Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  As the daughter of lower-middle-class Sicilian parents who strove for better things, she grew up until the age of eight in Trieste, where her parents had moved for work. When she returned to Palermo, she attended a convent school and her father locked her in the house in the afternoon because it wasn’t seemly for a little girl to play outside. To escape her father, at the age of sixteen she married the first boy who asked her. She married as a virgin. At her wedding she wore a pink lace hat by the French fashion designer Jacques Fath. Her husband was the scion of a Sicilian coffee-roasting dynasty. She gave him three daughters, one after the other. When she expressed the desire to study, her husband declared that she had gone insane. For fifteen years she led the life of a Sicilian wife, then she suffered a collapse, a psychologically induced heart attack. Her husband sent her to the best doctors in Italy and to Switzerland for a sleeping cure, and, when nothing worked, to a psychotherapist in Palermo. Letizia spent years in psychoanalysis and at the end of it she left her husband, taking her three daughters with her.

  ‘You know,’ Letizia says, ‘my husband could have forgiven me a lover, but not a job of my own.’

  When Shobha and her mother sit side by side today, they might be mistaken for sisters: they look very similar, with the difference that Letizia has smooth, strawberry-blonde hair, while Shobha is a resolutely fake blonde.

  ‘I can remember my daughters when they were little,’ Letizia says, with a glance at Shobha, ‘but not my life before I was forty. Strange, isn’t it?’

  Shobha sets her camera down on the table for a moment. I wonder if even your own mother is transformed when you look at her through the lens. Whether she becomes a different person, a stranger whom you approach impartially? During the Palermo Spring, Letizia was a heroine to many women. To Shobha, she was always her mother. Although perhaps Shobha is more maternal than her mother. Shobha is solicitous about everyone, whether it be her neurotic cat or the tortoises that live on her terrace. She even mothers me. She calls me Petruccia. And tells me to eat more pineapple.

  When we’re working together, Shobha can persuade even the most intransigent men and the most circumspect women to pose for her, to smile at her, to give meaningful looks, whatever’s needed. And as she rules with an iron hand – ‘No! Don’t look into the camera! Mouth shut! Yes, that’s great!’ – everyone is so busy trying to please her that I manage to study them all unobserved, to read a raised eyebrow here, notice a false smile there, or perhaps just a trembling of the hands.

  That’s how it was in Corleone, where we saw five old men sitting in a row, as if for the Benetton photographer. All wearing the coppola, the Sicilian hunter’s cap, and freshly ironed shirts. At the old men’s feet there stood a basket of pomegranates. From the hall behind them came the murmur of appreciative voices and the slap of cards being slammed down on the table. On the wall there was a sign: A well-mannered person doesn’t swear or spit on the floor. Shobha managed to make them all feel important, shirt buttons were done up and hair combed smooth.

  The old men were looking across at the church of Santa Rosalia, jostled by decaying palazzi and new grey buildings. Inside, three young girls were waiting for visitors, to teach them about the art-historical significance of the crucifix, the value of the painting by De Vasco, which depicts St John the Baptist and was once stolen but returned immediately, thanks to the Mafia. But no one wandered into the unassuming church. The parish priest had gone to Monreale to see the archbishop, so the girls were whiling away their time. They scampered around the church like elves, climbed giggling into the niche where the crucifix was kept, hid behind the choir screens, behind which the closed-order nuns used to sit, startled the doves in the bell tower, shared a cigarette up there and sounded a shrill and weary little bell until the old men of the Circolo degli Agricoltori pushed back their caps and stretched their wrinkled necks to look at the sky.

  Even today, Santa Rosalia is the church of the Riinas and the Bagarellas, those two families responsible for what was probably the most bloodthirsty period of Cosa Nostra’s history. Santa Rosalia was also the church of Luciano Liggio – or ‘Lucianeddu’, the diminutive by which he is affectionately known here – the legendary boss known as the ‘red primrose of Corleone’, who was once thought to control the weather in these parts, the foster-son of the mighty Don Michele Navarra, Corleone’s post-war godfather.

  But Don Michele, his former patron, got in the way of Liggio’s entry into the modern age because the old man refused to contribute to the modernization of the Mafia and its entry into the drugs trade and the lucrative kidnapping business. Don Michele, an old yard-dog, too old to bark. But maybe not too old to bite. So one August day in 1958 he was shredded in his Fiat with 112 bullets.

  Red and yellow bunting stretched across the alley. In the tense nothingness of Corleone, the little flapping pennants seemed to suggest an unexpected outbreak of high spirits. It was the bunting from the parish festival. For a few days Santa Rosalia had had a new parish priest, Domenico Mancuso. A handsome man, the girls said, and sighed. Only twenty-eight. But already putting on a bit of weight. He eats too much!

  The handsome parish priest came from Prizzi and, it was said, from a very pious family. His predecessor was Monsignore Liggio, who had overseen the salvation of the people of Corleone from cradle to grave for half a century. Monsignore Liggio lived only a few steps away from his church, with his sister and his niece. An old man in the middle of a still-life of tatted doilies, bunches of dried flowers and polished walnut. He was a pure-blood Corleonese, he said proudly, looking at his white hands and manicured fingers. His eyes were pale blue and alert in his waxy face. He was born and bred in Corleone, and it was in Corleone that he wanted to die. Peacefully, in his sleep.

  The boss Luciano Liggio was Monsignore Liggio’s cousin. When the boss died in prison, the Monsignore fought tirelessly to arrange a church funeral for his cousin. ‘Does not even the lost sheep have the right to be buried by his family?’ he had asked at the time.

  But for now he was saying nothing. He ran the tip of his tongue over his white, cracked lips. ‘Mafia? You are asking impertinent questions,’ he said, and a faint irritation played around his mouth. Silence fell around us like a fine dust. And when his old sister gasped, he prodded her with his long thin finger.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ he said, ‘these matters have nothing to do with us.’

  It was at that moment that the sexton of Santa Rosalia pulled on the rope and the bell rang for evening mass. The bell-tower doves flew off in flocks and the sky began to darken. The church filled slowly, mostly with women saying the rosary even before mass began. A muted hubbub of voices, a creaking sound as the women knelt before the Madonna, crossing themselves briefly before loudly kissing their thumbs. Everyone prayed here, butchers and victims, elbow to elbow. Monsignore Liggio wanted to celebrate evening mass along with his young successor. The power of habit. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. As Monsignore Liggio unsteadily climbed the altar steps, the young parish priest held out his arm. The elves sat in the front row and smiled at the handsome priest.

  ‘Ah, Corleone,’ the younger man said later in the sacristy. It smelled of wax and lavender and dusty old tomes.

  ‘Once the soil here was drenched with blood, but that’s a long time ago now. Though the Mafia is everywhere today,’ he said, and held his arms folded over his belly. His head was young, his body already showing signs of stoutness.

  ‘We don’t know who’s in the Mafia and who isn’t,’ he said in his soft, casual-sounding Sicilian. ‘And what is said at confession remains secret. It’s as if we hadn’t heard it.’

  He smiled thoughtfully and ran his hand over his hair as casually as he spoke. ‘You know, the judiciary can’t forbid us to lead even a mafioso to his salvation. We can’t refuse the sacraments to anyone.

  ‘It’s always been so, and it always will be. The Lord seeks the lost sheep, the lost son, he forgives the sinners. Oh, the Mafia! Couldn’t consumeris
m be said to be the scourge of the modern age? Saving souls! That’s a priest’s job. If only everyone would do his job, the carabiniere the carabiniere’s job, the public prosecutor the public prosecutor’s – then he’ll win respect! Il rispetto! Il rispetto! No one in Corleone would dream of disrespecting the parish priest, no one, however young or old.’

  As he spoke, Monsignore Liggio nodded to him. And then said, delighted: ‘He does it much better than I do.’

  When mass was over, the women disappeared as quickly as if the alley had swallowed them up. The old men had already gone home, the Circolo degli Agricoltori opposite the church had closed its tall double doors. The elves had vanished and the doves had withdrawn to their niches in the church tower. The evening light melted the shadows away, silence stretched like a puddle of oil, and Corleone yielded at last to its drowsiness. Monsignore Liggio was walked home by his young successor. He linked arms with the younger man and cautiously matched his pace. Like that they walked sedately along the alley. Both took very small steps.

  Palace of Poison

  Shobha decides – whether it’s melodramatic or not – that the Palace of Justice is at least worth a shot. ‘Come on,’ she says to Letizia, ‘one more photograph.’

  Letizia sighs. For years she has avoided the Palace of Justice – still known in Palermo as the Palace of Poison, because deep down it has little to do with justice for all. Time and again public prosecutors have fought not against the Mafia, but for it. Because Giovanni Falcone knew that, he founded the Anti-Mafia Pool, the investigation team to which various anti-Mafia public prosecutors belonged. The chief commandment of the Anti-Mafia Pool was that all investigations should be made accessible to all participating public prosecutors. The investigating public prosecutors of the Anti-Mafia Pool worked on cases together and shared all their information, which first of all removed the threat of a corrupt public servant appropriating a crucial piece of knowledge which might be useful to the Mafia and, secondly, ensured that, in the event of a member of the Pool being murdered, no knowledge should go missing. The Pool was not to be organized vertically, according to hierarchy and years of service: instead, all the public prosecutors in the pool were to have equal access to all inquiries.

  And because by no means all politicians in the Italian parliament are involved in the struggle against the Mafia, for years Palermo’s Anti-Mafia Pool has been an irritation to many of them, from Andreotti via Berlusconi to former Sicilian regional president Cuffaro – who have all set themselves the goal of destroying the Anti-Mafia Pool. And if they can’t destroy it, then they can at least discredit it through political intrigue and journalistic mudslinging, in which the public prosecutors in the Pool are accused, just as they were in Falcone’s day, of participating in a personality cult, and are demonized as communist enemies of the state – if not actually as ‘mentally disturbed and anthropologically different from the rest of the human race’, as Berlusconi felt obliged to remark.

  Salvo’s chief problem with the Palace of Justice concerns the availability of parking. A large area around it is closed off, less for security reasons than because of the vast building site needed to produce an underground car park – which has already provoked a certain amount of controversy in Palermo. What if the Mafia exploded a car bomb in that underground car park?

  Like most of the other Palaces of Justice in Italy, the one in Palermo looks like a fascistic marble block. I always wonder how this discrepancy between a great stone demonstration of power and a plainly powerless judiciary might be explained. And I can find no answer. The Italian Palaces of Justice look like fortresses of the legal system, but hidden away in their deep interior are outmoded offices without computers, without enough paper, without enough pencils. If you can’t force the public prosecutors to their knees politically, then you try to do it by cancelling paper, pencils and the petrol for armoured limousines.

  A flight of very tall steps leads to the entrance. The higher you climb, the smaller you feel. A steel fence used to close off the semicircle of the Palace of Justice, and after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino soldiers were entrenched there behind sandbags. Today, the Palace of Justice is guarded by just a few carabinieri, armed with machine guns, whose readiness for action not even the dogs in the street take seriously. They doze in the shade beside their sentry boxes and don’t even blink when you walk past.

  From the back, the Palace of Justice looks like a gigantic pink tombstone; the modern extension is extolled by architects and looks no less fascistic than the granite-grey part, except that the colour softens the effect. People passing in front of the Palace of Justice look as small as if they were walking past the Pyramid of Cheops. The square in front of it is called Piazza della Memoria. Here you can read, cast in steel, the names of all the murdered Sicilian public prosecutors.

  Shobha gives Letizia instructions that she isn’t keen to hear. ‘Turn round, head up, yes, that’s lovely, no, take your hand away.’ Letizia poses ironically, and wastes no time in taking her own pictures with her new Leica, while at the same time delivering a polemic about the stalemate in the struggle against the Mafia. She asks what the Germans thought when the Duisburg massacre took place. Were they surprised? Shocked by the cold-bloodedness of it all? Perhaps dismayed that the Mafia was just as blithely active in Germany as it was in Italy? Letizia’s eyes look combative again. Yes, that’s it exactly: the arrogance of the Mafia! The presumption of the powerful! What do the Germans think? The Mafia isn’t just an Italian problem, after all. If the EU doesn’t pay attention, the Mafia will swallow us all up!

  Shobha brushes me aside because I’ve got into the shot again. So I stand to one side and consider the Palace of Justice, some plaster already crumbling away at one corner. In which it resembles the Palace of Justice in Calabria, which, like many public buildings in southern Italy, is in need of serious restoration.

  Throughout the whole of southern Italy, the power of the Mafia can be read in the architecture. Like the Mafia in Sicily and Campania, for half a century the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria has had a share of public commissions, 3 or 5 per cent – what the Calabrians, with bitter irony, call a ‘security tax’. All businessmen working in Calabria pay this contribution to the Mafia, whether they are building roads, Palaces of Justice or hospitals. And they save that contribution by putting up plasterboard rather than laying bricks, by quoting for steel and using iron, by using cheap rendering that cracks after just a few months, by failing to make windows watertight or walls damp-proof.

  The Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria looks as if Ceauşescu’s architect had finally used it to realize his dream of omnipotence, even though little details, such as properly functioning lifts, escaped him. Here I met Salvatore Boemi, the leading senior public prosecutor in the Anti-Mafia Pool, and Nicola Gratteri, the public prosecutor investigating the Duisburg massacre. The bearded Boemi has been dealing with the Mafia for more than forty years; he’s the historical memory of the public prosecutor’s office of Reggio Calabria, a city in which the ’Ndrangheta controls the very air that people breathe. Boemi looked like a melancholy English aristocrat; there were English leather chairs in his office, which contrasted curiously with the view from his window out on to Sahara-coloured Reggio Calabria, which seemed to consist entirely of flyovers on concrete stilts, ruined buildings and a leaden sea which merged in the distance with the horizon.

  Duisburg was a massacre that was committed in a megalomaniac frenzy, Boemi said. With these murders, the mafiosi of San Luca had taken the greatest possible risk: that Italy and Germany would become aware of the threat from the Mafia and react to it. And there had been no reaction from the state, either in Germany or in Italy. If nothing happened now, Germany could soon find itself approaching the Italian condition, in which the Mafia had elevated itself to a bourgeoisie controlling politics and the economy. ‘In Calabrian society I see no will to get rid of the Mafia – just the will to get rid of us,’ said senior public prosecutor Boemi
. And he added: ‘The rot in Sicilian and Calabrian politics is boundless. The criminal system here works closely with politics and the business class.’

  Boemi was excluded from the Anti-Mafia Pool in Reggio Calabria for five years. Supposedly to keep public prosecutors from turning into ‘autonomous power centres’, the Berlusconi government passed a law according to which no public prosecutor could work for more than eight years in the Anti-Mafia Pool – like a yoghurt that’s past its sell-by date. In this way not only was the work of the Anti-Mafia Pool slowed down, but many Pools were cleaned of those public prosecutors who refused to see the Mafia merely as a problem of public order and who instead investigated politicians who were close to the Mafia. In Palermo, it wasn’t just the public prosecutors who had run the Andreotti trial who had been eliminated from the Anti-Mafia Pool – Roberto Scarpinato, Guido Lo Forte and Gioacchino Natoli – but also Antonio Ingroia, who had revealed the Mafia links of the Berlusconi confidant Marcello Dell’Utri and the high-ranking secret service agent Bruno Contrada.

  As Boemi spoke, you could hear the wind howling through the ventilation shafts of his office. He acted as if he couldn’t hear a thing. He just went on talking, looking out at the lead-coloured sea, as if he mustn’t lose sight of it. On the other side lay Sicily.

  ‘We need European laws,’ he said. ‘It’s a task for the politicians, not for the legal profession. We’ve got to be able to confiscate Mafia property abroad as well, even in Germany, which we thought was immune to Mafia intrigues. People said to us: “The Mafia, that’s your problem. Punish them, do what you like – they’re Italians, after all.” In Europe today you have to take into account the fact that the Mafia is a reality that we’re exporting.’