The Full Catastrophe

by James Angelos

  The old man had pale blue eyes and dyed black hair. Two fingers were missing from the hand he reached out to me. I shook it and began to introduce myself, but he interrupted as if he’d already been fully briefed.

  “Do you know what you should write in your book?” he said.

  “No, tell me.”

  “ ‘Fuck the Greeks!’ ”

  A friend sitting across from him at the table, an octogenarian with a mullet, made a look of horror. “No! Don’t write that,” he said, doing the best he could to raise his faint voice.

  “Okay, don’t write that,” said the man with the missing fingers. “Write, ‘We need to burn down this whole idiotic country and start with the government.’ ”

  “No! Don’t write that,” said the octogenarian. “Write: ‘I can’t make sense of any of it.’ ”

  The man with the missing fingers was Lambros Kotsikaris. He’d worked for forty-nine years as a “guest worker” in Germany, one of the hundreds of thousands of laborers from the Mediterranean rim who in the decades following World War II went to Germany to provide muscle for its booming economy. He’d left his fingers behind in a German auto parts factory, he told me. Kotsikaris complained about various matters of local governance that did not seem serious enough to warrant his outrage. He pointed to the row of empty flagpoles across the street. The municipality had once kept a nice row of international flags there. What the hell happened to the flags? He complained of the noisy engines on mopeds and motorcycles that local teenagers adjusted to make louder. He criticized the twenty-euro fee necessary to reserve a plot in the community cemetery.

  He then casually mentioned that his nephew had provided the Uzi that the treasurer had used to shoot the mayor. The nephew, who was described by witnesses in the murder trial as unmarried and marginally employed, testified that he had found the Uzi in an abandoned quarry. “I know it was illegal, but I held on to it,” he told the court. “That weapon, I saw it and I had it. It looked loaded.” The court found that the nephew provided the gun in exchange for the promise of a 5,000-euro payment, and sentenced him to seventeen years in prison for complicity in murder and for offenses related to the weapon. Kotsikaris didn’t have much sympathy for his nephew. “He and the others should be sentenced to a lifetime of hard labor,” he said.

  “What about the fact that the two others are still on the municipal payroll?” I said. I thought, given his considerable anger over other matters, he’d have something to say about it. To my surprise, it was not among his issues of concern. “It’s a way of taking care of their families,” he said. “That’s the way I see it.”

  “But is that the proper way to provide welfare to the families?” I said. “By keeping convicts on the municipal staff?”

  “What’s proper in Greece?” said a heavy man who had come over, taken a seat, and lit a cigarette.

  The octogenarian decided I needed to be reminded: “Write, ‘I won’t make sense of any of it,’ ” he said.

  “People in Germany hear stories like this and ask, ‘Why should we send money down there?’ ” I said, thinking this might provoke a response from Kotsikaris, who at one point showed off his German with the thickly accented declaration: “Ich spreche Deutsch.” Kotsikaris said nothing. A butcher with a bald crown and a lazy eye who had until then sat in silence was inspired.

  “Tell Merkel there’s nothing left to take,” the butcher said. “The cow has run off! We’re holding only the cowbell now.” This statement induced a round of laughs. Encouraged, the butcher went on, making a fist and grabbing his wrist in a manner of depicting a penis. “Merkel can come and take this!” he said. There were more laughs. The butcher then invited me to spend the night drinking ouzo with him, but I declined on account of having more work to do.

  The octogenarian arose and looked as if the conversation had disturbed his peace. “Write: ‘I won’t make sense of any of it,’ ” he told me again, and then hobbled off.

  A few days later, I returned to Nikisiani and stopped by the former town hall—which still functioned as a small municipal office—during working hours. One of the clerks was an affable, lanky man who sat at a desk filling out and stamping paperwork for a small group of gathered citizens. After he was done, he offered to show me the dead mayor’s office, which, he said, still looked like it did the day he died. We walked up a few flights of wood stairs and entered the office. On the wall behind the desk hung an imposingly large print of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper in between Greek and European Union flags. Scattered around were religious icons and a bust of Democritus, the ancient thinker who theorized the existence of atoms. On the wall hung a plaque with a saying attributed to the historian Thucydides: “The city runs well if the citizens are convinced by the rulers, and the rulers by the law.” The clerk told me that the mayor used to be his gym teacher. He was a friendly guy, the clerk said, and relations between the mayor and the treasurers had seemed good. “I couldn’t believe it,” he said of the shooting. “It all happened because of money.”

  After I left the mayor’s office, I visited a man named Apostolos Tsiakiris in his tidy house near the former town hall. Tsiakiris, a retired municipal clerk, had been a friend and political associate of the mayor, and filled in for him for one year after the shooting. Tsiakiris sat on his couch in a pair of shorts under an icon of Mary and Jesus. He told me that when he was acting mayor, he’d stopped sending payments to the treasurers because they’d been jailed for the shooting. At the time, however, stopping their pay was illegal. Employees who couldn’t go to work due to incarceration were considered on “automatic holiday” and entitled to half their pay, pending the outcome of a local government disciplinary board decision. A lawyer for Saltouridis, the treasurer, therefore sued Tsiakiris for breach of duty, forcing the municipality to begin paying the prisoners again, and to make back payments. About six months after the killing, the local disciplinary board ruled that the treasurers ought to be dismissed for “undignified behavior.” The lawyer for Saltouridis, however, appealed that decision, sending the case to a secondary disciplinary board in Athens. That meant the treasurers would keep getting their halved salaries at least until a decision on the appeal was handed down, which would take a very long time. This very much upset Tsiakiris. “You can’t be a murderer and keep getting paid,” he told me. “That doesn’t happen in any other government.” Before I left, I asked Tsiakiris what the mayor had been like. “He always tried to help,” he said. “He could never say no to anyone.”

  On my way out of town that day, I stopped by the local cemetery. Triantafyllos Koukoudis’s grave was decorated with a large crucifix, plastic flowers, and three portrait images of him wearing a tie. On a plaque was written a message from his daughter: “I hope you are the closest star up there and your sparkle will hug the whole world as happened when you were with us. You are and will always be my angel.”

  —

  During their murder trial, Savvas Saltouridis and Ioakeim Monos told the court they never intended to harm the mayor, just to frighten him. “I learned from my parents, both of whom are lost, to not do harm to any person,” Saltouridis, the shooter, told the jury. “Never, never did I intend to do something like this.” Saltouridis testified that shortly after he was appointed treasurer, the mayor began asking him for municipal money. On the first occasion, Saltouridis testified, the mayor called him into his office and said: “Because we had elections, I had some financial exposures.” The treasurer, eager to please, said he forked over 50,000 euros. Over the next three years, the mayor’s requests for money kept coming, according to Saltouridis. He said he grew anxious over the growing financial gap, and suffered periods of trembling and high blood pressure. His psychological state deteriorated, and he couldn’t play with his children. “I’m near death,” he said to himself at the time, according to his testimony. “I’m going to die. I’m certain.” In the summer of 2009, Saltouridis said, he reminded the mayor that certified accountants would be coming for a routin
e check of the municipal books. “Don’t worry,” the mayor said, Saltouridis testified. “Everything will fall into place.” Saltouridis said he complained to the mayor about the situation one day, but the mayor just lay down on his office sofa and began scratching his genitals. “I started to go crazy,” Saltouridis told the court.

  Monos, the deputy treasurer, described himself to the court as a dedicated public servant. “I did what I could to serve the local citizens and to be okay at my job,” he said. “Whatever the mayor told me to do, I did it.” Monos said he gave the mayor “some amounts,” but added he did not have a complete understanding of the depth of the fiscal gap until November 2009, when Saltouridis informed him. At one point, the mayor called him into his office and asked for the titles to his house, Monos told the court. “But I don’t have anything to do with this,” Monos testified he told the mayor. “Do what you can to help,” Monos said the mayor told him. “Otherwise I will be destroyed, but I’ll destroy you both as well.” In December, as the visit from the accountants was imminent, Saltouridis proposed a plan to scare the mayor, Monos told the court. “If you think it will change something, let’s scare him,” Monos said he replied.

  Saltouridis said he didn’t mean to pull the Uzi trigger that night; he was trembling when he removed the weapon out from under a jacket and said: “Mayor, please put back the money because I don’t know what will happen.” Saltouridis said he expected the mayor to be frightened by the sight of the gun. Rather, according to his testimony, the mayor said: “Stop, you tsoutseki”—an untranslatable, derogatory word thought to be derived from the Turkish for “flower,” or perhaps “dwarf”—and lunged toward him, hitting the gun. Saltouridis said he then slipped backward and accidentally pulled the trigger. The gun was set to automatic and sprayed bullets, he testified. “I pulled the trigger once,” he told the court. “I regret it. Not once in a million times would I do something like this again. I couldn’t understand what I had done. I’m ashamed of it and I should be punished for what I’ve done,” he said. “I apologize one thousand times.”

  The court did not believe Saltouridis’s version of the events. It found the gun was not set to automatic, but to fire one bullet at a time, and that Saltouridis intentionally and repeatedly pulled the trigger. One year after the shooting, the court convicted Saltouridis of intentional homicide “decided on and carried out in a calm mental state.” He was sentenced to life in prison. Monos, the deputy treasurer, was sentenced to sixteen years in prison for direct complicity in the murder, and one year for possession of the weapon. The court held that both men acted with intent to kill the mayor as part of a plan to pin on him the full blame for the missing money. At the time of my visit, both Saltouridis and Monos faced additional criminal charges of embezzlement, in which prosecutors said they acted jointly with the mayor to take more than 700,000 euros of municipal money, some 6,000 of which came from a public kindergarten fund. Lawyers for Saltouridis and Monos told me their clients were not responsible for the embezzlement and did not take any of the missing money for themselves. They were also appealing the convictions in the murder case, maintaining they had not intended to kill the mayor and that things had just gotten out of hand.

  The mayor, of course, was not around to defend himself from allegations that he partook in the embezzlement or was responsible for it. The mayor’s brother testified that the mayor had used some 200,000 of the missing municipal euros to plug a temporary financial shortage elsewhere in the budget, the result of “some community program” being delayed. “That happens in municipalities, that is to say, to use money on other projects,” the brother said. The other 500,000 euros, the brother added, was probably misappropriated by the two treasury employees.

  —

  One morning in Kavala, a nearby Aegean port city dotted with Ottoman-era buildings, I visited the office of a lawyer for Saltouridis, a man named Vasileios Kagkaidis. The lawyer worked in a dingy office building near the city’s harbor, and seemed to have a good business going. When I arrived, I sat down next to a few seemingly down-and-out clients in a small, windowless waiting room filled with their cigarette smoke. In his office, Kagkaidis loudly maintained simultaneous conversations with a client, an office phone, a mobile phone, and a young woman working for him. When he hung up one of the phones, it inevitably rang again within a few seconds. “Those are magic tricks!” he yelled into one phone, smacking the desk with his palm. “Whatever they say, the truth is I opened their eyes!” he yelled into the other phone. Eventually, he yelled to me: “Come inside, big guy.” Kagkaidis was a short man with graying hair and large brown eyes. The back of his swivel chair reached above his head. Above him on a bookshelf was a plaque inscribed with an Ancient Greek aphorism: “There is no surer enemy than an ungrateful beneficiary.” Two older men, both clients wearing shorts and sleeveless T-shirts, sat at the desk opposite the lawyer. Kagkaidis asked me why I was interested in Saltouridis’s case. I told him it was because Saltouridis was still on the public payroll even as Greece’s creditors were demanding the country fire civil servants. “So now that the Troika, Europe, are asking us to lay off loads of civil servants, now it becomes an issue,” he said. “Otherwise, they would have kept getting paid.” He banged his hand on his desk in a way that made it seem he was angry about this, though I soon realized this was his default way of talking. “And they keep searching for civil servants to fire so we can get the next dose.” “Dose” had become the common Greek way of describing the bailout loan installments, which came in trickles, like methadone for an addict, based on the fulfillment of the creditors’ rehabilitation program.

  I asked Kagkaidis if it was right that his client still remained on the public payroll. “Behind it all is a woman and three children,” he said, in a plaintive, lowered voice. “The law wisely foresaw, that if he kills someone, what are his kids going to do?” His voice resumed its normal, elevated volume. “Wise is the law that says you’ll take half because there’s a wife and three children.” It seemed important to Kagkaidis that his imprisoned-for-life client be grateful, if not for a less severe sentence, then for the fact that he was still getting a paycheck. Kagkaidis, after all, was the one who had sued Tsiakiris, the acting mayor after the shooting, for having refused to pay his client; and it was his idea to appeal the local government disciplinary board decision, which forced the municipality to keep paying the men, pending the outcome.

  “All those babies were paid from me,” Kagkaidis said, in reference to his client’s three children.

  “What was your justification for the appeal?” I asked him.

  “What justification?” he said, shrugging, looking side to side and scrunching his face to indicate this was a preposterous, legally irrelevant question. “There is no justification. You took a weapon and killed the mayor? What justification?” The reason for the appeal, he said, was to “draw it out.”

  Indeed, the disciplinary review process had been drawn out. During the summer of my visit to Pangaio—three years after the appeal—a second-degree review board in Athens decided that Saltouridis and Monos should be dismissed, as Mitsotakis, the administrative reform minister, had pointed out on the radio. When I contacted the ministry to find out why it had taken that long, the answer wasn’t particularly illuminating. “It took really long to start functioning properly,” a ministry spokesman said. That spokesman also maintained that the two employees had been fired as a result of the appeal decision. I asked him if he was sure about that. Yes, he told me. He was very sure. In Pangaio, however, municipal officials told me that only they could technically fire the employees, and legally, they could not do so quite yet. According to Greek law at the time, the employees had a right to appeal again, this time to the country’s supreme administrative court. The treasurers would automatically be given up to three months to decide whether they would file such an appeal. This three-month period could not, according to the law, begin over the summer, due to its being a period of leisure. That meant the convicts would
remain on the payroll at least until late autumn, and potentially much longer if they did decide to appeal again. I eventually informed the reform ministry that it had been premature in declaring the treasurers fired, and its spokesman later acknowledged the error.

  Kagkaidis, seemingly bored with discussing the case any further, began to talk to me about politics. He said he’d had a poster of John F. Kennedy in his room as a child. Kennedy, Obama, they were human beings, he said. Bush? “He fucked up the whole world.” Kagkaidis was a passionate advocate of PASOK, which made him a bit unique for the time, as the party was politically eviscerated, and scorned by most Greeks for its part in the country’s downfall. “Tell America that Greece exists,” Kagkaidis told me. “That there’s freedom in Greece, and that we speak freely.” He then proceeded to speak his mind some more. German chancellor Angela Merkel, he said, was like Bush, and she was the one who wanted Greece to fire civil servants. “For me it’s a mistake to fire them,” he said. “They have families, etc. But the European right is pushing us. Bush, in other words. Bush!” He then paused, and changed tack, like a lawyer able to argue any side of an issue. “But they’ve got the money,” he said, shedding the indignant tone of his previous statements. Kagkaidis then pointed to the two gray-haired clients on either side of him, who’d been listening in reverential silence. “You see these two deadbeats?” Kagkaidis said, pointing in their directions but not bothering to look at them. “Greece has three million pensioners like them. Deadbeats. And illegal pensions, too. Thankfully, Germany pays, and they get their money. If their pensions are cut, they’ll start killing each other.” The two men remained silent, and one nodded slightly in agreement.