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May Day 1947. Portella della Ginestra Massacre Salvatore Giuliano’s name will be associated for eve

May Day 1947. Portella della Ginestra Massacre

Salvatore Giuliano’s name will be associated for ever in Italian memories with a place—Portella della Ginestra. Today, nowhere in Sicily seems more bleak and haunted by violence than this piece of open ground at one end of a valley between Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. It was here that peasants came together to celebrate May Day in 1947. Families assembled in their best clothes for a picnic, a song, and a dance; their donkeys and painted carts were decorated with banners and ribbons. It was to be a celebration of the freedoms that had returned after the fall of Fascism.
At 10.15 A.M. the secretary of the People’s Bloc from Piana degli Albanesi stood up amid the red flags to open proceedings. He was interrupted by loud bangs. At first many people thought they were fireworks, part of the celebration. Then the bullets fired by Giuliano’s men began to find their mark. Ten minutes of machinegun fire from the surrounding slopes left eleven dead, among them Serafino Lascari, aged fifteen; Giovanni Grifò, aged twelve; and Giuseppe Di Maggio and Vincenzo La Fata, both seven years old. Thirty-three people were wounded, including a little girl of thirteen who had her jaw shot off.
The impact of the massacre on the local communities was profound and lasting. When Francesco Rosi came to film the Portella della Ginestra sequence for Salvatore Giuliano, he asked 1,000 peasants to go back and enact exactly what they, their friends and relatives had been through fourteen years earlier. Events nearly slipped out of the director’s control. When the gunfire sound effects started, the crowd panicked and knocked over one of the cameras in the rush to escape; women wept and knelt in prayer; men threw themselves to the ground in agony. One old woman, dressed entirely in black, planted herself before the camera and repeated in an anguished wail, ‘Where are my children?’ Two of her sons had died at the hands of Giuliano and his band.
Despite public outrage at the horrors of Portella della Ginestra, the ‘King of Montelepre’ remained at large for a further three years. Following the massacre, the molten lava of social conflict in post-war Sicily slowly hardened into a new political landscape dominated by the Christian Democrats. It was these political changes, rather than the fury and sorrow aroused by Giuliano’s actions, that began to make him look like a wild anachronism. The electoral victories secured by the DC slowly removed the need for his clamorous brand of anti-Communist terror.
Giuliano continued his attacks on peasant activists and institutions, but the members of his band gradually fell into the hands of the authorities—often with the help of information from the mafia. At the same time, Giuliano’s actions became more difficult to read. In the summer of 1948, he killed five mafiosi including the boss of Partinico. It is not known exactly why. Not surprisingly, many people identify this as the moment when Giuliano’s fate was sealed. Nevertheless a year later he was still powerful enough to murder six morecarabinieri in an ambush at Bellolampo just outside Palermo.
All this time investigations into the Portella della Ginestra massacre plodded on amid growing speculation that someone—possibly the Minister of the Interior— might have ordered Giuliano to carry it out. The bandit himself wrote a public letter, taking sole responsibility for the murders and denying that there was anyone behind him. He claimed that he had only intended his men to fire above the heads of the crowd; the deaths had been a mistake. He cited the fact that children had died as evidence that it was an accident: ‘Do you think I have a stone in place of a heart?’ The 800 spent rounds of ammunition found at the scene are enough in themselves to make this denial ring dreadfully hollow.
Speaking at Portella della Ginestra on the second anniversary of the massacre, Sicilian Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi, who had become a Senator since surviving Don Calò’s grenade attack in Villalba, publicly called on Giuliano to name names. The appeal led to an extraordinary public exchange. Li Causi received a written reply from the bandit leader: ‘It is only men with no shame who give out names. Not a man who tends to take justice into his own hands; who aims to keep his reputation in society high, and who values this aim more than his own life.’
Li Causi responded by reminding Giuliano that he would almost certainly be betrayed: ‘Don’t you understand that Scelba [the Minister of the Interior, a Sicilian] will have you killed?’
Giuliano again replied, hinting at the powerful secrets that he possessed: ‘I know that Scelba wants to have me killed; he wants to have me killed because I keep a nightmare hanging over him. I can make sure he is brought to account for actions that, if revealed, would destroy his political career and end his life.’ No one was sure how much of this to believe.
In the summer of 1950, Giuliano’s captured associates were finally arraigned in Viterbo near Rome for the trial that was supposed to answer all the questions. But no sooner had the hearing got under way than the mysteries deepened when Giuliano’s body was found in the courtyard of a house in Castelvetrano—outside his mountain realm.
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Although it would be futile now to try to solve the mysteries surrounding Portella della Ginestra and Salvatore Giuliano, it is certainly worth listing some of the evidence. Ever since Giuliano’s death, ‘behindologists’ have been trying to assemble a coherent picture out of these and other facts:
• Several witnesses recalled that Giuliano received a letter just before he carried out the Portella della Ginestra atrocity. When he read it, he destroyed it carefully and told the members of his band, ‘Boys, the hour of our liberation is at hand’; he then announced the plan to attack the peasant celebration. No one has ever discovered who sent the letter.
• After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, the Chief of Police in Sicily met senior Monreale mafiosi at his house in Rome. There they handed him a written testimony by Giuliano which he in turn seems to have sent to the home address of the chief prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal, a man who may also have had contacts with Giuliano. The testimony has never been found.
• The same Chief of Police had a regular correspondence with Giuliano through the same mafia channels. On at least one occasion he actually met the bandit leader—they shared panettone and two different kinds of liqueur.
The one man able and possibly willing to reveal the truth about Portella della Ginestra was Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s dapper cousin who betrayed and probably killed him on behalf of the carabinieri. While he was with the band he had a pass, signed by a colonel in the carabinieri, that allowed him to move about the island freely. He had even visited a doctor under the supervision of another officer— he suffered from tuberculosis. During the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta had proclaimed, ‘We are one body: bandits, police and mafia—like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’
At the conclusion of the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta was given a life sentence for his part in the events at Portella della Ginestra. While he was in prison—he spent his time writing an autobiography and doing silk embroidery—it became clear that the authorities were starting to give more credit to some of his evidence. There was to be a new trial at which he would be charged with Giuliano’s murder. Perjury and other charges were to be made against police and carabinieri. Pisciotta contacted an investigating magistrate and said that he was intending to reveal much more than he had done before.
On the morning of 9 February 1954, Pisciotta made himself a cup of coffee. Into it he stirred what he thought was his tuberculosis medicine. He took an hour to die, his body tormented by the violent head-to-toe convulsions that are the characteristic symptom of strychnine poisoning. His autobiography vanished.
Pisciotta was poisoned in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo—the mafia’s university of crime since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is inconceivable that he was killed without at least the honoured society’s approval. Whatever the mafia’s involvement in the intrigues behind Portella della Ginestra and the Giuliano band, it was they who made sure that the whole truth would never come out.