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15 Years of mafia

Franco Zecchin

I moved to Palermo in 1975 and started working with the group of photographers who followed the local news for the “L’Ora” newspaper. I liked the noise of Palermo, the bustle in the streets, the heat, the light, the pleasure people took in meeting with each other, in talking, organising and demonstrating. I knew of the existence of the mafia but had no very clear idea of what it was. My first experience of a mafia killing was Benedetto D'Atola, who was killed on the afternoon of 9 July 1976 at the Zisa. I remember a mad dash in the car through the afternoon traffic, a crowd of curious onlookers in a circle – some smoking, some making jokes; women, children squeezing forward to the front, police taking measurements, newspaper reporters taking notes, police cars arriving or driving off with a squeal of tyres, the investigating magistrate, the police doctor, the forensic team, the photographers, the cry of desperation from the relatives. In the middle of all the confusion lay the body of a man who, just half an hour previously, had been finishing his normal working day and was about to get in the car with his wife to return home. I remember my astonishment at seeing his face, immobile, with the eyes open, still bleeding; I was waiting for a slight movement, a tremor, the blink of an eyelid. But Benedetto D'Atola was a corpse lying on the asphalt, supine and motionless. I did not take any photographs. I watched Letizia take them, trying to learn the rules of the trade: what to photograph, or rather what images the newspaper wanted: the scene of the crime, perhaps a panoramic photo, possibly from above; different shots of the corpse, in the foreground, from the head, from the feet, in relation to other things that might be related to him or to the murder (the car, the door of the house or the office, the briefcase, a hat, an umbrella, the gun); the police officers, the investigating magistrate, the relatives, their desperation, the women fainting, the men’s anger; a reproduction of the driving licence photo or some other document found on the body; any interrogations that might be underway at the police station, people arrested or taken into custody following investigation. The photographer must get a clear image that bears witness to, and narrates, what has happened; in the fraction of a second he must have the right light, a good composition, the image in focus, and must know the exact moment to snap, when a face turns, when a gesture is most expressive. He must succeed in reconciling these demands, that are strictly photographic, with the need to tackle all the obstacles that crop up while he is working. It is not always possible to photograph everything. First of all, the right to the news, or rather the right to the images, is at the discretion of the Public Security officer, the police superintendent or the magistrate heading the investigation. It depends on on-the-spot decisions, on the mood of the person responsible, on directives from above or on the relationships which these people have with the press. And then the relatives of the victim do not like this intrusion, and nor do they like being photographed. They may react with violence, sometimes physical violence. This creates further confusion and provides another reason for the officers of law and order to deny access to journalists. The first killing was followed by many others: between 1976 and 1993 we photographed hundreds. It is a job that requires you to be available 24 hours a day, to be always there in the territory: we lived for years in a state of alert, always ready to interrupt any activity in order to encounter often very dramatic situations at short notice. We worked without job security and in isolation: we didn’t have any insurance cover, or any social security; we could be robbed or attacked and the newspaper wouldn’t intervene. At the same time we were held responsible for any false or distorted news that was published. The photographer has no control over the use that the mass media make of his pictures; he is only the first link in a chain of information, the first necessary link-up with reality; his is a raw and immediate interpretation, immersed in the event that has happened. After him, there will be someone who will decide how to reduce this immediacy, manipulating it to construct proofs that support his own version of the truth or that which is desired by the political and economic interests of the publisher. The escalation of the mafia war, whose devastating effects I was called upon to witness by my profession, left me with an ever-increasing sense of frustration. On one hand, I saw the ineffectiveness of information that was inadequate to deal with all that was happening, and was blocked by prudent and intangible interests and by the limitations of the medium itself – printed paper, the newspaper that would no longer be read the following day. But at the same time, it was a matter of urgency to get public opinion involved: young people, women, students, the workers, so that they would mobilise against the logic and practices of the mafia. When they started to target judges, policemen, and politicians, people that I knew and admired for their commitment, who were killed because, isolated from their colleagues and from society, they had taken a stand against mafia power, I could no longer continue in my job, taking refuge, like so many others, behind an apparent “professional impartiality”. The murder of Giuseppe Impastato was the beginning of a shift towards a political and social use for our work. On the morning of 9 May 1979 news came of a failed terrorist at tack with the perpetrator dead on the railway line at Cinisi. I immediately went to the scene, but the rails had already been repaired and there was nothing left to show what had happened. At Cinisi I met Peppino’s friends who were very upset, and were all convinced that it was not a failed terrorist attack at all, nor suicide. The version of events provided by the police was not very clear and Peppino’s friends were probably right. The next day, at the funeral, there was a great show of emotion and almost a sense of blame for having abandoned the struggle and the social commitment in order to devote ourselves to our private lives. Peppino was killed because he had been left on his own. I could not accept the fact that the newspapers, in the middle of an election campaign and at the same time as the murder of Aldo Moro, passed off Impastato’s murder as suicide or a failed terrorist attack. In little more than two years of photo-journalism in Palermo I had begun to understand how the press functions. There was a pressing need to find other channels to bring people information that was free and uncorrupted by obscure political and economic interests. Letizia Battaglia and I were among the founding members of the Giuseppe Impastato Sicilian Centre for Documentation: the first initiative was a reconstruction of the photographic exhibition that Peppino had organised before his death, “Mafia and Territory”. The exhibition was held in the Cinisi piazza on the occasion of the first national demonstration against the mafia. From that time on we have continued to produce photographic exhibitions and to hold them in piazzas, schools, villages, galleries and museums in Sicily, Italy and Europe. Judges, investigators and politicians who want to oppose the mafia can use weapons and means which we do not have access to. We had the photos – dramatic, disturbing, and graphic – and the determination to use their power to shake prejudices, galvanise opinion and trouble consciences. Our weapon was information, which we used to break the transmission of a widespread culture of resignation, submission and omertà (code of silence). We showed our young people the devastating reality of the mafia, in contrast with the literary and romantic stereotypes that fed the myth of a “good” mafia, that respected a code of honour, and defended and supported the weakest members of society, guaranteeing the services that the state denied them. We tried to deprive the mafia of the consent of the new generations. We continued our journalist work at the same time, but it was motivated by commitment, by the need and urgency to show people, to show the world, the reality in which we live and to contribute to the creation of an antimafia culture. Lying in our archives are hundreds of murder victims, portraits of those who are already corpses or are in their last moments of life. I always find it hard and painful to flick through the prints in search of someone in particular. My relationship with the dead is inscribed in their photos, in the way in which I observe and manipulate them, in the way in which they are organised in the archive. And in its streets the city provides a continual flash-back of images of massacres, taking us back in time. A toponymy has been created through the killings: in a territory that is dotted with memorial plaques, to indicate Via Isidoro Carini they say “Where Dalla Chiesa was killed”. The massacres of Falcone and Borsellino provoked indignation, despair, and rebellion within Italian civil society; the Italian State had to act, and it finally did what it could have done much earlier: it arrested Totò Riina. The new alliance between families that has replaced the hegemony of the “Corleone” clan within “Cosa Nostra”, has re-established the old strategies of infiltration, corruption, blackmail and alliance with political power. The mafia of today invests its drug money in international finance. It no longer appears, it no longer offers the spectacle of death, it no longer puts on show its terrible power. One can do business better when all is quiet, when the spotlights of the news are switched off, when there is no further possibility of an opposition.



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