spend an hour or so with me in some corner of the city where he would be allowed to feed on memories of Soho’s Greek Street.
I left Sicily and thereafter we exchanged sporadic correspondence from which I learned of journeys made to the US. It had become clear that the Mafia had moved in to control the traffic in heroin; their secret laboratories now produced one-quarter of the world’s supply. It was no longer possible for a policeman to continue to stand on the sidelines and talk about containment. On one occasion when he made a brief stopover in London I met him for an hour or so at the airport. He was on his way to Washington to confer with the FBI, and mentioned that a previous visit had had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, when he had put the theory, later accepted by many Americans, that contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission, this had been organised by the Mafia. His contentions suggested the plot of a novel which I subsequently wrote about the assassination.
In the early part of 1979, Boris’s letters stopped, due I supposed to the increasing pressure of his work. In July of that year he visited Marseilles and Milan in the course, as later revealed, of investigations into the allocation of spheres of influence in the narcotics trade between the US and Sicilian Mafia. It has been surmised that high government officials of both countries found themselves compromised as a result of these investigations.
On 21 July he was back in Palermo, and at exactly 8 a.m., as usual, called in for a coffee at the Bar Lux, a few yards from where he lived. He stood at the counter to drink it, then chatted for a moment with several regulars before turning to go. At that moment there were about twenty customers, only one of whom could be traced by the police to give an account of what happened next. ‘I noticed a man who was trembling,’ this undoubtedly reluctant witness said. ‘He was white in the face. He must be ill, I thought. My first impulse was to offer to help. When the commissario went towards the door the man followed him. He drew a pistol and shot him three times in the neck. Signor Giuliano fell face downwards, and the man then fired four more bullets into his back.’
The blundering and impetuous Colonel Giuseppe Russo had gone blindly to the attack of an opponent he did not understand. He had arrested suspects by the hundred, nearly all of whom were released through lack of evidence, thus surrounding himself with implacable enemies who were prepared to bide their time. This came in July 1977 when a phone call the colonel had been awaiting summoned him to a mysterious rendezvous. He was heard to say to the subordinate he called, ‘This is the breakthrough’, before the two men dashed off. The bodies of both men, riddled with bullets, were discovered in a remote part of the island some days later.
Despite his long experience of the environment and the relative subtlety of his methods, Giuliano had lasted only another two years, almost to the day. He was accorded in death the extraordinary civic accolade of Cadavere Eccelente, with which only six (including Russo) had been honoured in the decade, and was carried to the grave in a hearse drawn by twelve horses. By subsequent accounts of his career, he may have come as near as any single man could have done to breaking the stranglehold of the Honoured Society.
1989
Beautiful Bean-Stew Faces
C ENTRAL AMERICA HAS BEEN frequently referred to by its great northern neighbour as the States’ backyard, and the undertone of presumed control and dependency suggested by the description has not been lost on the Spanish-speaking peoples of the countries concerned. Porfirio Diaz, a Mexican president at the close of the nineteenth century, famously attributed his country’s deficiencies to being ‘too near to the USA and too far from God’. Mexico was simply too big to have wholly collapsed under outside pressures but its smaller neighbours,
I left Sicily and thereafter we exchanged sporadic correspondence from which I learned of journeys made to the US. It had become clear that the Mafia had moved in to control the traffic in heroin; their secret laboratories now produced one-quarter of the world’s supply. It was no longer possible for a policeman to continue to stand on the sidelines and talk about containment. On one occasion when he made a brief stopover in London I met him for an hour or so at the airport. He was on his way to Washington to confer with the FBI, and mentioned that a previous visit had had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, when he had put the theory, later accepted by many Americans, that contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission, this had been organised by the Mafia. His contentions suggested the plot of a novel which I subsequently wrote about the assassination.
In the early part of 1979, Boris’s letters stopped, due I supposed to the increasing pressure of his work. In July of that year he visited Marseilles and Milan in the course, as later revealed, of investigations into the allocation of spheres of influence in the narcotics trade between the US and Sicilian Mafia. It has been surmised that high government officials of both countries found themselves compromised as a result of these investigations.
On 21 July he was back in Palermo, and at exactly 8 a.m., as usual, called in for a coffee at the Bar Lux, a few yards from where he lived. He stood at the counter to drink it, then chatted for a moment with several regulars before turning to go. At that moment there were about twenty customers, only one of whom could be traced by the police to give an account of what happened next. ‘I noticed a man who was trembling,’ this undoubtedly reluctant witness said. ‘He was white in the face. He must be ill, I thought. My first impulse was to offer to help. When the commissario went towards the door the man followed him. He drew a pistol and shot him three times in the neck. Signor Giuliano fell face downwards, and the man then fired four more bullets into his back.’
The blundering and impetuous Colonel Giuseppe Russo had gone blindly to the attack of an opponent he did not understand. He had arrested suspects by the hundred, nearly all of whom were released through lack of evidence, thus surrounding himself with implacable enemies who were prepared to bide their time. This came in July 1977 when a phone call the colonel had been awaiting summoned him to a mysterious rendezvous. He was heard to say to the subordinate he called, ‘This is the breakthrough’, before the two men dashed off. The bodies of both men, riddled with bullets, were discovered in a remote part of the island some days later.
Despite his long experience of the environment and the relative subtlety of his methods, Giuliano had lasted only another two years, almost to the day. He was accorded in death the extraordinary civic accolade of Cadavere Eccelente, with which only six (including Russo) had been honoured in the decade, and was carried to the grave in a hearse drawn by twelve horses. By subsequent accounts of his career, he may have come as near as any single man could have done to breaking the stranglehold of the Honoured Society.
1989
Beautiful Bean-Stew Faces
C ENTRAL AMERICA HAS BEEN frequently referred to by its great northern neighbour as the States’ backyard, and the undertone of presumed control and dependency suggested by the description has not been lost on the Spanish-speaking peoples of the countries concerned. Porfirio Diaz, a Mexican president at the close of the nineteenth century, famously attributed his country’s deficiencies to being ‘too near to the USA and too far from God’. Mexico was simply too big to have wholly collapsed under outside pressures but its smaller neighbours,
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