Studying Mafias in Sicily by Umberto Santino Doi: 10.2383/35872
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Symposium / “Telling about the Mafia”: Research, Reflexivity, and Representation, edited by Marco Santoro Studying Mafias in Sicily by Umberto Santino doi: 10.2383/35872 For those who are born in Sicily and choose a form of militancy to transform their own reality, the encounter with the phenomenon of mafia is arguably “natural.” I was born in the inner Sicily, in the province of Palermo, but I can not remember any particular episode from the place where I lived my early childhood. My father used to tell me that some figures who had survived the Fascist internment were Mafiosi, but they did not look so active. The most powerful and bloody Mafia was in the nearby towns: in Alia, where two peasants were killed in 1946 by a bomb that was thrown to the Chamber of Work’s Secretary’s house, where the protagonists of the political struggles in those years used to meet; in Caccamo, where the mafia boss had a reserved seat in the council chamber, near the major’s (but I learnt it later): in Sciara, where in 1955 trade unionist Salvatore Carnevale was murdered. However, people did not talk (a lot) about Mafia. When I moved to the city to keep on studying, I discovered Palermo. It exhibited its war ruins, while preparing itself for the great speculation that was going to overwhelm it. In the early 1960s there were the great killings mainly associated with the “sack of Palermo.” My interest towards studying mafia and fighting against it increasingly de- veloped during my militancy within the New Left groups that were born at the end of the 1960s. In that period, the most significant figure was Mario Mineo, an economist who had been politically engaged since his early youth, firstly in the underground anti-Fascism and then in the Socialist Party and in the Communist Party. After being elected in the list of the so-called “Blocco del Popolo” (Bloc of the People) during Sociologica, 2/2011 - Copyright © 2011 by Società editrice il Mulino, Bologna. 1 Santino, Studying Mafias in Sicily the first regional elections on April 20, 1947 (that was the first and only victory of the Left in Sicily, and after ten days the massacre of Portella della Ginestra took place), he presented the draft of a regional statute, which included the abolition of the provinces. After leaving the Communist Party, he had pursued his activities with- in extra-parliamentary groups. I met him at the end of the Sixties, when I was one of the leaders of the Lenin Circle, which joined the Manifest in 1970. In a paper, Mineo wrote about mafia as a “mafia-capitalistic bourgeoisie” which was widespread throughout Sicily [now in Mineo 1995]. On the basis of that paper, and through the rediscovery of Leopoldo Franchetti’s work, I started developing my analysis of the system of relationships and the Mafia bourgeoisie [Santino 1994a]. Such analysis was not welcome within the national Manifest and was contested also by Sicilian milit- ants. Some considered the Mafia to be dead, others claimed that in eastern Sicily a capitalistic bourgeoisie that had nothing to do with Mafia had imposed itself. Sub- sequently, we launched a popular initiative campaign for a regional law aimed at the expropriation of Mafia’s properties: it was more than ten years before the anti-Mafia law, but the attempt was unsuccessful. In 1977 I left politics and I founded the Sicilian Centre of Documentation (Centro siciliano di documentazione) together with a few others, among which Anna Puglisi: I had met her during the political militancy (both of us were active at the Zen, a public housing neighbourhood that had been occupied by homeless persons after the earthquake in January 1968) and we got married in 1972. The Centre’s first initiat- ive was the organization of the national meeting “Portella della Ginestra. A massacre for the centrism” (“Portella della Ginestra. Una strage per il centrismo”), which took place in the 30th anniversary of the massacre and was arguably a “heretical” initiat- ive during the so-called historical compromise between the Communist Party (PCI) and the Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana). On May, 9, 1978 Peppino Im- pastato, a militant of the New Left coming from a Mafia’s family, was murdered. It represented a crucial event in our personal lives as well as in the life of the Centre. I was nine year older than Peppino, we were active within different and competing militant groups, and we had never had personal relationships. Everything began after his death. As soon as we heard about it, we rushed to Cinisi; people claimed it to be a terroristic attack or a suicide, but we immediately understood that he had been killed by the Mafia because of his decennial activity of denounce and counter-information. We put up a poster in Palermo which said: “Peppino Impastato was murdered by the Mafia”, and we undersigned a petition in the Public Prosecutor’s office. The fol- lowing day we went to the funeral and we learned that only a few Cinisi citizens were there. On May 11, 1978, we organized a meeting at the University of Palermo in the morning, and in the afternoon we went back to Cinisi for the closing electoral meeting 2 Sociologica, 2/2011 that should have been held by Peppino. A leader of Democrazia Proletaria (Prolet- arian Democracy) who came from Milan was the official speaker, but the comrades of Cinisi, who knew my activity, asked me to talk. I accepted and, on the basis of their information, I named the name of mafia boss Badalamenti as the instigator of the murder. After a few days, breaking her ties with their mafia family, Peppino’s mother sued for damaging in a civil proceeding. Thus a long battle began, a battle fought with Peppino’s relatives and militant fellows in order to defend his memory and obtain justice. In 1979 we organized the first national manifestation against Mafia, in 1980 we named the Centre after Peppino Impastato and we started living years of isola- tion: he was unknown to many, for many others such as the magistrates of the Court House, with a very few exceptions such as investigating magistrate Rocco Chinnici, he was a terrorist who had committed suicide. The study of mafia and anti-mafia have since been at the core of my own activity as well as of the work of the Centre. xStereotypes and Paradigms My study, which was carried out mainly with Anna, aimed at developing a meth- odology. We started with an unsuited fund. I had a BA (laurea) in Law, with a thesis in Criminal Law, and after a brief experience as a voluntary assistant I wan an open competition to work as a regional official (while in the previous years many regional officials had entered thanks to internal calls), retiring early with the minimum wage. With a BA (laurea) in Mathematics, she used to teach in the Faculty of Science, and she too retired after a few years. Our research required other competences. My legal knowledge turned out to be useful, but we also started studying, with the enthusiasm and risks of the autodidacts, in order to widen our tool-kit. Anna focused on the role of women, doing press reviews and gathering life histories. The methodology I developed is not particularly original and it can be outlined as follows: 1) analysis of current ideas; 2) formulation of a defining hypothesis; 3) verification of the hypothes- is through research, in a way that combined sociology and history (some would call it “socio-history”) but remained open to insights from other disciplines. We clearly needed help from the outside: we asked for collaborations, but we could find only a very few of them. When we started our research, the dominant ideas were based on stereotypes: mafia was considered a subculture involving the whole population living in Western Sicily (the most diffused book was Hess 1970, with the foreword by Leonardo Scias- cia), and there was a distinction between “old mafia,” which had the sense of honour and the respect for women, children, and men of the institutions, and the contem- 3 Santino, Studying Mafias in Sicily porary “new mafia,” which was considered a sort of common delinquency and urb- an gangsterism without rules. Only after the murder of Dalla Chiesa on September 3, 1982, an anti-mafia law was approved, which codified mafia as a criminal associ- ation with peculiar characteristics. This brought to a turnabout in the field of study, which has always suffered from a strong polarization. Mafia was formerly “subcul- ture without organization”, then it became only “organization”. I described such a turnabout as a shift from the “indigestion of the informal” with an amoebic, inver- tebrate mafia (in that period the most diffused scientific expressions were “disorgan- ized crime” and “non corporate groups”), to an “overdose of the super-structured,” with an hyper-organized, Cartesian mafia [Santino 1994b].