their farms, producing grain, olives, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and they raised sheep and cattle for slaughter or trade. They controlled jobs for which the government appropriated small funds, and they had influence along the pier and among the merchants, receiving tribute for their protection. They literally controlled the towns in that area as surely as had the ancient princes and viceroys before them, taxing their subjects for services rendered, services that included the arbitration of neighborly disputes, the recovery of stolen property, personal assistance in all family problems, personal redress for wrongs to one’s honor or one’s wife. They interceded with the judge at the trials of their countrymen and received favors from the politicians in Palermo in return for solid support in the hills. They often did things illegally, but their law was largely their own. For centuries their region’s poverty and pestilence was ignored by the Sicilian government, by the parliament in Rome, by dozens of previous rulers overseas; so finally they took the law into their own hands and bent it to suit themselves, as they had seen the aristocrats do.
They believed that there was no equality under law; the law was written by conquerors. In the tumultuous history of Sicily, going back more than two thousand years, the island had been governed by Greek law, Roman law, Arab law, the laws of Goths, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese—each new fleet of conquerors brought new laws to the land, and no matter whose law it was, it seemed that it favored the rich over the poor, the powerful over the weak. While the law opposed vendettas among villagers, it allowed organized brutality and killing by government guardsmen or king’s armies—wars were allowed, feuds were not—and the first to be conscripted into the king’s armies were the sons of the soil. The laws regulating food, drink, dress, drugs, literature, or sexual behavior were usually extensions of the life style of the nobleman in power. They reflected his past, they varied if his background was prudish or permissive, if he was Christian or Moslem, if he was of an Eastern or a Western culture, if he was merciful or mad. The Germanic tyrant King Frederick II decreed that adulterous women should have their noses cut off, whereas other despots, lax and licentious, condoned concubines in court and the pursuit of other men’s wives at will. The fact that the law was often inconsistent from generation to generation and was sometimes even contradictory to existing laws seemed of mild concern to the lawmakers, who were mainly interested in controlling the masses and remaining in power.
Under such an unenlightened leadership, feudalism was permitted to exist until the nineteenth century, and illiteracy prevailed in much of Sicily through the midtwentieth century, particularly in the barren mountain villages of the western region. Here in an atmosphere of neglect and isolation, families became more insular, more suspicious of strangers, held to old habits. The official government was often the enemy, the outlaw often a hero; and family clans such as the Bonannos, the Magaddinos, and numbers of other large families in neighboring seaside villages or interior towns were held in awe by their townsmen. Though certain of these leaders were vengeful and corrupt, they identified with the plight of the poor and often shared what they had stolen from the rich. Their word was nearly always good, and they did not betray a trust. Usually they went about their business quietly, walked arm in arm with the village priest through the square, or sat in the shade of cafés while lesser men stopped to greet them and perhaps seek a favor. While they bore the humble manner of other men in the town, there was nevertheless an easy confidence about them, a certain strength of character. They were more ambitious, shrewder, bolder, perhaps more cynical about life than their resigned paesani, who relied largely upon God. They were often spoken of in hushed tones by other men but were never called mafiosi. They were usually referred to as the amici, friends, or uomini rispettati, men of respect.
Since the ancestors of Joseph Bonanno and Peter Magaddino had long been part of the amici in Castellammare, the two men had a certain status at birth, and they were courteously treated wherever they went in the town. As a boy, Joseph Bonanno particularly liked to travel through the town on horseback, to swim near the old castle, to sometimes ride beyond the mountain through the wild pastures to