Free The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash

to think of the Sicily of 1860 as a province united in more than its suspicion of outsiders. There were considerable differences between the eastern districts, where the earth was rich and the local barons still lived on their estates, investing in roads, bridges, and irrigation schemes, and the western portions of the island, where it was far more difficult to wrest a living from the land. Western Sicily was a place of mountains, dust, poor soil, and poorer agricultural towns. A thin strip along the west coast was relatively wealthy; it consisted of the capital, Palermo—an elegant port with little fishing and less industry, many of whose people earned a living as functionaries of the state—and the Conca d’Oro, the Golden Shell, where the island’s most important exports, oranges and lemons, were grown in innumerable small citrus groves. The aristocrats of the western hinterlands were mostly absentees, who preferred to live comfortably in Palermo and lease out their estates to grasping tenant farmers known as gabelloti . It was in the interest of the barons of Palermo to keep the city’s working classes pacified with cheap bread and endless festivals, but the peasants of the distant interior were accorded less respectful treatment. In the eyes of many of the barons, they existed merely to grow food and pay taxes, at rates that, by 1860, required them to hand over half their crops and half their earnings to their landlords and the government.
    These demands left peasants practically destitute, a state of affairs rendered more unbearable by the fact that most barons, and even the gabelloti who ran their estates, paid practically nothing. One army officer, sent over from the mainland to help keep order, remembered that
it hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July … I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that a tear was gliding silently down from each eye.
    All this was difficult enough when times were good. But times were rarely good for long in Sicily, and the lot of the peasantry worsened considerably in the course of the nineteenth century. The abolition of feudalism, which occurred only in 1812, upset the economy of the interior; it resulted in the dissolution of many large estates, with a consequent diminution in efficiency, and ushered in the rawest sort of capitalism. The gabelloti —who paid fixed rents to the barons for the right to farm their lands—had every motivation to extract the maximum revenues from their properties, and wages, where they were paid at all, were driven down by an abundance of labor, a population explosion in the early nineteenth century taking the number of Sicilians to as many as two million. That total far outstripped the numbers that the island could support, and the misery endured by Sicily’s peasants was increased by a long succession of natural disasters—floods, drought, and landslides among them—that culminated in the terrible earthquake that destroyed the city of Messina in 1908 and killed as many as eighty thousand people. So great was the poverty in the western districts of the island, and so terrible the destitution, that as much as a third of the population of the island emigrated between 1870 and 1910, at first mostly to the cities of northern Italy but increasingly to the United States. One side effect of this unparalleled movement