by Petra Reski
THE
HONORED
SOCIETY
THE
HONORED
SOCIETY
A Portrait of Italy’s
Most Powerful Mafia
By Petra Reski
Translated by Shaun Whiteside
Preface to the American edition
translated by Ross Benjamin
First published in Germany in 2008 by Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf. GmbH & Co.
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © 2013 by Petra Reski
Translation copyright © 2013 by Shaun Whiteside
English translation of preface copyright © 2013 Ross Benjamin
Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 116
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Designed by Linda Mark
Text set in 12 point Adobe Jenson Pro Light
Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover as follows:
Reski, Petra.
[Mafia. English]
The honored society : the secret history of Italy’s most powerful Mafia / by Petra Reski ; translated by Shaun Whiteside ; introduction to the American edition translated by Ross Benjamin.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-56858-969-5 (e-book) 1. Mafia—Italy—History. I. Title.
HV6453.I83M3754 2013
364.1060945—dc23
2012039373
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Shobha
CONTENTS
MAP OF SOUTHERN ITALY
PREFACE
MARCELLO FAVA
ROSARIA SCHIFANI
SAN LUCA
DON PINO
LETIZIA
PADRE FRITTITTA
CORLEONE
PALACE OF POISON
SILVIO BERLUSCONI AND MARCELLO DELL’UTRI
ANNA PALMA
HEINZ SPRENGER
MAFIA WOMEN
CARLA MADONIA
ROSALBA DI GREGORIO
CARMINE SARNO
MESSINA DENARO
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
PREFACE
It was a balmy summer night when the German Mafia massacre occurred. On August 15, 2007, six Italians from Calabria were executed—in the middle of Duisburg, one of those cities built of brick in the Ruhr area, the old industrial heart of western Germany. The hit squad had fired over seventy shots. The youngest victim was sixteen years old, the oldest thirty-eight: Francesco and Marco Pergola, Sebastiano Strangio, Francesco Giorgi, Marco Marmo, and Francesco Tommaso Venturi. Five were killed instantly; the sixth died on the way to the hospital.
All the victims were from San Luca, the stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia organization that was fourth on the White House list of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world (“Narcotics Kingpin Organizations”), after al-Qaeda, the PKK, and the Mexican narcos. With its estimated annual turnover of 45 billion euros, the ’Ndrangheta is not only the richest Mafia organization in Italy, but also the most mobile, the largest multinational Mafia organization—and the first to put down roots in Germany, where in the early 1960s, even before the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Campanian Camorra, it found its second home.
The hit men in Duisburg had surprised their victims in their cars in front of the Italian restaurant Da Bruno in the city center, not far from the train station. Here the Italians had in the hours before their deaths participated in what is for the Mafia a very special event: in the pocket of eighteen-year-old Francesco Tommaso Venturi was a burnt prayer card of the Archangel Gabriel. The six Italians had on that evening celebrated the induction of the youngest member into the clan.
The village of San Luca is known among Italian investigators as “the mother of crime,” as it is distinguished by a density—high even for Calabria—of thirty-nine clans to only four thousand residents. The Mafia families from San Luca count among the most powerful clans in the ’Ndrangheta—and in Germany possess enormous manpower adept in every type of crime. Whether in international narcotics or arms trafficking, shakedowns, abductions, car theft, or money laundering, the clans of San Luca look back on decades of experience. To avoid attracting attention in Germany, fresh young men who have no record of previous convictions but are related by blood to the bosses are regularly sent from San Luca.
On the morning after the night of the Duisburg murders, Germany was in shock. The Mafia always exists only once dead bodies are lying in the street. Germans knew the Mafia from the Godfather movies, perhaps from The Sopranos as well—but scarcely anyone had ever heard of the Italian Mafia organization with the unpronounceable name ’Ndrangheta, which had brought its war to Germany. For decades two clans from San Luca, the Pelle-Vottari and the Nirta-Strangio, have been carrying on a feud for supremacy in drug and arms trafficking and for business in Germany.
Until the Duisburg bloodbath, the Mafia had always been regarded by Germans as only an Italian problem. The German constitutional state was well armed against all dangers, the argument had always gone; Germany was for the Mafia at most a “place of retreat,” as if the mafiosi used Germany as a vacation spot.
But as more and more investigations into Mafia activities in Germany came to light, the situation became increasingly unsettling. Suddenly Germans began to suspect that the Mafia had by no means descended on their country like a summer storm, but had already been well established in the heart of Germany for more than forty years. The situation was similar to the former state of affairs in America, where the Mafia was able to remain invisible for almost forty years and traffic in drugs until 1957, when the FBI raided a Mafia summit in Apalachin, New York, and arrested sixty-four bosses. Until then not many Americans had taken notice of the fact that as early as 1920 the second wave of Mafia immigration had already washed up on America’s shores.
It was exactly the same in Germany, where people were even more naive than in America. No one was bothered by the fact that the Mafia had been doing business there since the 1960s—in those places where southern Italian guest workers once found jobs on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, and in the mines. The classic bases of the Mafia in Germany are the industrial centers in the west, south, and southwest: in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden-Württemberg; in cities like Duisburg, Bochum, Oberhausen, Stuttgart, and Munich; and, since the fall of the Wall, in eastern Germany as well, particularly in cities like Erfurt and Leipzig.
The families of the Campanian Camorra and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra are also active in Germany. The Cosa Nostra brought many years of experience in the construction industry to Germany. Manipulating public contracts, carrying out building contracts as subcontractors without paying social welfare contributions or taxes—all that is a specialty of the Sicilians. Competition between the individual Italian Mafia organizations doesn’t exist. There are enough
pieces of the German pie for everyone.
And it’s not only Germany. The clans of the ’Ndrangheta are the biggest fans of European freedom of travel. They’re also active in Holland and Belgium, where they control the ports; in France they’ve invested in villas on the Côte d’Azur; in the Balkans they control the drug-smuggling routes; and in Bulgaria they invest in tourism. They do all this in harmony with the clans of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra, who have learned from the mobility of the ’Ndrangheta and have long done business throughout Europe as well. Not only does a considerable stretch of the Spanish Costa del Sol belong to the Neapolitan Camorra; it’s also active in England and Scotland, where its members invest in real estate and give themselves cover with import-export enterprises. The European economic crisis promotes the business of the Mafia tremendously. When there’s no money, people don’t look as closely at where it comes from.
Because the Duisburg Mafia massacre first gave the lie to the myth of Germany as a “place of retreat” for mafiosi, the bloody night in Duisburg was a mishap, at least from the Mafia’s perspective. For it was certainly not in the clans’ interest to make unequivocally clear that the Mafia was not an exclusively Italian problem, but a global one. No sooner had the Duisburg corpses been buried than the Italian secret service from Calabrian San Luca reported that the two enemy clans, the Pelle-Vottari and the Nirta-Strangio, had declared a truce. That was also entirely in the interest of German politics—which had no more desire than the bosses to discuss the topic of the “Mafia in Germany.” There was reluctance not only to alarm the citizenry, but also to endanger the investments of the ’Ndrangheta. Whole eastern German city centers were rebuilt with ’Ndrangheta money after the fall of the Wall.
In the months after the Duisburg Mafia massacre, the bosses applied all their energy to lulling the Germans back into their long sleep, which had lasted for forty years: Don’t worry, they said, the Mafia exists only in backward Italian villages! The mafiosi devoted themselves intensely to image management: even while on the run, Giovanni Strangio, one of the Duisburg killers, gave an interview to the Italian weekly magazine Panorama, in which he portrayed himself as an Italian man unjustly persecuted by the criminal justice system, guilty only of having been born in San Luca.
The triumph of the Mafia in the world is by no means based solely on violence; it is based above all on money and kind words. As long as people believe in the myths of the Mafia, they’re in no danger. That’s why journalists in the service of the Mafia are so valuable: the bosses by no means hide from journalists, but are eager to use them as megaphones for their messages. Therefore, the question is not whether a journalist succeeds in talking to a boss; rather, it is whether or not one is willing to be used by him for his propaganda.
In Germany, too, many naive journalists turned into servants of Mafia propaganda. German defenders of the Mafia disseminated press reports of innocent, persecuted pizza bakers, and many German journalists took down heartrending immigrant stories in their notepads. There was talk of “kin liability” and racism—but not of the 229 clans and 1,800 individuals listed in the report of the Bundeskriminalamt (the German Federal Criminal Police Office) on the ’Ndrangheta in Germany.
The Honored Society appeared in Germany a year after the Duisburg Mafia murders. The Mafia had achieved its first successes in the attempt to smooth out its battered image. Forgetting had already set in. The Mafia was almost once again “cult.” As computer games, as television series, as party music, it had again cloaked itself in its folkloric garb and successfully sold its propaganda—such as the notion that its members didn’t murder women and children, that they were God-fearing and victims of the Italian state, and that in Germany they wanted nothing but to bake a good pizza romana.
How much my book disrupted that goodwill tour of the Mafia in Germany I would soon find out. It was necessary to make an example: punish one person to teach hundreds a lesson. Shortly after its publication, I was severely threatened at a reading in Erfurt. Before long, five lawsuits had been brought and two complaints lodged against me and my book. Soon thereafter, I sat in court as a defendant. My Mafia book was censored—at the behest of German judges.
When I first held my book in my hands, with its court-ordered, blacked-out passages, those pages seemed to me somehow strangely unreal, as if the book had surfaced from underground—as if it were a book that could be dangerous to read. I always expect my fingers to be stained black when I run them over those sections.
“Anyone who writes about the Mafia does so at their own risk,” Alberto Spampinato, the brother of a journalist murdered by the Sicilian Mafia, had once told me. In Italy more than two hundred journalists were threatened by the Mafia in the last three years—not only with incendiary devices and undisguised death threats, but also legally: with libel actions and astronomical claims for damages. There’s only one thing that even the harshly tested Italian Mafia journalists have not yet seen, and that’s blacked-out pages in a book about the Mafia. The Italian media reported extensively about the peculiarity that the Italian restaurateur Spartaco Pitanti and the San Luca–born Duisburg hotelier Antonio Pelle had managed to get some of the passages concerning them in my book blacked out—by injunction. Redactions of content that I had thoroughly backed up with the files of German and Italian Mafia investigators.
How little German judges know about the Mafia I learned firsthand in various German courtrooms. They might be forgiven their inability to pronounce the word ’Ndrangheta, but not their underestimation of what lies behind the Mafia’s litigation strategy—namely, the attempt to prevent journalists from reporting on the Mafia. I don’t view the journalist’s task as reporting on a mafioso when he is already behind bars. As a journalist I am much more concerned with drawing attention to the dangers the Mafia poses, conveying suspicious facts supported by numerous reliable sources (this is known somewhat stiltedly in German legalese as “Verdachtsberichterstattung,” or “press coverage based on suspicions”). It’s ultimately about whether the names of suspected parties are to be kept under wraps by the authorities or are permitted to be stated publicly by journalists like me.
At a trial in Munich a judge upheld the censorship in its entirety—not without ordering police protection for the trial beforehand, probably less out of concern for me than for herself. Two officers armed with batons and guns sat in the courtroom. When we left the court, the plaintiff placed his hand on our lawyer’s arm and said to him patronizingly, “And let her know that next time she should come with six police officers.” In addition, the judge sentenced the publisher to a payment of 10,000 euros in damages—not without first asking the plaintiff whether he was a member of the ’Ndrangheta or not. No, he wasn’t, he answered. And no, he didn’t know why he had been appearing for years in the Bundeskriminalamt reports on organized crime in Germany.
When I went to Palermo for the first time as a journalist in 1989 and saw Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two anti-Mafia prosecutors who only three years later were murdered by the Mafia, I couldn’t have imagined that I would one day stand trial in Germany because of a book on the Mafia and that my readings in Germany would take place under police protection.
My German publisher has now lodged an appeal with the highest German court, the constitutional court. Ultimately, this is about more than one book—it’s about freedom of the press and what the task of journalists is. For as long as the Mafia is regarded not as a global phenomenon but only as an Italian one, it is in no danger.
MARCELLO FAVA
It’s always horrible, being present at a murder. Particularly if it’s a person you know. And if you don’t know why that person is dying or has died. You don’t know, and you’ll never find out. Because if you’re acting as an ordinary soldier, as we call it in Cosa Nostra, they won’t give you any explanations.
THE MAN WEARS HIS DARK BLOND HAIR WITH A PARTING. HE has sea-blue eyes. A little double chin and womanly lips. He’s wearing a midnight-bl
ue, double-breasted suit and clumsily balancing a briefcase on his knees.
He looks at his watch and then at the departure board for our flight from Venice to Palermo. The twenty-minute delay that’s been announced is nearly over. When the stewardess opens the gate, he stands up and smooths the material of his suit over his knees. He looks oddly old-fashioned, as Sicilians often look when life has washed them northward—as if they came from a time long forgotten. Of course, he wears a monogrammed shirt. Sicilians celebrate elegance as something sacredly serious, like the businessman in the pinstripe suit pacing up and down by the gate, holding a little cigarillo that went out ages ago. Just like in Prizzi’s Honor. Or the woman with the big earrings and stockings, the tops of which stand out against her tight skirt when she crosses her legs. Just like Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. Or the old couple who look like extras in a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement: the wife in a black suit and with her hair in a bun, the husband in a rough checked jacket. A couple who only communicate with each other in whispers and who, you can see, only leave their village once a year, to visit their son, who’s found himself a job in the Veneto. Which the parents consider a terrible blow. Apart from these visible Sicilians, there are the invisible ones who don’t look Sicilian in Venice at all, as if they had grown pale away from Sicily. Who are transformed during the flight. Who, with each minute in the air that brings them closer to Sicily, assume their original color.
The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit is the first to board the airport bus; he doesn’t set his little briefcase down on the floor but carries it under his arm, which makes him look oddly anxious, like a child going on its travels for the first time.
Generally the victim is brought to a house by a friend, his best friend if possible, so that he feels safe. Then they grab him, and if he still has something to say, he says it now. I’d like to see the one who doesn’t speak, with a noose around his neck. But regardless of whether he speaks or not, he gets killed anyway.