Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  There was another quite fundamental reason why no building company could avoid dealing with the Mafia: they had a stranglehold over the supply of raw materials – hard core, cement, sand, tiles, marble and fittings. And while it was virtually physically impossible to use heavy supplies or equipment from outside the area, if companies did try to use non-Mafia suppliers they frequently found their sites suffered mysterious fires or bomb attacks; the dynamite used within Mafia-controlled quarries could easily be put to other uses outside. And if these small building companies and their owners did anything else the Mafia disapproved of, they could stop supplying them with these essential goods and create serious problems for them. In one way or another all building work was closely connected to the Mafia.

  It was a sign of the increasing maturity of Peppino and his group that they were able to work with the CGIL union federation, despite the fact that this union was closely allied to the Communist Party. Historically the CGIL had been a militant union, and many members were still very radical, so this local collaboration may well have happened because the Communist Party was no longer interested in leading militant struggles. Pino Vitale, a short and straight-talking electrician who worked at the airport and was a union activist, recalls the dispute beginning for the following reason: ‘It started because Napoleone, a building worker and member of the Communist Party, couldn’t really get his party interested.’

  Demanding better pay and conditions for hundreds of building workers meant working towards a situation where these people didn’t feel obliged to work under Mafia conditions – in broader terms this is one of the basic changes that needs to be made to remove the influence of organised crime. Therefore a union leaflet was distributed demanding an end to casualisation:

  Building workers – our working and living conditions have always suffered from the most inhuman exploitation. The majority of us has never been on the books, never had

  any help with illnesses or accidents, has always worked in unsafe and unhealthy conditions – without insurance. Now is the time to bring this to an end! We are getting organised to demand our rights and satisfy our needs. This is what we want:

  1) Hiring to be carried out legally.

  2) The 40 hour week to be respected.

  3) Appropriate payment of overtime (35 per cent extra).

  The impact was huge, as Pino Vitale remembers: ‘The fact that these workers were insisting they be put on the books was something almost unheard of in Cinisi.’ But they went further, as he explains: ‘We put up a poster denouncing the involvement of the local job centre in sending people to those jobs. The manager was a fascist, who afterwards had to resign.’ These young activists were no longer just shouting the odds about Marx or Mao; they were starting to make changes in the town.

  From just a few individuals trying to organise workers into gaining their rights, by the end of 1973 several meetings had been held, and there was a group of 90–100 young building workers committed to fighting for their rights. The demands they were making were threatening the entire structure of economic and social power in the town; in essence they wanted to transfer a significant amount of wealth from unscrupulous employers and Mafiosi to ordinary working people.

  The Mafia weren’t going to ignore all this. Piero Impastato, another activist and distant relative of Peppino, recalls: ‘I remember I once went with Peppino to a meeting he held with about 50 building workers at the airport, and as he was speaking Giuseppe Finazzo walked in. Not only did he have his own building company, he was also Badalamenti’s right-hand man. He just looked around, he had only turned up to see who was there.’

  Who knows whether Peppino realised that history was virtually repeating itself? Twenty-five years earlier, in 1948, the Communist Stefano Venuti had experienced almost exactly the same kind of indirect intimidation from Mafia boss Procopio Di Maggio, in a similar situation with workers trying to win their legal rights. The key turning point came when a leaflet was produced calling a demonstration outside the council building in a week’s time.

  Suddenly the parents of many of the young building workers started getting knocks on the door. When they opened them they were told: ‘You’d better watch out for your son, he’s mixing with bad company, he could end up getting hurt.’ Who was making the threats? According to Pino Vitale:

  Pressure was applied on families either by the employers, or by the Mafia. Parents would then say to their sons: ‘Now that you’ve got involved with the Communists, you’ll never work again’. This was a real worry for people from an agricultural background, because after the building of the third runway many of them were forced to emigrate. Some people had even died of a broken heart because they had lost the very land that had allowed them to raise an entire family.

  Whether the employers were closely linked to the Mafia or not didn’t really matter – what mattered was the reality of capitalism, as Vitale explains: ‘You couldn’t prove employers were linked to the Mafia. But they were all in competition with each other, and they all tried to lower their costs.’ And by the same token, people were frightened for two different reasons: fear of the Mafia and fear of losing their job.

  That was the ‘scattergun’ approach to workers and their families. Another approach was to target individual activists such as Peppino Impastato by sending them threatening letters. Pino Vitale also received one of these letters:

  We’re writing you this letter to tell you something. Above all we’re telling you a friend of yours (Impastato) has already received a letter like this. We are people who earn our daily bread and you Communists want to take it away from us. But we’re telling you and all Communists to lay

  off the builders. We’re ready to do anything if you carry on we’ll act straight away. And we’re not afraid because many political forces are behind us. You, Impastato and others have played games with us builders. So now we’ve decided to blow up the house where you have your club and then it’ll be your turn. So lay off the builders once and for all and let us get on with our work. If we get to hear lots of things about you and we’ve got spies who tell us then we’ll start threatening again. It’s not us who exploits the lads but it’s you lot who keep on causing aggro! Now we’re watching everything you do so be careful the whole lot of you not to make any false moves.

  Goodbye, and watch what you’re doing with the builders.

  A group of workers Threats to blow up a building, in a town where the local Mafia boss had been murdered in a car bomb just a few years earlier, were chillingly realistic. The precise comments relating to Pino Vitale’s activities contained in this second letter could only convince him he was being closely watched:

  We’ve been told that you’re a Communist too. You’ve been warned to lay off the builders but instead you’ve made up leaflets and we’ve seen you. You’re going to pay for this you have to stop fuckin’ bothering us. You’ve got to pack it in and from now on you’re going to pay for it. We’ll take action personally against you or the house where you go with the builders. You’ve got a job what the fuck are you interested in the builders for why don’t you stop turning builders into Communists. Anyway from now on you’re all going to pay students Communists builders. As soon as we move we’re sure you’ll lay off the builders.

  Down with the Communists

  A group of workers The bad language, both in the sense of swearwords and poor grammar, makes the letters seem like genuine threats. They could have been written by some of the ‘reputable’ small building companies or by Mafiosi – there was no way of knowing. Not only were the Mafia more than capable of carrying out these threats, very few people felt the police would investigate seriously or could offer meaningful protection.

  The campaign quickly collapsed. The demonstration planned outside the council building was called off. Many people involved in the campaign then had to engage in the schizophrenic communication used in Mafia towns. They endured a painful ritual of pretending they didn’t know fellow activists when they met them. By o
penly ignoring friends, frightened campaigners were trying to send a public message to the people who were threatening them that they had stopped working together.

  It was clearly a defeat for these young activists. But this was now the second broad campaign in which they had played a leading role, and this one had threatened the economic interests of some Mafiosi. The stakes had been raised on both sides – but what caused Peppino to become such a committed anti-Mafia campaigner at such a young age?

  The Impastato Brothers: One Down, One to Go

  Peppino turned 20 in 1968. Perhaps it was the tensions in his family life that led him to both study far more than most other people, and on a personal level to be rather withdrawn and serious. He had enrolled at Palermo University in 1966 and started to take courses but two years later many universities in Italy and around the world were in turmoil. Peppino later looked back on that period thus: ‘1968 caught me by surprise. I took part in the early student struggles and occupations chaotically. And once again, I came to agree with the ideas of one of the groups more on an emotional than a political level.’

  He is painfully honest with himself – part of his interest in politics was the search for an emotional substitute for his disturbed family life. He once wrote a poem in his diary:

  A long dividing wall

  So long you cannot see the end A chorus of yellowed skulls: ‘We shall not have love’

  Leaving all these personal considerations aside, Peppino and others were deadly serious about turning the world upside down, and to do that they had to agree on how that would be done. So, not surprisingly, there was a lot of discussion about what kind of organisation and party was needed. As he says, this was: ‘a time of arguments about the party – what it meant and how it should be built. It was an amazing and fascinating period of theoretical discussion.’ But it was also difficult for him: ‘I didn’t speak to anyone for days, then when I came up with new ideas I became happy again. I was going through a period of uncontrollable schizophrenia.’

  For several years after 1968 Peppino and others joined, left and created a whole range of local and national political parties and organisations. Once again he reveals the schizophrenic nature of his life, defining this period: ‘Maybe this was the most heartbreaking and exciting time of my life and of my political activity.’

  His mother, who didn’t see him nearly as much as she would have liked, used to worry: He didn’t accept this society, he used to study all the time. My brother, who was well off, allowed him to keep studying because he paid his fees and his living expenses, everything. He had his head into politics, he hardly thought about anything else.

  Sometimes I would ask him: ‘Peppino, what do you do in the evenings?’ And he’d answer: ‘Nothing, I kill time.’ And I’d answer him: ‘Don’t get into trouble. You know you can’t do that.’ ‘Why can’t I do that?’ ‘Because you belong to a Mafia family – and you can’t act on what you’re saying.’

  Felicia was trying to face two ways at the same time: looking after her son and being a dutiful wife to her Mafia husband. But she was trying to reconcile what could not be reconciled; despite the fact she was both mother and wife she couldn’t bring her family together. It was unthinkable that Luigi Impastato would change his Mafia ways, so as long as Peppino carried on with his political activity nobody would have a normal family life.

  The only time Luigi Impastato really worried about his son’s activities was before local council elections. His mother remembers that Luigi would ask his son to come round and tell him:

  ‘You know the elections are on, careful what you get up to, don’t talk about the Mafia. If you had got a degree, my friends would have . . .’ ‘Your friends? You think I want a job from them? I’d rather die of hunger than take a job from one of your friends.’ They used to shout at each other . . . He’d tell him to his face: ‘They disgust me, I can’t stand them.’ . . . So then he said: ‘get out’.

  So she was forced to have a secret relationship with her son, almost as if they were illicit lovers, and would literally watch the clock when he came round:

  Giovanni was at the shop with his father and Peppino and I were at home by ourselves. I used to run a bath for him, always on the quiet. I’d say to him: ‘Get a move on!’ He finished his bath, put on his clean clothes and left. Or he used to come round to eat, when I got his lunch ready for 1pm. I used to bung the pasta in and set the table: meat, fruit. ‘Get a move on, in case your dad comes.’ He would finish eating and leave.

  Indeed when they used to argue about Peppino, Luigi would sometimes say to his wife: ‘You’re married to your son!’ Even without Peppino in the house, and the best efforts of Felicia, the tension was tremendous. As she explains: ‘My husband’s relatives used to tell him what Peppino was doing . . . they couldn’t stand him’.

  As is so often the case, Giovanni stood in the shadow of his older brother. He had a stark choice in front of him: either behave like his father or like his brother. While he never took on his father’s views, in his adolescence he never made exactly the same kind of choices that Peppino had. Although Giovanni nearly always speaks in calm and measured tones, he is as brutally honest about himself as his brother is:

  I was part of the group that Peppino managed to organise at the end of the 1960s, even though I never had a leading role. We had a love-hate relationship, because we had completely different personalities. He had studied much more than me, and knew a lot more. He was also much more extrovert, whereas I was still a teenager. I had a girlfriend, I used to go dancing, I liked to have a good time.

  Peppino and I didn’t live together for a long time, it was just one phase of our lives. Yet after he was kicked out of the house I always felt the absence of my brother strongly. But we would meet up outside – and I always shared his ideas and political decisions.

  I had a good relationship with my mum but not with my father, it annoyed me he had kicked Peppino out of the house. I had already worked out he was a Mafioso, and I didn’t share his values or his way of behaving. He was very authoritarian towards me, he wasn’t open to any discussion with me. He simply tried to impose his values and lifestyle on his sons. The problem is that he couldn’t really convince us – at the end of the day a Mafioso isn’t used to in-depth discussion. He simply tried to impose himself on us, and this really annoyed Peppino because he could see he was living with the Mafia.

  Although they might be crude and violent, one thing Mafiosi aren’t is stupid. Giovanni’s father understood that he had ‘lost’ Peppino, but also that his younger son was different, and here he saw an opening to apply classic Mafia pressure, as Giovanni relates:

  He understood I didn’t have the same dynamic and adventurous character as Peppino, he could see I was much more docile and soft. To some extent his tactics worked because I was a bit afraid. He often warned me: ‘be careful’, adding that if I went the same way as my brother I could lose everything. If I did what he told me to he could guarantee me a life without any problems. All of this was going on when I was 18 or 19, and he was sure of himself. Even though he knew I agreed with Peppino, and didn’t agree with him, he was sure that I would never betray him, and never leave home like he did.

  One of the key arguments used by the Mafia is respect for traditional family values. Giovanni accepted this, but not because he agreed with his father’s attitudes. As he explains, much of his thinking came out consideration for his mother and brother: ‘Although he dominated me there was another reason I behaved like this – I wanted to keep a minimum level of contact with him to try and limit the damage Peppino’s traumatic situation had created within the family. So I tried to compromise and keep things on an even keel.’

  To the extent that these three members of the Impastato family lived together, Giovanni’s line of thinking worked. Yet while the good ship Impastato may have more or less kept an even keel, Peppino was outside rocking it furiously, and the boat itself was adrift in a stormy sea of Mafia activity.

 
9

  Capo of the Commission

  The Return of the Commission

  The ‘Commission’ had been set up on the advice of ItalianAmerican gangsters way back in 1957. An organisation such as the Mafia, based in a society rapidly changing from farming to industry and services, needed to move with the times. Things had to be organised, coordinated, agreed upon. Criminal activities such as drug or cigarette smuggling, or large building projects, required very considerable amounts of money, so ‘joint ventures’ between rival gangs were needed, as were banks – and in this period many new banks were founded with Mafia money.

  But then came the First Mafia War of 1962–63, culminating in the massacre of seven policemen. The Italian establishment woke up from its slumber and had to be seen to be doing something against the Mafia. Consequently, over a hundred people faced the first ever ‘maxi trial’ held in Catanzaro, but when the verdict was reached in December 1968, 114 out of 141 Mafiosi were cleared, including Tano Badalamenti, who was acquitted in absentia because he was on the run. A few leaders were given long sentences but most defendants were released because they had already spent a long period in jail.

  So by early 1969 the coast was clear again, and Badalamenti duly resurfaced in July. But none of these shrewd leaders would have broken cover if another condition hadn’t been created: a pax mafiosa – Mafia peace. Lots of people had seen their best friends or family members gunned down, and if anybody thought people were still harbouring grudges none of these wily old foxes would have ever crept out of the undergrowth.