Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Riccobono’s personal bodyguard of three ate in another room with Giovanni Brusca and Baldassare Di Maggio. The meal went on for ever, there were so many different courses, so many wines. At the end of it all Riccobono was slumped in a digestive doze. It was then that Greco and the elder Brusca grabbed him while Totò Riina went for his throat. He throttled the guest in barely three minutes as the others held him down. Alerted by a whistle at the same time, young Brusca and Di Maggio, who’d eaten little and drunk less, jumped the bodyguards and strangled them with cords. The bodies took forever to dissolve in their drums of acid, maybe because of the rain that day. Then all that afternoon and evening, over at the Greco country place, Riccobono’s men went down. It happened so fast that none of them realized what was happening. Some were strangled while strolling the paths of the extensive gardens, others were shot in the house. They were buried with quicklime or dissolved in acid. The few remaining Riccobono boys who’d missed the party were picked off over the next couple of days in Palermo. Then they were all gone.

  Everything was now his. Only the Corleonesi and their oldest, closest allies were left. Michele Greco, the Pope, was left as a puppet to head the Cupola, who were all Riina’s men. And yet things were still not quite perfect, power not quite total. It was time to look at the Corleonesi themselves. Who among them might one day challenge his supremacy? So began phase three. It was summarized by the Palermo prosecutors.

  This work of selection, which would lead in time to the formation of a highly restricted and utterly compact nucleus, totally subject to Riina’s will, was brought about with great political intelligence, cleverly exploiting the differences that inevitably emerged in the group’s relations …

  He started removing the successful, the assured, the charismatic killers who’d served him well. People like Pino The Shoe Greco, who’d personally killed over a hundred victims and was getting cocky. Then the people close to those people had to go. Even so, a rebellion flared up in 1989 and its leader had to have his head smashed in with a cast iron frying pan as he slept in his cell in the Ucciardone. It was done by the brother of Bagarella’s wife, a relative by marriage, who thus killed his own boss for Riina. By now Riina had killed and had killed rather more than eight hundred men of honour in the course of his rise to power. This simple fact was behind the phenomenon of the pentiti. Everything they’d lived for had been destroyed, materially and morally. They had nothing left to lose and endless anger at the man who’d destroyed their world.

  Riina’s internal transformation of Cosa Nostra also transformed Cosa Nostra’s relations with the outside world. Until the early eighties each family had run its own businesses and its own relations with government and industry. All that now went. Everything was centralized in Riina’s Cosa Nostra, and he now wanted control in his relations with business and politics. After killing Bontate, who’d been the old mafia’s great mediator with the politicians, Riina told the Salvo cousins, Tell your friend Lima that from now on he deals only with me. After that, said Mutolo, the normal circuit for Cosa Nostra’s interests, when they needed the help of decisions or actions in Rome, was Ignazio Salvo, Salvo Lima and senator Giulio Andreotti. On really serious matters, even this was too indirect. Totò Riina spoke directly to Giulio Andreotti. Andreotti was interested in power too, and an historian’s remark around that time hinted at a parallel between Riina’s rise among the families of Cosa Nostra and Andreotti’s among the factions of the DC. The historian Gianni Bazet Bozzo wrote that

  Andreotti was the first to understand that real power is transverse, in the sense that the powerful one is he who holds power in all the other powers … Andreotti is a silent component of all the demochristian policies and all the histories.

  It was a relief to get back to sweet coastal Sicily at the end of my grim expedition to Corleone, though nothing now felt quite the same. I was reminded of Leopoldo Franchetti’s words, in his acute and still pertinent report on Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, written after a visit the young Tuscan had made with two friends to the crime-ridden island over a century earlier, a few years after Italy became a nation. After being struck by the florid beauty of Palermo and its gardens, and the courtesy and hospitality of those he’d met, he’d started hearing about what was going on. They were mafia murders mostly. Retailing a few true stories in the opening pages of the report he made for the Italian parliament in 1877, a report that identified that class of middle-class thugs that was still much in evidence in Sicilian business and politics over a century later, Franchetti remarked that

  After a certain number of stories like that, all that perfume of orange blossom and lemon blossom starts to smell of corpses.

  IV

  A THIN MAN AND A FAT MAN

  ROBERT WAS an archeologist from Oxford preparing a dissertation on the carved panels from the temple at Selinunte, the time-worn scenes from the myths that were now in the archeological museum at Palermo. Maybe we were the only people in the city that wet Easter of 1980 who were unaware of the terrible mafia violence that was about to engulf Palermo, because we seemed to be the only people around. We kept meeting in the museum or over cheap meals at the Horse Shoe or walking the deserted streets. Robert was the son of a Harvard entymologist and had spent a large part of his childhood following his father in pursuit of butterflies through the Amazon rainforest. He dragged me along to a midnight Easter service in Greek in a Byzantine church and I’m fairly sure it was his idea too that we spend a pleasant afternoon in the Capuchin catacombs. Robert was into this kind of thing. I’d’ve preferred butterflies in the rainforest.

  A bearded and faintly sinister monk in a coarse brown habit sold us tickets and asked where I was from. When I told him Australia he stared hard and mentioned that he’d been a prisoner of the Australians during the war. There was no sign the memory was a happy one. Then we were sent underground to the company of eight thousand mummified corpses. Some of these were concealed in coffins or stretched out in horizontal niches cut in the walls, but these weren’t the ones that seized your attention. The ones you noticed were the crowds stretching along corridor after corridor, propped upright in their smartest clothes. The best clothes, the velvets, the silks, the lace, the taffetas, were often no longer more than faded accretions of dust, and even the best-preserved outfits had been gnawed by mice and nibbled by insects. The wearers likewise were no longer at their best, but lolling-headed, hollow-eyed, pigeon-toed, baring their teeth in the cosmic rictus. The odd skull or limb had dropped away and clattered to the ground over the years, but loving hands had reattached the bones with wire. Inaugurated at the end of the sixteenth century for dead monks, the catacombs were later extended and opened on payment to the general public of the dead. They reached the height of popularity in the last century, and were busy until 1880 when the catacombs’ last guests checked in. When families of the deceased fell behind in their annual rental payments, the mummies were evicted to make space for new big spenders. Death was no leveller down in the catacombs. Earthly power, sex, religion and professional status were even more rigidly distinguished than in the world of the living. Apart from the religious division, there were separate corridors for men, women and children. Within the women’s department was a special first class section for virgins. The aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century were vastly present down there. The entire casts of Tolstoy’s, Balzac’s and Dickens’s novels seemed to have been dried out and stacked away vertically in their disintegrating dress uniforms, their rotting ball gowns, their dusty frock coats, rows and rows of the upper strata of nineteenth-century society, rigorously grouped in their Darwinian or Marxist categories. Married couples were sometimes together for eternity, grinning toothily at the privilege, heads sagging on to spouses’ shoulders.

  The Sleeping Beauty in the children’s alcove was in some respects a cheat, because she’d been let in forty years after closing time and her perfect preservation was due to twentieth-century science and not, like tha
t of all the others, to the local properties of earth and air. She was embalmed with secret-formula injections in 1920, her long golden hair was combed out and she was placed on display shortly after her death at the age of two in a nauseating mise en scène reminiscent of an old Myer Emporium Christmas window in Melbourne and featured, with special glass and lighting, as the catacomb’s main attraction, a necro-pedophile delirium. Monks had an evil reputation as child stealers when Leonardo Sciascia was little, were known to often carry guns under their habits. Children were told to keep away from them. Sciascia remembered a monk’s warning visit to a shopkeeper. The shopkeeper was behind on his protection payments and when the monk called his little daughter was playing in the shop. The monk caressed her head, remarking on the child’s beauty and saying, by way of warning, that she seemed almost alive. In the fifties a monastery full of Capuchins in central Sicily had run an extortion and murder racket for which they were eventually jailed. I looked up from the Sleeping Beauty and noticed that the catacombs were now deserted except for Robert and me, that through the little grilles the daylight was fading. I remembered the sinister monk guarding the entrance and a fear came over me of being buried alive. Enough was enough of that particular manifestation of Palermo’s intimacy with the dead. We hurried to the surface. The monk was gone and the door still open. I never felt the need to return. Later I heard the mummies had been imprisoned behind metal grilles and no longer mingled with the living on such free and equal, not to say promiscuous, terms.

  * * *

  ONE NIGHT not long after that, I set out to eat pasta con le sarde and involtini di pesce spada and drink white Rapitalà wine at the Charleston. The smartest and most expensive restaurant in Palermo, and the best, many said, required some effort to smarten up. I scrubbed and changed and peered at the minimal improvement in the spotted oval on the sagging wardrobe door. I’d got very wet trying in vain to get into the oratory of San Lorenzo. I wanted to see the late Caravaggio painting of The Adoration of the Shepherds with Saints Francis and Lawrence that was supposed to be inside. Frustration and discomfort had earned a treat. I might’ve felt this even more if I’d known then that Caravaggio’s painting had been stolen from the oratory ten years earlier, and that the prevailing theory on its fate was that it’d never left Palermo and secretly adorned the home of a mafia boss. Pasta con le sarde is a quintessentially Palermo dish and oddly little known outside the city, let alone outside Sicily. It’s a fairly simple dish. It also sounds a little odd to anyone who doesn’t actually know it. The possibly mythological Ada Boni, in her Talisman of Happiness, a robust and practical kitchen classic that isn’t particularly alive to regional subtleties, remarks before listing the dish’s very heterogeneous ingredients that

  … these apparent dissonances come together to make a first-rate harmony. Pasta con le sarde is a kind of mosaic in which each little piece finds its reason for being there in the final result. It would thus be an error for anyone to want, as many do, to make personal modifications out of a taste for simplification or variation without first having tried the true recipe.

  That true is interesting. All the more so in that la Boni’s recipe turns out to be for a timballo, that is pasta baked into a drum-like form deriving from the shape of the oven dish. I never encountered pasta con le sarde as other than a spaghetti dish, or some similar form of long pasta. In Sicilian matters I was coming across the words true and truth more and more often, and starting to interpret them as expressions of a fervent longing rather than objectively established fact. Never as in Sicily was the truth invoked so often, never had it seemed so chimerical. In any case, the flesh of the fresh sardines is mixed and sauteed with already sauteed chopped onions and a little salted anchovy. The crucial additional ingredient is wild fennel, boiled and chopped and added to the sardines along with pine nuts, raisins and saffron. The late Waverley Root wrote once of encountering almonds, for which he may have mistaken the pine nuts, which he didn’t mention, unless the almonds were a substitute, and other unconvincing additions like beaten egg that suggested the prudence of sticking with Boni. Fennel seeds are also sometimes used as a substitute when there is no wild plant growing nearby.

  What nobody mentioned was that this was surely an Arab dish. You only had to look at the ingredients. The tomatoes would have been added five hundred years after the Arabs invented this way of presenting their newly-invented long thin strands of pasta asciutta, when Columbus brought the fruit back from the Americas to transform southern Italy’s cooking. Elizabeth David offered a perfunctory second-hand version of pasta con le sarde in two lines. She wrote of salted sardines, which would’ve been a disaster, and adding tomatoes, admitting she’d never eaten the dish in loco. She did cite a 1935 description of the dish as discordant but exhilarating. Since the Talisman was first published in 1932, this sounded like a reply to Boni, who insisted on its harmony at greater length than the above quotation shows. The Charleston’s pasta was good, as it should have been, and so were the swordfish involtini and so was the straw-coloured Rapitalà. The place however had the fatal air of an hotel dining room. Diners all seemed engrossed in their own sotto voce discussions. What the subject was of these intensely murmured conversations might have intrigued me more if I’d known then that a few months earlier, in the summer of 1979, Michele Sindona had been dining often at the Charleston.

  * * *

  MICHELE SINDONA at that time was being pursued by the police of two continents, but this was the least of his worries. Michele Sindona had lately lost billions of dollars of other people’s money and a lot of it was mafia money and he was in Palermo as a guest of Cosa Nostra. Sindona’s was an exemplary story of Italy in the seventies. A few years earlier, he’d been a whisker from total dominance of Italian finance and control of the biggest financial group in Europe. He’d been Cosa Nostra’s financier when heroin was first multiplying its income madly. He’d been the Vatican’s financier. He was called a financial wizard. When it all fell apart, Sindona caused the worst crash in American banking history and the worst in Italian history. By the time the government receiver of his Italian bank was assassinated in a Milan street in July 1979, most people understood what kind of man the financier Sindona was and where his money had come from. What people didn’t understand was why the prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, was still in extremis trying so hard to salvage the disgraced Sindona’s financial empire.

  Sindona was born sixty years before these disasters, a florist’s son from Patti, a town on the north coast of Sicily, not far from Messina and the continent. His father specialized in funeral wreaths and floral decorations for tombs. The adolescent Sindona, after a wholly undistinguished school career, at the age of seventeen suddenly discovered an ability to solve complex equations in his head and fairly early decided to turn his gift to the service of a quick buck. He met the allied liberator Vito Genovese at the end of the war and did some deals in blackmarket lemons and wheat. The young Sindona also caught his bishop’s eye, and he set off for Milan in 1945 with letters of recommendation from both. He set up there as a small-time speculator, tax lawyer, real estate developer. He did people favours and got favours in return. He cultivated secrecy in the operations of his clever financial mind, and secrecy about his friends. He wanted to be a banker. Banks stood for power. Companies are bought and sold, banks are bought and held, he used to say. It took him fifteen years. By 1961 he was majority partner in the Banca Privata Finanziaria, in which four years later Hambros of London and the Continental Illinois of Cicero, Illinois took a forty per cent holding. By 1973 Sindona had bought them out and become sole owner of a much bigger bank. He’d bought another bank in partnership with the Vatican bank, the IOR, and three of Italy’s biggest banks were his clients. His network of partnerships and operations was international. He was a friend and partner of Nixon’s treasury secretary, his banks a conduit for CIA funds to the Greek colonels at the time of their 1968 coup and four years later for eleven million dollars of secret electoral support to
twenty-one anticommunist politicians in Italy. By the end of the sixties Business Week was calling Sindona the most successful Italian financier and Fortune went further and called him one of the world’s most brilliant businessmen.

  Sindona was also one of four people named in a letter sent in November 1967 from the head of Interpol in Washington to the Italian police in Rome. The letter said he was involved in drug trafficking between Italy and the US and in Europe. The American and Italian governments might have saved themselves many billions of dollars if either had responded to this warning. Neither did. At the start of the seventies Sindona was running a mafia finance corporation which defrauded Sicilian emigrants from the Agrigento province of millions of dollars in savings. He was buying up real estate corporations, insurance companies, industrial concerns, hotel chains and ever more banks. As ever, his success in making money stifled people’s suspicions about the origins of the funds he multiplied. Sindona did financial magic. He had in those days some prestigious partners. He’d made a strategic friend of Pope Paul VI in the sixties when the future holy father was archbishop of Milan. In 1969 he bought the Vatican’s property development company for three hundred and fifty million dollars, billions today. The agreement was signed personally by Sindona and His Holiness in an unrecorded meeting late at night on the third floor of the papal apartments. He’d displaced the Vatican’s traditional advisors, and at a moment when the Vatican bank’s new head, archbishop Marcinkus, formerly of Cicero, Illinois, and now a prelate close to Paul VI, was shifting the Vatican’s huge investments from Italy to the international market. As the Vatican’s financial advisor, Sindona used his new prestige to intensify his own international operations. By now he controlled at least five banks and more than a hundred and twenty-five public companies in eleven countries.