Gaetano Badalamenti, called Tano, came from Cinisi, a town near Palermo, and for most of the 1970s he was among the most powerful men in Cosa Nostra. He sat with Stefano Bontade and Luciano Liggio at the head of the organization's Commission, grew rich on the drug trade, and was expelled from the organization in 1978 as the Corleonese faction under Salvatore Riina gained ground. Two courts on two continents later convicted him, for entirely different offenses.
In Italy he was sentenced to life imprisonment on April 11, 2002 as the instigator of the murder of Giuseppe "Peppino" Impastato, a 30-year-old political activist from his own town who had mocked him on local radio and who died in Cinisi on the night of 8 to May 9, 1978. In the United States a federal jury found him guilty on March 2, 1987 of a narcotics conspiracy and of running a continuing criminal enterprise, and he received 45 years. He died in custody on April 29, 2004. The Italian verdict came 24 years after the death of Impastato.
Other charges did not end in conviction. He was tried in Perugia for instigating a second murder, in Rome in 1979; he was acquitted at first instance, convicted on appeal in November 2002 and finally acquitted by the Court of Cassation in October 2003. Earlier, between the 1940s and the 1960s, Italian courts had acquitted him on charges that included aggravated murder. Only one killing, the death of Impastato, ended in a conviction of Badalamenti himself.
Badalamenti was born in Cinisi on September 14, 1923. By his early twenties he was already known to the authorities. A warrant was issued in March 1946 for criminal association and for kidnapping for extortion, and in 1947 he was named in complaints that included an attempted murder with injuries and an aggravated murder. On September 14, 1949 a court acquitted him of aggravated murder for insufficient evidence. In 1950 he was arrested in Monroe, Michigan, and later deported to Italy, and on January 11, 1951 he was arrested in Naples and charged with illegal re-entry and with fraud against a shipping company. On June 21, 1951 the assize court at Trapani acquitted him of kidnapping and of criminal association, in the case of the kidnapping "for not having committed the act."
Customs and smuggling charges followed. On March 10, 1957 the customs police at Catania arrested him at Pozzillo during a seizure of about 3,000 kilograms of foreign tobacco. In 1958 the Palermo police headquarters formally warned him. In the spring of 1963 he went into hiding; he was declared a fugitive on May 28, 1963, and on July 17, 1963 a Palermo court issued an arrest warrant on a charge of criminal association and other offenses. On February 21, 1966 he was ordered to serve three years for smuggling tobacco, because he had not paid the fine. On December 22, 1968 the assize court at Catanzaro acquitted him of criminal association for lack of evidence.
He was repeatedly placed in forced residence outside Sicily, at Cuneo, Velletri, Macherio and Calciano. In the Palermo trial that ended on July 29, 1974 he was sentenced to six years and eight months for the offenses charged against him, which concerned drug trafficking; one of the aggravating circumstances charged was excluded.
On October 12, 1957 Badalamenti attended a meeting at the Hotel delle Palme in Palermo between Sicilian and American mafiosi, a gathering described as linking Sicilian and American criminal interests in drug trafficking. In June 1970 he met Tommaso Buscetta, Stefano Bontade and Salvatore Greco in Rome, and the four agreed to revive the Commission, the body that coordinated the Palermo families. A police informant later said that the family heads had made Badalamenti its president, and the Commission's report on the Impastato case states that it was reconstituted with Badalamenti at its head. A triumvirate of Bontade, Liggio and Badalamenti took charge, with Riina standing in for Liggio when Liggio was absent.
The Anti-Mafia Commission's account of the period portrays him as a rough and poorly educated man who was nevertheless venerated in his circles, with a network of influence that reached beyond Cosa Nostra, and who grew rich on drug trafficking. In Cinisi he was respected and feared at once. The triumvirate postponed the struggle for control of the organization but did not end it. Riina, who had taken over from Liggio, steadily weakened the positions of Bontade and Badalamenti.
In the autumn of 1978, on September 30 in Giovanni Falcone's account, Badalamenti was "posato," expelled by his own family. The reasons are not settled. Three explanations have been offered and they do not exclude one another: a personal bond with Liggio that may have spared his life, the economic cost to others of removing a man whose drug dealings were often run jointly with other bosses, and the likelihood that killing him would have drawn a harsh response from Bontade. Under the rules of the organization as set out in the maxi-trial judgment, an expelled member could have no relations with other members, who were not even to speak to him. Bontade was later killed on Riina's orders; Badalamenti was allowed to go into exile.
Giuseppe Impastato was born in Cinisi on January 5, 1948. As an adolescent he broke with the mafia world of his town. In 1965 he founded a small newsletter, L'Idea socialista, and joined the PSIUP; from 1968 he was active in the new left groups and in local struggles. In 1975 he co-founded a cultural group, Musica e cultura. Through Radio Aut, a self-financed station, he made fun of the local mafiosi and politicians, with Badalamenti the main target. One satirical program was called "Onda pazza."
On April 7, 1978 he used that program to ridicule Badalamenti as "Tano Seduto." The broadcast fell at a tense moment in the town, which was waiting on a decision about a five-storey building, and the town itself was being called "Mafiopoli" in the satire. Residents listened and laughed at the figures in the sketches. Naming mafia bosses and mocking them in public was, as the Anti-Mafia Commission later wrote, an exceptionally bold thing to do at the time. Impastato was also standing for the town council in the May 1978 elections on the list of Democrazia Proletaria.
He was killed in Cinisi in the night of 8 to May 9, 1978. Two days later the voters of Cinisi elected him to the council.
The Palermo prosecutor's office opened a file on May 9, 1978, and on November 6, 1978 the case was formally registered against unknown persons and sent to the investigating judge, Rocco Chinnici, for formal proceedings. For years the police and the judiciary did not treat the death as a mafia murder. A complaint pointing to a mafia origin was filed on May 11, 1978, 48 hours after the death, and Chinnici wrote a memorandum setting out an investigative program; the mafia hypothesis was pursued formally only after the homicide charge was formalized, and a prosecutor had long excluded it in the summary inquiry. Chinnici was killed in 1983, and Antonino Caponnetto took over the Palermo investigating office in November of that year.
On May 19, 1984 Caponnetto issued a ruling that there were no grounds to proceed because the perpetrators remained unknown, while recognizing that the death was of mafia origin. In 1986 the Centro siciliano di documentazione, which carries Impastato's name, published a dossier naming Badalamenti as the instigator. In May 1992 the case was archived again: the court recognized a mafia responsibility but found that the perpetrators could not be identified.
The case moved only when a collaborator of justice, Salvatore Palazzolo, was questioned. In May 1994 the Centro, backed by a popular petition, had asked that he be heard. In June 1996 the inquiry was formally reopened after his statements named Badalamenti as the instigator and Vito Palazzolo as Badalamenti's right-hand man. On May 26, 1997 the prosecutors asked for custody for Badalamenti and for house arrest for Palazzolo. On November 11, 1997 the judge for the preliminary investigation ordered custody for Badalamenti but not for Palazzolo, finding no serious evidence against him beyond the accusation of one collaborator. On appeal the review court placed Palazzolo under house arrest and rejected Badalamenti's challenge, and the Court of Cassation rejected both appeals. Badalamenti was by then held in the United States, and the Commission urged the justice minister in 1999 to press Washington on the extradition request.
A preliminary hearing was set for November 30, 1999. Badalamenti waived it, and on November 23, 1999 the judge ordered an immediate trial before the Palermo assize court (Corte d'assise). Palazzolo asked for an abbreviated trial. The case rested on the statements of a group of collaborators of justice about Badalamenti's role in Cosa Nostra and his exclusion from the Commission. The Anti-Mafia Commission, which had begun its own work in 1998 and approved its report on December 6, 2000, said that it was not deciding on guilt and that it was reviewing what had obstructed the truth.
On March 5, 2001 the assize court convicted Vito Palazzolo of murder and sentenced him to 30 years. On April 11, 2002 the same court sentenced Badalamenti to life imprisonment as the instigator, 24 years after the death. He followed the proceedings from the United States by video link.
While Palermo was reopening the Impastato file, Badalamenti was already in custody on the other side of the Atlantic. On April 8, 1984 Spanish authorities, acting on information from the FBI, arrested him in Madrid. The next day the FBI arrested nearly 30 other people across the United States, and an indictment was unsealed in New York. Indictment SS 84 Cr. 236, filed on February 19, 1985 in the Southern District of New York, charged 35 defendants. Prosecutors charged a conspiracy that moved narcotics from Turkey through Sicily to the United States for sale through pizza restaurants and other businesses from New York to Illinois and Wisconsin, with further narcotics imported from South America. The government put the street value at more than $1.6 billion for the period from 1975 to 1984.
The government's case was that Badalamenti, a fugitive living in Brazil and the deposed head of the Sicilian Mafia, was a source of South American narcotics. The investigation drew on the FBI, the DEA, Customs, the New York police and legal attaches in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Brazil and other countries. Spain extradited Badalamenti to the United States. Of the 35 defendants, 22 went to trial in the autumn of 1985 before Judge Pierre Leval, and after pleas and dismissals 19 remained; the trial ran for about 17 months and was the longest criminal jury trial in United States history up to that time. Prosecutor Louis Freeh led the case, and Rudolph Giuliani was the United States Attorney.
Badalamenti was one of only two defendants who testified. He testified that certain telephone calls with a co-defendant did not concern narcotics. The evidence included intercepted calls about "shirts," "parcels" and "containers," which the court read as references to narcotics shipments, and two deliveries, in April 1983 and February 1984, linked to a subordinate of his. The Court of Appeals listed what the jury could rely on: twenty-two calls over nearly four months, his supervision of at least five people, a remark about "the shirts of four years ago" that pointed to years of importing, and a payment of $10,000 from a subordinate about two months after the February 1984 delivery. On cross-examination he refused to explain the calls.
On March 2, 1987 the jury returned verdicts against 18 defendants. It found Badalamenti guilty on counts one and two. Count one was narcotics conspiracy under 21 U.S.C. section 846, and count two was a continuing criminal enterprise under 21 U.S.C. section 848. He was not charged in count sixteen, the racketeering conspiracy. In 1987 he was sentenced to 15 years and a $25,000 fine on count one and to 45 years on count two, to run concurrently, with a $100,000 fine and mandatory release after 30 years. On a separate indictment, 86 Cr. 1128, he conditionally pleaded guilty on April 21, 1987 to criminal contempt under 18 U.S.C. section 401 for refusing to answer the prosecutor's questions on cross-examination, and received 18 months, concurrent with the main sentence. A second defendant from the case, Salvatore Catalano, received the same 45 years.
Fifteen defendants appealed, Badalamenti among them. The Second Circuit heard argument on January 26, 1989 and decided the appeal on October 11, 1989, in an opinion by Judge Pierce. It rejected his challenges to the sufficiency of the evidence and affirmed his convictions on counts one and two. It reversed convictions on a few counts for two other defendants and vacated restitution for eight appellants. The Supreme Court later declined the due-process appeal of 13 defendants.
Badalamenti was also tried for the murder of Carmine Pecorelli, killed in Rome on March 20, 1979. Prosecutors in Perugia charged him and others as instigators. The charge was under articles 110, 112, 575 and 577 of the Italian Penal Code: complicity, aggravating circumstances, homicide and premeditation. On September 24, 1999 the assize court in Perugia acquitted Badalamenti and the other defendants. The jury had two judges and six private citizens and deliberated for four days; Badalamenti was acquitted "per non aver commesso il fatto."
The prosecutors appealed. On November 17, 2002 the Corte di Assise di Appello of Perugia convicted Badalamenti as an instigator and sentenced him to 24 years, a verdict that reversed the acquittal; it was the court's sentence number 4 of 2002, and its reasoning was filed on February 13, 2003. Badalamenti challenged the verdict before the Court of Cassation on several grounds. He argued that the prosecution should not have gone forward because of the rule of extradition specialty, since Spain had extradited him to the United States; the Court rejected that, because no extradition procedure had ever been started for this offense. He argued that the first-instance trial had gone on without him although he was detained in the United States and had said he wished to attend. He argued that the appeal court had used videoconference in a way his lawyers said was not allowed. And he argued that the reasoning was inadequate and illogical.
On October 30, 2003 the Court of Cassation, sitting in joint sections, annulled the appeal judgment without remand and acquitted him "per non avere commesso il fatto," for not having committed the act. The court held that the original acquittal should have stood. It called the alleged motive abstract and unsubstantiated and said that the testimony of a collaborator of justice lacked supporting evidence, while holding that the prosecution had acted legitimately in bringing the charges.
Badalamenti died in American custody on April 29, 2004, aged 80. He had been in custody in the United States since 1984.
His estate was dealt with after his death. In July 2007 the preventive-measures section of the Palermo court issued a confiscation decree covering rural land in Cinisi, Montelepre and Carini, apartments in Palermo and its province and several companies, in a case begun in 1982; the estate was estimated at about 100 million euros. Those contesting the decree argued that the wealth came from legitimate work and that no preventive measure had been applied to him before his death. The court rejected both arguments and found that the origin of the property was "certainly criminal."
The Impastato case itself did not close. In 2018 a judge in Caltanissetta closed an inquiry into the early handling of the death without a verdict, because the statute of limitations had run out. The judge found that the first inquiry had ignored a mafia lead.
Several features of Italian and American procedure shape the case. Forced residence (soggiorno obbligato) was the measure under which people suspected of mafia association were assigned to towns outside Sicily; Badalamenti was assigned to several, and the Palermo Court of Appeal changed one of those assignments in 1970. The Commission of Cosa Nostra, which he helped revive that year, coordinated the Palermo families, and its rules were severe about expulsion: a man who was "posato" lost all contact with the members, who were not to address him. Badalamenti's expulsion in 1978 therefore cut him off from the organization he had led, though not from the drug trade.
Murder cases in Italy are tried before an assize court (Corte d'assise), composed of judges and lay members; the Perugia court of 1999, for example, had two judges and six private citizens. Appeals go to an assize court of appeal and then to the Court of Cassation, which can annul a conviction without sending the case back for a new trial, as it did for Badalamenti in October 2003. The rule of extradition specialty, which limits what a person extradited by one state can be tried for, figured in that case: Spain had extradited Badalamenti to the United States, and he argued that Italy could not prosecute him. The Court of Cassation held that the rule did not apply where no extradition procedure had ever been started for the offense.
In the United States the conviction rested on two federal statutes. Section 846 of title 21 covers narcotics conspiracy, and section 848 covers the continuing criminal enterprise, an offense that requires proof that the defendant organized or supervised at least five other people and received substantial income; the Second Circuit found both elements supported for Badalamenti. The same indictment included a racketeering conspiracy count, but he was not charged in it. The FBI later described the investigation and trial as its first major transnational criminal enterprise case, one that helped pave the way for expanding its network of legal attaches and set a standard for using the racketeering statute against larger groups.
Only the Impastato judgment is a conviction for a killing, and Badalamenti died two years after it, while still in custody in the United States.
The Perugia case shows how far an instigation charge can travel and still fail. He was acquitted at first instance in September 1999, convicted and sentenced to 24 years on appeal in November 2002, and acquitted for good by the Court of Cassation on October 30, 2003, which found the motive abstract and the collaborator's testimony unsupported. The same court rejected his procedural objection about extradition, so the acquittal rested on the evidence, not on a technicality.
The older charges also ended without conviction: aggravated murder in 1949 (acquitted for insufficient evidence), kidnapping and criminal association at Trapani in 1951, and criminal association at Catanzaro in 1968. The reasons for his expulsion in 1978 are not settled; the explanations offered are a personal tie, an economic calculation and the fear of a reaction from Bontade. The inquiry into the early handling of the Impastato death was closed in 2018 because the time limit had run out, without a finding on intent.
September 14, 1923: Gaetano Badalamenti is born in Cinisi.
September 14, 1949: acquitted of aggravated murder for insufficient evidence.
June 21, 1951: acquitted at Trapani of kidnapping and criminal association.
October 12, 1957: attends the Hotel delle Palme meeting in Palermo.
December 22, 1968: acquitted of criminal association at Catanzaro.
June 1970: takes part in the meeting in Rome that revives the Commission.
July 29, 1974: sentenced in Palermo to six years and eight months.
April 7, 1978: Giuseppe Impastato mocks him on air.
8 to May 9, 1978: Impastato is killed in Cinisi.
September 30, 1978: expelled from Cosa Nostra, in Giovanni Falcone's dating.
March 20, 1979: the Rome killing for which he is later tried in Perugia.
April 8, 1984: arrested in Madrid.
May 19, 1984: the Palermo investigating office rules that the perpetrators of the Impastato killing are unknown.
February 19, 1985: Indictment SS 84 Cr. 236 is filed in New York.
March 2, 1987: guilty on counts one and two; 45 years follow.
October 11, 1989: the Second Circuit affirms.
June 1996: the Impastato inquiry is reopened.
November 11, 1997: custody is ordered for him in the Impastato case.
September 24, 1999: acquitted at first instance in Perugia.
November 23, 1999: immediate trial is ordered in Palermo.
March 5, 2001: Vito Palazzolo is sentenced to 30 years.
April 11, 2002: life imprisonment in Palermo.
November 17, 2002: convicted on appeal in Perugia, 24 years.
October 30, 2003: acquitted by the Court of Cassation.
April 29, 2004: dies in custody.
July 2007: confiscation of assets estimated at about 100 million euros.
2018: the inquiry into the early handling of the Impastato case is closed because the time limit had run out.