La Mafia in Casa Mia

"This is a very, very sad story. It’s about a woman whose son was killed by a Mafioso called Gaetano Badalamenti. And both the family of this woman and Gaetano Badalamenti were from the same Sicilian town, Cinisi. The son was called Giuseppe (Peppino) Impastato. Peppino was killed in 1978 on the same day that the body of Aldo Moro, the kidnapped Italian prime minister, was found in Rome. So the story was completely neglected by the media. Peppino was a very Leftist, militant young man, and he was killed because he was running a local radio station on which he was revealing a lot of facts about the Mafia, and also making fun of Mafiosi and the politicians who colluded with them. So the Mafia simulated a terrorist accident: they tied Peppino up on a railway line and put dynamite under his body and blew him up. And the conclusion of the first inquest is that Peppino had been trying to carry out a terrorist attack and made a mistake and killed himself. Then there was a movement of people who worked very hard to review the case, until they succeeded in getting a conviction of the Cinisi Mafia boss, Gaetano Badalamenti. And the book is an interview with the mother, who was a poorly educated woman who came from a Mafia family and also married into a Mafia family. But as a result of her son’s death she disowned them publicly. It is a gruelling story, but you see the world from her point of view, you see how things happen, you see the kind of roles that Mafiosi play in their lives. Absolutely, it’s a whole new world. Pietro Grasso, the judge who is now in charge of the anti-Mafia agency, is an extremely able and determined man. There has been a long line of judges and anti-Mafia officials. When the Mafia killed one, the next one would pop up, saying, “I have to make good the sacrifice of my predecessor!” This started in 1979 with the assassination of Judge Cesare Terranova. And then it went on. They assassinated Chinnici, and Dalla Chiesa took up the fight and was killed. Then you had Falcone and Borsellino. They were assassinated and others took over. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And brutal. But that doesn’t mean it’s run by fools. They are interesting behaviorally, it’s an extreme test case of what humans are capable of. But certainly The Godfather did manage to glamorize their behavior and gave them a sense that they were not so petty, they were not so marginal, that they were not only uncouth hoodlums – but that there was a story of some universal value in what they did. Which is of course untrue. But it did have a tremendous impact on these guys."