Prop Guns

The danger of laughing at men who need to be feared: the story of a rebellion built on ridicule.

Giuseppe "Peppino" Impastato.

At 3:45 in the morning, train engineer Gaetano Sdegno stopped the train after feeling an unusual vibration in the locomotive. When he climbed down, he found twisted rails and charred railroad ties. Half an hour later, police officers and nocturnal onlookers arrived on the outskirts of Cinisi. With the first light of dawn, what had seemed like an act of vandalism turned into a homicide investigation — or at the very least, a suicide inquiry. Human remains were found scattered several meters away from the tracks. The body was identified immediately.

The morgue attendant was there as well. He had arrived almost at the same time as the police. His work did not consist solely of collecting human remains. While combing through the area, he found three sets of keys — a fourth would later appear in the hands of a police officer — next to a bloodstained rock inside a small shack a few meters from the tracks.

According to investigators, the victim had died while handling explosives as he attempted to place a bomb on the railway tracks. By midday, the local press had leaked the rest of the report: “Between approximately 12:30 and 1:00 a.m. on 9 May 1978, a person currently unknown, but presumably identified as Giuseppe Impastato (...), who was aboard his FIAT 850 automobile at kilometer 30+180 of the Trapani–Palermo railway line in order to place a bomb there, was himself torn apart when the device exploded.”

The Pedagogy of Terror

In territories controlled by the mafia, terror takes different forms. In Cinisi and throughout most of Sicily, the Cosa Nostra uses each of them at precisely the right moment. Physical violence is the most visible one and is within reach of any hitman in the service of the mafia. But when used excessively, it loses effectiveness and becomes vulgar. The mafia ceases to be what it is and turns into a gang of savages obsessed with keeping their trigger fingers exercised.

Another tool is corruption. The money the mafia earns is generally spent on luxury goods — wasted because of their permanent condition as fugitives — reinvested into the business, and used to buy loyalties. A far subtler method than physical violence, but one that generates far less public shock than corpses lying in the streets.

The third tool is fear. The sensation of living inside a mafioso panopticon — a structure that seems to see and hear everything — produces a form of self-surveillance, and more often than not, that self-surveillance is profitable. Beyond facilitating business and money, fear creates an intimidating image that both insiders and outsiders mistake for respect.

Only the force of the State can confront mafia violence. Against money, there is ethics in public life. But against fear, something unexpected appeared in the Cinisi of the 1970s: mockery.

Especially when it came from an heir to the mafia itself.

A Prince Who Abdicated

Peppino refused to become a prince of the mafia. His family name made it possible. As in the Middle Ages, when two families unite through marriage, power, resources, and prestige grow. Peppino’s aunt had married Cesare Manzella, an important figure within the Cosa Nostra and one of the first men to establish a heroin route between Sicily and the United States.

In Cinisi, the distance between everyday life and the mafia was almost nonexistent. As a child, Peppino spent much of his time around mafiosi. To him, his uncle was not the architect of the first Interprovincial Commission of the Cosa Nostra, but simply a respected man who, alongside others, organized the life of the town. When childhood grows too close to violence, horror ceases to feel extraordinary.

Death was always somewhere around Peppino, but the bomb that killed his uncle during the first mafia war marked much of his future path. Giovanni, Peppino’s younger brother, later recalled the feelings and first impressions of a teenager experiencing the mafia in the rawest possible way: “Is this the mafia? If this is the mafia, then I will fight it for the rest of my life.”

But the struggle had already begun. Like many adolescents of his generation, Peppino found in politics an accelerator for emotions. He became active in different currents of Italian socialism, all of them deeply shaped by ongoing debates over their relationship with Soviet Stalinism.

The Mafia Is a Mountain of Shit

La idea socialista was the newspaper Peppino founded in 1965, where he first began publicly expressing his condemnation and rejection of the mafia, which he identified as the most decomposed element of the capitalist system. In its pages, he denounced the displacement of peasants and the destruction of cultural heritage so that mafia-linked companies — through permits granted by the municipality — could erect poorly built buildings of questionable aesthetic dignity.

The newspaper was shut down for more than a year by order of a judge connected to the mafia, but when the mimeograph rollers began turning again, Peppino and his comrades launched themselves headfirst against the mafia. In that new edition, a front-page article written by Peppino bore the title: “The mafia is a mountain of shit.” In Cinisi, nobody spoke about the mafia that way. In a town governed by the mafia, the phrase amounted to a public insult. Over time, it became one of the defining slogans of anti-mafia culture and ceased to belong to Peppino alone.

The rift with his father grew immense and Peppino was forced to leave home, although his domestic exile did not prevent him from continuing his political activity, especially in opposition to the mafia. He joined movements opposed to the construction of a third runway at Palermo–Punta Raisi Airport, controlled by the Cosa Nostra and transformed into a strategic hub for heroin trafficking to the United States. He also founded cultural spaces for young people shaped by the cultural transformations of the era, increasingly distant from Sicilian traditions and, above all, from those of the mafia.

In 1977, Peppino suffered one of the most painful events of his life. His father died in a car accident. It was never determined whether it was truly an accident or the murder of a mafioso incapable of controlling his own son. Despite having grown distant from Peppino, his father still tried to protect him from the organization to which he himself belonged. At the funeral, Peppino once again defied the mafia: in front of everyone, he refused to shake their hands — including that of Gaetano Badalamenti, the new boss of the Cosa Nostra in Cinisi.

The Danger of Making People Laugh

That was one of Peppino’s first direct challenges to Badalamenti. Then came the radio.

Together with his fellow activists, he set up a small radio station whose signal could be heard across several nearby towns. There, he launched a program devoted to ridiculing mafiosi, politicians, and especially Badalamenti. In one of the station’s most memorable broadcasts, Western a Mafiopoli, Peppino and his comrades parodied a conversation between the mayor of a mafia town and the mafioso Tano Seduto — the nickname through which they turned Badalamenti into a public caricature.

The mockery directed at Badalamenti coincided with a period of extreme fragility for the mafia boss. His ability to impose fear was beginning to slip through his fingers.

And within the mafia, losing the monopoly on fear is often a death sentence.

To Kill and To Lie

Municipal elections were scheduled in Cinisi for May 14, 1978, and Peppino was running as a candidate for the Proletarian Democracy party. These were tense days, shaped not only by the campaign but above all by events unfolding in Rome: the Red Brigades — a far-left militant organization — had been holding former Prime Minister Aldo Moro hostage for several weeks. The campaign kept Peppino in the streets all day, moving between meetings and political activities, but it made no sense for him to simply disappear. In the early hours of May 9, after filing a missing person report with the police, his comrades searched Cinisi and nearby towns looking for information. Bad news travels fast.

Shortly before dawn, they received word that a body had been found, and their worst fears became reality. When they arrived at the railway tracks, authorities confirmed that the body was Peppino’s and attempted to convince them that he had died while trying to place a bomb. Indignation and grief became impossible to contain.

But that very same day, another assassination absorbed the attention of all Italy. The body of Aldo Moro was found in the trunk of a car, riddled with bullets. Moro’s murder, only a few hundred kilometers from Cinisi, ended up being used by the police to portray Peppino as a terrorist and divert the investigation.

One day after his death, Peppino’s funeral was held. Nearly fifteen hundred people marched to his family home. After the ceremony, friends and neighbors returned to the railway tracks and discovered more bloodstained stones and additional remains of Peppino’s body. In the center of town, a banner was hung reading: “Peppino Impastato has been murdered. His long history as a revolutionary militant was exploited by murderers and ‘policemen’ in order to construct the absurd hypothesis of a terrorist attack. The murder has a clear name: MAFIA.”

On election day, many residents of Cinisi voted for Peppino after his death. The vote became a belated form of reparation.

Laughter Survived

Shortly after Peppino’s death, the new bosses of the Cosa Nostra expelled Badalamenti, forcing him to leave Sicily. He fled to Brazil. From there, the aging mafia boss, stripped of power, devoted himself alongside other fugitive mafiosi to trafficking cocaine and heroin into the United States. Five years later, he was finally arrested in Spain.

That same year, an investigation initiated by police chief Rocco Chinnici — himself assassinated shortly afterward by the mafia — and a ruling promoted by anti-mafia judge Antonino Caponnetto officially recognized that Peppino’s death had been a mafia murder, although the direct perpetrators had still not been identified. Nearly fifteen years after the assassination, a jailed mafioso decided to cooperate with the courts and accused Badalamenti and another mafioso of ordering Peppino’s murder. Both men were ultimately convicted for the crime.

The persistence of Peppino’s family, social organizations, and sectors of the judiciary dismantled the lies surrounding his death. Peppino’s mother and brother became leading figures in the anti-mafia movement. They succeeded in forcing the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission to acknowledge the obstruction carried out by police and judicial authorities during the early stages of the investigation. When Peppino’s mother died at the age of eighty-four, the Impastato family home — which had become a site of memory — was renamed “Casa Memoria Felicia e Peppino Impastato.”

Decades after his assassination, Peppino remains present in songs, films, books, and popular tributes. Even after death, Peppino continued doing what the mafia never tolerated: ridiculing it.