Defiance (7 page)

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 original 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.

The building of the airport meant the economy started to change, the new jobs that were being created were no longer related to agriculture. Construction work was managed by Mafia-controlled contractors, so for the first time
Mafiosi
became employers in an area of high unemployment. Piero Impastato, a distant relative of Peppino, remembers when as a child he used to visit ‘the patriarch of Cinisi’ with his family:

When my family went to visit Don Masi Impastato they generally used to chat and play cards. After a while, I noticed Don Masi was always surrounded by young people and I thought: ‘What the fuck are these young guys doing here? They’re talking to an old man!’ Afterwards I worked it out: given that in our area there’s always been a lot of unemployment, you either emigrate, get someone to put a word in for you somewhere in the public sector, or you become part of the Mafia. There really is no other escape route. So these people were turning up to ask him to put a word in somewhere.

Work on the airport was completed on time, and the first flight landed from Rome on the evening of 1 January 1960. Interestingly enough, at a press conference the captain said: ‘We didn’t know there was a mountain so close’, and was overheard talking to his co-pilot about a ‘crazy wind’. Three weeks later a flight from Naples suffered terrible air turbulence during its approach and the captain refused to land, flying to another airport.

Maybe the airport needed a third runway which ran in a different direction? Why not? It would mean another round of huge public sector contracts. This wasn’t such a mad idea – a few miles away in Palermo all manner of tricks were being pulled in the name of progress and economic development.

Until his murder in 1992, Salvo Lima had enjoyed forty very successful years in Sicilian politics. A tall distinguishedlooking man with wavy white hair, the great enigma was that in all this time he probably made less than a dozen public speeches – yet he always received more votes than any other Christian Democrat politician in Sicily.

He became mayor of Palermo for the first time in 1958, aged just 30, holding office continuously until 1963, and again in 1965 to 1966. In 1968 he stood for parliament, made no campaign speeches, but received a massive 80,000 first-preference votes. After being re-elected several times, he stood for the European parliament in 1979. Yet, just three years earlier, the Italian parliament’s permanent AntiMafia Commission had released a mammoth report into the Mafia, the result of ten years’ research, which saw Lima’s name mentioned 149 times. But such ‘guilt by association’ did nothing to slow Lima’s career; if anything the opposite happened. In 1983 two finance police reports named him as being involved in arms trafficking to members of the Mafia, yet the following year he was re-elected with an avalanche of 246,000 preference votes.

Lima’s charmed career is a warning against the simplistic arguments that the Mafia can be defeated by electing honest politicians. The majority of people voting for Lima probably presumed he was a
Mafioso
, and voted for him because they thought that both he and the Mafia could do something for them. The way politics can work in Sicily is that being linked to the Mafia doesn’t necessarily mean people won’t vote for you – it often means they will – in the hope of personal gain rather than out of fear.

Lima’s most notorious contribution to Mafia power coincided with his term of office as mayor of the Sicilian capital, a period known as ‘the sack of Palermo’ due to the destruction of much of the city’s architectural heritage and its replacement with ugly blocks of flats. Lima was operating in a situation where there was a huge demand for houses, Sicilians were leaving an unproductive countryside and looking for better-paid public sector and service jobs in Palermo. People – including the Mafia – were following the money.

The trick was how to award huge building contracts to your friends, who obviously couldn’t actually appear to be in control of the contracts because of their criminal reputation. So, of the total of 4,205 building licences granted by Palermo council from 1959 to 1963, an incredible 80 per cent went to just five people. These individuals were later described in an official report as being: ‘retired persons, of modest means, none with any experience in the building trade, and who, evidently, simply lent their names to the real builders’. They were
prestanomi
, literally ‘name lenders’. Indeed one of these pensioners later got a job as the doorkeeper of one of the blocks of flats he was supposed to have built. It was relatively easy for the many brand-new building companies to obtain credit from banks, generally they found a friendly face at those newly created banks that were being founded by the most forward-looking
Mafiosi
.

Because of all the dirty tricks and creative accounting, costs and profits were inflated. Around this period the budget for street maintenance in Palermo was 4.4 billion lire, yet in a similar-sized city, Bologna, it was 500 million – Palermo cost nine times more. It was the same for sewer and drain maintenance: 6 billion in Palermo against 200 million in Bologna – 30 times higher. Not only were consumers paying way over the odds, but the centre of Palermo was ruined. One example was Villa Deliella, a building protected due to its ‘significant artistic value’. On 29 November 1959 Prince Lanza di Scalea applied to demolish it, permission was granted by the council immediately, and that night the bulldozers moved in and destroyed it.

One thing that is sure is that he was developing his drugs trade with the US. In 1968 Italian police had charged two Italian Americans linked to Badalamenti with running a heroin distribution ring out of a pizzeria in Himroad Street, New York. Three years later an even bigger network was unearthed. The basic mechanism was Roma Foods, which distributed food to over 650 restaurants and pizzerias. Another was the Piancone Pizza Palaces chain, all owned by two of Badalamenti’s nephews. It was in a New Jersey Pizza Palace that the biggest heroin seizure so far ever discovered was made by police – 86 kilos sent by Badalamenti.

Wherever he was, Badalamenti definitely knew about the development of the new airport, as well as the nearby ‘sack of Palermo’. It is equally certain that somebody of his criminal stature would have been wheeling and dealing with important people. What’s also sure is that at some stage Badalamenti became friends with the Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio, often described as the ‘financial lungs’ of the Christian Democrat Party. One of the Mafia’s top supergrasses, Antonino Calderone, described the Salvos very differently: ‘The Salvo cousins were the richest men in Italy and they were both men of honour. They were in a position to dictate things to ministers . . . The Salvos were introduced to me by Gaetano Badalamenti, who was both proud and jealous of his friendship.’

Under Italian law Sicily is defined as a ‘special region’, and has many central powers devolved locally, one of them being tax collection. Whereas in the rest of Italy tax collectors like the Salvo cousins cost the state an average of 3.3 per cent of the revenue collected, in Sicily the Salvos got away with keeping 10 per cent of the money they had amassed. They were also allowed to hold on to the actual revenue for inordinately long periods, thus effectively enjoying huge interest-free loans.

This is how they were able to become leading landowners, hotel operators, wine producers and real estate developers in Sicily. They were active within the party, and in all likelihood gave certain Christian Democrat leaders large private donations. The Salvos were also able to deliver a significant number of votes to party candidates in their home town. And the party gave things in return. One of the most notorious examples was the La Zagarella hotel just outside Palermo. At 1970s prices, it cost $15 million to build, but the Salvos put up just $600,000 of their own money. The rest came from public funds, controlled by the Christian Democrats. Fittingly, this was the hotel where the dominant party in government and their associates held their luxury receptions and weddings. It was also where they staged their big political meetings, at which they would invite seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. For slightly more intimate parties, they kept a 26-metre yacht moored in Palermo harbour, aboard which were paintings by Van Gogh and Matisse.

They transformed it without spending a penny of their own money. They got loans from banks, then they did the paperwork to exploit that EU law, and got the money back they had been loaned . . . Just imagine, they diverted a river and got it to pass through this big wine grove, creating six or seven small artificial lakes. Then they installed some huge pumps which irrigated the entire estate with water from the lakes. And these lakes were no joke: Nino drove me around them in a jeep and boasted that the whole operation was the apple of his eye. And he hadn’t paid a thing.