The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (18 page)

Later, there were further delays before Focoso could be handed over to the Italians, because German legislation doesn’t allow someone to be sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment—which was the case with the multiple killer Focoso, who had been in hiding for over six years. In order for the mafioso to be handed over to Italy, the Italian investigators had to prove that the lawyers who had defended him had kept their client very well informed about all developments, so that he was able to follow the course of the trial in detail.

If you talk to Italian investigators, Germany is by no means prepared for the battle against the Mafia: membership in the organization isn’t a crime in Germany, and eavesdropping isn’t legal in public places. In addition, Mafia property can’t be confiscated—as it can in Italy, thanks to the Pio La Torre law, which states that even if a person is only under suspicion of Mafia membership, his possessions can be confiscated. In Germany, on the other hand, property can be seized only if a connection can be demonstrated with a concrete crime. German law does have the crime of criminal association, but given that the maximum sentence is five years in jail, it amounts to a trivial offense.

When Anna Palma explained the German-Italian imbroglio to me, I couldn’t help thinking about Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force in Reggio Calabria. Cortese didn’t just start working with the German police after the Duisburg massacre; he had already been involved with his German colleagues during the search for the legendary Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano. Cortese once spent Christmas in Mönchengladbach because the investigators had hoped Provenzano would spend the holiday with his brother, who lived in Germany. For two weeks, Cortese lay in wait for the boss in Mönchengladbach, but to no avail. Two years later he would arrest Provenzano, who had been in hiding for forty years, in a Corleone cheese-farmer’s hut.

After that, Cortese was promoted to the status of
super-poliziotto
, for which he was awarded a silver medal and transferred to Reggio Calabria. We met in a cafe not far from police headquarters, and Cortese looked as if he was one of the two bronze statues of Riace: fished from the sea, put in a pinstripe suit, and decorated with a pair of Ferragamo sunglasses.

Cortese set out the contrast between the German and Italian police for us, from his personal point of view. He pointed to the bottle of mineral water on our table and said: “If I know that this bottle here is the boss, then we go and arrest him. In Germany, they do a ‘briefing’ first. And by the time the briefing is over, the boss has gone into hiding.”

A pale noonday haze has settled on Palermo like a pillow of cotton wool, a pillow that muffles every sound, even the noise of the tires of the armored limousines on the marble surrounding the Palace of Justice. Salvo looks at his watch because Piccola
Napoli always closes on time. At last we set off, past the Teatro Massimo, toward Borgo Vecchio, the heart of Palermo that lives on the drug trade and looks like a cross between Baghdad and Bogotá. With fat men in baseball caps and flip-flops, with piles of trash and blocked canals, with the burned-out carcasses of cars, mangy dogs, and a big statue of Padre Pio behind glass. The Borgo is right behind the Teatro Politeama with its jacaranda trees; sometimes tourists stray to this part of town, and little boys with iPhones take pictures of their horrified faces. The Borgo has nothing of the charming shabbiness of Palermo’s old town, which as a visitor you can imagine as beautiful; the Borgo is nothing but Mafia arrogance, just a few yards away from the upper-class elegance of the Via della Libertà.

Written on a wall are the words
Honor the Dishonored
, and next to that hangs one of many house altars. Between narrow curtains a haggard Jesus gazes at a pink Madonna, surrounded by offerings of plastic flowers and lit by old bedside lights. A short time ago a man was murdered here, in broad daylight, in front of the fishmonger’s stall. No one saw anything.

A few yards to the rear of the square with the statue of Padre Pio a goose runs along the road. The goose is called Candy, and she bites anyone who goes near her, because Candy doesn’t think she’s a goose, she thinks she’s a dog guarding the front door of a family house. Candy turned out like this because she grew up with a pit bull terrier, people say. Originally, in fact, there were two geese, but one of them died. Everyone remembers the other goose running out in front of a car, with its chest puffed up.

As we step inside Piccola Napoli the wind from the air conditioning falls on us like an icy cloth, making us hold our breath
for a second. While outside in the Borgo the trash might be rotting in the gutter, inside Piccola Napoli everything is sterile, with white tiles, starched tablecloths, and a freshly scoured counter on which no drop of water would stand a chance.

As always, the whole family is at work. Behind the till sits an old black-clad woman with the eyes of a bird; orders are taken by her son-in-law, whose red face always looks a bit unhealthy in the fluorescent light. Behind the fish counter stands one of those Sicilian women who wouldn’t smile even under threat of torture, her brother works in the kitchen, and the usual crew are joined by an old man whose degree of kinship I don’t know. He’s leaning motionlessly by the old woman at the till, with his waistband hitched up to his armpits. Depending on the time of day, all kinds of other cousins and brothers-in-law and aunts and great-nieces and people I can’t tell apart turn up as well.

As soon as we’re sitting down, there’s white wine on our table, and green Sicilian olives the size of quail’s eggs, and oriental-scented bread with sesame seeds. The brother-in-law brings us
panelle
, the chickpea fritters that I fell in love with on my first day in Sicily, and sea urchins and a bit of
caponata
, the vegetable dish of aubergines, tomatoes, olives, and capers, which sensitive Italian stomachs find irredeemably
indigeribile
, completely indigestible—which is why it lies for hours, maybe days even, in my belly, formerly inured to such things by my German upbringing but softened by my time in Italy—but which we still find irresistible.

For a second we think guiltily about the heaviness of Sicilian cooking, but it doesn’t stop us going on to order tiny fried octopi, swordfish, and tuna. And if Letizia hadn’t asked about Duisburg, we’d be talking about the food for hours.

What was it like? she asks, suddenly looking like a young girl. More than most people, Letizia has preserved a childish curiosity about life. She soon tires of talking about herself, about things she knows, about repeated situations. But she loves experiencing new contexts, new things, outrageous things. She loves learning. But it all has to happen very quickly.

It’s weird talking about Duisburg in Palermo. Thinking about steelworks, blast furnaces, and housing projects when you’re surrounded by house altars, baroque churches, and palm-lined avenues. And yet the two places do have some things in common. A death toll. When I got into my old Renault 4 that time to drive from the Ruhr to Corleone, because Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather
had aroused my curiosity, I never imagined that I would one day make the return journey—that I would travel from Italy to the Ruhr and get out of the train in Duisburg because the Mafia had drenched the place in blood.

H
EINZ
S
PRENGER

H
EINZ
S
PRENGER
,
DIRECTOR OF THE
D
UISBURG
M
URDER
Commission, is waiting for me outside the station. He told me on the phone that he was short, with a moustache. Outside the exit a man was waiting, wrapped in a black leather jacket, the kind of leather jacket I’ve only ever seen in two places in the world: the Ukraine and the Ruhr.

If I were casting a police procedural set in the Ruhr, I’d immediately book Heinz Sprenger for the role of a police inspector to whom nothing human is alien and who doesn’t waste his words. Sprenger is someone who keeps the ball close to the ground, as they say in the Ruhr. I tried to imagine him in Calabria. Heinz Sprenger in his black leather jacket next to Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force of Reggio Calabria, looking in his dark-blue, pinstripe suit as if he had stepped straight out of a Mafia film. Cortese, drawing on his cigarillo and
watching after the smoke, and Sprenger, watching his partner with the patient attention of an ornithologist. Working with the Italians had taught him, Inspector Sprenger says, that it’s important to make a
bella figura
.

If he believed the newspapers, he said, the Mafia was being defeated in Italy every day. He was referring to those spectacular mass arrests of thirty or forty people that are always worth a small story even abroad: bosses, policemen disguised in ski masks, in the background a helicopter in which the mafioso is being taken away—a helicopter that has landed just for the photograph of the arrest. And that flies off again once the picture has been taken, without the mafioso.

Whole clans in Italy are regularly arrested for membership in the Mafia, he said, and no one learns that after a short time many bosses are simply put under house arrest for lack of evidence. Or leave prison as free men once their remand period is over, because the judges aren’t able to prosecute them within the designated period.

Heinz Sprenger and I drove to the scene of the crime. The Da Bruno pizzeria is only a few yards behind the station, on the ground floor of the Klöckner building, one of those 1980s buildings that you see everywhere in the Ruhr, buildings that look as if the architect had drawn his inspiration from the
Star Trek
movies. The restaurant looked as if it had been precipitously abandoned, the chairs were dusty and stood randomly around in the restaurant, a yucca palm withered in a corner, and above the counter there was an amateur painting of a pizza Margherita:
Pizza, la specialità di Sebastiano
. Outside was a big terrace with wooden benches; plainly the restaurant had been quite a success,
in every respect. The pizza Margherita, and the money laundering, too.

I thought about Sebastiano Strangio’s grave in the San Luca cemetery. About that crude concrete box with rusty iron girders sticking out of it. And I thought about Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, who was a cousin of the murdered Sebastiano Strangio, and who had traveled to Duisburg with the Bishop of Locri shortly after the massacre and held a “reconciliation mass” outside the pizzeria.

“I don’t eat pizza anymore myself,” said Inspector Sprenger. He said it casually, without any particular emphasis. Just stating a fact.

The bloodbath had taken place in the drive, just a few feet away from Da Bruno. We were standing in the rain; it smelled of soil and damp leaves, and Sprenger showed me the place where the shots had fallen. It was a driveway paved with those small square pieces of shale that you only get in the Ruhr. The two hit men had hidden behind the bushes planted along the drive. One of the surveillance cameras in the Klöckner building had caught the gunfire, more of a flash behind the leaves of the trees. Sixty shots from two different firearms, followed by shots to the head of each of the victims before the perpetrators fled in separate directions.

Until that night in August 2007, Heinz Sprenger had had nothing to do with the Mafia. He was the director of the Murder Commission in Duisburg, and had, among other things, made his name by developing a system for the monitoring of child abuse. His job was to clear up murder cases. His colleagues were responsible for organized crime. And now, overnight, he
was in the eye of the hurricane—a hurricane of journalists, politicians, and anti-Mafia parliamentary committees, lip service, postulations, and inferences, of ’Ndrangheta, investigating magistrates, and police. A hundred and twenty of his colleagues, half of all the investigators in Duisburg, were deployed to clear up the massacre.

At night Sprenger read books about the ’Ndrangheta. And files about the blood feud of San Luca. About the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, who had been at war since one side had thrown an egg at the other as a carnival prank. About a village that essentially consisted of organized crime, drug dealing, arms dealing, and murder. When Sprenger went to Calabria, he always took his personal interpreter with him. Not out of suspicion, no. “Just because,” he said.

His office was in a fascistic-looking red-brick police headquarters, built in the 1930s, like the Italian Palaces of Justice. There was linoleum in the corridors; cacti and little ficus trees were lined up neatly in Sprenger’s office, and the walls were hung with organizational charts that Sprenger had drawn up: family trees of the clans of San Luca, the members of the warring Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, assignments of tasks, family relationships and flows of information, arrows connecting men’s heads, women’s faces, hit men, victims, witnesses, perpetrators, getaway cars. At once a kind of wallpaper and a cartography of crime. Hanging next to it was a photograph of a trash bag with a child’s arm sticking out of it.

Heinz Sprenger had learned a lot about the family relationships of the Calabrian clan, about how almost everyone in San Luca has the same name, and you always have to know their mother’s name to distinguish one ’Ndranghetista from another.
And he had learned that in the summer before the massacre, Marco Marmo had driven through Duisburg: Marco Marmo, the instigator of the Duisburg massacre, the ’Ndranghetista who had carried out at Christmas 2006 the murder of Maria Strangio, which had been intended to kill her husband, the clan head Gianluca Nirta.

Since the murder of his wife, the boss Gianluca Nirta had been seen as a time bomb by the enemy Pelle-Vottari clan, so it was the job of the hit man Marco Marmo to get rid of him as quickly as possible: “Gianluca must die, otherwise nothing here is going to work. He has nothing to lose now, you see, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, the hit man’s devoted helper, who had traveled halfway across Europe with him, all the way to Duisburg. In a car that wasn’t just full of bugs but was also fitted with a satellite transmitter that told Italian investigators its exact location—in Tonhallenstrasse in Duisburg, for example, or Saarstrasse and Mühlheimer Strasse, where the pizzeria Da Bruno stood.