The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (10 page)

Letizia dragged me to the headquarters of a legendary Mafia investigator who had been transferred sideways because of his success and now sat gloomily at an empty desk. The investigator was called Saverio Montalbano. He had Nordic blue eyes and a half-bald crown, because at that time it wasn’t yet fashionable to shave your head. In those days Andrea Camilleri hadn’t yet invented his Commissario Montalbano, and he would certainly have been unsettled to watch this Montalbano being guarded by two bodyguards who drove him around in an armored limousine. I still remember thinking: What a strange country! The policemen need bodyguards!

Saverio Montalbano had been active in Palermo’s mobile task force, where he had been responsible for tracking down Mafia fugitives. He had uncovered the “pizza connection,” the heroin link between America and Sicily. He had, when he was running the mobile task force in Trapani, revealed the connections between Freemasons, leading Christian Democrats, the vice prefect, and the local police chief—and by way of reward the Ministry of the Interior had ordered him to leave Sicily because
they could no longer guarantee his safety. After that, he was transferred to the commissariat in San Lorenzo. I found it bizarre that successful policemen in Sicily were rewarded with a disciplinary transfer, but I imagined that soon this would definitely be a thing of the past—after all, we were in the spring of 1989, and everyone had this amazing faith in the future. Everyone except Montalbano. Two of his predecessors had been murdered: Boris Giuliano and Ninni Cassarà. We were sitting in the courtyard of the commissariat, which had once been a monastery, with no sound but the lapping of the fountain and the faint crunch of gravel under the feet of the odd stray cat. And Montalbano clicking his tongue when Letizia asked him if he still believed in the future.

Letizia lived in the old town. Her apartment was filled to the rafters with archive boxes; proclamations were stacked up on the floor, manifestos spread out on tables. In Letizia’s apartment I was reminded of clandestine meetings I had had with
Solidarność
activists, and I remember finding that connection rather odd: Wasn’t Italy part of the free West? And wasn’t the Mafia a criminal organization? Rather than part of the state, for example?

People were constantly going in and out of Letizia’s house: trade unionists, communists, and women dialect poets; bearded men who had written about the Mafia in their own villages and published their books themselves; singers from ethno-rock groups; and mothers of sons killed by the Mafia—activists in a revolution that was plainly just around the corner. Letizia introduced me to everybody; she explained connections, ideas, and plans, never losing faith in my capacity for lifelong learning. She introduced me to her daughter, Shobha, who was a photographer in the service of the cause, the inheritor of Letizia’s poetic
legacy, and was carrying on as a photographer the task that her mother now hoped to accomplish in politics. Together they dragged me to the meeting of the city council in the Palazzo delle Aquile. And as I looked down in amazement at the arguing councillors and wondered how many of them might be mafiosi, Leoluca Orlando sent me a note, which was passed to me by a waiter on a silver tray. On it was written: “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”

That small gesture was what won me over to him—that and the trust that Letizia and Shobha placed in him, even though he had once been a Christian Democrat. At the time, the Christian Democrats were irrevocably linked with the Mafia through Andreotti’s connections. Then Shobha and I had waited outside the door of his office until three o’clock in the morning, when Orlando finally granted us an interview.

When I look up from my notebook, a waiter is standing by my table. He inquires impatiently whether he can clear my table. “The breakfast buffet is closing now,” he says. I quickly drink my cold tea and finally leave the table.

Salvo is waiting in the lobby. He is hopping agitatedly from one foot to the other because his cardsharp ladies have already called three times to ask him where he’s got to. Then we make our way painfully slowly through the morning traffic along the Via Roma. Armored limousines with darkened windows force their way past us, along with swarms of Vespa riders. The city swims in the blue of the sky. It smells of exhaust fumes and the sea. I would recognize Palermo with my eyes shut. By its smell, as unsettling as the scent of a strange man. A smell that both attracts and repels. Palermo is always ambivalent. Always beautiful
and terrible at the same time. Like a beautiful woman with an eye missing. Like one of those bearded Madonnas sold by the albino below the church of Sant’Antonio Abate. The bearded Madonna can be seen only if you stand at the right angle in front of her picture. If you stand to the left, a bearded Jesus appears. If you look from the right, you see a Madonna with a flaming heart. But if you stand right in the middle you can see them both merging into a Madonna with a beard.

As we drive past, I see the albino gleaming in the shade of his stall. With his white hair and pale skin he looks very vulnerable, so vulnerable that I have to buy a Madonna from him every time I come to Palermo. And he swindles me every time.

Letizia and Shobha live on the top two floors of a 1970s tower block which bears a striking resemblance to an air-raid shelter. The lift cautiously jerks its way up, so slowly that you expect to come out at the twenty-ninth floor, not the ninth. I’m still standing in the doorway when I can hear Shobha on the phone, blowing kisses,
Baci
,
baci
,
baci
, dismissing the caller,
Ciao
,
ciao
,
ciao
, “Yes, yes, see you, no time right now, see you tomorrow.” Clutching two phones, she gives me a sign to say that Letizia is waiting on the floor below.

When I go down the stairs I have to have my hand licked by Letizia’s dog, which she picked up somewhere in Palermo, just like all those foreign journalists she picks up, even now, like orphan children; there’s always someone sitting on her sofa, sometimes it’s a Spanish journalist, sometimes an American—Letizia helps them all, she makes contacts, spurs people on, introduces people, all for the cause. Still. A bit. Sometimes. Often.

For a short time now she’s been living in this apartment whose walls look like the walls of a stalactite cave, as if it was
made as a film set for a 1970s domestic drama. If you stand on the terrace, you can see the Ucciardone prison. She herself feels like a prisoner in Palermo, Letizia says. It’s ridiculous, in Germany she was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize for her Mafia photographs, and in Sicily they want to forget her. She sits in the breeze from the ceiling fan, clutching an unlit cigarette, and says without much of an introduction: “I was happier back then. In 1989 we thought we could change things, in love, in society. We have lost the battle. On every level.”

And then she falls silent and there is no sound but the whirr of the ceiling fan, the panting of her dog, and the roar of the Palermo traffic. The eighties were also the years of the big Mafia wars: the Corleone family assumed power in Palermo; there were killings almost every day. Not just among the mafiosi but also among public prosecutors, judges, police—and Letizia, Franco, and Shobha were always first to the scene. Like all good reporters, they listened to the police radio. And photographed bullet-riddled bodies, pools of blood, and widows in the grip of despair.

“We were unfettered. If we traveled off in an old VW van, it was never for longer than a week, because we couldn’t bear to leave the city for longer than that. We loved Palermo,” Letizia says. And she sounds as if she’s talking about a drug addict that she’s hoped in vain to save.

“Today there is not any anti-Mafia awareness,” she says, brushing her dog aside as he tries to kiss her.

Letizia has always been a plain speaker. She has never tried to prettify anything, ever, and doesn’t see why she should start now. “There’s nothing left,” she says. All those anti-Mafia meetings,
symposia, and memorials for the victims were nothing but window dressing, and that’s something she’s always rejected.

When Letizia talks about window dressing, I immediately see an image of the children by the Falcone tree, that huge magnolia below the house where Giovanni Falcone lived. The death of the murdered public prosecutor is commemorated here every year. A stage had been set up next to the magnolia and children stood on it in green baseball caps. The children danced under their teachers’ beady eyes; they read out poems they had written themselves, about a Mafia cockerel that wanted to dictate the law, and sang law-abiding songs.

Standing next to me was a journalist from
Corriere della Sera
, who noticed my astonishment. Glancing at the stage, he said with a shrug: “An identity ritual. We’re Catholics, we need something like this. Like the processions. We have to keep proving our identity.”

As the children were singing under the magnolia, people remembered Falcone and Borsellino in the “aula bunker,” the high-security courtroom in Ucciardone prison, which had been built for the “maxi-trial,” which would go down in history not only because of its sheer size—474 defendants, of whom 114 were acquitted, the guilty ones being sentenced to a total of 2,665 years’ imprisonment—but also because it was the first in the history of the Italian judiciary from which the Mafia had not emerged victorious. A huge scout camp had been set up in the courtyard of the prison: the law-and-order village. The children wore T-shirts bearing the picture of the murdered public prosecutors. The prison fence was draped with sheets scrawled with words like
The Mafia suppresses us
or
Grow up honest!
One
teacher went up to her pupils and hissed: “Write something! Write something intelligent!”

Inside, the two prosecutors were commemorated with a lot of speeches, a lot of noisy applause, and television films about the Mafia—films in which the mafiosi looked like action heroes with pump-action shotguns and the public prosecutors looked bold and incorruptible. They love films like that in Palermo, where the Mafia is now once more as invisible as it used to be. Aristocratic among aristocrats, bourgeois among the bourgeoisie. The bosses stopped being shepherds a long time ago, shepherds who could barely speak Italian; now they’re doctors, businessmen, politicians, the so-called white-collar Mafia. Palermo returned to its normality a long time ago. Only rarely are there diplomatic incidents like the one that year when a student asked the minister of the interior, Giuliano Amato, who was attending the Falcone-Borsellino memorial day, what he planned to do about all the MPs with criminal convictions, two of whom were even on the anti-Mafia commission. The minister didn’t say: “They will have to be thrown out.” Instead, he accused the student of being a little populist. A hint of the Eastern bloc wafted through the “aula bunker” and lingered in the air even after the minister had disappeared. A speaker addressed the schoolchildren sitting on the floor: “You are stronger than the Mafia!” And the children cheered, as if they were watching a school play.

“
Niente
,” says Letizia, and draws on her cigarette. “We’re finished.”

She doesn’t think for a second of lying to herself with the eternal “there’s-no-work-here-and-that’s-why-we’ve-got-the-Mafia” hypocrisy, with the romantic idea of the healing power of
culture, as if the Mafia could be got rid of like a typo. In her hoarse voice, she speaks the truth that no one in Italy wants to hear: “Barbarism rules on our island! People are stuck in a lawless mindset!”

“And that wasn’t even Berlusconi’s fault,” she says; the Sicilians had been waiting for him as if he were a seller of dreams, someone who could at last let them forget. Her comrades-inarms fell silent, crept away. Lots of them jumped on the Forza Italia bandwagon, and when Berlusconi was deselected and everyone expected the Prodi government to launch a campaign against the Mafia with renewed zeal, Clemente Mastella was appointed minister of justice. This is a man who is seen as an ardent supporter of Giulio Andreotti and who has also demonstrated a certain familiarity with organized crime: in 2000 he was a witness at the wedding of the Sicilian mafioso Francesco Campanella, who had no hesitation in turning state’s evidence immediately after his arrest. Mastella’s first action in office was to introduce a mass pardon for convicts, benefiting not only Silvio Berlusconi and the Eritrean human-trafficker Ganat Tewelde Barhe, better known as “Madame Gennet,” but also countless mafiosi, who immediately returned to their daily business.

Anti-Mafia public prosecutors uncovering the connection between politicians and the Mafia had long been isolated in the Anti-Mafia Pool. Some were withdrawn from investigations, and Leoluca Orlando, too, failed in his attempt to win back the city for himself. In Letizia’s eyes, Orlando was the only one capable of restoring the city’s dreams. He stood for mayor and only narrowly lost the election to the Forza Italia candidate. There was the usual talk of election fraud. It was said that people had been told to take pictures of their ballot papers with
their
telefonini
to prove to the bosses that they had followed their electoral recommendations. In vain Orlando demanded that the election be declared invalid. A year later, the public prosecutor’s office brought an action for proven electoral fraud and arrested two electoral district officers.

For a long time, Palermo has been governed by a triad of mayor, regional president, and president of the council. Political best buddies, who won’t be shaken by allegations of electoral shenanigans. The innovations of the last mayor, Diego Cammarata, stopped with the introduction of two double-decker buses for sightseeing tours. And the next thing he did was to commission a lawyer to take action against any journalist who criticized the city administration. Regional President Totò Cuffaro was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia and was forced to step down, but found brief consolation with a seat in the senate until his prison term began. He was replaced as regional president by a soul mate, his former party colleague Raffaele Lombardo. And the former council president Gianfranco Miccichè is a close friend of Marcello Dell’Utri, the senator and companion of Berlusconi who was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia.