Authors: Tom Behan
Defiance (4 page)
His influence and eyes must have been everywhere; indeed, his black eyes burned like lumps of coal. As somebody once said of him: ‘In Cinisi a leaf didn’t move without Don Tano knowing about it.’ Photographs from back then show him often dressing as a typical peasant, in an ordinary jacket and cloth cap, although on special occasions he wore a suit and sunglasses. Over the years his face became burnt by the sun and grizzled, like that of most Sicilians – yet this was a man who operated on a global scale. His behaviour in public, particularly at trials, was both courteous and grave, he acted like a real ‘man of honour’. His measured response to any question or comment, often answered indirectly, meant that people hung on his every word, simply because they knew how powerful he was.
But when his boss Cesare Manzella was blown up in 1963 during the First Mafia War, the leaves stopped moving. Badalamenti went on the run for six years and disappeared from his hometown.
It’s in the Air that You Breathe
ifteen miles to the west of Palermo, the town of Cinisi is like many in Sicily: small, isolated and – particularly in the summer heat – sleepy. Like other towns it is
also claustrophobic, everybody knows everybody else, and everybody often knows everybody else’s business. People talk, maybe not in front of you, but they talk. You sense it when you’re walking along the streets, in the way people look at you. Some give you friendly glances if you know them, others greet you in an apparently friendly way, but you can see a knowing or penetrating look in their eyes.
If people don’t know you then their gaze is even more inquisitive, searching and invariably hostile. If you’re an outsider arriving by car, by the time you’ve locked the door many people have registered your alien presence. All of this surveying happens from two vantage points: people looking out from shops or at tables outside of bars, or in hot weather people sitting on chairs on their doorsteps. You are being watched all the time, there is no escape from the equivalent of hundreds of ‘smart’ CCTV cameras. Even houses with closed doors can be observation posts: you can easily imagine people peering at you from between the slats of their window blinds.
Lots of communication takes place without words, as one Cinisi resident put it: ‘Our culture is one in which nobody talks but everybody knows everything. It’s as if there are some magnetic waves.’ Everyday activity is often highly symbolic. Because everybody knows everything, you know that one supermarket is run by a
Mafioso
and one isn’t. The same goes for the butcher, or the petrol station, or the numerous bars on the main street.
Felicetta Vitale’s family has been running a bar on the main street for nearly fifty years. Things haven’t changed very much from the 1960s and 1970s she remembers:
Back then every bar had its own clientele: there was the Bar Palazzolo on the corner of the town square – that was the bar for the ‘gentlemen’ of the town. The Bar Roma was across the street, and it was the students’ bar. Halfway down there were another two bars, one in front of the other. One was the Maltese, which was used by cattle farmers, whereas opposite it, the Mastrominico – which has now become a pub – was used by building workers and manual labourers. Right at the bottom there were another two bars which were frequented by truck drivers, since they were very close to the main road.
This was how the town was divided: these were your reference points. However, over time two groups – workers and students – started to mingle.
The town has always been divided, but the walls and fences are in people’s minds. If a member of a Mafia family gets a top-up for their mobile from a non-Mafia shop it’s a significant event. Maybe they’re making a statement, or sending a message – but what is it? Is it friendly or aggressive? Alternatively, if a non-Mafia man suddenly goes for a drink in a Mafia bar he doesn’t make that move by chance, he has a very good reason and will set people wondering why he has broken the habits of a lifetime. Growing up in Sicily, people understand what talking to
Mafiosi
can lead to. According to Giuseppe Nobile from the nearby town of Partinico, this means that the underlying meaning of communication between ordinary people and a Mafia family can be the complete opposite of what it appears to be:
People’s common sense is not to criticise them publicly, but to keep well away from them. This is the average way of thinking for ordinary Sicilians, poor Sicilians. You try to keep as far away from them as possible, because getting involved with them socially or economically only creates problems.
Formally, the normal behaviour of ordinary people is one of extreme respect, without ever challenging their social authority. For example, if a
Mafioso
is arrested and his wife is left on her own, when her next-door neighbour meets her she will express her sympathy, her understanding. But she is going through the motions, she doesn’t really feel like this. If he’s really in serious trouble you show all the sympathy in the world, but underneath you’re happy.
Even a simple gesture like saying hello to people is a minefield; just by greeting a
Mafioso
you can risk being sucked into their web. By saying hello to someone you know – a perfectly normal thing to do – you are sending a message to that person and to anyone else who sees that gesture. A
Mafioso
may then want to develop that relationship. So the next time he might stop for a chat, the third time offer to buy you a coffee in a bar. At that point a threshold is crossed, but not only that of a bar. You have accepted that person up until then, said hello to him, chatted together, there is no reason in the world why you shouldn’t have a drink with him. But that level of friendship means something, and its existence is noted by many others. You can’t deny it, nor say it was imposed on you – you are now friends with this person.
The way a long-time opponent of the Mafia, Piero Impastato, puts it, is that: ‘The Mafia wants to create consensus. It wants everybody to say hello to each other, so we’re all in things together. It’s as if Cinisi is the sea, and they’re fish swimming around in it.’ In a way, the Mafia wants to create the illusion that there are no divisions, that everybody shares the same traditional values of family and religion.
The Mafia wants to embody society’s traditions and show its members as generous and caring people. To do this, the society they live in has to accept them and not ostracise them. This is why getting people to say hello to them is important. Piero recalls how his relative and Mafia patriarch used to behave: ‘Don Masi Impastato always used to watch you when you saw him, to see whether you said hello or not. If you didn’t you were rude, a bad person, if you did you were a good guy – but it was always down to you to make the first move.’ What these behavioural patterns reveal is the mental discipline imposed, as well as a broad social conditioning. But there is also the more subtle mechanism by which the Mafia are trying to dictate everyday social activities.
Once you’ve started acknowledging
Mafiosi
, the only way back is to suddenly start completely ignoring them. But exactly when do you start doing that? And what do you do if you’re with your mother and she says hello to a
Mafioso
?
Giovanni Impastato, one of two brothers who are central to this whole story, remembers his early years in Cinisi thus: ‘Growing up as a kid you just breathed Mafia. I played with relatives of Procopio Di Maggio and many other
Mafiosi
. But later on we each made our own choices and went our separate ways.’ Pino Manzella, another man who started to oppose the Mafia in the 1960s, points out the difficulty of completely keeping your distance if a town is dominated by
Mafiosi
: ‘For many years I never said hello to these kinds of people. But, after while, you end up ignoring nearly everyone!’ It is so difficult to make a break because to be surrounded by the Mafia in towns such as Cinisi is normal: ‘When you’re growing up in a town like this you simply come across the Mafia because it’s in the air that you breathe.’
The central focus of Cinisi, if it has one, is the town hall and the small square outside it. The building is a former monastery, but more than anything else the town is shaped by the main street, Corso Umberto I. Named after King Humbert I, it is normally abbreviated to Corso; it is the only wide street in the town, and like most others, it runs down from the high part of the town towards the sea. Like some streets in capital cities – such as O’Connell Street in Dublin – it is where all of the most major events have taken place.
What happens and who you see on the Corso depends on the time of day. At about 8am men start to appear and slowly congregate in groups. They are either elderly, that is pensioners, or younger and unemployed. In essence they have been chucked out of the house until lunchtime so women can do the cleaning and cooking. It gets busier as the shops open, and you start to see more women, either shopping or serving customers. The street bustles until 1pm and then suddenly empties. It’s lunchtime: the shop shutters are pulled down and people go home to eat and snooze, and nothing much happens until about 4pm. By this time people who work in the public sector have finished work, and they are joined by others who work outside town. So there are another three or four hours of activity until the shops shut again, but after that the Corso is dotted by groups of teenagers for another three hours – bored just as teenagers get bored in any other town in the world. And just as in any other main street, they watch enviously as big cars and motorcycles drive by.
As you walk up the Corso, your eyes are naturally drawn upwards, to the end – the council building housed in the former monastery. Just above it, closing in your vision, are two mountain slopes that sweep down in a V-shape. Depending on the time of year, if you look in that direction early in the morning you’re blinded, as the sun rises from behind one of the mountains. But if you’re going down the Corso towards the sea you’re sometimes faced with a peculiar sight: aircraft passing from right to left, lifting off into the air at a point that looks like the end of the street. This is Palermo Airport: first opened with two runways in 1960, followed by a third in 1968; it falls within the northern part of Cinisi’s municipal boundaries.
The back streets of town, off the Corso, are claustrophobic. Not only are they very narrow, but they are arranged in a block pattern, so each corner is totally blind and you never know who is about to come round the next one. Apart from the council building and a couple of nondescript churches the town can justifiably be called ugly. In a desperate attempt at giving itself some airs and graces, halfway along the Corso there is a crossroads locally called
I quattro canti
– the four corners. This is named after a huge baroque road junction in the centre of Palermo, full of ornate statues; in Cinisi it is just another anonymous and ugly street corner like another, blink and you’d miss it.
This feeling of being hemmed in comes above all from natural rather than human geography. At the lower end of the town there are fields leading down to the sea, thus cutting the town off definitively. But at the upper end Cinisi comes to an abrupt end with Mount Pecoraro, which rises almost vertically to 3,000 feet. Throughout the day the bare rock changes colour, from light blue to gold, turning pink at sunset. When it is cloudy, if there are fluffy white clouds the mountains can seem like some inviting ‘never never land’. Dark clouds, and a dark sea, make things much more threatening. Yet it is always there, brooding, emphasising the lack of an exit route. A further human barrier was erected when the motorway was built at the bottom of the mountain’s slopes, yet another obstacle to moving out of town easily. The only clear open access is to the south, away from Palermo.
Although there are indications that its history goes much further back, Cinisi was really put on the map in 1617, when Benedictine monks decided to build a monastery in this largely deserted area. Cinisi was unusual in that it developed far later than similar towns nearby: in 1853 it still had only 5,269 inhabitants.
The early development of industry in nearby Palermo in the first half of the nineteenth century saw virtually no inhabitants from Cinisi taking part. When feudalism was abolished in 1812 the local order of Benedictine monks sold large areas of land immediately, because they were afraid it would be seized by the new government. The buyers were mostly notaries, although there were also a few doctors and lawyers – but with these kinds of people buying it was clear there was still no local industrial or business development. The land had not been cared for by the monks and had become impoverished with serious long-term consequences; they had frequently cut down and not replaced trees, which they sold as firewood.
The new council administration functioned well enough, but the Sicilian press did not deem political life in Cinisi worthy of any comment. In some ways sitting on the council was like belonging to a gentlemen’s club: only those with high personal incomes were allowed to hold office. So, not surprisingly, it seems that virtually nobody from the town joined Garibaldi’s revolutionary conquest of Sicily, leading to the creation of the Italian nation in 1860. The town elders, meanwhile, did wake up and fight to get a railway station built in Cinisi rather than in nearby Terrasini. But its opening in 1880 did not really change very much, although limited mains water supplies were developed just before the end of the century, and some electric street lighting was installed during the First World War.
There was another system of power in the area that was far more dynamic – violent criminals. This kind of lawlessness existed before the Mafia, but the same conditions applied: given that these were small towns in isolated areas that didn’t produce very much wealth, the new government really wasn’t that interested what happened there. So ‘law and order’ was pretty much a ‘hit or miss’ affair.
A local priest, Vito Mangiapani, wrote a book about the town in 1910 and reported: ‘The most common crimes are thefts in the fields and illegal grazing, which could be stopped by creating a better system of field guards. Cattle rustling is common, as is damage to private property caused by personal hatred and vendettas.’ What he may or may not have known is that these armed field guards were the people who were evolving into
Mafiosi
. These individuals, who earned money through instilling fear in people on behalf of local landowners, very quickly saw the sense of doing the same on their own behalf.
The rich people of Cinisi, the town councillors, tried to protect themselves from this lawlessness by setting up their own system of armed guards, paying their wages out of council funds – or in other words from people’s taxes. The consequences were very serious: most of those hired already had criminal records, so in the long term the creation of a Mafia-type environment was only encouraged by local politicians. Furthermore, only the very rich were protected, while smaller businessmen and shopowners found criminals swarming around them to an even greater extent, and at the bottom of the pile ordinary working people were disgusted at the reality of the new ‘democratic’ Italian state.