Free Cosa Nostra by John Dickie Page A

He was too modest even to mention the assassination attempt that he himself had suffered only the previous year; it was, after all, only one of many violent episodes in the countryside around Palermo in the difficult years that followed Garibaldi’s expedition. Turrisi Colonna’s discretion means that it is not known who ambushed him and why, or what later happened to the attackers. But reasons have now emerged for suspecting that they may not have lived for very long afterwards.
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    A dozen years later, on 1 March 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, two wealthy, high-minded young Jewish intellectuals from Tuscany, arrived in Palermo with a friend and their manservant to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. By this time—the year after Dr Galati wrote his memorandum—the word ‘mafia’ had been on everyone’s lips for a decade, but there was great confusion about what it meant, if, indeed, it meant anything at all. (There was even uncertainty about how to spell it: in the nineteenth century, mafia was sometimes written with one F, sometimes with two, without any difference in meaning.) Franchetti and Sonnino had no doubts that the mafia was a dangerous form of criminality, and intended to blow away the mist of different opinions that enveloped it.
    The day after reaching Sicily, Sonnino wrote to a friend, asking her to arrange letters of introduction to Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, Baron of Buonvicino and expert on the sect:
    Here they say he is linked to the mafia. But that doesn’t matter to us. We want to hear what he has to say … Mind you do not tell anyone what I have told you about Baron Turrisi Colonna and his supposed links with the maffia. Some friend of his could write to him about it and that would do us a nasty service.
    There is a deal of evidence to suggest that Turrisi Colonna, author of the analysis of the sect, was indeed the strategic political protector of the most important and ruthless mafiosi in Palermo. Rumours of his mafia connections were widespread; even members of his own political grouping were expressing their concerns about him at court in Rome.
    In 1860, Turrisi Colonna had made a leading sect member into a captain of his National Guard unit. The man was chosen because of his authority and military experience; earlier he had led one of the revolutionary gangs that descended on Palermo from the surrounding countryside as the patriotic revolution spread. The man in question was a canny thug named Antonino Giammona—the same Antonino Giammona who would later orchestrate the takeover of the Fondo Riella from Dr Galati. Turrisi Colonna was one of the landowners who supported Giammona when the Ministry of the Interior looked into Dr Galati’s allegations; it was Turrisi Colonna’s lawyers who prepared Giammona’s defence statement. According to the Chief of Police’s 1875 report, the mafia’s initiation rituals took place on one of Turrisi Colonna’s estates.
    In three separate interviews with Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876, Turrisi Colonna was his usual lucid self on matters of economics. In addition to his interest in the sect, he was a forward-thinking farmer and an agronomist with a long list of academic publications on the citrus fruit business to his name. But he was uncharacteristically evasive on the crime issue. Two years previously, four of his men had been arrested on his estate near Cefalù. To Franchetti and Sonnino he protested their innocence, as, indeed, he had done at the time of the arrests. Landowners like him were the victims, he complained; out on their country estates they were forced to deal with bandits because otherwise they would be unable to protect their valuable crops and trees. He made no mention of a sect.
    When Franchetti and Sonnino later interviewed the Palermo Chief of Police they found him pessimistic about a prosecution against Turrisi Colonna’s men because the baron had the political connections