Defiance (6 page)

with an entourage. He was always very correct and kind with me. The way he showed his Mafia power was through simplicity, he was very communicative even though he couldn’t speak Italian very well. But through the Mafia code of communicating he was able to transmit fear very easily, he was very charismatic. He wasn’t one of those show-offs who would take his gun out, he was very cool.

The problem is that the Mafia is like a spider’s web; once you’re caught you can’t escape. People might think that just respecting social conventions means they can keep their distance from more serious entanglement. If they’re very lucky things can work out that way, but although he was small fry, the head of the Impastato household was all for encouraging these connections. But in a highly dictatorial organisation like the Mafia he didn’t make those decisions.

One day Manzella made sure Felicia and Giovanni went and stayed in one of his houses in the village of Contessa Entellina, where Giovanni’s uncle and
Mafioso
Giuseppe ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato worked. Despite his nickname, those who knew Giuseppe remember him as a chubby and friendly man, but even back then, in the 1950s, Manzella had started to use the gravy train of Christian Democrat politicians and had got ‘Leadspitter’ a job as a field guard on the land of local MP Antonio Pecoraro.

Through their control over the political system, and the public sector economy, Christian Democrats were able to manage and allocate precious resources, such as jobs. The Mafia often acted as a filter in this system: forwarding requests upwards to politicians and receiving favours in return. The key link between the politicians and
Mafiosi
was the Mafia’s ability to deliver votes, although sometimes the two roles could be combined in just one person.

The most notorious example from this period was Giuseppe Genco Russo, the head of the Mafia after the death of Don Calogero Vizzini in 1954. Genco Russo had first come to the authorities’ attention as far back as 1927, when the Caltanissetta police chief had written that Genco Russo’s wealth had been gained ‘with profits from crime and the Mafia’; he had also taken part in the Hotel Delle Palme summit in Palermo in 1957. Genco Russo had briefly been secretary of the Christian Democrat branch in his hometown, and when he stood as a councillor in Mussomeli in October 1960 a row broke out during an election debate on television. The party provincial secretary immediately told the press, ‘Mr Genco Russo is just like anyone else, and as such has the right to be a Christian Democrat candidate in Mussomeli.’ Even party leader Aldo Moro defended his candidature, so not surprisingly he was elected.

To come back to Cinisi, why was Cesare Manzella being so generous by inviting the Impastatos to stay in his country house? The reason emerged soon after, when a double murder took place in the town –
ammazzarono
; he wanted to make sure Felicia and her son were not around. On one hand Felicia must have appreciated Manzella’s gesture, but on the other her blood must have run cold when she thought about how deeply she was compromised. She often went and stayed at his house during the holidays, but again couldn’t fail to notice what was happening: ‘Sometimes I saw certain people. I once met Luciano Leggio. I had nothing to do with him but I understood what was going on. He slept there, and then in the morning they took him somewhere else.’

Known as the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ for his long periods on the run, Leggio was far from being the romantic figure his nickname suggests. His rapid rise within the organisation began when, as a 23-year-old, he murdered a Socialist trade unionist named Placido Rizzotto in his hometown of Corleone back in 1948. By the late 1950s he had gained control of the Corleone clan, which has dominated the Mafia since the late 1970s, and tutored the man who remained boss until his capture in April 2006 – Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. At the time Felicia met him, she would have known that Leggio was one of the main leaders of the Mafia, and was on the run from the police when he stayed in the same house as her.

Whether she liked it or not, Felicia was in deep. She faced a choice: if she told the police where to find one of the country’s most wanted fugitives, she would have had to go into hiding in order to stay alive, along with her children and husband, yet at that time the police did not have anything approaching a witness protection programme. And even if they did, Manzella would have killed her other relatives, so if she had decided to be an honest citizen it would have meant her death and that of her immediate family, or many of her close relatives. In situations like this
Mafiosi
can see that people have chosen to turn a blind eye to their activities. But what drags people in even deeper is the awareness of having become an accessory to serious crimes by not reporting them. Regardless of your own personal views, your safety becomes linked to that of Mafia leaders.

While all this was going on their eldest child, Peppino, was developing in a completely independent way. His mother remembers him going to hear the Communist activist Stefano Venuti speak: ‘He used to listen to all his speeches. He’d sit on the kerb with his hands like this; he was against the Christian Democrats. Me and Venuti knew each other, so I said to him: “Mr Venuti, would you do me a favour? Would you get my boy to stop this?” “Why should he, he’s an intelligent boy.”’

Although his mother might have been understanding, Peppino’s father was not. One day Peppino came home and told his father he’d passed his exams: ‘My uncle has bought me a raincoat and a bag to carry my books. What are you going to give me?’ Sometimes Peppino could be a bit too pushy and sarcastic with his father, failing to show the respect that was normal for the time. So his father answered coldly: ‘What am I going to give you? Nothing. When you decide to leave the Communist Party is when I’ll buy you something.’ Given that his attitude tended to create confrontation, at a very young age Peppino was forced to make a choice between developing his own ideas, or submitting to tradition and having a normal family life.

A key turning point came when his uncle Don Cesare Manzella was killed by a car bomb in the First Mafia War. Shocked, Peppino told his mother, ‘these people really are criminals’. She remembered, ‘That’s when it all started. He started talking about bullying, about injustice.’ Although aged just 15, Peppino made a conscious decision: ‘if this is what the Mafia is, then I’m going to oppose it’. If he had been living under the same roof as his Mafia father it would have been unlikely that he thought in this way, and what he went on to do was simply unheard of at the time. For a small sleepy town such as Cinisi, Peppino’s actions were going to be truly shocking.

Contrary to some stereotypes, Peppino was a left-wing activist with emotions. Indeed, perhaps this brief poem he wrote expresses the self-denial that is inevitable in what was virtually full-time political activity:

Men look at the sky
And are amazed,
They look at the earth
And they feel compassion But oddly,
They do not notice themselves.

These were the days before the Internet – indeed, many local people still had no television – so the method Peppino and his friends used to spread their views was a newspaper,
L’Idea Socialista
(
Socialist Idea
).

By today’s standards the contents of this small newspaper might seem tame, but reaction in the town showed that it was viewed as revolutionary. The first taboo subject they broached was women’s rights and sex. Italy was still backward in this field; for example, the penal code sanctioned harsher punishments for women than for men in cases of adultery, and there was a huge debate in Sicily in 1965 when a woman who had been raped refused to marry her attacker. The first major article in the paper supporting local women’s criticism of male chauvinism appeared in March 1967 and, significantly, was written by a man. A few months later the same writer and Peppino returned to the subject, stating:

Such discussion meant coming into conflict with the selfappointed guardian of public morals, the Church. Another early editorial emphasised that the paper was aiming at a new generation of young people: ‘Perhaps these young people don’t go to church, but they have a strong moral sense that is no longer held back by prejudiced dogma. This is an expression of a consciousness that sees the evils of the world and is upset by them, and tries to bring some relief to the victims.’

The issues the
Socialist Idea
raised were also tangible ones. For example, in one article it attacked both the fact that apart from two well-lit streets: ‘the rest of the town seems illuminated by candlelight’, and that the town only had water for five hours a day. They accused the mayor of not insisting that a councillor from the same party, upon whose private land there was a large fresh water well, agree to supply the town with water at an acceptable rate.

Stefano Venuti, the best-known Communist activist in town, also contributed to the paper, openly denouncing corruption following local elections:

This occurs in various ways – the outright buying of votes (a packet of pasta, 1 to 10,000 lire, a promise of a job, a favour, etc). And here a ‘favour’ can mean anything: a prisoner who will be released from jail, a patient who will not pay hospital fees, a consumer who will not pay water rates or council tax, or somebody else who will get planning permission or a licence to trade.

But Peppino and his friends were also breaking from the Communist Party, the only organisation that had managed to be some kind of opposition to corrupt local politicians and the Mafia. Although the Communist Party is not named in the following editorial it is clear that this is the organisation the writer has in mind. This stress on practical action is important to mention again, because such a strategy was to shake the town over the next ten years:

In essence, over this two-year period Peppino and others were becoming revolutionaries, rejecting the politics of the Socialist and Communist Parties, all of which had been tried and tested, but had failed to really change things. There had been great anticipation in 1963 when the Socialists had joined a national government after 16 years in opposition, but their enthusiasm for reform was quickly blocked and blunted by the Christian Democrats. The main hope of the Communist Party was to win a majority in parliament and form a government – something distinctly unlikely in the medium and long term, given the Cold War politics that dominated Italy. Local Communist activists such as Venuti might have influenced Peppino, but often the hands of these individuals were tied by regional and national leaders, and they were forced into alliances with dodgy Christian Democrats.

On an international scale, young people such as Peppino had new models too, such as the Cuban and Vietnam national liberation struggles, or looked to individuals like Che Guevara, and genuinely believed that Mao’s China was a shining example of a new socialism. Local Communists tried to compete: when Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia the local branch produced a booklet, but after the single page on Che there were eight pages on the Russian revolution of 1917, often in the form of a series of events listed chronologically and ending in a statement by the party’s general secretary – hardly the sort of stuff to capture the imagination of young people.

The second biggest taboo that Peppino and others broke was to talk about the Mafia. This is how his mother Felicia found out what her 17-year-old son was doing:

he was reading. Then he came downstairs – ‘Felicia’. ‘What is it?’ ‘Have you seen that Peppino is coming out against the Mafia?’ And I said: ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do about my husband?’ He was a touch aggressive, and used to hit us. Peppino didn’t get hit a lot because he wasn’t home that much, but Giovanni copped quite a bit. I used to jump in the middle and got hit a few times as well.

Giovanni says his father never hit him. It is possible he has genuinely forgotten, or is embarrassed by the memory – or that his mother was exaggerating. Regardless of the specific level of violence within the Impastato family, these are very much the attitudes and dynamics within a Mafia family, and it is through repeated treatment of this kind that future generations of
Mafiosi
are shaped.

Even though Peppino probably got off lightly compared to his brother, he also had other problems to worry about. The Christian Democrat mayor (also magistrate and cousin of Gaetano Badalamenti), Domenico Pellerito, reported the content of the
Socialist Idea
to the police. Within five days of its first appearance on newsagents’ shelves the small group of young editors were called into the police station to explain themselves. The police then launched an official investigation, and later questioned the youths individually. They reached the conclusion that it was an illegal publication because it had been published secretly, and a magistrate gave them a suspended sentence. The editors appealed, and the legal dance continued.

Why did the mayor react so quickly, and the authorities so harshly? Hard as it is to believe, the answer is sport. The paper criticised the lack of facilities in the town in an article which contained the following sentence: ‘Perhaps Cinisi’s first citizen is completely unaware of the meaning of the word sport, and the lack of interest of council officials is obvious – this is a slap in the face for all sports enthusiasts in town.’ The fact this harmless article could have created such a bizarre response shows there was no real political discussion in town; the Communist opposition had failed to stir things up. Everybody knew their place. Nobody criticised the local establishment.

One of the most important outcomes was that the legal to-ings and fro-ings meant the paper couldn’t be published for nearly a year. It is highly likely that the ‘offending article’ was not the real reason for the clampdown but was merely a pretext. Given that the paper dealt with corruption, emigration and sexual repression – in anyone’s book far more important issues than sport – the authorities were probably just looking for an excuse. Yet once it started to be published again in early 1966 the paper began attacking in even more aggressive tones the politicians who had attempted to close it down.

One notorious article written by Peppino exploded like a bomb through the town. It was entitled: ‘The Mafia – A Mountain of Shit’. His mother went to visit the parents of all the other boys involved in the paper and asked them to persuade their children to stop what they were doing. She was stunned to discover that these parents supported their actions. Although her primary concern was to protect her own son, the fact that other parents were behind the paper must have in some way forced her to realise Peppino was in the right.

All editors suffered harassment because of the paper’s content, but Peppino more than most. One day soon after the publication of the ‘Mountain of Shit’ article the Impastatos heard a knock on the door of their house on the Corso, it was the old Mafia patriarch Don Masi Impastato. Luigi went outside to talk to him, and the old don told Peppino’s father, ‘If that was my son, I’d dig a grave and bury him in it.’ Felicia was listening behind the blinds, and at that point could not contain her protective instincts and burst out to shout at him, ‘you’re skating on very thin ice if you carry on making threats like that’.

‘Leadspitter’ Impastato, Peppino’s uncle, told Luigi that this kind of thing could not happen in a Mafia family. These were just the first two angry responses from a pair of
Mafiosi
. Such comments were in all likelihood just opinions and nothing more, however, over the next few years Peppino’s behaviour meant that angry comments became calculated threats.

Peppino had moved back home a year or two earlier to live with his parents when he was about 18, because one of the relatives he had been living with had died and another had got married. But now his father had lost face, not only with the town at large but also with his Mafia friends in particular. So he kicked him out, and Peppino went back to live with his aunt and uncle.

Luigi Impastato must have remembered something Cesare Manzella had said to him a few years earlier: ‘But what kind of family have you got involved in, what are you playing at?’ For a father, not being able to control his family is a humiliating sign of weakness. Although Luigi would never admit it, he had lost the battle to control his son, and his behaviour only increased Peppino’s determination to rebel against his father’s values. When Luigi got angry he’d tell his wife: ‘Leave, and take your sons with you.’ This only entrenched divisions, as Peppino’s uncle Matteo would come to visit Felicia rather than her husband.

My mother was the wife of a
Mafioso
and the mother of a left-wing activist who fought against the Mafia. She was in a very difficult situation because she was right in the middle. She didn’t want me to go down the same road as Peppino . . . she treated me normally, but she was always more worried about Peppino because he was in far more danger. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about me or didn’t love me, she was just very worried about what could happen to Peppino. It’s as if this family has lived a kind of Greek tragedy, with my mother forever at a crossroads. Because she was a Christian the family was sacred, and you had to respect your husband.

Felicia was born during the First World War, and still belonged to that time and culture. This meant that she had to be a wife to her husband and a mother to her children, servicing all of them materially and emotionally, yet she knew she couldn’t play either of these roles adequately.

Peppino’s horizons, meanwhile, started to broaden. He got involved with the civil rights activist Danilo Dolci in the nearby town of Partinico, where he went to secondary school. He went on a five-day ‘March of Protest and Hope’ through the Sicilian countryside, ending in Palermo. He learned perhaps for the first time that the Mafia exists because of a lack of economic development and real alternatives, one very concrete example being the shortage of water caused by the government refusing to build dams to create reservoirs – and all the while the Mafia controlled precious fresh water wells. One of the other issues was the Vietnam War, the Iraq of Peppino’s generation. The final speech of the march was given by Vo Van Ai, a leader of the Vietnamese resistance, whose words were published by the
Socialist Idea
:

The Vietnam War was on news bulletins daily around the world, and many young people were starting to oppose American involvement. By publishing this article, and many others, the
Socialist Idea
began to draw in its young readers.

Yet the paper was not dealing only with politics in the abstract, or events occurring half a world away. It carried on attacking the corruption of local politicians, who continued to demand that action be taken against it; the new mayor, a Social Democrat, had once again called on the police to take action. The party that had sponsored the paper, meanwhile, withdrew its support, and the police were now telling the editors – now just Peppino and one other – that the paper had to be closed down. It did close, yet Peppino had other ideas he wanted to try out.