Calogero Vizzini - King of The Black Market

King of The Black Market

Because of his excellent connections, Vizzini also became the 'king' of the rampant post-war black market and arranged to get Villalba's overly inquisitive police chief killed. AMGOT relied on mafiosi who were considered staunch anti-fascists because of the repression under Benito Mussolini. Many other mafiosi, such as Giuseppe Genco Russo, were appointed as mayors of their own hometowns. Coordinating the AMGOT effort was the former lieutenant-governor of New York, Colonel Charles Poletti, whom Luciano once described as "one of our good friends."

A peasant told the social activist Danilo Dolci in the 1950s how the situation was in Villalba after the Americans had landed: the Mafia "robbed the storehouses of the agrarian Co-op and the army’s storehouses; sold food, clothes, cars and lorries in Palermo on the black market. In Villalba all power was in their hands: church, Mafia, agricultural banks, latifundia, all in the hands of the same family … One used to go and see him and ask 'Can you do me this favour?' even for a little affair one had with some other person."'

Vizzini established one of the largest black market operations in southern Italy, together with the American gangster Vito Genovese, who had fled to Italy in 1937 after being accused of murder. Don Calogero sent truck caravans loaded with all the basic food commodities necessary for the Italian diet rolling northward to hungry Naples, where their cargoes were distributed by Genovese's organization. All of the trucks were issued passes and export papers by the AMGOT administration in Naples and Sicily, and some corrupt American army officers even made contributions of gasoline and trucks to the operation. According to Luke Monzelli, a lieutenant in the Carabinieri assigned to follow Genovese during his time in Italy: “Truckloads of food supplies were shipped from Vizzini to Genovese — all accompanied by the proper documents which had been certified by men in authority, Mafia members in the service of Vizzini and Genovese.”