Soon after the Corte di Cassazione rejected my appeal, Sara and Vanessa visited Bongiorno's elegantly appointed law office a few minutes' walk from the Italian parliament. They were steered there by another Alleanza Nazionale member, a Sicilian senator with a legal background named Domenico Nania. Once they were in the room, though, there was no talk of political connections; it was all business.
Bongiorno said, "Give me the files and I'll tell you whether or not I want to take this case." She was no-nonsense, straight to the point, and did not waste time on awkward expressions of sympathy that might have sounded forced and insincere.
Would her decision be influenced by how much my family was willing to pay?
"It's not about the price. It's about whether I'm willing to risk my reputation."
And that was that. We waited a couple of weeks while she read through the court documents and made an initial assessment.
And then she came back with her answer. It was a yes.
* * *
The first thing I noticed about Giulia Bongiorno when she came to meet me was that she had little or no bedside manner. She cut a disarming, almost boyish figure with her carefully groomed short hair, her big, round eyes, and rimless glasses. But it was obvious when she spoke that she was a person of consequence. Every word out of her mouth was effortlessly impressive. It was a little jarring, at first, how clipped and detached she was. Some might call her aloof. But, after listening to a lot of meaningless feel-good banter from Tedeschi and Maori and knowing how little good it had done me, I didn't mind. sensed I could trust her because she would never promise more than she could deliver.
On that first visit we talked through the basics of the case, so she could develop a feel for me and the impression I might make in court. Mostly, though, she wanted to know if I was covering for Amanda in some way.
I told her I was not.
"I believe what you are telling me," she said. "But if you have something to say that you're holding back for any reason, say it, because otherwise it may be too late."
Calmly I repeated, "I have nothing to say.""
Then she left. She wrote to me regularly and asked for my input on ideas she was developing. But I didn't have a one-on-one conversation with her again for months.
* * *
My father would arrive like clockwork every Friday. Sometimes he was alone; other times he would bring friends, or other members of the family. He pushed the prison authorities to expand visiting hours as much as possible and was allotted six hours a month instead of the usual four.
He had to reorganize his professional life completely after my arrest. To make sure he could drive to Terni every week, he dropped out of the roster of doctors on call to perform emergency surgeries. Soon he was no longer operating at all. That was a blow, but one he accepted with good grace. He couldn't afford the luxury of stopping work altogether, because the legal bills were mounting and likely to get a lot steeper. But he found that if he volunteered to do house calls rather than receiving patients, he could work a more flexible schedule and earn better money too.
The visiting room at Terni had one peculiarity: a large concrete barrier, about waist-high, separating the two sides. This was specific to the protected section, presumably because they didn't want inmates to have any inappropriate sexual contact with visitors. Having such a barrier was controversial; many in law enforcement and prison management argued that such things were illegal. It meant, above all, that I could not give my father and my other visitors a proper hug. I didn't know how much I could miss the comfort of' physical contact until I was denied it.
Papa was glad to see I was doing modestly better and that I felt more or less safe. The food in the special section was slightly more interesting than in solitary, and we could make things of our own on the gas stoves in our cells. But my father and I were both frustrated by the maddeningly slow progress of my case and talked about how best I should pass the time.
"I think I should enroll in graduate school and continue my studies," I said.
"How are you going to do that without going to class and talking to your professors?"
"I'll try it on my own. You can bring me the books and 1 can work on my laptop."
And so things transpired. Two Italian universities, Verona and Turin, offered courses I was interested in, and I picked Verona because I thought it would be a more beautiful place to visit, if I was granted the freedom to go there. My father completed
the paperwork and paid the fees, and I wrote to my new professors to explain the unusual circumstances and see if anyone might make special accommodations to teach me behind bars. Nobody rushed to volunteer.
* * *
Mignini's office announced in late June that the investigation was formally over, and almost immediately the newspapers were tilled with a barrage of negative stories about my family. Even before we'd had time to look over the newly available documents, we were fending off accusations that we'd tried to exploit our political connections to push for my freedom.
Some of the stories said we'd begged Sara's highly placed friends in Rome to apply pressure to the Corte di Cassazione before our hearing in April, or to exploit Bongiorno's prominent position. Others postulated, more wildly, that my family had approached Mafia thugs in Bari and contracted with them to intimidate the Perugia police.
Me source for all these stories, we learned to our consternation, were wiretaps the police had placed on my family's phones since February. This was no small operation: in just a kw months they intercepted close to forty thousand calls. Sonic of the phrases in the news stories were familiar enough; my family had let rip about the behavior of the Perugia police and called them pigs, bastards, and figli di puttana. And why not? They had every reason to be angry and had no idea that their conversations were being monitored.
But a lot of the other reporting was distorted or wrong, as though designed expressly to cast us in the worst possible light and to discredit any progress we had made in challenging the evidence. Senator Nania went public immediately to deny he had interceded on our behalf with Giulia Bongiorno, conceding only that he had mentioned her name to Sara over the phone. Bongiorno herself pointed out that she had not been hired by my family until after the Corte di Cassazione issued its ruling. These news stories were exactly the kind of political damage Bongiorno had been afraid of, and she was quick to share her alarm with us. The thing that perturbed her most was a report in Corriere della Sera, the country's most prestigious newspaper, in which my father was quoted saying, "I want to get Giulia Bongiorno on our side because she can wield political influence on the case."
If my father had really said this, even once, even casually, she warned, she would have had to withdraw as my defense attorney immediately.
Papa said he was quite sure this was a fabrication, but Bongiorno was insistent: "I want to believe you, but you'd better be quite sure."
So we asked to see the intercepts ourselves. They were available, but we had to pay six thousand euros to have them transferred Onto audio CDs. The authorities made nothing easy for us.
The transcripts vindicated us entirely and yielded something we were not even expecting: the real-time comments the Perugia police had scribbled to each other as they listened in on our conversations. It was startling reading: incontrovertible evidence, in black and white, that they were out to get us.
Monica Napoleoni, the Squadra Mobile's chief homicide investigator, came out with the choicest lines. She called Mara and Sara cretine (idiots) and vipere (snakes). Once, when Mara was on the line to my father's sister, Dora, Napoleoni jotted down, Fanno le stronze come al solito. They're doing their usual bitch act. Napoleon is sidekick Lorena Zugarini also got into the swing of things, reacting to one conversation about Mignini and how crazy he seemed to be by writing, all in upper case: "LAUGH AWAY HE WHO LAUGHS LAST LAUGHS LONGEST."
Some things in the wiretaps had been twisted to the point of absurdity. The story about us hiring Mafia thugs was derived from
a house call my father made in the old "casbah" of central Bari. Since it was a rough neighborhood, he didn't want to leave his car unattended, so he asked Sara, who was riding with him, to stay put while he visited his patient. Sara killed time by calling her husband. In the version later fed to the newspapers, Sara supposedly told. Giuseppe she was acting as lookout while my father went in to cut a deal with a local Mafia boss. But of course, as the transcripts showed, she said nothing of the kind.
It was galling enough that my family's phones were tapped at all. They were not suspected of any major crimes, the benchmark for ordering wiretaps under Italian law. So why were they being monitored? We never did get an adequate explanation. In the first of many authorization letters that Domenico Giacinto Profazio, the Squadra Mobile chief, addressed to Mignini, he hinted that my father was trying to tamper with the evidence. What he wrote, though, was not that explicit. "Raffaele Sollecito's father is taking steps to lighten the evidentiary burden against his son," he charged, "in such a way as to compromise the outcome of the prosecution at hand."
Certainly, the word compromise was pejorative, but otherwise I'm not sure my father would have disagreed: yes, he was working night and day to defend me and was absolutely interested, as a matter of constitutional right, in bringing "the prosecution at hand" to a screeching halt.
To us, Profazio's letter revealed a more profound motive for the wiretaps: the police were nervous about the work we were doing to undermine their investigation and wanted to monitor everything we were doing.
* * *
One pleasant surprise from the investigation files was that the bloody shoe print, the one that had caused us to expend so much energy and motivated so much of the courts' early decision to hold me in pretrial custody, was no longer deemed to be mine. Rudy Guede had come clean in a conversation with Mignini in May and admitted that the shoe belonged to him.
I was not off the hook entirely. The police still insisted that the bloody footprint at the murder scene, the one accompanying the left shoe print that was now identified as Guede's, belonged to me. The scenario this conjured up—of Guede hopping on one foot and me, shoeless, hopping on the other as if in some kind of three-legged race—was obviously absurd and logistically impossible, but no matter. We still had to find a way to counter it.
When my defense team examined the official paperwork, they noticed that the analysis of the footprints—including extensive inquiry into the length and shape of the foot likely to have produced them—had been conducted by two members of the Polizia Scientifica in Rome, working not in their official capacity but as private consultants charging thousands of euros to Mignini's office. One of the analysts, Lorenzo Rinaldi, was a physicist, not a specialist in anatomy, and the other, Pietro Boemia, was a fingerprint technician with no further scientific credentials. That begged the question: if Mignini's office felt it needed to contract the job out to private consultants, why wouldn't it go to people with more pertinent qualifications? The whole thing stank.
We were stunned, too, to discover that some of the most important parts of the evidence were not handed over at all. We were given a document detailing the Polizia Scientifica's conclusions about DNA evidence on the knife and the bra clasp, but we had none of the raw data, nothing that would enable us to make our own independent evaluation. We put in a request for the data and when it was rejected, filed another. The DNA evidence was now the bedrock of the case against me. What possible motivation could there be to withhold it?
Something else we were missing was video footage from the surveillance camera in the parking structure across the street from the murder house. We knew the prosecution had this because it. was on their evidence list, and we knew it could be significant in settling the question of whether Inspector Battistelli arrived before or after I called the carabinieri on November 2.
But the prosecution was playing hardball, meaning we'd. have to appeal the decision to a judge. And that was not now going to happen until after the long Italian summer break.
* * *
Already by June, the heat in the protected section was stifling. We'd soak towels in cold water and hang them over the bars of our windows to try to block out the sun. And we'd fill buckets with water and slop them on the ground, just to keep the temperature clown by a degree or two.
With the heat came shorter tempers and constant confrontation, both along the corridor and on the exercise yard. A Lebanese prisoner, Ahmed (I've changed this name, as I have the names of most of my fellow prisoners), was in my face more than the others, forever needling me about Meredith's murder and every last detail he'd read in the newspaper. Ahmed was a smart guy, one of the few with family money, and he knew exactly how to hit me where it hurt most.
"Hey, you know what I'm going to do with Giulia Bongiorno?" he said one day. "I'm going to fuck her up the ass!" Everyone who heard collapsed in laughter. He'd go after my family, tease me about Amanda, whatever it took to provoke a reaction. I'd get back at him the same way, making fun of the fact that his family was so rich, calling him a spoiled kid, even giving him a hard time because he'd been adopted.
I was not proud of doing this, but it was a way to survive. Sometimes, I felt that prison stripped us of our humanity and reduced us to attack dogs, good only for turning on each other at the slightest provocation. Was this how I was going to spend the next thirty years of my life? The thought was too awful to contemplate.
I did make some friends, if that's the right word. Early on, a man not too much older than me named Filippo Greco let me know that he was a fan of comic books and Japanese manga. So we talked about that and got along well enough to become cell mates. He told me about an ex-girlfriend and their complicated breakup, and sympathized with everything I was going through. Really, he sounded so normal I almost forgot that he was in here because he had raped someone.
Filippo and I were solid for a couple of months. Then, one day, he flew into a rage with his food server, whom he suspected of talking trash behind his back. Filippo reached through the slot in his cell door and grabbed the ladle out of the server's hands. He whacked him in the head, shouting "figlio di puttana!" and telling him he hadn't wanted soup for lunch in the first place. The server dropped his tureen, soup went everywhere, and both of them ended up in solitary confinement.
I focused on my studies and on going to the exercise room each morning and afternoon. Exercise room is probably too grand a term, as it did not contain any actual equipment. We'd lie down using two stools for support and do stretches. Or we'd lash big bottles of water on each end of a broomstick and use them for weight t raining. In another room, we had a Ping-Pong table, foosball and a chess board.
I wrote a lot of letters, to my family and to a growing number of supporters from. Giovinazzo, my hometown, and the wide world. When July 9 rolled around, I couldn't help remembering, Amanda's birthday, and I decided it was time to break my silence with her—lawyers and family be damned. I wanted her to know I was thinking of her.
So I sent her roses. And began what would turn into a long correspondence in which we talked about music, or books--everyday things that seemed more comforting than the craziness around us.
It seemed easy to slip back into communication with her not least because her Italian had improved enormously and we now had a comfortable common language. Neither of us harbored any ill will for what had been said in public. We knew, without having to articulate it explicitly, that we had each other's backs. Every time she wrote, she signed off ti voglio bene, the Italian way of saying "I love you.
The roses I sent made the papers—of course they did—and gave my lawyers and family palpitations. They warned me in no uncertain terms never to discuss the case with Amanda and said sending presents could only attract unwanted publicity. Vanessa laid into me about that. Papa was more understanding, saying that the most important thing for me was to have moral support. While the correspondence with Amanda made him nervous, he trusted me not to do anything stupid.
I ta
lked about Amanda with Filippo, my cellmate, and he listened, just as I had listened to his problems. One day, though, he told me he was bisexual, and his eyes started to brighten visibly when he looked at me. Then he burst into tears and tried to caress my face.
It was more pathetic than threatening, but it was definitely a deal-breaker. I moved in with another cellmate just as soon as I could.
* * *
In late August, my defense team was at last granted access to the murder house and had a chance to assess how much of a Spider-Man Rudy Guede would have had to be to break Filomena's window and climb up the exterior wall.
The first thing they observed was that an intruder had no need to throw the rock from the grassy slope thirteen feet below the window. A gravel driveway leading from the street to the front door of-the girls' apartment included an open area a little to the kit that overlooked the ravine. This area was at the same elevation as Filomena's window, separated only by a six-foot gap where the ground fell away sharply on the other side of a wooden fence. So Guede, or any other intruder, would not have had to hurl a rock in the air or clamber up with it; he merely needed to lob it about one-third of the distance required for a free throw in basketball, his favorite sport.
Honor Bound: Page 14
