Authors: Tom Behan
I really begged him. I remember we were in the kitchen, and I told him: ‘Look, Peppino, this is a terrible period. These people are killing each other as well, nowadays they’ve got no respect for anyone. Why don’t you stop
what you’re doing – why don’t you go to Bologna?’ – I said that because I knew he had friends there. ‘You could build a political organisation there, just as you want, and once it’s grown you could come back to Sicily.’ But I was just clutching at straws. He turned round, raising one of the fingers of his hand, and he said: ‘They can all dance on this.’
Deep down, Peppino was paying a heavy price for his commitment. There was no end of ways in which the Mafia could try to ‘get’ to him, so perhaps the only way to survive was absolute self-control. Graziella Iacopelli, then a teenager, who knew him slightly remembers, ‘Peppino wasn’t the kind of person who easily let himself go.’ She recalls, ‘he always used to dress in black’, and she used to see him walking along the Corso, but in such a way that you could see his nervous energy; he would bob and weave as he walked almost like a boxer does in the ring. Another teenager at the time, Margherita Galati, says: ‘He always used to bite his nails.’ This was perhaps one of the few slight chinks in his armour, otherwise: ‘Peppino was very withdrawn. And sometimes his loneliness really touched me.’
The amateur actor Gaspare Cucinella knew him better because in this period he was working closely with Peppino on the
Crazy Wave
programme for Radio Aut:
He always had his mind elsewhere, preoccupied with something or other. He was never calm, and that’s why his life in this dirty filthy town was so difficult . . .
He was alone, totally alone . . .
Peppino worked himself too hard. Inside, he was falling to bits. He was on his own – totally – and this loneliness made him very sad. Physically he had become very weak, he hardly ate anything, sometimes he was put on an intravenous drip to pick himself up.
Near the end of election campaign Cucinella bumped into Peppino and found him tired and disappointed, so ‘I suggested that he come and stay at my house for a couple of weeks, to get away from such a worrying environment. He said that he couldn’t, he had to see the election campaign through, and that in any case there was no need to worry.’
Soon after the calling of council elections something had happened that raised the political temperature even further: former Prime Minister Aldo Moro was kidnapped in Rome by the Red Brigades. It was a brutally efficient action: five bodyguards were killed, and the Christian Democrats’ most senior statesman was now in a self-styled ‘people’s prison’ facing a ‘trial’, at the end of which nearly everybody expected him to be sentenced to death. At the same time, the Red Brigades demanded the opening of negotiations for the release of some of their members held in prison.
To cynical Christian Democrats this was a gift – after all, if politicians were prepared to do deals with
Mafiosi
then it was clear they had very little morals. First of all, for as long as Moro was held they could milk public sympathy because their leader was facing execution by terrorists. Secondly, and this went on for much of the 1970s, right-wing politicians and their friends in the media could insinuate that the Communist Party was in sympathy with ‘the Reds’.
Rather than stressing their total lack of any links with terrorism, and exposing the Christian Democrats’ cynical exploitation of their leader’s personal nightmare, the Communists dutifully played the role assigned to them: a week before the election a local Communist MP gave a speech in Cinisi in which he attacked ‘the mummy’s boys, the dangerous accomplices of terrorists’. The end result that was hoped for was that all opposition to the Christian Democrats would cease, given the need – in the Communist Party’s eyes – for ‘national unity’ to face ‘the terrorist threat’.
Not for the first time, Peppino wrote on behalf of Proletarian Democracy a condemnation of the Red Brigades, which he defined as:
government would enjoy the consensus it has so cynically sought by refusing to negotiate and ratcheting up the strongest threat possible to national security . . . Until the last possible moment we will repeat our proposal to negotiate. It isn’t only Moro’s life that is at stake: a dramatic situation of gang warfare must be avoided in our country. Mass struggles must become the driving force of social transformation.
In the midst of this hostage crisis that was followed throughout the world, Peppino and others didn’t forget about their own ‘enemy within’, the Mafia. They mounted a photographic exhibition along the Corso – dozens of panels roughly two feet by four feet. Called ‘Exhibition About our Territory’, it illustrated and explained in great detail the local council’s corruption and collusion with the Mafia. Displayed as it was on the main street, the whole town could not avoid seeing in great detail the dirty linen of local politicians being washed in public.
It was clear that these ‘mummy’s boys, the dangerous accomplices of terrorists’ were a force to be reckoned with. Otherwise why, three weeks before polling day, was sugar poured into the petrol tank of Peppino’s car, with which he planned to drive around with a loudspeaker making electoral announcements? After all, what would be the point in damaging the activities of a candidate who stood no chance?
The strength of the election campaign could be seen when Peppino gave his final speech on the Corso. Even though it was raining there were hundreds of people, perhaps close to a thousand. This speech was being held at the same time as one by Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Sicilian Christian Democrats (who would be murdered by the Mafia two years later), who was due to speak in the square in front of the council building. Shortly before Mattarella began speaking, two people went up the Corso and saw there were just a few dozen people getting ready to hear Sicily’s most powerful politician. Margherita Galati’s recollections end with perhaps a bit of an understatement: ‘When Peppino gave his final campaign speech it was packed, and he was very explicit about naming names. He had created widespread consensus and this worried certain people.’
Petty censorship also illustrated the fear his candidacy had created. During the campaign Peppino gave an interview to a local radio station in Terrasini, but they bleeped out the word ‘Mafia’ every time he used the expression ‘Christian Democracy is Mafia’. Despite all these difficulties at least Peppino’s campaign had Radio Aut, and they made full use of it. In such a tense period, Felicia remembers: ‘I didn’t have the courage to listen to it. Sometimes Giovanni switched it on and I told him: ‘For the love of God, switch it off’.’ In their last broadcast before election day, Peppino and the rest showed that they would not stop attacking the Mafia. It was also clear, once again, that they knew all the council’s dirty secrets:
[WHISPERED]
1st voice: Ssshhh! Quiet! The electoral rules committee is meeting in Mafiopoli. They’re dividing up the cake.
2nd voice: Ah the cake – and there’s a bit for everyone.
1st voice: No, there’s not! They’re only dividing it up amongst themselves. And they’re dividing up the returning officers.
2nd voice: Shit! What’s it all mean?
1st voice: They get paid – 40,000 lire each.
2nd voice: They’re all going bla-bla-bla. What’s it mean?
1st voice: They’re dividing up the returning officers on the basis of how many votes every party is expected to get. And it seems the party of the advanced left [the Communist Party] took part in this secret meeting – just like the ones held by the Red Brigades. And now we can bring you the official results of who the returning officers will be.
2nd voice: Christian Democrats – 27, with nine to the advanced left. We can now bring you the latest
news: the Christian Democrats have told Don Tano they’re willing to give him all 27 returning officers, but we don’t know whether Don Tano Seduto has accepted their offer (cow noises).
Three nights after this radio broadcast about election irregularities, Fara Bartolotta came back home after midnight. She shared her house, just outside Cinisi station, with her nephew Peppino. She didn’t look in his room because Peppino often came home late as well, so she went straight to bed.
An hour later the driver of the midnight train from Palermo stopped his locomotive out near the airport. He climbed down and saw the line was twisted and broken, but luckily the train hadn’t jumped the tracks. He started to search in the dark; Peppino’s car was parked nearby. It quickly became clear to him a bomb had gone off. Several sticks of dynamite had exploded, and human remains were scattered over a wide area.
Peppino’s Aunt Fara got up early the next morning, about 5.30am, and noticed that he had not come back home. Worried by something so unusual, she rushed off to the house of her sister, Felicia.
Back at the railway lines, the human remains strewn around the railway tracks were identified as belonging to Peppino, dead at just 30 years old.
Ammazzarono
. At around 7am a separate police squad was sent to Aunt Fara’s house. Not finding her there, they went on to her sister’s house – a total of four vans went to his mother’s house. Fara was taken back to search the house where Peppino lived. Like any political activist Peppino had lots of books, leaflets and notes scattered around his room.
One of the books they impounded had now taken on a lot of symbolic importance:
Anatomy of Human Destructiveness
was written by the German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, a very popular writer among left-wingers in the 1960s. Fromm started from the fact that humans are the only species that inflicts pain and torture on others, the only animal that is violent when there is no threat, and tried to understand why. He concluded that this violence generally reached excessive levels only in the industrial era; human aggression is the inevitable outcome of a social system that seems actively designed to suppress positive outlets such as love and compassion, and to embed individuals as a cog in a machine.
The police, meanwhile, finished their search and left at about 8am. Back out near the airport, the police were getting ready to evacuate the site, even though they had received the first call about the incident just over four hours earlier. The remains of Peppino’s body had been collected very hurriedly, and the track was repaired immediately. With hindsight, such eagerness to lose vital evidence was odd to say the least – after all, somebody had just been blown to bits for reasons that weren’t immediately clear.
One piece of vital evidence was found, but it remained overlooked for many years. The council gravedigger who had been asked by the police to collect Peppino’s remains had called them over to a small barn very near the explosion. Inside there were fresh bloodstains on two stones, and a trail of blood on the floor heading towards the door. The obvious presumption was that Peppino was wounded or killed inside, and then dragged out, therefore he couldn’t have ignited any sticks of dynamite a hundred metres away on the railway tracks.
At around this time, 8am, Peppino’s friends were arriving because they had heard what had happened. As soon as they approached the area a police superintendent saw them and said ‘give me your details’. Once he had written them down in a little notebook he curtly told them: ‘Go to the police station, we want to question you’. A line of police officers stopped them from walking onto the railway tracks, yet behind that line they could see ordinary people, people they knew from Cinisi, wandering about and satisfying their curiosity. This was the first of many negative signals from the police.
At around the same time in Partinico Gino Scasso was woken up and heard the word used so often in Cinisi: ‘
ammazzarono’
. ‘Who?’ ‘Peppino’.
Although he speaks very slowly, and some people would call him dopey, the first thing Scasso did was to go to the Proletarian Democracy branch and burn all records of party membership. The man who had been killed had been standing as a Proletarian Democracy councillor, and the man burning party records was already a councillor for the same party in the next town. What was the connection between the dead man and the burning of party records? There was none, of course, but as Scasso explains: ‘I knew immediately what kind of climate would be created, I knew immediately in which direction the police would take their investigations.’
Back in Cinisi, when some of Peppino’s friends arrived at the police station for questioning, they noticed Peppino’s car was already parked outside – a police officer must have driven it there. Anybody could touch it, adding new fingerprints or rubbing out others. The direction in which the police were taking the investigation became clear once the questioning began. Peppino’s brother Giovanni endured a five-hour session that morning. They told him that his brother had ‘died on the job’, in the sense that he was a terrorist who was preparing a bomb. The statement Giovanni signed at midday revealed the kind of questions the police were asking: ‘I have never seen my brother handling dynamite or other terrorist weaponry. He was against terrorism, practically everyone knows this. Until I see conflicting ballistic evidence I am convinced my brother was deliberately killed, and that those responsible wanted to make his death look like an accident which occurred when he was preparing a terrorist attack.’
Giovanni’s girlfriend Felicetta also endured a long session. What she said in her statement at 2.30pm revealed a second line of police inquiry: ‘it does not seem possible to me that he committed suicide; neither do I believe him capable of carrying out a terrorist attack.’ Further on she added: ‘I do not have strong arguments to back up what I have said above. I can say that he was against acts of violence.’
Naturally these young people were shocked and devastated by Peppino’s death. Furthermore, they must have been deeply confused and disturbed by what the police were making them talk about. But despite the formal language of police statements, the words ‘I do not have strong arguments to back up what I have said’ show the kind of pressure they were being put under.
Years later another young man questioned that day, Giovanni Riccobono, explained in a hearing of the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission how they were treated: