by Behan, Tom
Soon after his return the family went out to eat, as Felicia recalls:
We were at the pizzeria one evening in September. It was near closing time as the waiters were packing things away, and my husband said, ‘I’ll go on ahead.’ So I got into the car with my daughter-in-law, but when we got home there was nobody in. We retraced our steps and she saw him lying on the ground, dead.
A car had stopped nearby. Afterwards the driver said she had never seen anybody, but had felt the car drive over something on the road.
Luigi Impastato was dead – but who had killed him – the driver or somebody else? It is perfectly possible that it was an accident, after all, the bumper had been damaged. On the other hand, the Mafia could well have had an interest in getting rid of him.
As with any family, the death of the father obliged those left to take stock. This was one of Giovanni’s thoughts: ‘When my father died I felt a huge sense of liberation inside me – “at last I’m free”, I said to myself. On the other hand, I did feel a lot of pain because the person who had brought me into the world had died.’ But his mother was worried about her other son: ‘As soon as my husband had his accident I immediately thought, “my son’s already dead”.’
Despite any suspicions the family might have had, and despite Peppino’s activities, Badalamenti visited Felicia to pay his condolences: ‘he was here in front of me, he was paying his respects. I would have liked to throw him out but I didn’t, I was worried about Peppino. We really were on our own.’ Whether they were behind Luigi’s death or not, the Mafia quickly discovered that Peppino had not changed his attitude. All the top Mafiosi turned out for the funeral, but at the cemetery Peppino stood with his arms folded across his chest when they walked up to him to offer him their condolences – not even with his father’s death would Peppino show Mafia bosses any respect and shake their hands.
Meanwhile, Felicia had managed to get Peppino to respond to their changed situation: ‘He went to Milan for a month and then he came back. He was meant to go to America, my cousin was waiting for him and he had agreed to go. But in the meantime the elections were announced and he decided to stand.’
11
The Last Crazy Wave
A
new national organisation came into being in 1977 – Proletarian Democracy – which contained within it most of the various strands of the small revolutionary
parties that had folded over the previous two years. In Partinico, Gino Scasso signed his party card and recounts what happened next:
When Peppino told me he was prepared to stand as a Proletarian Democracy candidate, I organised a meeting at Radio Aut between him, myself and the only representative we had within national institutions at that time, a senator from Arezzo, Dante Rossi. As a newly formed party we were willing to support Peppino, but the senator imposed one condition: ‘you’re going to have to make it very clear you have nothing to do with the Red Brigades’.
It might seem strange for the senator to make such a big fuss about this, particularly when there had been no leftwing terrorist actions in Sicily. The problem was that the media and some political parties would sometimes use a few actions taking place at the other end of Italy to suggest there was an imminent threat of terrorism in Sicily. Public opinion would become worried, and politically it would become easier to isolate and damage people who criticised the government’s policies.
One instructive example had occurred two years before Peppino decided to stand at Alcamo Marina, just a few miles away from Cinisi, when two policemen were murdered in cold blood in their barracks. Even the most inexperienced police officer knew that Alcamo, Cinisi and Partinico were towns full of powerful Mafia gangs dealing in drugs, extortion rackets, building speculation, kidnappings, illegal production of wine and the procurement of public sector contracts. These were also areas where there had been no left-wing terrorist actions whatsoever.
Yet, following these murders, the police raided hundreds of houses belonging to members of the Communist Party and the revolutionary left, including five in Cinisi, while Mafiosi houses were left untouched. The two people later convicted of the murders had nothing to do with the Red Brigades.
This was part of the ‘strategy of tension’, a conspiracy between elements of the police, the secret services and the Christian Democrats to accuse the far left of any act of violence that took place in the country. The underlying reason for this strategy was that in recent years the left had been growing electorally and, equally, trade unions had become strong. Even in a small town such as Cinisi ordinary people had the confidence to stand up and show the power their jobs gave them. As Pino Vitale remembers:
Myself and Rosario Rappa were charged following a dispute in 1977. The situation was that we were electricians who would pass from one contractor to another, but the work we did was always the same – electrical maintenance at the airport. Because a new contractor didn’t want to take us on a dispute developed, and I can remember writing a leaflet with Peppino. I remember once we switched the airport lights off for a whole night and several flights were cancelled. It was treated so seriously we were even called to a meeting at the Ministry of Transport in Rome.
Despite the risk of other parties playing the ‘terrorist card’, and the fact that Peppino made no secret of his belief in revolution, many moderate people in Cinisi had come to respect Peppino. He had received a significant number of votes when he stood as a candidate for regional government a few years earlier, and his speeches were always attended by large crowds. Furthermore, there was a new wave of young voters, given that the minimum voting age in council elections had been reduced from 21 to 18 in 1975. In other words, it certainly wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he would be elected as a councillor. His chances of getting elected were probably high because he promised to reveal even more of the shady dealings going on between the local council and Mafia bosses. Not only was there no other candidate prepared to stand on such a platform, but Peppino already had a record that was second to none in exposing corruption and collusion.
All this was swirling around a recently widowed woman in her 60s, his mother Felicia: ‘I lived through a terrible period. I used to wake up at night and go and check that Giovanni was there . . .’; she was worried about Giovanni because of Peppino:
I used to talk about the Mafia with Peppino. I told him I hated the Mafia as well, we’re decent people, but he didn’t listen. I used to say to him: ‘snuffing out a candle is nothing to them, it doesn’t take long to dig a grave because they’re animals.’ Well really they’re worse – at least you can reason with some animals, but with them it’s impossible. They’re wild animals. The Mafia won’t listen to people.
During the election campaign another close relative tried to dissuade Peppino too: I really begged him. I remember we were in the kitchen, and I told him: ‘Look, Peppino, this is a terrible period. These people are killing each other as well, nowadays they’ve got no respect for anyone. Why don’t you stop
what you’re doing – why don’t you go to Bologna?’ – I said that because I knew he had friends there. ‘You could build a political organisation there, just as you want, and once it’s grown you could come back to Sicily.’ But I was just clutching at straws. He turned round, raising one of the fingers of his hand, and he said: ‘They can all dance on this.’
Deep down, Peppino was paying a heavy price for his commitment. There was no end of ways in which the Mafia could try to ‘get’ to him, so perhaps the only way to survive was absolute self-control. Graziella Iacopelli, then a teenager, who knew him slightly remembers, ‘Peppino wasn’t the kind of person who easily let himself go.’ She recalls, ‘he always used to dress in black’, and she used to see him walking along the Corso, but in such a way that you could see his nervous energy; he would bob and weave as he walked almost like a boxer does in the ring. Another teenager at the time, Margherita Galati, says: ‘He always used to bite his nails.’ This was perhaps one of the few slight chinks in
his armour, otherwise: ‘Peppino was very withdrawn. And sometimes his loneliness really touched me.’
The amateur actor Gaspare Cucinella knew him better because in this period he was working closely with Peppino on the Crazy Wave programme for Radio Aut:
He always had his mind elsewhere, preoccupied with something or other. He was never calm, and that’s why his life in this dirty filthy town was so difficult . . .
He was alone, totally alone . . .
Peppino worked himself too hard. Inside, he was falling to bits. He was on his own – totally – and this loneliness made him very sad. Physically he had become very weak, he hardly ate anything, sometimes he was put on an intravenous drip to pick himself up.
Near the end of election campaign Cucinella bumped into Peppino and found him tired and disappointed, so ‘I suggested that he come and stay at my house for a couple of weeks, to get away from such a worrying environment. He said that he couldn’t, he had to see the election campaign through, and that in any case there was no need to worry.’
Soon after the calling of council elections something had happened that raised the political temperature even further: former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades. It was a brutally efficient action: five bodyguards were killed, and the Christian Democrats’ most senior statesman was now in a self-styled ‘people’s prison’ facing a ‘trial’, at the end of which nearly everybody expected him to be sentenced to death. At the same time, the Red Brigades demanded the opening of negotiations for the release of some of their members held in prison.
To cynical Christian Democrats this was a gift – after all, if politicians were prepared to do deals with Mafiosi then it was clear they had very little morals. First of all, for as long as Moro was held they could milk public sympathy because their leader was facing execution by terrorists. Secondly, and this went on for much of the 1970s, right-wing politicians and their friends in the media could insinuate that the Communist Party was in sympathy with ‘the Reds’.
Rather than stressing their total lack of any links with terrorism, and exposing the Christian Democrats’ cynical exploitation of their leader’s personal nightmare, the Communists dutifully played the role assigned to them: a week before the election a local Communist MP gave a speech in Cinisi in which he attacked ‘the mummy’s boys, the dangerous accomplices of terrorists’. The end result that was hoped for was that all opposition to the Christian Democrats would cease, given the need – in the Communist Party’s eyes – for ‘national unity’ to face ‘the terrorist threat’.
Not for the first time, Peppino wrote on behalf of Proletarian Democracy a condemnation of the Red Brigades, which he defined as:
The party of death, of fear, of expropriation of mass struggle. Moro murdered would reinforce this state; the government would enjoy the consensus it has so cynically sought by refusing to negotiate and ratcheting up the strongest threat possible to national security . . . Until the last possible moment we will repeat our proposal to negotiate. It isn’t only Moro’s life that is at stake: a dramatic situation of gang warfare must be avoided in our country. Mass struggles must become the driving force of social transformation.
In the midst of this hostage crisis that was followed throughout the world, Peppino and others didn’t forget about their own ‘enemy within’, the Mafia. They mounted a photographic exhibition along the Corso – dozens of panels roughly two feet by four feet. Called ‘Exhibition About our Territory’, it illustrated and explained in great detail the local council’s corruption and collusion with the Mafia. Displayed as it was on the main street, the whole town could not avoid seeing in great detail the dirty linen of local politicians being washed in public.
It was clear that these ‘mummy’s boys, the dangerous accomplices of terrorists’ were a force to be reckoned with. Otherwise why, three weeks before polling day, was sugar poured into the petrol tank of Peppino’s car, with which he planned to drive around with a loudspeaker making electoral announcements? After all, what would be the point in damaging the activities of a candidate who stood no chance?
The strength of the election campaign could be seen when Peppino gave his final speech on the Corso. Even though it was raining there were hundreds of people, perhaps close to a thousand. This speech was being held at the same time as one by Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Sicilian Christian Democrats (who would be murdered by the Mafia two years later), who was due to speak in the square in front of the council building. Shortly before Mattarella began speaking, two people went up the Corso and saw there were just a few dozen people getting ready to hear Sicily’s most powerful politician. Margherita Galati’s recollections end with perhaps a bit of an understatement: ‘When Peppino gave his final campaign speech it was packed, and he was very explicit about naming names. He had created widespread consensus and this worried certain people.’
Petty censorship also illustrated the fear his candidacy had created. During the campaign Peppino gave an interview to a local radio station in Terrasini, but they bleeped out the word ‘Mafia’ every time he used the expression ‘Christian Democracy is Mafia’. Despite all these difficulties at least Peppino’s campaign had Radio Aut, and they made full use of it. In such a tense period, Felicia remembers: ‘I didn’t have the courage to listen to it. Sometimes Giovanni switched it on and I told him: ‘For the love of God, switch it off’.’ In their last broadcast before election day, Peppino and the rest showed that they would not stop attacking the Mafia. It was also clear, once again, that they knew all the council’s dirty secrets:
[WHISPERED]
1st voice: Ssshhh! Quiet! The electoral rules committee is meeting in Mafiopoli. They’re dividing up the cake.
2nd voice: Ah the cake – and there’s a bit for everyone.
1st voice: No, there’s not! They’re only dividing it up amongst themselves. And they’re dividing up the returning officers.
2nd voice: Shit! What’s it all mean?
1st voice: They get paid – 40,000 lire each.
2nd voice: They’re all going bla-bla-bla. What’s it mean?
1st voice: They’re dividing up the returning officers on the basis of how many votes every party is expected to get. And it seems the party of the advanced left [the Communist Party] took part in this secret meeting – just like the ones held by the Red Brigades. And now we can bring you the official results of who the returning officers will be.
2nd voice: Christian Democrats – 27, with nine to the advanced left. We can now bring you the latest
news: the Christian Democrats have told Don Tano they’re willing to give him all 27 returning officers, but we don’t know whether Don Tano Seduto has accepted their offer (cow noises).
12
And the Windows Stayed Shut
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
Three nights after this radio broadcast about election irregularities, Fara Bartolotta came back home after midnight. She shared her house, just outside Cinisi station, with her nephew Peppino. She didn’t look in his room because Peppino often came home late as well, so she went straight to bed.
An hour later the driver of the midnight train from Palermo stopped his locomotive out near the airport. He climbed down and saw the line was twisted and broken, but luckily the train hadn’t jumped the tracks. He started to search in the dark; Peppino’s car was parked nearby. It quickly became clear to him a bomb had gone off. Several sticks of dynamite had exploded, and human remains were scattered over a wide area.
Peppino’s Aunt Fara got up early the next morning, about 5.30am, and noticed that he had not come back home. Worried by something so unusual, she rushed off to the house of her sister, Felicia.
Back at the railway lines, the human remains strewn around the railway tracks were identified as belonging to Peppino, dead at just 30 years old. Ammazzarono. At around 7am a separate police squad was sent to Aunt Fara’s house. Not finding her there, they went on to her sister’s house – a total of four
vans went to his mother’s house. Fara was taken back to search the house where Peppino lived. Like any political activist Peppino had lots of books, leaflets and notes scattered around his room.
One of the books they impounded had now taken on a lot of symbolic importance: Anatomy of Human Destructiveness was written by the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a very popular writer among left-wingers in the 1960s. Fromm started from the fact that humans are the only species that inflicts pain and torture on others, the only animal that is violent when there is no threat, and tried to understand why. He concluded that this violence generally reached excessive levels only in the industrial era; human aggression is the inevitable outcome of a social system that seems actively designed to suppress positive outlets such as love and compassion, and to embed individuals as a cog in a machine.
The police, meanwhile, finished their search and left at about 8am. Back out near the airport, the police were getting ready to evacuate the site, even though they had received the first call about the incident just over four hours earlier. The remains of Peppino’s body had been collected very hurriedly, and the track was repaired immediately. With hindsight, such eagerness to lose vital evidence was odd to say the least – after all, somebody had just been blown to bits for reasons that weren’t immediately clear.
One piece of vital evidence was found, but it remained overlooked for many years. The council gravedigger who had been asked by the police to collect Peppino’s remains had called them over to a small barn very near the explosion. Inside there were fresh bloodstains on two stones, and a trail of blood on the floor heading towards the door. The obvious presumption was that Peppino was wounded or killed inside, and then dragged out, therefore he couldn’t have ignited any sticks of dynamite a hundred metres away on the railway tracks.