The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  And then she falls silent and there is no sound but the whirr of the ceiling fan, the panting of her dog, and the roar of the Palermo traffic. The eighties were also the years of the big Mafia wars: the Corleone family assumed power in Palermo; there were killings almost every day. Not just among the mafiosi but also among public prosecutors, judges, police—and Letizia, Franco, and Shobha were always first to the scene. Like all good reporters, they listened to the police radio. And photographed bullet-riddled bodies, pools of blood, and widows in the grip of despair.

  “We were unfettered. If we traveled off in an old VW van, it was never for longer than a week, because we couldn’t bear to leave the city for longer than that. We loved Palermo,” Letizia says. And she sounds as if she’s talking about a drug addict that she’s hoped in vain to save.

  “Today there is not any anti-Mafia awareness,” she says, brushing her dog aside as he tries to kiss her.

  Letizia has always been a plain speaker. She has never tried to prettify anything, ever, and doesn’t see why she should start now. “There’s nothing left,” she says. All those anti-Mafia meetings, symposia, and memorials for the victims were nothing but window dressing, and that’s something she’s always rejected.

  When Letizia talks about window dressing, I immediately see an image of the children by the Falcone tree, that huge magnolia below the house where Giovanni Falcone lived. The death of the murdered public prosecutor is commemorated here every year. A stage had been set up next to the magnolia and children stood on it in green baseball caps. The children danced under their teachers’ beady eyes; they read out poems they had written themselves, about a Mafia cockerel that wanted to dictate the law, and sang law-abiding songs.

  Standing next to me was a journalist from Corriere della Sera, who noticed my astonishment. Glancing at the stage, he said with a shrug: “An identity ritual. We’re Catholics, we need something like this. Like the processions. We have to keep proving our identity.”

  As the children were singing under the magnolia, people remembered Falcone and Borsellino in the “aula bunker,” the high-security courtroom in Ucciardone prison, which had been built for the “maxi-trial,” which would go down in history not only because of its sheer size—474 defendants, of whom 114 were acquitted, the guilty ones being sentenced to a total of 2,665 years’ imprisonment—but also because it was the first in the history of the Italian judiciary from which the Mafia had not emerged victorious. A huge scout camp had been set up in the courtyard of the prison: the law-and-order village. The children wore T-shirts bearing the picture of the murdered public prosecutors. The prison fence was draped with sheets scrawled with words like The Mafia suppresses us or Grow up honest! One teacher went up to her pupils and hissed: “Write something! Write something intelligent!”

  Inside, the two prosecutors were commemorated with a lot of speeches, a lot of noisy applause, and television films about the Mafia—films in which the mafiosi looked like action heroes with pump-action shotguns and the public prosecutors looked bold and incorruptible. They love films like that in Palermo, where the Mafia is now once more as invisible as it used to be. Aristocratic among aristocrats, bourgeois among the bourgeoisie. The bosses stopped being shepherds a long time ago, shepherds who could barely speak Italian; now they’re doctors, businessmen, politicians, the so-called white-collar Mafia. Palermo returned to its normality a long time ago. Only rarely are there diplomatic incidents like the one that year when a student asked the minister of the interior, Giuliano Amato, who was attending the Falcone-Borsellino memorial day, what he planned to do about all the MPs with criminal convictions, two of whom were even on the anti-Mafia commission. The minister didn’t say: “They will have to be thrown out.” Instead, he accused the student of being a little populist. A hint of the Eastern bloc wafted through the “aula bunker” and lingered in the air even after the minister had disappeared. A speaker addressed the schoolchildren sitting on the floor: “You are stronger than the Mafia!” And the children cheered, as if they were watching a school play.

  “Niente,” says Letizia, and draws on her cigarette. “We’re finished.”

  She doesn’t think for a second of lying to herself with the eternal “there’s-no-work-here-and-that’s-why-we’ve-got-the-Mafia” hypocrisy, with the romantic idea of the healing power of culture, as if the Mafia could be got rid of like a typo. In her hoarse voice, she speaks the truth that no one in Italy wants to hear: “Barbarism rules on our island! People are stuck in a lawless mindset!”

  “And that wasn’t even Berlusconi’s fault,” she says; the Sicilians had been waiting for him as if he were a seller of dreams, someone who could at last let them forget. Her comrades-inarms fell silent, crept away. Lots of them jumped on the Forza Italia bandwagon, and when Berlusconi was deselected and everyone expected the Prodi government to launch a campaign against the Mafia with renewed zeal, Clemente Mastella was appointed minister of justice. This is a man who is seen as an ardent supporter of Giulio Andreotti and who has also demonstrated a certain familiarity with organized crime: in 2000 he was a witness at the wedding of the Sicilian mafioso Francesco Campanella, who had no hesitation in turning state’s evidence immediately after his arrest. Mastella’s first action in office was to introduce a mass pardon for convicts, benefiting not only Silvio Berlusconi and the Eritrean human-trafficker Ganat Tewelde Barhe, better known as “Madame Gennet,” but also countless mafiosi, who immediately returned to their daily business.

  Anti-Mafia public prosecutors uncovering the connection between politicians and the Mafia had long been isolated in the Anti-Mafia Pool. Some were withdrawn from investigations, and Leoluca Orlando, too, failed in his attempt to win back the city for himself. In Letizia’s eyes, Orlando was the only one capable of restoring the city’s dreams. He stood for mayor and only narrowly lost the election to the Forza Italia candidate. There was the usual talk of election fraud. It was said that people had been told to take pictures of their ballot papers with their telefonini to prove to the bosses that they had followed their electoral recommendations. In vain Orlando demanded that the election be declared invalid. A year later, the public prosecutor’s office brought an action for proven electoral fraud and arrested two electoral district officers.

  For a long time, Palermo has been governed by a triad of mayor, regional president, and president of the council. Political best buddies, who won’t be shaken by allegations of electoral shenanigans. The innovations of the last mayor, Diego Cammarata, stopped with the introduction of two double-decker buses for sightseeing tours. And the next thing he did was to commission a lawyer to take action against any journalist who criticized the city administration. Regional President Totò Cuffaro was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia and was forced to step down, but found brief consolation with a seat in the senate until his prison term began. He was replaced as regional president by a soul mate, his former party colleague Raffaele Lombardo. And the former council president Gianfranco Miccichè is a close friend of Marcello Dell’Utri, the senator and companion of Berlusconi who was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia.

  “So you’ve met him, Micciché, when he was still council president,” Letizia says, “and what do you want me to tell you?”

  In fact, Shobha and I did once meet the minister, who isn’t really a minister now but is still addressed as such, at the Villa Igiea, the luxury hotel in the Bay of Palermo where the city’s upper crust meet, from ministers to Mafia bosses to cardinals. It was a remarkable encounter with a representative of Sicilian politics.

  Under Berlusconi, Forza Italia MP Gianfranco Miccichè was appointed deputy economics minister and secretary of state for development, but during his time in office he was better known to the wider public for an inglorious and quickly buried affair involving cocaine: a runner, a Sicilian Forza Italia activist, had delivered the drug straight to the ministry. In Rome, the minister wa
s also responsible for deciding what EU sponsorship money went to Sicily, and was rewarded for this with the highest number of direct votes in the Sicilian election.

  At Villa Igiea he introduced his latest gift: a daily soap opera entitled Agrodolce (Bittersweet)—240 episodes, which were to be produced in Sicily. Supported by EU funding. You can’t always talk about the Mafia and nothing else, the minister says, you have to be able to see the positive side as well. In a freezing-cold conference room he presented the trailer to the journalists. He didn’t show trash in the streets or endless traffic jams; he didn’t show the skeletons of burned-out cars in the Borgo Vecchio or the weeds tearing up the motorways; he showed dolphins gliding through a sky-blue sea to the sound of melancholy accordion music, and Kalsa cathedral, which looked as if it had been dipped in honey, and at the end of the trailer the minister wiped tears from his eyes. Next to him sat another party colleague who was equally moved—he was one of the closest political allies of Miccichè and Marcello Dell’Utri: Angelino Alfano, who was appointed justice minister in the third Berlusconi government in 2008 and, since 2011, has been the secretary of Berlusconi’s party, Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom).

  Later, after a generous lunch, Miccichè met up with a journalist from the Berlusconi newspaper Il Giornale on the hotel terrace. He didn’t want to talk to me because a German television team had once called him a mafioso, and he had brought charges against the television channel. But Shobha and I stayed stoically on our wicker chairs and watched a circle of young people crowding around Gianfranco Miccichè and the journalist, Italian neo-cons with turquoise ties, young lawyers, and economists, and a young woman with Cleopatra eyeliner.

  “We’re the Gianfranco boys,” one of them said, and the minister casually rested his feet on the table.

  His young admirers were all members of the Marcello Dell’Utri Club: the senator, cofounder of Forza Italia and Berlusconi confidant, found guilty of complicity with the Mafia, is so keen on disseminating his so-called culture that he has established hundreds of clubs all across Italy. When I asked a young man what they talked about in those culture clubs, he told me they often discussed issues such as “Is Italy a constitutional democracy?” Because in Italy, he argued, people had no protection once they fell into the clutches of the legal system.

  I looked at the young man in amazement. Because it didn’t seem likely to me that these young people were at risk of falling permanently into the clutches of the Italian legal system. In fact, these ambitious, talented, and probably privileged neoconservatives gave the impression of being intoxicated from their immersion in the sea of Berlusconi’s propaganda.

  “We want to prove that it’s not only the left that does any thinking, we also discuss issues like ‘Karl Marx and God—what’s left?’” said the girl with the Cleopatra eyes.

  They all spoke eloquently, word perfect in fact; they talked freely. Only the minister didn’t say a word and kept his eyes firmly closed. I wondered if he was bored. Or was it his heavy lunch? In fact, the minister had gone to sleep. He was snoring—it was impossible to ignore. And the Gianfranco boys just went on talking about their cultural activities and about how not everything in Sicily should be all about morality. The minister’s head was tilted to one side and his mouth slightly open, noises issuing from his soft palate.

  And the next day there was an interview with him in Il Giornale in which he promised to bless Sicily with ten golf courses: “We will bring Sicily back to the fore.”

  “Hmm, yeah, golf courses,” says Letizia, drawing on her unlit cigarette. For a while she moved from Palermo to Paris because she didn’t want her whole life to be eaten up by the Mafia. Because she couldn’t bear to stare into the triumphant faces of politicians who were collaborating with the Mafia. The former minister for infrastructure and transportation, the Lega Nord politician Pietro Lunardi, had with disarming honesty told the Italians they must finally get used to living with the Mafia: the Mafia and the Camorra had always existed, he said, and they always would. “Since then, politicians have lost their shame,” Letizia says.

  Up until a few years ago Letizia had also run a publishing company, Edizione della Battaglia, bringing out books about the Mafia and the southern hemisphere. She had sold these books in a little bookshop not far from the Teatro Politeama—until the day a man came in and asked her very politely for a donation for the prisoners. The second time he asked for a donation she closed the bookshop.

  “You know, I got the message,” she says, staring with amazement at her cigarette, still unlit.

  PADRE FRITTITTA

  LETIZIA’S DOG WAKES UP WHEN HE HEARS SHOBHA’S FOOT-steps on the stairs. He runs over and licks her too. “If I might briefly interrupt your conversation,” Shobha says, pointing at her watch and at the sun, which is already high in the sky. “Before midday, perhaps we could take a few pictures, in the Kalsa, perhaps, not far from the Piazza Marina.” She had had the idea, she says, of taking a photograph of Letizia in front of the church of Santa Maria della Pietà in Kalsa; Salvo is already waiting downstairs. Letizia nods, somehow resigned. She prefers to stand behind the camera. Particularly since she’s just been given a new camera, a digital Leica, which she now throws over her shoulder.

  As usual, Salvo has triple-parked, but it’s not a problem. Unusually, he isn’t in a hurry, the Kalsa isn’t far away, and his ladies are still engrossed in their game.

  When we arrive in the Piazza Marina, the waiters are already laying the tables for lunch. It’s one restaurant after another—and no reminders of the years when the mood was one of permanent curfew and not a single sound. No one in their right mind would ever have thought of setting foot in the Kalsa in those days. No one would ever attend a vigil of their own free will. Forty years of Mafia city administration had led to the abandonment of the old town. Forty years during which the bourgeoisie of Palermo had turned a blind eye to Mafia mayors and kowtowing city councillors, submissive architects, and venal city planners. As far as those people were concerned, the decay of the old city couldn’t happen quickly enough; ideally, they would have knocked the whole lot down so that they could fill the place with the tower blocks that had already disfigured the rest of the city. It was only since the Mafia had put money into the tourist industry as well that some of the baroque palazzi had had their façades restored.

  In the middle of Piazza Marina there’s a huge magnolia fig tree that has grown into a vast and magical forest. The trunk is reddish brown, like the Sicilian soil, and has transformed itself into some fabulous creature that consists of knotted, frozen snakes, dragons half hidden in the ground, and elongated elephants. Every time I turn my back on this tree I half expect it to stretch out its arms and grab me.

  Shobha immediately directs her mother to stand under the tree and starts taking pictures, and I take notes about Letizia, about her red fringe, which even today makes her look like a Parisian student who’s just climbed down from the barricades. She’s always been a reporter, commander, and spy all at once; she comforted widows, saw her friends die, and crept behind enemy lines. She photographed Giulio Andreotti holding out his hand to a Mafia boss—something that Andreotti still tried to deny decades later, when he was on trial for supporting the Mafia. But Letizia’s photograph was among the evidence produced.

  “And I only remembered that photograph when the police came looking for it in my archive,” Letizia says with amazement.

  When Shobha directs her mother toward the roots of the magic tree, I hear brass-band music floating across from the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Not a day passes in Sicily without a religious procession of one kind or another. Curious, I walk toward the street to take a look—before coming back, disappointed: there isn’t the usual sea of people, just a scattered troop of believers following the crucifix. It isn’t a procession as such, just a small penitential pilgrimage. The Jesus being carried along the Corso has bashed knees and a slightly crooked crown of thorns; he’s followed by a handful of believers being s
purred on by a priest with a bullhorn. “Lord, we beg thee,” the believers cry, asking for healing for the handicapped, for those who have succumbed to alcohol, for those who have fallen under the spell of evil. Would they include the mafiosi? Like the turncoat Marcello Fava, for example? Until his arrest he belonged to the congregation of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa, just a few steps behind us on Piazza Marina. There he had prayed to Santa Maria del Carmelo, when he wasn’t meeting the other bosses outside the church to discuss business with them. When I interviewed him in Rome he repeatedly stressed the importance to him of the spiritual assistance given to him by a nun after he had decided to turn state’s evidence. But now that I’m standing only a few yards away from his church, I wonder whether these people here mightn’t see betrayal of the Mafia as a greater sin than actually belonging to the Mafia.

  Salvo stands next to me. He casts an indifferent, if not contemptuous, glance at the procession moving past us, before staring again at the display of his telefonino, because he’s in permanent contact with his fiancée. But when the Jesus with the crooked crown of thorns is carried past, even Salvo glances up and crosses himself. Briefly, with his thumb, the way people do in Sicily.

  While Shobha and her mother are still trying to find the best perspective in the shadow under the magnolia fig tree, Salvo and I start walking toward Santa Teresa alla Kalsa. As always, a man sits opposite the church in the shade of a tree, frying croquettes in an aluminum pot full of seething oil. Santa Teresa alla Kalsa is a small, sand-colored church with bashful baroque forms. Stucco saints stand in the niches, sighing for all eternity from their half-open mouths. It’s here that we find Padre Frittitta. The priest Don Pino—the priest from San Luca—reminded me of.