PEPPINO IMPASTATO: THE ANTI-MAFIA CULTURE

Giuseppe "Peppino" Impastato was an Italian socialist activist who stood up to the mafia in the town of Cinisi, on the island of Sicily. To this day, he remains a symbol of resistance and a reference point in the fight against the mafia. Using tools like art, music, and poetry, he helped shape what is now known as anti-mafia culture. Here is part of his story.

Giuseppe "Peppino" Impastato.

To enforce its rules, violence is one of the most common tools at the mafia’s disposal—but that doesn't mean it can use it under every circumstance. If the mafia were to impose a permanent state of physical violence (symbolic violence is always present), the feeling of safety and protection that it claims to offer would not be objectively sustainable. That is why the mafia must also rely on fear and the constant threat of violence. In order for these threats to be credible, the mafia’s reputation—if it can be said to have one—must be maintained at a certain level among its victims, whether they are clients or not. For instance, if the mafia fails to efficiently distribute criminal market shares, to protect and uphold each criminal organization in its assigned sector, or to prevent disputes among its clients and associates, or allows unauthorized criminal activities to take place, it begins to lose its credibility—and with it, its clientele. People will prefer not to waste money on a “service” that no longer fulfills its supposed purpose.

Beyond its tools, the mafia is surrounded by concepts, by an entire mafia dialect. Within this language, there is one word that is truly defining—a concept that is the very core of the mafia system and its means of survival and expansion: omertà. This term refers to the code of silence that people connected directly or indirectly to the mafia are expected to uphold. It is the silence that should ideally prevail both inside and outside of mafia organizations, a secrecy that walks hand in hand with fear, inspiring terror of both the known and the unknown. Another word, not specific to the mafia dialect but which has become its direct nemesis, is pentito. Literally translated as “repentant,” the term refers in legal and social contexts to a criminal who, once discovered and arrested, decides to collaborate with justice in exchange for a reduced sentence. To the mafia, however, a pentito is nothing less than a traitor.

Pentiti—the plural form—are those who break omertà, choosing to expose the secrets of their group in exchange for personal benefit. Perhaps their immediate biological family might also benefit, but doing so means betraying their sacred blood family. Typically, pentiti will confess to a number of crimes they themselves committed, and others committed by those closest to them—usually focusing their accusations on rival “brothers” within their criminal circle.

Since the mid-1980s, the presence of pentiti in courtrooms, testifying before judges, police, and journalists, has become increasingly common. There were pentiti as early as the 20th century, but their survival was rare. The figure of the collaborating witness, as they are known today in the Italian justice system, has become normalized over time—no longer surprising to anyone, except the future accused. What was unusual in the 1980s, and even more so in the 1970s, was to speak out against the mafia publicly—calling out mafiosi by name, nickname, and surname in political rallies, newspapers, and radio. Even more rare was mocking them. One who did just that—with the conviction that it was necessary to confront the mafia by exposing its figures, its very ethos, while defending the beauty and wisdom of culture—was a young Sicilian named Giuseppe Impastato.

Peppino at two years old with his father Luigi and his mother Felicia Bartolotta. Sicilian Center of Documentation Giuseppe Impastato.

In the small town of Cinisi, in the province of Palermo—the capital of the island of Sicily—Giuseppe “Peppino” Impastato was born on January 5, 1948, into a family with strong ties to the Cosa Nostra. On his father’s side, the family had a long tradition of agricultural work and the smuggling of those goods. His father, Luigi Impastato, became involved with the Cosa Nostra families in Cinisi from a young age. Peppino’s mother, Felicia Bartolotta, was also born in Cinisi, and much of her family was connected to the mafia. The marriage of Impastato and Bartolotta produced two more sons, both named Giovanni—the first died at the early age of three.

The Impastato family’s links to the mafia extended beyond the ties Luigi had forged in his youth, for which he had served three years in prison—convicted of smuggling—during the years of Mussolini’s regime. After leaving prison, Luigi resumed his mafia activities in food smuggling and became family-related to the local mafia boss of Cinisi, Cesare Manzella. Peppino’s aunt had married Manzella at a time when he was already a recognized mafia leader both in Italy and in the United States. In Chicago and surrounding areas, Peppino’s uncle had established a network of small but effective gambling houses used to launder money from pizzo (extortion) and heroin trafficking—from the Middle East, through Sicily, and ultimately into the veins of millions of Americans. When U.S. federal agencies began to focus on mafia activities on their soil, Manzella became one of the first and most prominent casualties of this awakening. He was forced to leave the country and returned to his hometown of Cinisi to resume his role as boss in situ.

The relevance of the Impastato name within the domestic sphere of the Cosa Nostra grew by osmosis alongside Manzella’s rising power. By 1958, Peppino’s uncle had become one of the initiators and members of the founding committee of the first Interprovincial Commission of the Cosa Nostra—a body in which a group of Sicilian mafia bosses sought to coordinate criminal activities and, above all, prevent or resolve internal disputes that could erupt within the organization. However, the Commission faced one failure after another and dissolved almost as quickly as it had been created.

Manzella’s exponential and symbolic rise began to collapse in the 1960s, coinciding with the relentless growth of the drug trade. Changes in the Cosa Nostra happen fast. Although such changes result from long-simmering, underground, interpersonal processes, the events that trigger them unfold in a matter of seconds—the time it takes for a bullet to leave a gun and pierce flesh, or the split seconds between the activation of a bomb and its deadly explosion. That subterranean process began in 1962, when a heroin shipment destined for the U.S. drug market—financed by Manzella himself along with Salvatore Greco and Angelo La Barbera, two of the most powerful mafia bosses in Palermo—arrived with far fewer kilograms than had been paid for in the Middle East. The intermediary in that transaction was another mafioso named Calcedonia Di Pisa, who was confronted by the defrauded parties before the Commission. Di Pisa claimed the missing heroin was due to the incompetence of the Corsican supplier. After a lengthy series of accusations and even longer defensive arguments, the Commission ruled that Di Pisa was not responsible for the shortfall. But the ruling failed to satisfy the defrauded mafiosi—and the next event was already about to unfold.

1952 - Commission for the festivities in honor of Santa Fara. From left to right: Leonardo Pandolfo, Cesare Manzella, Luigi and Masi Impastato, Sarino and Gaetano Badalamenti. Sicilian Center of Documentation Giuseppe Impastato.

The indiscreet yet timely inconvenience involving the heroin shipment would turn out to be only the latest in a long series of internal problems that plagued the Cosa Nostra at the time. These tensions increasingly targeted the powerful La Barbera family—controllers of much of Sicily’s capital city—as the scapegoats for breaking an unspoken code of honor and mutual restraint regarding territorial expansion into areas under the control of other families. The La Barbera clan’s open dissatisfaction with the Commission’s ruling on Di Pisa was seized upon by another boss, Michele Cavataio of the Acquasanta family. In January 1963, Cavataio ordered Di Pisa’s assassination in order to cast suspicion on the La Barbera family and deepen mistrust toward them within the Commission. Cavataio’s plan was executed with precision, and events escalated immediately. Peppino’s uncle was among the first to be killed: a car bomb packed with trinitrotoluene—TNT—blew Manzella’s body into pieces across an entire lemon grove in a radius of no less than one hundred meters. A wave of murders and car bomb attacks would continue until 1969, when a new massacre—the Strage di viale Lazio—put an end to the life of the man who had started the war (Cavataio) and, with it, the war itself.

The murder of his uncle would mark Peppino, still a teenager, for life—but his hatred for the mafia had already taken root at a young age. In scattered writings that resemble a kind of autobiographical account, Peppino himself would later state: "I got into politics around November 1965 for purely emotional reasons—basically, because I needed to react to a family situation that had become unbearable. My father, head of a small clan and member of a larger one with the typical traits of a late pre-industrial peasant society, had, since my birth, concentrated all his efforts on trying to impose on me his choices and his code of conduct." Many years later, his younger brother Giovanni would recall that, in the days following their uncle’s assassination, Peppino said: “This is the mafia? If this is the mafia, then I will fight it for the rest of my life.” From a young age, Peppino showed a keen interest in politics and began forming ties with members of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), particularly drawn by the party’s support for peasant land rights and by the emotional and intellectual bond he formed with the communist artist Stefano Venuti, who greatly influenced Peppino’s understanding of what the mafia was and what role it played in society.

The year 1965 was a whirlwind in Peppino’s political life. He left the PSI and joined another party, the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSIUP). That same year, along with fellow party members, he founded La Idea Socialista, a mimeographed newspaper through which Peppino began to publicly denounce and condemn mafia activity, which he identified as the most corrupt and intrinsic element of the capitalist system. In a pioneering tone, the newspaper reported on the issuing of urban construction permits to mafia-linked companies, which resulted in the destruction of cultural heritage sites and the displacement of large groups of peasants who had migrated to Palermo. After a series of publications and following a complaint by the mayor of Cinisi—a relative of a mafia boss—a judge connected to the Cosa Nostra imposed a fine on the activists, ordered the closure of the newspaper, and prevented it from being printed for over a year.

1968 - Peppino demonstrates in the courtyard of the municipal building in Cinisi, during the protests against expropriations for the construction of the third runway at Punta Raisi Airport. Sicilian Documentation Center Giuseppe Impastato.

Peppino himself would later reflect that the revolutionary year of 1968 had caught him off guard. He participated sporadically in student protests—centered in Sicily around the city of Palermo—but he felt overwhelmed by the transformations, debates, discussions, and crises that were shaking the socialist movement from within. Caught in a rollercoaster of anguish, euphoria, and joy, he oscillated between solitude and a burning need to engage with every political process he encountered. These erratic shifts in attitude—mirroring the political movements of the time—often earned him reprimands and sanctions from his party. It was also a time in which his yearning for love and his fear of freedom caused him suffocating emotional distress. He fell deeply in love and entered a relationship he would later describe as Kafkaesque: “I came out with broken bones and even less able to deal with the outside world.”

When Peppino and his comrades finally managed to restart their newspaper, they focused all their energy on exposing the mafia. In the very first issue of the revived publication, Peppino—known throughout Cinisi as "Impastato's son"—signed an editorial titled “The Mafia is a Mountain of Shit.” The article caused a major stir in Cinisi, especially within Peppino’s own family and among the mafia, who began to pressure Peppino’s father for failing to control his son. The audacity of that editorial—and particularly of that now-iconic phrase, which would become one of the most powerful slogans in the fight against the mafia—ultimately led to a rupture between Peppino and his father, forcing the young activist to leave home.

The first mafia war had resulted in a massive number of murders and attacks. Mafia families lost significant amounts of money, and the State had begun to take notice of the mafia’s activities. For one reason or another, by the mid-1970s, the mafia clans were compelled to establish a fragile yet effective peace that would last for roughly a decade. The widespread violence of the inter-family war had generated deep financial losses for all involved—but it also created opportunities for a select few to rise. One such beneficiary of the war—and of Manzella’s death—was Gaetano Badalamenti, who would become the new boss of Cinisi.

Even before rising to become one of the most powerful bosses in Cosa Nostra history, Badalamenti had long been organizing and managing drug trafficking operations—first heroin, then cocaine—through his mafia relatives based in the central United States. His level of influence in both the Cosa Nostra's criminal network and in Italian politics was so significant that judicial investigations and media reports of the time later placed him in Milan on the night of December 8, 1970, when a failed coup d’état was attempted. A year after that conspiratorial plot—hatched by princes, military officers, and mafiosi—Badalamenti was arrested for mafia-related crimes, along with Stefano Bontate, another historically significant mafia boss. Both men were released simultaneously three years later, returned to Sicily (Badalamenti to his native Cinisi), and—along with other bosses—succeeded in resurrecting the defunct Interprovincial Commission of Cosa Nostra, with Badalamenti assuming leadership.

In addition to his direct confrontation with the mafia, Peppino took on a prominent public role in leading citizen opposition in Cinisi and nearby areas against the construction of a third runway at the Palermo airport. The government’s justification for the project was based on the risks posed by strong winds, nearby mountains, and the sea—hazards that increased the likelihood of a plane crashing during takeoff or landing. From the outset, the project was slated to be carried out by companies controlled by the Cosa Nostra. The Punta Raisi Airport—today known as Falcone-Borsellino Airport—was already under mafia control. Since the 1960s, the airport had served as a gateway for heroin from the Middle East and cocaine from South America—and also as a departure point for those same drugs bound for the lucrative markets of the United States and the rest of Europe.

Peppino viewed politics as a means, not an end. That’s why, in mid-1976, together with a group of friends and comrades, he founded a cultural collective called Music and Culture. The organization was dedicated to political and cultural activities such as poetry readings, film screenings, and musical performances by local bands. These events brought together dozens of young people who were both eager and deeply moved by these new forms of cultural expression—forms that were radically different from Sicilian traditions and even more so from the mafia culture of the time. The following year, Peppino endured one of the most painful events of his life: his father Luigi died in a car accident, the circumstances of which were never fully clarified—leaving open the possibility that it had not been an accident at all, but rather a calculated move to eliminate the father of an anti-mafia activist. Despite being estranged from his son, Luigi had tried to protect Peppino from potential mafia reprisals. Just weeks before the fatal crash, Luigi had traveled to the United States to meet with his mafia relatives in a bid to both persuade Peppino to leave Cinisi and seek protection from the mafia so that they wouldn’t harm him or other family members. At his father’s funeral, Peppino once again defied the mafia by refusing to shake hands with Badalamenti himself, further escalating the danger he was in. His mother Felicia also urged him to leave Cinisi and move to California, but once again, Peppino refused.

1977 - Carnival at the “Music and Culture” nightclub. Sicilian Center of Documentation Giuseppe Impastato.

Together with several of his fellow members from the Music and Culture collective, Peppino founded the radio station AUT, broadcasting on frequency 98.800 MHz. The station operated from a structurally precarious building located on the outskirts of Cinisi, with just enough reach to be heard in several neighboring towns. It had multiple programs covering the schedule, but one in particular stood out: a show hosted by Peppino himself called Onda Pazza (The Crazy Wave). This show became known for its long, absurd, and satirical radio dramas through which Peppino denounced—and, above all, ridiculed—the mafia and the entire set of customs and values that sustained it. His mockery was especially directed at Badalamenti. One of the most memorable radio dramas from Onda Pazza aired on April 7, 1978, and was titled “Western in Mafiopoli.” In it, Peppino and his friend and comrade Salvo Vitale staged a fictional meeting between the mayor of "Mafiopoli" and the mafia boss of the town. The story clearly referenced their own hometown of Cinisi, portrayed as Mafiopoli, and mocked the mafia boss Badalamenti by calling him Tano Seduto (Sitting Tano, a parody of Sitting Bull).

These satirical attacks on the mafia—particularly on Badalamenti—came at a time when the boss was enjoying an economic boom, yet simultaneously faced deep internal crises regarding leadership and control within Cosa Nostra. Mafia members affiliated with families from the impoverished town of Corleone were beginning to move against the old guard, aiming to take control of the organization. Just like in the first mafia war fifteen years earlier, everything began with a murder. On March 16, 1978, boss Francesco Madonia—an ally of Totò Riina—was killed by order of Giuseppe Calderone, who was aligned with Badalamenti’s faction. Riina accused Badalamenti of orchestrating the murder and demanded that the Commission expel him, citing the violation of one of the few self-imposed rules of the mafia: no killing of another boss without the Commission’s authorization. After a brief deliberation, Badalamenti was expelled, and leadership of the Commission passed to Michele Greco, a boss closely aligned with the Corleone faction.

That same year, municipal legislative elections were held, and Peppino, now a member of the Proletarian Democracy party, ran as a candidate in his hometown of Cinisi. The campaign brought intense weeks of activity, with Peppino often in the streets, attending meetings and rallies. So initially, it didn’t raise alarms when he failed to show up to a scheduled meeting. But on the night of May 8, Peppino disappeared without a trace. As hours passed and he remained unreachable, his family and friends—aware of the constant danger he lived under—went to the police to report his disappearance.

At 3:45 a.m. on May 9, a train engineer on the outskirts of Cinisi felt the train vibrate strangely as it passed over the tracks. He stopped the locomotive, got out, and noticed that the tracks had been destroyed. A few minutes after he reported the incident, police, judicial authorities, and curious onlookers arrived at the scene. It quickly became clear that this was not just an act of vandalism: human remains were scattered around the area near the tracks. By around 7 a.m., two hours after the engineer Gaetano Sdegno had alerted the authorities, the judicial officials on-site began drafting the official report and noted that the likely victim was a young man named Giuseppe Impastato.

1977 – At the headquarters of “Radio Aut”. Sicilian Center of Documentation Giuseppe Impastato.

The judicial report stated that the death and the destruction of the tracks had been caused by the explosion of a bomb that detonated while being handled. The morgue attendant, who had been summoned almost as quickly as the police themselves, combed the area and found three sets of keys—a fourth set, belonging to the headquarters of the AUT radio station, was found by a police officer—and a bloodstained rock in a small outbuilding beside the tracks. None of this was recorded in the judicial report, and events began to unfold in an even more troubling manner.

Between 7 and 8 a.m., the Cinisi police raided the house where Peppino lived and the headquarters of AUT; meanwhile, the train tracks began to be repaired. By 10 a.m., the railway system on the Trapani–Palermo line was fully operational. Around midday, from Cinisi, a report was sent to the public prosecutor stating: “Between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m. on May 9th, 1978, an individual currently unidentified but presumed to be Impastato Giuseppe (...), who was in his FIAT 850 near kilometer 30+180 of the Trapani–Palermo railway line to plant a bomb, was torn apart by the explosion of said bomb.”

Although news of a failed terrorist attack would have likely drawn the attention of major media outlets at the time—even though it occurred in a small Sicilian town—by noon on May 9th, in Rome, the lifeless body of Aldo Moro was discovered in the trunk of a car. Moro, twice Prime Minister of Italy, had been kidnapped two months earlier by the Red Brigades. While Italy, Sicily, and the world learned how many bullets had been fired into the man in the trunk—who, at the time of his abduction, had been working to restructure the Italian political and governmental system through an alliance between the Christian Democrats and the Communists—the media and the people of Cinisi learned about the supposed attack in their town and the unacceptable, yet all-too-obvious connection this had to the death of Peppino.

Except for Vitale, one of Peppino’s closest friends and comrades, no one dared to speak up. On a wall in Cinisi, a sign was posted with the words: “Peppino Impastato has been murdered. His long history as a revolutionary activist was used by murderers and 'policemen' to advance the absurd hypothesis of a terrorist attack. (...) The murder has a clear name: MAFIA.”

Salvo’s courage, like that of a few others, lay in saying or writing what many already knew or suspected: that Peppino had not carried out any terrorist act, that he had never taken part in any act of violence, and that he had been killed for his political activism and, above all, for his mockery of and denunciations against the mafia.

On May 10th, the day after his death, the funeral was held. Nearly fifteen hundred people marched to the home of Felicia and Giovanni. After the procession ended, Peppino’s friends and comrades returned to the tracks where he had been killed and themselves found more bloodstained stones and additional body parts—some more than 250 meters from the site of the explosion.

The crime scene. © Franco Zecchin. Documentation Center of Sicily Giuseppe Impastato.

The trust that the people of Cinisi had in Peppino would become evident five days after his murder, during the municipal elections. To everyone’s surprise—but with his name still included on the ballots—Peppino and Proletarian Democracy received six percent of the votes in the Cinisi City Council elections. Part of the town had decided to go and vote for him as a gesture of tribute and reparation against the slanderous accusations made by representatives of the State, the Cosa Nostra, and the press. The mafia and its allies immediately felt the need to respond to this anonymous challenge from society, and to Giovanni and Felicia’s decision to file a formal complaint with the public prosecutor, demanding that the death be investigated as a murder. The triad of mafia, state officials, and journalists—or perhaps just the mafia—published excerpts from letters and texts in the Giornale di Sicilia, taken by police during the raid on Peppino’s home. These letters allegedly showed that he had suicidal tendencies, thus implying that his death could have been either an accident—while handling a bomb—or a suicide. The excerpts from Peppino’s private diary published in the paper referred to the real sense of despair that overwhelmed him politically, which in turn affected his overall state of mind.

“For the past nine months—the time required for a normal gestation—I have been reflecting on the possibility, or perhaps the need, to 'abandon' politics and life.” Peppino expressed deep disappointment with the leaders of the left, criticizing “the egoists and so-called creatives,” and declared he preferred “hardened criminals, thieves, prostitutes, rapists, murderers, and shameless people in general” over that kind of leadership.

Shortly after Peppino’s murder, Badalamenti was expelled from the Commission and forced to leave Cinisi. The mafia boss fled to Brazil, from where he continued coordinating cocaine and heroin shipments for the North American market alongside other Cosa Nostra members who, like him, were beginning to be hunted down by the man who would become the new capo of the Sicilian mafia and mastermind of the massacre that ended the first mafia war: Salvatore Riina. In 1984, the FBI arrested Badalamenti in Spain during a meeting with a relative from Illinois—who was the actual target of the FBI investigation. From a pizzeria, that relative oversaw the distribution of cocaine and heroin across much of the United States, with Badalamenti serving as his wholesale supplier. That same year, an investigation initiated by Rocco Chinnici—who would later be assassinated by the mafia—and a ruling by Judge Antonino Caponnetto—who would go on to lead the famous anti-mafia pool of Falcone, Borsellino, Di Lello, and Guarnotta—officially established that Peppino’s death had been a mafia murder, though without being able to identify those individually responsible for it.

On the walls of Cinisi, immediately after the assassination. Sicilian Documentation Center Giuseppe Impastato.

While Badalamenti was being extradited to the United States to await trial for drug trafficking and money laundering, Peppino’s family continued their long march and struggle for justice. In 1986, the Impastato family, along with the social and labor organizations that supported them, published their own investigation into Peppino’s murder alongside the book La mafia in casa mia ("The Mafia in My House")—an autobiography by Felicia in which she recounted her life story with the mafia and the absolute rupture she made with the mafiosi and their culture after her son’s assassination.

These publications and the growing social pressure led to the reopening of the investigation into Peppino’s death, and Badalamenti was officially named as a suspect in the crime. Almost ten years after the case was reopened, Salvatore Palazzolo—a member of Badalamenti’s mafia clan—was arrested. When he later chose to cooperate with the justice system, Peppino’s brother and mother asked the prosecutors handling the case to take his testimony, but the investigation was once again shelved. Two years later, in 1997, the family once again requested that the case be reopened and that responsibility be definitively assigned to Badalamenti and Palazzolo as the instigators of the crime. Palazzolo, in his role as a pentito (repentant mafia informant), accused Badalamenti and another mafioso with the same last name—Vito Palazzolo—of orchestrating Peppino’s murder. While the revelations of this mafioso moved the case forward, it was above all the persistent work and determination of Felicia, Giovanni, Peppino’s friends, and organizations like the Sicilian Documentation Center of Palermo—now named after Giuseppe Impastato—that led the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission to issue a report recognizing the initial obstruction by police and judicial authorities in uncovering the truth.

Amid these developments, the investigation and trial of Vito Palazzolo and Badalamenti came to an end. On March 5, 2001, Palazzolo was sentenced to 30 years in prison for the murder of Peppino. A year later—on April 11, 2002—Badalamenti was found guilty of Peppino’s assassination and sentenced to life imprisonment. In both trials, in addition to the testimony of Salvatore Palazzolo, statements from several other pentiti were used: Giovanni "il Scannacristiani" Brusca—one of the murderers of Judge Giovanni Falcone, Judge Francesca Morvillo, and their escorts; Giuseppe Marchese—one of the perpetrators of the 1981 Christmas Massacre; and Gaspare Asparino Mutolo—one of the killers of Salvatore Inzerillo, boss of the Passo di Rigano district in Palermo.

Felicia Bartolotta and Giovanni Impastato—Peppino’s mother and brother—became active anti-mafia campaigners after his death. They publicly broke off any remaining ties with family members connected to the Cosa Nostra and, as a result, suffered threats and attacks. But they never stopped. Together with Peppino’s friends and comrades, they founded Casa Memoria Peppino Impastato, which after Felicia’s death in 2004 was renamed Casa Memoria Felicia e Peppino Impastato. Felicia passed away at the age of eighty-eight, just two years after the convictions. Perhaps for Felicia, it was only after that brief breath of air—the verdicts—that she allowed herself to truly breathe again, and her body, finally, could begin to rest. Songs, films, books, and countless tributes continue to be made in memory of Peppino and Felicia—a son and a mother, an activist and a wife, an ordinary man and woman who helped trace the path of the anti-mafia struggle.