Scandals, Scandals . . . XII

POSSIBLY THE LEAST understood spot on the globe is the Italian island of Sicily, which is noted chiefly for its exportation of gangsters to the United States.

Sicily is a world unto itself, a world in which people live in wretched poverty. The Vatican has a formidable stake in this miserably depressed area, a fact that sometimes forces the clergy to join hands with the Mafia.

In Italy you are friends if you have the same enemies — and in Sicily a forty-four-year-old poet and architect from the “hated north” has emerged as the nemesis of both the Vatican and the Mafia. Known as the Sicilian Gandhi, Danilo Dolci of Trieste has already become something of a legendary hero. He is also one of the most hated men in Italy.

Although powerful, his enemies—the dreaded Mafia, the powerful Sicilian landowners, and the Vatican—have not been able to destroy him. For if there is hatred for Danilo Dolci in the most influential Italian circles, there is unbounded admiration for him outside Italy. His dramatic work among the Sicilian poor has drawn hundreds of volunteer pilgrims from Sweden, Switzerland, and England — people who pay their own expenses for the privilege of working with the gentle, round-faced rebel.

Sixteen years ago, Danilo Dolci was, at twenty-eight, a successful architect, the author of two architectural books, and a respected man in his field. Then he made a tour of Sicily, saw the appalling ignorance, apathy, and misery of the people—and decided to abandon his profession. He settled down in the fishing village of Trapetto, married a semiliterate widow with five children, and after adopting five more children, began using Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent methods to campaign for social reforms.

The first battle was fought with a hunger strike. Widely publicized, it brought some help to Trapetto. The next battle, however, brought the police. Dolci had rounded up two hundred unemployed men to work without pay on a road that needed repairs for which the Christian Democratic government seemed unable to delegate funds. Dolci led what was in effect a “strike in reverse,” for when the police ordered him to desist, he and his helpers calmly continued with their work. Infuriated, the police arrested him for “trespassing on public property.” In Palermo he was tried on five counts and sentenced to seven weeks in prison.

The nature of the “crime” and the ludicrous aspects of the trial resulted in unprecedented publicity. Before long, spontaneous Danilo Dolci committees sprouted up all over Europe and began to send money. Italian politicians were embarrassed, and when Dolci accepted the Lenin Prize for a volume of poetry, they tried to dismiss him as a Communist agent.

But financial aid still reaches Dolci, and foreign pilgrims still come to work with him. And Dolci is creating some minor miracles. He has built a shelter, known as the Village of God, for orphans and destitute families. He’s also dammed a small river to provide irrigation, built two modest-sized hospitals and a pharmacy, and constructed many sewers and roads. After moving his headquarters from Trapetto to the larger town of Partinico, which he considered a bigger challenge, he began, with forty foreign volunteers, a program to teach the peasants how to use new farming methods and to develop new crops.

In recent years, Dolci has been using long sit-down strikes in various small hill towns of western Sicily. In the fall of 1963, for example, Dolci staged a nine-day fast and mass sit-down in front of the only church in the town of Roccamena. Joining in the protest were movie star Vittorio Gassman and author Carlo Levi. Intellectuals from other European countries also joined the six hundred townsfolk and spent entire nights sitting and sleeping outdoors on straw mats. Gassman occasionally provided entertainment by reciting passages from Dante’s Divine Comedy while standing in the glare of auto headlights.

At issue was the Bruca Dam. The project had been delayed by Christian Democratic politicians for thirty years. Rome had earmarked $12.8 million for the Bruca Dam in 1952, but the money had disappeared, and work was never begun. The earlier $1.6 million that the government had appropriated for preliminary work had also vanished. So Roccamena remained without water, and its people were left to try to scratch a living from their arid but potentially fertile soil. The little water available was used for the advantage of the wealthy few, who had the support of the Vatican and the Mafia, while millions of gallons of water from the unharnessed Belice River ran off and was wasted. As the Dolci sit-in headlines mounted, so, too, did the pressure on Rome. At long last, the Ministry of Public Works conceded and issued an order to begin work on the Bruca Dam.

Situations like that in Roccamena often develop because Vatican strategies are based on a belief that it is easier for the Church to maintain its strength where poverty, misery, and ignorance breed. Italy’s southland is a case in point. Ironically, the situation is aggravated by the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Southland Development Fund), which, instead of bringing economic relief to an insular backyard like Sicily, has become a gigantic patronage organization. Often, developmental contracts are awarded strictly on the basis of political considerations —one of the most important of which is loyalty to the Christian Democratic party. Because the practice is no secret, bishops and local politicians have little trouble impressing recalcitrant individuals with the fact that there is little to be gained from supporting activities not approved by the Vatican.

The system is so firmly entrenched that it is not surprising to find many people who believe that Sicily, despite its formal governmental machinery, is nothing more than a Vatican holding. People have been shaking their heads over the situation for years, but until Danilo Dolci came on the scene, the combined forces of the old nobility, the Mafia, and the Church had escaped meaningful opposition. Dolci, a professed Roman Catholic who never attends mass, puts into practice the humanitarian ideas of the Church; the Vatican opposes him not on philosophical or theological grounds, but on hard business principles. Because of Dolci, there is danger that the Vatican’s most valuable resource—its churchgoing believers—may be diminished.

Paradoxically, Dolci is well liked by the local priests, who know him personally, and he is held in some admiration by Mafia chiefs, who, for reasons of their own, have left him alone. In Sicily it is said that if Dolci has not been assassinated by now, he never will be.

Dolci, who asks no quarter in his struggles against the Catholic hierarchy, is disliked in papal circles and is considered a thorn in the side of the Christian Democratic party. He is often accused of flirting with Communism and opening the way to a red-backed renaissance in Sicily. But his encounters with the mainland democris-tiani are largely ignored by the Vatican, which does not want to elevate him by engaging in a direct confrontation.

But if the Vatican has preferred to avoid a collision with Dolci, the Bank of Sicily (Banco di Sicilia) has chosen another course. The bank, a financial arm of the pope, is the overseer of the Vatican’s holdings in the western end of Sicily and, as such, has tried without marked success to make short shrift of the so-called Sicilian Gandhi. A recent scandal within the bank has reduced some of the pressures on Dolci.

Carlo Bazan, the bank’s highly respected president, was arrested in 1967 on charges of alleged irregularities. Over an eight-year period, he had hired nearly a hundred members of his family to fill various key posts in the bank —and, while nepotism is not unknown in Palermo and does not necessarily constitute a legal offense, Bazan, thrust into the glare of an unfavorable spotlight, was accused of having doctored records and overlooked payments due on loans made to members of his family.

Postwar Italy has been rife with scandals. Perhaps no more but certainly no less than any other power institution in Italy, the Vatican has had its share of troubles in this respect. But because of the Vatican’s position and prestige, foreign correspondents in Rome, and all too many Italian newspapermen also, have remained silent, or almost so.

Two recent subjects of scandal—the Fiumicino airport and the price of bananas—deserve more attention than they have received.

There are whole generations of Italians that don’t know what a good banana—a real banana—tastes like. Italy’s banana scandal made headlines inside Italy but caused no stir outside its borders, mostly because of the protective attitude of Rome’s resident correspondents toward the Catholic Church.

“La camorra delle banane” (the banana racket) began innocently enough. On December 2, 1935, while Italy was at war with Ethiopia, the Gazzetta Ufficiale published a decree that announced a new state monopoly—on the sale of bananas. Italy’s merchant ships were charged with the responsibility of transporting bananas from Libya, Somalia, and the Italian-owned islands of the Aegean. Up to that time, under a system of free enterprise, bananas had been exported to Italy not only by its colonies but also by the Canary Islands, by the Antilles, and by Guinea. Altogether, these last countries had raised their banana exports to Italy almost 200 percent, from eleven million pounds in 1925 to nearly thirty-one million in 1934. Bananas from Somalia in 1925 represented only 2 percent of Italy’s total banana imports, but by 1955 the Italian colony, through favoritism, had garnered better than 83 percent of the banana trade with Italy, having reached a total of close to eighty million pounds.

The establishment of the new Italian monopoly was more a political move than an economic one. It was designed to help the Italians establish themselves as “colonizers” in Africa by developing trade between the colonies and the mother country. The African bananas were an unsound economic proposition in the general European market, for it cost too much to produce them, too much to ship them, and, what’s more, they were of inferior quality. To administer the new monopoly, the Italian government set up a special agency, Regia Azienda Monopolio Banane (R.A.M.B.), which purchased the bananas from the growers and stabilized the prices with the middlemen and the retailers.

According to the terms of the decree, R.A.M.B. was supposed to put up for public bid concessions for forty- eight wholesalers, each of whom would have a specified territory. But, between 1937 and 1940, R.A.M.B. “temporarily” assigned these concessions—until a public competition could be held. The forty-eight persons who received the supposedly temporary concessions were high- ranking Fascists and Vatican-endorsed men and their relatives. These agents retained their concessions during the forties, the fifties, and the middle sixties.

In February 1945, the Minister of the Treasury dissolved R.A.M.B. and nominated a special commission to study the sale of bananas. After nine years, during which an emergency committee of R.A.M.B. continued administering the sale of bananas while the special committee undertook the inquiry, a new government agency was set up to deal with the banana monopoly. It was called 1’Azienda da Monopolio Banane (A.M.B.), and what it was was essentially only the old Regia Azienda Monopolio Banane with a new name and a new set of identifying initials.

A.M.B., in one of its first acts, raised the number of concessions from forty-eight to eighty-six. All eighty-six concessions were to be good for only one year; then the public was to be given a chance to bid on them. The public competition never took place, however, and the eighty-six concessionaires continued to hold their assigned territories.

A.M.B., in another of its first acts, established a fixed price for bananas in the wholesale and retail markets. Although the price of bananas in other countries fluctuated with the season, the price in Italy remained the same throughout the year. And the retail price of a colonial banana in Italy was over twice the price of a banana from the Canary Islands or Spanish Africa in other European countries. Thanks to A.M.B., Italians had to pay 475 lire (approximately 77 cents) for a kilogram of bananas; in nearby France a kilo of bananas cost half of that—even when the fruit was in short supply.

To add to the injury, Somalian bananas were of inferior commercial quality. No other country would import them. But Italy did and, thanks to A.M.B., paid a wholesale price of 106 lire a kilo for them—at a time when the highest wholesale price being paid for superior bananas was the equivalent (in pesos, francs, and other European currencies) of only 50 lire a kilo.

It should also be pointed out that the banana growers were getting 18 to 20 lire a kilo from the Italian “banana handlers” who resold the bananas to A.M.B. at the fixed 106-lire price. These “banana handlers”—theoretically serving on foreign soil—actually did not five outside Italy, nor did they ever see any of the bananas they were “handling.” They transacted their business at the Via Veneto sidewalk cafes, lived in Rome’s posh Parioli district, and kept summer villas at Viareggio on the Costa Azzurra.

Because of their “understanding” with A.M.B., the so- called banana handlers netted the equivalent of $4 million a year more than they would have netted in a freely competitive situation. Owners of the merchant boats that brought the bananas to Italy’s ports also had a deal with A.M.B.—and were making an extra $2.4 million a year. Local wholesale distributors were taking in an extra $3.84 million, and retailers an extra $4.48 million. Thus a grand total of $14.72 million—extra—was “earned” by individuals connected with Italy’s banana business. But not all of this money stayed in their pockets; a percentage was given to certain pezzi grossi (literally, big pieces— Italian slang for bigshots) who were affiliated with the Christian Democratic party.

Despite the artificially inflated prices paid by the Italian people (who never realized what people in other countries were paying for bananas), the sale of bananas in Italy almost quintupled over a twelve-year period—rising from

56.2 million pounds in 1951 to over 279.3 million in 1963. And, in 1960, to add to the irony, Italy’s finance minister bestowed silver and bronze medals on the banana concessionaires for the fine work they had been doing over the years. Three years later, the decorated individuals were indicted on charges of having committed fraud in the handling and sale of bananas. That was in 1963 —the trials still have not come up.

Gathering dust in the archives of Italy’s newspapers are reports of other financial scandals, involving Rome’s gleaming multimillion-dollar Leonardo da Vinci Airport. In the archives of non-Italian newspapers, there is nothing, or almost nothing, about these scandals, for the fuss over the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport at Fiumicino received very little coverage outside Italy. One American newsman confided to me that he had filed some good copy on the subject, but his editor in New York had told him to “lay off.” Which he did.

When the story broke in 1961, I was representing McGraw-Hill’s technical news weeklies and was able to cable full details from Rome. Which were printed. Subscribers to Aviation Week and Engineering News-Record were thus kept abreast of the Fiumicino airport situation. But very few newspaper readers in the United States learned the deplorable, almost incredible facts.

In 1952, the city of Rome recognized that its airport at Ciampino would soon be inadequate. Ciampino, which was ideally located, had three runways, each of them 7,380 feet long. Each could have been extended to accommodate jet planes, for the airport was situated in an uninhabited area with plenty of available lands. But, instead of allocating funds for Ciampino’s expansion, the Italian government elected to buy up large parcels of land in the nearby coastal town of Fiumicino.

As an airport site, Fiumicino had nothing to recommend it. A marshland near the mouth of the Tiber, it had earlier (in 1944) been rejected by the United States Army Air Force as a landing field for bombers. The Air Force report stated that shifting sands, frequent fogs, and occasional flooding made the land somewhat less than ideal for an airport site. Nevertheless, the Italian government paid $21 million for it. The purchase was made after the site had been recommended to the government by the Vatican- owned Societa Generale Immobiliare.

Prince Torlonia, who was prominent in many Catholic organizations, and whose family was prominent in Vatican history, received for the land the equivalent of $ 1,300 a hectare (about $525 an acre), even though at nearby Casal Palocco a huge parcel of fog-free, flood-free land was available for sale at considerably less.

Had the existing airport at Ciampino been expanded, or had the available Casal Palocco land been purchased, the government would not have had to appropriate $7.2 million to shore up the shifting sands of Fiumicino in order to lay concrete for the runways. It took workmen at Fiumicino five years to control the sand. Often their labors were interrupted by heavy fogs that descended over the site. Fogs are still a problem at Fiumicino—so much of a problem that airport authorities frequently have to direct traffic to the old Ciampino field.

All of this skulduggery took place before Rome came around to recognizing, in 1952, that Ciampino Airport would no longer do, but the scandal of Fiumicino had not yet reached the front pages. The purchase of the Torlonia land had been carried out quietly, even though $21 million in public funds had been spent. As it developed, the $21 million was a mere drop in the bucket.

On January 15, 1955, the Italian government allocated $22.4 million “for the prosecution and completion of an international airport at Rome, by the Ministry of Public Works, to include such necessary other works as connecting roadways to the city limits, electrical installations, and a communications system.” Although three plans had been submitted, the Ministry of Public Works did not select any of them and, a year later (January 13, 1956), asked for the sum of $10.4 million to study some new projects for the airport. Three more years went by, and on April 28, 1959, the Ministry of Public Works asked for, and got, the sum of $6.64 million “to make the airport operative.” Three months later another $640,000 was allocated “for the prosecution and completion of the work.” Other special allocations had been granted along the way—$1.76 million for Ministry expenses accruing from the building of the airport, $8 million for connecting roadways to the city limits, and $6.4 million for debts the Ministry had accumulated because of the airport. All this money was granted a singhiozzi (hiccup style), in violation of an Italian law that clearly states that all financial allocations for public works of an extraordinary nature must be discussed by the parliament and that a bill must be passed for any withdrawals from the treasury. The appropriation of money for the airport was certainly irregular. There were to be further irregularities.

The contract to construct the runways was awarded to the Manfredi Construction Company. It is no small coincidence that Manfredi belonged to the Vatican. The contract to build the main terminal was put up for public bidding, in which eight construction companies participated. Provera e Carrassi, the Vatican-owned company that won the bid at $5.12 million, proceeded to build the terminal building, but on the 376th day of work discovered that it had “underestimated” the total cost. Without further ado, or any publicity, the sum paid to Provera e Carrassi was raised another $4.38 million. Not until the final accounting was made was it learned that Provera e Carrassi had received 80 percent over its “low bid.”

A contract was given to the Castelli Construction Company (also Vatican owned) to put up the hangars. The sum of money earmarked for this expense was listed on the budget at $4.54 million. On the final expense sheet, however, it was not possible to determine just how much Castelli was paid for the work. So, too, with the amount paid the Vaselli Company, another Vatican-owned company, which got the assignment of building the connecting roadways.

If this sounds like the making of a good scandal, that’s precisely what it turned out to be in the spring of 1961. Although the world press generally ignored the details, the Italian press gave them adequate attention. The coverage was particularly full in Rome’s left-wing evening daily, Paese Sera, which printed a series of documented articles. The articles named names.

The Christian Democratic government set up a legislative commission to probe the matter, and, although four ministers (all Christian Democrats) were cited for irregularities in the report to the President of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, no criminal charges were made. Since the special investigating commission was primarily intended to placate an indignant Italian citizenry, the only person who finally received any kind of punishment was a small-time colonel in the Ministry of Defense. His punishment took the form of a transfer from an office in Rome to a post in Bari, on the other side of the peninsula.

During its first years the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport had its problems. It still has problems. Because of the settlement of the fill and the impact of giant jet liners, the main runway developed cracks—some of them over a mile long—that had to be repaved. The three-story terminal building, made entirely of glass, has neither windows that open nor air conditioning. On warm days it tends to be unpleasant, to say the least. In cold weather it’s not much better, for radiant heat pipes just below the surface of the rubber floor send up acrid fumes of seared rubber. Combine these with the jet fumes that hang motionless in the nonventilated terminal, and one understands why some travelers become ill from the smell.

So much for the terminal building. As for the airport as a whole, some Italians, knowing its history, don’t like the stench.