back then there was a vast quantity of contracts to be awarded there was lots of work plenty of public works projects underway all over our district construction was underway on highways and superhighways there was even talk of a new airport there was talk of a special highspeed train line there was talk of vast amounts of money to be invested in the area and so the clan pushed and brought every sort of pressure to bear some of it brutal to ensure that in the upcoming elections its candidates would be voted in to ensure that they would be voted into parliament voted into the regional and provincial and municipal councils and to make sure that the offices of director of the agencies such as the agency for the south the agency for reclamation and other agencies of this sort would be filled by people with ties to the clan or in any case people that the clan could easily corrupt

in this early phase politics seemed to control the clan it seemed that the politicians were making use of the clan for its various games and maneuvers the politicians turned to the clan because it managed to assemble with ease blocs of thousands and thousands of votes for example in my town out of a population of six thousand in a municipal election one candidate managed to procure two thousand votes but in exchange the clan demanded money the clan wanted a piece of the public works contracts the clan wanted the contracts to be awarded to people it trusted and from whom it could expect a lavish percentage most important the clan wanted to be left alone to operate undisturbed and this was something that the politicians could provide without problems because after all it’s not like there’s been this massive campaign it’s not like the Italian parliament and administration have done much down here to defeat organized crime in fact with all the murders that take place practically on a daily basis there’s never much more than a formal denunciation which is to say the various local senators and members of parliament make a solemn proclamation that they are opposed to organized crime but it’s not like they actually do anything it’s not like they propose special laws or call for any concrete action from the state

the only dissenting voices were from the opposition from the Communist Party as it was known at the time once for example that party organized an occupation of the town hall by a group of widows because when Ernesto Bardellino was mayor he had gone so far as to steal the money from the pensions that the municipal administrations received from the Italian state on behalf of widows and so they denounced this embezzlement and organized an occupation of the town hall by the widows there must have been a hundred or a hundred and fifty people then the lawyer arrived with a number of clan members but they understood that they couldn’t manhandle all those women and especially all those widows and so they shut it all down the lawyer explained that it wasn’t the way people thought that the Communists had made up everything and that the only real problem was that unfortunately the money hadn’t arrived yet but that they would get busy and would make sure that the money was allocated soon but the next day in response a Communist official had the front door of his apartment house burned and later he was publicly upbraided and even beaten but the clan didn’t have him killed because they didn’t consider him a real threat they just assumed he was someone who was doing his job a politico somebody they’d have to take into account and work around that’s all