Defiance (19 page)

Very soon after, Silvio Badalamenti was murdered. On another occasion, a few days before Christmas 1981,
Felicia Impastato woke up in the early hours:

I found the doors wide open. I went and looked to see whether the police were there, and I saw an officer from Cinisi I knew who said they were searching the house. Finazzo had been killed and his wife said she suspected it was Peppino Impastato’s brother. ‘What do you want?’ I shouted at them. ‘Isn’t one enough for you? There’s nothing here. Go and look for the murderers in the houses of
Mafiosi
.’ They found posters against the Mafia and a few dollars brought over by my sister. Me, my son and his wife were sat on the bed while they emptied everything and looked all over.

Giuseppe ‘Hod Carrier’ Finazzo, construction manager and Badalamenti henchman, had just been murdered. But why raid the Impastatos’ house – hadn’t they publicly rejected the Mafia tradition of vendetta three years earlier? Whatever else could be said about them, Giovanni and his mother were certainly not involved in the Mafia. Either the police simply wanted to harass the family, or they had a crude Mafia mentality and therefore investigated following typical
Mafioso
logic according to which, despite all evidence to the contrary, the Impastatos sooner or later were bound to react like
Mafiosi
and launch a revenge attack.

The following month, January 1982, Giacomo Impastato was murdered. Son of ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato, brother of Peppino’s father, what had really caused his death was his marriage to Agata Badalamenti, daughter of one of Gaetano Badalamenti’s brothers. Nobody was too young for the Corleonesi – in November 1982 the 17-year-old son of Antonino Badalamenti, Salvatore, was murdered because he had sworn revenge for his father’s murder. Across the Atlantic, in New Jersey another two nephews were killed, Matteo and Salvatore Sollena – the latter was found in the boot of a car wrapped up in a rubbish bag, having been shot several times.

In November 1983 Riina’s men dressed up as nurses and entered Carini hospital, killing 64-year-old Natale Badalamenti in his bed. But, despite all these deaths the Corleonesi had still not eliminated their main target, Gaetano Badalamenti. Another close relative, Agostino, fled to Germany, but Riina’s men found him in February 1984, tortured him, shot him once and then knifed him 12 times. Back in Cinisi, three days later another Impastato, Luigi, was murdered. He was the son of Giacomo, so was Peppino’s cousin.

In all, Badalamenti lost 17 relatives. But the wily old fox was long gone from Cinisi even before most of his relatives were killed. Sometime between 1981 and 1982 he had left his hometown for the last time, taking his wife and two sons with him.

All of this
mattanza
produced changes, the smallest of which was in Cinisi. The surviving members of Badalamenti’s clan were terrified, all their certainties had melted into air. Felicia noticed a chink of light: ‘in town people only stopped criticising my son after their own children had been killed’. But in such a thoroughly Mafia town, most people simply kept their head down and waited to see, once the shooting stopped, who would emerge as top dog.

The biggest changes occurred in Palermo and Rome. With such a massive scale of bloodshed it became increasingly difficult for individuals within the institutions to connive with the Mafia, and compromised politicians found it far more problematic to oppose anti-Mafia legislation. Incredibly, the crime of ‘Mafia association’ – essentially Mafia membership – only entered the statute books in 1982.

The first-ever national anti-Mafia demonstration was called to commemorate the first anniversary of his death. Around two thousand people marched through Cinisi, along with a massive police presence. The broadcasting of Peppino’s
Crazy Wave
monologues from loudspeakers placed up and down the Corso created a powerful effect.

It was a significant success, with people coming from all over the country, and Giovanni was one of the speakers. Felicia remembers: ‘For the first time ever there were demonstrations with people stopping outside the house of a
Mafioso
and shouting, “You’re a murderer.” How my heart used to pound . . . I shouted louder than them.’ It was a show of strength and defiance that temporarily turned the tables: ‘When demonstrations took place in the early period, Badalamenti left home for two or three days and only came back when things had calmed down.’ Events like this were glimpses of the possibility that
Mafiosi
could be exposed and publicly humiliated, creating a completely different climate in town.

A leaflet advertising the event had argued: ‘We believe the time has come to end the widespread belief that views the Mafia as a limited phenomenon, a remnant of the past, a subject for novels and blockbusters.’ It had been coproduced by Umberto Santino’s research centre in Palermo (which was now named after Peppino), and was strongly influenced by his thinking:

ones. But all of this had nothing to do with any personal ‘friendship’. Maybe for Anglo-Saxon readers this destroys the stereotype of Sicilians only getting involved in things if there is some kind of personal friendship involved.

Despite this increase in an understanding of the Mafia, which was broadcast publicly, problems were far from solved. A month after this demonstration it was announced that Giovanni Impastato and Umberto Santino were going to stand for parliament. Two days later, Giovanni explained, ‘They attacked my shop at night, shooting it up. They deliberately killed my dog, which was inside.’

It must have been hard for all those campaigning, particularly those living in Cinisi, not to think about some kind of act of revenge – to raise morale if for nothing else. After all, what would it take to make a few petrol bombs and throw them at
Mafiosi
construction lorries or shop fronts in the dead of night? And besides, in a town like Cinisi it was not difficult to get hold of guns.

This frustration would sometimes come out during the early demonstrations to commemorate Peppino’s death. Giuseppe Nobile remembers a Proletarian Democracy leader called Emilio Molinari who gave a speech in Cinisi on 9 May 1982, saying: ‘The
Mafiosi
who are moving here among us now should pin back their ears and listen very carefully – we don’t like getting involved in vendettas, but if any of us were to come to any harm, we’d know what we have to do.’

cent of the vote, and there was a huge downturn in social and trade union struggles. And I’ll go further: after that speech everyone left and went home, and the only people left were me, Gino Scasso and Giovanni Impastato. Given that there was an election on, us three went round the town at night putting up posters. After a speech like that they could have cut all three of us into tiny little pieces, no problem.

His fear was perfectly justified; all
Mafiosi
were extremely jumpy at that time, it was right in the middle of the Second Mafia War. But luckily nothing happened to them, and nobody was ever foolish enough to start acting like a
Mafioso
and launch even a symbolic act of revenge.

For many years these campaigners would suffer defeats and setbacks. Andrea Bartolotta, who had known Peppino since the first year of secondary school, remembers: ‘it felt like we were shipwrecked on an island of indifference, virtually condemned to irrelevance and isolation, almost as if we had the plague.’ But after a while they began to be compensated by small token victories. The first real step forward occurred in May 1984, six years after Peppino’s death, with a court reaching a verdict that he had been murdered by the Mafia because he campaigned against them. So he had not killed himself during an act of terrorism. But the verdict also stated that it was impossible to identify his murderers.

The institutions had slowly come round to the viewpoint of the family and their small group of dedicated campaigners. In the very month he died, Felicia and Giovanni had outlined in a sworn statement to police that in his last speech Peppino made it clear that if elected (something everyone expected) he would have brought more scandals out into the open. As they pointed out, this ‘behaviour is very different to that of somebody unbalanced or frustrated’. And they continued: ‘People who want to commit suicide are demoralised, without any apparent future, not people who plan their schedule and organise a series of commitments for the following days.’

All told, the lights were beginning to burn brighter behind the blinds of the Impastato household on the Corso. Since the death of her son, Felicia Impastato had virtually never left her house: ‘Apart from a few people, I don’t want to look into the face of anybody from Cinisi.’ One of the few people she did see was the actor Gaspare Cucinella: ‘I went to visit her sometimes, but it broke my heart to see her, to listen to her talk.’

Felicia didn’t even go out to attend her younger son’s wedding to Felicetta Vitale a few months after Peppino’s death, even though she had asked Giovanni to get married. Apart from friends of the bride and groom, a scandal halfemerged many years later that another group of people had taken a very close interest in this marriage, and it wasn’t the Mafia. Secret service agents took down the number plates of all the cars that attended the service, and Giovanni was subject to surveillance for approximately two years. The reason? The same deranged but desperate desire to try to link Peppino’s family and friends to terrorism.

Felicetta was now the daughter-in-law of Peppino’s mother, and fully supported her decision to cut herself off from nearly everyone else in town: ‘After Peppino’s death she hardly ever went out. One of the times she felt obliged to go out was when friends or relatives were ill, or had had an operation. But she never even went shopping. I would buy her everything she needed. And she never wanted to stop mourning: she always wore black.’

Despite her self-imposed isolation, Felicia understood that small changes were occurring, changes that made her more relaxed about Giovanni’s activism. Speaking in 1984, at the end of the Second Mafia War, she said:

Meanwhile Don Tano’s star continued to wane. After disappearing from Cinisi he had flitted between central Italy, Spain and Brazil, all the while importing huge amounts of heroin into the United States. He was finally picked up in Madrid in 1984 as part of an international investigation. More telling than his capture was his conviction: at the end of the mammoth ‘Pizza Connection’ trial held in New York, in June 1987 he was given a 45-year sentence for drug trafficking.

Six months later hopes rose once more when it was announced that Peppino’s case was to be re-opened. The most successful anti-Mafia magistrate, Giovanni Falcone, went to speak to Badalamenti in his US jail, but as ever Don Tano was saying nothing. So, not for the first time, in March 1990 the case was again closed. For Falcone it was a difficult time too: despite having convicted 342
Mafiosi
in the 1987 ‘maxitrial’, he was often isolated within the Palermo courthouse. Not only did he escape an assassination attempt in June 1989, he was passed over for promotion and was frequently attacked in the press through a series of anonymous letters, probably written by one of his fellow magistrates.

In July 1990 campaigners suffered one of their most demoralising setbacks, which fittingly came from one of the most tainted leaders of the Christian Democrats, the Neapolitan Antonio Gava. Ignoring the 1984 court verdict, as minister of the interior he announced that because Peppino had not been killed by the Mafia, his family was therefore not entitled to compensation as Mafia victims. It wasn’t that the family wanted to get rich, they had always said they would use the money to educate people to break free from the Mafia. What made such a decision so outrageous was that Gava was commonly held to be close to the Neapolitan Mafia, the Camorra.

A further setback was to follow in February 1992. Probably influenced by the scale of Riina’s violence, another court verdict stated that it was unlikely that Badalamenti was involved in Peppino’s murder – it was much more likely to have been the Corleonesi. In any event, the case was closed again because no new evidence had been found.

But in the very same month a sequence of events began at the other end of Italy that would unleash a tidal wave of political change, destroying Christian Democrat dominance, and with it, the cosy relationship the Mafia had enjoyed with them.

One day in February 1992 a virtually unknown magistrate, Antonio Di Pietro, organised the arrest for bribery of an equally unknown Socialist Party hospital manager in Milan. Mario Chiesa was caught red-handed taking a bribe worth £4,000 from the businessman who hoped to win the cleaning contract for his hospice. When the police burst into his office, Chiesa was trying to flush the equivalent of £9,000 down the toilet from his previous appointment. After his arrest he admitted to demanding bribes for every contract he awarded, from cleaning to meat supplies. The poor meat supplier had started with giving Chiesa the occasional gift, then in the early 1980s the bribes grew to silver plateware and works of art, and then Chiesa began demanding works by specific artists. The people who died in the hospice were then farmed out by Chiesa to another Socialist colleague, who in turn demanded a rake-off from funeral parlours for the right to bury them. The price per dead body was about £50.

Chiesa quickly implicated other Socialist politicians in Milan, such as Bettino Craxi, prime minister for much of the 1980s. From Milan investigations spread to Rome, and quickly the Christian Democrats were found to be up to their necks as well. Over the next two years – day after day, week after week, month after month – scandal after scandal emerged, and party after party disintegrated due to mass arrests or a collapse in their votes.

The party that had been at the heart of Italian government since 1945 was collapsing, and this produced huge instability in Sicily; the Mafia no longer had a reliable political structure from which they could demand protection in exchange for votes. Not for the first time, Riina and the Corleonesi decided to attack the state head-on, just to remind people in power that they still had to reckon with the Mafia. But this was at a time when the Christian Democrats no longer had support from their electorate – support for the political system was at an all-time low.

The anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone was the first to be killed, in May 1992. A massive bomb exploded underneath the motorway between the airport and Palermo, just as his car was passing, killing him, his wife, and three members of his police escort. Six weeks later his long-time partner, the second most successful anti-Mafia magistrate – Paolo Borsellino – also died in a car bomb. Both these funerals became mass events where the people of Palermo, and some police officers, vented their anger on a political class that had allowed the Mafia to grow so powerful. On one memorable occasion, mourners inside Palermo Cathedral, many of them police officers whose colleagues had died as part of these magistrates’ armed escort, jostled the head of state and the chief of police, while outside the crowd chanted, referring to these individuals, ‘Mafia out of the cathedral’.

The ‘Palermo spring’ had begun. Leoluca Orlando, an anti-Mafia politician, became mayor of Palermo with an unprecedented majority in 1993. Far more important than that was the fact that public opposition to the Mafia grew, street committees were formed, and many did not disappear after the first emotional outbursts. In essence, a new generation of anti-Mafia activists had emerged. Sicily had changed, forever.

Back in her house in Cinisi, Felicia Impastato, although she could not speak standard Italian and did not go out and get involved in these events, also understood things were different: ‘Something changed after the death of Borsellino and Falcone . . . people started to understand and think, “So when they killed Peppino, it was for the same reason!” . . . He might have been just a nipper, them lot was judges and grown-ups. Only then did they understand that in Cinisi you needed loads of Peppinos.’

In Palermo an unexpected stroke of luck also occurred one day in 1992. As part of their activities at the Peppino Impastato Research Centre Umberto Santino and his wife Anna Puglisi run a press-monitoring service and give their clients a daily round-up of Mafia-related news. One day Puglisi noticed an article that mentioned a new Mafia supergrass named Salvatore Palazzolo, from Cinisi. He was helping magistrates with other cases, but Santino and Puglisi suggested to the Impastato family lawyer that he ask magistrates to interview Palazzolo about the Impastato case, given that he was a member of Badalamenti’s gang. In some ways the signs weren’t promising, as after a while it transpired that Palazzolo was only cooperating with the authorities because he knew Riina wanted to kill him. In other words, he hadn’t decided to make a clean breast of all he knew because he had seen the error of his ways, so he was not cooperating across the board.

Meanwhile, the battle for justice was slowly beginning to gain support in a wider context. In November 1994 Palermo council named a street after Peppino, very near to the main jail. Two further events occurred in May 1995: first the Palermo provincial council passed a motion demanding the reopening of the Impastato case and secondly the Terrasini sea front was named after Peppino – only for the road signs to be ripped down less than a month later. Finally, in May 1996, 18 years after his death, Cinisi council finally named a street after Peppino.

The wheels of the Italian justice system grind outrageously slow. Following further sworn statements and dossiers from Santino’s research centre and from the family, Peppino’s case was opened again in February 1996. The following month the same people demanded an investigation into the police, accusing them of perverting the course of justice. Things were lumbering forward: a year later Judge Gian Carlo Caselli announced that he was considering bringing Badalamenti to trial as the instigator of Peppino’s murder. Some things never changed though; a few days later threatening graffiti appeared in Cinisi and other areas nearby, attacking Judge Caselli.

Finally, nearly twenty years after Peppino’s death, it was announced that Gaetano Badalamenti would be brought to trial for ordering his murder, and much of the evidence would in fact be provided by the supergrass Salvatore Palazzolo. Felicia and Giovanni Impastato had a poster put up in Cinisi immediately. While welcoming the news, it also criticised:

With its big, bold black typeface, it was a real slap in the face for the police officers who had protected the Mafia, and a clear provocation in such a Mafia town. The family had not forgiven or forgotten the often-lonely battle they had been forced to fight.

One of the people keenest to give evidence was Giovanni Riccobono. Back in 1978 he had told magistrates that on the evening of Peppino’s death his cousin had told him not to go back to Cinisi: ‘because something big was going to happen’. The fact that his cousin knew what was going to happen beforehand clearly implicated him directly or indirectly. This was yet another shock for Cinisi – somebody breaking ranks with the deeply held notion of family solidarity. Riccobono himself recounts what happened next: