He had believed the horses would halt before the thickets. This error, if the military report is to be credited, cost Antonio Locaso his life. For a man who had made the woods his home, his fortress, and his avenue of escape, defeat began the moment his pursuers refused to acknowledge the frontier he had assigned them.
He was known as il Capraro—the goatherd. Born in Abriola in 1841, he had come to the countryside of Castellaneta to seek work. His master, Rocco Giacoja, commanded the local National Guard: thus the future brigand had tended the flocks of a man charged with hunting down outlaws. In the summer of 1862, against a backdrop of draft resistance, he went underground. A few months proved sufficient to transform a farmhand into a bandit captain.
His recruits hailed chiefly from Palagianello. With them entered bitter resentments against the new Italian order and, among certain former soldiers, an enduring loyalty to the fallen Bourbons. In October, an alliance with Francesco Buono enlarged the enterprise. Men who stole merely to subsist or enrich themselves now found themselves enlisted in projects of political restoration. Yet such a compact did not transmute an extortion into a voluntary offering: the landowners summoned to pay still knew the difference all too well.
In the woods and around the homesteads, the conflict struck down those who embodied public authority. Local records attribute to Locaso’s band the deaths of National Guardsman Antonio Semeraro and forest warden Alfonso D’Eredità, at San Basilio, in October 1862. The goatherd was no mere shadow pursued through the foliage: behind his company lay corpses, mourning families, and bloody reprisals. The countryside, which the traveler may deem peaceful because he discerns no soul upon the road, was rife with such unsettled reckonings.
The authorities struck at the fugitives’ resources. A prefectural decree mandated the closure of outlying farms suspected of harboring them and restricted the provisions that might be carried into the fields. The laborers required bread; so too did the bands. Between the two, the inspection of a basket could become an affair of state. The masserie offered food, intelligence, and shelter—sometimes under duress, sometimes with the willing consent of their occupants. The authorities sought to strip from the forest what the hearths had long supplied.
In December, the ambition of the confederated bands was shattered near the Monaci estate. The ancient account of Antonio Lucarelli depicts men who had dismounted, busying themselves with their meal, tending their steeds, or resting in the lofts, when the troops fell upon them. Locaso was among the assembled chiefs. Those who had dreamed of a triumphant march were forced once more into headlong flight. The great concourse had swelled the numbers of the outlaws; it had also rendered them far easier to surprise.
In January 1863, the forces dispatched against the Capraro applied themselves precisely to depriving him of the advantage of dispersion. It was not enough to unearth his lair: the path out of the refuge had to lead directly into the arms of other soldiers. The report of Colonel Regis lays out this stratagem with the satisfaction of a commander for whom the names of isolated farms become, in the wake of victory, the neat components of a flawless syllogism.
Captain Angioli, of the Thirtieth Infantry Regiment, coordinated his movements with the Saluzzo cavalry stationed at Castellaneta. Positions were seized around the Sarapo and Magliari estates. Angioli scoured the Cesine woods with infantrymen, carabinieri, and a handful of National Guardsmen, while another detachment entered Girifalco. Thus the uniforms no longer advanced from a single quarter. The troop marching forward might well be seen; that which lay in wait had to remain entirely unsuspected. A successful flight now demanded far more than an intimate knowledge of the trail: one had to divine what lay at its end. The infantry could fail to seize the chieftain without endangering the enterprise, so long as it drove him toward the ground where the horsemen had taken up their posts.
The lair was discovered. Locaso’s men heard their pursuers, exchanged a few musket shots, and fled, abandoning their baggage. The military register records seven horses, six cloaks, and three casks of wine. This inventory attests to the brutality of the rout: what had constituted an encampment was reduced, in a matter of moments, to a tally of captured spoils. The cloaks remained behind, though the men would need to sleep in the open; the mounts were left behind by those whose very salvation depended upon speed.
Locaso and his companions endeavored to reach other woodlands. But Captain Pedrocchi had dispatched twenty dismounted cavalrymen by night to hold the paths leading to the Lenna torrent. At daybreak, twenty-three mounted men set forth upon reconnaissance under Lieutenant Morozze’s command. Each body had its appointed task: to seal the defiles, discover the fugitives, and bring them to bay. The cavalry abandoned its customary dispositions in order to render the terrain less legible to its quarry.
The outlaws, suspecting that the outlets were watched, hesitated to hazard themselves upon the open expanse of Sant’Angelo. Once more they sought cover. Pickets caught sight of them; the mounted platoon charged and scattered them. This was the juncture where the dense brush should have saved them. Horses amidst such difficult defiles, soldiers less acquainted with the ground, a slackening pursuit: Locaso still relied upon the natural defenses of the earth.
The military report even attributes to him a confession of this overconfidence following his capture. He had slowed his pace, it was said, because he did not believe the horsemen capable of plunging so deeply into the brambles. Remaining in the rear to cover his men, he was overtaken by Sergeant Bernasconi and Lance-Corporal Basile. He resisted; they disarmed him. Thus the chase concluded, devoid of the epic combat so often promised by the legend of an outlaw chief: two soldiers held at last the man whom the rest of the column had driven into their grasp.
Conveyed to Castellaneta, Locaso appeared before a court-martial presided over by Pedrocchi. The judgment was summary. On January 17, 1863, he was executed by firing squad near the Calvario. He was not yet twenty-two years old. The woods, whose mastery had afforded him a few months of dominion, had denied him a final way out.
The victors, for their part, had one remaining dispute to settle. Before the parliamentary commission of inquiry into brigandage, Pedrocchi claimed all credit for the cavalry. Deputy Stefano Romeo countered with the account he had received from the commander of the Ginosa National Guard, Luigi Miani. It became necessary to acknowledge the role of those who had unearthed the encampment and provoked the rout. Locaso was dead; over his capture, men were already wrangling for the spoils of glory. The very paths that had served to encircle him were now used to divide the men who would write the history of the victory.