The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  Today the ’Ndrangheta is seen as the epitome of a successful criminal organization. It isn’t organized hierarchically like the Sicilian Mafia, but federally: each Calabrian clan chief makes autonomous decisions. He accepts advice, but not orders. In Sicily, on the other hand, it’s the commission that makes the decisions: la reunione dei mandamenti. And therein lies the weakness of Cosa Nostra—because, if someone at the top spills the beans, the whole organization collapses. The ’Ndrangheta is a close-knit family, everyone’s related—unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which places more emphasis on the criminal weight of a mafioso than it does on blood ties.

  After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, it took Cosa Nostra years to regain its invisibility—the silent acquiescence of Sicilians, the discreet handouts from politicians, and the blind eyes turned by everyone—without which the Mafia cannot flourish. During the years when Cosa Nostra was in the spotlight, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta rose in its shadow.

  With the introduction of a law freezing the property of people who had been kidnapped, abduction ceased to be a viable business. So the ’Ndrangheta left the kidnapping industry and entered the cocaine trade. In Calabria it also controls all public commissions and maintains its power by collecting protection money. It has branches throughout the whole world; in Germany alone it has a network of three hundred pizzerias and, like al-Qaeda, connects the middle ages with the globalized future, negotiating by e-mail with cocaine brokers in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay, buying a bank in St Petersburg and whole stretches of road in Brussels, while at the same time its members will only marry a woman from the same village, because the family is sacred. Blood relations don’t betray one another. The ’Ndrangheta’s only worry lies in being able to launder money before it rots—as it has done in the past, when two bosses buried 25 million euros in the ground and 8 million became damp and had to be thrown away.

  But what could Don Pino do about that? Does the shepherd of souls not have to go where evil is? Is he not more responsible for the sick than for the well?

  Evil must be fought with good, says Don Pino, who is responsible not only for the salvation of San Luca but also for the pilgrimage site of Santa Maria di Polsi. He is the spiritual leader there, a role of considerable importance since the pilgrimage site is effectively the ’Ndrangheta’s meeting place.

  In Calabria, San Luca is seen as the mother lode of crime, and to a great extent the village derives this status from its proximity to the Madonna of Polsi—a place distinguished less for its miracle-working capacities than for the fact that the ’Ndrangheta gather there every year to pay homage to the clan chiefs. They gather there even today. They no longer do so at the monastery, however, but in a house nearby. Three representatives of the Calabrian Mafia stop off at that house: one representing the city of Reggio Calabria, one from the Tyrrhenian group, one from the Ionian. These three wise men receive representatives from all the Calabrian ’Ndrine, the family clans—from Italy and the whole of Europe, from Canada, America, and Australia. They come to Polsi, they bring gifts and set out their problems to these three wise men, who then give them advice. It’s a kind of annual ’Ndrangheta summit meeting, which lasts a month.

  “You see, we don’t deny that there were certain gatherings in Polsi in the past,” Don Pino said, and hurried to add: “but the people didn’t gather there to, okay, let’s say, put something or other into action!” It had, as Don Pino put it, been more of a traditional form of devotion, of the negative kind. Which, put like that, sounds decidedly more elegant than “ ’Ndrangheta.” Don Pino is careful not to use the word. “Certainly, it’s a deadly sin to revere the image of the Madonna and at the same time to commit crimes. But in the face of the Madonna of Polsi even the hardest hearts soften, and people break down in tears.” Don Pino had seen men in Polsi licking the aisle leading up to the altar with their tongues! “And the only gathering that verifiably took place there was the one in 1967, when everyone was first arrested and then released again because they’d just been looking for mushrooms!” said Don Pino. “Those are the great dramas of history!”

  I’m still deep in thought about our meeting with Don Pino when Shobha says: “I don’t want to think about San Luca anymore. Let’s just do a story about Sicilian aristocrats planting vineyards—suggest that to one of your editors. Or Selinunte, the acropolis—let’s do something about Selinunte.”

  “Yes,” I say, “Selinunte. But wasn’t the father of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro a famous graverobber who stole the ephebes from Selinunte? Yes, maybe we really should stop. But maybe it’s all a matter of perspective.”

  “Basta,” says Shobha, orders some more wine, and then turns pale because she thinks she recognizes the youngest son of the mafioso and ex-mayor Vito Ciancimino at the next table.

  “I’ve never seen him here before,” says Shobha.

  Palermo reminds me a little of East Germany. The Lives of Others is played out here every day. With the arrogance of the powerful. With members of the opposition who end up working with the ruling party, with heroes who aren’t. Sometimes a handshake from the wrong person is enough to lose you your credibility forever. Anti-Mafia public prosecutors seldom go out in Palermo.

  “Thank God, he’s leaving,” says Shobha, looking at Ciancimino’s son, who is greeting everyone heartily as he leaves the restaurant.

  It’s at that moment that the pianist takes a break. He approaches our table in a series of concentric circles, and Shobha turns her back to him. “May I join you for a moment?” he asks, and Shobha says: “Sorry, but we’re just discussing our latest report, it wouldn’t be very interesting to you.”

  And then she takes out the battered map of Calabria that she still happens to have in her pocket and points to San Luca and Polsi: “Polsi basically wasn’t that far away,” she says, “but we’d never have made it in our little Fiat Uno.”

  To persuade us of the holiness of the place, Don Pino had suggested taking us to Polsi in person. You could only get there in a Land Rover, and luckily Don Pino always had a few people at hand to help him with his divine mission: an engineer and a driver, whom Don Pino called his “jack of all trades,” a silent man who drove the Land Rover and nodded when the engineer said sadly: “God knocks on our door every day, but we don’t hear him.”

  On a bend in the road the vehicle stopped so that we could enjoy the view of San Luca. Don Pino, the pious engineer, and the silent driver looked at the village with as much emotion as if they were seeing it for the first time. We drove for hours through forests of chestnut trees, past goatherds and over gravel, up and down the twisting road. “We go down so that we can come back up again,” says Don Pino. He saw it as a symbol of the holiness of the place. I thought of the ’Ndrangheta.

  In the courtyard of Polsi monastery everyone was already waiting for Don Pino: some women from the village were roasting chestnuts, a group of men were stacking wood. Don Pino dashed off through the monastery, which had been renovated thanks to the largesse of the European Union. We looked at everything, from the eight-hundredweight tufa-stone Madonna, via the coffin of the child who had been brought back to life here, to the recently installed disabled toilet. There were countless plastic bags under the altar. Because Polsi was a spiritual space, Calabrian brides brought their wedding dresses here as votive offerings. Don Pino was drowning in tulle and lace, and sent the dresses on to Africa.

  At last Don Pino led us, whispering, to his room and announced a mystery that he wanted to share with us: the sweating crucifix. The cross had been dripping for fourteen days! Jesus was sweating under his armpits! Don Pino took the crucifix from the wall and said: “Feel it, it’s really wet down at the bottom!” Even though the St Anthony right next to it was completely dry. “I’m going mad,” said Don Pino, and looked up to the sky and added: “It’s a good sign for the people here. For the purity of their hearts.”

  Later, he invited us to lunch. We sat down at a long table in the refectory, in front of a mura
l of the Last Supper, and ate pasta and porcini. There were only men sitting at the table with us; the women stayed in the kitchen. “You won’t find the eyes of the women of San Luca anywhere else in the world,” said Don Pino and smiled, his cheeks slightly flushed from the wine. “The family protects you against everything,” he said and looked around. “You know, the true fugitives aren’t the mafiosi, they’re the politicians. Here every civil right becomes a favor that’s granted.”

  While Don Pino said grace, I watched the men. They spoke in short, simple sentences because they were used to speaking only in dialect, and Italian sounded heavy in their mouths. They spoke of how they had worked in Germany. In Duisburg and in Wolfsburg, for Volkswagen. Their hands were tanned and blistered. And as I watched those men I wondered what it’s like when they kill someone.

  Shortly after the Duisburg massacre forty inhabitants of the village had been arrested. For membership in the Mafia, arms dealing and drug dealing, for murder, grievous bodily harm, false imprisonment. Almost all of those arrested were related to one another. Almost all claimed their right to silence.

  Since I had read all 1,150 pages of the public prosecutor’s custody order, page after page of wiretap records, I found it hard to believe the peaceful image of San Luca evoked by Don Pino. There was the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven all the way to Duisburg in June 2007 in search of weapons and an armored truck for the next assassination. There were men who talked about buying parabellum ammunition as if they were discussing the artichoke harvest. There were mothers who moved Kalashnikovs from house to house, wives who patrolled in camouflage suits, sisters who ran messages and transported their brothers from A to B in the trunks of their cars—if those brothers weren’t actually living in bunkers, like some members of the Pelle-Vottari clan, in the midst of an arsenal of Luger pistols, Berettas and Scorpion machine guns, ammunition and cash, statues of the saints, an altar bearing the photographs of murdered clan members, and The Godfather on DVD.

  He was glad to be able to help people, said Don Pino, adding: “People come to Polsi with tears in their eyes. And who is better at drying tears than the mother of God?” At any rate, he had dedicated an anti-Mafia field at the pilgrimage site. And at that event the bishop had announced: “If Polsi is a Mafia meeting place, then I’m the head mafioso!” Polsi was, in fact, a holy, miraculous place. “Lots of women whose husbands are in jail come here to pray,” he said, and, via the prison priest, Don Pino was in constant contact with the prisoners: “Things happen there that you wouldn’t imagine!” And I thought, so much for high security.

  On the way back, Don Pino whispered to us: “If these meetings of the ’Ndrangheta really did take place, in spite of the presence of the carabinieri, then we’re not just talking about people who have this mindset—something’s not working.”

  In referring so openly to collaboration between carabinieri and ’Ndrangheta, he was being very like Padre Frittitta, one of the many Sicilian priests who secretly heard confessions of refugee mafiosi in their hiding places, always justifying themselves by saying that it wasn’t earthly justice that would deliver the final judgment, it was the divine kind—and as its humble drudges they were merely performing a service. They were saving souls. That was Don Pino’s argument in a nutshell. That was all he was interested in. The soul of the man who drove the Land Rover, for example, and who was a kind of odd-job man in Polsi. The judge had entrusted this young man to him after he had been condemned to two years’ imprisonment for attempted murder. He had shot a carabiniere in the face.

  “But only with buckshot,” Don Pino said, by way of exculpation.

  Back in San Luca, he dropped us off at the bar decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna. It was already dark, and there was no one to be seen in the streets except for the village idiot, who was standing by the fountain playing the mouth organ. Shobha hadn’t said a word on the way back. While Don Pino had been delivering his monologue, she had looked out of the window. When we got to the bar she went straight to the toilet and threw up.

  The image of the Madonna of Polsi had also been found in the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg. Along with a .223 caliber American assault rifle, a statue of the Archangel Michael, a picture of the same saint with its head burned, a prayer book, some .280 caliber ammunition, various replacement magazines, and the receipt for a payment of more than 300 euros for an armored Peugeot truck, made out to the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven to Duisburg to get hold of weapons for the next attack on the Nirta-Strangio clan. Marmo had killed the wife of the boss Gianluca Nirta: that was the notorious Christmas assassination that had to be avenged by the bloodbath in Duisburg. Marmo knew that his days were numbered so long as Gianluca Nirta was still alive.

  “He has nothing more to lose, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, Marco Marmo’s assistant, who drove with him to Duisburg. There’s something unreal about standing in the bar in San Luca and thinking about the wiretap records of the conversations held there. When Michele Carabetta had talked to his sister Sonia, all they spoke about was weapons, “deer” that had appeared in the village (the term they used for policemen in those parts), house searches by the carabinieri, wigs and makeup for hiding scars, messages, and ferrying people around in jeeps. About “them” and “us.” And as I stood at the bar drinking my espresso, I wondered whether the man standing next to me eating his cream pastry mightn’t have been shifting a consignment of bazookas the previous day.

  A few days later, Shobha and I decided to take a look at the house that stood over the Pelle-Vottari clan’s bunker—not the only one in San Luca, incidentally. The important families of San Luca had holed up at the edge of the village in fortresses, five-story concrete castles. The Pelle-Vottari family had built one such. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a five-meter-high steel fence. Because the bunker underneath it had been sealed and impounded, we thought the house was empty. A false assumption, as it turned out.

  First we just heard a sound. A hoarse cry, then a dull rumble, and at last the automatic gate opened. Like a herd of wildly snorting bulls, ten men came charging down the drive. Quivering, bobbing, and cursing, they stood in our way, and in the way of our car. They demanded that Shobha hand over her camera and grabbed for my notebook. The youngest of them was twenty years old at most; they wore white Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts and their hair was gelled into spikes. They hissed: “Piss off, you miserable whores.” They were boys who pressed their teeth tightly together until their lower jaws trembled. Only one of them was older, perhaps fifty; with his padded waistcoat, he looked like a shepherd coming back from vespers. The men were being urged on by an old woman in a black pleated skirt. “Break their knees!” she cried. Their faces contorted with fury, the young men rubbed their fists as if they’d already started thumping us. They pressed so close to us that we could smell their breath. “You stupid bitches, we’re going to smash your heads in.”

  As they doubtless would have done if a police patrol hadn’t arrived and stopped them. A plump policeman got out and pushed the men aside. His voice sounded like a woman’s. There was something surreal about standing at the end of this cul-de-sac, between hate-filled mafiosi and a high-pitched policeman trying to calm them down. It was our good fortune that the Duisburg attack had already attracted far too much attention. The Italian secret services had reported on attempts by ’Ndrangheta families to bring about a cease-fire in San Luca. Because if the Duisburg murders were properly avenged, there was a danger that Europe would become aware of the problem that the ’Ndrangheta represented. And the Calabrian Mafia desperately wanted to prevent that. According to the famous Agenda 2000, the European Union’s sponsorship program, huge amounts of European money is flowing into Calabria, and thus into the hands of the Mafia. “Measures to remove imbalances between the regions,” they call it in Brussels. That’s why they want peace in San Luca. And that was why we were able to get back into our car and drive away.

  After t
hat, Shobha and I thought it might be a good idea to give San Luca a wide berth for the rest of our Calabrian story. We decided to drive to Locri, just a few miles away from San Luca. The name of Locri has a strong resonance in Italy: in Locri the regional politician Francesco Fortugno was killed by ’Ndrangheta assassins in 2005, and it was here, shortly afterward, that the Calabrian anti-Mafia movement Ammazzateci tutti, “Kill all of us!” was founded—an organization that emerged from a student group and called for a revolt against the ’Ndrangheta. However, it was Sunday, and Locri was nothing but a main street with deserted-looking houses. We walked across an empty, rectangular piazza planted with withered jasmine bushes. Along uneven pavements and potholed tarmac. Locri was the essence of nothingness. No cinema, no theater, no museum, no traffic.

  In the only bar that was open a man told us that a procession in honor of the Madonna of the Clairvoyance would be taking place that afternoon. The high point of Locri life. Outside the church the usual stands stood ready for the visitors attending the procession—selling drills, spanners, and steering wheels, gingerbread and popcorn. The brass band from Gerace was waiting there already, in Madonna-blue suits with sky-blue ties. The faithful were sitting in the church saying their Ave Marias. The parish priest played casually with his rosary and strolled along the rows of the faithful, like a beautiful woman who’s aware of the eyes of her admirers on her.

  Shobha was bored; we were actually used to better processions than this one. The impressive Good Friday processions in Trapani. The spectacular Santa Rosalia procession in Palermo. And here there was nothing to see but popcorn and drills, women dressed in black—and a nun who approached us with undisguised hostility and ordered us to leave the procession straightaway: “If you want to take a picture, you need a permit!”