Defiance (21 page)

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 Party, 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.

Nevertheless, the court held that Andreotti had lied 23 times and found him guilty of: ‘cultivating personal and friendly relations with Cosa Nostra leaders’, and meeting with Stefano Bontate, a top
Mafioso
and ally of Badalamenti, murdered in the Second Mafia War. Overall, the verdict referred to: ‘Andreotti’s generic proximity to the Cosa Nostra faction led by Bontate and Badalamenti’ in the very period that Peppino Impastato was murdered.

The establishment’s response to this trial was to turn reality on its head: they congratulated Andreotti as if he had been comprehensively acquitted. Berlusconi said he was ‘very happy for Andreotti’, while the man who was to become prime minister three years later, Romano Prodi, called it ‘wonderful news’. The Vatican too expressed ‘great satisfaction’ as Andreotti was congratulated on a live interview shown simultaneously on several channels.

Despite Andreotti’s conviction, Marcello Dell’Utri (despite his conviction) proposed Andreotti as the Italian head of state, the president of the Republic, when the post fell vacant in May 2006, a proposal that was supported by Silvio Berlusconi and many other politicians. Although Andreotti’s bid was unsuccessful, to this day he still passes legislation through the Senate and on television chat shows is treated as one of Italy’s most prestigious politicians of all time. His reputation is so good that he recently fronted a major publicity campaign for a mobile phone company.

The only journalists who try to talk to him about his conviction are not highly paid, and do not have an easy time for actually daring to show a critical attitude towards him. For example on 20 June 2006 an amateur journalist named Piero Ricca decided to tackle Andreotti about his criminal record at the end of a public meeting at Milan University. Although Andreotti briefly engaged with the journalist, after a few minutes bodyguards pulled Ricca away. He was then followed outside by police officers, cautioned, taken to a police station, and questioned for two hours.

In Cinisi the old Mafia boss Procopio Di Maggio is still alive – he even survived a leap from the third floor of a US hospital when he heard some unwelcome visitors were coming to see him. Nowadays he moves about with two walking-sticks, and most days you can find him hanging around outside the bar at the top of the Corso, watching who goes in or out of the council building.

But the world in which Di Maggio grew up in, the one recounted in
The Godfather
films, is long gone. On Cinisi’s Corso you no longer see poor peasants on donkeys. As in nearly all corners of the world, globalisation has arrived here – one of the most visible features are North African and Sri Lankan migrants selling carpets or other trinkets. You won’t find straw on the pavement either, but Alitalia in-flight tissues discarded by the many people who work at Palermo’s international airport, the area’s largest employer.

And given that the world has changed, so too has the Mafia.
Just as the Mafia shifted from dominating a world of agriculture and illiteracy to one of industry and public sector development, it is now adjusting to the recent growth in service industries, privatisation and globalisation. There isn’t respectable society and the Mafia, there is a growing ‘middle class Mafia’, prepared to invest and make money working alongside people who have had professional criminal careers.
So, while drug trafficking, murder and extortion are still part of the Mafia’s staple diet, the big growth area is whitecollar crime. And apart from the embezzlement of EU and other public sector funds, insurance fraud and identity theft, a major new field of money making is privatised health care.
When Totò Riina was arrested in January 1993 the police found a note in his jacket pocket that mentioned a Sicilian builder named Michele Aiello. Over the next few years Aiello started investing his profits from building by buying up laboratories that process test results. As the Italian public health system started collapsing, he bought a hotel and turned it into a private cancer clinic – which politicians subsidised by arranging a continuous stream of public sector patients. Aiello’s clinic (until his arrest for Mafia association in November 2003) quickly invested in extremely expensive equipment, making it one of the top five centres for cancer treatment in Europe, offering treatment which is virtually unavailable in the public health system. Looked at cynically, even a patient who needs kidney dialysis for thirty years is a significant and long-term source of profit.
In other words, dirty money can be recycled by investing in a privatised health system, and a guaranteed stream of business is supplied by corrupt politicians. While Lombardy in the north of Italy, with double the population of Sicily, has just 60 private health centres accredited by the public sector, there are now over 1,800 in Sicily.
Given this kind of bonanza, and the sheer economic weight of a privatised health system, it is inevitable that a high number of Sicilian politicians are also doctors and surgeons; indeed, in one recent case a senior surgeon was arrested and accused (due to his past convictions) of being the Mafia boss for an entire area of Palermo. This is why a recent report by Palermo’s special police investigative unit can state: ‘It is very worrying to discover that for so many professionals – above all doctors – being in contact with Cosa Nostra is such a natural thing.’
As Umberto Santino, president of the Peppino Impastato Research Centre, points out, just as today’s professionals try to infiltrate the Mafia, how to mobilise ordinary people against the Mafia needs some new thinking: ‘If we want to resurrect the great traditions of anti-Mafia struggles then I think we have to concentrate on people’s needs, by placing the problem of unemployment, casual labour and so-called development at the centre of our activities.’
Peppino Impastato fought a very unequal battle; with a small group of local followers he led a campaign against the leader of the Mafia. But a lot of what he did still remains valid – most of all his rejection of the notion that the police, government and institutions are fully committed to eradicating the Mafia. His other major contribution, which is still relevant today, was his constant attempt to create mass disputes around people’s immediate needs. Umberto Santino again starts from the past and tries to look forward:

While it’s true that nineteenth-century trade unionism is finished – or is becoming increasingly conservative – I’ve often argued that we need to create a new kind of trade unionism, and develop new kinds of disputes. At the end of the day this battle must be fought on concrete issues and clear objectives. But it’s not easy: people’s lives today are so fragmented.

Nowadays politicians frequently try to create consensus by promising their electorate ‘empowerment’ in their daily lives. Many people at work have to grapple with and try to implement meaningless mumbo-jumbo such as ‘synergy’, ‘mission statements’, ‘benchmark values’ and ‘best practice’. Yet in the real world, large numbers of young people are alienated by high unemployment and the authorities enacting repressive legislation against what is often not much more than high spirits; while people in work suffer long hours and job insecurity.

As Santino concludes, stopping the Mafia means concentrating on generalised and radical change rather than new buzzwords, laws and prisons: ‘If you don’t link the fight against the Mafia to a serious battle for development and real democratic change, then the fight against the Mafia will only consist of people making worthy statements.’

The last interview I did for this book was on the outskirts of Cinisi, towards the mountains rather than the sea. It was nearly dark as the car drove down a
trazzera
, a Sicilian country lane, although I could see the lower slopes of Mount Pecoraro looming up out of the gathering darkness.

The two people I was going to meet had detached themselves from active campaigning quite a while back, although they proudly defended the stand they had taken alongside Peppino all those years ago. As ever, it was a very pleasant chat, so much so that one of them – who had never met me before – was breastfeeding much of the time.

Given they were the last of the many people I had interviewed, it wasn’t surprising that they didn’t tell me very much that was new. But as I was packing away my digital voice recorder and getting ready to say goodbye, one of them said: ‘it’s still carrying on today, just look at that house down the road.’

‘What house?’ I asked, expecting to hear a perfectly ordinary tale of somebody building a house illegally and getting retrospective planning permission from the council. ‘The one on the corner. It was owned by a nephew of Gaetano Badalamenti until the council confiscated it.’

‘And when was that?’ After a quick discussion the general consensus was ‘ages’, and the only one prepared to put a number to the period said ‘about 15 years ago’. I asked more questions, often getting conflicting replies from my interviewees. What was clear was that the council had confiscated it from the Badalamentis years before, and that work to repair it had just started again recently.

One of them told me a story about the morning a few years ago when she had gone to the local fountain to get fresh water, because the mains supply is too chlorinated. As a few women were lining up they looked across at the house – which workers had been cleaning out the previous day – and noticed a large object on the front lawn, wrapped inside a big roll of heavy cellophane. It was a large dog, whose throat had been cut. This is a classic Mafia warning to stay away, or risk suffering the same fate.

I tried to find out more: ‘What was the council going to use it for?’ They didn’t know. ‘Why had it been confiscated?’ They weren’t sure, and although this couldn’t be the reason for confiscation, one of them seemed to think when it was first built about thirty years ago the whole thing was done illegally.

I was stunned. After the lengthy campaign for justice, the huge popularity of
The Hundred Steps
, two successful trials, the Anti-Mafia Commission report, the arguments over Felicia’s death – why had nobody told me about this before? As I said goodbye there were two questions buzzing around my head:
Why does nobody know anything definite about this
? and
Why has nobody campaigned over the long delay in making use of the building?