Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  By today’s standards the contents of this small newspaper might seem tame, but reaction in the town showed that it was viewed as revolutionary. The first taboo subject they broached was women’s rights and sex. Italy was still backward in this field; for example, the penal code sanctioned harsher punishments for women than for men in cases of adultery, and there was a huge debate in Sicily in 1965 when a woman who had been raped refused to marry her attacker. The first major article in the paper supporting local women’s criticism of male chauvinism appeared in March 1967 and, significantly, was written by a man. A few months later the same writer and Peppino returned to the subject, stating:

  In Cinisi the majority of young women respond to their first sexual instincts in one way: by suppressing or denying them, with consequences that are easy to imagine . . . the fear of gossiping leads them to create unstable relationships with boys (with whom they obviously meet in secret), to whom they give complete attention, something which becomes unhealthy in a suffocating environment of repressed sexuality.

  They normally meet ‘on the quiet’ due to understandable ‘fears’, and rather than feeling satisfied they can feel embittered and may suffer some kind of mental disturbance.

  Such discussion meant coming into conflict with the selfappointed guardian of public morals, the Church. Another early editorial emphasised that the paper was aiming at a new generation of young people: ‘Perhaps these young people don’t go to church, but they have a strong moral sense that is no longer held back by prejudiced dogma. This is an expression of a consciousness that sees the evils of the world and is upset by them, and tries to bring some relief to the victims.’

  The issues the Socialist Idea raised were also tangible ones. For example, in one article it attacked both the fact that apart from two well-lit streets: ‘the rest of the town seems illuminated by candlelight’, and that the town only had water for five hours a day. They accused the mayor of not insisting that a councillor from the same party, upon whose private land there was a large fresh water well, agree to supply the town with water at an acceptable rate.

  Stefano Venuti, the best-known Communist activist in town, also contributed to the paper, openly denouncing corruption following local elections:

  This occurs in various ways – the outright buying of votes (a packet of pasta, 1 to 10,000 lire, a promise of a job, a favour, etc). And here a ‘favour’ can mean anything: a prisoner who will be released from jail, a patient who will not pay hospital fees, a consumer who will not pay water rates or council tax, or somebody else who will get planning permission or a licence to trade.

  But Peppino and his friends were also breaking from the Communist Party, the only organisation that had managed to be some kind of opposition to corrupt local politicians and the Mafia. Although the Communist Party is not named in the following editorial it is clear that this is the organisation the writer has in mind. This stress on practical action is important to mention again, because such a strategy was to shake the town over the next ten years:

  if you look back you realise that in Cinisi the working class and the socialist tradition cannot boast of class struggle, nor popular demands or protests. This has undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of a significant gap between workers and peasants and the political parties that represent them. Furthermore, it has stunted the growth

  of a broad working class which is aware of its purpose, merits and strength. In essence, over this two-year period Peppino and others were becoming revolutionaries, rejecting the politics of the Socialist and Communist Parties, all of which had been tried and tested, but had failed to really change things. There had been great anticipation in 1963 when the Socialists had joined a national government after 16 years in opposition, but their enthusiasm for reform was quickly blocked and blunted by the Christian Democrats. The main hope of the Communist Party was to win a majority in parliament and form a government – something distinctly unlikely in the medium and long term, given the Cold War politics that dominated Italy. Local Communist activists such as Venuti might have influenced Peppino, but often the hands of these individuals were tied by regional and national leaders, and they were forced into alliances with dodgy Christian Democrats.

  On an international scale, young people such as Peppino had new models too, such as the Cuban and Vietnam national liberation struggles, or looked to individuals like Che Guevara, and genuinely believed that Mao’s China was a shining example of a new socialism. Local Communists tried to compete: when Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia the local branch produced a booklet, but after the single page on Che there were eight pages on the Russian revolution of 1917, often in the form of a series of events listed chronologically and ending in a statement by the party’s general secretary – hardly the sort of stuff to capture the imagination of young people.

  The second biggest taboo that Peppino and others broke was to talk about the Mafia. This is how his mother Felicia found out what her 17-year-old son was doing:

  I knew nothing about it because I was staying in the countryside. I slept downstairs, and Peppino and my brother upstairs. Peppino would be writing away, and from time to time my brother would have a look at what

  he was reading. Then he came downstairs – ‘Felicia’. ‘What is it?’ ‘Have you seen that Peppino is coming out against the Mafia?’ And I said: ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do about my husband?’ He was a touch aggressive, and used to hit us. Peppino didn’t get hit a lot because he wasn’t home that much, but Giovanni copped quite a bit. I used to jump in the middle and got hit a few times as well.

  Giovanni says his father never hit him. It is possible he has genuinely forgotten, or is embarrassed by the memory – or that his mother was exaggerating. Regardless of the specific level of violence within the Impastato family, these are very much the attitudes and dynamics within a Mafia family, and it is through repeated treatment of this kind that future generations of Mafiosi are shaped.

  Even though Peppino probably got off lightly compared to his brother, he also had other problems to worry about. The Christian Democrat mayor (also magistrate and cousin of Gaetano Badalamenti), Domenico Pellerito, reported the content of the Socialist Idea to the police. Within five days of its first appearance on newsagents’ shelves the small group of young editors were called into the police station to explain themselves. The police then launched an official investigation, and later questioned the youths individually. They reached the conclusion that it was an illegal publication because it had been published secretly, and a magistrate gave them a suspended sentence. The editors appealed, and the legal dance continued.

  Why did the mayor react so quickly, and the authorities so harshly? Hard as it is to believe, the answer is sport. The paper criticised the lack of facilities in the town in an article which contained the following sentence: ‘Perhaps Cinisi’s first citizen is completely unaware of the meaning of the word sport, and the lack of interest of council officials is obvious – this is a slap in the face for all sports enthusiasts in town.’ The fact this harmless article could have created such a bizarre response shows there was no real political discussion in town; the Communist opposition had failed to stir things up. Everybody knew their place. Nobody criticised the local establishment.

  One of the most important outcomes was that the legal to-ings and fro-ings meant the paper couldn’t be published for nearly a year. It is highly likely that the ‘offending article’ was not the real reason for the clampdown but was merely a pretext. Given that the paper dealt with corruption, emigration and sexual repression – in anyone’s book far more important issues than sport – the authorities were probably just looking for an excuse. Yet once it started to be published again in early 1966 the paper began attacking in even more aggressive tones the politicians who had attempted to close it down.

  One notorious article written by Peppino exploded like a bomb through the town. It was entitled: ‘The Mafia – A Mountain of Shit’. His mother went to visit the parents of all the ot
her boys involved in the paper and asked them to persuade their children to stop what they were doing. She was stunned to discover that these parents supported their actions. Although her primary concern was to protect her own son, the fact that other parents were behind the paper must have in some way forced her to realise Peppino was in the right.

  All editors suffered harassment because of the paper’s content, but Peppino more than most. One day soon after the publication of the ‘Mountain of Shit’ article the Impastatos heard a knock on the door of their house on the Corso, it was the old Mafia patriarch Don Masi Impastato. Luigi went outside to talk to him, and the old don told Peppino’s father, ‘If that was my son, I’d dig a grave and bury him in it.’ Felicia was listening behind the blinds, and at that point could not contain her protective instincts and burst out to shout at him, ‘you’re skating on very thin ice if you carry on making threats like that’.

  ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato, Peppino’s uncle, told Luigi that this kind of thing could not happen in a Mafia family. These were just the first two angry responses from a pair of Mafiosi. Such comments were in all likelihood just opinions and nothing more, however, over the next few years Peppino’s behaviour meant that angry comments became calculated threats.

  Peppino had moved back home a year or two earlier to live with his parents when he was about 18, because one of the relatives he had been living with had died and another had got married. But now his father had lost face, not only with the town at large but also with his Mafia friends in particular. So he kicked him out, and Peppino went back to live with his aunt and uncle.

  Luigi Impastato must have remembered something Cesare Manzella had said to him a few years earlier: ‘But what kind of family have you got involved in, what are you playing at?’ For a father, not being able to control his family is a humiliating sign of weakness. Although Luigi would never admit it, he had lost the battle to control his son, and his behaviour only increased Peppino’s determination to rebel against his father’s values. When Luigi got angry he’d tell his wife: ‘Leave, and take your sons with you.’ This only entrenched divisions, as Peppino’s uncle Matteo would come to visit Felicia rather than her husband.

  Life in the Impastato household became like a pressure cooker, as Giovanni recalls: My mother was the wife of a Mafioso and the mother of a left-wing activist who fought against the Mafia. She was in a very difficult situation because she was right in the middle. She didn’t want me to go down the same road as Peppino . . . she treated me normally, but she was always more worried about Peppino because he was in far more danger. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about me or didn’t love me, she was just very worried about what could happen to Peppino. It’s as if this family has lived a kind of Greek tragedy, with my mother forever at a crossroads. Because she was a Christian the family was sacred, and you had to respect your husband.

  Felicia was born during the First World War, and still belonged to that time and culture. This meant that she had to be a wife to her husband and a mother to her children, servicing all of them materially and emotionally, yet she knew she couldn’t play either of these roles adequately.

  Peppino’s horizons, meanwhile, started to broaden. He got involved with the civil rights activist Danilo Dolci in the nearby town of Partinico, where he went to secondary school. He went on a five-day ‘March of Protest and Hope’ through the Sicilian countryside, ending in Palermo. He learned perhaps for the first time that the Mafia exists because of a lack of economic development and real alternatives, one very concrete example being the shortage of water caused by the government refusing to build dams to create reservoirs – and all the while the Mafia controlled precious fresh water wells. One of the other issues was the Vietnam War, the Iraq of Peppino’s generation. The final speech of the march was given by Vo Van Ai, a leader of the Vietnamese resistance, whose words were published by the Socialist Idea:

  For a solution to be created, it is necessary that peoples throughout the world put pressure on their governments so that they unanimously demand:

  1) An immediate end to all American bombing in Vietnam.

  2) An end to America’s support of the Ky government in South Vietnam.

  3) The creation of a civilian government in the South elected by the people, free of all foreign interference, able to work effectively for peace by negotiating an end to hostilities and moving towards reunification.

  The Vietnam War was on news bulletins daily around the world, and many young people were starting to oppose American involvement. By publishing this article, and many others, the Socialist Idea began to draw in its young readers.

  Yet the paper was not dealing only with politics in the abstract, or events occurring half a world away. It carried on attacking the corruption of local politicians, who continued to demand that action be taken against it; the new mayor, a Social Democrat, had once again called on the police to take action. The party that had sponsored the paper, meanwhile, withdrew its support, and the police were now telling the editors – now just Peppino and one other – that the paper had to be closed down. It did close, yet Peppino had other ideas he wanted to try out.

  7

  Welcome to Mafiopoli

  T he police finally caught sight of Gaetano Badalamenti at Palermo Airport on 26 July 1969, getting off a flight from Rome. They’d lost trace of him since he

  disappeared back in 1963 to avoid both an arrest warrant, and the people who wanted to kill him in the First Mafia War.

  It was fitting that he should be resurfacing at the airport, in many ways it was a monument to his power. It was controversial when it opened in 1960 because it stood next to a mountain, and was therefore liable to suffer from unpredictable winds and air turbulence. So why was it ever built in the first place? One answer is that Badalamenti owned much of the land, land that had to be bought at high prices in order to develop it. The way in which Mafiosi often used to buy land also reveals their powers of intimidation, generally expressed indirectly. Nino Mannino, former mayor of Carini, a town on the other side of Mount Pecoraro, outlines a classic method: ‘Let’s say a Mafioso is interested in buying a piece of land. He gets a message to the current owner along the lines of: “It would be a shame to sell this without telling so-and-so.” This is a coded message to tell the owner that a Mafioso wants to buy it.’ And naturally, the owner doesn’t want to offend the local Mafia boss by not offering the land to him first. Badalamenti and other Mafia leaders would also gain further from the building of the airport, as they had a controlling influence over all of the cement and earth-moving companies that would be needed for the building work.

  Furthermore, if Badalamenti could control who got jobs at the airport he could kill two birds with one stone. First, by strategically placing his men he could facilitate the international drug smuggling he had been involved in for many years. And in fact, sometimes passengers’ luggage did not pass through the terminal and all its checks, but was moved to and from the aircraft by trusted airport drivers. The second advantage, which represents a key social change, was that he could create consensus and support by finding scarce jobs for desperate local people.

  What Badalamenti was grappling with was the fact that the whole of southern Italy was changing, from a backward agricultural society to a modern urban society. And most of this change was being managed by public authorities. So the other vital factor in the siting of Palermo’s new airport in Badalamenti’s back yard was that it fell within the boundaries of Cinisi city council. To some people, it looked like a gold mine.

  When the proposal to build an airport first became public, the mayor of Cinisi, Antonino Orlando, told local people in a speech: ‘you don’t understand, the airport will make us rich – they’ll pay for the land in gold’. Holding out the palms of his hands, he continued: ‘here’s the land and here’s the gold’. In a limited sense, he was true to his word. Those who were already in the know had bought up some of these areas, only to sell them on later at ten or twenty times the o
riginal price. For local councillors all this meant gaining access to large amounts of public money. Those who profited were the architects, the consultants, the political and military committees responsible for approving various plans – and of course the Mafia. And remember that under Italian law it is legal to propose, or work on, an existing project in the morning as a consultant or architect, and in the evening to vote projects through as a councillor.

  Leaving aside such practices, equally worrying was the overlooking of safety issues. When the council’s plans went up to regional government, former pilots warned that the winds in that area and the close proximity to the sea and mountains made any such decision pure madness. Regional government therefore asked national government to hold a commission of inquiry. A group of air force generals then held one meeting that lasted less than two hours and decided that the airport was safe after all.

  It was a huge building project, which would take three years to complete. One runway would be 3.6 kilometres long and 65 metres wide, whereas the other would be 2.7 kilometres by 45 metres. This meant a massive amount of earth moving and concrete. A company named SAB won most of the contracts because its tender was 29 per cent lower than others. But how could they do the work so much cheaper than other firms? A company controlled or influenced by the Mafia can make most of its employees work illegally – so they can pay them below the minimum wage, and also avoid paying tax and national insurance. Given that the wage bill is normally far higher than the cost of machinery and raw material, a Mafia company can still make a large profit even though it has tendered for the contract at a far lower level than its rivals.

  There is another trick the Mafia can use, just in case they can’t drive down wages and fiddle the books: raise the cost of the project. The original plans for developing the site, strangely, didn’t include a geological survey. Then, when work started, huge subterranean caverns were ‘discovered’, which obviously entailed much more work and higher costs than were originally planned.