by Petra Reski
Finally, a cosmopolitan boss.
Then the investigator called one of his men who did nothing more than listen in on suspicious conversations, using a mobile surveillance device, and record unusual movements, in Messina Denaro’s birthplace of Castelvetrano. The investigator was waiting for us in a parking garage just outside the town, a bearded man in jeans and running shoes. What drives these men isn’t money, it’s a hunting instinct. The thrill when they catch a boss in his sleep after lying in wait for him for months, disguised as an Albanian, as a gypsy, as a grass-mowing peasant. For a long time it didn’t occur to any of the men to claim overtime.
When we were driving through Castelvetrano, we had the impression of driving through a town where nothing ever happens; you couldn’t even hear a dog barking. The houses with the closed shutters looked like lockers. You avoided people’s eyes, as if they could pass on an infectious illness.
“They’re all friends here,” said the policeman, and drove past Messina Denaro’s parents’ house, where his mother, his partner, and their daughter live. It was in an alley not far from the church. A run-down-looking, three-story house, and the policeman cried: “Whatever you do, don’t take a photograph!” Just as he was constantly warning us not to write this and that because Messina Denaro was extremely sensitive where his family was concerned—until finally I wondered, how dangerous could it be to write that Francesco Messina Denaro’s mausoleum is a high, narrow chapel with a glass mosaic Christ, locked with a cast-iron gate, flanked by two Ficus benjamina trees, which, as the policeman observed, had recently been watered?
Messina Denaro’s mother visited the grave every day, dressed in black even ten years after her husband’s death. She often went there with her three daughters. On one occasion, the police had hidden bugs in the grave to listen to the dialogue that she liked to have with her husband. Unfortunately, one of the policemen hadn’t put one of the vases back in the right place. Messina Denaro would never forgive those sons of bitches that impious act of eavesdropping.
By the time his father died ten years ago, Matteo Messina Denaro had been underground for a long time. The boss Francesco Messina Denaro had died of a heart attack, presumably the result of the fury unleashed by the recent arrest of his eldest son, Salvatore. Someone had carefully laid the corpse beside a vineyard in Castelvetrano, dressed in a silk dressing gown. When the body was found, it had already rained on the body. His wife tore off her own Persian lamb coat to wrap her dead husband in it. And at the funeral she threw herself on the coffin and cried: “At least they didn’t manage to put handcuffs on you!”
The Messina Denaro family commemorates the day of his death every year, not just with a religious service, but also with an obituary, most recently in Latin: “There is no time to be born and to die, but only he who wants to can fly. And forever your flight was the highest.” The investigators assumed that this might be a coded message. But it was only a statement of faith—in blood, in family, in the Mafia.
Of course, it may be that the boss doesn’t live in Sicily at all but in Venezuela or Colombia, somewhere in South America—unlike the other Sicilian bosses, who are always tracked down only a few miles from their own territory. But.
But even an icon could drop his guard in his own territory, the investigator said. A young mafioso had to have seen the boss at least once. Otherwise his magic would flee.
To kiss the hem of the Madonna’s robe, just once.
“You remember how run-down the house of Messina Denaro’s family looked?” I say to Shobha, as she serves the caponata.
Messina Denaro’s house had dirty white walls and frosted glass in the windows. Clearly it was designed to give the lie to any thoughts of a worldwide Mafia organization. As if the Mafia was still controlled by a handful of shepherds. As if the Mafia wasn’t a social and political problem, but just an occasional inconvenience to public order.
“Would the children of the mafiosi, the ones who have studied—maybe even at the London School of Economics, as the children of some Catania bosses are said to do—live in rickety-looking houses like that today?” Shobha asks.
Again and again, I’m struck by the discrepancy between the pointed frugality and the vast incomes of the Mafia bosses. Mafia families have every interest in not standing out, in being accepted as part of society—that’s their shield, and their strength at the same time. Give or take their millions, the foundation of all Mafia power remains their rootedness in social consensus.
Here too, protection money has a fundamental part to play. Above all, it’s about a demonstration of power when superglue is squeezed into the greengrocer’s lock to make the urgency of the payment quite clear. If a mafioso leaves a bomb outside a shop, it’s reported in all the papers. But if he squirts superglue into fifty locks, nobody hears about it. And the Mafia don’t want to appear in the papers; they just want to get on with their business in peace.
One of the biggest Mafia bosses of recent years was the doctor Giuseppe Guttadauro, the brother-in-law of Matteo Messina Denaro. He received patients in his surgery from five till seven in the evening, and from seven onward the picciotti, the lowest-ranking mafiosi, and gave them orders about collecting protection money. And this wasn’t just about filling the war coffers of Cosa Nostra; more important, it was about control, about demonstrating presence, marking territory.
Sometimes in Palermo you see little black-rimmed stickers on waste bins: Un intero popolo che paga il pizzo è un popolo senza dignità, “A whole people that pays protection money is a people without dignity.” These are the stickers of the Addiopizzo organization, which developed out of a student group and now calls for a revolt against paying protection money to the Mafia. Thanks to the Addiopizzo, the Italian business association—the Confindustria—has finally summoned the courage to exclude those businessmen who pay protection money. Sicilian public prosecutors, on the other hand, urged the association to exclude from its ranks those businessmen who had already been legally punished for supporting the Mafia. Because they were the real criminals, while a businessman who doesn’t report the extortion of protection money is just someone who lacks moral courage. However, many Sicilian businessmen had an interest in ensuring that everything stayed as it was: what’s at stake, after all, is millions in European funding, the benefits of which they want to go on enjoying, thanks to the Mafia. After all, it is a long time since the Mafia was content to extort 500 euros in protection money. For ages now it had been sitting in the businessmen’s drawing rooms. In Calabria, even northern Italian businessmen don’t report the extortion of protection money by the ’Ndrangheta, but take the protection money into account: as a “security cost.” After all, you don’t want to turn down big public contracts, like the construction of the Salerno–Reggio motorway. The companies pay 3 percent of the contract fee directly to the ’Ndrangheta.
Because it’s late now, I decide to say a quick good-bye to Letizia before she gets ready for bed. When I go downstairs to her apartment, I hear that she’s watching television. Giulio Andreotti is a guest on a talk show again. When Letizia notices my footsteps, she turns off the television. Then she picks up a box of household matches and tries to relight her cigarette in the wind from the ceiling fan. It takes her three matches before the cigarette is finally burning. She could have got up and lit it somewhere else. But that wouldn’t be her way.
“You know, I’d really love to escape from Palermo. If my grandchildren didn’t live here, I’d get out. It’s too painful, it’s too humiliating, to watch our values being co-opted here. The bad guys have even taken over the anti-Mafia movement. On the anniversaries of Falcone and Borsellino’s killings, the whole of Palermo was full of posters saying Our heroes forever! Signed by none other than the city administration of Palermo.”
“The bad guys.” I like Letizia’s direct way of putting it. The ceiling fan cuts through the smoke, and I’m thinking about the Forza Italia caste that has triumphed in Palermo, when Letizia says that even the Italian left w
on’t come to the rescue, because it’s sold its soul to Berlusconi.
“In the past, the left-wing ideal was like a warming blanket to me,” she says. “Now it no longer exists. Or only among a very few young people. The ones in Antimafia Duemila, perhaps, the anti-Mafia newspaper. But otherwise? Nothing.”
Letizia bends down to me and asks if I’ve got enough material for my article about her, urges me to call her if there’s anything else I want to know, tells me about the next exhibition that she and Shobha are having together in China—even in China people are interested in the Mafia, just not in Palermo. Then she looks over at the terrace door. The night wind runs through her hair.
“They’ve thrown our dreams in the sea,” she says, “and their own as well.”
The sky over Palermo shimmers as if the stars were constantly being turned on and off in the firmament. It’s still hot and sultry; a warm damp settles on our arms. Because Salvo’s off duty, Shobha has called a taxi, but even after half an hour the woman on the switchboard can do nothing but console me. “Patience, you need to have patience,” she says, until I decide to try my luck on foot. Shobha suggests coming with me. When we step out of the cool entrance hall of the building and into the street, gasoline-filled air hits us, air that stings the lungs and would prompt a choking attack in any asthmatic. Although midnight is long past, the traffic is just as solid as it was in the morning. The nighthawks flit from one side of the road to the other like a swarm of mosquitoes. The marble pavement gleams as if it’s sweating. We walk toward Via della Libertà and those posters with the famous photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Our heroes. The city of Palermo.
As we cross the piazza in front of the Teatro Politeama, little purple dots gleam on the marble paving stones, and the air suddenly smells of lemon verbena. And cooking fat. On every street corner there are vans selling fried calves’ cheeks between two slices of bread, or bread with spleen. Our pace assumes the rhythm of the revelers hurrying toward Piazza Olivella. The flower sellers who tout their wares by day are still standing on the pavement in front of the Teatro Massimo, and a newspaper vendor has spread out his piles of papers next to them.
We walk on without saying anything; our footsteps hammer on the marble. There are no taxis outside the Teatro Massimo either. So we walk on before turning off at last into one of the twisting alleys near the Piazza Olivella, where the gas-canister filler Nino sits by the door to his shop. Shobha lived opposite him for a while, so Nino greets her particularly warmly. As usual, his whole family has assembled beside him on white plastic chairs: his wife with her toothless mouth, his fat sister, his children, one grandchild, and his gaunt brother-in-law who runs a cobbler’s shop next door. They all sit there with their hands folded over their bellies, as if watching the performance of a play, while cats poke among the trash on the other side of the street.
It’s quieter at the end of Via Patania. We walk on, now along the Via Roma, past the Piazza San Domenico, where, as always, a few Nigerian prostitutes lurk, and past the steps that lead to the Vucciria market and which, even at night, smell of fish guts. Here there are no revelers, and our footsteps echo. A wind blows up. From the walls and palisades that support the derelict palazzi, it tugs at the posters. We walk on.
By way of farewell, Salvo puts on Antonacci again, “Dream of me if it snows.” “But just for you, Petra, I don’t understand what women see in him.”
We drive out of town, past palm trees and box hedges, past the enameled domes of the churches, past street after street of air raid—shelter tower blocks that look as if they might harbor life, past the dry leaves of the rubber trees blown by the wind onto the pavements.
At last we drive onto the motorway, toward Trapani, toward the Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino: it’s still called that, for how long? On our right the Isola delle Femmine bathes in the morning light. “They have thrown our dreams in the sea, and their own as well.”
I think of Montalbano—Saverio Montalbano, whom I met on my first assignment, the policeman who was once responsible for tracking down fugitive mafiosi as part of the mobile task force, and who discovered the “pizza connection.” Recently I met up with him over coffee and biscuits. He looked unchanged, which may have had something to do with the fact that Montalbano, with his bald patch and his silver-gray fringe of hair, had never looked young. The only change was a thin-rimmed pair of reading glasses, over which he looked at me ironically. As always, he asked how I managed to live in a city that consisted only of water. As a respectable Sicilian, he said, he feared the sea.
Montalbano was on the point of retirement. His last job had been as head of the local police of Termini Imerese. Before that, he had been head of the administrative police of Ragusa; he had been kept as far as possible from Mafia investigations. One day he had received an anonymous letter. In it someone expressed his admiration for him: “I like the real Montalbano better than the one in the film.” The letter was signed “Diabolik.”
Eventually he had decided no longer to address the subject of the Mafia, Montalbano said. “I fell out of love,” he says. He stopped reading the reports about arrests. Now he read books about Indians.
Salvo carries my case to the check-in desk, where a long line has formed as usual. He kisses me good-bye on both cheeks and expresses his regret at not being able to wait with me, but his ladies need to play their first game of the morning. But he hopes to see me again soon in Palermo. Then he hurries across the departure lounge. Before he steps outside he briefly waves to me again. When I turn around, the very same man who sat next to me on the outbound flight is standing right beside me.
“I’ll talk to him now,” I say to myself. But he’s ahead of me. He smiles at me. And says in an American accent: “Nice to see you again.”
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Pietro Aglieri—Sicilian Mafia boss and member of the council of Cosa Nostra; serving a life sentence since 1997 for, among other things, his involvement in the murders of the public prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Giulia Alvaro—Member of the Nirta-Strangio clan, the clan involved in the Duisburg massacre; arrested in 2007 for membership in the Mafia and involvement in the international drug trade.
Giuliano Amato—Italian politician; former Socialist; and several times prime minister, foreign minister, and most recently minister of the interior in the second Prodi government (2006–2008).
Giulio Andreotti—Italian Christian Democrat, seven-time prime minister; indicted for favoring the Mafia and convicted in May 2003, his support for the Mafia judged proven until 1980 and not thereafter—there was insufficient proof for further conviction.
Giovanna Atria—Mother of Rita Atria, the teenager who spoke out against the Mafia in her village.
Rita Atria—Daughter of a Sicilian Mafia boss, who decided, after the murder of her father and brother, to collaborate with the judicial system; was rejected by her mother; and, after the murder of public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino in 1992, threw herself out of a window.
Gaetano “Don Tano” Badalamenti—Mafia boss from the Sicilian Cinisi clan; built up the “pizza connection,” the heroin trade between Sicily and America; died of heart failure in 2004 in an American prison, at the age of eighty and without ever saying a word about the Mafia.
Antonietta “Ninetta” Bagarella—Wife of the Sicilian Mafia boss Salvatore “Totò” Riina and daughter of an old Corleone Mafia family; lived underground with her husband for almost twenty years, bearing him four children, with whom she returned to Corleone after the arrest of her husband in 1993.
Leoluca Bagarella—Sicilian Mafia boss of the Corleone clan, hit man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, brother of Ninetta Bagarella, and brother-in-law of the Mafia boss Totò Riina; in prison since 1995.
Agata Barresi—Sicilian mother of five sons murdered by the Mafia, famous for maintaining her silence.
Antonio Bassolino—Democratic Left regional president of Campania until 2010, who fell
into disrepute for nepotism and his responsibility for the waste crisis.
Letizia Battaglia—International award-winning Sicilian photographer and publisher; city counselor for quality of life under Leoluca Orlando in Palermo; later, member of the anti-Mafia party La Rete in the Sicilian parliament.
Piersilvio Berlusconi—Son of Silvio Berlusconi, now director of his father’s private broadcasting group, Mediaset.
Silvio Berlusconi—Three-time Italian prime minister; the wealthiest businessman in Italy; founder of the Forza Italia party, now known as Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom); variously indicted for tax avoidance, false accounting, collaboration with a Mafia association, bribery of judges, and complicity in assassination attempts—accusations that ended in acquittal, cases dropped because of the statute of limitations or lack of evidence, or convictions that were later subject to an amnesty.
Salvatore Boemi—Leading senior public prosecutor in the anti-Mafia investigative authority of Reggio Calabria.
Stefano Bontade—Mafia boss from Corleone, known as the “Prince of Villagrazia”; known to have had connections with notable Italian politicians including Silvio Berlusconi; murdered in 1981.
Paolo Borsellino—Legendary anti-Mafia public prosecutor in the Palermo Anti-Mafia Pool; murdered by the Mafia in 1992.
Tommaso Buscetta—Sicilian Mafia boss and the first significant turncoat in the history of Cosa Nostra; an important witness in the maxitrials against the Mafia under Giovanni Falcone; died in New York in 2000.
Giuseppe “Pippo” Calò—Sicilian Mafia boss, also known as the “Mafia’s cashier”; thought to have murdered the banker Roberto Calvi but acquitted of the charge in 2007; serving a life sentence.
Roberto Calvi—Italian bank employee, involved not only in money laundering for the Mafia but also in secret financial operations by the Vatican, which won him the nickname “God’s banker”; found murdered in London in 1982.