The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (28 page)

While the speeches were being delivered, Alessandro, the fair-haired, unemployed kid, looked into the street. And then he turned away and said: “They haven’t come again. They’ll never come.”

M
ESSINA
D
ENARO

W
HEN
S
HOBHA STEPS ONTO THE TERRACE
,
SHE’S TURNED
herself into a glittering apparition with sparkling earrings, a deep décolleté, and coal-black eyes. And pointed shoes. At the end of the day she always needs to get rid of the flat shoes and trousers that she makes herself wear when she’s working. Making herself feminine again. Although this time we don’t have a sense of having worked at all. It’s more as if we’d just taken a walk, like the French and American tourists who walk through Palermo, always slightly anxiously, pressed close to the walls of the houses, in the deluded hope that they won’t be recognized as tourists. Whose tour guides do everything they can to ensure that visitors to Sicily think not about fugitive bosses but about the ancient theater of Segesta, the colonnade of the cathedral of Monreale, and the oratory of
Santa Cita, where myriads of angels whir about—the baroque extravagance, the Sicilian excess.

From Shobha’s roof terrace you can watch the city getting ready for nightfall. Putting on stars and bathing in moonlight. The domes of the baroque churches curve triumphantly next to Palermo’s single, rather anorexic-looking skyscraper, and in the distance the lights gleam from the illegally built houses on the hill of Mondello. Shobha has uncorked a bottle of chardonnay from Planeta; we listen to David Bowie and a jingling wind chime.

“Trapani,” says Shobha, after she has tasted the wine. Strange, it tastes like Trapani. The sea and wisteria. The way it smelled in the morning when we used to go to processions.

I hold the wine under my nose, close my eyes, and try to smell Trapani. I actually smell jasmine, rosemary, and oregano. A hint of wisteria. Perhaps some salt in the air, and, if I put my mind to it, I can also smell a bit of myrrh. For years we took a pilgrimage to the Good Friday procession of Trapani,
La processione dei misteri
. We set off from Palermo at night and drove, drunk with sleep, down the
autostrada
to reach Trapani at dawn. We parked the car in the harbor and walked shivering through the night air, always heading toward the funeral march. You could hear the music from a long way away, music that sounded beautiful and skewed and grabbed our hearts in its clutches.

When we got there, the faithful had already been following the penitential procession for hours. Men in dark suits carried the enormously heavy stations of the cross: Christ before Pilate, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the raising of the cross, the entombment, the mother of sorrows. Each time the bearers set down the bier, lit with incandescent bulbs, for a few minutes, they passed around bottles wrapped in brown paper, and the
women leaned against a house wall, closed their eyes and murmured the rosary to keep from falling asleep. “
Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori
.” As day palely dawned, the world stood still for a moment. Just long enough for the music to start again and the sea on the horizon to color itself pink.

We felt intoxicated. Shobha photographed angels, Roman legionnaires in shimmering gold armor, brides of Christ, and little girls carrying the crown of thorns through the streets on purple velvet cushions. She photographed mothers holding their handbags in front of them like protective shields, she photographed the notables in their sashes, all the presidents who take very small, important steps—
presidente della confraternità dei pescatori
,
presidente dell’associazione SS. Crocefisso, presidente della società sanguinis Christi
—and I walked behind the brass bands with my tape recorder, in search of funeral marches. “
Una lacrima sulla tomba di mia madre
” remains my favorite funeral march, “A Tear on My Mother’s Grave”—Chopin, Op. 32, with the tuba at the beginning, the tremolo clarinet, and the trumpets which, when they come in, sound as if the funeral march is about to turn into a piece of dance music.

The climax of the procession was reached when the stations of the cross were carried back into the Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio in the early afternoon: a finale like a never-ending act of coitus, the church struggling against it doggedly and without success. With seeming hesitancy, the individual groups of figures were carried in and out through the portal of the church, rocking back and forth, amid applause, a rain of rose petals, and out-of-tune trumpet entries. Inside the church it looked as if a weary traveling circus had collapsed: on the floor, amid damp sawdust and crushed blossoms, the bearers sat blank-faced, others
hugged and wept with exhaustion—whether it was the exertion of carrying things for hours, or the contents of the bottles in their brown-paper wrappings, everything was discharged in a collective crying fit, the men wiped the tears from their eyes with white damask handkerchiefs, and we wept along too.

And just a day later Trapani was as forbidding as ever. With gleaming light and a landscape buried under concrete.

“Strange, isn’t it?” says Shobha, sniffing the wine again. “At some point I lost the desire to go there,” she says.

Was it that moment when the part-time photographers and amateur film directors gained the upper hand and kept walking into the picture? Or when, still in Trapani, we went in search of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro? At some point we lost the procession virus. Like a scab under which new skin has formed.

“Trapani,” says Shobha, who sticks her nose back in the wine glass and adds: “Have you heard about the murals?”

“What murals?” I ask, really thinking about art for a moment.

“Murals of Messina Denaro,” says Shobha. In the style of Warhol. With the inscription
You’ll be hearing from me
. They appeared in Palermo and in Messina Denaro’s place of birth, Castelvetrano, not far from Trapani. “The police investigated,” Shobha says and smiles ironically. The murals were immediately painted over.

Messina Denaro is a kind of icon among mafiosi. When investigators or public prosecutors talk about Messina Denaro, there’s a hint of respect for their opponent. Investigators see Messina Denaro as the boss with the greatest political foresight. In his case the word
latitante
, fugitive, has a different ring: it sounds like a mark of distinction, like an accolade, a higher Mafia qualification.

Certainly it’s the case that hunters would rather go after a tiger than a rabbit. Particularly since most bosses are more like rabbits. Powerful rabbits, admittedly, but rabbits nevertheless. So it’s all the more striking when a boss like Matteo Messina Denaro moves around the world as if it belonged to him—not least since he has slipped the Mafia’s moral straitjacket and consolidated his position as a ladies’ man, defying the Sicilian proverb that giving orders is better than fucking. Messina Denaro has proved that you can do both. When he was in hiding he even managed to father an illegitimate daughter, who is now ten years old, has never seen her father, and lives in her grandmother’s house in Castelvetrano—along with her mother who, as long as she lives, will never look another man in the eye. To keep from damaging the boss’s reputation. And to protect her own life. If a mafioso loses face as a result of his wife’s infidelity, she is as good as dead.

The Mafia revere Matteo Messina Denaro as a saint: “I’d love to be able to see him, touch him, just once,” they sigh on the telephone, as if they dreamed of dabbing kisses on the hem of the Madonna’s robe with their fingertips. “Everything good comes from him,” the mafiosi whisper, “we must worship him.”

His nickname is “Diabolik,” the name of an Italian comic character, an elegant gangster who lives in the grand style from his jewel robberies: a representative of evil who always maintains a certain code of honor. Diabolik basically only robs rich people from the top levels of society—although the similarity to Robin Hood stops there, because you couldn’t exactly say that he shares his booty with the poor. It’s more that evil triumphs with him in a world of weak supermen, as the mafiosi imagine the world to be in their idle moments—idle moments when they believe the singer Vasco Rossi’s hymn to the fearless life,
“the exaggerated life, the life full of troubles.” Idle moments when they manage to fade out reality as if it were a film: the reality in which they smell of fear because they’re next on the hit man’s list, a hit man who boasts that he’s never worn gloves when dissolving corpses in hydrochloric acid; the reality that consists in throttling a friend, beheading and castrating him, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. The reality is one in which children can be kept for years in an underground dungeon, like little Giuseppe di Matteo, who was locked up in a cell in San Giuseppe Jato until he was strangled and dissolved in acid.

Giuseppe’s father had become a turncoat, and the abduction of his son was supposed to keep him quiet. At the end of his imprisonment, the boy had been reduced to nothing but a “human larva,” said the mafioso who had been given the job of strangling him.

All the more important are the miracle stories about Messina Denaro, of whom the mafiosi couldn’t get enough: about how he is supposed to have driven an Alfa 164 armed with machine guns that could be activated by the push of a button from the driver’s seat; how he boasted that he could fill a cemetery with his victims; how he guarded the treasure of the arrested boss Totò Riina, a treasure that consisted not only of jewelry but also of the Mafia archive; and how he had hidden with that treasure in an underground apartment in a jeweler’s shop in Castelvetrano, entered via a strong room with an elevator built into it.

It’s a long time since Cosa Nostra produced such a pop star.

Matteo Messina Denaro comes from Castelvetrano, and in the police files his profession is given as “farmer.” He is what people here call an “artist’s son”: his father, Francesco, was one of the
most powerful bosses of Cosa Nostra, a member of the
cupola
, the Mafia council. Both Matteo Messina Denaro and his brother Salvatore, as well as his father, Francesco, were on the payroll of one of the richest families in Trapani, the family of the Forza Italia senator and current president of the province of Trapani, Antonio D’Ali, a large landowner, banker, and businessman—Matteo and his father as estate managers, his brother Salvatore as a clerk in the family-owned bank.

“No one had any idea of Messina Denaro’s involvement with the Mafia,” the senator said. And he sued anyone who claimed otherwise—like the two Rai journalists who accused the provincial president of being behind the transfer of a prefect who was unacceptable to the Mafia.

At Trapani police headquarters we met the investigator who has been on Messina Denaro’s trail for years. The office was papered with newspaper cuttings about arrests; next to it there hung a faded list of the names of mafiosi currently in hiding. Matteo Messina Denaro was the last on the list. There was even a hint of respect in the investigator’s voice when he spoke of the boss: “If you met Messina Denaro, you’d like him,” he said. “Messina Denaro is generous, he’s an effortless conversationalist and he can judge the
perlage
of a fine champagne.”

Finally, a cosmopolitan boss.

Then the investigator called one of his men who did nothing more than listen in on suspicious conversations, using a mobile surveillance device, and record unusual movements, in Messina Denaro’s birthplace of Castelvetrano. The investigator was waiting for us in a parking garage just outside the town, a bearded man in jeans and running shoes. What drives these men isn’t money, it’s a hunting instinct. The thrill when they catch a boss in his sleep
after lying in wait for him for months, disguised as an Albanian, as a gypsy, as a grass-mowing peasant. For a long time it didn’t occur to any of the men to claim overtime.

When we were driving through Castelvetrano, we had the impression of driving through a town where nothing ever happens; you couldn’t even hear a dog barking. The houses with the closed shutters looked like lockers. You avoided people’s eyes, as if they could pass on an infectious illness.

“They’re all friends here,” said the policeman, and drove past Messina Denaro’s parents’ house, where his mother, his partner, and their daughter live. It was in an alley not far from the church. A run-down-looking, three-story house, and the policeman cried: “Whatever you do, don’t take a photograph!” Just as he was constantly warning us not to write this and that because Messina Denaro was extremely sensitive where his family was concerned—until finally I wondered, how dangerous could it be to write that Francesco Messina Denaro’s mausoleum is a high, narrow chapel with a glass mosaic Christ, locked with a cast-iron gate, flanked by two
Ficus benjamina
trees, which, as the policeman observed, had recently been watered?

Messina Denaro’s mother visited the grave every day, dressed in black even ten years after her husband’s death. She often went there with her three daughters. On one occasion, the police had hidden bugs in the grave to listen to the dialogue that she liked to have with her husband. Unfortunately, one of the policemen hadn’t put one of the vases back in the right place. Messina Denaro would never forgive those sons of bitches that impious act of eavesdropping.

By the time his father died ten years ago, Matteo Messina Denaro had been underground for a long time. The boss
Francesco Messina Denaro had died of a heart attack, presumably the result of the fury unleashed by the recent arrest of his eldest son, Salvatore. Someone had carefully laid the corpse beside a vineyard in Castelvetrano, dressed in a silk dressing gown. When the body was found, it had already rained on the body. His wife tore off her own Persian lamb coat to wrap her dead husband in it. And at the funeral she threw herself on the coffin and cried: “At least they didn’t manage to put handcuffs on you!”