A Lady's Honor

On a balmy night last July, a statuesque Sicilian brunette, Graziella Quartuccio, 43, was snatched away in her nightgown from her Monreale home near Palermo by a machine-gun-toting gang of ski-masked Mafiosi. A kidnaping is no surprise in Italy. It has become such a way of life since 1970 that police now freeze the assets of the victim's family in an effort to prevent payoffs. Million-dollar ransoms are routine. But this case rocked Palermo; it is not honorable to involve women in such matters, and the victim's husband, Contractor Giuseppe Quartuccio, 66, was known to have Mafia connections.

Goodbye Embrace. Seven days after the kidnaping came women's lib: Graziella turned up unharmed, even though a $1.5 million ransom demand had not been met. That night, acting on a telephone tip, police found the body of a tortured hoodlum, his face burned and battered beyond recognition, his death caused by strangulation. The next day a Monreale jeweler was murdered in his shop--only five minutes after Giuseppe Quartuccio had been seen giving him the Mafia's classic goodbye kiss on each cheek. Asked about the ominous embrace, Quartuccio said sadly, "My friend? He had the courage to console me and clasp me after the terrible event." In the next four weeks, two brothers of the slain jeweler were gunned down in the wholesale vegetable market, two 20-year-old suspected Mafiosi were shot dead in Piazza Don Bosco, and two others disappeared.

Now, after months of investigation, police have arrested Quartuccio and charged him with waging a vendetta against the gang that kidnaped his wife. It first appeared that the kidnapers had hastily released Graziella when they realized they were not tangling with just any old Siciliano. As it turned out, however, Graziella had been forcibly rescued by some of her husband's friends. Apparently the kidnapers were younger Mafiosi, who in recent years have grown markedly disrespectful of their elders' feelings. Even the favored nephew of Giuseppe Garda ("Don Peppino"), the boss of Monreale and an associate of Quartuccio's, was kidnaped in 1974 and ransomed for $1.5 million. To Sicilian police, the wave of killings suggested that the dons were at last losing patience with the punks.

Will prosecutors be able to prove that Quartuccio was a contractor in more ways than one? As usual, witnesses are few. Sicily's Mafia may have lost its respect for its elders, but its respect for silence remains.

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