Calogero Vizzini - Early Career

Early Career

Vizzini became a cancia – an intermediary between the peasants who wanted their wheat milled into flour and the mills that were located near the coast. Mafiosi that did not tolerate any competition controlled the mills. In the case of Villalba the mills were some 80 kilometres away. To get the grain safely to the mills over roads infested by bandits was no easy task.

He arranged protection with the bandit Francesco Paolo Varsallona whose hide-out was in the Cammarata mountains. Varsallona, an alleged "man of honour", also supplied manpower to noble landowners to repress farmers' revolts. Vizzini enrolled in Varsallona’s band while conducting his cancia business. Both were arrested in 1902 when Varsallona’s band finally fell into a trap set up by the police. Vizzini stood trial with the rest of the band for "association to commit a crime" – but he was one of the few to be acquitted.

The episode had few negative consequences. In 1908 Vizzini was able to acquire a substantial part of the Belici estate when he brokered a deal between the owner, the duke Francesco Thomas de Barberin who resided in Paris, and the local rural bank Cassa Rurale, whose president, the priest Scarlata, was Vizzini’s uncle. Vizzini held 290 hectares for himself and generously left the rest to the bank to lease out to Catholic peasants.