Death of a mafioso
Desmond O'Grady
Rome The sun had barely left a cloudless sky when Giuseppe Sirchia and his wife were shot dead outside Palermo's grey, fortress-like Ucciardone prison. The death was worth only a few paragraphs in the Italian press: Sirchia was a minor mafioso. But he was unusually voluble; indeed in Mafia eyes, Sirchia's volubility was probably his gravest crime.
When shot, Sirchia, who was 48, was seated in a car outside the prison which he had to re-enter at 9p.m. each evening., Sentenced to Ucciardone for an attempted Fifties murder, he was due for release in 1979. With Sirchia were his 20-yearold daughter Maria and his wife Giacoma, the sister of Francesco Gambino, another minor mafioso enjoying daytime exit from Ucciardone. Revolvers and lupare (sawn-off shotguns), fired from two speeding cars, riddled Sirchia and his wife with bullets. Maria was slightly injured.
Sirchia had approached me when, in 1972, I was sent by the Italian weekly II Mondo to write about 18 Mafia suspects transferred to the small volcanic island of Linosa, which is nearer to Tunisia than to Sicily. Although the suspects would have known that I was a journalist, Sirchia called to me as I passed the first-aid station where he had the injections necessary for his health. With his fawn suit, light-brown hair and tinted glasses, Sirchia could have been any unprepossessing clerk as we made our way to the wharf where other suspects, one of them his brother-in-law Francesco Gambino, were bargaining for fish from the catch.
Sirchia and 17 other godfathers' cousins twice-removed were in Linosa indefinitely under a refurbished version of a law Mussolini used against mafiosi. 'We're hounded', said Sirchia with a .put-upon expression, 'because police can't lay their hands on the really guilty ones.' And,, with Sicilian elections imminent, Sirchia was probably right to suggest that the transfer was a politicallyinspired measure by authorities who although unable, or unwilling, to prove 'Mafia guilt' wanted to seem energetically opposed to the criminal organisation.
For the previous 16 months, Sirchia had worked in a sock factory at Castelfranco Veneto, in north Italy, where he was constrained to live. He asked if a rich mafioso would want such a job. I noticed his shabby canvas shoes. He resembled the frugal citizen who complains the State is a shambles. 'We're poor. I've got daughters of 13 and 14 at school — who's going to look after them?' He had mar ried in 1956 but, as he had spent most of the intervening 16 years in prison, he had been with his wife, in all, for only 30 months.
As we passed the carabinieri (militarised police) station, Sirchia complained that the injections he needed could not be found on the island, that the one doctor was about to depart and there was no nurse. 'I've got a nervous complaint: chronic colitis. I need tranquillity.' I said death must be the only thing more tranquil than Linosa. 'Too much sun's bad for me', Sirchia added, but he had not tried to join his boss, Angelo La Barbera, in the shade, Although Sirchia was one of his gang, La Barbera barely greeted him — presumably because he was too low in the hierarchy or too talkative.
The slaughter of four men in Palermo on 10 December 1969 could have had something to do with Sirchia's nervous complaint. Earlier that year, Sirchia and his brother-in-law Gambino were accused of killing four rival gang members. On 10 December, as a reprisal, four members of La Barbera's gang were shot. Sirchia and Gambino were said to be on the death list, but they survived. Subsequently, Sirchia was sent to Castelfranco Veneto. The following November, carabinieri arrested four heavily-armed men in a car on Castelfranco Veneto's outskirts. The four men were convicted for intending to kill Sirchia. It was as good a reason as any for chronic colitis. Had he known the killers?
'The carabinieri wanted to prove that those four were after me.' Sirchia seemed saddened by my question. 'If I'd accused them, the carabinieri would've given me freedom to move and a passport. But they were only cigarette smugglers. If there's a Mafia, it's' something big, important — look for it in Rome. We're governed by homosexuals. Do you understand? Men who're not men.' Sirchia presented himself as a victim with a capital V, but of an unjust society rather than of the Mafia. He could not stand against the Mafia unless convinced that the broader society was more honest and efficient. However he knew mainly its prisons, the exile it inflicted even when it could not prove guilt, its punishment for some mafiosi but not for politicians linked to them.
The Sicilian novelist, Leonardo Sciascia, has revealed that Sirchia, after reading his novels on the Mafia, sent him several letters from Linosa. 'In Sicily', wrote Sirchia, 'omerta has to be respected in every sector: politics, police, justice etc Omerta, often translated as 'connivance', means rather 'sticking together', almost mateship. Typical of a society in which group law is stronger than civil law, it is a form of honour, although with overtones of `if we don't hang together we'll hang separately'. 'I can't change things', Sirchia had protested to Sciascia, 'I'm only a small tessera in a large mosaic which is the Society [the Mafia]. If I don't want to be crushed, I have to stay squeezed in my place.'
Sciascia requested Sirchia's permission to publish information on the Mafia contained in his letters. Sirchia would not allow this, but conveyed his refusal in a story about St Anthony of Padua. St Anthony, while preaching, heard that his father had been convicted for homicide. He rushed home to Portugal and resuscitated the victim, who then acknowledged that Anthony's father had not killed him. Anthony rejected the police's request to ask who was the assassin: 'I'm only interested in proving my father's innocence. It's your job to find the assassin.'
Released, along with other suspected mafiosi, after the elections, Sirchia returned to Palermo. Its stylish Hotel des Palmes is preferred by Mafia leaders but Sirchia was lodged, instead, at Ucciardone prison. By day he worked in a relative's clothes shop where, police claimed, he resumed contact with other mafiosi. Of course: for he was married to the Mafia. With his prison record, could he start a new life in his old haunts, in his mid-40s?
Palermo's streets proved fatal for Sirchia but Ucciardone prison, where he had spent altogether more than ten years and whose director had several Sirchia paintings in his office, was dangerous also: Gaetano Fidenza, one of the four men picked up outside Castelfranco Veneto in 1970 and charged with intending to kill Sirchia, was imprisoned there. Sirchia surely knew that; his boss, Angelo La Barbera, had come to a grisly death in Perugia jail: he was stabbed eight times. And so Sirchia was encircled. His killers in prison, his killers in Palermo; and police controlling his contacts. He was trying to say something with his paintings, his letters, his conversations. But, ultimately, he had neither the courage to speak in public nor the prudence to keep quiet. Apparently he thought that he kept his place in the mosaic; but he did not fit in the overall design and was crushed by his enemies — or his friends. He spoke of the Mafia as if, like God, it was invisible and unknowable. His death, however, was one more proof of its existence.
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