The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  Sarno quickly climbed the stairs to the Paolillo family’s apartment. He didn’t knock, but stepped inside the apartment just as naturally as a king coming to greet his subjects.

  The mother had her late son’s name tattooed on her lower arm. For months she had slept in a tent at the spot where her son had died, to demonstrate that children have to play in derelict buildings here. On the weekend a sports field was due to be opened in Ponticelli. It was that mother’s victory. Against defeatism, against resignation. Regional president Antonio Bassolino and mayoress Rosa Russo Iervolino had announced their arrival, the dead boy’s brother, Alessandro, proudly informed us—a tall, fair, unemployed kid. Neither the regional president nor the mayoress had ever set foot in Ponticelli; it was all due to his mother that the politicians were interested in their fate, he said, and his mother mutely put on the DVD of Sarno’s video.

  The clip was shot in black and white. Carmine Sarno had seen it thousands of times and still had tears in his eyes at the end. “Everyone has his feelings,” he said later.

  Shobha has turned up the music: David Bowie, “We can be heroes, just for one day.” The music has startled the tortoises, which are now pretending to be dead. Often when we’re traveling in Sicily or Calabria, Shobha and I feel the need to listen to music at deafening volume and sing along. Driving through Brancaccio, Castellammare, Cinisi, through all those Mafia villages with their Padre Pio statues behind glass, with the fat men sitting on plastic chairs lined up at the edge of the street, waiting for their telefonini to ring, while we screech “Is there life on Mars?” Displacement activity? Perhaps. And our only salvation.

  Carmine Sarno had arranged to meet me that night. He was accompanying his singer Alessio to various performances around Naples. And I was to be there.

  Sarno had discovered Alessio when he was sixteen years old and singing “Vola cardillo,” the prisoners’ hymn to freedom. Now Alessio was the best horse in his stable. Tens of thousands of people cheered him at his concerts in the Teatro Palapartenope, and Alessio couldn’t complain about performing as a star guest at family parties and discos. Forty minutes of Alessio cost 1,500 euros, and he could do as many as five performances in a single night.

  Carmine Sarno was waiting for me in the car park behind his house. He drove ahead in his silver Mercedes, Alessio followed in a gray van, along with the guitarist, keyboard player, drummer, and roadie. Before the tour began, Carmine Sarno distributed Madonnas to his musicians. Key rings that his wife had brought back from Lourdes. Then he put the lock of the seat belt into the lock without the belt—so that the alert wouldn’t constantly remind him to do himself up. Seat belts aren’t for men like Sarno.

  He hurtled through the night at 125 mph and was in a mind for confessions. About the fact that he was a former gambler, but had overcome that addiction. That after leaving jail he had slept in the car for eight months because he didn’t want to go back to his wife at the apartment. That apart from his four legitimate children, he had two illegitimate ones. That there had only been one turncoat in the Sarno clan—one infame, although he wasn’t a blood relation. And about the fact that his brother Ciro had got five degrees in jail and was now writing his life story. “If you see him, you’ll think he’s a professor,” said Carmine Sarno.

  He’d already been offered a transfer fee of 700,000 euros for Alessio, although Sarno had turned it down. Alessio was more than a singer to him, he said.

  “It was through me that Alessio was born,” said Carmine Sarno. “And he will die with me.”

  That night Alessio had his first performance as a star guest at Anna Chiara’s first-communion party, in the Piccolo Paradiso restaurant, where the children had already drunk themselves into a Coca-Cola rush by the time Alessio entered the room. He was twenty-three, wore a retro-style leather jacket, a Rolex on his wrist, and a lot of gel in his hair, and said: “My songs come from my heart.”

  The communicant Anna Chiara weighed about 175 pounds and wept into her napkin when she saw Alessio. When he started singing, all the females in the room between the ages of eight and eighty started screeching as if the Messiah had suddenly appeared. Twitching ecstatically, they sang along and took photographs with their mobile phones, and the mother of the communicant cried: “Take him, take him!”—until at last her daughter embraced him with her short, fat arms and kissed him, blushing, on the cheeks. At the end of the concert, Carmine Sarno applauded too, for politeness’s sake.

  Then we glided on through the night, the moon hung like a bisected disc above a mountain, and Carmine put on his singers’ CDs. In the distance you could see the sea, with the moonlight reflected on it. Next stop was the bingo hall in Teverola. Here it was as silent as a church—not a sound apart from the rustle of paper and the creak of the chairs when the winning numbers were read out. It was already midnight when a security man started setting up crowd barriers for Alessio’s performance. The security man had mascara on his eyelashes and upper arms like oak trees, and didn’t reply when the girls asked him if Alessio had already arrived. The huge hall was completely packed. Fat women, whose bodies spilled like soft mountains over the edges of the chairs, chain-smoked. An orange carpet swallowed the sound of every footstep. Sometimes the women whispered to the moneylenders, who ran back and forth like stray dogs between the players’ tables.

  Bingo halls are Camorra money-laundering institutions, although Carmine would never have put it like that—quite the contrary: he felt sorry for the people there, everyone has his feelings after all, he himself had been a gambler, and many of the people who win something here will be robbed when they leave the bingo hall. A woman turned to Carmine, pointed to me, and said she knew me off the television. Sarno didn’t reply; he just gave a flattered smile. Then Alessio came and a whirlwind swept through the rows of seats, a wave of weeping girls surged against the barriers, and it was all the security man with the mascaraed eyelashes could do not to be crushed.

  “Sei bellissimo,” screamed the girls, “you’re gorgeous,” and Carmine Sarno looked at his watch.

  The next morning the sports field in honor of the late Francesco Paolillo was opened in Ponticelli. When I arrived, there was no sign of Sarno. Presumably he was still sleeping. Or pretending to, because he doesn’t like appearing at public events. Listening to politicians’ speeches. After all, he knows the politicians better than anyone. He knows how high their price is.

  Alessandro, the dead boy’s brother, was very excited; he kept running along the seats where his neighbors were all sitting, repeating that the limousines of mayoress Iervolino and the regional president Bassolino would soon be there. The sports field looked like a cage; it was laid with green artificial lawn and surrounded by high fences. The dead boy’s sister delivered a speech inside the cage. “Francesco, we’ll never forget you,” she said, and her mother bit her handkerchief. A single local politician had come; he too delivered a speech in the cage and managed not to use the word Camorra once.

  While the speeches were being delivered, Alessandro, the fair-haired, unemployed kid, looked into the street. And then he turned away and said: “They haven’t come again. They’ll never come.”

  MESSINA DENARO

  WHEN SHOBHA STEPS ONTO THE TERRACE, SHE’S TURNED herself into a glittering apparition with sparkling earrings, a deep décolleté, and coal-black eyes. And pointed shoes. At the end of the day she always needs to get rid of the flat shoes and trousers that she makes herself wear when she’s working. Making herself feminine again. Although this time we don’t have a sense of having worked at all. It’s more as if we’d just taken a walk, like the French and American tourists who walk through Palermo, always slightly anxiously, pressed close to the walls of the houses, in the deluded hope that they won’t be recognized as tourists. Whose tour guides do everything they can to ensure that visitors to Sicily think not about fugitive bosses but about the ancient theater of Segesta, the colonnade of the cathedral of Monreale, and the oratory of Santa Cita, where myriads of angels
whir about—the baroque extravagance, the Sicilian excess.

  From Shobha’s roof terrace you can watch the city getting ready for nightfall. Putting on stars and bathing in moonlight. The domes of the baroque churches curve triumphantly next to Palermo’s single, rather anorexic-looking skyscraper, and in the distance the lights gleam from the illegally built houses on the hill of Mondello. Shobha has uncorked a bottle of chardonnay from Planeta; we listen to David Bowie and a jingling wind chime.

  “Trapani,” says Shobha, after she has tasted the wine. Strange, it tastes like Trapani. The sea and wisteria. The way it smelled in the morning when we used to go to processions.

  I hold the wine under my nose, close my eyes, and try to smell Trapani. I actually smell jasmine, rosemary, and oregano. A hint of wisteria. Perhaps some salt in the air, and, if I put my mind to it, I can also smell a bit of myrrh. For years we took a pilgrimage to the Good Friday procession of Trapani, La processione dei misteri. We set off from Palermo at night and drove, drunk with sleep, down the autostrada to reach Trapani at dawn. We parked the car in the harbor and walked shivering through the night air, always heading toward the funeral march. You could hear the music from a long way away, music that sounded beautiful and skewed and grabbed our hearts in its clutches.

  When we got there, the faithful had already been following the penitential procession for hours. Men in dark suits carried the enormously heavy stations of the cross: Christ before Pilate, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the raising of the cross, the entombment, the mother of sorrows. Each time the bearers set down the bier, lit with incandescent bulbs, for a few minutes, they passed around bottles wrapped in brown paper, and the women leaned against a house wall, closed their eyes and murmured the rosary to keep from falling asleep. “Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori.” As day palely dawned, the world stood still for a moment. Just long enough for the music to start again and the sea on the horizon to color itself pink.

  We felt intoxicated. Shobha photographed angels, Roman legionnaires in shimmering gold armor, brides of Christ, and little girls carrying the crown of thorns through the streets on purple velvet cushions. She photographed mothers holding their handbags in front of them like protective shields, she photographed the notables in their sashes, all the presidents who take very small, important steps—presidente della confraternità dei pescatori, presidente dell’associazione SS. Crocefisso, presidente della società sanguinis Christi—and I walked behind the brass bands with my tape recorder, in search of funeral marches. “Una lacrima sulla tomba di mia madre” remains my favorite funeral march, “A Tear on My Mother’s Grave”—Chopin, Op. 32, with the tuba at the beginning, the tremolo clarinet, and the trumpets which, when they come in, sound as if the funeral march is about to turn into a piece of dance music.

  The climax of the procession was reached when the stations of the cross were carried back into the Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio in the early afternoon: a finale like a never-ending act of coitus, the church struggling against it doggedly and without success. With seeming hesitancy, the individual groups of figures were carried in and out through the portal of the church, rocking back and forth, amid applause, a rain of rose petals, and out-of-tune trumpet entries. Inside the church it looked as if a weary traveling circus had collapsed: on the floor, amid damp sawdust and crushed blossoms, the bearers sat blank-faced, others hugged and wept with exhaustion—whether it was the exertion of carrying things for hours, or the contents of the bottles in their brown-paper wrappings, everything was discharged in a collective crying fit, the men wiped the tears from their eyes with white damask handkerchiefs, and we wept along too.

  And just a day later Trapani was as forbidding as ever. With gleaming light and a landscape buried under concrete.

  “Strange, isn’t it?” says Shobha, sniffing the wine again. “At some point I lost the desire to go there,” she says.

  Was it that moment when the part-time photographers and amateur film directors gained the upper hand and kept walking into the picture? Or when, still in Trapani, we went in search of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro? At some point we lost the procession virus. Like a scab under which new skin has formed.

  “Trapani,” says Shobha, who sticks her nose back in the wine glass and adds: “Have you heard about the murals?”

  “What murals?” I ask, really thinking about art for a moment.

  “Murals of Messina Denaro,” says Shobha. In the style of Warhol. With the inscription You’ll be hearing from me. They appeared in Palermo and in Messina Denaro’s place of birth, Castelvetrano, not far from Trapani. “The police investigated,” Shobha says and smiles ironically. The murals were immediately painted over.

  Messina Denaro is a kind of icon among mafiosi. When investigators or public prosecutors talk about Messina Denaro, there’s a hint of respect for their opponent. Investigators see Messina Denaro as the boss with the greatest political foresight. In his case the word latitante, fugitive, has a different ring: it sounds like a mark of distinction, like an accolade, a higher Mafia qualification.

  Certainly it’s the case that hunters would rather go after a tiger than a rabbit. Particularly since most bosses are more like rabbits. Powerful rabbits, admittedly, but rabbits nevertheless. So it’s all the more striking when a boss like Matteo Messina Denaro moves around the world as if it belonged to him—not least since he has slipped the Mafia’s moral straitjacket and consolidated his position as a ladies’ man, defying the Sicilian proverb that giving orders is better than fucking. Messina Denaro has proved that you can do both. When he was in hiding he even managed to father an illegitimate daughter, who is now ten years old, has never seen her father, and lives in her grandmother’s house in Castelvetrano—along with her mother who, as long as she lives, will never look another man in the eye. To keep from damaging the boss’s reputation. And to protect her own life. If a mafioso loses face as a result of his wife’s infidelity, she is as good as dead.

  The Mafia revere Matteo Messina Denaro as a saint: “I’d love to be able to see him, touch him, just once,” they sigh on the telephone, as if they dreamed of dabbing kisses on the hem of the Madonna’s robe with their fingertips. “Everything good comes from him,” the mafiosi whisper, “we must worship him.”

  His nickname is “Diabolik,” the name of an Italian comic character, an elegant gangster who lives in the grand style from his jewel robberies: a representative of evil who always maintains a certain code of honor. Diabolik basically only robs rich people from the top levels of society—although the similarity to Robin Hood stops there, because you couldn’t exactly say that he shares his booty with the poor. It’s more that evil triumphs with him in a world of weak supermen, as the mafiosi imagine the world to be in their idle moments—idle moments when they believe the singer Vasco Rossi’s hymn to the fearless life, “the exaggerated life, the life full of troubles.” Idle moments when they manage to fade out reality as if it were a film: the reality in which they smell of fear because they’re next on the hit man’s list, a hit man who boasts that he’s never worn gloves when dissolving corpses in hydrochloric acid; the reality that consists in throttling a friend, beheading and castrating him, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. The reality is one in which children can be kept for years in an underground dungeon, like little Giuseppe di Matteo, who was locked up in a cell in San Giuseppe Jato until he was strangled and dissolved in acid.

  Giuseppe’s father had become a turncoat, and the abduction of his son was supposed to keep him quiet. At the end of his imprisonment, the boy had been reduced to nothing but a “human larva,” said the mafioso who had been given the job of strangling him.

  All the more important are the miracle stories about Messina Denaro, of whom the mafiosi couldn’t get enough: about how he is supposed to have driven an Alfa 164 armed with machine guns that could be activated by the push of a button from the driver’s seat; how he boasted that he could fill a cemetery with his victims; how he guarded the
treasure of the arrested boss Totò Riina, a treasure that consisted not only of jewelry but also of the Mafia archive; and how he had hidden with that treasure in an underground apartment in a jeweler’s shop in Castelvetrano, entered via a strong room with an elevator built into it.

  It’s a long time since Cosa Nostra produced such a pop star.

  Matteo Messina Denaro comes from Castelvetrano, and in the police files his profession is given as “farmer.” He is what people here call an “artist’s son”: his father, Francesco, was one of the most powerful bosses of Cosa Nostra, a member of the cupola, the Mafia council. Both Matteo Messina Denaro and his brother Salvatore, as well as his father, Francesco, were on the payroll of one of the richest families in Trapani, the family of the Forza Italia senator and current president of the province of Trapani, Antonio D’Ali, a large landowner, banker, and businessman—Matteo and his father as estate managers, his brother Salvatore as a clerk in the family-owned bank.

  “No one had any idea of Messina Denaro’s involvement with the Mafia,” the senator said. And he sued anyone who claimed otherwise—like the two Rai journalists who accused the provincial president of being behind the transfer of a prefect who was unacceptable to the Mafia.

  At Trapani police headquarters we met the investigator who has been on Messina Denaro’s trail for years. The office was papered with newspaper cuttings about arrests; next to it there hung a faded list of the names of mafiosi currently in hiding. Matteo Messina Denaro was the last on the list. There was even a hint of respect in the investigator’s voice when he spoke of the boss: “If you met Messina Denaro, you’d like him,” he said. “Messina Denaro is generous, he’s an effortless conversationalist and he can judge the perlage of a fine champagne.”