Cosa Nostra (38 page)

In 1947, another famous figure was introduced to Buscetta: Salvatore Giuliano, the last bandit. The young Buscetta was awed by Giuliano’s presence, by the ‘special light’ that seemed to emanate from him. It seems that Buscetta was considerably less impressed by another man of honour he met early in his career, Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of Mussomeli, sidekick of Don Calò Vizzini, and the man whom other mafiosi referred to as ‘Gina Lollobrigida’ for his love of the media spotlight. For an urban sophisticate like Buscetta, Genco Russo embodied the coarse life of the Sicilian interior. He was by then a wealthy landowner and a DC politician, but he still kept his mule inside the house and the toilet outside (it was little more than a hole in the ground with a stone for a seat and no walls or door). This detail particularly struck Buscetta because, as he later recalled with horror, Genco Russo actually sat down and used the ‘toilet’ in front of him during their discussion.

Buscetta soon began to travel. He spent his first years abroad, from 1949 to 1952, in Argentina and Brazil. In 1956 he returned from another stay in Argentina with plans to resume the cigarette smuggling at which he had already proved to be adept. The Palermo he found on his homecoming was just beginning to be buried in concrete—and its burial would seal a new kind of pact between organized crime and political power.

THE SACK OF PALERMO

The ‘sack of Palermo’—the building boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s—still inspires a certain melancholy in Palermo residents. To get a sense of that melancholy it is enough to head north-west along Palermo’s main artery from the Quattro Canti, the crossroads where the four quarters of the baroque city meet. To walk along the via Maqueda, past the giant bronze lions guarding the Teatro Massimo, and carry straight on into via Ruggero Settimo, is to follow the path of Palermo’s expansion during the late nineteenth century. Via Ruggero Settimo in its turn becomes the broad avenue of via Libertà, where the fashion-conscious bourgeois of the Florio era promenaded in their carriages and built splendid Liberty-style homes. On the eastern side of via Libertà, just before the Giardino Inglese, the road opens out into Piazza Francesco Crispi, its centre now dominated by giant advertising hoardings. Almost lost below the hoardings are the rusting scrolls and spikes of an elegant wrought-iron railing—an oddly grand surround for the shabby open-air car park that lies behind. The railing is, in fact, all that remains of one of the jewels of Florio-era Palermo.

The Villa Deliella once stood here, surrounded by palm trees. Its watchtower, slim windows, grand balcony, and gently sloping roofs were designed in lush homage to the architectural idiom of the Tuscan Renaissance. On 28 November 1959—a Saturday—plans to knock down the Villa Deliella were submitted to the city council. They were approved in time for demolition to begin that very afternoon, and by the end of the weekend one of the most beautiful houses of the Liberty era was rubble. A month later the Villa Deliella would have reached fifty years of age, and therefore become protected by law. The loss of the Villa Deliella is only one minor tragedy of the many that together make up the story of the sack of Palermo.

When the Second World War ended, Palermo was still, in essence, the same city it had been in the Florio era. Beyond via Libertà, the Conca d’Oro with its villas and its lemon groves began. Palermo as a whole was ringed with countryside. But despite its beauty, it was a city in desperate need of renewal. Allied bombing was partly responsible; it had rendered homeless an estimated 14,000 people, many of whom lived in shacks amid the rubble of the old centre where the bomb damage was concentrated. The pressure to build more homes only increased in the 1950s when there was an influx of provincials seeking the public sector jobs available now that Palermo was, once again, a capital city, the headquarters of the new regional government. Between 1951 and 1961, the population increased by 20 per cent to 600,000.

A post-war building boom was inevitable—as it was in much of Europe. It was also inevitable that the often giddily high expectations for planned urban development would meet with disappointment. But the results of Palermo’s expansion in the 1950s and 1960s were far worse than anyone could have foreseen. When the building boom ended, a good portion of the city centre still lay in ruins; much of the rest was a half-abandoned slum; and some of its finest private homes—baroque and Liberty alike—had been demolished. The verdant periphery had disappeared under concrete; most of the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro had fallen to the bulldozer. Before this transformation, it was hard to detect the signs of the city’s underworld in its fabric of buildings and streets. The sack of Palermo turned every crumbling baroque palace, every jerry-built council estate, every aspirational apartment stack, into a monument to corruption and crime.

But the story of the sack of Palermo is in essence political rather than architectural, and as such it begins in another city. When Italians complained that the mafia was ‘run from Rome’, they were expressing a simplistic version of an undoubted truth. The politicians, contractors, and mafiosi responsible for the sack of Palermo were at one end of a chain that led directly to the headquarters of the Democrazia Cristiana in Piazza del Gesù, Rome. It was there that a whole new structure of patronage government for the democratic era was invented.

The first link in the chain was Amintore Fanfani, a tiny, proud-chested university professor from Arezzo in Tuscany. When he became leader of the DC in 1954, he proposed a wholesale modernization of the party that aimed to put more power in his own hands. The DC dominated government, but was itself susceptible to the influence of outside powers: above it, the Vatican and the titans of Italian industry; below it, the conservative grandees who supplied packets of votes in the towns and villages. There was little to guarantee the DC’s claim on the support of these outside powers. To deal with them on at least equal terms, Fanfani believed that the party had to become a modern mass organization and a power in its own right.

In Sicily, as in much of southern Italy, the Fanfani revolution meant two things. First a new breed of political manager—the ‘young Turks’—emerged within the party. Second, the same men colonized every post they could in local or national government, in quangos and nationalized companies. Thus, in the new DC, the charismatic old notables had to come to terms with dynamic young bureaucrats of sleaze who set about ‘occupying the state’ on behalf of their party and themselves. The young Turks turned public resources into DC resources.

The young Turk principally responsible for implementing Fanfani’s programme on the island, and the next link in the corrupt chain linking Rome and the pillaging of Palermo, was Giovanni Gioia. Gioia did not have a high public profile—Tommaso Buscetta describes him merely as having a ‘glacial character’—and he never held any office in the municipality, but he was nonetheless fundamental to the history of the city in these years. Insiders called him ‘the Viceroy’ and regarded him as having sole power to choose who became mayor of the city. At twenty-eight, in 1954, Gioia became secretary of the DC in the province of Palermo and, just as importantly, the head of the party’s Organization Office, which supervised membership. Gioia, or one of his followers, controlled the Organization Office for nearly a quarter of a century thereafter. It was from this key position that the glacial Gioia would reinvent Sicilian machine politics.

Under the Fanfani reforms, local DC Party branches were set up across Italy for the first time; there were fifty-nine in Palermo, for example. The aim, ostensibly, was for Christian Democracy to reach out into the community, recruiting new members as it did so. Fanfani’s followers issued new party slogans proclaiming an end to ‘
maccheroni
politics’—votes exchanged for favours. The mechanics of this political modernization were simple: the DC’s new structure meant that card-carrying members elected party leaders; the members also voted for delegates who in turn selected election candidates. Or, at least, that was the theory. In practice, in Palermo, the power lay not in the hands of the members, but in Gioia’s. With Gioia in the DC Organization Office, party memberships were given out to friends, relatives, dead people, and names plucked from the phone book. The more members a local party section had, the more delegates it could send to conferences. In other words, the more members a local party chief like Gioia could boast, the more power he was able to offer upwards to the head of a national DC faction like Fanfani. The prodigious rise in membership on the island subsequently gave the Sicilian DC, and Fanfani, a disproportionate influence within the DC nationally. (The little university professor from Tuscany served as Prime Minister six times.)

All this power that ‘Viceroy’ Gioia won
within
the new Democrazia Cristiana in Sicily counted for nothing in itself; it only paid off if the party could distribute the jobs, licences, grants, and other valuable assets that came from control over local and regional government. The scene was set for the sack of Palermo, and for the emergence of its two principal villains: Vito Ciancimino and Salvo Lima, both elected to Palermo city council for the first time in 1956, and both supporters of Gioia. It was they who would turn
maccheroni
politics into concrete politics.

As characters, Ciancimino and Lima were almost diametrically opposed. Ciancimino was born the son of a Corleone barber. He was arrogant, loutish, bright, and ambitious. Photos of him from the sack of Palermo era show a weaselly man in a sharp three-piece suit, a garish tie, slicked-back hair, and a dark pencil moustache. Lima, the son of a municipal archivist, had a law degree and began his working life in the Bank of Sicily. With eyes bulging beneath neatly curling hair, he was as chubby, polished, and slippery as Ciancimino was thin, coarse, and abrasive.

Despite both being in Fanfani’s faction of the DC, Ciancimino and Lima had different mafia connections. Hence the fact that Tommaso Buscetta had a contrasting view of the two. He recalled Ciancimino as ‘a pushy Corleonese embezzler’ who only looked after his own interests and those of the men of honour from his home town. Buscetta—a long-standing opponent of the Corleonesi—channelled the votes under his own control towards Lima. The two were never on first-name terms, and they were both men of few words, but their business relationship was based on what Buscetta called ‘reciprocal respect and sincere cordiality’. Knowing Buscetta’s passion for opera, Lima would make sure he always had tickets for the Teatro Massimo.

Between them Ciancimino and Lima turned the seemingly humble municipal post of Officer of Public Works into Italy’s most shameless and lucrative patronage engine. Between 1959 and 1963—the hottest years of the construction fever, and the years when first Lima and then Ciancimino were at the Office of Public Works—the city council granted 80 per cent of 4,205 building permits to just five men. The bulk of Palermo’s economy depended on publicly funded construction at this time. So a huge proportion of the city’s wealth was routed through those same five names.

But they were not, as one might expect, construction magnates of national stature. In fact they were nobodies. The Office of Public Works was supposed to award licences only to civil engineers qualified to carry out the work. Yet someone had spotted a regulation dating back to 1889—before modern civil engineering qualifications existed. According to this regulation, companies that were granted a licence to build needed to have a ‘master mason’ or a ‘capable contractor’ on their books. The council kept lists of such approved persons. All five of the major licensees in the Lima–Ciancimino system were on a list that dated back to before 1924. Even then, it looked very much as if the qualifications they cited were false; one of the five men seemed to be nothing more than a coal merchant; another turned out to be a former bricklayer—he subsequently took a job as a doorkeeper and janitor in one of the apartment blocks whose construction he had supposedly supervised. When interviewed, he said merely that he was a guy who did what he had to do to get along; he had signed the licences as a favour to some ‘friends’.

Seen from the point of view of the ‘friends’ rather than that of the politicians, the sack of Palermo began on the ground, with the mafiosi who now kept watch over the building sites just as they had once kept watch over the lemon groves. Vandalism and theft could bring any construction project to a halt if the local boss chose. The second storey of mafia influence was a dense tier of small subcontractors who supplied workers and materials. Even if Lima and Ciancimino had not existed, politicians and construction companies would have had to come to terms with mafia power at this level. On the level above them were the great building entrepreneurs, men tied into corrupt webs of friends, relatives, clients, and cohorts. Those networks become thicker and thicker the more one probes, connecting local politicians, municipal functionaries, lawyers, policemen, building contractors, bankers, businessmen, and mafiosi.

At the centre of these networks were Gioia, Lima, and Ciancimino. The young Turks’ method was a form of carefully engineered chaos, as the story of the Palermo town plan shows.

It began its life back in 1954. Each time it looked close to being finalized, in 1956 and 1959, hundreds of amendments were made in response to applications from private citizens, many of whom turned out to be DC politicians, mafiosi, or their relatives and associates. The plan gained definitive approval in 1962. Yet by then the Office of Public Works had granted many building licences on the basis of the 1959 version; blocks of flats already stood on many areas that the plan was supposed to regulate. Even after 1962, people with access to Gioia, Lima, and Ciancimino could get the plan altered in their favour, or have breaches of planning law retrospectively condoned. Only in one case was the demolition ordered of an illegally built structure. No company dared come forward to take on the contract to knock it down.

There is, it must be said, a certain genius in these methods. The town plan, like the regulations setting out who could be awarded planning permission, was meant to prevent illegal building. Under Lima and Ciancimino, these measures only served to place firmly in the politicians’ hands the power to build illegally. It is a bitter paradox with which Italians are all too familiar: the more severe a rule is, the higher the price a politician is able to command for finding a way round it.