Defiance (8 page)

Back in the early 1960s police reports were already describing the Salvo cousins as
Mafiosi
who were sons of
Mafiosi
, but they had reached such a level of wealth, power and respectability that they had become untouchable.

Apart from drug running, for people such as Badalamenti this is where the big money could be made – getting contracts and grants from public funds. This meant rubbing shoulders with the great and the good. After all, rich people who are corrupt need someone important to recycle or look after their money. In this period most top
Mafiosi
had their companies registered at the offices of Giuseppe Mandalari, who had been a parliamentary candidate for the fascist MSI party in 1972.

The other great institution and power broker in Italian society was the Church. The supergrass Antonino Calderone recalls that at the end of the 1960s Badalamenti invited him to lunch in Cinisi. The reason was to ask whether he could hide Luciano Leggio, but as he put the question a priest walked in, and Badalamenti immediately introduced him to the others as a ‘man of honour’, a
Mafioso
. This was Agostino Coppola, parish priest of Carini, a town on the other side of Mount Pecoraro, and cousin of top US mobster Frank ‘Three Fingers’ Coppola.

Agostino Coppola had his uses, such as christening children and performing wedding services for notorious gangsters on the run, such as Totò Riina’s marriage in 1974 – a few years later Riina became leader of the Mafia, a position he held until his arrest in January 1993. But Coppola also had a more earthly importance, such as acting as a go-between and negotiator; on more than one occasion such a respected member of the community picked up a ransom payment during a Mafia kidnap. The fact that he was seen more than once at Mafia summits in Milan showed that he was far more than just a convenient cover or courier – he was a senior and active Mafia member. On the other side of Mount Pecoraro, the Church was equally compromised, as one anti-Mafia activist comments: ‘I used to see the archbishop of Cinisi arm in arm with Giuseppe Finazzo’, one of Badalamenti’s most trusted lieutenants. There was a rumour in Cinisi that this priest allowed Luciano Leggio to hide out in his church. In any event, it is hard not to disagree with the following comment: ‘As for taking care of people’s souls, the Mafia here in Cinisi have always been very good!’

But where had Badalamenti been hiding for the last six years?
Again, nobody knows for sure. But in all likelihood he was often ‘hiding’ at home, in Cinisi.

One of the young men in Cinisi who was starting to rebel against his Mafia background remembered that during this time: ‘Very often I used to see these police – and this was something that annoyed me intensely – going off to have a coffee with
Mafiosi
. Sometimes people might say “what does that prove?”, but to me and lots of other people it was obvious what going to the bar with
Mafiosi
meant, everyone knew they were
Mafiosi
.’ He was right. In a Mafiaridden town, for a policeman to go to a bar with a
Mafioso
means the same thing as handing over the keys to the jail. The important thing about it was that everybody saw it happening and understood what it meant – that these people were friends, they would help each other out. A wellknown opponent of the Mafia remembers: ‘The police never had any problems with the
Mafiosi
, they had problems with us! So people used to see who the authorities dealt with and drew their own conclusions.’ All these messages came over clearer than front-page headlines in a newspaper, because everybody in town followed the local gossip.

Badalamenti too once recalled a senior local officer thus: ‘when somebody wanted to have a coffee . . . he wanted to have a coffee. But only he would pay, he wouldn’t let anyone else pay.’ In always paying, the policeman wanted everyone to know that he intended to cultivate this relationship – for whatever reason.

It is not surprising then, that according to another Mafia supergrass, it was widely known that Badalamenti and his gang: ‘had the police stations of Cinisi and Terrasini in their pocket’. So when Badalamenti was facing an arrest warrant: ‘sometimes he went on the run in Cinisi, particularly in the summer. It was quiet there, nobody went looking for him.’ Obscenity piles upon obscenity: through much of the 1960s police issued Badalamenti, of all people, with a gun licence.

In a typically indirect manner, the Mafia would send messages to keen young officers who arrived in the town. Pino Manzella recalls:

I always remember that back then, whenever a new police superintendent arrived, soon afterwards there was a bank robbery. The superintendent then somehow understood he had to behave in a certain way, and after that there were no more bank robberies, break-ins, etc etc. The bank robbery was a message which said: ‘unless you mind your own business, and allow us to mind ours, then there will be a lot more bank robberies.’ Sometimes a housebreaker would disappear. Rather than taking him to the police they would kill him and burn his car. So back then nothing ever happened, you could leave your door unlocked at night, nothing would happen. Things were totally calm here, but this was due more to the Mafia than the police . . .

Such an arrangement helped the police, as it contributed to keeping the overall crime rate down, and for the Mafia it meant less patrols and investigations – and therefore better conditions to run their illegal businesses.

Indeed, Salvatore Maltese, a long-term fascist councillor, recalled that other traditional ‘pillars of the community’ had a very small role to play: ‘There was a time here when lawyers had no work at all. This was because all disputes were settled by
Mafiosi
. Whenever there was a dispute over land boundaries, or problems between a man and a woman, or animals that had been stolen, people turned to them.’ But sometimes even Don Tano was unlucky enough to be arrested, although he was rarely charged and never convicted of a serious crime until the mid-1980s. Nevertheless, he would need inside help when he was in the Ucciardone, Palermo’s main jail – and here things become even more surprising.

Back in the mid-1950s, Christian Democrat politicians such as Salvo Lima, following national party policy, launched big campaigns of ‘moralisation’ and ‘renewal’ within the party. One of these ‘renewers’ was a young doctor named Francesco Barbaccia, who when he first stood for parliament was completely unknown, gave no speeches, yet received the highest vote of all Christian Democrat candidates in Sicily. For several years he continued in the same vein, writing no articles and giving no speeches. What he got in exchange from Lima’s council for such commitment were favourable decisions on his building investments, and his brother was appointed leader of the council’s tourism committee.

One thing Barbaccia did bother to do was write a letter supporting the passport application of one of the most powerful Mafia killers, Tommaso Buscetta, describing him as ‘a person who interests me a great deal’. Years later, as a supergrass, Buscetta revealed what the interest was – Buscetta would deliver thousands of votes to Barbaccia and help get him elected. But maybe Barbaccia’s heart wasn’t really in making money, or in helping Mafia killers, after all, he was a doctor. As well as being an MP for a decade, he also worked in Palermo prison from 1964 to 1993. Several supergrasses have confirmed that he was a
Mafioso
, probably part of Badalamenti’s clan, and would convey messages to and from prison inmates.

Not for nothing did Felicia, mother of the two Impastato brothers, once say: ‘In Cinisi Don Tano protected people who minded their own business, he helped people across the board, if they needed to go into hospital . . .’ – or any other favours. Councillor Maltese recounts one of many emblematic episodes:

There was a retired police officer who wanted to place a water butt on the pavement outside the front of his house to collect water. He applied to the council but they turned him down. But he knew that Badalamenti had one outside his house, which had been authorised by the council. So he went to Badalamenti and said: ‘I know that for you I’m just a filthy cop, but how come they gave you permission and not me?’ ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he told him, ‘I’ll sort it out.’ Then he phoned the council, which immediately granted permission – that’s the kind of atmosphere we lived in back then.

Badalamenti and the authorities were two sides of the same coin. As Giovanni Impastato once testified to the Anti-Mafia Commission:

It seems that Badalamenti was well-liked by the police as he was calm, reliable and always liked a chat. It almost felt like he was doing them a favour in that nothing ever happened in Cinisi, it was a quiet little town. If anything, we were subversives who made nuisances of ourselves. This was what the police thought. When I chanced to speak to one of them – something which didn’t happen often because I didn’t really trust them – I realised that it was a widely held belief that Tano Badalamenti was a gentleman and it was us who were the trouble-makers . . . I often used to see them walking arm in arm with Tano Badalamenti and his henchmen.

Giovanni’s brother Peppino once coined a name that brought all these changes together – the fact that Sicily was becoming both urbanised and dominated by the Mafia. Whether it was Cinisi or Palermo, for many people the idea they were living in a ‘Mafiopoli’ wasn’t far wrong.

fter the closure of the
Socialist Idea
, the next activity that was to worry the legal and illegal establishment of Cinisi was the setting up of the ‘Che Club’, named

after Che Guevara, the Argentinian revolutionary murdered by the CIA in the Bolivian jungle in 1967. Once again, it was Peppino Impastato who played a central role.

My parents ran the
Bar Roma
on the
Corso
– nowadays my brother runs it. In fact I first met Peppino in that bar, when I was a little girl. Peppino’s group used our bar regularly, it was the ‘students’ bar’. He used to come in with his friends and they’d be discussing things – but he was
unreachable
. I really admired him because I could see he was a real leader. He was small in height, shorter than Giovanni.

As is often the case, in order to become a leader, individuals often develop an intense, moody, almost withdrawn personality, and to a large extent this was what Peppino was like.

In any event, once the decision was made to set up the Che Club, Peppino found a room owned by his family that could be used as a meeting place. Apart from the inevitable Che Guevara, one activist recalls that: ‘On the walls of our office there were posters of Marx, Engels, Stalin, Lenin and Mao, and our future was mapped out by Lin Piao – go further to the left.’ It may seem strange today, but back then the myth of Mao Zedong and other Chinese leaders was very strong; during the 1968 election it was discovered that in Cinisi 13 ballot papers had been spoiled by people sticking on a photo of the Chinese leader. Three hundred copies of Mao’s
Little Red Book
were distributed in Cinisi alone, and were often waved about during demonstrations. Giuseppe Nobile remembers what getting involved in a Maoist group meant in Partinico, the first town you encounter moving inland from Cinisi:

logical to go beyond all this: we never knew exactly when or how, but at some point in the future people would agree with us and we would find ourselves in power. We were strongly influenced by Third World struggles – where the countryside surrounded the cities.

Although much of Maoist thought and practice was childishly and irrelevantly radical, it was beyond doubt that there were many struggles breaking out at this time that inspired people, and which were not associated with dictators, such as the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement in the US. Young Italians in particular were made aware there was an alternative to the lukewarm opposition that the Communist Party had led against the Christian Democrat government.

Some activists drew direct parallels between national liberation struggles in other countries and government repression in the south of Italy. In April 1969 the police opened fire on striking agricultural workers in the town of Battipaglia, south of Naples, killing two and wounding 50. There were chilling similarities with the ‘Killing Fields’ in Sicily twenty years earlier. So in a way it wasn’t surprising that one response of the Che Club was to write wall slogans that told a basic truth: ‘The police have killed again at Battipaglia’; but they also wrote: ‘Arm the workers’.

Of course in one sense this was empty rhetoric – who was actually going to arm them? But in another way it was an illustration of the radical changes the Che Club wanted. Another time, the group spent a month painting a huge and detailed wall mural, showing Israeli warplanes bombing Palestinians.

All of this activity started to give people confidence. Pino Manzella, a giant of a man but nevertheless very softly spoken, recalls an encounter with one of the top
Mafiosi
of Cinisi: