never met Sciascia but she knew his books and was intrigued by this small, obstinate man. What forces had created this justice-obsessed moral lodestar? Forty years later and now a veteran biographer with a remarkable knowledge of Italy, Moorehead answers the question with A Sicilian Man, which is as much a history of the deeply crooked culture of Italian politics as it is a a vivid biography of one man. Sciascia was born in 1921 and grew up in Racalmuto, a bleak village north of Agrigento in Sicily. The local school had no heating, nor buildings of its own. Sciascia knew his family were fortunate: he wore shoes, even in the summer. His father was a bookkeeper for the nearby sulphur mines, a position that kept him apart from the men who worked inside the mines — nightmarish places of suffocating heat that would recur in Sciascia’s books. Little had changed in Sicily after Italian unification in 1870. To be Sicilian was different — connected to the mainland but also alienated. The island was backward and beset by illiteracy, conditions that allowed the mafia to take over the running of feudal estates, growing rich and powerful in the process. The Maxiprocesso (“Maxi Trial”) in Sicily in the 1980s and 1990s was the largest mafia trial in history ALAMY Sciascia came to know the mafia in his bones. As a boy at election time, Moorehead writes, he watched strangers arrive in the village and make their preferences clear. He knew the local capo (boss), Don Calo, and saw how these men whom no one ever mentioned conversed “mainly by gesture, moving their eyes, hands and heads”. He never got over seeing a mafioso visit a shopkeeper known to be behind on his payments. The man tenderly stroked the hair of the shopkeeper’s small daughter and said: “She seems almost alive.” He recognised, Moorehead writes, that “the mafia’s form of justice, with its codes and omerta, was more real to most Sicilians than a toothless government”. • Gomorrah author: I exposed the mafia and it ruined my life Under Mussolini, Moorehead argues convincingly, the Mob merely became dormant. It was the occupying Allies who “totally misunderstood the reality of Sicily” and brought the mafiosi out of hibernation. In one extraordinary (and possibly only partly true) tale, a mafioso called Lucky Luciano arranged from his prison cell for Don Calo to be hoisted on board a Sherman tank to make sure the Americans could make their way to Palermo unimpeded. Italian soldiers duly fled on the orders of Don Calo’s followers. Don Calo’s reward? He was appointed the mayor of Villalba and asked to compile a list of names for other mayoral positions across the island. A view of the public gallery and the caged defendants during the Maxi Trial in 1986 AFP/GETTY IMAGES Sciascia, who became a primary school teacher, had fallen for literature, especially his fellow Sicilian Luigi Pirandello, Georges Simenon’s French police detective, Maigret, and the French Enlightenment philosophers. He began to write. His early books touched on the mafia and in 1961 he produced fiction’s first serious portrayal of the mafia — and its links to state power — with The Day of the Owl. “Perhaps,” his carabiniere detective Bellodi speculates at the end, “the whole of Italy is becoming like Sicily. The line of the palm tree is moving north.” The mafia, Sciascia warned, were on the move. The book changed his life. He continued to live a quiet domestic existence with his wife and two daughters but he courted controversy, taking on the church, the state and their connections with the mafia in his books and commentary. In a country known for verbosity he stood out as a smooth and lucid stylist. He especially loathed the ruling Christian Democrats, and briefly served on Palermo council and later in Rome’s parliament as a radical, only to withdraw in disgust. He used what he had learnt to publish The Moro Affair, a trenchant attack on the government’s handling of the 1978 kidnapping and murder of the former prime minister Aldo Moro by the leftist Red Brigades. Writing, Sciascia maintained, was the way to truth. By the end of the 1970s the mafia was dispatching more than $1 billion worth of heroin to the US. In Sicily, the cadavere eccellente (excellent corpses) began to rack up as anti-mafia lawyers, judges, policemen and journalists were gunned down. The Maxiprocesso at last laid bare the scale of the mafia’s brutality and greed, the extent of its reach. “It confirmed everything that Sciascia had spent his life saying.” The journalist and author Caroline Moorehead At this point, though, Sciascia perhaps went too far. He wrote an eviscerating article attacking one of the magistrates, Paolo Borsellino, which Moorehead generously terms to be “ill-judged”. Another reading was that you could date the murder of Borsellino (and Falcone) back to his article. Whatever the case, in Moorehead’s expert telling Sciascia emerges as a unique force and talent. It seems curious, given our fascination with the mafia and Italy, that no one in Britain reads him. This book could change that, and if it convinces you start with The Day of the Owl and follow it with To Each His Own. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what’s top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List What we will never really know is why the mafia didn’t murder him as they did so many of his friends. Did he not feel threatened, a journalist once asked. “No, the mafia doesn’t read books,” he replied. “And if you have to ask yourself if you are afraid then you cease to live.” A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus £25 pp320). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
