Cosa Nostra (47 page)
Authors: John Dickie
* * *
Peppino’s revolt tore at fissures that already existed in the Impastato household. His mother, Felicia Bartolotta Impastato, took to giving him food surreptitiously. She had married into the mafia, but did not have blood relatives who were men of honour. Peppino’s father was an inarticulate, domineering man who would only allow his wife out to meet other mafia wives. He vented on her the ‘dishonour’ and anxiety that his inability to control his son brought down on him. ‘It was a dictatorship. Desperation … fear. When I heard him come home I used to piss myself,’ she would later recount. Although Felicia was too afraid to attend Peppino’s rallies, she tried to persuade her son to moderate the tone of his campaigning. ‘Giuseppe, look, I’m against the mafia as well. But can’t you see what your father is like? Be careful, my son.’
Despite the mafia’s threats and his mother’s fears, Peppino pressed on. In his mother’s words he fought for ‘just and precise things’, things that almost always clashed with mafia interests. He was heavily involved in a campaign in support of the peasants whose land was to be expropriated so that a third runway for the airport could be built. He also struggled alongside building workers who were exploited by mafia-protected employers. Much of his time in the mid-1970s was taken up with the fight against what the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) called its ‘historic compromise’—its decision to support Christian Democrat governments where it felt they were moving in a progressive direction. Leftists cried out at this betrayal, although there is some justification in the claim that the ‘historic compromise’ saved Italy from the fate of Chile, where Pinochet’s bloody military coup overthrew a democratic government in 1973. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the PCI’s moderate strategy in the rest of Italy, in western Sicily compromise with the DC meant collaboration with the mafia in the eyes of Peppino and his network of comrades.
Peppino was also harsh in his ideological critique of the hippies who had set up Italy’s first commune in an abandoned Florio villa near by; he thought it demoralizing that they had forsaken politics in favour of nudism and cannabis. In 1977, he founded a tiny local radio station, Radio Aut. Its highlight was an evening show of music and satire directed at ‘Mafiopolis’ and its ‘Mafia-cipality’—in other words Cinisi and its DC-dominated town council. The show’s sketches lampooned the local Family and its shady affairs by setting them in grotesque versions of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
or the Wild West; ruling boss Tano Badalamenti was transparently mocked as ‘Tano Seduto’ (‘Sitting Bully’). In a newspaper article, Peppino also referred to Badalamenti as ‘a paleface adept in drug trafficking and the use of the sawn-off shotgun’. In the spring of 1978, Peppino helped set up a photographic exhibition in the town on ‘The mafia and the landscape’, demonstrating the damage done by cowboy road building; at the same time he was selected as a candidate in the local elections. There is a chilling photo of several men of respect closely examining one of the panels of the ‘mafia and the landscape’ exhibition; it was taken on the day before Peppino was murdered.
Peppino Impastato knew the risks he was taking. His mother warned him that the mafia were ‘animals’, for whom ‘snuffing out a candle was nothing’. He probably calculated that he would be protected to some extent by the fact that his father was a man of honour. His father is now known to have taken considerable risks to protect his son from Badalamenti’s vengeance. Then, in September 1977, he was knocked down and killed by a passing car. For many years the family thought his death was an accident, although they have now come to believe he was murdered. Whatever the truth, Peppino was left unprotected by his father’s death. At the funeral, Peppino refused to shake hands with the mafiosi who came to pay their respects—a resounding insult; nor did his campaigning decline in intensity in the following months. He almost certainly knew he was going to be killed.
On the night of 8–9 May 1978, Peppino was kidnapped on his way back from Radio Aut and taken in his own car to a tumbledown stone shack a few yards from the Palermo–Trapani railway line near the boundary fence of the airport. There he was beaten and tortured before being dumped on the track with several sticks of dynamite strapped to his torso.
Early the following morning railway workers reported that a fifty-centimetre section of track had been damaged. When the
carabinieri
arrived at the scene, they found Peppino’s car, his white Scholl clogs and his glasses near the hole blown by the explosion. Fragments of his body and clothes were scattered over a 300-metre radius around it; only his legs, parts of his face, and a few fingers were recognizable. Peppino’s death was a horrific echo of the way his uncle the mafioso had died back in 1963—the very murder that had provoked him to ask, ‘What must he have felt?’ and begin his rebellion against the mafia.
* * *
On 6 December 2000, twenty-two years later, a parliamentary commission of inquiry published a report into the way the authorities dealt with Peppino Impastato’s death. It concluded that the investigation had been handled in an insensitive and slapdash way that in effect supported the killers’ own efforts to make Peppino’s death look like a suicidal terrorist attack. Peppino’s friends and family had proclaimed all along that there was a cover-up.
Incredibly, despite Peppino’s well-known campaign against the mafia, despite the fact that Cinisi was a notorious mafia stronghold, despite the threats that activists had received, and despite the fact that even the
carabinieri
themselves had earlier reported that Peppino and his comrades were ‘incapable’ of committing terrorist acts, investigators in the immediate aftermath of Peppino’s death did not even entertain the possibility that he could have been murdered, let alone by men of honour. Witnesses who participated in the initial inspection of the scene, including the mortician brought in to collect what could be found of the victim’s body, are certain that there were clear traces of blood inside the shack where Peppino was tortured. Because the shack had no openings facing the railway track, those traces of blood could not have got there as a result of the explosion. Yet the initial report into the case by the
carabinieri
fails even to mention the stone shack, although Peppino’s car was found right next to it.
The morning after Peppino’s death, the
carabinieri
raided Radio Aut and the houses of his friends and relatives. His mother’s house was searched before she was even told of her son’s death. At his aunt’s house they found a letter in Peppino’s hand dating from several months previously; in it he alluded to his ‘failure as a man and as a revolutionary’ and hinted that he might take his own life. This was to be the slender basis for the ‘terrorist suicide’ conclusion reached by the initial report into the incident. The same story was immediately leaked to the press. In the following few days, as evidence of the bloodstains in the shack emerged, there were further misleading leaks to the newspapers. An anonymous article in the
Giornale di Sicilia
reported that the blood was menstrual and that it came from sanitary towels found near by. No such towels had, in fact, been discovered. Peppino’s friends visited the site and spent a day of inconceivable anguish filling several plastic bags with bits of Peppino’s body that the authorities had neglected to recover. In the shack, they also found a stone covered in more blood; when they showed it to an independent forensic scientist, the blood turned out to be from the same rare group as Peppino’s.
In the days following, Peppino’s friends’ houses were subject to mysterious break-ins. There were rumours in Cinisi that Peppino had a dossier on the local mafia and its political and business links—Peppino himself had hinted as much—but no such dossier was ever located. Tensions ran high; at Peppino’s funeral procession, 1,000 activists and friends carried banners: ‘Peppino was murdered by the mafia’, ‘With Peppino’s ideas and courage we will carry on’. Some later gathered in front of Don Tano Badalamenti’s house shouting, ‘Butcher.’
The parliamentary inquiry of 2000 is a sorry catalogue of omissions and suspicions. Peppino’s brother testified to the parliamentary commissioners that relations between the local mafia and the
carabinieri
appeared to be good before the murder. ‘I often saw them [the
carabinieri
] walking arm-in-arm with Tano Badalamenti and his deputies. You can’t have faith in the institutions when you see
mafiosi
arm-in-arm with
carabinieri.
’ The commission of inquiry concluded that this was a symptom of the way that the authorities had traditionally sought to live side by side with the informal power of the mafia in places like Cinisi.
Whatever the reasons for the way the investigation was handled in its early stages, the trail had gone cold by the time more competent investigating magistrates took over the case. They could only conclude, in 1984, that Peppino had indeed been murdered by the mafia but that it was not possible to identify the individual culprits.
The case was reopened eight years later as the result of campaigning by those close to Peppino, notably his mother, his brother, and the historian Umberto Santino. But even in 1992, investigators had to conclude that there was not enough evidence for a prosecution. New testimonies from
pentiti
finally resulted in Don Tano Badalamenti’s being committed for trial in 1999; by then he was already serving a long sentence in a New Jersey penitentiary for drug trafficking. While the trial was still continuing, and while the parliamentary inquiry was looking into the case, a powerful film of Peppino Impastato’s story won the prize for the best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival; it was called
I cento passi
—‘One Hundred Steps’—because that was the precise distance between Peppino’s home and Tano Badalamenti’s.
At last, in April 2002, Don Tano was given a life sentence for ordering the murder. Felicia Bartolotta Impastato’s reaction to the verdict was profoundly dignified:
I have never had any feelings of
vendetta.
All I have done is call for justice for my son’s death. I have to confess that, after so many years of waiting, I had lost faith—I never thought we would reach this point. Now I feel a great deal of contentment, of satisfaction. I always knew what happened. Badalamenti used to call my husband Luigi to complain about Peppino, and my husband begged him not to kill the boy.
These words demonstrate the astral distance that there now is between Peppino’s mother and the deathly domestic environment of honour and
omertà
in which she had been confined for so long. Her experience has provided crucial insights into the role of women in Cosa Nostra. For it is through the women of families close to Cosa Nostra that the mafia’s values—the code of honour, the contempt for the law, the tolerance of violence—are taught to the very young and handed down through the generations. Interviewed in 2001, Peppino’s mother made it clear how important women were to the mafia, how proud some Cinisi women were to call themselves
mafiose;
as she heard one such woman say, ‘My brothers were born mafiosi. Some are born stupid, and some are born mafiosi; my brothers were born mafiosi!’
Antimafia campaigners are now no longer as isolated and as alienated from the authorities as Peppino Impastato. Sicily has a varied constellation of antimafia associations. Felicia Bartolotta Impastato, like her son, has become one of the symbols of this broad-based movement. All the same, it is a sign of Sicily’s misfortunes that it still needs symbols like them. And it is difficult to conclude that the justice they have finally won after a quarter of a century is really justice at all.
The bosses who began to be released from jail following the trial verdicts of 1968–9 had lost a great deal of money. Legal fees and the expense of supporting prisoners had emptied their coffers. Catania man of honour Antonino Calderone, who later turned state’s evidence and talked to Judge Falcone in 1987, had a particularly vivid memory of those hard times. He recalled that Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina had wept because he was unable to pay for his mother to come and visit him while he was awaiting trial. Calderone also remembered how rapidly the situation changed once the mafia became active again. ‘They all became millionaires. Suddenly, in a couple of years. Because of drugs.’ The history of Cosa Nostra in the 1970s rides on a flood tide of heroin profits. And it was that flood that ultimately led to the bloodiest conflict in the mafia’s history.
Not that all Palermo mafiosi were poor in 1970. The Grecos, Cosa Nostra’s royal family, were still more than comfortable. In Cinisi, Don Tano Badalamenti’s transatlantic business had not been hampered by the aftermath of the first mafia war. But many of the other capos needed money quickly, the Corleonesi more than any of them. Thus it was that they turned to kidnapping as a way of meeting their basic needs and accumulating capital. The principal targets were the offspring of leading Palermo businessmen; the profits earned were then turned into seed capital for illegal business. The 1970s saw a boom in tobacco smuggling, centred on Naples. Whereas Tommaso Buscetta had been trafficking in hundreds of cases of cigarettes between Sicily and the mainland back in the 1950s, Neapolitan smugglers and their Sicilian partners were now dealing in shiploads. Camorra chief Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza later admitted dealing in 50,000 cases of cigarettes per month. More and more mafiosi were drawn towards Naples to partake of the bonanza.
Even the immense profits of tobacco were soon to be outstripped in importance by heroin. US President Richard Nixon announced a ‘war on drugs’ soon after his inauguration in 1969. Like most such wars, it ultimately proved counter-productive. By causing the closure of Corsican-run refineries in Marseilles, the Nixon administration created the opportunity for Sicily to become the new base for this crucial phase of heroin’s long journey from the poppy fields of the Near and Far East to the streets of American cities. In 1975, a Turkish drugs and arms dealer who had been the main supplier of morphine base to the Marseilles refineries approached Cosa Nostra directly. Soon afterwards heroin laboratories began to appear across western Sicily, staffed initially by chemists who were refugees from Marseilles. The figures for heroin addiction across Western Europe and North America registered a huge leap in 1977 as the Sicilian refineries came on stream. The amount of heroin seized across the world increased by nearly six and a half times between 1974 and 1982, the years when the Sicilian mafia established its dominance of the market.
