Defiance
Page 4
Badalamenti’s first arrest in 1946, for criminal association and conspiracy to kidnap, showed that he had started out on a professional criminal career. He often boasted with Mafiosi that once he had been ‘made’ and joined the Mafia – soon after Lucky Luciano’s arrival in Naples in 1946 – he was entrusted with his first murder. Luciano had been slapped at the Agnano racecourse, just outside the city, and Badalamenti’s job was to organise the murder of this offender, which he entrusted to a local criminal, Salvatore Zaza.
Looking back now, Gaetano Badalmenti was just one small-time criminal out of many. The only law these people followed was that of the jungle, and Badalamenti – through chance or luck – managed to survive. Many of his actions were low-level feuds if judged by the standards under which Mafiosi were operating by the 1960s, but murder was murder whatever the year. In June 1947 he was first accused of killing someone, but when the charge was made he was already on the run.
Four months later something more serious happened, indicating a real battle for power, and therefore a real growth in local Mafia gangs. A few years before, the Badalamentis and another local family had had a serious disagreement. The arrival of a senior Italian-American gangster led to the decision that the other gang had to make a sacrifice to the Badalamentis, or in other words one of them had to die. Understandably, the poor man in question, Procopio Finazzo, shut himself in at home and virtually never came out, even though he was a good shot. On 10 October 1946 he did emerge, and Badalamenti managed to wound him. Exactly a year later Finazzo went to a bar for a drink. Coming out, he saw six men waiting for him in the main square, he begged the barman to lend him a gun but was cut down immediately. This time, Badalamenti faced a charge of organising the murder. This was a sure sign that he was becoming important – ordering six other people to murder on his behalf shows that there was an organisation, and that Badalamenti had power within it.
The charges mounted up. In 1949 another arrest warrant was issued for kidnapping and extortion, but Badalamenti was now far away. The same year he left Italy illegally for Detroit, but was deported in 1950. His brother Emanuele, 20 years older than Gaetano, had already moved to the US and ended up running a supermarket and petrol station in Monroe, Michigan. Back in Cinisi the following year, Gaetano was arrested for kidnapping but released without charge.
Two years later he was again arrested for cigarette smuggling and armed resistance to arrest, but charges were dropped, this time for lack of evidence. Three years after that he was apprehended once more, again with a weapon, but this time in possession of 3,000 kilos of foreign cigarettes. Cigarette smuggling is still a key activity for organised crime today, and the system tends to work like this. Senior criminals make perfectly legal deals with major cigarette manufacturers to deliver massive amounts of cigarettes to a third country. In turn these items are then taken to sea and unloaded from cargo ships onto speedboats just outside Italian territorial waters, and then the illegal cargo speeds to land and is distributed up and down the country, although mainly in the south. The reason is that the government has a monopoly on cigarette sales in Italy and imposes a huge duty on top of the manufacturers’ prices. Once the price of duty is avoided, these cigarettes can be sold for close to half the legal price, all the while guaranteeing big profits for the criminal gangs that distribute them.
Far greater profits could be made dealing in drugs rather than cigarettes. In 1951 an American police report named than cigarettes. In 1951 an American police report named kilo consignment of heroin to the US. The following year an Italian police investigation states that he was involved in a drug smuggling ring with other top criminals, such as Frank Coppola. One of the ways that drugs were moved was through the easy access to fruit and vegetable markets in both the US and Italy. Police eventually discovered a ‘drugged oranges’ trade in 1959; drugs were injected into the base of oranges, thus doubling their weight and making them ‘pregnant’ until their ‘birth’ on the other side of the Atlantic. This system was virtually global: the raw material was shipped from Syria and Turkey to the Sicilian coasts, where the speedboats sometimes used for illegal fishing brought it ashore and into citrus groves. Then certain oranges were injected, placed in crates, and sent on to Palermo for export. The other up-and-coming Mafioso in Cinisi, Procopio Di Maggio, had links with other Mafiosi who had also been at the Hotel Delle Palme summit, so a completely alternative route existed as well.
Although Badalamenti had already been arrested and charged several times, he was yet to spend a long time in jail. Not only were the police aware of his charmed life, but local people too had started to realise he was close to being untouchable. In 1957 he was believed to have stolen five head of cattle from one family, and 13 from another. These actions probably weren’t directly important from a financial point of view, but their purpose was probably broader: to show people who was in charge. Gaspare Cucinella recalls an event from the same period: ‘One day, for some reason or other, he wanted to show he was boss of the whole town. So he took all his cows down into town and let them drink from the fountain outside the town hall. Nobody said a word against him.’ Not for nothing did an Anti-Mafia Commission report comment years later: ‘Due to the iron law of silence in this situation, out of fear of even worse reprisals, injured parties sometimes do not even report crimes. In any event, they never voice their suspicions.’ This is why, a year after the 1957 Hotel Delle Palme summit, a police headquarters report could say of Badalamenti: ‘due to his past and his violence he represents an important figure in the local underworld. So much so that local people fear him to the extent that they prefer to silently accept his bullying and crimes due to their fear of vendettas and retaliation.’
Once again, individual words are important: Badalamenti isn’t defined as being a member of the Mafia but of the underworld. Decades were to pass before membership of the Mafia was made a criminal offence; decades were to pass too before a verdict was reached in a courtroom that an organisation known as the Mafia even existed. In a notorious case in 1975, a Communist politician had accused a former Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo of being a Mafioso, the mayor had then sued for libel. During the hearing, when the defence lawyer asked the former mayor whether he was a Mafioso or not, the judge ruled the question out of order. There was a criminal conspiracy amongst the powerful, not only in a legal sense, but also in a political and moral sense, to keep all of this quiet – often because these influential people had links with top gang leaders or were prepared to come to an arrangement with them sometimes, particularly during elections if they were politicians.
So, legally it was as a simple criminal, rather than as a Mafioso, that Badalamenti continued his life of crime. In September 1961 two murders were committed in Cinisi, and it was widely believed Badalamenti was responsible for them – the two victims were viewed as being ‘guilty’ of getting ideas above their station. But once again Badalamenti wasn’t convicted. Unusually for a mere cattle farmer, he now owned a car, in which, according to the police: ‘he often travels from one town to another committing all kinds of crimes, thus becoming one of the most influential and dangerous members of the Cinisi underworld’.
The following month the police reported that Badalamenti had met top Mafia leaders at Palermo Airport, and in February 1962 he was again spotted by the police at a Mafia summit in Rome. The new airport, opened in 1960, was within Cinisi’s council boundaries, and in later years became a Badalamenti stronghold. His family owned a nearby mountain that was the only local source of rock, gravel and sand in the area, and very quickly Don Tano came to own two construction companies, a concrete factory and fleet of lorries. The authorities believed Badalamenti was coordinating links between the Sicilian and American Mafias, yet despite all of this he was convicted of hardly any of the crimes for which he was arrested and charged. Local people saw that he lived a charmed life, that he was untouchable.
His influence and eyes must have been everywhere; indeed, his black eyes burned like lump
s of coal. As somebody once said of him: ‘In Cinisi a leaf didn’t move without Don Tano knowing about it.’ Photographs from back then show him often dressing as a typical peasant, in an ordinary jacket and cloth cap, although on special occasions he wore a suit and sunglasses. Over the years his face became burnt by the sun and grizzled, like that of most Sicilians – yet this was a man who operated on a global scale. His behaviour in public, particularly at trials, was both courteous and grave, he acted like a real ‘man of honour’. His measured response to any question or comment, often answered indirectly, meant that people hung on his every word, simply because they knew how powerful he was.
But when his boss Cesare Manzella was blown up in 1963 during the First Mafia War, the leaves stopped moving. Badalamenti went on the run for six years and disappeared from his hometown.
5
It’s in the Air that You Breathe
Fifteen miles to the west of Palermo, the town of Cinisi is like many in Sicily: small, isolated and – particularly in the summer heat – sleepy. Like other towns it is
also claustrophobic, everybody knows everybody else, and everybody often knows everybody else’s business. People talk, maybe not in front of you, but they talk. You sense it when you’re walking along the streets, in the way people look at you. Some give you friendly glances if you know them, others greet you in an apparently friendly way, but you can see a knowing or penetrating look in their eyes.
If people don’t know you then their gaze is even more inquisitive, searching and invariably hostile. If you’re an outsider arriving by car, by the time you’ve locked the door many people have registered your alien presence. All of this surveying happens from two vantage points: people looking out from shops or at tables outside of bars, or in hot weather people sitting on chairs on their doorsteps. You are being watched all the time, there is no escape from the equivalent of hundreds of ‘smart’ CCTV cameras. Even houses with closed doors can be observation posts: you can easily imagine people peering at you from between the slats of their window blinds.
Lots of communication takes place without words, as one Cinisi resident put it: ‘Our culture is one in which nobody talks but everybody knows everything. It’s as if there are some magnetic waves.’ Everyday activity is often highly symbolic. Because everybody knows everything, you know that one supermarket is run by a Mafioso and one isn’t. The same goes for the butcher, or the petrol station, or the numerous bars on the main street.
Felicetta Vitale’s family has been running a bar on the main street for nearly fifty years. Things haven’t changed very much from the 1960s and 1970s she remembers:
Back then every bar had its own clientele: there was the Bar Palazzolo on the corner of the town square – that was the bar for the ‘gentlemen’ of the town. The Bar Roma was across the street, and it was the students’ bar. Halfway down there were another two bars, one in front of the other. One was the Maltese, which was used by cattle farmers, whereas opposite it, the Mastrominico – which has now become a pub – was used by building workers and manual labourers. Right at the bottom there were another two bars which were frequented by truck drivers, since they were very close to the main road.
This was how the town was divided: these were your reference points. However, over time two groups – workers and students – started to mingle.
The town has always been divided, but the walls and fences are in people’s minds. If a member of a Mafia family gets a top-up for their mobile from a non-Mafia shop it’s a significant event. Maybe they’re making a statement, or sending a message – but what is it? Is it friendly or aggressive? Alternatively, if a non-Mafia man suddenly goes for a drink in a Mafia bar he doesn’t make that move by chance, he has a very good reason and will set people wondering why he has broken the habits of a lifetime. Growing up in Sicily, people understand what talking to
Mafiosi can lead to. According to Giuseppe Nobile from the nearby town of Partinico, this means that the underlying meaning of communication between ordinary people and a Mafia family can be the complete opposite of what it appears to be:
People’s common sense is not to criticise them publicly, but to keep well away from them. This is the average way of thinking for ordinary Sicilians, poor Sicilians. You try to keep as far away from them as possible, because getting involved with them socially or economically only creates problems.
Formally, the normal behaviour of ordinary people is one of extreme respect, without ever challenging their social authority. For example, if a Mafioso is arrested and his wife is left on her own, when her next-door neighbour meets her she will express her sympathy, her understanding. But she is going through the motions, she doesn’t really feel like this. If he’s really in serious trouble you show all the sympathy in the world, but underneath you’re happy.
Even a simple gesture like saying hello to people is a minefield; just by greeting a Mafioso you can risk being sucked into their web. By saying hello to someone you know – a perfectly normal thing to do – you are sending a message to that person and to anyone else who sees that gesture. A Mafioso may then want to develop that relationship. So the next time he might stop for a chat, the third time offer to buy you a coffee in a bar. At that point a threshold is crossed, but not only that of a bar. You have accepted that person up until then, said hello to him, chatted together, there is no reason in the world why you shouldn’t have a drink with him. But that level of friendship means something, and its existence is noted by many others. You can’t deny it, nor say it was imposed on you – you are now friends with this person.
The way a long-time opponent of the Mafia, Piero Impastato, puts it, is that: ‘The Mafia wants to create consensus. It wants everybody to say hello to each other, so we’re all in things together. It’s as if Cinisi is the sea, and they’re fish swimming around in it.’ In a way, the Mafia wants to create the illusion that there are no divisions, that everybody shares the same traditional values of family and religion.
The Mafia wants to embody society’s traditions and show its members as generous and caring people. To do this, the society they live in has to accept them and not ostracise them. This is why getting people to say hello to them is important. Piero recalls how his relative and Mafia patriarch used to behave: ‘Don Masi Impastato always used to watch you when you saw him, to see whether you said hello or not. If you didn’t you were rude, a bad person, if you did you were a good guy – but it was always down to you to make the first move.’ What these behavioural patterns reveal is the mental discipline imposed, as well as a broad social conditioning. But there is also the more subtle mechanism by which the Mafia are trying to dictate everyday social activities.
Once you’ve started acknowledging Mafiosi, the only way back is to suddenly start completely ignoring them. But exactly when do you start doing that? And what do you do if you’re with your mother and she says hello to a Mafioso?
Giovanni Impastato, one of two brothers who are central to this whole story, remembers his early years in Cinisi thus: ‘Growing up as a kid you just breathed Mafia. I played with relatives of Procopio Di Maggio and many other Mafiosi. But later on we each made our own choices and went our separate ways.’ Pino Manzella, another man who started to oppose the Mafia in the 1960s, points out the difficulty of completely keeping your distance if a town is dominated by Mafiosi: ‘For many years I never said hello to these kinds of people. But, after while, you end up ignoring nearly everyone!’ It is so difficult to make a break because to be surrounded by the Mafia in towns such as Cinisi is normal: ‘When you’re growing up in a town like this you simply come across the Mafia because it’s in the air that you breathe.’
Cinisi
The central focus of Cinisi, if it has one, is the town hall and the small square outside it. The building is a former monastery, but more than anything else the town is shaped by the main street, Corso Umberto I. Named after King Humbert I, it is normally abbreviated to Corso; it is the only wide street in the town, and like mos
t others, it runs down from the high part of the town towards the sea. Like some streets in capital cities – such as O’Connell Street in Dublin – it is where all of the most major events have taken place.
What happens and who you see on the Corso depends on the time of day. At about 8am men start to appear and slowly congregate in groups. They are either elderly, that is pensioners, or younger and unemployed. In essence they have been chucked out of the house until lunchtime so women can do the cleaning and cooking. It gets busier as the shops open, and you start to see more women, either shopping or serving customers. The street bustles until 1pm and then suddenly empties. It’s lunchtime: the shop shutters are pulled down and people go home to eat and snooze, and nothing much happens until about 4pm. By this time people who work in the public sector have finished work, and they are joined by others who work outside town. So there are another three or four hours of activity until the shops shut again, but after that the Corso is dotted by groups of teenagers for another three hours – bored just as teenagers get bored in any other town in the world. And just as in any other main street, they watch enviously as big cars and motorcycles drive by.
As you walk up the Corso, your eyes are naturally drawn upwards, to the end – the council building housed in the former monastery. Just above it, closing in your vision, are two mountain slopes that sweep down in a V-shape. Depending on the time of year, if you look in that direction early in the morning you’re blinded, as the sun rises from behind one of the mountains. But if you’re going down the Corso towards the sea you’re sometimes faced with a peculiar sight: aircraft passing from right to left, lifting off into the air at a point that looks like the end of the street. This is Palermo Airport: first opened with two runways in 1960, followed by a third in 1968; it falls within the northern part of Cinisi’s municipal boundaries.