by John Berendt
Out of breath, Paggiaro shouted, “Beppe, Beppe, I smelled smoke down on the second tier! Come give me a hand. We’ve got to find out where it’s coming from. Come on. Hurry!”
The two of them left Bonannini’s office and started down the stairs. “The second tier, the second tier!” Paggiaro shouted, leading the way.
They opened the door to the horseshoe corridor on the second tier and immediately smelled smoke. Paggiaro turned on his flashlight and illuminated a thin haze. They proceeded farther along the corridor, passing the doors of the individual boxes, toward the rear of the hall. They were just behind the royal box when, looking through the door into the Apollonian rooms, they saw heavy black smoke rolling down the stairs from the ridotto, smoke so acrid they were forced to cover their noses and mouths with their handkerchiefs. Reflections of flames flickered on the walls. They heard the crackling sound of a fire burning furiously. Then suddenly there was a burst of flames. They turned and ran back down the corridor and up to Bonannini’s office to call the fire department. Bonannini fumbled with the keys and could not find the right one. Meanwhile Paggiaro saw a phone outside the messenger center, ran to it, picked it up, and made the call. The dispatcher told him they had already been informed about the fire and to run downstairs quickly and open the front door for the firemen. When the two men reached the ground floor, Bonannini left immediately. Paggiaro darted into his office to put on his overcoat and a beret-style cap. Then, thinking there might be someone else left in the theater, he called out, “Fire! Fire! Is anybody there?” But there was no answer. Then he, too, ran out through the stage door and down the calle to Campo San Fantin. At exactly 9:21, his flashlight still in hand, Paggiaro presented himself to the first policeman he saw and announced that he was the custodian of the Fenice.
The policeman looked at him in amazement. For the past twenty minutes, he had been banging on the front door, shouting for someone to open it. “Where have you been all this time?”
CASSON ASKED PAGGIARO THE SAME QUESTION over and over again in the course of no fewer than ten interviews. Casson did not suspect Paggiaro of direct complicity in the fire, but he thought it likely the man had gone out for something to eat, abandoning his post at a crucial moment. Paggiaro swore he had never left the theater, that he had brought something to eat from home that day, though whether it was fruit or sandwiches he could not recall. In spite of his protestations, Casson was not convinced. So he kept Paggiaro on the list of people to be charged with negligence.
Casson had no suspicions about the photographer Bonannini. His story checked out, and he had no discernible motive.
The seventh and last Viet electrician to leave, the thirty-two-year-old Roberto Visentin, the one nobody actually saw walk out the door, was Casson’s first serious arson suspect. It had been Visentin’s fourth day on the job for Viet, but he was familiar with the layout of the theater, having worked there previously for three years as a full-time employee. One of the other electricians had privately voiced suspicions about Visentin, citing his disappearance from the dressing room at about 8:15, when he said he was going to turn off lights in the theater. Casson questioned Visentin closely and went over the route he said he took while turning out the lights. Visentin’s story did not conflict with anyone else’s—it was corroborated by the house electrician, who confirmed that he had asked Visentin to turn out the lights—and Visentin had no likely motive. Casson crossed him off the list.
Casson now concentrated on Enrico Carella, the owner of Viet, and his cousin, Massimiliano Marchetti, age twenty-six. He examined the transcripts of their earlier interviews. Both had said they had left the Fenice at 8:30 P.M. and stopped briefly next door at the Bar al Teatro La Fenice to have a spritz with three of the other electricians. Then they had taken the vaporetto to the Lido to have dinner with Carella’s girlfriend, arriving at her house at 9:15. It was while he was at the Lido, Carella said, that he had received a call from a friend who had just seen a report on television that the Fenice was on fire. Carella told Marchetti and his girlfriend about the fire, and the three of them called a water taxi and came back to Venice.
Over the next several months, Casson summoned all seven electricians for repeated questioning, together and separately. He broke down their stories, compared the details, drilled them on contradictions to determine whether these were honest lapses of memory or outright lies. When their answers did not satisfy him, they knew it: His face turned bright red. He was unrelenting. He had detectives follow them; he bugged their cars, tapped their telephones and cell phones, tapped the telephones and cell phones of their parents and girlfriends, and he secretly videotaped them while they sat in holding rooms at the police station waiting to be questioned. Then, on May 22, 1997, sixteen months after the fire, Casson pounced.
Shortly before dawn, a squad of policemen knocked on the door of the apartment on the Giudecca where Enrico Carella lived with his mother and her second husband. For the next four hours, the police searched the apartment; then they told Carella to get into the police boat. The same scenario was being played out simultaneously in Salzano, a small town on the mainland, where Massimiliano Marchetti lived with his parents and younger brother.
At noon TV news programs showed footage of Carella and Marchetti being led out of police headquarters in handcuffs on their way to jail. They had been interrogated and formally arrested on suspicion of burning the Fenice. Casson had obtained a court order invoking a new law that allowed “preventive detention” for ninety days. He had based his request on the concern that if Carella were to remain at large, he might try to tamper with the evidence by exerting psychological pressure on the other Viet electricians. As their boss, Carella still owed them money for salary and overtime.
The motive for burning the theater, said Casson, had been to avoid having to pay a penalty for lateness in completing the electrical wiring. The deadline had been February 1, only two days away, and the penalty was $125 a day for every day beyond the deadline. An estimated two months’ work still remained to be done, which meant the total charge against Viet would have come to $7,500. That seemed like a ludicrously small amount of money, hardly enough to cause someone to burn down an opera house. But added to the $75,000 in debts that Casson said Carella had outstanding, it might have seemed daunting. According to Casson’s theory, Carella and Marchetti had meant to set a small fire that would have interrupted their work and released them from the deadline. But things had gotten out of hand.
Viet was working at the Fenice as a subcontractor for Argenti, a big construction firm in Rome. Carella’s father, Renato Carella, had brokered the deal with Argenti and then set up Viet for his son. The electrical subcontract for the Fenice was Viet’s first job. Renato Carella served as Viet’s foreman and liaison with Argenti in Rome, which made him, in effect, his son’s employee.
Of the two cousins, Enrico Carella was the more outgoing and self-assured. He was smart and articulate. He dressed in expensive clothes, even on the job. “He’d show up wearing Fratelli Rossetti loafers,” said one of the Viet electricians. The dark-haired, handsome Carella had a string of overlapping girlfriends. He would move in with one girl and, after a period of time, announce that he was seeing someone else. Alessandra, the girlfriend he and Marchetti visited on the Lido the night of the fire (and who had loaned Carella $8,000), was replaced by Elena, who was told by Carella that he was going on vacation with another girl, Michela, but not before Elena, shortly after meeting him, had loaned him $3,000. By the time he was arrested a year and half later, Carella was engaged to Renata, who owned an ice cream shop in Crespano del Grappa and whose father had graciously loaned Carella’s father $12,000. During this period, Carella bought a BMW for $25,000 and an Acquaviva motorboat for $7,000.
Massimiliano Marchetti was, by comparison, a tongue-tied wall-flower. He was not interested in the high life; he did not appear to be ambitious; he was shy and inarticulate, and had only one girlfriend, his fiancée.
With the two cousins
in his crosshairs, Casson showed himself still to be an unusually aggressive prosecutor. He not only booked them for arson, he threw in a charge of attempted murder—worse than murder, actually: the term Casson used was strage, which means “slaughter” or “massacre.” Casson had in mind the scores of people who might have died if the fire had swept through a large swath of Venice, as it could easily have done. Moreover, he bluntly announced that he was also investigating three other arson suspects still at large: Renato Carella and two Sicilian mobsters—Aglieri, the Mafia boss in Palermo who had allegedly boasted of burning the Fenice, and the man who had supposedly helped him do it, Carlo Greco.
Renato Carella had left the Fenice at least two hours before the fire and was not thought to have had a direct hand in it. Casson suspected he might have been the connection between his son and persons unknown for whom a destroyed Fenice would be worth a considerable sum of money. For Casson the most likely suspects were companies that expected to play a significant, lucrative role in rebuilding the theater.
Thus, there were really two arson theories: the small-fire theory, in which the two cousins, acting alone, attempted to set a minor, contained fire to avoid paying a $7,500 penalty, and the total-devastation theory, in which the cousins were secretly paid to burn the theater to the ground. Casson had the luxury of pursuing both theories at once.
The shift to the arson theory came as a relief to the fourteen people Casson had earlier cited for negligence, but their relief was short-lived. Within days Casson announced he would still seek indictments for negligence. Even if the fire had been the work of arsonists, he argued, negligence had created conditions that made it impossible to extinguish. In any case, if he failed to get a conviction for arson, Casson could fall back on the easier-to-prove case of negligence.
“I NEVER EXCLUDED THE POSSIBILITY OF ARSON,” Casson told me shortly after the arrests. “I gave the experts a written report at the very start, saying that evidence of arson should not be overlooked. But they kept telling me, ‘Negligence, negligence, negligence. ’ From time to time, I’d ask, ‘What about arson?’ and they’d answer, ‘Negligence.’”
We met in Casson’s office in the fifteenth-century Tribunal building at the foot of the Rialto Bridge. The building’s interior had been partitioned haphazardly. Snaking hallways were lined with battered metal cabinets and stacks of legal documents, giving the place the ambience of a cluttered warehouse. Casson’s office looked out on the Grand Canal, but it was drab and felt more like borrowed space than the central nervous system of a busy anticrime division.
“When the experts decided it was arson after all,” Casson went on, “I had to review months’ worth of interviews, looking for clues.”
“Did you find any bombshells?” I asked.
“One of the first things I verified,” said Casson, “was Enrico Carella’s statement that after he and his cousin had left the theater, they went to have a spritz next door at the Bar al Teatro La Fenice and then went to the Lido. This may sound foolish to you, but I wanted to know if it was true that they had had a spritz at the bar. So I went there and asked to talk to the bartender who had been on duty the night of the fire. It turned out the bar was closed that night.”
Casson allowed himself a modest smile.
“I immediately called in one of the other electricians who had confirmed the story about the bar, and I confronted him with the news that the bar had been closed. He backed down and admitted it was a lie. Then he told me that the day after the fire Carella had tried to persuade all of the electricians to agree on a consistent story to tell the police. Carella had set up meetings to talk it over, once at a pizzeria near St. Mark’s Square and another time at his girlfriend’s house on the Lido. He wanted them to say they had all left together at seven-thirty, an hour earlier than they really had.”
Casson paused to see if I understood the significance of the change in time.
“Only a person who set the fire,” he said, “would have known that leaving the building an hour before it burst into flame would have put him in the clear.
“When I looked carefully at their statements, I found that Carella and Marchetti had told conflicting stories. In separate interviews, they had both said they went up to the dressing room together, but each described taking a different route through the theater.
“The times they cited were frequently contradicted by the evidence. For example, Carella said he had arrived at his girlfriend’s house at nine-fifteen. But phone records show that she had called him at nine twenty-one, when he was supposedly already there. Why would she have called him if he was with her?”
“Could Carella merely have been mistaken about the time?” I asked.
“Possibly,” said Casson, “but there are other time conflicts. For example, Carella said he learned about the fire from a friend who called him after hearing the news on television. We checked: The first mention of the fire was at ten thirty-two P.M., but at ten twenty-nine P.M., Carella called the fire department, identified himself, and asked if it was true the Fenice was burning. At least one hour before that, he had called one of his workers and left a mysterious message asking if the man had left a blowtorch burning. The worker had not used a blowtorch all day.”
Casson recited these points without having to consult notes or files. It was clear that he was intensely, intimately involved with the case.
“Carella had been exhibiting strange behavior in the days leading up to the fire,” Casson continued. “Nine days before, late on a Saturday evening when the theater was empty, one of the watchmen was surprised to find Carella up in the soffitone, the attic, in his street clothes. This is the location where one of the experts believes that a second fire was set, and Carella had no work-related reason to be there. Carella tried to explain his presence by telling the watchman he was hoping to catch a glimpse of a woman taking her clothes off in a window across the calle.”
Casson raised an eyebrow.
“About a week before that, someone working for Viet had left a blowtorch turned on with a four-inch flame burning all night. It was connected to a fifteen-kilo cylinder of propane gas.”
“Do you have any notion of when and how they set the fire?” I asked.
“I was just coming to that,” said Casson. “Several witnesses said that Carella and Marchetti had both absented themselves from the Viet work site on the ground floor more than once during the afternoon and evening. Sometime between seven and eight o’clock, Carella was seen walking away from the work site in the direction of the ridotto upstairs.
“This is when I believe he set things up for later on. He went up to the ridotto, knowing that the crews working there that day had already gone home. He opened a cabinet, took out the cans of solvent, opened them, and poured the solvent onto the floor and on a pile of raw planking. He then went on to the dressing room, where he joined the others and changed his clothes. After getting into street clothes, Carella and Marchetti came downstairs with the others. Carella went into the custodian’s office to make a phone call, and Marchetti waited for him outside the office. The first three electricians said good-bye and went out the door. Carella and Marchetti then hid somewhere in the building until the last electrician, Visentin, had left. After Visentin was out the door, they slipped back upstairs to the ridotto, unseen. With Marchetti standing lookout, Carella picked up a blowtorch, lit it, and trained the flame on the floorboards. As the fire began to spread, they ran back downstairs and left through the stage door at eight forty-five.”
“Nobody saw them during all that activity?” I asked.
“Well, yes: Carella and Marchetti were probably the two young men seen running down Calle della Fenice ten minutes after the first three had gone by.”
LAWYERS FOR CARELLA AND MARCHETTI immediately attacked Casson’s case. Speaking for Marchetti, Giovanni Seno argued that almost all of Casson’s evidence involved the attempt by Carella and Marchetti to make it look as though they had left the Fenice at least an hour before the f
ire broke out.
“Of course they did!” said Seno. “They were frightened. It’s only human that a person would try to distance himself from unfounded suspicion in a horrific event like this. Casson’s case is all conjecture, nothing more.”
Carella’s lawyer added that Casson had got it all wrong as to motive: Viet was not really late; the Fenice had given them a six-week extension, until March 15. Furthermore, if there had been a penalty, it would have been paid by the company that had given Viet the subcontract, Argenti. Carella’s lawyer also claimed that Enrico’s personal debt amounted to only $7,500, a tenth of what Casson had estimated. The $75,000 figure, he said, had probably come from a wiretapped conversation in which Carella’s father mentioned to a friend that his son’s debts had mounted after the fire. That was because much of his equipment had been destroyed in it.
