by Behan, Tom
Because of this climate of intimidation, Venuti and others went further by organising public meetings; it was important to destroy the sense of isolation, fear and hopelessness, to show everybody that there was opposition to the Mafia. He remembers one person who always used to listen to him: ‘I recall one small boy who came to all my speeches. While everybody else of his age was running around and playing, he would listen to everything I said sitting on the kerb. When I first met him my first impression was of a boy full of enthusiasm and a huge desire for honesty and justice.’
That young boy was called Peppino Impastato.
6
The Impastatos
The Impastato family were fairly typical for Cinisi. When Felicia Bartolotta married Luigi Impastato in 1947 it was a very good deal for the groom, who had
spent a couple of years ‘in exile’ on the island of Ustica during the fascist period, suspected of Mafia membership. Under this legal restriction people were ordered to reside in exile in another town, in an attempt to prevent them from coming into contact with the wrong sort of people.
Luigi was a short squat man with a flat nose, the son of a cattle farmer. One of his cousins was Don Masi Impastato, a local landowner and old-fashioned Mafia boss in Cinisi during the postwar period. Another relative was Nick ‘Killer’ Impastato, who had emigrated to the US in 1927 and was arrested as the second in command of the country’s largest heroin ring in 1943. Luckily for Nick, he only served two years, but the main witness against him was unlucky in that he was murdered soon after Nick was released from jail. After a four-year legal battle, he was finally deported from Kansas City back to Italy in 1955.
That was more of an American story though. Indeed, the small minority of Italian migrants such as Nick Impastato, who turned into gangsters, has led to decades of generalised racist stereotyping of Italian-Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority didn’t go down that road. But as regards Luigi Impastato and the Mafia, what really brought him in was the marriage of one of his sisters to Don Cesare Manzella.
That’s not to say that Luigi Impastato ever had an important role to play: he earned his living transporting cheese and doing other odd jobs. His son Giovanni remembers that in the immediate postwar period: ‘My father earned money by dealing in illegal cigarettes and wheat. He had three lorries, so he moved these things illegally to avoid paying duties and taxes on them.’ In later years he was given a shop to run, and it’s possible that a business with such a high cash flow was used to recycle dirty money. He was lucky to marry into a good family and inherited various plots of land.
Felicia Bartolotta was different from her husband in many respects. She had a long thin face and came from a ‘good family’, both in the sense that her closest relatives were not linked to the Mafia, and also because her father had a stable job working at the council; she also brought various pieces of land to the marriage. Felicia was unaware of Luigi’s Mafia links: ‘I didn’t know what my husband was. I knew he was sent into exile – he must have done something.’ Partly because she didn’t know the ugly truth about his allegiances, she genuinely liked him, but ‘as soon as we got married all hell broke loose’. She had become the wife of someone with a very traditional attitude towards family and marriage, a real padre padrone: ‘He used to argue at the drop of a hat, and you never knew what he was doing or where he was going.’ Gaspare Cucinella, a few years younger than Luigi, remembers him thus: ‘Luigi was very uncommunicative. You could never chat with him. It was always just: “hello, how are you?” . . . “hello how are you?” . . . it never went further than that.’
Their first son, Peppino, was born in 1948, in a nowabandoned house behind the main church. He wasn’t just born into the family of a low-level Mafia member, but Mafia boss and relative Don Masi Impastato lived next door, and the up-and-coming boss Procopio Di Maggio lived just behind them.
Although his mother accepted that being a woman meant she was treated as an inferior being, her desire to protect her son pushed her into conflict with her husband from the very beginning. This was the period of the notorious bandit gang led by Salvatore Giuliano, which had murdered – ammazzarono – 12 peasants on May Day 1947. Not only were the gang based in the nearby town of Montelepre, they also regularly killed policemen in shoot-outs, so sometimes suspected Mafiosi were rounded up in the next towns. Her husband knew a local policeman, and, as Felicia recounts:
They’d told my husband there would be round-ups that night. I was terrified – whenever I saw policemen my heart used to pound. There was knocking at the door, it was the cops. Peppino was really tiny at the time. I told my husband: ‘Murderer, why don’t you get out? Why have you stayed home? Didn’t you know they were meant to come?’
However, it was the unexpected consequences of the birth of their second son Giovanni that were, in the long term, to tear the family apart and put Cinisi on the map. Giovanni had died of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain caused by contagious infection, so Peppino was sent to live with his maternal aunt and uncle, Fara and Matteo, who essentially raised him. Looking back on this set-up, Peppino’s mother was satisfied that her son lived in a conventional family structure, in that he ‘grew up in a family that had a brother, a sister and a mother. In a way his mother and father were a bit distant. But I was comfortable with this because I knew my brother would keep him on the straight and narrow . . .’
There may have been other reasons, because this was a highly unusual arrangement. In the long term this different existence – compared to the norm of a rigidly conventional family structure – may have influenced his future development. But as a boy Peppino behaved like any other, playing football on a piece of waste ground by pushing two sticks into the ground and fixing a fishing net between them. In any event, as his mother adds in a masterful piece of understatement: ‘in fact he grew up different’. Giovanni, the third son who was born a couple of years later (and named after the child who had died), many years later defined his elder brother Peppino in the following terms: ‘For this culture, Peppino’s break with his family was a historical turning point.’
Peppino came under the influence of his uncle Matteo, who was a clerk at the council and therefore relatively well educated. He saw that Peppino had a talent for studying and he encouraged him to go further and paid for his schoolbooks. When Peppino was a teenager Matteo took him to his first meetings of the Italian Communist Party.
Peppino’s rebellious spirit began to emerge when he went to high school in the nearby town of Partinico. His mother remembers the day he handed in a Latin essay:
the teacher made a correction because according to her he’d made a mistake, but Peppino said ‘There’s no mistake here!’ In other words they started arguing and she told him: ‘You blackguard, go and sit down!’ As soon as he could, he got hold of a dictionary to find out what the word meant, and all hell broke loose when he got home. My brother went and spoke with the headmaster: Peppino was in the right, he hadn’t made a mistake and to top it all she had insulted him!
Meanwhile, his father only saw him occasionally, and essentially just tried to show off his first-born to his Mafia friends. To be shunted around by a distant father like some kind of trophy must have been irritating for any adolescent, but given that he was growing up outside his father’s influence, the gap could only grow wider over time.
Back at the family home, Felicia Bartolotta remembers: ‘My husband would tell me nothing. I had to work everything out for myself.’ It wouldn’t have taken much to work out why the police would often call asking to question Luigi, who habitually hid himself inside a large family chest down in the basement. Felicia started to show the first signs of being a free spirit: ‘my mother had taught me about the Mafia’, and made it very clear to her husband that her family would not be a Mafia family: ‘so I told him – “I don’t want people who are on the run staying in my house”. And my husband answered – “well, what if he’s a friend of mine . . .?” “I don’t care, I wouldn’t
even care if it was my dad.” I’ve never taken anyone in.’
The problem was that the Mafia was all around her, and in a town like Cinisi there is no wall that can be built to keep it out of sight and out of contact. Not only was Felicia living with a low-level Mafioso, she was closely related to the town boss, Cesare Manzella. She could maybe hold the line with her husband, but not with her brother-in-law. Despite all that happened in between, looking back many years later Felicia said this about Cesare Manzella: ‘He used to come visiting and was very kind . . . I can’t speak badly of him.’
One day Felicia found out that Luigi was having an affair with a neighbour and moved back in with her mother, taking Giovanni with her. But Cesare Manzella came and spoke to her, using the coded language typical of a Mafioso: ‘Well, you know how things are.’ He also went to speak to her brother Matteo, who was looking after Peppino. Afterwards Matteo advised his sister: ‘Look, Felicia, move back because there’s nothing else you can do.’ In order to keep a lid on things and avoid any public scandal, Manzella then gave some money to the woman involved in the affair in order to keep her quiet. As Felicia says in her colourful Sicilian: ‘your blood remains dirty, you’re sick to your stomach’.
It was also in the day-to-day etiquette of showing respect to your relatives and friends that Felicia was unable to keep the Mafia at bay. She remembers: ‘My husband and Badalamenti were like brothers.’ The head of the house naturally wanted his children to meet his friends and associates, so, as their youngest child Giovanni recalls:
My father often took me to birthday parties at the houses of Mafiosi. Many Mafiosi, including Tano Badalamenti, would come in this very house and talk with my father, all of this happened often. Badalamenti always moved about
with an entourage. He was always very correct and kind with me. The way he showed his Mafia power was through simplicity, he was very communicative even though he couldn’t speak Italian very well. But through the Mafia code of communicating he was able to transmit fear very easily, he was very charismatic. He wasn’t one of those show-offs who would take his gun out, he was very cool.
The problem is that the Mafia is like a spider’s web; once you’re caught you can’t escape. People might think that just respecting social conventions means they can keep their distance from more serious entanglement. If they’re very lucky things can work out that way, but although he was small fry, the head of the Impastato household was all for encouraging these connections. But in a highly dictatorial organisation like the Mafia he didn’t make those decisions.
One day Manzella made sure Felicia and Giovanni went and stayed in one of his houses in the village of Contessa Entellina, where Giovanni’s uncle and Mafioso Giuseppe ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato worked. Despite his nickname, those who knew Giuseppe remember him as a chubby and friendly man, but even back then, in the 1950s, Manzella had started to use the gravy train of Christian Democrat politicians and had got ‘Leadspitter’ a job as a field guard on the land of local MP Antonio Pecoraro.
Through their control over the political system, and the public sector economy, Christian Democrats were able to manage and allocate precious resources, such as jobs. The Mafia often acted as a filter in this system: forwarding requests upwards to politicians and receiving favours in return. The key link between the politicians and Mafiosi was the Mafia’s ability to deliver votes, although sometimes the two roles could be combined in just one person.
The most notorious example from this period was Giuseppe Genco Russo, the head of the Mafia after the death of Don Calogero Vizzini in 1954. Genco Russo had first come to the authorities’ attention as far back as 1927, when the Caltanissetta police chief had written that Genco Russo’s wealth had been gained ‘with profits from crime and the Mafia’; he had also taken part in the Hotel Delle Palme summit in Palermo in 1957. Genco Russo had briefly been secretary of the Christian Democrat branch in his hometown, and when he stood as a councillor in Mussomeli in October 1960 a row broke out during an election debate on television. The party provincial secretary immediately told the press, ‘Mr Genco Russo is just like anyone else, and as such has the right to be a Christian Democrat candidate in Mussomeli.’ Even party leader Aldo Moro defended his candidature, so not surprisingly he was elected.
To come back to Cinisi, why was Cesare Manzella being so generous by inviting the Impastatos to stay in his country house? The reason emerged soon after, when a double murder took place in the town – ammazzarono; he wanted to make sure Felicia and her son were not around. On one hand Felicia must have appreciated Manzella’s gesture, but on the other her blood must have run cold when she thought about how deeply she was compromised. She often went and stayed at his house during the holidays, but again couldn’t fail to notice what was happening: ‘Sometimes I saw certain people. I once met Luciano Leggio. I had nothing to do with him but I understood what was going on. He slept there, and then in the morning they took him somewhere else.’
Known as the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ for his long periods on the run, Leggio was far from being the romantic figure his nickname suggests. His rapid rise within the organisation began when, as a 23-year-old, he murdered a Socialist trade unionist named Placido Rizzotto in his hometown of Corleone back in 1948. By the late 1950s he had gained control of the Corleone clan, which has dominated the Mafia since the late 1970s, and tutored the man who remained boss until his capture in April 2006 – Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. At the time Felicia met him, she would have known that Leggio was one of the main leaders of the Mafia, and was on the run from the police when he stayed in the same house as her.
Whether she liked it or not, Felicia was in deep. She faced a choice: if she told the police where to find one of the country’s most wanted fugitives, she would have had to go into hiding in order to stay alive, along with her children and husband, yet at that time the police did not have anything approaching a witness protection programme. And even if they did, Manzella would have killed her other relatives, so if she had decided to be an honest citizen it would have meant her death and that of her immediate family, or many of her close relatives. In situations like this Mafiosi can see that people have chosen to turn a blind eye to their activities. But what drags people in even deeper is the awareness of having become an accessory to serious crimes by not reporting them. Regardless of your own personal views, your safety becomes linked to that of Mafia leaders.
While all this was going on their eldest child, Peppino, was developing in a completely independent way. His mother remembers him going to hear the Communist activist Stefano Venuti speak: ‘He used to listen to all his speeches. He’d sit on the kerb with his hands like this; he was against the Christian Democrats. Me and Venuti knew each other, so I said to him: “Mr Venuti, would you do me a favour? Would you get my boy to stop this?” “Why should he, he’s an intelligent boy.”’
Although his mother might have been understanding, Peppino’s father was not. One day Peppino came home and told his father he’d passed his exams: ‘My uncle has bought me a raincoat and a bag to carry my books. What are you going to give me?’ Sometimes Peppino could be a bit too pushy and sarcastic with his father, failing to show the respect that was normal for the time. So his father answered coldly: ‘What am I going to give you? Nothing. When you decide to leave the Communist Party is when I’ll buy you something.’ Given that his attitude tended to create confrontation, at a very young age Peppino was forced to make a choice between developing his own ideas, or submitting to tradition and having a normal family life.
A key turning point came when his uncle Don Cesare Manzella was killed by a car bomb in the First Mafia War. Shocked, Peppino told his mother, ‘these people really are criminals’. She remembered, ‘That’s when it all started. He started talking about bullying, about injustice.’ Although aged just 15, Peppino made a conscious decision: ‘if this is what the Mafia is, then I’m going to oppose it’. If he had been living under the same roof as his Mafia father it would have be
en unlikely that he thought in this way, and what he went on to do was simply unheard of at the time. For a small sleepy town such as Cinisi, Peppino’s actions were going to be truly shocking.
‘The Mafia – A Mountain of Shit’
Contrary to some stereotypes, Peppino was a left-wing activist with emotions. Indeed, perhaps this brief poem he wrote expresses the self-denial that is inevitable in what was virtually full-time political activity:
Men look at the sky
And are amazed,
They look at the earth
And they feel compassion But oddly,
They do not notice themselves.
In the following quotation he expresses in more formal language what happened to him as a teenager: I got involved in politics way back in November ’65 on a purely emotional basis, in other words it began from my need to react against the unbearable situation within my family. My father, head of a little clan and member of a bigger clan, had since my birth tried to impose on me his choices and behavioural patterns – with the ideological connotations typical of a late peasant and pre-industrial society. All he managed to do was to cut off all emotional communication . . . I got involved with the Italian Socialist Party for Workers’ Unity with all the anger and desperation of somebody who was simultaneously trying to destroy everything and find protection. We set up a strong youth
group, created a newspaper and a new way of thinking, ended up in court and in all the newspapers. These were the days before the Internet – indeed, many local people still had no television – so the method Peppino and his friends used to spread their views was a newspaper, L’Idea Socialista (Socialist Idea).