The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (15 page)

A flight of very tall steps leads to the entrance. The higher you climb, the smaller you feel. A steel fence used to close off the semicircle of the Palace of Justice, and after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino soldiers were entrenched there behind sandbags. Today, the Palace of Justice is guarded by just a few
carabinieri
, armed with machine guns, whose readiness for action not even the dogs in the street take seriously. They doze in the shade beside their sentry boxes and don’t even blink when you walk past.

From the back, the Palace of Justice looks like a gigantic pink tombstone; the modern extension is extolled by architects and looks no less fascistic than the granite-gray part, except that the color softens the effect. People passing in front of the Palace of Justice look as small as if they were walking past the pyramid of Cheops. The square in front of it is called Piazza della Memoria. Here you can read, cast in steel, the names of all the murdered Sicilian public prosecutors.

Shobha gives Letizia instructions that she isn’t keen to hear. “Turn around, head up, yes, that’s lovely, no, take your hand away.” Letizia poses ironically and wastes no time in taking her own pictures with her new Leica, while at the same time delivering a polemic about the stalemate in the struggle against the Mafia. She asks what the Germans thought when the Duisburg massacre took place. Were they surprised? Shocked by the coldbloodedness of it all? Perhaps dismayed that the Mafia was just
as blithely active in Germany as it was in Italy? Letizia’s eyes look combative again. Yes, that’s it exactly: the arrogance of the Mafia! The presumption of the powerful! What do the Germans think? The Mafia isn’t just an Italian problem, after all. If the EU doesn’t pay attention, the Mafia will swallow us all up!

Shobha brushes me aside because I’ve got into the shot again. So I stand to one side and consider the Palace of Justice, some plaster already crumbling away at one corner. In which it resembles the Palace of Justice in Calabria, which, like many public buildings in southern Italy, is in need of serious restoration.

Throughout the whole of southern Italy, the power of the Mafia can be read in the architecture. Like the Mafia in Sicily and Campania, for half a century the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria has had a share of public commissions, 3 or 5 percent—what the Calabrians, with bitter irony, call a “security tax.,” All businessmen working in Calabria pay this contribution to the Mafia, whether they are building roads, Palaces of Justice, or hospitals. And they save that contribution by putting up plasterboard rather than laying bricks, by quoting for steel and using iron, by using cheap plaster that cracks after just a few months, by failing to make windows watertight or walls damp-proof.

The Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria looks as if Ceauşescu’s architect had finally used it to realize his dream of omnipotence, even though little details, such as properly functioning elevators, escaped him. Here I met Salvatore Boemi, the leading senior public prosecutor in the Anti-Mafia Pool, and Nicola Gratteri, the public prosecutor investigating the Duisburg massacre. The bearded Boemi has been dealing with the Mafia for more than forty years; he’s the historical memory of the public prosecutor’s office of Reggio Calabria, a city in which
the ’Ndrangheta controls the very air that people breathe. Boemi looked like a melancholy English aristocrat; there were English leather chairs in his office, which contrasted curiously with the view from his window out onto Sahara-colored Reggio Calabria, which seemed to consist entirely of overpasses on concrete stilts, ruined buildings, and a leaden sea that merged in the distance with the horizon.

Duisburg was a massacre that was committed in a megalomaniac frenzy, Boemi said. With these murders, the mafiosi of San Luca had taken the greatest possible risk: that Italy and Germany would become aware of the threat from the Mafia and react to it. And there had been no reaction from the state, either in Germany or in Italy. If nothing happened now, Germany could soon find itself approaching the Italian condition, in which the Mafia had elevated itself to a bourgeoisie controlling politics and the economy. “In Calabrian society I see no will to get rid of the Mafia—just the will to get rid of
us
,” said senior public prosecutor Boemi. And he added: “The rot in Sicilian and Calabrian politics is boundless. The criminal system here works closely with politics and the business class.”

Boemi was excluded from the Anti-Mafia Pool in Reggio Calabria for five years. Supposedly to keep public prosecutors from turning into “autonomous power centers,” the Berlusconi government passed a law according to which no public prosecutor could work for more than eight years in the Anti-Mafia Pool—like a yogurt that’s past its sell-by date. In this way not only was the work of the Anti-Mafia Pool slowed down, but many Pools were cleaned of those public prosecutors who refused to see the Mafia merely as a problem of public order and who instead investigated politicians who were close to the Mafia.
In Palermo, it wasn’t just the public prosecutors who had run the Andreotti trial who had been eliminated from the Anti-Mafia Pool—Roberto Scarpinato, Guido Lo Forte, and Gioacchino Natoli—but also Antonio Ingroia, who had revealed the Mafia links of the Berlusconi confidant Marcello Dell’Utri and the high-ranking secret service agent Bruno Contrada.

As Boemi spoke, you could hear the wind howling through the ventilation shafts of his office. He acted as if he couldn’t hear a thing. He just went on talking, looking out at the lead-colored sea, as if he mustn’t lose sight of it. On the other side lay Sicily.

“We need European laws,” he said. “It’s a task for the politicians, not for the legal profession. We’ve got to be able to confiscate Mafia property abroad as well, even in Germany, which we thought was immune to Mafia intrigues. People said to us: ‘The Mafia, that’s your problem. Punish them, do what you like—they’re Italians, after all.’ In Europe today you have to take into account the fact that the Mafia is a reality that we’re exporting.”

Where Boemi emanated melancholy, his colleague Nicola Gratteri communicated a sense of dynamism—quick, quick, don’t waste a minute. When the elevator didn’t arrive, he ran all the way up the seven floors to the public prosecutor’s office, and as he ran he outlined the relationship between the ’Ndrangheta and the Colombian cocaine barons. There has always been a special “feeling” between them, based on the fact that the ’Ndrangheta had built up more money through its kidnapping industry than any other client—a special relationship that lasts up to the present day: now, the ’Ndrangheta has a monopoly on cocaine importation in Europe.

Gratteri drove the armored Lancia himself, 150 kilometers every day, between Gerace and Reggio Calabria, to the sound of
classical music. His three bodyguards followed in the car behind him. He wanted to drive himself, he said, because the journey was the only moment in the day when he was alone.

The wall behind his desk was decorated with the usual investigator’s trappings—the shield of US Special Agent, of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Wiesbaden, of the Amsterdam Politie. And a framed certificate behind glass, an award that Gratteri had been given for his battle against organized crime—organized crime which, as the Italian text so beautifully puts it, is notoriously able to rely on support from parts of certain institutions.

He worked on a laptop in his office. He had made five copies of the hard drive and hidden them in five different places. In the context of the inquiries into the Duisburg bloodbath he had issued the custody order that had put whole families behind bars. In March 2008, in San Luca alone, he confiscated Mafia properties to the value of 150 million euros. So much for Don Pino’s village of poor, God-fearing forestry workers. And pious women. The confiscated property of the two ’Ndrangheta clans involved in the blood feud, the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, included furniture, packets of files, and certificates from insurance companies in Germany and beyond.

Gratteri spoke just as quickly as he moved. With cool realism he described his battle against the ’Ndrangheta: the word “Duisburg” had turned long ago from the name of an investigation file into a metaphor for the arrogance of the ’Ndrangheta.

Before Duisburg, Gratteri’s commitment to the fight against the Mafia wouldn’t have been worth covering—not in Italy, and certainly not abroad: the floodlights of public interest had always been turned on Palermo. Only a few local newspapers in
Calabria had reported on the four hundred dead in six years that the ’Ndrangheta had called for. It was only after Duisburg that public prosecutors like Gratteri were invited onto Italian television programs. Once I saw him in a Rai Due studio sitting next to the then minister of justice, Clemente Mastella. In reply to the question of what needed to be done to fight the Mafia, Gratteri said: “The opposite of what’s been done over the past twelve years.” At which Justice Minister Mastella corrected the public prosecutor: “He should just get on with his job.” Politicians would take care of everything else.

“Indeed,” Gratteri said to me. And fired a mocking smile across his desk, piled high with bundles of documents. Because a short time later the minister had had to step down after being investigated for extortion and abuse of office.

And a similar scenario might also menace Germany if the Germans didn’t start understanding what it meant for the Mafia to take root in their country. Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Italy had modified any of their laws in response to the Duisburg killings.

While Shobha looks for her shot, Letizia and I sit on a marble bench in the shade and try to imagine some numbers. The annual business turnover of the Italian Mafia, for example. Which is supposed to stand at around 100 billion euros. I fail in my attempt to conjure the image of 100 billion euros in 500 euro notes. What would that fill? A room? An apartment? A Palace of Justice? How many politicians, lawyers, judges could you buy with that?

“A million euros fits in a shoebox,” Salvo says sagely. “Ladies’ shoes.”

“How do you know that?” Letizia asks in amazement.

“From our neighbor,” says Salvo. “With men’s shoes, it’s two million.”

“Sorry for asking,” says Letizia, “but what does your neighbor do with a million euros in a shoebox?”

“He picks it up,” Salvo replies, and purses his lips.

Then we try to imagine the number of
affiliati
, the numbers of members regularly inducted into the Mafia. The newspaper
Antimafia Duemila
reported that in Calabria 25 percent of the population—a full quarter—belong to the ’Ndrangheta. In Campania 12 percent belong to the Camorra; in Sicily 10 percent belong to the Mafia; and in Apulia it’s a modest 2 percent who belong to the Sacra Corona Unita.

And to these regular
affiliati
may be added the sympathizers, relatives, and silent helpers. “And the ones who are too scared to say anything,” Letizia adds. She looks at the passersby, most of them lawyers with briefcases, tight-skirted secretaries tottering to the entrance of the Palace of Justice.

“That leaves hardly anyone,” says Salvo. “Or have we miscalculated?”

“Even as a child I couldn’t do sums,” I say. And I remember public prosecutor Gratteri giving me a few simple examples that even a mathematical dyslexic like me could understand, explaining the danger that the wealth of the ’Ndrangheta meant for Germany. He sat at his laptop, answering e-mails and delivering a little lecture on the financial power of the ’Ndrangheta.

The elite of the ’Ndrangheta didn’t have the problem of getting rich, just of laundering their money, he said. A small amount was spent on building a lovely house. Then a hotel was built, a holiday village, a supermarket. In northern Italy
buildings were bought, and in Germany hotels, restaurants, pizzerias—all with cocaine money. The account of a typical ’Ndrangheta businessman was always in the red. He never had any money in the bank, but took out loans and then paid them back very gradually. That was how he laundered his money.

The game goes like this. The businessman buys a product for 100 euros; let’s say, coffee. So he pays 100 euros for the coffee, and by selling the coffee he makes a profit of, let’s say, 25 percent. No one can dispute that 25 percent; the financial police can’t, and the public prosecutors can’t either. With that 25 percent profit the Mafia businessman has managed to launder dirty money—not by buying the coffee, but just by presenting a receipt for it. A secretary sits there from dawn till dusk issuing false invoices, because it’s in the Mafia businessman’s interest to provide evidence of nonexistent expenditure—as if he had had huge expenses and made enormous profits—in order to justify the cocaine money. Logically, the Mafia businessman also has an interest in paying as much tax as possible. The more invoices he issues, the more tax he pays, and the more illegal money he can justify.

Of course, this game with fake invoices works particularly well in restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets, Gratteri stressed, where goods can go off and many (fake) invoices are issued to suppliers. After a few years the Mafia businessman has bought the restaurant, the hotel, the supermarket with his cocaine money—and they’re all quite legal.

The ’Ndrangheta isn’t just an Italian problem, he explains, because the fake invoice game isn’t just played in Reggio Calabria, it’s played throughout the whole of the Western world. But having great mountains of money doesn’t just mean being
able to influence the market. It also means financing electoral campaigns on behalf of parliamentarians who represent Mafia interests. The whole of democratic life is infected.

While Gratteri was speaking, I thought about how it was that the then C DU representative and now minister-president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger, had emerged unscathed from the affair surrounding the pizza-chef Mario Lavorato, even though things hadn’t looked nearly so good at the outset. Oettinger’s friendship with the dubious pizzeria owner had gotten him into difficulties; the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office investigated the Calabrian Lavorato for drug dealing and money laundering, on the grounds that he was supposed to have used his money to support Oettinger’s election.
               
                                                                                       
                                                                                       
who had already been mentioned in a Federal Criminal Police (BKA) report in 2000,
                                                                                       
the 400-seat
                             
restaurant
                                                                                       
who, according to investigators,
                                                                                       
in the Da Bruno pizzeria. Contacts can be helpful—even if Da Bruno hasn’t been at the top of most people’s lists since the Duisburg massacre. At any rate, Pitanti nurtured his connections in Erfurt, by generously supporting the golf club.
                                                          
they also bumped into the then Thuringian minister-president Bernhard Vogel and his minister of the interior, Richard Dewes. Both men had been staying there by chance, claimed Pitanti—who also had an excellent relationship with the police: in the course of further searches,
the police found an ID card for an Interpol conference in Rome identifying Pitanti as a translator for the Uzbek delegation. It had been issued by the minister of the interior for Saarland.