Honoured Society, The
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And true enough, the trial in the little courtroom lasted only a few minutes. There was hardly time to appreciate the dusty little fan that stood in the corner and to notice that a silver tassel was missing from the public prosecutor’s gown. As always, the microphones weren’t working. The trial had been adjourned over a formality.
A few months after our meeting, Senator Marcello Dell’Utri was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia and a lifelong exclusion from public office. As usual in Italy, however, the sentence in the first instance had no effect on the defendant’s life: until the sentence has been confirmed in the second and third instances, Marcello Dell’Utri remains a free man. On average that takes ten years. And because the period of limitation begins with the start of the trial, like many other defendants in Italy, Marcello Dell’Utri can expect his crime to have lapsed when the final sentence is passed by the supreme court.
I will never be able to get used to this regulation. The three instances rule in Italian law is referred to as garantista: a law that respects the rights of the citizen. But it’s one that benefits the Mafia and corrupt politicians more than anyone else. I can’t get my head round the fact that someone whose guilt has been acknowledged by a court can go on strolling around the place unmolested and carry on being a politician – even in the European Parliament, as Marcello Dell’Utri has done. But equally it comes as no surprise that a judicial reform abolishing this three instances rule would never be passed by the Italian parliament.
At the end of the eight-year trial the judges have taken it as read that Marcello Dell’Utri has worked as a mediator for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra since the 1970s, in the economy and in politics. His contact was Silvio Berlusconi. ‘The defendant has represented the interests of the Mafia in one of the biggest companies in the country; from the 1970s until the present day he was at the disposal of the Mafia, and made a more than considerable contribution to the consolidation and reinforcement of Cosa Nostra. He has favoured [it] and received favours,’ the judges wrote. The public prosecutors identified Dell’Utri as a kind of insurance agent for the Mafia: he drafted the contract with his client and ensured that it was precisely adhered to.
Immediately after the proclamation of the sentence, the then president of the chamber of deputies, Pier Ferdinando Casini, phoned up the defendant and assured him of his highest esteem and friendship, and also passed this on to the Italian public in an official note. And Berlusconi assured his friend Dell’Utri that he would put both hands in the fire for him. At the same time, Berlusconi warned the public prosecutors of Palermo not to play with fire. Berlusconi has never been terribly skilled in his use of metaphors.
Only a few short steps from the courtroom where I met Dell’Utri, in a corridor that, with its rows of discarded photocopiers and dusty swivel chairs, looked like a furniture storeroom for the next intake of Bosnian refugees, public prosecutor Antonio Ingroia, Dell’Utri’s accuser, had his office. A bearded man with an old man’s posture, even though he wasn’t all that old.
On his desk lay a silver wolf’s head as a paperweight; on the wall there were prints and the usual carabinieri calendars that every public prosecutor is given as a present. Public prosecutor Ingroia told me how he had come to Rome with over a hundred questions in his luggage to hear Silvio Berlusconi take the witness stand. The prime minister evoked his right to silence. And the public prosecutor regretted this as a missed opportunity to tell the truth.
The story of the friendship between the Milanese Silvio Berlusconi and the Sicilian Marcello Dell’Utri is documented in the 2,500 pages of files produced by the Palermo public prosecutor’s office. Here one can read that the two men met in 1961, both in their early twenties, at Milan University. Marcello Dell’Utri began his professional life as secretary to Silvio Berlusconi, who was only four years his senior. This first collaboration lasted only a short time, however, and a year later Dell’Utri went to Rome, where he became sports director at a sports centre run by Opus Dei. From Rome he returned to Palermo, where he became sports director of an athletics club, where he became acquainted with the mafiosi Vittorio Mangano and Gaetano Cinà. Mangano was later deployed as Cosa Nostra’s middleman at Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore. Gaetano Cinà worked as a bagman between the Mafia and Berlusconi, and at Christmas expressed his thanks for his successful collaboration with Berlusconi with ten kilos of cassata cake. But that time had not yet come. In 1970 sports director Dell’Utri became a bank clerk. A particularly skilful one. Soon he was responsible for the allocation of agricultural credits in the Sicilcassa bank.
A few years later, the Mafia threatened rising businessman Silvio Berlusconi with the kidnap of his son Piersilvio, unless Berlusconi paid protection money. Berlusconi didn’t report this blackmail, but remembered his Sicilian friend. Marcello Dell’Utri brought his contacts into play and learned that a clan from Catania was threatening Berlusconi. However, the power of Cosa Nostra traditionally lies in the hands of families from Palermo, with which Marcello Dell’Utri had excellent relations – which is why there were several meetings between Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri and the legendary Mafia boss Stefano Bontade, known as the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’.
These meetings ended, to the satisfaction of all participants, with the assurance of the greatest goodwill. The mafioso Vittorio Mangano moved into Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore as guarantor of the security of the Berlusconi family, officially as a stable-man. Berlusconi’s flexibility was rewarded: from now on 113 billion lire (around 300 million euros in present-day terms) flowed into Fininvest, the holdings in which Berlusconi has bundled his activities as major investor, building contractor and media entrepreneur. Later, in the Mafia trial against Marcello Dell’Utri, even an adviser for the defence had to admit that these payments from Fininvest between 1975 and 1983 had not been transparent. According to the statements of various turncoat mafiosi, during that period the Mafia boss Stefano Bontade invested a considerable amount of Mafia capital in Berlusconi’s consortium and thus became an associate in the Fininvest group’s private television channels.
In 1976 a daily newspaper in Lombardy reported that a mafioso was working in Berlusconi’s villa, whereupon Mangano returned to Palermo. A year later Marcello Dell’Utri left his friend Silvio as well. He had hoped in vain for an executive position in the company, but Berlusconi didn’t think he was up to it – only for Berlusconi to change his mind a short time later. The Mafia boss Stefano Bontade had been murdered and the new generation of bosses was no longer satisfied with flexibility and little presents, and instead exerted pressure on Berlusconi. Meanwhile, the former stable-man Vittorio Mangano had been arrested and from prison tried in vain to put in a good word for Berlusconi with the new bosses. Silvio Berlusconi was forced to bring Marcello Dell’Utri back into his enterprise so that he could take care of delicate Sicilian business relationships.
In the meantime, Dell’Utri not only had to assume responsibility for the fraudulent bankruptcy of his building consortium, but also had to establish fresh Mafia connections. Toughened by this experience, he negotiated an annual ‘friendship contribution’ to the Mafia from his friend Silvio, to the tune of 200 million euros a year. But even that didn’t keep the bosses happy. After a bloody Mafia war, the Corleonese Totò Riina had reached the top of Cosa Nostra and he wanted a reshuffle. As the collaboration between Cosa Nostra and the Christian Democrats no longer prevailed, Riina tried to reach Berlusconi and the head of the Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi, through Dell’Utri. To stress the urgency of this collaboration, in November 1986 he arranged for a bomb to be set off outside Berlusconi’s Milan headquarters in the Via Rovani – a bomb that, Berlusconi said, had been placed there with respect, even with a certain affection. When not even a bomb could convince Berlusconi that cooperation with the Mafia was a good idea, a series of attacks was carried out on his La Standa supermarket chain. After this, Marcello Dell’Utri travelled to Catania as an emissary to clarify the conditions of the collabor
ation.
In 1992 Italy was rocked by the bribery scandal known as Tangentopoli, which dragged the established Italian parties into the abyss. Berlusconi was concerned about how his enterprise might survive without the protection of friendly parties like the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. Marcello Dell’Utri persuaded him to enter politics himself and started to prepare for the foundation of Forza Italia. A short time afterwards came the assassinations of the two anti-Mafia public prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The last interview that Paolo Borsellino gave before his death was the one in which he talked about the Mafia boss Mangano’s involvement with Dell’Utri and Berlusconi.
A year after the assassinations of the two public prosecutors, Bernardo Provenzano was made the new boss of Cosa Nostra. He negotiated a pact with Dell’Utri. He offered his support for Forza Italia, a renunciation of any further violence – and demanded certain guarantees in return: the end of criminal prosecution and political pressure on the Mafia, an end to the confiscation of Mafia property, and the abolition of the state witness regulations for turncoat mafiosi. Shortly after the meeting with Dell’Utri, Provenzano convened the leading bosses. We’re in good hands with Dell’Utri, Provenzano said, let’s work for Forza Italia.
So there we have the reconstruction of the charges against Marcello Dell’Utri, which would lead to a nine-year sentence. The further course of this friendship has gone down in Italian history. Forza Italia fulfilled its contract with Cosa Nostra to the letter: it declared the reform of the judiciary to be its most important political task – and this meant, among other things, the near abolition of high-security detention for mafiosi, and, thanks to the introduction of various forms of remission, life sentences no longer exist. Both life imprisonment and high-security detention were a thorn in the flesh for the mafiosi. A mafioso accepts a prison sentence without further ado, but not being kept out of the game forever. Or not being able to communicate with the outside world.
There used to be two high-security prisons, Asinara and Pianos, in which mafiosi were actually isolated. These two prisons have now been closed down. High-security detention is practised in normal prisons. There are certain sections there in which prisoners are isolated – always, of course, in accordance with human rights laws, which demand humane conditions even for Mafia bosses. Thus, for example, they have a right to regular association with other prisoners, which often leads to little meetings of Mafia bosses in prison. They can also communicate with the outside world because they are, after all, allowed regular family visits – even without armoured glass if their children are minors. At the present day, high-security detention merely means detention that is slightly less comfortable than the normal kind.
That’s why it’s hardly worthwhile for a mafioso to leave the Mafia. And it’s become harder for public prosecutors to use the statements of turncoat mafiosi in trials. The state witness regulations have been weakened. Today the turncoat must confess to everything that he has experienced in his whole life with the Mafia during the first 180 days after his arrest; statements made later are invalid. This has halved the value of these state witnesses: twenty or thirty years of Mafia life can’t be summed up all that simply. And besides, the statement of the turncoat will only be recognized at the trial if it is confirmed by two further turncoat mafiosi. And it sounds like a cruel irony within the history of the Italian judiciary that this state witness law so craved by Berlusconi was passed not by the Berlusconi government but by the left-wing government that came after it – plainly with a view to getting rid of the label of being the party of ‘red judges’.
And yet time and again there are moments when the Mafia finds that its demands aren’t being satisfied quite quickly enough. The cooperation between the Christian Democrats and the Mafia came to an end in 1992 with the murders of Salvo Lima and Ignazio Salvo, Andreotti’s governors in Sicily. Many people saw a parallel to this when the mafioso Leoluca Bagarella, the brother-in-law of the imprisoned boss Totò Riina, read out a declaration during a trial in 2002. In it, he announced a hunger-strike of seventy-one mafiosi protesting against their conditions of imprisonment and complained that promises made by politicians, such as the definitive revision of all Mafia trials, had not been kept. Results were expected. There was speculation about impending Mafia attacks on Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi.
For a while there was still a danger for Marcello Dell’Utri and Berlusconi that the two most important witnesses to Mafia deals might hit on the idea of becoming state witnesses, with a view to having their sentences reduced. The problem was solved when the bagman, fellow defendant and Dell’Utri confidant Gaetano Cinà died in Palermo in 2006 – as his death notice put it: at the end of a difficult and honest life. The mafioso and former stable-man Vittorio Mangano had already died in 2000. Vittorio was seen as a Mafia bridgehead in northern Italy; public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino said as much in his last interview, twenty hours before the Mafia blew him up.
Vittorio Mangano came home from prison only once, to die in the arms of his daughters. He had no regrets. It’s not only his daughters who are grateful to him for that. His friends Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi are too. In the 2008 election campaign, Marcello Dell’Utri was even moved to celebrate Mangano as a hero: he died for me, Dell’Utri said, because he was suffering from cancer and would have been released from prison if he had incriminated me and Berlusconi.
And Berlusconi had no hesitation in standing by his friend. Mangano had heroically refused to invent anything about him or Dell’Utri. When he had been living at Berlusconi’s villa he had always behaved impeccably, and it was only because of various difficulties that Mangano had fallen into the hands of a criminal organization. But he hadn’t been found guilty of anything.
Berlusconi was wrong there. In spite of the slowness of the Italian judicial system, Mangano had been found guilty on two out of the various charges against him, including murder, drug dealing and Mafia membership, and had been sentenced to thirteen years for Mafia membership and drug dealing – of which he had served eleven by the time of his death.
In the eyes of Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri, Mangano was quite definitely a hero.
After his victorious re-election in 2008, Silvio Berlusconi continued with his tried and tested judicial policy. He announced that he was changing the wiretapping law, which is a source of vexation not just to the mafiosi but also to politicians – which is why the left-wing government’s unfortunate justice minister, Romano Prodi, had tried to pass a law that would definitively have weakened the practice of wiretapping. Berlusconi thought he’d be more successful. And both Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi announced that they were going to build a bridge between Sicily and the mainland – a project that has been craved by the clans of Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta for years, because, as the boss Provenzano said, when that happens everyone will get a slice of the pie.
As it happened, Berlusconi wasn’t successful, neither in the change of the wiretapping law nor the building of the bridge. But it is only postponed. The next new government will doubtless try again. The interests of the Mafia are too big to be ignored.
Anna Palma
‘Basta,’ says Letizia. ‘Basta,’ says Shobha, and I say, ‘Basta,’ too. We decided to have lunch. When we’re working, we stick slavishly to our mealtimes. Regardless of whether we’re tracking down Mafia priests, heroic public prosecutors or fugitive bosses, we have lunch and dinner; we have starter, main, dessert and coffee, as if our lives depended on it. For an hour we belong to ourselves again.
‘Piccola Napoli,’ says Shobha, and I agree. The trattoria Piccola Napoli is an eerily beautiful place with extremely effective air conditioning and fluorescent lighting which takes a bit of getting used to since it colours everything slightly blue and makes you feel like a dead fish on ice. A delicious one, though.
When we come down the steps of the Palace of Justice, we see some public prosecutors driving up and slipping out of
their limousines. The public prosecutor Anna Palma greets us briefly as she walks past. I’ve known her since the trial of the murderers of Paolo Borsellino. Since she’s been working on the anti-Mafia commission in Rome and for Renato Schifani, the disputed President of the Italian Senate, she is seen more rarely in the Palace of Justice. Before that, she was in the Palermo Anti-Mafia Pool and responsible for the Mafia in Agrigento, Palma di Montechiaro and Porto Empedocle – the clans that have the closest connections with Germany, where they launder money and hide fugitive mafiosi, who live there as ice-cream salesmen or pizza-chefs, unmolested by the German police.
Anna Palma told me about the arrest of the Sicilian hit man Joseph Focoso, who was arrested in the Saarland village of Spiesen-Elversberg, where he had fled with his wife and children. As a Sicilian son should, he was living there with his parents. The Sicilian police had suspected that Focoso was there since tapping the phones of his relatives in Porto Empedocle and hearing that Focoso’s son, who had just travelled from Germany, was given a slap for saying, ‘But Dad said ...’ That was the confirmation for his pursuers that Focoso was living with his family in Germany. Since bugs have become the essential weapon of the police, every mafioso watches his tongue. Only children blab – and elderly aunts, like Aunt Giugia, who gave away on the phone the fact that she was supposed to be bringing Sicilian fish to Germany. Clearly for her fugitive nephew, because anyone else could simply have gone to Sicily for themselves. In the end it was his craving for Sicilian fish that did for Focoso. Because along with the fish and his aunt came the mobile task force from Agrigento.