by Petra Reski
“You’ve gotten blonder,” Shobha says.
Every time we see each other again, we behave like an old couple who have been apart for a few weeks and are now looking at each other with a critical eye: Is your hair shorter or longer? Are your earrings new? Yes, they really suit you, and what wonderful shoes you have, I want some pointed shoes like those. We’ve been working together for so long that we’ve decided to stop counting the years, because then anyone would be able to work out how old we are.
The pianist comes to our table, makes sheep’s eyes at Shobha, and asks if she’ll be coming to eat here again tomorrow, then she could go with him to a concert afterward. Shobha doesn’t even turn around, and says: “I’m busy over the next few weeks. And the next few months, and the next few years as well. I’m sorry. Scusami.”
And then we stare at the walls of the Hohenstaufen fortress until the pianist wanders back, shoulders drooping, to his piano and plays something that sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March.
“And your mother?” I ask Shobha.
“Tomorrow,” Shobha says. “We’ll get to work tomorrow.” Then she adds: “At least it’s a good story. Not something like San Luca.”
At the end of every report we swear we won’t do any more Mafia stories. Basta. We plan only to cover stories about Sicilian wine and fine hotels. About the wonderful quality of Calabrian olive oil. About Naples without rubbish in the streets.
Somehow we never manage to put our good intentions into action. Even while we were on the ferry from Sicily to Reggio Calabria we remembered our plan to do a report on something positive at long last. But instead we were sitting a short time later in the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria, looking at a sea that looked as if it was poisonous, shimmering in tones of greyish blue with oil tankers in the glaring light. The 1970s hung in the hotel’s heavy curtains; they fell from the neon light of the restaurant and settled on the faces of the hotel guests, who all looked like pharmaceutical salesmen passing through. In the elevator, one of them asked if we were hostesses.
“It isn’t so bad here,” we reassured each other, like a mantra.
“You don’t find such lovely cafes that often. We haven’t got such an elegant seafront in Palermo,” said Shobha.
Like a woman whose eyes are so beautiful that you forget her short legs, Reggio Calabria is saved by its seafront. The cafes stood side by side under palms and magnolias and cast-iron arches. Later, we walked through the warm sirocco night down Corso Garibaldi and established that you would have to go to the Via Montenapoleone in Milan to find a greater density of luxury boutiques: Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Versace, Rolex, Gucci, Prada, Cesare Paciotti. The ’Ndrangheta’s shopping mile. Nothing but marble temples with salesgirls who look like something halfway between nuns and museum attendants. And whose eyes are as icy as the breeze from an air-conditioning system.
We drove in silence along the coast road to San Luca. We glided through a diffuse grey light, as if the sky were filled with sand. We drove past shells of buildings, orphaned houses, prickly pears, and crippled olive trees, past concrete posts for bridges that had never been finished, street signs riddled with bullet holes and a tugboat rusting away on the beach amid driftwood and bits of plastic. People trafficking is a source of income for the ’Ndrangheta, and the villages of the Ionian coastal region are its fortresses: Platí, Áfrico, San Luca.
Since the murders in Duisburg, San Luca had become almost more famous than Corleone. The blood feud had broken out eighteen years before, and since then the clans of the Nirta-Strangio and the Pelle-Vottari seemed to have been persecuting one another with an Old Testament thirst for revenge, as if time were still being measured with hourglasses and honor could only be redeemed with blood. Because the Mafia thrives on symbols, murders tend to be carried out on feast days—Christmas, May 1, Assumption. Behind this lies the message: “Until the end of my life I may remember the murder of my wife every Christmas; but for you, Assumption will never again be a feast day because on that day, until the end of your life, you will think about your murdered brother.”
The investigators know, beyond the bloodlust, the Mafia always thinks pragmatically. The blood feud is by no means entirely archaic. The criminal prestige of the family that organized the Duisburg massacre has risen enormously, and that’s where economic profit lies. Now they just have to present themselves to a member of the regional government and say: “We’re the people from San Luca.” And the next public bid will be in their favor.
The ’Ndrangheta has divided Calabria up into three territories: the Tyrrhenian coast, the Ionian coast, and the city of Reggio Calabria. Even if you didn’t know, you would smell it. In the air, which always smells a bit burned. In the 1960s and 1970s the ’Ndrangheta bought up the biggest agricultural enterprises, vineyards, and olive groves, and the public prosecutor’s office couldn’t bring a case against it because the owners hadn’t reported the extortionate purchases. The ’Ndrangheta now controls every breath anyone takes, every inch of road, every thought.
When we arrived in San Luca that autumn, after the assassination, the day lay there like a piece of wet gray cotton wool, between the Aspromonte mountains and the dry bed of a river called Bonamico, “good friend.” In San Luca every hour seemed as long as a day of atonement, as weird as an endless Day of the Dead when you’re forever bumping into ghosts.
We stopped outside a bar that sparkled like a crystal. One wall was decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna of Polsi, and the barman ceaselessly polished the marble counter, the glass shelves, the brass-colored water taps, and served three young financial policemen their espressos. One of the cops had flaming red hair. He was constantly checking the position of his beret in the mirror beside the bar, and Shobha was so taken with this that she casually took a picture. When we stepped up to the bar, he told us that on one of their patrols a few days previously they’d noticed a Volkswagen Golf which, it turned out, had been hired in Duisburg and not taken back. And they’d found half a kilo of hashish in its boot. No big deal. But still.
San Luca looked as if its walls had been designed to match the gray of the sky, unplastered, with rusty iron railings and electric wires that hung between the houses like clotheslines. There weren’t even any street signs: the street names were just painted on the walls of the houses with black paint. Shortly after the Duisburg massacre, San Luca had tried to present itself to the world’s press as a village forgotten by the world, full of unemployed woodsmen, God-fearing women, and one brave priest, a lone voice in the desert, fighting tirelessly against the Mafia. He was the one we wanted to meet. Don Pino.
Up on the hill, next to the church of Santa Maria Addolorata, a few old gray stone houses clung to one another. When there had been an earthquake a few years ago, these old houses had been destroyed. And not rebuilt, just abandoned. As if it wasn’t worth preserving anything. Opposite the church there was another bar, a scruffy little affair with a veranda where a few men sat. When we asked about Don Pino, they shrugged as if they were hearing his name for the first time. A man offered us a coffee. His eyes looked as if he was wearing mascara: his lashes were black and dense, and curved slightly upward as if he’d used an eyelash curler.
He really lived in Australia, in Adelaide, he said. But then he had started feeling terribly homesick and had come back to his home of San Luca with his wife and two children. Although he regretted that, because there were no jobs here. He smiled politely, and perhaps with some embarrassment.
Because Adelaide is thought of as a stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, and particularly of two clans from San Luca, the Nirtas and the Romeos, both of which were involved in the Duisburg murders.
Among the Italian Mafia organizations, the ’Ndrangheta has proved to be the most mobile, an unbeatable advantage in business terms; unlike the entrenched Sicilian Mafia, the Calabrian clans are active not only in every region of Italy but all over the world. Even before the First World War, the ’Ndrangheta had invested the m
oney it made from extortion in the cultivation of cannabis in Australia. By the 1950s it controlled the drug trade in Canada. In America, the Calabrian men of honor joined forces with the Sicilians; according to the FBI, between one and two hundred mafiosi of Calabrian origin are active in New York and Florida. In South and Central America the ’Ndrangheta enjoys privileged trade relations with cocaine producers in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia. Calabrian public prosecutors have uncovered links between the Colombian paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC, and the ’Ndrangheta. Thanks to its good connections, the ’Ndrangheta has been able to open up new sources of production and export routes for the cocaine trade, cutting out the middlemen and selling the cocaine more cheaply. That’s another unbeatable advantage.
The ’Ndranghetista Roberto Pannunzi had the best connections with the Colombian drug cartel: he was able to buy his cocaine at a particularly good rate because he took delivery of at least three tons a month, and always paid on time and in cash. Pannunzi even sealed his business connections with blood bonds: his son Alessandro married the daughter of a Colombian drug baron. In 2004 Pannunzi was arrested, along with his son, in Spain—the soft underbelly of Europe, according to the investigators. Spain is the most significant portal for the importation of cocaine from South America. And in January 2008, Pannunzi’s henchman in Calabria was arrested: “Don Micu” Trimboli, who was led away in his tracksuit after he had been tracked down to a bunker under a sheep pen. When he was arrested, he cursed the politicians, who were concerned only with garnering votes. And didn’t keep their promises. And behind this there lay an undisguised threat: the politician who was supposed to have been looking out for him had clearly committed a small but significant act of negligence—that was the only explanation the boss could find for the fact that the police had suddenly appeared on his trail. The Mafia had always bought political protection with votes.
The reason Germany is so important for the ’Ndrangheta is because that’s where they invest their profits from the drug and arms trade, which would risk confiscation in Italy. Since 1982 it has been possible in Italy to confiscate the property of individuals who are only suspected of belonging to the Mafia. They have to demonstrate that their property was acquired legally, with clean money. If that proof cannot be supplied, confiscation can go ahead. At least, that’s what the law says. So it’s easier for the ’Ndrangheta to invest abroad, without bothering about the precautionary measures that are required in Italy. In Germany, a waiter who earns a thousand euros a month can buy a hotel without anyone asking any questions.
According to a report by the BND, the German federal intelligence service, the ’Ndrangheta have bought shares in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and they’ve invested millions of euros in hotel chains and restaurants in eastern Germany. The clans from San Luca are particularly active: in North Rhine-Westphalia, in Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg. In Bochum, and in Duisburg.
And the man from Adelaide said: “My children were born in Australia, they’re homesick for Australia. Here they have nothing to do with their spare time. There isn’t a decent sports club, nothing. That’s why we’ll probably go back soon.”
And I said: “I can understand that.”
DON PINO
THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA ADDOLORATA IN SAN LUCA was painted white, and its interior was decorated with the sort of living-room furnishings that you find in department stores: fake marble and figures of saints that looked like display-window dummies, with a gaudy Christ hovering over the altar and a Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows.
Don Pino would be there at any moment, the curate, Don Stefano Fernando, told me, but if we didn’t mind, he himself would be happy to answer our questions. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses and addressed me respectfully in the second person plural, voi—that antiquated, polite form that has disappeared everywhere except in southern Italy.
Yes, he said, the ’Ndrangheta had become well known in Germany since Duisburg, even though the Germans must clearly have known that the ’Ndrangheta had invested in restaurants and hotels to launder their money. The Germans, he said, had taken the dirty money without hesitation after reunification; they’d turned a blind eye. I’d love to know, he said, what the German government thinks about that now.
Don Stefano Fernando had developed a whole theory about the sad lot of southern Italy: it extended from the economic boom of the 1950s, which never arrived, to the secularized society of the present—it’s not true to say that people here aren’t devout, they’re just indifferent! And he would have liked to expound his theory still further, if he hadn’t suddenly come over all self-effacing—after all, he was just the curate, and the role of explaining the world fell instead to Don Pino, who was now standing in the door to the sacristy. There were only a few minutes before the start of mass; the bells were already ringing. Don Pino Strangio had ebony-black hair and smiled at us winningly, as if he’d just been waiting for us to turn up. Of course, of course, he would love to speak to us, right after mass.
“Bringing peace to the villages . . . not losing faith . . . because we must give an account of ourselves before God . . . if we could see him with our mortal eyes. . . .” The words rang out over the church square. Don Pino hovered like a spirit over San Luca; his words rang out from the loudspeakers, echoed against the gray, unplastered walls, and crept into the hairy ears of the men sitting not in church but outside the bar, blinking into the milky morning light.
As in Sicily, churchgoing in San Luca is for the womenfolk. So Don Pino had decided to broadcast his sermons into the church square via loudspeakers. The women who listened to his words were all dressed in black, as if life were a time of endless mourning. Old women, with their thin hair in buns, tightened their wrinkled mouths as the host dissolved on their tongues. Their daughters had faces that could have been carved from olive wood; they wore tight, black skirts, black pullovers, and flat, black shoes, and allowed themselves only one piece of jewelry: a wedding ring. Only the granddaughters were allowed to shine. With blond strands in their hair, Dolce & Gabbana belts, and sequined blouses glittering above their naked midriffs. And during prayers the mothers quietly tugged the blouses down over their daughters’ waistbands.
At the end of mass, Shobha was surrounded by little girls demanding to have their pictures taken. When Shobha said she didn’t like posed photographs, the little girls turned angry. They hissed: we issue the orders here.
The women darted back down the alleys like blackbirds and I thought of the wife of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who had spent fifteen years living underground with him and their children. At one with the Mafia and the Lord God. After she had returned to Corleone, she was a signora. Respected by everyone, a first lady who was allowed to the front of the queue for ricotta. Her husband? Respectable and hardworking, a victim of the Italian judiciary, that was how she described him.
The men in San Luca drank some more beer before they too disappeared and the village looked uninhabited once again. As if everything human had fled—fled the cement-gray color of everything, the bare lightbulbs that dangled above the lintel, by the trash cans peppered with machine-gun fire. And fled the words But the soul never dies spray-painted on the cemetery wall.
The dead of Duisburg were buried in the new cemetery which, seen from above San Luca, looked like a holiday resort. Their graves were right beside the entrance: rough cement boxes with rusty iron girders protruding from them. On every grave lay a crucifix with a shrink-wrapped rosary. Don Pino had buried three of the Duisburg victims: Marco Marmo, the hit man who had murdered the wife of the head of the enemy clan at Christmas; Sebastiano Strangio, who owned the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg; and Francesco Giorgi, at sixteen the youngest victim of the killing spree, and the son of Don Pino’s female cousin. “Mio cuginetto,” Don Pino said, “my little cousin.” Francesco, the poor boy, had only wanted to visit his uncle in Germany. And then Don Pino praised the piety of his cousin
, the boy’s mother, who was sitting in the front row of the church. Her daughter, Elisa, was playing organ in church when she learned of her brother’s death.
“In her pain, the mother gazed into the distance,” Don Pino said. “No doubt she wanted to look her son’s murderers in the eyes. But there was no hatred there! She said: ‘I forgive you.’ And lots of people joined in that forgiveness. Perhaps Duisburg was the end of something and a peaceful rebirth would follow. The people are crying out for peace,” he added sadly.
We were sitting on a wooden bench next to the church—the same wooden bench on which he had received almost the whole of the world’s press since the massacre, not just the German daily papers but El País and the Italian broadcaster Rai. Even Japanese television crews had come to listen to Don Pino, who tirelessly stressed that the people of San Luca were simple and good, and only afraid to say anything to the journalists because you never know how what you say is going to be used.
“We condemn all kinds of Mafia, with our swords drawn,” said Don Pino. “And then they write that we’re all like that! And years ago someone even wrote: ‘The parish priest cohabits with the Mafia’.”
Don Pino has spent half his life as a parish priest in San Luca. He was born here, he grew up here, he knew them all, he baptized and married them, and carried them to the grave. He was already the parish priest when San Luca grew rich in the 1980s on the money it raised from kidnappings, when Jean Paul Getty’s grandson had his ear cut off in a neighboring village, and when the women caught an industrialist who had managed to escape from his hiding place and held him until he could be returned to his abductors.
Don Pino was already here when San Luca started investing its ransom money in the cocaine trade; before, along with the villages of Platí and Sinópoli, it hosted the elite of the ’Ndrangheta, the wealthiest Mafia organization in Italy—which today, with an annual turnover of 45 billion euros, controls the whole of Europe’s cocaine trade and has diversified its activities like a multinational corporation, so that it now deals just as successfully in arms as it does in people.