Perhaps Rosaria was right after all, and all that remains is hope of a divine plan.
San Luca
‘Ma,’ says Salvo, as if he could read my mind. Ma means ‘but’. In Sicily, though, the word ma has many more meanings than that. According to emphasis, ma can mean: ‘Everyone here has gone mad’, or ‘If you think so’, or ‘Do what you like’. And if the m is particularly protracted, mmma means: ‘The longer you think about life, the more you reach the conclusion that everything is in vain.’
We’ve left the bypass, and we’re very close to the Piazza Indipendenza. And we’re in a traffic jam. There’s always a traffic jam in Palermo, the traffic is in a constant unforeseen state of emergency. A state of emergency that lasts from eight in the morning till midnight. Four-lane bypasses end up in one-way streets. Or nowhere. In the Palermo suburb of Mondello there’s a four-lane road that looks as if it could be somewhere in Los Angeles. It comes from nowhere and peters out as a dirt track half a kilometre further on. A boss wanted it.
Salvo opens the window a crack. A hubbub of voices enters from outside, scraps of music, exploding firecrackers, the wail of a burglar alarm. Faded blue saints glow in the wall of a house, promising two hundred days of absolution to anyone who says the credo before them. Finally we’ve arrived in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, outside my hotel. The Centrale Palace is my home in Palermo, a home that has survived even extensive renovation unharmed. Where hotels are concerned, I fear nothing more than alterations. That’s why I love the familiar faces at the Centrale all the more. The head porter wears a pair of glasses that sit on his nose like a pince-nez, his centre parting looks as if it’s been drawn with a ruler. The Tunisian hotel servant has frozen into a statue, and the old maître d’ serves the breakfast tea with distracted dignity. Anyone who stays at the Centrale Palace is living not in a hotel but in a nineteenth-century Sicilian novel.
As soon as I enter the lobby, the receptionist bows in greeting. He purses his lips as if to kiss my hand and scatters a few compliments: ‘Time simply doesn’t pass as far as you’re concerned, Dottoressa!’ he says.
Since the day I was picked up by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, the receptionist has respectfully addressed me as Dottoressa. The lawyer was pleasantly touched not to have had to introduce himself. The receptionist obviously knew his name.
I have my case brought to my room, and rejoin Salvo in the car. To get to the restaurant, we have to turn into the Via Roma. As it is every Sunday, the Via della Libertà is closed to through traffic. The Sunday-evening stroll from the Teatro Politeama to the Teatro Massimo is one of Palermo’s sacred rituals. Wives are got up in outfits that look like suits of armour. They hold their handbags pressed under one arm and their husbands under the other. And by the boutique window displays the women sink into a dream-like state – until their husbands drag them away.
Shobha is already sitting on the terrace of the Fresco when I get there. Her blonde hair flashes in the darkness. Piano music drifts from the restaurant, and sitting on the terrace you look down on the yellow volcanic walls of the Ucciardone prison, an old Hohenstaufen fortress with floodlights and sentries behind armoured glass. The mafiosi called the prison Grand Hotel Ucciardone: they had champagne and lobsters delivered until they were released, usually after just a few months. After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, a stay in the Ucciardone temporarily became rather less comfortable. Temporarily. Because lately the prison attracted a certain amount of attention when guards were found to have distributed telefonini among the bosses.
‘You’ve got blonder,’ Shobha says.
Every time we see each other again, we behave like an old couple who have been apart for a few weeks and are now looking at each other with a critical eye: is your hair shorter or longer? Are your earrings new? Yes, they really suit you, and what wonderful shoes you have, I want some pointed shoes like those. We’ve been working together for so long that we’ve decided to stop counting the years, because then anyone would be able to work out how old we are.
The pianist comes to our table, makes sheep’s eyes at Shobha and asks if she’ll be coming to eat here again tomorrow, then she could go with him to a concert afterwards. Shobha doesn’t even turn round, and says: ‘I’m busy over the next few weeks. And the next few months, and the next few years as well. I’m sorry. Scusami.’
And then we stare at the walls of the Hohenstaufen fortress until the pianist wanders back, shoulders drooping, to his piano and plays something that sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March.
‘And your mother?’ I ask Shobha.
‘Tomorrow,’ Shobha says. ‘We’ll get to work tomorrow.’ Then she adds: ‘At least it’s a good story. Not something like San Luca.’
At the end of every report we swear we won’t do any more Mafia stories. Basta. We plan only to cover stories about Sicilian wine and fine hotels. About the wonderful quality of Calabrian olive oil. About Naples without rubbish in the streets.
Somehow we never manage to put our good intentions into action. Even while we were on the ferry from Sicily to Reggio Calabria we remembered our plan to do a report on something positive at long last. But instead we were sitting a short time later in the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria, looking at a sea that looked as if it was poisonous, shimmering in tones of greyish blue with oil tankers in the glaring light. The 1970s hung in the hotel’s heavy curtains; they fell from the neon light of the restaurant and settled on the faces of the hotel guests, who all looked like pharmaceuticals salesmen passing through. In the lift, one of them asked if we were hostesses.
‘It isn’t so bad here,’ we reassured each other, like a mantra.
‘You don’t find such lovely cafes that often. We haven’t got such an elegant seafront in Palermo,’ said Shobha.
Like a woman whose eyes are so beautiful that you forget her short legs, Reggio Calabria is saved by its seafront. The cafes stood side by side under palms and magnolias and cast-iron arches. Later, we walked through the warm sirocco night down Corso Garibaldi and established that you would have to go the Via Montenapoleone in Milan to find a greater density of luxury boutiques: Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Versace, Rolex, Gucci, Prada, Cesare Paciotti. The ’Ndrangheta’s shopping mile. Nothing but marble temples with salesgirls who look like something halfway between nuns and museum attendants. And whose eyes are as icy as the breeze from an air-conditioning system.
We drove in silence along the coast road to San Luca. We glided through a diffuse grey light, as if the sky were filled with sand. We drove past shells of buildings, orphaned houses, prickly pears and crippled olive trees, past concrete posts for bridges that had never been finished, street signs riddled with bullet holes and a tug-boat rusting away on the beach amidst driftwood and bits of plastic. People-trafficking is a source of income for the ’Ndrangheta, and the villages of the Ionian coastal region are its fortresses: Platí, Áfrico, San Luca.
Since the murders in Duisburg, San Luca had become almost more famous than Corleone. The blood feud had broken out eighteen years before and since then the clans of the Nirta-Strangio and the Pelle-Vottari seemed to have been persecuting one another with an Old Testament thirst for revenge, as if time were still being measured with hourglasses and honour could only be redeemed with blood. Because the Mafia thrives on symbols, murders tend to be carried out on feast days – Christmas, 1 May, Assumption. Behind this lies the message: ‘Until the end of my life I may remember the murder of my wife every Christmas; but for you, Assumption will never again be a feast day because on that day, until the end of your life, you will think about your murdered brother.’
The investigators know, beyond the bloodlust, the Mafia always thinks pragmatically. The blood feud is by no means entirely archaic. The criminal prestige of the family that organized the Duisburg massacre has risen enormously, and that’s where economic profit lies. Now they just have to present themselves to a member of the regional government and say: ‘We’re the peop
le from San Luca.’ And the next public bid will be in their favour.
The ’Ndrangheta has divided Calabria up into three territories: the Tyrrhenian coast, the Ionian coast and the city of Reggio Calabria. Even if you didn’t know, you would smell it. In the air, which always smells a bit burned. In the 1960s and 1970s the ’Ndrangheta bought up the biggest agricultural enterprises, vineyards and olive groves, and the public prosecutor’s office couldn’t bring a case against it because the owners hadn’t reported the extortionate purchases. The ’Ndrangheta now controls every breath anyone takes, every inch of road, every thought.
When we arrived in San Luca that autumn, after the assassination, the day lay there like a piece of wet grey cotton wool, between the Aspromonte mountains and the dry bed of a river called Bonamico, ‘good friend’. In San Luca every hour seemed as long as a day of atonement, as weird as an endless Day of the Dead when you’re forever bumping into ghosts.
We stopped outside a bar that sparkled like a crystal. One wall was decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna of Polsi and the barman ceaselessly polished the marble counter, the glass shelves, the brass-coloured water taps, and served three young financial policemen their espressos. One of the cops had flaming red hair. He was constantly checking the position of his beret in the mirror beside the bar, and Shobha was so taken with this that she casually took a picture. When we stepped up to the bar, he told us that on one of their patrols a few days previously they’d noticed a Volkswagen Golf which, it turned out, had been hired in Duisburg and not taken back. And they’d found half a kilo of hashish in its boot. No big deal. But still.
San Luca looked as if its walls had been designed to match the grey of the sky, unplastered, with rusty iron railings and electric wires that hung between the houses like washing lines. There weren’t even any street signs: the street names were just painted on the walls of the houses with black paint. Shortly after the Duisburg massacre, San Luca had tried to present itself to the world’s press as a village forgotten by the world, full of unemployed woodsmen, God-fearing women and one brave priest, a lone voice in the desert, fighting tirelessly against the Mafia. He was the one we wanted to meet. Don Pino.
Up on the hill, next to the church of Santa Maria Addolorata, a few old grey stone houses clung to one another. When there had been an earthquake a few years ago, these old houses had been destroyed. And not rebuilt, just abandoned. As if it wasn’t worth preserving anything. Opposite the church there was another bar, a scruffy little affair with a veranda where a few men sat. When we asked about Don Pino, they shrugged as if they were hearing his name for the first time. A man offered us a coffee. His eyes looked as if he was wearing mascara: his lashes were black and dense, and curved slightly upwards as if he’d used an eyelash curler.
He really lived in Australia, in Adelaide, he said. But then he had started feeling terribly homesick and had come back to his home of San Luca with his wife and two children. Although he regretted that, because there were no jobs here. He smiled politely, and perhaps with some embarrassment.
Because Adelaide is thought of as a stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, and particularly of two clans from San Luca, the Nirtas and the Romeos, both of which were involved in the Duisburg murders.
Among the Italian Mafia organizations, the ’Ndrangheta has proved to be the most mobile, an unbeatable advantage in business terms; unlike the entrenched Sicilian Mafia, the Calabrian clans are active not only in every region of Italy but all over the world. Even before the First World War, the ’Ndrangheta had invested the money it made from extortion into the cultivation of cannabis in Australia. By the 1950s it controlled the drugs trade in Canada. In America, the Calabrian men of honour joined forces with the Sicilians; according to the FBI, between one and two hundred mafiosi of Calabrian origin are active in New York and Florida. In South and Central America the ’Ndrangheta enjoys privileged trade relations with cocaine producers in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia and Colombia. Calabrian public prosecutors have uncovered links between the Colombian paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC, and the ’Ndrangheta. Thanks to their good connections, the ’Ndrangheta has been able to open up new sources of production and export routes for the cocaine trade, cutting out the middlemen and selling the cocaine more cheaply. That’s another unbeatable advantage.
The ’Ndranghetista Roberto Pannunzi had the best connections with the Colombian drugs cartel: he was able to buy his cocaine at a particularly good rate because he took delivery of at least three tonnes a month, and always paid on time and in cash. Pannunzi even sealed his business connections with blood bonds: his son Alessandro married the daughter of a Colombian drugs baron. In 2004, Pannunzi was arrested, along with his son, in Spain – the soft underbelly of Europe, according to the investigators. Spain is the most significant portal for the importation of cocaine from South America. And in January 2008, Pannunzi’s henchman in Calabria was arrested: ‘Don Micu’ Trimboli, who was led away in his tracksuit after he had been tracked down to a bunker under a sheep-pen. When he was arrested, he cursed the politicians who were concerned only with garnering votes. And didn’t keep their promises. And behind this there lay an undisguised threat: the politician who was supposed to have been looking out for him had clearly committed a small but significant act of negligence – that was the only explanation the boss could find for the fact that the police had suddenly appeared on his trail. The Mafia had always bought political protection with votes.
The reason Germany is so important for the ’Ndrangheta is because that’s where they invest their profits from the drugs and arms trade, which would risk confiscation in Italy. Since 1982 it has been possible in Italy to confiscate the property of individuals who are only suspected of belonging to the Mafia. They have to demonstrate that their property was acquired legally, with clean money. If that proof cannot be supplied, confiscation can go ahead. At least, that’s what the law says. So it’s easier for the ’Ndrangheta to invest abroad, without bothering about the precautionary measures that are required in Italy. In Germany, a waiter who earns a thousand euros a month can buy a hotel without anyone asking any questions.
According to a report by the BND, the German federal intelligence service, the ’Ndrangheta have bought shares in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and they’ve invested millions of euros in hotel chains and restaurants in eastern Germany. The clans from San Luca are particularly active: in North Rhine-Westphalia, in Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg. In Bochum, and in Duisburg.
And the man from Adelaide said: ‘My children were born in Australia, they’re homesick for Australia. Here they have nothing to do with their spare time. There isn’t a decent sports club, nothing. That’s why we’ll probably go back soon.’
And I said: ‘I can understand that.’
Don Pino
The church of Santa Maria Addolorata in San Luca was painted white and its interior was decorated with the sort of living-room furnishings that you find in department stores: fake marble and figures of saints that looked like shopwindow dummies, with a gaudy Christ hovering over the altar and a Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows.
Don Pino would be there at any moment, the curate, Don Stefano Fernando, told me; but, if we didn’t mind, he himself would be happy to answer our questions. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses and addressed me respectfully in the second person plural, voi – that antiquated polite form that has disappeared everywhere except in southern Italy.
Yes, he said, the ’Ndrangheta had become well known in Germany since Duisburg, even though the Germans must clearly have known that the ’Ndrangheta had invested in restaurants and hotels to launder their money. The Germans, he said, had taken the dirty money without hesitation after reunification, they’d turned a blind eye. I’d love to know, he said, what the German government thinks about that now.
Don Stefano Fernando had developed a whole theory about the sad lot of southern Italy: it extended from the econom
ic boom of the 1950s which never arrived, to the secularized society of the present – it’s not true to say that people here aren’t devout, they’re just indifferent! And he would have liked to expound his theory still further, if he hadn’t suddenly come over all self-effacing – after all, he was just the curate, and the role of explaining the world fell instead to Don Pino, who was now standing in the door to the sacristy. There were only a few minutes before the start of mass, the bells were already ringing. Don Pino Strangio had ebony-black hair and smiled at us winningly, as if he’d just been waiting for us to turn up. Of course, of course, he would love to speak to us, right after mass.
‘Bringing peace to the villages ... not losing faith ... because we must give an account of ourselves before God ... if we could see him with our mortal eyes ...’ The words rang out over the church square. Don Pino hovered like a spirit over San Luca; his words rang out from the loudspeakers, echoed against the grey, unplastered walls, and crept into the hairy ears of the men sitting not in church but outside the bar, blinking into the milky morning light.
As in Sicily, churchgoing in San Luca is for the womenfolk. So Don Pino had decided to broadcast his sermons into the church square via loudspeakers. The women who listened to his words were all dressed in black, as if life were a time of endless mourning. Old women, with their thin hair in buns, tightened their wrinkled mouths as the host dissolved on their tongues. Their daughters had faces that could have been carved from olive wood; they wore tight, black skirts, black pullovers and flat, black shoes, and allowed themselves only one piece of jewellery: a wedding ring. Only the granddaughters were allowed to shine. With blonde strands in their hair, Dolce & Gabbana belts and sequined blouses glittering above their naked midriffs. And during prayers the mothers quietly tugged the blouses down over their daughters’ waistbands.
Honoured Society, The Page 5