Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  The building of the airport meant the economy started to change, the new jobs that were being created were no longer related to agriculture. Construction work was managed by Mafia-controlled contractors, so for the first time Mafiosi became employers in an area of high unemployment. Piero Impastato, a distant relative of Peppino, remembers when as a child he used to visit ‘the patriarch of Cinisi’ with his family:

  When my family went to visit Don Masi Impastato they generally used to chat and play cards. After a while, I noticed Don Masi was always surrounded by young people and I thought: ‘What the fuck are these young guys doing here? They’re talking to an old man!’ Afterwards I worked it out: given that in our area there’s always been a lot of unemployment, you either emigrate, get someone to put a word in for you somewhere in the public sector, or you become part of the Mafia. There really is no other escape route. So these people were turning up to ask him to put a word in somewhere.

  Work on the airport was completed on time, and the first flight landed from Rome on the evening of 1 January 1960. Interestingly enough, at a press conference the captain said: ‘We didn’t know there was a mountain so close’, and was overheard talking to his co-pilot about a ‘crazy wind’. Three weeks later a flight from Naples suffered terrible air turbulence during its approach and the captain refused to land, flying to another airport.

  Maybe the airport needed a third runway which ran in a different direction? Why not? It would mean another round of huge public sector contracts. This wasn’t such a mad idea – a few miles away in Palermo all manner of tricks were being pulled in the name of progress and economic development.

  The ‘Sack of Palermo’

  Until his murder in 1992, Salvo Lima had enjoyed forty very successful years in Sicilian politics. A tall distinguishedlooking man with wavy white hair, the great enigma was that in all this time he probably made less than a dozen public speeches – yet he always received more votes than any other Christian Democrat politician in Sicily.

  He became mayor of Palermo for the first time in 1958, aged just 30, holding office continuously until 1963, and again in 1965 to 1966. In 1968 he stood for parliament, made no campaign speeches, but received a massive 80,000 first-preference votes. After being re-elected several times, he stood for the European parliament in 1979. Yet, just three years earlier, the Italian parliament’s permanent AntiMafia Commission had released a mammoth report into the Mafia, the result of ten years’ research, which saw Lima’s name mentioned 149 times. But such ‘guilt by association’ did nothing to slow Lima’s career; if anything the opposite happened. In 1983 two finance police reports named him as being involved in arms trafficking to members of the Mafia, yet the following year he was re-elected with an avalanche of 246,000 preference votes.

  Lima’s charmed career is a warning against the simplistic arguments that the Mafia can be defeated by electing honest politicians. The majority of people voting for Lima probably presumed he was a Mafioso, and voted for him because they thought that both he and the Mafia could do something for them. The way politics can work in Sicily is that being linked to the Mafia doesn’t necessarily mean people won’t vote for you – it often means they will – in the hope of personal gain rather than out of fear.

  Lima’s most notorious contribution to Mafia power coincided with his term of office as mayor of the Sicilian capital, a period known as ‘the sack of Palermo’ due to the destruction of much of the city’s architectural heritage and its replacement with ugly blocks of flats. Lima was operating in a situation where there was a huge demand for houses, Sicilians were leaving an unproductive countryside and looking for better-paid public sector and service jobs in Palermo. People – including the Mafia – were following the money.

  The trick was how to award huge building contracts to your friends, who obviously couldn’t actually appear to be in control of the contracts because of their criminal reputation. So, of the total of 4,205 building licences granted by Palermo council from 1959 to 1963, an incredible 80 per cent went to just five people. These individuals were later described in an official report as being: ‘retired persons, of modest means, none with any experience in the building trade, and who, evidently, simply lent their names to the real builders’. They were prestanomi, literally ‘name lenders’. Indeed one of these pensioners later got a job as the doorkeeper of one of the blocks of flats he was supposed to have built. It was relatively easy for the many brand-new building companies to obtain credit from banks, generally they found a friendly face at those newly created banks that were being founded by the most forward-looking Mafiosi.

  Because of all the dirty tricks and creative accounting, costs and profits were inflated. Around this period the budget for street maintenance in Palermo was 4.4 billion lire, yet in a similar-sized city, Bologna, it was 500 million – Palermo cost nine times more. It was the same for sewer and drain maintenance: 6 billion in Palermo against 200 million in Bologna – 30 times higher. Not only were consumers paying way over the odds, but the centre of Palermo was ruined. One example was Villa Deliella, a building protected due to its ‘significant artistic value’. On 29 November 1959 Prince Lanza di Scalea applied to demolish it, permission was granted by the council immediately, and that night the bulldozers moved in and destroyed it.

  Mafiopoli

  But what had Gaetano Badalamenti been up to for the last six years? Even today, nobody knows for certain. One thing that is sure is that he was developing his drugs trade with the US. In 1968 Italian police had charged two Italian Americans linked to Badalamenti with running a heroin distribution ring out of a pizzeria in Himroad Street, New York. Three years later an even bigger network was unearthed. The basic mechanism was Roma Foods, which distributed food to over 650 restaurants and pizzerias. Another was the Piancone Pizza Palaces chain, all owned by two of Badalamenti’s nephews. It was in a New Jersey Pizza Palace that the biggest heroin seizure so far ever discovered was made by police – 86 kilos sent by Badalamenti.

  Wherever he was, Badalamenti definitely knew about the development of the new airport, as well as the nearby ‘sack of Palermo’. It is equally certain that somebody of his criminal stature would have been wheeling and dealing with important people. What’s also sure is that at some stage Badalamenti became friends with the Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio, often described as the ‘financial lungs’ of the Christian Democrat Party. One of the Mafia’s top supergrasses, Antonino Calderone, described the Salvos very differently: ‘The Salvo cousins were the richest men in Italy and they were both men of honour. They were in a position to dictate things to ministers . . . The Salvos were introduced to me by Gaetano Badalamenti, who was both proud and jealous of his friendship.’

  Under Italian law Sicily is defined as a ‘special region’, and has many central powers devolved locally, one of them being tax collection. Whereas in the rest of Italy tax collectors like the Salvo cousins cost the state an average of 3.3 per cent of the revenue collected, in Sicily the Salvos got away with keeping 10 per cent of the money they had amassed. They were also allowed to hold on to the actual revenue for inordinately long periods, thus effectively enjoying huge interest-free loans.

  This is how they were able to become leading landowners, hotel operators, wine producers and real estate developers in Sicily. They were active within the party, and in all likelihood gave certain Christian Democrat leaders large private donations. The Salvos were also able to deliver a significant number of votes to party candidates in their home town. And the party gave things in return. One of the most notorious examples was the La Zagarella hotel just outside Palermo. At 1970s prices, it cost $15 million to build, but the Salvos put up just $600,000 of their own money. The rest came from public funds, controlled by the Christian Democrats. Fittingly, this was the hotel where the dominant party in government and their associates held their luxury receptions and weddings. It was also where they staged their big political meetings, at which they would invite seven-times Prime Minister Giulio
Andreotti. For slightly more intimate parties, they kept a 26-metre yacht moored in Palermo harbour, aboard which were paintings by Van Gogh and Matisse.

  Then there was the huge estate of thousands of acres near the town of Gela, and according to a supergrass: They transformed it without spending a penny of their own money. They got loans from banks, then they did the paperwork to exploit that EU law, and got the money back they had been loaned . . . Just imagine, they diverted a river and got it to pass through this big wine grove, creating six or seven small artificial lakes. Then they installed some huge pumps which irrigated the entire estate with water from the lakes. And these lakes were no joke: Nino drove me around them in a jeep and boasted that the whole operation was the apple of his eye. And he hadn’t paid a thing.

  Back in the early 1960s police reports were already describing the Salvo cousins as Mafiosi who were sons of Mafiosi, but they had reached such a level of wealth, power and respectability that they had become untouchable.

  Apart from drug running, for people such as Badalamenti this is where the big money could be made – getting contracts and grants from public funds. This meant rubbing shoulders with the great and the good. After all, rich people who are corrupt need someone important to recycle or look after their money. In this period most top Mafiosi had their companies registered at the offices of Giuseppe Mandalari, who had been a parliamentary candidate for the fascist MSI party in 1972.

  The other great institution and power broker in Italian society was the Church. The supergrass Antonino Calderone recalls that at the end of the 1960s Badalamenti invited him to lunch in Cinisi. The reason was to ask whether he could hide Luciano Leggio, but as he put the question a priest walked in, and Badalamenti immediately introduced him to the others as a ‘man of honour’, a Mafioso. This was Agostino Coppola, parish priest of Carini, a town on the other side of Mount Pecoraro, and cousin of top US mobster Frank ‘Three Fingers’ Coppola.

  Agostino Coppola had his uses, such as christening children and performing wedding services for notorious gangsters on the run, such as Totò Riina’s marriage in 1974 – a few years later Riina became leader of the Mafia, a position he held until his arrest in January 1993. But Coppola also had a more earthly importance, such as acting as a go-between and negotiator; on more than one occasion such a respected member of the community picked up a ransom payment during a Mafia kidnap. The fact that he was seen more than once at Mafia summits in Milan showed that he was far more than just a convenient cover or courier – he was a senior and active Mafia member. On the other side of Mount Pecoraro, the Church was equally compromised, as one anti-Mafia activist comments: ‘I used to see the archbishop of Cinisi arm in arm with Giuseppe Finazzo’, one of Badalamenti’s most trusted lieutenants. There was a rumour in Cinisi that this priest allowed Luciano Leggio to hide out in his church. In any event, it is hard not to disagree with the following comment: ‘As for taking care of people’s souls, the Mafia here in Cinisi have always been very good!’

  But where had Badalamenti been hiding for the last six years? Again, nobody knows for sure. But in all likelihood he was often ‘hiding’ at home, in Cinisi.

  One of the young men in Cinisi who was starting to rebel against his Mafia background remembered that during this time: ‘Very often I used to see these police – and this was something that annoyed me intensely – going off to have a coffee with Mafiosi. Sometimes people might say “what does that prove?”, but to me and lots of other people it was obvious what going to the bar with Mafiosi meant, everyone knew they were Mafiosi.’ He was right. In a Mafiaridden town, for a policeman to go to a bar with a Mafioso means the same thing as handing over the keys to the jail. The important thing about it was that everybody saw it happening and understood what it meant – that these people were friends, they would help each other out. A wellknown opponent of the Mafia remembers: ‘The police never had any problems with the Mafiosi, they had problems with us! So people used to see who the authorities dealt with and drew their own conclusions.’ All these messages came over clearer than front-page headlines in a newspaper, because everybody in town followed the local gossip.

  Badalamenti too once recalled a senior local officer thus: ‘when somebody wanted to have a coffee . . . he wanted to have a coffee. But only he would pay, he wouldn’t let anyone else pay.’ In always paying, the policeman wanted everyone to know that he intended to cultivate this relationship – for whatever reason.

  It is not surprising then, that according to another Mafia supergrass, it was widely known that Badalamenti and his gang: ‘had the police stations of Cinisi and Terrasini in their pocket’. So when Badalamenti was facing an arrest warrant: ‘sometimes he went on the run in Cinisi, particularly in the summer. It was quiet there, nobody went looking for him.’ Obscenity piles upon obscenity: through much of the 1960s police issued Badalamenti, of all people, with a gun licence.

  In a typically indirect manner, the Mafia would send messages to keen young officers who arrived in the town. Pino Manzella recalls:

  I always remember that back then, whenever a new police superintendent arrived, soon afterwards there was a bank robbery. The superintendent then somehow understood he had to behave in a certain way, and after that there were no more bank robberies, break-ins, etc etc. The bank robbery was a message which said: ‘unless you mind your own business, and allow us to mind ours, then there will be a lot more bank robberies.’ Sometimes a housebreaker would disappear. Rather than taking him to the police they would kill him and burn his car. So back then nothing ever happened, you could leave your door unlocked at night, nothing would happen. Things were totally calm here, but this was due more to the Mafia than the police . . .

  Such an arrangement helped the police, as it contributed to keeping the overall crime rate down, and for the Mafia it meant less patrols and investigations – and therefore better conditions to run their illegal businesses.

  Indeed, Salvatore Maltese, a long-term fascist councillor, recalled that other traditional ‘pillars of the community’ had a very small role to play: ‘There was a time here when lawyers had no work at all. This was because all disputes were settled by Mafiosi. Whenever there was a dispute over land boundaries, or problems between a man and a woman, or animals that had been stolen, people turned to them.’ But sometimes even Don Tano was unlucky enough to be arrested, although he was rarely charged and never convicted of a serious crime until the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, he would need inside help when he was in the Ucciardone, Palermo’s main jail – and here things become even more surprising.

  Back in the mid-1950s, Christian Democrat politicians such as Salvo Lima, following national party policy, launched big campaigns of ‘moralisation’ and ‘renewal’ within the party. One of these ‘renewers’ was a young doctor named Francesco Barbaccia, who when he first stood for parliament was completely unknown, gave no speeches, yet received the highest vote of all Christian Democrat candidates in Sicily. For several years he continued in the same vein, writing no articles and giving no speeches. What he got in exchange from Lima’s council for such commitment were favourable decisions on his building investments, and his brother was appointed leader of the council’s tourism committee.

  One thing Barbaccia did bother to do was write a letter supporting the passport application of one of the most powerful Mafia killers, Tommaso Buscetta, describing him as ‘a person who interests me a great deal’. Years later, as a supergrass, Buscetta revealed what the interest was – Buscetta would deliver thousands of votes to Barbaccia and help get him elected. But maybe Barbaccia’s heart wasn’t really in making money, or in helping Mafia killers, after all, he was a doctor. As well as being an MP for a decade, he also worked in Palermo prison from 1964 to 1993. Several supergrasses have confirmed that he was a Mafioso, probably part of Badalamenti’s clan, and would convey messages to and from prison inmates.

  Not for nothing did Felicia, mother of the two Impastato brothers, once say: ‘In Cinisi Don Tano protected p
eople who minded their own business, he helped people across the board, if they needed to go into hospital . . .’ – or any other favours. Councillor Maltese recounts one of many emblematic episodes:

  There was a retired police officer who wanted to place a water butt on the pavement outside the front of his house to collect water. He applied to the council but they turned him down. But he knew that Badalamenti had one outside his house, which had been authorised by the council. So he went to Badalamenti and said: ‘I know that for you I’m just a filthy cop, but how come they gave you permission and not me?’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told him, ‘I’ll sort it out.’ Then he phoned the council, which immediately granted permission – that’s the kind of atmosphere we lived in back then.

  Badalamenti and the authorities were two sides of the same coin. As Giovanni Impastato once testified to the Anti-Mafia Commission:

  It seems that Badalamenti was well-liked by the police as he was calm, reliable and always liked a chat. It almost felt like he was doing them a favour in that nothing ever happened in Cinisi, it was a quiet little town. If anything, we were subversives who made nuisances of ourselves. This was what the police thought. When I chanced to speak to one of them – something which didn’t happen often because I didn’t really trust them – I realised that it was a widely held belief that Tano Badalamenti was a gentleman and it was us who were the trouble-makers . . . I often used to see them walking arm in arm with Tano Badalamenti and his henchmen.

  Giovanni’s brother Peppino once coined a name that brought all these changes together – the fact that Sicily was becoming both urbanised and dominated by the Mafia. Whether it was Cinisi or Palermo, for many people the idea they were living in a ‘Mafiopoli’ wasn’t far wrong.