23 May 2006

9 - The mafia

I’m continuing to publish some questions and answers from the book "Intervista su Tangentopoli" published by Laterza and edited by Giovanni Valentini.

ADP: But even the business people when they had contracts in the South, they were very reluctant to speak about how things were conducted in the market for bribes down there.

GV: Were they working for the mafia?
ADP: No, not for the mafia as such. Everyone makes this error. The mafia doesn’t run businesses, in the sense that they take hold of the tools to construct roads and bridges. The mafia prefers to gather the profits from the businesses by obliging the business people to give them a percentage with the excuse of insuring the so-called “pax sociale” {social peace} in the territory. Basically, for contracts from Naples down, and especially in Sicily, the business people that we interrogated responded: ‘No, I can’t tell you. I prefer to go to prison.’ What’s the difference? In the Centre-North, the illicit agreement is between the system of businesses and the political party system; in the Centre-South however the illicit winning of contracts passes through a third party: the local business that is connected with the mafia. In Sicily, the politician does not directly collect the money from the bribes and it’s not the business person that pays directly. When there’s a big contract to be gained in the zone subject to the influence of mafia and organised crime, the national system of businesses knows that they have to go to work in a hostile territory. This can also be seen in the records of the statements made. Thus they don’t go to have a dialogue with the politician, they go to negotiate with the business association where they can find the local businessperson who guarantees the pax.
What’s the agreement? The local businessperson says: ‘You don’t simply promise to give me the 8 to 10 per cent of the profits related to the work that you are sub-contracting to me; you must also give me that “quid pluris” {plural amount} that I have to distribute partly to the local political system and partly to the mafia system that protects (that is the term used) the territory.’ This generally is how things are conducted.

Posted by Antonio Di Pietro in Interview about Tangentopoli