The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (22 page)

Agata Barresi said nothing when the Mafia murdered the first of her five sons. She also said nothing when the Mafia murdered the last of her five sons. She didn’t even open her mouth when the policeman asked her for her personal details. She remained silent until her death.

The mother of the mafioso Enrico Incognito wept when her son was killed. But what good did it do? The shame had to be eradicated, honor reestablished. Enrico’s brother Marcello had shot him to stop him from going over to the other side, the side of justice. The murder was accidentally captured on video, because at the very moment that his mother and his murderer entered the room, Enrico was recording his statement on tape. “No! Marcello, no!” Enrico cried, begging for his life. In vain. Then the mother left the room so that she didn’t have to watch what was about to happen.

And Vincenzina Marchese, sister-in-law of the boss Totò Riina and wife of the boss Leoluca Bagarella, disappeared when her husband was arrested. He wore her wedding ring on a chain around his neck, as one would with someone who had died, and put fresh flowers by her photograph. A note was found in her handwriting: “Forgive me, everyone, my husband is worth his weight in gold, it’s all my fault,” read the message on squared
paper. Later, the police learned from two turncoat mafiosi that Vincenzina had supposedly hanged herself. Not only was she the wife of a powerful mafioso, she was also the sister of one of the most important state witnesses against the Mafia. Vincenzina had wanted to erase the shame, people said. Her body was never found.

Those bloodletting times, when the mafiosi had turned state’s evidence in droves, had been the times of the Mafia women. Of the cold-blooded mothers, the wives who were as self-sacrificing as they were vengeful. During those hard times, the Mafia women had become more valuable than ever. After all, no wave of arrests, no law, had done so much damage to the Mafia as the statements of its own men. There were men who talked about how they had strangled a little boy and dissolved his corpse in hydrochloric acid, about a man having his arm chopped off before being killed, about a pregnant woman being throttled. Now the wives were called upon to play their part, to praise the sacredness of the family, to extol the infallibility of the husband, to level accusations against the judiciary—wives who were willing to do anything to make the image of Cosa Nostra shine again. In the end, it was all about their children’s future.

We drive along the seafront of Mondello, past the pier where the Charleston restaurant stands, looking, with its turrets and curlicues, like a Russian railway station from the days of the Tsars. It smells of oysters and burned almonds. The fish restaurants are on their afternoon break, and people jostle each other at the stalls selling sunglasses and fake Vuitton bags as if there were something to be had for free. The turquoise sea looks like a tourist poster, and lovers lie embracing on the beach.

We plan to have a coffee in the piazza in Mondello, and I desperately crave some
cannoli
, regardless of their proven indigestibility, to which Shobha refers once again.

“I haven’t been to Mondello for ages,” Letizia announces with amazement. She stares at the passing couples, who all look as if they’ve allowed themselves a lunch in Mondello today, with their parents, their sisters and in-laws, their children. As if they’ve had swordfish at Al Gabbiano, preceded by a few oysters and sea urchins and spaghetti with clams. The son-in-law will have chosen the wine, perhaps a light Tasca d’Almerita, for which his father-in-law will have despised him because he himself drinks red wine with fish. Now they’ve taken a stroll along the shore, along the quay to the little white statue of Mary at the end, past the fishing boats and back to the stalls of the Vietnamese street traders selling cigarette lighters in the shape of hand grenades. Exhausted by this effort, they slump onto a chair in the piazza, for an ice cream, or perhaps just one tiny
cannolo
. In a moment the mother-in-law will say that the
cannoli
aren’t bad, but not nearly as good as the ones she makes herself, which are as light as a breeze. Then they will all argue about whether the
cannoli
from Pasticceria Alba on Piazza Don Bosco are really the best ones in the whole city, and the father-in-law will dare to announce that the best
cannoli
come from Piana degli Albanesi, which will put his wife in such a huff that she won’t talk to him until dinnertime. “That’s what it’ll be like,” says Shobha.

And we sit next to the couples, at one of the wobbly little tables; columns of cars drive noisily past and suddenly, at one of the neighboring tables, I think I recognize a woman whom Shobha and I met in this cafe a few years ago: Carla Cottone,
daughter-in-law of one of the most powerful godfathers in Palermo, Francesco Madonia, who ruled the Resuttana clan with his four sons.

I point at her, but Shobha shakes her head. “No, that’s not her. Although it does look very like her.”

Carla Cottone, Madonia by marriage, was wearing a dark-blue suit and a pearl necklace when she collected us that time from the cafe on the piazza in Mondello. Everyone turned to stare as she crossed the piazza, because since her appearance on the Maurizio Costanzo talk show she had acquired a certain degree of celebrity. It was the first time that a woman from one of the most powerful Mafia families in Sicily had spoken publicly. But not to condemn the Mafia, as the presenter had hoped. Since her husband, Aldo, had been behind bars, Carla had embarked on a goodwill tour through the media to convince the public that her husband had fallen victim to a miscarriage of justice.

Carla Cottone had married Aldo, the youngest son of the Madonia clan, one of the most bloodthirsty Mafia families in Sicily, a clan that could boast of being involved in almost every “excellent” murder in the 1980s and 1990s: the assassinations of the regional president Piersanti Mattarella, the prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the police chief Ninni Cassarà, the public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. And the Palermo businessman Libero Grassi, who had publicly refused to go on paying protection money to the Mafia. Aldo Madonia was the last of the four Madonia sons to be still out of prison. He was also known as
dottoricchio
, little doctor, because he was the only one in the family to have graduated from college. His subject had been chemistry. He was arrested after a turncoat mafioso had stated that Aldo had been involved in a drug deal in which 600
kilos of cocaine from Colombia were delivered to the beach of Castellammare del Golfo. Aldo was said to have been present at a business meeting between Sicilian and Colombian drug dealers. One of the Madonia brothers who had already been sentenced tried to convince the turncoat that it was a case of mistaken identity. It was he, not his brother, who had taken part in the meeting.

In reply, the state witness said to him: “Why do you address me with the familiar
tu
? I don’t know you, I only know your brother Aldo.”

Carla Cottone had thought that we, too, were propagandists, who were going to deluge her with a flood of imprecations, accusations, and entreaties as soon as she’d asked us into her villa in the center of Mondello, with all its security alarms and high steel walls. She raged, as if she could prove her husband’s innocence simply by shouting. She cursed Palermo’s judges and all the turncoats who had denounced her husband. Her irreproachable husband Aldo a mafioso? All lies told by rats in return for promised privileges. Aldo was innocent, she cried. She turned into an animal when she heard those accusations; the problem was just that he bore the name of Madonia.

Until his arrest, it was in this house in Mondello that Aldo Madonia had led the blameless life as a pharmacist that his wife evoked. Shobha and I sat in the midst of an idyll of period furniture, family photographs in silver frames, and little porcelain figurines, and wondered why a respectable pharmaceutical adviser would need to protect himself with high steel walls. And as we sat there and wondered, Carla Cottone compared the Italian judiciary with the medieval Inquisition and the fascist era, and painted a romantic picture of the Mafia, which many people in
Sicily joined only because they were in financial difficulties. “They’re unemployed, and life is expensive. So they choose to fit in with something,” she said.

Not a bad word about her husband’s family crossed her lips: it was all just dust that was being raised about all his supposed crimes. There was nothing behind any of it. Aldo had always said that his father was a very loving man.

On the day of our meeting with Carla Cottone, I learned that a car-bomb attack had been launched against Maurizio Costanzo, the host of the talk show on which Carla had so volubly defended her husband. Costanzo had survived only by the skin of his teeth. The bomb had gone off just before his car drove past.

Costanzo had long been a thorn in the flesh of the Mafia because of his critical attitude toward them. In his program, not only had he challenged Carla Cottone to condemn the Mafia but he had also wished a tumor upon a mafioso, after the man in question had managed to get himself transferred from jail to hospital with a faked illness. When the hard core of the Corleonesi decided, after the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, to continue with their murderous strategy, the suggestion that Costanzo become a target had been carried unanimously.

“Let’s walk along the beach for a bit,” Shobha says to Letizia and me. I feel like doing that as well. To feel the wind in my face and the water on my feet. Finally to feel a bit of movement. Because when I think about our meeting with Carla Cottone, about the attempt on Maurizio Costanzo’s life, I feel the torpor of Sicily settling on us.

“Chemistry,” Shobha says. Just that one word, and we laugh. No subject could have suited Aldo Madonia better. In the late 1980s Sicily was the center of the heroin trade and heroin refinement. At the time there were lots of rumors about the heroin refineries around Monreale, and Shobha hadn’t given them enough credence. One day when she came home to the little house not far from Monreale that she had rented shortly before, her eye fell first on the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, which was still swinging back and forth, as if it had taken a knock—a furious, raging knock that had shattered all the furniture in her apartment, bed, cupboard, table and chairs, books, clothes, plates, and cups, all smashed and shattered. Only her saints had been left unharmed, the statues of Santa Rosalia, Santa Rita, and the Madonna of Trapani.

The next time they were a bit more polite. When Shobha came home, two men were waiting for her in a Mercedes. Men who moved as if they were being filmed. Economical movements, sparse sentences. She had half an hour to pack her things and get out, they said. No one was allowed to live in this area. Her furniture would be taken away in a truck; she could pick it up from a garage on the edge of Palermo.

Shobha packed her most necessary belongings and fled. Later she drove to the garage they had described. It was empty.

Even today Shobha is angry with herself for believing the two mafiosi. Believing in honesty, in a sense of honor.

“I left Sicily after that,” says Shobha.

You never hear from any Cosa Nostra women anymore. After the numbers of turncoats dwindled almost to nothing, the
women became invisible again. They disappeared into nowhere, like rabbits that a magician had pulled out of his hat before conjuring them back again. Once again they became as invisible as Cosa Nostra itself.

The Calabrian Mafia women learned from the deployment of the Sicilian Mafia women: each time the clans are temporarily weakened by waves of arrests, the Calabrian women appear in public. A well-aimed stab to the maternal heart always works in Italy. A year after the Duisburg massacre, the wives of various arrested ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca even joined an anti-’Ndrangheta march, in which they had no hesitation in holding banners demanding
True Justice
—for their husbands, brothers, and sons: wanted murderers, arrested clan chiefs.

Carla Cottone and her blameless husband went on living their respectable life. Once his period in custody was over, Aldo Madonia was able to leave prison and wait comfortably at home for the further judgments of the higher-court authorities. In 2003 he was acquitted by the supreme court. He was defended by the Mafia lawyer Nino Mormino, who finally became a Forza Italia MP and worked under the Berlusconi government as vice president of the parliamentary judiciary committee. There he campaigned for an amnesty, which would apply not least to legally sentenced mafiosi. It was only when the Palermo state prosecutor’s office investigated Mormino that he stepped down from the judiciary committee. Even now Avvocato Mormino is one of the most sought-after Mafia defenders in Palermo. He defended Berlusconi’s friend Marcello Dell’Utri in the second instance against the charge of assisting the Mafia, and also the former Sicilian regional president Totò Cuffaro against the
charge of helping the Mafia, both with great success. Cuffaro celebrated his lenient sentence from the court of the first instance: five years, for favoring the Mafia. Originally he was to have been sentenced for supporting the Mafia—not just a difference in the choice of words, but in the length of sentence as well. And Marcello Dell’Utri can consider himself lucky that public prosecutor Ingroia, whose indictment brought him a nine-year sentence for supporting the Mafia in the first instance, was not in charge of the trial in the second instance.

The blow of Cuffaro’s resignation as Sicilian regional president was briefly softened for him by a seat in the senate, where he could feel that he was among friends. Giulio Andreotti, sentenced for supporting the Mafia—whose support for the Mafia until 1980 was proven, and is now deemed to have lapsed—sits in the senate, as do Marcello Dell’Utri and the president of the senate, Renato Schifani. Schifani wasn’t sentenced for supporting the Mafia, but founded the company Sicula Brokers in 1979 together with a number of Mafia bosses—which, for a man appointed senate president by Prime Minister Berlusconi, and who therefore holds nothing less than the second-highest political office in Italy, is at least slightly awkward. Particularly since one of those Mafia bosses, Nino Mandalà, boasted years later of his friendship with Renato Schifani—something recorded in the files of various Mafia trials. Unlike politicians, the Mafia doesn’t forget. Not even decades on. Favors must be returned.