The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  The funeral was, to say the least, rhetorical. ‘Nothing’s beautiful like my country’ intoned an Alpine regiment. Later, when chatting to journalists, Prince Emanuele Filiberto’s phone went off. It didn’t ring, though: it beeped out the Italian national anthem, the Inno di Mameli. His father, the ruddy, jowly-cheeked Vittorio Emanuele, is always a little less adept with the media. ‘We’ll see you in Naples in four months,’ he said optimistically. Does that mean, asked one of the journalists in a huddle around the ‘monarch’, that he’s prepared to take an oath of loyalty to the Italian republic? ‘No, no, I don’t want to talk about that, absolutely not,’ he snapped. His wife leant towards him and whispered something in French. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he then said stiffly.

  In the still before its election storm, Italy underwent a mini Savoia revival. There was, not for the first time, much discussion about changing the Italian constitution (which currently decrees: ‘For the former king of the House of Savoia, his consorts and male descendents, entry and sojourn in national territory is forbidden.’) For most Italians, though, the Savoia are the cause of the darkest days of Italy’s twentieth century. What democratic instincts King Vittorio Emanuele III possessed quickly folded in the face of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in 1922; years later, in 1938, he signed the country’s anti-semitic race laws. The king swiftly swapped sides in 1943, after the Allied landings in Sicily, thus starting the Italian civil war between Fascists and partisans which raged until April 1945 and, some would argue, way beyond. In exile, Vittorio Emanuele has become one of Europe’s major arms dealers, and in 1978 he accidently shot and killed a German tourist from on board his yacht.

  It’s a strange ‘first family’: the now capofamiglia, Vittorio Emanuele, is usually decked out in jeans and brogues, and is always irascible. His wife, Marina Doria, is the daughter of a biscuit magnate, and was four-times world water skiing champion in the 1950s. She’s often photographed as she slips back into Italy for a shopping trip. Most visible of the three is their son, Emanuele Filiberto, whose lanky hair and unshaven face is used to promote various products, and who occasionally commentates on Juventus matches for Italian TV from his house in Geneva. The family were a small, side-issue to the election, but in many ways their cause touched all the key issues involved. The election was to become largely about attitudes to immigration, with the right desperate for tougher measures against everyone bar the Savoia. Welcoming back the royal family would in itself require the rewriting of the constitution; once work was then started overhauling the country’s key democratic document, many suspected that it would continue far beyond simply allowing the Savoia back into Italy. Finally, that promise radically to alter the constitution reminded many of a particular masonic lodge of which both Vittorio Emanuele and Silvio Berlusconi had once been members: P2.

  A few weeks after the funeral I received a book in the post. I hadn’t ordered it, certainly hadn’t paid for it. It just arrived one morning. It was called Una Storia Italiana, An Italian Story. It was distributed to about twelve million Italian homes by Berlusconi’s publishing house, Mondadori, at an estimated cost of some eleven billion lire. The name of the author wasn’t on the cover. Instead there were, on the front and back of the book, a total of 114 photographs of the same man. Balding, smiling, shaking hands, cheering football teams, greeting world leaders, blessing the Pope: Silvio Berlusconi. The vanity of the book was nothing as compared to its contents. It opened, of course, with that Italian obsession – the horoscope – as if to suggest that Berlusconi’s destiny was written in the constellations. Silvio, I was told, was born a Libra, and is thus ‘a communicative person, capable of strong passions and profound loves. Charismatic, thanks to great adaptability and innate talent, he stands out in the activities which he brings before the great public, has optimum ability to judge, analyse and synthesise, constructs every reasoning with stringent logic managing to confer clarity on every debate…’

  Berlusconi had previously published a collection of his speeches called The Italy I Have in Mind (a text which was interrupted by repeated parentheses to indicate where the audience had broken into ‘prolonged applause’). Reading An Italian Story was even better, like reading a rags-to-riches fairy-tale, and just as enchanting. It was impossible to put the thing down. After the horoscope, came the opening chapter, describing Silvio’s family, his love for his mother, his ‘spiritual exercises’ in Bermuda where he retires with his friends to read the great classics of the western canon. The text was easy to read, because between every paragraph was a photo: baby Silvio, Silvio at school, Silvio singing on a cruise ship accompanied on the piano by someone called Fedele Confalonieri (now Chairman of Mediaset). It was also almost impossible to read the book and not think ‘I want to emulate this man, I want to become like him, or at least follow him, certainly vote for him’: his life is a dream, a childhood fantasy. He’s been a musician, a businessman, a TV impresario, he has a beautiful wife, good-looking children, houses and gardens and cruise ships and private planes. Most of all, he adores football, his team actually wins things, he wins things. He wins everything. Now, of course, he wants to win an election.

  For many, however, An Italian Story was nothing more than that: a story. It was an incredibly vain, slick, seductive story, a glossy piece of propaganda. Many found it ridiculous and rather embarrassing. Friends of mine in Parma, during a rally of environmentalists, decided to put out a large bin, offering any of the passing twelve million Italians who had been sent the ‘story’ the opportunity to throw it away for recycling. ‘For a clean recycling’ read the banner. To anyone with a sense of irony, the allusion was obvious, and much repeated over the ensuing months: riciclaggio, recycling, was to become the key word of the election.

  ‘Recycling’ is an issue which has dogged Berlusconi for decades, and it came back to haunt him during the election. The allegations that his humble beginnings were aided by epic riciclaggio – money laundering on behalf of the Mafia – dominated the campaign; Berlusconi denied all the accusations. A rival ‘Italian Story’, L’Odore dei Soldi, was published two months before the electorate went to the polls. Its claims were equally fantastic, and received ample publicity on those television channels (of the state RAI network) still outside Berlusconi’s reach. The book was based on an interview with an anti-Mafia judge, Paolo Borsellino, shortly before he was killed in 1992. During the interview Borsellino had hinted that the Mafia, having at its disposal vast sums of money made from drugs-smuggling, laundered it through companies in the north, including (according to the authors) Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding company. The title of the book was particularly apt. The crime of Mafia collusion in Italy is called, evocatively, odore di Mafia (literally ‘the whiff of Mafia’). The book was called The Whiff of Money.

  According to the authors of L’Odore dei Soldi, Berlusconi had, throughout the 1970s, profited from collusion with organised crime. The allegations went that Berlusconi was a prime example not of the peasant, murderous Mafia in Sicily, but something more sophisticated exported to the north. This was something much larger, more sinister and more disguised: the ‘White Mafia’ of financial scams, money-laundering and international investment rackets. The book quoted the old notion that you enter the arena of democratic politics by leaving ‘your wallet and your pistol at the door’. The implication was not just that Berlusconi would bring his wallet into government if he won the election (some $14 billion); the allegation also went that he had friends in Sicily with some very sizeable holsters.

  Both stories, Berlusconi’s own and that of his enemies, were gripping. An Italian Story and The Whiff of Money formed a perfect symmetry, one full of implausible, heroic achievement, the other full of improbable accusations. As with the country’s press and television, there was no room for the middle-ground: Berlusconi was either a saint or a sinner, and the ordinary voter was confronted by two versions of his career both so incredible that it was hard to know what was reality and what fantasy. If, as was probable, the t
ruth lay somewhere between the two stories, no one was willing to say so. I didn’t know what to believe. Enrico Deaglio, the editor of one political weekly, told me bluntly that he believed every word of the accusations against Berlusconi. Marcello Veneziani, a columnist on Berlusconi’s Il Giornale, told me that the whole thing was ‘obscene and absurd’. Was it too incredible to think that Berlusconi really did have connections with Cosa Nostra? Where, after all, was the evidence?

  I tried, not for the first time, to understand Berlusconi’s origins. Complication and confusion, as it should by now be clear, are the smokescreens of Italian life, and Berlusconi is a master of the art. When he began building the 3,500 flats on the outskirts of Milan in the 1970s, he created endless financial Chinese boxes which were entirely unfathomable to outsiders. Bizarre businesses were set up under prestanomi (‘nicknamed’ accounts with dummy holders) and furnished with billions of lire from businesses in Switzerland. Or else money arrived through the Banca Rasini where Berlusconi’s father had worked and which has been frequently cited in Mafia trials in recent years. Then Fininvest, the empire which was later to become the driving force behind Forza Italia, was set up with 22 ‘holdings’ and mysterious offshore companies like ‘Group B’ and ‘All Iberian’. It would take an accountant an eternity to understand what was going on. To many the Chinese boxes seemed a suspiciously complicated way of building a few blocks of flats.

  The story of one of Berlusconi’s gardeners on his Arcore estate is equally bizarre. Berlusconi had bought the estate after two murders, a crime of passion, prompted the owner to sell the property in the mid-1970s. Berlusconi, having moved in, employed someone called Vittorio Mangano, a mafioso later handed down two life sentences for murder and heroin trafficking. Berlusconi had no involvement in Mangano’s crimes, but it was certainly extraordinary company to keeep. Apart from being resident on Berlusconi’s estate, Mangano was also on close terms with Berlusconi’s business-partner and Forza Italia general, Marcello Dell’Utri (currently on trial in Palermo for ‘association with the Mafia’). Maybe it’s all just coincidental, maybe not. ‘For me,’ Mangano said during a prison interview in July 2000, ‘Berlusconi was like a relative. The trust he had in me was the same as that I had in him and his family. I like Berlusconi, still do. He’s an honest person, write it!’ Is a compliment of honesty from a convicted murderer an asset? Does that mean he really is honest? The extraordinarily complicated facts are all out in the open, hundreds of thousands of dubious transcripts and transactions (dubious because they cast doubt in both directions: towards both the investigators and the investigated). It’s only the interpretation that differs.

  Berlusconi’s response to the (hardly new) accusation of being a closet mafioso was to be indignant, aggressive and bullying. ‘Contain yourself,’ he screamed to one RAI presenter whose programme he had interrupted with a live telephone call. The programme in question was Michele Santoro’s Il Raggio Verde on RAI 2 (the channel which had originally publicised the book). Forza Italia’s general, Marcello Dell’Utri, the man at the centre of the scandal, was later given a chance to defend himself. For once an Italian studio was silent rather than noisy; instead of the usual revolving glitter-ball, the lighting was low. The advertising breaks were announced by a string quartet. It takes courage for a journalist from Palermo to hint live on national TV that a man of Dell’Utri’s power was possibly guilty of collusion with the Mafia: ‘You really are a heedless Palermitan,’ said the journalist, Saverio Lodato, ‘who has been very unfortunate in his choice of friends. In those years [1970s] one smelt the Mafia. Any Palermitan sensed it.’ At the suggestion Dell’Utri, I thought, whitened visibly, his skin tightening in disbelief at the arrogance of the suggestion. ‘Not even in my dreams’, he stuttered, caught off-guard by the frankness of the frontal attack, ‘did I smell the Mafia.’

  Thereafter, Berlusconi refused (temporarily) to appear on the RAI TV channels, as did those in his coalition. They retreated to the safety of Mediaset journalists. His allies spoke of cleaning up the ranks of RAI after the election. Others urged Italians to refuse to pay their licence fees to RAI, since it was clearly Communist. Berlusconi’s own Mediaset television channels resorted to impassioned pleas not to believe the allegations: on ‘Rete 4’, for example, the newscaster Emilio Fede couldn’t contain his outrage, banging his fists on his desk as he denounced the dirty tricks of the left. Each time he tried to introduce another story he couldn’t do it, he started frowning, almost on the verge of tears, and returned to defend his boss, Silvio Berlusconi. Not for the first time, the nation’s television channels became, like the country at large, polarised into shrill declarations of love or loathing for Berlusconi. The actual issue, of whether there was any truth in the allegations, of whether Berlusconi really was dangerously close to collusion with organised crime, became lost in the hysteria.

  Some saw sufficient grounds to indict Il Cavaliere, suggesting that suspicion really is ‘the antechamber of truth’ as far as the Mafia is concerned. Weeks before the election, the cover of Britain’s The Economist showed a photograph of Berlusconi, with the headline ‘Why Berlusconi is Unfit to Govern Italy’. The article, which caused an even bigger storm than the The Whiff of Money book, duly proceeded to list the crimes for which Il Cavaliere had been recently investigated: ‘money-laundering… connections with the Mafia’ and so on. ‘The public’s acquittal,’ the magazine warned, could become ‘a terrible condemnation of the electorate.’ The reply from Forza Italia was the same as usual: a conspiracy of left-wing intellectuals had it in for the honest, family-man, Silvio Berlusconi. The Economist, far from being a sober organ of financial analysis, was a ‘Communist publication,’ edited by wannabe Stalinists. (The Economist was swiftly issued with a writ for damages in Italy. The publication is currently fighting a libel action brought by Berlusconi arising from the cover article. Over a year later, in May 2002, both Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri would be acquitted by the Palermo courts of any involvement in the murder of Paolo Borsellino and Giovanni Falcone; the judge noted, however, as he ‘archived’ the case, that ‘links have been ascertained betweeen companies which are part of Fininvest and people who are in various ways linked to Cosa Nostra.’ Those links, wrote the judge, meant that the accusations of penitent mafiosi who had implicated Berlusconi were ‘not entirely implausible’.)

  Italians of eighteen and above elect 630 deputati (aged 25 or over) of the parliamentary camera. Those of 21 and above also elect 315 senatori (40 or older) in the senato (there are nine ‘senators for life’, the equivalent of life peers, either former Prime Ministers or Presidents, or else dignitaries like Gianni Agnelli, head of FIAT, Juventus, Ferrari and so on). The eventual make-up of the parliament is decided both by a first-past-the-post system (75%) and by proportional representation (25%).

  On the surface, the election was a presidential show-down between – on the left – the former mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli, and – on the right – Il Cavaliere. Dozens of political parties were lined up in one coalition or the other. The bucolic left-wing coalition was called ‘the olive’ and was made up of ‘the sunflower’ (greens and socialists), ‘the daisy’ (Democrats, the Popular Party, the Union of Democrats of Europe, a former Prime Minister’s ‘Dini list’), ‘the oak’ (the former Communist party, now called Democrats of the Left), and one half of the Communist party proper (The Italian Communists). The ‘Pole of Liberties’ was Berlusconi’s rival, right-wing coalition, made up of his own Forza Italia party, the ‘post-Fascist’ National Alliance, and the separatists/federalists of the Northern League. Other parties supporting him were from the ‘White Flower’, made up of the two broadly Catholic parties, the CCD and the CDU. Various fringe parties (the Refounded Communist Party, the ‘Di Pietro list’, the Radicals) refused to adhere to either coalition, preferring to go it alone and barter with their votes in the aftermath of 13 May.

  Given that confusing plethora of parties, few ordinary voters understood those coalitions, let alone
what they stood for. It was hard even to know what had happened in the last five years: during the 13th parliament of the Italian republic (1996–2001) 158 politicians had changed political allegiance, and the country had had three different Prime Ministers (Romano Prodi, Massimo D’Alema, and Giuliano Amato) presiding over four different governments. Political debate and front page scoops had often simply been about who was building or breaking which coalition, about who was redesigning their party flag or currently reinventing themselves as a politician of the right, or of the left. Smears, scandals, accusations and court-cases had piled up. During the election, leading politicians were arrested or investigated: one Democrat of the Left in Tuscany was arrested for taking bribes; a Forzista in Calabria was sentenced to five years for collusion with the local Mafia; another Forzista in Milan was arrested, accused of extortion. The President of the Republic, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, appealed for dignity, but the strange, hysterical campaigning continued.

  Short, always wearing a double-breasted suit, smiling and suntanned, Silvio Berlusconi was obviously viewed by the left as a very Faustian figure, and his probable victory on 13 May was seen in apocalyptic terms. Even cultured political commentators on the right, however, were dismayed. Italy, they said, had never produced a ‘normal’ right-wing party. Mussolini’s Fascism, the Christian Democrats’ ‘Christian Democracy’ were both, by anyone’s reckoning, highly unorthodox political movements. Berlusconi’s partito-azienda, his business-political party, appeared, if anything, even more idiosyncratic. Indro Montanelli was a right-wing, nonagenarian writer who many saw as the soul of Italian journalism (he used to be editor of Berlusconi’s paper, Il Giornale, before resigning because of editorial interference). In the weeks before the election he called the Forza Italia leader a ‘systematic liar’, someone whose methods are ‘of the truncheon … akin to those of Fascism’. (Berlusconi didn’t directly answer the accusation, although his defenders did suggest that Montanelli, by then in his 90s, was simply senile and embittered.)