The Godmother - Italy

A documentary, 'The Godmother - Italy', by Journeyman Pictures from February 2001 reveals the women of the mafia. As the mafia godfathers are being jailed and killed by rivals, it is the godmothers, like Maria Licciardi, who are taking over.

Giuseppe Impastato

A young Giuseppe with his father Luigi Impastato and mother Felicia Bartolotta

Giuseppe Impastato, also known as Peppino, was born on the 5th of January 1948 in Cinisi, Palermo, Italy. Impastato was famous for his opposition to the Mafia, and his political activism led to his murder on the 9th of May 1978.

Impastato was born into a Mafia family. His father Luigi had been sent into internal exile during the reign of Fascism, and was close friends with Gaetano Badalamenti, a Mafia boss. His uncle, Cesare Manzella, a high-profile Mafia boss, was killed in a car bomb attack in 1963. Later, Giuseppe's brother Giovanni, made comment that this tragedy struck a chord with the fifteen-year-old Peppino. Pieces of Manzella were found hung on lemon trees hundreds of meters from the crater where the car had been. Giuseppe remembers his brother as having said, 'Ma questa è veramente mafia? Se questa è mafia io per tutta la vita mi batterò contro queste cose.' (Is this really Mafia? If this is Mafia I will fight it for the rest of my life.' As a youth, Giuseppe disassociated himself from his father, was kicked out of his home, and began his anti-Mafia activism.

In 1965, Peppino began the newsletter named L'idea socialista, and joined the left-wing PSIUP party (Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity). From 1968 he played a major part in the revolutionary activities that were emerging; fighting for the rights of peasants, building workers, and the unemployed. In 1975, with other youths of Cinisi, Music and Culture was set up; a group which organised debates, film, theatre, and music shows, as well as beginning a self-funded radio station Radio Aut. Peppino's weapon against the mafia was his use of satire; which he used abundantly to mock both politicians and mafiosi on his daily radio programme Onda pazza (Crazy Wave). 'Its highlight  was an evening show of music and satire directed at 'Mafiopolis' and its 'Mafia-cipality' - in other words Cinisi and its DC-dominated town council. The show's sketches lampooned the local Family and its shady affairs by setting them in grotesque versions of Dante's Divine Comedy or the Wild West; ruling boss Tano Badalamenti was transparently mocked as 'Tano Seduto' (Sitting Bully). Through the medium of the radio he would announce stories of crime, heavily implicating and implying the involvement of the local mafia. Although the radio show was popular with people, Impastato and his friends who were disliked by the authorities; revealing perhaps, just how deeply the influence of the mafia ran.

Impastato recognised the danger that mafia leader Tano Badalamenti posed, and vice versa. Badalamenti did not like Impastato's public activism. It is believed that Peppino's father tried to protect his son, but after his own death by a car in September 1977, a suspected but never proven murder, Badalamenti gave the order for Peppino's murder.

Peppino Impastato was killed on the night of his election campaign, as he was running for the Cinisi council elections for the Proletarian Democracy.

'On the night of 8-9 May 1978, Peppino was kidnapped on his way back from Radio Aut and taken in his own car to a tumbledown stone shack a few yards from the Palermo-Trapani railway line near the boundary fence of the airport. There he was beaten and tortured before being dumped on the track with several sticks of dynamite strapped to his torso.

Early the following morning railway workers reported that a fifty-centimetre section of track had been damaged. When the caravinieri arrived at the scene, they found Peppino's car, his white Scholl clogs and his glasses near the hole blown by the explosion. Fragments of his body and clothes were scattered over a 300 metre radius around it; only his legs, parts of his face, and a few fingers were recognisable. Peppino's death was a horrific echo of the way his uncle the mafiosi had died back in 1963 - the very murder that had provoked him to ask, 'What must he have felt?' and begin his rebellion against the mafia.'

At first, the press, police, and the investigation authorities believed Giuseppe Impastato had been a terrorist who had attempted to bomb the railway, but had accidentally killed himself. A letter that he had written months before his death was found, and there was now speculations of suicide. But it was his brother Giovanni and his mother Felicia Bartolotta, who separated themselves from their mafia family, together with Giuseppe's activist friends, and the Centro siciliano di documentazione, that fought for the recognition of the mafia as being responsible for the murder.

Salavatore Palazzolo spoke out against the Cinisi Mafia, of which he had once been a member, and named Badalamenti as the one who had ordered the killing of Impastato. In June 1996, the case was reopened, and in Novemeber 1997, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Badalamenti. It wasn't until 2002 that he was given a life sentence. Felicia Bartolotta made a dignified statement after the verdict was announced, 'I never had any feelings of vendetta. All I have done is call for justice for my son's death. I have to confess that, after so many years of waiting, I had lost faith - I never thought we would reach this point. Now I feel a great deal of  contentment, of satisfaction. I always knew what happened. Badalamenti used to call my husband Luigi to complain about Peppino, and my husband begged him not to kill the boy.'

Quotations taken from 'Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia' by John Dickie

Mamma Coraggio

Angela Casella is known to most of Italy as Mamma Coraggio, 'Mother Courage'. On the evening of the 18th of January 1988, her 18-year-old son, Cesare Casella, was kidnapped by the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrese Mafia from Southern Italy, who, in the 1970's and 80's, had formed a 'professional' kidnapping industry that came to be known as Anonima Sequestri (Kidnapping Anonymous). Cesare was abducted from his hometown, Pavia, in Northern Italy, just outside his father's Citroen dealership. Cesare was hidden in a garage near Pavia for ten days, before being transferred to Aspromonte, moving to three different locations during his captivity. In a book he published after his release, he described his prisons as being 'holes', dug in the ground; 2m long, 1m wide, and 1.5m high. At the foot of a tree, he was chained by the ankle and by the neck. The walls were lined with stones and a sheet of metal, covered in leaves, was the roof.

Cesare's kidnappers initially demanded eight billion Lira as ransom. After much negotiation, the sum was reduced to one billion Lira; which the Casella family paid in August 1988, but Cesare was not released. After more time, the kidnappers asked for another five billion Lira, which the family just could not afford. Cesare's father Luigi was a car dealer, and his mother Angela was a secretary for the family business. The Italian State would not allow the Casellas to raise the money, freezing their bank account and assets, as they feared paying the ransom would only encourage further abductions for money.

In June 1989, Angela Casella had had more than enough, extremely worried in the seventeen months since her son had been kidnapped, and with only infrequent contact with the kidnappers, she made up her mind to go down to Calabria herself to plead for and win the solidarity of the Calabrese women. She went through the towns and villages of Aspromonte, Calabria; chaining herself in the piazze and sleeping in a tent, trying to communicate to the locals the horrific conditions her son was being kept in. The media publicised her plight and Angela was dubbed Mamma Coraggio, for her braveness and courage to stand up to those who had taken her son.

Finally, in December of 1989, the police caught and arrested one of the kidnappers as he went to collect half a billion Lira in ransom money. The other kidnappers now felt threatened by the police and with all the publicity, could not hide the boy any longer. On the 30th of January 1990, after a terrifying 743 days in captivity, Cesare Casella was released. The man they caught during the ransom collection would be the only kidnapper the police would ever find. Cesare would go on to write a book about his ordeal and Mamma Coraggio had a brief stint in politics before the family settled down to a quiet, normal life.

Angela Casella passed away in December 2011. What an amazing mother. What an amazing woman.

Rita Atria

On the 26th of July 1992, a young seventeen year old Italian girl committed suicide. This is Rita Atria's story.

Where talking is met with deadly silence: In a small town on a Sicilian hilltop, a young woman could no longer keep quiet after the Mafia shot dead first her father, then her brother. Clare Longrigg reports on the courage, the fear and the tragic death of Rita Atria.

by Clare Longrigg, The Independent, Monday 21 September 1992.

NICOLO ATRIA and Piera Aiello were married in Partanna, a little hilltop town in the beautiful and fertile Val del Bellice, in western Sicily. When their baby was three, they moved to Montevago, a village near Agrigento, and set up their own pizzeria.

On the day of the opening, in June last year, they held a modest celebration, and invited a few neighbours. The guests departed early. As Nicolo was clearing away, a man walked into the restaurant and shot him. Nicolo died in Piera's arms. He was 24.

It was a settling of scores between Mafia clans, and people knew better than to interfere. Nicolo's father, Vito, a shepherd, had been shot dead in 1985 by a hitman from a rival family. Nicolo was 18 at the time, the only son, and he talked obsessively about avenging his father. He probably knew who the murderer was; perhaps, in his eagerness to be taken seriously, he had talked too much about his vendetta.

The police made half-hearted inquiries into Nicolo's death, but were greeted by silence. This is Mafia heartland, and nobody talks to the police, not even to ask the time of day. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for Nicolo's sister. Rita was 18, a quiet girl, ordinary-looking, short, with dark brown hair and black eyes. Her father and now her brother had been murdered, and she knew that the killers were free and had nothing to fear: Mafia hitmen are seldom arrested and almost never tried for murder.

Rita had been timid and unassuming, always in the background of small-town life. Unable to suppress her grief and anger any longer, she took her revenge. She disobeyed the Mafia's most powerful, unwritten law - instilled into her from her earliest childhood. A month after her brother's murder, she went to the police with his widow, and talked.

The police took the women straight to Paolo Borsellino, the magistrate conducting investigations into Mafia activity in the west of Sicily. Rita's anger came out in a torrent of words. She told Borsellino about the war between the Mafia families of Partanna, in which 30 people have died in the past few years; she named the heads of the most powerful families. She named the men who had killed her father and her brother. Borsellino questioned her about Partanna's most notorious unsolved murder: the shooting of the deputy mayor in 1983. Rita told him what every other resident of Partanna believed, but would not say: that the former mayor had killed his own deputy.

Last October the police made their move. Ten people were imprisoned for Mafia crimes on the evidence of Rita Atria's testimony, and in the following months, 20 more mafiosi were behind bars. When her mother found out that Rita was collaborating with the police, she threw her out. It did not matter that her own son's killer was to be brought to justice; as far as she was concerned, the police were on the wrong side of the law. Borsellino was afraid the Mafia would discover the identity of his source and try to silence her. Rita was taken to a seventh-floor flat on the outskirts of Rome, where the only people she knew were her police guards. Borsellino became her lifeline.

On Sunday 19 July, Paolo Borsellino was blown up on the doorstep of his mother's house in Palermo. Italy reeled with the shock. Rita, alone in the apartment in Rome, read the papers and saw the mangled cars and bodies on television. A week later, she locked herself into the apartment and wrote a note, which said: 'I am devastated by the killing of Judge Borsellino. Now there's no one to protect me, I'm scared and I can't take any more.' Then she threw herself out of the window.

It took two days for the newspapers to trace this anonymous suicide - no one in the apartment block knew the girl on the seventh floor, and no one but Borsellino and his colleagues had seen her for months. Anti-Mafia campaigners instantly adopted Rita as a martyr. The unknown heroine was splashed across every front page, but no one had a picture of her.

The road to Partanna winds through the rich countryside, past fields of melons and corn. As you approach the small hilltop town, the road rises in a grandiose arc and curls into a massive spaghetti junction. But this astonishing construction does not actually lead into the town. You have to circle the summit and go down again, turn down a side street and enter the town on the old, broken road.

Partanna was partially destroyed by earthquakes in 1968, and, after almost 10 years, the money began to arrive to rebuild it. Rivers of money, from the EC and the state, went straight into the pockets of the Mafia. Individuals were paid to rebuild their own palatial villas. The approach road with no exit appeared, while the church roof still lies where it fell.

On the day of Rita Atria's funeral, journalists and anti-Mafia campaigners arrived from Palermo and wandered about in the blistering heat, trying to find out when the ceremony would take place. There was a confusion about the proceedings that heightened the mutual suspicion between the townsfolk of Partanna and the unwelcome visitors. At the town hall, they said Mass would be held at noon. At the church, a man said there would be no funeral for Rita.

At one o'clock, Don Calogero Russo, the parish priest, stepped out to the vestry in the middle of another funeral, and was taken aback to find a group of women waiting for him, demanding to know what was happening and when the funeral would be. 'These are terrible times. It's a cruel world. What a dreadful thing to happen,' he said in an unctuous voice. 'We won't be saying Mass for the poor girl, her family doesn't want us to.'

This was difficult to believe: there had been no sign of a single member of Rita's family since the news of her death had broken, and her sister-in-law, who had gone to the police with her, was still in hiding. The women were indignant. As they walked away, one remarked that a priest who would not say Mass for a girl who had betrayed the Cosa Nostra must be a mafioso. Another said that because Rita had committed suicide, the priest would not bury her in holy ground.

The citizens of Partanna seemed rather inclined to forget who Rita Atria was. But a bar owner was more helpful. She said that Rita's mother was in the local hospice for the poor, being looked after by the nuns. 'She's only 50, but they say she's gone mad. I'm not surprised after what has happened.'

The hospice is surrounded by 20ft walls, with a solid steel gate and electronic surveillance. A voice on the entryphone beneath the eye of a video camera shrieked at the outsiders to go away.

At five o'clock the entrance to the cemetery was blocked by television cameras and press photographers. Journalists and anti-Mafia campaigners outnumbered the local mourners, and searched frantically for anyone who had known the dead girl. A strangled howl among the tombs sent the press corps half-running towards Rita's family grave. The mother? But the old woman in black, grey hair wild about her crumpled face, was not related. A group of women from Partanna looked on uneasily. They all said they didn't know Rita Atria, but it was a pity, such a young girl . . .

To a brief burst of applause, Rita's coffin came unsteadily down the path. It was carried by a dozen women from Palermo, heroines of the anti-Mafia movement who jostled for position to pay homage to their dead sister. At the rear was Michela Buscemi, who had taken her brothers' mafioso killers to court; leading the mourners was Letizia Battaglia, who spent two years photographing the shattered corpses of Mafia victims, in protest against Cosa Nostra.

The coffin was followed by the mayor and three carabinieri in uniform, bearing a standard - it had been decided, at short notice, that Rita was an official heroine. Father Russo celebrated Mass under a piercing blue sky, the cyprus trees rustled by a gentle breeze. The small crowd filtered through the graves, standing on the tombs to get a better view. The mayor gave a long speech about Rita's bravery, without once mentioning the Mafia.

Father Russo recited: 'Pardon your servant for her sins. . . .' 'Rita non ha peccato, ha parlato,' cried out one of the protesters. 'Rita did not sin, she talked. And what she said was the truth.' There was a shocked silence, then a ripple of cautious applause.

Rita was not the first to talk. In recent years, a number of women from Mafia families have denounced the killers of their husbands or sons. All of them have been ostracised by their families as a result, many have had their livelihoods destroyed. When Michela Buscemi testified against the killers of her brothers, Salvo and Rodolfo, her bar in Palermo was blown up and her mother disowned her; it was not until her four-year-old daughter's life was threatened that she withdrew her case. Pietra Lo Verso's husband fell foul of a Mafia boss and was shot dead in a massacre that killed eight people. She took his killers to court; as a result, customers deserted her shop, her parents cut her out of their lives, and her sons will not allow her to speak to anyone.

During his last investigations, Judge Borsellino maintained that the only effective weapons in the war against the Mafia were the pentiti - the 'penitent' mafiosi who, out of fear or revenge, revealed the inside workings of the impenetrable organisation - and the innocent members of Mafia families who knew the names of killers and bosses. He knew what would happen to a woman who betrayed her family to the police, and he used to give his 'penitents' personal support, remembering birthdays and Christmas presents for the children. Just before he died, he had requested better protection for these informers.

When Rita Atria's funeral was over, the journalists, giving up hope of finding anyone who had known her, interviewed each other outside the cemetery gate. But as the people of Partanna edged back up the hill to their homes, one woman spoke up. 'I didn't know Rita, but I came to her funeral because I believe in what she did,' she said rapidly as the reporters closed in around her, wielding microphones. 'We are all to blame for her death, because of our silence. But what happened to her is not going to change anything around here. It's not going to make anyone else talk.'

Source: The Independent

Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, and Rita Atria

This year is the 20th anniversary of the deaths of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two brave men who fought against the mafia, convicting more than 300 criminals. The two Palermo prosecutors were childhood friends who grew up to risk their lives bringing the members of the notorious Cosa Nostra to justice. This photograph was taken just months before their murders, in a moment of calm framed by the immense pressure of their situation. This image is now in almost every Italian judicial office, and in many schools and city halls throughout Sicily; reflecting just how influential and inspirational they were.

On the 23rd of May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, together with his wife Francesco Morvillo and three of their bodyguards, were tragically killed on highway 29, between Palermo and the airport. The mafia had planted the bomb to end the life of the man who had jailed so many in the maxi-trials. Falcone had been one of the first to follow the 'money trail' of the mobsters and was a major part of the exposure of massive heroin trade that was disguised by the front of pizza parlours.

Just months after the assassination of his friend Falcone, on the 19th of July, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by a car bomb in Via D'Amelio, near his mother's home. Borsellino left behind his wife, Angela Piraino Letto, one son, and two daughters.

A week after Borsellino's death, on the 26th of July, Rita Atria committed suicide. Atria was a young woman born into a Mafia family who had broken the code of omertà, working closely with Borsellino as she named the men of the rival Mafia who had killed her father and brother. Although she was aiming to bring their murderers to justice, Atria's own mother disowned her; for to her, like to many Mafia families, the police are always the enemy. With her brother's widow, Piera Aiello, and the help of Borsellino, Atria testified against the Mafiosi; and in doing so, endangered her own life, leading to her relocation to a hidden position in Rome. Abandoned by her family, Borsellino had been her father figure, supporting her in her ordeal. But when he was killed, Atria felt overwhelmingly terrified and unprotected; throwing herself out of her apartment window. She was only seventeen.

Salvatore Riina, the godfather of the Corleonesi Mafia was sentenced for life imprisonment for sanctioning the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, alongside numerous other crimes.

'È normale che esista la paura, in ogni uomo, l'importante è che sia accompagnata dal coraggio. Non bisogna lasciarsi sopraffare dalla paura, altrimenti diventa un ostacolo che impedisce di andare avanti.'

'It is normal that there is fear, in every man, the important thing is that it is accompanied by courage. We must not be overwhelmed by fear, otherwise it becomes an obstacle to moving forward.'

- Paolo Borsellino