Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  Prior to this there had been years of coordination problems between German and Italian investigators. The Germans demanded proof that Focoso was actually staying with his parents in Spiesen-Elversberg. Regardless of the fish and Aunt Giugia. None of that was sufficient reason to tap the flat, the Germans said. And the Italians said: if we had proof, we would have had Focoso arrested long ago. In the end the Italian officials demanded that the Germans let them search Focoso’s parents’ flat. And they didn’t have to look for long, because Joseph Focoso was in bed, sleeping deeply, and presumably dreamlessly, when he was arrested.

  Later, there were further delays before Focoso could be handed over to the Italians because German legislation doesn’t allow someone to be sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment – which was the case with the multiple killer Focoso, who had been in hiding for over six years. In order for the mafioso to be handed over to Italy, the Italian investigators had to prove that the lawyers who had defended him had kept their client very well informed about all developments, so that he was able to follow the course of the trial in detail.

  If you talk to Italian investigators, Germany is by no means prepared for the battle against the Mafia: membership of the organization isn’t a crime in Germany, and eavesdropping isn’t legal in public places. In addition, Mafia property can’t be confiscated – as it can in Italy, thanks to the Pio La Torre law which states that even if a person is only under suspicion of Mafia membership their possessions can be confiscated. In Germany, on the other hand, property can be seized only if a connection can be demonstrated with a concrete crime. German law does have the crime of criminal association, but, given that the maximum sentence is five years in jail, it amounts to a trivial offence.

  When Anna Palma explained the German – Italian imbroglio to me, I couldn’t help thinking about Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force in Reggio Calabria. Cortese didn’t just start working with the German police after the Duisburg massacre, he had already been involved with his German colleagues during the search for the legendary Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano. Cortese once spent Christmas in Mönchengladbach because the investigators had hoped Provenzano would spend the holiday with his brother who lived in Germany. For two weeks, Cortese lay in wait for the boss in Mönchengladbach, but to no avail. Two years later he would arrest Provenzano, who had been in hiding for forty years, in a Corleone cheese-farmer’s hut.

  After that, Cortese was promoted to the status of superpoliziotto, for which he was awarded a silver medal and transferred to Reggio Calabria. We met in a cafe not far from police headquarters and Cortese looked as if he was one of the two bronze statues of Riace: fished from the sea, put in a pinstripe suit and decorated with a pair of Ferragamo sunglasses.

  Cortese set out the contrast between the German and Italian police for us, from his personal point of view. He pointed to the bottle of mineral water on our table and said: ‘If I know that this bottle here is the boss, then we go and arrest him. In Germany, they do a “briefing” first. And by the time the briefing is over, the boss has gone into hiding.’

  A pale noonday haze has settled on Palermo like a pillow of cotton wool, a pillow that muffles every sound, even the noise of the tyres of the armoured limousines on the marble surrounding the Palace of Justice. Salvo looks at his watch because Piccola Napoli always closes on time. At last we set off, past the Teatro Massimo, towards Borgo Vecchio, the heart of Palermo that lives on the drugs trade and looks like a cross between Baghdad and Bogotá. With fat men in baseball caps and flip-flops, with piles of rubbish and blocked canals, with the burned-out carcasses of cars, mangy dogs and a big statue of Padre Pio behind glass. The Borgo is right behind the Teatro Politeama with its jacaranda trees; sometimes tourists stray to this part of town and little boys with iPhones take pictures of their horrified faces. The Borgo has nothing of the charming shabbiness of Palermo’s old town, which as a visitor you can imagine as beautiful; the Borgo is nothing but Mafia arrogance, just a few yards away from the upper-class elegance of the Via della Libertà.

  Written on a wall are the words Honour the Dishonoured, and next to that hangs one of many house altars. Between narrow curtains a haggard Jesus gazes at a pink Madonna, surrounded by offerings of plastic flowers and lit by old bedside lights. A short time ago a man was murdered here, in broad daylight, in front of the fishmonger’s stall. No one saw anything.

  A few yards to the rear of the square with the statue of Padre Pio a goose runs along the road. The goose is called Candy and she bites anyone who goes near her, because Candy doesn’t think she’s a goose, she thinks she’s a dog guarding the front door of a family house. Candy turned out like this because she grew up with a pit bull terrier, people say. Originally, in fact, there were two geese, but one of them died. Everyone remembers the other goose running out in front of a car, with its chest puffed up.

  As we step inside Piccola Napoli the wind from the air conditioning falls on us like an icy cloth, making us hold our breath for a second. While outside in the Borgo the rubbish might be rotting in the gutter, inside Piccola Napoli everything is sterile, with white tiles, starched tablecloths and a freshly scoured counter on which no drop of water would stand a chance.

  As always, the whole family is at work. Behind the till sits an old black-clad woman with the eyes of a bird; orders are taken by her son-in-law, whose red face always looks a bit unhealthy in the fluorescent light. Behind the fish counter stands one of those Sicilian women who wouldn’t smile even under threat of torture, her brother works in the kitchen, and the usual crew are joined by an old man whose degree of kinship I don’t know. He’s leaning motionlessly by the old woman at the till, with his waistband hitched up to his armpits. Depending on the time of day, all kinds of other cousins and brothers-in-law and aunts and great-nieces and people I can’t tell apart turn up as well.

  As soon as we’re sitting down, there’s white wine on our table, and green Sicilian olives the size of quail’s eggs, and oriental-scented bread with sesame seeds. The brother-in-law brings us panelle, the chick-pea fritters that I fell in love with on my first day in Sicily, and sea urchins and a bit of caponata, the vegetable dish of aubergines, tomatoes, olives and capers which sensitive Italian stomachs find irredeemably indigeribile, completely indigestible – which is why it lies for hours, maybe days, even in my belly, formerly inured to such things by my German upbringing but softened by my time in Italy – but which we still find irresistible.

  For a second we think guiltily about the heaviness of Sicilian cooking, but it doesn’t stop us going on to order tiny fried octopi, swordfish and tuna. And if Letizia hadn’t asked about Duisburg, we’d be talking about the food for hours.

  What was it like? she asks, suddenly looking like a young girl. More than most people, Letizia has preserved a childish curiosity about life. She soon tires of talking about herself, about things she knows, about repeated situations. But she loves experiencing new contexts, new things, outrageous things. She loves learning. But it all has to happen very quickly.

  It’s weird talking about Duisburg in Palermo. Thinking about steelworks, blast furnaces and workers’ estates when you’re surrounded by house altars, baroque churches and palm-lined avenues. And yet the two places do have some things in common. A death toll. When I got into my old Renault 4 that time to drive from the Ruhr to Corleone, because Mario Puzo’s The Godfather had aroused my curiosity, I never imagined that I would one day make the return journey – that I would travel from Italy to the Ruhr and get out of the train in Duisburg because the Mafia had drenched the place in blood.

  Heinz Sprenger

  Heinz Sprenger, director of the Duisburg Murder Commission, is waiting for me outside the station. He told me on the phone that he was short, with a moustache. Outside the exit a man was waiting, wrapped in a black leather jacket, the kind of leather jacket I’ve only ever seen in two places in the world: in the Ukraine and the Ruhr.

  If I were casting a police procedural set in
the Ruhr, I’d immediately book Heinz Sprenger for the role of a police inspector to whom nothing human is alien and who doesn’t waste his words. Sprenger is someone who keeps the ball close to the ground, as they say in the Ruhr. I tried to imagine him in Calabria. Heinz Sprenger in his black leather jacket next to Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force of Reggio Calabria, looking in his dark-blue, pinstripe suit as if he had stepped straight out of a Mafia film. Cortese, drawing on his cigarillo and watching after the smoke, and Sprenger, watching his partner with the patient attention of an ornithologist. Working with the Italians had taught him, Inspector Sprenger says, that it’s important to make a bella figura.

  If he believed the newspapers, he said, the Mafia was being defeated in Italy every day. He was referring to those spectacular mass arrests of thirty or forty people which are always worth a small story even abroad: bosses, policemen disguised in ski-masks, in the background a helicopter in which the mafioso is being taken away – a helicopter that has landed just for the photograph of the arrest. And that flies off again once the picture has been taken, without the mafioso.

  Whole clans in Italy are regularly arrested for membership of the Mafia, he said, and no one learns that after a short time many bosses are simply put under house arrest for lack of evidence. Or leave prison as free men once their remand period is over, because the judges aren’t able to prosecute them within the designated period.

  Heinz Sprenger and I drove to the scene of the crime. The Da Bruno pizzeria is only a few yards behind the station, on the ground floor of the Klöckner building, one of those 1980s buildings that you see everywhere in the Ruhr, buildings that look as if the architect had drawn his inspiration from the Star Trek movies. The restaurant looked as if it had been precipitously abandoned, the chairs were dusty and stood randomly around in the restaurant, a yucca palm withered in a corner, and above the counter there was an amateur painting of a pizza Margherita: Pizza, la specialità di Sebastiano. Outside was a big terrace with wooden benches; plainly the restaurant had been quite a success, in every respect. The pizza Margherita, and the money laundering too.

  I thought about Sebastiano Strangio’s grave in the San Luca cemetery. About that crude concrete box with rusty iron girders sticking out of it. And I thought about Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, who was a cousin of the murdered Sebastiano Strangio, and who had travelled to Duisburg with the Bishop of Locri shortly after the massacre and held a ‘reconciliation mass’ outside the pizzeria.

  ‘I don’t eat pizza any more myself,’ said Inspector Sprenger. He said it casually, without any particular emphasis. Just stating a fact.

  The bloodbath had taken place in the drive, just a few feet away from Da Bruno. We were standing in the rain; it smelled of soil and damp leaves, and Sprenger showed me the place where the shots had fallen. It was a driveway paved with those small square pieces of shale that you only get in the Ruhr. The two hit men had hidden behind the bushes planted along the drive. One of the surveillance cameras in the Klöckner building had caught the gunfire, more of a flash behind the leaves of the trees. Sixty shots from two different firearms, followed by shots to the head of each of the victims before the perpetrators fled in separate directions.

  Until that night in August 2007, Heinz Sprenger had had nothing to do with the Mafia. He was the director of the Murder Commission in Duisburg, and had, among other things, made his name by developing a system for the monitoring of child abuse. His job was to clear up murder cases. His colleagues were responsible for organized crime. And now, overnight, he was in the eye of the hurricane – a hurricane of journalists, politicians and anti-Mafia parliamentary committees, lip service, postulations and inferences, of ’Ndrangheta, investigating magistrates and police. A hundred and twenty of his colleagues, half of all the investigators in Duisburg, were deployed to clear up the massacre.

  At night Sprenger read books about the ’Ndrangheta. And files about the blood feud of San Luca. About the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, who had been at war since one side had thrown an egg at the other as a carnival prank. About a village that essentially consisted of organized crime, drug dealing, arms dealing and murder. When Sprenger went to Calabria, he always took his personal interpreter with him. Not out of suspicion, no. ‘Just because,’ he said.

  His office was in a fascistic-looking red-brick police headquarters, built in the 1930s, like the Italian Palaces of Justice. There was lino in the corridors; cacti and little ficus trees were lined up neatly in Sprenger’s office and the walls were hung with organizational charts that Sprenger had drawn up: family trees of the clans of San Luca, the members of the warring Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, assignments of tasks, family relationships and flows of information, arrows connecting men’s heads, women’s faces, hit men, victims, witnesses, perpetrators, getaway cars. At once a kind of wallpaper and a cartography of crime. Hanging next to it was a photograph of a bin bag with a child’s arm sticking out of it.

  Heinz Sprenger had learned a lot about the family relationships of the Calabrian clan, about how almost everyone in San Luca has the same name and you always have to know their mother’s name to distinguish one ’Ndranghetista from another. And he had learned that in the summer before the massacre Marco Marmo had driven through Duisburg: Marco Marmo, the instigator of the Duisburg massacre, the ’Ndranghetista who had carried out at Christmas 2006 the murder of Maria Strangio, which had been intended to kill her husband, the clan head Gianluca Nirta.

  Since the murder of his wife, the boss Gianluca Nirta had been seen as a time-bomb by the enemy Pelle-Vottari clan, so it was the job of the hit man Marco Marmo to get rid of him as quickly as possible: ‘Gianluca must die, otherwise nothing here is going to work. He has nothing to lose now, you see, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,’ said Michele Carabetta, the hit man’s devoted helper, who had travelled halfway across Europe with him, all the way to Duisburg. In a car that wasn’t just full of bugs but was also fitted with a satellite transmitter that told Italian investigators its exact location – in Tonhallenstrasse in Duisburg, for example, or Saarstrasse and Mühlheimer Strasse, where the pizzeria Da Bruno stood.

  Unlike the Sicilian mafiosi, who are always worried that their flats and cars might be bugged and who therefore talk rarely or in a very coded way about their business, what is astonishing about the ’Ndrangheta is the openness with which they talk about their dealings: the wiretap records of San Luca and the ones from the car in Duisburg suggest a certain recklessness. The killer and his henchman talked quite openly about their plans: plainly they thought they had nothing to fear, from either the Italian or the German police. Who, incidentally, knew nothing about the fact that the two mafiosi were driving through Duisburg in a bugged car – and Heinz Sprenger remains angry about that, because of the not inconsiderable danger that the two men represented. After they’d been stopped at a roadblock, the hit man told his henchman that he would have fired if they had been held any longer. But because Italian wiretap records are illegal under German law, they are ineligible as evidence.

  Behind this lurks what German detectives politely term ‘different investigative traditions and legal cultures’: the Italian police try to penetrate the structures of a whole clan, which it can then finally arrest for the crime of Mafia membership. The German police have to be able to demonstrate a concrete crime, so they must look for evidence, for DNA traces, fingerprints, traces of gunpowder. Or, as Inspector Sprenger puts it: the Italians bug everything, they tap people’s phones for years – and nothing happens.

  But where the Italian police have the edge, as far as he’s concerned, is in their ability to seize Mafia property, even if Mafia membership is only suspected. How many times have the German police questioned Italians who have come to Germany without funds, worked making pizzas for six months, and then bought up half of Duisburg city centre? And, when they were asked where the money came from, said, ‘From my uncle in Italy.’

  All mafiosi c
herish this hole in German legislation, and they exploit it even today. Especially, of course, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. German investigators noticed this when mafiosi from Duisburg, Cologne or Dortmund moved to the east, to Saxony and Thuringia, and particularly to the Baltic coast where millions of euros were laundered through the purchase of hotels, restaurants and holiday resorts.

  There isn’t a single Calabrian-run pizzeria in Germany that hasn’t got some involvement with the ’Ndrangheta, says Inspector Sprenger. But so long as there is no shift in the burden of proof, so long as the police have to demonstrate that the money comes from criminal offences and the investor does not have to prove that his money was acquired legally, the Mafia’s businesses in Germany will go on thriving.

  What did he expect?

  ‘I don’t think the Germans are going to change their laws because of Duisburg,’ he said. ‘And if they don’t change anything, nothing will change between Italy and Germany.’

  For me this accorded with the views of the Calabrian state prosecutors Gratteri and Boemi and the investigator Cortese: all three men were united by the oppressive feeling that Duisburg hadn’t really changed anything. That the initial enthusiasm that had inspired Germany and Italy to work very closely together had already dissipated. Cortese saw that his German colleagues were highly motivated, but that they were hampered by the legal situation. German laws were no match for the criminal reality.

  ‘So the Mafia has a great future in Germany,’ I said to Letizia, who had forgotten all about her swordfish as we talked about Duisburg. The red-faced son-in-law has been lurking for quite a while, and when finally Letizia sets down her cutlery he immediately takes the plates away and tries to persuade us to have a dessert, wild strawberries in orange sauce, or hand-made lemon sorbet, almost compulsory at the end of a fish dinner: ‘To lose the fishy taste in your mouth,’ he adds. We comply without much resistance and take both. Wild strawberries with lemon sorbet.