by Peter Robb
the hypothesis, at this point more than legitimate, that Senator Andreotti was forced to deny this acquaintance because to admit it meant conceding the validity of the charge of mafia-type association, since the Salvos’ status as men of honour has been recognized by verdicts pronounced in mafia trials.
While Clara took Pippo out to the kitchen to see the couscous bowls, the kids went outside with a basket to pick some fruit. There was a moment’s alarm when Clara’s mother went to give Lola some chicken bones. I didn’t know they’d hurt her, she said without taking her cigarette from her mouth. We sipped our marsala. Angelo lit a cigarette. I was thinking a couple of things. One was, how foolish Andreotti sounded in his stubborn blanket denials. The other was, this man who said he knew so little of Sicily, that he found it foreign and hostile ground, was sounding awfully like a mafioso under interrogation. The mafia response to the law was always to deny everything. Deny totally. However false it sounds. Don’t open a chink. Let the other do the work. Throw in a few stupid explanations to show your contempt for the questioner and the institutions he represents. Give nothing away. I’d have expected the finest political mind in Europe to articulate something a little more plausible.
Angelo shot two dragon blasts of smoke from his nostrils and reminded me of what was at stake for Andreotti. The charge that the Salvos had asked Cosa Nostra to kill Pecorelli because they in turn had been asked by Andreotti to get rid of him. The charge that it was in the surviving Salvo’s house that Andreotti sealed his pact with Cosa Nostra’s new chief Riina. The overarching thesis that the Salvos were the necessary link between the DC and Cosa Nostra, mediating between Andreotti and the bosses. So that when the pact was broken in 1992 by Andreotti’s failure to deliver a supreme court acquittal in the maxitrial, the murders that year of Lima and Salvo were as close as Cosa Nostra could get to settling with Andreotti himself. For Andreotti, to admit any link at all with the Salvos might be the beginning of the end. Better deny the obvious than run this risk. The kids came in with some mandarins. Lola followed and nobody seemed to notice. The pungent smell of peeled mandarins cut through the stale smoke.
* * *
THE OPULENCE of Angela Salvo’s wedding, whose photographic record had disappeared, foreshadowed the Salvos’ obscene banquet for Andreotti at the Hotel Zagarella, whose opening moment Letizia Battaglia’s photos had accidentally immortalized. The Salvos’ habits of conspicuous consumption were further described in The True History of Italy by another witness revolted by their ostentation of power. This witness spoke severely of parties and outings that recalled The Great Gatsby, Scott Fitzgerald’s novel of the New York twenties, easy money, jazz and prohibited booze, as much as they did the high life of Rome under Nero, as represented in the Satyricon of Petronius. It made sense. The fabulously rich former gangster Gatsby was modelled by Fitzgerald on the fabulously rich former slave Trimalchio. Gatsby’s gaudy story is told in the novel by his prim and uptight but fascinated young neighbour, and this was rather how the lawyer Alfonso Conte came across in the pages of The True History. He wasn’t otherwise identified, and he sounded so disapproving in his evidence that I wondered how he’d ever come to be mixing socially with the Salvos in the first place. So prissy, indeed, that it took me a long time to remember that I’d known avvocato Alfonso Conte. I’d been to his house. I knew one or two things about him.
When I was struggling to keep afloat in Naples at the end of the seventies, I’d given private lessons in English, as few and as expensive as I could make them. I charged so shamelessly much that people imagined I must be rather good. For a brief golden time I was the most fashionable private English teacher in the city, fought over by women in mink, and thus made my entrance into the salons of Napoli bene. One day a message was delivered summoning me to the presence of a certain avv. Alfonso Conte. The doorman passed it on rather more ceremoniously than he usually treated my affairs and he was distressed by my fuck-you response to its imperiousness. You haven’t been to see the avvocato, he said anxiously a day or so later. Another minion had been around and the doorman seemed to be in a cold sweat. I finally made my way up to a gorgeous home carved into the hill over the bay of Naples and took coffee over a very deep pile white carpet with the avvocato’s blonde wife and teenage son. The son’s English needed urgent attention over the approaching summer, and I was expected to cross the water several mornings a week, to where the avvocato’s huge yacht would be anchored off Capri for the season, and give the son some injections of English before breakfast. Quite how the rest of my life would be moulded to this requirement was of little interest. You could stay on Capri, said the avvocato’s wife vaguely. Or you could go back to Naples. Then the avvocato himself arrived, distinguished under wavy grey hair, in silk shirt and moccasins, like a slightly over-the-hill TV actor. The matter was clinched. By the time the summer heat descended I badly needed the money and even more I was curious. Reading in L’Espresso about some murky affair, I’d incidentally learnt of the avvocato Conte’s rapid rise to immense wealth and his equally rapid rise inside the communist party. The stateroom of the yacht was said to be strewn with red silk cushions embroidered with little hammers and sickles in gold thread. Or to have been so strewn until the PCI expelled the avvocato for unworthiness. When I rang to finalize the summer details however, his wife had forgotten who I was. The son, his English, I persisted. We sent him to England, she said and hung up.
The Contes were busy people, I thought philosophically and passed a lean summer. They sure were. Many years later I read in the parliamentary antimafia commission’s report of avvocato Conte’s conviction for crimes relating to the Fabbrocini bank, owned by the camorra family of the same name, the bank whose Naples office had been bombed in my street. He’d later been in trouble again for fraud and other crimes, other banks, other camorra financial operations. And now The True History revealed that at the same time, in the late seventies, the Conte couple were leading an intense social life in Sicily, where they were mixing with the Salvo cousins and Andreotti’s man Claudio Vitalone. Like his former political master, Vitalone in 1994 was denying ever having known the Salvos. One witness in The True History who remembered how often Vitalone had been seen aboard the Salvos’ yacht burst out laughing when he heard this, and told the magistrates how Palermo society fought with knives for invitations to the Salvos’ parties.
In particular Alfonso Conte offered the magistrates of The True History a memory of a very Gatsbian party in Palermo in the villa of his business partner, a party he thought maybe took place in the late summer of 1979, the summer I’d been meant to be fixing his son’s English on the yacht at Capri. There were a hundred or so guests, and the Contes and many others were put up by their host in the Hotel Villa Igiea. Conte’s partner had flown Vitalone and his wife from Rome for the party in a private jet, along with Salvo Lima. Other guests were the Salvo cousins and whoever was mayor of Palermo that year, and Aristide Gunnella, an already-notorious government minister later convicted as a mafioso. Conte emphasized to the magistrates that after this party he personally had broken with that social world because I was particularly disgusted by the exessive display of wealth and power that one noticed on these convivial occasions. Conte’s sensibility was offended at this party by the sight of the long avenue leading to the villa illuminated by various persons holding burning torches and dressed in traditional Sicilian costumes. All through the dinner Conte noticed Vitalone deep in conversation with the Salvo cousins and with Salvo Lima. All evening Nino Salvo kept summoning this or that powerful figure to his side and going into a conversational huddle. At another moment Conte heard Lima and Gunnella deciding together who to make the next mayor of Palermo. The next day some of the guests, including the Contes, the Vitalones and the Salvo cousins, were taken on a scenic tour of the beauties of Palermo in a motorcade of a dozen Mercedes Benz limos, before returning to lunch by the villa’s swimming pool. It was like the visit of a head of state. After that the avvocato Conte had to go back to N
aples, for work.
* * *
THEY’RE CRUDE people, Angelo said suddenly. Brutal and primitive and petty. Outsiders forget this. When you live on the territory you never forget. He told me how they’d burnt his house down a few years earlier. The house we were sitting in had only recently been rebuilt and repainted.
I had a very good gun dog, a bitch. She had a litter and this guy from Trapani wanted to buy a couple of the pups. I told him I was sorry, they were all bespoken. A while later the pups went missing, stolen. We knew who it was. In town one day Clara and I saw the guy in a bar. Clara bawled him out in front of a crowd of people. She can be terrible when she gets going, scathing, sarcastic. It was a burning humiliation for a man of honour.
I could imagine how Clara might be when she got going with her low hoarse voice. A couple of weeks later their house was set on fire. Luckily they were out that night.
Angelo was still living in Salemi when an earthquake struck the Belice valley below Salemi in 1968. It was the earthquake that destroyed the palace of Lampedusa’s childhood in Santa Margherita di Belice, the original of Donnafugata in The Leopard. It killed five hundred villagers and left ninety thousand homeless. The Italian government reacted to that emergency as it was to react twelve years later after the much bigger Irpinia earthquake near Naples. It showered money on the disaster zone. Paul Ginsborg describes what happened to the money in his History of Contemporary Italy.
Nine years later, 60,000 people in the valley were still living in the Nissen huts which had been erected immediately after the earthquake. Huge and surreal infrastructures had been built in the valley—roads that led nowhere, flyovers used only by flocks of sheep, pedestrian walkways with no pedestrians … not a single new house had been assigned by the authorities to any of the villagers. The money voted by Parliament had not been spent, or it had been misspent or simply embezzled.
At the prompting of a local priest, children of homeless families wrote in 1976 to parliamentarians, and Ginsborg reproduces a young girl’s letter to the veteran Christian Democrat leader Andreotti. With his reply Andreotti sent the girl a doll.
Travelling anywhere through the interior of Sicily you recognized the landscape Ginsborg describes. The Belice earthquake locally intensified what’s always gone on all over Sicily. Huge amounts of government money have always been channeled into private interests like the Hotel Zagarella and the development of Palermo, or into huge and pointless public works projects whose only real reason for existing was to provide contracts for companies owned by the friends. Sciascia’s favourite instance was the usually deserted Messina-Catania freeway. There was plenty of money to spend. Its special status as an autonomous region let Sicily keep all the taxes the Salvos collected and guaranteed a generous flow of finance from Rome as part of the 1948 package. The government’s Cassa per il Mezzogiorno chipped in huge sums of development money as well. What Angelo remembered was that the aftermath of the Belice earthquake was when the Salvo cousins made their spectacular leap into power, from being very rich and very influential tax collectors and businessmen into a super rich political power that attracted demochristian ministers from Rome to political rallies in Salemi. The flyovers for sheep were theirs.
Angelo himself got out. He went to study architecture in Palermo and later moved to the continent and enrolled in the university at Florence. He plunged into the swirling currents of student activism, the more and more extreme attempts to find an alternative to the DC’s suffocating power and the PCI’s cautious immobilism. He brushed with those groups that were passing into clandestinity and terrorist action. It all passed. The left failed and the demochristian regime was left to collapse years later on its own. Angelo never finished his degree. He made a living as an artisan, working and selling metal jewellery. After a long relationship he broke up with the mother of his daughter and returned to Sicily. Clara in Trapani had children from another relationship that had lately ended. Not long after they linked up they started the Trybynis together. Angelo’s father died and he inherited the little farm.
The arson at the farmhouse had a sequel after the 1994 elections, Angelo said. The previous year Berlusconi swept to an ephemeral power as the head of the first new government after the collapse of the demochristian regime. New, of course, was a relative term in a society as old as Sicily, and there were old interests for the politicians to look after. There were interests the DC had looked after pretty well for half a century that now needed fresh political allies, fresh cover. It wasn’t until after Angelo and I spoke that autumn Sunday in 1995 that the president of Palermo province, a man called Musotto, was arrested at dawn as a mafioso, but when it happened I was struck by the fact that he was a leading member in Sicily of Berlusconi’s political group. And it wasn’t until some months later that it clearly emerged that Giovanni Brusca, the boss who seemed to be Cosa Nostra’s new capo di tutti capi after Riina’s arrest in 1993 and Bagarella’s in 1995, had been issuing instructions to the families to vote Berlusconi. You didn’t need to know, however, given the evident strength of Berlusconi’s people in Sicily. Even in 1996, when Berlusconi was soundly defeated by the moderate left group and Italy got its first really new government since the war, the Berlusconians won in Sicily. In 1996 Sicily was the only region in Italy where the Berlusconians did win.
But in 1994, in his hour of triumph, Berlusconi had suffered a tiny but stinging reverse in Trapani. The various forces of the left had been able to unite on a platform and a candidate and Angelo had been active in a campaign that was effective enough to win the election in Trapani, to everyone’s surprise. The Berlusconians were greatly displeased. A friend of Angelo’s who’d been foolish enough to approach the Berlusconi headquarters on election night was badly beaten. Shortly after that there was a fire in the Trybynis. A passerby saw smoke coming from the restaurant and gave the alarm in time. A week or so later there was another and more damaging blaze.
* * *
ANGELO WENT away after 1968, and while he was being a student in Palermo and Florence his home province of Trapani was flourishing. In the nineteen eighties the town of Trapani, with a population of eighty thousand, held in its banks forty per cent of Sicily’s bank deposits. Trapani had a lot of banks. Six regional banks, twenty-eight provincial banks and two hundred-odd savings banks and finance companies were in Trapani. There’d been a magistrate in Trapani in the early eighties, one of only two, called Giangiacomo Ciaccio Montalto, who thought the money they held had to do with tons of heroin being shipped from Trapani to America. The mayor of Trapani, however, denied the existence of the mafia there and the sub-prefect protested against the criminalization of this serious and hardworking city. In late 1982 Ciaccio Montalto had traced heroin shipments from Trapani to Montreal via Paris worth a third of a billion dollars. He was working closely with a magistrate in northern Italy, Carlo Palermo, who was following the international traffic in drugs and arms from another angle. In January 1983, five months after the murder of Dalla Chiesa in Palermo, Ciaccio Montalto was shot outside his house at night. He had the feeling a vacuum was being created around him, said his wife. He’d also had the feeling his only colleague was working for the mafia.
In the northern investigation, Carlo Palermo had made some very embarrassing discoveries about the financing of prime minister Craxi’s socialist party but was blocked by parliament from continuing. Craxi had lately voted against forcing Andreotti’s resignation over the Sindona business, and now Andreotti’s people had voted to save Craxi. Carlo Palermo then got a transfer to Trapani to take the place of the murdered Ciaccio Montalto, a job for which there was little competition. In April 1985 Palermo’s car was blown up by a huge bomb, but he wasn’t killed because a passing car took the force of the blast and those killed were a mother and her six-year-old twin children. A few days after the attempt on Palermo’s life, the police officer Saverio Montalbano discovered the largest heroin refinery in Europe near Alcamo in Trapani province. It’d only been in operation two months.
It was a joint venture of Totò Riina and Bernardo Brusca, father of Giovanni, and they were ropable, in a pentito’s later testimony. Montalbano also made some interesting discoveries about Trapani’s political-criminal masonic network and was in general so effective that he was charged with improper use of a public vehicle, demoted and transferred. A protesting judge wrote that one couldn’t help maintaining there was outside interest in getting rid of such a formidable investigator.
In 1988 judge Alberto Giacomelli was murdered in Trapani. Two weeks later the activist Mauro Rostagno, who’d started a drug rehabilitation community in Trapani and broadcast against the mafia on a local TV channel, was murdered. In 1989 the Trapani judge Costa was arrested. He was the colleague whom Ciaccio Montalto had unwisely realized, a week before being murdered, was working with the mafia. Judge Costa’s house was full of weaponry and cash. To the passing visitor, Trapani seemed an utterly sleepy silent place, with its low white houses in the blinding sun and the wide straight road that ran down to the promontory and ended at the blinding sea.
* * *
CLARA WAS curious at the thought I might be going to write something. It was doubtful, I said. How could you make Sicily intelligible? Even just to explain what was going on with the mafia and the politicians—At least you’re not an American, Clara said thoughtfully, more to herself than me. She dragged on her cigarette. We’ve already had an American. Couple of years ago. Don’t talk to me about Americans. Clara went on,
This American woman turned up in Trapani. An Italo-American woman. Her ancestors emigrated from somewhere round Trapani and she was looking for her roots. Like, digging up her past. The world she never knew and stuff. She’d got some letter of introduction to a friend of mine, and since I’ve got a certain interest in the local history and culture she was handed on to me.