Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  I believe I’ve understood the new rule of the game. The powerful man is killed when this fatal combination is brought about: he has become too dangerous but he can be killed because he’s isolated … The mafia is cautious, slow, it takes your measure, it listens, it makes sure about you from a distance …

  I’m up to my neck in this, he told his son the same month. This was the quicksand of Andreotti’s DC. While the mafia was taking his measure, subtly isolating and discrediting him, Dalla Chiesa was spending his last month vainly trying to meet the national leader of the DC, vainly asking the interior minister for greater powers. He was still asking on the morning of his murder. His last throw of the dice, an act even more eloquent than the general’s own words in the diary to Doretta, was to make a secret visit on the last day of his life to the United States consul in Palermo, to ask him to put pressure on the Italian prime minister, to get Dalla Chiesa the support he needed against Cosa Nostra and its political allies. About the sovereignty of the Italian state in the postwar half century, this secret visit of general Dalla Chiesa’s says everything. In his moment of greatest need, one of that state’s most loyal, intelligent, scrupulous and effective servants turned to the Americans.

  The consul, whose name was Jones, later recalled the meeting for the Wall Street Journal, from which Sterling quotes an anecdote Dalla Chiesa recounted. It was about his days as commander of the Palermo carabinieri in the seventies. The captain of carabinieri posted to Palma di Montechiaro, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Palma, the town described in The Leopard, had called Palermo to tell his commander of threats received from the local boss. Colonel Dalla Chiesa had gone to Palma and at the time of the Mezzogiorno’s ritual evening stroll had walked slowly up and down the main drag, arm in arm with the captain. They’d paused for a while outside the boss’s house, and then walked on. Recalling his little demonstration of solidarity, Dalla Chiesa told the consul, All I’m asking is for somebody to take my arm and walk with me.

  Emanuela Setti Carraro called at the prefect’s office that night to take the general home in her mini. It was already dark. Dalla Chiesa set store by inconspicuousness, mobility, unpredictable times and itineraries rather than armour and guards. A single escort, Domenico Russo, followed in another car. They were overtaken by eight men in via Carini, four on two powerful bikes, four in a BMW. Dalla Chiesa threw himself across his wife, but she was shot first. They were killed by the same kalashnikov used to dispatch Bontate and Inzerillo. Somebody got out of the BMW and delivered the final shots. Russo died later of his wounds.

  When he arrived in Palermo a hundred and twenty-seven days earlier, the general had confided to Doretta’s shade

  I’m perfectly aware that it would be suicide not to face my new task not so much with guards and escort but with the intelligence it demands and a little imagination. I’m nevertheless sure my Doretta will protect me, so that I can still do a little good for this society that too many people have really betrayed.

  Intelligence and imagination hadn’t been enough. The general was betrayed along with the society. Here lie the hopes of all honest Palermitans, said a note on a wreath placed at the scene of the massacre. In the finest Italian style, a wave of feeling now swept the nation and gave in death what the general had been denied in life. The post of antimafia high commissioner with overarching powers such as Dalla Chiesa had pleaded for was immediately created. And the Italian parliament passed without debate the bill Pio La Torre had proposed two years earlier. It now became the La Torre law. The new high commissioners appointed were such ineffectual bureaucrats that nobody minded when the post was abolished not long after. The La Torre law changed everything. For the first time ever the words mafia and mafioso appeared in the Italian penal code. The soon-to-be-famous Articolo 416 bis achieved Pio La Torre’s aim of incriminating the organization Cosa Nostra, and the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, and not just the individual crimes of its thousands of component members. The law made a global strategy possible against Cosa Nostra. Without Articolo 416 bis, Falcone’s maxitrial would never have taken place, or Cosa Nostra’s terrible revenge in 1992. Without Articolo 416 bis the statesman Giulio Andreotti would never have gone on trial in Palermo in the summer of 1995.

  While I was staring at the Jornal do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro that fourth of September, near Belém on the mouth of the Amazon, two thousand kilometres away in the north of Brazil, Tommaso Buscetta was learning the same news on TV. Buscetta was in the company of Gaetano Badalamenti. Badalamenti had been the first of the Palermo bosses Riina had defeated. He’d seen the writing on the wall in time and got out before the slaughter and was doing good business running drugs in north and south America. Buscetta too, after seeing that mediation between the Palermo families and the Corleonesi was hopeless, had returned to Brazil to his own drug business and his wife and family. Commenting expertly on the circumstances of the killing and who must have ordered it, Riina’s Corleonesi, and who’d carried it out, the Catania mafia of Nitto Santapaola, the former boss remarked to Buscetta,

  Masino, some politician’s used the mafia to get rid of the general. He’d become too awkward a presence … They sent him to Palermo to get him out of the way. He hadn’t done anything yet in Sicily that could justify that great hatred of him.

  A little later, Badalamenti got to speaking of the murder of Pecorelli, and he confirmed exactly something that Buscetta had already been told two years earlier by Stefano Bontate. Which was that the Pecorelli killing was a political crime carried out by Cosa Nostra, at the request of the Salvo cousins, who’d been asked in turn by the Hon. Andreotti. Buscetta’s evidence went on

  General Dalla Chiesa had to be killed because he was in possession of secrets—I don’t know if they were information, documents, papers or what—connected with the Moro case and liable to give Andreotti serious trouble. The same secrets Mino Pecorelli had, the journalist … It was Badalamenti who told me that Pecorelli and Dalla Chiesa are two things intertwined together …

  The general’s posting to Palermo was merely a way of making his elimination easier—above all more logical, more justifiable. It had already been decided some time earlier, and for reasons other than the antimafia policy.

  Ever the gent, the old-style mafioso Buscetta added

  His wife was killed too, and not because the mafia had lost its ancient respect for women and innocents, but because Dalla Chiesa might have revealed those secrets to her, or given her dangerous papers.

  In 1993 Vito Ciancimino reminisced to the investigating magistrates of The True History about the collective psychosis of that summer in Palermo when Dalla Chiesa arrived, and how the general ended up isolated and powerless. Soon after the assassination, the former mayor and mafioso found himself chatting, naturally enough, with the former mayor and mafioso Salvo Lima and the mafioso multimillionaire Nino Salvo. He asked them why, if Dalla Chiesa was already washed up at every level, and even the stones knew it, why kill him?

  Lima, his eyes reddening with hatred and losing his normal self-control, said, For certain Romans he was more dangerous shoved aside with a pension than as Prefect with special powers. Lima went on to say, The ones who are going to take it up the ass are going to be us and who knows how long it’ll go on.

  He meant, explained Ciancimino, us Sicilians. And Nino Salvo nodded agreement, looking very upset. Andreotti’s viceroy in Sicily was furious that Andreotti had put the friends to all that trouble, and exposed them to the incalculable damage that Article 416B would do to Cosa Nostra, in order to cancel the memory of his own past, to cover his own tracks. Lima was soon mollified, when Andreotti came south in late 1982 to counter the negative fallout from the assassination and hold a rally with Lima and Ciancimino. You Sicilian demochristians are strong, that’s why people attack you, Andreotti told the crowd. We reject the false moralism of critics who foam at the mouth while you get stronger and stronger at every election. By now Lima was beaming again.

  In November that year His Holiness John Paul II
also visited Palermo, apparently recovered from the bullet wounds received in the attack by an agent of the Turkish mafia in St Peter’s square the year before. The investigation of this seeming assassination attempt was being directed toward Bulgaria, and many people supposed the attack was linked to the holy father’s activism in support of the anticommunist Solidarity movement in his native Poland. Others would later say the attack had been ordered within the Vatican itself and had only been intended as a warning. In Palermo the Pope spoke to a hundred and fifty thousand people in the central piazza of Palermo at the end of that terrible year. He didn’t mention the mafia.

  VI

  A BAD HABIT

  THE SUGAR always goes in first. The sugar goes in when the tiny cup is fished from the standing tray of boiling water. Before the coffee oozes from the nozzle. Only that way can the slow, hot, thick drip, soon rising dangerously, unless the operator acts fast, as he does when he whisks the cup from the boiling water with his fingers, to a hotter, thinner, faster, weaker falling trickle of newly expressed coffee, meld with the white powder that fills most of the tiny white cup. Only thus do you get a wholly caramelized double hit of caffeine and glucose. The intrusion of a spoon would compromise the process. At this point. So, at home, the sugar is placed in the upper part of the faceted aluminium coffee pot before it ejaculates, lightly stirred in as heat still rises from the flame.

  Only in Naples does the sugar go in first. You have to intercept the barman as he makes his first move if you want little or none. If it is a high turnover bar he may code your little cup with a speck of coffee on the rim to mark the difference. You will mark yourself too, indelibly, as slightly bizarre if you refuse sugar. I went back last year to the Bar Messico after three years away. The Bar Messico is near the station, and the barmen there make thousands of coffees a day every day of the year except Sundays. There was a new barman up my end of the bar. The older barman up the other end went through the elaborate pantomime that Neapolitans always do go through if you disappear and reappear after a long absence, a performance which consists of not betraying any awareness that you have ever been away. It’s a way of reclaiming you. You’ve never really left. Without in any way acknowledging my presence, as I hadn’t yet spoken first, the older barman muttered to the younger, That’s a no sugar down on the end there.

  Later I went back to the tiny Bar Nilo, so called because it stands opposite, in the very heart of Naples, the tiny piazzetta Nilo which has an ancient marble statue of the reclining river god of the Nile. It was put up a couple of millennia ago by immigrants from Alexandria, who brought the worship of the Nile with them to Naples. Over the centuries Neapolitans have got to know it more familiarly as ’o cuorpo ’e Napule, and consider that it represents the body of the city itself. A newspaper seller used to work from a trestle table in front of the statue, and strung porno magazines around its plinth. When Naples cleaned up for president Clinton and the promised return of the tourists in 1994, the newspaper seller was forced round the corner, which was where I found him when I went back. Day by day, he was inching his news stand back to the body of Naples. The statue and the bar are on Spaccanapoli, the straight and narrow street that splits the city and was marked out by the founding Greeks two and a half thousand years ago. When I went back there too, after years away, the walleyed barman’s first words were, Sempre amaro, professò? Still no sugar? The Bar Nilo won a prize once, for the best coffee in Naples. That would make it the best coffee in the world. I think the Messico is better, but there are days when I vacillate. The Nilo is one of the best. And when I went back too to a little bar in the Spanish quarters, where I used to breakfast in 1978 and hadn’t been since, the barman, who was the same, remembered. So you’ve been making money, they used to say when you reappeared in Naples after an absence. It was understood that money was only made elsewhere, and that making money was the only reason anyone would leave.

  Every transaction in Naples, every social act, requires a complex and at times exhausting social trafficking, a subtle and insidious play whereby the socially weaker player contrives to ingratiate himself and at the same time take the piss out of the stronger, to catch the other wrong-footed, but delicately, imperceptibly, to introduce some subliminal sense of social unease that may then be used as leverage. To create if possible a sense of obligation, of gratitude, even dependency. There isn’t necessarily any malice in this. It’s an old art of creating strength out of weakness and Neapolitan amiability itself is part of it. In Naples it has always been a necessary art of survival. If respect is the crucial concept in social relations in Sicily, the Neapolitan counterpart is its opposite, disrespect. Naples is infinitely more labile, more difficult a world. The dour Sicilian Sciascia noticed the Neapolitan way of charging so simple an act as making a coffee with hidden pleas, taunts, complicity, when in his first novel, the 1961 The Day of the Owl, the carabiniere captain

  drank a boiling coffee, a coffee that the carabiniere-barman made in a special way for him, in the special amount of coffee and the skill in making it that a Neapolitan, as the carabiniere-barman was, could deploy to obtain the special esteem of a superior.

  The bar opposite the San Carlo where I went some evenings had changed entirely. I drank rum there after dinner and played the jukebox a long time ago. It was the only bar I knew in Naples that had a jukebox. Kids from the Pallonetto, Santa Lucia’s little promontory warren of contrabbandieri, used to hang around the bar at night. One night the owner of the bar asked me if I wanted to join him in an orgy at his villa. These kids, he said, will do anything I want. He used to sing in the opera chorus at the San Carlo over the road, and I told him once I’d recognized him on stage in a production of Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri that had just concluded its season, singing in the eunuchs’ chorus. His face darkened when he heard this. I was in the chorus of Algerian nobles, he said. A couple of years later he was murdered in his villa.

  Why coffee should have become such a particular obsession in Naples, of all places in Europe, I don’t know. In Milan they go in for aperitivi, which are unknown in Naples. The aperitif implies both an alcoholic relaxation of attention and the promise of a stomach-filling meal to come. The meal to come in Naples is historically in doubt. Which is also why Naples has given the world the classic quick cheap stomach fillers, the original fast food, like pizza and pasta and all their variants. A Neapolitan coffee packs the kick of a mule. It keeps you going, and at minimal cost.

  Italian coffee gets worse fast as you move north of Naples. In Rome it is often undrinkable. Southward, standards are generally maintained. The coffee in Palermo is excellent. Maybe the ideal espresso for Sicilians, the journalist Giorgio Bocca decided after calling on the magistrates of the antimafia pool in Palermo’s justice building, is a black drop containing a superconcentration of all the caffeine in the world. There is no guarantee, though, even in Naples, that coffee will be good. A bar needs well maintained machines and a high turnover as well as good coffee. A coffee in Naples may be quite as thin and sour and bitter as anything to be found in Sydney. This happens in a bar whose owner has put himself in hock to the suppliers to pay for refurbishing his premises. The thousands and thousands of tiny bars in Naples are always competitively redecorating. An overextended coffee bar owner is tied in perpetuity to that supplier, who is thus free to dump inferior coffee on him forever. Coffee is the Neapolitan drug. Apart from a little wine with meals, Neapolitans rarely drink, at most a medicinal-tasting amaro at the meal’s end. There was a passing fashion among the toughs of the Spanish quarters for an infusion of camomile, which they used to take before retiring in the early hours of the morning, to help them sleep, and once an elderly boss of the quarteri offered me a Chivas Regal.

  The sugar people put into it with such care may have been tied up with the cult of coffee. Naples was one of Europe’s first and biggest importers of sugar. Fernand Braudel in his great work The Mediterranean said that in the single year of 1625, when sugar was still barely known in the rest
of Europe, Naples imported what he called the unbelievable quantity of fifteen hundred tons of it. In the same year Naples also imported five hundred tons of honey. This huge consumption of sugar was recorded half a century after coffee first arrived in Italy from the east. The Venetians first imported coffee in 1580 from Constantinople, where it had arrived thirty years earlier from Egypt. Did Neapolitan sugar consumption jump with the arrival of coffee? Braudel didn’t say. Naples, he remarked, thinking of the late sixteenth century, was excessive in every respect … it was the most astonishing, most fantastically picaresque city in the world. Since the amount of liquid in a Neapolitan coffee is barely enough to dissolve the sugar, the thought is inescapable that the coffee is mainly a way of flavouring the sugar and helping its assimilation. And the sugar must be dissolved. In the early days, when I was still into sugar, a scugnizzo reprimanded me for bad manners in using the spoon to scoop the undissolved sugar from the bottom of the cup. It was a more venial offence than pouring wine underarm, as Judas did, but an offence nevertheless. A scugnizzo is, or was, a Neapolitan street kid, though not in the modern sense of social detritus, abandoned and homeless, but having his own status, prestige even, integrated within the society but not yet tied down, avoiding school but not yet part of any work force. In the nineties, the scugnizzi have been mainly recruited as drug couriers, work for which their alertness, streetwise intelligence and their remarkable mobility on Vespas are ideally suited. Their employers call them muschilli, little flies, and also appreciate the fact that until the muschilli reach the age of fourteen they are entirely immune from prosecution under Italian law.

  The seventeenth was a busy century for gourmets in Naples. Ice cream was invented there and the city’s Spanish rulers brought chocolate from the new world, and by the 1690s chocolate ice cream was born. Throughout the south the things made with sugar, cakes and pastries and all the other icecreams, granite, semifreddi, cassate, marzipan are still sublime. In Palermo, plump bespectacled Totò of the Sant’Andrea was lately moved to tears as he described the complex intensities of his lifelong love of chocolate. And of the market providors of the borgo of Sant’Antonio Abate in Naples, only the man who sold me cheese rivalled the importance in my life of the little pastrycook on the corner, who was maker as well as purveyor, a wholesaler and supplier of bars and cafés working from a little signless laboratorio rather than a shop, as source of information and receiver of confidences, about pastries and other matters.