Defiance (20 page)

The real reason I left town for a few weeks was that when I’d walk past people on the street I’d hear them mumble ‘grass’.

When he returned to Cinisi he went to see Peppino’s mother, who drew his hand over her heart: ‘Giovanni, I’ve lost a son. If you don’t feel up to it, don’t go down that road – I’ll always love you whatever you do.’

When Felicia heard I was going to testify in Palermo and confirm all that I had said 20 years earlier, when I was at her house she took me into the back room. Then she took me by the hand and said that if I didn’t feel up to testifying against Gaetano Badalamenti she wouldn’t hold it against me.

But perhaps the person who was most anxious to go to court was Peppino’s mother. Felicia finally got her day in court in October 2000, 22 years after the death of her son. Now aged 84, she could hardly walk and sometimes misunderstood what she was being asked. But when she found an outlet for her anger, she was direct and defiant: ‘They smashed his skull with rocks then they took him to the railway track putting a bomb around him here, as if he was a terrorist. But it was the
Mafiosi
who were the terrorists.’ Her son Giovanni summed up how the tables had been turned in all these years, and showed how his confidence had grown, telling Badalamenti: ‘My brother has turned you into a small-town wanker.’

Don Tano was looking and listening on a video link from his jail in the US. As ever, he was as silent as the grave. Felicia looked up at the screen and said: ‘that man murdered my son’. Her deposition was an extremely fraught moment: she was a vital witness for the prosecution, so if she gave unreliable testimony it could be a serious blow to the whole case. The defence lawyer did the work he was paid to do, trying to lay traps and get her to contradict herself, showing that she couldn’t distinguish between fact and her own imagination. But she got through the test, and the evidence started to pile up against Badalamenti.

Felicia couldn’t make the trip to hear the verdict 18 months later, having recently been diagnosed with asthma. Many people did make a special effort to get to the courthouse though; a demonstration called by the Palermo Social Forum against the Berlusconi government decided to stop protesting and go instead to the prison courtroom to hear the verdict. Don Tano had already let it be known he would not listen to the verdict, so the video link with his New Jersey jail was switched off. Badalamenti received his first conviction in an Italian court for 33 years – a life sentence for having organised Peppino’s murder.

Giovanni was in court to hear the verdict. Despite his customary good manners, he could not hide his anger about the people who were equally responsible for almost a quarter of a century of torment:

I feel angry, because getting to the truth after 25 years, when we could have reached it immediately, makes you angry . . . it makes me angry to know that there are men in the institutions who have been accomplices in perverting the course of justice. Our task now is to continue the work done over these years with the Peppino Impastato Research Centre, and to continue searching for the truth about what happened.

The harsh reality behind this long-delayed conviction was devastating for the authorities. It had been obtained for two reasons alone: first it was thanks to long-term campaigning, which was often ignored or discouraged by the authorities; secondly it was due to the testimony of supergrasses. From the moment when Peppino’s friends and comrades fought off the crows to collect his remains, the police in particular had ignored what even the leaves of Cinisi knew.

The authorities managed to save some face in late 2000. Nearly two years earlier, parliament’s permanent AntiMafia Commission had set up a committee to investigate the ‘Impastato case’. It heard dozens of witnesses and examined hundreds of documents in its many sittings, and although it presented a stark picture of police incompetence and what was in essence protection of the Mafia, it did not have legally binding powers.

Yet, in a surprising departure from normal parliamentary procedure, out of respect for the family’s long years of campaigning, the committee decided to deposit the official copy in the Impastato household. Felicia hugged the three members of the commission who came to deliver it, whispering in their ears in Sicilian: ‘Today you have brought Peppino back to life.’ All three men, professional politicians for decades, broke down in tears.

In terms of public exposure, this event paled into insignificance compared to something else that had emerged a few weeks earlier, the release of a film on Peppino’s life entitled
I cento passi
, (
The Hundred Steps
).

The film was made on quite a low budget. The director was not particularly famous, and most of the cast were Sicilian actors largely unknown to Italian cinema audiences. Named after the distance between the Impastatos’ and Don Tano’s house on the Corso,
The Hundred Steps
was a huge artistic, commercial and political success. It became the second-largest grossing Italian film of the last 10 years, essentially due to word-of-mouth recommendations.

It won a Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for best screenplay; indeed, such was the interest in the film – shown also throughout the country in schools and at trade union festivals – that even the screenplay quickly sold 100,000 copies in paperback before the DVD became available. The director and crew had received a lot of help from the Impastato family and people who had campaigned for justice for so long. In the final scene of Peppino’s funeral many of the extras were people who had been at his real funeral back in 1978. Fittingly, the director gave his award to Peppino’s mother.

The film’s huge success meant that the annual commemorations in May became much bigger. In 2002 over a thousand people marched from Carini to Cinisi, a distance of ten miles that took over three hours – but once again most doors and windows stayed shut as it passed through town. As the march passed Don Tano’s house on the Corso somebody ran out and wrote on it: ‘you stupid and ignorant murderer – thank you Peppino’. Three whole days of meetings and cultural events were organised, in an event that was now globalised; many marchers were carrying Palestinian flags. One of the speakers, Haidi Giuliani, whose son Carlo had been killed by the police at a demonstration in Genoa the year before, reminded people that there had been many Peppinos and Carlos.

The following year a different kind of problem arose: the local archbishop ‘forgot’ about the anniversary march, held every year for the last 25 years, and declared that celebrations of the patron saint of the town would be held on the same day. The authorities now had a problem – would they allow just one march or both? Giovanni said that the commemoration ‘will happen anyway, even without authorisation’. The family released a statement saying that
Mafiosi
: ‘are not only those who shoot, but also those who want to erase the memory of those who have fought the Mafia until their last breath’. The archbishop’s procession was held on another date.

Felicia was now too frail to leave her house, and would greet supporters from her doorstep. Her favourite month of the year was May, as many more people would visit and remember what her son had stood for. In many ways her life’s work was over, but people wouldn’t stop knocking on her door: from Boy Scouts to politicians, it was literally ‘open house’ at the Impastatos. By speaking out, Felicia and Giovanni had broken a taboo, by trusting strangers their behaviour was the very opposite of a Mafia family. She once commented on journalists’ expectations of meeting her: ‘They think beforehand: “She’s Sicilian, she won’t say very much.” On the contrary, I have to defend my son, I have to defend him politically. My son wasn’t a terrorist, he fought for very concrete and positive things.’

Entering the house, you would now hear her before you saw her, as she came shuffling out of her bedroom in the back. The tapping on the floor was caused by Felicia moving a kitchen chair in front of her for support: the Impastatos were not rich, there was no point in buying an expensive Zimmer frame when an old wooden chair would do just as well. Her mind and face were far more lively than her body, now bent by age. What characterised her expression more than anything else was her sweet but determined smile, which often verged on a sarcastic smirk when she wanted to stress a point she thought you hadn’t understood
.

As Cinisi’s
Mafiosi
died off one by one, over more than twenty years she often drank to their death. One day at the end of April 2004 Salvo Vitale raced to her house to bring her a bit of news, and to ask her whether she wanted to raise a glass to the death of Badalamenti. Age had not slowed her down, as she told him: ‘My son, when I heard that pig had died, I finished the bottle.’

The following day she was as incisive as ever, talking to the press: ‘I want to know the names of those who helped him for so many – too many – years.
Mafiosi
, politicians and some policemen were all in on it together. And together they misled investigations into Peppino’s murder. Why are judges hesitating about starting new investigations?’

One thing she would often say was that her house was alive and full of people, whereas a hundred steps away Badalamenti’s was empty and locked up. Occasionally Badalamenti’s widow comes from Castellammare del Golfo to air it, but now it is just inhabited by ghosts.

n Italy every day of the year bears the name of a saint, and small towns tend to guard the reputation of their local saints jealously. So in many ways it was fitting

that the asthma attack that caused Felicia’s death two weeks before Christmas 2004 occurred on the day named after Saint Fara, the patron saint of Cinisi.

There is a sarcastic remark used in nearby towns to provoke people from Cinisi – ‘What a miracle St Fara has done! The church is closed but the bells are ringing!’ The implication is that people from Cinisi often make a lot of noise, but what they’re doing and saying is essentially empty and pointless. The response to Felicia’s death showed that, on the contrary, her life had had enormous substance.

Given the recent successes of
The Hundred Steps
, the conviction of Badalamenti and the Anti-Mafia Commission’s report, Felicia’s death became a news item on most television channels. All national newspapers had an article the following day, Cinisi council declared that the day of her funeral be a day of official mourning, that is, an invitation for shops to shut. They also organised a commemoration in the council building, inviting the Impastato family.

The head of state, President Ciampi, even sent the family a message of condolence recognising Felicia’s ‘tireless commitment in defence of legality and justice against criminal lies’. In Rome, the Anti-Mafia Commission stood and gave a standing ovation in her memory. The family also received messages from the mayor of Rome and three other towns, the leaders of the country’s second and fourth largest political parties, television presenters, trade union leaders, religious orders and school groups. Over the next few days several hundred more messages of condolence were to arrive, including some from Britain, France and Spain – mainly from ordinary people.

Felicia’s body was carried out of her house on that rainy December morning by some of the men who had been activists with her son 30 years earlier, such as Giovanni Riccobono and Salvo Vitale, and also by a much younger man, Salvo Ruvolo, secretary of the Cinisi branch of the far left party Communist Refoundation.

Waiting outside were politicians such as the former mayor of Palermo Leoluca Orlando, Left Democrat MP Giuseppe Lumia and a Communist Refoundation regional councillor; while trade unions were represented by the regional secretary of the CGIL federation; another prominent individual was Rita Borsellino, sister of the anti-Mafia magistrate murdered in 1992. The road outside was also crowded, as seven investigating magistrates had come – people who have to travel in armour-plated dark blue cars and with an armed escort because many of their investigations are directed against the Mafia.

Luigi Lo Cascio, the actor who played Peppino in
The Hundred Steps
was also there, as was the producer, Fabrizio Mosca. The film’s director, Marco Tullio Giordana, had been working on his next film at the other end of Italy, but immediately left the set to fly down for the funeral. He said: ‘It’s paradoxical, but I think that, having lost Peppino, she acquired hundreds of thousands of other children.’ The mayor of Cinisi was there, as were photographers, journalists, young Communists and other political activists. There was also a group of Boy Scouts from northern Italy who had visited and interviewed her the day before her death.

The funeral oration was given by Umberto Santino, who described what Felicia’s house had become in her final years: ‘All forms of resistance – be they against fascism, the Mafia or neo-liberalism – met here in the most natural way possible . . . The best of Italy and Sicily has passed through these doors.’

Yet at most there were just 150 people waiting to greet her coffin, and most of them had come from outside Cinisi. The funeral cortege wound its way down the Corso, but the people of Cinisi stayed at home, withdrawing further indoors whenever photographers moved close to their windows. As mourners passed bars and shops, not even the shutters were pulled down as a mark of respect.

It seemed like a bad dream, and very similar to Peppino’s funeral; it wasn’t as if local people ignored or never took part in funerals.

In September 2000 the son of Mafia boss Procopio Di Maggio disappeared and his dead body was washed up on a beach a few days later. Between five and eight hundred people came to his funeral, while many bystanders applauded and others threw orchids as the cortege passed. All the shops pulled down their blinds on that occasion. In December 2001 Vito Palazzolo died, aged 84. He had been convicted in March of that year, in a trial parallel to Badalamenti’s, of having organised Peppino’s murder. The local police chief banned a public funeral, ‘for reasons of public order’ – in other words the authorities would have been too embarrassed to see the level of support he had. Ultimately, nearly everyone ends up identifying with some kind of network that they feel can protect and help them.

One of the reasons local people ignored Felicia’s funeral, though, was mere indifference, the desire for a quiet life. Giovanni and Felicetta’s daughter Luisa, aged 19, even noticed it among young people: ‘When my grandmother died, I heard from a friend my age that she had been told by her mother to stay home, and I thought, in this day and age, that’s very sad.’ The point Luisa is at pains to stress is that people’s indifference influences a given situation: ‘I don’t think people didn’t come because of Mafia pressure. But indifference can also strengthen the Mafia’s power.’

Salvatore Maltese knows the town like the back of his hand. A Cinisaro born and bred, he was also a fascist councillor for over twenty years:

You need to realise that in a town of 10,500 people such as Cinisi, if you put together relatives, people who share the same house, your friends, workmates, employees – there are at least 3,500 people who in one way or another have to live alongside Mafia bosses. This could be because you’re a blood relative, or because of marriage, or business links, or because you’re employed by them – it’s clear then that a
Mafioso
will ask you to hide a gun, or drugs, or to hide them when they’re on the run.

This attitude was mirrored at the first council meeting held a few days after Felicia’s death. The first item on the agenda was a commemoration of Peppino’s mother, but councillors from Forza Italia– the party led by the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi – did not attend, only coming into the meeting afterwards without offering any explanation. Furthermore, the kind of employees the council hires, although in its defence it could argue they are simply a mirror of local attitudes, is revealed by the fact that only three out of a hundred council employees have ever taken part in activities that commemorated Peppino.

Although the family and their friends had achieved justice, and Peppino’s story had become known throughout Italy and to some extent abroad, it was clear that the battle he fought was still far from being won. But, as Felicetta Vitale explains, perhaps things have moved forward since Peppino’s day:

Depressing as that may be, it is a sign that the ideas Peppino stood for still challenge the traditional attitude of general indifference or the showing of respect towards Mafia families.

What has perhaps changed for ever is the open visibility of
Mafiosi
and Mafia behaviour. As Felicetta’s daughter Luisa points out: ‘Now, to some extent, Sicilian consciousness has moved forward. This is why the Mafia has decided to hide itself away, also because it’s dealing in business and drugs so much – all things that can’t be very visible.’

Having said that, things have continued to be difficult for Giovanni and Felicetta. Due to the success of
The Hundred Steps
, in February 2001 Giovanni was invited to appear on Italy’s premier talk show,
The Costanzo Show
. He attacked some of the opinions Badalamenti’s defence lawyers were using in his trial – they had dusted down the idea that Peppino was a terrorist, and also called him a ‘good-fornothing’ and a ‘layabout’. Giovanni defined such opinions as ‘stupidities’, and those who put them as ‘imbeciles in bad faith’. But although he never named anybody, Badalamenti’s lawyer won a case against Giovanni for libel. He was fined £3,500 and the lawyer then moved very quickly, rapidly obtaining a possession order on the family’s pizzeria, thus forcing immediate payment. Giovanni commented bitterly: ‘not only do they kill my brother, not only do they damage his reputation for over twenty years and blacken his name, but now I get convicted as well . . .’ However, the name Impastato was now known nationally, and an appeal fund launched by Umberto Santino’s Peppino Impastato Research Centre ended up collecting nearly £30,000.

Sadly, the Impastatos’ problems have been more than just financial. Three weeks after Badalamenti was convicted and given a life sentence in 2002, in Cinisi two ‘Peppino Impastato’ street signs were covered over with signs reading ‘Gaetano Badalamenti Street’. And in late November Giovanni remembers: ‘They even daubed red paint on the white walls of our shop, in the form of rivulets of blood flowing from a bullet wound.’ Felicetta adds: ‘I can tell you they looked very realistic.’ In June 2007 the attacks resumed: twice in two days acid was thrown at the front door of the familiy house on the Corso, as well as againt the plaque that commemorates Peppino.

Every town has its problems – and Cinisi has more than most – but these difficulties always exist in a much wider context.

The major media story of the week that Felicia died was not her death, but an important trial verdict handed down in Milan involving a man named Marcello Dell’Utri. Such was its importance that as the court retired to consider its verdict the speaker of the houses of parliament phoned the accused to express his ‘deep esteem and friendship’, while the then Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi commented ‘I would put both my hands in the fire for Dell’Utri’.

Who is Dell’Utri?
What distinguishes him more than anything else is his close relationship to Berlusconi. The two first met in 1961, when Dell’Utri left his hometown of Palermo to go to university in Milan. Three years later the 23-year-old Dell’Utri started working as a secretary for Berlusconi’s building company. After several years back in Sicily, he moved back to Milan in March 1974 to become Berlusconi’s private secretary, a position he held for three years. By 1983 Berlusconi had become a powerful television broadcaster and called Dell’Utri back as number three in his Fininvest holding company. He got involved in politics for the first time at the age of 55, when in 1996 he was elected as an MP for Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party. In June 1999 he was elected as an MEP and joined the EU’s justice commission; and, finally, became a senator in 2001.

In other words Dell’Utri has been Berlusconi’s right hand man for forty years, and one of his most revealing early moves, four months after returning to Milan in 1973, was to employ a man named Vittorio Mangano as a ‘stable boy’ in Berlusconi’s 147-room villa just outside Milan.

So who was Mangano?
He was a man who was first arrested by the Palermo Flying Squad in 1965 and charged with illegal earnings; his first major conviction came in 1968 for writing bad cheques, followed by another in 1971 for fraud. During his employment under Berlusconi he served time for fraud, was convicted for conspiracy to receive stolen goods, was arrested and jailed for carrying a knife and once again convicted for fraud and writing bad cheques. Over the next fifteen years he was periodically in close contact with Dell’Utri, and in the meantime was in and out of jail, collecting convictions for drug trafficking, and in 1998 a life sentence for murder and Mafia membership.

At the same time Dell’Utri was faithfully serving his boss and close friend Silvio Berlusconi, including during his two periods as prime minister, but he too had problems with the law. In 1996 it was announced that Dell’Utri was under investigation for Mafia membership, and very soon after he was elected as an MP in Berlusconi’s party – thus acquiring parliamentary immunity – although immediately after his election he was found guilty of tax fraud and false accounting. In May 2004 he was convicted of attempting to extort money from a Republican Party senator in a case dating back to 1992. Then in December 2004, the same week as Felicia Impastato’s death, he was given a nine-year sentence for collusion with the Mafia, with judges defining him as having been: ‘Cosa Nostra’s ambassador in Milan for thirty years’.