Honoured Society, The

by Reski, Petra; Whiteside, Shaun

  And just a day later Trapani was as forbidding as ever. With gleaming light and a landscape buried under concrete.

  ‘Strange, isn’t it?’ says Shobha, sniffing the wine again. ‘At some point I lost the desire to go there,’ she says.

  Was it that moment when the part-time photographers and amateur film directors gained the upper hand and kept walking into the picture? Or when, still in Trapani, we went in search of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro? At some point we lost the procession virus. Like a scab under which new skin has formed.

  ‘Trapani,’ says Shobha, sticks her nose back in the wine glass and adds: ‘Have you heard about the murals?’

  ‘What murals?’ I ask, really thinking about art for a moment.

  ‘Murals of Messina Denaro,’ says Shobha. In the style of Warhol. With the inscription You’ll be hearing from me. They appeared in Palermo and in Messina Denaro’s place of birth, Castelvetrano, not far from Trapani. ‘The police investigated,’ Shobha says and smiles ironically. The murals were immediately painted over.

  Messina Denaro is a kind of icon among mafiosi. When investigators or public prosecutors talk about Messina Denaro, there’s a hint of respect for their opponent. Investigators see Messina Denaro as the boss with the greatest political foresight. In his case the word latitante, fugitive, has a different ring: it sounds like a mark of distinction, like an accolade, a higher Mafia qualification.

  Certainly it’s the case that hunters would rather go after a tiger than a rabbit. Particularly since most bosses are more like rabbits. Powerful rabbits, admittedly, but rabbits nevertheless. So it’s all the more striking when a boss like Matteo Messina Denaro moves around the world as if it belonged to him – not least since he has slipped the Mafia’s moral straitjacket and consolidated his position as a ladies’ man, defying the Sicilian proverb that giving orders is better than fucking. Messina Denaro has proved that you can do both. When he was in hiding he even managed to father an illegitimate daughter, who is now ten years old, has never seen her father and lives in her grandmother’s house in Castelvetrano – along with her mother who, as long as she lives, will never look another man in the eye. To keep from damaging the boss’s reputation. And to protect her own life. If a mafioso loses face as a result of his wife’s infidelity, she is as good as dead.

  The Mafia revere Matteo Messina Denaro as a saint: ‘I’d love to be able to see him, touch him, just once,’ they sigh on the telephone, as if they dreamed of dabbing kisses on the hem of the Madonna’s robe with their fingertips. ‘Everything good comes from him,’ the mafiosi whisper, ‘we must worship him.’

  His nickname is ‘Diabolik’, the name of an Italian comic character, an elegant gangster who lives in the grand style from his jewel robberies: a representative of evil who always maintains a certain code of honour. Diabolik basically only robs rich people from the top levels of society – although the similarity to Robin Hood stops there, because you couldn’t exactly say that he shares his booty with the poor. It’s more that evil triumphs with him in a world of weak supermen, as the mafiosi imagine the world to be in their idle moments – idle moments when they believe the singer Vasco Rossi’s hymn to the fearless life, ‘the exaggerated life, the life full of troubles’. Idle moments when they manage to fade out reality as if it were a film: the reality in which they smell of fear because they’re next on the hit man’s list, a hit man who boasts that he’s never worn gloves when dissolving corpses in hydrochloric acid; the reality that consists in throttling a friend, beheading and castrating him, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. The reality is one in which children can be kept for years in an underground dungeon, like little Giuseppe di Matteo, who was locked up in a cell in San Giuseppe Jato until he was strangled and dissolved in acid.

  Giuseppe’s father had become a turncoat and the abduction of his son was supposed to keep him quiet. At the end of his imprisonment, the boy had been reduced to nothing but a ‘human larva’, said the mafioso who had been given the job of strangling him.

  All the more important are the miracle stories about Messina Denaro, of whom the mafiosi couldn’t get enough: about how he is supposed to have driven an Alfa 164 armed with machine guns which could be activated by the push of a button from the driver’s seat; how he boasted that he could fill a cemetery with his victims; how he guarded the treasure of the arrested boss Totò Riina, a treasure that consisted not only of jewellery but also of the Mafia archive, and how he had hidden with that treasure in an underground flat in a jeweller’s shop in Castelvetrano, entered via a strongroom with a lift built into it.

  It’s a long time since Cosa Nostra produced such a pop star.

  Matteo Messina Denaro comes from Castelvetrano and in the police files his profession is given as ‘farmer’. He is what people here call an ‘artist’s son’: his father Francesco was one of the most powerful bosses of Cosa Nostra, a member of the cupola, the Mafia council. Both Matteo Messina Denaro and his brother Salvatore, as well as his father Francesco, were on the payroll of one of the richest families in Trapani, the family of the Forza Italia senator and current president of the province of Trapani, Antonio D’Ali, a large landowner, banker and businessman – Matteo and his father as estate managers, his brother Salvatore as a clerk in the family-owned bank.

  ‘No one had any idea of Messina Denaro’s involvement with the Mafia,’ the senator said. And he sued anyone who claimed otherwise – like the two Rai journalists who accused the provincial president of being behind the transfer of a prefect who was unacceptable to the Mafia.

  At Trapani police headquarters we met the investigator who has been on Messina Denaro’s trail for years. The office was papered with newspaper cuttings about arrests, next to it there hung a faded list of the names of mafiosi currently in hiding. Matteo Messina Denaro was the last on the list. There was even a hint of respect in the investigator’s voice when he spoke of the boss: ‘If you met Messina Denaro, you’d like him,’ he said. ‘Messina Denaro is generous, he’s an effortless conversationalist and he can judge the perlage of a fine champagne.’

  Finally, a cosmopolitan boss.

  Then the investigator called one of his men who did nothing more than listen in on suspicious conversations, using a mobile surveillance device, and record unusual movements, in Messina Denaro’s birthplace of Castelvetrano. The investigator was waiting for us in a car park just outside the town, a bearded man in jeans and trainers. What drives these men isn’t money, it’s a hunting instinct. The thrill when they catch a boss in his sleep after lying in wait for him for months, disguised as an Albanian, as a gypsy, as a grass-mowing peasant. For a long time it didn’t occur to any of the men to claim overtime.

  When we were driving through Castelvetrano, we had the impression of driving through a town where nothing ever happens; you couldn’t even hear a dog barking. The houses with the closed shutters looked like lockers. You avoided people’s eyes, as if they could pass on an infectious illness.

  ‘They’re all friends here,’ said the policeman, and drove past Messina Denaro’s parents’ house, where his mother, his partner and their daughter live. It was in an alley not far from the church. A run-down-looking, three-storey house, and the policeman cried: ‘Whatever you do, don’t take a photograph!’ Just as he was constantly warning us not to write this and that because Messina Denaro was extremely sensitive where his family was concerned – until finally I wondered how dangerous could it be to write that Francesco Messina Denaro’s mausoleum is a high, narrow chapel with a glass mosaic Christ, locked with a cast-iron gate, flanked by two Ficus benjamina trees which, as the policeman observed, had recently been watered?

  Messina Denaro’s mother visited the grave every day, dressed in black even ten years after her husband’s death. She often went there with her three daughters. On one occasion, the police had hidden bugs in the grave to listen to the dialogue that she liked to have with her husband. Unfortunately, one of the policemen hadn’t put one of the vases back in the r
ight place. Messina Denaro would never forgive those sons of bitches that impious act of eavesdropping.

  By the time his father died ten years ago, Matteo Messina Denaro had been underground for a long time. The boss Francesco Messina Denaro had died of a heart attack, presumably the result of the fury unleashed by the recent arrest of his eldest son, Salvatore. Someone had carefully laid the corpse beside a vineyard in Castelvetrano, dressed in a silk dressing gown. When the body was found, it had already rained on the body. His wife tore off her own Persian lamb coat to wrap her dead husband in it. And at the funeral she threw herself on the coffin and cried: ‘At least they didn’t manage to put handcuffs on you!’

  The Messina Denaro family commemorates the day of his death every year, not just with a religious service, but also with an obituary, most recently in Latin: ‘There is no time to be born and to die, but only he who wants to can fly. And for ever your flight was the highest.’ The investigators assumed that this might be a coded message. But it was only a statement of faith – in blood, in family, in the Mafia.

  Of course, it may be that the boss doesn’t live in Sicily at all but in Venezuela or Colombia, somewhere in South America – unlike the other Sicilian bosses, who are always tracked down only a few miles from their own territory. But.

  But even an icon could drop his guard in his own territory, the investigator said. A young mafioso had to have seen the boss at least once. Otherwise his magic would flee.

  To kiss the hem of the Madonna’s robe, just once.

  ‘You remember how run-down the house of Messina Denaro’s family looked?’ I say to Shobha, as she serves the caponata.

  Messina Denaro’s house had dirty white walls and frosted glass in the windows. Clearly it was designed to give the lie to any thoughts of a worldwide Mafia organization. As if the Mafia was still controlled by a handful of shepherds. As if the Mafia wasn’t a social and political problem, but just an occasional inconvenience to public order.

  Would the children of the mafiosi, the ones who have studied – maybe even at the London School of Economics, as the children of some Catania bosses are said to do – live in rickety-looking houses like that today? Shobha asks.

  Again and again, I’m struck by the discrepancy between the pointed frugality and the vast incomes of the Mafia bosses. Mafia families have every interest in not standing out, in being accepted as part of society – that’s their shield, and their strength at the same time. Give or take their millions, the foundation of all Mafia power remains their rootedness in social consensus.

  Here too, protection money has a fundamental part to play. Above all, it’s about a demonstration of power when superglue is squeezed into the greengrocer’s lock to make the urgency of the payment quite clear. If a mafioso leaves a bomb outside a shop, it’s reported in all the papers. But if he squirts superglue into fifty locks, nobody hears about it. And the Mafia don’t want to appear in the papers, they just want to get on with their business in peace.

  One of the biggest Mafia bosses of recent years was the doctor Giuseppe Guttadauro, the brother-in-law of Matteo Messina Denaro. He received patients in his surgery from five till seven in the evening, and from seven onwards the picciotti, the lowest-ranking mafiosi, and gave them orders about collecting protection money. And this wasn’t just about filling the war coffers of Cosa Nostra; more importantly, it was about control, about demonstrating presence, marking territory.

  Sometimes in Palermo you see little black-rimmed stickers on waste bins: Un intero popolo che paga il pizzo è un popolo senza dignità, A whole people that pays protection money is a people without dignity. These are the stickers of the Addiopizzo organization, which developed out of a student group and now calls for a revolt against paying protection money to the Mafia. Thanks to this organization, the Italian business association has finally summoned the courage to exclude those businessmen who pay protection money. Sicilian public prosecutors, on the other hand, urged the association to exclude from its ranks those businessmen who had already been legally punished for supporting the Mafia. Because they were the real criminals, while a businessman who doesn’t report the extortion of protection money is just someone who lacks moral courage. However, many Sicilian businessmen had an interest in ensuring that everything stayed as it was: what’s at stake, after all, is millions in European funding, the benefits of which they want to go on enjoying, thanks to the Mafia. After all, it is a long time since the Mafia was content to extort 500 euros in protection money. For ages now it had been sitting in the businessmen’s drawing rooms. In Calabria, even northern Italian businessmen don’t report the extortion of protection money by the ’Ndrangheta, but take the protection money into account: as a ‘security cost’. After all, you don’t want to turn down big public contracts, like the construction of the Salerno – Reggio motorway. The companies pay 3 per cent of the contract fee directly to the ’Ndrangheta.

  Because it’s late now, I decide to say a quick goodbye to Letizia before she gets ready for bed. When I go downstairs to her flat, I hear that she’s watching television. Giulio Andreotti is a guest on a talk show again. When Letizia notices my footsteps, she turns off the television. Then she picks up a box of household matches and tries to relight her cigarette in the wind from the ceiling fan. It takes her three matches before the cigarette is finally burning. She could have got up and lit it somewhere else. But that wouldn’t be her way.

  ‘You know, I’d really love to escape from Palermo. If my grandchildren didn’t live here, I’d get out. It’s too painful, it’s too humiliating, to watch our values being co-opted here. The bad guys have even taken over the anti-Mafia movement. On the anniversaries of Falcone and Borsellino’s killings, the whole of Palermo was full of posters saying Our heroes forever! Signed by none other than the city administration of Palermo.’

  ‘The bad guys’. I like Letizia’s direct way of putting it. The ceiling fan cuts through the smoke, and I’m thinking about the Forza Italia caste which has triumphed in Palermo when Letizia says that even the Italian left won’t come to the rescue, because it’s sold its soul to Berlusconi.

  ‘In the past, the left-wing ideal was like a warming blanket to me,’ she says. ‘Now it no longer exists. Or only among a very few young people. The ones in Antimafia Duemila, perhaps, the anti-Mafia newspaper. But otherwise? Nothing.’

  Letizia bends down to me and asks if I’ve got enough material for my article about her, urges me to call her if there’s anything else I want to know, tells me about the next exhibition that she and Shobha are having together in China – even in China people are interested in the Mafia, just not in Palermo. Then she looks over at the terrace door. The night wind runs through her hair.

  ‘They’ve thrown our dreams in the sea,’ she says, ‘and their own as well.’

  The sky over Palermo shimmers as if the stars were constantly being turned on and off in the firmament. It’s still hot and sultry, a warm damp settles on our arms. Because Salvo’s off duty, Shobha has called a taxi, but even after half an hour the woman on the switchboard can do nothing but console me. ‘Patience, you need to have patience,’ she says, until I decide to try my luck on foot. Shobha suggests coming with me. When we step out of the cool entrance hall of the building and into the street, petrol-filled air hits us, air that stings the lungs and would prompt a choking attack in any asthmatic. Although midnight is long past, the traffic is just as solid as it was in the morning. The nighthawks flit from one side of the road to the other like a swarm of mosquitoes. The marble pavement gleams as if it’s sweating. We walk towards Via della Libertà, and those posters with the famous photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Our heroes. The city of Palermo.

  As we cross the piazza in front of the Teatro Politeama, little purple dots gleam on the marble paving stones and the air suddenly smells of lemon verbena. And cooking fat. On every street corner there are vans selling fried calves’ cheeks between two slices of bread, or bread with spleen. Our pace assume
s the rhythm of the revellers hurrying towards Piazza Olivella. The flower sellers who tout their wares by day are still standing on the pavement in front of the Teatro Massimo, and a newspaper vendor has spread out his piles of papers next to them.

  We walk on without saying anything, our footsteps hammer on the marble. There are no taxis outside the Teatro Massimo either. So we walk on before turning off at last into one of the twisting alleys near the Piazza Olivella, where the gas-canister filler Nino sits by the door to his shop. Shobha lived opposite him for a while, so Nino greets her particularly warmly. As usual, his whole family has assembled beside him on white plastic chairs: his wife with her toothless mouth, his fat sister, his children, one grandchild and his gaunt brother-in-law who runs a cobbler’s shop next door. They all sit there with their hands folded over their bellies, as if watching the performance of a play, while cats poke among the rubbish on the other side of the street.

  It’s quieter at the end of Via Patania. We walk on, now along the Via Roma, past the Piazza San Domenico, where, as always, a few Nigerian prostitutes lurk, and past the steps that lead to the Vucciria market and which, even at night, smell of fish guts. Here there are no revellers and our footsteps echo. A wind blows up. From the walls and palisades that support the derelict palazzi, it tugs at the posters. We walk on.

  By way of farewell, Salvo puts on Antonacci again, ‘Dream of me if it snows’. ‘But just for you, Petra, I don’t understand what women see in him.’

  We drive out of town, past palm trees and box hedges, past the enameled domes of the churches, past street after street of air-raid-shelter tower blocks which look as if they might harbour life, past the dry leaves of the rubber trees blown by the wind on to the pavements.