The City of Falling Angels (13 page)
Read The City of Falling Angels Online
Authors: John Berendt
Tags: #History, #Social History, #Europe, #Italy
“Yes, but in Italy, not right away. The racial laws were not being enforced, but they hadn’t actually been abolished yet. So my father, who was pretty cool, sends a friend to talk with the Vatican secretary of state, who says, ‘As absurd as it might sound, if I were Count Volpi, I would pay, because the case could come before an anti-Semitic judge who could legitimately rule against him.’
“My father knew that if he lost, the ruling would be reversed as soon as the racial laws were abolished, which was only a matter of time. But by then the horse would be out of the barn, so to speak, and he would never recover all the money, or even most of it. So he takes his good, sweet time and starts paying by installments. When he’s paid three-quarters of it, the racial laws are abolished and he stops paying. My half sisters have always sworn they never blackmailed their father, but there’s the record of the money he paid them. So then they say, well, it was their husbands who did it.”
“Where are your half sisters now?”
“They were thirty years older than me. One’s dead, the other lives near the Salute.”
“Is she as resentful as you are about the lack of respect for your father’s memory?”
“Resentful! On the contrary,” said Volpi, “she denounced him herself! She gave interviews on American television in the 1960s and 1970s, saying her father had ‘unfortunately’ created Marghera. When you hear that from one of his daughters, you naturally have to assume that Giuseppe Volpi must really have been a criminal.”
“Have you ever talked to her about it?”
“I haven’t spoken to her since 1947.”
“That’s heavy.”
“Well, but it’s so unjust! Venice was my father’s passion. He had nothing but the best interests of Venice at heart. Somebody—I won’t tell you who—somebody wrote a really wonderful description of him. I’ll read it to you.”
Volpi took a book from the shelf and read a passage from it:
“‘Count Giuseppe Volpi is perhaps the only Venetian who truly loves his hometown. For him, Venice is the universal city. If the world became one big Venice, the site of the foremost of human sentiments, he would deem himself to be a happy man. His melancholy hinges on the knowledge that this dream can never be realized.’”
Volpi closed the book.
“Okay,” I said. “Who wrote it?”
“Mussolini.”
“Could you ever love Venice?” I asked.
“I do love Venice. It’s the Venetians I’m pissed off at. They’re consumed by jealousy and envy—of everyone and everything. They’re clowns.”
“What would it take for you, finally, to let go of your anger?” I asked.
Volpi thought for a moment, then sighed one of his deep sighs. “The accounts between this city and my father are not settled yet. If Venice names a street or a square after him—and not a minor one—then, and only then, I might feel they’ve given him the recognition he deserves.”
{5}
SLOW BURN
ON THE SAME AFTERNOON that Mario Moro was reliving the night of the Fenice fire, waving signals to his imaginary water-bearing helicopter, the panel of experts investigating the fire handed the chief magistrate their preliminary report: Arson had not been the cause.
The experts had reached this conclusion, they said, because it had been established that the last workmen had left the theater at 7:30 P.M., and the fire had not broken out until at least an hour later. According to their theory, fires caused by arson generally involve the use of highly flammable substances and are raging within minutes of being set. Accidental fires tend to smolder awhile, and from all appearances the fire at the Fenice had smoldered for at least two hours. Heavy wooden beams supporting the floor of the lobby on the third level, the
ridotto del loggione,
where the blaze had presumably started, had burned through completely, indicating a slow, penetrating start to the fire. Most likely, according to the preliminary report, the fire started when resins used to refinish the wooden flooring had been accidentally ignited by a spark, or a short circuit, or the stub of a cigarette, or the heat from an overloaded electrical cable. More than a thousand kilos of the resins had been stored in the
ridotto,
and some of the containers had been left open. The experts also noted that eight people who had been in the vicinity of the Fenice that evening had come forward after the fire to say they had smelled something burning as early as six o’clock. This, too, would have been consistent with a smoldering fire.
ridotto del loggione,
where the blaze had presumably started, had burned through completely, indicating a slow, penetrating start to the fire. Most likely, according to the preliminary report, the fire started when resins used to refinish the wooden flooring had been accidentally ignited by a spark, or a short circuit, or the stub of a cigarette, or the heat from an overloaded electrical cable. More than a thousand kilos of the resins had been stored in the
ridotto,
and some of the containers had been left open. The experts also noted that eight people who had been in the vicinity of the Fenice that evening had come forward after the fire to say they had smelled something burning as early as six o’clock. This, too, would have been consistent with a smoldering fire.
Given what they knew, the experts estimated that the fire had smoldered for about two or three hours, meaning that it had started around 6:00 P.M.
In their initial report, the experts cited the chaotic conditions at the Fenice that had made an accidental fire a near inevitability. The prosecutor, Felice Casson, compiled a list of people he deemed responsible for those conditions, then summoned them to the chief magistrate’s office and informed them they were under investigation for criminal negligence. It was understood that if the investigations resulted in formal charges, he would seek jail terms.
Mayor Massimo Cacciari headed the list of possible defendants. As mayor, Cacciari was automatically president of the Fenice, so the safety of the theater was his responsibility. The others under investigation included the general manager of the Fenice, the secretary-general, the financial chief, the custodian, the director of the restoration work, and the chief engineer of Venice.
Most of the accused were men of influence, and they immediately hired the most politically powerful lawyers available. Despite elements of the case in their favor, however, there was one significant factor working against them: Felice Casson, an unusually courageous and relentless prosecutor.
The forty-two-year-old Casson did not look the part. Bespectacled and slight of stature, he had lank brown hair, a pallid complexion, and a youthful face, the most prominent feature of which, paradoxically, was a receding chin. Casson had been born in Chioggia, a tiny fishing village at the southern tip of the Lido, and he was utterly without social pretense or ambition. His one sartorial quirk was a preference for collarless sport shirts, which he wore virtually all the time, even under his black judicial robes. He played on a soccer team with other magistrates, but his real passion was American basketball. On trips to the United States, even business trips, he always made arrangements to see at least one NBA game, and he still talked about a memorable contest between the Chicago Bulls and the New York Knicks in which Michael Jordan managed to brush off two defensive players assigned to guard him throughout the game. But, all in all, Felice Casson was the sort of person who could pass through a roomful of people unnoticed. His presence was so light that you could almost imagine him walking through walls. However, he had one physical characteristic that hinted at the presence of an inner turbulence, of banked fires waiting to burst into flame. It was the tendency, when he was angered, for his face to turn pink, then red, then scarlet, from the top of his forehead to the neckband of his collarless shirt. Neither his expression nor his voice betrayed the slightest emotion, but there was no disguising the litmus of his face. He was known for it. Defendants due to be cross-examined by Casson were cautioned to watch for the crimson blush and to be guided accordingly.
Casson had established himself as a hard-driving investigating prosecutor early in his career when, in 1982, he reopened an unresolved 1972 bombing case in which three policemen had been murdered near Trieste. The policemen, responding to a telephone tip about a suspicious car, had opened the hood of the car and set off a bomb that killed them instantly. The deaths were blamed on the militant Red Brigades, and hundreds of leftists were brought in for questioning, but no one was ever charged. Ten years later, Casson, then a twenty-eight-year-old prosecutor, was given the task of reviewing the case in the expectation that he would tie up a few loose ends and close the file for good.
Instead, despite receiving intentionally misleading information from the police and the secret service, Casson managed to turn the case on its head. He discovered, first of all, that the police had never investigated the incident. When he traced the explosives, he found that the trail led to a
right-
wing group. He quickly arrested the culprit and obtained a confession that included the startling revelation that within three weeks of the bombing, the true story had been known to the police, the Ministry of the Interior, the Customs and Excise police, and the civilian and military secret services. All of these agencies had conspired to cover it up for political reasons. Casson put the guilty party behind bars, but he did not stop there.
right-
wing group. He quickly arrested the culprit and obtained a confession that included the startling revelation that within three weeks of the bombing, the true story had been known to the police, the Ministry of the Interior, the Customs and Excise police, and the civilian and military secret services. All of these agencies had conspired to cover it up for political reasons. Casson put the guilty party behind bars, but he did not stop there.
He demanded and was granted permission to search the archives of the Italian secret service. There he found documents revealing the existence of a covert, high-level paramilitary army, code-named Gladio, that had been set up and financed by the American CIA in 1956 for the purpose of waging guerrilla warfare in case the Soviet Union ever invaded Italy. Gladio was furnished with a secret training camp in Sardinia and had 139 arms and weapons depots hidden across northern Italy. Gladio’s 622 operatives were trained in intelligence gathering, sabotage, radio communications, and creating escape networks.
While the establishment of a “stay-behind” resistance militia could be justified in the Cold War environment, Casson found disturbing references to “internal subversion” in the Gladio documents. Casson then discovered that the organization’s largely far-right-wing network of operatives had used Gladio’s supplies and infrastructure to stage terrorist attacks within Italy, with the intention of implicating domestic political parties on the left.
Quietly pursuing his investigation through the 1980s, Casson uncovered evidence linking Gladio to a wave of deadly bombings in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, all of which had been blamed on the left. The chain of evidence also suggested that Gladio had taken part in no fewer than three abortive attempts to overthrow the legitimate government of Italy—in 1964, 1969, and 1973.
Casson finally went public in 1990, when he insisted on interviewing Italy’s prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. He forced Andreotti to go before Parliament and deliver a detailed report about Gladio, which for thirty years he had denied existed. At the same time, Casson subpoenaed President Francesco Cossiga and compelled him to admit under oath that he had helped organize Gladio when he worked in the Ministry of Defense in the 1960s. Andreotti soon ordered Gladio dismantled.
As a direct result of Casson’s revelations, information came pouring out about the existence of similar Gladio-type secret armies set up by the CIA in France, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Greece, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Turkey.
Casson’s pursuit of Gladio was unflinching, despite the obvious danger. As he later admitted, “It was a terrible feeling to realize that I was the only person who knew about the existence of Gladio, except for the members of Gladio themselves, and to think they could kill me at any moment.”
Compared to the harrowing ordeal of stalking a murderous clandestine militia all by himself, the prospect of taking on a group of genteel white-collar functionaries for malfeasance at the Fenice Opera House must have seemed to Casson like gliding in a gondola.
Knowing that any attempt at deal making would be futile, lawyers for the accused instead attacked the credibility of Casson’s panel of experts. Francesco D’Elia, the attorney for the Fenice’s custodian, heaped scorn on the selection of two of the experts: Alfio Pini, the head of the fire brigade, and Leonardo Corbo, the national director of civil protection.
“They name the fire chief as an expert?” D’Elia exclaimed to a television reporter. “He should be a defendant! He was five minutes away from the Fenice when the fire started, but he didn’t get there until half an hour later. What took him so long? Even I was there before he was. And his boss in Rome, Corbo, he should be held responsible too, because the fire brigade mishandled the fire in every way. Did they use the proper procedures? Did they have the proper equipment? The fire chief and his boss say yes, but what do you expect them to say? If they had told the truth, it would have amounted to an admission of guilt.
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