The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  And we sit next to the couples, at one of the wobbly little tables; columns of cars drive noisily past and suddenly, at one of the neighboring tables, I think I recognize a woman whom Shobha and I met in this cafe a few years ago: Carla Cottone, daughter-in-law of one of the most powerful godfathers in Palermo, Francesco Madonia, who ruled the Resuttana clan with his four sons.

  I point at her, but Shobha shakes her head. “No, that’s not her. Although it does look very like her.”

  Carla Cottone, Madonia by marriage, was wearing a dark-blue suit and a pearl necklace when she collected us that time from the cafe on the piazza in Mondello. Everyone turned to stare as she crossed the piazza, because since her appearance on the Maurizio Costanzo talk show she had acquired a certain degree of celebrity. It was the first time that a woman from one of the most powerful Mafia families in Sicily had spoken publicly. But not to condemn the Mafia, as the presenter had hoped. Since her husband, Aldo, had been behind bars, Carla had embarked on a goodwill tour through the media to convince the public that her husband had fallen victim to a miscarriage of justice.

  Carla Cottone had married Aldo, the youngest son of the Madonia clan, one of the most bloodthirsty Mafia families in Sicily, a clan that could boast of being involved in almost every “excellent” murder in the 1980s and 1990s: the assassinations of the regional president Piersanti Mattarella, the prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the police chief Ninni Cassarà, the public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. And the Palermo businessman Libero Grassi, who had publicly refused to go on paying protection money to the Mafia. Aldo Madonia was the last of the four Madonia sons to be still out of prison. He was also known as dottoricchio, little doctor, because he was the only one in the family to have graduated from college. His subject had been chemistry. He was arrested after a turncoat mafioso had stated that Aldo had been involved in a drug deal in which 600 kilos of cocaine from Colombia were delivered to the beach of Castellammare del Golfo. Aldo was said to have been present at a business meeting between Sicilian and Colombian drug dealers. One of the Madonia brothers who had already been sentenced tried to convince the turncoat that it was a case of mistaken identity. It was he, not his brother, who had taken part in the meeting.

  In reply, the state witness said to him: “Why do you address me with the familiar tu? I don’t know you, I only know your brother Aldo.”

  Carla Cottone had thought that we, too, were propagandists, who were going to deluge her with a flood of imprecations, accusations, and entreaties as soon as she’d asked us into her villa in the center of Mondello, with all its security alarms and high steel walls. She raged, as if she could prove her husband’s innocence simply by shouting. She cursed Palermo’s judges and all the turncoats who had denounced her husband. Her irreproachable husband Aldo a mafioso? All lies told by rats in return for promised privileges. Aldo was innocent, she cried. She turned into an animal when she heard those accusations; the problem was just that he bore the name of Madonia.

  Until his arrest, it was in this house in Mondello that Aldo Madonia had led the blameless life as a pharmacist that his wife evoked. Shobha and I sat in the midst of an idyll of period furniture, family photographs in silver frames, and little porcelain figurines, and wondered why a respectable pharmaceutical adviser would need to protect himself with high steel walls. And as we sat there and wondered, Carla Cottone compared the Italian judiciary with the medieval Inquisition and the fascist era, and painted a romantic picture of the Mafia, which many people in Sicily joined only because they were in financial difficulties. “They’re unemployed, and life is expensive. So they choose to fit in with something,” she said.

  Not a bad word about her husband’s family crossed her lips: it was all just dust that was being raised about all his supposed crimes. There was nothing behind any of it. Aldo had always said that his father was a very loving man.

  On the day of our meeting with Carla Cottone, I learned that a car-bomb attack had been launched against Maurizio Costanzo, the host of the talk show on which Carla had so volubly defended her husband. Costanzo had survived only by the skin of his teeth. The bomb had gone off just before his car drove past.

  Costanzo had long been a thorn in the flesh of the Mafia because of his critical attitude toward them. In his program, not only had he challenged Carla Cottone to condemn the Mafia but he had also wished a tumor upon a mafioso, after the man in question had managed to get himself transferred from jail to hospital with a faked illness. When the hard core of the Corleonesi decided, after the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, to continue with their murderous strategy, the suggestion that Costanzo become a target had been carried unanimously.

  “Let’s walk along the beach for a bit,” Shobha says to Letizia and me. I feel like doing that as well. To feel the wind in my face and the water on my feet. Finally to feel a bit of movement. Because when I think about our meeting with Carla Cottone, about the attempt on Maurizio Costanzo’s life, I feel the torpor of Sicily settling on us.

  “Chemistry,” Shobha says. Just that one word, and we laugh. No subject could have suited Aldo Madonia better. In the late 1980s Sicily was the center of the heroin trade and heroin refinement. At the time there were lots of rumors about the heroin refineries around Monreale, and Shobha hadn’t given them enough credence. One day when she came home to the little house not far from Monreale that she had rented shortly before, her eye fell first on the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, which was still swinging back and forth, as if it had taken a knock—a furious, raging knock that had shattered all the furniture in her apartment, bed, cupboard, table and chairs, books, clothes, plates, and cups, all smashed and shattered. Only her saints had been left unharmed, the statues of Santa Rosalia, Santa Rita, and the Madonna of Trapani.

  The next time they were a bit more polite. When Shobha came home, two men were waiting for her in a Mercedes. Men who moved as if they were being filmed. Economical movements, sparse sentences. She had half an hour to pack her things and get out, they said. No one was allowed to live in this area. Her furniture would be taken away in a truck; she could pick it up from a garage on the edge of Palermo.

  Shobha packed her most necessary belongings and fled. Later she drove to the garage they had described. It was empty.

  Even today Shobha is angry with herself for believing the two mafiosi. Believing in honesty, in a sense of honor.

  “I left Sicily after that,” says Shobha.

  You never hear from any Cosa Nostra women anymore. After the numbers of turncoats dwindled almost to nothing, the women became invisible again. They disappeared into nowhere, like rabbits that a magician had pulled out of his hat before conjuring them back again. Once again they became as invisible as Cosa Nostra itself.

  The Calabrian Mafia women learned from the deployment of the Sicilian Mafia women: each time the clans are temporarily weakened by waves of arrests, the Calabrian women appear in public. A well-aimed stab to the maternal heart always works in Italy. A year after the Duisburg massacre, the wives of various arrested ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca even joined an anti-’Ndrangheta march, in which they had no hesitation in holding banners demanding True Justice—for their husbands, brothers, and sons: wanted murderers, arrested clan chiefs.

  Carla Cottone and her blameless husband went on living their respectable life. Once his period in custody was over, Aldo Madonia was able to leave prison and wait comfortably at home for the further judgments of the higher-court authorities. In 2003 he was acquitted by the supreme court. He was defended by the Mafia lawyer Nino Mormino, who finally became a Forza Italia MP and worked under the Berlusconi government as vice president of the parliamentary judiciary committee. There he campaigned for an amnesty, which would apply not least to legally sentenced mafiosi. It was only when the Palermo state prosecutor’s office investigated Mormino that he stepped down from the judiciary committee. Even now Avvocato Mormino is one of the most sought-after Mafia defenders in Palermo. He defended Berlusconi’s fr
iend Marcello Dell’Utri in the second instance against the charge of assisting the Mafia, and also the former Sicilian regional president Totò Cuffaro against the charge of helping the Mafia, both with great success. Cuffaro celebrated his lenient sentence from the court of the first instance: five years, for favoring the Mafia. Originally he was to have been sentenced for supporting the Mafia—not just a difference in the choice of words, but in the length of sentence as well. And Marcello Dell’Utri can consider himself lucky that public prosecutor Ingroia, whose indictment brought him a nine-year sentence for supporting the Mafia in the first instance, was not in charge of the trial in the second instance.

  The blow of Cuffaro’s resignation as Sicilian regional president was briefly softened for him by a seat in the senate, where he could feel that he was among friends. Giulio Andreotti, sentenced for supporting the Mafia—whose support for the Mafia until 1980 was proven, and is now deemed to have lapsed—sits in the senate, as do Marcello Dell’Utri and the president of the senate, Renato Schifani. Schifani wasn’t sentenced for supporting the Mafia, but founded the company Sicula Brokers in 1979 together with a number of Mafia bosses—which, for a man appointed senate president by Prime Minister Berlusconi, and who therefore holds nothing less than the second-highest political office in Italy, is at least slightly awkward. Particularly since one of those Mafia bosses, Nino Mandalà, boasted years later of his friendship with Renato Schifani—something recorded in the files of various Mafia trials. Unlike politicians, the Mafia doesn’t forget. Not even decades on. Favors must be returned.

  When she thinks about it she feels ill, Letizia says. She draws on her cigarette and runs her fingers through her fringe. Clouds roll across the sky, turn pink at the edges, and pull apart. The last swimmers stand in little groups like members of a congregation after church; a boy shuts the parasols and collapses the deck chairs. We go on walking along the water, it slowly grows cooler, and the shadow of Monte Pellegrino falls on the shore. The sea swallows our footprints. Shobha takes casual snaps.

  ROSALBA DI GREGORIO

  SALVO IS WAITING OUTSIDE THE CHARLESTON RESTAURANT to bring us back to Palermo. The sky has assumed a faint purple tinge, which seldom happens in Sicily. Usually night falls from the sky like a black cloth, as it does in Africa. By the time we drive through La Favorita park, it’s already so dark under the canopy of the magnolia fig tree that the eyes of stray dogs gleam like little dots in the headlights.

  I’m thinking about the dog. Its fur was dirty gray, with a beard under its jaw. I only saw the beard later, because the dog appeared from nowhere like a white plastic bag being blown out of the bushes. I braked abruptly, but it was too late. I still remember the feeling. It was as if I was driving over a bump in the road. Even though the cars behind me honked their horns, I drove to the side and pulled the dead dog out of the road. And saw its beard. And its eyes.

  When I told a friend about the dog later on, he said: “Funny. Human beings are killed here every day, and you’re crying over a dog.”

  I think about that as we’re driving along the avenue, and about the fact that I can’t tell Shobha about the dead dog because she’d never forgive me.

  And I think about the young, fair-haired cameraman whom we met when we were waiting for an interview with the then Sicilian regional president Totò Cuffaro, who was charged with favoring the Mafia. Collesano lies in the Madonia Mountains, in the hinterland of Cefalù. It was very hot. We sat in the shade of the church and waited for Cuffaro to talk to us after mass, having followed him all the way around Sicily. Next to us waited a few of Cuffaro’s bodyguards, who whispered into their jacket sleeves from time to time. Photographers were hanging around, and so was this young cameraman who was supposed to be delivering new pictures of the president. We fell into conversation: at first the usual shoptalk among colleagues, just to kill time, then a cautious approach, the sort of discreet questions that people ask in Sicily when they’re trying to work out which side the other person is on. And then, with no need and no real cause, the cameraman told me how once, at night, after a day’s shoot in western Sicily, as they drove past he had noticed a parked car with its doors open. Someone was sitting inside and there was plainly something wrong with him. Even though his journalist colleague urged him to drive on, the cameraman stopped. And walked over to the car. In it was a man, bound hand and foot. His hands were tied to his feet, his legs bent back and tied to his arms, and his feet tied to a noose around his neck—a noose that tightened around his neck the more his legs stretched.

  Incaprettato, tied up like a goat—that’s what they call it when the Mafia condemns its victim to a slow death by suffocation. The man was already black in the face, his veins swollen as thick as fingers, the cameraman said. He cut his bonds and the man groaned like someone who had been underwater for a long time. Then the journalist demanded that they clear off. On the way they called the carabinieri.

  Later he learned that the man had survived, the cameraman said.

  Letizia’s face is slightly sunburned, like a child’s face after a day on the beach. She looks at the display of her Leica and checks her last shots. Shobha holds her camera at the ready on her lap. When we are on Via Ruggero Settimo, we notice that the traffic is being diverted for a procession, and we can’t turn around. We are stuck in Palermo’s “street of wealth”—wealth that comes from the drug trade, embezzled EU funds, and extorted protection money—and see smartly dressed women walking past our car, the usual crowd for Palermo’s early-evening shopping expeditions. The women walk past the shop windows of the jewelers and the luxury boutiques: Versace, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana. Girlfriends walk arm-in-arm, mothers are dragged from window to window. Some women linger a bit longer by the shop windows, others walk past them with the apparent indifference that can be mustered only by people who could easily buy up the whole lot if they felt like it. The self-confidence of the elect. A class pride like that emanating from the Mangano women: the three daughters and wife of Vittorio Mangano, the mafioso whose discretion Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri never tired of praising.

  It was thanks to the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio that Shobha and I met the Mangano women. Up until her death, Rosalba Di Gregorio defended the mafioso Vittorio Mangano, whom the papers called “Berlusconi’s stable-keeper” and who had worked for two years in the entrepreneur’s villa—and who said nothing of what he knew about Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri, and many other businessmen, politicians, and lawyers. Right up to his death. It’s thanks to Rosalba that Vittorio Mangano was able to die in the arms of his daughters. At least she managed to do that. Even though she’d hoped to get him placed under house arrest.

  It wasn’t a chance acquaintance as far as we were concerned: the Mangano women hoped to use a media charm offensive to soften hearts, to ensure that the father’s high-security imprisonment was turned into house arrest. Rosalba Di Gregorio always defends, first and foremost, the interests of her clients. The Mafia has known for ages that the struggle can no longer be waged with bombs, but only with leading articles, interviews, and television reports.

  That’s why the three daughters and the wife had declared themselves willing to meet us for an interview in her chambers. It was Rosalba Di Gregorio who thought her client’s wife and daughters should be given the opportunity to set out their view of things.

  They remembered their time in Berlusconi’s villa as if it had been paradise. She had always played with Berlusconi’s eldest son, said Cinzia, Vittorio Mangano’s middle daughter.

  For her and her sisters, Loredana and Marina, it was unimaginable that their father could ever have turned state’s evidence. To fall from enlightenment to disgrace? To become someone for the judiciary to wipe their boots on? They would have had to kick him out.

  He would never have destroyed the image she had of a father she had always admired, Cinzia said. He had always said: “I will leave you no wealth, but I will leave you dignity.”

  They were beautiful young wome
n, the ones sitting at Rosalba’s desk. Not black-clad women, but cultivated young women who played the piano and were interested in art. Mafia princesses. Loredana, the eldest, was a restaurateur; Cinzia a painter; and Marina, the youngest, was still at school. They weren’t women whose lives were all casa and chiesa, as you would normally expect of Mafia women: they didn’t say the rosary, they watched films by Nanni Moretti. Women like you and me.

  The mother was an elegant, blond lady with a pearl necklace. Loredana had long, curly hair and wore a floral dress; her sister Cinzia was in trousers. She was the leader of the three daughters, black-haired, modest, and confident. She casually appraised us. The youngest daughter, Marina, was so thin that her knees pointed through the material of her jeans.

  Marina sat on the edge of the chair, constantly ready to get up and run away; her mother watched her apprehensively from the corner of her eye. Loredana sat bolt upright in her armchair, straining for a ladylike effect, while her sister Cinzia sat in front of us in that comfortable and confident posture that is usually reserved for men. Like a well-traveled woman with nothing to fear.

  Their name made them proud; it reassured them: “We know who our father is,” said the Mafia princesses.

  “Our father is someone with high moral principles,” said Cinzia, “and of course we miss him in the family, as a support and as a human being who has a solution for everything.” A father who’s a friend—even if he was indicted for Mafia membership, two murders, extortion, and drug dealing. And even so, their name had never been a burden to them, said the Mangano daughters.