Executioner

The police took official credit for the job, but it was not they who had killed famed Bandit Giuliano. The machine-gun fire which Italy's carabinieri last July pumped into the glamorous outlaw who had terrorized and fascinated Sicily for seven years (TIME, July 17) was aimed at a man they knew to be already dead. The police shots were a blind to cover the real executioner. Last week, on trial in Viterbo for an assortment of killings and other acts of banditry, Giuliano's former lieutenant and confidant, Gaspare Pisciotta, confessed that he had killed Giuliano.

"We Must Do Something." Pisciotta had a falling out with his chief. Some of their followers were being held for trial for the murder of May Day marchers at Portella della Ginestra (TIME, May 12, 1947). Pisciotta proposed a raid to save them. "We must do something for our friends," he urged. But Giuliano was hesitant. "There is little we can do," he said. "If, we allow our organization to be destroyed, our friends will have no hope." Giuliano made a gesture. He wrote a letter to the trial judge in which he took personal blame for the murders. Pisciotta, far from satisfied, arranged a meeting in Rome with Carabinieri Colonel Ugo Luca, whose sole assignment for two years had been to kill or capture Giuliano. The two talked long and earnestly. Then the bandit lieutenant drove to Castelvetrano, where his chieftain was hiding out.

A carload of carabinieri was waiting outside of the house where Giuliano was hiding. The bandit chief was in a room upstairs. "Your letter," Pisciotta told him after the two had exchanged greetings, "has brought no help to our friends. They will be sentenced to life imprisonment."

Giuliano glared at him in quick suspicion. "What do you mean?" he asked. Pisciotta shrugged, laughed and guided the talk into reminiscences. Ah, banditry today was not what it once was. Remember the old days when . . .

Giuliano forgot his suspicions. As the clock struck 3, he rose, stretched and unbuckled his cartridge belt. He laid his pistol on the table, placed a wad of notes beside it and stretched out on the bed. He was just lifting his arms to put them back of his head when Pisciotta whipped out his gun and fired.-The waiting police rushed in, seized the bandit's body, dragged it into the street and fired their bullets into it.

"Please Arrest Me." Two days later, cold with fear, Pisciotta turned up at police headquarters. He had just learned that fierce, vindictive old Maria Lombardo, the mother of Giuliano, knew who had killed her son. "Arrest me," Pisciotta begged, "or I'll tell everyone what I've done." The police obliged and tossed him into prison with the other bandits. But the loyalty even of those he had tried to save belonged not to him but to Giuliano. On visiting day, the executioner begged his mother to "please bring me food from outside." Prison food, he knew, might well be poisoned by his old comrades.

-Making Giuliano's end oddly similar to that of U.S. Bandit Jesse James, who was murdered in his St. Joseph, Mo. home in 1882 by his henchmen the Ford brothers, Bob and Charlie, who had joined forces with the police partly in grudge against Jesse, partly to gain a pardon for another bandit, Dick Liddil.

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