A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial (19 page)

During the call, while humans talk, the SIM and the tower will continue to chat steadily in the background about whether they have a good connection. If the phone’s receiver senses a stronger signal from another tower, and if the phone company to which the SIM is subscribed is privileged to use that tower, and if that tower has bandwidth for the call (there being a limit to how many cellular suitors one tower can entertain), the switch, per its name, will switch the call to the new tower. In a dense city, the phone of a caller on the go may connect to a new tower every minute, or even every several seconds. In the ideal mobile world, the caller notices no interruption. More typically there are lacunae, and sometimes calls are dropped.

All of which is to say that having a mobile phone turned on in a dense city can reveal its location to within a few blocks. If the owner of the phone’s SIM is on file with the phone company, her identity can be revealed too. If she makes or receives a call, the identity of the person on the other end of the call may also be revealed. For these reasons, the wise criminal uses mobile phones rarely. She prefers phones and SIMs that have been stolen or bought on the black market, and she disposes of them rapidly. Police know as much, and they do not expect to solve many cases by tracking mobile phones, but they also know crooks make mistakes.

Seven cell towers stood within a quarter mile of where Abu Omar was kidnapped. The nearest three, owned by separate phone companies, were clustered atop the Best Western Hotel Blaise & Francis, one hundred and fifty meters as the microwave flies from the scene of the crime. It was the call logs for these seven towers that Magistrate Dambruoso requested for the wrong date and then had to re-request. The phone companies finally gave the new logs to DIGOS in the late spring of 2004, more than a year after the abduction. The logs showed that between 11:00
a.m
. and 1:00
p.m
. on the abductive day, 10,718 SIMs connected with the seven towers. The investigators had hoped one SIM might stand out as that of the Westerner whom Merfat Rezk had seen talking on a mobile phone—a SIM belonging, say, to a police officer or a known criminal. But none of the SIMs stood out. DIGOS reasoned, however, that the Westerner must have had accomplices, and possibly they had coordinated their work by phone. So DIGOS cross-checked the 10,718 SIMs to see which of them had exchanged calls with each other between 11:00 and 1:00. Some people in the kidnap zone would of course have called each other innocently, but, again, maybe some of the calls would stand out in some way. The results of this and related analyses were months in the making.

ARMANDO SPATARO
CHOSE
his calling in 1976, in the middle of the epoch known in Italy as the Years of Lead, as in the material of bullets. During those roughly eighteen years, terrorists of the Left and Right murdered hundreds of people in hope of provoking (from the Left) revolution or (from the Right) retrenchment. Magistrates who prosecuted the crimes sometimes became the next victims. The magistracy was not, therefore, the safest field one could have chosen at the time, but Spataro’s father had been a magistrate, in Taranto, an arid port lodged like a pebble in the arch of the Italian boot, and had prosecuted many men of violence, including organized criminals. The bedroom of the junior Spataro was the study of the senior, and sometimes at night the son would be awakened by police who came to speak with the father on urgent matters. Young Spataro was not the first, nor even the thousandth, Spataro to grow up in law enforcement, for the family name is descended from the late Latin
spatharius
, or swordsman. When he came of age, he took the trade of his father in much the same way his forebears must have taken theirs. He had an additional reason, perhaps shared by some of his forebears: he felt a duty to serve his country, although he thought it sounded sentimental to say as much. He read law at university and by virtue of a superlative score on the test for incoming magistrates was given a post in Milan, which was coveted.

He was mentored in Milan by a young magistrate named Emilio Alessandrini, one of whose lessons was to treat every offender not only with courtesy but generosity. Spataro once watched him patiently interrogate a madam who styled herself a countess. Alessandrini never addressed her as anything but Contessa nor showed her less than the deference due her imagined station. The defendants Alessandrini convicted at trial sometimes told him as they were led off to prison that they would never forget his humanity. Years later, when Spataro prosecuted Islamic terrorists, he would remember these lessons. When a suspect asked to interrupt his interrogation so he could pray toward Mecca at the time required by his faith, Spataro would accede and find him a newspaper to kneel on to satisfy the injunction against praying on the ground. When Muslims asked him to refer to Islamic terrorism as “so-called Islamic terrorism” because terrorists practice a perverted Islam, Spataro changed his habitual speech.

One of his first assignments was to prosecute several members of the leftist Brigate Rosse, the Red Brigades. The defendants had nearly stood trial on related crimes in Turin, but the trial had been canceled after their colleagues assassinated their court-appointed defender, whom they regarded as an abettor of the oppressor state. The terrorists also held jurors in low esteem, and it had been impossible to seat a Turinese jury. The Brigades thought even less of prosecutors. Spataro’s boss appointed him to the case in Milan because he was unknown and thus, perhaps, less prized as a target for assassination than his more senior colleagues. Early in the proceedings, Spataro angered lawyers who were affiliated with the Brigades (but who, in protest of the system, were not representing the defendants) by denying their request to see their jailed comrades. Before one hearing, one of the lawyers told Spataro that if he persisted in his opposition, they would have to report the young prosecutor’s obstinacy to Renato Curcio, the leader of the Brigades. It was a raw threat.

“In that case,” Spataro replied, “it would be preferable to tell him the prosecutor’s name as well,” and he wrote his name on a piece of paper, handed it to the lawyer, and turned his back. The lawyer left without another word.

“Ah,” said his mentor Alessandrini, who had been sitting discreetly behind him on the assumption he would need instruction, “I see you have played prosecutor before, no?”

Spataro confessed he had learned a few tricks from his father. Alessandrini patted him on the back and, smiling, left the courtroom. The show of faith that Spataro could do the job alone sprang reflexively to Spataro’s mind a year and a half later when he saw his mentor slumped over a steering wheel and streaming blood. Alessandrini had just dropped his son at elementary school and was driving to work when assassins from the leftist Prima Linea, Front Line, opened fire on him at a stoplight. Called by the police, Spataro ran to the intersection, which was not far from the Palazzo di Giustizia, but his friend was already dead. Front Line had chosen Alessandrini because as a man of integrity he made the Italian state more palatable to its subjects, thereby postponing the hour of revolution. On the day of his funeral, it seemed to Spataro that all Milan turned out, the streets and piazzas full of people applauding and crying.

Spataro had another mentor, Guido Galli, with whom he worked on one of Italy’s most important terrorism cases. The case arose from the kidnapping by the Red Brigades, in 1978, of Aldo Moro, a recent prime minister and continuing leader of the ruling Christian Democratic Party. The Brigades held Moro for fifty-four days, throughout which they released pathetic photos of him and still more-pathetic letters from him that sent the nation into something approaching shock. Ultimately his kidnappers executed him. One of the conspirators was later caught in Milan, and his arrest led investigators to other Brigadiers, some of whom Spataro and Galli were assigned to prosecute. As they traveled across northern Italy building their case, they were appalled to find that many police officers had collected strong evidence against terrorists but could do nothing with it because magistrates were too frightened to prosecute. Spataro and Galli offered to take the cases, and their craven colleagues were only too glad to get rid of them. Other magistrates, leftist in their politics, denounced Galli and Spataro for prosecuting terrorists of the Left. Galli responded that prosecutors prosecuted criminals, whatever their ideology. Conversely, another magistrate, a man of some seniority, warned Spataro that the leftist Galli would betray him to the Brigades. Spataro never saw evidence that Galli was a leftist—or a rightist or a centrist. He was professionally nonpolitical and did not tell Spataro, even as an aside, how he voted in elections. Galli’s was a model Spataro tried to hold himself to, not always with success. The two magistrates consolidated the many cases they had gathered into a mass trial, the first maxi-trial, as Italians call such affairs, of terrorists in Italy. During the proceedings, Galli honored Spataro by putting forward his argument, then novel, that the leader of a terrorist cell could be held responsible for a murder executed by the cell, even if there was no proof that the leader had ordered the specific murder. The argument carried, and Galli and Spataro convicted their terrorists. In future trials, many more terrorists would fall to Spataro’s argument.

The danger of their work notwithstanding, Galli had no police escort, partly because he was not a full-time magistrate (he also lectured in law at the University of Milan) but also because he was out of favor with his superiors. Spataro, who had an escort, sometimes accompanied his mentor home to give him its protection. Fourteen months after Alessandrini was assassinated, Galli walked out of a university lecture hall and was shot three times in the back, fatally, by an assassin from Front Line. He had been targeted for the same reason Alessandrini had. Shortly before his death, Galli had invited Spataro to speak to his class, and Spataro could not help thinking that if only he had given his lecture on the day of the murder, his escort would have been there and his friend would not have been killed. (Front Line, in all likelihood, would only have killed him another day.) On a leaf of his address book, Galli had written, “If anything happens to me, call Armando Spataro.” Spataro kept a copy of the page for decades, as if to remind himself that he had been called on. Although he would not have put it in precisely these words, he believed the assassinations had invested him with a sacred trust.

A captured member of Front Line would later tell Spataro that the group thought he was nothing more than a tool of his mentors, that with Galli in particular gone, he would do little. But Spataro became the leading prosecutor of Front Line, the Red Brigades, and other leftist terrorists in northern Italy, and among those he convicted were conspirators to his friends’ murders. Years later, after some of them repented, he was able to feel something like forgiveness toward them. But the memory of one witness in Galli’s case stirred anger in him decades on. The witness was a law student who worked in his father’s bicycle shop, from which the assassins had bought the bicycles on which they fled through the warren of streets. Spataro had solved most of the case and needed the student only to confirm the identity of the buyers, but the student refused. He said he did not want to be
tirato in ballo
—dragged to the dance—and that anyway if Galli had been murdered, there must have been a reason. Salt to Spataro’s wound, the young man had been a student of Galli’s. Spataro jailed him and his father, who also refused to testify—an example to his son no less than Spataro’s father had been to him—but eventually had to release them. Long after the student’s name disappeared from his memory, Spataro remained offended that such a specimen had probably become his colleague at the bar, maybe even in the magistracy. Bystanders to justice disgusted him, particularly those who had a special obligation to uphold it.

By the end of the 1980s, Spataro and other magistrates had prosecuted the terrorists of the Years of Lead nearly out of existence. He switched to prosecuting the Calabrian and Sicilian Mafias, whose drug trafficking, extortion, money laundering, and attendant violent crime had crept north to Lombardy. In 1998, after a decade convicting mafiosi, his fellow magistrates and select members of the bar elected him to Italy’s governing council of the magistracy. He served a four-year term in Rome, then returned to Milan to prosecute the new terrorism that had blown into Italy like a sirocco. Hardly had he begun this work when he learned he would have to fight not only terrorists but the fighters of terrorists as well.

SPATARO HAD
a Roman nose, not in the classical iteration—long and tall—but in the sense of the old vaudeville line “It’s roamin’ all over his face.” Congenitally curvilinear, it had been further improved by a car wreck. In mid-life the face from which it looked out was blotched like an old leather recliner, and during summertime liver spots emerged from under his hair of thinning, patriarchal white like an archipelago in the Tyrrhenian Sea at low tide. His thick mustache waffled, uncharacteristically for him, between the ivory of his hair and the ebony of his strong eyebrows. He was handsome, but atypically.

In the spring of 2004, Magistrate Dambruoso left for a posting abroad, and the Abu Omar case fell to Spataro. Weeks later Abu Omar emerged from prison, began calling people in Italy, then was re-arrested. After a few more weeks it became clear from phone taps that Nabila Ghali planned imminently to return to Alexandria in case her husband should be released again. Spataro, not wanting her to leave unquestioned, summoned her and Abu Omar’s other colloquist in Milan, Mohammed Elbadry, to the Palazzo di Giustizia. He also had the apartment on Via Conte Verde searched.

The chief item of interest in the apartment was Abu Omar’s computer, on which, it turned out, were stored several documents testifying to his fanaticism. In one, titled “Italian Terrorism,” he condemned Italians for their intolerance of Islamists and promised their “Satanic prejudice” would be “neither forgiven by history nor forgotten by the children of Islam.” Islam’s children, he said, were “of a breed that does not forget to avenge itself. Vengeance will stay in our hearts until God allows us to return to our homeland.” He had apparently distributed “Italian Terrorism” at a mosque in Como the day before he disappeared, and after his release from prison, he said (either naively or disingenuously) that he thought he had been kidnapped in retaliation for the tract. Another document on the computer, apparently written by someone else, was a three-pager called “Military Jihad.” Under headings like “Preparation of the Mujahidin” and “The Jihad, Men and Money: Creating Jihadist Factories,” the author said that holy warriors who wished to make their exile useful must study everything about the enemy: his streets, his bridges, his banks, his police stations, his culture, his desires, his habits. Anything might be needed for jihad. For the same reason, the jihadi should be versed in science and medicine, business and the humanities, geography and mathematics. The memo’s audience, it was clear, was less the obeisant suicide bomber than the man who would lead him. Perhaps because of the audience, the memo was surprisingly bland of diction and lacking in rhetorical flourishes, its inflammatory subject notwithstanding. With the substitution of a few terms, it could have been a précis of how to assemble a mid-tier sales force.