Defiance

by Behan, Tom

  Perhaps more important than the national dailies were the Sicilian papers. The first news in print was published by Palermo’s evening paper, L’Ora, which mentioned all three explanations for his death without emphasising any one in particular. Over the next couple of days it moved towards the idea he had committed suicide, a theory that was rammed home a week after his death by Il Giornale di Sicilia. This paper must have illegally obtained from the police some notes written by Peppino, taken away when they searched his aunt’s house for evidence. For anyone who did not know him or what he had been doing all his life, it was very difficult not to believe after reading these notes that he wanted to commit suicide:

  I have been thinking about abandoning politics and life for nine months . . . I have fed my feelings to the dogs. With all the strength left in my body I have tried to claw my way back – but I didn’t get there . . . I openly admit my failure as a man and as a revolutionary . . . I would like very much to be cremated, and that my ashes be thrown in the town’s public toilet.

  Shocking as such thoughts are, many people, particularly young people, say and write things like this from time to time, and although they are genuine feelings in the heat of the moment very few actually take any concrete steps toward suicide.

  Aware that a smear campaign was in full swing, the following day Giovanni made a statement to the magistrate investigating Peppino’s death. After having been shown his brother’s handwritten note he pointed out: ‘I believe it can be dated at about spring ’77, during some political demonstrations, particularly student ones.’ In other words, he told investigators that his brother had written that particular note – and many notes and articles by Peppino were unearthed following his death – over a year before he died. In Palermo people were desperately trying to get their version of the truth out. Two days after his death there was a crowded meeting at Palermo University to hear a speech by the leader of Proletarian Democracy. Sympathetic lawyers were writing reports for the family, taking affidavits from witnesses and collecting evidence.

  A truly macabre event had also taken place: in the 48 hours after his death Peppino’s friends had gone back to the stretch of railway line that the authorities had abandoned in such a hurry. Fighting off the crows that were picking at the many pieces of his body still around the site, they collected as much of his remains as they could, together with a bloodstained stone taken from the small barn near the bomb crater, and handed them over to a university professor, an expert in forensic science. The reason they had done this was that when they had taken this material to the police, it was clear they were not interested in looking at forensic evidence seriously.

  The day after Peppino’s death, a demonstration had been organised in the capital, and even though the police had not given their permission, it went ahead nevertheless. As demonstrators were waiting to go into another meeting at the Architecture Faculty, police attacked the crowd, arresting four people and injuring a 16-year-old. Although the Communist Party daily criticised some aspects of police behaviour, it made a point of mentioning: ‘yesterday the grave news from Cinisi provided the pretext for a mixed grouping of “extra-parliamentarians” to create serious tension in the heart of Palermo.’ Not for the first time, the local establishment just wanted to pigeonhole Peppino and people like him as fanatical troublemakers.

  The end result was that in both Cinisi or Palermo very few people heard an explanation as to why Peppino had been murdered by the Mafia. In the meantime, another grim ritual was about to take place – elections for Cinisi council. The election rules stated that all votes for the party list would be counted, including crosses next to Peppino’s name, and that if Proletarian Democracy received a sufficient number of votes, it would have its own councillor.

  Dead Man’s Shoes

  Initially it wasn’t even clear whether Peppino’s friends and comrades wanted to continue with the election or withdraw from it.

  Gino Scasso puts one side of the argument: I was a member of Proletarian Democracy and had already been elected as a councillor in Partinico. Our view was that we had to carry on campaigning, because withdrawing would have been seen as a retreat. I remember arguing that we needed to get a positive political response from the town because of his murder, and go house to house asking people to vote for him. Not everyone agreed.

  The opposing view was more ‘extremist’, in the sense that people felt taking part in elections meant ‘joining the system’. This is what Salvo Vitale thought: ‘Our thinking was that this was something only Peppino wanted to do. It meant going and playing a role within the institutions, and this was something we were totally against.’

  Eventually it was agreed that the party should not withdraw, and on polling day Peppino’s mother and aunt broke a centuries-old tradition by leaving their house. As recently bereaved women they should have stayed at home in mourning for a month – Peppino had died just five days earlier.

  Salvo Vitale describes what happened when they arrived at the polling station: there were two flunkeys who were distributing Christian Democrat leaflets. When they saw Felicia and Fara they came up to them to express their condolences, telling

  them they were asking people to vote for Peppino and his party. Felicia looked at them with extreme pride, but almost with disgust, and never said a word. As soon as the two women walked past them they started giving out their leaflets again.

  Despite the hypocrisy of the Christian Democrats, 264 people voted for the name ‘Peppino Impastato’ on the ballot paper. This was 6 per cent of the vote, and technically meant that he was elected. Relatively speaking it was a high vote, far higher than he had scored when he was alive, and not far behind the Communist Party, which received 10 per cent of votes. On the down side, the Christian Democrat vote increased significantly, from 36 per cent to 49 per cent. In all likelihood, the tension created by Peppino’s death had led to a concentration of Mafia votes for their traditional allies.

  The next issue was: who would be the councillor? Since Peppino’s death odd things had been happening in town. The house where he lived with his aunt Fara had been broken into five times, but nothing was ever stolen. A house in the country owned by Pino Manzella, where Peppino’s friends had kept his remains overnight before taking them to Palermo, was broken into and turned upside down, although again nothing was stolen. Another two houses were also burgled.

  Nobody knew for sure what was going on, although many people had heard a rumour that Peppino – always so wellinformed – had a dossier that potentially contained all manner of secrets. Most of his friends had received several phone calls, but whenever they picked up the receiver the line went dead. All of this seemed coordinated in some way. In a normal society many people would tell the police, who were not difficult to find – the town had been flooded with police and military vehicles worried about the ‘terrorist threat’.

  But the general view of Peppino’s friends that the police were in league with Mafiosi increased their sense of vulnerability. And more than anything thing else they were bound to be afraid to some extent – after all, they believed the Mafia had just murdered their friend. They could also see that the press and establishment parties were only talking about terrorism. So no Mafioso was questioned and none of their houses were searched.

  Felicetta Vitale recalls the change in mood:

  After Peppino’s death we had lots of visits from activists who came to pay their respects. But many of them came in through the back door: because Badalamenti’s house was so close to ours they didn’t want to be seen coming in. Radio Aut got a load of threatening calls along the lines of: ‘now we’ve killed your leader, the rest of you better watch yourselves.’

  Peppino’s comrades in Cinisi were disoriented; his death suddenly and brutally revealed the reality of their weakness and isolation. In the end it came down to this: was anybody brave enough to step into Peppino’s shoes? If they did, their party – and the people who had voted for him – would expect his substitute to continue
Peppino’s work as a Cinisi councillor.

  A crisis meeting was held in a pizzeria on the beachfront that separates Cinisi from Terrasini. Gino Scasso recounts: I remember I turned up with a copy of the electoral regulations; I was a councillor and I wanted to give them some advice but I can remember one of them poking fun at me.

  The mood that dominated was fear, but I don’t want to blame anyone, this was something perfectly natural and normal. But this meant they didn’t want to take responsibility for anything and were trying to pass the buck on who would become councillor. Everyone started to find an excuse for not being a councillor. For example, one of the most experienced of them started to say he had a full-time job, and so on.

  Over the next few years the role of councillor was rotated between a few of the candidates on the party list, but nobody really had their heart in it. One of the main reasons was their political assessment of what it meant to be a councillor; apart from Peppino, most of the group had always thought it was a waste of time.

  So essentially, from now on the battle to defend Peppino’s name and ideas would be fought out more in Palermo than in Cinisi. One aspect of this fight would be to avoid him suffering a second death – ‘buried’ by the justice system, the media and the political establishment as a terrorist or somebody who had committed suicide.

  13

  The Light Behind the Blinds

  When Felicia Bartolotta Impastato went to the Palermo courthouse with her sister Fara and son Giovanni on 17 May 1978 to talk to the magistrate

  investigating Peppino’s death, it was just a week before her 62nd birthday. Peppino had died eight days earlier. She had neither spoken in public, nor talked to journalists or officialdom before. Despite her son’s very public activities, in order to protect him she had never talked to anyone outside her family about what she knew about the Mafia. Outside the courthouse a journalist she had never met asked her whether she knew Cesare Manzella and she said she didn’t. But the reporter knew Felicia wasn’t telling the truth, so he asked her again, reminding her she had gone to his funeral. Then she admitted in a quiet voice, ‘he was my cousin’.

  Felicia was torn: she still respected her Mafia husband who had died the year before, and who had tried to keep their son alive. Besides, she came from a culture where women were seen and not heard. But she also admired her son’s commitment, and finally decided to speak to Sicily’s main newspaper:

  I’ve got one goal – to make it clear that my son Peppino didn’t commit suicide and that he wasn’t a terrorist. I’m certain that my son was killed. The murderers’ aim was to make Peppino appear as somebody violent who was going to plant a bomb, in order to discredit him in the eyes of townspeople, public opinion and his fellow political activists.

  Felicia had taken her first public step, the first of many. But the reason she went down that road wasn’t really because of one good journalist – who tragically would be murdered by the Mafia early the following year – she had been discussing her position intensely with her son and others.

  Just as he did at the funeral, Giovanni was pushing for the family to campaign openly for justice. Peppino’s younger brother had never really engaged in anti-Mafia activity consistently; but now he began to make up for lost time. Felicia’s instinctive response was to keep quiet: ‘In the beginning I didn’t want to speak out because I was worried they’d kill Giovanni as well.’ But Peppino’s younger brother was coming out of the shadow his elder sibling had cast, he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Felicia continues: ‘we argued all the time, because I used to get scared. So my son brought these lawyers along and they persuaded me – “By not speaking you are harming the memory of your son”.’ And, just in case she suddenly backslided, he had another card he was prepared to play: ‘Giovanni told me he would have started telling everyone I was mad.’

  Even the quiet and shy Aunt Fara, who had moved in with her sister Felicia after Peppino’s death, eventually started to speak up. A few months after Peppino’s death she gave a sworn statement in which she ripped into the two official reasons given for his death. As regards the suicide note the police found, she recollected precisely when it was written – nearly a year before his death, and went on to state:

  I can confirm that towards the end of his life my nephew was calm; he was even happy because his political activity was going well. I’m aware of a letter he wrote quite a while ago, when he was in disagreement with other members of his party . . . I insist in the most categoric terms possible that my nephew did not intend to commit suicide.

  She was equally forthright in her attack on the police’s notion that Peppino went out to a secluded piece of railway track in the dead of night to plant a bomb: ‘he had never been there, he didn’t know that place. They killed him first and then took him to the railway line. It’s impossible that my nephew thought about doing something like that, because he fought for workers and ordinary people and could never dream of a criminal act such as blowing up a train.’

  Yet the family had a mountain to climb; all the major parties, the media and the police were against them.

  In order to understand what happened from then on a basic explanation needs to be made: the Italian legal system is distinctly different to that in most Anglo-Saxon countries. In Italy the police collect evidence, arrest suspects and sometimes question them, but it is judges, also known as investigating magistrates, who have overall responsibility for both investigations and then mounting court cases.

  The other key difference is that these individual magistrates rarely come close to the British stereotype of reactionary public schoolboys sitting around in Mayfair clubs drinking brandy. Essentially they are appointed through a kind of civil service selection procedure, therefore you find people from all walks of life in this position. One of the most famous of recent years, Antonio Di Pietro, came from a poor family that emigrated to Germany to work in a car factory. Di Pietro studied hard, and in the early 1990s was perhaps the individual most responsible for bringing down the entire Italian political ruling class in a series of corruption scandals. Because of their commitment to democracy, some magistrates can be popular heroes in Italy. And in Sicily the occupational hazard of investigating the Mafia means they can also become martyrs, such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, killed in separate car bombings in 1992.

  So if the family had any hope in the months after Peppino’s death, it lay with the investigating magistrate. And some moves were made; almost immediately after Peppino’s death Judge Rocco Chinnici ordered a ballistics investigation into the kind of explosive used at the scene. Then things slowed down, as they do so often in the Italian justice system. A ray of light emerged 18 months after Peppino’s death, when Chinnici ordered the seizure of Cinisi council documents, many of them relating to accusations made by Peppino. Another positive development was the obligatory legal notice to Giuseppe ‘Hod Carrier’ Finazzo – a local builder and Badalamenti henchman – that he was under investigation.

  But this investigation wasn’t a priority for Chinnici. In July 1983 he issued arrest warrants for Totò Riina and 200 other Mafiosi, a major attack on the organisation. He was to pay for this with his life – ammazzarono – by the end of the month he was blown up by a car bomb. After his death, Chinnici’s private diary was published, shedding light on some of his thinking, which tragically he did not have time to develop into action. At one point he defines Francesco Scozzari, the deputy prosecutor who took part in the examination of the site where Peppino died, as ‘a revolting turncoat, servant of the Mafia’.

  But the huge bomb blast that killed Chinnici and two others was just one of the consequences of a ferocious Mafia war that had started two years earlier.

  The Mattanza: The Second Mafia War

  For years, Sicilian fishermen used to follow tuna fish to their feeding grounds, and then slowly trap them in their nets. The boats would move together, raising the nets out of the water. Then hundreds of fish would be gored with harpoons,
so much so the sea ran red with their blood. This was the mattanza – a good as description as any of the Second Mafia War that broke out 23 April 1981.

  This date was the birthday of Stefano Bontate, one of Badalamenti’s allies on the Commission and a major Mafioso in his own right. As he was returning from his birthday party in his new limousine, the Corleonesi delivered their own present – ammazzarono – a salvo of bullets that totally disfigured his face and body. The Corleonesi, under Totò Riina, had finally made their move.

  Two weeks later Badalamenti’s other main ally on the Commission, Salvatore Inzerillo, was also out in his new car. He thought he was safe because he had just taken delivery of a brand new bullet-proof Alfa Romeo. But Riina’s men had done their homework. They had done some tests on a jeweller’s bullet-proof display case and discovered that heavy fire on a small area would shatter the glass. Their research paid off and Inzerillo was killed.

  This was just a taste of what was to come. In the following months 200 men of this losing faction were murdered in the province of Palermo. Over the next two years around one thousand people were killed. Much of this killing was a delayed reaction, certainly as regards Badalamenti’s own situation within the Mafia, as he had already been ‘retired’ as head of the Mafia three years earlier.

  In a normal job, when someone is ‘retired’ from an organisation they tend to get a nice card from workmates and start drawing a pension, but obviously the Mafia isn’t like this. How Badalamenti actually lost his dominance of the Commission in 1978 remains shrouded in mystery. Again, this is only to be expected; news is fragmentary because the Mafia hardly post accounts of their discussions on the Internet.

  In the long term, what got Badalamenti ‘retired’ was the drugs trade. His clan was wading through piles and piles of money and had never wanted to share it with the people from the hill town of Corleone, whom they called ‘peasants’. So the Corleonesi slowly built up their support among smaller gangs, particularly in Palermo. And, as we have seen, they received large amounts of money from a series of high-profile kidnappings, which they then invested in the drugs trade. But all the while, they were developing their military firepower.