Salvatore Giuliano: Sicily's Robin Hood Bandit and the May Day Massacre

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In September 1943, with Sicily's government collapsed and as much as 70 percent of its food coming through the black market, a young olive oil trader named Salvatore Giuliano was stopped at a police checkpoint with two sacks of illegal grain. He shot an officer dead, took a bullet in the back, and fled into the hills. On Christmas Eve he escaped a dragnet in his hometown and killed a second officer. From then on he lived as an outlaw, building a gang through a jailbreak and paying peasants up to ten times the market rate for supplies, which bought him an early warning network across the mountains.

This episode follows his short life, from 1922 to 1950, as he moved from survival to celebrity to disaster. He posed for photographs labeled Robin Hood and became a colonel for Sicilian separatists in 1945. Then, on May Day 1947, his men fired on a crowd of peasants at Portella della Ginestra, killing eleven people, among them a woman and three children. Abandoned by the politicians he served and hunted by Colonel Ugo Luca with the Mafia's help, he was shot in his sleep on July 5, 1950 by his closest lieutenant.

• In 1944 he robbed a duchess by kissing her hand, taking a diamond ring he wore for the rest of his life, and borrowing a John Steinbeck novel that he returned a week later with a note.
• When the interior minister put 800,000 lire on his head, Giuliano offered two million for the capture of the minister.
• He executed suspected informants and pinned notes to their bodies, enforcing the code of silence through terror.
• After Gaspare Pisciotta killed him, police dragged the body into a courtyard, shot it, and announced a gun battle. Journalist Tommaso Besozzi exposed the lie.
• Pisciotta confessed at trial and died in his prison cell in 1954, poisoned by strychnine in his morning coffee.