Defiance (5 page)

The vast majority of local people were poor peasants who worked up to 16 hours a day, lived in crowded rented houses and ate meat just a handful of times a year. They don’t feature in the history books for this period, although the authorities were quick to remember them during the First World War, when hundreds left town to go and fight high up in the Alps on the Austrian border. About a hundred died in such an alien environment, and roughly the same number were seriously wounded. All told, it is not surprising that when they came back, once it was clear most of them would not find work, they either emigrated or were tempted by a life of crime.

Economically speaking, the existence of Mafia gangs discourages development, as they are essentially parasitic upon others’ work. They rake in money for doing and creating nothing, while at the same time demanding money from people trying to generate greater economic growth and employment. A member of a well-off and industrious family remembers problems back in the 1950s: ‘We had 15 or 16 workers, back then this was a big workplace. And we were very rich. But what do you do when they kidnap your cart and driver? You might get the cart back empty, but what about the driver? They fired machine guns at our premises, they tried to kidnap my brother when he was seven.’ All of this explains why you only find Mafia in poor areas, and why a hundred years ago a priest could write: ‘where bad faith and fraud continue, they block the union of capital’. Not surprisingly, there were no private companies in town.

Local people with time and money to spare would pass the time of day in their own clubs, often watching other people pass by. As the parish priest wrote, for them: ‘life goes on just as it did a century ago’. The most prestigious meeting place was the Circolo dei Galantuomini (Gentlemen’s Club), frequented by the rich and professional people. For the middle class – small landowners and shopkeepers – there was the Circolo dei Cacciatori (Hunters’ Club). The basis of membership – enough money to buy rifles and ammunition, and the free time to enjoy them – excluded poorer people. Below this was the Circolo dei Vaccari (Herdsmens’ Club), for the surprisingly large number of people who grazed cattle. The meeting place of the poor was the street corner.

One inhabitant of Cinisi recalls the Gentlemen’s Club thus: ‘There was a big entrance room with lots of armchairs, from which you could look outside. Once in a while they went in the countryside, but they never worked.’ Undoubtedly this was true, but this club was also a kind of seat of power: ‘The mayors who were elected all came from these clubs, it was always the same people.’

In Cinisi there is one word you hear a lot –
ammazzarono
. Literally it means ‘they murdered’ but it’s used on its own, ungrammatically. It is a stark statement, describing an all too familiar event.

The cosy life for the town’s elite was shattered after the end of the First World War. For a start, there was a huge Mafia turf war in the Cinisi area –
ammazzarono
– which seemed to be driven more by a series of personal vendettas than a steady build-up in wealth and power which is the normal circumstance in which middle-ranking
Mafiosi
are tempted to launch a bid to become top dog. However the number of murders, about thirty, showed that local gangs had become sizeable. This wave of violence quickly receded due to two factors. Firstly, mass migration to the United States drained the lifeblood out of some gangs, as well as reducing the root causes of family vendettas. Secondly, the advent of a fascist dictatorship in 1922 meant that for the first time the government took public order seriously; the totalitarian ideology of fascism could not tolerate any kind of alternative power structure.

On his first visit to Sicily in 1924 Mussolini was enraged when on a trip to Piana degli Albanesi the local Mafia boss insisted he get rid of his bodyguards as he was now a guest under the Mafia’s protection. Soon after that Mussolini appointed Cesare Mori, a tough no-nonsense career politician who had been fighting the Mafia since 1903, and entrusted him with full powers.

Mori quickly began a policy of mass round-ups in many Sicilian towns, a kind of collective punishment that effectively put the entire population under siege. Felicia Bartolotta, a teenager at the time, remembers what Mori – nicknamed the ‘Iron Prefect’ – did when he wanted to capture
Mafiosi
: ‘Everybody had animals, so he cut off the water and the animals died – people had to give themselves up! Or they’d arrest women, and when the men-folk came out they were taken away.’ The outcome was that many low-level members were convicted and received prison sentences, whereas more important
Mafiosi
either left the country, joined the Fascist Party or simply went dormant.

According to the new mayor, by 1927 the town’s problems had been solved because everybody had become fascist: ‘No longer is Cinisi a poor town, the current government’s reforming breeze has step by step penetrated the consciousness of local people, who today are fascist from the first to the last.’ The reality was that at least half of the town was illiterate, very few had baths or toilets where they lived, and 60 per cent virtually never ate any meat. The only cases of violence and lawlessness that would now be allowed were those committed by the government. So a new system of police field guards was set up, illegal connections to water supply were stopped and those in debt were cut off.

But to some extent Mafia activity continued. One of the victims was Gaspare Cucinella, an old man who ran a corner shop on the Corso, selling flour and beans. ‘Binardinu’ Palazzolo and his brothers had been demanding protection money but Cucinella had refused to pay. Then one day in 1937 when Cucinella was out in the countryside he saw the Palazzolos coming and knew what they meant to do, but they got the first shot in and –
ammazzarono
. They then tied Cucinella’s dead body to his cart, and his donkey made its way home, delivering a dead husband to his distraught wife.

The longer the Second World War continued, the more the fascist regime began to unravel, and the Mafia to resurface. Just a few weeks after Mussolini’s declaration of war in June 1940, French bombers attacked Palermo twice, an event that caused a mass exodus from the Sicilian capital. Several thousands ended up in Cinisi and the surrounding countryside, either staying with relatives, or in empty houses, barns, stables or even caves. They were not entirely safe here either, as later in the war Allied planes would regularly strafe the station and any trains running along the lines. The fascist council obviously had a responsibility to make sure any refugees were fed, but the inefficiency of both local and national administration meant that an expensive black market flourished quickly, and
Mafiosi
supported the new mayor who was trying to deal with an emergency situation.

One young thug who would lead a long and charmed life was Procopio ‘Shorty’ Di Maggio. He first came to people’s attention when he pulled out a knife and killed someone during an argument. A few years later the town rumour mill held him responsible for the killing of a policeman – naturally he wasn’t convicted of either murder. As Gaspare Cucinella recalls, he brought the same attitude to bear in his private life: ‘When Procopio Di Maggio met his future wife her father said he was against the marriage. So Don Procopio took out his gun and kneecapped him, and then told him: “Next time I’ll kill you.” That’s how things were back then.’

Problems quickly mushroomed as the war came to a close. Authorities imposed taxes and duties on agricultural produce, part of which was allocated for public rations. Yet local landowners and wholesalers could see that if they managed to bypass the authorities they could make large profits selling food to a starving population, not just in Cinisi, but in nearby Palermo as well. The huge amount of money to be made meant it was relatively easy to bribe local officials and to be let through road blocks, otherwise these newly created criminal gangs quickly became powerful enough to shoot it out with the police if the police decided to resist them. Quick to seize on an opportunity,
Mafiosi
took over local mills that ground wheat into flour, thus effectively gaining control over bread and other food supplies at source.

Whether these gangs were run by true
Mafiosi
is unclear; in many ways it doesn’t matter because even if they weren’t, they acted just like them, and in any event by the 1950s a stable and widely recognised Mafia structure had emerged in the town. A clear sign of increased criminal confidence was revealed after a mayor appointed by the Allies resigned in February 1946. Soon after the new mayor took office, a grenade exploded one night outside his house, apparently a warning that the authorities shouldn’t check up on the food rationing system.

Just as the Mafia resurfaced in Cinisi after the end of fascism, so too did the fight against organised crime. Here and elsewhere in Sicily, for well over a century, mass opposition to the Mafia has not concentrated on polite parliamentary politics but on local resistance, which has often been led by Communists and Socialists.

The Communist Party opened a branch in Sicily just after the Second World War, and it was originally run by just two men, Stefano Venuti and Filippo Maniaci. Venuti came from a liberal middle-class family, whereas Maniaci was far more working class. The key moment occurred when Venuti came back to Cinisi after the war and received two offers, the first of which he refused. The first was from Don Masi Impastato, who offered to find him a good job, and the other was from Maniaci, who suggested they opened a party branch together.

I remember the inauguration of the Communist Party branch in Cinisi. It was in the town square, on the left hand side coming up the Corso. We left Terrasini with our huge party banner, which used to be the pole of the Fascist Party banner, but I had sewn on our own flag because I was a tailor. We had a marvellous comrade there called Filippo Maniaci who gave the first speech. He began by saying: ‘comrades, we have to fight the Mafia.’ There was a group off to the left who started to make a noise – sadly at that time it was normal that meetings were disrupted – so Maniaci shouted at them ‘You’re bastards, and so is the man standing behind you.’ The man stood behind was no less than Cesare Manzella.

Although Communists and Socialists sometimes just reacted instinctively, as in this case, their strategy was to give people hope, to show them they could keep their self-respect and resist the Mafia and its ways. The main platform in this strategy was demanding rights: to decent housing, employment and – in broader terms – a society where everybody obeyed the law.

In the first national election in 1946 the party received just three votes, and the following year its branch suffered a bomb attack. Venuti showed what he was made of by bravely accusing Manzella and Masi Impastato of the crime. However, they were soon released without charge. Only a huge amount of political commitment could explain why Venuti and Maniaci didn’t give in and choose an easy life. So they stuck at it: in 1948 the party’s vote rose to 130, and throughout the 1950s it scored an average of around 700 votes in the town.

In 1948 a dispute erupted over the building of a road from Cinisi to Furi, which was an illustration of what was to become a vital area of Mafia money making in the 1960s: contracts awarded by public authorities. Once the contract to build the road was awarded the local Mafia demanded a rake-off for ‘protection’. The company refused, and for their pains their equipment was blown up twice – after which they started paying. But it was the workers who had to pay for their employers’ decision to agree to bribes: the company told them they would work an hour for free in order to finance the Mafia. The 54 workers, most of them union members, held a union meeting that was also attended by Venuti, and agreed to strike. Half an hour after Venuti left, Procopio Di Maggio arrived and told them: ‘Do be careful. You can see that we can put your heads where you’ve got your feet. So let’s try and do the right thing and just get food on the table – without contacting the union.’

The strike was called off, the Mafia had won again. To survive, people like Venuti were not only forced to be very courageous, but at times they felt obliged to act like
Mafiosi
. When Venuti heard that local Mafia leaders had decided to kill him he coolly walked into their favourite bar, and calmly said out loud:
The fact that Venuti came from a very comfortable middleclass background, that he was a sensitive and imaginative person, an amateur poet and painter, and yet he was behaving like this, shows how living in a Mafia environment distorts normal human behaviour. In any event, every evening Venuti would walk down the same country lane to see his girlfriend, and nothing ever happened to him. The bluff worked.

Because of this climate of intimidation, Venuti and others went further by organising public meetings; it was important to destroy the sense of isolation, fear and hopelessness, to show everybody that there was opposition to the Mafia. He remembers one person who always used to listen to him: ‘I recall one small boy who came to all my speeches. While everybody else of his age was running around and playing, he would listen to everything I said sitting on the kerb. When I first met him my first impression was of a boy full of enthusiasm and a huge desire for honesty and justice.’

he Impastato family were fairly typical for Cinisi. When Felicia Bartolotta married Luigi Impastato in 1947 it was a very good deal for the groom, who had

spent a couple of years ‘in exile’ on the island of Ustica during the fascist period, suspected of Mafia membership. Under this legal restriction people were ordered to reside in exile in another town, in an attempt to prevent them from coming into contact with the wrong sort of people.

Luigi was a short squat man with a flat nose, the son of a cattle farmer. One of his cousins was Don Masi Impastato, a local landowner and old-fashioned Mafia boss in Cinisi during the postwar period. Another relative was Nick ‘Killer’ Impastato, who had emigrated to the US in 1927 and was arrested as the second in command of the country’s largest heroin ring in 1943. Luckily for Nick, he only served two years, but the main witness against him was unlucky in that he was murdered soon after Nick was released from jail. After a four-year legal battle, he was finally deported from Kansas City back to Italy in 1955.

That was more of an American story though. Indeed, the small minority of Italian migrants such as Nick Impastato, who turned into gangsters, has led to decades of generalised racist stereotyping of Italian-Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority didn’t go down that road. But as regards Luigi Impastato and the Mafia, what really brought him in was the marriage of one of his sisters to Don Cesare Manzella.

That’s not to say that Luigi Impastato ever had an important role to play: he earned his living transporting cheese and doing other odd jobs. His son Giovanni remembers that in the immediate postwar period: ‘My father earned money by dealing in illegal cigarettes and wheat. He had three lorries, so he moved these things illegally to avoid paying duties and taxes on them.’ In later years he was given a shop to run, and it’s possible that a business with such a high cash flow was used to recycle dirty money. He was lucky to marry into a good family and inherited various plots of land.

Felicia Bartolotta was different from her husband in many respects. She had a long thin face and came from a ‘good family’, both in the sense that her closest relatives were not linked to the Mafia, and also because her father had a stable job working at the council; she also brought various pieces of land to the marriage. Felicia was unaware of Luigi’s Mafia links: ‘I didn’t know what my husband was. I knew he was sent into exile – he must have done something.’ Partly because she didn’t know the ugly truth about his allegiances, she genuinely liked him, but ‘as soon as we got married all hell broke loose’. She had become the wife of someone with a very traditional attitude towards family and marriage, a real
padre padrone
: ‘He used to argue at the drop of a hat, and you never knew what he was doing or where he was going.’ Gaspare Cucinella, a few years younger than Luigi, remembers him thus: ‘Luigi was very uncommunicative. You could never chat with him. It was always just: “hello, how are you?” . . . “hello how are you?” . . . it never went further than that.’

Their first son, Peppino, was born in 1948, in a nowabandoned house behind the main church. He wasn’t just born into the family of a low-level Mafia member, but Mafia boss and relative Don Masi Impastato lived next door, and the up-and-coming boss Procopio Di Maggio lived just behind them.

Although his mother accepted that being a woman meant she was treated as an inferior being, her desire to protect her son pushed her into conflict with her husband from the very beginning. This was the period of the notorious bandit gang led by Salvatore Giuliano, which had murdered –
ammazzarono
– 12 peasants on May Day 1947. Not only were the gang based in the nearby town of Montelepre, they also regularly killed policemen in shoot-outs, so sometimes suspected
Mafiosi
were rounded up in the next towns. Her husband knew a local policeman, and, as Felicia recounts:

They’d told my husband there would be round-ups that night. I was terrified – whenever I saw policemen my heart used to pound. There was knocking at the door, it was the cops. Peppino was really tiny at the time. I told my husband: ‘Murderer, why don’t you get out? Why have you stayed home? Didn’t you know they were meant to come?’

However, it was the unexpected consequences of the birth of their second son Giovanni that were, in the long term, to tear the family apart and put Cinisi on the map. Giovanni had died of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain caused by contagious infection, so Peppino was sent to live with his maternal aunt and uncle, Fara and Matteo, who essentially raised him. Looking back on this set-up, Peppino’s mother was satisfied that her son lived in a conventional family structure, in that he ‘grew up in a family that had a brother, a sister and a mother. In a way his mother and father were a bit distant. But I was comfortable with this because I knew my brother would keep him on the straight and narrow . . .’

There may have been other reasons, because this was a highly unusual arrangement. In the long term this different existence – compared to the norm of a rigidly conventional family structure – may have influenced his future development. But as a boy Peppino behaved like any other, playing football on a piece of waste ground by pushing two sticks into the ground and fixing a fishing net between them. In any event, as his mother adds in a masterful piece of understatement: ‘in fact he grew up different’. Giovanni, the third son who was born a couple of years later (and named after the child who had died), many years later defined his elder brother Peppino in the following terms: ‘For this culture, Peppino’s break with his family was a historical turning point.’

Peppino came under the influence of his uncle Matteo, who was a clerk at the council and therefore relatively well educated. He saw that Peppino had a talent for studying and he encouraged him to go further and paid for his schoolbooks. When Peppino was a teenager Matteo took him to his first meetings of the Italian Communist Party.

Peppino’s rebellious spirit began to emerge when he went to high school in the nearby town of Partinico. His mother remembers the day he handed in a Latin essay:

the teacher made a correction because according to her he’d made a mistake, but Peppino said ‘There’s no mistake here!’ In other words they started arguing and she told him: ‘You blackguard, go and sit down!’ As soon as he could, he got hold of a dictionary to find out what the word meant, and all hell broke loose when he got home. My brother went and spoke with the headmaster: Peppino was in the right, he hadn’t made a mistake and to top it all she had insulted him!

Meanwhile, his father only saw him occasionally, and essentially just tried to show off his first-born to his Mafia friends. To be shunted around by a distant father like some kind of trophy must have been irritating for any adolescent, but given that he was growing up outside his father’s influence, the gap could only grow wider over time.

Back at the family home, Felicia Bartolotta remembers: ‘My husband would tell me nothing. I had to work everything out for myself.’ It wouldn’t have taken much to work out why the police would often call asking to question Luigi, who habitually hid himself inside a large family chest down in the basement. Felicia started to show the first signs of being a free spirit: ‘my mother had taught me about the Mafia’, and made it very clear to her husband that her family would not be a Mafia family: ‘so I told him – “I don’t want people who are on the run staying in my house”. And my husband answered – “well, what if he’s a friend of mine . . .?” “I don’t care, I wouldn’t even care if it was my dad.” I’ve never taken anyone in.’

The problem was that the Mafia was all around her, and in a town like Cinisi there is no wall that can be built to keep it out of sight and out of contact. Not only was Felicia living with a low-level
Mafioso
, she was closely related to the town boss, Cesare Manzella. She could maybe hold the line with her husband, but not with her brother-in-law. Despite all that happened in between, looking back many years later Felicia said this about Cesare Manzella: ‘He used to come visiting and was very kind . . . I can’t speak badly of him.’

One day Felicia found out that Luigi was having an affair with a neighbour and moved back in with her mother, taking Giovanni with her. But Cesare Manzella came and spoke to her, using the coded language typical of a
Mafioso
: ‘Well, you know how things are.’ He also went to speak to her brother Matteo, who was looking after Peppino. Afterwards Matteo advised his sister: ‘Look, Felicia, move back because there’s nothing else you can do.’ In order to keep a lid on things and avoid any public scandal, Manzella then gave some money to the woman involved in the affair in order to keep her quiet. As Felicia says in her colourful Sicilian: ‘your blood remains dirty, you’re sick to your stomach’.

It was also in the day-to-day etiquette of showing respect to your relatives and friends that Felicia was unable to keep the Mafia at bay. She remembers: ‘My husband and Badalamenti were like brothers.’ The head of the house naturally wanted his children to meet his friends and associates, so, as their youngest child Giovanni recalls: