Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  The registrar chewed gum. As he started his speech, the women’s heels slowly sank into the red Sicilian earth. He had been very pleased to learn that he was going to wed this famous couple, he said. They were, after all, well known in the city. He ran his hand along his official sash and gave a sphinx-like smile. Certainly, some kind of synergy could be expected from this marriage. The couple had already accomplished many wonderful things, he said. And he hoped that things would continue in that vein, so that they could still accomplish a great deal more!

  He smiled cryptically, and the guests applauded when the bride and groom finally said yes. After the registrar had declared them man and wife, Franco and Rosalba kissed passionately in front of the frozen centaurs of the magnolia fig tree. Dust shimmered in the sunlight. For one brief moment Rosalba was silent. And, touched, her children smiled.

  After that she stood on the first-floor balcony and threw the bouquet down among the unmarried women, to choose the next bride. But the bouquet was caught by an eight-year-old girl. Everything was different at this wedding, in fact. Unlike the usual Sicilian weddings – with at least seven hundred invited guests, Little Tony or some other Sicilian singing star, two video teams who don’t miss a single glance between the couple, and at least one member of parliament to give them a silver tray, which may one day feature in a public prosecutor’s bill of indictment as proof of Mafia involvement.

  I gave Rosalba an antique table runner as a wedding present. Would it, too, one day be used as evidence? At any rate, Rosalba said that the antique table runner went very well with the antique French book, La princesse Rosalba, given to her by Marcello Dell’Utri, that éminence grise who is somehow impossible to avoid in certain circles in Sicily.

  And so it is that the darkness of the Italian republic lurks within the heart of this apricot-coloured bride. In Rosalba Di Gregorio’s chambers the destinies of the most important Cosa Nostra bosses cross paths with those of Italian politicians: Bernardo Provenzano and his family, Vittorio Mangano and his family, Pietro Aglieri, Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi.

  A niece of the new godfather, the fugitive boss Matteo Messina Denaro, the supposed successor to Bernardo Provenzano, had recently had an internship in her chambers, Rosalba said. And I thought: Why not?

  Rosalba had travelled to her wedding at Villa Trabia in her dented Renault Twingo. Her last car had been a Twingo as well. She crashed it into a wall when an accidental contact caused a short circuit. Her garage discovered that a bug, acting as a tracking device, must have been removed from her car a short time before. Her client Pietro Aglieri had just been arrested at the time. After that, her journeys clearly hadn’t been interesting enough to keep spying on her, said Rosalba. ‘They turned me inside out like a pillowcase, I was X-rayed, I was vivisected. But they didn’t find a thing.’

  When Rosalba invited me to her wedding, we had already known each other for a few years. I had first met her in the high-security courtroom at Caltanissetta, where she was defending her client, the boss Pietro Aglieri, on one of his fifteen counts of murder. I had been struck that Rosalba was the only Mafia lawyer who had been listening during the trial. All the others ostentatiously fell asleep when a turncoat mafioso began to speak. That kind of effect was too cheap for Rosalba. She listened attentively, if reluctantly, so that she could object at the right moment.

  It might indeed be the case, Rosalba said, that her client was a mafioso, but there was still no proof about the indictments of murder. And without proof there was no guilt.

  And then she smiled with pursed lips. There was a principle at stake, she said. The principle of the freedom of the individual. And just by chance this individual was a mafioso. Are we not living in a constitutional, democratic state? Does a mafioso not have a right to be defended like everyone else? Well then.

  Regardless of whether she is waiting for a trial in the Palace of Justice or visiting her clients in jail, Rosalba is always dressed in a way that makes respectable Sicilian women blanch. She wears jeans with holes. Or a pinstripe jacket with a studded belt. Or army boots. Or a deep cleavage. Or everything at the same time. And her lawyer’s gown is thrown casually over her arm.

  Rosalba Di Gregorio doesn’t defend just any old Mafia bosses. But she does defend the ones accused of blowing up the public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino along with his bodyguards outside his mother’s front door. Some of them are in jail, others in hiding. Rosalba communicates with them via their relations. Sometimes I met them in the corridor of Rosalba’s chambers. The brothers and sisters of fugitive Mafia bosses were courteous people who greeted me cordially.

  ‘My clients tell me they’re innocent,’ Rosalba says firmly. ‘You can believe that or not. It doesn’t matter at all. At any rate, according to our legislation the client is deemed to be innocent until the judge delivers his judgement. The prosecution must present evidence, the defence must present counter-evidence. That’s how you get close to the truth. Or whatever the truth might be.’

  When the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri was arrested in Palermo in 1998, after eight years in hiding, he said just one sentence: ‘My lawyer’s name is Rosalba Di Gregorio.’ In those days the papers couldn’t get enough of the fairy-tale of the Beauty and the Beast. The Beast had the air of a seminarian and was considered the leading brains behind the current Mafia generation. The mafiosi call him u signorinu, the little gentleman. A Mafia boss of the kind that Sicily craved: an ascetic, constantly described by journalists as having read Kierkegaard in his hiding place and prayed with the priest Padre Frittitta before a house altar. Someone who could make himself understood in grammatically impeccable Italian – unlike the bosses arrested up until that point, who only had a command of Sicilian dialect and looked like the janitor next door. And a woman was defending him. That was the loveliest thing about him. Today, Pietro Aglieri is studying theology in jail, by correspondence course with Rome University. His professors are full of praise for him. He only ever gets the best marks.

  Rosalba has a pragmatic view of her job: she isn’t supporting monsters, just defendants. A moral problem would arise only if someone who had already been sentenced brought guns into jail. But until a sentence is passed, she assumes that she is standing by saints in their martyrdom trials. She looks at me ironically and draws on her cigarette.

  Every time I leave Rosalba’s chambers I have the feeling of being under anaesthetic. This has to do on the one hand with her extreme cigarette consumption, and on the other with ‘mafiology’, that self-referential area of study that has blossomed into an art form in Palermo, and in which Rosalba is an expert. Sicily is a world of interpretation, in which you read things into silences, into the pauses in the wiretap notes, into raised eyebrows, into the way someone lifts his coffee cup. Where you puzzle over what is hidden, could be hidden, should be hidden, behind each tiny gesture. As if reality were only a question of interpretation. As if the truth could constantly change like the sky in springtime.

  Regardless of the apricot-coloured wedding dress and the ribbon of bliss, Rosalba didn’t allow the merest hint of solemnity to appear at her wedding. She talked as she always talks. As if she were sitting behind her glass desk in her chambers, amidst yard after yard of files tagged with the names ‘Vittorio Mangano’ or ‘Borsellino’, in the middle of a menagerie consisting of a cloth swallow that sits on the desk lamp, a cloth snake that serves as a back rest, a horned computer with a leather cover and a fire-red rubber stiletto in which she usually rests her telefonino. Since she’s used to talking to her secretary in the outer office, Franco in the side room, the wife of a jailed mafioso on the phone and the legal intern in the armchair opposite her, all at the same time, Rosalba talked away nineteen to the dozen to the whole wedding party, witnesses and bridesmaids included. She whooped, cooed, growled and cursed. As if what was at stake was not the cupid’s bow of her lips, the curve of which everyone praised, but paragraph 41b, the one that prescribes high-security detention for mafiosi – which Rosalba fought a
gainst tenaciously and successfully and anti-constitutionally, on the grounds that it contravened human rights.

  Defending mafiosi as a lawyer is no longer the exception in Sicily but the rule, although it is an unusual career for a woman. So far Rosalba is the only one. She originally wanted to study medicine, but then it was law – for her mother’s sake. Her father died when she was sixteen and, as the only daughter of a single mother, Rosalba wanted to do everything particularly well.

  Her timetable has always been dictated by the destinies of the Mafia. At the time of the maxi-trial she met her present husband, Franco. When the first turncoats appeared as witnesses in the trials, they started going out together. After the assassination of Falcone and Borsellino, they became a couple. Two years after the murders, Franco was indicted for favouring the Mafia. Ten years after the murders, they married. Rosalba doesn’t take holidays, she doesn’t participate in Palermo’s mondanità; she is so much a lawyer, to the exclusion of everything else, that all question of a life outside her job is forbidden. What a child’s first tooth might be for other people was, for Rosalba, an appeal or a reform of the code of criminal procedure. The maxi-trial of 1985 was a milestone in her life: on the one hand, because she and Franco, her former colleague in chambers and future fiancé, were defending a dozen mafiosi in the trial; on the other, because it was the first spectacular trial led by the anti-Mafia chief investigator Giovanni Falcone, who had whole clans arrested. For the first time, the Mafia was forced to experience what it was like not to have a trial ‘adjusted’, aggiustato, as they say in Palermo: sentences weren’t quashed in the subsequent instances, as they traditionally had been, but were confirmed in all instances – and for public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone that meant a death sentence. Of the mafiosi defended by Franco and Rosalba, however, only one received a life sentence.

  Rosalba’s actual life is played out in chambers. When she comes back from her days in the courtroom, she often sits in her office until after midnight, preparing defence papers – below the oil painting in which horses loom in pink and turquoise, and also below a small icon. She knows what’s right and proper. After all, her clients are devoutly religious. Then, if she can chat to the court reporters, with blond Lirio from the Ansa agency, or little, round Enrico from La Repubblica who always breathes ‘Sei bellissima’ and kisses her hand, or the reporter from Radio Capital, and can make a few mocking remarks about some public prosecutor or other, then Rosalba is in her element. Where, between the rows of files and the red rubber stiletto, she draws up strategies that might be useful to her clients.

  After the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006, and his successor Salvatore Lo Piccolo in November 2007, aftershocks were expected on planet Mafia. The power had to be redistributed. Backgrounds had to be clarified. Because in Sicily people don’t believe in chance, they believe in prophecy. They believe in the divine plan and the urgency of fate. And fate decreed that Bernardo Provenzano’s game of hide-and-seek would end, thirty-four years on, where it had begun, in Corleone. And on the day after the parliamentary elections. Not one day before. What would have happened if the godfather, the capo di tutti capi, the one everyone called ‘Professor’, had been arrested the day before the elections? Would Cosa Nostra have filled in their voting slips for Forza Italia even then? As it has done since the day Berlusconi’s party put itself up for election for the first time. And no one thinks it’s a coincidence that it should have been a bag of laundry – tracked by the police from his family to his hideout – that sealed his fate.

  Since the statements of the turncoat Antonino Giuffrè, every child in Sicily knows that in 1993, after the murders of Falcone and Borellino, and after the arrest of his predecessor Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano negotiated a pact with Forza Italia. The Mafia boss offered his support and a renunciation of further violence, and demanded guarantees in return: an end to criminal prosecution of 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. This has been on record since the Mafia trial against Berlusconi’s right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri in November 2004, when he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in the first instance for supporting a Mafia association.

  That Provenzano should have been arrested regardless of his connections meant only that he was no longer of use – either to the Mafia or to his political friends. Now the way was open for a power struggle in the Mafia: the young, ambitious Mafia is waiting outside, while in jail the old Mafia is sitting around Totò Riina, spending years hoping their trials will be subject to appeal. The next generation is greedy for power: Matteo Messina Denaro, for example, the boss of an old Mafia family from Trapani, once a devoted ally of Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, later their competitor. Messina Denaro has been wanted since 1993, and is deemed to be the boss with the political intelligence required to lead Cosa Nostra into the modern age: when money no longer comes just from the drugs trade and protection money, but from public funds – tenders on behalf of the Mafia.

  Since the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo and his son, Messina Denaro has been the undisputed number one in Cosa Nostra. Until then, Cosa Nostra had been led by both in a kind of co-sovereignty – a leadership that came to an abrupt end during the hours of the morning in November 2007 when investigators arrested Lo Piccolo and his son. They had met up with other mafiosi for a business discussion, when forty officers surrounded the house and fired warning shots. Lo Piccolo tried to flush down the toilet the pizzini he was carrying, the little notes by which mafiosi communicate in these times of eavesdropping. But he didn’t get the chance to push the handle.

  And yet Lo Piccolo must have been relieved to realize that it was only the police who had lain in wait for him, and not the hit man who had been waiting for months to get rid of the Mafia boss at the behest of his enemies. In times of changing allegiances, Lo Piccolo had made himself unpopular. He had facilitated the return to Palermo of the Inzerillo family, who had fled to America in the 1980s. This had brought upon him the wrath of Totò Riina, who had tried to eradicate that same family in a bloody Mafia war. Lo Piccolo hadn’t wanted to leave the drugs trade in the hands of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra any longer and hoped to use his American connections to bring back the glory days of the mid-eighties when Sicily had, through its alliance with its American cousins, risen to become the hub of the international heroin and cocaine trade.

  And then Berlusconi had triumphed in the parliamentary elections and moved into parliament and the senate with fat majorities. Those are the themes that stir Rosalba; those are the scenarios that she likes to think about in peace – much more than taking part in the social life of the city. Much more than drinking a turquoise aperitif in the middle of a wedding party – even her own.

  After the wedding, Rosalba had changed and was now wearing a turquoise dress that matched the aperitif. The wedding guests had driven in convoy to the Villa Giuditta, a restaurant where we sat at long tables under bitter orange trees in a garden – a garden where nature had been tamed to the extent that it looked like a living room. The bitter orange trees were drilled never to lose a leaf, and seemed to grow not from the earth but from a parquet floor, a gleamingly beautiful parquet, with which the whole garden was laid. Between sea salad on couscous and chicken risotto with green apples, the couple were celebrated. After the three-tiered wedding cake was cut, Rosalba put one leg on the table, her heel among the plates of remnants of cream cake, and hoisted up her turquoise dress. Then she pulled the blue ribbon of bliss from her thigh and threw it among her admirers. A young agency journalist caught it, held it appreciatively under his nose and closed his eyes. Satisfied, Rosalba got down from the table and straightened her dress. As she did so, the moonlight caught the tattoo on her wrist. The scorpion’s claws were open.

  The same black-blue sky that stretched above Rosalba’s wedding party spreads over us, too – over Shobha, Letizia, Salvo and me, and ove
r the Piazza Pretoria. The gods and nymphs that stand on the rim of the fountain look heedlessly down on us. Shobha has managed to turn the whole wedding party into a tableau vivant. The parents of the bride, witnesses and flower-girls are in position, the bride has already decided to jump into the fountain – and then Shobha lowers the camera, thanks them politely for their cooperation and gets back into the car. Letizia is urging us to leave, saying that her dog must feel abandoned by now.

  The smell of fried meat wafts over, along with the smell of the crowd coming from the avenue and now pressing into the bars. Scraps of music fly through the air, Vasco Rossi shrills out of the speaker of an illegal CD seller, ‘Voglio una vita spericolata,’ Salvo joins in at the top of his voice, that hymn to the fearless life: ‘to the unruly life, a life where nothing matters, a life in which it’s never too late and you never have to sleep, a life like a life in a film. A life, you’ll see, what a life.’

  Carmine Sarno

  When Salvo drops us off on Via Carini, not far from Letizia and Shobha’s house, both his telefonini ring at the same time. One of the calls is his fiancée, the other one of his ladies – and both want to know when he will finally have time for them. While Salvo tries to placate both the lady and his fiancée, we gesticulate to arrange a meeting for the following morning. Then I follow Shobha and Letizia. We’ve decided to have dinner on Shobha’s terrace. The lift creaks its way up to the ninth floor.

  Exhausted by the heat we slump into the armchairs. Shobha turns on the television, and on Rai Uno we see a report on the death of a Camorrista. In Campania, the father of a turncoat has been shot, the Casalesi clan has wreaked revenge on the renegade. A country lane is shown, a bare stone farmhouse, a barn with bullet holes in the wall, a pool of blood on the ground. Mafia corpses in Italy are as inconspicuous as car-crash corpses. Then life goes on with reports of traffic jams, with people coming back from holiday, with pictures of the beach at Rimini.