Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  On the wall of Room No 50 was a framed enlargement of the much-reproduced and ever affecting black-and-white news photo of Falcone and Borsellino sharing a joke. Under the photo was the caption TO MAKE THAT SMILE LIVE FOREVER. Scarpinato, like the other magistrates in the Palermo pool, worked for years with Falcone and Borsellino. He’s a Sicilian from Caltanisetta, where Totò Riina was even then on trial for the murder of Falcone, and a magistrate by family tradition as well as personal conviction, what Italians called a son of art. In the fifties, Scarpinato’s father was the judge who sent don Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of bosses of that time, chairman of the board at the transatlantic conference in the sala Wagner of the hotel Delle Palme in 1957 and genial host at the Spanò fish dinner, the successor to don Calò Vizzini, to internal exile. Moving a mafia boss out of his home territory was the ultimate sanction in those days, and did a lot to help Cosa Nostra extend its activities to other parts of Italy.

  When the Andreotti trial resumed a couple of days later, Scarpinato and I happened to arrive outside the bunker at the same instant. Two bullet-proofed Alfas screamed down from the opposite end of the driveway, very fast and a few inches apart. They stopped abruptly, still a few inches apart, skidding on gravel and dust. Three doors of the second car flew open before it had even stopped and there were three unshaven crouching figures in vests pointing these giant pistols at me. Holding them in both hands. It was a make my day situation. Scarpinato slouched out of the first car and shambled toward the lawyers’ steel door with his bursting old leather briefcase of documents and he didn’t even look up. He’d been living like that for years. It had been a couple of years ago, he told me, while he was gathering evidence on Andreotti, that a telecom technician had visited Scarpinato’s apartment block in Palermo and left behind a little telecom toolbag. The man was noticed, however. Checks were made, and there turned out to be no such telecom technician. And the little technical toolkit, checked just in time, turned out not to contain tools. Such were the uses of a bodyguard. Scarpinato was protected around the clock by a team of eight men. It was striking that even inside the bunker courtroom, where everyone present had passed these endless checks, documentary, physical, electronic, Scarpinato was shadowed at every step by two or three bodyguards. He was the member of the prosecution group held to be most at risk.

  The afternoon our arrivals coincided at the bunker, everyone was a little jumpy. The minister for the interior had just confirmed that there were indeed good reasons for believing that Brusca’s strike group had missiles and a military missile launcher. The Ucciardone bunker courtroom and the justice building were held to be the most likely targets, for fairly obvious reasons. Scarpinato himself was a lot less alarmed about the physical danger than the political dangers magistrates in Italy were then facing. The pursuit of justice in Italy had always been subject to grave political interference, until the collapse of the old regime in Italy in 1992 had let magistrates work unhampered for three years on Italy’s massive and institutionalized illegalities. Antonio Di Pietro’s corruption investigations in Milan had made him the national hero of a country that still seemed alarmingly eager to find heroes and scapegoats. The fall of the old order and shock at the murders of Falcone and Borsellino had given a similar impetus to the Palermo magistrates who were fighting the crimes of the mafia. For three years the magistrates of both cities had felt the surge of consensus behind them as they’d probed into the dark areas of Italy’s recent past.

  As they worked, said Scarpinato, magistrates in both cities had become aware that they were looking at what he described as systemic criminality, based on the mafia in the south and corruption in the north, something so deeply rooted in the society and so widespread that the judicial system couldn’t cope with it, couldn’t metabolize it, in another Scarpinato phrase. And as they’d moved further into the grey areas of complicity, the magistrates of Milan and Palermo found consensus drained away. Outlaw Italy was a pyramid. At the apex were those who ordered the murder of the state’s representatives and at its base were sleazebag businessmen, corrupt local politicians, tax evaders and bylaw breakers. The problem was political, and the solution could only be political. For the northern crimes of bribery and corruption some form of amnesty might have been eventually conceivable. But for the killers of Cosa Nostra there can be no armistice. Palermo was the ultimate goal of those who were determined to stop the reform process, and it wasn’t negotiable. In Palermo there could be no compromise. Scarpinato pointed out that Cosa Nostra has been part of a wider criminal system that has written some of the most bloody and tragic pages in the history of our country. Ten thousand deaths between 1983 and 1993. You lost track.

  He was also talking about a string of aborted coups d’état, about the activities of the secret P2 lodge and the deviant secret services, about the connections of both of these with right-wing terrorism, left-wing terrorism, organized crime and the Vatican. Palermo, said Scarpinato, perhaps unconsciously echoing Leonardo Sciascia, was an extreme metaphor for Italy. If the Palermo magistrates were ever to piece together the whole picture of Cosa Nostra’s activities, the consequences for Italy would be felt far outside the confines of the legal system. Which was why the magistrates working on the Andreotti case felt so exposed to hidden dangers. And yet, he insisted, the fate of democracy in Italy depended on the outcome of their work. A democracy that left killers and mass murderers unpunished would be a democracy without truth or justice, a deformed democracy condemned sooner or later to relive its terrible past.

  The magistrates had been attacked for years, even by Sciascia, for being careless of human rights in their paper storms of arrest warrants. Scarpinato insisted he didn’t mean the law should limit the human rights of mafiosi, but that it should recognize the difference between kinds of crime. You can’t fight an organization responsible for systematic massacres with a law designed to punish housebreaking and crimes of passion. Crimes of passion was a nice Sicilian touch, I thought. It’s like trying to perform microsurgery on the brain with the instruments used for appendicitis, he offered instead. You need lasers, not forceps. Or the patient dies. The example he gave me was this. The Italian government had abolished the legal sanction of prison that would oblige a person to give evidence in court against the mafia. The sanction, along with witness protection measures, was absolutely necessary, Scarpinato said. A witness against the mafia is not an ordinary witness. A witness against the mafia is under sentence of death for the rest of his life. Another issue was the limit on the length of time an accused criminal could be held in prison before conviction. This was a real guarantee of individual rights, and not a principle Italian justice should forgo, but the scrupulousness of the procedure in principle and its susceptibility to manipulation in fact had made the time limit on preventive custody a prime escape route for the mafia. Years of brave and meticulous investigation had been annulled on this ground, and professional killers freed. It had become a cavil much used by the egregious Corrado Carnevale, the supreme court judge now suspended and under investigation for his own ties to the mafia.

  Scarpinato made it clear from the start that he wouldn’t talk about the trial under way or about politics. He was equally reticent about his private life, and given the portentousness of what we touched on, I didn’t press him. I wanted, though, to know what it was like, practically and intimately, to live such a public and such a lonely life, victim designate of a criminal organization of unprecedented power and cruelty, more a prisoner than anyone he convicted, as the old order regrouped and the tide of public solidarity receded. A woman friend told me he was separated from his magistrate wife, that he now lived alone, when not travelling the world in search of evidence, in a flat with an empty fridge and without any trace of a woman. He reads vastly, she told me, literature of all kinds, listens endlessly to music and when he gets the time he writes. What does he write, I wanted to know. His thoughts. His thoughts about life.

  If you pressed Scarpinato too hard, if you spoke too tenden
tiously about the situation the Palermo magistrates were in, he snapped back with a flash of professional pride. He reminded you that organized crime had become an wholly international phenomenon and that it had become imbedded in the political life of a number of other countries beside Italy. He refused to name them. He said Italian magistrates had developed techniques of investigation whose sophistication and effectiveness were unmatched elsewhere. Warming up, he mentioned France. He noted how every inquiry into signs of major corruption and institutionalized criminality in France had been promptly stifled. He mentioned eastern Europe and Cosa Nostra’s other international links. He spoke of the incredible rapidity with which criminal money could be passed through the international banking system. We have to wait months for approval to examine a single bank account. He added that one longstanding proposal had been the establishment of a central financial data bank which would have recorded every banking transaction in Italy the moment it was made. It was perfectly feasible. It would’ve been an amazing help. It had never been approved.

  * * *

  WEEKS LATER I went back to the Palermo justice building to speak with Gian Carlo Caselli. The long summer had suddenly broken and turned to winter overnight. Snow dusted the spiky peaks around Palermo, the sky was streaked and livid and gusts of rain swept the desolate space before the justice building as daylight faded. Two days earlier, the leading Italian newsweekly had announced fear had come back to Palermo. A major terror attack was imminent. Probably with heat-seeking missiles. They were talking about Giovanni Brusca and his missile launcher again. Brusca had had some narrow escapes, but he’d always got away and taken his missile launcher with him. In one villa the police squad had burst in to find Brusca just gone and an open copy of Giovanni Falcone’s book on Cosa Nostra by the bed.

  A group of armed soldiers nervously circled me at the gates, eyeing my bag, and the police officer in charge insultingly described me to his subordinates as this person while they checked me out. A morose functionary was waiting by the electronic controls. He led me across the dark, immense and now deserted marble hall to the lift. Outside Caselli’s office, a dozen piratical bodyguards lounging on pews stiffened like rottweilers at our approach. The door to Caselli’s antechamber, under its wood veneer, was like a bank vault’s. Caselli was from Turin and earlier was deeply involved in the suppression of BR terrorism in Italy. When he’d applied for transfer to Palermo three years ago, this possibly suicidal move was decided by a sense of duty. He was taking up the baton of his murdered colleagues and friends Falcone and Borsellino. It’d been Caselli who’d led the magistrates for Falcone in January 1988, with his passionate championing before the vote that denied Falcone the chief investigator’s post in Palermo. It had been Falcone’s cruellest defeat, at the hands of his own jealous and obscurely motivated colleagues. Caselli arrived to work in Palermo some months later, on the fifteenth of January 1993. It was a momentous day, they joked in the prosecutor’s office Caselli now headed, because that same day police seized Totò Riina. Since then Caselli had been living, as he’d known before coming south, under constant threat of assassination, probably never more in danger than at the time of the Andreotti trial’s opening. Like the others, he’d serenely renounced personal freedom and family life, to do what one can. It was a choice they’d all willingly made. It was the paradox of Italy that this gravely compromised state, in the murky interregnum of jostling forces between the first republic and whatever might follow, still produced intellectuals who readily accepted to die for it. It wasn’t a choice any peacetime Australian had yet been asked to make.

  With Caselli was the dapper Guido Lo Forte in an off-duty jumper. If Scarpinato was the world weary bohemian of the Andreotti prosecution, Lo Forte had the air of a clever and amiable seminarian. I’d last seen him swathed in a black gown with ruff and tassels, leading the case against Andreotti and bearing with infinite courtesy the endless quibbles and interruptions of the defence. Do you realize the first objection came twenty seconds into the prosecution case? he asked me now. Lo Forte’s imperturbable mask had momentarily slipped at the end of that wearing day in the bunker when a radio reporter’s mike picked up a string of ripe Sicilian obscenities muttered to Scarpinato and Natoli. He wasn’t going to take it up the fucking ass any fucking longer, had been the appproximate sense. And at the next hearing the prosecution had startled the court by choosing silence, leaving unfinished its outline of the case that Andreotti was in effect a Cosa Nostra member. The interruptions made it impossible to demonstrate the logic of the evidence, Lo Forte said. Caselli grimly insisted it was not a polemical move, it was a purely technical matter, even when I remarked that it was without precedent in Italian legal history.

  Caselli’s reaction, he told me, to the menace of a ministerial inspection of the Palermo office, which was the just-announced political threat then hanging over them, had been surprise and curiosity. We have absolutely no idea what the reasons might be. Caselli was utterly reticent about the political climate in which the trial was opening, a trial he insisted repeatedly and publicly was not itself political. The purpose of the trial is to ascertain the facts, irrespective of the importance of those involved. The trial is not political. It is not a vendetta and it is not a beatification. Nobody, I noticed, was mentioning Andreotti except myself. I felt doltish and indiscreet. It was hard, though, to resist observing that the very fact Caselli felt it necessary to reaffirm so often the basic principles of civil law had itself a certain political point. Coming down from Piedmont, Caselli had been conscious of entering a culture whose subtleties were often hard to grasp, and that he couldn’t hope to emulate Falcone’s inwardness with the shades of the mafia mindset. But a great complementarity had evolved, Lo Forte put in now, with the Sicilian magistrates, an outsider-insider synergy of organization and psychology that had led to the arrest and trial since Caselli’s arrival of hundreds of mafiosi at all levels of the Cosa Nostra hierarchy.

  With a sudden hooked smile, Lo Forte remarked that Sicily was often too complicated even for Sicilians to understand, and didn’t seem particularly perturbed by the thought. He added, as if something big had hit him as we lounged on these low soft chairs behind armoured doors, that it’s as though in Sicily there were so many different truths … He was Sicilian himself, and his sharp, beaming, seminarian’s glint showed that this was a joke. The northerner Caselli shifted in his chair and his eyes flashed signals. Caselli showed no taste for metaphysical web spinning. Maybe he was wondering what it had to do with the matter in hand. Everyone became serious, though, when Lo Forte spoke of Sciascia’s corrosive Sicilian scepticism, that fatalism that had led him to attack Borsellino, Orlando and by implication Falcone as antimafia careerists eight years earlier. Lo Forte repeated more thoughtfully now that the difficulty is to find one truth when there are so many and maybe none. He started to talk about Borges and I’d have liked to pursue this, but Caselli had clearly had enough of literary criticism. Scepticism laid traps in Sicily. Caselli added though that he gave his children Sciascia’s books to read, so they’d understand.

  When I mentioned Scarpinato’s remarks on the international activities of the mafia, Caselli leaned forward in his chair. The mafia, he said, speaking slowly and weighting his words, Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia.

  It kills in Palermo. It invests in Milan. In Frankfurt. In London. New York. Maybe in Sydney. Cosa Nostra is a machine for producing power and money. Wherever and however it can. It would be a disaster to think of the mafia as just a Sicilian problem, or even as just an Italian problem. The immense wealth of Cosa Nostra is ever more massively present in the economy. Polluting legitimate interests. Nationally and internationally. Cosa Nostra’s historical roots are in Sicily, the heart and the brain probably still are. But its activities and interests are now entrenched in the world economy. It’s because the economic stakes are so high that the mafia inevitably contaminates politics. Where the mafia is, human rights, freedom, democracy are in danger.

  Outsi
de it was already dark as I trailed across the rain puddles. I remembered what Sciascia had said. Sicily is a metaphor for the modern world. A soldier barked at me to use the other gate. And unlike the magistrates I’d left inside, I was free to go where I wished.

  * * *

  A FEW nights later, not long before I left Palermo, I invited Letizia and Shobha to dinner at the Sant’Andrea, where they’d never been. We met in the lobby of the Delle Palme, waiting for a German writer, a woman who’d been with Shobha to Corleone, to do a joint piece for the German Playboy. At the Sant’Andrea Saverio Montalbano joined us, now a deputy police chief of Palermo, the man who’d discovered the biggest heroin refinery in Europe and been demoted for probing into Trapani’s mafia lodges. I was curious to meet the intrepid police officer, and looked out eagerly when the Alfa driven by his bodyguard screeched into the tiny piazza. He was welcomed by a kick in the shins, but it was just Anna Maria trying to keep out Miele, the abandoned Persian cat who’d adopted the Sant’Andrea and taken to sinking his claws into the soft thighs of women diners when he wanted their fish. I’d vaguely had the younger Al Pacino in mind, Serpico in a leather jacket, but Saverio Montalbano turned out to be a very slight, balding intellectual-looking man with a mild and refined manner.

  Shobha tossed her golden mane and recounted how they’d seen a little bent old black-clad widow that day in the Corleone supermarket, wearing a solid gold Rolex studded with diamonds. She said she’d photographed some gipsy children in the cemetery, dancing naked on Luciano Liggio’s grave. They had no pants on? asked Letizia, rather shocked. Just underpants, said Shobha. A man came up from another table and told Letizia how much he admired her. Petra the German and I talked about how hard it was to make the mafia intelligible, how much you needed to know and how little you could say. I told Letizia that Naples was dying and she said she wanted to come to Australia. I thought maybe she could hold that exhibition. She wanted to take photos there. Not in the cities. I want to go to the more remote parts. Saverio Montalbano was talking about his small boys. They respect me, you know, he was saying with emphasis. My kids respect me.