The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia (23 page)

When she thinks about it she feels ill, Letizia says. She draws on her cigarette and runs her fingers through her fringe. Clouds roll across the sky, turn pink at the edges, and pull apart. The last
swimmers stand in little groups like members of a congregation after church; a boy shuts the parasols and collapses the deck chairs. We go on walking along the water, it slowly grows cooler, and the shadow of Monte Pellegrino falls on the shore. The sea swallows our footprints. Shobha takes casual snaps.

R
OSALBA
D
I
G
REGORIO

S
ALVO IS WAITING OUTSIDE THE
C
HARLESTON RESTAURANT
to bring us back to Palermo. The sky has assumed a faint purple tinge, which seldom happens in Sicily. Usually night falls from the sky like a black cloth, as it does in Africa. By the time we drive through La Favorita park, it’s already so dark under the canopy of the magnolia fig tree that the eyes of stray dogs gleam like little dots in the headlights.

I’m thinking about the dog. Its fur was dirty gray, with a beard under its jaw. I only saw the beard later, because the dog appeared from nowhere like a white plastic bag being blown out of the bushes. I braked abruptly, but it was too late. I still remember the feeling. It was as if I was driving over a bump in the road. Even though the cars behind me honked their horns, I drove to the side and pulled the dead dog out of the road. And saw its beard. And its eyes.

When I told a friend about the dog later on, he said: “Funny. Human beings are killed here every day, and you’re crying over a dog.”

I think about that as we’re driving along the avenue, and about the fact that I can’t tell Shobha about the dead dog because she’d never forgive me.

And I think about the young, fair-haired cameraman whom we met when we were waiting for an interview with the then Sicilian regional president Totò Cuffaro, who was charged with favoring the Mafia. Collesano lies in the Madonia Mountains, in the hinterland of Cefalù. It was very hot. We sat in the shade of the church and waited for Cuffaro to talk to us after mass, having followed him all the way around Sicily. Next to us waited a few of Cuffaro’s bodyguards, who whispered into their jacket sleeves from time to time. Photographers were hanging around, and so was this young cameraman who was supposed to be delivering new pictures of the president. We fell into conversation: at first the usual shoptalk among colleagues, just to kill time, then a cautious approach, the sort of discreet questions that people ask in Sicily when they’re trying to work out which side the other person is on. And then, with no need and no real cause, the cameraman told me how once, at night, after a day’s shoot in western Sicily, as they drove past he had noticed a parked car with its doors open. Someone was sitting inside and there was plainly something wrong with him. Even though his journalist colleague urged him to drive on, the cameraman stopped. And walked over to the car. In it was a man, bound hand and foot. His hands were tied to his feet, his legs bent back and tied to his arms, and his feet tied to a noose around his neck—a noose that tightened around his neck the more his legs stretched.

Incaprettato
, tied up like a goat—that’s what they call it when the Mafia condemns its victim to a slow death by suffocation. The man was already black in the face, his veins swollen as thick as fingers, the cameraman said. He cut his bonds and the man groaned like someone who had been underwater for a long time. Then the journalist demanded that they clear off. On the way they called the
carabinieri
.

Later he learned that the man had survived, the cameraman said.

Letizia’s face is slightly sunburned, like a child’s face after a day on the beach. She looks at the display of her Leica and checks her last shots. Shobha holds her camera at the ready on her lap. When we are on Via Ruggero Settimo, we notice that the traffic is being diverted for a procession, and we can’t turn around. We are stuck in Palermo’s “street of wealth”—wealth that comes from the drug trade, embezzled EU funds, and extorted protection money—and see smartly dressed women walking past our car, the usual crowd for Palermo’s early-evening shopping expeditions. The women walk past the shop windows of the jewelers and the luxury boutiques: Versace, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana. Girlfriends walk arm-in-arm, mothers are dragged from window to window. Some women linger a bit longer by the shop windows, others walk past them with the apparent indifference that can be mustered only by people who could easily buy up the whole lot if they felt like it. The self-confidence of the elect. A class pride like that emanating from the Mangano women: the three daughters and wife of Vittorio Mangano, the mafioso whose discretion Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri never tired of praising.

It was thanks to the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio that Shobha and I met the Mangano women. Up until her death, Rosalba Di Gregorio defended the mafioso Vittorio Mangano, whom the papers called “Berlusconi’s stable-keeper” and who had worked for two years in the entrepreneur’s villa—and who said nothing of what he knew about Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri, and many other businessmen, politicians, and lawyers. Right up to his death. It’s thanks to Rosalba that Vittorio Mangano was able to die in the arms of his daughters. At least she managed to do that. Even though she’d hoped to get him placed under house arrest.

It wasn’t a chance acquaintance as far as we were concerned: the Mangano women hoped to use a media charm offensive to soften hearts, to ensure that the father’s high-security imprisonment was turned into house arrest. Rosalba Di Gregorio always defends, first and foremost, the interests of her clients. The Mafia has known for ages that the struggle can no longer be waged with bombs, but only with leading articles, interviews, and television reports.

That’s why the three daughters and the wife had declared themselves willing to meet us for an interview in her chambers. It was Rosalba Di Gregorio who thought her client’s wife and daughters should be given the opportunity to set out their view of things.

They remembered their time in Berlusconi’s villa as if it had been paradise. She had always played with Berlusconi’s eldest son, said Cinzia, Vittorio Mangano’s middle daughter.

For her and her sisters, Loredana and Marina, it was unimaginable that their father could ever have turned state’s evidence. To fall from enlightenment to disgrace? To become
someone for the judiciary to wipe their boots on? They would have had to kick him out.

He would never have destroyed the image she had of a father she had always admired, Cinzia said. He had always said: “I will leave you no wealth, but I will leave you dignity.”

They were beautiful young women, the ones sitting at Rosalba’s desk. Not black-clad women, but cultivated young women who played the piano and were interested in art. Mafia princesses. Loredana, the eldest, was a restaurateur; Cinzia a painter; and Marina, the youngest, was still at school. They weren’t women whose lives were all
casa
and
chiesa
, as you would normally expect of Mafia women: they didn’t say the rosary, they watched films by Nanni Moretti. Women like you and me.

The mother was an elegant, blond lady with a pearl necklace. Loredana had long, curly hair and wore a floral dress; her sister Cinzia was in trousers. She was the leader of the three daughters, black-haired, modest, and confident. She casually appraised us. The youngest daughter, Marina, was so thin that her knees pointed through the material of her jeans.

Marina sat on the edge of the chair, constantly ready to get up and run away; her mother watched her apprehensively from the corner of her eye. Loredana sat bolt upright in her armchair, straining for a ladylike effect, while her sister Cinzia sat in front of us in that comfortable and confident posture that is usually reserved for men. Like a well-traveled woman with nothing to fear.

Their name made them proud; it reassured them: “We know who our father is,” said the Mafia princesses.

“Our father is someone with high moral principles,” said Cinzia, “and of course we miss him in the family, as a support and as a human being who has a solution for everything.” A father
who’s a friend—even if he was indicted for Mafia membership, two murders, extortion, and drug dealing. And even so, their name had never been a burden to them, said the Mangano daughters.

The arrest was really terrible. Papa had a meeting with his lawyers here; my mother and I were waiting in the car because we hadn’t found a parking space. Then he came down, and as we drove down the Via della Libertà, Papa could already see something coming. Cars driving towards us, more and more of them, and he said: “Don’t worry, don’t be alarmed; they might detain us.” And I said: “But, Papa, what are you saying?” And all he said was: “Stay calm, don’t worry.” Then we turned into a side street off Via della Libertà and they jumped out of the car, with their guns cocked, and stood in front of us. It was really very horrible. They cut us off. It was really loutish the way they behaved: all the people were looking at us; it was a performance as much as anything, it was theatrical. Papa said: “Put your guns down, these are my wife and my daughter, one of them will go off and there’ll be an accident.” They were nervous and smoking. They searched Papa. We weren’t allowed to call home; my sisters got really worried because they didn’t know where we were. They took us to a barracks and we didn’t see Papa again. While we were in the barracks they searched our house. My sisters didn’t know anything; they came with cars and guns, it was terrible. They could have done it differently too, they didn’t have to be so rough. After all, Papa hadn’t gone into hiding or anything. And then it said in the papers that we’d gone for a walk on Via della Libertà, but Papa had been coming from his lawyers and none of it was true
.

When Loredana, Vittorio Mangano’s eldest daughter, described her father’s last arrest, her eyes filled with tears. She kneaded a perfumed handkerchief in her manicured hands. Loredana Mangano was the spitting image of her father: she had the same narrow face, his long, narrow nose. That father that his three daughters never tired of praising. A good father, who unfortunately only very rarely had the chance to prove his love to them. Of the last twenty years of his life, he had spent only five in freedom. The girls’ mother constantly lamented their bitter lot. And what did the Mafia have to do with it?

I don’t see the Mafia. For me it’s history; it could also be another way of life, I don’t know. At any rate, I don’t see them, and that’s my opinion. In my mind it doesn’t exist. What should I say? I can’t make a judgment about it. So, if I had to see it, I’d see it everywhere, in the civil service, in the most unlikely places, at school, but I don’t see it amongst ordinary people
.

The Mafia is everywhere, said the wife of Vittorio Magano, because she knew that every Italian agrees with this assertion. We’re all guilty, so we’re innocent.

The public relations work of the Mangano ladies was exemplary. They complained about the victimization that they were exposed to on their prison visits. They complained about charges based on the statements of turncoats; they complained about the judiciary. They were victims.

But what happened to the values of life, to justice? It’s a regime. I often watch that film
Schindler’s List.
It makes me cry. But every time I turn on the video recorder I get new strength from it. Because there are lots of things that are very like our situation, and the situation in other families too. The same feelings, the same torments, as if there is no way out because they have superior numbers. But the judiciary can’t be like that. It can’t be like that. If someone isn’t well, at least he has the right to have his health taken into consideration. That’s normal. Even for a dog. The prisoners in high security are the Jews of the Second World War. There’s no difference. The Jews were killed, and a slow death awaits the prisoners
.

Cinzia Mangano was the most voluble. And the most confident. The ideal ambassador for planet Mafia. Cinzia was convinced of what she was saying. She wasn’t hypocritical, she didn’t lie, she was fundamentally honest. She had grown up in the Mafia: she divided the world into inside and outside, like a mafioso who feels no guilt when he commits a murder against the outside world. Cinzia was a soldier in the war. Her father could be proud of his womenfolk. They weren’t shy with an answer. Not even when we talked about the murders of Falcone and Borsellino.

When the assassinations happened in 1992, when Falcone died, someone I knew very well told me: “It’s the beginning of the end.” Because to do something like that you must have fallen so low that you can’t see a chance anymore. Because there had been men who had embodied the Mafia as an ideal of progress; the Mafia had once been a dream of the future, the epitome of doing something—and all that was left behind was scorched earth. They’ve destroyed everything, everything
.

Cinzia’s remark about the meaning of the Falcone assassination was perhaps the most thought-provoking observation made by this Mafia princess: she regretted Falcone’s death less than its consequences for the Mafia. Like many other mafiosi, she wasn’t convinced by the strategy of terror that the boss Totò Riina was responsible for. Cinzia had understood very clearly after the murder of the two public prosecutors that the Mafia faced difficult years ahead if they were to become invisible again, to be a part of society, to be influential again.

The only one of the three Mafia princesses who hadn’t yet managed to lay her conscience on the line was the youngest Mangano daughter, Marina, who had been four years old when her father was arrested for the first time. She had grown up with a father whom she only knew from prison visits.