Defiance
Page 17
Strategic differences arose over how to deal with the authorities. One controversial area was how to behave with ‘friendly policemen’, an issue that can only be described as a hornet’s nest. The relationship between a corrupt policeman and a top criminal generally works both ways – but invariably the criminal gets the better deal as long as he’s allowed to continue his illegal activities. It was known in Mafia circles that Colonel Giuseppe Russo had told local police to give Badalamenti an easy ride in his hometown. The issue was: what would Badalamenti offer in return? The worry wasn’t that some small-fry Mafioso would be arrested, but that Badalamenti would get rid of a serious rival by fingering him to the police.
Although this was unlikely because it goes against all Mafia instincts, in a growing situation of internal tension people started to think Badalamenti might just try to get rid of his rivals by non-violent means. Crucially, Russo was an efficient crime fighter who had many Mafiosi arrested, sometimes apparently by torturing suspects – so his links with Badalamenti made things all the more worrying. This is why in one Commission meeting the proposal was made to kill him. Significantly, Don Tano voted against Russo’s murder, thus saving his life. According to Mafia wisdom the killing would cause more trouble than it was worth; there is no way the police would not turn Sicily upside down if the Mafia killed a senior officer. That was Don Tano’s argument, but others were wondering why he wanted to keep this dangerous police contact alive.
The issue was finally settled in August 1977, when Russo was gunned down in the main square of Ficuzza, in an attack personally led by Totò Riina. It was another challenge to Badalamenti’s authority.
Badalamenti was the leader of the Mafia, but people wouldn’t obey him. He even started losing votes at meetings, and the leader of the Mafia up to 2006, Bernardo Provenzano, once took the unheard step of mocking him: ‘Uncle Tano, what you’re saying isn’t right, that isn’t how things are at all. It seems like you’ve banged your head on something.’
The tipping point for Badalamenti’s ‘retirement’ came in spring 1978. The Commission had earlier discussed whether to murder another senior Mafioso and had decided not to go ahead. When the man in question (an ally of Riina) was murdered anyway, Riina accused Badalamenti of involvement, thus rendering nonsensical his leadership of the Commission.
Why didn’t Badalamenti move against Riina and Provenzano earlier? We don’t know for sure, although we know meetings were held in one of his villas in the hills behind Cinisi to discuss a pre-emptive strike, but nothing came of them. At one such meeting, held the very month that Peppino died, his closest associates could see all the danger signals. Some were demanding immediate war on the Corleonesi, others advised caution: ‘At the moment we can’t act openly in your support. If we do they’ll go crazy.’ Badalamenti was sitting out on the veranda and was silent; his faction didn’t make a move so for him all that beckoned was ‘retirement’.
So why didn’t he launch an attack, and why over the next three years did Riina and his men not attack him? Again, nobody knows for sure. Much of the speculation is that everybody knew he had powerful political friends – so both he and his enemies felt he was protected and therefore ‘untouchable’.
If so, that would explain why all bets were off by 1981. The Corleonesi had had enough of Badalamenti hovering around like a king who had lost his crown. They were also tired of harassment from the police; the ‘peasants’ had never cultivated friendships within government or the criminal justice system. While Badalamenti always said ‘we can’t declare war on the state’, this is just what the Corleonesi did.
First, though, they had to get rid of Don Tano, who had been replaced on the Commission by his cousin Antonino since 1978. Even before then Antonino would stand in for him at meetings if Tano was in prison. The Corleonesi had been working on Antonino for a while, and after he had hinted many times that he was going to lead them to his cousin they lost patience, killing him in August 1981.
The following month another Cinisi Mafia boss, Procopio Di Maggio, was attacked outside the petrol station he controlled. Like Badalamenti, he had his finger in the pie of the local airport; driving staff and passengers around the airport he had easy access to the baggage hall. In this attack, although he was shot in both the liver and a kidney he managed to drive his attackers off. Two years later he survived another attempt on his life: a group of killers headed towards him as he was chatting in the main square in front of the council with Salvatore Zangara, secretary of the local Socialist Party branch. Di Maggio reacted fast and avoided the bullets while Zangara, who was totally innocent, was killed and three others wounded. ‘Shorty’ Di Maggio then drew his pistol and unsuccessfully tried to catch his attackers.
In other words, Cinisi was being turned upside down. Gabriella Ruffino had married a nephew of Don Tano, Silvio Badalamenti, and remembers the period well: All the Badalamentis were already in hiding. If Silvio knew where they were they would have kidnapped him, instead they wanted to send a message to those who were hiding the Badalamentis – that they might get killed as well.
‘When did I know we were in danger?’ I often went to Cinisi because I’ve got relatives there, and as I was crossing the Corso this car was coming down, being driven by a very good friend of mine. Every time we meet we have a chat, he asks me how I am, and so on. He was the owner of a bar, and as you know, you can hear everything in a bar. I went up to him, and he had this expression as if he couldn’t see me. I raised my hand to say hello but he’s got this blank look about him, as if he can’t see.
What I saw was him thinking, ‘Why did I have to meet her today?’ For the first time I saw this bottomless black well in his eyes, and for the first time I was frightened. When Sicilians decide they don’t want to say something their
eyes become black wells – their pupils grow enormous and all you see is your own reflection. He was frightened. My husband wasn’t a Mafioso – if I’d been the wife of a Mafioso he would have said hello to me. But maybe it could have been dangerous for him to show he was my friend. This was the first moment I got wind of something.
Very soon after, Silvio Badalamenti was murdered. On another occasion, a few days before Christmas 1981,
Felicia Impastato woke up in the early hours:
I found the doors wide open. I went and looked to see whether the police were there, and I saw an officer from Cinisi I knew who said they were searching the house. Finazzo had been killed and his wife said she suspected it was Peppino Impastato’s brother. ‘What do you want?’ I shouted at them. ‘Isn’t one enough for you? There’s nothing here. Go and look for the murderers in the houses of Mafiosi.’ They found posters against the Mafia and a few dollars brought over by my sister. Me, my son and his wife were sat on the bed while they emptied everything and looked all over.
Giuseppe ‘Hod Carrier’ Finazzo, construction manager and Badalamenti henchman, had just been murdered. But why raid the Impastatos’ house – hadn’t they publicly rejected the Mafia tradition of vendetta three years earlier? Whatever else could be said about them, Giovanni and his mother were certainly not involved in the Mafia. Either the police simply wanted to harass the family, or they had a crude Mafia mentality and therefore investigated following typical Mafioso logic according to which, despite all evidence to the contrary, the Impastatos sooner or later were bound to react like Mafiosi and launch a revenge attack.
The following month, January 1982, Giacomo Impastato was murdered. Son of ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato, brother of Peppino’s father, what had really caused his death was his marriage to Agata Badalamenti, daughter of one of Gaetano Badalamenti’s brothers. Nobody was too young for the Corleonesi – in November 1982 the 17-year-old son of Antonino Badalamenti, Salvatore, was murdered because he had sworn revenge for his father’s murder. Across the Atlantic, in New Jersey another two nephews were killed, Matteo and Salvatore Sollena – the latter was found in the boot of a car wrapped up in a rubbish bag, having been shot several times.
In all, Badalamenti lost 17 relatives. But the wily old fox was long gone from Cinisi even before most of his relatives were killed. Sometime between 1981 and 1982 he had left his hometown for the last time, taking his wife and two sons with him.
All of this mattanza produced changes, the smallest of which was in Cinisi. The surviving members of Badalamenti’s clan were terrified, all their certainties had melted into air. Felicia noticed a chink of light: ‘in town people only stopped criticising my son after their own children had been killed’. But in such a thoroughly Mafia town, most people simply kept their head down and waited to see, once the shooting stopped, who would emerge as top dog.
The biggest changes occurred in Palermo and Rome. With such a massive scale of bloodshed it became increasingly difficult for individuals within the institutions to connive with the Mafia, and compromised politicians found it far more problematic to oppose anti-Mafia legislation. Incredibly, the crime of ‘Mafia association’ – essentially Mafia membership – only entered the statute books in 1982.
Turning the Corner
Yet the death of just one person, Peppino Impastato, had already produced some changes. The first-ever national anti-Mafia demonstration was called to commemorate the first anniversary of his death. Around two thousand people marched through Cinisi, along with a massive police presence. The broadcasting of Peppino’s Crazy Wave monologues from loudspeakers placed up and down the Corso created a powerful effect.
It was a significant success, with people coming from all over the country, and Giovanni was one of the speakers. Felicia remembers: ‘For the first time ever there were demonstrations with people stopping outside the house of a Mafioso and shouting, “You’re a murderer.” How my heart used to pound . . . I shouted louder than them.’ It was a show of strength and defiance that temporarily turned the tables: ‘When demonstrations took place in the early period, Badalamenti left home for two or three days and only came back when things had calmed down.’ Events like this were glimpses of the possibility that Mafiosi could be exposed and publicly humiliated, creating a completely different climate in town.
A leaflet advertising the event had argued: ‘We believe the time has come to end the widespread belief that views the Mafia as a limited phenomenon, a remnant of the past, a subject for novels and blockbusters.’ It had been coproduced by Umberto Santino’s research centre in Palermo (which was now named after Peppino), and was strongly influenced by his thinking:
There were two reasons why I decided to name the Centre after him and why we decided to dedicate so much of our lives to keeping his memory alive and to achieving justice: firstly I realised Peppino was a unique case in Sicily – there had never been anyone who got involved in an anti-Mafia struggle who came from a Mafia family. Secondly Peppino, albeit in an under-developed fashion, had a modern way of analysing and fighting the Mafia. In other words he was half way between the battles of decades ago and new
ones. But all of this had nothing to do with any personal ‘friendship’. Maybe for Anglo-Saxon readers this destroys the stereotype of Sicilians only getting involved in things if there is some kind of personal friendship involved.
Despite this increase in an understanding of the Mafia, which was broadcast publicly, problems were far from solved. A month after this demonstration it was announced that Giovanni Impastato and Umberto Santino were going to stand for parliament. Two days later, Giovanni explained, ‘They attacked my shop at night, shooting it up. They deliberately killed my dog, which was inside.’
It must have been hard for all those campaigning, particularly those living in Cinisi, not to think about some kind of act of revenge – to raise morale if for nothing else. After all, what would it take to make a few petrol bombs and throw them at Mafiosi construction lorries or shop fronts in the dead of night? And besides, in a town like Cinisi it was not difficult to get hold of guns.
This frustration would sometimes come out during the early demonstrations to commemorate Peppino’s death. Giuseppe Nobile remembers a Proletarian Democracy leader called Emilio Molinari who gave a speech in Cinisi on 9 May 1982, saying: ‘The Mafiosi who are moving here among us now should pin back their ears and listen very carefully – we don’t like getting involved in vendettas, but if any of us were to come to any harm, we’d know what we have to do.’
This was Nobile’s response: I was a member of the same party, and because we were holding our conference primaries I criticised Molinari’s speech by saying: ‘It’s fundamentally wrong that someone comes in from the outside to such a problematic town as Cinisi and says something so dangerous – and then leaves.’ Later Molinari came up to me and explained that in fact it had been the Cinisi comrades who had asked him to say this.
I really couldn’t understand where all this was coming from – after all, Proletarian Democracy got just 1.5 per cent of the vote, and there was a huge downturn in social and trade union struggles. And I’ll go further: after that speech everyone left and went home, and the only people left were me, Gino Scasso and Giovanni Impastato. Given that there was an election on, us three went round the town at night putting up posters. After a speech like that they could have cut all three of us into tiny little pieces, no problem.
His fear was perfectly justified; all Mafiosi were extremely jumpy at that time, it was right in the middle of the Second Mafia War. But luckily nothing happened to them, and nobody was ever foolish enough to start acting like a Mafioso and launch even a symbolic act of revenge.
For many years these campaigners would suffer defeats and setbacks. Andrea Bartolotta, who had known Peppino since the first year of secondary school, remembers: ‘it felt like we were shipwrecked on an island of indifference, virtually condemned to irrelevance and isolation, almost as if we had the plague.’ But after a while they began to be compensated by small token victories. The first real step forward occurred in May 1984, six years after Peppino’s death, with a court reaching a verdict that he had been murdered by the Mafia because he campaigned against them. So he had not killed himself during an act of terrorism. But the verdict also stated that it was impossible to identify his murderers.
The institutions had slowly come round to the viewpoint of the family and their small group of dedicated campaigners. In the very month he died, Felicia and Giovanni had outlined in a sworn statement to police that in his last speech Peppino made it clear that if elected (something everyone expected) he would have brought more scandals out into the open. As they pointed out, this ‘behaviour is very different to that of somebody unbalanced or frustrated’. And they continued: ‘People who want to commit suicide are demoralised, without any apparent future, not people who plan their schedule and organise a series of commitments for the following days.’
All told, the lights were beginning to burn brighter behind the blinds of the Impastato household on the Corso. Since the death of her son, Felicia Impastato had virtually never left her house: ‘Apart from a few people, I don’t want to look into the face of anybody from Cinisi.’ One of the few people she did see was the actor Gaspare Cucinella: ‘I went to visit her sometimes, but it broke my heart to see her, to listen to her talk.’
Felicia didn’t even go out to attend her younger son’s wedding to Felicetta Vitale a few months after Peppino’s death, even though she had asked Giovanni to get married. Apart from friends of the bride and groom, a scandal halfemerged many years later that another group of people had taken a very close interest in this marriage, and it wasn’t the Mafia. Secret se
rvice agents took down the number plates of all the cars that attended the service, and Giovanni was subject to surveillance for approximately two years. The reason? The same deranged but desperate desire to try to link Peppino’s family and friends to terrorism.
Felicetta was now the daughter-in-law of Peppino’s mother, and fully supported her decision to cut herself off from nearly everyone else in town: ‘After Peppino’s death she hardly ever went out. One of the times she felt obliged to go out was when friends or relatives were ill, or had had an operation. But she never even went shopping. I would buy her everything she needed. And she never wanted to stop mourning: she always wore black.’
Despite her self-imposed isolation, Felicia understood that small changes were occurring, changes that made her more relaxed about Giovanni’s activism. Speaking in 1984, at the end of the Second Mafia War, she said:
Now that some of them are dead or have disappeared, who knows where they’ve ended up? I’m a bit calmer. I used to hear him come in late at night when I was in bed and I used to say: ‘Why didn’t you come home earlier, son?’ Now when he leaves I’m happy, I think to myself: ‘at least he’s away from here’.
Meanwhile Don Tano’s star continued to wane. After disappearing from Cinisi he had flitted between central Italy, Spain and Brazil, all the while importing huge amounts of heroin into the United States. He was finally picked up in Madrid in 1984 as part of an international investigation. More telling than his capture was his conviction: at the end of the mammoth ‘Pizza Connection’ trial held in New York, in June 1987 he was given a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.