Defiance (18 page)

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.

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.

hen 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:

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.

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.

Strategic differences arose over how to deal with the authorities. One controversial area was how to behave with ‘friendly policemen’, an issue that can only be described as a hornet’s nest. The relationship between a corrupt policeman and a top criminal generally works both ways – but invariably the criminal gets the better deal as long as he’s allowed to continue his illegal activities. It was known in Mafia circles that Colonel Giuseppe Russo had told local police to give Badalamenti an easy ride in his hometown. The issue was: what would Badalamenti offer in return? The worry wasn’t that some small-fry
Mafioso
would be arrested, but that Badalamenti would get rid of a serious rival by fingering him to the police.

Although this was unlikely because it goes against all Mafia instincts, in a growing situation of internal tension people started to think Badalamenti might just try to get rid of his rivals by non-violent means. Crucially, Russo was an efficient crime fighter who had many
Mafiosi
arrested, sometimes apparently by torturing suspects – so his links with Badalamenti made things all the more worrying. This is why in one Commission meeting the proposal was made to kill him. Significantly, Don Tano voted against Russo’s murder, thus saving his life. According to Mafia wisdom the killing would cause more trouble than it was worth; there is no way the police would not turn Sicily upside down if the Mafia killed a senior officer. That was Don Tano’s argument, but others were wondering why he wanted to keep this dangerous police contact alive.

The issue was finally settled in August 1977, when Russo was gunned down in the main square of Ficuzza, in an attack personally led by Totò Riina. It was another challenge to Badalamenti’s authority.

Badalamenti was the leader of the Mafia, but people wouldn’t obey him. He even started losing votes at meetings, and the leader of the Mafia up to 2006, Bernardo Provenzano, once took the unheard step of mocking him: ‘Uncle Tano, what you’re saying isn’t right, that isn’t how things are at all. It seems like you’ve banged your head on something.’

The tipping point for Badalamenti’s ‘retirement’ came in spring 1978. The Commission had earlier discussed whether to murder another senior
Mafioso
and had decided not to go ahead. When the man in question (an ally of Riina) was murdered anyway, Riina accused Badalamenti of involvement, thus rendering nonsensical his leadership of the Commission.

Why didn’t Badalamenti move against Riina and Provenzano earlier? We don’t know for sure, although we know meetings were held in one of his villas in the hills behind Cinisi to discuss a pre-emptive strike, but nothing came of them. At one such meeting, held the very month that Peppino died, his closest associates could see all the danger signals. Some were demanding immediate war on the Corleonesi, others advised caution: ‘At the moment we can’t act openly in your support. If we do they’ll go crazy.’ Badalamenti was sitting out on the veranda and was silent; his faction didn’t make a move so for him all that beckoned was ‘retirement’.

So why didn’t he launch an attack, and why over the next three years did Riina and his men not attack him? Again, nobody knows for sure. Much of the speculation is that everybody knew he had powerful political friends – so both he and his enemies felt he was protected and therefore ‘untouchable’.

If so, that would explain why all bets were off by 1981. The Corleonesi had had enough of Badalamenti hovering around like a king who had lost his crown. They were also tired of harassment from the police; the ‘peasants’ had never cultivated friendships within government or the criminal justice system. While Badalamenti always said ‘we can’t declare war on the state’, this is just what the Corleonesi did.

First, though, they had to get rid of Don Tano, who had been replaced on the Commission by his cousin Antonino since 1978. Even before then Antonino would stand in for him at meetings if Tano was in prison. The Corleonesi had been working on Antonino for a while, and after he had hinted many times that he was going to lead them to his cousin they lost patience, killing him in August 1981.

The following month another Cinisi Mafia boss, Procopio Di Maggio, was attacked outside the petrol station he controlled. Like Badalamenti, he had his finger in the pie of the local airport; driving staff and passengers around the airport he had easy access to the baggage hall. In this attack, although he was shot in both the liver and a kidney he managed to drive his attackers off. Two years later he survived another attempt on his life: a group of killers headed towards him as he was chatting in the main square in front of the council with Salvatore Zangara, secretary of the local Socialist Party branch. Di Maggio reacted fast and avoided the bullets while Zangara, who was totally innocent, was killed and three others wounded. ‘Shorty’ Di Maggio then drew his pistol and unsuccessfully tried to catch his attackers.