by Peter Robb
It wasn’t yet fully dark and the road stretched ahead very white and boxed in between high walls. Just out of the Salina property on the left could be seen the half-ruined villa Falconeri, owned by Tancredi, his nephew and ward. A spendthrift father, married to the prince’s sister, had squandered his entire wealth and then died. It was one of those total ruins in which they melt down even the silver thread in the epaulettes of the servants’ liveries … they drove past villa Falconeri, whose enormous bougainvillea cascaded over the gates its billows of episcopal silk and lent it an illicit air of opulence in the dark.
Rattling toward a sexual escapade in Palermo, the prince in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard is driven past a villa whose original is now nearly engulfed by the city, though still protected by its own grounds and the Favorita park and the great promontory of Monte Pellegrino. The villa Niscemi was instantly identifiable in the novel by those readers who remembered its blaze of bougainvillea. The real house never fell into ruin, and one of its last inhabitants, a child called Fulco who later became the last duke of Verdura, remembered a distant cousin who occasionally came to play and who when he grew up was to become the duke of Palma and prince of Lampedusa and write a famous novel, even if one the duke of Verdura judged to be historically incorrect. The duke remembered his cousin as a fat, silent boy with big sleepy oriental eyes, who didn’t like outdoor games and was shy with the animals.
Nobody would ever have imagined, the duke noted tartly, that in the distant future he would become the author of a masterpiece. The duke wrote that Tancredi and Angelica, the glamorous characters played by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale in Visconti’s film of The Leopard, were based on his maternal grandparents. I noted a number of factual errors, but after all it is a novelist’s privilege to alter the facts. The duke didn’t, in his childhood memoir that he published first in English with a title from Lewis Carroll, The Happy Summer Days, and only subsequently recast in the Italian version given me in Palermo, go into exactly what his quarrel was with his cousin’s posthumous and fictional version of the family story, but he was sounding a note here that I found was to recur with some insistence over the time I spent in Palermo. The note was accusatory, and the issue was getting things right and getting them wrong. The problem was what made history, the status of fact, the weight of detail and the squaring of different versions of the same thing. It was the problem of interpretation, the question of meaning. The duke of Verdura alluded to matters of fact, a list of points to be corrected, in a tone that queried his cousin’s whole way of being in the world. So, when the novel came out, did Leonardo Sciascia. The duke’s quarrel with Lampedusa was over family and Sciascia’s was over Sicily, and they both challenged the history.
Ways of perceiving the world were an issue in Palermo in 1995. Versions of history. The trial that was about to open, however it ended, and it wouldn’t do that for years, was bound to revise a great deal of the known history of Italy since the war. In Naples just before I boarded the night ferry for Palermo, the publisher Tullio Pironti had given me a copy of his latest book. It was a wristbreaking large format volume of nine hundred and seventy-three pages, printed on good white paper, and it must have weighed a couple of kilos. Its cover was plain blue, with an outline map of the Italian peninsula and the islands in white. The title, printed at the top in small sober yellow letters, was The True History of Italy. A subtitle read Interrogations, testimony, evidence, analysis. Gian Carlo Caselli and his assistants reconstruct the last twenty years of Italian history. This massive book consisted of an edited version of the main testimony that prosecutors had gathered against Andreotti. I’d taken it dutifully, this monster collection of legal depositions. I’d opened it and been transfixed. By the time I disembarked in Sicily The True History of Italy had become a talisman. History was on trial. The years I’d lived in southern Italy, from the later seventies to the early nineties, when Andreotti’s power was greatest, were also exactly the years, from 1978 to 1992, that in the words of the prosecutors’ preliminary findings, set out on page 9 of The True History of Italy,
relations between Sen. Andreotti and Cosa Nostra were established—in a form not contingent or occasional—at least from 1978 and maintained until 1992, such as to materially confirm the charge of membership of a mafia organization.
A few questions were in order in Palermo in 1995, about what made history, and who made it, and how things were.
The last duke of Verdura was long since dead. He’d in any case left Italy many years before. The happy childhood over, he served as an army officer in the first war, and before the second came around he was settled in Hollywood, later New York. He’d turned out to be artistic, and to have social gifts that eluded his shy and awkward cousin. Soon he was designing splendid jewels and in charge of bijoux for Coco Chanel. He became the jeweller to the Beautiful People in America and Europe, and a Beautiful Person ante litteram himself, among whose clients and friends were the duchess of Windsor, Salvador Dalì, Rita Hayworth and Marlene Dietrich. He came back to Europe to write his memoir and die and take the family crypt’s last remaining place in Palermo cathedral. The princesses who inherited villa Niscemi also lived in America, and in 1987 they sold it to the city of Palermo. Even the bougainvillea that briefly flared in the dark in the opening pages of The Leopard was gone when I arrived at the gates of the villa Niscemi and crunched down its deep gravel drive under the midday sun. Leoluca Orlando, the mayor of Palermo, had invited me to lunch.
* * *
IT’D BE less official, less portentous, but not the first visit Orlando had received from an Australian. A few years earlier the Australian ambassador to Rome had decided to visit, during his tour of duty, all those places in Italy from which people had emigrated to Australia. His itinerary naturally got denser and more complex as he moved south into the Mezzogiorno, the territories of the old Bourbon Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. It was these poor and prolific regions with a difficult past that had contributed so largely to Europe’s populating of the Americas and Australia. The ambassador covered the region of Campania around Naples, the kingdom’s old capital, a couple of hours’ drive south of Rome, he visited Apulia in the eastern heel of the Italian boot, Calabria in the peninsula’s far southern toe, poor and tiny Lucania, hemmed in by these other three. Finally he arrived on the island of Sicily. Its capital Palermo, the other great city of the old Bourbon kingdom, is almost as close to Africa as to the nearest extremity of what Sicilians call the continent, and a lot closer to Tunis than it is to Rome.
It was in Calabria that the ambassador struck trouble. All of these regions, with the exceptions of Lucania and until very recently Apulia, had a long history of organized crime. That history had been part of a long and dire history of foreign occupation, exploitation and neglect. The Spanish Bourbons, who’d lasted until the time of Garibaldi and Italian unification a little over a century earlier, were merely the most recent of a succession of invaders that went back to the ancient Greeks and Phoenicians nearly three thousand years earlier. From the point of view of the locals, the national government in Rome was not a great improvement. For Rome, the south had always been the problem of the Mezzogiorno.
The criminal activities and organizations developed differently in each region. The volatile urban criminality of the Neapolitan camorra was very different from the old rural mafia’s activities in the Sicilian hinterland, and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta another thing again. But in each case a parasitic criminal class had inserted itself in the interstices between rulers and the ruled, exploiting both. Crime, like any successful industry, moved with the times, and these organizations became urban and multinational, vastly rich and powerful conglomerates. The Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra, dominated European crime and a piece of the European economy. The others were allies operating under a kind of regional franchise agreement. The mafia most active in Australia was the Calabrian ’ndrangheta, and the ’ndrangheta happened in Calabria to work out of the most impenetrable terrain in Italy.
In the mountainous and densely wooded range of the Aspromonte that ran like a backbone down the middle of the region, the ’ndrangheta still ran a kidnap and ransom business. Prisoners could be held securely for months and years in the Aspromonte, while their families drummed up the tens of millions of dollars required to buy their release. The jailers had little to fear from the carabinieri’s military search operations. From time to time a once-sleek industrialist, now almost forgotten, with a wispy grey beard to his waist and haunted eyes, would totter out of the mountains to the appalled embrace of his loved ones, after years of living in a hut, chained like a dog, fed from tins.
Since the earnings from these kidnappings were invested in the marijuana plantations of New South Wales, and since the profits from these, running at around sixty million dollars a year when they were disturbed in the late seventies, in turn flowed back into Calabria, it was the ’ndrangheta that particularly had a bone to pick with Australian authorities. Calabrian criminality was, in the words of the parliamentary antimafia commission chairman, a traditional presence in Australia … along with honest immigrants. The ambassador was perfectly aware of this when he set out, but he was startled to find that the Italian government refused to guarantee his safe conduct over large tracts of Calabrian territory. It was under the control of the ’ndrangheta and the government in Rome politely forbade the ambassador to extend his goodwill tour into those parts. He hadn’t expected that in western Europe at the close of the twentieth century. It was a time, in fact, the end of the eighties, when the man recently appointed antimafia high commissioner had had to report that the Italian state was indeed no longer in control of all of the national territory. In many parts of Sicily, Calabria and Campania the domination of the territory by organized crime groups is absolute, he’d said.
The mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, said Cosa Nostra was buying the Italian state piece by piece. It was a time when the governor of the Bank of Italy reported that organized crime was contaminating the entire national economic mechanism. It was a time when the national governing body of Italian magistrates, whose head was the president of Italy, reported that justice in Sicily was impossible, and a magistrate in the antimafia pool in Palermo said Cosa Nostra had capillary control over every quarter of Palermo. The ambassador did make it to Sicily and was officially received by Orlando. Cosa Nostra had no specific quarrel with the government of Australia and the visit of its representative passed unnoticed. Cosa Nostra did, however, have a quarrel with Leoluca Orlando, and the ambassador might have felt even less easy about government control of the territory if he’d been shown the twenty-eight bullet-proof vests neatly stacked in the mayoral wardrobe, ready to be donned by staff and visitors in case of attack. The mayor of Palermo, the dissident demochristian and antimafia Leoluca Orlando, had been condemned to death.
At a mafia summit in 1987 the head of Cosa Nostra, Salvatore Riina, had handed down three death sentences. Those who were to die were Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino and Leoluca Orlando. Six months later Riina’s assistant, Baldassare Di Maggio, took delivery of two bazookas, two kalashnikovs, one of them fitted with a grenade launcher, and two containers of plastic explosive. He was instructed that these were to carry out the killing of Falcone, Borsellino and Orlando. The weaponry was concealed in a tomb in the cemetery of San Giuseppe Jato, not far from Palermo. The family of San Giuseppe, headed by Bernardo Brusca and his son Giovanni, were the oldest and closest allies of Riina’s group from Corleone that now controlled Cosa Nostra. Falcone and Borsellino were to be killed for the maxitrial. Orlando’s offence was political. He was speaking out too much against the mafia family.
Getting rid of them was easier said than done. The designated victims knew a lot about the ways of their intending killers. There was no hurry, however. When the moment came the three would be removed. The moment very nearly came for Falcone in the early summer of 1989. He’d rented a house on the rocks by the sea at Addaura, and one day in June, just before his top secret movements took him there on his second visit that year, his security escort noticed a skindiver’s Adidas bag left negligently on the rocks in front of the house. When they looked into it they found fifty-eight sticks of plastic explosive and a remote-controlled detonator. Nobody was supposed to know Falcone was just about to arrive, or that he was bringing some visitors for a swim and lunch, some Swiss magistrates who were opening up Cosa Nostra’s bank accounts.
It was mafia procedure to isolate and discredit a representative of the state before removing him. It made him easier to pick off, and it minimized reprisals. Falcone was an isolated and vulnerable figure at that time, lately the slandered victim of a jealous colleague’s anonymous letter campaign, attacked openly and covertly by interested parties in the judiciary and the government. The attempt on his life, some whispered when it failed, hadn’t been serious, or he’d planned it himself, for sympathy. Falcone did however receive one striking expression of solidarity, and it was the first to arrive, an early-morning phone call from the Hon. Giulio Andreotti to congratulate him on his narrow escape. Falcone wasn’t at all reassured. The next day he told a couple of friends, fellow judges, about it in a somewhat agitated manner. Falcone had never met Andreotti or had any dealings with him. As a Sicilian and student of mafia culture, Falcone was greatly disturbed by his phone call. On page 150 of Tullio Pironti’s True History of Italy, I found that one of the judges Falcone confided in later testified that
He told me that when he was killed we would have to find out who had sent the first wreath of flowers to be placed on his coffin. He explained that this was a widespread custom in mafia crimes … He took the Hon. Andreotti’s phone call as underlining the isolation in which he found himself … Giovanni told me that to save his life he would have to really get to know his political enemies …
The other added that
after that, among us three any mention of the Hon. Andreotti’s phone call became a kind of coded signal to indicate who had ordered a crime or some other disempowering strategy.
Cosa Nostra killed Falcone in the end, and Borsellino, but their murders had many and curious consequences. One of them was the arrest eleven months later of Salvatore Riina, who turned out to have been living comfortably in Palermo while he was on the run, so to speak, for twenty-four years. Who are you? was Riina’s first question when he was flung to the ground in a Palermo street. His first thought was a leadership coup inside Cosa Nostra. It didn’t enter his mind that these people might, after all these years, be police. He breathed a sigh of relief. The man who led the undercover police commando to Riina was the one who’d taken Riina’s orders five years earlier to kill the three. Baldassare Di Maggio had realized that Riina was about to kill him too. Riina was like that, with people close to him.
* * *
LEOLUCA ORLANDO was still alive and ready to talk and ready to lunch at villa Niscemi on a hot September day in 1995. The functionaries fussed around like family servants at the villa’s entrance, and for a moment I expected a derisive child in a sailor suit to appear with the family dogs and a fretful Irish governess. Up the early eighteenth century staircase they led me, past a row of glowering kings of Sicily to a smaller room which must have been the child Fulco’s telephone room, the one he’d described as the focus of family life. After a wait on balding red velvet I was summoned to the library. Orlando charged in wearing a dark grey suit and looking small and dark. He’d lost a lot of weight. Five years earlier he’d been a worried bearlike man in a crumpled suit, with a clump of dark hair that kept flopping over his face. Orlando’s undapperness, in that Italian context of ruling party power brokers in shiny silk suits, gossamer stockings and glossy black dancing pumps, was deeply sympathetic. So was the way he ignored the insults being heaped on him by president Cossiga.
Another potentate of the ruling party with a submerged and secret past, Cossiga wonderfully embodied the senile arrogance of a fin de régime, as well as that clerical shiftiness that had always characterized the church’s pa
rty, and was now lost in cloudy dreams of resurrection. Orlando had a lot of trouble with his fellow demochristians in those days, apart from the head of state. As the son of an establishment lawyer in Palermo, a clever boy who’d also studied in Heidelberg, he’d gone naturally into politics and inevitably joined the DC. As a stubborn man of principle, he soon ran into trouble, but fought back. In 1990 Orlando resigned as mayor of Palermo. Claire Sterling described him then after his first years in office:
The effort had transformed him from a hopeful young believer to a weary, harrowed, and sadly battle-scarred figure in just four years. He was the first reformer in a century to last that long in office …
She was writing him off too early. Orlando came out fighting again. He broke with Italy’s ruling party because in Sicily it was the party of the mafia and beyond reform. In 1991 he formed La Rete, the network, an antimafia association that was to be the nucleus of a new politcal party. Since the DC had southern Italy politically locked up, Orlando’s was a brave act. There was no intimation then that a small corruption inquiry in Milan would bring down the regime. Neither could Orlando have foreseen how the murders of Falcone and Borsellino would rouse people to fight Cosa Nostra. In the 1990 elections, the prime minister Andreotti had urged Sicilians not to vote for Orlando in Palermo, although he was the number one candidate of Andreotti’s own party. Andreotti’s word at that time was still law in the DC, though something was starting to change. People understood the message, and everybody voted for me, Orlando told me now. Orlando for his part had refused in 1989 to head a DC ticket for the European parliament if it included Salvo Lima, because Lima was mafioso. Forced to choose, the DC chose Lima.
Everybody knew that Andreotti was the protector of Lima, said Orlando now. And everybody knew that Lima was the political voice of the mafia. Lima was the link between Andreotti and Riina, between the political mind of the mafia and the killers, the bosses. Everyone knew that in Sicily the mafia organized the votes at election time, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, for the candidate who best represented mafia interests. The candidate was almost invariably demochristian. There was a long-gathered inevitability about Orlando’s final break with the ruling party. When no one dared speak against Andreotti, I spoke against Andreotti. He was theatrically simplifying a little, but not much. Orlando’s oddity in the eighties had been to be a demochristian who was both a Christian and a democrat. After first Falcone and then Borsellino were killed in 1992, Orlando was urged to leave Sicily for a while for his own safety. He said, If I’m killed I’d like people to know it wasn’t only the mafia … He was referring to the friends of the friends, the politicians nobody else was yet mentioning in connection with that year’s massacres. He stayed in Palermo and slept in a carabinieri barracks. When he stood again for mayor of Palermo in 1993, he won more than three-quarters of the first-round vote. By the time I called two years later his hopes of building La Rete into a national party had faded, as had his popularity. Not that he seemed depressed. He plonked himself in a sofa now and started talking about the last duke of Verdura, the jeweller to the stars. He became expansive. It was the setting, the villa and the garden. When he left the city administration behind and came out of town to the villa Niscemi, Orlando said, he moved into a more reflective mode. He loved coming here. Orlando was flamboyantly pessimistic about the Andreotti trial. I’ll be there of course, on the first day. Calling for a conviction in the name of the people of Palermo. The city administration had declared itself an interested party, and would be represented at the trial.