Part from an article written by Tim Newark,bout WWII...
Talking to Sicilians in Palermo you soon get a clear picture of how they view their own history. They remember the delight of their parents being liberated by the Allies from Fascist rule and German occupation. They recall the pleasure of being given sweets and food by American soldiers—and wearing American clothes sold in local markets for years afterwards. But when you talk to them about the Mafia and the Allies, they have one certain vision of what happened.
“They make the same mistake, they make all the time,” says one Palermo resident, whose parents saw the bombs rain down on their city. “They made a deal with the bad guys and then we got stuck with the Mafia back in control.”
But is this true?
There are many anecdotes that support the notion that the US did strike a deal with the Mafia to help them conquer Sicily. The most famous story is that Allied troops and tanks rolled into Sicily in 1943 carrying yellow flags emblazoned with the letter ‘L’. The ‘L’ represented the infamous mobster ‘Lucky’ Luciano.
From his Great Meadow prison cell in New York State, Luciano had struck a devil’s deal with the US government to help them secure New York’s docks from Nazi or Fascist sabotage. As an extension of this pact, it is said, not a single shot was fired by Italian troops at the invading Americans in Sicily.
Despite Mussolini’s successful crusade against the Mafia, in the 1940s, the Mafia still commanded tremendous influence in Europe and America. As a result, the Allies needed the Mafia. Arguably, the US wartime government could not have controlled the vital New York docks without the assistance of the Mob. The Mafia even believed it could alter the course of the war by assassinating Hitler and his top henchmen.
To uncover the truth of these remarkable claims, I have explored archives in London, Washington and New York, analysing first–hand intelligence reports made by Allied agents dealing with the Mafia on a day-to-day basis. Many of these reports have never been published before or cited in Mafia literature. I have visited the sites of notorious Mafia crimes and report the testimony of people who were there at the time—including those recorded in the secret Herlands report which remained top secret for decades after the events described. These accounts bring to life one of the most important – and hitherto unexplored – areas of the Allied war in Europe.
Some of the players in the game are known. Allied connections with the Mafia undeniably reached the highest level. Recommendations to work alongside mobsters were put before senior US generals and politicians—including supreme commander Dwight Eisenhower. Even war leaders Churchill and Roosevelt were keen to exploit Italian-American connections. Notorious gangsters Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and Vito Genovese all played their part in the war on Hitler and Mussolini, mixing easily with senior military officials on both sides.
