The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (11 page)

“So you’ve met him, Micciché, when he was still council president,” Letizia says, “and what do you want me to tell you?”

In fact, Shobha and I did once meet the minister, who isn’t really a minister now but is still addressed as such, at the Villa Igiea, the luxury hotel in the Bay of Palermo where the city’s upper crust meet, from ministers to Mafia bosses to cardinals. It was a remarkable encounter with a representative of Sicilian politics.

Under Berlusconi, Forza Italia MP Gianfranco Miccichè was appointed deputy economics minister and secretary of state for development, but during his time in office he was better known to the wider public for an inglorious and quickly buried affair involving cocaine: a runner, a Sicilian Forza Italia activist, had delivered the drug straight to the ministry. In Rome, the minister was also responsible for deciding what EU sponsorship money went to Sicily, and was rewarded for this with the highest number of direct votes in the Sicilian election.

At Villa Igiea he introduced his latest gift: a daily soap opera entitled
Agrodolce (Bittersweet)
—240 episodes, which were to be produced in Sicily. Supported by EU funding. You can’t always talk about the Mafia and nothing else, the minister says, you have to be able to see the positive side as well. In a freezing-cold conference room he presented the trailer to the journalists. He didn’t show trash in the streets or endless traffic jams; he didn’t show the skeletons of burned-out cars in the Borgo Vecchio or the weeds tearing up the motorways; he showed dolphins gliding through a sky-blue sea to the sound of melancholy accordion music, and Kalsa cathedral, which looked as if it had been dipped in honey, and at the end of the trailer the minister wiped tears from his eyes. Next to him sat another party colleague who was equally moved—he was one of the closest political allies of Miccichè and Marcello Dell’Utri: Angelino Alfano, who was appointed justice minister in the third Berlusconi government in 2008 and, since 2011, has been the secretary of Berlusconi’s party, Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom).

Later, after a generous lunch, Miccichè met up with a journalist from the Berlusconi newspaper
Il Giornale
on the hotel terrace. He didn’t want to talk to me because a German television
team had once called him a mafioso, and he had brought charges against the television channel. But Shobha and I stayed stoically on our wicker chairs and watched a circle of young people crowding around Gianfranco Miccichè and the journalist, Italian neocons with turquoise ties, young lawyers, and economists, and a young woman with Cleopatra eyeliner.

“We’re the Gianfranco boys,” one of them said, and the minister casually rested his feet on the table.

His young admirers were all members of the Marcello Dell’Utri Club: the senator, cofounder of Forza Italia and Berlusconi confidant, found guilty of complicity with the Mafia, is so keen on disseminating his so-called culture that he has established hundreds of clubs all across Italy. When I asked a young man what they talked about in those culture clubs, he told me they often discussed issues such as “Is Italy a constitutional democracy?” Because in Italy, he argued, people had no protection once they fell into the clutches of the legal system.

I looked at the young man in amazement. Because it didn’t seem likely to me that these young people were at risk of falling permanently into the clutches of the Italian legal system. In fact, these ambitious, talented, and probably privileged neoconservatives gave the impression of being intoxicated from their immersion in the sea of Berlusconi’s propaganda.

“We want to prove that it’s not only the left that does any thinking, we also discuss issues like ‘Karl Marx and God—what’s left?’” said the girl with the Cleopatra eyes.

They all spoke eloquently, word perfect in fact; they talked freely. Only the minister didn’t say a word and kept his eyes firmly closed. I wondered if he was bored. Or was it his heavy lunch? In fact, the minister had gone to sleep. He was snoring—it
was impossible to ignore. And the Gianfranco boys just went on talking about their cultural activities and about how not everything in Sicily should be all about morality. The minister’s head was tilted to one side and his mouth slightly open, noises issuing from his soft palate.

And the next day there was an interview with him in
Il Giornale
in which he promised to bless Sicily with ten golf courses: “We will bring Sicily back to the fore.”

“Hmm, yeah, golf courses,” says Letizia, drawing on her unlit cigarette. For a while she moved from Palermo to Paris because she didn’t want her whole life to be eaten up by the Mafia. Because she couldn’t bear to stare into the triumphant faces of politicians who were collaborating with the Mafia. The former minister for infrastructure and transportation, the Lega Nord politician Pietro Lunardi, had with disarming honesty told the Italians they must finally get used to living with the Mafia: the Mafia and the Camorra had always existed, he said, and they always would. “Since then, politicians have lost their shame,” Letizia says.

Up until a few years ago Letizia had also run a publishing company, Edizione della Battaglia, bringing out books about the Mafia and the southern hemisphere. She had sold these books in a little bookshop not far from the Teatro Politeama—until the day a man came in and asked her very politely for a donation for the prisoners. The second time he asked for a donation she closed the bookshop.

“You know, I got the message,” she says, staring with amazement at her cigarette, still unlit.

P
ADRE
F
RITTITTA

L
ETIZIA’S DOG WAKES UP WHEN HE HEARS
S
HOBHA’S FOOT
-steps on the stairs. He runs over and licks her too. “If I might briefly interrupt your conversation,” Shobha says, pointing at her watch and at the sun, which is already high in the sky. “Before midday, perhaps we could take a few pictures, in the Kalsa, perhaps, not far from the Piazza Marina.” She had had the idea, she says, of taking a photograph of Letizia in front of the church of Santa Maria della Pietà in Kalsa; Salvo is already waiting downstairs. Letizia nods, somehow resigned. She prefers to stand behind the camera. Particularly since she’s just been given a new camera, a digital Leica, which she now throws over her shoulder.

As usual, Salvo has triple-parked, but it’s not a problem. Unusually, he isn’t in a hurry, the Kalsa isn’t far away, and his ladies are still engrossed in their game.

When we arrive in the Piazza Marina, the waiters are already laying the tables for lunch. It’s one restaurant after another—and no reminders of the years when the mood was one of permanent curfew and not a single sound. No one in their right mind would ever have thought of setting foot in the Kalsa in those days. No one would ever attend a vigil of their own free will. Forty years of Mafia city administration had led to the abandonment of the old town. Forty years during which the bourgeoisie of Palermo had turned a blind eye to Mafia mayors and kowtowing city councillors, submissive architects, and venal city planners. As far as those people were concerned, the decay of the old city couldn’t happen quickly enough; ideally, they would have knocked the whole lot down so that they could fill the place with the tower blocks that had already disfigured the rest of the city. It was only since the Mafia had put money into the tourist industry as well that some of the baroque
palazzi
had had their façades restored.

In the middle of Piazza Marina there’s a huge magnolia fig tree that has grown into a vast and magical forest. The trunk is reddish brown, like the Sicilian soil, and has transformed itself into some fabulous creature that consists of knotted, frozen snakes, dragons half hidden in the ground, and elongated elephants. Every time I turn my back on this tree I half expect it to stretch out its arms and grab me.

Shobha immediately directs her mother to stand under the tree and starts taking pictures, and I take notes about Letizia, about her red fringe, which even today makes her look like a Parisian student who’s just climbed down from the barricades. She’s always been a reporter, commander, and spy all at once; she
comforted widows, saw her friends die, and crept behind enemy lines. She photographed Giulio Andreotti holding out his hand to a Mafia boss—something that Andreotti still tried to deny decades later, when he was on trial for supporting the Mafia. But Letizia’s photograph was among the evidence produced.

“And I only remembered that photograph when the police came looking for it in my archive,” Letizia says with amazement.

When Shobha directs her mother toward the roots of the magic tree, I hear brass-band music floating across from the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Not a day passes in Sicily without a religious procession of one kind or another. Curious, I walk toward the street to take a look—before coming back, disappointed: there isn’t the usual sea of people, just a scattered troop of believers following the crucifix. It isn’t a procession as such, just a small penitential pilgrimage. The Jesus being carried along the Corso has bashed knees and a slightly crooked crown of thorns; he’s followed by a handful of believers being spurred on by a priest with a bullhorn. “Lord, we beg thee,” the believers cry, asking for healing for the handicapped, for those who have succumbed to alcohol, for those who have fallen under the spell of evil. Would they include the mafiosi? Like the turncoat Marcello Fava, for example? Until his arrest he belonged to the congregation of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa, just a few steps behind us on Piazza Marina. There he had prayed to Santa Maria del Carmelo, when he wasn’t meeting the other bosses outside the church to discuss business with them. When I interviewed him in Rome he repeatedly stressed the importance to him of the spiritual assistance given to him by a nun after he had decided to turn state’s evidence. But now that I’m standing only a few yards
away from his church, I wonder whether these people here mightn’t see betrayal of the Mafia as a greater sin than actually belonging to the Mafia.

Salvo stands next to me. He casts an indifferent, if not contemptuous, glance at the procession moving past us, before staring again at the display of his
telefonino
, because he’s in permanent contact with his fiancée. But when the Jesus with the crooked crown of thorns is carried past, even Salvo glances up and crosses himself. Briefly, with his thumb, the way people do in Sicily.

While Shobha and her mother are still trying to find the best perspective in the shadow under the magnolia fig tree, Salvo and I start walking toward Santa Teresa alla Kalsa. As always, a man sits opposite the church in the shade of a tree, frying croquettes in an aluminum pot full of seething oil. Santa Teresa alla Kalsa is a small, sand-colored church with bashful baroque forms. Stucco saints stand in the niches, sighing for all eternity from their half-open mouths. It’s here that we find Padre Frittitta. The priest Don Pino—the priest from San Luca—reminded me of.

“I don’t suppose you want to have another chat with Padre Frittitta?” Salvo asks and laughs. I involuntarily stick out my little finger and my forefinger, to ward off evil. Everyone in Palermo knows the name of Padre Mario Frittitta. On one occasion Don Mario had been arrested for supporting the Mafia because he had heard fugitive Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri’s confession in his hiding place and had read him private masses. After the arrest of Padre Frittitta, his congregation had organized street demonstrations. Only four days later Padre Frittitta was released from the Ucciardone prison: a lenient judge had released him on condition that he leave Sicily. But even that punishment
wouldn’t last for long: we met the Carmelite priest shortly after he returned to the bosom of his church amid the triumphant cries of his congregation.

There was quite a tense atmosphere around the meeting because Padre Frittitta no longer gave interviews to journalists. He had only agreed to talk to us because we had been recommended by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri.

It was a very hot day in October when we met Padre Frittitta. He was walking busily through his church. Against the light I could see his Carmelite habit slipping across the floor and swirling up dust. At first, the only sound was that of his crêpe soles squeaking across the marble—Padre Frittitta arranged a bouquet here, straightened an altar cloth there—until he greeted us very cordially and led us through his church, past the statues of the saints with their electric candles, past the church’s patron, St. Teresa of Avila, past Sant’Anna, Sant’Antonio, and Santa Rita—who actually had no business in this church, Padre Frittitta observed, but had been put here for the devotion of the little people, the lower classes, the
popolino
, Padre Frittitta sighed.

As Shobha prowled around the church taking pictures of the saints, I sat down on a pew beside Padre Frittitta and became aware that the church air was making me a bit dizzy. It smelled sweet and sour at the same time: it smelled of faded lilies, of muttered sins and stale air, of myrrh, of absolution, and of old men. I held the microphone of my tape recorder at arm’s length and Padre Frittitta said: “God is everywhere.”

He told me his favorite saint was Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity, because she had taught him that God dwells within us.

“God is in the mountains, in the sea and in the trees,” Padre Frittitta said. His voice sounded like whispering from hundreds
of years ago, a hoarse susurration, a quiet murmur. “I don’t have to seek God in the clouds,” said Padre Frittitta, “because I carry him within me, and that is what gives me courage and strength. That’s what I always preach: ‘Take God with you wherever you go!’”

So Padre Frittitta had also brought the Lord God to the hiding place of the fugitive mafioso Pietro Aglieri. There, in front of the home altar, he had served the mass to the murderer, had taken his confession and granted him absolution. Since then, the law had investigated the Carmelite priest, and Padre Frittitta no longer understood the world. He spoke without waiting for a question, as if he had pressed a button deep within himself. The button of absolution.