Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  One thing she would often say was that her house was alive and full of people, whereas a hundred steps away Badalamenti’s was empty and locked up. Occasionally Badalamenti’s widow comes from Castellammare del Golfo to air it, but now it is just inhabited by ghosts.

  14

  The Bells of St Fara

  In Italy every day of the year bears the name of a saint, and small towns tend to guard the reputation of their local saints jealously. So in many ways it was fitting

  that the asthma attack that caused Felicia’s death two weeks before Christmas 2004 occurred on the day named after Saint Fara, the patron saint of Cinisi.

  There is a sarcastic remark used in nearby towns to provoke people from Cinisi – ‘What a miracle St Fara has done! The church is closed but the bells are ringing!’ The implication is that people from Cinisi often make a lot of noise, but what they’re doing and saying is essentially empty and pointless. The response to Felicia’s death showed that, on the contrary, her life had had enormous substance.

  Given the recent successes of The Hundred Steps, the conviction of Badalamenti and the Anti-Mafia Commission’s report, Felicia’s death became a news item on most television channels. All national newspapers had an article the following day, Cinisi council declared that the day of her funeral be a day of official mourning, that is, an invitation for shops to shut. They also organised a commemoration in the council building, inviting the Impastato family.

  The head of state, President Ciampi, even sent the family a message of condolence recognising Felicia’s ‘tireless commitment in defence of legality and justice against criminal lies’. In Rome, the Anti-Mafia Commission stood and gave a standing ovation in her memory. The family also received messages from the mayor of Rome and three other towns, the leaders of the country’s second and fourth largest political parties, television presenters, trade union leaders, religious orders and school groups. Over the next few days several hundred more messages of condolence were to arrive, including some from Britain, France and Spain – mainly from ordinary people.

  Felicia’s body was carried out of her house on that rainy December morning by some of the men who had been activists with her son 30 years earlier, such as Giovanni Riccobono and Salvo Vitale, and also by a much younger man, Salvo Ruvolo, secretary of the Cinisi branch of the far left party Communist Refoundation.

  Waiting outside were politicians such as the former mayor of Palermo Leoluca Orlando, Left Democrat MP Giuseppe Lumia and a Communist Refoundation regional councillor; while trade unions were represented by the regional secretary of the CGIL federation; another prominent individual was Rita Borsellino, sister of the anti-Mafia magistrate murdered in 1992. The road outside was also crowded, as seven investigating magistrates had come – people who have to travel in armour-plated dark blue cars and with an armed escort because many of their investigations are directed against the Mafia.

  Luigi Lo Cascio, the actor who played Peppino in The Hundred Steps was also there, as was the producer, Fabrizio Mosca. The film’s director, Marco Tullio Giordana, had been working on his next film at the other end of Italy, but immediately left the set to fly down for the funeral. He said: ‘It’s paradoxical, but I think that, having lost Peppino, she acquired hundreds of thousands of other children.’ The mayor of Cinisi was there, as were photographers, journalists, young Communists and other political activists. There was also a group of Boy Scouts from northern Italy who had visited and interviewed her the day before her death.

  The funeral oration was given by Umberto Santino, who described what Felicia’s house had become in her final years: ‘All forms of resistance – be they against fascism, the Mafia or neo-liberalism – met here in the most natural way possible . . . The best of Italy and Sicily has passed through these doors.’

  Yet at most there were just 150 people waiting to greet her coffin, and most of them had come from outside Cinisi. The funeral cortege wound its way down the Corso, but the people of Cinisi stayed at home, withdrawing further indoors whenever photographers moved close to their windows. As mourners passed bars and shops, not even the shutters were pulled down as a mark of respect.

  It seemed like a bad dream, and very similar to Peppino’s funeral; it wasn’t as if local people ignored or never took part in funerals.

  In September 2000 the son of Mafia boss Procopio Di Maggio disappeared and his dead body was washed up on a beach a few days later. Between five and eight hundred people came to his funeral, while many bystanders applauded and others threw orchids as the cortege passed. All the shops pulled down their blinds on that occasion. In December 2001 Vito Palazzolo died, aged 84. He had been convicted in March of that year, in a trial parallel to Badalamenti’s, of having organised Peppino’s murder. The local police chief banned a public funeral, ‘for reasons of public order’ – in other words the authorities would have been too embarrassed to see the level of support he had. Ultimately, nearly everyone ends up identifying with some kind of network that they feel can protect and help them.

  One of the reasons local people ignored Felicia’s funeral, though, was mere indifference, the desire for a quiet life. Giovanni and Felicetta’s daughter Luisa, aged 19, even noticed it among young people: ‘When my grandmother died, I heard from a friend my age that she had been told by her mother to stay home, and I thought, in this day and age, that’s very sad.’ The point Luisa is at pains to stress is that people’s indifference influences a given situation: ‘I don’t think people didn’t come because of Mafia pressure. But indifference can also strengthen the Mafia’s power.’

  Some people, however, stayed away for far ‘stronger’ reasons. As Luisa’s mother, Felicetta Vitale, explains: My mother-in-law’s funeral caused me a lot of bitterness. It was one of those moments when I thought: ‘What are we doing here in Cinisi? Why are we living here? We’re always wanting Cinisi to change but it never does.’ I wanted to say to people: ‘a funeral isn’t a political protest with red flags’ – but people here can’t seem to make that distinction. A funeral is a moment of solidarity, of respect. But even people who have business dealings with us every day didn’t come.

  I had the feeling that because the Mafia is going through a transition at the moment, people are isolating us again. Some people in Cinisi are compromised with the Mafia, they have too many connections – a good number of local people are in that situation. And showing solidarity with us means showing you’re not with them, that’s how I explain what happened. Whoever accepts a favour from these people can never break free of them.

  Salvatore Maltese knows the town like the back of his hand. A Cinisaro born and bred, he was also a fascist councillor for over twenty years:

  You need to realise that in a town of 10,500 people such as Cinisi, if you put together relatives, people who share the same house, your friends, workmates, employees – there are at least 3,500 people who in one way or another have to live alongside Mafia bosses. This could be because you’re a blood relative, or because of marriage, or business links, or because you’re employed by them – it’s clear then that a Mafioso will ask you to hide a gun, or drugs, or to hide them when they’re on the run.

  This attitude was mirrored at the first council meeting held a few days after Felicia’s death. The first item on the agenda was a commemoration of Peppino’s mother, but councillors from Forza Italia– the party led by the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – did not attend, only coming into the meeting afterwards without offering any explanation. Furthermore, the kind of employees the council hires, although in its defence it could argue they are simply a mirror of local attitudes, is revealed by the fact that only three out of a hundred council employees have ever taken part in activities that commemorated Peppino.

  Although the family and their friends had achieved justice, and Peppino’s story had become known throughout Italy and to some extent abroad, it was clear that the battle he fought was still far from being won. But, as Felicetta Vitale explains, perhaps things have moved
forward since Peppino’s day:

  People know we are right. But sometimes we say to ourselves: ‘why are we bothering here?’ Despite the difficulties and discouragement, we’ve found that our cultural activities work. When we give talks in schools we often see that we’ve planted a seed that has started to grow. You’ve got to start from below, from schoolchildren.

  Initially it was very difficult to get into schools, the first time we managed to do it was in 1992. In the first class we asked them to make a drawing of Peppino, and in the second and third to write an essay about him. Of course, what happens in school gets back to every family, and as soon as they got back home they were asked: ‘what did you do?’ The fact that we talked about Peppino, who he was and what he did, really shook people up because so many had wanted to forget about him.

  Soon afterwards we got threatening phone calls, mainly from women: ‘why don’t you mind your own business?’, ‘why are you upsetting and shocking our kids?’, ‘who’s paying you to do this?’, ‘why don’t you go and get a proper job?’, ‘why don’t you get the hell out of Cinisi?’ – and loads of swearwords.

  Depressing as that may be, it is a sign that the ideas Peppino stood for still challenge the traditional attitude of general indifference or the showing of respect towards Mafia families.

  What has perhaps changed for ever is the open visibility of Mafiosi and Mafia behaviour. As Felicetta’s daughter Luisa points out: ‘Now, to some extent, Sicilian consciousness has moved forward. This is why the Mafia has decided to hide itself away, also because it’s dealing in business and drugs so much – all things that can’t be very visible.’

  Having said that, things have continued to be difficult for Giovanni and Felicetta. Due to the success of The Hundred Steps, in February 2001 Giovanni was invited to appear on Italy’s premier talk show, The Costanzo Show. He attacked some of the opinions Badalamenti’s defence lawyers were using in his trial – they had dusted down the idea that Peppino was a terrorist, and also called him a ‘good-fornothing’ and a ‘layabout’. Giovanni defined such opinions as ‘stupidities’, and those who put them as ‘imbeciles in bad faith’. But although he never named anybody, Badalamenti’s lawyer won a case against Giovanni for libel. He was fined £3,500 and the lawyer then moved very quickly, rapidly obtaining a possession order on the family’s pizzeria, thus forcing immediate payment. Giovanni commented bitterly: ‘not only do they kill my brother, not only do they damage his reputation for over twenty years and blacken his name, but now I get convicted as well . . .’ However, the name Impastato was now known nationally, and an appeal fund launched by Umberto Santino’s Peppino Impastato Research Centre ended up collecting nearly £30,000.

  Sadly, the Impastatos’ problems have been more than just financial. Three weeks after Badalamenti was convicted and given a life sentence in 2002, in Cinisi two ‘Peppino Impastato’ street signs were covered over with signs reading ‘Gaetano Badalamenti Street’. And in late November Giovanni remembers: ‘They even daubed red paint on the white walls of our shop, in the form of rivulets of blood flowing from a bullet wound.’ Felicetta adds: ‘I can tell you they looked very realistic.’ In June 2007 the attacks resumed: twice in two days acid was thrown at the front door of the familiy house on the Corso, as well as againt the plaque that commemorates Peppino.

  Every town has its problems – and Cinisi has more than most – but these difficulties always exist in a much wider context.

  The Bigger Picture

  The major media story of the week that Felicia died was not her death, but an important trial verdict handed down in Milan involving a man named Marcello Dell’Utri. Such was its importance that as the court retired to consider its verdict the speaker of the houses of parliament phoned the accused to express his ‘deep esteem and friendship’, while the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi commented ‘I would put both my hands in the fire for Dell’Utri’.

  Who is Dell’Utri? What distinguishes him more than anything else is his close relationship to Berlusconi. The two first met in 1961, when Dell’Utri left his hometown of Palermo to go to university in Milan. Three years later the 23-year-old Dell’Utri started working as a secretary for Berlusconi’s building company. After several years back in Sicily, he moved back to Milan in March 1974 to become Berlusconi’s private secretary, a position he held for three years. By 1983 Berlusconi had become a powerful television broadcaster and called Dell’Utri back as number three in his Fininvest holding company. He got involved in politics for the first time at the age of 55, when in 1996 he was elected as an MP for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. In June 1999 he was elected as an MEP and joined the EU’s justice commission; and, finally, became a senator in 2001.

  In other words Dell’Utri has been Berlusconi’s right hand man for forty years, and one of his most revealing early moves, four months after returning to Milan in 1973, was to employ a man named Vittorio Mangano as a ‘stable boy’ in Berlusconi’s 147-room villa just outside Milan.

  So who was Mangano? He was a man who was first arrested by the Palermo Flying Squad in 1965 and charged with illegal earnings; his first major conviction came in 1968 for writing bad cheques, followed by another in 1971 for fraud. During his employment under Berlusconi he served time for fraud, was convicted for conspiracy to receive stolen goods, was arrested and jailed for carrying a knife and once again convicted for fraud and writing bad cheques. Over the next fifteen years he was periodically in close contact with Dell’Utri, and in the meantime was in and out of jail, collecting convictions for drug trafficking, and in 1998 a life sentence for murder and Mafia membership.

  At the same time Dell’Utri was faithfully serving his boss and close friend Silvio Berlusconi, including during his two periods as prime minister, but he too had problems with the law. In 1996 it was announced that Dell’Utri was under investigation for Mafia membership, and very soon after he was elected as an MP in Berlusconi’s party – thus acquiring parliamentary immunity – although immediately after his election he was found guilty of tax fraud and false accounting. In May 2004 he was convicted of attempting to extort money from a Republican Party senator in a case dating back to 1992. Then in December 2004, the same week as Felicia Impastato’s death, he was given a nine-year sentence for collusion with the Mafia, with judges defining him as having been: ‘Cosa Nostra’s ambassador in Milan for thirty years’.

  What is Berlusconi? He was prime minister from 2001 to 2006, and a very controversial one at that. Through tax reductions and further liberalisation of television advertising, his personal wealth doubled in just the first two years of his political leadership of Italy. While he was ‘only’ the 48th richest person in the world in 2001, by 2005 he had risen in rank to 25th.

  But it would seem that he is also more than being a fantastically wealthy businessman and successful politician. The month after he was elected prime minister in 2001 the Court of Appeal of Caltanissetta handed down a verdict against 39 Mafia bosses. Part of the sentence mentioned a ‘fruitful relationship, at least economically’ between the Mafia and Berlusconi’s financial empire. One element in this relationship consisted of ‘gifts’ made to the Mafia over many years, in the form of ‘large sums of money’ that were initially cashed by Vittorio Mangano – Berlusconi’s ‘stable boy’.

  The broader issue at stake here is not the behaviour of one individual such as Berlusconi, but that professional politicians and the media are happy to work with and show respect towards people with this kind of track record. While people such as Dell’Utri have a legal right to pursue their activities, the Italian establishment and media legitimises these suspect individuals by giving them air time and treating them the same as untainted politicians.

  If we look back at similar figures in Peppino’s time we can see that over and over again it is the system that is at fault, not just a few bad apples – let’s just look at one man, Giulio Andreotti.

  Who is Giulio Andreotti? He was the embodiment of the Christian Democrat P
arty, holding ministerial office almost without interruption between 1945 and 1992, including seven terms as prime minister.

  In late 2002 judges in Perugia handed down a 24-year sentence against a man convicted – together with the Mafia – of organising the murder of a journalist. Obviously this was a hefty sentence for a very serious crime, involving an organisation that has profoundly weakened Italian democracy for decades. Yet Prime Minister Berlusconi immediately defined the sentence as ‘justice gone mad’, and said it was necessary ‘to rebuild true legality’. The Forza Italia spokesperson on justice, Giuseppe Gargani, defined the sentence in the following terms: ‘hordes of executioners who insist on eliminating by judicial means an entire political class elected democratically’. In democracies, politicians generally accept the verdict of courts, particularly for serious crimes, yet what is doubly strange here is that the man convicted – Giulio Andreotti (subsequently acquitted on appeal) – comes from a different political party to Berlusconi.

  What is equally disturbing is that while Andreotti was waiting to appeal against his murder conviction he was allowed to sit in the Senate and pass laws, and was treated reverentially on the many political talk shows to which he was invited. There was nothing but continuity here: up until 1992 investigating magistrates had asked parliament to lift Andreotti’s immunity from prosecution 26 times – and each time they were denied – while all the time his party continued to put him forward as minister or prime minister.

  Apart from murder, Andreotti has also been tried for Mafia membership, and in the first verdict of this trial he was convicted of holding a meeting with Gaetano Badalamenti in his office in Rome. In 2003 the Court of Appeal in Palermo decided that had never happened, and that Andreotti had no case to answer for Mafia association up to spring 1980. But he was neither cleared nor acquitted of association with the Mafia; what had happened was that the ‘statute of limitations’ – the fixed period within which one can be convicted for a crime – had been exceeded and therefore the crime was no longer punishable.