How Joe Pace got his kiosk

This article was published in The Malta Independent on Sunday on 9 June 2002. It is the story of how Joe Pace, who is currently claiming to be the victim of political discrimination, got his kiosk. Because it is highly topical, it is being republished, for those who have forgotten it, for those who took no interest the first time round, and for those who missed it all together. I wish to add just two points. The first is that when Pace was quoted in a newspaper report yesterday as having had €70,000 taken from his cash-till when Magic Kiosk was dismantled on Friday and the items within it confiscated, I remarked on my blog that my reckoning of the true figure, based on the sort of trade I observed at Magic Kiosk, meant that two of those noughts were redundant. And sure enough, the government responded with a statement, saying that €530 were found in the till and given to Pace, and that a receipt was signed for the money – so much for his credibility.

The second point is that you cannot expect a man who has a track record of dishonourable behaviour to behave honourably towards his employees. He showed no concern for their future, even though some of them had been working at Magic Kiosk for almost three decades and are now in their late 40s or 50s and with difficult prospects. He should have done the decent thing, given them notice and some form of redundancy payment in gratitude for all those years of service, which would have given them time to find another job instead of the shock of turning up for work only to find their place of work being dismantled with police in attendance. Despite having received several eviction notices and being in effect a squatter on the land once his fixed-term commercial leases had expired (one of them four years ago), he first thought that Labour would win the election last March and that he would be sorted; then he thought that he could fix things by speaking to a few people; and then he went to court claiming political discrimination.

So now please read what I wrote more than six years ago. It was written in response to a letter published in this newspaper, from Joe Pace, who was objecting to something I had written about him earlier. He had been posturing all over a series of articles in Malta Today, about how he had been ‘forced’ to bribe corrupt government people during Labour’s term in government. I didn’t buy it. The reality is that they all scratched each other’s backs while all around human rights and civil liberties were being violated, corruption was rampant, and the government’s way of doing things was as transparent or acceptable as Haiti’s.

Now here it is, the story of how Pace got Magic Kiosk, from six-and-a-half years ago.

I was more than a little amused by Joe Pace’s comparison of his business to Mount Everest in a letter to the correspondence pages of this newspaper last Sunday. A comparison to the Grand Canyon might have been more accurate. HSBC is suing him for a sum in excess of Lm1 million. Any reporter who wants to ferret out the details from the court records is free to do so. Indeed, the sudden appearance of Joe Pace in a certain newspaper (Malta Today) which is portraying him as the hapless victim of Lorry Sant (there were so many truly hapless victims) is not a coincidence. The ultimate aim may be to ‘prove’ that he was ‘forced’ to borrow that kind of money by Lorry, Piju and the rest of the gang. The loans for which HSBC is suing him date back to the corrupt days of Mid-Med Bank, which was treated like a piggy-bank for pampaluni and tal-qalba. (Current note: I have had no time to discover whether HSBC got its money back, or whether the case was resolved some other way. But it bears pointing out that Pace got his bank facility under Labour and more than 20 years later he owed upwards of a million liri and with no sign of paying it.)

I knew he was going to write that letter, because the morning after my piece about him appeared, I got a telephone call from his buddy Joe Borg. “I’m calling you on behalf of Joe Pace,” he said, “ghax ha ghalih.” I expressed my surprise at the fact that these two, who spent several years making public their differences of opinion, were suddenly the best of friends. Joe Borg asked whether he and Joe Pace tal-Magic Kiosk could pop along and visit me, to tell me Pace’s version of events, u biex l-affarijet ma jikbrux. I snapped that I had no wish to meet either of them, and that I was the elast likely person to buy the ‘poor Joe Pace’ version of events that he had sold to Malta Today. “If Joe Pace wishes to put matters straight, then he should sit down and write a letter to the editor,” I said. “But perhaps you should remind him that he can’t do what he did and expect either sympathy or silence.” As I reminded Joe Borg over the telephone, I didn’t just grow up in that particular Sliema neighbourhood, I also did so in a pretty well-connected family, which means that I tend to know the background to things, if not also the details.

So Joe Pace wrote his letter to the editor, missing the point of my piece entirely: that those who bribe are as bad as those who are bribed, and that bribing places a noose around your neck, which the bribed will tighten from time to time, perhaps even strangling those who have bribed them. Bribery and blackmail are intertwined.

The next morning, I got another call, this time from a son of the three Bonello brothers who ran the traditional wooden kiosk that all Sliema natives my age and older remember so well. It was a landmark meeting-place that plays a big part in the memory of our daily life – until the day that Joe Pace set his sights on it and the Bonellos, who had been there since just after World War II, were thrown out. We then watched as St Anne Square, public propery, was excavated for the creation of a large basement, while the old kiosk was torn down, a ghastly structure went up instead, and the entire square was walled in so that this public square suddenly became the private commercial territory of Joe Pace, with just a cursory walkway, merely enough to allow access to the shops and doorways on the square.

We also had to put up with Mrs Pace flashing her diamond rings (li xtralha Joe) and telling the court she held daily down at Magic Kiosk that Joe ghandu tlett miljun lira l-iSvizzera. It would be interesting to find out whether this was just a vacuous and ill-advised boast, but of course, one can’t. All one know is that Joe ghandu hofra ta’ miljun lira mall-bank hawn Malta.

I met the Bonellos for a chat. These are the people who truly deserve the sympathy that Joe Pace is now trying to garner for himself. Their kiosk was very small, but every night, they gathered up all the chairs and somehow fitted them inside it, leaving the square unencumbered. They paid their rent on 12 June every year. Six weeks before their rent was due in 1974, they received a letter from the Lands Department, telling them that they were to vacate the kiosk by 30 June. They went immediately to the Lands Department and were told: “Hadn’t you better go to Patrick Holland?” (Current note for a younger generation: Patrick Holland was a senior member of Mintoff’s cabinet, and Sliema was his constituency. He had a terrible reputation and used as his ‘long arm’ the thug John Bondin, known as Il-Fusellu, who was later shot dead, and whose death was followed by the mysterious disappearance of an accountant, whose butchered remains were found in a remote well.)

The Bonellos didn’t think that the suggestion of going to Patrick Holland was odd, because even though he was, strictly speaking, the minister responsible for trade licensing and not for the Lands Department, he had established himself as the corrupt king of Sliema, a rival for Lorry Sant. I won’t go into the details, but he withheld import licences until he was ‘compensated’, used business-crippling quotas in the same way, and sent out his man Fusellu to gather protection money. The difference between Patrick Holland and Lorry Sant, who are now both dead, is that Holland came from a better social background and he didn’t have the demeanour of a thug. But still, he did what he did.

So the Bonellos went to Holland, as they were told to do. And he told them: “You’ve had that kiosk long enough. Now it’s time somebody else gets it. I’m going to put the lease out to tender.” Anyone who lived through doing business in those days will tell you that tenders were nothing more than a hideous joke, a paraventu for ministers to favour their friends. The Bonello brothers, each of whom had a family, told him: “But that’s our livelihood. You can’t do this to us. We can’t find another source of income in six weeks. That kiosk supports three families.”

On 12 June, they tried to pay their rent. It wasn’t accepted. They sued, eventually losing the case because – oh great irony of ironies – they hadn’t paid their rent. Years later, the Commission for Injustices found in their favour and Joe Galea Debono, who is a judge today, ruled that compensation is due. It still hasn’t arrived, 11 years after the ruling. (Current note: I am told that even now, 17 years later, the Bonellos are still waiting for that compensation.)

Meanwhile, even before the tender was out and while the Bonellos were trying to pay their rent, Joe Pace actually went down to the kiosk while they were still running it, took measurements, and checked out their equipment. He did so as one of the Bonello brothers watched, stupefied. The call for tenders had not even been announced yet.

Then the harassment began. And again, all those of us who lived through those years will know exactly what I mean. Plain-clothes policemen would stop at the kiosk to buy soft drinks, and then arrest the brothers for charging three cents and five mils when the price of a Kinnie at the grocer was mandated as two cents and three mils (Current note: the police once called at our house when we were children to pick up my father – at night, of course. They told my mother, ‘You’d better pack his bag, because he’s not coming back tonight.’ When she asked what he had done, they told her that one of the pharmaceutical products he distributed was going out at a wholesale price of three mils more than it should have been.)

One day, a police officer in uniform arrived and announced: “Gejt biex naghmlilkom mandate.” When Joe Bonello asked what it was for, the policeman replied: “I don’t know yet. They sent me here to find something that doesn’t have a price on it.” (Current note: I know that everyone under the age of 40 will be shaking their heads in disbelief. I know, because my own sons can’t believe that this is how we lived. But believe me, it’s true. It was like living in a novel by Ivan Klima or Milan Kundera.) In those days, not having a price on each and every individual item was grounds for prosecution. If you had a shelf full of bottles of Coca-Cola, for example, you would have to mark each one of them, and not just put one price on the shelf. If you didn’t do that, and the inspectors came round and ‘caught’ you, you were arrested.

The policeman almost gave up when he found a price-sticker on every bottle of fizzy drink and every packet of sweets. Now read what’s coming next and weep for the way we lived then. As he was walking out of the kiosk, he saw a box of Twistees that had just been delivered by the wholesaler, and which obviously didn’t have prices on the individual packets because the box was still sealed. Joe Bonello was arrested for the crime of having on his premises a newly-delivered box of Twistees, still sealed, with unpriced packets inside it.

The harassment went on. They were prosecuted for sweeping the dust from the square into the taxi stand that stood then were it is now. You might be tempted to laugh at the one that’s coming next. But please, try not to do so. The Bonellos were prosecuted for leaving their broom propped up against a L-Orizzont poster. I can’t imagine what the charge was: insulting the General Workers’ Union?

One day during this prolonged nightmare, Joe Bonello ran into Joe Pace’s Valletta barman. “Don’t bother suing or trying to hang onto your lease,” the barman told him. “And don’t bother putting in a tender application, either. My boss has got it already. He’s even got a name for it – Magic Kiosk, ghax se jaghmel affarijiet tal-magic go fih.”

On 1 July, the police arrived to close down the kiosk. Back then in 1974, people were not yet accustomed to mobilising to express their anger. That came in the next few years, when life became unbearable. But the fury among Sliema residents, and their sympathy for the Bonellos, was palpable. Suddenly, three breadwinners (that’s what men were in 1974) with wives and children to support were left without a cent of income. Joe Bonello was out of work for a year, which wasn’t a joke in those days when the safety net was not the welfare state but friends and family. “The worst of the pain,” he told me when we met a few days ago, “was having my children come home from school to ask, ‘Daddy, have you found work yet?’” With thousands of people unemployed and thousands of others working far below their abilities for the minimum wage, he wasn’t going to find work any time soon. Farsons, whose drinks the Bonellos had sold for 30 years to generations of Sliema people, employed one of the brothers. The Grech family who owned the Square Deal shop which was then just across the road from St Anne Square (Current note: Today it’s Mil Ideas.) rallied to support Joe Bonello when they saw that he couldn’t find work. They set him up with a shop in Bugibba and provided him with stock. “I will always be grateful to Gorg Grech and to his father,” he told me. “If it hadn’t been for them, I don’t know what my family would have done.”

A few years later, Joe Bonello’s phone rang shortly after dawn. “Is that the Bonello home?” a man asked, refusing to give his name. When Bonello replied in the affirmative, the man continued: “Patrick Holland died last night. He wanted you to know how deeply sorry he was for what he did to you, and he asks for your forgiveness. It makes no difference to you who I am. I am just the messenger.”

This article is published in The Malta Independent on Sunday today.