The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (19 page)

Unlike the Sicilian mafiosi, who are always worried that their apartments and cars might be bugged and who therefore talk rarely or in a very coded way about their business, what is astonishing about the ’Ndrangheta is the openness with which they talk about their dealings: the wiretap records of San Luca and the ones from the car in Duisburg suggest a certain recklessness. The killer and his henchman talked quite openly about their plans; plainly they thought they had nothing to fear, from either the Italian or the German police. Who, incidentally, knew nothing about the fact that the two mafiosi were driving through Duisburg in a bugged car—and Heinz Sprenger remains angry about that, because of the not inconsiderable danger that the
two men represented. After they’d been stopped at a roadblock, the hit man told his henchman that he would have fired if they had been held any longer. But because Italian wiretap records are illegal under German law, they are ineligible as evidence.

Behind this lurks what German detectives politely term “different investigative traditions and legal cultures”: the Italian police try to penetrate the structures of a whole clan, which it can then finally arrest for the crime of Mafia membership. The German police have to be able to demonstrate a concrete crime, so they must look for evidence, for DNA traces, fingerprints, traces of gunpowder. Or, as Inspector Sprenger puts it: the Italians bug everything, they tap people’s phones for years—and nothing happens.

But where the Italian police have the edge, as far as he’s concerned, is in their ability to seize Mafia property, even if Mafia membership is only suspected. How many times have the German police questioned Italians who have come to Germany without funds, worked making pizzas for six months, and then bought up half of Duisburg city center? And, when they were asked where the money came from, said, “From my uncle in Italy.”

All mafiosi cherish this hole in German legislation, and they exploit it even today. Especially, of course, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. German investigators noticed this when mafiosi from Duisburg, Cologne, or Dortmund moved to the east, to Saxony and Thuringia, and particularly to the Baltic coast, where millions of euros were laundered through the purchase of hotels, restaurants, and holiday resorts.

There isn’t a single Calabrian-run pizzeria in Germany that hasn’t got some involvement with the ’Ndrangheta, says Inspector
Sprenger. But so long as there is no shift in the burden of proof, so long as the police have to demonstrate that the money comes from criminal offenses, and the investor does not have to prove that his money was acquired legally, the Mafia’s businesses in Germany will go on thriving.

What did he expect?

“I don’t think the Germans are going to change their laws because of Duisburg,” he said. “And if they don’t change anything, nothing will change between Italy and Germany.”

For me this accorded with the views of the Calabrian state prosecutors Gratteri and Boemi and the investigator Cortese: all three men were united by the oppressive feeling that Duisburg hadn’t really changed anything. That the initial enthusiasm that had inspired Germany and Italy to work very closely together had already dissipated. Cortese saw that his German colleagues were highly motivated, but that they were hampered by the legal situation. German laws were no match for the criminal reality.

“So the Mafia has a great future in Germany,” I said to Letizia, who had forgotten all about her swordfish as we talked about Duisburg. The red-faced son-in-law has been lurking for quite a while, and when finally Letizia sets down her cutlery, he immediately takes the plates away and tries to persuade us to have a dessert, wild strawberries in orange sauce, or hand-made lemon sorbet, almost compulsory at the end of a fish dinner: “To lose the fishy taste in your mouth,” he adds. We comply without much resistance and take both. Wild strawberries with lemon sorbet.

By now we’re the last guests in Piccola Napoli; the old woman at the till is already starting to cash out for the day. She’s a bit like the grim-looking old Sicilian woman that I saw in a
pizzeria in Duisburg. A policeman had recommended the restaurant to me: “I can assure you that the kitchen’s clean, we searched the place only recently,” he said.

I had gone to Duisburg with my uncle, an undercover agent in a sailor’s cap. My uncle is a retired miner, so he’s the ideal companion for looking around Duisburg without drawing attention to yourself. We had lunch in the Sicilian pizzeria that had already been searched by the criminal investigation department. No one in the restaurant spoke even halfway decent German; they didn’t even speak Italian, they just communicated in a Sicilian dialect that they muttered through unmoving lips, as if they’d been catapulted into the present of Duisburg from the depths of the Sicilian past. My uncle was eagerly wolfing down a plate of salmon with prawn sauce when the old woman came out of the kitchen. She was very short, had eyes like bits of coal, and her hair was in a thin bun at the back of her neck. She poured herself a glass of mineral water at the counter. When I saw her, a film played out in my mind’s eye, showing all the encounters that I’ve ever had with Mafia wives. I couldn’t help thinking about suspicious glances behind fly-curtains, the severe faces of the black dwarves of Corleone, of Mafia mothers who call their sons vermin when they have left the Mafia. But perhaps the old woman with the coal-black eyes was just a generous Sicilian grandmother helping out in this restaurant for a few hours a day. Perhaps.

But this restaurant was actually only a warm-up. The destination for our outing was the Landhaus Milser. A hotel that was “the expression of Southern vitality,” according to the prospectus. It was on the edge of Duisburg, between meadows and little pieces of woodland.

My uncle stepped into the hotel lobby as if into a church; he crossed his arms behind his back and stepped across the terracotta tiles with great deference. Displayed in a case next to the entrance were medals won by the weightlifter Rolf Milser, who had founded the hotel along with the Calabrian Antonio Pelle. The hotel became famous in 2006 when the Italian national football team stayed there. And when the Duisburg massacre took place. During those August days there was barely an interview in which the Calabrian owner, Antonio Pelle from San Luca, didn’t endeavor to avoid arrest on grounds of kinship: not all Calabrians were mafiosi; he’d rather have been born on the moon than in San Luca.

                              But I said nothing of that to my uncle. We stepped through the light-drenched hotel lobby, poked our heads into the Da Vinci restaurant, and admired the photographs of the Italian national team. My uncle thought everything was very nice, very well cared for.

As we left, my eye was drawn to a gold plaque that hung in the lobby, on which Antonio Pelle was celebrated as a “successful migrant” who had brought honor on Calabria. The medal of honor had been awarded by the Pro Loco of San Giovanni di Gerace, one of those associations devoted to the fostering of local traditions. The medal was signed by the Pro Loco president, Dr. Mario Carabetta. And I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the companion of the hit man from San Luca who drove through Duisburg in a bugged car the summer before the assassination bore the same surname: Michele Carabetta.

When Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, had traveled to Duisburg to deliver his mass of reconciliation, he spent the night in the Landhaus Milser. As befits a Calabrian. Compatriots always look out for each other.

M
AFIA
W
OMEN

W
HEN WE LEAVE THE TRATTORIA AT LAST
,
THE WOMEN OF
the Piccola Napoli look up for the first time. The old woman stares at us and at the money that the waiter brings her on a little silver tray; the daughter-in-law finally stops polishing the counter and wipes her hand on her apron. But not even Shobha can wrest a smile from the daughter-in-law, not even when she takes a picture of her and admires her delicate profile. The daughter-in-law shrugs carelessly, as if she thinks her symmetrical face is entirely uninteresting.

Outside, the light has softened again; we stand irresolutely in the street, Letizia lights a cigarette and looks through the smoke at the clear, endless sky as if expecting a sign.

“We could drive to Mondello,” Shobha suggests. “We could take a few pictures on Monte Pellegrino first, and then a few on Mondello beach.”

Letizia looks up in astonishment, as if remembering only now that this is all about her. “Haven’t we finished?” she asks. She hesitates for a moment between protest and resignation, and then opts for an aggressive: “Let’s get it over with.”

Shobha calls Salvo, who is clearly in the middle of his siesta, because it takes him ages to answer. He suggests that we go in the direction of Ucciardone prison, where he’ll pick us up to take us to Mondello. First he has some things to do for one of his ladies.

“Madonna,” says Shobha, as she puts the
telefonino
away again, “they’ve really got him over a barrel.” So that we don’t have to wait too long for Salvo, we walk through the Borgo at a leisurely pace, as slowly as tourists, past the piles of trash from the market stalls, through air that smells as if it’s fermenting. The green of artichokes lies next to burst watermelons and shimmering gray fish scales. Not a single car drives past; nothing stirs around here before five o’clock. A deep silence prevails in the street, on the artichoke-green, on the fly-curtains of the balconies. The silence of paused time. The sacred southern Italian lunch break is even respected by the dogs in the street, which lie snoring in the shade on the pavements. Beside them, fat women sit spread-legged on plastic chairs outside the front doors of their houses. The women sleep open-mouthed, hands folded on their bellies.

The plastic chairs aren’t the usual white ones that pollute the world, but chairs stretched with strips of plastic, old chairs that look almost beautiful next to the omnipresent white plastic stacking chairs. It’s not just traditions that last longer in Sicily than elsewhere, chairs do too. They remind me of Rita Atria’s
mother’s chair. It was in their living room, made of white and yellow plastic strips, with an old sofa cushion on the seat.

Rita Atria was a Sicilian girl, about whom I wrote my very first book. She was eleven years old when her father, a Mafia boss, was murdered. She was sixteen when her brother was killed. She took her own life at seventeen. She had grown up in the Mafia. Rita wanted to avenge her father and brother by collaborating with the judiciary and telling them what she knew about the Mafia in her village. Since then her mother had rejected her.

Rita lived in Rome under a series of assumed names—with her sister-in-law, her brother’s widow, in an apartment that the Ministry of the Interior had rented for the two young women. They were filled with hope for a new life beyond the Mafia, until public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was murdered. A week after the assassination Rita Atria jumped from the seventh floor of a block of apartments in Rome. She would have turned eighteen four weeks later.

A state prosecutor gave me a photocopy of Rita Atria’s diary. In it she wrote:

No one can understand the emptiness that Borsellino’s death has left in my life. Everybody’s scared. But the only thing I’m scared of is that the Mafia state will always win, and the few poor idiots who tilt against windmills will be murdered too. Before you start fighting against the Mafia you have to test your own conscience—it’s only when you have defeated the Mafia within yourself that you can fight against it in your circle of friends. Because the Mafia is us and our twisted way of behaving. Borsellino. You died for what you believed in. But without you, I’m dead
.

Rita’s mother didn’t come to her daughter’s funeral. Eight women from Palermo carried Rita’s coffin on their shoulders: they were the women from the committee of “Women Against the Mafia,” and one of them was Letizia. Rita Atria’s grave was marked with a small headstone with the inscription
The Truth Lives
. Rita’s sister-in-law had had this gravestone erected—the sister-in-law who had lived with her until her suicide. It was only months after her daughter’s death that the girl’s mother visited the grave—and shattered the gravestone with a hammer that she had hidden in her handbag. She went on striking the stone until only a few splinters remained of Rita’s photograph and the inscription
The Truth Lives
.