On this day‬ in 1978 Giuseppe Impastato was killed during by a charge of TNT that was placed under his body during an election campaign.

Impastato was a political activist who opposed the Mafia but his death was initially believed to be an act of terrorism, and then his death was down to suicide. It was only years later when a Cinisi mobster called Salvatore Palazzolo turned FBI informant and confirmed that the Mafia was behind the hit. Gaetano Badalamenti was eventually given a life sentence on April 11, 2002, over 20 years after Impastato’s death.

On this day in 1978, Giuseppe Impastato, a courageous Sicilian political activist who had spent years publicly defying the Mafia, was murdered in one of the most brazen and deliberately staged killings in modern Italian organised crime history. He was just 30 years old. His killers placed a charge of TNT beneath his body on a railway line near Cinisi, Sicily, attempting to make his death appear either as an act of terrorism or a botched suicide bombing. It was a grotesque and calculated cover-up that, for years, very nearly succeeded.

Impastato had grown up surrounded by the Mafia. His father was connected to the Cinisi crime family, and his uncle was a man of considerable standing within the organisation. Rather than follow the path laid out before him, Impastato chose open defiance. He became a left-wing activist, a journalist, and the founder of a community radio station called Radio Aut, from which he broadcast sharp, satirical programmes that openly mocked and exposed local Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti. In a deeply conservative Sicilian town where silence was survival, this was an act of extraordinary bravery — and, ultimately, a death sentence.

Badalamenti was no minor figure. He had served as head of the Sicilian Mafia's ruling body, the Commissione, and was deeply embedded in the international heroin trade that connected the Sicilian clans to American organised crime during the era when the so-called Pizza Connection funnelled hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of narcotics into the United States. He was precisely the kind of powerful, ruthless boss who did not tolerate public ridicule or dissent.

Following Impastato's murder on the night of 8th to 9th May 1978 — the same night, coincidentally, that former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro's body was discovered in Rome — investigators initially ruled the death an act of left-wing terrorism, and later entertained the suicide theory. It took the courage of Cinisi mobster Salvatore Palazzolo, who turned FBI informant years later, to formally confirm what Impastato's family and supporters had always known: the Mafia ordered the hit. Badalamenti, already serving time in the United States for his role in the Pizza Connection case, was finally convicted of ordering Impastato's murder on 11th April 2002 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Giuseppe Impastato has since become a symbol of anti-Mafia resistance in Italy, immortalised in the 2000 film "I Cent'anni di Pioggia" — more widely known as "I Cento Passi" — and his legacy continues to inspire activists who dare to speak truth to organised crime.