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Giuliano the bandit
Attacks on Carabinieri barracks, ambushes of police officers, kidnappings to fund his activities, relations with politicians, even negotiations with those who were supposed to capture him…
This was the daring criminal career of Salvatore Giuliano, bandit-cum-terrorist, responsible from 1943 onwards, namely from the moment the Allies landed in Sicily, for protracted guerrilla warfare against the state and for mysterious episodes like the massacre of Portella delle Ginestre. The Giuliano gang became notorious immediately after the other bands of outlaws who infested the western half of Sicily after the end of the War. The “political” line followed by Turiddu, as Giuliano was known, was what made his gang different from the others: separatism, in fact, was the ideological justification for a relentless battle that reached its conclusion in Castelvetrano on the night of 5 July 1950. According to the official version, the notorious bandit was shot in a gunfight by Captain Perenze. In actual fact he was shot in his sleep by his
second-in-command Gaspare Pisciotta. Giuliano the bandit first came to notoriety on 2 September 1943. He was transporting wheat on a mule, which was then a crime. He was stopped and searched by some Carabinieri, who discovered what he was carrying. One of the Carabinieri, Antonio Emanuele Mancino, took him by the arm to accompany him to the police station. Giuliano struggled free and shot the officer dead – out of fear, it was said – and then escaped. This was the beginning of the long period he spent on the run.
Initially the Giuliano gang was one of the many bands of misfits that prospered in Sicily. People who answered to no one, with no aim except to steal whatever came their way. There was no future for them, and one after another they were all eliminated. With one exception: the Giuliano gang. Why? Over fifty years later, the answer is now clear. Turiddu’s organization attracted the attention (and the money) of landowners, local bosses, reactionary political forces, and the Mafia, which had emerged from the “limbo” to which it had been relegated during the twenty years of Fascism and had begun to infiltrate public institutions.
Giuliano and his men thus began their war against the state, joining forces on some occasions with the Sicilian separatists. They carried out five attacks on Carabinieri barracks in just twelve days, from 26 December 1945 to 7 January 1946.
The first attack came two days before the Battle of San Mauro di Caltagirone between the Italian army and the separatists, which ended with the capture of Concetto Gallo, the leader of the ELVIS, the separatist army. Three days after the Battle of San Mauro, the Giuliano gang attacked the Carabinieri barracks at Bellolampo, just outside Palermo. Giuliano wore a colonel’s uniform, with a star on his chest like a sheriff in the Far West. He handed out the weapons to his men himself. In the end the Carabinieri surrendered. Turiddu’s men daubed the separatist emblem on the walls of the barracks in black paint.
The day after there was another attack. This time it was the turn of the small barracks in Grisì, a few miles from Partinico. The fourth attack came on 3 January 1946; this time the target was the Carabinieri station in Pioppo. Two days later the Giuliano gang moved on to Borgetto, and then to the Montelepre barracks. It was a violent battle, lasting many hours. In the end the separatist flag was hoisted on the top of the building.
As if this were not enough, there were also ambushes on military convoys, including a train robbery. Salvatore Giuliano was no longer a bandit, but a terrorist controlled by dark forces. According to the authorities, he died in a gunfight in the town of Castelvetrano on 5 July 1950.
