Defiance (15 page)

A few days later there was a knock on the door of the Impastatos’ house on the Corso. It was a well-known Badalamenti henchman, who had something to say to Luigi Impastato.

This had never happened before: Luigi had always made arrangements and gone to meetings of his own accord, his family never knew precisely when he was seeing his Mafia friends. The Mafia is always very careful and precise about how it communicates, and it often does so by sending unspoken messages. Don Tano’s open message, to all those who heard it – or who would hear about it – was that he wanted to meet Peppino’s father right away.

This is the typical brusque manner of a traditional patriarch – no explanation, no discussion, just action. Amazed by his behaviour, his daughter-in-law Felicetta Vitale attacked him too: ‘But what do you mean? You’re acting like a baby.’

Luigi Impastato’s weakness was clear for all to see. His leaving must have had something to do with his meeting with Badalamenti; whatever he was doing now was happening because he had been told to do it. He didn’t want to discuss things with his family and explain why he was taking such drastic action. So he just doggedly stuck to his guns: ‘I’m going, and if anybody asks for me, say that I’m going for work.’

Felicia was exasperated: ‘I responded by saying I didn’t want to know a thing, and that all he should do was leave.’ And with that he was gone. On the short drive to the airport, Luigi told a relative: ‘I’ll come back when things are sorted out. Look out for Giovanni though – because my other son is a lost cause.’

That was it. Nobody even knew where he had gone, and as to why he had gone – all they knew was that ‘things had to be sorted out’.

A whole series of questions arose in the minds of those he had left behind: what was it that needed sorting out? Was it Peppino? Why did Luigi have to leave so that things could get sorted out? Should Peppino change his behaviour? Should the family send some kind of message to Badalamenti? Should they just carry on as before and wait for Luigi to come back? None of these questions had simple or easy answers.

As Felicia recounts, her eldest son did not seem prepared to change tack in the face of his father’s sudden disappearance: ‘When my husband went to America, the person who was struck the most was Peppino. He said, “He’s gone to America to let me be killed, who cares?”’ His mother, though, was very worried, so she asked Peppino: ‘Why don’t you carry a gun?’ This wasn’t such an unusual question to ask, hunting has always been popular in Italy and these small Sicilian towns had always been awash with guns.

Maybe five years earlier Peppino might have responded differently, but the political climate had changed dramatically over the last couple of years. On the mainland a left-wing terrorist group called the Red Brigades had launched a spectacular series of kneecappings, bank robberies, and lately political assassinations. Although they called themselves communists, they were a very elitist group: all their supporters had to do was to just sit at home and watch – the communism they apparently wanted to create would be the work of a few hundred terrorists. Not only was their strategy doomed to failure; when the Red Brigades attacked the establishment it gave the Christian Democrats and the police a stick they could beat radicals such as Peppino with. If democratic revolutionaries such as Peppino – whose concept of communism came through mass action – could somehow be associated with the Red Brigades, he and others like him could be criminalised and therefore removed as a serious force of opposition. This was the thinking behind Peppino’s answer to his mother: ‘If I were to carry a gun, given that the police are in agreement with the Mafia, they’d take me in as an armed terrorist.’

Meanwhile, Luigi Impastato had caught a flight to America.
First he went to New Orleans and stayed with the children of his brother, ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato. Then he went to stay with other relatives near Los Angeles, but the fact that he arrived without warning them was proof of his confused state of mind. Yet the change did him good. He was far away from Cinisi, totally separated from his hometown. Trips across the Atlantic were very expensive, as were transatlantic phone calls, so he had no contact with Cinisi. Not only was he more relaxed, but in the US he had no ‘face’ to lose, he could say what he thought and talk far more freely than he could with his wife and sons.
So he started to open up a bit, and told his relatives that Peppino: ‘talked an awful lot’. But he also uttered a key phrase: ‘I’ve told them – they’ll have to kill me first before they kill Peppino’. He admitted to his relatives across the Atlantic what he had never told his family in Cinisi: that his Mafia friends had discussed killing Peppino. Once again, given that he no longer felt he had to act like an alpha male, he started to talk about his feelings. Despite all his blunt arguments, insults and brutality, he wanted to defend his son and protect him – something he would never admit to back home.
Many things still weren’t clear, though: what did the Cinisi Mafia think of his attitude? Perhaps they respected traditional family loyalty and would let things lie. But what if Peppino carried on – could there be a breaking point? And how serious was Luigi’s threat to defend his son at all costs?
None of these conversations filtered back to his family. After about a week they did find out where he was, yet they still didn’t know why he was there. There were a couple of theories being tossed around by the family: firstly that it was just a vindictive act, aimed at punishing them by making them worry and suffer; the second idea was that he had left Cinisi to give the Mafia an opportunity to kill Peppino. It obviously wasn’t the latter, because when Luigi came back after a month all of his family were still doing very much the same things. Once again, he told them nothing. Did the fact he was now back meant that whatever had driven him away had been ‘sorted out’? Nevertheless his wife remembers: ‘When he got back from America he seemed better’.
Maybe what had been sorted out was in Luigi’s mind; perhaps he had decided to come off the fence and defend his son. Soon after his return, his brother ‘Leadspitter’ Impastato told another relative: ‘A few days ago my brother Luigi almost had a go at me. He’s gone mad, he doesn’t think straight. He agrees with everything his wife says.’ Not only was this a terrible situation for a male chauvinist to witness, but once again it suggests that Luigi Impastato was not prepared to stand by and let his son be murdered.
Soon after his return the family went out to eat, as Felicia recalls:

We were at the pizzeria one evening in September. It was near closing time as the waiters were packing things away, and my husband said, ‘I’ll go on ahead.’ So I got into the car with my daughter-in-law, but when we got home there was nobody in. We retraced our steps and she saw him lying on the ground, dead.

A car had stopped nearby. Afterwards the driver said she had never seen anybody, but had felt the car drive over something on the road.

Luigi Impastato was dead – but who had killed him – the driver or somebody else? It is perfectly possible that it was an accident, after all, the bumper had been damaged. On the other hand, the Mafia could well have had an interest in getting rid of him.

As with any family, the death of the father obliged those left to take stock. This was one of Giovanni’s thoughts: ‘When my father died I felt a huge sense of liberation inside me – “at last I’m free”, I said to myself. On the other hand, I did feel a lot of pain because the person who had brought me into the world had died.’ But his mother was worried about her other son: ‘As soon as my husband had his accident I immediately thought, “my son’s already dead”.’

Despite any suspicions the family might have had, and despite Peppino’s activities, Badalamenti visited Felicia to pay his condolences: ‘he was here in front of me, he was paying his respects. I would have liked to throw him out but I didn’t, I was worried about Peppino. We really were on our own.’ Whether they were behind Luigi’s death or not, the Mafia quickly discovered that Peppino had not changed his attitude. All the top
Mafiosi
turned out for the funeral, but at the cemetery Peppino stood with his arms folded across his chest when they walked up to him to offer him their condolences – not even with his father’s death would Peppino show Mafia bosses any respect and shake their hands.

Meanwhile, Felicia had managed to get Peppino to respond to their changed situation: ‘He went to Milan for a month and then he came back. He was meant to go to America, my cousin was waiting for him and he had agreed to go. But in the meantime the elections were announced and he decided to stand.’

Despite the risk of other parties playing the ‘terrorist card’, and the fact that Peppino made no secret of his belief in revolution, many moderate people in Cinisi had come to respect Peppino. He had received a significant number of votes when he stood as a candidate for regional government a few years earlier, and his speeches were always attended by large crowds. Furthermore, there was a new wave of young voters, given that the minimum voting age in council elections had been reduced from 21 to 18 in 1975. In other words, it certainly wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he would be elected as a councillor. His chances of getting elected were probably high because he promised to reveal even more of the shady dealings going on between the local council and Mafia bosses. Not only was there no other candidate prepared to stand on such a platform, but Peppino already had a record that was second to none in exposing corruption and collusion.

All this was swirling around a recently widowed woman in her 60s, his mother Felicia: ‘I lived through a terrible period. I used to wake up at night and go and check that Giovanni was there . . .’; she was worried about Giovanni because of Peppino:

I used to talk about the Mafia with Peppino. I told him I hated the Mafia as well, we’re decent people, but he didn’t listen. I used to say to him: ‘snuffing out a candle is nothing to them, it doesn’t take long to dig a grave because they’re animals.’ Well really they’re worse – at least you can reason with some animals, but with them it’s impossible. They’re wild animals. The Mafia won’t listen to people.