Free Defiance by Tom Behan Page B

periods on the run, Leggio was far from being the romantic figure his nickname suggests. His rapid rise within the organisation began when, as a 23-year-old, he murdered a Socialist trade unionist named Placido Rizzotto in his hometown of Corleone back in 1948. By the late 1950s he had gained control of the Corleone clan, which has dominated the Mafia since the late 1970s, and tutored the man who remained boss until his capture in April 2006 – Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. At the time Felicia met him, she would have known that Leggio was one of the main leaders of the Mafia, and was on the run from the police when he stayed in the same house as her.
    Whether she liked it or not, Felicia was in deep. She faced a choice: if she told the police where to find one of the country’s most wanted fugitives, she would have had to go into hiding in order to stay alive, along with her children and husband, yet at that time the police did not have anything approaching a witness protection programme. And even if they did, Manzella would have killed her other relatives, so if she had decided to be an honest citizen it would have meant her death and that of her immediate family, or many of her close relatives. In situations like this Mafiosi can see that people have chosen to turn a blind eye to their activities. But what drags people in even deeper is the awareness of having become an accessory to serious crimes by not reporting them. Regardless of your own personal views, your safety becomes linked to that of Mafia leaders.
    While all this was going on their eldest child, Peppino, was developing in a completely independent way. His mother remembers him going to hear the Communist activist Stefano Venuti speak: ‘He used to listen to all his speeches. He’d sit on the kerb with his hands like this; he was against the Christian Democrats. Me and Venuti knew each other, so I said to him: “Mr Venuti, would you do me a favour? Would you get my boy to stop this?” “Why should he, he’s an intelligent boy.”’
    Although his mother might have been understanding, Peppino’s father was not. One day Peppino came home and told his father he’d passed his exams: ‘My uncle has bought me a raincoat and a bag to carry my books. What are you going to give me?’ Sometimes Peppino could be a bit too pushy and sarcastic with his father, failing to show the respect that was normal for the time. So his father answered coldly: ‘What am I going to give you? Nothing. When you decide to leave the Communist Party is when I’ll buy you something.’ Given that his attitude tended to create confrontation, at a very young age Peppino was forced to make a choice between developing his own ideas, or submitting to tradition and having a normal family life.
    A key turning point came when his uncle Don Cesare Manzella was killed by a car bomb in the First Mafia War. Shocked, Peppino told his mother, ‘these people really are criminals’. She remembered, ‘That’s when it all started. He started talking about bullying, about injustice.’ Although aged just 15, Peppino made a conscious decision: ‘if this is what the Mafia is, then I’m going to oppose it’. If he had been living under the same roof as his Mafia father it would have been unlikely that he thought in this way, and what he went on to do was simply unheard of at the time. For a small sleepy town such as Cinisi, Peppino’s actions were going to be truly shocking.
‘The Mafia – A Mountain of Shit’
    Contrary to some stereotypes, Peppino was a left-wing activist with emotions. Indeed, perhaps this brief poem he wrote expresses the self-denial that is inevitable in what was virtually full-time political activity:
    Men look at the sky
And are amazed,
They look at the earth
And they feel compassion But oddly,
They do not notice themselves.
In the following quotation he expresses in more formal language what happened to him as a teenager:
    I got involved in