The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  As we step inside Piccola Napoli the wind from the air conditioning falls on us like an icy cloth, making us hold our breath for a second. While outside in the Borgo the trash might be rotting in the gutter, inside Piccola Napoli everything is sterile, with white tiles, starched tablecloths, and a freshly scoured counter on which no drop of water would stand a chance.

  As always, the whole family is at work. Behind the till sits an old black-clad woman with the eyes of a bird; orders are taken by her son-in-law, whose red face always looks a bit unhealthy in the fluorescent light. Behind the fish counter stands one of those Sicilian women who wouldn’t smile even under threat of torture, her brother works in the kitchen, and the usual crew are joined by an old man whose degree of kinship I don’t know. He’s leaning motionlessly by the old woman at the till, with his waistband hitched up to his armpits. Depending on the time of day, all kinds of other cousins and brothers-in-law and aunts and great-nieces and people I can’t tell apart turn up as well.

  As soon as we’re sitting down, there’s white wine on our table, and green Sicilian olives the size of quail’s eggs, and oriental-scented bread with sesame seeds. The brother-in-law brings us panelle, the chickpea fritters that I fell in love with on my first day in Sicily, and sea urchins and a bit of caponata, the vegetable dish of aubergines, tomatoes, olives, and capers, which sensitive Italian stomachs find irredeemably indigeribile, completely indigestible—which is why it lies for hours, maybe days even, in my belly, formerly inured to such things by my German upbringing but softened by my time in Italy—but which we still find irresistible.

  For a second we think guiltily about the heaviness of Sicilian cooking, but it doesn’t stop us going on to order tiny fried octopi, swordfish, and tuna. And if Letizia hadn’t asked about Duisburg, we’d be talking about the food for hours.

  What was it like? she asks, suddenly looking like a young girl. More than most people, Letizia has preserved a childish curiosity about life. She soon tires of talking about herself, about things she knows, about repeated situations. But she loves experiencing new contexts, new things, outrageous things. She loves learning. But it all has to happen very quickly.

  It’s weird talking about Duisburg in Palermo. Thinking about steelworks, blast furnaces, and housing projects when you’re surrounded by house altars, baroque churches, and palm-lined avenues. And yet the two places do have some things in common. A death toll. When I got into my old Renault 4 that time to drive from the Ruhr to Corleone, because Mario Puzo’s The Godfather had aroused my curiosity, I never imagined that I would one day make the return journey—that I would travel from Italy to the Ruhr and get out of the train in Duisburg because the Mafia had drenched the place in blood.

  HEINZ SPRENGER

  HEINZ SPRENGER, DIRECTOR OF THE DUISBURG MURDER Commission, is waiting for me outside the station. He told me on the phone that he was short, with a moustache. Outside the exit a man was waiting, wrapped in a black leather jacket, the kind of leather jacket I’ve only ever seen in two places in the world: the Ukraine and the Ruhr.

  If I were casting a police procedural set in the Ruhr, I’d immediately book Heinz Sprenger for the role of a police inspector to whom nothing human is alien and who doesn’t waste his words. Sprenger is someone who keeps the ball close to the ground, as they say in the Ruhr. I tried to imagine him in Calabria. Heinz Sprenger in his black leather jacket next to Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force of Reggio Calabria, looking in his dark-blue, pinstripe suit as if he had stepped straight out of a Mafia film. Cortese, drawing on his cigarillo and watching after the smoke, and Sprenger, watching his partner with the patient attention of an ornithologist. Working with the Italians had taught him, Inspector Sprenger says, that it’s important to make a bella figura.

  If he believed the newspapers, he said, the Mafia was being defeated in Italy every day. He was referring to those spectacular mass arrests of thirty or forty people that are always worth a small story even abroad: bosses, policemen disguised in ski masks, in the background a helicopter in which the mafioso is being taken away—a helicopter that has landed just for the photograph of the arrest. And that flies off again once the picture has been taken, without the mafioso.

  Whole clans in Italy are regularly arrested for membership in the Mafia, he said, and no one learns that after a short time many bosses are simply put under house arrest for lack of evidence. Or leave prison as free men once their remand period is over, because the judges aren’t able to prosecute them within the designated period.

  Heinz Sprenger and I drove to the scene of the crime. The Da Bruno pizzeria is only a few yards behind the station, on the ground floor of the Klöckner building, one of those 1980s buildings that you see everywhere in the Ruhr, buildings that look as if the architect had drawn his inspiration from the Star Trek movies. The restaurant looked as if it had been precipitously abandoned, the chairs were dusty and stood randomly around in the restaurant, a yucca palm withered in a corner, and above the counter there was an amateur painting of a pizza Margherita: Pizza, la specialità di Sebastiano. Outside was a big terrace with wooden benches; plainly the restaurant had been quite a success, in every respect. The pizza Margherita, and the money laundering, too.

  I thought about Sebastiano Strangio’s grave in the San Luca cemetery. About that crude concrete box with rusty iron girders sticking out of it. And I thought about Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, who was a cousin of the murdered Sebastiano Strangio, and who had traveled to Duisburg with the Bishop of Locri shortly after the massacre and held a “reconciliation mass” outside the pizzeria.

  “I don’t eat pizza anymore myself,” said Inspector Sprenger. He said it casually, without any particular emphasis. Just stating a fact.

  The bloodbath had taken place in the drive, just a few feet away from Da Bruno. We were standing in the rain; it smelled of soil and damp leaves, and Sprenger showed me the place where the shots had fallen. It was a driveway paved with those small square pieces of shale that you only get in the Ruhr. The two hit men had hidden behind the bushes planted along the drive. One of the surveillance cameras in the Klöckner building had caught the gunfire, more of a flash behind the leaves of the trees. Sixty shots from two different firearms, followed by shots to the head of each of the victims before the perpetrators fled in separate directions.

  Until that night in August 2007, Heinz Sprenger had had nothing to do with the Mafia. He was the director of the Murder Commission in Duisburg, and had, among other things, made his name by developing a system for the monitoring of child abuse. His job was to clear up murder cases. His colleagues were responsible for organized crime. And now, overnight, he was in the eye of the hurricane—a hurricane of journalists, politicians, and anti-Mafia parliamentary committees, lip service, postulations, and inferences, of ’Ndrangheta, investigating magistrates, and police. A hundred and twenty of his colleagues, half of all the investigators in Duisburg, were deployed to clear up the massacre.

  At night Sprenger read books about the ’Ndrangheta. And files about the blood feud of San Luca. About the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, who had been at war since one side had thrown an egg at the other as a carnival prank. About a village that essentially consisted of organized crime, drug dealing, arms dealing, and murder. When Sprenger went to Calabria, he always took his personal interpreter with him. Not out of suspicion, no. “Just because,” he said.

  His office was in a fascistic-looking red-brick police headquarters, built in the 1930s, like the Italian Palaces of Justice. There was linoleum in the corridors; cacti and little ficus trees were lined up neatly in Sprenger’s office, and the walls were hung with organizational charts that Sprenger had drawn up: family trees of the clans of San Luca, the members of the warring Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, assignments of tasks, family relationships and flows of information, arrows connecting men’s heads, women’s faces, hit men, victims, witnesses, perpetrators, getaway cars. At once a kind of wallpap
er and a cartography of crime. Hanging next to it was a photograph of a trash bag with a child’s arm sticking out of it.

  Heinz Sprenger had learned a lot about the family relationships of the Calabrian clan, about how almost everyone in San Luca has the same name, and you always have to know their mother’s name to distinguish one ’Ndranghetista from another. And he had learned that in the summer before the massacre, Marco Marmo had driven through Duisburg: Marco Marmo, the instigator of the Duisburg massacre, the ’Ndranghetista who had carried out at Christmas 2006 the murder of Maria Strangio, which had been intended to kill her husband, the clan head Gianluca Nirta.

  Since the murder of his wife, the boss Gianluca Nirta had been seen as a time bomb by the enemy Pelle-Vottari clan, so it was the job of the hit man Marco Marmo to get rid of him as quickly as possible: “Gianluca must die, otherwise nothing here is going to work. He has nothing to lose now, you see, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, the hit man’s devoted helper, who had traveled halfway across Europe with him, all the way to Duisburg. In a car that wasn’t just full of bugs but was also fitted with a satellite transmitter that told Italian investigators its exact location—in Tonhallenstrasse in Duisburg, for example, or Saarstrasse and Mühlheimer Strasse, where the pizzeria Da Bruno stood.

  Unlike the Sicilian mafiosi, who are always worried that their apartments and cars might be bugged and who therefore talk rarely or in a very coded way about their business, what is astonishing about the ’Ndrangheta is the openness with which they talk about their dealings: the wiretap records of San Luca and the ones from the car in Duisburg suggest a certain recklessness. The killer and his henchman talked quite openly about their plans; plainly they thought they had nothing to fear, from either the Italian or the German police. Who, incidentally, knew nothing about the fact that the two mafiosi were driving through Duisburg in a bugged car—and Heinz Sprenger remains angry about that, because of the not inconsiderable danger that the two men represented. After they’d been stopped at a roadblock, the hit man told his henchman that he would have fired if they had been held any longer. But because Italian wiretap records are illegal under German law, they are ineligible as evidence.

  Behind this lurks what German detectives politely term “different investigative traditions and legal cultures”: the Italian police try to penetrate the structures of a whole clan, which it can then finally arrest for the crime of Mafia membership. The German police have to be able to demonstrate a concrete crime, so they must look for evidence, for DNA traces, fingerprints, traces of gunpowder. Or, as Inspector Sprenger puts it: the Italians bug everything, they tap people’s phones for years—and nothing happens.

  But where the Italian police have the edge, as far as he’s concerned, is in their ability to seize Mafia property, even if Mafia membership is only suspected. How many times have the German police questioned Italians who have come to Germany without funds, worked making pizzas for six months, and then bought up half of Duisburg city center? And, when they were asked where the money came from, said, “From my uncle in Italy.”

  All mafiosi cherish this hole in German legislation, and they exploit it even today. Especially, of course, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. German investigators noticed this when mafiosi from Duisburg, Cologne, or Dortmund moved to the east, to Saxony and Thuringia, and particularly to the Baltic coast, where millions of euros were laundered through the purchase of hotels, restaurants, and holiday resorts.

  There isn’t a single Calabrian-run pizzeria in Germany that hasn’t got some involvement with the ’Ndrangheta, says Inspector Sprenger. But so long as there is no shift in the burden of proof, so long as the police have to demonstrate that the money comes from criminal offenses, and the investor does not have to prove that his money was acquired legally, the Mafia’s businesses in Germany will go on thriving.

  What did he expect?

  “I don’t think the Germans are going to change their laws because of Duisburg,” he said. “And if they don’t change anything, nothing will change between Italy and Germany.”

  For me this accorded with the views of the Calabrian state prosecutors Gratteri and Boemi and the investigator Cortese: all three men were united by the oppressive feeling that Duisburg hadn’t really changed anything. That the initial enthusiasm that had inspired Germany and Italy to work very closely together had already dissipated. Cortese saw that his German colleagues were highly motivated, but that they were hampered by the legal situation. German laws were no match for the criminal reality.

  “So the Mafia has a great future in Germany,” I said to Letizia, who had forgotten all about her swordfish as we talked about Duisburg. The red-faced son-in-law has been lurking for quite a while, and when finally Letizia sets down her cutlery, he immediately takes the plates away and tries to persuade us to have a dessert, wild strawberries in orange sauce, or hand-made lemon sorbet, almost compulsory at the end of a fish dinner: “To lose the fishy taste in your mouth,” he adds. We comply without much resistance and take both. Wild strawberries with lemon sorbet.

  By now we’re the last guests in Piccola Napoli; the old woman at the till is already starting to cash out for the day. She’s a bit like the grim-looking old Sicilian woman that I saw in a pizzeria in Duisburg. A policeman had recommended the restaurant to me: “I can assure you that the kitchen’s clean, we searched the place only recently,” he said.

  I had gone to Duisburg with my uncle, an undercover agent in a sailor’s cap. My uncle is a retired miner, so he’s the ideal companion for looking around Duisburg without drawing attention to yourself. We had lunch in the Sicilian pizzeria that had already been searched by the criminal investigation department. No one in the restaurant spoke even halfway decent German; they didn’t even speak Italian, they just communicated in a Sicilian dialect that they muttered through unmoving lips, as if they’d been catapulted into the present of Duisburg from the depths of the Sicilian past. My uncle was eagerly wolfing down a plate of salmon with prawn sauce when the old woman came out of the kitchen. She was very short, had eyes like bits of coal, and her hair was in a thin bun at the back of her neck. She poured herself a glass of mineral water at the counter. When I saw her, a film played out in my mind’s eye, showing all the encounters that I’ve ever had with Mafia wives. I couldn’t help thinking about suspicious glances behind fly-curtains, the severe faces of the black dwarves of Corleone, of Mafia mothers who call their sons vermin when they have left the Mafia. But perhaps the old woman with the coal-black eyes was just a generous Sicilian grandmother helping out in this restaurant for a few hours a day. Perhaps.

  But this restaurant was actually only a warm-up. The destination for our outing was the Landhaus Milser. A hotel that was “the expression of Southern vitality,” according to the prospectus. It was on the edge of Duisburg, between meadows and little pieces of woodland.

  My uncle stepped into the hotel lobby as if into a church; he crossed his arms behind his back and stepped across the terracotta tiles with great deference. Displayed in a case next to the entrance were medals won by the weightlifter Rolf Milser, who had founded the hotel along with the Calabrian Antonio Pelle. The hotel became famous in 2006 when the Italian national football team stayed there. And when the Duisburg massacre took place. During those August days there was barely an interview in which the Calabrian owner, Antonio Pelle from San Luca, didn’t endeavor to avoid arrest on grounds of kinship: not all Calabrians were mafiosi; he’d rather have been born on the moon than in San Luca.

  But I said nothing of that to my uncle. We stepped through the light-drenched hotel lobby, poked our heads into the Da Vinci restaurant, and admired the photographs of the Italian national team. My uncle thought everything was very nice, very well cared for.

  As we left, my eye was drawn to a gold plaque that hung in the lobby, on which Antonio Pelle was celebrated as a “successful migrant” who had brought honor on Calabria. The medal of honor had been awarded by the Pro Loco
of San Giovanni di Gerace, one of those associations devoted to the fostering of local traditions. The medal was signed by the Pro Loco president, Dr. Mario Carabetta. And I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the companion of the hit man from San Luca who drove through Duisburg in a bugged car the summer before the assassination bore the same surname: Michele Carabetta.

  When Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, had traveled to Duisburg to deliver his mass of reconciliation, he spent the night in the Landhaus Milser. As befits a Calabrian. Compatriots always look out for each other.

  MAFIA WOMEN

  WHEN WE LEAVE THE TRATTORIA AT LAST, THE WOMEN OF the Piccola Napoli look up for the first time. The old woman stares at us and at the money that the waiter brings her on a little silver tray; the daughter-in-law finally stops polishing the counter and wipes her hand on her apron. But not even Shobha can wrest a smile from the daughter-in-law, not even when she takes a picture of her and admires her delicate profile. The daughter-in-law shrugs carelessly, as if she thinks her symmetrical face is entirely uninteresting.

  Outside, the light has softened again; we stand irresolutely in the street, Letizia lights a cigarette and looks through the smoke at the clear, endless sky as if expecting a sign.

  “We could drive to Mondello,” Shobha suggests. “We could take a few pictures on Monte Pellegrino first, and then a few on Mondello beach.”

  Letizia looks up in astonishment, as if remembering only now that this is all about her. “Haven’t we finished?” she asks. She hesitates for a moment between protest and resignation, and then opts for an aggressive: “Let’s get it over with.”