Defiance by Behan Tom

Author:Behan, Tom [Behan, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-06-27T05:00:00+00:00

A Mafia God Walks the Earth

The high point of Badalamenti’s career came with his ‘Pizza Connection’ system in the United States – the distribution of hard drugs through pizza parlours. At one stage in the early 1980s Caribbean banks were getting so overloaded with the dirty money they needed to launder that the whole operation became bottlenecked. There was so much cash that delivering money in suitcases became impractical, so private jets were chartered to transport millions of dollars.

It was a global operation. From the global east came the heroin, from the global west – Bolivia and Paraguay – came the cocaine. Heroin was generally refined in Sicily, but in Italy most drug users lived in the richer cities of the north and centre of the country (where the drugs were originally delivered). In any event, most of the heroin was refined and sent on to a country in the global north, the United States.

Despite such a huge operation Badalamenti’s wealth and power still had geographical foundations, he still needed a physical base, his own ‘home turf’. If he didn’t have these things he would have counted for nothing in the Mafia pecking order. The only problem he had as regards Cinisi was getting there as often as he wanted, given that sometimes he was either forced to live elsewhere in Italy in ‘internal exile’, or was in jail awaiting trials that either never happened or in which he was acquitted. Yet when he did appear, he always made an impression, as Piero Impastato recalls: ‘Badalamenti had an amazing physical presence. He reminded me a lot of that actor who always used to play Dracula – Christopher Lee.’

In one way or another it was virtually impossible not to be aware of Badalamenti’s change in status, Mafiosi made no attempts to hide it. As a town councillor explains, they would also boast about having links with one of the most senior Christian Democrat politicians, who had already been prime minister three times:

When somebody becomes head of the Commission their house becomes a port of call for people from all over the island. Gaetano Badalamenti’s house used to be frequented by ordinary people, then at a certain point certain well-known individuals were always going in and out of it. There were loads of Mercedes and BMWs parked outside, whereas virtually everyone else had little Fiat 500s. I remember I used to go into bars during that period and people were saying: ‘these days Gaetano Badalamenti has got top-level friends in Rome, he’s a friend of Andreotti’. People would turn round and say: ‘What? Andreotti?’ Today maybe it would be dangerous to say something like that, but back then it was something that was said openly, with pride.

Badalamenti’s main meeting place was the Palazzolo bar, which significantly was in front of the council building. And as one of his opponents was forced to recognise: ‘Whenever Badalamenti went to a bar he was always surrounded by loads of people, people who were desperate in one way or another.’ Badalamenti

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