Palermo ponders: to pay or not to pay the mafia?

“People who are against the mafia are no longer afraid to step forward.” – Linda Vetrano, anti-mafia activist

Telford Vice / Catania, Sicily

MARLON Brando and Al Pacino don’t live here. But Sicily makes us an offer we can’t refuse: to come and see for ourselves that the achingly beautiful, elegantly crumbling, rough-edged, warm-hearted island is not a mafia movie set.

Even so, it doesn’t help that the climax of The Godfather III — when Mary, Michael Corleone’s daughter, is killed by a bullet meant for her father — was shot on the steps of Teatro Massimo, the opera house that dominates Piazza Verdi and is the pride of Palermo. 

It also doesn’t help that the tourists and Palermitani who tread these ancient streets are assailed by tat featuring Don Vito Corleone, as portrayed by Brando, for sale on everything from aprons to playing cards to beermats.

Let the buyers of this stuff beware. They are paying to own the likeness of a fictional mob boss, but some of the money they spend is probably funnelled to the mafia. The real mafia.

South Africans who think their country has a monopoly on corruption can think again. The sophistication and scale of Cosa Nostra — “Our Thing” — reduces the Guptas to petty pickpockets.

Like South Africa’s first family of financial felony, the mafia’s reach goes all the way to the top. But also all the way to the bottom: most Sicilian businesses pay pizzo, or protection money. Umberto Santino, in his book “Mafia and Anti-mafia, yesterday and today”, describes the practice as “parallel taxation”. 

Pizzo could come from pizzu, the Sicilian for beak. As in a bird dipping into many small sources of nourishment. Or it could be derived from the term used to describe the beaker of wheat an overseer was entitled to claim from the peasants who had threshed it. Often the overseer was a smalltime mafiosi.

So your purchase of Godfather-branded goods from a Palermo street seller has a better than even chance of helping to finance the mafia. But while Cosa Nostra still hides in plain sight, it’s not as strong as it used to be. And for that local businesses deserve a large share of the credit.

Around 80% of companies in Sicily used to pay pizzo — either in money or favours, like giving jobs to Cosa Nostra types or using mob-approved suppliers. But the Addiopizzo campaign, which started in 2004, has helped whittle that down to 60%.

Addiopizzo began when a group of friends who wanted to open a bar in Palermo knew they would run into the pizzo problem. So, late on the night of June 28, 2004, they distributed leaflets throughout the city that were designed to look like obituaries. They read: “An entire people that pays protection money is a people without dignity.” More than 1,000 businesses have since pledged to refuse to pay pizzo. 

Linda Vetrano, an activist who works in Addiopizzo’s travel section by running anti-mafia tours in Palermo, enjoys pointing out three businesses on Via Vittorio Emanuele, where tourists can marvel at the 12th-century cathedral, enjoy a cannoli and avoid being run over by someone on an electric scooter all in the same few steps.

The owner of a souvenir shop knew the Addiopizzo organisers and naturally felt drawn to the campaign. A bar a few doors down was told to put slot machines on the premises, or else. The owners reported the approach to the police. Addiopizzo didn’t exist when the men from the mob came calling, but the bar became one of the first signatories. Across the street is an outlet of a gelato chain, which signed up before opening its first set of doors. None of their branches have been threatened by the mafia.

Was the tide turning against Cosa Nostra? “No,” Vetrano told the FM. “It’s a very good sign, but it just means that people who are against the mafia are no longer afraid to step forward. There are, sadly, still shopkeepers who either are too afraid or don’t want to be bothered by the mafia. There is an idea that if they pay protection the mafiosi will be on their side. We can call this a mafia mentality, which is the biggest obstacle to be defeated. That will take a long time.”

That’s because Cosa Nostra “live inside our society. They evolve as our society evolves. They adapt. They are not good people, but they are successful because they have managed to integrate.”

South Africans could say something similar about their country’s own corruption corporation. The crooks live among us. And they engineer the opportunity they could, as they have done before, pull the levers of the highest power.

The Guptas are not Marlon Brando or Al Pacino, and they don’t live in Sicily. Neither does the Don of Nkandla, and they’re unlikely to collide with justice on the stairs of an opera house. The best we can hope for is that the Dubai connection holds firm, and makes them an offer they can’t refuse.

First published by the Financial Mail.

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Don’t bet on sport ever ridding itself of gambling

Television and sport are each other’s life support. What keeps television sport alive? Gambling.

Times SELECT

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THINK not a lot could connect a pioneering New York mob boss with the man for whom cricket’s grandest ground is named? Think again.

They are awkward bedfellows because of money, which they knew was readily generated in gambling on sport.

And before television bought sport lock, stock and smoking broadcast rights deals, everything sport achieved as an industry was paid for by gambling.

These days television and sport are each other’s life support. What keeps television sport alive? Gambling.

The life of Arnold Rothstein, nicknamed “The Brain” by Damon Runyon for his reimagining and reorganisation of common thuggery as the profitable business we now call the mafia, was always going to end badly.

It did in November 1928 when he was rubbed out for refusing to pay up after racking up debts of what in today’s money would be US$5-million in a poker game he considered fixed.

If Rothstein’s name rings a bell it’s because he’s the figure most often accused of fixing baseball’s World Series in 1919 — which the Chicago White Sox admitted throwing, creating what the papers enthusiastically wrote up as “the Black Sox scandal”.

Rothstein denied his involvement to a grand jury. Another theory is that he said it ain’t so with reference to one plot but was central to another, and even that he was in on both ends of the fix.

There is less doubt that he fixed more horseraces than you could shake a whip at, including at the track he owned in Maryland.

The son of a banker and the younger brother of a rabbi, Rothstein was a bad man to the bitter end. “Me mudder did it,” he told the cops when they pitched up at his deathbed to ask who shot him.

Thomas Lord, Yorkshire-born but a Londoner all his adult life, was engaged as a general skivvy at the White Conduit Club (WCC) in the days when gentlemen batted and professionals bowled.

Lord was, of course, a bowler among as ripe a collection of cricketing young and old farts as could be found.

In 1786 two of his supposed betters at the WCC, the ninth earl of Winchilsea and the fourth duke of Richmond, known by their titled peers as George Finch and Charles Lennox, tasked Lord, and backed him financially, with finding a ground that was less accessible by the public.

Among the motivations put forward for the move was that Joe and Joanne Soap were sometimes less than complimentary about the poncy players’ efforts. That’s right: what became, in 1787, the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) was snobbish even before it existed.

Importantly, entry to a ground that was less like a public park and more like today’s stadiums could be controlled by the sale of tickets — and that meant cricket’s burgeoning betting market could be kept from prying eyes and thus more easily manipulated.

After two false starts in other parts of London, what we call Lord’s — don’t forget the indelible apostrophe — opened for  business in June 1814.

And we do mean business. In 1793 alone one of the previous Lord’s grounds hosted 14 matches that attracted a total of 11 000 guineas — a guinea is a pound and a shilling — in bets.

Most of them would have been laid by the earls and dukes of the day, who had inherited money to burn unlike people who had to work for a living.

When the MCC assumed superiority over every organisation in cricket, just a year after the club was founded, their rendition of the laws included regulations on gambling, as had two previous versions issued by other clubs.

You can see where this is going. In 1785, Finch himself — remember him, the ninth earl of Winchilsea — recruited Billy Beldham, then 19 and on his way to becoming a revered player, having seen him in action a year earlier.

In an interview with James Pycroft, a noted writer on cricket, in 1836, Beldham was quoted as saying, “You may hear that I sold matches. I will confess I once was sold myself by two men, one of whom would not bowl, and the other would not bat, his best, and lost 10 pounds.

“The next match, at Nottingham, I joined in selling, and got my money back. But for this once, I could say I never was bought in my life; and this was not for want of offers from C [sic] and other turfmen, though often I must have been accused.

“For where it was worthwhile to buy, no man could keep a character; because to be out without runs or to miss a catch was, by the disappointed betting-men, deemed proof as strong as Holy Writ.”

Which sounds a bit like Hansie Cronje blaming the devil for making him do it. Perhaps South Africa’s crooked captain should have blamed the British aristocracy instead.

Pycroft held up cricket as the epitome of life as a Victorian gentleman: “Cricket is essentially Anglo-Saxon, … Foreigners have rarely imitated us. English settlers everywhere play at cricket; but of no single club have we heard that dieted either with frogs, saur-kraut [sic] or macaroni.”

But, odd ideas and all, he knew corruption when he saw it: “Lord’s [at the turn of the 19th century] was frequented by men with book and pencil, betting as openly and professionally as in the ring at Epsom, and ready to deal in the odds with any and every person of speculative propensities.”

Rothstein, had he been old enough at the time and on the right side of the Atlantic, would doubtless have jumped in, expensive shoes and all, at Lord’s with offers that couldn’t be refused to make sure the ball bounced his bank balance’s way.

Not a lot has changed, except that betting companies now sponsor teams and advertise on mainstream sport websites.

And that the gambling industry has grown exponentially in the internet age. Globally, the online sport and gaming betting business is set to be worth almost US$60-billion by 2020, and most of it will be spent from half a world away by people watching television.

This also holds true in the bricks-and-mortar world. Show me a betting shop and I will show you walls covered in televisions beaming events thousands of kilometres distant. True story: on April 2, 2011 — the day of the cricket World Cup final between Sri Lanka and India in Colombo — I walked into a gambling den in Galle, Sri Lanka and was able to watch live racing from Turffontein, Johannesburg.  

Maybe Rothstein wouldn’t have been shot had he been playing poker from behind a screen in 1928.

Maybe Lord would have cut to the chase and become an online bookmaker, and Lord’s wouldn’t exist.

But it’s no maybe that sport and gambling are as wedded to each other now as they were then, and will be long after television is obsolete and every game we watch — and bet on — is streamed online, perhaps even from empty stadiums.

Don’t think so? Want to bet on it?

Leading Edge: Some blacks not black enough for cricket’s new elite

Black African mafia the latest in a long line of cabals to rule the game in South Africa.

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

THE dysfunction of cricket’s relationship with race in South Africa has always run deep, but it is scraping new lows.

Some black people, it seems, are not black enough. They used to be. No longer.

A hundred years and more ago the game’s controlling mafia was a jumped up gang of British colonialists, white to a man. And they were all men.

They passed the bat to English-speaking white South African men, who after a few decades allowed Afrikaans-speaking white South African men into they thought was their exclusive club.

Then came a jewish tendency, followed at last by blacks of all shades and cultures. But not many black Africans. Then Asian, mostly muslim, people earned authority and influence.

All of those mafias got a lot wrong and a lot right, and cricket survived. More often than not it prospered.

A decent argument could be made that the game is the closest thing — besides, possibly, football — we have to democracy in what remains, almost 24 years after we first had an election worthy of the name, a starkly, cruelly, disgustingly undemocratic society.

That money’s vote is still the only vote that matters tells us how dismally we have failed to build the country of which Luthuli and Sobukwe dared to dream.

And even though cricket has tried, and sometimes succeeded, to do its duty and rise above the stinking badness of all that, it is not and has not been immune to falling into the abyss of wrong.

That brings us to these sad days, when blacks who are not black African look at whites with what learned people might call “cryptomnesia”, which dictionaries define as, “the reappearance of a suppressed or forgotten memory which is mistaken for a new experience”. Whites look back at those suddenly not black enough blacks with tingles of deja vu running up and down their spines.

“This is unfair,” the blacks say to the whites.

“Welcome to our world,” the whites reply.

That’s out of order. Typically those now not black enough have done and are still doing more to unify cricket and work for its healthy future than too many whites, who even now have an unfortunate and self-defeating problem with acknowledging that all of us, whatever our race, own the game and are entitled to play, umpire, score, administer, report on, follow and love it to the limits of our passion.

Whatever bleating you may hear from whites about being drummed out of the game in this country isn’t worth the paper a Kolpak contract is printed on. Look around: cricket at all levels is riddled with white people. This columnist is among them, and has been for almost half his life.

So, who or what is causing this desperate and dangerous state of affairs? Cricket’s new elite, who will struggle to convince neutrals that they are not cynically fostering racial division to keep themselves on top of the heap.

There has been too much worried whispering in the corridors adjacent to the corridors of power to dismiss that notion easily, and last week at the Wanderers there was fire to add to the smoke.

With reporters handily present to attend press conferences before the fourth one-day international between South Africa and India, a briefing was called. The subject was an update on Cricket South Africa’s plans to recover from the mess that became the aborted T20 Global League.

Only black African reporters were invited, which made at least one of them uncomfortable: did the suits think they could get away with saying what they wanted on a sensitive issue and trust that it would be reported uncritically because everybody in the room was of the same race?

What message did they think they were sending to journalists present who were not invited and who included some of the most senior members of cricket’s press corps reporting for major publications? Some were black. None were this columnist.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for answers. The mafia doesn’t work like that.