Free Cosa Nostra by John Dickie Page B

to undermine the trial. Other interviewees quickly changed the subject when asked for an opinion of him.
    Turrisi Colonna embodies the puzzles of the violent years that saw the mafia appear. He probably based his 1864 pamphlet about the sect on inside sources—perhaps even on what he was told by Antonino Giammona himself. When he wrote it, he may also genuinely have hoped that unification with Italy could normalize Sicily. He may have been a victim of mafia intimidation, who wanted a powerful, efficient new state to help landowners like himself put the mafiosi in their place. Perhaps he saw himself as reluctantly collaborating with men like Giammona on a short-term basis, while he waited for the Italian government to take the violence out of Sicilian society. If so, these were hopes that he had lost long before he was interviewed by Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876.
    A less generous interpretation is that Turrisi Colonna was never a victim at all. Giammona’s relationship with him may have been based more on deference than intimidation. Perhaps Turrisi Colonna was simply the first of many Italian politicians whose pronouncements on the mafia did not match their actions. For all the sophistication of its structure and the insidious grip of its code of honour, the Sicilian mafia would be nothing without its links to politicians like Turrisi Colonna. Ultimately, there would be little point in the mafia’s corrupting policemen and magistrates if the dignitaries to whom those officials are answerable were still intent on impartially upholding the rule of law. And in the mafia’s account book, a friendly politician is more useful the more credibility he has. If credibility has to be bought with thundering speeches against crime, or with learned diagnoses of the state of law and order in Sicily, then so be it.
    The mafia deals with politicians in a currency that is rarely printed on the paper of parliamentary proceedings and law books. Rather it is stamped on the solid gold of small favours: news of government contracts or land sales leaked, overzealous investigators made to pursue their careers away from the island, jobs in local government given to friends. Thus, in public, Turrisi Colonna could take a detached, scientific interest in the sect, gazing down on it from the height of his intellectual and social prestige. In private, away from the domain of open debate, a close relationship with men like Giammona was integral to his business interests and political support.
    Whatever went on between Giammona the mafia boss and Turrisi Colonna the politician, intellectual, and landowner, the Palermo revolt that took place two years after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s pamphlet was probably an important stage in their relationship. In September 1866, armed gangs once again marched on the city from the surrounding villages. Turrisi Colonna’s National Guard, captained by Antonino Giammona, opposed the revolt. Whereas Giammona, like many other men of violence, had speculated on revolution in the past, he now realized that the Italian state was a body with which he could do business. Key members of the sect like Giammona were beginning to put their revolutionary past behind them, and as they did so the sect began to enter the bloodstream of the new Italy. Like other leading defenders of order, Turrisi Colonna was interviewed during a government inquiry into the trouble of 1866, and he had no hesitation in using the new word ‘mafia’ to describe some of the troublemakers who caused the revolt: ‘Trials cannot be brought to a conclusion because the witnesses are not sincere. They will only start to tell the truth when the nightmare of the Mafia comes to an end.’ ‘Mafia’, Turrisi Colonna had evidently decided, only meant criminals he did not know personally.
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    The question that still remains is how the ‘nightmare of the mafia’ began. In 1877, the two men who interviewed Turrisi Colonna published their