The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

  “We all have a feeling of exhilaration,” she said. Her efforts, like those of everyone else, would be part of an attempt to re-create the Fenice as it was designed after the 1836 fire so that, as the architect Giambattista Meduna put it at the time, “no part will be diminished in flamboyance [and] those who see it will say that the magnificence of the decorations of Versailles are no more splendid.”

  As to whether the former opulence, magnificence, and flamboyance could be regained, Laura Migliori would say only, “We’ve made a start. We’ve got the mud off.”

  THE OPERA MUSIC BLASTING out of the protesters’ loudspeakers on the fifth anniversary of the Fenice fire carried across the Grand Canal to the Palace of Justice, where, as it happened, prosecutor Felice Casson was making his closing remarks in the arson trial of Enrico Carella and Massimiliano Marchetti. The charge of attempted murder had been set aside in an earlier session.

  Casson sat alone at a table in the high-ceilinged chamber wearing black robes over a collarless shirt and facing a panel of three judges. He spoke for five hours, detailing the case against the two electricians. The defendants and their lawyers sat at tables behind him. Enrico Carella wore a dark suit, a silk tie, and polished black shoes; Massimiliano Marchetti was dressed in a sport jacket, corduroy pants, a plain tie, and work shoes. Both were subdued. Carella shifted nervously in his chair.

  Casson told the story of the fire in a meticulous, spellbinding narrative—the workers leaving the theater at the end of the day, Carella pouring solvent on a pile of planks of wood upstairs in the ridotto in preparation for setting the fire later on, Carella and Marchetti hiding as the last of the workmen left, Carella using a blowtorch to ignite the fire while Marchetti stood lookout, the fire creeping, then roaring, through the theater. Casson’s narrative was accompanied by a computerized, three-dimensional reenactment shown on four large television monitors placed around the courtroom.

  In the course of his recitation, Casson made it clear that he had placed the two young electricians under near-constant, almost obsessive surveillance.

  In one conversation, taped after a lengthy interrogation at police headquarters, Carella and Marchetti had gotten into their car unaware that it had been bugged. Their behavior at this moment, Casson said, was significant:

  “They get into the car, and you would think that after what they’d been through they would blurt out, as any normal, innocent person would, ‘They’re crazy! This is madness! What do we have to do with the Fenice?!’ Instead Carella says, ‘Mauro better get his story in line.’ They were worried about somebody named Mauro. They were hiding him. Then Massimiliano tells Enrico that he didn’t mention Mauro’s last name to the police, and Enrico answers, ‘Good, perfect!’”

  The recording was the first time Casson had heard mention of Mauro Galletta, a fishmonger who lived near the Fenice. According to Casson, Carella and Marchetti wanted to keep his existence unknown for two reasons. First, a few hours before the fire, Galletta had come to the Fenice at Carella’s request to take photographs of the electrical work that Carella’s company was doing at the time. Those photographs, once they came to light, proved that Carella was way behind schedule and faced a penalty charge, which Carella had repeatedly denied. The prospect of a penalty was central to Casson’s explanation of a motive; it was just as important to Carella’s defense to prove he was not facing a penalty. Second, after leaving the Fenice, Carella and Marchetti had not gone directly to the Lido as they had said; they had gone to their friend Mauro Galletta’s house to smoke marijuana and eat pizza. According to Galletta, they arrived at his house a little after nine o’clock. This would have made it impossible for them to have reached the Lido by nine-fifteen, as they had claimed.

  Casson now estimated that it was not until ten o’clock that Carella and Marchetti had left for the Lido, where Carella claimed he had received the call telling him about the fire.

  “By the time they were crossing the lagoon on the way to the Lido,” said Casson, “the sky was all lit up. How could they not have known about the fire?” Carella had offered an absurd explanation, said Casson: They had been sitting with their backs to Venice.

  Casson’s surveillance picked up two virtual confessions from Carella and Marchetti. A plainclothesman sitting behind them on a vaporetto overheard Marchetti say to Carella, “Don’t worry, I won’t rat on you.”

  Then, in a conversation taped after a particularly grueling police interrogation, Marchetti was heard to say, “We’re both going to jail,” to which Carella replied, “They’ve got us. They’ve really got us.” Casson read these two quotes to the court, adding dryly that he had omitted the profanities from both remarks.

  One of the most damaging blows to Carella’s credibility came from an unexpected source: his father, Renato Carella. When Renato Carella was asked how he had heard about the fire, he said his son had called to tell him at 10:10 P.M. That was twenty minutes before the first mention of the fire on television, but Enrico Carella had claimed that he had learned about the fire from someone who had just seen it on TV. Was Renato Carella sure about the time? Yes, he said, he was positive.

  In fact, Renato Carella had become the mystery man in the case. He had set up his son’s company for the sole purpose of receiving the electrical subcontract from Argenti in Rome. Renato Carella was then hired by Argenti to serve as its liaison at the Fenice. When Casson announced his original list of defendants in 1998, Renato Carella had not been among them. But Casson had named three suspects who were still under investigation. Two were Mafia bosses from Palermo. The other was Renato Carella. The Mafia bosses had since been dropped as suspects, but Carella remained in Casson’s sights even at this late date, and Casson intended to keep him there indefinitely.

  “I’D LIKE TO KNOW MORE about Renato Carella myself,” said Giovanni Seno, Massimiliano Marchetti’s lawyer, during a one-hour break in Casson’s closing remarks. I had gone downstairs to take a walk in the Rialto food market and found myself in lockstep with Seno. We started talking. Seno still had his air of cocky confidence, but I could tell he was worried. Casson had built a strong case, and Seno no longer argued that the fire had been caused by negligence. He now claimed that the hapless Marchetti was in the dark “about what was going on that night.” He did not say the same for Enrico Carella, and he admitted that he had suspicions about Renato Carella. As we spoke, he kept looking around as if to make sure he was not being overheard.

  “Look,” he said, “I’m going to tell you some things you may not know. About how contracting and subcontracting work in Italy. Behind these big contracts—and this is just between you and me—there is almost always favoritism, some politics, and maybe a little bribery. I’m not saying that’s what happened in this situation, but it would be unusual if it didn’t. The way it works is this: A big company like Argenti wins a contract and then dumps all the work onto subcontractors who do the job as cheaply as possible. The big company doesn’t do any of the work themselves. It doesn’t send laborers. It does nothing. It gets the contract for, say, seven hundred fifty million lire [$375,000] and then turns around and hands out jobs to subcontractors for maybe six hundred million [$300,000]. The company makes a profit without lifting a finger. It goes on all the time, and it’s not illegal. Now, in this case, certain people suspect that maybe—just maybe—it was Renato Carella, the lowly foreman, who secretly won the contract for Argenti.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe he had inside information. Maybe he knew the costs or what other competitors were bidding, but since he wasn’t a registered contractor, he couldn’t bid for the job himself. So he passes this valuable information to Argenti. Argenti tailors its bid to fit Renato’s information and wins the contract. To show their gratitude, they throw some money Renato’s way by subcontracting part of the work to a company Renato sets up for his son—a company that, bear in mind, didn’t exist before, that had no track record. And then Argenti hires Renato as the foreman. Have I explained myself?”


  Seno leaned a little closer. “The way I figure it, Renato Carella, my client’s uncle, was the one in control, the one who had the real power. It’s not clear to me exactly how. I don’t have specific information, but this guy is an operator. Right after the fire, even though he was under suspicion for arson, Renato Carella got another big public subcontract, this one at the Arsenal. He took Enrico along on that job, too.”

  “But what has this got to do with the Fenice fire?”

  “I’m giving you the broad picture. Renato Carella is a man with connections to lots of companies. Not just Argenti.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “But inside that broad picture, there are some very curious specifics. We know, for instance, that at the time of the fire, the son had debts of a hundred and fifty million lire [$75,000]. Mysteriously, seven months after the fire, Renato Carella gives him the money to pay off the debts. That’s on the record. If he’s only a foreman, how can he afford to do that? Where did he get the money?”

  “So you think,” I said, “that the money might have come from whoever paid Carella to set the fire, assuming somebody did.”

  “No, no!” Seno raised his right hand, as if swearing an oath. “Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that! I never said that! You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.” He looked around again. “But here’s another curious fact: Renato Carella hired one of the most expensive attorneys in Italy, a guy who works for Prime Minister Berlusconi.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “This was for his own defense,” said Seno.

  “And for his son?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What about his nephew?”

  “Even less.”

  AT THE END OF HIS SUMMATION, Casson asked the court to find Carella and Marchetti guilty of arson and send them to prison for seven years. As to the possibility that the fire was ordered and paid for by others, he said an investigation was continuing and would perhaps lead to another trial later on.

  Before the judges would issue their verdict, the trial would go into its second phase: charges against eight defendants for negligence and dereliction of duty.

  Casson opened by arguing that convictions for arson did not automatically rule out criminal negligence.

  “Attacks on works of art,” he said, “especially theaters, are unfortunately not unusual in the Italian panorama. Since October 1991, when the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari burned, there have been a dozen instances of damage to theaters and art galleries by arson. Therefore, in 1996, a fire at the Fenice was within the realm of possibility, and those responsible for its security should have known this. But nobody gave a damn.”

  He read the names of the defendants and the prison terms he had selected for each. The list was headed by ex-mayor Massimo Cacciari: nine months in jail. A sentence of that length was purely symbolic, however, since any jail term of less than two years was automatically suspended. The only other of the eight to draw a proposed sentence of less than two years was the Fenice’s custodian, Gilberto Paggiaro. Casson considered Paggiaro’s absence from his post on the night of the fire to be negligence of a less serious nature, because it had not contributed to the hazardous conditions at the theater before the fire. Casson asked that Paggiaro, who had suffered two heart attacks and depression since the fire, be given a sentence of eighteen months.

  The other six were charged with a long list of derelictions and malfeasances, from failure to control the handling and storage of flammable materials to allowing the fire-extinguisher system to be dismantled before a new one was installed.

  The most serious offender, in Casson’s view, was the chief engineer of the Comune of Venice, who was the top executive in charge of the theater’s renovation. For him, Casson proposed a four-year prison term; for his two assistants, two years; and for the top management of the Fenice, the general manager and the secretary-general, three years.

  Arguments for the defense all had one theme in common: the denial of responsibility. Officials at the top pointed sideways and downward. Those at the bottom pointed up.

  The most novel defense was offered by the lawyer for Gianfranco Pontel, the Fenice’s general manager. Pontel’s attorney claimed, at great length and with a straight face, that his client was responsible for the safety and security of the Fenice theater and that when the Fenice was not putting on productions, it ceased to be a theater and became a mere complex of buildings for which his client had no legal obligations at all. The theater had vanished, at least where Gianfranco Pontel was concerned, and would reappear only when productions once again were mounted on its stage. The lawyer’s speech drew laughter from the gallery and could have fit seamlessly into Alice in Wonderland or any number of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Gianfranco Pontel had been a political appointee, one who was always thought to have been an odd choice as general manager of the Fenice, as he had no musical background and spent most of his time in Rome. In any case, since the fire, Pontel had moved on to become secretary-general of the Venice Biennale.

  When the second phase of the trial was finished, the judges retired to consider all the evidence. At the end of the month, the presiding judge read the verdicts to a crowded courtroom:

  Enrico Carella—guilty of arson, seven years in jail. Massimiliano Marchetti—guilty of arson, six years in jail. All eight negligence defendants—not guilty. Arson had been the sole cause of the fire.

  Giovanni Seno was incensed. “The verdict was written by the end of the first day in court!” he told reporters. Carella, who had not been present at the reading of the verdict, gave a statement to the Gazzettino, proclaiming his innocence. Marchetti said nothing. The two would remain free, pending appeal.

  Two months later, the judges filed the motivazione, their explanation of how they reached their verdict. Their report contained a chilling revelation:

  “Carella and Marchetti were not alone,” the judges said. “They were surrogates for others who remained in the shadows, people with financial interests of such magnitude that, by comparison, the sacrifice of a theater would have seemed a small thing.”

  The judges had put the weight of their authority behind the notion that the arson had been paid for by persons unknown. “For the judges,” the Gazzettino reported, “what had once been merely an investigative theory has now become a certainty.”

  A presumptive spotlight fell on Renato Carella. But three months later, Renato Carella was dead of lung cancer. I called on Casson at his office in the Tribunal building to ask what effect this would have on the investigation.

  “It’s over,” he said simply. “Renato Carella was the focus of our investigation. We thought he might have been the link between the boys and the money. He had contacts with a number of companies outside Venice. We were investigating him and also looking into every contractor and subcontractor that was hired to work on the Fenice, but we were never able to come up with any concrete evidence. And now, with his death, all trace has been lost.”

  “What about the boys?” I asked. “Have they shown any inclination to talk?”

  “On several occasions, they told us they would give us further information about him, but they changed their minds every time. And, unfortunately, we have a huge number of cases that demand our attention. Until there is something new—like a statement from Carella or Marchetti—the case won’t be reopened. We simply don’t have the time to pursue it.”

  “THE FATHER’S DEAD, THE TRAIL GOES COLD, and the mystery lingers on,” said Ludovico De Luigi with a chuckle. “It’s all about money, as usual. Not love—money. The perfect ending, for Venice.”

  De Luigi was sitting in his ground-floor studio in front of an unfinished painting of a jeweled dress floating against a barren landscape, as if it were being worn by an invisible woman.

  “I’m painting a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim’s self-esteem,” he said. “It’s the gold evening gown she was wearing in the famous photograph Man Ray took of her in the 1920s. It’s a Poiret dress
.” The photograph had appeared on the dust jacket of Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography, Out of This Century, which De Luigi had tacked to the side of his easel.