The Dark Heart of Italy

by Tobias Jones

  The priorities of the new government quickly became obvious. Most things take years and years in Italy but, when there’s something of overwhelming importance, it’s done with lightning speed (direttissima is one example, when petty criminals are speed-sentenced within days of the crime, in sharp contrast to the grinding progress of ‘sensitive trials’). By the summer, one of Berlusconi’s first significant acts of legislation had been proposed. It directly affected his own business manoeuvres. The crime of falso in bilancio, of cooking the books, was decriminalised. The legislation was, admittedly, begun under the previous government, but the new amendments which suddenly emerged were tailored to Berlusconi like a bespoke suit. The very crime of which Berlusconi had so often stood accused was, in his first foray in government, turned into a minor infringement (or, in the technical phraseology, it was changed from being a crime of ‘danger’ to a crime of ‘damage’).

  Basically, in future, corrupt businessmen will face fines instead of prison and only if denounced by their own shareholders. It was a perfect example, according to the defeated left, of what is called a colpo di spugna, a clean-up job with the ‘sponge’. As always with Berlusconi, the only thing to admire was the audacity. At the same time that extremists from the Northern League were talking about their idea of making clandestinità (illegal immigration) a full-scale crime, Berlusconi’s government was giving accounting irregularities the all-clear. Thus, an impoverished immigrant risking his life to reach the shores of the Italian peninsula might face jail, whilst multi-billionaire businessmen who fiddle their tax returns will, from now on, simply face a fine or, more probably, a pardon. According to the left, it was salva-ladri (save-the-thief) law-making at its finest. (Berlusconi had pulled a similar stunt during his first, brief period in power in 1994. As prosecutors were on the verge of arresting several executives from his Fininvest empire, and as Italy was absorbed in the World Cup in America, his government hurriedly tried to pass through parliament the Decreto Biondi, making it impossible to arrest defendants accused of white-collar crimes.) The actual amendments were conceived by the Judicial Affairs Committee. The Chairman of the Committee, Gaetano Pecorella, and another of its members, Niccolò Ghedini, both double as defence lawyers for Berlusconi in various trials.

  The false-accounting legislation had two very clear implications: since prison terms were drastically reduced, the Statute of Limitations – the practice whereby a crime is no longer a crime after a certain period – was reduced from fifteen years to seven and a half. That simple amendment would mean that all those white-collar crimes dogging Berlusconi, from Clean Hands to Dirty Feet, would be washed away, no longer subject to legal investigations or prosecutions. The second implication was even more far-reaching and more indicative of the new Presidente’s intentions. Since false accounting was only a crime if denounced by affected parties (a shareholder or creditor), it was obvious that something as mundane as the state, trying to impose taxes on company profits, would be impotent. For me, it was the first indication that the country was now at the service of Il Cavaliere, rather than vice versa.

  It’s part of the rewiring process of living in Italy that, as one experienced journalist described it to me, ‘it’s entirely useless to think in terms of left and right. Politicians swap so often between the two that that will leave you utterly confused’. To understand what goes on in the country, it was explained, the only possible definitions for slippery politicians are ‘pre-political’ ones: not ‘right’ or ‘left’ wing, not historical dinosaurs like ‘Fascist’ or ‘Communist’, but old-fashioned judgements like ‘honest’, ‘law-abiding’, ‘tax-paying’ or simply ‘moral’. Given those definitions, the politics of Berlusconi were thrown into sharp relief: the man who had so earnestly painted a picture of himself as a free-marketeer in the Thatcher mould, was actually nothing of the sort. With his first legislative act he had – it seemed to me – removed one of the foundation stones of capitalism: probity with the accounts.

  Berlusconi wasn’t the only one who found himself with a mild conflict of interests in the government. The newly promoted undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior, Carlo Taormina, continued practising as a defence lawyer for someone accused of ‘external collusion with the Mafia’. ‘That’s not, of course,’ a left-wing politician explained to me, ‘to say he’s a mafioso. Simply that it’s absurd to have an undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior,’ he repeated it in disbelief, ‘the Ministry of the Interior!, who doubles as a lawyer for someone accused of “external collusion with the Mafia”. You can’t be part of the State and the anti-State at the same time. Can you? Here you can. You can be on both sides…’

  The left-wing press were understandably indignant about the government’s new, ambiguous approach to law-abiding:

  The principle, let’s admit it, is revolutionary. Thinking about it, it could be extended to other fields. An unscrupulous person robs a bank? The regional authorities send him a taxi and reimburse him for the balaclava. A mafioso kidnaps a northern industrialist? The regional authorities pay for the transfer and send an accountant to negotiate. A robber cleans out a supermarket? The regional authorities busy themselves with the stocktaking and provide an alibi to the burglar. The rule is clear: who does wrong goes unpunished, gets helped, understood, encouraged…

  Within months of the election, two historic sentences were handed down by the courts. After almost eighteen months, on 30 June 2001, the judge and jury in the Piazza Fontana trial reached a decision on the bombing which had taken place 32 years previously. The announcement of three life sentences, for Delfo Zorzi, Carlo Maria Maggi and Giancarlo Rognoni, was greeted in court by applause from the families of the bomb victims. The verdict barely raised a stir in the press. By then we were all suffering from scandal-fatigue and over-exposure to contrite pentiti. The revelations that the Italian state machine colluded with Fascist bombers decades ago was either, given the farcical court case, unbelievable, or else was so obvious already that it wasn’t even news. What was news was the fact that Gaetano Pecorella, one of Berlusconi’s judicial advisers, had also been the defence lawyer for Zorzi; Taormina, the undersecretary at the Ministry of the Interior, had previously acted as defence lawyer for Maggi. ‘The outcome of political show-trials is already written at their inception,’ Pecorella wearily told the cameras outside the court, before pouring more scorn on the judiciary of which he had become one of the political heads. ‘History is being rewritten with a red pen,’ said Taormina.

  The other court case which came to a conclusion during the same month was the trial of a judge accused of collusion with the Mafia. The judicial career of Corrado Carnevale had been for decades typical of the insinuation of organised crime into the upper echelons of the Italian state. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino (the two magistrates murdered at the outset of the Clean Hands revolution) had gathered evidence about the Mafia and its tentacles across the Italian peninsula (rehashed interviews with Borsellino were, of course, the foundation for the accusations against Berlusconi). The research and prosecutions began by Falcone and Borsellino resulted in major, spectacular convictions against hundreds of mafiosi. With startling regularity, however, when the cases against mafiosi came up for appeal, they were often thrown out on grounds of an absurd technicality or by the convoluted logic of the judge Carnevale.

  Carnevale (president of the ‘first section’ of Italy’s Supreme Court) was ‘like Homer’s Penelope in the Odyssey’,1 unravelling the threads of the diligently assembled tapestry. His was a career indicative of that so-called ‘White Mafia’: the export of Cosa Nostra to the gangli, the ‘ganglions’, of the Italian state. As he overturned convictions, and released hundreds of mafiosi, Carnevale became known in the press as the ammazza-sentenze, the ‘sentence-killer’. In June 2001 he was sentenced to six years in prison. Dozens of pentiti, repentant mafiosi, had come forward to witness that for decades Carnevale had been a ‘guarantee’ of a legal let-off for the M
afia. Carnevale, a man who appeared the true incarnation of the corrupt legal system, much more sinister than the zealous Clean Hands investigators, was however swiftly defended by the government. As with the convicted Fascists from Piazza Fontana, government ministers leapt to his defence. The phrase of ‘Communist justice’ was again trotted out. The conviction was hailed as just another instance of the work of ‘red togas’. More than simply taking sides in legal cases, the government always seemed to be on the least savoury side. After the fall-out from the two trials, one newspaper carried a bitter cartoon. Two people were discussing politics. ‘The lawyers for the Fascists and mafiosi are all in government’ said one. ‘That,’ replied the other, ‘is because they’ve followed their clients there.’

  Meanwhile, throughout that summer, miles of newsprint were dedicated to comparisons between 1969 and 2001. Many government ministers whispered anxious warnings that the country was sliding back towards its terrorist past. The left, meanwhile, promised a ‘hot autumn’ (the phrase used in 1969) if, as predicted, Berlusconi’s government began rewriting the 18th article of the Workers’ Charter, thus tampering with workplace rights and pay. Not since the 1960s or 1970s, I was told, had the country been so clearly divided down the middle: one half denouncing ‘Communist delinquents’, the other fretting about the ‘Fascist government’ and its swaggering, aggressive statements.

  The tensions came out into the open in July. The month before the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001 the Italian media spoke about nothing other than the threat of riots and terrorism. £300 million had been set aside to organise the summit, and 15,000 ‘forces of order’ had evacuated the streets of the city at the height of the tourist season. The country was whipped into a frenzy as it was treated to back-to-back broadcasts showing police and rioter rehearsals for the confrontation (truncheons and tear-gas for the former, gas-masks and cardboard shin-pads for the others). Manu Chao, a popular and politicised French/Spanish singer, went on stage to lend his support to the Tute Bianche (the ‘white overalls’ anti-globalist lobby). Looking like astronauts, they joined him on stage days before G8, raising their left fists in their meaningless ‘anti-global’ salute.

  For anyone with a sense of history, the Genoa venue was ominous. It was there that, in 1960, the neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, attempted to organise a conference. It was to have been chaired by the former (Italian) prefect of the city when it was under Nazi occupation. On 30 June 1960 the city saw riots which were, at the time, unprecedented, and which were intended to prevent the inclusion of the Fascists in government. Within days the riots spread elsewhere, particularly to Reggio Emilia, the ‘red’ town a short drive east of Parma. There, five protestors were killed by police, raising to 94 the number of strikers and ‘rioters’ killed by the Italian police between 1945 and 1960. That memory of martyrs from 41 years before, and the history of trigger-happy policing, meant that the G8 summit was becoming a cause for acute concern.

  Shortly before the summit, bombs appeared across the country. As usual they were ‘minor’. Many didn’t go off, and others were paltry packages with simply a dusting of dynamite. Benetton, Fiat, an office for ‘temporary work’ were all targeted. (Employment agencies are seen as an affront to the ‘time immemorial’ job, and are thus as much a target of Italian anti-globalists as is McDonalds.) Emilio Fede, Berlusconi’s favourite newscaster, was sent a bomb which did explode, hospitalising his secretary. The hysteria about terrorism and the G8 reached ridiculous new levels.

  What actually happened in Genoa is well known. There were the usual looters and car-burners (the so-called ‘black block’) amongst the quarter of a million protestors who marched around the outskirts of the city. The ‘white overalls’ protestors had been infiltrated, according to Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels, by a sinister new terrorist outfit. All one could see were a few dozen people dressed in black, banging drums and throwing bricks into shop windows; hooligans certainly, but hardly the ‘terrorists’ the government said they were. (One was decked out in blacked-up cricket pads, which hardly seemed to me like the livery of a dangerous revolutionary.)

  Much more serious was the behaviour of the police. The problem of Italian policing (as at the football stadia) is that it’s a combination of the incompetent and the very heavy-handed. The one exacerbates the other: the greater the incompetence, of course, the greater the need for heavy hands. If those hands are carrying loaded weapons that are fired at point-blank range it seems fairly obvious that there will be casualties. The £300 million spent organising the summit wasn’t enough to prevent an armoured car being ‘attacked’. Defending himself from a fire-extinguisher being thrown towards his vehicle, one Carabiniere opened fire and killed the twenty-year-old Carlo Giuliani. But even that tragic and unnecessary death was surpassed a day later. The Carabinieri then conducted a night-raid on the Diaz school where many journalists and protesters from the Genoa Social Forum were staying. The brutality of the Carabinieri overshadowed anything that had happened before. It was thuggery at its crudest. Pictures the next day showed teeth strewn across the floor of the school. There were bloodstains at head height on many of the walls. 93 people were arrested and others were taken to the temporary barracks at Bolzaneto, outside Genoa.

  There, various protesters suffered beatings to the accompaniment of the Fascist hymn, Faccetta Nera. One Carabiniere later confessed to La Repubblica newspaper what his colleagues had done to the journalists and protestors: ‘They lined them up and banged their heads against the walls. They urinated on one person. They beat people if they didn’t sing Faccetta Nera. One girl was vomiting blood but the chief of the squad just looked on. They threatened to rape girls with their batons…’ Bones were broken. The injuries of the British alone were obscene: broken ribs, punctured lungs, ruptured spleens, broken wrists, severe head injuries. Months later many people, both Italians and indignant foreigners, were still imprisoned and awaiting charges, let alone a trial from the government of ‘civil rights’. The Italian press compared the behaviour to that of militarists in Pinochet’s Chile, and for once the rhetoric didn’t appear overblown. ‘This,’ said my normally reticent flatmate, ‘is just the beginning. It’s a calling card from the Fascists in government.’

  A few days later, I was back in Parma drinking a coffee in the town’s main square, Piazza Garibaldi. I heard a chorus coming from outside the bar and, accompanied by the jovial policeman who had been at the bar, I went outside to see what was going on. There were about two or three hundred people of roughly student age, shouting ‘Justice! Justice!’ and marching under a banner (a painted sheet) saying ‘Forces of Order = Fascist Murderers’. The protesters walked up to the dozen Carabinieri in attendance and pointed their middle fingers in their faces, shouting ‘murderers’. It was, of course, impossible to reason with the marchers, as they walked past with left fists raised defiantly. It was pointless trying to point out that not all ‘forces of order’ are Fascists, in the same way that (despite government rhetoric) not all protesters were teppisti, delinquenti or deficienti (‘hooligans,’ ‘delinquents’ or ‘half-wits’). It was bizarre. Parma, whilst fiercely political, is normally blissfully peaceful. Here, though, was Genoa writ small: visceral hatred between Italy’s ‘two halves’. The friendly policeman from the bar looked as bemused as me.

  Within a few weeks, the Justice Minister, Roberto Castelli, was confronted with a request to offer a grazia to Adriano Sofri to allow him to leave prison. The guardasigilli (‘keeper of the seals’) turned down the appeal, saying that it would be ‘inopportune’ to pardon a police-killer ‘considering the climate’ of the times, and the recent ‘confrontations with the police’ in Genoa. Sofri, not surprisingly, was downcast. ‘I will die inside’ said the 58-year-old who isn’t due for release until 2017.

  Just as the Genoa tragedy reached its conclusion, the nonagenarian journalist Indro Montanelli died. To the last he had continued his vehement criticisms of Berlusconi, claiming that the methods of Il Cavaliere w
ere ‘akin to Fascism’. Since he had never been a figure who endeared himself to the left (he had been a dedicated anti-Communist and old-fashioned authoritarian who had, in the 1970s, been kneecapped by the Red Brigades) his dying pronouncements were all the more powerful. No one could convincingly dismiss his criticisms as the whingeings of a ‘Communist’. His death, coinciding with ‘Year Zero’ of the new regime, was thus quickly seen as a metaphor for the closing of one chapter of ‘The Italian Story’ and the opening of another, much stranger, one.

  References - 8 An Italian Story

  1 Alexander Stille, Excellent Cadavers (London, 1995)

  9

  Concrete Problems

  It was the houses: all of these new buildings that were being put up, tenements from six to eight storeys high, their white mass like a barrier shoring up the crumbling slope of the coast, opening up as many windows and balconies as possible on to the sea. The concrete fever had got hold of the Riviera: over there was one building already lived-in, with its geranium tubs, all looking similar, on the balconies; here was a recently finished development, its window panes marked with snaky chalk squiggles, waiting for the little families from Lombardy eager to go to the seaside; further on, a castle of scaffolding and, under it, the turning concrete mixer and the estate agent’s sign advertising the new flats on sale…

  Italo Calvino

  Sicily. The scene looked like something from a war. There were women wailing. Some occasionally collapsed with grief and an ambulance was called. It arrived dramatically with sirens blaring, in full view of camera crews. There was an indignant priest, shaking his head at what was going on. On the other side were armed police and military, huddled around heavily defended jeeps and holding large weapons. The terapia delle ruspe, the ‘therapy of the bulldozers’, was a new front in the very strange Italian civil war. It was a shock therapy, and one which few Sicilians ever expected to see: the military were bulldozing their houses.