by John Dickie
The sack of Palermo. From the late 1950s, the construction industry propelled organised crime in Sicily and Calabria to new levels of wealth and power.
In 1971, when the sack of Palermo was complete, a journalist climbed Monte Pellegrino, the vast rocky outcrop that surges between the Piana dei Colli and the sea. The view below him had once been stunning. Now it was shocking.
From up there you can cast your eyes across the whole city and the Conca d’Oro. Palermo seems much bigger than you would imagine: long rows of houses spreading out from the periphery towards the orange groves. Concrete has now devastated one of the most beautiful natural spectacles in the world. The huge blocks of flats, all alike, seem to have been made by the same hand. And that hand belongs to ‘don’ Ciccio Vassallo. More than a quarter of the new Palermo is his work.
Francesco Vassallo, known as ‘don Ciccio’ (‘don Frankie’), or ‘King Concrete’, was by a distance the dominant figure in the Palermo construction industry in the 1960s. Between 1959 and 1963, under the Young Turks Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino, Palermo City Council granted 80 per cent of 4,205 building permits to just five men, all of whom turned out to be dummies. One of the five subsequently got a job as a janitor in the apartment block he had nominally been responsible for building. Behind those five names, more often than not, stood don Ciccio Vassallo.
King Concrete was a fat, bald, jowly man with a long nose, dark patches under his eyes, and a preference for tent-like suits and loud ties. He rose from very humble origins in Tommaso Natale, a borgata or satellite village that sits at the northern end of the Piana dei Colli. Reputed to be only semi-literate, he was the fourth of ten children born to a cart driver. Police reports mention Vassallo as moving in mafia circles from a young age; his early criminal record included proceedings for theft, violence and fraud—most of them ended in a suspended sentence, amnesty or acquittal for lack of proof. His place in the local mafia’s circle of influence was cemented in 1937 by marriage to the daughter of a landowner and mafioso, Giuseppe Messina. With the Messina family’s muscle behind it, his firm established a monopoly over the distribution of meat and milk in the area around Tommaso Natale. Vassallo and the Messinas were also active in the black market during the war. When peace came, Vassallo started a horse-drawn transportation company to ferry building materials between local sites. His mafia kinfolk would be sleeping partners in this enterprise, as in the many lucrative real-estate ventures that would come later.
Suddenly, in 1952, Vassallo’s business took off. From nowhere, he made a successful bid to build a drainage system in Tommaso Natale and neighbouring Sferracavallo. He had no record in construction; it was not even until two years later that he was admitted onto the city council’s list of approved contractors. He was only allowed to submit a tender for the contract because of a reference letter from the managing director of the private company that ran Palermo’s buses. The company director would later become Vassallo’s partner in some lucrative real-estate ventures. At the same time, Vassallo received a generous credit line from the Bank of Sicily. Then his competitors withdrew from the tendering process for the drainage contract in mysterious circumstances. Vassallo was left to thrash out the terms of the deal in one-to-one negotiations with the mayor, who would also later become his partner in some lucrative real-estate ventures.
In the mid-1950s, King Concrete started to work closely with the Young Turks. Construction was becoming more and more important to the economy of a city whose productive base, such as it was, could not compete with the burgeoning factories of the ‘industrial triangle’ (the northern cities of Milan, Turin and Genoa). By the 1960s, 33 per cent of Palermo workers were directly or indirectly employed in construction, compared to a mere 10 per cent in Milan, the nation’s economic capital. However temporary the dangerous and badly paid work in Palermo’s many building sites might be, there were few alternatives for ordinary working-class palermitani. Which made construction workers a formidable stock of votes that the Concrete King could use to attract political friends. Friends like Giovanni Gioia, the leader of Palermo’s Young Turks, who would go on to benefit from a number of lucrative real-estate ventures piloted by Vassallo.
The notion of a ‘conflict of interests’ was all but meaningless in building-boom Palermo. The city municipality’s director of works became King Concrete’s chief project planner. From his political contacts, the rapidly rising Vassallo acquired the power to systematically ignore planning restrictions. The Young Turk, Salvo Lima, was repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) indicted for breaking planning law on Vassallo’s behalf. During the sack of Palermo, journalists speculated ironically about the existence of a company they called VA.LI.GIO (VAssallo—LIma—GIOia). They were successfully sued. Rather pedantically, the judges ruled that no such legally constituted company existed.
In the mid-1960s, the market for private apartments reached saturation point. By that stage King Concrete had built whole dense neighbourhoods of condominia that were without schools, community centres and parks. Ingeniously, he then turned to renting unsold apartments and other buildings for use as schools. In 1969 alone he received rent of nearly $700,000 (in 1969 values) from local authorities for six middle schools, two senior schools, six technical colleges and the school inspectorate. The DC press hailed him as a heroic benefactor. In the same year he was recorded as being the richest man in Palermo.
It pays to remember that don Ciccio Vassallo was an affarista rather than an entrepreneur. His competitive advantage lay not in shrewd planning and investment, but in corruption, in making useful friends, and of course in the unspoken menace that shadowed his every move. Right on cue, unidentified ‘vandals’ would cut down all the trees on any stretch of land that had been zone-marked as a park. Any honest company that somehow managed to win a contract from under the mafia’s nose would find its machinery in flames. Dynamite proved a handy way of accelerating demolition orders.
In 1957, just as the sack of Palermo was about to enter its most devastating phase, a mafia power struggle began in King Concrete’s home village of Tommaso Natale. His own family was soon drawn in. In July 1961 his brother-in-law, Salvatore Messina, was shotgunned to death by an assassin who had sat in wait for him for hours in the branches of an olive tree. Another brother-in-law, Pietro, was shot dead a year later. A third brother-in-law, Nino, only saved himself from the same fate by hurling a milk churn at his attacker when he was ambushed; it is thought he then left Sicily. The fact that don Ciccio himself was not attacked (as far as we know) shows that his power now transcended any local base: he was a money-making machine for the entire political and mafia elite.
Mass migration was one of the most important characteristics of Italy’s economic miracle. As the industrial cities of the North boomed, they sucked in migrants. About a million people moved from the South to other regions in just five years, between 1958 and 1963.
Mafiosi also became more mobile in the post-war decades: their trade took them to other regions of Italy. In some places, gangsters went on to found permanent colonies. Those bases in central and northern Italy, as well as in parts of the South not traditionally contaminated by criminal organisations, are one of the distinctive features of the recent era of mafia history. Nothing similar is recorded in previous decades.
Some of the American hoodlums who were expelled from the United States after the Second World War were the first to set up business outside the mafia heartlands of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. Frank ‘Three Fingers’ Coppola dealt in drugs from a base near Rome, for example.
The earliest signs of mafia colonisation from within Italy came in the great North–South migration during the economic miracle. In the mid-1950s, Giacomo Zagari founded one of the first cells of ’ndranghetisti near Varese, close by Italy’s border with Switzerland. The murder of a foreman in the early hours of New Year’s Day in 1956 revealed the existence of mafia control among the Calabrian flower-pickers of the Ligurian coast near the French border.
Man
y northerners resented the hundreds of thousands of new arrivals from the South. Southerners, they said, had too many children and grew tomatoes in the bathtub. News of mafia-related crime, or indeed any crime as long as it was committed by an immigrant, merely served to confirm those anti-southern prejudices. Mafia appeared to be a kind of ethnic affliction that made everyone from ‘down there’ proud, vengeful, violent and dishonest.
The truth is that mass migration from the South was not to blame for the mafias’ spread northwards. Mafiosi are a tiny minority of professional criminals; they are not typical southerners. There were plenty of places where immigrants arrived and the mafias did not follow. But migration did create many new opportunities for mafiosi—notably, as the flower-pickers of Liguria illustrate, in gangmastering, when immigrants were forced to work for low wages, untaxed, and without the protection of the law. As Italy grew during the economic miracle and afterwards, such criminal opportunities expanded and multiplied.
The criminal opportunities most conducive to long-term mafia colonisation of the North came from the construction industry. The most notorious case is the winter sports resort of Bardonecchia, in the northern region of Piedmont; it is situated in the Alps just a few kilometres from the French border. Bardonecchia is where the inhabitants of Turin, Italy’s motor city and one of the capitals of the economic miracle, go to ski. Eventually, in 1995, Bardonecchia became the first town council in northern Italy to be dissolved by central government in Rome because of mafia infiltration. Strikingly, the mafia that had colonised Bardonecchia long before then was the ’ndrangheta. Italy’s least-known mafia, the one most frequently associated with a disappearing world of peasant penury, was quick to spot the illegal profits to be made from construction, and put itself in the vanguard of the new era of expansion in the North.
The story of Bardonecchia is like a sequence of time-lapse photographs in a nature documentary. Narrowly focused, as if on the growth of a single poisonous weed, it nevertheless exposes the secret workings of a whole ecosystem. Played in rapid sequence, the images from Bardonecchia take us far ahead in our story. They illustrate how, from small beginnings, and in the right circumstances, the mafias can establish what they call ‘territorial control’ from virtually nothing.
The first hint of the ’ndrangheta’s arrival in Bardonecchia came at past midnight, on 2 September 1963. A heavy rain was falling as Mario Corino, a young primary school teacher, turned into via Giolitti in the old part of town. He was approached by two men, both of them half hidden by umbrellas. The attack was swift -– so swift that Corino did not see what type of blunt instrument flashed towards him. He instinctively parried the first blow with his umbrella and his forearm; the second grazed his head before smashing into his shoulder. His screams drove the attackers away. Evidently this was only meant to be a warning.
Initial speculation linked the attack with Corino’s work as leader of the local branch of the Christian Democrat Party. More specifically, he had denounced what were politely called ‘irregularities’ in the local construction industry and the town plan. But within days the two men who attacked Corino had confessed, and the press was able to reassure itself that there was no political background to the assault. The culprits were both plasterers, paid by the square metre of wall they finished; they assaulted Corino because they objected to his attempts to enforce rules against piecework on building sites. Case closed. Or so it seemed.
As it turned out, the original suspicions were correct. Moreover, the assault on Mario Corino was only the first symptom of something much more menacing. The problems began, as Mario Corino had suspected, with a building boom in the early 1960s: tourists and second-homers needed places to stay if they were going to enjoy Bardonecchia’s mountain air. Building firms needed cheap hands and a way round safety regulations and labour laws: they turned to ’ndrangheta gangmasters, who were more than happy to provide this service by recruiting from among the droves of Calabrian immigrants. The labourers in Bardonecchia, many of whom had criminal records and little chance of finding more regular employment, lived camped out in semi-squalor. By the early 1970s, an estimated 70–80 per cent of labour in the village was recruited through the mafia racket; many of those workers had to kick back part of their salary to the capo. Trades unions found it impossible to set up branches.
But long before then, the ’ndrangheta bosses had gone far beyond labour racketeering. First they set up their own companies to carry out subcontracting work: plastering and trucking were favourite niches. ’Ndrangheta-controlled construction firms were not far behind. Shadowy real-estate companies came and went from the record books. Then, at rival building sites, there were unexplained fires, machinery was vandalised and workers were threatened at gunpoint. Before long most of the honest building companies had been driven out of the market, or driven into the hands of the gangsters.
Meanwhile, the government had done its bit to fill the Calabrian mafia’s coffers by building a new highway and a tunnel through the mountains. The ’ndrangheta recruited some local politicians and administrators to help them win contracts and get round regulations. Barely a stone was turned without the say-so of the local capo. One city council employee would simply hand out the boss’s visiting card to anyone who applied for a licence to start up a new business—just to avoid any messy bureaucratic problems, he claimed. Mario Corino, the schoolteacher-cum-politician who had been attacked in 1963, led a heroic resistance to ’ndrangheta influence over local government when he became mayor in 1972. In 1975 the courts dismissed his alarm-calls as a politically motivated fiction: they said he was using the mafia as a pretext to throw mud at his rivals. Corino’s opponents would feign disbelief and outrage when any journalist suggested that there might be a mafia problem in the town. Yet, at the same time, energetic policemen would be mysteriously transferred to other parts of the country. In a phone tap, the local boss was recorded as saying, ‘We are the root of everything here, you understand me?’
It was remarkable that Bardonecchia had to wait until as late as 1969 for its first mafia murder. Forty-four deaths would follow between 1970 and 1983. On 23 June 1983, the ’ndrangheta proved how high, and how brutally, it was prepared to strike. Not long before midnight, Bruno Caccia was walking his dog when he was approached by two men in a car; they shot him fourteen times, and then got out to fire three coups de grâce. Caccia was an upstanding investigating magistrate who had refused any dialogue with what was now a thoroughgoing ’ndrangheta power system.
It is unlikely that there was a grand strategy behind the mafias’ move north. Rocco Lo Presti, the ’ndranghetista who led his organisation’s rise to power in Bardonecchia during the building boom of the 1960s, had been there since the mid-1950s. It seems he came as a humble migrant, albeit one with some fearsome relatives. But he was less interested in getting a job than he was in handling counterfeit banknotes. Thereafter, mafiosi came north for many reasons: to hide from the police or their enemies; to set up temporary narcotics trading posts; to quietly launder and invest their ill-gotten gains, or to capitalise on criminal opportunities opened up by pioneers like Rocco Lo Presti. The full-scale colonisation of a town like Bardonecchia created a pattern to be followed elsewhere. In one bugged conversation, one of Rocco Lo Presti’s friends was heard giving him a verbal pat on the back: ‘Bardonecchia is Calabrian,’ he said. The irony in this remark was that many of the entrepreneurs, administrators and politicians who had helped turn Bardonecchia Calabrian were as Piedmontese as Barolo wine and agnolotti.
In the political sphere, organised crime has always been a problem that affected the North and centre as well as the South. From soon after the birth of Italy as a unified state in 1861, coalition governments in Rome had to recruit clusters of supporters among southern MPs; and southern MPs—some of them, at least—used racketeers to hustle votes. Yet after the economic miracle, thanks primarily to infiltration of the construction industry, the mafias became a national problem in two dramatically new ways. On the o
ne hand, as we have seen, the North became a theatre of operations for southern mobsters. On the other hand, the South became a theatre of cooperation between northern big industry and the mafias. For example, companies from the industrialised North were also dealing on friendly terms with the ’ndrangheta back in Calabria, where concrete proved even more lucrative than it was in Piedmont.
In the 1960s there began a major road-building programme. Its emblem was the so-called ‘Motorway of the Sun’ that ran down Italy from north to south. The last stretch of that motorway, covering the 443 kilometres from Salerno to Reggio Calabria, carried the burden of enormous hopes: a century on from Italian unification, the ‘Salerno–Reggio Calabria’ (as it is universally known) would finally end the deep South’s isolation from the national transport network. Grand exploits of civil engineering were required to traverse the region’s forbidding geology: no fewer than 55 tunnels and 144 viaducts, some of which soar over 200 metres above the forests at the valley floor.
Today the Salerno–Reggio Calabria is notorious—a prodigy of chaotic planning, pork-barrelling and broken political promises. It is still not finished nearly half a century after it was begun. Rather than taking the most logical and direct route along the coast, the Salerno–Reggio Calabria cuts tortuously inland to visit the electoral fiefdoms of long-forgotten ministers. At times the motorway’s only purpose seems to be to join a chain of permanent construction sites. Long stretches are so narrow and winding that they have a 40-kilometre-per-hour speed limit. Jams are so frequent that the roadside is permanently lined with chemical toilets to allow desperate motorists to relieve themselves. During peak times, ambulances are parked ready to intervene. In 2002, magistrates in Catanzaro sequestered a whole section of recently modernised motorway because it was so shoddily built as to be acutely dangerous. The Bishop of Salerno recently called Europe’s worst motorway a Via Crucis. The Salerno–Reggio Calabria shows the Italian state at its most incompetent.