Incaprettato, tied up like a goat – that’s what they call it when the Mafia condemns its victim to a slow death by suffocation. The man was already black in the face, his veins swollen as thick as fingers, the cameraman said. He cut his bonds and the man groaned like someone who had been underwater for a long time. Then the journalist demanded that they clear off. On the way they called the carabinieri.
Later he learned that the man had survived, the cameraman said.
Letizia’s face is slightly sunburned, like a child’s face after a day on the beach. She looks at the display of her Leica and checks her last shots. Shobha holds her camera at the ready on her lap. When we are on Via Ruggero Settimo, we notice that the traffic is being diverted for a procession, and we can’t turn round. We are stuck in Palermo’s ‘street of wealth’ – wealth that comes from the drugs trade, embezzled EU funds and extorted protection money – and see smartly dressed women walking past our car, the usual crowd for Palermo’s early-evening shopping expeditions. The women walk past the shop windows of the jewellers and the luxury boutiques: Versace, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana. Girlfriends walk arm-in-arm, mothers are dragged from window to window. Some women linger a bit longer by the shop windows, others walk past them with the apparent indifference that can be mustered only by people who could easily buy up the whole lot if they felt like it. The self-confidence of the elect. A class pride like that emanating from the Mangano women: the three daughters and wife of Vittorio Mangano, the mafioso whose discretion Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri never tired of praising.
It was thanks to the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio that Shobha and I met the Mangano women. Up until her death, Rosalba Di Gregorio defended the mafioso Vittorio Mangano, whom the papers called ‘Berlusconi’s stable-keeper’ and who had worked for two years in the entrepreneur’s villa – and who said nothing of what he knew about Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri and many other businessmen, politicians and lawyers. Right up to his death. It’s thanks to Rosalba that Vittorio Mangano was able to die in the arms of his daughters. At least she managed to do that. Even though she’d hoped to get him placed under house arrest.
It wasn’t a chance acquaintance as far as we were concerned: the Mangano women hoped to use a media charm offensive to soften hearts, to ensure that the father’s high-security imprisonment was turned into house arrest. Rosalba Di Gregorio always defends, first and foremost, the interests of her clients. The Mafia has known for ages that the struggle can no longer be waged with bombs, but only with leading articles, interviews and television reports.
That’s why the three daughters and the wife had declared themselves willing to meet us for an interview in her chambers. It was Rosalba Di Gregorio who thought her client’s wife and daughters should be given the opportunity to set out their view of things.
They remembered their time in Berlusconi’s villa as if it had been paradise. She had always played with Berlusconi’s eldest son, said Cinzia, Vittorio Mangano’s middle daughter.
For her and her sisters, Loredana and Marina, it was unimaginable that their father could ever have turned state witness. To fall from enlightenment to disgrace? To become someone for the judiciary to wipe their boots on? They would have had to kick him out.
He would never have destroyed the image she had of a father she had always admired, Cinzia said. He had always said: ‘I will leave you no wealth, but I will leave you dignity.’
They were beautiful young women, the ones sitting at Rosalba’s desk. Not black-clad women, but cultivated young women who played the piano and were interested in art. Mafia princesses. Loredana, the eldest, was a restaurateur, Cinzia a painter and Marina, the youngest, was still at school. They weren’t women whose lives were all casa and chiesa, as you would normally expect of Mafia women: they didn’t say the rosary, they watched films by Nanni Moretti. Women like you and me.
The mother was an elegant, blonde lady with a pearl necklace. Loredana had long, curly hair and wore a floral dress; her sister Cinzia was in trousers. She was the leader of the three daughters, black-haired, modest and confident. She casually appraised us. The youngest daughter, Marina, was so thin that her knees pointed through the material of her jeans.
Marina sat on the edge of the chair, constantly ready to get up and run away; her mother watched her apprehensively from the corner of her eye. Loredana sat bolt upright in her armchair, straining for a lady-like effect, while her sister Cinzia sat in front of us in that comfortable and confident posture that is usually reserved for men. Like a well-travelled woman with nothing to fear.
Their name made them proud, it reassured them: ‘We know who our father is,’ said the Mafia princesses.
‘Our father is someone with high moral principles,’ said Cinzia, ‘and of course we miss him in the family, as a support and as a human being who has a solution for everything.’ A father who’s a friend – even if he was indicted for Mafia membership, two murders, extortion and drug dealing. And even so, their name had never been a burden to them, said the Mangano daughters.
The arrest was really terrible. Papa had a meeting with his lawyers here; my mother and I were waiting in the car because we hadn’t found a parking space. Then he came down, and as we drove down the Via della Libertà, Papa could already see something coming. Cars driving towards us, more and more of them, and he said: ‘Don’t worry, don’t be alarmed; they might detain us.’ And I said: ‘But, Papa, what are you saying?’ And all he said was: ‘Stay calm, don’t worry.’ Then we turned into a side street off Via della Libertà and they jumped out of the car, with their guns cocked, and stood in front of us. It was really very horrible. They cut us off. It was really loutish the way they behaved: all the people were looking at us; it was a performance as much as anything, it was theatrical. Papa said: ‘Put your guns down, these are my wife and my daughter, one of them will go off and there’ll be an accident.’ They were nervous and smoking. They searched Papa. We weren’t allowed to call home; my sisters got really worried because they didn’t know where we were. They took us to a barracks and we didn’t see Papa again. While we were in the barracks they searched our house. My sisters didn’t know anything; they came with cars and guns, it was terrible. They could have done it differently too, they didn’t have to be so rough. After all, Papa hadn’t gone into hiding or anything. And then it said in the papers that we’d gone for a walk on Via della Libertà, but Papa had been coming from his lawyers and none of it was true.
When Loredana, Vittorio Mangano’s eldest daughter, described her father’s last arrest, her eyes filled with tears. She kneaded a perfumed handkerchief in her manicured hands. Loredana Mangano was the spitting image of her father: she had the same narrow face, his long, narrow nose. That father that his three daughters never tired of praising. A good father, who unfortunately only very rarely had the chance to prove his love to them. Of the last twenty years of his life, he had spent only five in freedom. The girls’ mother constantly lamented their bitter lot. And what did the Mafia have to do with it?
I don’t see the Mafia. For me it’s history; it could also be another way of life, I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t see them, and that’s my opinion. In my mind it doesn’t exist. What should I say? I can’t make a judgement about it. So, if I had to see it, I’d see it everywhere, in the civil service, in the most unlikely places, at school, but I don’t see it amongst ordinary people.
‘The Mafia is everywhere,’ said Mama, because she knew that every Italian agrees with this assertion. We’re all guilty, so we’re innocent.
The public relations work of the Mangano ladies was exemplary. They complained about the victimization that they were exposed to on their prison visits. They complained about charges based on the statements of turncoats, they complained about the judiciary. They were victims.
But what happened to the values of life, to justice? It’s a regime. I often watch that film Schindler’s List. It makes me cry. But every time I turn on the video recorder I get new stren
gth from it. Because there are lots of things that are very like our situation, and the situation in other families too. The same feelings, the same torments, as if there is no way out because they have superior numbers. But the judiciary can’t be like that. It can’t be like that. If someone isn’t well, at least he has the right to have his health taken into consideration. That’s normal. Even for a dog. The prisoners in high security are the Jews of the Second World War. There’s no difference. The Jews were killed, and a slow death awaits the prisoners.
Cinzia Mangano was the most voluble. And the most confident. The ideal ambassador for planet Mafia. Cinzia was convinced of what she was saying. She wasn’t hypocritical, she didn’t lie, she was fundamentally honest. She had grown up in the Mafia: she divided the world into inside and outside, like a mafioso who feels no guilt when he commits a murder against the outside world. Cinzia was a soldier in the war. Her father could be proud of his womenfolk. They weren’t shy with an answer. Not even when we talked about the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.
When the assassinations happened in 1992, when Falcone died, someone I knew very well told me: ‘It’s the beginning of the end.’ Because to do something like that you must have fallen so low that you can’t see a chance any more. Because there had been men who had embodied the Mafia as an ideal of progress; the Mafia had once been a dream of the future, the epitome of doing something – and all that was left behind was scorched earth. They’ve destroyed everything, everything.
Cinzia’s remark about the meaning of the Falcone assassination was perhaps the most thought-provoking observation made by this Mafia princess: she regretted Falcone’s death less than its consequences for the Mafia. Like many other mafiosi, she wasn’t convinced by the strategy of terror that the boss Totò Riina was responsible for. Cinzia had understood very clearly after the murder of the two public prosecutors that the Mafia faced difficult years ahead if they were to become invisible again, to be a part of society, to be influential again.
The only one of the three Mafia princesses who hadn’t yet managed to lay her conscience on the line was the youngest Mangano daughter, Marina, who had been four years old when her father was arrested for the first time. She had grown up with a father whom she only knew from prison visits.
When he got out I was fourteen. It was a real drama. I spurned him. I was convinced that it was his fault that he wasn’t with us. I didn’t want to know why he had been in jail. I was convinced that he was the one who had left us in the lurch. ‘You abandoned us,’ I said, ‘so now you have no right to hug me either. Or to say to me: “Come here, give me a kiss.” Because it was your fault that you weren’t there. And that’s it.’ When I last saw him in jail, he said: ‘I’d so love to hug you. With any luck I’ll soon be released from high security and back in normal jail.’ And I – yes, I thought: No, with any luck this pane of glass will stay between us.
That was the moment when Rosalba, the mother and the sisters lost their composure. They struck the desk with their palms and shouted: ‘No, no, Marina, you didn’t really think that. You didn’t think that.’
But Marina assured them: ‘Yes, I did think that. I really did think that.’
Then she wept. Her sisters, her mother and Rosalba stroked her cheeks, her head, her shoulders, and Marina sobbed into the Kleenex tissues that Rosalba took from the box on the desk. And I turned off the tape recorder.
Finally things get going again on Via Ruggero Settimo, the traffic is rerouted, and Salvo curses because he has to take a detour. Suddenly we find ourselves back by the Piazza Pretoria, next to the city hall. On the steps in front of the fountain lies a bride, draped there like Santa Rosalia in her sarcophagus. The train of her wedding dress flows down the steps. The bride has, apparently just by chance, pulled the dress up to her knees. A wedding photographer is giving instructions, and Shobha calls out to Salvo: ‘Stop!’ Because she loves throwing wedding parties into chaos. I once saw her, apparently uninterested, approach a bridal couple who were standing on Trapani beach, posing very stiffly for a wedding photographer, along with other guests. After a minute, Shobha had sent everyone climbing on to shipwrecks in their evening wear, between carcasses of boats and rusty anchor chains, and persuaded the bride to push her cleavage out for the camera, like a figurehead.
It was pretty much the same when we were guests at the wedding of the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio, but that time Shobha didn’t need to use her powers of persuasion all that much. Rosalba automatically assumed the right pose in front of the camera: she sat down on the aerial roots of the magnolia fig tree in the garden of the Villa Trabia and smoked. She blew smoke rings into the air, which floated quiveringly above her head until they became invisible, and sometimes Rosalba exhaled the smoke through her nose. It’s not for nothing that she’s called the devil’s lawyer.
Before the wedding, Rosalba had had a scorpion tattooed on her wrist. When she smoked – and she smoked a lot – the eye was inevitably drawn to the bluish animal on her skin. Her wedding dress was made of apricot-coloured silk taffeta. It rustled with every step she took. Her copper-coloured hair was piled up in one of those masterpieces of the Palermo hairdresser’s art, notable for looking studiedly casual: solidly sprayed to look like flowing drips of liquid, her curls played around the back of her neck, both artful and casual. The make-up artist had sprayed her face so that the lipstick didn’t creep into the little wrinkles around her mouth, her mascara didn’t run, her aubergine-coloured eyeshadow didn’t smudge the line of her eyelids.
Under her apricot-coloured taffeta Rosalba wore the ‘ribbon of bliss’, a thin blue satin band tied around her right thigh. When she momentarily lifted her dress for the photograph, her alabaster skin gleamed. And her tanga. After all, she had a reputation to lose. It’s no coincidence that she’s the best-known Mafia defender in Sicily. The only woman who defends Mafia bosses. And her groom, too, the Mafia lawyer Franco Marasà: thanks to Rosalba’s dedication, Dr Marasà had been acquitted of favouring the Mafia. Various turncoat mafiosi had accused him of passing on messages to imprisoned bosses. Rosalba had prepared his defence; two colleagues conducted it. For a year the bar association had withdrawn his certification. Rosalba took over his clients for that period. They included Angelo Provenzano, eldest son of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who was in hiding. Dedication that was to pay off – because when the boss was finally arrested, after forty-three years, his son Angelo turned to Dr Marasà and asked him to undertake the defence of his father. So in the end everything stayed in the family.
The official wedding of the illustrious lawyer couple took place in Palermo, in the Villa Trabia, one of the Sicilian nobility’s feudal villas: faded glory in the midst of palm trees, box hedges and a forest of gigantic magnolia fig trees, whose branches look like enchanted dragons and centaurs. The marriage vows were to be taken under one such monster.
Rosalba smoked, jabbed the air with her freshly manicured fingernails and talked about high-security detention for mafiosi, about the possibilities of appeal in all Mafia trials, about turncoats – until it finally occurred to her that the wedding wasn’t a day in court. Again she flared her nostrils and expelled the smoke. She didn’t stub out her cigarette until her daughter laid the bridal bouquet of apricot-coloured calla lilies in her arm and urged her to go. It was Rosalba’s second wedding at the Villa Trabia. The first had been to a bank clerk. When her son was four and she was in the fourth month of her next pregnancy, she sat her law exam. And shortly afterwards dumped her husband. She still loves her former mother-in-law, even today. Rosalba invited her to the second wedding.
The groom was in pinstripes; he was slimmer than usual, and waited for Rosalba along with the registrar. Dr Marasà knew what he had found in Rosalba. As a sign of that, he took her name: Franco Marasà-Di Gregorio.
Avvocato Marasà enjoys the greatest respect in Palermo. I once went with him to a bar in a side street off the Via della Libertà where we waited for Rosalba. When he ordered a prosecco for me,
the barman emptied the open bottle down the sink in front of our eyes and opened a new one. A small but significant gesture.
Bride and groom had appointed their children from their first marriages as witnesses. Apart from the family, their colleagues from their chambers were all there: from the curvaceous, mini-skirted secretary to the legal intern who spoke and smoked like a cloned Rosalba; from the fellow lawyer who defends the Graviano brothers and always ostentatiously goes to sleep when the judge hears renegade mafiosi, to childhood friends and two journalists from the Ansa news agency. The ladies in the wedding party proved that anything is wearable – everything was represented, from tiny pink dresses with glitter straps to the silver-grey lampshade look with tassels. The two Ansa journalists couldn’t take their eyes off a blonde in a tiny pink dress whose bosom seemed to have sprung from the pages of an anatomy textbook.
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