Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  The Honoured Society

  First published in Germany in 2008 by

  Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf. GmbH & Co.

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books,

  an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Petra Reski, 2008

  Translation © Shaun Whiteside, 2012

  The moral right of Petra Reski to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  The moral right of Shaun Whiteside to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN 978 1 84887 134 2

  Trade Paperback ISBN 978 1 84887 135 9

  eISBN 978 0 85789 929 3

  Designed by Richard Marston

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.co.uk

  For Shobha

  Contents

  Foreword

  Marcello Fava

  Rosaria Schifani

  San Luca

  Don Pino

  Letizia

  Padre Frittitta

  Corleone

  Palace of Poison

  Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri

  Anna Palma

  Heinz Sprenger

  Mafia Women

  Carla Madonia

  Rosalba Di Gregorio

  Carmine Sarno

  Messina Denaro

  Dramatis Personæ

  Foreword

  The sun is shining, and a light spring breeze stirs the lawyers’ robes as we walk to the hearing in the Higher Regional Court. It’s an impressive building, with colonnades, broad flights of stairs and high ceilings.

  Even before I get the chance to admire the architecture any further, we’ve reached the courtroom, which has two policemen armed with guns and truncheons standing outside. Which surprises me a little. At the last hearing in a regional court there were no policemen; after all, these weren’t criminal trials.

  Has police protection become standard in German regional courts? After all, much has changed in Germany since I’ve been living in Italy. I don’t have a chance to ask our lawyer. It’s only a few minutes until the hearing’s due to start. We step into the courtroom and sit down behind the sign that reads ‘Beklagte’: ‘Defendant’. I’m ruminating on the strangeness of the word, when I realize it refers to me. Sitting next to me is the publisher, my co-defendant. We have to push our chairs close together so that we can both sit behind the ‘Defendant’ sign. A tense silence reigns in the courtroom. We are sitting at Formica tables, like students in a seminar room, preparing to take our state exam in Late Medieval French.

  The lawyers flick through their files, and I remember what it was like to hold my book in my hands for the first time. I’d impatiently torn off the plastic wrapping, and the spine of the book had cracked slightly when I opened it up. Both reverent and anxious, I had flicked through the virgin pages that smelled of paper and solvent. It’s always an intimate moment for me to hold at last a book that previously existed only virtually, as a Word document or an email attachment. Feeling it, smelling it – and knowing that it will now go on to live its own life, independent of me. While I had still been sitting bent over the manuscript, some German friends had asked me apprehensively whether it wasn’t dangerous to write a book about the Mafia. After all, anti-Mafia journalists in Italy lived under police protection.

  ‘But my book’s being published in Germany,’ I’d replied.

  It is still silent in the courtroom. The two policemen sitting outside the door both have a lot of gel in their hair, one of them has such curly hair that I can’t help wondering whether it might be a perm. Aren’t perms for men out of fashion?

  The judge’s bench is slightly raised, and a crucifix hangs on the wall behind. I look to the right, to the gallery, where I recognize a few familiar faces – a friend, a female journalist, a male journalist. The male journalist is thumbing through his notepad. I run my hands over the Formica table, which looks as if it’s new. In Italy, courtrooms are always slightly tatty and the microphones never work. That would be unthinkable here, quite apart from the fact that the courtroom is small enough for anyone to be heard even without a microphone.

  Seen from distance, my view of Germany had always been that it was the country with litter-free fields and trains that ran on time. Unlike Italy, where everything’s a bit haywire, where the Mafia has infested whole stretches of the country, and even penetrated the highest political offices. With every year that I spent in Italy, Germany had become cleaner, more punctual and more incorruptible to me. And my Italian friends reinforced that assessment – perhaps out of conviction, or perhaps only because they were being kind. They exclaimed, ‘Ah, la Germania! Tutto funziona!’ when I raved to them about Germany. They praised the Germans’ sense of civic responsibility, the functioning legal system and the honest politicians who have to resign when so much as an unauthorized free trip can be proved against them. Never, I thought, could the Mafia really find a foothold in Germany. Because the Germans would take unhesitating and energetic action against it.

  The door behind the judge’s bench is still closed. No one in the courtroom dares even to whisper. Some people clear their throats. Others guiltily turn off their mobile phones, farewell tunes ring out and fall silent until there’s nothing to be heard but the rustling of paper. I look at the crucifix and recall a day in the high security courtroom in Caltanissetta, where the trials against the assassins of Giovanni Falcone were held. I was sitting amongst the journalists behind the lawyers, right next to the cages in which the mafiosi sat. The hearing dragged on until late evening. I saw the lawyers of the Mafia bosses Totò Riina and Leoluca Bagarella chatting amicably with their clients. The cages were roped off with only a thin, burgundy-coloured cord, which did nothing to prevent the lively exchange of ideas between the mafiosi and their lawyers. They shook hands through the bars. Late that night I drove back to Palermo, thinking all the way about what I had seen. Should high security imprisonment look like that?, I wondered. They might as well just sentence them to house arrest. Which is, incidentally, pretty much the norm in Italy. As if they weren’t Mafia bosses, but badly behaved children. I was convinced that nothing like that could ever happen in Germany.

  At last the door behind the judges’ bench opens, and the court comes in, a female judge and two assessors. I jump up from my chair, like everyone else there I’m determined to show respect to the court. Chairs scrape, and under the bench the wooden platform creaks as the judges take their seats. The journalist in the gallery clicks his biro. My book lies on the table next to him.

  Only one day after I first flicked through my book, I set off on a tour of readings in Germany. I read in bookshops, libraries and at literary festivals. Behind the questions of the German readers and journa
lists, I often sensed the belief that the Mafia was very far away. The Mafia for them was almost folklore, a phenomenon that mostly appeared in backwater villages in Southern Italy, steeped in incomprehensible rituals and archaic blood feuds, with, why not, songs to which the mafiosi danced in their hideouts, songs that Germans liked to listen to as slightly sinister party music. Every bit as if the Mafia were an oppressed little ethnic group that was only trying to keep its customs alive.

  I tried to make it clear to the audiences what I had been told by the state prosecutors in Reggio Calabria, Palermo and Naples: that the Mafia had adapted perfectly well to conditions in Germany for decades – because a mafioso can’t be bugged either in public places or at home, because membership of the Mafia isn’t a crime in German law, unlike in Italian law, and because money laundering is much easier in Germany, because in Germany a mafioso doesn’t have to demonstrate that the money he has invested is clean. Unlike in Italy, where the Pio La Torre law meant that even a person who was only under suspicion of Mafia membership could have his or her possessions confiscated. I told them that the German legal clause concerning criminal association was no substitute for the Italian clause concerning Mafia membership; criminal association requires evidence of preparation for a particular crime, which means that in Germany, the Mafia only risks suspicion of criminal activity in exceptional cases – the Duisburg massacre of August 2007 was a very visible ‘industrial accident’ that they’d love to forget. I explained that a Europe without borders would apply not only to holidaymakers, but above all to the Mafia.

  And the audiences looked at me as if I was warning them about a toxic cloud approaching from the distance. A toxic cloud whose effects they didn’t need to worry about if they didn’t leave the house. Then they asked me: ‘Have you ever been threatened by the Mafia?’

  That was the question I was asked most often. As if it was entirely natural or at least only to be expected that a journalist who dealt with the Mafia would put their own life at risk.

  I gave a hesitant reply to that question, which I found distasteful and almost too intimate. I’ve actually been threatened twice in the course of my research: once in Corleone. And once in Calabria, in San Luca, the place that the hitmen in the Duisburg massacre came from. I’d been threatened there because I was at the heart of the Mafia’s territory, I explained.

  Now the lawyers are making their case. The courtroom is tense, silent. The journalist hunches over his notepad like a schoolboy, and I think back to the reading I gave in Erfurt. My copy of the book had been around for almost two months, and the pages weren’t quite as virginal as before. I’d scribbled on them in pencil, it was bristling with post-it notes, and was slightly battered at the corners. As I walked through the beautiful streets of Erfurt to the bookshop, I thought about how surprised I had been in San Luca that there were so many cars with the German registration EF – for Erfurt – driving through the village.

  A few days before the reading, my publishers had received a lawyer’s letter threatening action if my book continued to be distributed with the passages about their client. It was already the third interim injunction I had been threatened with – and there was actually a bailiff waiting for me outside the bookshop. She handed me a letter containing the injunction.

  It wasn’t exactly the best start to the reading, particularly since about a hundred people were waiting for me inside: I tore the letter open and ran my eyes over it. Then I stepped into the bookshop. The bookseller had engaged a presenter for the reading – that’s not necessarily common, but neither is it unusual. The presenter was a stout gentleman, and greeted me by saying that my book was full of untruths. And that he was a good friend of the complainant whose interim injunction I was currently holding in my hand.

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  I’d have liked to tell him that he had every right not to like my book. I would have liked to suggest that he step down as presenter, but it was one minute to eight, and the audience were already shuffling their feet. He had a lot of good friends in Naples, the presenter went on, and I replied: ‘Me too’.

  Then I read. I read the passage about my trip to San Luca, and I read the passage about money laundering in Germany, what German investigators call Beweislastumkehr – a shift in the burden of proof. It is the reason why they envy Italian legislation: in Italy it isn’t up to the police to demonstrate that the money is dirty, but the investor to show that his money is clean.

  After my reading the stout presenter introduced the discussion by holding forth on how money laundering wasn’t possible in Germany, and how it was a mystery to him how I could have got hold of this truly bizarre information.

  At this point a gentlemen who spoke in a distinguished and authoritative tone started off on a lecture peppered with legal pseudo-information, which also led to the conclusion that money laundering in Germany was simply unthinkable. Last to speak was the former mayor of Erfurt, Manfred Ruge, who had also found time to come to my reading. He didn’t waste much time with an introduction, but launched a frontal assault on me: everyone here in the bookshop knew that I was the guiding spirit behind a recent documentary about the Mafia in Germany, the film in which he himself had been made to say things that he hadn’t meant in that way. I tried in vain to point out to him that he was perhaps overestimating my influence, and I’d had nothing at all to do with the documentary, rather the film-makers had done their research independent of me, but had plainly come to the same conclusion: that the Mafia had done a great job of settling itself in Germany for decades. I added that I was, however, flattered by the suggestion, because I thought the documentary was very good.

  He now clearly regretted every single word that had slipped from his lips in front of a rolling television camera.

  After the former mayor of Erfurt, some of the Italians in the room felt moved to take the floor. A man with a bow-tie rose to his feet and delivered a long speech in which he defended my accusers, who were, after all, valuable members of society, by saying that everything that I had written in my book with reference to documents from the Italian and German police was a complete invention – that I had therefore stained the honour of the gentlemen I had quoted. Those same gentlemen clearly enjoyed his speech – which was why he glanced, looking for approval, at some men sitting next to him, and then said, ‘I admire your courage, I very much admire your courage, I have a quite extraordinary degree of admiration for your courage, Frau Reski.’

  Thus inspired, the Italians sitting next to him also felt spurred to speak, but their German was poor, so they attacked me in Italian, calling me a liar and finally crying, ‘You are the mafiosa here!’ I couldn’t see their faces clearly, because I was blinking under a harsh light all the time, and they were in the shadows.

  Until that point the audience had sat there like rabbits frozen in the headlights. But now they started shouting: ‘Who are you? What on earth’s going on here?’ There was uproar, and it was a long time before the stout gentleman remembered his role as presenter and called for quiet. At the end of the event both German and Italian readers came up to me and asked me anxiously if I was alone in Erfurt, and if they could accompany me to my hotel.

  That evening in my hotel room I thought for a long time about all that had happened. I knew a turning point had been reached, and not just for me. My book had been published at a time when the Mafia, particularly the ’Ndrangheta, were trying hard to slip back out of sight. Lulling the Germans back into the deep slumber from which the Duisburg murders had startled them.

  Now, in the courtroom, it’s the turn of the plaintiff’s lawyer to set out his case. It seems to me that he’s trying to hypnotize me. He doesn’t take his eyes from mine for a second as he delivers his speech. That nettles the judge, who instructs the lawyer to look not at me but at the court while he’s speaking. ‘We attach great importance to that,’ she says.

  The male journalist takes notes and skims back and forth through my book. The first time I held a copy, with the passag
es blacked out in accordance with the court instructions, it seemed strangely unreal, as if the book had appeared from somewhere underground. As if this was a book that might be dangerous to read. I still expect my fingers to turn black every time I run them over the pages. Shortly after the reading in Erfurt some German newspapers reported on my case – and again I thought of the moment when I first held my book in my hands. I had expected it to lead a life of its own, but not that my book would turn into a ‘case’. Italian journalists took a great interest, and wrote with amazement about the strangeness of the fact that a Mafia book could only be published in Germany if it had passages blacked out. Blacked-out content that had already been documented at length by the Italian press, with no judicial consequences.

  At last the court orders a break for deliberation, and I think about all the little flickering distress flares that were fired off after my reading in Erfurt. Phone calls to my publishers, letters, emails. People who didn’t inspire confidence offering their advice. The German police advised me to replace the door to my flat in Germany with an armoured one. And to put up panes of bullet-proof glass over my windows.

  Worried friends rang me up leaving unhelpful messages saying ‘Hey, you take care,’ as if I was notorious for forgetting to look left and right when crossing the road. A friend advised me always to check that the wheel nuts on my car were fastened tightly enough. Luckily I don’t own a car. Most of the year I live in Venice.

  During the break, no one in the courtroom dares to speak in a loud voice. The plaintiff mutters something to the lawyer behind his hand, the journalist leafs through a newspaper, and the two armed policemen crack their fingers. In a whisper, I ask our lawyer if it’s normal to have armed policemen at a hearing in the Higher Regional Court. He shakes his head. Clearly the judge has ordered police protection.