The subtle, round-about manner in which the "Black-Hander" scatters the seeds of his propaganda so that they will grow and bear fruit of themselves and disarm suspicion is well-illustrated in the way in which the attempt was made to inveigle Schiavi.
Corleone is the home town of Morello and Lupo, the arch-plotters. It is a place fascinating to the eye of the artist. Nestling at the foot of Mount Cardellia, in the province of Palermo, Sicily, it lies about two thousand feet above sea-level and seems to be sailing in the clouds like a phantom city of the Middle Ages.
Corleone means Lion-Heart. Korliun it was named by the Saracens, who founded it and made it a military stronghold in the picturesque thirteenth century. Something of the savage, marauding spirit of the Saracen, always a menace to civilization, hovers about the place—a savagery that has nursed into being a dangerous and powerful arm of the great Mafia or "Black-Hand" Society of Italy. The town holds only about twenty thousand inhabitants and there is no industry to speak of. Palermo is but twenty-one miles to the north of it. There is a splendid old church in Corleone reminiscent of the time when King Frederick II colonized these parts with Lombardian peasants as early as 1237.
One night in the year 1889, while on his way home, Giovanni Vella, Chief of the Sylvan Guards, was murdered in a dark street but a short distance from his residence in Corleone. A bullet had torn its way through his back and into his lung. Vella lasted but a few minutes after the shooting, but long enough to cause a nasty tangle for the police in their effort to solve the murder. Vella lived just long enough to utter a few remarks that were misused by Mafia influences to send an innocent man to prison for twenty-two years.
Anna Di Puma, a neighbor, returning to her house at that hour had just passed through a dark alley and noticed two men lurking in the shadow. She passed close and looked into their faces, recognizing one of the men as Giuseppe Morello, whom she knew very well.
A couple of minutes later, even before she had reached her door, she heard a shot and ran back into the alley. There she found Vella lying in the exact spot where she had seen Morello and his companion apparently hiding but a few minutes previously. Anna Di Puma told the neighbors what she had seen. She was also incautious enough to say that she was going to court to tell on the witness stand just what she had observed.
Anna Di Puma was shot in the back and killed two days later while she was sitting on the door-step of a neighbor's store.
Morello was arrested and charged with the murder of the Di Puma woman. He was held in prison to await trial, but powerful influences of the Mafia were set to work and Morello was discharged for lack of evidence. The only witness to the murder of Vella was dead. Two lawyers of his band testified that Morello was in Palermo with them and not in Corleone on the night the Di Puma woman was murdered.
Michele Guarino Zangara, living in the next apartment to Morello, who noticed when the "Black-Hander" arrived home and overheard the conversation that followed between Morello and his mother, was also murdered. He was thrown off a bridge one night while on his way home. He was found the next morning under the bridge dead. This man Zangara had gone to the accused man's house, three or four days after the Chief of the Sylvan Guards was murdered, and told the family of the man unjustly arrested for the crime that he (Guarino) had overheard Mrs. Morello say to her son:
"Peppe, what have you done? Now they will come and arrest you," and in response to this Morello said, "Shut up, mother, they have gone on the wrong scent."