by Peter Robb
Letizia’s talk about coming to Australia reminded me that Roberto Scarpinato had told me he’d been to Sydney once, in the eighties. He’d gone there with Falcone, when they were looking into Cosa Nostra’s investments. What had he found there? I’d asked. Scarpinato had given a funny, wild, incredulous little laugh.
Australia was wide open, he’d said.
I hung round the Sant’Andrea after the others left, having a last drink with the Bissos and the kitchen staff. By the time we closed up, and I crossed the deserted piazza in the direction of the hotel, it was already midnight.
* * *
IN THE deep sea of Sicily, things go on changing and things go on staying the same. At the end of 1995 I came up for air, though like Cola Pesce I might’ve stayed underwater forever. The Andreotti mafia trial in Palermo inched forward through 1996. Nearly a year from its opening, three significant witnesses had been heard, the pentiti Tommaso Buscetta, Gaspare Mutolo and the one-time Palermo doctor, man of honour and DC politician Gioacchino Pennino. One of the assisting judges was hurt in a traffic accident early in 1996 and for a moment the trial risked aborting. A string of minor pentiti insisted, though only by hearsay, on Cosa Nostra’s reliance on Andreotti as its link with the supreme court judge Corrado Carnevale, who liquidated their convictions, and its fury when this confidence was betrayed in 1992. Appeals in the Andreotti trials would surely take The True History of Italy well into the third millenium before we’d know whether the court agreed it was all true, too.
Unlike the Palermo mafia trial, vast in its elaboration of a whole system of political power, the Perugia murder charge against Andreotti and his factotum Vitalone was precisely focused and highly documented, and was moving briskly toward a conclusion. The accused was now seventy-seven and ever more likely to have run his mortal race ere the Palermo judges decided, but a murder rap loomed. Between the start of the mafia trial in Palermo and the start of the murder trial in Perugia, His Holiness Pope John Paul II found time in the Vatican to clasp Andreotti’s hands fervently between his own in a photo opportunity the media described as almost an embrace. The former prime minister seemed heartened by the Holy Father’s attention, but a student challenged the Pope from the pulpit of Saint Peter’s over this, and it was the first time a pope had been challenged in his own church in seven hundred years.
The most ominous sign for Andreotti was the conviction in April 1996 of Bruno Contrada as mafioso and his ten-year prison sentence. Contrada was still a figure with very powerful friends, a former head of the Palermo investigative police and later third in charge of one of the Italian secret services, and his conviction after a two-year trial was a major victory for Gian Carlo Caselli and his team in the first political mafia trial. Contrada was always deeply distrusted by Giovanni Falcone, who’d seen him as one of the highly refined minds behind the failed bomb attack in 1989. His conviction meant the court and its judge Francesco Ingargiola, the same presiding over the Andreotti trial, accepted the evidence of the mafia pentiti, who among other things testified that Riina owed his long avoidance of capture to Contrada.
The political context too had changed and not changed a year later. In spring the election of a mildly reforming Italian government with a strong popular mandate looked like the real beginning of a bipolar parliamentary system in Italy, and this government’s leaders immediately promised an end to political interference in the administration of justice and full support for the antimafia magistrates in Palermo and the anticorruption magistrates in Milan. One of the new ministers was Antonio Di Pietro, the former magistrate who’d set off the political cataclysm in 1992, and one of the government parties the post-communists. Berlusconi, to whom Sicily alone of all the regions had given a majority, was now facing his own corruption charges, while the other leaders of his empire were simultaneously entangled in charges of corrupting the Rome magistracy, and of involvement with the mafia. The Rome justice building, where such strange things had happened to the Pecorelli murder enquiry and the Guttuso adoption enquiry, among countless other cases, was finally under investigation itself.
Cosa Nostra in 1996 had more to worry about than which politicians to back. The arrest of Giovanni Brusca in May left only two leaders of the Corleone group and its allies at large, Pietro Aglieri and Bernardo Provenzano, and it seemed that the long wave of hideous violence might now be nearly over, or at least in abeyance after twenty years. This was not, Gian Carlo Caselli warned in June, a reason for believing Cosa Nostra less active, less powerful, less internationally dangerous, or that other great areas of mafia activity weren’t still intact. The international network of organized crime alliances was becoming ever more close-knit.
In 1996 after a decade of inattention, there were Guttuso retrospectives in London and Ferrara. The New York Review briefly praised Leonardo Sciascia as the exponent of a brilliant and haunting crime fiction in which what matters is not so much the crime as the danger of knowing anything about it. Leoluca Orlando was still mayor of Palermo, though sliding in popularity, and Marta Marzotto’s instant fashions were moving briskly off the supermarket racks. Letizia Battaglia was seeing a lot of her newest granddaughter and Licio Gelli continued to advise those who were around to listen. Early in the year many magistrates applied for transfer from the stress-wracked Palermo prosecutor’s office, but Gian Carlo Caselli, Guido Lo Forte and Roberto Scarpinato kept plugging away. In Palermo the Sant’Andrea was crowded every night.
POSTSCRIPT
ON A WALL in every courtroom in Italy are the words THE LAW IS EQUAL FOR ALL. Everyone sees them except the judges on the bench, behind whose heads the principle is proclaimed. Italians read and reread the words over painful and tedious hours, catch sight of them through hard or tear-filled eyes, and their unspoken thoughts about them must be many. The Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, during one of his several ongoing trials in the Italian criminal courts in the middle of 2003, did not keep silent about his own thoughts on the law. He announced that The law is equal for all but more equal for me because so many Italians voted for me. It was clear the greater equality the prime minister had in mind was his own power to change the law, in ways that would make some of the long-standing charges against himself and his associates disappear. If the law is a problem, spend your way into office and change it as you will. This is a daring and risky plan, hard even for the richest man in Europe to bring off, and Berlusconi is not yet out of the woods. It might have been unwise of him to speak out, since people who proclaim themselves above the law, unlike those who merely and quietly break it, often come to bad ends.
In the brave new Italy of the two thousands, to look back at the Italy and Sicily of the second half of the twentieth century—at some of the events and people described in Midnight in Sicily—arouses a kind of nostalgia. A psychopathic killer like Cosa Nostra’s former head Totò Riina is unlikely to arouse a warm glow in anyone, and it is hard to sentimentalize a car bomb. Yet beside Silvio Berlusconi, one-time cruise-boat crooner and real estate man, Giulio Andreotti has acquired a patina of antique probity, deeply respectful of the laws of church and republic, austerely dedicated to party and career, and very, very careful with words. A lot of older Italians revere Andreotti as an almost saintly figure from a more dignified past, and the Life Senator knows how to play, with a downward smile and a murmured irony, on the contrast with the present. He does have a murder conviction hanging over him, which taints the aura somewhat, but after a long trial he has been cleared of association with Cosa Nostra and may yet live to be acquitted of the murder conspiracy in Italy’s highest court. Half way through Andreotti’s years-long mafia trial, the tide turned against the prosecutors when Baldassare di Maggio—Baldo to the friends—reverted from being a prosecution witness under state protection to his old role as mafia killer. Whatever made di Maggio do this, his turn was finely exploited inside and outside the courtroom, and it threw a fatal uncertainty over all the evidence given against Andreotti by former members of Cosa Nostra. So for one
Italian court Andreotti is now innocent of association with the mafia, but for another court he is guilty of a murder conspiracy whose articulation presupposes that he was able to call on Cosa Nostra to take out a troublesome journalist.
Beyond style, the difference between then and now in Italy is the acceleration of events. Andreotti’s troubles began after he left office, when the postwar status quo collapsed in 1992. No one before that year had dared whisper a word against him. Whereas Berlusconi’s problems with the law preceded his amazing makeover into a political leader, and they have not gone away since. Berlusconi’s earlier and even more astonishing career in business is a matter of ongoing interest—especially the origins of the money he first invested in the construction business, and his long cohabitation with a Palermo Mafia boss—and has been raised in evidence in mafia trials. Nothing like this happened in the fifty years of Christian Democracy; although the Sindona affair was a close call.
Andreotti never felt the hot shame of Berlusconi on his first outing as an international statesman, the shame of being served a warrant under the eyes of world’s mighty. This happened to Berlusconi on the last day of the G7 summit he was hosting in Naples at the end of 1994, and his first government imploded soon after. Berlusconi will never forgive or forget the judiciary’s role in his humiliation and fall, and the enacting of a new law by the second Berlusconi government, one which now prevents Berlusconi being tried on criminal matters as long as he remains prime minister, hardly restores the old decorum. The new law makes carefully clear that the temporary immunity applies to crimes committed before reaching high public office as well as anything the prime minister may perpetrate while in power. It will not affect the trial of Berlusconi’s closest associate for mafia association, which has been under way in Palermo for some years, or the conviction of another, his legal advisor and first minister of defence, for corrupting a judge in Rome.
Yet the principle uttered by The Leopard’s Sicilian prince still obtains. Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same. So the social order of Bourbon Sicily remained intact after Garibaldi, so the American liberators of 1944 put Cosa Nostra back in power. And so in the nineteen nineties, after the present book was written, Sicily made the transition from Christian Democracy to Come on Italy without missing a beat. Berlusconi’s party is now as deeply implanted as the power in Sicily as Andreotti’s ever was. It’s the same on the Continent. Faces are different, organizations have different names, yet Italy after Andreotti, after everything, remains a strangely familiar place. When the wave of Cosa Nostra violence receded after 1993, the politicians in Rome lost interest in the mafia presence once again. The Italian judiciary, harried and menaced, is now almost paralyzed. The opposition seems as unlikely to displace entrenched interests as the Communist Party was during the cold war.
Cosa Nostra, meanwhile, is as busy as ever, always changing, always the same, doing business with the Russians, the Colombians, and anyone else whose interests coincide with its own. I was recently looking into some matters concerning a president of Brazil and at the end of a long trail was startled to find myself looking—from a great distance—at a seized shipment of five and a half tons of cocaine and some familiar names from Naples, Calabria, Palermo. Surprise was somehow less than total. Yet ordinary Italians, without leaders, without organization, have not lost their energy, imagination, passion or their individual commitment. Nothing in Italy is ever a matter of indifference, and utterly unexpected things are no less likely to happen now than they were in the remarkable year of 1992. Three million people marched in Rome against the war in Iraq, and even unopposed, Berlusconi has never really got a secure grasp on power. The most interesting chapters of the Silvio Berlusconi story are still unwritten.
* * *
ALTHOUGH MIDNIGHT in Sicily was published in a fair few countries and was generously received, it never found a publisher in Italy. They all shied off, and I was inclined to put this down to a not unreasonable sense that Italians already knew a lot more about their own dreadful secrets than a foreigner could ever tell them. Then one day a fax arrived bearing the letterhead of a law firm in Catania in Sicily. The signatory claimed, in a loosely worded way, to represent former prime minister Giulio Andreotti and former prime minister Bettino Craxi—who had fled the country ahead of arrest and later died in exile—and objected to factual inaccuracies in the book. These were never specified, then or later, but the fax claimed Midnight in Sicily libelled Andreotti and Craxi, and demanded that it be withdrawn from sale around the world. A young Melbourne woman who lived in Rome, where she had clearly fallen into bad company, visited the book’s publishers in Sydney and London and ingenuously retailed a few threats. She said that Nitto Santapaola had read the book and was very angry. Nitto Santapaola had been quick to anger as a Cosa Nostra boss, and had once had his men torture and murder a group of youngsters who had snatched a necklace from his mother in Catania. In case the publishers of Midnight in Sicily did not get the message, the young woman added that Nitto Santapaola’s anger was something to worry about. She too demanded that the book be pulped. Nitto Santapaola was doing life by then, maybe several lives, and had plenty of time for reading, but there was something faintly unlikely in the image of him curled up on his bunk in maximum security and engrossed in Midnight in Sicily. The publishers held their ground and neither the Sicilian lawyers nor the young woman were ever heard from again. The British edition of Midnight in Sicily continues to do rather well in Italian bookshops.
What I had to do in Midnight in Sicily was to tell a terrible story. In telling it, I tried to give, in however partial and fragmentary a way, some of the ever-present history that produced the contemporary marriage of government and organized crime. And to show some of the everyday context of mafia crimes, show how people had to cope, show daily life lived in an uninterrupted noise of supermarket holdups, unexplained disappearances, shoot outs at petrol stations, rigged government contracts, drug overdoses, murdered magistrates, bag snatches in the streets, bodies on waste ground, political opportunism, road cargo hijackings, bureaucratic rivalries, burnt out cars, property development scams and now the cries from the shiploads of clandestines drowning offshore.
That life in its earlier forms forced many, over the last hundred years or so, to leave Sicily and the south. In the years described in Midnight in Sicily, many Italians left for Australia, and nothing in the book’s reception meant more to me than the remarks of those Australians who knew what they and I were talking about. I spent a lot of my own fifteen years in southern Italy energetically ignoring the mafia and the camorra and the ’ndrangheta. In the end I had to see that all the worst things in late twentieth-century Italy—the corruption and greed and secrecy, the social injustice, the political violence, the administrative inertia, the poisonous stagnation of public life, the cynical opportunism of individuals and the selling out of the young by the old—were all cemented by mafia. Since my love of the Italian south—all of it from Rome down—had grown rather than diminished over these years, I felt a responsibility to make some sense of it all, to understand what the connections were, and the discoveries that led to the start of Andreotti’s trials in 1995 provided an opening. I’m nowhere near the end of it.
* * *
THE WORDS above were written in June 2003 to introduce a new Australian edition of Midnight in Sicily. Four months later Italy’s Supreme Court overturned Giulio Andreotti’s conviction for conspiring with the mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti to murder the journalist Mino Pecorelli and annulled his twenty-four year prison sentence. Badalamenti was acquitted too. Pecorelli stayed dead but now nobody had ordered him killed. A year after that, in October 2004, the same Court confirmed the Palermo Appeal Court’s verdict in Andreotti’s trial for criminal association with Cosa Nostra.
The Palermo appeal verdict had been a curious one. The Court found Andreotti guilty of criminal involvement with Cosa Nostra, not just in the sense of mere availability but, as the Supreme Court reiterated,
in the wider and juridically more meaningful terms of a concrete collaboration. But only until the spring of 1980. After that, Andreotti’s active part in mafia crime had apparently ended, and the Appeal Court in Palermo had acquitted him on all the charges arising from his activities in later years.
The year 1980 was not early in Andreotti’s career—he was prime minister of Italy five times during the years he was also busy with Cosa Nostra—but it was early enough. Some remained convinced that the concrete collaboration had lasted another ten years at least, until just before Andreotti’s Sicilian proconsul Salvo Lima was shot dead in the spring of the terrible year 1992. The Supreme Court found this not so and the word of the highest court is the last word. Its decision was handed down in October 2004.
The special thing about 1980, apart from Andreotti’s dramatic change of ways in the spring, related to the Italian statute of limitations. Crimes in Italy were no longer punishable twenty-two years after they were committed. The Palermo verdict was handed down in May 2003, so Andreotti could no longer be pursued for anything he had done before 1981. Six months earlier and he would have been saved from jail only by his advanced age. Six months was next to nothing in Italian legal time. Andreotti’s trial had begun more than nine years before that final verdict was delivered in 2004 and dragged on, from the accused’s point of view, just long enough.
And in any case—another coincidence of timing—the Italian law for the crime of mafia association, Articolo 416 bis of the criminal code, had been enacted only at the end of that earlier terrible summer of 1982, as Midnight in Sicily recounts, five months after Cosa Nostra’s murder of the law’s proponent Pio La Torre and a couple of years after Andreotti was now found to have stopped working with and for Cosa Nostra. Andreotti was lucky too, in stopping when he did.