Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  Where Boemi emanated melancholy, his colleague Nicola Gratteri communicated a sense of dynamism – quick, quick, don’t waste a minute. When the lift didn’t arrive, he ran all the way up the seven floors to the public prosecutor’s office, and as he ran he outlined the relationship between the ’Ndrangheta and the Colombian cocaine barons. There has always been a special ‘feeling’ between them, based on the fact that the ’Ndrangheta had built up more money through its kidnapping industry than any other client – a special relationship that lasts up to the present day: now, the ’Ndrangheta has a monopoly on cocaine importation in Europe.

  He drove the armoured Lancia himself, 150 kilometres every day, between Gerace and Reggio Calabria, to the sound of classical music. His three bodyguards followed in the car behind him. He wanted to drive himself, he said, because the journey was the only moment in the day when he was alone.

  The wall behind his desk was decorated with the usual investigator’s trappings – the shield of US Special Agent, of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Wiesbaden, of the Amsterdam Politie. And a framed certificate behind glass, an award that Gratteri had been given for his battle against organized crime – organized crime which, as the Italian text so beautifully puts it, is notoriously able to rely on support from parts of certain institutions.

  He worked on a laptop in his office. He had made five copies of the hard drive and hidden them in five different places. In the context of the inquiries into the Duisburg bloodbath he had issued the custody order that had put whole families behind bars. In March 2008, in San Luca alone, he confiscated Mafia properties to the value of 150 million euros. So much for Don Pino’s village of poor, God-fearing forestry workers. And pious women. The confiscated property of the two ’Ndrangheta clans involved in the blood feud, the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, included furniture, packets of files and certificates from insurance companies in Germany and beyond.

  Gratteri spoke just as quickly as he moved. With cool realism he described his battled against the ’Ndrangheta: the word ‘Duisburg’ had turned long ago from the name of an investigation file into a metaphor for the arrogance of the ’Ndrangheta.

  Before Duisburg, Gratteri’s commitment to the fight against the Mafia wouldn’t have been worth covering – not in Italy, and certainly not abroad: the floodlights of public interest had always been turned on Palermo. Only a few local newspapers in Calabria had reported on the four hundred dead in six years that the ’Ndrangheta had called for. It was only after Duisburg that public prosecutors like Gratteri were invited on to Italian television programmes. Once I saw him in a Rai Due studio sitting next to the then minister of justice, Clemente Mastella. In reply to the question of what needed to be done to fight the Mafia, Gratteri said: ‘The opposite of what’s been done over the past twelve years.’ At which justice minister Mastella corrected the public prosecutor: ‘He should just get on with his job.’ Politicians would take care of everything else.

  ‘Indeed,’ Gratteri said to me. And fired a mocking smile across his desk, piled high with bundles of documents. Because a short time later the minister had had to step down after being investigated for extortion and abuse of office.

  And a similar scenario might also menace Germany if the Germans didn’t start understanding what it meant for the Mafia to take root in their country. Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Italy had modified any of their laws in response to the Duisburg killings.

  While Shobha looks for her shot, Letizia and I sit on a marble bench in the shade and try to imagine some numbers. The annual business turnover of the Italian Mafia, for example. Which is supposed to stand at around 100 billion euros. I fail in my attempt to conjure the image of 100 billion euros in 500 euro notes. What would that fill? A room? An apartment? A Palace of Justice? How many politicians, lawyers, judges could you buy with that?

  ‘A million euros fits in a shoebox,’ Salvo says sagely. ‘Ladies’ shoes.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Letizia asks in amazement.

  ‘From our neighbour,’ says Salvo. ‘With men’s shoes, it’s two million.’

  ‘Sorry for asking,’ says Letizia, ‘but what does your neighbour do with a million euros in a shoebox?’

  ‘He picks it up,’ Salvo replies, and purses his lips.

  Then we try to imagine the number of affiliati, the numbers of members regularly inducted into the Mafia. The newspaper Antimafia Duemila reported that in Calabria 25 per cent of the population – a full quarter – belong to the ’Ndrangheta. In Campania 12 per cent belong to the Camorra; in Sicily 10 per cent belong to the Mafia; and in Apulia it’s a modest 2 per cent who belong to the Sacra Corona Unita.

  And to these regular affiliati may be added the sympathizers, relatives and silent helpers. ‘And the ones who are too scared to say anything,’ Letizia adds. She looks at the passers-by, most of them lawyers with briefcases, tight-skirted secretaries tottering to the entrance of the Palace of Justice.

  ‘That leaves hardly anyone,’ says Salvo. ‘Or have we miscalculated?’

  ‘Even as a child I couldn’t do sums,’ I say. And I remember public prosecutor Gratteri giving me a few simple examples that even a mathematical dyslexic like me could understand, explaining the danger that the wealth of the ’Ndrangheta meant for Germany. He sat at his laptop, answering emails and delivering a little lecture on the financial power of the ’Ndrangheta.

  The elite of the ’Ndrangheta didn’t have the problem of getting rich, just of laundering their money, he said. A small amount was spent on building a lovely house. Then a hotel was built, a holiday village, a supermarket. In northern Italy buildings were bought, and in Germany hotels, restaurants, pizzerias – all with cocaine money. The account of a typical ’Ndrangheta businessman was always in the red. He never had any money in the bank but took out loans and then paid them back very gradually. That was how he laundered his money.

  The game goes like this. The businessman buys a product for 100 euros; let’s say, coffee. So he pays 100 euros for the coffee, and by selling the coffee he makes a profit of, let’s say, 25 per cent. No one can dispute that 25 per cent; the financial police can’t, and the public prosecutors can’t either. With that 25 per cent profit the Mafia businessman has managed to launder dirty money – not by buying the coffee, but just by presenting a receipt for it. A secretary sits there from dawn till dusk issuing false invoices, because it’s in the Mafia businessman’s interest to provide evidence of non-existent expenditure – as if they had had huge expenses and made enormous profits – in order to justify the cocaine money. Logically, the Mafia businessman also has an interest in paying as much tax as possible. The more invoices he issues, the more tax he pays, and the more illegal money he can justify.

  Of course, this game with fake invoices works particularly well in restaurants, hotels and supermarkets, Gratteri stressed, where goods can go off and many (fake) invoices are issued to suppliers. After a few years the Mafia businessman has bought the restaurant, the hotel, the supermarket with his cocaine money – and they’re all quite legal.

  The ’Ndrangheta isn’t just an Italian problem, he explains, because the fake invoice game isn’t just played in Reggio Calabria, it’s played throughout the whole of the Western world. But having great mountains of money doesn’t just mean being able to influence the market. It also means financing electoral campaigns on behalf of parliamentarians who represent Mafia interests. The whole of democratic life is infected.

  While Gratteri was speaking, I thought about how it was that the then CDU representative and now minister-president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger, had emerged unscathed from the affair surrounding the pizza-chef Mario Lavorato, even though things hadn’t looked nearly so good at the outset. Oettinger’s friendship with the dubious pizzeria owner had got him into difficulties; the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office investigated the Calabrian Lavorato for drug dealing and money laundering, on the grounds that he was supposed to have used his money to support Oett
inger’s election. It wasn’t thought to be only connection between an alleged ’Ndranghetista and a German politician. In Erfurt, the Calabrian Spartaco Pitanti, who had already been mentioned in a Federal Criminal Police (BKA) report in 2000, had got himself talked about. Pitanti ran the 400-seat Paganini im Gildehaus restaurant in Erfurt – not a bad achievement for someone like Pitanti, who, according to investigators, had started as a chef in the Da Bruno pizzeria. Contacts can be helpful – even if Da Bruno hasn’t been top of most people’s lists since the Duisburg massacre. At any rate, Pitanti nurtured his connections in Erfurt, by generously supporting the golf club. When the police searched the Paganini restaurant because of Pitanti’s supposed involvement in a murder, they also bumped into the then Thuringian minister-president Bernhard Vogel and his minister of the interior, Richard Dewes. Both men had been staying there by chance, claimed Pitanti – who also had an excellent relationship with the police: in the course of further searches, the police found an ID card for an Interpol conference in Rome identifying Pitanti as a translator for the Uzbek delegation. It had been issued by the minister of the interior for Saarland.

  A quick glance from Gratteri’s eyes darted across his laptop to me, as if he wanted to check that I was following him. The arrogance of the young ’Ndranghetisti derived on the one hand from their wealth, and on the other from their knowledge of their de facto immunity from prosecution, he said. Over the last ten years, the Italian state had weakened in its struggle against the Mafia, even gradually relaxing its anti-Mafia legislation, culminating in the large-scale amnesty under the Prodi government. The problem wasn’t that 18,000 or 25,000 criminals were allowed to leave. The problem was a different one. Italians were increasingly convinced that there was a solution for everything, but there was no longer such a thing as a bail culture. For twenty-two years he had been investigating the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria: always the same families – he had arrested the same people three or four times for Mafia membership and international drug dealing, and after a short time they had been released again thanks to an amnesty or remission of punishment. It was easy to imagine that the justice system didn’t exactly gain in credibility in this way. Besides, these people weren’t normal, small-time criminals. Being an ’Ndranghetista or a member of Cosa Nostra was a lifestyle. A philosophy. These were people who had as four-year-olds experienced the police knocking at their doors, in search of an uncle, a brother or their father, a cocaine dealer. For them, the policeman would always be a ‘spy’, an enemy who had to be fought against.

  Every year he arrested between thirty and forty individuals who had been accused of drug dealing and who all came from the same village. Purely theoretically, these people would be sentenced to twenty or thirty years’ imprisonment. You could imagine what that meant to a village of three or four thousand inhabitants – if the sentence was actually served. Instead, the punishment was reduced, thanks to various negotiations which were intended to shorten the process, from twenty to seven or eight years. With good behaviour the prisoner could expect a further remission, and in the end an international cocaine dealer could be out of jail in five years maximum. And what was five years’ imprisonment compared with the prospect of importing a thousand kilos of cocaine? For one kilo of cocaine the ’Ndrangheta would pay 1,200 euros in Bogotà. The cocaine was cut and one kilo turned into four and a half. And a gram of cocaine would fetch 70 euros in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo.

  ‘Work it out for yourself,’ said Gratteri. And then he smiled, calmly, as if his calm was the result of long experience.

  The Germans believed that the ’Ndrangheta didn’t exist in Germany, Gratteri said. It was a careless error to underestimate the situation, as had been the case over the past few years. Unlike in Italy, in Germany the mere suspicion of Mafia membership was not sufficient to justify an arrest, and spying on people in public places was not permitted. In a few years it could be too late for Germany. The German police didn’t have any of the tools required to pursue Mafia dealings. Without electronic eavesdropping, investigators in Italy would have been powerless. Germany, he said, had no time to lose. Because if a mafioso buys a hotel, a restaurant or a stretch of road today, in a few years’ time no one will be able to prove that he bought the building with cocaine money.

  It wasn’t just an ethical problem, Gratteri said, it was also a matter of the law of the marketplace. Unlike normal businessmen, who have to make sacrifices to put up a building, the Mafia businessman has only the problem of justifying his money. Or protection money: if there are three supermarkets in his area who are all paying him protection money, and the fourth supermarket belongs to the Mafia, he doesn’t have to pay protection money, and for that very reason he can sell his products 2 or 3 per cent cheaper. That’s unfair competition. And when free competition breaks down, the laws of the marketplace go awry and democracy breaks down as well. Because democracy means the possibility of choice. The same possibilities for everyone.

  That was what he said. And as we spoke, the electricity failed once again in the Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria.

  Seven months after our meeting it became known that the public prosecutor Nicola Gratteri was being bugged when he met with detectives in the Palace of Justice to discuss current investigations. The bug used hadn’t been very technically sophisticated and had only been able to record conversations up to a distance of twenty metres. It was said.

  Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri

  ‘Just one more photograph,’ says Shobha, ‘over there by the entrance.’

  ‘I’m done,’ says Letizia. She’s had enough of posing and being stared at by the passers-by. Resigned, she lights another cigarette and walks to the other side of the Palace of Justice, where the armoured limousines stand between the granite columns. Only anti-Mafia public prosecutors enjoy the privilege of being allowed to drive up the ramp of the Palace of Justice, right in front of the entrance.

  ‘Let’s go,’ says Letizia. ‘The Palace of Justice depresses me.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Shobha, and presses the shutter release.

  When she’s packing her camera away again, we talk about how it is that every time we do interviews with public prosecutors here we have a serious-men-in-ties problem. There’s nothing more depressing than a photograph of a serious-looking man sitting at his desk. Particularly since all the offices look the same: carabinieri calendars on the wall, a picture of Giovanni Falconi and Paolo Borsellino, and paintings loaned from Palermo’s picture gallery – rural idylls with ploughing peasants or grim-looking old women. Generally we would persuade the public prosecutors to pose for us on the roof of the Palace of Justice. But even that shot had worn itself out at some point. Photographically, the Palace of Justice doesn’t have much to offer, although its inner life is very informative. I’ve often sat in the corridors and watched the women defence counsels tottering along the marble granite with a metallic squeak. Until early afternoon, the court reporters prowl the corridors as well, sit outside the doors of the public prosecutors’ offices, listen to conversations, try to read the click of a public prosecutor’s tongue, to interpret a lawyer’s nod, spend hours waiting on the red plastic chairs outside the chief prosecutor’s office. All in the hope of being in the right place at the right time, finding that missing piece that might finally give a meaning to the puzzle made up of news, suspicions, hints and rumours.

  Perhaps one of my most remarkable meetings in the Palace of Justice was the one I had with Marcello Dell’Utri. Berlusconi’s right-hand man. The founder of Forza Italia. The senator. The Euro MP. The man accused of supporting the Mafia in Palermo. Which did nothing to dampen his mood that morning.

  I had noticed Marcello Dell’Utri by chance in the corridors of the Palace of Justice. I had actually come here to talk to a public prosecutor about a Mafia boss who had gone into hiding. And then there was the senator, just standing there. The morning sun bathed the interior of the Palace of Justice in a mild light, and Marcello Dell’Utri’s head w
as thrown back. He pouted as he smoked his cigar and watched as the smoke wafted away. The hearing was supposed to have started ages ago, but the judge was still missing. Only a few local journalists were following the trial. Not a single Italian television channel was covering the story and barely any non-regional daily newspapers. The fact that Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, Berlusconi’s companion from the very first, Euro MP and Sicilian, was being accused of Mafia association in Palermo, attracted less attention than a television presenter’s move from Rai Uno to Canale 5.

  The senator stood in the semicircle of his lawyers, bag-carriers and confidants, smoking a cigar. His lawyers were smoking cigars as well. When Dell’Utri laughed, they laughed too. Dell’Utri was surprisingly short, and wore an azure-blue shirt with a blue suit. His lawyers were also wearing azure-blue shirts. His face seemed to sag slightly at the edges, and his heavy eyelids gave his expression a certain veiled quality. The senator gripped people by the arm as he talked to them; he slapped people cordially on the back, shook hands and hugged people. The lawyers coughed with laughter over each of his remarks, and gigglingly spluttered, ‘Oh! Senatore!’ The cigar smoke hung quivering and blue above their heads, drifting away into the great expanse of the marble hall.

  The public prosecutor who had led the trial in the first instance had told me that on the very first day Marcello Dell’Utri had got to his feet during the prosecution speech and left the courtroom, saying: ‘I’m bored stiff.’ I didn’t seriously imagine that he would answer my questions, but I didn’t want to reproach myself for not having tried. So I pushed my way past his bag-carriers, who eyed me suspiciously. When I stood in front of him at last and talked to him about his Mafia indictment, he didn’t answer straightaway. He took a drag on his cigar, blew the smoke out and said: ‘Bellissima signora, this trial is so boring, don’t waste your time on it. Go and look at the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti instead.’