Defiance (22 page)

As I got a lift back to the centre of town we stopped briefly outside the house. There wasn’t much point getting out as it was dark, but I could still make out that it was a sizeable villa – with up to ten rooms.

The following day I talked to a few people about the Badalamenti house. Salvo Ruvolo, secretary of the far left Communist Refoundation Party, had the vague idea that maybe the council would name it after Felicia Impastato, whereas Pino Vitale knew next to nothing. This was all starting to look very odd: after all these two individuals were among the strongest supporters of the Impastatos and the most vocal opponents of the Mafia in Cinisi.

When my friend Giuseppe Nobile arrived in town we decided to go and have a look at the house in daylight. I couldn’t exactly remember where it was, but we bumped into Felicetta’s brother who took us there. It looked just as big in the sunshine, and in front of it there was a large drinking fountain for cattle.

The structure looked solid but in need of repair; there was a sign nailed up on the first floor detailing which company was going to do the building work, and a pile of sand out the front. You could walk right into the front garden, which is what I did, and then down towards the basement, which I’d noticed was open as well. Giuseppe stood outside on the pavement, at first I thought because he wanted to act as a kind of lookout, but knowing him it was probably because he didn’t want to get his shoes dirty.

The basement was a total mess, all kinds of junk and lumps of concrete were strewn everywhere. A toilet and bathroom had been plumbed in, as had a washing machine and dryer. It wasn’t clear whether any of the Badalamentis had ever actually lived in the place, but my interviewee of the day before thought they had. One thing intrigued me: two square holes had been cut into the concrete floor, about one foot deep and four feet square. There seemed no purpose for a hole of that size, so what could they mean? My mind started racing: somewhere to hide drugs, or the beginnings of a bunker to hide away when you’re on the run from the police? I didn’t have time to go upstairs as Giovanni and Felicetta were waiting to say goodbye.

I told them what I’d learnt about the house. Giovanni said he had heard something unofficially from the council – that it would be named after his mother. He was as tense as ever, and almost apologetic that he didn’t know more. But there was a tension in the air. Felicetta remained silent and impassive. They both looked tired. It’s not surprising: for nearly thirty years not only have they led a battle against the Mafia and the institutions that protected it, they have also raised a family and run a business. Neither of them needs to apologise to anyone, and I certainly wasn’t going to start criticising them after all they’ve been through. We said goodbye, but when I looked at things in a wider context I still couldn’t answer these two questions:
Why does nobody know anything definite about this
? and
Why has nobody campaigned over the long delay in making use of the building?

As dusk fell Giuseppe Nobile and I drove out of Cinisi up to Partinico, where we met with Gino Scasso. Given that Giuseppi and Gino are both from this town and not from Cinisi they knew absolutely nothing about the house, so they couldn’t answer these two questions either.

I was so distracted I forgot to buy my ticket before boarding the train for Palermo, and the conductor wanted to fine me. I talked him out of it, and perhaps made a very convincing case for being ‘distracted’. As we walked down the platform at Palermo I started talking to him: ‘I’m writing a book about Peppino Impastato and the Badalamentis, have you heard about them?’ He nodded almost imperceptibly, which only encouraged me to carry on: ‘Peppino had a terrible life, what with the Mafia, all the tensions within his family – and maybe he never even went to bed with anyone in his life. But now I’ve just discovered that the council confiscated a house from the Badalamentis fifteen years ago and has virtually left it untouched.’ I put my two questions to him too, but he just held out his hand, impassively: ‘Best of luck with your book.’

Now I was back in the city, Cinisi seemed like another world. Nobody can answer my questions; it all seems so strange, above all in a town that is probably the best known in the whole country for both Mafia domination and anti-Mafia campaigning. As I walked out of the station at midnight I remembered the final episode of the 1960s cult television series
The Prisoner
. After living in an oppressive and surreal community as prisoners for an unknown period, three of them make their way back to London. One of the final scenes is a long shot of one former prisoner outside the Houses of Parliament, gesticulating wildly to a policeman, trying to convince him of where he’s been and what he’s seen.

The following day was my last in Italy in terms of preparing this book, and I decided to make more phone calls. Other people in Cinisi confirmed the basics of what I had discovered. Despite it being 11am on a Saturday I decided to phone the mayor’s house, but was told he was out and would be back for lunch; I phoned at 2pm and he still wasn’t back; I left a message but he didn’t ring back. This is very unusual: in years of experience nobody has ever refused to speak to me when I decide to introduce myself as a
professore
from the University of Canterbury.

I started to think the mayor was avoiding me and my questions. For a while I got worried, and phoned a journalist to tell him the basic outline of what I knew.

Next morning I noticed something interesting in the local papers: the arrest of the mayor of a town near Corleone accused of Mafia membership. Two local builders were arrested too, as well as the town’s ‘patriarch’, who had already been tried for membership of the Mafia and murdering a policeman. Apparently there was a system of recycling dirty money and manipulation of tenders for council contracts.

What was politically interesting about the mayor wasn’t so much the stolen pistol that was found in his desk, but that he was a member of the party that has inherited the traditions of the Christian Democrats – the Union of Christian Democracy. The Sicilian leadership was holding a meeting at the time and the regional secretary commented: ‘You shouldn’t confuse events which involve individuals with the soul of the party, which is against the Mafia’.’

This meeting was being held to confirm the candidacy of Salvatore Cuffaro as president of Sicilian regional government, a position he had won with a massive vote in June 2001. Such huge support made a few cynics wonder whether he had got a little extra help, but they were dismissed until exactly two years later, when it was announced that he was facing charges of associating with the Mafia – the first time that Sicily’s most important politician has ever faced such serious accusations.

The basic fact to understand about modern political life in Sicily and Italy is that Cuffaro didn’t resign and wait until his name was cleared. Neither did he resign in February 2004, when further charges of aiding and abetting criminal activities within his administration were laid against him. It is this very track record that encouraged his fellow party members to call for his re-election at that meeting in early 2006. Not only that, but in the meantime Cuffaro stood as a senator in the April general election and was easily elected. Number two on the Union of Christian Democracy list was Calogero Mannino, a former Christian Democrat minister who had been convicted two years before of involvement with the Mafia and given a five-and-a-half-year sentence; again his reputation secured his election to the Senate. Despite – or because of – the fact that Cuffaro’s election leaflets were found in the hideout of Mafia leader Bernardo Provenzano, captured during the campaign, Salvatore Cuffaro was comfortably re-elected as president of the Sicilian region in 2006. This is why Giovanni Impastato defiantly argued in a front-page newspaper article: ‘We Sicilians have to realise that we live in a region where the majority of politicians are in cahoots with the Mafia, starting with President Cuffaro . . . We have to solve these problems and break the links between the institutions and the Mafia.’

These stories surrounding Sicily’s most popular and powerful politicians were far more important than
my
story of a house in Cinisi that used to belong to the Badalamentis. Yet, wherever you go in Sicily it is hard not to be reminded of the Mafia’s power. Near the motorway turnoff for the airport you come round a bend and notice two brown obelisks in front of you, on both sides of the road, about 40 feet high and about 100 yards apart – this is the same size as the crater created in the motorway, caused by the bomb that killed Judge Giovanni Falcone. And as the plane pulled off the runway I looked out of the window and noticed the railway line where Peppino’s body had been blown to bits. * * *

A few days later I finally managed to speak with the mayor. He sounded a bit nervous but agreed to send me all the documents the council had about the house. He said it had originally been built illegally, and handed over to the council about four years ago. Given that he had been elected 18 months ago, and that before that the council was run by government-appointed commissioners for a couple of years, he probably felt he was in the clear. The commissioners – appointed because the government had disbanded the council on suspicion of Mafia infiltration – only came to Cinisi once a fortnight.

In the end I received just one document from the council, and it told a slightly different story. The Badalamentis had originally got planning permission for a bungalow, but had made it 200 per cent bigger by building a first floor and attic level illegally. The house had first been impounded in 1985 by a Palermo courthouse, and was definitively confiscated in 1987 by a Supreme Court verdict. I had been wrong to doubt my interviewee: the house had belonged to the authorities – and therefore to the Italian people – for over 15 years.

Following the Supreme Court decision, the property was managed by a kind of government land registry office. They did nothing with it for 10 years – a whole decade. Then in 1997 it was offered to the police, who turned it down because they said they didn’t have the money to renovate it.

Another half a decade passed, and then in 2002 things suddenly started speeding up. But I couldn’t help thinking: at that point Gaetano Badalamenti and his henchmen had just been convicted, the Anti-Mafia Commission had recently condemned the police’s mismanagement of the investigations and
The Hundred Steps
had been a huge success, surely all of this was no coincidence.

Following a request from the council commissioners the house was now finally handed over to Cinisi council. So the current mayor, elected at the end of the commissioners’ mandate, was essentially correct – it had ‘only’ been council property for four years. The original plan was that it would be used as a headquarters for the municipal police, although there would also be an ‘office for legality’, in other words a structure that promoted a culture of generalised legality. The current plan has slightly changed, and the intention now is to make it both an ‘office for legality’ and a youth training centre.

At that point I decided to contact the land registry office to ask for an explanation for such a long delay, and any more information that was available. It has a wonderfully slick website, and has the most impressive ‘Code of Ethics’ imaginable, brimming with phrases about ‘transparency’ and ‘serving the public’. When I rang them up they promised to send me a report, but when they got round to writing they said their Code of Ethics prevented them from releasing any information. I quoted their Code of Ethics back at them, pointing out these were public documents available to the public, but they ignored me for weeks. When I threatened to appeal to their ‘Monitoring Committee’ they wrote back, saying that if I ‘made unjustified negative statements about the conduct of this office, the same body reserves the right to take legal action’.

Despite all that I had managed to find out, nobody I knew in Cinisi had given me sufficient answers to my two questions, so here are my own. My explanation is recounted on three levels: Cinisi, Sicily and national.

The old actor Gaspare Cucinella once said to me: ‘Peppino isn’t dead’ and instinctively I knew what he meant. Nearly thirty years after his death Peppino still casts a long shadow, primarily because it took twenty-five years to establish the truth and obtain justice. His brother Giovanni has got drawn into recounting all of this history, including his brother’s activities during the 1970s. As a result of the success of
The Hundred Steps
, if he accepted every invitation he received to go and speak he would spend three days out of four outside Cinisi.

For many years several of Peppino’s fellow comrades spent a lot of time campaigning to clear his name, and perhaps felt a bit guilty when they looked back and wondered whether they could have done more to save him. Maybe they were also embarrassed by the fact that soon after Peppino died, large-scale political campaigning in Cinisi perished too. The annual 9 May commemoration is now a national event. The end result has been very positive and significant, as Felicetta says: ‘when we started Cinisi was known as the town of Gaetano Badalamenti, now people know it as the town of Peppino Impastato’.

But the prominence of this campaigning over a past miscarriage of justice has meant that people’s attention has been distracted from the here and now. What is lacking in Cinisi is a noisy, irreverent and daring opposition against local, national and international politics. Gaspare Cucinella draws a deep sigh before telling me: ‘The fight against the Mafia can’t just take place once a year. Demonstrations, meetings, films are all fine – but you just can’t talk about Peppino – you’ve got to have “after Peppino” discussions as well. And where is it, this “after Peppino”? It doesn’t exist. It’s as if Peppino isn’t really dead.’

This vacuum is also influenced by Sicilian and national politics. The Mafia is everywhere but cannot be seen. It is murderous but it doesn’t kill. The crude domination of a Badalamenti has largely disappeared, as has Riina’s strategy of a head-on collision with government. Today, one of the biggest growth areas for the Mafia is privatised health care.