Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  Major gang leaders organised summit meetings. At one held in a Zurich hotel all the main bosses sat round and talked lots of issues through. Nearly all agreed with the slogans that were bandied about: ‘Peace, peace, peace! Let’s stop all the murders and move forward.’ Yet one boss didn’t utter a word throughout the entire discussion, Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco. At the end he said: ‘You’re making peace – do what you want – you’re the majority.’ It was clear that he mistrusted many of the people in the room but accepted that it was pointless to set himself against everyone else.

  Greco’s suspicions were soon justified. There was a huge shoot-out in December 1969 in which five Mafiosi died. But rather than the start of a new war it was really the end of the First Mafia War – the last score had been settled. The sign that things had moved on was that all major families contributed to the manpower needed for the strike force, led by a man from the town of Corleone, Totò Riina. In a climate of unity, but in perennial distrust of each other, the gangs moved forward.

  Representatives, or leaders, went to these summit meetings – yet what did they represent? It almost goes without saying that they represented gangs, but what defines a gang, or family? Where does one end and the other begin?

  Apart from blood links, what defines a Mafia gang is territorial control. The gang and their leader must have a physical presence, the existence of the Mafia is based on it being tangible although rarely visible, most of the time it is in your mind not in your eyes. So, once a group of people gain control of an area they become a gang. And to get in that position, they must have a fearsome reputation that intimidates everybody, to the extent that in reality they very rarely have to use violence. Controlling an area means earning a rake-off from all economic activities within it. If any gang wants to do anything in another one’s area they have to ask for permission. In short, controlling a territory means control over most of the legal and all of the illegal activities that are carried out there.

  This is why somebody like Gaetano Badalamenti became one of the three men to lead the new Commission. Don Tano had been boss in Cinisi since 1963 and partly thanks to him the town was experiencing a boom – most of it due to the drugs trade. If money was flowing in then Badalamenti was bound to be popular, and therefore could impose his control over the area fairly easily.

  Gaspare Cucinella remembers how he noticed these changes and what it meant for people who opposed the Mafia:

  Suddenly, out of the blue, people came back from the States and started saying, ‘take a trip to America, go on a trip to the States!’ Don Tano developed a system that couldn’t fail because people had so many relatives over there. Cinisi became a boomtown and people were saying: ‘God bless Don Tano’. People were building villas and all sorts. And this is why whoever spoke out against the Mafia was a shithead.

  Many local people, often women, became drug mules, flying from the local airport apparently to visit relatives in the United States. Felicia Impastato recalled some of the sociological changes the drugs boom produced:

  They never stopped. They came and went, came and went. One of them built a villa, and had a four-million-lira chandelier installed. What an ignoramus! Who is going to be visiting them – it’s not as if they ever organised huge society receptions. Four million! And whoever goes to

  visit them says: ‘Isn’t this chandelier beautiful?’ ‘It cost four million’. And these people want to pay any price for my cousin’s land, given that it’s near to theirs.

  Peasant families were building luxury villas. In just a few years some people moved from cohabiting with animals to living in accommodation with the most expensive fittings.

  Back in the centre of town this huge influx of money could be seen as well – by the early 1970s Cinisi was second only to Milan in terms of density of car ownership. Not many people could fail to see the shiny luxury cars parked outside the houses of Mafiosi, and news quickly spread about where the money had come from. After a lifetime, or even generations, of poverty, people flaunted their wealth, as Felicia describes: ‘everybody had their balconies open, and was sitting out. Others passed by in cars, others would walk around, because it’s a small town.’A few years later it emerged that over half of Cinisi families had a second car, and one-third had a house in the country.

  According to the supergrass Antonino Calderone, by early 1970: Gaetano Badalamenti became the most important person within Cosa Nostra. One of his first actions was to organise a series of attacks in Sicily to show everybody that the Mafia was back, stronger than ever. He often used to say: ‘We’ve got to bring Sicily back under our control. We’ve got to make ourselves heard. We’ve to chuck all policemen into the sea.’

  This is strategic thinking. Badalamenti saw that the Mafia had to create its own special brand of ‘public relations’. One way they announced their return was by exploding a bomb inside the Appeal Court buildings in Catania. The murder of an investigative journalist in 1970 and Judge Pietro Scaglione the following year were further signs of growing confidence and power. This latter murder was something quite rare and dangerous – a direct attack on a senior government figure – but Badalamenti quickly changed tack and tried to stop any head-on attacks on other important government figures.

  One of the reasons was that the Mafia was now an important player, not so much in the corridors of power, but in the back rooms. In the front rooms, or command centres of power, there was a lot of unease in the late 1960s. A mass student movement had exploded in 1968 and, far more worryingly, this had detonated a wave of general strikes. In France President de Gaulle temporarily fled the country at the height of the 1968 general strike, while in Italy fascists and their supporters within government had even taken the first steps towards launching a military coup in June 1964. Indeed in the summer of 1970 Tommaso Buscetta, Luciano Leggio and ‘Little Bird’ Greco held a series of meetings in Italy and Switzerland to discuss whether to support a right-wing coup, which in the end never really took off. Nevertheless, it was an indication both of how powerful the Mafia was, and that politicians knew where to find its leaders and were prepared to talk to them.

  In late 1973 Badalamenti’s power increased even further; he was either elected as sole leader of the Commission after a vote at a summit, or simply declared himself leader. Either way, he was now boss of the Mafia, the capo di tutti i capi.

  Although most gangs tended to do their own thing, there were some joint ventures in this period, particularly cigarette smuggling. The system was centred on Naples and was run by the criminal organisation dominant in that city, the Camorra. Nevertheless, much of the capital needed to start up and maintain the trade came from the Mafia. Most major Sicilian families invested in the trade and reaped handsome profits. But the power structure was clear: in the words of a supergrass, after all expenses were paid ‘everything was added up, and the profits were taken to Gaetano Badalamenti, who then divided the money up for everybody.’

  Totò Riina and the Corleonesi

  As is often the case in Mafia history, too much power above leads to resentment below. In the world of the Mafia, as elsewhere, power tends to come from wealth, and in the 1970s Sicily was flooded by drug money. Sicilian Mafiosi were well placed to develop a global system: they had a long history of links with producing countries so they could source the morphine base quite easily. And it was in Sicily that they did the refining because they felt the police wouldn’t create too many problems for them. Once that was done, Sicilians had thousands of personal contacts in the States, to whom they exported roughly 80 per cent of all refined heroin supplies through family links. This was the period when a global drug system emerged on a large scale; between 1974 and 1982 the amount of heroin seized around the world rose by six and a half times.

  To the extent that anyone follows any rules within the Mafia, Badalamenti should have offered other gangs a ‘piece of the action’ in the drugs trade, but, as ever, in practice a Mafioso is selfish and cannot be trusted. Besides, given
the long prison sentences that people risked, drug deals were not openly discussed at summit meetings. Badalamenti could justify himself by arguing that what he was really doing was sending drugs to the United States from his own territory – the airport – therefore he wasn’t obliged to involve anyone else.

  Totò Riina, an up-and-coming killer and boss from the inland town of Corleone, was resentful of Badalamenti’s wealth and power. Riina and many of the Corleonesi had still not made a full move to Palermo and had missed out on making big money. Up until the mid-1960s, beyond Palermo most Mafiosi concentrated on low-level extortion and protection rackets. Indeed Riina, unusually moved to tears, once told a supergrass that when he was in prison in 1966–67 he was still so poor that his mother didn’t have enough money to come and visit him.

  What infuriated Riina and others was that Badalamenti never mentioned what he was up to, they only found out from other sources. Because Badalamenti wouldn’t play ball with them, the Corleonesi thought up another way of getting rich quickly – kidnapping wealthy people. The first victim was taken in 1971, Pino Vassallo, son of the main building contractor who had profited from the ‘sack of Palermo’. By any standards of strategic thinking this was crazy: the Corleonesi were directly attacking the business and power structure they fed off, the ChristianDemocrat-dominated public sector. But Riina and his men kept to their guns, and after five months got an incredible sum, the equivalent of £4 billion today. And what they did with much of this ransom was very shrewd strategically speaking – they distributed much of it to the poorer gangs in Palermo. Naturally this wasn’t an act of generosity, it was the beginning of their long-term strategy to gain new loyal friends, and to undermine Badalamenti and his allies.

  Another victim was selected the following year, Luciano Cassina. Totò Riina conducted negotiations personally over the phone, sometimes while physically sitting on his victim. Up to £9.2 million in today’s money was paid to release Cassina, and was collected by Mafia priest Agostino Coppola. This time around the Corleonesi kept the money. Like any capitalist enterprise, they needed to invest large amounts of money to start up in business, and that business was the drugs trade. Their first move was to ask the Catania family to take part in a joint venture, and naturally the Corleonesi behaved the same as Badalamenti, telling nobody about it.

  Riina had sprung this kidnap when Badalamenti and other leaders were in jail, yet even so he denied all knowledge of it when Badalamenti came out and asked him about it. Mafia wisdom had it that if rich or important people were kidnapped, the police would take such a crime seriously and start searching and arresting people all over the island, thus disturbing all Mafia activities. Badalamenti’s view was: ‘We can’t declare war on the state’, and he made it clear there were to be no more kidnappings. The Corleonesi pretended to agree, and then waited a short while before carrying out a few more.

  By far the most serious kidnapping took place in July 1975. Luigi Corleo was father-in-law of the fantastically rich Nino Salvo, millionaire tax collector and close friend of Christian Democrats and Gaetano Badalamenti. While never admitting to anything, the Corleonesi were in fact demanding an impossibly high price, £120 billion at today’s prices. Although Corleo was probably the richest man in Sicily, Nino Salvo turned to his Mafia friends, who told him they knew nothing. As the weeks wore on, and Corleo’s death became a certainty due to the fact he was well over 70, Salvo pleaded with Badalamenti to his face, begging him to at least find the body of the old man. Once again, Badalamenti could do nothing – and this was an intense embarrassment for him.

  For Riina it was the opposite: in the words of a supergrass he was sending a message ‘as big as a house’ to anybody who would listen that he was fast emerging as a rival to Don Tano.

  Yet for all of this jockeying for power, which took place over several years, the agreed position remained that Badalamenti was in charge. One Mafioso once described Badalamenti thus: ‘a crude and ignorant person, but in Mafia circles he is “revered as a god that walks the earth”.’

  A Mafia God Walks the Earth

  The high point of Badalamenti’s career came with his ‘Pizza Connection’ system in the United States – the distribution of hard drugs through pizza parlours. At one stage in the early 1980s Caribbean banks were getting so overloaded with the dirty money they needed to launder that the whole operation became bottlenecked. There was so much cash that delivering money in suitcases became impractical, so private jets were chartered to transport millions of dollars.

  It was a global operation. From the global east came the heroin, from the global west – Bolivia and Paraguay – came the cocaine. Heroin was generally refined in Sicily, but in Italy most drug users lived in the richer cities of the north and centre of the country (where the drugs were originally delivered). In any event, most of the heroin was refined and sent on to a country in the global north, the United States.

  Despite such a huge operation Badalamenti’s wealth and power still had geographical foundations, he still needed a physical base, his own ‘home turf’. If he didn’t have these things he would have counted for nothing in the Mafia pecking order. The only problem he had as regards Cinisi was getting there as often as he wanted, given that sometimes he was either forced to live elsewhere in Italy in ‘internal exile’, or was in jail awaiting trials that either never happened or in which he was acquitted. Yet when he did appear, he always made an impression, as Piero Impastato recalls: ‘Badalamenti had an amazing physical presence. He reminded me a lot of that actor who always used to play Dracula – Christopher Lee.’

  In one way or another it was virtually impossible not to be aware of Badalamenti’s change in status, Mafiosi made no attempts to hide it. As a town councillor explains, they would also boast about having links with one of the most senior Christian Democrat politicians, who had already been prime minister three times:

  When somebody becomes head of the Commission their house becomes a port of call for people from all over the island. Gaetano Badalamenti’s house used to be frequented by ordinary people, then at a certain point certain well-known individuals were always going in and out of it. There were loads of Mercedes and BMWs parked outside, whereas virtually everyone else had little Fiat 500s. I remember I used to go into bars during that period and people were saying: ‘these days Gaetano Badalamenti has got top-level friends in Rome, he’s a friend of Andreotti’. People would turn round and say: ‘What? Andreotti?’ Today maybe it would be dangerous to say something like that, but back then it was something that was said openly, with pride.

  Badalamenti’s main meeting place was the Palazzolo bar, which significantly was in front of the council building. And as one of his opponents was forced to recognise: ‘Whenever Badalamenti went to a bar he was always surrounded by loads of people, people who were desperate in one way or another.’ Badalamenti and his gang could supply the commodity that people in town were most desperate for, and it wasn’t drugs – it was jobs.

  One of the many people who couldn’t stand him was Felicia Impastato, but as she says: It was my husband who told me we had to go to Don Tano’s house out of courtesy, when Peppino was already making his accusations. I didn’t want to go, and every time we used to argue about it. But his wife had been asking about us, and it always used to make my husband happy. Badalamenti’s house was always full of people – and what a queue there was outside his door! And how could I ever forget the luxury – two people used to come from Palermo to clean Badalamenti’s Persian carpets. I remember once we were talking and somebody asked me: ‘What’s your son, a Maoist?’ So I told him, ‘everyone’s got their own party. You’ve got your own one, and he and his friends have got another one. Everybody’s got their own.’

  Nowadays Badalamenti never even asked after Felicia’s son Peppino. Maybe this was because he had more important things on his mind, or maybe he was simply too angry about Peppino’s activities.

  10

  Crazy Waves

  Ma
ybe Badalamenti’s henchman was right to call Peppino Impastato a Maoist. While Peppino and others were simply unaware that Mao was a brutal

  dictator, they were nevertheless committed revolutionary socialists, people who believed that fundamental change could not come through parliamentary politics and parties. Locally, they had seen all the major parties slowly moving towards direct or indirect accommodation with the Mafia. So their aim was still the creation of a mass national movement outside parliament, concentrating on where people were collectively strong – principally where they worked.

  But by the early 1970s – after several years of intense political activity – Peppino’s generation could see that the revolution wasn’t round the corner. So without changing their ideas, they started to take seriously issues such as local and national elections. In 1972 Peppino took part in the general election campaign built around a left-wing newspaper, Il Manifesto. The results weren’t that encouraging, but Peppino more than others became increasingly convinced that the comfortable set-up at Cinisi council needed to be challenged.

  Given that they really didn’t have the experience or forces to mount their own campaign, in the same year Peppino and his group decided to put their votes behind the Communist Party, the only left-wing force standing in local council elections. They had very little faith in the enthusiastically parliamentary Communist Party, what they wanted perhaps more than anything else was for people to see there was at least some kind of alternative to the sleazy Christian Democrats.

  Soon after the election they were shocked. The sole Communist councillor they had helped to elect repaid them by joining a coalition with the Christian Democrats and became deputy mayor. It was the hypocrisy of the Communists that they found so irritating. In the same period in which their councillor was in alliance with the Christian Democrats, the local branch wrote an article in its area magazine entitled: ‘Is Capitalism’s Crisis Caused by the Oil Crisis?’ which contained the following conclusion: ‘It’s clear that the struggle will not be easy and will not develop in a linear fashion, but today it has never been clearer that socialism is the only real solution to the intrinsic anarchy of the capitalist system.’ How could the party face two directions at the same time, talking about socialism while sharing power with the traditional facilitators of Italian capitalism? All of this caused a lot of bitterness, which was to last until the Communist Party dissolved itself in the 1990s.