Gaetano Badalamenti

Gaetano Badalamenti (14 September 1923 – 29 April 2004) was a powerful member of the Sicilian Mafia.

In 1941, he was conscripted into the Royal Italian Army and deserted during the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

His elder brother Emanuele Badalamenti had moved to the United States and operated a supermarket and gas station in Monroe, Michigan.

In 1946 Gaetano was named in an arrest warrant on charges of conspiracy and kidnapping.

In 1947 he was charged with murder as well, and he fled to his brother Emanuele in the US.

Badalamenti was arrested in 1950 and deported back to Italy.

He married Theresa Vitale (her sister was married to Filippo Rimi, the capomafia of Alcamo) and set up a business on the family land as a lemon grower.

His judicial difficulties were all resolved because of insufficient evidence.

Badalamenti founded a successful construction business that supplied the crushed rock for Palermo's Punta Raisi Airport which fell within the Cinisi family's sphere of influence.

However, in the 1950s most money was made by smuggling foreign cigarettes into Italy.

In 1951, the American police identified a 50 kilogram shipment of heroin to Badalamenti who was then living in Detroit as an illegal immigrant.

In 1953 Badalamenti was arrested for cigarette smuggling in Italy for the first time.

In 1957 he was caught again with 3,000 kilograms of foreign-made cigarettes.

The repression caused by the Ciaculli Massacre disrupted the Sicilian heroin trade to the United States.

Mafiosi were banned, arrested and incarcerated.

Control of the trade fell into the hands of a few fugitives: the cousins Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco and Salvatore Greco, also known as "l'ingegnere", Pietro Davì, Tommaso Buscetta and Gaetano Badalamenti.

In the early 1960s, he successfully bribed officials to have the airport built near his hometown, despite its inconvenient geographical position.

The construction needed supplies of rock and gravel, which were available in large quantities on the family property.

His two construction firms, a concrete plant and a fleet of trucks provided much needed employment for the townsfolk and enriched Badalamenti.

Badalamenti assumed leadership of the Mafia in Cinisi in 1963 after a car bomb killed Cesare Manzella during the First Mafia War.

The Ciaculli Massacre on 30 June 1963 – when seven police and military officers sent to defuse a car bomb intended for mafioso Salvatore Greco were killed – changed the Mafia War into a war against the Mafia.

It prompted the first concerted anti-mafia efforts by the state in post-war Italy.

Within a period of ten weeks 1,200 mafiosi were arrested, many of whom would be kept out of circulation for five or six years.

The Sicilian Mafia Commission was dissolved.

Badalamenti had complete control in Cinisi.

"It seemed that Badalamenti was well liked by the Carabinieri as he was calm, reliable, and always liked a chat. It almost felt like he was doing them a favour in that nothing ever happened in Cinisi, it was a quiet little town."

and "I often used to see them walking arm in arm with Tano Badalamenti and his henchmen. You can't have faith in the institutions when you see the police arm in arm with mafiosi", according to Giovanni Impastato – the brother of murdered anti-mafia activist Giuseppe Impastato – in his declaration before the Italian Antimafia Commission.

Gaetano Badalamenti would become one of the major heroin traffickers of the Sicilian Mafia.

Don Tano Badalamenti was the capofamiglia of his hometown Cinisi, Sicily, and headed the Sicilian Mafia Commission in the 1970s.

In 1970, the Sicilian Mafia Commission was revived.

It consisted of ten members but was initially ruled by a triumvirate consisting of Gaetano Badalamenti, Stefano Bontade and the Corleonesi boss Luciano Leggio, although it was Salvatore Riina who would actually represent the Corleonesi.

One of the first issue that had to be confronted was an offer of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese who asked for support for his plans for a neofascist coup in return for a pardon of convicted mobsters like Vincenzo Rimi and Luciano Leggio.

Giuseppe Calderone and Di Cristina went to visit Borghese in Rome.

Badalamenti opposed the plan.

From 1975 to 1984, he was one of the main ringleaders of a US$1.65 billion heroin trafficking operation, known as the Pizza Connection, that imported heroin from the Middle East and distributed the drugs through U.S. mid-western pizzeria store fronts.

In 1987, he was sentenced in the United States to 45 years in federal prison for being one of the leaders in the so-called "Pizza Connection", a $1.65 billion drug-trafficking ring that used pizzerias as fronts to distribute heroin from 1975 to 1984.

He was also sentenced in Italy to life imprisonment in 2002 for the 1978 murder of Peppino Impastato.

Tano Badalamenti was the youngest of a family with five boys and four girls.

His family owned a dairy farm in Cinisi.

He had minimal schooling, attending school for only four years, before he was put to work as a field hand at age ten.