The Big Mouth

Up to three years ago, swart young Gaspare Pisciotta was the close friend and trusted lieutenant of Sicily's most notorious bandit chieftain, Salvatore Giuliano (TIME, July 17, 1950 et seq.). Thanks to the unremitting efforts of Mario Scelba, who was then Italy's Interior Minister, Giuliano was killed and Pisciotta captured. At his trial, the boastful bandit lieutenant proudly admitted that it was he who had told the police where to find Giuliano, that it was he and not the police who fired the fatal bullet into the bandit's body. The confession earned him no forgiveness for his other crimes; he was sentenced to life imprisonment. And it left him haunted by the certainty that Giuliano's friends would seek revenge. "One of these days they will kill me," he was sometimes heard to mutter as he paced the tiny cell he shared with his father (also a convicted bandit) in Palermo's grim Ucciar-done Prison.

One day last week, the guards at Ucci-ardone heard a cry for help from Pisciotta pere. "Gasparino is feeling bad," called the old man. "Help him in God's name." The guards arrived in time to find the young bandit writhing convulsively on his bunk. Rushed off to the prison hospital, he died some 40 minutes later. What had happened? On the face of it, nothing. Gaspare had brewed his own and his father's coffee as he did every morning. As usual, he had stirred into his own cup a spoonful of vitamin preparation. The medicine was not even new; he had already taken two doses from the bottle. Yet scarcely had Pisciotta downed the coffee when he was seized with the violent cramps that led to his death soon afterward. "Cardiac paralysis," was the prison doctor's first hesitant diagnosis, but prison officials were far from satisfied.

All Italy was alive with theories about who killed Pisciotta. The fascist and Communist press did their best to put it on newly appointed Premier Scelba's administration, but had no evidence to go on. Others whispered the dread and legendary name of Mafia. But in Sicily, where the ways of bandits are better understood, the people cared little for such sophisticated argument. For Sicilians, it was enough that an informer had been killed.

As Gaspare Pisciotta's dead body was borne from the church in the small town of Montelepre to the little cemetery on its outskirts, it passed the drygoods shop of Mariannina Giuliano, Salvatore's sister. The windows were banked high with cheerful red carnations, as if for a village festival. "At last," signed Giuliano's vindictive old mother, Maria, when the procession wound by her house, "the big-mouthed one is silent."

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