Defiance (3 page)

He is the Mafia boss of Cinisi, and has a domineering and violent personality . . . Cesare Manzella is cunning, with remarkable organisational abilities . . . Such is his influence that the crimes committed by his accomplices are not even reported to the authorities. For this reason . . . he has always escaped justice, in fact he has no convictions. He makes use of hit-men for murders . . . It is beyond doubt, however, that the small number of serious crimes which have taken place in the Cinisi area were decided by him. There is no other explanation: a Mafia boss such as Manzella would not allow illegal acts to take place in his territory without his permission . . . Manzella himself is very well-off economically, being the owner of substantial real estate (olive groves, market gardens, buildings, all within Cinisi), valued at about 20 million lire.

The drugs trade was starting to make Mafia bosses very rich. The 20 million lire mentioned in this 1958 report is worth about £300 million today. People like Manzella were no longer simply parasites organising low-level protection rackets in the countryside. They were international businessmen, albeit of an unusual kind.

The whole town was frightened of them. People in Cinisi weren’t afraid because they were cowards, but for a reason that this report could never mention: as a rich and powerful man Manzella had a lot of influence, in essence he was protected by members of the police and local politicians. If honest people were to stand up against the Mafia, they knew that not only were local politicians and policemen unlikely to protect them, but in some cases they would actively take the Mafia’s side. That’s why, as the report states, so many crimes went unreported.

This local power structure produces public grovelling, a reality in which people feel obliged to demonstrate their lack of self-respect publicly. A Communist activist from this period remembers: ‘As soon as Cesare Manzella arrived in the town square it was all “Don Cesare, Don Cesare” – people kissing his hand.’ This was a perfectly normal event at this time. In the nearby town of Carini another young Communist remembers ‘his’ Mafia boss thus: ‘He used to walk up and down with the mayor, the priest, the police superintendent – people used to kiss his hand, and so on.’

Despite the existence of the Commission, and the fact that Manzella’s deputy in Cinisi, Gaetano Badalamenti, was one of its three members, the massive and sudden increase in wealth and influence caused by the drugs trade created instability. To finance big drug deals individual Mafia families had to make agreements with other gangs, they had to trust each other and make huge financial investments on trust – a problematic situation that quickly brings to mind the phrase ‘there’s no honour among thieves’. Perhaps this was what Mafia leader Giuseppe Genco Russo meant at the Hotel Delle Palme summit in 1957, in the only snippet of conversation that was overheard: ‘when a hundred dogs are fighting over a bone, blessed be the man who is far away’. In any event, it was a major drug deal that was to be Manzella’s undoing.

In February 1962 Manzella, together with other gang leaders Salvatore Greco and the brothers Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera, raised the money to buy a large consignment of heroin. Delivery to the United States was entrusted to Manzella’s gang, but when the heroin got to America less money came back than had been agreed. The Americans said they had paid for the amount they received. The La Barbera brothers suspected that Manzella’s man had kept some of the heroin.

It was a large amount of money. Since the Hotel Delle Palme summit five years earlier the price of heroin had nearly doubled in New York, from $12,000 to $22,000 a kilo. The Sicilians were selling it on at four or five times the price they paid, and by 1963 Sicily had become the world’s largest staging area for drugs. The Mafia could no longer turn back: the drugs trade had become vital to the activities of many gangs and members. Given these serious accusations and the essential nature of the drugs trade itself, the Commission held a summit, where it was agreed that Manzella and his accomplices were not to blame.

But the La Barberas didn’t agree, and decided to launch the ‘First Mafia War’. It began in December when the man who had taken the consignment to the US, and other gang members, were killed in Palermo. This was a very serious move. These were attacks on another major gang and against the Commission. Salvatore La Barbera, who had taken part in the summit but ignored its outcome, was challenging the whole way the Mafia operated. This was why, three weeks later, he left home and never came back.

The La Barberas started to hit back at the loss of one of their leaders. Early on the morning of 26 April 1963 Cesare Manzella and his estate manager Filippo Vitale were driving through their lemon groves when they saw a car identical to Badalamenti’s. Confused, they got out, but were then blown up by a massive car bomb that was heard throughout Cinisi. The police officers who arrived at the scene later wrote in their report:

In one of these notes Manzella had written down the address of one of Luciano Leggio’s gang from Corleone – the top Mafia leader at the time, who was also in alliance with Manzella – as well as the car registration number of La Barbera’s top killer. The La Barberas had got to Manzella first, yet despite all his notoriety Manzella died without ever being convicted of a single crime.

The killing continued. Two months later Angelo La Barbera was attacked and riddled with six bullets, but somehow he survived. Significantly, he wasn’t attacked on the ‘mean streets’ of Palermo but at the other end of Italy – in Milan – the country’s financial capital. Clearly, the Mafia was no longer just something local, confined to small Sicilian towns.

When the dust settled, it became clear that Manzella’s death had produced three changes. The first took a few years to have an effect. One of the mourners at Manzella’s funeral was a 15-year-old boy named Peppino Impastato, who was taken along by his mother, and who was deeply shocked by the death of Manzella, his uncle. The second immediate consequence was that Manzella’s right-hand man, Gaetano Badalamenti, became the new Mafia boss in Cinisi.

Then something completely unexpected happened, and produced the third change. On 7 July a car bomb was planted in the town of Ciaculli as part of this gang war; the intended targets were probably Salvatore Greco and Luciano Leggio. But the bombers partly bungled the operation and the police were called to investigate. When one of them opened the boot a huge explosion rocked the whole area. Flames shot fifty feet into the air, a nearby villa was totally destroyed, and seven policemen were literally blown to pieces.

The media and the government were now driven into action. A permanent parliamentary committee was set up, the Anti-Mafia commission, and 2,000 arrest warrants were issued, including ones for Tommaso Buscetta and Badalamenti. Both went on the run: Badalamenti may have been one of the Mafia’s top three, but now he had to learn fast how to be invisible, even to his own organisation. For the foreseeable future there was to be no more Commission, no more regional meetings, no ‘boss of bosses’. From 1963 to the end of the decade it was ‘every man for himself’, or more precisely every local gang for itself.

uring his most difficult trial, an American lawyer once said of ‘Don Tano’, an abbreviation of Gaetano Badalamenti: ‘There are three things guaranteed

in life – death, taxes and Badalamenti’s silence.’ Facing a life sentence in the ‘Pizza Connection’ trial, 63-year-old Badalamenti refused to plead guilty to a minor charge, and imposed the same response on his son Vito and many other relatives. When one of his co-defendants started to break ranks, Badalamenti ominously warned him: ‘if you take this plea, you’re out of the family’.

Families are hugely important to Italians, both in the north of the country, and in the deep south such as Sicily – they are probably the strongest organising bond in Italian society. Being part of a family is almost like being a soldier in an army: your life is not your own. Although many Italians go through family life happily, the rhythm of their lives is often dictated by the marriages, deaths, birthdays, births, illnesses, graduations, engagements of many of their close relatives, not to mention the rituals of Easter, Christmas and New Year. Due respect has to be shown at all times. Once you get married – and still today the traditional view is that there must be something a bit wrong with unmarried people – your family duties almost doubled because you now have obligations towards your spouse’s family too.

At the head of any traditional family is the patriarch, the father. Italians have a useful expression for describing his power –
padre padrone
– literally ‘boss father’. When this widespread mentality is then reproduced within a Mafia gang, which is normally based on blood ties, the power of the leader becomes virtually absolute. A woman who married into the Badalamenti clan noticed the tradition and hierarchy at weddings and christenings: ‘All the men are on one side of the room, all the women are on the other. The women who never talk but know everything sit near the men, whereas the younger or more stupid women sit further away.’ This was how she saw things being organised:

A Mafia family is organised like a beehive. First of all there’s the queen bee, the boss, then come the drones, the soldiers, then the worker bees – generally the women or men who are distant relatives. Women can only marry men approved by the queen bee, there’s no getting away from that. But in a way women have an easier life because their husbands always have to show them respect.

The claustrophobic power of family ties is magnified in towns such as Cinisi because almost everybody is related to many other people – even second or third cousins are important links. Letterboxes are dominated by just a few surnames: Badalamenti, Bartolotta, Impastato, Mangiapane, Maniaci, Manzella, Palazzolo, Ruvolo and Vitale.

Another very strong characteristic of Cinisi is the use of nicknames, which often help in distinguishing people with identical names. The one used for the Badalamenti clan began one day when an ancestor of Don Tano decided he wanted to be noticed, so he put huge cow bells on his livestock to make sure everybody would notice it was his cattle that were passing by – indeed, cattle were the family’s main source of income. And that became the family’s nickname: ‘cow bells’.

The Badalamenti clan is descended from two patriarch brothers, Vito and Salvatore, both of whom had cattle herds and sired many children. Gaetano, as the song that introduces
The Sopranos
television series says, was ‘born under a bad sign’ in 1923, in the sense that his father died the same year. While he may not have ‘got himself a gun’ straight away, he grew up in a violent town, with his four older brothers getting involved in various kinds of crime before him. He went to school for four years, but at the age of 10 he started work in the family business.

His parents were respected locally, although not in the way he later became. Someone who married into the family remembers the reason for that respect: ‘both because they were experts in choosing cattle and because their cheeses were the best. All this was due to their skill in preparing the cheese, as well as their knowledge of when to move their cattle – from the coast to the mountains and vice versa – therefore their milk was always the best.’

One of the main reasons for Don Tano’s early success was cattle rustling, for which the 18-year-old Gaetano was first reported in 1941. Cattle rustling might seem quaint and low-level criminal activity to most, but at that time it was an important crime. People were so poor – or supplies were so scarce – that a few aspirin tablets could be exchanged for several fish or hens. The theft, or killing, of even a single cow was a serious economic blow to a family.

Another of his early activities was robbing houses, often with another young sidekick, Procopio Di Maggio. One of their favourite targets was young women’s dowries, the luxurious presents families collected for many years in expectation of a daughter’s marriage. All of these criminal activities, whether it was cattle rustling or burglary, were taking place in a small town where news travels fast. And to a large extent, a professional criminal wants his reputation to be known far and wide, so word spread very quickly about their actions.

Although Gaetano Badalamenti did not come from a strictly Mafia background, after the Second World War his family links read like a Mafia family tree. His wife, Teresa Vitale, is from nearby Castellammare del Golfo, a key town in terms of links with the US. One of her sisters is married to Filippo Rimi, of the powerful Alcamo Mafia; that marriage made Badalamenti and Filippo Rimi cousins. In turn, his cousins from Alcamo were linked with the Bonannos in New York, his sons-in-law with the Maggadinos of Buffalo. The clan was clearly international. Indeed, for a long period one of Gaetano’s brothers, Emanuele, virtually commuted from Cinisi to Detroit – there was a jumbo jet a week from the local airport. Many of Badalamenti’s relatives worked at the airport, and when drug smuggling got big it was often they who would load and unload all the baggage, drugs and dollars. In its heyday there were about 200 people in the Badalamenti clan, who managed to move about a thousand foot soldiers,
picciotti
. It was something more than a family; it was an organisation, often prepared to use force.

Badalamenti’s first arrest in 1946, for criminal association and conspiracy to kidnap, showed that he had started out on a professional criminal career. He often boasted with
Mafiosi
that once he had been ‘made’ and joined the Mafia – soon after Lucky Luciano’s arrival in Naples in 1946 – he was entrusted with his first murder. Luciano had been slapped at the Agnano racecourse, just outside the city, and Badalamenti’s job was to organise the murder of this offender, which he entrusted to a local criminal, Salvatore Zaza.

Looking back now, Gaetano Badalmenti was just one small-time criminal out of many. The only law these people followed was that of the jungle, and Badalamenti – through chance or luck – managed to survive. Many of his actions were low-level feuds if judged by the standards under which
Mafiosi
were operating by the 1960s, but murder was murder whatever the year. In June 1947 he was first accused of killing someone, but when the charge was made he was already on the run.

Four months later something more serious happened, indicating a real battle for power, and therefore a real growth in local Mafia gangs. A few years before, the Badalamentis and another local family had had a serious disagreement. The arrival of a senior Italian-American gangster led to the decision that the other gang had to make a sacrifice to the Badalamentis, or in other words one of them had to die. Understandably, the poor man in question, Procopio Finazzo, shut himself in at home and virtually never came out, even though he was a good shot. On 10 October 1946 he did emerge, and Badalamenti managed to wound him. Exactly a year later Finazzo went to a bar for a drink. Coming out, he saw six men waiting for him in the main square, he begged the barman to lend him a gun but was cut down immediately. This time, Badalamenti faced a charge of organising the murder. This was a sure sign that he was becoming important – ordering six other people to murder on his behalf shows that there was an organisation, and that Badalamenti had power within it.

The charges mounted up. In 1949 another arrest warrant was issued for kidnapping and extortion, but Badalamenti was now far away. The same year he left Italy illegally for Detroit, but was deported in 1950. His brother Emanuele, 20 years older than Gaetano, had already moved to the US and ended up running a supermarket and petrol station in Monroe, Michigan. Back in Cinisi the following year, Gaetano was arrested for kidnapping but released without charge.

Two years later he was again arrested for cigarette smuggling and armed resistance to arrest, but charges were dropped, this time for lack of evidence. Three years after that he was apprehended once more, again with a weapon, but this time in possession of 3,000 kilos of foreign cigarettes. Cigarette smuggling is still a key activity for organised crime today, and the system tends to work like this. Senior criminals make perfectly legal deals with major cigarette manufacturers to deliver massive amounts of cigarettes to a third country. In turn these items are then taken to sea and unloaded from cargo ships onto speedboats just outside Italian territorial waters, and then the illegal cargo speeds to land and is distributed up and down the country, although mainly in the south. The reason is that the government has a monopoly on cigarette sales in Italy and imposes a huge duty on top of the manufacturers’ prices. Once the price of duty is avoided, these cigarettes can be sold for close to half the legal price, all the while guaranteeing big profits for the criminal gangs that distribute them.

Far greater profits could be made dealing in drugs rather than cigarettes. In 1951 an American police report named than cigarettes. In 1951 an American police report named kilo consignment of heroin to the US. The following year an Italian police investigation states that he was involved in a drug smuggling ring with other top criminals, such as Frank Coppola. One of the ways that drugs were moved was through the easy access to fruit and vegetable markets in both the US and Italy. Police eventually discovered a ‘drugged oranges’ trade in 1959; drugs were injected into the base of oranges, thus doubling their weight and making them ‘pregnant’ until their ‘birth’ on the other side of the Atlantic. This system was virtually global: the raw material was shipped from Syria and Turkey to the Sicilian coasts, where the speedboats sometimes used for illegal fishing brought it ashore and into citrus groves. Then certain oranges were injected, placed in crates, and sent on to Palermo for export. The other up-and-coming
Mafioso
in Cinisi, Procopio Di Maggio, had links with other
Mafiosi
who had also been at the Hotel Delle Palme summit, so a completely alternative route existed as well.

Although Badalamenti had already been arrested and charged several times, he was yet to spend a long time in jail. Not only were the police aware of his charmed life, but local people too had started to realise he was close to being untouchable. In 1957 he was believed to have stolen five head of cattle from one family, and 13 from another. These actions probably weren’t directly important from a financial point of view, but their purpose was probably broader: to show people who was in charge. Gaspare Cucinella recalls an event from the same period: ‘One day, for some reason or other, he wanted to show he was boss of the whole town. So he took all his cows down into town and let them drink from the fountain outside the town hall. Nobody said a word against him.’ Not for nothing did an Anti-Mafia Commission report comment years later: ‘Due to the iron law of silence in this situation, out of fear of even worse reprisals, injured parties sometimes do not even report crimes. In any event, they never voice their suspicions.’ This is why, a year after the 1957 Hotel Delle Palme summit, a police headquarters report could say of Badalamenti: ‘due to his past and his violence he represents an important figure in the local underworld. So much so that local people fear him to the extent that they prefer to silently accept his bullying and crimes due to their fear of vendettas and retaliation.’

Once again, individual words are important: Badalamenti isn’t defined as being a member of the Mafia but of the underworld. Decades were to pass before membership of the Mafia was made a criminal offence; decades were to pass too before a verdict was reached in a courtroom that an organisation known as the Mafia even existed. In a notorious case in 1975, a Communist politician had accused a former Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo of being a
Mafioso
, the mayor had then sued for libel. During the hearing, when the defence lawyer asked the former mayor whether he was a
Mafioso
or not, the judge ruled the question out of order. There was a criminal conspiracy amongst the powerful, not only in a legal sense, but also in a political and moral sense, to keep all of this quiet – often because these influential people had links with top gang leaders or were prepared to come to an arrangement with them sometimes, particularly during elections if they were politicians.

So, legally it was as a simple criminal, rather than as a
Mafioso
, that Badalamenti continued his life of crime. In September 1961 two murders were committed in Cinisi, and it was widely believed Badalamenti was responsible for them – the two victims were viewed as being ‘guilty’ of getting ideas above their station. But once again Badalamenti wasn’t convicted. Unusually for a mere cattle farmer, he now owned a car, in which, according to the police: ‘he often travels from one town to another committing all kinds of crimes, thus becoming one of the most influential and dangerous members of the Cinisi underworld’.

The following month the police reported that Badalamenti had met top Mafia leaders at Palermo Airport, and in February 1962 he was again spotted by the police at a Mafia summit in Rome. The new airport, opened in 1960, was within Cinisi’s council boundaries, and in later years became a Badalamenti stronghold. His family owned a nearby mountain that was the only local source of rock, gravel and sand in the area, and very quickly Don Tano came to own two construction companies, a concrete factory and fleet of lorries. The authorities believed Badalamenti was coordinating links between the Sicilian and American Mafias, yet despite all of this he was convicted of hardly any of the crimes for which he was arrested and charged. Local people saw that he lived a charmed life, that he was untouchable.