The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (2 page)

In the months after the Duisburg Mafia massacre, the bosses applied all their energy to lulling the Germans back into their long sleep, which had lasted for forty years: Don’t worry, they said, the Mafia exists only in backward Italian villages! The mafiosi devoted themselves intensely to image management: even while on the run, Giovanni Strangio, one of the Duisburg killers, gave an interview to the Italian weekly magazine
Panorama
, in which he portrayed himself as an Italian man unjustly persecuted by the criminal justice system, guilty only of having been born in San Luca.

The triumph of the Mafia in the world is by no means based solely on violence; it is based above all on money and kind words. As long as people believe in the myths of the Mafia, they’re in no danger. That’s why journalists in the service of the Mafia are so valuable: the bosses by no means hide from journalists, but
are eager to use them as megaphones for their messages. Therefore, the question is not whether a journalist succeeds in talking to a boss; rather, it is whether or not one is willing to be used by him for his propaganda.

In Germany, too, many naive journalists turned into servants of Mafia propaganda. German defenders of the Mafia disseminated press reports of innocent, persecuted pizza bakers, and many German journalists took down heartrending immigrant stories in their notepads. There was talk of “kin liability” and racism—but not of the 229 clans and 1,800 individuals listed in the report of the Bundeskriminalamt (the German Federal Criminal Police Office) on the ’Ndrangheta in Germany.

The Honored Society
appeared in Germany a year after the Duisburg Mafia murders. The Mafia had achieved its first successes in the attempt to smooth out its battered image. Forgetting had already set in. The Mafia was almost once again “cult.” As computer games, as television series, as party music, it had again cloaked itself in its folkloric garb and successfully sold its propaganda—such as the notion that its members didn’t murder women and children, that they were God-fearing and victims of the Italian state, and that in Germany they wanted nothing but to bake a good pizza romana.

How much my book disrupted that goodwill tour of the Mafia in Germany I would soon find out. It was necessary to make an example: punish one person to teach hundreds a lesson. Shortly after its publication, I was severely threatened at a reading in Erfurt. Before long, five lawsuits had been brought and two complaints lodged against me and my book. Soon thereafter,
I sat in court as a defendant. My Mafia book was censored—at the behest of German judges.

When I first held my book in my hands, with its court-ordered, blacked-out passages, those pages seemed to me somehow strangely unreal, as if the book had surfaced from underground—as if it were a book that could be dangerous to read. I always expect my fingers to be stained black when I run them over those sections.

“Anyone who writes about the Mafia does so at their own risk,” Alberto Spampinato, the brother of a journalist murdered by the Sicilian Mafia, had once told me. In Italy more than two hundred journalists were threatened by the Mafia in the last three years—not only with incendiary devices and undisguised death threats, but also legally: with libel actions and astronomical claims for damages. There’s only one thing that even the harshly tested Italian Mafia journalists have not yet seen, and that’s blacked-out pages in a book about the Mafia. The Italian media reported extensively about the peculiarity that the Italian restaurateur Spartaco Pitanti and the San Luca–born Duisburg hotelier Antonio Pelle had managed to get some of the passages concerning them in my book blacked out—by injunction. Redactions of content that I had thoroughly backed up with the files of German and Italian Mafia investigators.

How little German judges know about the Mafia I learned firsthand in various German courtrooms. They might be forgiven their inability to pronounce the word ’
Ndrangheta
, but not their underestimation of what lies behind the Mafia’s litigation strategy—namely, the attempt to prevent journalists from reporting on the Mafia. I don’t view the journalist’s task as reporting
on a mafioso when he is already behind bars. As a journalist I am much more concerned with drawing attention to the dangers the Mafia poses, conveying suspicious facts supported by numerous reliable sources (this is known somewhat stiltedly in German legalese as “Verdachtsberichterstattung,” or “press coverage based on suspicions”). It’s ultimately about whether the names of suspected parties are to be kept under wraps by the authorities or are permitted to be stated publicly by journalists like me.

At a trial in Munich a judge upheld the censorship in its entirety—not without ordering police protection for the trial beforehand, probably less out of concern for me than for herself. Two officers armed with batons and guns sat in the courtroom. When we left the court, the plaintiff placed his hand on our lawyer’s arm and said to him patronizingly, “And let her know that next time she should come with six police officers.” In addition, the judge sentenced the publisher to a payment of 10,000 euros in damages—not without first asking the plaintiff whether he was a member of the ’Ndrangheta or not. No, he wasn’t, he answered. And no, he didn’t know why he had been appearing for years in the Bundeskriminalamt reports on organized crime in Germany.

When I went to Palermo for the first time as a journalist in 1989 and saw Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two anti-Mafia prosecutors who only three years later were murdered by the Mafia, I couldn’t have imagined that I would one day stand trial in Germany because of a book on the Mafia and that my readings in Germany would take place under police protection.

My German publisher has now lodged an appeal with the highest German court, the constitutional court. Ultimately, this is about more than one book—it’s about freedom of the press and what the task of journalists is. For as long as the Mafia is regarded not as a global phenomenon but only as an Italian one, it is in no danger.

M
ARCELLO
F
AVA

It’s always horrible, being present at a murder. Particularly if it’s a person you know. And if you don’t know why that person is dying or has died. You don’t know, and you’ll never find out. Because if you’re acting as an ordinary soldier, as we call it in Cosa Nostra, they won’t give you any explanations
.

T
HE MAN WEARS HIS DARK BLOND HAIR WITH A PARTING
. H
E
has sea-blue eyes. A little double chin and womanly lips. He’s wearing a midnight-blue, double-breasted suit and clumsily balancing a briefcase on his knees.

He looks at his watch and then at the departure board for our flight from Venice to Palermo. The twenty-minute delay that’s been announced is nearly over. When the stewardess opens the gate, he stands up and smooths the material of his suit
over his knees. He looks oddly old-fashioned, as Sicilians often look when life has washed them northward—as if they came from a time long forgotten. Of course, he wears a monogrammed shirt. Sicilians celebrate elegance as something sacredly serious, like the businessman in the pinstripe suit pacing up and down by the gate, holding a little cigarillo that went out ages ago. Just like in
Prizzi’s Honor
. Or the woman with the big earrings and stockings, the tops of which stand out against her tight skirt when she crosses her legs. Just like Sophia Loren in
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
. Or the old couple who look like extras in a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement: the wife in a black suit and with her hair in a bun, the husband in a rough checked jacket. A couple who only communicate with each other in whispers and who, you can see, only leave their village once a year, to visit their son, who’s found himself a job in the Veneto. Which the parents consider a terrible blow. Apart from these visible Sicilians, there are the invisible ones who don’t look Sicilian in Venice at all, as if they had grown pale away from Sicily. Who are transformed during the flight. Who, with each minute in the air that brings them closer to Sicily, assume their original color.

The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit is the first to board the airport bus; he doesn’t set his little briefcase down on the floor but carries it under his arm, which makes him look oddly anxious, like a child going on its travels for the first time.

Generally the victim is brought to a house by a friend, his best friend if possible, so that he feels safe. Then they grab him, and if he still has something to say, he says it now. I’d like to see the one who doesn’t speak, with a noose around his neck. But regardless of whether he speaks or not, he gets killed anyway
.

When we board the plane, I lose sight of him. The Sicilian woman with the garter belt sashays down the rows to her seat. The old Sicilian couple cart plastic bags and tied-up parcels down the aisle, as if they planned to stow all their household goods in the luggage rack. Apart from a few overweight American tourists struggling past the narrow rows of seats, the plane is full of Italians, most of them business travelers. I always take the evening plane from Venice to Palermo. I like to get there at night, just early enough to have dinner. When I’m in my seat, I send another two texts: one to Salvo, my trusted taxi driver; one to Shobha, the photographer I’ve been working with for so long that our relationship’s almost like a marriage. I tell them we’re twenty minutes late and ask Shobha to reserve a table in a restaurant for us.

As always, I plan to do a bit more work on the flight and start flicking through my archive material. Then I take from my pocket the book about the mystery of the lawyer Paolo Borsellino’s red diary. When I open it, I immediately have the feeling that someone’s reading over my shoulder. Sicilian paranoia is starting even before I’ve arrived in Sicily. Every time I fly to Palermo I wonder if it’s a good idea to read articles about Mafia bosses or investment strategies or flick through lectures about the Mafia and power. Or even read
Antimafia Duemila
, a newspaper that is always sent to subscribers in a strikingly neutral envelope, as if it were a porn mag. Sometimes I feel a bit rebellious and think: I don’t care. We’re living in Europe, after all, not in Transnistria! Italy’s one of the founding members of the
EU! And sometimes I snap my book shut and put it away. As I do now.

When the man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit sits down in the same row as me, I’m already flicking unexcitedly through the in-flight magazine, which says that an apartment in Venice will lay you golden eggs, because you can rent it out all year as a holiday apartment. He gives me a friendly but noncommittal nod, the way you greet a stranger with whom you have nothing in common but your flight route. The seat between us is empty, and the man sets his briefcase down on it.

Before I had to kill someone, I would cross myself. I would say: “Dear God, stand by me! Make sure nothing happens!” But I wasn’t the only one who crossed himself beforehand and prayed to God. We all did
.

I still remember every one of his sentences. To be able to speak to him, I had to apply to the Ministry of the Interior. I had to set out my motives and guarantee that I wouldn’t ask him any questions about current trials. Our meeting had to have the agreement not only of the secretary of state at the Ministry of the Interior, but also of every individual public prosecutor in the Mafia trials in which Marcello Fava appeared, either as defendant or witness. Every week, at first, to check the state of things, I called the Servizio Centrale, the department of the Ministry of the Interior in Rome responsible for turncoat mafiosi, whose name sounds like some sort of secret-service operation. It was very quickly made clear to me, however, that my inquiries wouldn’t speed up matters. “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” For six months I heard nothing at all. And I’d actually
given up all hope when I got a call from Rome one afternoon. “Servizio Centrale,” said a voice. My application had been approved. I was to make my way to a bar in Rome, which, as fate would have it, bore the name Lo zio d’America, The American Uncle.

A few days later a taxi set me down a short distance from the bar. It looked like one of those labyrinthine Italian motorway service stations which you step into to get an espresso and leave with five CDs, some Sardinian donkey sausage, and a lump of parmesan. Behind an endless counter stood barmen with paper hats sitting on their gelled hair. When I was about to order an espresso, my phone rang. I felt in my pocket, from the depths of which it went on ringing, until a man standing next to me said: “I called you. Please follow me.”

I hadn’t caught his name. I walked some distance behind him. For a split second I wondered what would happen if the man I was following wasn’t the man I thought he was. I followed him along potholed pavements, past 1960s buildings and box hedges that smelled of cats. The periphery of Rome is so faceless that I had trouble remembering the way. At last he stopped outside the entrance to a building, where two men stood looking conspicuously inconspicuous, as only policemen can. The hallway smacked of a housing project, with greyish-yellow paint flaking off the walls.

Afterwards we would often go out to eat together. Maybe that’s sadism. Could be, I don’t know. And I don’t know what else to call it, either. But that’s what happened. We met up in the evening and went out to eat together. You just have to forget the whole business. Nothing happened, nothing at all
.

The mafioso Marcello Fava was waiting for me on the third floor. In an apartment that had been rented by the Ministry of the Interior under a false name—for “collaborators with the judiciary,” as turncoat mafiosi are known in the politically correct and somewhat euphemistic language of the law. Since Marcello Fava was working with the public prosecutor’s office, he, his wife, and his two sons had to be protected from the revenge of Cosa Nostra. They had had to leave Sicily and live somewhere in Italy under police protection and false names.