The night of 8–9 May 1978 was one of the darkest in our country's history. In Rome, while the city is still asleep, the president of the Christian Democracy party Aldo Moro is about to be executed by the Red Brigades, after a kidnapping that lasted nearly two months. His body would be found on the morning of the 9th in the boot of a car.

Mafia roots and rebellion in 1970s Sicily

A thousand kilometres further south, in Sicily, a young man of just 30 is dragged by force into a farmhouse. It is nearly two in the morning and the small town of Cinisi is also asleep. His body is tied to a railway track, on top of a charge of TNT, and blown up. The young man was Giuseppe Impastato, Peppino to everyone. Journalist and far-left activist. But above all, a sworn enemy of the mafia.

Peppino had come to know organised crime before he even knew what it was, because his own family was involved in the mafia. Numerous relatives were affiliated with the clans, and his father's brother-in-law was boss Cesare Manzella, killed by a bomb planted in his Alfa Romeo Giulietta on 26 April 1963. The succession to leadership of the clan crowned the man who became the undisputed godfather of the area: Gaetano Badalamenti, unchallenged boss of the international drug trade, thanks to his direct control over Punta Raisi airport, located right within the municipality of Cinisi.

From peasant struggle to Radio Aut in the Cinisi of "One Hundred Steps"

Peppino Impastato, however, refused to accept this and decided to rebel. Not yet eighteen, he founded the newspaper "L'idea socialista" and joined the Psiup, the Partito socialista italiano di unità proletaria. Three years later, he led the activities of the group "Nuova Sinistra" and coordinated the struggle of peasant farmers who had been expropriated to make way for the expansion of the airport.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYZ7O-hBNw

It was during these years that the idea took shape of combining political activism with the anti-mafia struggle, and of conveying that message through a more powerful medium: radio. It was 1976, and Peppino Impastato founded Radio Aut, to which his name would be forever linked. The idea was simple and inspired: to destroy the image of the mafia by ridiculing them. This gave birth to the satirical programme "Onda pazza", whose favourite target was none other than "Zu Tano", uncle Tano Badalamenti — who lived just a short distance from Peppino's home: the famous "one hundred steps" depicted in Marco Tullio Giordana's celebrated film.

When Peppino Impastato said: "The mafia is a mountain of shit"

Little by little, the boss understood that the radio station was a danger. Too many people were listening, and too much information was being made public about illicit businesses, criminal strategies and collusion with politicians. The mafia chief began to worry, and warnings and threats followed. But Radio Aut pressed on undaunted, holding up "Tano Seduto" — as Peppino called him at the microphone — and the mafia, described as "a mountain of shit", to ridicule.

A few months before his death, Peppino stood as a candidate in the local elections with Democrazia proletaria. He did not live to see the election campaign through, but was nonetheless symbolically elected by the citizens. For his murder, Badalamenti was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2002, as the instigator. Already imprisoned in the United States for drug trafficking, the boss died two years later. Twenty-six years after the murder of Peppino.