money making in the 1960s: contracts awarded by public authorities. Once the contract to build the road was awarded the local Mafia demanded a rake-off for ‘protection’. The company refused, and for their pains their equipment was blown up twice – after which they started paying. But it was the workers who had to pay for their employers’ decision to agree to bribes: the company told them they would work an hour for free in order to finance the Mafia. The 54 workers, most of them union members, held a union meeting that was also attended by Venuti, and agreed to strike. Half an hour after Venuti left, Procopio Di Maggio arrived and told them: ‘Do be careful. You can see that we can put your heads where you’ve got your feet. So let’s try and do the right thing and just get food on the table – without contacting the union.’
The strike was called off, the Mafia had won again. To survive, people like Venuti were not only forced to be very courageous, but at times they felt obliged to act like Mafiosi . When Venuti heard that local Mafia leaders had decided to kill him he coolly walked into their favourite bar, and calmly said out loud:
The fact that Venuti came from a very comfortable middleclass background, that he was a sensitive and imaginative person, an amateur poet and painter, and yet he was behaving like this, shows how living in a Mafia environment distorts normal human behaviour. In any event, every evening Venuti would walk down the same country lane to see his girlfriend, and nothing ever happened to him. The bluff worked.
Here I am. These people have to know two things: firstly, if something were to happen to me or my comrades, even their pets will be shot down like dogs – and we will respect nobody, neither women nor children. Secondly, their names are already known, and when the time is right they will be passed on to those who need to know.
Because of this climate of intimidation, Venuti and others went further by organising public meetings; it was important to destroy the sense of isolation, fear and hopelessness, to show everybody that there was opposition to the Mafia. He remembers one person who always used to listen to him: ‘I recall one small boy who came to all my speeches. While everybody else of his age was running around and playing, he would listen to everything I said sitting on the kerb. When I first met him my first impression was of a boy full of enthusiasm and a huge desire for honesty and justice.’
That young boy was called Peppino Impastato.
6
The Impastatos
T
he Impastato family were fairly typical for Cinisi. When Felicia Bartolotta married Luigi Impastato in 1947 it was a very good deal for the groom, who had
spent a couple of years ‘in exile’ on the island of Ustica during the fascist period, suspected of Mafia membership. Under this legal restriction people were ordered to reside in exile in another town, in an attempt to prevent them from coming into contact with the wrong sort of people.
Luigi was a short squat man with a flat nose, the son of a cattle farmer. One of his cousins was Don Masi Impastato, a local landowner and old-fashioned Mafia boss in Cinisi during the postwar period. Another relative was Nick ‘Killer’ Impastato, who had emigrated to the US in 1927 and was arrested as the second in command of the country’s largest heroin ring in 1943. Luckily for Nick, he only served two years, but the main witness against him was unlucky in that he was murdered soon after Nick was released from jail. After a four-year legal battle, he was finally deported from Kansas City back to Italy in 1955.
That was more of an American story though. Indeed, the small minority of Italian migrants such as Nick Impastato, who turned into gangsters, has led to decades of generalised racist stereotyping of Italian-Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority didn’t go down that road. But as regards Luigi Impastato and the Mafia, what really brought him in was
The strike was called off, the Mafia had won again. To survive, people like Venuti were not only forced to be very courageous, but at times they felt obliged to act like Mafiosi . When Venuti heard that local Mafia leaders had decided to kill him he coolly walked into their favourite bar, and calmly said out loud:
The fact that Venuti came from a very comfortable middleclass background, that he was a sensitive and imaginative person, an amateur poet and painter, and yet he was behaving like this, shows how living in a Mafia environment distorts normal human behaviour. In any event, every evening Venuti would walk down the same country lane to see his girlfriend, and nothing ever happened to him. The bluff worked.
Here I am. These people have to know two things: firstly, if something were to happen to me or my comrades, even their pets will be shot down like dogs – and we will respect nobody, neither women nor children. Secondly, their names are already known, and when the time is right they will be passed on to those who need to know.
Because of this climate of intimidation, Venuti and others went further by organising public meetings; it was important to destroy the sense of isolation, fear and hopelessness, to show everybody that there was opposition to the Mafia. He remembers one person who always used to listen to him: ‘I recall one small boy who came to all my speeches. While everybody else of his age was running around and playing, he would listen to everything I said sitting on the kerb. When I first met him my first impression was of a boy full of enthusiasm and a huge desire for honesty and justice.’
That young boy was called Peppino Impastato.
6
The Impastatos
T
he Impastato family were fairly typical for Cinisi. When Felicia Bartolotta married Luigi Impastato in 1947 it was a very good deal for the groom, who had
spent a couple of years ‘in exile’ on the island of Ustica during the fascist period, suspected of Mafia membership. Under this legal restriction people were ordered to reside in exile in another town, in an attempt to prevent them from coming into contact with the wrong sort of people.
Luigi was a short squat man with a flat nose, the son of a cattle farmer. One of his cousins was Don Masi Impastato, a local landowner and old-fashioned Mafia boss in Cinisi during the postwar period. Another relative was Nick ‘Killer’ Impastato, who had emigrated to the US in 1927 and was arrested as the second in command of the country’s largest heroin ring in 1943. Luckily for Nick, he only served two years, but the main witness against him was unlucky in that he was murdered soon after Nick was released from jail. After a four-year legal battle, he was finally deported from Kansas City back to Italy in 1955.
That was more of an American story though. Indeed, the small minority of Italian migrants such as Nick Impastato, who turned into gangsters, has led to decades of generalised racist stereotyping of Italian-Americans, despite the fact that the vast majority didn’t go down that road. But as regards Luigi Impastato and the Mafia, what really brought him in was
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