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It was a typical sultry and warm Sicilian night in Cinisi, when a young man, grabbed his younger brother and forced him to walk, arm in arm. They started walking from the porch of their house, and the young man kept counting his steps with tenacity and with an impetuous tone. “One! Two! Three!” he started counting and violated the silence of that night. He stopped on the 100th step, screaming one last time “One hundred!” His brother besides him, with his eyes looking down, in fear as they arrived in front of the house of the mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti.

This young man was Giuseppe Impastato, better known as Peppino,  and on that summer night of 1965, his father kicked him out of his house after he published an article on the newspaper “Socialist Idea” by him funded, which was titled “La Mafia e’ una montagna di merda!” (“The Mafia is a pile of shit!”). With this article, Peppino started his rebellious fight against the mafia and joined the Italian Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity.

Peppino, born January 5th 1948, has been one of the first Italian activists which have deliberately attacked the oppressions and criminal activities exerted by the mafia. He was courageous, and with tenacity he kept reveal the corruption and the cruelty of this criminal organisation, claiming that “ We need to rebel, before it is going to be too late, before we get used to their faces, before we won’t be aware of anything!”. His fight against the criminal system ,which was infiltrated into the roots of Sicilian politics, was obviously not well seen but, with the newspaper he funded, he started to gain the attention of educated young people which decided to embrace the fight against the Mafia and claim their inalienable right to live in a society without corruption and violence.

The attention that Peppino gained thanks to the “Socialist Idea” newspaper was still not enough to fight the old and established power of the mafia. His thrive and determination made him fund a local radio station in 1976. The infamous radio station was called “Radio Aut”, which was a free and self-funded. During his public protests Peppino was often accused of occupying public soil with no right, and therefore to express his message against the local bosses he used “Radio Aut” as a tool to comment, reveal and inform locals of the sinister activities of the boss Gaetano Badalamenti, which was the most influential mafia boss at the time. Peppino often used satire and irony in order to diminish the public perception of the bosses and to unveil the drug trafficking through the airport in Cinisi.

“Radio Aut” was an incredible platform to denounce how the Mafia affected the lives of the people in Cinisi. The Mafia and the boss Gaetano Badalamenti created an atmosphere of fear and “omertà”, where people accepted the abuse and the subjugation, which made them powerless in front of a corrupted political class, which was subject to the impositions of the bosses.

Peppino’s glorious cavalcade brought him to candidate himself, in 1978, for the elections of the local city council and joined the Proletarian Democracy party. His propaganda campaign was based on the idea of rebuilding the local community by starting up a new political class which was clean and intact, which would not encourage and support the business plans of the local criminality. His propaganda campaign was self-funded, with the contribution of the young people working for his radio station. Peppino had the support of the old school socialists but he also attracted young people with ideals of political correctness and justice.

However his campaign was not well perceived by Badalamenti and his men. Peppino’s bravery’s costed him his father’s life, who was assassinated, his family’s reputation but lastly and most importantly his life. Peppino was assassinated in the night between the 8th and 9th May 1978. With his body, the criminals tried to recreate a terroristic attack and damage his image. He was tied to train tracks with his body positioned upon some TNT, in order to make his death appear like a suicide. The press, the judges and the police hypothesised the staging of a terror attack conceived by the bomber who has ended up being the victim of his same plan. His death was obscured in those days because the corpse of Aldo Moro, president of the political party “Christian Democracy”, was found and the news created great commotion in the Italian people all around the country.

He received an unfair and disorganised trial, were the investigations from the police were inconclusive and poorly managed. His family and the people supporting Peppino’s cause battled for many years after his death, and only after 18 years this legal battle made the magistracy recognise Gaetano Badalamenti as the planner of the assassination, in 1997 an arrest warrant was issued, and after many vicissitudes, he was given a life sentence on April 11, 2002.

One hundred steps were in between his house and the house of the planner of his death. Throughout his whole life, one hundred steps separated the good from the bad. They lived on the same road, maybe they went to the same bar and perhaps they even bought meat from the same butcher. One was part of the other’s life. Gaetano saw Peppino grow up, he saw him raise his voice and scream that the mafia is a pile of shit, he saw him become an activist, a journalist, a man, a hero and finally he decided to end his life because too much bravery and too much justice were not appropriate in an environment oppressed by fear and forced to live in silence.

Peppino was different. Peppino decided to scream, yell and shout that the mafia was a pile of shit and his restless activism was suppressed. However his death didn’t stop his screams to spread into the minds of hundreds of thousands of people, and hopefully now his screams will have spread into your minds and I am sure that they will never become silent whispers.

Image credits: www.sardegnasoprattutto.com