by Behan, Tom
At around this time, 8am, Peppino’s friends were arriving because they had heard what had happened. As soon as they approached the area a police superintendent saw them and said ‘give me your details’. Once he had written them down in a little notebook he curtly told them: ‘Go to the police station, we want to question you’. A line of police officers stopped them from walking onto the railway tracks, yet behind that line they could see ordinary people, people they knew from Cinisi, wandering about and satisfying their curiosity. This was the first of many negative signals from the police.
At around the same time in Partinico Gino Scasso was woken up and heard the word used so often in Cinisi: ‘ammazzarono’. ‘Who?’ ‘Peppino’.
Although he speaks very slowly, and some people would call him dopey, the first thing Scasso did was to go to the Proletarian Democracy branch and burn all records of party membership. The man who had been killed had been standing as a Proletarian Democracy councillor, and the man burning party records was already a councillor for the same party in the next town. What was the connection between the dead man and the burning of party records? There was none, of course, but as Scasso explains: ‘I knew immediately what kind of climate would be created, I knew immediately in which direction the police would take their investigations.’
Back in Cinisi, when some of Peppino’s friends arrived at the police station for questioning, they noticed Peppino’s car was already parked outside – a police officer must have driven it there. Anybody could touch it, adding new fingerprints or rubbing out others. The direction in which the police were taking the investigation became clear once the questioning began. Peppino’s brother Giovanni endured a five-hour session that morning. They told him that his brother had ‘died on the job’, in the sense that he was a terrorist who was preparing a bomb. The statement Giovanni signed at midday revealed the kind of questions the police were asking: ‘I have never seen my brother handling dynamite or other terrorist weaponry. He was against terrorism, practically everyone knows this. Until I see conflicting ballistic evidence I am convinced my brother was deliberately killed, and that those responsible wanted to make his death look like an accident which occurred when he was preparing a terrorist attack.’
Giovanni’s girlfriend Felicetta also endured a long session. What she said in her statement at 2.30pm revealed a second line of police inquiry: ‘it does not seem possible to me that he committed suicide; neither do I believe him capable of carrying out a terrorist attack.’ Further on she added: ‘I do not have strong arguments to back up what I have said above. I can say that he was against acts of violence.’
Naturally these young people were shocked and devastated by Peppino’s death. Furthermore, they must have been deeply confused and disturbed by what the police were making them talk about. But despite the formal language of police statements, the words ‘I do not have strong arguments to back up what I have said’ show the kind of pressure they were being put under.
Years later another young man questioned that day, Giovanni Riccobono, explained in a hearing of the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission how they were treated:
‘Following his death investigators took me and other friends of Peppino to the police station, where we were all harassed and treated like terrorists.’ Asked to explain the content of that phrase further, he added: ‘I used the term “harassed” because they kept on asking the same question: “Why were you organising a bombing?” We were supposed to answer that we were preparing a bomb, or that as we were placing it things went wrong and Peppino was killed. This is what I meant. We were asked the same question over and over again.’. . .
‘From the very beginning we got the feeling they weren’t interested in the truth. We all noticed that immediately. I repeat: they didn’t ask us about anything else, all they said was that we were bombers.’. . . ‘I, along with all the
others, made it clear that Peppino had written leaflets and made speeches against the Mafia. In different ways, we were all asking the police to investigate in that direction.’
By 8pm that evening three police officers in Cinisi signed a document defining the explosion thus: ‘such a criminal action was presumably intended to cause a train crash’. Other lines of inquiry were being ruled out, it was all as easy as ABC – the officers were called Abramo, Buono and Canale.
Aside from ‘helping police with their inquiries’, Peppino’s friends were facing their first big test without him: how to respond publicly to his death, and their reaction had to be immediate, his funeral would certainly not past unnoticed. They decided to print a large poster and put it up in the town, but they could get nobody in Cinisi to print it. Gino Scasso recalls some of them arriving in Partinico: ‘they looked like they’d taken a real hammering’. Nobody in Partinico would print it either, so they had to drive over to a third town, Alcamo, where they finally found someone prepared to do the work.
The explanation given in the poster for Peppino’s death was totally different to the one given by the police: Peppino Impastato has been murdered. His long activity as a revolutionary activist has been used by his murderers and ‘the forces of law and order’ to create the ridiculous notion of a terrorist attack. This is a lie! This murder has a very obvious explanation: MAFIA. As we gather together round Peppino’s twisted body we make one single promise – to carry on the fight against his murderers. Proletarian Democracy.
The following day the main local investigator, Major Antonino Subranni, continued in the same vein as his colleagues. He entitled his report: ‘Death of Peppino Impastato . . . due to a terrorist attack carried out by himself’. In the main text he spoke of Impastato: ‘planning and carrying out an attack on the railway line with dynamite, so as to link his death with such a remarkable event’.
So according to the police Peppino had a death wish, but what was this ‘remarkable event’? About 12 hours after the discovery of his mutilated body, Aldo Moro’s body was found in the boot of a car in central Rome – the Red Brigades had killed him with 11 bullets fired at point-blank range. For 55 days the Italian police had failed to find him; the whole country and much of the world were talking about nothing but Italy’s left-wing terrorists. The idea that Peppino had decided to blow himself up several hours before the ‘remarkable event’ of Moro’s death obviously suggested that he was in direct contact with the Red Brigades’ leadership.
Peppino’s Funeral
Peppino’s funeral would be a testing ground. His fellow comrades wanted it to be big, and to accuse those they viewed as being responsible for his death – the Mafia. The Mafia would have preferred no funeral at all, or if it went ahead they wanted it to be small; the smaller it was the clearer it would be to the town that Peppino was isolated, that the man who had exposed and irritated them intensely for more than ten years had no real support. The unstated views of senior policemen and Christian Democrats were probably quite similar to those of the Mafia. The Communist Party was deeply embarrassed, but more of that later.
The key response, the ‘detonator’ for good or bad, had to come from his family.
His mother remembers it as a turning point: ‘My relatives didn’t want it to take place, at that point there still hadn’t been a definitive breakdown.’ One of them, 80-year-old Nick ‘Killer’ Impastato, warned her in typical Mafia language: ‘Be careful, for Giovanni’s sake’. On one level he was expressing natural family concern for her one remaining son, but on another he was indirectly warning her that one day Giovanni could suffer the same fate.
Another notorious Mafioso, ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato – Felicia’s brother-in-law – came to the funeral as well, along with his sons. But the local Mafiosi were to be deeply disappointed. Felicia remembers ‘Leadspitter’:
sat on a corner, and then my niece Maria came up in a big rush and says, ‘Ah, Felicia, come here, look, there are loads of people – and look, even more people are gathering!’ He went as white as a sheet, ‘They’re going to give me a hiding’. He was terrified, and a
sked for a glass of water because he looked as though he was going to die.
For a town of around eight to ten thousand people, Peppino’s funeral was a huge procession, probably over a thousand people. Many mourners were young rather than old, and although people wore black there were political banners, one of which read: ‘Peppino – murdered by the Christian Democrat Mafia’. It looked as if the Mafia hadn’t got their way.
One image of that grey and overcast day still stands out. As the cortege set off, Giovanni suddenly raised his clenched fist high above the heads of mourners, giving the traditional Communist salute. It was the first sign that the Impastato family – Giovanni and his mother – were going to follow in Peppino’s footsteps.
But as the angry march went down the Corso the windows of the houses stayed shut, the blinds of shops were not drawn down as the coffin passed. Most of the mourners were from outside Cinisi; the town as a whole had not shown its support. At the cemetery many of Peppino’s comrades sang revolutionary songs over his grave, but it wasn’t only these young radicals who disagreed with the police about how he had died. On the evening of his death Peppino had been due to meet his 50-year-old cousin who had just flown in from the US. She later recalled to investigators what people were saying: ‘at the funeral all his relatives and many other people all mentioned the name of Don Tano Badalamenti, giving one single explanation – Peppino Impastato had been killed by the Mafia.’
Many people then marched back to the town square, where a rally was held. On their way up the Corso, some of Peppino’s friends and comrades gathered in front of Badalamenti’s house and shouted ‘butcher’. Others threw stones at the windows of the Christian Democrats’ local party branch. These were acts of courage and anger, but it soon became clear that they were isolated acts. As far as local people were concerned such actions created the same kind of echo a pin makes when it falls to the floor of a soundproofed room.
The following day Proletarian Democracy, the party for which Peppino had been a candidate, held its final rally, which had been organised long before; it was just three days before the local council election. Just as Giovanni’s clenched fist salute illustrated that the driving force of Peppino’s life would be defended, some of the people speaking at that rally represented the handing over of another baton in this fight against the Mafia – from Cinisi to Palermo. One of the speakers, Umberto Santino, was born just before the Second World War, and like many people born around this time he is very short, due to the acute hunger of the period. He has the look of an accountant about him but his ideas were unlike those of a stereotypical accountant – like Peppino he was a revolutionary Marxist.
One reason Santino was asked to speak was because people knew he had a lot of experience, given that he had already been deeply involved in far left activity throughout Sicily for several years. Another reason was that the year before he had created a research centre in Palermo on the Mafia, as he explains: ‘When I founded the Centre, the Mafia was viewed as a phenomenon destined to disappear; so that’s why I decided to found a research centre dedicated to analysing the Mafia and how it was changing.’
As regards his speech at the rally: ‘I got up on this tiny little stage that had been built on the Corso, in front of the Christian Democrat offices, and I noticed that up and down the street virtually all the windows were shut.’ But as ever on these occasions, there were many more people eagerly listening behind the blinds of closed windows. Just as with Peppino’s radio shows, there was a passive audience listening to an anti-Mafia message. And the whole purpose of Peppino’s life was to turn that passive sympathy into open opposition against the Mafia. This is why Santino also said in his speech: ‘If these windows don’t open, Peppino Impastato’s actions will have been pointless’.
Yet Umberto Santino had never known Peppino. Despite belonging to similar political organisations, the 20 miles between Cinisi and Palermo meant that the two had never met. Not belonging to Cinisi, it was easier for Santino and others to identify immediately the key problem – Peppino’s group in Cinisi was isolated. If more ‘windows’ didn’t open in the town no real progress could be made.
Isolation and Implosion
Peppino’s friends were exhausted. On the evening of his disappearance they had started frantically looking for him just ten minutes after the time he was due to attend a meeting with them. At one point four cars were scouring the town and the surrounding countryside. Inevitably, feelings of guilt started to emerge – could they have done more to save him?
One person with a lot on his mind was Giovanni Riccobono. The morning after Peppino’s death Riccobono realised that during the very hours it was estimated that Peppino had died, he had driven his car up the lane towards that very small barn, stopping just 100 metres away from where Peppino’s mutilated body was found, before turning back. And earlier on that evening Riccobono had rushed to Cinisi from his job in Palermo because his cousin had told him to stay out of town that particular evening: ‘because something big was going to happen’. While he told many other people about such a worrying signal, he hadn’t told Peppino because they had recently had a bitter political disagreement.
Over time, people would look back at their actions and, inevitably, with hindsight wonder whether they had done the right thing. At the beginning of his biography of his friend Peppino, Salvo Vitale wrote of their time together at Radio Aut: ‘I still feel some remorse about those eight months of intense commitment. I went too far, and I made Peppino go further than he had done up to that point. I encouraged his natural aggression, and let his huge knowledge of Cinisi’s politicians and Mafiosi explode without restraint.’
But it wasn’t as if Peppino’s friends collapsed overnight. On the same morning as the Proletarian Democracy rally they had distributed another leaflet in Cinisi, explaining that: ‘he was killed by the Christian Democrat Mafia, linked to building speculation, gun running and heroin smuggling’. The defiant tone continued: ‘We’ll never tire of saying it until the police start investigating the Mafia, specifically those Mafiosi who have always acted undisturbed in our area’. They explained that Peppino couldn’t have been planting a bomb – his hands were undamaged.
Despite this commitment, Peppino’s supporters had a mountain to climb. At times like this you turn to your friends, but politically speaking these young revolutionaries didn’t have many friends. Opposition to the Mafia has to be total, otherwise it is meaningless. This very clarity and determination meant that other political groupings wanted to keep their distance from the ‘extremists’ or ‘extraparliamentarians’.
They discovered this on the morning after Peppino’s death, when three of them went to the Communist Party branch to agree on a joint statement. In moments of crisis and struggle Peppino had worked together with Communist Party members. And despite all the theoretical arguments about whether the world could be changed through gradual reforms or revolution, there was an understanding between these two groups in practice; they had the same roots, they were all ‘comrades’. But as Piero Impastato recounts, they had a brutal awakening:
First they said they had to wait for the full-time official to come from Palermo, and we started saying: ‘Why the fuck have we got to wait for him? Everybody knows who and what Peppino was.’ You have to remember that by this time the police version that Peppino had committed suicide had already come out, and they had some doubts, maybe he did commit suicide or he was a terrorist. So we just told them to get fucked and left.
The next day they produced their own leaflet, which talked about ‘a young man named Peppino Impastato’, and that almost accepted the police version . . . years had to pass before . . .
The emotional weight of what he is saying prevents him putting it all into words. The sense of betrayal, of not calling Peppino a ‘comrade’, was too intense. And as regards local Communists: ‘After that we never had any respect for them.’
Despite such anger, given the fact that Peppino was now passing into history, his fri
ends needed to make sense of what had happened, to put his life into some kind of historical context. In the impassioned speeches he gave in the coming few weeks Gino Scasso remembers he often harked back to the history of Communist Party activists of decades before: ‘I recounted what I had learnt from an old Communist who had been active under fascism in the Messina area: ‘One of us got up to speak and the police arrested him, so then another one stood up, and so on.’ I was trying to say: ‘Peppino is dead, but the struggle goes on’.’
In the days immediately following Peppino’s death, his friends’ anger was reinforced by what the communist daily, L’Unità, said about the case. The first article was quite long, 10 paragraphs, with the Mafia only being mentioned for the first time half way through. The most probable causes of Peppino’s death that were given were terrorism or suicide. The same journalist wrote another lengthy article the following day; the only difference was that he said investigators had ‘totally ruled out’ the notion that the Mafia had wanted to eliminate a ‘dangerous adversary’, so the only two causes remaining were suicide or some kind of involvement in terrorism. Avanti!, the Socialist Party newspaper, was even more categorical. The headline of its first article was: ‘Bomber Blown Up’.
There was considerable interest in Peppino’s death. Like today, this was a period when there was a degree of hysteria over the ‘terrorist threat’, which apparently could pop up even in small provincial towns. It quickly became obvious that all newspapers were on the same wavelength – a unified explanation was emerging. The major establishment daily, Il Corriere Della Sera, headlined its first article: ‘Left-Wing Extremist Blown Up on Railway Tracks by Own Bomb’.
A net was starting to close around Peppino’s comrades. A fog of silence and disinformation was starting to smother Cinisi.