For Smokers in Italy, Strike Stubs Out Dolce Vita

ROME — Judge Osvaldo Bonsangue’s mugger was a smoker. The crime happened on Teocrito Street in the Sicilian city of Syracuse, hometown of the great mathematician Archimedes. The judge was smoking a cigarette when a young man snatched it from his mouth and--eureka!--ran off puffing madly.

Strange things happen when a whole country is unconditionally sentenced to nicotine withdrawal.

It has been 18 days of trauma for Italy’s 13 million smokers--and their suffering compaesani who must live with them. A strike by employees of the government tobacco monopoly has choked off supplies and sent contraband prices sky high. To add insult to injury, the nation’s 60,000 tobacconists closed their shutters Tuesday in protest.

The tobacconists’ shelves were smoked bare long since. But the shopkeepers were at least sympathetic listeners for anguished customers hoping to unearth a stray pack of anything smokable.

In a country where smoking is still fashionable, the villains have been 86 die-hard distributors who work for the state tobacco monopoly. The monopoly, which employs 13,000, makes domestic brands of cigarettes and distributes the more expensive and sought-after imported brands.

Tuesday’s tobacconists’ strike, which shows no sign of ending, protests privatization of the monopoly and the trimming of a featherbedded work force that would follow.

The Italian Parliament, whose members include some of Italy’s most prominent smokers, is debating government plans to sell off state industries ranging from banks and engineering companies to the small but lucrative tobacco monopoly.

The government of (moderate smoker) Prime Minister Giuliano Amato hopes to earn $20 billion in privatization sales over the next three years but for the time being is losing about $20 million a day in its share of cigarette revenues.

“If the strike goes on, it will be intolerable. We cannot allow the distributors to endanger the financial well-being of the country’s 60,000 family-run tobacconists,” said Franco Ragni, president of the tobacconists union known appropriately as FIT (Federazione Italiana Tabaccai).

To hear the national chorus of smoker outrage as it filters through the Italian press, money is less and less of an object in an increasingly desperate search for the demon weed. Sicilians are making day trips to nearby Malta to stock up. Sardinians ferry to French Corsica. Northern Italians on international cigarette-shopping expeditions are jamming the borders with Switzerland and France. Nearly every passenger in the nonsmoking section of a weekend Istanbul-Rome flight arrived clutching cartons of cigarettes.

In Rome, cigarettes sell in the streets at nearly $1 a butt. In Palermo, black market packs sell for about $15. Waiters ask for tips in cigarettes, Italian newspapers report, and in Genoa, prostitutes accept them as payment in kind: two cartons for half an hour.

A three-pack-a-day habit drove Italian reporter Giuseppe D’Avanzo into the darkest corners of Rome, winding up eventually among nearly 100 other cigaretteless souls at the Termini train station, one of the toughest spots in town.

“I was offered heroin, cocaine, grass, amphetamines, Ecstasy, but not one pack of cigarettes,” D’Avanzo wrote in the newspaper La Repubblica. Desperate, he met a man who said his smuggler brother Rafiluccio was arriving with a stash on the 3 p.m. train from Naples. When the train pulled in--late--Rafiluccio was overrun by deranged smokers, yelling, clutching at his sleeves, thrusting money, begging.

“In my best Neapolitan I said, ‘Give us a carton of Marlboros, pal,’ and Rafiluccio opened his bag and took out a delicious red-and-white box. I slipped him 50,000 lire (about $36) and ran off. Like a thief. Like a drug addict,” D’Avanzo confessed.