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