When hiring a car in England this year, the young guy who took my booking information was curious about what life was like in Italy. “Have you got the credit crunch?” he asked before reverting to the default option query : “Have you still got the Mafia, then?”

Aside from the three Ps ( pizza, pasta and Pavarotti) the English cannot quite get the image of the Godfather out of their heads. Think Italy and Mafia is an immediate word association.

I suppose national stereotypes work like this. When Italians think of the English they think of James Bond, Mr Bean and the Royal Family. So you can imagine an Englishman at a Hertz Rental in Rome being asked “Have you still got the Queen, then?”

Families are always especially fascinating especially when they are so disfunctional, anachronistic and ruthless.

But enough about the Royal Family! This is a post about the Mafia and in particular an excellent new book by my good friend Tom Behan called simply ‘Defiance’ and subtitled ‘The story of one man who stood up to the Sicilian Mafia’.

The Mafia may be an obvious choice of topic, but it is given a fresh and highly readable contemporary perspective here as he traces the true story of Giuseppe ‘Peppino‘ Impastato (1948 – 78).

Peppino was an activist who has also been the subject of an award winning Italian film ‘Cento Passi’ (One Hundred Steps) by Milanese director Marco Tullio Giordana . The title of that movie refers to the distance between the Impastato’s house and local Mafioso Tano Badalamenti, thus emphasising the fact that Peppino lived and died in a heartland of Mafia power. His home was the town Cinisi in the provence of Palermo which Peppino referred to as ‘Mafiopoli’ in newspaper articles and in his satirical local radio show.

Almost inevitably, Peppino’s courage in openly defying the Mafia cost him his life. He was brutally murdered by the Mafia, a cowardly killing which was made to look like suicide or the result of a terrorist act gone wrong. Behan’s book starts with gruesome details of how his body was laid across railway tracks and blown up .

Tom devotes the first five chapters to explaining the way the Mafia have succeeded in gaining such a strong foothold in towns such as Cinisi. He is particularly good at showing how the organisation builds its power base from deep within the traditions of family, religion and social convention. He writes: “Even a simple gesture like saying hello to people is a minefield: just by greeting a Mafioso you can risk being sucked into their web”. Obviously, the contrary of this is also true, by ignoring or snubbing them means that you could be branded as an enemy.

Instead of taking a worthy but dull look at history. Tom illustrates how the Mafia’s power and criminal acts of violence and intimidation are rooted in the politics and events of daily life.

The defiance of Peppino is shown not as the act of a hot-headed rebel but as a stance that required incredible bravery . To this day this makes him a hero of all right minded people who detest what the Mafia stands for

Nor does Tom shy from making the crucial link between what his story represents and the present day political climate in Italy. The old guard, in the shape of Andreotti, like the new, with Berlusconi, are implicated in the story through their willingness to forge and maintain a network of shadowy associations with the Mafia in order to gain greater power. By this means they can manipulate the wheels of justice so that they run the course they want them to.

They may smugly place themselves above the law but this does not mask the fact that the moral deficiency that lies at the root of their actions is fundamentally the same as that which Peppino exposed.

Movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas are entertaining but also serve to promote, and glamorise, the myth of the Mafiosi. Tom admirably takes to higher ground as he sets out at the end of the bibliography: “This is neither an academic book that pretends it can detach itself from the world that surrounds it, nor a crime thriller obsessed with describing bloodshed and psychopaths . It is a book committed to ridding the world of the Mafia” .

The book is not an attempt to sensationalise or glorify Peppino but to show that his courage in standing up to the Mafia is an example of the defiance that is as necessary today as it was three decades ago .