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carabineri and higher authorities, who arrested three of the Bocchicchio Family.
Even before the trial the manor house of the baron was torched. The indictment
and accusations were withdrawn. A few months later one of the highest
functionaries in the Italian government arrived in Sicily and tried to solve the
chronic water shortage of that island by proposing a huge dam. Engineers
arrived from Rome to do surveys while watched by grim natives, members of the
Bocchicchio clan. Police flooded the area, housed in a specially built barracks.
It looked like nothing could stop the dam from being built and supplies
and equipment had actually been unloaded in Palermo. That was as far as they
got. The Bocchicchios had contacted fellow Mafia chiefs and extracted
agreements for their aid. The heavy equipment was sabotaged, the lighter
equipment stolen. Mafia deputies in the Italian Parliament launched a
bureaucratic counterattack against the planners. This went on for several years
and in that time Mussolini came to power. The dictator decreed that the dam
must be built. It was not. The dictator had known that the Mafia would be a
threat to his regime, forming what amounted to a separate authority from his
own. He gave full powers to a high police official, who promptly solved the
problem by throwing everybody into jailor deporting them to penal work islands.
In a few short years he had broken the power of the Mafia, simply by arbitrarily
arresting anyone even suspected of being a mafioso. And so also brought ruin to
a great many innocent families.
The Bocchicchios had been rash enough to resort to force against this
unlimited power. Half of the men were killed in armed combat, the other half
deported to penal island colonies. There were only a handful left when
arrangements were made for them to emigrate to America via the clandestine
underground route of jumping ship through Canada. There were almost twenty
immigrants and they settled in a small town not far from New York City, in the
Hudson Valley, where by starting at the very bottom they worked their way up
to owning a garbage hauling firm and their own trucks. They became prosperous
because they had no competition. They had no competition because competitors
found their trucks burned and sabotaged. One persistent fellow who undercut
prices was found buried in the garbage he had picked up during the day,

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smothered to death.
But as the men married, to Sicilian girls, needless to say, children
came, and. the garbage business though providing a living, was not really
enough to pay for the finer things America had to offer. And so, as a
diversification, the Bocchicchio Family became negotiators and hostages in the
peace efforts of warring Mafia families.
A strain of stupidity ran through the Bocchicchio clan, or perhaps they
were just primitive. In any case they recognized their limitations and knew they
could not compete with other Mafia families in the struggle to organize and
control more sophisticated business structures like prostitution, gambling, dope
and public fraud. They were straight-from-the-shoulder people who could offer a
gift to an ordinary patrolman but did not know how to approach a political
bagman. They had only two assets. Their honor and their ferocity.
A Bocchicchio never lied, never committed an act of treachery. Such
behavior Was too complicated. Also, a Bocchicchio never forgot an injury and
never left it unavenged no matter what the cost. And so by accident they
stumbled into what would prove to be their most lucrative profession.
When warring families wanted to make peace and arrange a parley, the
Bocchicchio clan was contacted. The head of the clan would handle the initial
negotiations and arrange for the necessary hostages. For instance, when Michael
had gone to meet Sollozzo, a Bocchicchio had been left with the Corleone
Family as surety for Michael’s safety, the service paid for by Sollozzo. If
Michael were killed by Sollozzo, then the Bocchicchio male hostage held by the
Corleone Family would be killed by the Corleones. In this case the Bocchicchios
would take their vengeance on Sollozzo as the cause of their clansman’s death.
Since the Bocchicchios were so primitive, they never let anything, any kind of
punishment, stand in their way of vengeance. They would give up their own
lives and there was no protection against them if they were betrayed. A
Bocchicchio hostage was gilt-edged insurance.
And so now when Don Corleone employed the Bocchicchios as
negotiators and arranged for them to supply hostages for all the Families to come
to the peace meeting, there could be no question as to his sincerity. There could
be no question of treachery. The meeting would be safe as a wedding.
Hostages given, the meeting took place in the director’s conference
room of a small commercial bank whose president was indebted to Don
Corleone and indeed some of whose stock belonged to Don Corleone though it
was in the president’s name. The president always treasured that moment when

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he had offered to give Don Corleone a written document proving his ownership
of the shares, to preclude any treachery. Don Corleone had been horrified. “I
would trust you with my whole fortune,” he told the president. “I would trust
you with my life and the welfare of my children. It is inconceivable to me that
you would ever trick me or otherwise betray me. My whole world, all my faith
in my judgment of human character would collapse. Of course I have my own
written records so that if something should happen to me my heirs would know
that you hold something in trust for them. But I know that even if I were not here
in this world to guard the interests of my children, you would be faithful to their
needs.”
The president of the bank, though not Sicilian, was a man of tender
sensibilities. He understood the Don perfectly. Now the Godfather’s request was
the president’s command and so on a Saturday afternoon, the executive suite of
the bank, the conference room with its deep leather chairs, its absolute privacy,
was made available to the Families.
Security at the bank was taken over by a small army of handpicked
men wearing bank guard uniforms. At ten o’clock on a Saturday morning the
conference room began to fill up. Besides the Five Families of New York, there
were representatives from ten other Families across the country, with the
exception of Chicago, that black sheep of their world. They had given up trying
to civilize Chicago, and they saw no point in including those mad dogs in this
important conference.
A bar had been set up and a small buffet. Each representative to the
conference had been allowed one aide. Most of the Dons had brought their