The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (24 page)

When he got out I was fourteen. It was a real drama. I spurned him. I was convinced that it was his fault that he wasn’t with us. I didn’t want to know why he had been in jail. I was convinced that he was the one who had left us in the lurch. “You abandoned us,” I said, “so now you have no right to hug me either. Or to say to me: ‘Come here, give me a kiss.’ Because it was your fault that you weren’t there. And that’s it.” When I last saw him in jail, he said: “I’d so love to hug you. With any luck I’ll soon be released from high security and back in normal jail.” And I—yes, I thought: No, with any luck this pane of glass will stay between us
.

That was the moment when Rosalba, the mother, and the sisters lost their composure. They struck the desk with their palms and shouted: “No, no, Marina, you didn’t really think that. You didn’t think that.”

But Marina assured them: “Yes, I did think that. I really did think that.”

Then she wept. Her sisters, her mother, and Rosalba stroked her cheeks, her head, her shoulders, and Marina sobbed into the Kleenex tissues that Rosalba took from the box on the desk. And I turned off the tape recorder.

Finally things get going again on Via Ruggero Settimo, the traffic is rerouted, and Salvo curses because he has to take a detour. Suddenly we find ourselves back by the Piazza Pretoria, next to the city hall. On the steps in front of the fountain lies a bride, draped there like Santa Rosalia in her sarcophagus. The train of her wedding dress flows down the steps. The bride has, apparently just by chance, pulled the dress up to her knees. A wedding photographer is giving instructions, and Shobha calls out to Salvo: “Stop!” Because she loves throwing wedding parties into chaos. I once saw her, apparently uninterested, approach a bridal couple who were standing on Trapani beach, posing very stiffly for a wedding photographer, along with other guests. After a minute, Shobha had sent everyone climbing onto shipwrecks in their evening wear, between carcasses of boats and rusty anchor chains, and persuaded the bride to push her cleavage out for the camera, like a figurehead.

It was pretty much the same when we were guests at the wedding of the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio, but that time Shobha didn’t need to use her powers of persuasion all that much. Rosalba automatically assumed the right pose in front of the camera: she sat down on the aerial roots of the magnolia fig tree in the garden of the Villa Trabia and smoked. She blew smoke rings into the air, which floated quiveringly above her
head until they became invisible, and sometimes Rosalba exhaled the smoke through her nose. It’s not for nothing that she’s called the devil’s lawyer.

Before the wedding, Rosalba had had a scorpion tattooed on her wrist. When she smoked—and she smoked a lot—the eye was inevitably drawn to the bluish animal on her skin. Her wedding dress was made of apricot-colored silk taffeta. It rustled with every step she took. Her copper-colored hair was piled up in one of those masterpieces of the Palermo hairdresser’s art, notable for looking studiedly casual: solidly sprayed to look like flowing drips of liquid, her curls played around the back of her neck, both artful and casual. The makeup artist had sprayed her face so that the lipstick didn’t creep into the little wrinkles around her mouth, her mascara didn’t run, her aubergine-colored eye shadow didn’t smudge the line of her eyelids.

Under her apricot-colored taffeta Rosalba wore the “ribbon of bliss,” a thin, blue satin band tied around her right thigh. When she momentarily lifted her dress for the photograph, her alabaster skin gleamed. And her tanga brief. After all, she had a reputation to lose. It’s no coincidence that she’s the best-known Mafia defender in Sicily. The only woman who defends Mafia bosses. And her groom, too, the Mafia lawyer Franco Marasà: thanks to Rosalba’s dedication, Dr. Marasà had been acquitted of favoring the Mafia. Various turncoat mafiosi had accused him of passing on messages to imprisoned bosses. Rosalba had prepared his defense; two colleagues conducted it. For a year the bar association had withdrawn his certification. Rosalba took over his clients for that period. They included Angelo Provenzano, eldest son of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who was in hiding. Dedication that was to pay off—because when the boss
was finally arrested, after forty-three years, his son Angelo turned to Dr. Marasà and asked him to undertake the defense of his father. So in the end everything stayed in the family.

The official wedding of the illustrious lawyer couple took place in Palermo, in the Villa Trabia, one of the Sicilian nobility’s feudal villas: faded glory in the midst of palm trees, box hedges, and a forest of gigantic magnolia fig trees, whose branches look like enchanted dragons and centaurs. The marriage vows were to be taken under one such monster.

Rosalba smoked, jabbed the air with her freshly manicured fingernails, and talked about high-security detention for mafiosi, about the possibilities of appeal in all Mafia trials, about turncoats—until it finally occurred to her that the wedding wasn’t a day in court. Again she flared her nostrils and expelled the smoke. She didn’t stub out her cigarette until her daughter laid the bridal bouquet of apricot-colored calla lilies in her arm and urged her to go. It was Rosalba’s second wedding at the Villa Trabia. The first had been to a bank clerk. When her son was four and she was in the fourth month of her next pregnancy, she sat her law exam. And shortly afterward dumped her husband. She still loves her former mother-in-law, even today. Rosalba invited her to the second wedding.

The groom was in pinstripes; he was slimmer than usual, and waited for Rosalba along with the registrar. Dr. Marasà knew what he had found in Rosalba. As a sign of that, he took her name: Franco Marasà-Di Gregorio.

Avvocato Marasà enjoys the greatest respect in Palermo. I once went with him to a bar in a side street off the Via della Libertà where we waited for Rosalba. When he ordered a prosecco for me, the barman emptied the open bottle down the sink
in front of our eyes and opened a new one. A small but significant gesture.

Bride and groom had appointed their children from their first marriages as witnesses. Apart from the family, their colleagues from their chambers were all there: from the curvaceous, mini-skirted secretary to the legal intern who spoke and smoked like a cloned Rosalba; from the fellow lawyer who defends the Graviano brothers and always ostentatiously goes to sleep when the judge hears renegade mafiosi, to childhood friends and two journalists from the Ansa news agency. The ladies in the wedding party proved that anything is wearable—everything was represented, from tiny pink dresses with glitter straps to the silver-gray lampshade look with tassels. The two Ansa journalists couldn’t take their eyes off a blond in a tiny pink dress whose bosom seemed to have sprung from the pages of an anatomy textbook.

The registrar chewed gum. As he started his speech, the women’s heels slowly sank into the red Sicilian earth. He had been very pleased to learn that he was going to wed this famous couple, he said. They were, after all, well known in the city. He ran his hand along his official sash and gave a sphinx-like smile. Certainly, some kind of synergy could be expected from this marriage. The couple had already accomplished many wonderful things, he said. And he hoped that things would continue in that vein, so that they could still accomplish a great deal more!

He smiled cryptically, and the guests applauded when the bride and groom finally said yes. After the registrar had declared them man and wife, Franco and Rosalba kissed passionately in front of the frozen centaurs of the magnolia fig tree. Dust
shimmered in the sunlight. For one brief moment Rosalba was silent. And, touched, her children smiled.

After that she stood on the first-floor balcony and threw the bouquet down among the unmarried women, to choose the next bride. But the bouquet was caught by an eight-year-old girl. Everything was different at this wedding, in fact. Unlike the usual Sicilian weddings—with at least seven hundred invited guests, Little Tony or some other Sicilian singing star, two video teams who don’t miss a single glance between the couple, and at least one member of parliament to give them a silver tray, which may one day feature in a public prosecutor’s bill of indictment as proof of Mafia involvement.

I gave Rosalba an antique table runner as a wedding present. Would it, too, one day be used as evidence? At any rate, Rosalba said that the antique table runner went very well with the antique French book,
La princesse Rosalba
, given to her by Marcello Dell’Utri, that éminence grise who is somehow impossible to avoid in certain circles in Sicily.

And so it is that the darkness of the Italian republic lurks within the heart of this apricot-colored bride. In Rosalba Di Gregorio’s chambers the destinies of the most important Cosa Nostra bosses cross paths with those of Italian politicians: Bernardo Provenzano and his family, Vittorio Mangano and his family, Pietro Aglieri, Marcello Dell’Utri, and Silvio Berlusconi.

A niece of the new godfather, the fugitive boss Matteo Messina Denaro, the supposed successor to Bernardo Provenzano, had recently had an internship in her chambers, Rosalba said. And I thought: Why not?

Rosalba had traveled to her wedding at Villa Trabia in her dented Renault Twingo. Her last car had been a Twingo as well.
She crashed it into a wall when an accidental contact caused a short circuit. Her garage discovered that a bug, acting as a tracking device, must have been removed from her car a short time before. Her client Pietro Aglieri had just been arrested at the time. After that, her journeys clearly hadn’t been interesting enough to keep spying on her, said Rosalba. “They turned me inside out like a pillowcase, I was X-rayed, I was vivisected. But they didn’t find a thing.”

When Rosalba invited me to her wedding, we had already known each other for a few years. I had first met her in the high-security courtroom at Caltanissetta, where she was defending her client, the boss Pietro Aglieri, on one of his fifteen counts of murder. I had been struck that Rosalba was the only Mafia lawyer who had been listening during the trial. All the others ostentatiously fell asleep when a turncoat mafioso began to speak. That kind of effect was too cheap for Rosalba. She listened attentively, if reluctantly, so that she could object at the right moment.

It might indeed be the case, Rosalba said, that her client was a mafioso, but there was still no proof about the indictments of murder. And without proof there was no guilt.

And then she smiled with pursed lips. There was a principle at stake, she said. The principle of the freedom of the individual. And just by chance this individual was a mafioso. Are we not living in a constitutional, democratic state? Does a mafioso not have a right to be defended like everyone else? Well then.

Regardless of whether she is waiting for a trial in the Palace of Justice or visiting her clients in jail, Rosalba is always dressed in a way that makes respectable Sicilian women blanch. She wears jeans with holes. Or a pinstripe jacket with a studded belt.
Or army boots. Or a deep cleavage. Or everything at the same time. And her lawyer’s gown is thrown casually over her arm.

Rosalba Di Gregorio doesn’t defend just any old Mafia bosses. But she does defend the ones accused of blowing up the public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino along with his bodyguards outside his mother’s front door. Some of them are in jail, others in hiding. Rosalba communicates with them via their relations. Sometimes I met them in the corridor of Rosalba’s chambers. The brothers and sisters of fugitive Mafia bosses were courteous people who greeted me cordially.

“My clients tell me they’re innocent,” Rosalba says firmly. “You can believe that or not. It doesn’t matter at all. At any rate, according to our legislation the client is deemed to be innocent until the judge delivers his judgment. The prosecution must present evidence, the defense must present counter-evidence. That’s how you get close to the truth. Or whatever the truth might be.”

When the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri was arrested in Palermo in 1998, after eight years in hiding, he said just one sentence: “My lawyer’s name is Rosalba Di Gregorio.” In those days the papers couldn’t get enough of the fairy tale of the “Beauty and the Beast.” The Beast had the air of a seminarian and was considered the leading brains behind the current Mafia generation. The mafiosi call him
u signorinu
, the little gentleman. A Mafia boss of the kind that Sicily craved: an ascetic, constantly described by journalists as having read Kierkegaard in his hiding place and prayed with the priest Padre Frittitta before a house altar. Someone who could make himself understood in grammatically impeccable Italian—unlike the bosses arrested up until that point, who only had a command of Sicilian dialect and
looked like the janitor next door. And a woman was defending him. That was the loveliest thing about him. Today, Pietro Aglieri is studying theology in jail, by correspondence course with Rome University. His professors are full of praise for him. He only ever gets the best marks.

Rosalba has a pragmatic view of her job: she isn’t supporting monsters, just defendants. A moral problem would arise only if someone who had already been sentenced brought guns into jail. But until a sentence is passed, she assumes that she is standing by saints in their martyrdom trials. She looks at me ironically and draws on her cigarette.

Every time I leave Rosalba’s chambers I have the feeling of being under anesthetic. This has to do on the one hand with her extreme cigarette consumption, and on the other with “mafiology,” that self-referential area of study that has blossomed into an art form in Palermo, and in which Rosalba is an expert. Sicily is a world of interpretation, in which you read things into silences, into the pauses in the wiretap notes, into raised eyebrows, into the way someone lifts his coffee cup. Where you puzzle over what is hidden, could be hidden, should be hidden, behind each tiny gesture. As if reality were only a question of interpretation. As if the truth could constantly change like the sky in springtime.

Regardless of the apricot-colored wedding dress and the ribbon of bliss, Rosalba didn’t allow the merest hint of solemnity to appear at her wedding. She talked as she always talks. As if she were sitting behind her glass desk in her chambers, amid yard after yard of files tagged with the names “Vittorio Mangano” or “Borsellino,” in the middle of a menagerie consisting of a cloth swallow that sits on the desk lamp, a cloth snake that serves as a
backrest, a horned computer with a leather cover, and a fire-red rubber stiletto in which she usually rests her
telefonino
. Since she’s used to talking to her secretary in the outer office, Franco in the side room, the wife of a jailed mafioso on the phone, and the legal intern in the armchair opposite her all at the same time, Rosalba talked away nineteen to the dozen to the whole wedding party, witnesses and bridesmaids included. She whooped, cooed, growled, and cursed. As if what was at stake was not the cupid’s bow of her lips, the curve of which everyone praised, but paragraph 41b, the one that prescribes high-security detention for mafiosi—which Rosalba fought against tenaciously and successfully and anticonstitutionally, on the grounds that it contravened human rights.