Defiance (17 page)

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.

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 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 asked 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.

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:

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 friends 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.

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.

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

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.