Blood Brotherhoods (98 page)

Pandico began a long stretch behind bars. There his literary and legal expertise were spotted by Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo, who initiated him into the NCO and used him as a secretary, a position that gave him access to a great deal of inside information. In a typically self-aggrandising fashion, Pandico would later claim that he had been nothing less than Cutolo’s
consigliere
, and thus the acting boss of the NCO after the Professor was transferred to the prison island of Asinara.

Pandico was the second member of the NCO to turn penitent after the Animal. He told magistrates that
Portobello
presenter Enzo Tortora was a cocaine dealer and money launderer for the NCO. Indeed the TV star had been such a successful criminal that he had been initiated into the brotherhood in 1980. But some time after that, according to Pandico’s narrative, Tortora’s relationship with the NCO had broken down when he failed to pay for a large consignment of cocaine. Pandico claimed to have been entrusted by Cutolo himself with the task of getting the money back. He also said that Tortora received his drugs wholesale through Domenico Barbaro—the same Domenico Barbaro who had sent the doilies to
Portobello
back in December 1977.

Tortora was confronted with these accusations in Rome’s historic Regina Coeli prison. He admitted that, yes, he had had indirect contact with Barbaro. Through 1978 and into 1979, Tortora had received a long, indignant and verbose correspondence demanding to know what had become of the doilies. He showed investigators the letters, pointing out their absurd contents: they accused Tortora of stealing the doilies and made far-fetched threats of legal action. One of the letters Tortora received contained the following passage:

My current status as a detainee who is still bound to the healthy principles of Honour, would oblige me not to inflict damage on you, if I were to see that you forthwith intended, giving tangible proof thereof, to see to the return of the package. As a result, in agreement with my legal advisors, I have decided to suspend the planned penal action as long as you demonstrate your goodwill.

As their pseudo-legalese, rambling logic, paranoia and scarcely suppressed violence betray, the semi-literate Barbaro was not the author of these words. They were the work of Giovanni Pandico, who was an inmate at the same Elba prison as Barbaro at the time of the doilies affair. Pandico had evidently taken charge of pressing the case for the return of the doilies with his usual obsessive persistence.

As a popular TV presenter, Tortora was meticulously protective of his public image, even when the public in question was languishing in jail. So, as he explained to his interrogators, he personally wrote a polite reply to Barbaro/Pandico’s complaints, and even arranged for the RAI legal office to compensate the prisoner to the very generous tune of 800,000 lire—some $480 at the time.

Dear Mr Domenico Barbaro,

I am very sorry to tell you that I know nothing about the package you sent and have never seen a trace of it. What concerns me is that you are drawing conclusions from this fact that do not shed a very honourable light either on me, or on the respect that I have always shown to whoever it might be
.

Tortora’s perfectly reasonable assumption was that these documents would bolster his defence. As it turned out, passages from them would become a central part of the prosecution case. On Pandico’s prompting, magistrates decided that these were coded messages: for ‘package’ read ‘consignment of drugs’; for ‘doilies’ read ‘cocaine’. And when ‘honour’ and ‘respect’ were mentioned, it was a signal that both parties in the deal adhered to the ethical code of the criminal underworld.

What seemed to give this airy-fairy interpretation the heft of truth was the cascade of NCO defectors, including the Animal, who backed up Pandico’s story. The NCO certainly feared the penitents enough to mount violent attacks on them and their relatives in the build-up to the trial. Pandico’s own mother died in an explosion only a few days after he had been cross-examined in court. Crucially, there were also two witnesses, an artist and his wife—neither of them prisoners or
camorristi
—who claimed to have seen Tortora actually swapping a small suitcase of cash for a package of white powder in a Milan TV studio.

On 17 September 1985, the huge trial against Cutolo’s NCO reached its conclusion: Enzo Tortora was found guilty; he was sentenced to ten years in prison and given a fine of 50 million lire ($80,000 in 2011). For similar offences, Tortora’s principal accuser, Giovanni Pandico, received a three-year sentence. The judge’s ruling demolished the
Portobello
presenter’s character:

Tortora has demonstrated that he is an extremely dangerous individual who for years has managed to conceal his sinister activities and his true face—the face of a cynical merchant of death. His real identity is all the more pernicious because it has been covered by a mask which exudes nothing but courtesy and
savoir-faire
.

The verdict against Tortora seemed to confirm suspicions about the real nature of public life—suspicions that had deep roots in the country’s psyche. Many of the millions of ordinary Italians who spent their Friday nights in front of
Portobello
also harboured a half-buried belief that they were witnessing a façade. Behind the televisual world of light entertainment, sport, and above all politics, lay a sordid reality of favouritism, corruption, political shenanigans, and—why not?—organised crime and drug dealing. Indeed, the more suave and convincing the façade, the more cunning and devilish was the truth it concealed. According to this pernicious calculus, Enzo Tortora stood condemned by his own affable public image. The sentimental glow that issued from
Portobello
was reflected back onto its presenter as the incriminating glare of an interrogator’s lamp.

The truth of Tortora’s off-screen life was anything but lurid. He was exceptionally quiet and bookish by the standards of the media milieu. A non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian, his favourite author was Stendhal and he liked to spend his spare time reading Livy and Seneca in the original Latin. But before the trial even began, journalists had been hunting for—and finding—evidence of the double life that he
surely
must have led.

To British observers like myself, the Italian legal system’s way of doing things can sometimes seem monstrous. That is to say: to anyone raised on an adversarial system that gives judges the power to abandon a trial if the press has said anything likely to prejudice the outcome of the jury’s deliberations, the sheer noise that accompanies a prominent case in Italy can be disturbing. Long before the decisive hearings, much of the evidence to be cited by lawyers on both sides is widely available and widely discussed. Witnesses and defendants give lengthy interviews. Multiple media investigations run in parallel to the official legal process. Opinions divide into opposing factions of
colpevolisti
and
innocentisti
(literally ‘guilty-ists’ and ‘innocent-ists’). The actual verdict is frequently not enough to dislodge the most hardened views on the case: it remains only one view among many.

The most important argument in the Italian system’s defence is that every stage of a trial, including the preparation of evidence, must be open to public scrutiny. In other words, the axiom ‘justice must be seen to be done’ applies long before prosecution and defence square up in front of a judge. And this is a strong argument in a country like Italy, where all kinds of undue influences, ranging from a Fascist dictatorship to the mafia, have tilted the scales of justice over the years.

Enzo Tortora certainly had the skills and the influence to fight his corner in the media battle leading up to the trial. Seven months after being arrested, he was granted house arrest for the remainder of his time on remand. He stood for election under the Radical Party banner for the European elections of June 1984. (The Radical Party had a strong civil liberties platform.) Tortora’s living room was converted into a TV studio for the campaign, and he was resoundingly elected. In Italy at the time, Members of Parliament, whether in Rome or Strasbourg, had immunity from prosecution. Tortora publicly renounced his immunity.

After being convicted, he took advantage of a period of bureaucratic formalities to visit Asinara maximum security jail as part of a Radical Party initiative highlighting the desperate conditions for inmates. In a bizarre encounter, Tortora even shook hands with Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo. ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ the NCO boss quipped. ‘I’m your lieutenant, remember?’

Tortora, who knew that Cutolo had openly called Pandico a liar, accepted the joke in good spirits: ‘No, look, you’re the boss.’

Between Christmas and New Year 1985, Tortora resigned as a Euro MP. In front of a meeting of thousands of supporters in Milan’s vast piazza Duomo, he gave himself up to the police who took him off to begin his jail sentence.

In September 1986, almost exactly a year after Tortora was first found guilty, the Appeal Court overturned his conviction and restored his reputation completely.

The Appeal Court judges’ ruling made the first trial seem like
The King of Comedy
rescripted by Franz Kafka. Tortora’s main accuser, Giovanni Pandico, was exposed as a vindictive, self-aggrandising fantasist. Flattered by the attention and power that turning penitent brought him, he had taken revenge on the
Portobello
star for ‘snubbing’ him over the doilies. The other NCO defectors, many of whom were held together in an army barracks for their own protection during the investigation, had simply brought their stories into line with Pandico’s. The artist who claimed to have seen Tortora swapping cash for cocaine in a TV studio, it turned out, was a known slanderer desperate to use the publicity surrounding the case to hawk a few more of his execrable paintings.

Portobello
returned to the airwaves on 20 February 1987. Tortora, visibly worn down by his ordeal, nonetheless opened the show in his usual gentlemanly style: ‘So then, where were we?’ It is still one of the most remembered moments in Italian television history, a moment marked with indelible poignancy because Tortora died of cancer a little over a year later.

The whole Tortora story did serious damage to the public’s support for the fight against organised crime. The successes of the trial against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata were completely overshadowed. The image of the
pentito
that would remain fixed in the public mind was of Giovanni Pandico in court decrying Tortora’s evidence as a mere ‘performance’, and melodramatically demanding to undergo a lie-detector test.

Just before lunchtime on Monday 16 July 1984, with the Tortora saga still a long way from being resolved in Naples, another penitent from the world of organised crime was going through the formalities of his first interrogation in a police cell in Rome.

I am Tommaso Buscetta, son of the late Benedetto and the late Felicia Bauccio. Born in Palermo on 13 July 1928. I have not done military service. Married with children. Agricultural entrepreneur. With a criminal record.

Buscetta had once been one of the most charismatic and powerful bosses in Sicily, an international drug lord with contacts on both sides of the Atlantic that earned him the nickname ‘the boss of two worlds’. Now, he was a physical wreck. His dark features, which had the noble impassivity of an Aztec prince’s, were pale and blurred. Having broken parole and fled Italy in 1980, he had taken refuge on his 65,000-acre farm in Brazil. From there he had watched, impotent, as the
corleonesi
slaughtered his friends and picked off several members of his family.

When the Brazilian police caught up with him, they tortured him: they pulled his toenails out, electrocuted him, and then took him for a ride in an aeroplane over São Paolo and threatened to throw him out. All he said was, ‘My name is Tommaso Buscetta.’ Just before being extradited to Italy, Buscetta tried to commit suicide by swallowing strychnine. When he landed at Rome airport, he had to be helped from the plane. Soon afterwards, he asked to speak to Giovanni Falcone, who now sat across the desk from him, listening to his every word. When asked if he had anything to declare, Buscetta spoke the following words:

Before anything else, I want to point out that I am not a stoolie, in the sense that what I say is not dictated by the fact that I intend to win favours from the justice system.

And I am not a ‘penitent’ either, in the sense that the revelations I will make are not motivated by wretched calculations of what is in it for me.

I was a
mafioso
, and I made mistakes for which I am ready to pay my debt to justice completely.

Rather, in the interests of society, of my children and of young people generally, I intend to reveal everything I know about that cancer that is the mafia, so that the new generations can live in a worthier and more human way.