THE

HONORED

SOCIETY

THE

HONORED

SOCIETY

A Portrait of Italy’s

Most Powerful Mafia

By Petra Reski

Translated by Shaun Whiteside

Preface to the American edition

translated by Ross Benjamin

First published in Germany in 2008 by Droemersche Verlagsanstalt Th. Knaur Nachf. GmbH & Co.

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © 2013 by Petra Reski

Translation copyright © 2013 by Shaun Whiteside

English translation of preface copyright © 2013 Ross Benjamin

Published by Nation Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 116

East 16th Street, 8th Floor, New York, NY 10003

Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the Perseus Books Group.

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Designed by Linda Mark

Text set in 12 point Adobe Jenson Pro Light

Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover as follows:

Reski, Petra.

[Mafia. English]

The honored society : the secret history of Italy’s most powerful Mafia / by Petra Reski ; translated by Shaun Whiteside ; introduction to the American edition translated by Ross Benjamin.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-56858-969-5 (e-book) 1. Mafia—Italy—History. I. Title.

HV6453.I83M3754 2013

364.1060945—dc23

2012039373

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Shobha

CONTENTS

MAP OF SOUTHERN ITALY

PREFACE

MARCELLO FAVA

ROSARIA SCHIFANI

SAN LUCA

DON PINO

LETIZIA

PADRE FRITTITTA

CORLEONE

PALACE OF POISON

SILVIO BERLUSCONI AND MARCELLO DELL’UTRI

ANNA PALMA

HEINZ SPRENGER

MAFIA WOMEN

CARLA MADONIA

ROSALBA DI GREGORIO

CARMINE SARNO

MESSINA DENARO

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

INDEX

PREFACE

It was a balmy summer night when the German Mafia massacre occurred. On August 15, 2007, six Italians from Calabria were executed—in the middle of Duisburg, one of those cities built of brick in the Ruhr area, the old industrial heart of western Germany. The hit squad had fired over seventy shots. The youngest victim was sixteen years old, the oldest thirty-eight: Francesco and Marco Pergola, Sebastiano Strangio, Francesco Giorgi, Marco Marmo, and Francesco Tommaso Venturi. Five were killed instantly; the sixth died on the way to the hospital.

All the victims were from San Luca, the stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia organization that was fourth on the White House list of the most dangerous criminal organizations in the world (“Narcotics Kingpin Organizations”), after al-Qaeda, the PKK, and the Mexican narcos. With its estimated annual turnover of 45 billion euros, the ’Ndrangheta is not only the richest Mafia organization in Italy, but also the most mobile, the largest multinational Mafia organization—and the first to put down roots in Germany, where in the early 1960s, even before the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Campanian Camorra, it found its second home.

The hit men in Duisburg had surprised their victims in their cars in front of the Italian restaurant Da Bruno in the city center, not far from the train station. Here the Italians had in the hours before their deaths participated in what is for the Mafia a very special event: in the pocket of eighteen-year-old Francesco Tommaso Venturi was a burnt prayer card of the Archangel Gabriel. The six Italians had on that evening celebrated the induction of the youngest member into the clan.

The village of San Luca is known among Italian investigators as “the mother of crime,” as it is distinguished by a density—high even for Calabria—of thirty-nine clans to only four thousand residents. The Mafia families from San Luca count among the most powerful clans in the ’Ndrangheta—and in Germany possess enormous manpower adept in every type of crime. Whether in international narcotics or arms trafficking, shakedowns, abductions, car theft, or money laundering, the clans of San Luca look back on decades of experience. To avoid attracting attention in Germany, fresh young men who have no record of previous convictions but are related by blood to the bosses are regularly sent from San Luca.

On the morning after the night of the Duisburg murders, Germany was in shock. The Mafia always exists only once dead bodies are lying in the street. Germans knew the Mafia from the Godfather movies, perhaps from The Sopranos as well—but scarcely anyone had ever heard of the Italian Mafia organization with the unpronounceable name ’Ndrangheta, which had brought its war to Germany. For decades two clans from San Luca, the Pelle-Vottari and the Nirta-Strangio, have been carrying on a feud for supremacy in drug and arms trafficking and for business in Germany.

Until the Duisburg bloodbath, the Mafia had always been regarded by Germans as only an Italian problem. The German constitutional state was well armed against all dangers, the argument had always gone; Germany was for the Mafia at most a “place of retreat,” as if the mafiosi used Germany as a vacation spot.

But as more and more investigations into Mafia activities in Germany came to light, the situation became increasingly unsettling. Suddenly Germans began to suspect that the Mafia had by no means descended on their country like a summer storm, but had already been well established in the heart of Germany for more than forty years. The situation was similar to the former state of affairs in America, where the Mafia was able to remain invisible for almost forty years and traffic in drugs until 1957, when the FBI raided a Mafia summit in Apalachin, New York, and arrested sixty-four bosses. Until then not many Americans had taken notice of the fact that as early as 1920 the second wave of Mafia immigration had already washed up on America’s shores.

It was exactly the same in Germany, where people were even more naive than in America. No one was bothered by the fact that the Mafia had been doing business there since the 1960s—in those places where southern Italian guest workers once found jobs on the assembly lines, in the steel mills, and in the mines. The classic bases of the Mafia in Germany are the industrial centers in the west, south, and southwest: in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Hesse, and Baden-Württemberg; in cities like Duisburg, Bochum, Oberhausen, Stuttgart, and Munich; and, since the fall of the Wall, in eastern Germany as well, particularly in cities like Erfurt and Leipzig.

The families of the Campanian Camorra and the Sicilian Cosa Nostra are also active in Germany. The Cosa Nostra brought many years of experience in the construction industry to Germany. Manipulating public contracts, carrying out building contracts as subcontractors without paying social welfare contributions or taxes—all that is a specialty of the Sicilians. Competition between the individual Italian Mafia organizations doesn’t exist. There are enough pieces of the German pie for everyone.

And it’s not only Germany. The clans of the ’Ndrangheta are the biggest fans of European freedom of travel. They’re also active in Holland and Belgium, where they control the ports; in France they’ve invested in villas on the Côte d’Azur; in the Balkans they control the drug-smuggling routes; and in Bulgaria they invest in tourism. They do all this in harmony with the clans of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra, who have learned from the mobility of the ’Ndrangheta and have long done business throughout Europe as well. Not only does a considerable stretch of the Spanish Costa del Sol belong to the Neapolitan Camorra; it’s also active in England and Scotland, where its members invest in real estate and give themselves cover with import-export enterprises. The European economic crisis promotes the business of the Mafia tremendously. When there’s no money, people don’t look as closely at where it comes from.

Because the Duisburg Mafia massacre first gave the lie to the myth of Germany as a “place of retreat” for mafiosi, the bloody night in Duisburg was a mishap, at least from the Mafia’s perspective. For it was certainly not in the clans’ interest to make unequivocally clear that the Mafia was not an exclusively Italian problem, but a global one. No sooner had the Duisburg corpses been buried than the Italian secret service from Calabrian San Luca reported that the two enemy clans, the Pelle-Vottari and the Nirta-Strangio, had declared a truce. That was also entirely in the interest of German politics—which had no more desire than the bosses to discuss the topic of the “Mafia in Germany.” There was reluctance not only to alarm the citizenry, but also to endanger the investments of the ’Ndrangheta. Whole eastern German city centers were rebuilt with ’Ndrangheta money after the fall of the Wall.

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.

MARCELLO FAVA

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.

THE MAN WEARS HIS DARK BLOND HAIR WITH A PARTING. HE 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.

Although the apartment was uninhabited, it was still full of traces of other lives. On a wall was a picture of a mountain scene and an almost blind Venetian mirror; in one corner stood a torn, mustard-colored sofa, and next to it a battered wicker chair, an old gas stove. The stove had seen better days, and on the dining-room table there was a waxed tablecloth scored with knife marks. It was as if the inhabitants had only gone out for a moment; they would shortly open the door and stare in horror at the strangers in their apartment—a woman and six men.

The shutters were lowered, and the policemen took up their positions. A bodyguard walked up and down on the balcony, watching the street; two officials stood down by the main entrance, another had planted himself in the hallway, another was reading the latest John Grisham. They were all chewing gum and wore ripped jeans, safari waistcoats, and earrings. Fava, on the other hand, looked like an employee of the Banco di Sicilia. He wore a midnight-blue suit with a light-blue tie. His face was rosy and scattered with a few freckles, his dark blond hair carefully parted. His eyebrows had a reddish tinge. He nervously ran his palms over his sleeves, over his trouser legs, as if he lived in fear of something awful happening to his suit. Fava had brought a little briefcase, which rested on his knees, and which he initially clung onto. Like a student going to his first lecture.

“Tranquillo,” he said, as he switched on my tape recorder. I was completely relaxed. Uttered in a Sicilian accent by a mafioso, the word sounds like an executioner trying to reassure his victim. “Tranquillo.” We were sitting by artificial light at the kitchen table, and Fava was telling the story of his life. A life that had only really begun when he was “chosen.”

It was a wonderful thing for me. It was everyone’s desire to be accepted into Cosa Nostra. To be close to these people, to be respected by everyone. Wherever you go, no one dares stand in your way. Respect is your due. Even though other people couldn’t know, they sensed you were a man of honour. That you were entitled to everything. That’s what they’re like, the mafiosi of Palermo. And only in Palermo. Not in the whole of Sicily.

He talked about his acceptance into the Mafia as if talking about an awakening. Fava had been twenty years old when he was accepted into the Porta Nuova family in Palermo. Unlike the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, in which the members of a family are actually related by blood, a family of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is based on elective affinity. The family is the smallest organizational unit of Cosa Nostra, whose bonds are reinforced by the acceptance ritual. Even today, the Mafia uses an initiation ceremony that seems to have had its origins in the rites of the Freemasons and makes a deep, almost religious, impression on young and ambitious mafiosi: the presence of the godparents, the drop of blood falling on the holy picture, the invocation of the price to be paid for betrayal, the burning of the picture of the saint—nothing significant has changed for centuries. It was only when mafiosi started turning state’s evidence in droves that the boss, Bernardo Provenzano, suspended the initiation ritual. The mafiosi must not know the names of the members of their family, so that if one day they do become turncoats, they cannot betray them.

Because if one person betrays, the others fall, too. No other Mafia organization in Italy is as hierarchically structured as Cosa Nostra. After the family comes the mandamento, the Mafia district, consisting of several Mafia families. Above this is the provincial commission, which is composed of the district regional heads. And at the very top, for a while, was the cupola, the commissione interprovinciale, the Mafia council consisting of the heads of the provincial commissions—a council that existed until the boss Totò Riina assumed autocratic power.

The family into which Marcello Fava was accepted wasn’t just any Mafia family; it was a clan that had produced some remarkable bosses, some of whom later shook planet Mafia to the core. Tommaso Buscetta was part of the family—the first turncoat boss in the history of the Mafia, of whom the legendary anti-Mafia public prosecuter Giovanni Falcone once said, he was like a teacher who introduced him to the language of the Mafia. Salvatore Cancemi was a member, the boss who first spoke about the Mafia connections of Silvio Berlusconi and his right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri—the former manager who became cofounder of the right-wing party Forza Italia, the inhouse party of the businessman Berlusconi. By founding the party, he was trying to react to the crisis that had arisen out of corruption investigations that went under the slogan “Clean Hands.” In 1993 Cosa Nostra had been in direct contact with representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, said the turncoat mafioso Antonino Giuffrè, concerning an alliance between the Mafia and the newly founded Forza Italia party. In 2004 Marcello Dell’Utri was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting a Mafia association. (In Italy, a sentence only comes into effect once it has reached the third “instance.”) By that time, his connection with the mafioso Vittorio Mangano was already well documented. On the initiative of Dell’Utri, Mangano had lived for two years in Berlusconi’s villa as a middleman for Cosa Nostra—officially as a “stable-keeper.”

Vittorio Mangano also belonged to the Porta Nuova family, as did the boss Pippo Calò, known as the “Mafia’s cashier,” who was involved in the murder of “God’s banker,” Roberto Calvi, who was in charge of the Banca Ambrosiana and had transacted deals not only with the Vatican Bank but also with the Mafia. Calvi was found hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London with US$15,000 and heavy stones in his pockets. But Calò didn’t become a turncoat; he merely broke with the Mafia, without spilling any beans.

Marcello Fava described his Mafia baptism as rapturously as if he were recalling his meeting with his first great love. He spoke with high esteem of his godfather, who wasn’t just one of the little group leaders who had acted as godfathers to other mafiosi, but a major boss. Fava obsessively described every detail of the ritual of his acceptance into the organization. How his baptism had taken place one morning in a warehouse, in the presence of twelve bosses. Who had all risen to their feet when the godfather came in. And who later withdrew for their deliberations. He had had to wait outside, along with three other boys who were also due for induction.

When I asked him whether his memory wasn’t distorting things, Fava became furious. It was something you had to feel, he said defiantly. And he sounded like an unhappy lover, an abandoned lover, a man seduced. He praised the induction ritual as a holy liturgy—the burning of the holy picture, Santa Rosalia, San Giuseppe, the drop of blood dripping on the picture, the prophecy that he would be burned like the saint in his hand if he were ever to betray Cosa Nostra. And now he saw himself burning. A little bit more each day.

Fava would never be able to lead a normal life. A mafioso who breaks his silence becomes an untouchable. Despised equally by the Mafia and by respectable Sicilians: by the Mafia because he has revealed their secrets in order to buy his freedom; by Sicilians because he has only repented in order to save his own skin. In the first few years after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, mafiosi had gone over to the law in droves. Now it happens very rarely. Public prosecutors generally fail when they try to persuade imprisoned bosses to leave the organization. One prosecutor told me how, talking to one of them, he had painted his post-Mafia life in the most glowing terms, invoking the future of his children, who would grow up on the right side. The mafioso merely pointed with a smile at the prosecutor’s bodyguards and said, “Mr. Public Prosecutor, if you can’t rely on your own security, how are you going to protect me?” And the prosecutor hadn’t been able to give him an answer.

The first time I was there, it was a trauma for me. Because they hadn’t told me anything about it beforehand, and then this boy I knew was brought in; it was terrible, he was crying and pleading, but there was nothing to be done. The decision had been made. No one could help him. He was punished as a warning to the others.

I thought it was odd, hearing a mafioso talking about trauma. Plainly, it was easier for Fava to judge his actions in terms of psychological categories than moral ones. “Trauma” is an easier word to say than “murder.”

Throughout the whole of the conversation he clutched a piece of paper on which he had written notes about his life, a life that had consisted of Mafia membership, bank raids, drug deals, murder. Mostly by strangling. It’s the Mafia’s preferred method of killing: no noise, no blood. Two men hold the victim tightly while a third strangles him—usually with a small wire loop, because strangling by hand is too troublesome. Totò Riina was famous among his men for always setting his own hand to the job. When he murdered the mafioso Rosario Riccobono at the end of a wine-fueled lunch, the boss called him by his nickname. “Saruzzo, your story is over,” he whispered tenderly, as he put his hands around the sleeping man’s neck. The two other mafiosi present held the helpless man down. With the strength of a bull, the boss strangled his victim in less than three minutes. That achievement was greatly admired in retrospect, even by the two turncoat mafiosi who later betrayed him.

Fava was used to talking only to public prosecutors and defense lawyers. Perhaps that was why he sought comfort in that piece of paper, that crib sheet for the stages of his life: when he was boss of the Porta Nuova family, when he was on the run, the first time he was arrested, and when he turned pentito, defector. When he became an outcast. He wasn’t used to talking for once not about dates, facts, and names, but about what he had felt.

A mafioso doesn’t find it hard to murder. At least, no harder than a soldier does. If Italy were to go to war with another country, and an Italian soldier were to shoot fifty or sixty of the enemy, the soldier wouldn’t be considered a criminal; he’d be honored as a war hero. The mafiosi say. Because they define themselves as soldiers, who never murder for personal reasons but only for their state and their people. What the world sees as a criminal organization the mafiosi see as a society, a state, a people. And for that reason a mafioso doesn’t have a bad conscience if he kills someone. He’s only interested in the judgment of his own people, not that of strangers. Just like a soldier who finds himself in a war and who has no feelings of guilt.

The police gave no clue as to whether they were listening to Fava’s descriptions or wondering whether it was time to buy a new mobile phone. They hid in the semidarkness, behind blank, expressionless faces. They betrayed neither curiosity nor surprise, as if Fava were speaking not about murder and the Mafia but about how to download a software program.

I wondered whether they secretly despised him. Until recently he had been on the other side. They had been “flunkeys” as far as he was concerned, not the guardian angels that he called them now. And for each of them, his arrest had meant a promotion and a silver badge nestling on dark blue velvet.

I was a very clever boy, I’d committed a few robberies—those are things that don’t get past Cosa Nostra. So they approached me. I’d spent a few months in prison, and after that I was accepted.

I tried to imagine the twenty-year-old Fava being made a “man of honor” in a warehouse in Palermo’s old town. Rising from a nessuno mischiato con niente, a nobody involved with nothing, to a person of respect. Someone who’s allowed to jump the queue in shops, is given free coffee and nodded to at the till: “It’s all paid for.” Someone who never needs to raise his voice. Someone below whose window the procession of the Madonna del Carmine, complete with brass band, stops so that he can hand the Madonna a few banknotes from his window. Sicilians are addicted to respect, and the Mafia sells them the dope.

Fava spoke in those Sicilian sentences half of which evaporates, flies away, seeps away. What he couldn’t say in words, he said in gestures. He described little circles with his hand, curled his fingers and hooked them together; he pointed to imaginary dirt under his fingernails—he wasn’t even worth that!—and stuck out his index finger and little finger to ward off evil.

His voice was amazingly light for a man, and as Sicilians often do, he used the remote past tense, a tense that sounds very formal and is now used very rarely, even in written Italian. Sicilian has neither a recent past tense nor a future tense; it knows only the present. And the very remote past.

Fava came from the Kalsa. He had grown up in a family of ten—three sisters and six brothers—in a district of Palermo’s old town that the city’s middle class seldom goes near, and then only with very great caution, as if it were a wild animal that might attack you if you turn your back on it. He had grown up in a world of tufa-stone baroque and alley cats, tinkers and tinsmiths, a world in which the buzz of power saws seared the air and Eros Ramazzotti’s voice groaned from the ramshackle speakers of the CD salesmen.

When Fava thought of Palermo, his nostrils were filled with the scent of the fried-food stalls in the Piazza della Kalsa, the smell of seething oil bubbling away in big aluminum pots, the aroma of panelle, chickpea fritters, of roasted calves’ feet. He remembered picking the panelle out of their paper and saying hello to the fat man who always sat outside the church of Santa Teresa alla Kalsa in the rectangular shadow of a pollarded tree, cleaning olives and peeling potatoes to make croquettes. He remembered how there were always snails there on a Sunday, snails in garlic, from eleven in the morning till eight at night. And the fact that he would never again walk through the Kalsa with his two sons. Sometimes he consoled himself with the fact that at long last he no longer smelled of fear, fear of the police, of an undercover agent, of traitors in his own ranks, of a mission that he couldn’t refuse. Bringing a friend to his executioner.

All his brothers worked in his family’s butcher shops in the Ballarò market, not far from the police headquarters. Fava had worked there as well; no one had asked any questions when he disappeared from time to time, for an hour, for half a day. His younger brother, Giuseppe, was in Cosa Nostra as well. He was arrested ten days after Marcello. And he has kept his mouth shut until now, as befits a man of honor.

When Fava’s brothers found out that Marcello had become a turncoat, they closed up the iron shutters of their butcher shops and laid chrysanthemums outside them. Above them they hung a sign: Per un crasto, For a castrated billy goat. Nothing dishonors a Sicilian more than this jibe. “We have no turncoat brother,” they said, “we have only a dead brother.”

I haven’t told my children anything about my past. You can imagine what our first meeting in jail was like, after my family had been taken out of Palermo and brought to a strange city where no one knows us. The two boys cried, they wanted to go back to Sicily, to their grandmother, to their cousins. My children have always been spoilt rotten. It was terrible for them, suddenly feeling they were all alone in the world. Then when I talked to them I made them understand that they would never have seen their father again if he hadn’t taken this step.

When Fava talked about committing murder, he sounded like a car mechanic explaining the problems that arise when he takes out an old gearbox and puts a new one in. He smiled with a mixture of embarrassment and superiority, the way car mechanics smile when they’re talking about torque-to-weight ratios, knowing that the customer won’t have the faintest idea what they’re going on about. But when he talked about his family he seemed to lose his composure, his voice trembling, as if what he regretted was not the murders but the shame he had brought on his family. There were eighty relatives in his family, counting only the closest blood relations. His children had no relatives now; they would never celebrate weddings with their family, or baptisms, or first communions. All because their father had wanted only the best for them. And had turned into a worm. Into less than nothing.

I remember what it was like when I learned that my godfather had become a turncoat. It was a Sunday when I got the call. Men from my clan rang me up: “Get on your motorbike right now and come and see us!” They sounded very agitated. I remember arriving at the meeting place outside Palermo half an hour later, where a lot of men of honour had already assembled and were waiting for me, stony-faced. They said, “Sit down.” At that moment I knew nothing except that my godfather had been arrested two days previously. I thought, maybe they’ve killed him up at police headquarters. Because he’d tried to escape. Something like that. But then they told me: “Your godfather has become a turncoat.” And I started laughing like a lunatic. “That’s why you had me almost kill myself driving through Palermo on my bike? To tell me some crap like that?” “What do you mean crap,” the others said, “it’s true.” And then I really did have to sit down. It was the disappointment of my life. A myth collapsed for me. My godfather was—something like that. Someone who had been like a visiting card for me: if you thought about it, people were always mentioning the fact that he was my godfather. And now—a nobody. They all went underground for a while. As for me, I stayed quietly at home and waited. All around me men were being arrested, I was the only one who was spared the investigations. And I said to myself: my godfather’s forgotten about me.

For the blink of an eye, I had the impression that Fava’s face had been set in motion: his eyelids were flickering, his cheeks trembling, and his freckles twitching. But then his cheeks turned pink and relaxed again, and he fell silent. The woven straw seat of the chair he was sitting on creaked. It was as if the straw were betraying his insecurity. For a long time there was no sound to be heard but the squeaking of the woven straw and the officer sitting by the door making a rustling sound as he turned the pages of his John Grisham novel. Some noise filtered up from the street, car doors slamming and the roar of a passing bus.

The fact that his own godfather had become a turncoat hadn’t persuaded him, he said, to switch to the other side. There was still no need. Plainly his godfather had covered for him, in spite of the obligation to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He had simply hushed up the fact that Marcello Fava had belonged to Cosa Nostra since he was twenty years old. So why should Fava have crossed over to the other side? There was no need to. No feelings of guilt. He only experienced those later on, toward his wife. For twenty years he had cheated on her with the Mafia. His wife had never known anything, he said, she had never doubted him for a moment. If I say a horse is flying, my wife will believe it.

But she wasn’t as naive as her husband imagined. No Sicilian woman is naive. She walked to police headquarters when she heard that her husband had been arrested again. She knew that he hadn’t been a victim of the judiciary, innocently persecuted on suspicion of being a thief and a bank robber, but someone who had had the end of his prison sentence sweetened by his bosses when they had paid for the baptisms of his two sons—four hundred guests, very Cosa Nostra. Lobsters and champagne. She knew that when he went with her to mass on Sunday he was only waiting for a sign from his boss. A slight nod of the head, and already he was getting up from his pew to discuss a few matters outside—protection money, money from public contracts, bribes, new supermarkets and bingo halls for money laundering, money for mafiosi in jail. The clan’s money was never enough. After communion he sat back down in his seat. She knew he ignored her when she said: “I don’t like those people you talk to.” She said nothing more than that. She knew what it meant when he begged her to go with him to lunch at the boss’s villa. To a christening in Palermo cathedral. To a wedding feast in Mondello, in the Palace Hotel, with real swans swimming in the pool. It would have been a deadly insult to appear without his wife.

His wife’s dislike of Cosa Nostra didn’t stop her from following him in his flight from the police. A life that Cosa Nostra made as pleasant for him as possible. His brother found him a little villa outside Palermo and a few lads to act as bodyguards, who checked that the coast was clear, who went with him on his motorbike, because that’s the easiest way for a wanted mafioso to get around Palermo. The full-face helmet was his disguise, that and the wigs, the stick-on beards—which didn’t keep the “flunkeys,” as he still called the police in those days, from storming the villa. Shots rang out, and his wife thought he was injured. While she was looking for him in all the hospitals of Palermo, she didn’t know that they had just been warning shots and he was already in handcuffs at police headquarters. She was pregnant at the time. And lost the child. After a week in solitary, he decided to do the unthinkable. His wife said only: “Whatever you do, I’m with you.”

I have no daughters. That’s something I’d rather not talk about. It’s an open wound for me. Because when I was twenty, I was given a daughter. Who died at birth. I have three dead children. They all died at birth. That’s something my wife is always reminding me about. Because they’re buried in Palermo. And my wife constantly thinks of them, of those dead children. I hope I’ll bring her back to me one day. So that I can do my duty at last.

When he talked about his three dead children, his eyes welled up with tears. He looked awkwardly in his briefcase for a handkerchief, bent down to hide his face, and blew his nose noisily into it. He saw the miscarriages as a curse from God. As a punishment for his blasphemous life. Perhaps he was thinking about the people who had wept like children before they were strangled. Perhaps he was thinking of the ones who had died standing up, which is what the men of Cosa Nostra call it when a man of honor doesn’t plead for his life. Perhaps he was thinking about how he had taken part in the funeral of a victim, about how he had straightened the sash on the wreath, looked the family in the eyes, and shaken their hands to express his sympathy. Perhaps. And perhaps not. Had he not acted like a soldier?

I was always very devout. As a child, I was an altar boy for the Salesians. After that, I drifted away from the church a little, I committed my first burglaries—but I’m still devout even today. As my son is, too. He loves religious processions. When we were still living in Sicily, he wouldn’t miss a procession. Sometimes he copied them at home, he wore a veil and a train like the saints in the procession. He has three hundred figures of the saints at home. He’s taken them all over the place. And he does that even now that he’s eighteen years old and has a girlfriend.

At the end of the interview Fava got to his feet and cracked his knuckles. The police woke from their slumbers; one of them looked through the peephole and nodded to the other officers. He hoped his observations had been useful to me, Fava said sheepishly. He awkwardly put his crib sheet back in the briefcase. When he opened it I saw that it was empty, apart from a book, History of the Mafia from 1943 until the Present. I remembered an old bookseller in Palermo, whose shop wasn’t far from the Via della Libertà, telling me that the bosses from the Borgo Vecchio were among her best customers. As soon as she put a new book about the Mafia in her shop window, it sold out straightaway.

“Is there anything about you in that book?” I asked. And Fava replied: “Yes, on page 568.” He said it like someone who’s managed to get an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Then he took his leave of me, very formally, with a small hint of a bow. He seemed relieved. He said: “There are people who go through life with their eyes open. And those who live with their eyes closed.” At last, four officers flanked him and walked him to the street. I had to wait upstairs in the apartment until the car he was in had disappeared.

The two remaining policemen were curious to know whether I’d found the interview interesting. Whether I’d met other mafiosi, and what differences I’d spotted in their personalities. And what Germans know about the Mafia. Then they offered to take me in their car to the nearest taxi stand. Their car looked like a cross between a minibus and an amphibious vehicle, so I asked them if it could drive in water as well.

“We can’t tell you that,” the policemen said, “because then we’d have to kill you.”

The man in the midnight-blue, double-breasted suit also cracks his knuckles. We’re already preparing to land in Palermo, the tables are tipped up again, the seat-belt signs are on, and I’m still wondering whether I should speak to him for a moment. But what would I say? “Remember me? I’m a journalist and interviewed you once, in Rome.” Because I don’t think he does remember me. Journalists are never perceived as people. We’re nothing but mirrors that people talk into. You speak into them, and in the end an article comes out. You remember the name of the newspaper or magazine. Or maybe not. In Italy, at any rate, I’m rarely remembered. And he would have good reason not to remember me, because in returning secretly to Palermo he is putting his new life on the line. His freedom, his status as a collaborator with the forces of law and order, his livelihood, the protection of his family, everything. When a turncoat mafioso returns secretly to Sicily, it doesn’t augur well. In Sicily everyone remembers the career of Baldassare Di Maggio—mafioso, hit man, and driver to the boss Totò Riina. As a key witness in the Andreotti trial, Di Maggio had been responsible, among other things, for describing the kiss on the cheek between Andreotti and Totò Riina—one of the more spectacular statements about the close relationship between the politician and the Mafia boss. Later Di Maggio had returned to Sicily where, in his hometown of San Giuseppe Jato, he would commit a murder—one that had nothing to do with the Andreotti trial but was a settling of old scores.

When Di Maggio was arrested for that murder, he provided the excuse that was needed to bring about the collapse of the Andreotti trial. The defense wanted above all to prove that the key witnesses whose statements incriminated Andreotti were not credible. If the witness to the kiss on the cheek was not in fact the turncoat mafioso he claimed to be, but a mafioso who was still committing crimes, even though he was in the witness protection program, then it would be a major error even to listen to his testimony against one of the most important Italian statesmen, let alone take it seriously as incriminating evidence.

Di Maggio was arrested and thrown out of the witness protection program. But even then he didn’t deviate from his account of the kiss on the cheek between Totò Riina and Giulio Andreotti.

Below us, the sea glistens as smooth and viscous as pitch. The plane is already flying at a low altitude, and I see the Isola delle Femmine floating in the pitch. The sky is bright with stars, and the mountain, the one I always think we’re going to crash into every time I fly into Palermo, stands out in the moonlight. But before fear can really take hold of me, the plane has already landed.

As always in Italy, the passengers are getting up and impatiently clearing out the luggage compartments while the plane is still rolling along the runway. When the engines are turned off, everyone crams into the narrow aisle, the two old Sicilians try to push their way to the front with their plastic bags and parcels, the man in the pinstripe suit sticks his unlit cigarillo in his mouth, and the woman with the stockings straightens her skirt. When the plane door opens, damp, warm air pours in, smelling of Africa.

We walk across the runway to the airport building; in the pale glow of the floodlights I see the man who was sitting next to me. I watch him furtively as we wait for our bags beside the carousel. He takes his mobile phone out of his briefcase and switches it on. Our bags arrive at the same time. As we plunge into the sea of waiting Sicilians, I almost lose sight of him. But then I see him walking up to a thin man holding up a sign with a name written on it: Mr. Berenson. Then he is swallowed up by the night.

And I hear Salvo, my taxi driver, saying to me, “Ciao, Petra. Still carrying that same old battered suitcase?”

ROSARIA SCHIFANI

SALVO MAKES THAT REMARK ABOUT THE SUITCASE EVERY time I come to Palermo; it’s a solicitous ritual of his. Because Salvo can’t understand why I’m devoted to this battered suitcase even though I could easily afford a new one. A neat, smooth Signora suitcase. Not this old aluminum thing covered with stickers, which he’s now stowing in his taxi with an indulgent expression on his face.

Salvo always drives me when I’m in Palermo; he’s done it for years. I’ve known him for so long that he’s gone through three fiancées in that time. Now he’s got another one, and this time it’s serious. Salvo’s very thin, with a profile like a mouse. A mouse with alert, black eyes that seem to consist entirely of pupil. Even in jeans and sneakers, Salvo always tries to look smart. When he puts his hands on the wheel he sticks out his little finger, the way other people do when drinking tea. It’s not as if he’s scrambling to drive me around Palermo, it’s more that he’s doing me a favor—because for some time now he’s become the regular driver for a group of old ladies who play scopa, the Sicilian game played with cards that look like tarot cards. These old-lady cardsharps meet every afternoon, which is why they represent a secure source of income for Salvo: the ladies always have absolute precedence.

I tap in a text to Shobha: “Where are we eating?” And she answers: “Everything’s shut on Sunday evening. Except Fresco.”

Fresco is Shobha’s local, a kind of vegetarian hippy restaurant opposite Ucciardone prison. They serve up a passable couscous, with piano accompaniment on Sundays. The pianist has been wooing Shobha, in vain, for years.

“OK, Fresco,” I reply, and Salvo asks me why I still haven’t got a new phone. He proudly shows me his new super-thin Samsung. Of course, he has two telefonini, like any self-respecting Italian: one for private conversations, one for business. The private one’s reserved exclusively for his fiancées. And his mother.

We drive silently along the motorway. Cinisi. Carini. Capaci. Each sign represents a case file, a police operation, a raid. Against the Alcamo clan, against the Castellammare del Golfo clan, against the Cinisi clan. Some trials have the names of the places the clans come from; others bear names like film titles: they’re called “mstorm,” or “Golden Market,” or “Akragas.” And behind the film titles lurk mafiosi who look like janitors. Or bank clerks. Every time I come from the airport and see the sign for Cinisi, I can’t help thinking about the boss in hiding, Matteo Messina Denaro—and his submissiveness to Don Tano Badalamenti, an old boss who came from Cinisi and preferred to let his life trickle away in an American jail rather than be disloyal to Cosa Nostra. He spent almost twenty years in a prison in Massachusetts.

Messina Denaro is seen as the new boss of the Sicilian Mafia: young, brilliant, and on the run. In Sicily the phrase “on the run” sounds as normal as a description of someone’s marital status. Single, married, on the run. I wonder whether the brilliant Messina Denaro would maintain his loyalty to Cosa Nostra even in an American high-security prison. Perhaps he’d be readier to come clean than people might imagine.

To do me a favor, Salvo puts on Biagio Antonacci’s CD and “Sognami se nevica,” “Dream of me if it snows.” In Sicily, the metaphor par excellence for unrequited love.

Few men in Sicily are as sought after as mafiosi on the run. Matteo Messina Denaro met up with ladies from the highest echelons of Trapani society at a hotel in Selinunte—and a short time later had its owner murdered because he didn’t feel he had treated him with sufficient respect. The boss enjoyed himself at the elegant spa of Forte dei Marmi, adorned himself with Rolex watches, fell in love with an Austrian woman, whom he visited and whose telephone is probably still tapped today, and spent part of his time on the run from the police in Bagheria, not far from Palermo, staying with a woman who wrote him pages of love letters: “I have loved you, I love you, and I will love you all my life.” She went to jail for acting as his accomplice. When Messina Denaro hid at this woman’s home, his pursuers were so hot on his heels that they came close to catching him, except that one of the carabinieri had turned off the hidden cameras and given the boss the tip he needed.

Salvo says: “I don’t know what you women see in this song.” And I can’t give him an answer.

“What kind of a story are you doing this time?” Salvo asks. He asks more out of politeness than interest; basically, he thinks a preoccupation with the Mafia is a waste of time. On the one hand. On the other, it fills him with a curious sort of pride that I should come here specially from Venice to tell the Germans what’s happening in Sicily. As if the island’s inhabitants were a people at risk of extinction, of interest to a very few, highly specialized anthropologists. People whom he meets daily in the hall of his building, and whom he otherwise considers overrated. Salvo still lives with his mother, in the district between the Piazza Indipendenza and the Capuchin Crypt, where tourists shudder at the sight of the mummies. It’s a normal district of Palermo, which lives equally normally off the drug trade. Salvo loves describing how the customers meet by the statue of Padre Pio, because the goods are hidden under the saint’s feet. A neighbor on Salvo’s floor has already been arrested four times for membership in the Mafia, and each time he got out of prison he rose a bit higher in the hierarchy. First he committed break-ins, then he collected protection money—that is, he picked up the envelopes that were laid out ready for him, and if there was nothing ready he squeezed superglue into the locks of the shops that hadn’t paid—and now you only ever see him in a suit and tie.

“I’m writing a portrait of Letizia,” I say.

“Letizia?” Salvo asks in amazement, because he knows Letizia, and because he thinks I write about people who are either famous or dangerous, and in his eyes Letizia is neither famous nor dangerous, but just the mother of the photographer Shobha.

“Letizia Battaglia is perhaps your most famous woman photographer,” I say, “your most famous anti-Mafia photographer.” A Sicilian Cartier-Bresson, I’m about to say, if Letizia wouldn’t have taken offense at being compared to someone else. And if Salvo knew who Cartier-Bresson was.

“Minchia,” Salvo says. “I drove her only yesterday, and I didn’t know she was so famous.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. When Sicilians say “minchia” they’re really impressed. Minchia means “cock” in Sicilian. In fact, Sicily has tried its damnedest to forget Letizia. There is no exhibition in her honor, no archive of her work, nothing. “They pretend I don’t exist,” Letizia always says. “As if I were guilty for the things I’ve seen.”

There are no reminders of her—and she was always more than a photographer: Letizia was a theater director, city councillor and member of parliament for the anti-Mafia party La Rete. Her surname Battaglia means “battle”—her life’s manifesto.

“And why are the Germans interested in Letizia right now?” asks Salvo.

“Because of Duisburg,” I say.

Because, when there are no corpses, people are inclined to suspect that the Mafia doesn’t exist. Before six Calabrians were murdered in Duisburg, a lot of editors saw my interest in the Mafia as a personal eccentricity, a whim—as if I’d become obsessed with some absurd topic like the life of the giant anteater—to be treated with a degree of indulgence. Okay, if she’s absolutely desperate to write about the Mafia, then for God’s sake let her get on with it; on the other hand, next time get her to write us something about Tuscany.

And then the massacre in Duisburg happened, and my phone started ringing nonstop. Everyone wanted to send me to Calabria. News Web sites, weekly papers, monthly magazines. “Haven’t you got a mafioso at hand that you could interview?” one editor asked me. Suddenly everyone wanted to know all about the Mafia, to what extent Cosa Nostra differed from the Camorra and whether it was actually imaginable that something like the Duisburg massacre could happen more often. I heard myself lecturing and doling out definitions—that the word Mafia actually referred only to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra; while the Calabrian Mafia was called ’Ndrangheta and was at the moment the most successful criminal association in Italy; alongside the Neapolitan Camorra, which, unlike Cosa Nostra with its strictly hierarchical vertical organization, was organized horizontally, which also explained the constant gang wars, everyone wanting to be the boss, and you can’t have that without corpses; and the Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, the youngest Mafia organization in Italy, which only came into being in the 1980s. And at the end of the phone calls I turned down all the commissions because at the time I happened to be in Poland covering a story—which was a source of relief to me. It was only several months later that I traveled to San Luca, and by that time all interest had subsided again.

“The Germans must have been really shocked when that thing happened in Duisburg,” Salvo says with concern. And also some worry. “Che brutta figura,” he says—what an ugly image we’ve given of ourselves. As if he were personally responsible for his Calabrian compatriots. For the ’Ndrangheta massacre. He looks crestfallen and turns the music up slightly.

There’s dense traffic on the motorway; the whole of Palermo’s coming back from the weekend. As if impelled by a death wish, the cars dash down the tunnel. The sea shimmers like blackish-blue metal, with a strip of pale moonlight. Up by Carini you can’t see the sea anymore, it’s hidden behind a settlement of shacks that stretches all the way to Palermo and looks like a poor district in Calcutta. The rubbish from the weekend is piled up alongside the motorway. The buildings are mostly one-story houses with rough brick walls, no plaster or cement anywhere; rusty metal rods stick out of the concrete on the roofs. These are Palermo’s holiday homes. They’re all illegal, and they have been for thirty years. In Sicily they call this “surveyors’ architecture.” It has ravaged the island. In Sicily everyone knows a surveyor who will draw up an illegal building plan for a bribe.

And then we get to Capaci. For a while, there was always a pause when we drove past this place. It didn’t matter who I was with; all my friends, taxi drivers, interviewees fell silent. Not anymore. Now everyone just goes on talking. Before, the only reminder of what had happened was a bit of red crash barrier. Five hundred kilos of explosives on a skateboard in a sewage pipe. Set off by remote control.

Now, two red marble steles stand here with the names and the date: 23 May 1992, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani. One marble stele in each direction. War memorials for a lost battle, as red as the Sicilian soil. Sometimes there’s a faded wreath with a sash that’s already slightly faded: in Sicily things deteriorate very quickly.

I’d only seen Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino once, from a distance, in the Palace of Justice. Like a lot of other people in those days, I, too, thought they were immortal. When they were murdered, it was felt in Palermo that the killing of the two public prosecutors wasn’t a murder like the previous ones. Not a small death that the city could have shaken off, denied, and forgotten again the following morning, but one that clung to the city in front of everyone’s eyes. “È andata oltre,” people said, things have gone too far. For the first time, Sicily could no longer dispute the existence of the Mafia, and the reaction was one of catharsis. Temporarily.

“The mafiosi will pay for it,” Rosaria had said. We were sitting in a bar not far from the Teatro Politeama, at a white marble table that had been scrubbed till it had lost its sheen, when Rosaria suddenly grabbed my wrist and said: “They’ll pay for it, on the earth and in the hereafter.” What other point would there be in their going on living after committing those murders? Were they never to be punished? Then life in general would have no point, no point at all. “There must be something, after all, don’t you think?”

And I said: “Yes, sure.” Because she was looking at me so piercingly with those black eyes of hers. And because I didn’t have the courage to rob her of her hope. Hope of the divine plan. When I was sitting in the bar with Rosaria, her husband Vito Schifani, Giovanni Falcone’s bodyguard, had only been dead for six months.

“They only showed me his hands,” she said. “His hands. They were the only bits undamaged. He had such lovely hands.”

Rosaria had been widowed at the age of twenty-three and had become an anti-Mafia icon. Her son, Antonio Emanuele, was only four months old. Even today, everyone in Palermo remembers Rosaria haltingly trying to read out a text at Giovanni Falcone’s funeral, supported by a priest who kept encouraging her to go on reading—until Rosaria threw aside the pages of her prepared text and cried out her true feelings: “They’re even here in the church, the mafiosi.” And: “Too much blood, there is no love here, no love of anything or anyone.” And: “I forgive you. But you must kneel.”

Everyone sensed that this wasn’t the usual forgiveness, that empty ritual of absolution that everyone in Italy always has to defer to; before the corpses are even cold, the first television reporter has asked the victims about forgiveness. Only very seldom does anyone have the courage to step aside from this sale of indulgences. Like Rita Costa, the widow of the public prosecutor Gaetano Costa, shot by the Mafia in the center of Palermo. “I forgive no one and nobody,” she said. “I could kill my husband’s murderers and then calmly go off and have an espresso in a cafe.”

I had first seen Rosaria when Margarethe von Trotta was in Palermo introducing her film The Long Silence, a film that paid tribute to the women widowed by the Mafia. Rosaria wore a sand-colored blazer, sat next to Rita Costa on the podium, and looked as if she’d rather have been a million miles away. Far from the widows, far from having to set an example, far from Palermo. She almost crept to the microphone as she said: “When I talked about forgiveness in church, that sentence was my personal affair. Whether a person can forgive is, of course, a matter for each individual.”

Then she said nothing all the way through the panel discussion. She later told me how angry her mother had been when Rosaria had insisted on being seen in public in a sand-colored blazer and not in black.

We had met at the regional administration, her new place of work. As is generally the case with victims of the Mafia, a job had been hastily found for her to supplement her meager widow’s pension. But she hadn’t been given any actual work, just a reason to leave the house in the morning. Her office was empty. The phone was out of order, the desk hadn’t been used for ages, the shelves were bare and dusty, and Rosaria talked about the profound shame she felt at never having taken an interest in what Mafia really meant. “Even two days after my husband’s death I didn’t know who Totò Riina was!” she exclaimed. After the murder she had approached the public prosecutor, Paolo Borsellino. Once she had asked him if he was scared, and Borsellino had replied: “I’m only scared for my wife and children.” Fifty-seven days after the assassination of Falcone, he too was dead.

After her husband’s death Rosaria became a driven woman: one who wanted to know what was happening around her, how it had come to this, how it could have been prevented. “Tell everyone what happened to you,” one widow advised her. “Shout it out. Everyone must know, go into the schools and speak to the children. Headlines aren’t enough to reach the hearts of the children.”

And Rosaria followed her advice. She took part in demonstrations and panel discussions, she visited schools and juvenile institutions, and she published a book of her talks, dedicating it to her little son. In her open letter to the mafiosi, Rosaria wrote: “You are murderers. Let’s say it out loud, so that your sons can look you in the eyes and see what murderers’ eyes look like.”

Perhaps that was the moment when Palermo became strange to her. She was a diva, people said, only interested in getting on television. And she was a lunatic. An attention-seeking lunatic.

Even if her husband had been killed by the Mafia, a Sicilian widow has to deal with her pain in silence. Fatti gli affari tuoi e campi cent’anni. Mind your own business and you’ll live to a hundred.

Soon Rosaria stopped taking part in panel discussions, in memorial services, demonstrations, and candlelight processions. I still heard from her from time to time. I heard she’d left Sicily. That she’d married again. That she’d had another child. She never wrote another open letter. The mafiosi who murdered her husband have been sentenced in the meantime. Some of them have repented. None of them has bent the knee.

Some have even managed to get college degrees, like the boss Pietro Aglieri. And they hope for their sentences to be overturned. Perhaps not entirely without justification. In the years following the assassinations, the anti-Mafia laws were gradually abolished. There is effectively no longer such a thing as high-security detention, no life imprisonment, and anyone who has been sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment for drug dealing can expect to be out of jail again in seven years. The last president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Salvatore “Totò” Cuffaro, was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment, which he celebrated with a little communal drink and a tray full of cannoli, that traditional sweetmeat that every Sicilian emigrant devours until the day he dies. Cuffaro was celebrating because he knew that he would never have to serve his sentence; by the time it was confirmed by the supreme court, it would have lapsed. But he was wrong: in January 2011, Cuffaro went to prison. You never know what’s around the corner.

Today, even the commemoration of the victims is too much. The former president of the Sicilian regional assembly, Gianfranco Miccichè, has demanded that the name of Palermo airport be changed as a matter of urgency: Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino smacks too much of the Mafia.

Perhaps Rosaria was right after all, and all that remains is hope of a divine plan.

SAN LUCA

“MA,” SAYS SALVO, AS IF HE COULD READ MY MIND. MA means “but.” In Sicily, though, the word ma has many more meanings than that. According to emphasis, ma can mean: “Everyone here has gone mad,” or “If you think so,” or “Do what you like.” And if the m is particularly protracted, mmma means: “The longer you think about life, the more you reach the conclusion that everything is in vain.”

We’ve left the bypass, and we’re very close to the Piazza Indipendenza. And we’re in a traffic jam. There’s always a traffic jam in Palermo; the traffic is in a constant unforeseen state of emergency. A state of emergency that lasts from eight in the morning till midnight. Four-lane bypasses end up in one-way streets. Or nowhere. In the Palermo suburb of Mondello there’s a four-lane road that looks as if it could be somewhere in Los Angeles. It comes from nowhere and peters out as a dirt track half a kilometer farther on. A boss wanted it.

Salvo opens the window a crack. A hubbub of voices enters from outside, scraps of music, exploding firecrackers, the wail of a burglar alarm. Faded blue saints glow in the wall of a house, promising two hundred days of absolution to anyone who says the credo before them. Finally we’ve arrived in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, outside my hotel. The Centrale Palace is my home in Palermo, a home that has survived even extensive renovation unharmed. Where hotels are concerned, I fear nothing more than alterations. That’s why I love the familiar faces at the Centrale all the more. The head porter wears a pair of glasses that sit on his nose like a pince-nez; his center parting looks as if it’s been drawn with a ruler. The Tunisian hotel servant has frozen into a statue, and the old maître d’ serves the breakfast tea with distracted dignity. Anyone who stays at the Centrale Palace is living not in a hotel but in a nineteenth-century Sicilian novel.

As soon as I enter the lobby, the receptionist bows in greeting. He purses his lips as if to kiss my hand and scatters a few compliments: “Time simply doesn’t pass as far as you’re concerned, Dottoressa!” he says.

Since the day I was picked up by the lawyer defending the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, the receptionist has respectfully addressed me as Dottoressa. The lawyer was pleasantly touched not to have had to introduce himself. The receptionist obviously knew his name.

I have my case brought to my room and rejoin Salvo in the car. To get to the restaurant, we have to turn onto the Via Roma. As it is every Sunday, the Via della Libertà is closed to through traffic. The Sunday evening stroll from the Teatro Politeama to the Teatro Massimo is one of Palermo’s sacred rituals. Wives are dressed up in outfits that look like suits of armor. They hold their handbags pressed under one arm and their husbands under the other. And by the boutique window displays the women sink into a dreamlike state—until their husbands drag them away.

Shobha is already sitting on the terrace of the Fresco when I get there. Her blond hair flashes in the darkness. Piano music drifts from the restaurant, and sitting on the terrace you look down on the yellow volcanic walls of the Ucciardone prison, an old Hohenstaufen fortress with floodlights and sentries behind armored glass. The mafiosi called the prison Grand Hotel Ucciardone; they had champagne and lobsters delivered until they were released, usually after just a few months. After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, a stay in the Ucciardone temporarily became rather less comfortable. Temporarily. Because lately the prison attracted a certain amount of attention when guards were found to have distributed telefonini among the bosses.

“You’ve gotten blonder,” Shobha says.

Every time we see each other again, we behave like an old couple who have been apart for a few weeks and are now looking at each other with a critical eye: Is your hair shorter or longer? Are your earrings new? Yes, they really suit you, and what wonderful shoes you have, I want some pointed shoes like those. We’ve been working together for so long that we’ve decided to stop counting the years, because then anyone would be able to work out how old we are.

The pianist comes to our table, makes sheep’s eyes at Shobha, and asks if she’ll be coming to eat here again tomorrow, then she could go with him to a concert afterward. Shobha doesn’t even turn around, and says: “I’m busy over the next few weeks. And the next few months, and the next few years as well. I’m sorry. Scusami.”

And then we stare at the walls of the Hohenstaufen fortress until the pianist wanders back, shoulders drooping, to his piano and plays something that sounds like Chopin’s Funeral March.

“And your mother?” I ask Shobha.

“Tomorrow,” Shobha says. “We’ll get to work tomorrow.” Then she adds: “At least it’s a good story. Not something like San Luca.”

At the end of every report we swear we won’t do any more Mafia stories. Basta. We plan only to cover stories about Sicilian wine and fine hotels. About the wonderful quality of Calabrian olive oil. About Naples without rubbish in the streets.

Somehow we never manage to put our good intentions into action. Even while we were on the ferry from Sicily to Reggio Calabria we remembered our plan to do a report on something positive at long last. But instead we were sitting a short time later in the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Reggio Calabria, looking at a sea that looked as if it was poisonous, shimmering in tones of greyish blue with oil tankers in the glaring light. The 1970s hung in the hotel’s heavy curtains; they fell from the neon light of the restaurant and settled on the faces of the hotel guests, who all looked like pharmaceutical salesmen passing through. In the elevator, one of them asked if we were hostesses.

“It isn’t so bad here,” we reassured each other, like a mantra.

“You don’t find such lovely cafes that often. We haven’t got such an elegant seafront in Palermo,” said Shobha.

Like a woman whose eyes are so beautiful that you forget her short legs, Reggio Calabria is saved by its seafront. The cafes stood side by side under palms and magnolias and cast-iron arches. Later, we walked through the warm sirocco night down Corso Garibaldi and established that you would have to go to the Via Montenapoleone in Milan to find a greater density of luxury boutiques: Valentino, Alexander McQueen, Versace, Rolex, Gucci, Prada, Cesare Paciotti. The ’Ndrangheta’s shopping mile. Nothing but marble temples with salesgirls who look like something halfway between nuns and museum attendants. And whose eyes are as icy as the breeze from an air-conditioning system.

We drove in silence along the coast road to San Luca. We glided through a diffuse grey light, as if the sky were filled with sand. We drove past shells of buildings, orphaned houses, prickly pears, and crippled olive trees, past concrete posts for bridges that had never been finished, street signs riddled with bullet holes and a tugboat rusting away on the beach amid driftwood and bits of plastic. People trafficking is a source of income for the ’Ndrangheta, and the villages of the Ionian coastal region are its fortresses: Platí, Áfrico, San Luca.

Since the murders in Duisburg, San Luca had become almost more famous than Corleone. The blood feud had broken out eighteen years before, and since then the clans of the Nirta-Strangio and the Pelle-Vottari seemed to have been persecuting one another with an Old Testament thirst for revenge, as if time were still being measured with hourglasses and honor could only be redeemed with blood. Because the Mafia thrives on symbols, murders tend to be carried out on feast days—Christmas, May 1, Assumption. Behind this lies the message: “Until the end of my life I may remember the murder of my wife every Christmas; but for you, Assumption will never again be a feast day because on that day, until the end of your life, you will think about your murdered brother.”

The investigators know, beyond the bloodlust, the Mafia always thinks pragmatically. The blood feud is by no means entirely archaic. The criminal prestige of the family that organized the Duisburg massacre has risen enormously, and that’s where economic profit lies. Now they just have to present themselves to a member of the regional government and say: “We’re the people from San Luca.” And the next public bid will be in their favor.

The ’Ndrangheta has divided Calabria up into three territories: the Tyrrhenian coast, the Ionian coast, and the city of Reggio Calabria. Even if you didn’t know, you would smell it. In the air, which always smells a bit burned. In the 1960s and 1970s the ’Ndrangheta bought up the biggest agricultural enterprises, vineyards, and olive groves, and the public prosecutor’s office couldn’t bring a case against it because the owners hadn’t reported the extortionate purchases. The ’Ndrangheta now controls every breath anyone takes, every inch of road, every thought.

When we arrived in San Luca that autumn, after the assassination, the day lay there like a piece of wet gray cotton wool, between the Aspromonte mountains and the dry bed of a river called Bonamico, “good friend.” In San Luca every hour seemed as long as a day of atonement, as weird as an endless Day of the Dead when you’re forever bumping into ghosts.

We stopped outside a bar that sparkled like a crystal. One wall was decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna of Polsi, and the barman ceaselessly polished the marble counter, the glass shelves, the brass-colored water taps, and served three young financial policemen their espressos. One of the cops had flaming red hair. He was constantly checking the position of his beret in the mirror beside the bar, and Shobha was so taken with this that she casually took a picture. When we stepped up to the bar, he told us that on one of their patrols a few days previously they’d noticed a Volkswagen Golf which, it turned out, had been hired in Duisburg and not taken back. And they’d found half a kilo of hashish in its boot. No big deal. But still.

San Luca looked as if its walls had been designed to match the gray of the sky, unplastered, with rusty iron railings and electric wires that hung between the houses like clotheslines. There weren’t even any street signs: the street names were just painted on the walls of the houses with black paint. Shortly after the Duisburg massacre, San Luca had tried to present itself to the world’s press as a village forgotten by the world, full of unemployed woodsmen, God-fearing women, and one brave priest, a lone voice in the desert, fighting tirelessly against the Mafia. He was the one we wanted to meet. Don Pino.

Up on the hill, next to the church of Santa Maria Addolorata, a few old gray stone houses clung to one another. When there had been an earthquake a few years ago, these old houses had been destroyed. And not rebuilt, just abandoned. As if it wasn’t worth preserving anything. Opposite the church there was another bar, a scruffy little affair with a veranda where a few men sat. When we asked about Don Pino, they shrugged as if they were hearing his name for the first time. A man offered us a coffee. His eyes looked as if he was wearing mascara: his lashes were black and dense, and curved slightly upward as if he’d used an eyelash curler.

He really lived in Australia, in Adelaide, he said. But then he had started feeling terribly homesick and had come back to his home of San Luca with his wife and two children. Although he regretted that, because there were no jobs here. He smiled politely, and perhaps with some embarrassment.

Because Adelaide is thought of as a stronghold of the ’Ndrangheta, and particularly of two clans from San Luca, the Nirtas and the Romeos, both of which were involved in the Duisburg murders.

Among the Italian Mafia organizations, the ’Ndrangheta has proved to be the most mobile, an unbeatable advantage in business terms; unlike the entrenched Sicilian Mafia, the Calabrian clans are active not only in every region of Italy but all over the world. Even before the First World War, the ’Ndrangheta had invested the money it made from extortion in the cultivation of cannabis in Australia. By the 1950s it controlled the drug trade in Canada. In America, the Calabrian men of honor joined forces with the Sicilians; according to the FBI, between one and two hundred mafiosi of Calabrian origin are active in New York and Florida. In South and Central America the ’Ndrangheta enjoys privileged trade relations with cocaine producers in Peru, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Colombia. Calabrian public prosecutors have uncovered links between the Colombian paramilitary Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC, and the ’Ndrangheta. Thanks to its good connections, the ’Ndrangheta has been able to open up new sources of production and export routes for the cocaine trade, cutting out the middlemen and selling the cocaine more cheaply. That’s another unbeatable advantage.

The ’Ndranghetista Roberto Pannunzi had the best connections with the Colombian drug cartel: he was able to buy his cocaine at a particularly good rate because he took delivery of at least three tons a month, and always paid on time and in cash. Pannunzi even sealed his business connections with blood bonds: his son Alessandro married the daughter of a Colombian drug baron. In 2004 Pannunzi was arrested, along with his son, in Spain—the soft underbelly of Europe, according to the investigators. Spain is the most significant portal for the importation of cocaine from South America. And in January 2008, Pannunzi’s henchman in Calabria was arrested: “Don Micu” Trimboli, who was led away in his tracksuit after he had been tracked down to a bunker under a sheep pen. When he was arrested, he cursed the politicians, who were concerned only with garnering votes. And didn’t keep their promises. And behind this there lay an undisguised threat: the politician who was supposed to have been looking out for him had clearly committed a small but significant act of negligence—that was the only explanation the boss could find for the fact that the police had suddenly appeared on his trail. The Mafia had always bought political protection with votes.

The reason Germany is so important for the ’Ndrangheta is because that’s where they invest their profits from the drug and arms trade, which would risk confiscation in Italy. Since 1982 it has been possible in Italy to confiscate the property of individuals who are only suspected of belonging to the Mafia. They have to demonstrate that their property was acquired legally, with clean money. If that proof cannot be supplied, confiscation can go ahead. At least, that’s what the law says. So it’s easier for the ’Ndrangheta to invest abroad, without bothering about the precautionary measures that are required in Italy. In Germany, a waiter who earns a thousand euros a month can buy a hotel without anyone asking any questions.

According to a report by the BND, the German federal intelligence service, the ’Ndrangheta have bought shares in the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and they’ve invested millions of euros in hotel chains and restaurants in eastern Germany. The clans from San Luca are particularly active: in North Rhine-Westphalia, in Thuringia, in Baden-Württemberg. In Bochum, and in Duisburg.

And the man from Adelaide said: “My children were born in Australia, they’re homesick for Australia. Here they have nothing to do with their spare time. There isn’t a decent sports club, nothing. That’s why we’ll probably go back soon.”

And I said: “I can understand that.”

DON PINO

THE CHURCH OF SANTA MARIA ADDOLORATA IN SAN LUCA was painted white, and its interior was decorated with the sort of living-room furnishings that you find in department stores: fake marble and figures of saints that looked like display-window dummies, with a gaudy Christ hovering over the altar and a Saint Sebastian riddled with arrows.

Don Pino would be there at any moment, the curate, Don Stefano Fernando, told me, but if we didn’t mind, he himself would be happy to answer our questions. He wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses and addressed me respectfully in the second person plural, voi—that antiquated, polite form that has disappeared everywhere except in southern Italy.

Yes, he said, the ’Ndrangheta had become well known in Germany since Duisburg, even though the Germans must clearly have known that the ’Ndrangheta had invested in restaurants and hotels to launder their money. The Germans, he said, had taken the dirty money without hesitation after reunification; they’d turned a blind eye. I’d love to know, he said, what the German government thinks about that now.

Don Stefano Fernando had developed a whole theory about the sad lot of southern Italy: it extended from the economic boom of the 1950s, which never arrived, to the secularized society of the present—it’s not true to say that people here aren’t devout, they’re just indifferent! And he would have liked to expound his theory still further, if he hadn’t suddenly come over all self-effacing—after all, he was just the curate, and the role of explaining the world fell instead to Don Pino, who was now standing in the door to the sacristy. There were only a few minutes before the start of mass; the bells were already ringing. Don Pino Strangio had ebony-black hair and smiled at us winningly, as if he’d just been waiting for us to turn up. Of course, of course, he would love to speak to us, right after mass.

“Bringing peace to the villages . . . not losing faith . . . because we must give an account of ourselves before God . . . if we could see him with our mortal eyes. . . .” The words rang out over the church square. Don Pino hovered like a spirit over San Luca; his words rang out from the loudspeakers, echoed against the gray, unplastered walls, and crept into the hairy ears of the men sitting not in church but outside the bar, blinking into the milky morning light.

As in Sicily, churchgoing in San Luca is for the womenfolk. So Don Pino had decided to broadcast his sermons into the church square via loudspeakers. The women who listened to his words were all dressed in black, as if life were a time of endless mourning. Old women, with their thin hair in buns, tightened their wrinkled mouths as the host dissolved on their tongues. Their daughters had faces that could have been carved from olive wood; they wore tight, black skirts, black pullovers, and flat, black shoes, and allowed themselves only one piece of jewelry: a wedding ring. Only the granddaughters were allowed to shine. With blond strands in their hair, Dolce & Gabbana belts, and sequined blouses glittering above their naked midriffs. And during prayers the mothers quietly tugged the blouses down over their daughters’ waistbands.

At the end of mass, Shobha was surrounded by little girls demanding to have their pictures taken. When Shobha said she didn’t like posed photographs, the little girls turned angry. They hissed: we issue the orders here.

The women darted back down the alleys like blackbirds and I thought of the wife of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who had spent fifteen years living underground with him and their children. At one with the Mafia and the Lord God. After she had returned to Corleone, she was a signora. Respected by everyone, a first lady who was allowed to the front of the queue for ricotta. Her husband? Respectable and hardworking, a victim of the Italian judiciary, that was how she described him.

The men in San Luca drank some more beer before they too disappeared and the village looked uninhabited once again. As if everything human had fled—fled the cement-gray color of everything, the bare lightbulbs that dangled above the lintel, by the trash cans peppered with machine-gun fire. And fled the words But the soul never dies spray-painted on the cemetery wall.

The dead of Duisburg were buried in the new cemetery which, seen from above San Luca, looked like a holiday resort. Their graves were right beside the entrance: rough cement boxes with rusty iron girders protruding from them. On every grave lay a crucifix with a shrink-wrapped rosary. Don Pino had buried three of the Duisburg victims: Marco Marmo, the hit man who had murdered the wife of the head of the enemy clan at Christmas; Sebastiano Strangio, who owned the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg; and Francesco Giorgi, at sixteen the youngest victim of the killing spree, and the son of Don Pino’s female cousin. “Mio cuginetto,” Don Pino said, “my little cousin.” Francesco, the poor boy, had only wanted to visit his uncle in Germany. And then Don Pino praised the piety of his cousin, the boy’s mother, who was sitting in the front row of the church. Her daughter, Elisa, was playing organ in church when she learned of her brother’s death.

“In her pain, the mother gazed into the distance,” Don Pino said. “No doubt she wanted to look her son’s murderers in the eyes. But there was no hatred there! She said: ‘I forgive you.’ And lots of people joined in that forgiveness. Perhaps Duisburg was the end of something and a peaceful rebirth would follow. The people are crying out for peace,” he added sadly.

We were sitting on a wooden bench next to the church—the same wooden bench on which he had received almost the whole of the world’s press since the massacre, not just the German daily papers but El País and the Italian broadcaster Rai. Even Japanese television crews had come to listen to Don Pino, who tirelessly stressed that the people of San Luca were simple and good, and only afraid to say anything to the journalists because you never know how what you say is going to be used.

“We condemn all kinds of Mafia, with our swords drawn,” said Don Pino. “And then they write that we’re all like that! And years ago someone even wrote: ‘The parish priest cohabits with the Mafia’.”

Don Pino has spent half his life as a parish priest in San Luca. He was born here, he grew up here, he knew them all, he baptized and married them, and carried them to the grave. He was already the parish priest when San Luca grew rich in the 1980s on the money it raised from kidnappings, when Jean Paul Getty’s grandson had his ear cut off in a neighboring village, and when the women caught an industrialist who had managed to escape from his hiding place and held him until he could be returned to his abductors.

Don Pino was already here when San Luca started investing its ransom money in the cocaine trade; before, along with the villages of Platí and Sinópoli, it hosted the elite of the ’Ndrangheta, the wealthiest Mafia organization in Italy—which today, with an annual turnover of 45 billion euros, controls the whole of Europe’s cocaine trade and has diversified its activities like a multinational corporation, so that it now deals just as successfully in arms as it does in people.

Today the ’Ndrangheta is seen as the epitome of a successful criminal organization. It isn’t organized hierarchically like the Sicilian Mafia, but federally: each Calabrian clan chief makes autonomous decisions. He accepts advice, but not orders. In Sicily, on the other hand, it’s the commission that makes the decisions: la reunione dei mandamenti. And therein lies the weakness of Cosa Nostra—because, if someone at the top spills the beans, the whole organization collapses. The ’Ndrangheta is a close-knit family, everyone’s related—unlike the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, which places more emphasis on the criminal weight of a mafioso than it does on blood ties.

After the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, it took Cosa Nostra years to regain its invisibility—the silent acquiescence of Sicilians, the discreet handouts from politicians, and the blind eyes turned by everyone—without which the Mafia cannot flourish. During the years when Cosa Nostra was in the spotlight, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta rose in its shadow.

With the introduction of a law freezing the property of people who had been kidnapped, abduction ceased to be a viable business. So the ’Ndrangheta left the kidnapping industry and entered the cocaine trade. In Calabria it also controls all public commissions and maintains its power by collecting protection money. It has branches throughout the whole world; in Germany alone it has a network of three hundred pizzerias and, like al-Qaeda, connects the middle ages with the globalized future, negotiating by e-mail with cocaine brokers in Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Uruguay, buying a bank in St Petersburg and whole stretches of road in Brussels, while at the same time its members will only marry a woman from the same village, because the family is sacred. Blood relations don’t betray one another. The ’Ndrangheta’s only worry lies in being able to launder money before it rots—as it has done in the past, when two bosses buried 25 million euros in the ground and 8 million became damp and had to be thrown away.

But what could Don Pino do about that? Does the shepherd of souls not have to go where evil is? Is he not more responsible for the sick than for the well?

Evil must be fought with good, says Don Pino, who is responsible not only for the salvation of San Luca but also for the pilgrimage site of Santa Maria di Polsi. He is the spiritual leader there, a role of considerable importance since the pilgrimage site is effectively the ’Ndrangheta’s meeting place.

In Calabria, San Luca is seen as the mother lode of crime, and to a great extent the village derives this status from its proximity to the Madonna of Polsi—a place distinguished less for its miracle-working capacities than for the fact that the ’Ndrangheta gather there every year to pay homage to the clan chiefs. They gather there even today. They no longer do so at the monastery, however, but in a house nearby. Three representatives of the Calabrian Mafia stop off at that house: one representing the city of Reggio Calabria, one from the Tyrrhenian group, one from the Ionian. These three wise men receive representatives from all the Calabrian ’Ndrine, the family clans—from Italy and the whole of Europe, from Canada, America, and Australia. They come to Polsi, they bring gifts and set out their problems to these three wise men, who then give them advice. It’s a kind of annual ’Ndrangheta summit meeting, which lasts a month.

“You see, we don’t deny that there were certain gatherings in Polsi in the past,” Don Pino said, and hurried to add: “but the people didn’t gather there to, okay, let’s say, put something or other into action!” It had, as Don Pino put it, been more of a traditional form of devotion, of the negative kind. Which, put like that, sounds decidedly more elegant than “ ’Ndrangheta.” Don Pino is careful not to use the word. “Certainly, it’s a deadly sin to revere the image of the Madonna and at the same time to commit crimes. But in the face of the Madonna of Polsi even the hardest hearts soften, and people break down in tears.” Don Pino had seen men in Polsi licking the aisle leading up to the altar with their tongues! “And the only gathering that verifiably took place there was the one in 1967, when everyone was first arrested and then released again because they’d just been looking for mushrooms!” said Don Pino. “Those are the great dramas of history!”

I’m still deep in thought about our meeting with Don Pino when Shobha says: “I don’t want to think about San Luca anymore. Let’s just do a story about Sicilian aristocrats planting vineyards—suggest that to one of your editors. Or Selinunte, the acropolis—let’s do something about Selinunte.”

“Yes,” I say, “Selinunte. But wasn’t the father of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro a famous graverobber who stole the ephebes from Selinunte? Yes, maybe we really should stop. But maybe it’s all a matter of perspective.”

“Basta,” says Shobha, orders some more wine, and then turns pale because she thinks she recognizes the youngest son of the mafioso and ex-mayor Vito Ciancimino at the next table.

“I’ve never seen him here before,” says Shobha.

Palermo reminds me a little of East Germany. The Lives of Others is played out here every day. With the arrogance of the powerful. With members of the opposition who end up working with the ruling party, with heroes who aren’t. Sometimes a handshake from the wrong person is enough to lose you your credibility forever. Anti-Mafia public prosecutors seldom go out in Palermo.

“Thank God, he’s leaving,” says Shobha, looking at Ciancimino’s son, who is greeting everyone heartily as he leaves the restaurant.

It’s at that moment that the pianist takes a break. He approaches our table in a series of concentric circles, and Shobha turns her back to him. “May I join you for a moment?” he asks, and Shobha says: “Sorry, but we’re just discussing our latest report, it wouldn’t be very interesting to you.”

And then she takes out the battered map of Calabria that she still happens to have in her pocket and points to San Luca and Polsi: “Polsi basically wasn’t that far away,” she says, “but we’d never have made it in our little Fiat Uno.”

To persuade us of the holiness of the place, Don Pino had suggested taking us to Polsi in person. You could only get there in a Land Rover, and luckily Don Pino always had a few people at hand to help him with his divine mission: an engineer and a driver, whom Don Pino called his “jack of all trades,” a silent man who drove the Land Rover and nodded when the engineer said sadly: “God knocks on our door every day, but we don’t hear him.”

On a bend in the road the vehicle stopped so that we could enjoy the view of San Luca. Don Pino, the pious engineer, and the silent driver looked at the village with as much emotion as if they were seeing it for the first time. We drove for hours through forests of chestnut trees, past goatherds and over gravel, up and down the twisting road. “We go down so that we can come back up again,” says Don Pino. He saw it as a symbol of the holiness of the place. I thought of the ’Ndrangheta.

In the courtyard of Polsi monastery everyone was already waiting for Don Pino: some women from the village were roasting chestnuts, a group of men were stacking wood. Don Pino dashed off through the monastery, which had been renovated thanks to the largesse of the European Union. We looked at everything, from the eight-hundredweight tufa-stone Madonna, via the coffin of the child who had been brought back to life here, to the recently installed disabled toilet. There were countless plastic bags under the altar. Because Polsi was a spiritual space, Calabrian brides brought their wedding dresses here as votive offerings. Don Pino was drowning in tulle and lace, and sent the dresses on to Africa.

At last Don Pino led us, whispering, to his room and announced a mystery that he wanted to share with us: the sweating crucifix. The cross had been dripping for fourteen days! Jesus was sweating under his armpits! Don Pino took the crucifix from the wall and said: “Feel it, it’s really wet down at the bottom!” Even though the St Anthony right next to it was completely dry. “I’m going mad,” said Don Pino, and looked up to the sky and added: “It’s a good sign for the people here. For the purity of their hearts.”

Later, he invited us to lunch. We sat down at a long table in the refectory, in front of a mural of the Last Supper, and ate pasta and porcini. There were only men sitting at the table with us; the women stayed in the kitchen. “You won’t find the eyes of the women of San Luca anywhere else in the world,” said Don Pino and smiled, his cheeks slightly flushed from the wine. “The family protects you against everything,” he said and looked around. “You know, the true fugitives aren’t the mafiosi, they’re the politicians. Here every civil right becomes a favor that’s granted.”

While Don Pino said grace, I watched the men. They spoke in short, simple sentences because they were used to speaking only in dialect, and Italian sounded heavy in their mouths. They spoke of how they had worked in Germany. In Duisburg and in Wolfsburg, for Volkswagen. Their hands were tanned and blistered. And as I watched those men I wondered what it’s like when they kill someone.

Shortly after the Duisburg massacre forty inhabitants of the village had been arrested. For membership in the Mafia, arms dealing and drug dealing, for murder, grievous bodily harm, false imprisonment. Almost all of those arrested were related to one another. Almost all claimed their right to silence.

Since I had read all 1,150 pages of the public prosecutor’s custody order, page after page of wiretap records, I found it hard to believe the peaceful image of San Luca evoked by Don Pino. There was the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven all the way to Duisburg in June 2007 in search of weapons and an armored truck for the next assassination. There were men who talked about buying parabellum ammunition as if they were discussing the artichoke harvest. There were mothers who moved Kalashnikovs from house to house, wives who patrolled in camouflage suits, sisters who ran messages and transported their brothers from A to B in the trunks of their cars—if those brothers weren’t actually living in bunkers, like some members of the Pelle-Vottari clan, in the midst of an arsenal of Luger pistols, Berettas and Scorpion machine guns, ammunition and cash, statues of the saints, an altar bearing the photographs of murdered clan members, and The Godfather on DVD.

He was glad to be able to help people, said Don Pino, adding: “People come to Polsi with tears in their eyes. And who is better at drying tears than the mother of God?” At any rate, he had dedicated an anti-Mafia field at the pilgrimage site. And at that event the bishop had announced: “If Polsi is a Mafia meeting place, then I’m the head mafioso!” Polsi was, in fact, a holy, miraculous place. “Lots of women whose husbands are in jail come here to pray,” he said, and, via the prison priest, Don Pino was in constant contact with the prisoners: “Things happen there that you wouldn’t imagine!” And I thought, so much for high security.

On the way back, Don Pino whispered to us: “If these meetings of the ’Ndrangheta really did take place, in spite of the presence of the carabinieri, then we’re not just talking about people who have this mindset—something’s not working.”

In referring so openly to collaboration between carabinieri and ’Ndrangheta, he was being very like Padre Frittitta, one of the many Sicilian priests who secretly heard confessions of refugee mafiosi in their hiding places, always justifying themselves by saying that it wasn’t earthly justice that would deliver the final judgment, it was the divine kind—and as its humble drudges they were merely performing a service. They were saving souls. That was Don Pino’s argument in a nutshell. That was all he was interested in. The soul of the man who drove the Land Rover, for example, and who was a kind of odd-job man in Polsi. The judge had entrusted this young man to him after he had been condemned to two years’ imprisonment for attempted murder. He had shot a carabiniere in the face.

“But only with buckshot,” Don Pino said, by way of exculpation.

Back in San Luca, he dropped us off at the bar decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna. It was already dark, and there was no one to be seen in the streets except for the village idiot, who was standing by the fountain playing the mouth organ. Shobha hadn’t said a word on the way back. While Don Pino had been delivering his monologue, she had looked out of the window. When we got to the bar she went straight to the toilet and threw up.

The image of the Madonna of Polsi had also been found in the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg. Along with a .223 caliber American assault rifle, a statue of the Archangel Michael, a picture of the same saint with its head burned, a prayer book, some .280 caliber ammunition, various replacement magazines, and the receipt for a payment of more than 300 euros for an armored Peugeot truck, made out to the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven to Duisburg to get hold of weapons for the next attack on the Nirta-Strangio clan. Marmo had killed the wife of the boss Gianluca Nirta: that was the notorious Christmas assassination that had to be avenged by the bloodbath in Duisburg. Marmo knew that his days were numbered so long as Gianluca Nirta was still alive.

“He has nothing more to lose, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, Marco Marmo’s assistant, who drove with him to Duisburg. There’s something unreal about standing in the bar in San Luca and thinking about the wiretap records of the conversations held there. When Michele Carabetta had talked to his sister Sonia, all they spoke about was weapons, “deer” that had appeared in the village (the term they used for policemen in those parts), house searches by the carabinieri, wigs and makeup for hiding scars, messages, and ferrying people around in jeeps. About “them” and “us.” And as I stood at the bar drinking my espresso, I wondered whether the man standing next to me eating his cream pastry mightn’t have been shifting a consignment of bazookas the previous day.

A few days later, Shobha and I decided to take a look at the house that stood over the Pelle-Vottari clan’s bunker—not the only one in San Luca, incidentally. The important families of San Luca had holed up at the edge of the village in fortresses, five-story concrete castles. The Pelle-Vottari family had built one such. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by a five-meter-high steel fence. Because the bunker underneath it had been sealed and impounded, we thought the house was empty. A false assumption, as it turned out.

First we just heard a sound. A hoarse cry, then a dull rumble, and at last the automatic gate opened. Like a herd of wildly snorting bulls, ten men came charging down the drive. Quivering, bobbing, and cursing, they stood in our way, and in the way of our car. They demanded that Shobha hand over her camera and grabbed for my notebook. The youngest of them was twenty years old at most; they wore white Dolce & Gabbana T-shirts and their hair was gelled into spikes. They hissed: “Piss off, you miserable whores.” They were boys who pressed their teeth tightly together until their lower jaws trembled. Only one of them was older, perhaps fifty; with his padded waistcoat, he looked like a shepherd coming back from vespers. The men were being urged on by an old woman in a black pleated skirt. “Break their knees!” she cried. Their faces contorted with fury, the young men rubbed their fists as if they’d already started thumping us. They pressed so close to us that we could smell their breath. “You stupid bitches, we’re going to smash your heads in.”

As they doubtless would have done if a police patrol hadn’t arrived and stopped them. A plump policeman got out and pushed the men aside. His voice sounded like a woman’s. There was something surreal about standing at the end of this cul-de-sac, between hate-filled mafiosi and a high-pitched policeman trying to calm them down. It was our good fortune that the Duisburg attack had already attracted far too much attention. The Italian secret services had reported on attempts by ’Ndrangheta families to bring about a cease-fire in San Luca. Because if the Duisburg murders were properly avenged, there was a danger that Europe would become aware of the problem that the ’Ndrangheta represented. And the Calabrian Mafia desperately wanted to prevent that. According to the famous Agenda 2000, the European Union’s sponsorship program, huge amounts of European money is flowing into Calabria, and thus into the hands of the Mafia. “Measures to remove imbalances between the regions,” they call it in Brussels. That’s why they want peace in San Luca. And that was why we were able to get back into our car and drive away.

After that, Shobha and I thought it might be a good idea to give San Luca a wide berth for the rest of our Calabrian story. We decided to drive to Locri, just a few miles away from San Luca. The name of Locri has a strong resonance in Italy: in Locri the regional politician Francesco Fortugno was killed by ’Ndrangheta assassins in 2005, and it was here, shortly afterward, that the Calabrian anti-Mafia movement Ammazzateci tutti, “Kill all of us!” was founded—an organization that emerged from a student group and called for a revolt against the ’Ndrangheta. However, it was Sunday, and Locri was nothing but a main street with deserted-looking houses. We walked across an empty, rectangular piazza planted with withered jasmine bushes. Along uneven pavements and potholed tarmac. Locri was the essence of nothingness. No cinema, no theater, no museum, no traffic.

In the only bar that was open a man told us that a procession in honor of the Madonna of the Clairvoyance would be taking place that afternoon. The high point of Locri life. Outside the church the usual stands stood ready for the visitors attending the procession—selling drills, spanners, and steering wheels, gingerbread and popcorn. The brass band from Gerace was waiting there already, in Madonna-blue suits with sky-blue ties. The faithful were sitting in the church saying their Ave Marias. The parish priest played casually with his rosary and strolled along the rows of the faithful, like a beautiful woman who’s aware of the eyes of her admirers on her.

Shobha was bored; we were actually used to better processions than this one. The impressive Good Friday processions in Trapani. The spectacular Santa Rosalia procession in Palermo. And here there was nothing to see but popcorn and drills, women dressed in black—and a nun who approached us with undisguised hostility and ordered us to leave the procession straightaway: “If you want to take a picture, you need a permit!”

We ignored the nun’s baleful looks. When the Madonna left the church under her sky-blue baldachin, the priest, who still has a certain standing here, tried to fan the hostility through his loudspeaker by ordering disbelievers to leave the procession. Then he walked ahead, followed by white-clad acolytes, like a pop star leading his fans. Many women in the procession walked barefoot. As the Madonna was carried, swaying on a bouquet of roses, past the houses, the people waiting on their balconies fell to their knees. One man kissed the hem of the Madonna’s robe, and an old woman in a red dressing gown ran onto the balcony to greet the Madonna with loud, smacking kisses. The priest was still playing with his rosary.

And we walked along with the others. Driven by bull-headedness and boundless amazement at how it’s possible to kiss the hem of the Madonna’s robe and at the same time turn a blind eye to the Mafia. Only a few yards away from the church there stood a charred bookshop with the carabinieri seal on its door: clearly the owner had refused to pay protection money.

When we left Locri and drove back along the coast road to Reggio Calabria the night had swallowed everything, the ruined buildings and the sea, and even the wreck of the illegal tugboat rusting away on the beach. Suddenly a car braked sharply in front of us, and we saw something flying through the air. It was an Indian migrant worker who had been riding his bicycle and was now lying in a pool of blood. When I bent over him, he asked: “Are you my mother?” Then he lost consciousness. So he wasn’t aware of the car that had just knocked him down suddenly driving away. A man watched the disappearing car and said by way of exculpation: “Maybe he was just scared.” Certainly, it could have happened somewhere else. But still.

Seven months later I would read in La Repubblica that the carabinieri had managed another devastating strike against the ’Ndrangheta of San Luca: nine suspects had been arrested, including the head of the Pelle-Vottari clan, Giuseppe Pelle, who had, according to the Ministry of the Interior, been one of the thirty most dangerous Mafia fugitives in Italy. Later, on the news, when I saw him being led away and cursing the journalists as they watched, I recognized him: he was one of the men who had run out of the Pelle-Vottari house and threatened us. Giuseppe Pelle was the oldest one—the one in the padded waistcoat who had looked like a shepherd coming back from vespers. I wondered why the carabinieri hadn’t come up with the same idea as we had, only earlier: just dropping in at the Pelle-Vottari house. Perhaps if they had done so, they’d have been able to catch Giuseppe Pelle, one of the thirty most dangerous Mafia fugitives in Italy, while he was having his midday snooze.

It’s nighttime and we’re still sitting in the Fresco in Palermo. The floodlight from the prison opposite darkens the sky so that we can’t see any stars.

“I’m never going back to Calabria,” says Shobha. “You can do what you like.”

Our couscous has gone cold by now. The waitress brings us the bill and starts impatiently clearing the tables while we’re still wondering where to take a picture of Shobha’s mother. In Mondello? Too pretty. Outside the Palace of Justice? Too melodramatic. At the Vucciria market? Too folksy. In the end, we put off the decision until morning. The pianist gets his scores in order and shuts the lid of the piano. “Let’s just get out of here,” says Shobha. “Otherwise he’ll want to come with us.”

I bring Shobha to her front door and then walk back to the hotel. Past the jacaranda trees of the Piazza Politeama, past the Piazza Olivella, past rotting walls that are just held together by faded posters advertising singers called things like Mimmo or Pippo, with their shirt collars turned up. The cobbles look as if they’re sweating. It smells, as always, of damp warmth. Of petrol. And of the dark soil of Africa.

LETIZIA

I’M SITTING IN THE BREAKFAST ROOM OF THE CENTRALE, TRYING in vain to order some tea. The old maître d’ stands in the corner like a monument that comes to life only intermittently, and all the other waiters are chatting so excitedly that I don’t dare to disturb them. Because as they stand in front of the stucco rosettes, with their slicked-back black hair and blood-red brocade waistcoats over white shirts, they look like figures from novels, as if their thoughts, longings, and goals were somehow sublime, extraordinary, perhaps even heroic, even if in reality they’re only talking about when they can finally get around to dismantling the breakfast buffet.

Two female English tourists run their fingertips across their street map in search of the Capuchin Crypt; an Italian businessman with an imposing knot in his tie flicks through La Repubblica. I wonder what sort of business he’s going to be doing in Palermo. Selling surgical instruments, maybe? Private clinics are a flourishing branch of Cosa Nostra business, financed by the Italian state. While public hospitals are crumbling, half of the Sicilian domestic budget is flowing into the health service, with 1,800 private practices and clinics recognized by the state and financed by the region. By way of comparison, in Lombardy it’s sixty.

Many of these state-recognized and regionally financed private clinics are run by Mafia bosses. The mafia has learned that public commissions can bring in risk-free money. Unlike the drug trade, the penalties for misuse of public contracts are extremely low.

Judging by the knot in his tie, the man could also be a lawyer. Lawyers who come to Sicily for Mafia trials often stay at the Centrale. In fact, it was a lawyer who recommended the Centrale Palace to me, a woman who regularly traveled on Mafia-related business. She traveled from one courthouse to another defending turncoat mafiosi, ten days in Rome, a week in Florence, two days in Venice, a week in Palermo. After she had spent her day in the “aula bunker,” the high-security courtroom where she passed hours listening to how her clients had shot, dismembered, and burned people, she spent her evenings in her room in the Centrale, watching cartoons.

One of her most famous clients was the Mafia hit man Calogero Ganci: no previous convictions and a hundred murders. One of his victims was his father-in-law. Business is business. When Ganci’s wife found out, she had a nervous breakdown: “Tell me it isn’t true,” she screamed at her husband, “it can’t be true that I’ve slept with my father’s murderer. What am I supposed to tell my children?”

Calogero Ganci had run a butcher and a drapery shop in Palermo. He had never come to the attention of the authorities.

“What scares me most,” the lawyer says, “is knowing about the Mafia’s perfect disguise. When I walk down the street, I’m thinking about how the bus driver could be a mass-murderer, or the man who runs the pharmacy next door.”

I look again at the knot of that tie. And at the two English tourists, who have finally found the way to the Capuchin Crypt and are carefully marking it on their map. And I think: Sicilian paranoia. The man might just be a rep for a travel agency. Or an olive-oil wholesaler. Or a mathematician. And in the breakfast room of the Centrale, Palermo is nothing other than an opulent palace, with red marble columns, capitals and pilasters, chandeliers and mirrored halls, in which the sultry sirocco air and thoughts of the Mafia are kept at bay by an extraordinarily efficient air-conditioning system.

At last, one of the waiters takes pity and brings me a green tea. He looks at me sympathetically. Anyone in Sicily who drinks tea in the morning must be unwell. Or a foreigner. I flick through my moleskin notebook and try to take notes for my interview with Letizia. It’s hard. I’ve known her for so long that I almost feel as if we’re related. Although it would be wrong to imagine that you know everything about your relatives.

Letizia is the first person I met in Palermo, in the spring of 1989—which wasn’t just any old spring, but the Palermo Spring. It was a moment of hope; the world was finally stirring, the concrete was crumbling in the east, and even in Sicily the foundation on which the Mafia had built its power for more than a century seemed to be shifting: for the first time Palermo was run by a mayor who sided with the fight against the Mafia. Leoluca Orlando was seen as a shining light, besieged by journalists from all over the world. Letizia was a protagonist of that spring—not a Sicilian Madonna, but a breathless subversive, a photographer at the service of the revolution, her revolution. A flame-haired rebel who had reinvented herself at the age of thirty-six. Who had transformed herself from a bourgeois Sicilian housewife into a legend, a chain-smoking legend: the first anti-Mafia photographer in Sicily.

Leoluca had appointed her as councillor for quality of life, and Letizia had thrown herself into politics with the same passion that she had previously shown for photography. She installed benches in the city, introduced pedestrian zones, and freed the seafront from the barricades behind which the sea lay hidden as if people were ashamed of it. Today, Letizia’s palms are perhaps the only souvenir of that Palermo Spring, which many people, in 1989, thought would go on forever.

We drove along the seafront in Letizia’s official car and she lit one of her MS cigarettes, which immediately went out in the airstream. Letizia haughtily tried to ignore the fact, because she was too busy talking to the driver about the shortest way from the harbor to the La Favorita park, telling me about the importance of the freshly planted palm trees along the seafront for the rebirth of Palermo, and crying “Amore mio” into the car telephone—it being unclear whether she was referring to her partner, one of the city gardeners under her control, or a fellow combatant in the battle against the Mafia. And every now and again I tried to ask her questions about her calling as a photographer.

Letizia drew on her unlit cigarette and thought it was too banal to talk about her photographs. Basically it had all been quite easy! When she was thirty-six, she had separated from her husband, moved to Milan, and started writing for the communist Sicilian daily newspaper L’Ora as cultural correspondent. And she’d only started taking photographs because stories with photographs sold better than stories without. Art can be as simple as that. Shortly afterward she had moved back to Palermo, where she was appointed photographer-in-chief at L’Ora. Letizia was forty at the time and had just fallen in love with a skinny twenty-two-year-old boy, Franco Zecchin, with whom she was to spend almost twenty years, breathing, taking photographs, sleeping, eating, drinking, dreaming, arguing, and fighting. And talking on the phone. Every two minutes. “Amore mio.”

At last, Letizia and I were invited to lunch by the city gardeners, in the city nursery, near La Favorita park. We ate bread with olive oil and drank red wine, and Letizia moved among the men like a mother, distributing praise and, every now and then, a bit of blame. They chucked around remarks and references that I didn’t understand, and I think Letizia felt a bit sorry for me because I knew so little about that Sicilian planet that she had made it her business to revolutionize. She’d already forgotten that I’d actually come here to write an article about her: it was far more important for her to bring my knowledge about the Mafia up from zero to 100 percent within a week. She bombarded me with names, murders, Mafia connections; she smiled at me if there was something I didn’t understand; she showed me street corners where policemen had been shot down, public prosecutors shredded in a hail of bullets, and unfortunate Mafia bosses executed by their opponents, and explained to me that the reason the city consisted of such endless stretches of road and faceless tower blocks was because the palazzi of the aristocracy, along with their knot gardens, pergolas, and fountains, had been stamped into the ground overnight by the Mafia. In the 1970s, when the Mafia boss Vito Ciancimino was mayor of Palermo, he had issued 4,200 building permits in four years—3,300 of them to a street trader, a night watchman, and two bricklayers, all four of them illiterate and straw men for the Mafia—in an unparalleled building speculation known even today as Il sacco di Palermo, the looting of Palermo—as if marauding mercenaries had passed through the place. And what sounded to my ears like a piece of Sicilian puppet theater was nothing but the absolute, total, submissive capitulation of the city.

Letizia dragged me to the headquarters of a legendary Mafia investigator who had been transferred sideways because of his success and now sat gloomily at an empty desk. The investigator was called Saverio Montalbano. He had Nordic blue eyes and a half-bald crown, because at that time it wasn’t yet fashionable to shave your head. In those days Andrea Camilleri hadn’t yet invented his Commissario Montalbano, and he would certainly have been unsettled to watch this Montalbano being guarded by two bodyguards who drove him around in an armored limousine. I still remember thinking: What a strange country! The policemen need bodyguards!

Saverio Montalbano had been active in Palermo’s mobile task force, where he had been responsible for tracking down Mafia fugitives. He had uncovered the “pizza connection,” the heroin link between America and Sicily. He had, when he was running the mobile task force in Trapani, revealed the connections between Freemasons, leading Christian Democrats, the vice prefect, and the local police chief—and by way of reward the Ministry of the Interior had ordered him to leave Sicily because they could no longer guarantee his safety. After that, he was transferred to the commissariat in San Lorenzo. I found it bizarre that successful policemen in Sicily were rewarded with a disciplinary transfer, but I imagined that soon this would definitely be a thing of the past—after all, we were in the spring of 1989, and everyone had this amazing faith in the future. Everyone except Montalbano. Two of his predecessors had been murdered: Boris Giuliano and Ninni Cassarà. We were sitting in the courtyard of the commissariat, which had once been a monastery, with no sound but the lapping of the fountain and the faint crunch of gravel under the feet of the odd stray cat. And Montalbano clicking his tongue when Letizia asked him if he still believed in the future.

Letizia lived in the old town. Her apartment was filled to the rafters with archive boxes; proclamations were stacked up on the floor, manifestos spread out on tables. In Letizia’s apartment I was reminded of clandestine meetings I had had with Solidarność activists, and I remember finding that connection rather odd: Wasn’t Italy part of the free West? And wasn’t the Mafia a criminal organization? Rather than part of the state, for example?

People were constantly going in and out of Letizia’s house: trade unionists, communists, and women dialect poets; bearded men who had written about the Mafia in their own villages and published their books themselves; singers from ethno-rock groups; and mothers of sons killed by the Mafia—activists in a revolution that was plainly just around the corner. Letizia introduced me to everybody; she explained connections, ideas, and plans, never losing faith in my capacity for lifelong learning. She introduced me to her daughter, Shobha, who was a photographer in the service of the cause, the inheritor of Letizia’s poetic legacy, and was carrying on as a photographer the task that her mother now hoped to accomplish in politics. Together they dragged me to the meeting of the city council in the Palazzo delle Aquile. And as I looked down in amazement at the arguing councillors and wondered how many of them might be mafiosi, Leoluca Orlando sent me a note, which was passed to me by a waiter on a silver tray. On it was written: “The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.”

That small gesture was what won me over to him—that and the trust that Letizia and Shobha placed in him, even though he had once been a Christian Democrat. At the time, the Christian Democrats were irrevocably linked with the Mafia through Andreotti’s connections. Then Shobha and I had waited outside the door of his office until three o’clock in the morning, when Orlando finally granted us an interview.

When I look up from my notebook, a waiter is standing by my table. He inquires impatiently whether he can clear my table. “The breakfast buffet is closing now,” he says. I quickly drink my cold tea and finally leave the table.

Salvo is waiting in the lobby. He is hopping agitatedly from one foot to the other because his cardsharp ladies have already called three times to ask him where he’s got to. Then we make our way painfully slowly through the morning traffic along the Via Roma. Armored limousines with darkened windows force their way past us, along with swarms of Vespa riders. The city swims in the blue of the sky. It smells of exhaust fumes and the sea. I would recognize Palermo with my eyes shut. By its smell, as unsettling as the scent of a strange man. A smell that both attracts and repels. Palermo is always ambivalent. Always beautiful and terrible at the same time. Like a beautiful woman with an eye missing. Like one of those bearded Madonnas sold by the albino below the church of Sant’Antonio Abate. The bearded Madonna can be seen only if you stand at the right angle in front of her picture. If you stand to the left, a bearded Jesus appears. If you look from the right, you see a Madonna with a flaming heart. But if you stand right in the middle you can see them both merging into a Madonna with a beard.

As we drive past, I see the albino gleaming in the shade of his stall. With his white hair and pale skin he looks very vulnerable, so vulnerable that I have to buy a Madonna from him every time I come to Palermo. And he swindles me every time.

Letizia and Shobha live on the top two floors of a 1970s tower block which bears a striking resemblance to an air-raid shelter. The lift cautiously jerks its way up, so slowly that you expect to come out at the twenty-ninth floor, not the ninth. I’m still standing in the doorway when I can hear Shobha on the phone, blowing kisses, Baci, baci, baci, dismissing the caller, Ciao, ciao, ciao, “Yes, yes, see you, no time right now, see you tomorrow.” Clutching two phones, she gives me a sign to say that Letizia is waiting on the floor below.

When I go down the stairs I have to have my hand licked by Letizia’s dog, which she picked up somewhere in Palermo, just like all those foreign journalists she picks up, even now, like orphan children; there’s always someone sitting on her sofa, sometimes it’s a Spanish journalist, sometimes an American—Letizia helps them all, she makes contacts, spurs people on, introduces people, all for the cause. Still. A bit. Sometimes. Often.

For a short time now she’s been living in this apartment whose walls look like the walls of a stalactite cave, as if it was made as a film set for a 1970s domestic drama. If you stand on the terrace, you can see the Ucciardone prison. She herself feels like a prisoner in Palermo, Letizia says. It’s ridiculous, in Germany she was awarded the Dr. Erich Salomon Prize for her Mafia photographs, and in Sicily they want to forget her. She sits in the breeze from the ceiling fan, clutching an unlit cigarette, and says without much of an introduction: “I was happier back then. In 1989 we thought we could change things, in love, in society. We have lost the battle. On every level.”

And then she falls silent and there is no sound but the whirr of the ceiling fan, the panting of her dog, and the roar of the Palermo traffic. The eighties were also the years of the big Mafia wars: the Corleone family assumed power in Palermo; there were killings almost every day. Not just among the mafiosi but also among public prosecutors, judges, police—and Letizia, Franco, and Shobha were always first to the scene. Like all good reporters, they listened to the police radio. And photographed bullet-riddled bodies, pools of blood, and widows in the grip of despair.

“We were unfettered. If we traveled off in an old VW van, it was never for longer than a week, because we couldn’t bear to leave the city for longer than that. We loved Palermo,” Letizia says. And she sounds as if she’s talking about a drug addict that she’s hoped in vain to save.

“Today there is not any anti-Mafia awareness,” she says, brushing her dog aside as he tries to kiss her.

Letizia has always been a plain speaker. She has never tried to prettify anything, ever, and doesn’t see why she should start now. “There’s nothing left,” she says. All those anti-Mafia meetings, symposia, and memorials for the victims were nothing but window dressing, and that’s something she’s always rejected.

When Letizia talks about window dressing, I immediately see an image of the children by the Falcone tree, that huge magnolia below the house where Giovanni Falcone lived. The death of the murdered public prosecutor is commemorated here every year. A stage had been set up next to the magnolia and children stood on it in green baseball caps. The children danced under their teachers’ beady eyes; they read out poems they had written themselves, about a Mafia cockerel that wanted to dictate the law, and sang law-abiding songs.

Standing next to me was a journalist from Corriere della Sera, who noticed my astonishment. Glancing at the stage, he said with a shrug: “An identity ritual. We’re Catholics, we need something like this. Like the processions. We have to keep proving our identity.”

As the children were singing under the magnolia, people remembered Falcone and Borsellino in the “aula bunker,” the high-security courtroom in Ucciardone prison, which had been built for the “maxi-trial,” which would go down in history not only because of its sheer size—474 defendants, of whom 114 were acquitted, the guilty ones being sentenced to a total of 2,665 years’ imprisonment—but also because it was the first in the history of the Italian judiciary from which the Mafia had not emerged victorious. A huge scout camp had been set up in the courtyard of the prison: the law-and-order village. The children wore T-shirts bearing the picture of the murdered public prosecutors. The prison fence was draped with sheets scrawled with words like The Mafia suppresses us or Grow up honest! One teacher went up to her pupils and hissed: “Write something! Write something intelligent!”

Inside, the two prosecutors were commemorated with a lot of speeches, a lot of noisy applause, and television films about the Mafia—films in which the mafiosi looked like action heroes with pump-action shotguns and the public prosecutors looked bold and incorruptible. They love films like that in Palermo, where the Mafia is now once more as invisible as it used to be. Aristocratic among aristocrats, bourgeois among the bourgeoisie. The bosses stopped being shepherds a long time ago, shepherds who could barely speak Italian; now they’re doctors, businessmen, politicians, the so-called white-collar Mafia. Palermo returned to its normality a long time ago. Only rarely are there diplomatic incidents like the one that year when a student asked the minister of the interior, Giuliano Amato, who was attending the Falcone-Borsellino memorial day, what he planned to do about all the MPs with criminal convictions, two of whom were even on the anti-Mafia commission. The minister didn’t say: “They will have to be thrown out.” Instead, he accused the student of being a little populist. A hint of the Eastern bloc wafted through the “aula bunker” and lingered in the air even after the minister had disappeared. A speaker addressed the schoolchildren sitting on the floor: “You are stronger than the Mafia!” And the children cheered, as if they were watching a school play.

“Niente,” says Letizia, and draws on her cigarette. “We’re finished.”

She doesn’t think for a second of lying to herself with the eternal “there’s-no-work-here-and-that’s-why-we’ve-got-the-Mafia” hypocrisy, with the romantic idea of the healing power of culture, as if the Mafia could be got rid of like a typo. In her hoarse voice, she speaks the truth that no one in Italy wants to hear: “Barbarism rules on our island! People are stuck in a lawless mindset!”

“And that wasn’t even Berlusconi’s fault,” she says; the Sicilians had been waiting for him as if he were a seller of dreams, someone who could at last let them forget. Her comrades-inarms fell silent, crept away. Lots of them jumped on the Forza Italia bandwagon, and when Berlusconi was deselected and everyone expected the Prodi government to launch a campaign against the Mafia with renewed zeal, Clemente Mastella was appointed minister of justice. This is a man who is seen as an ardent supporter of Giulio Andreotti and who has also demonstrated a certain familiarity with organized crime: in 2000 he was a witness at the wedding of the Sicilian mafioso Francesco Campanella, who had no hesitation in turning state’s evidence immediately after his arrest. Mastella’s first action in office was to introduce a mass pardon for convicts, benefiting not only Silvio Berlusconi and the Eritrean human-trafficker Ganat Tewelde Barhe, better known as “Madame Gennet,” but also countless mafiosi, who immediately returned to their daily business.

Anti-Mafia public prosecutors uncovering the connection between politicians and the Mafia had long been isolated in the Anti-Mafia Pool. Some were withdrawn from investigations, and Leoluca Orlando, too, failed in his attempt to win back the city for himself. In Letizia’s eyes, Orlando was the only one capable of restoring the city’s dreams. He stood for mayor and only narrowly lost the election to the Forza Italia candidate. There was the usual talk of election fraud. It was said that people had been told to take pictures of their ballot papers with their telefonini to prove to the bosses that they had followed their electoral recommendations. In vain Orlando demanded that the election be declared invalid. A year later, the public prosecutor’s office brought an action for proven electoral fraud and arrested two electoral district officers.

For a long time, Palermo has been governed by a triad of mayor, regional president, and president of the council. Political best buddies, who won’t be shaken by allegations of electoral shenanigans. The innovations of the last mayor, Diego Cammarata, stopped with the introduction of two double-decker buses for sightseeing tours. And the next thing he did was to commission a lawyer to take action against any journalist who criticized the city administration. Regional President Totò Cuffaro was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia and was forced to step down, but found brief consolation with a seat in the senate until his prison term began. He was replaced as regional president by a soul mate, his former party colleague Raffaele Lombardo. And the former council president Gianfranco Miccichè is a close friend of Marcello Dell’Utri, the senator and companion of Berlusconi who was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia.

“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 neo-cons 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.

PADRE FRITTITTA

LETIZIA’S DOG WAKES UP WHEN HE HEARS SHOBHA’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.

Of course, Pietro Aglieri’s involvement in the assassinations of the two public prosecutors, Falcone and Borsellino, was a grave matter even in the eyes of Padre Frittitta, not to mention the thirteen other accusations of murder—involvement in the murders of general public prosecutor Antonino Scopelliti, the MP Salvo Lima, the sisters of the turncoat mafioso Marino Mannoia, and murders during the Mafia war in 1983. But still.

“However, it was right for me to go there,” Padre Frittitta whispered, “it was right, because Jesus preached: ‘Go out and bring back the lost sheep!’ So I went. Because this individual had to change. The church must help these people: they too have dignity; they too have a soul that shouldn’t be kicked and battered with laws. Laws, laws, of course, but to achieve what? What?”

As he spoke, his gaze slipped across the pews to the wooden crucifix, the crown of thorns, the wounds, to Jesus, his legs polished smooth by the hands of the faithful who touched him during the Easter processions. “And Jesus went to the sinners,” Padre Frittitta whispered. “Yes, he went to them, so I went to them too, and I knew that I was taking a risk.”

Fury sprayed from his mouth in fine droplets of saliva, incessant, dense, and sticky. After all, everyone in Palermo knew how devout the Aglieri family was. Her son believed in God, Pietro Aglieri’s mother herself had insisted; he wasn’t pretending, he respected the Christian commandments, and all the things that had been circulated about him were false. His sister lived in a closed order, his cousin was chaplain at the Palermo polyclinic, an aunt was a nun, and Pietro Aglieri himself had attended the archiepiscopal seminary in Palermo, where he had acquired his knowledge of Latin and Greek.

“These people must be saved,” whispered Padre Frittitta, “and it’s not prison that saves them, not solitary confinement, no. Certainly, they must make good their injustice, that’s one thing, but the other thing is surely to convert them. And that requires someone who will sow supernatural, moral values in them. And only the church can do that!”

Padre Frittitta groaned, as if he were living through it all again: the policeman arresting him, the dazzling flashlights as he was dragged from his church in handcuffs—all the humiliations, all the insults, all the indignities still lay heavy on his heart.

Then, on the evening news, the whole of Italy had been able to see the pictures of Pietro Aglieri’s hiding place with its little chapel, its prayer stools, the statue of Saint Francis, the Bible, the gospels, the books by Edith Stein, and the files of the Second Vatican Council, crumpled and scattered on the floor. The newspapers reported how after his arrest Pietro Aglieri had spent hours in solitary confinement immersed in prayer and said at last: “I have repented before God.” Which, admittedly, he said more to himself than to the policeman who had opened the door and asked with surprise: “You want to repent?” And Aglieri had replied: “Before God. Not before you.”

Padre Frittitta wouldn’t have expected anything else of him. Who cares about earthly justice?

It’s heavenly justice that Cosa Nostra hopes for. Earthly justice it creates itself. Trials can be fixed, judges and politicians bought. The turncoat mafioso Leonardo Messina said: “Of course my wife and I are religious. I was taught that the Mafia exists in order to administer justice. So there is no contradiction. On the contrary, it’s now that I feel like more of a traitor. Before, when I was a murderer, I was relaxed as I walked into the church. Now that I’m a turncoat I can no longer pray with a clear conscience.”

When Nitto Santapaola, the boss of the Catania Mafia family, was arrested, before the handcuffs were put on him he picked up the Bible and kissed it. And when the boss Michele Greco, known as il Papa, the Pope, was called to account for hundreds of murders at the maxi-trial, he merely remarked: “I have an invaluable gift—inner peace.” On the bedside table in his prison cell there were four books that he read to make his life sentence go by more quickly: the gospels, a prayer book entitled Pray, Pray, and two liturgical books.

The reference library of Mafia boss Totò Riina is very similar: he never sleeps without pictures of the saints at the head of his prison bed. And Bernardo Provenzano’s knowledge of the Bible is legendary. When he was arrested at the end of his forty-two years, eleven months, and two days in Corleone, the police found five Bibles with annotations and passages underlined. At his desk the boss surrounded himself with pictures of the saints, the Last Supper framed in dark wood, the Mother of God in various versions, a calendar with a picture of Padre Pio, the boss’s favorite saint. There was even a rosary in the bathroom. After Provenzano’s arrest, the police counted ninety-one sacred statues, seventy-three of them Christ figures with the inscription Jesus, I put my trust in you. No one was surprised that Provenzano’s messages, the pizzini, those little pieces of paper, folded and sealed with adhesive tape, with which he managed to remain invisible in the age of the Internet, bugs, and satellite surveillance, always ended with the same phrase: May the Lord bless and protect you.

The messages to his followers, delivered in the solemn and affectionate tone of a good father, were typed up by Provenzano on a typewriter. When he was arrested, thirty little pieces of paper were ready to be collected and distributed to their addressees. The Provenzano code didn’t just consist of numbers—the boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo was no. 30, his son no. 31; only the boss Matteo Messina Denaro had the honor of being addressed by a code name, “Alessio”—but also his own personal, individual spelling: Provenzano wrote as he spoke, he confused t and d, g and c, in line with Sicilian dialect. But the lines of prayer and Bible quotations were by no means an expression of religious fanaticism; they were the vehicle of a secret code. When the boss Pino Lipari received a prison visit from his son Arturo, it concerned the content of the piece of paper that Arturo had copied down for his arrested father. The content had not been complete, his father complained. When his son justified himself by saying that there had been a lot of Ave Marias in the message, to which he hadn’t paid much attention, his father rebuked him: “Next time, copy out everything, because in the middle of all those Ave Marias there’s something that I need to understand, have you got that?”

The commandments of the church are the commandments of the Mafia. But for the Mafia the significance of the commandments is less ethical than practical. God exists in order to be useful to Cosa Nostra.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me: The boss is infallible, a padre eterno, God’s vicar on earth, master over life and death.

Honor thy father and thy mother: The preservation of the family goes above all else, even one’s own life. But only so long as individual family members don’t tread the dignity of a man of honor, the clan, or Cosa Nostra itself into the mud—a sister who has an extramarital affair that the whole town talks about has forfeited her life.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor: Mafiosi are obliged to be completely honest with one another. A man of honor never lies. Either he says nothing or he tells the truth, because his honesty is of crucial importance to the survival of Cosa Nostra.

Thou shalt not commit adultery: A mafioso may not deceive his wife: the mother of his children could become an unpredictable security risk if the extramarital relationship came to light. And a lover is often less easily tamed than a wife. Besides, a mafioso who is known to have affairs is seen as someone incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally, which means that he isn’t professionally trustworthy.

There is only one Christian commandment that has not been taken onboard by Cosa Nostra: Thou shalt not kill. But can a job be a sin? A man of honor kills without passion. For him, to kill is to fulfill one’s duty—to his state, his people, Cosa Nostra, which he is sworn to serve, since the all-powerful godfather said: “Now you no longer belong to this world. Now you are our business. Cosa Nostra.”

Do they have guilt feelings? “Does a judge have guilt feelings when he sentences a defendant to the electric chair or life imprisonment?” the turncoat mafioso Tommaso Buscetta once asked, and told the story of the mafioso who, before every murder, used to light a candle in front of the statue of Jesus and pray: “Jesus Christ, take him! Take him to you!” But God did not hear his plea. So the mafioso carried out the murder himself. After that he prayed again: “Dear God, you didn’t want him. I have sent him to you.” And before every murder the hit man Leoluca Bagarella went to church to pray: “Lord, you alone know that they are the ones who want to be killed. No guilt attaches to me.”

Since its origins, Cosa Nostra has tried to merge with the world in which it lives and from which it was born. That is crucial to its survival. The Mafia wants to be invisible; it wants to be part of society. It has always relied upon the Italian dislike of the state, and for centuries it has successfully sold the illusion of fighting for a higher justice—as if it were fighting for justice for the individual against a powerful state. This is something it has in common with the Catholic Church, which struggles to comply with the demands of earthly justice. In large parts of southern Italy the state is still seen as an occupying power—as if the Normans, the Hohenstaufen, the Bourbons, the Aragonese and Austrians had passed through here only yesterday.

As pragmatic as Cosa Nostra is, it would never dare call the church into question. Even in the third millennium, Italy is still a country where, every day, if not the Pope then at least one of his cardinals appears on television, addresses his subjects, and urges them to have more children, fewer divorces, to play more sport and use less homeopathic medicine.

The church fears for souls, the Mafia for its sinecure. And for that reason the Carmelite monks defended their fellow priest Padre Frittitta and instructed the public prosecutor’s office that the church was never against anything, not even Cosa Nostra, but only ever with: with the tormented souls, with every individual sinner who needed salvation. And Novica, a journal close to the Palermo curia, said this: “Even the most wanted mafioso in the world must be sure that at any time of day or night he can find a cleric who will hand him over neither to the public prosecutor’s office nor to police headquarters.”

“And through whose fault was Christ nailed to the cross?” whispered Padre Frittitta. “Through the fault of people who had sinned! Through the fault of us sinners! Should I have torn the passion story out of the gospels? Jesus is not only the Jesus of blessedness, but also the Jesus of the passion. That’s why I went.”

That’s what Padre Frittitta says. And I remember that at some point I lost all feeling in my arm. When I turned the tape recorder off I noticed a faint feeling of dizziness. The heat. The lilies. The incense. The smell of old men. Just before I reached the sacristy I fainted. When I woke up again I saw Padre Frittitta bending over me, rubbing a liquid that smelled like Melissa oil over my face, neck, and cleavage, and a deathly pale Shobha dashing in and yelling excitedly: “What’s going on here? What’s happened?” To which Padre Frittitta, bright red in the face, replied: “Nothing, nothing, nothing!”

Later, as I was washing my face with cold water, he asked Shobha in a whisper what state my faith was in. Shobha assured him that my faith was firmly rooted.

“Is she religious?” he persisted.

“Very religious,” said Shoba. “She would never miss a procession.”

When we were saying good-bye, Padre Frittitta offered us a peppermint each. I took one. Shobha turned hers down.

“You are a skeptic,” Padre Frittitta said reproachfully.

CORLEONE

PEOPLE NEED VALUES. EVEN MEN OF HONOR, WHO BELIEVE IN nothing but the power of Cosa Nostra, need a system to provide them with values and bring them into line. Every value system that strives for the absolute, regardless of whether it’s communism or the Catholic Church, gives its devotees not just a complete image of the world, a tight-fitting corset of rules and codes for good behavior, but an ideological foundation as well. The communists justify their thirst for power by leading people to freedom, to equality, to fraternity. To the victory of the proletariat, the eradication of capitalist oppression. The Catholic Church promises its believers salvation and eternal life. The Mafia, on the other hand, can give no metaphysical foundation for its thirst for power. It has no ideological foundation on which to build its system. That’s why it needs religion. Using the components of the Catholic faith, it has constructed God in its own image. The God of a tooth for a tooth. The God of the chosen people. The God who leveled Sodom and Gomorrah. A bloodthirsty God.

I was glad that a few days after my meeting with Padre Frittitta I was able to meet a cleric who had always spoken out against the close alliance between church and Mafia. The Sicilian Redemptorist padre Nino Fasullo bears the label of an “anti-Mafia priest,” because even today it isn’t obvious that anyone should be opposed to the Mafia. Not priests, not public prosecutors. “For a phenomenon like the Mafia, which has no intellectual justification at all, religion may represent the only ideological apparatus to which it can refer,” Padre Fasullo said. I met him in his bare office on the periphery of Palermo. He sat at his desk in a plain checked shirt, no habit, no aura of illumination, no incense.

“There isn’t a single mafioso who isn’t religious,” said Padre Fasullo, and his voice sounded agonized. All the articles he had written on the subject of church and Mafia! All the lectures he had given! Endless. He sighed.

“You know,” he said slowly, “the church is holy and sinful at the same time. It is clean and dirty, beautiful and ugly. We’re all in the church. Even the Mafia. Unfortunately. The church is embroiled in it. But regrettably not everyone in the church is convinced that opposition to the Mafia is necessary.”

What model is the anti-Mafia priest supposed to refer to when even the Archbishop of Monreale, the largest and wealthiest diocese in Sicily, had been up before the court for accepting bribes for the awarding of building contracts? Monreale has the highest Mafia density in Sicily. The diocese includes the little towns of Corleone and San Giuseppe Jato, Prizzi and Carini.

Padre Nino Fasullo despaired over all those pursed lips, the lowered eyes and closed ears of his colleagues. “So confession is no longer the sacrament of mercy and forgiveness, of freedom and courage, but the graveyard of morality?” he asked. And then he pointed out that hardly anything has changed since the 1960s—a time famous for a bon mot of the Archbishop of Palermo, Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, who said: “Mafia? Isn’t that a brand of soap?” Ruffini played down the Mafia to Pope Paul VI as a quantité négligeable, a band of petty criminals invented by the left in order to discredit Sicily, the Christian Democrats, and the church. The only one who had delivered moral sermons, who had condemned the Mafia as the spawn of the devil and called upon mafiosi to convert, had been John Paul II.

Of course that had been useful, said Padre Fasullo. A useful indignation. But. But it’s a long time ago. And Pope Benedict XVI hadn’t voiced nearly as much indignation against the Mafia. Even today there isn’t a single official church anti-Mafia document for public reference.

“In fact, the church, paradoxical though it may sound, has become the Mafia’s ethical point of reference,” Padre Fasullo said bitterly. “Over time an almost blind relationship of trust has established itself between them. You might even say, church and Mafia have, for various and contradictory reasons, found one another in their common desire for conservatism.”

When, on the pavement in front of the church, I tell Salvo about my fainting fit in the company of Padre Frittitta, I am careful to add: “And even today Shobha believes that Padre Frittitta put a spell on me.” I can’t persuade her otherwise, however convincingly I point out that it had been very sultry a moment before, that I have a tendency toward low blood pressure anyway, and have even fainted in the cinema, in the middle of The Silence of the Lambs.

“Ma,” Shobha says once more, as soon as she’s standing in front of Frittitta’s church. A ma which, in this case, means “you can say what you like.” And as if to ward off a curse, she decides to take Letizia’s picture not outside the church but a few yards farther on, in front of the tufa stone of the Porta Felice.

Luckily, Padre Frittitta is nowhere to be seen. We step inside the church for a moment, but neither inside, among the figures of the saints, nor outside, among all the Sicilian baroque of the Kalsa, where fish tails spill from the stone, dwarfs ride along on fanciful horses, and centaurs stick their tongues out at visitors, is a trace of his brown Carmelite habit to be seen. I wonder what the old men sitting in the shade of a bar not far from the Porta Felice think about him? As we approach them they are staring as steadfastly at the passing traffic as if it were about to bring them eternal salvation. Until Letizia appears and embroils them in a conversation, just as she used to when she was city councillor for quality of life and talked to the people about their town—which many Palermitans found almost impossible to believe. She looks at the holes in the pavement and tells the men that when she lived abroad she always took pictures of things she wanted to see in Palermo: beautiful pavements, public toilets, museums. “Strange, isn’t it?”

The old men giggle as if Letizia had said something salacious. One of them flicks through a copy of La Repubblica, which shows a photograph of Giuseppe Riina, the son of the Mafia boss Totò Riina, in a cashmere sweater and down waistcoat, wearing his shirttails fashionably outside his trousers, leaving prison, getting into an S-series Mercedes, and, accompanied by his sister and mother, going back to Corleone as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Even though he had been sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment, he was able to leave prison because too much time had elapsed between the judgments of the first and second instances. As soon as he arrived in Corleone, this son of the Mafia announced that he would shortly be taking his case to the European Court of Human Rights and bringing proceedings against the Italian state for the excessive length of his sentence.

Letizia watches over the men’s shoulders, points to the picture of the S-series Mercedes and says: “So, bearing in mind that in theory the entire property of the Riina family should be confiscated. . . .”

“Only in theory,” says one of the men.

In Corleone the children of the bosses now have the final word: they ensure continuity. A continuity that has continued for centuries. Every time I go to Corleone I look for changes and find none. The very first time I came to the city, in 1979, I was disappointed. I was a student and had driven straight from the Ruhr to Corleone in a rusty Renault 4 because I’d been such a fan of The Godfather. And then I saw a town that looked like a meteorite hurled by a giant into a rocky landscape. Grey, bare stone houses, electric wires leading nowhere. Suspicious glances behind fly-curtains. A town without a soul. Not a hint of Mario Puzo. Not a trace of that flaming lion heart promised by the Italian name Corleone.

I had no sense at the time that I was in Corleone at the precise moment when the village was striving for higher things. In the 1980s it was the boss Luciano Liggio who, along with Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, first brought the Corleonesi to the top of Cosa Nostra, which had traditionally been reserved for the Mafia of Palermo. Until then, Corleone had been a little Mafia village like many others—one that, apart from its walk-on role in The Godfather, had no remarkable features whatsoever. But this would soon change, in accordance with the will of the bosses. For almost thirty years, the Mafia of Corleone would lead Cosa Nostra, with Totò Riina ruling violently both at home and abroad, becoming responsible for what was probably the most bloodthirsty era of Cosa Nostra, which would reach its climax in the assassinations of the public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. Ruling along with his brother-in-law, Leoluca Bagarella, and with Bernardo Provenzano, the diplomat who succeeded in allowing Cosa Nostra to slip back into its cloak of invisibility. Who staunched the hemorrhage of turncoat mafiosi and reestablished a social consensus. Because the secret of the Mafia’s survival lies in the fact that it hasn’t fought against the state and society but has lived in and with them.

Even today, I wonder about Corleone’s piety—not least, perhaps, because I know that Corleone is the town of a hundred churches. The Chiesa Madre right next to the town hall is so big that I lose my way in it. There is said to be room for all of the inhabitants of the town inside it.

As Shobha and I walked through Corleone in search of godliness, we relied on chance, as ever. We simply strolled through the alleyways, stepped inside the churches, and hoped to fall into conversation with a priest. In the Chiesa Madre we met Father Vincenzo Pizzitola, the parish priest. Grey-haired, bent, and with sagging features, he dragged himself down the passageways and took refuge, so to speak, in an endless evocation of Corleone’s saints, the blessed and the anointed: San Leoluca, Corleone’s patron saint, keeping guard in a niche; the Capuchin monk Fra Bernardo in the nave aisle, one of the best sword-fighters in Sicily, who entered the monastery because he couldn’t get over the death of an opponent; San Martino, the church’s titular saint; San Placido, the martyr, also in bits—rotting away in a glass sarcophagus, a piece of his skull, his arm, his heart. Along with dusty pink plastic flowers.

Corleone. City of saints. The priest didn’t mention the doctor Michele Navarra. Michele Navarra wasn’t just a physician in Corleone; he was also president of the farmers’ association, a trustee of the farmers’ union, and supervisor of the region’s health insurance body. Even today, one of the front pews bears his nameplate. The godfather of the postwar period. His name was once uttered in Corleone with the same respect as that of San Leoluca. They called him u patri nostru and crossed themselves.

One of the adversaries of Michele Navarra was the trade unionist Placido Rizzotto. Navarra commissioned his foster-son Luciano Liggio to remove the trade unionist. Liggio made his victim kneel and shot him three times in the head. The only witness to the murder was little Giuseppe Letizia, who had been watching sheep nearby. Dr. Navarra had no qualms about personally killing the child with a fatal injection.

Day in, day out, the priest walked past that pew. “I don’t know which pew you’re talking about,” he croaked. “Navarra, Navarra, I don’t even know who that Navarra was, there are countless Navarras here, and anyway I wasn’t even here when this pew was made.

“The Mafia! The Mafia! As if there was nothing else in Corleone. I don’t want to comment on the subject, but there’s one thing you should know: the anti-Mafia can become a form of Mafia too!”

He gasped for air and for his words, which had escaped from his mouth so quickly. He wouldn’t hear a word about the Riinas, the Provenzanos, the Bagarellas, all the butchers who had sprung from Corleone’s womb and whose wives still say their Ave Marias here.

On Sunday Bernardo Provenzano’s wife goes to early mass in this church. Una signora. A Sicilian journalist once asked her if she feared the judgment of the courts.

“I acknowledge only divine justice,” she snapped back. “I no longer believe in justice on earth. I am answerable only to God. He alone will judge us, and he will do it impartially. He alone knows everything, he alone sees everything.”

Shortly after the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, in 1992, she had come back to Corleone, along with the two sons to whom she had secretly given birth, at the same time as Totò Riina’s wife, Antonietta, and her four children. Riina had been arrested and Bernardo Provenzano had taken over the business of Cosa Nostra as the new godfather. The women and their children arrived out of nowhere in a taxi and moved back into the house where they had lived before. Corleone welcomed them both without raising an eyebrow.

“I’m not afraid,” said Father Pizzitola, when I asked about Provenzano’s wife. His voice was trembling. As if ashamed of his weakness, he corrected himself quickly and said: “Of course, I mean I’m not afraid of journalists’ questions.”

As always, Corleone lay there like an endless Sunday afternoon. Only the old men had been sent into the street. With cautious boredom, they kept an eye out for unfamiliar car number plates. On these cobblestones the bosses accompanied the processions—the Riinas, the Provenzanos, the Liggios—they paid the carriers, those poor devils who earn a few centesimi by lugging the crucifix on Good Friday, the statue of Santa Rosalia on the first Sunday in June, and the glass sarcophagus of the martyr San Placido on his name day on the first Sunday in October. The procession usually stopped outside the house of the boss to give him an opportunity to greet the saints with a barely perceptible nod of the head. And that’s how it is even today. With only one small difference, that it’s the next generation that keeps the ritual going. The women and children of the bosses step out onto the narrow balcony, cross themselves in the presence of the saints, and rain rose petals down on them.

“When I married, I swore loyalty to my wife and the Mafia,” the turncoat mafioso Leonardo Messina told the public prosecutors. “The priest? What was he supposed to say? Do you think he didn’t know who paid for the feasts of the saints?” And then the mafioso added that he had always walked beside Sant’Annunziata in the procession: the meaning was there for anyone who wanted to understand.

There’s no such thing as chance in Sicily. Not an unthought gesture, not an unconsidered word. The procession is a ritual. From the procession, Sicilians read the distribution of power in their town and their community—who is allowed to carry the saint out of the church, who walks in front of the priest, who behind. Who collected the money for the feast of the Madonna del Carmine, who is granted the right to march in front of the baldachin. Who wears an absent expression as the procession advances down the alleyways, who makes a special effort during the cries of “Viva la Maria.” They all know about the sacredness of this ritual for the community. And the costs. Processions are expensive, all those garlands, lightbulbs, gun salutes, brass bands, fireworks—the priests know that the alms of the poor aren’t enough. Neither are they enough for the new stucco frieze, the new organ, the new chandeliers. In the end, one hopes, where possible, for certain concessions. Totò Riina didn’t have to give up the idea of a church wedding even when he was living underground. Don Agostino Coppola, the legendary Mafia priest who died under house arrest, married him to his fiancée, Antonietta, in the spring of 1974, and christened each of their four children.

Those priests who refused to understand the messages would receive a visit from the men of honor during the religious service, contrary to their custom of attending mass only on solemn feast days. Because a boss doesn’t like to make a display of his faith—confession and religious services are women’s business. But if it was unavoidable, they would take a seat in the front row and stare at the priest until he understood and got himself transferred to the missionary program. If he refused to understand, and even fired up the young people against Cosa Nostra, he would be shot in the back of the head, like Padre Puglisi in Palermo.

In 1993 the murder of the anti-Mafia priest Giuseppe Puglisi was arranged by the Graviano brothers. And seven years later his murderer, Salvatore Grigoli, said: “Padre Puglisi’s lips closed. He smiled. Gentle, cheerful, but also resigned. He only whispered a single sentence: ‘I expected this.’ I will never forget his smile.”

By that time Grigoli already had ninety murders behind him and asked for a meeting with the Pope. The beatification process for Padre Puglisi has been going on for years. His murderer’s statement is seen as an important piece of evidence for the process. Some clerics were surprised by the church’s urgent desire to beatify Padre Puglisi, because, just a short time before, the cardinal had shown his violent opposition to an anti-Mafia document: no one wanted an anti-Mafia pastoral letter. But they did want an anti-Mafia saint.

All this is pure show, however. We’d be better off going to the theater, Padre Fasullo had bitterly observed.

Letizia is still standing in the bar beside the old men, reading on in the article about the release of Totò Riina’s son from prison. Shobha takes pictures as her mother reads from the article, standing among the old men. At last, we take our leave and walk a few yards along the seafront. Plastic bags drift among the palm trees planted by Letizia; the flower beds are full of detergent bottles and rotting mattresses.

“I used to feel as responsible for Palermo as a mother feels for a handicapped child,” says Letizia. Used to.

Then we walk on, toward the Foro Italico, to have an espresso. In fact, the bar is an ice-cream parlor, of the kind that is the destination for the Sunday afternoon family stroll. And perhaps that’s what makes Letizia slide uneasily around on her chair. She hates all the places where the well-to-do of Palermo put themselves on display. Not for nothing has she spent her whole life fighting against that. She fought against the pusillanimous bourgeoisie, against clapped-out moral ideas, and against arrogant Sicilian menfolk. She fought against her own family.

As the daughter of lower-middle-class Sicilian parents who strove for better things, she grew up until the age of eight in Trieste, where her parents had moved for work. When she returned to Palermo, she attended a convent school, and her father locked her in the house in the afternoon because it wasn’t seemly for a little girl to play outside. To escape her father, at the age of sixteen she married the first boy who asked her. She married as a virgin. At her wedding she wore a pink lace hat by the French fashion designer Jacques Fath. Her husband was the scion of a Sicilian coffee-roasting dynasty. She gave him three daughters, one after the other. When she expressed the desire to study, her husband declared that she had gone insane. For fifteen years she led the life of a Sicilian wife, then she suffered a collapse, a psychologically induced heart attack. Her husband sent her to the best doctors in Italy and to Switzerland for a sleeping cure, and, when nothing worked, to a psychotherapist in Palermo. Letizia spent years in psychoanalysis and at the end of it she left her husband, taking her three daughters with her.

“You know,” Letizia says, “my husband could have forgiven me a lover, but not a job of my own.”

When Shobha and her mother sit side by side today, they might be mistaken for sisters: they look very similar, with the difference that Letizia has smooth, strawberry blond hair, while Shobha is a resolutely fake blond.

“I can remember my daughters when they were little,” Letizia says, with a glance at Shobha, “but not my life before I was forty. Strange, isn’t it?”

Shobha sets her camera down on the table for a moment. I wonder if even your own mother is transformed when you look at her through the lens. Whether she becomes a different person, a stranger whom you approach impartially? During the Palermo Spring, Letizia was a heroine to many women. To Shobha, she was always her mother. Although perhaps Shobha is more maternal than her mother. Shobha is solicitous about everyone, whether it be her neurotic cat or the tortoises that live on her terrace. She even mothers me. She calls me Petruccia. And tells me to eat more pineapple.

When we’re working together, Shobha can persuade even the most intransigent men and the most circumspect women to pose for her, to smile at her, to give meaningful looks, whatever’s needed. And as she rules with an iron hand—“No! Don’t look into the camera! Mouth shut! Yes, that’s great!”—everyone is so busy trying to please her that I manage to study them all unobserved, to read a raised eyebrow here, notice a false smile there, or perhaps just a trembling of the hands.

That’s how it was in Corleone, where we saw five old men sitting in a row, as if for the Benetton photographer. All wearing the coppola, the Sicilian hunter’s cap, and freshly ironed shirts. At the old men’s feet there stood a basket of pomegranates. From the hall behind them came the murmur of appreciative voices and the slap of cards being slammed down on the table. On the wall there was a sign: A well-mannered person doesn’t swear or spit on the floor. Shobha managed to make them all feel important; shirt buttons were done up and hair combed smooth.

The old men were looking across at the church of Santa Rosalia, jostled by decaying palazzi and new grey buildings. Inside, three young girls were waiting for visitors, to teach them about the art-historical significance of the crucifix, the value of the painting by De Vasco, which depicts St. John the Baptist and was once stolen but returned immediately, thanks to the Mafia. But no one wandered into the unassuming church. The parish priest had gone to Monreale to see the archbishop, so the girls were whiling away their time. They scampered around the church like elves, climbed giggling into the niche where the crucifix was kept, hid behind the choir screens, behind which the closed-order nuns used to sit, startled the doves in the belltower, shared a cigarette up there, and sounded a shrill and weary little bell until the old men of the Circolo degli Agricoltori pushed back their caps and stretched their wrinkled necks to look at the sky.

Even today, Santa Rosalia is the church of the Riinas and the Bagarellas, those two families responsible for what was probably the most bloodthirsty period of Cosa Nostra’s history. Santa Rosalia was also the church of Luciano Liggio—or “Lucianeddu,” the diminutive by which he is affectionately known here—the legendary boss known as the “red primrose of Corleone,” who was once thought to control the weather in these parts, the foster-son of the mighty Don Michele Navarra, Corleone’s postwar godfather.

But Don Michele, his former patron, got in the way of Liggio’s entry into the modern age, because the old man refused to contribute to the modernization of the Mafia and its entry into the drug trade and the lucrative kidnapping business. Don Michele, an old yard dog, too old to bark. But maybe not too old to bite. So one August day in 1958 he was shredded in his Fiat with 112 bullets.

Red and yellow bunting stretched across the alley. In the tense nothingness of Corleone, the little flapping pennants seemed to suggest an unexpected outbreak of high spirits. It was the bunting from the parish festival. For a few days Santa Rosalia had had a new parish priest, Domenico Mancuso. A handsome man, the girls said, and sighed. Only twenty-eight. But already putting on a bit of weight. He eats too much!

The handsome parish priest came from Prizzi and, it was said, from a very pious family. His predecessor was Monsignore Liggio, who had overseen the salvation of the people of Corleone from cradle to grave for half a century. Monsignore Liggio lived only a few steps away from his church, with his sister and his niece. An old man in the middle of a still-life of tatted doilies, bunches of dried flowers, and polished walnut. He was a pure-blood Corleonese, he said proudly, looking at his white hands and manicured fingers. His eyes were pale blue and alert in his waxy face. He was born and bred in Corleone, and it was in Corleone that he wanted to die. Peacefully, in his sleep.

The boss Luciano Liggio was Monsignore Liggio’s cousin. When the boss died in prison, the Monsignore fought tirelessly to arrange a church funeral for his cousin. “Does not even the lost sheep have the right to be buried by his family?” he had asked at the time.

But for now he was saying nothing. He ran the tip of his tongue over his white, cracked lips. “Mafia? You are asking impertinent questions,” he said, and a faint irritation played around his mouth. Silence fell around us like a fine dust. And when his old sister gasped, he prodded her with his long thin finger.

“Don’t say a word,” he said. “These matters have nothing to do with us.”

It was at that moment that the sexton of Santa Rosalia pulled on the rope and the bell rang for evening mass. The belltower doves flew off in flocks and the sky began to darken. The church filled slowly, mostly with women saying the rosary even before mass began. A muted hubbub of voices, a creaking sound as the women knelt before the Madonna, crossing themselves briefly before loudly kissing their thumbs. Everyone prayed here, butchers and victims, elbow to elbow. Monsignore Liggio wanted to celebrate evening mass along with his young successor. The power of habit. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. As Monsignore Liggio unsteadily climbed the altar steps, the young parish priest held out his arm. The elves sat in the front row and smiled at the handsome priest.

“Ah, Corleone,” the younger man said later in the sacristy. It smelled of wax and lavender and dusty old tomes.

“Once the soil here was drenched with blood, but that’s a long time ago now. Though the Mafia is everywhere today,” he said, and held his arms folded over his belly. His head was young, his body already showing signs of stoutness.

“We don’t know who’s in the Mafia and who isn’t,” he said in his soft, casual-sounding Sicilian. “And what is said at confession remains secret. It’s as if we hadn’t heard it.”

He smiled thoughtfully and ran his hand over his hair as casually as he spoke. “You know, the judiciary can’t forbid us to lead even a mafioso to his salvation. We can’t refuse the sacraments to anyone.

“It’s always been so, and it always will be. The Lord seeks the lost sheep, the lost son, he forgives the sinners. Oh, the Mafia! Couldn’t consumerism be said to be the scourge of the modern age? Saving souls! That’s a priest’s job. If only everyone would do his job, the carabiniere the carabiniere’s job, the public prosecutor the public prosecutor’s—then he’ll win respect! Il rispetto! Il rispetto! No one in Corleone would dream of disrespecting the parish priest, no one, however young or old.”

As he spoke, Monsignore Liggio nodded to him. And then said, delighted: “He does it much better than I do.”

When mass was over, the women disappeared as quickly as if the alley had swallowed them up. The old men had already gone home, the Circolo degli Agricoltori opposite the church had closed its tall double doors. The elves had vanished, and the doves had withdrawn to their niches in the church tower. The evening light melted the shadows away, silence stretched like a puddle of oil, and Corleone yielded at last to its drowsiness. Monsignore Liggio was walked home by his young successor. He linked arms with the younger man and cautiously matched his pace. Like that they walked sedately along the alley. Both took very small steps.

PALACE OF POISON

SHOBHA DECIDES—WHETHER IT’S MELODRAMATIC OR NOT—that the Palace of Justice is at least worth a shot. “Come on,” she says to Letizia, “one more photograph.”

Letizia sighs. For years she has avoided the Palace of Justice—still known in Palermo as the Palace of Poison, because deep down it has little to do with justice for all. Time and again public prosecutors have fought not against the Mafia, but for it. Because Giovanni Falcone knew that, he founded the Anti-Mafia Pool, the investigation team to which various anti-Mafia public prosecutors belonged. The chief commandment of the Anti-Mafia Pool was that all investigations should be made accessible to all participating public prosecutors. The investigating public prosecutors of the Anti-Mafia Pool worked on cases together and shared all their information, which first of all removed the threat of a corrupt public servant appropriating a crucial piece of knowledge that might be useful to the Mafia and, second, ensured that, in the event of a member of the Pool being murdered, no knowledge should go missing. The Pool was not to be organized vertically, according to hierarchy and years of service: instead, all the public prosecutors in the Pool were to have equal access to all inquiries.

And because by no means all politicians in the Italian parliament are involved in the struggle against the Mafia, for years Palermo’s Anti-Mafia Pool has been an irritation to many of them, from Andreotti via Berlusconi to former Sicilian regional president Cuffaro—who have all set themselves the goal of destroying the Anti-Mafia Pool. And if they can’t destroy it, then they can at least discredit it through political intrigue and journalistic mudslinging, in which the public prosecutors in the Pool are accused, just as they were in Falcone’s day, of participating in a personality cult, and are demonized as communist enemies of the state—if not actually as “mentally disturbed and anthropologically different from the rest of the human race,” as Berlusconi felt obliged to remark.

Salvo’s chief problem with the Palace of Justice concerns the availability of parking. A large area around it is closed off, less for security reasons than because of the vast building site needed to produce an underground parking garage—which has already provoked a certain amount of controversy in Palermo. What if the Mafia exploded a car bomb in that underground garage?

Like most of the other Palaces of Justice in Italy, the one in Palermo looks like a fascistic marble block. I always wonder how this discrepancy between a great stone demonstration of power and a plainly powerless judiciary might be explained. And I can find no answer. The Italian Palaces of Justice look like fortresses of the legal system, but hidden away in their deep interior are outmoded offices without computers, without enough paper, without enough pencils. If you can’t force the public prosecutors to their knees politically, then you try to do it by canceling paper, pencils, and the gasoline for armored limousines.

A flight of very tall steps leads to the entrance. The higher you climb, the smaller you feel. A steel fence used to close off the semicircle of the Palace of Justice, and after the assassinations of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino soldiers were entrenched there behind sandbags. Today, the Palace of Justice is guarded by just a few carabinieri, armed with machine guns, whose readiness for action not even the dogs in the street take seriously. They doze in the shade beside their sentry boxes and don’t even blink when you walk past.

From the back, the Palace of Justice looks like a gigantic pink tombstone; the modern extension is extolled by architects and looks no less fascistic than the granite-gray part, except that the color softens the effect. People passing in front of the Palace of Justice look as small as if they were walking past the pyramid of Cheops. The square in front of it is called Piazza della Memoria. Here you can read, cast in steel, the names of all the murdered Sicilian public prosecutors.

Shobha gives Letizia instructions that she isn’t keen to hear. “Turn around, head up, yes, that’s lovely, no, take your hand away.” Letizia poses ironically and wastes no time in taking her own pictures with her new Leica, while at the same time delivering a polemic about the stalemate in the struggle against the Mafia. She asks what the Germans thought when the Duisburg massacre took place. Were they surprised? Shocked by the coldbloodedness of it all? Perhaps dismayed that the Mafia was just as blithely active in Germany as it was in Italy? Letizia’s eyes look combative again. Yes, that’s it exactly: the arrogance of the Mafia! The presumption of the powerful! What do the Germans think? The Mafia isn’t just an Italian problem, after all. If the EU doesn’t pay attention, the Mafia will swallow us all up!

Shobha brushes me aside because I’ve got into the shot again. So I stand to one side and consider the Palace of Justice, some plaster already crumbling away at one corner. In which it resembles the Palace of Justice in Calabria, which, like many public buildings in southern Italy, is in need of serious restoration.

Throughout the whole of southern Italy, the power of the Mafia can be read in the architecture. Like the Mafia in Sicily and Campania, for half a century the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria has had a share of public commissions, 3 or 5 percent—what the Calabrians, with bitter irony, call a “security tax.,” All businessmen working in Calabria pay this contribution to the Mafia, whether they are building roads, Palaces of Justice, or hospitals. And they save that contribution by putting up plasterboard rather than laying bricks, by quoting for steel and using iron, by using cheap plaster that cracks after just a few months, by failing to make windows watertight or walls damp-proof.

The Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria looks as if Ceauşescu’s architect had finally used it to realize his dream of omnipotence, even though little details, such as properly functioning elevators, escaped him. Here I met Salvatore Boemi, the leading senior public prosecutor in the Anti-Mafia Pool, and Nicola Gratteri, the public prosecutor investigating the Duisburg massacre. The bearded Boemi has been dealing with the Mafia for more than forty years; he’s the historical memory of the public prosecutor’s office of Reggio Calabria, a city in which the ’Ndrangheta controls the very air that people breathe. Boemi looked like a melancholy English aristocrat; there were English leather chairs in his office, which contrasted curiously with the view from his window out onto Sahara-colored Reggio Calabria, which seemed to consist entirely of overpasses on concrete stilts, ruined buildings, and a leaden sea that merged in the distance with the horizon.

Duisburg was a massacre that was committed in a megalomaniac frenzy, Boemi said. With these murders, the mafiosi of San Luca had taken the greatest possible risk: that Italy and Germany would become aware of the threat from the Mafia and react to it. And there had been no reaction from the state, either in Germany or in Italy. If nothing happened now, Germany could soon find itself approaching the Italian condition, in which the Mafia had elevated itself to a bourgeoisie controlling politics and the economy. “In Calabrian society I see no will to get rid of the Mafia—just the will to get rid of us,” said senior public prosecutor Boemi. And he added: “The rot in Sicilian and Calabrian politics is boundless. The criminal system here works closely with politics and the business class.”

Boemi was excluded from the Anti-Mafia Pool in Reggio Calabria for five years. Supposedly to keep public prosecutors from turning into “autonomous power centers,” the Berlusconi government passed a law according to which no public prosecutor could work for more than eight years in the Anti-Mafia Pool—like a yogurt that’s past its sell-by date. In this way not only was the work of the Anti-Mafia Pool slowed down, but many Pools were cleaned of those public prosecutors who refused to see the Mafia merely as a problem of public order and who instead investigated politicians who were close to the Mafia. In Palermo, it wasn’t just the public prosecutors who had run the Andreotti trial who had been eliminated from the Anti-Mafia Pool—Roberto Scarpinato, Guido Lo Forte, and Gioacchino Natoli—but also Antonio Ingroia, who had revealed the Mafia links of the Berlusconi confidant Marcello Dell’Utri and the high-ranking secret service agent Bruno Contrada.

As Boemi spoke, you could hear the wind howling through the ventilation shafts of his office. He acted as if he couldn’t hear a thing. He just went on talking, looking out at the lead-colored sea, as if he mustn’t lose sight of it. On the other side lay Sicily.

“We need European laws,” he said. “It’s a task for the politicians, not for the legal profession. We’ve got to be able to confiscate Mafia property abroad as well, even in Germany, which we thought was immune to Mafia intrigues. People said to us: ‘The Mafia, that’s your problem. Punish them, do what you like—they’re Italians, after all.’ In Europe today you have to take into account the fact that the Mafia is a reality that we’re exporting.”

Where Boemi emanated melancholy, his colleague Nicola Gratteri communicated a sense of dynamism—quick, quick, don’t waste a minute. When the elevator didn’t arrive, he ran all the way up the seven floors to the public prosecutor’s office, and as he ran he outlined the relationship between the ’Ndrangheta and the Colombian cocaine barons. There has always been a special “feeling” between them, based on the fact that the ’Ndrangheta had built up more money through its kidnapping industry than any other client—a special relationship that lasts up to the present day: now, the ’Ndrangheta has a monopoly on cocaine importation in Europe.

Gratteri drove the armored Lancia himself, 150 kilometers every day, between Gerace and Reggio Calabria, to the sound of classical music. His three bodyguards followed in the car behind him. He wanted to drive himself, he said, because the journey was the only moment in the day when he was alone.

The wall behind his desk was decorated with the usual investigator’s trappings—the shield of US Special Agent, of the Federal Criminal Police Office of Wiesbaden, of the Amsterdam Politie. And a framed certificate behind glass, an award that Gratteri had been given for his battle against organized crime—organized crime which, as the Italian text so beautifully puts it, is notoriously able to rely on support from parts of certain institutions.

He worked on a laptop in his office. He had made five copies of the hard drive and hidden them in five different places. In the context of the inquiries into the Duisburg bloodbath he had issued the custody order that had put whole families behind bars. In March 2008, in San Luca alone, he confiscated Mafia properties to the value of 150 million euros. So much for Don Pino’s village of poor, God-fearing forestry workers. And pious women. The confiscated property of the two ’Ndrangheta clans involved in the blood feud, the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, included furniture, packets of files, and certificates from insurance companies in Germany and beyond.

Gratteri spoke just as quickly as he moved. With cool realism he described his battle against the ’Ndrangheta: the word “Duisburg” had turned long ago from the name of an investigation file into a metaphor for the arrogance of the ’Ndrangheta.

Before Duisburg, Gratteri’s commitment to the fight against the Mafia wouldn’t have been worth covering—not in Italy, and certainly not abroad: the floodlights of public interest had always been turned on Palermo. Only a few local newspapers in Calabria had reported on the four hundred dead in six years that the ’Ndrangheta had called for. It was only after Duisburg that public prosecutors like Gratteri were invited onto Italian television programs. Once I saw him in a Rai Due studio sitting next to the then minister of justice, Clemente Mastella. In reply to the question of what needed to be done to fight the Mafia, Gratteri said: “The opposite of what’s been done over the past twelve years.” At which Justice Minister Mastella corrected the public prosecutor: “He should just get on with his job.” Politicians would take care of everything else.

“Indeed,” Gratteri said to me. And fired a mocking smile across his desk, piled high with bundles of documents. Because a short time later the minister had had to step down after being investigated for extortion and abuse of office.

And a similar scenario might also menace Germany if the Germans didn’t start understanding what it meant for the Mafia to take root in their country. Meanwhile, neither Germany nor Italy had modified any of their laws in response to the Duisburg killings.

While Shobha looks for her shot, Letizia and I sit on a marble bench in the shade and try to imagine some numbers. The annual business turnover of the Italian Mafia, for example. Which is supposed to stand at around 100 billion euros. I fail in my attempt to conjure the image of 100 billion euros in 500 euro notes. What would that fill? A room? An apartment? A Palace of Justice? How many politicians, lawyers, judges could you buy with that?

“A million euros fits in a shoebox,” Salvo says sagely. “Ladies’ shoes.”

“How do you know that?” Letizia asks in amazement.

“From our neighbor,” says Salvo. “With men’s shoes, it’s two million.”

“Sorry for asking,” says Letizia, “but what does your neighbor do with a million euros in a shoebox?”

“He picks it up,” Salvo replies, and purses his lips.

Then we try to imagine the number of affiliati, the numbers of members regularly inducted into the Mafia. The newspaper Antimafia Duemila reported that in Calabria 25 percent of the population—a full quarter—belong to the ’Ndrangheta. In Campania 12 percent belong to the Camorra; in Sicily 10 percent belong to the Mafia; and in Apulia it’s a modest 2 percent who belong to the Sacra Corona Unita.

And to these regular affiliati may be added the sympathizers, relatives, and silent helpers. “And the ones who are too scared to say anything,” Letizia adds. She looks at the passersby, most of them lawyers with briefcases, tight-skirted secretaries tottering to the entrance of the Palace of Justice.

“That leaves hardly anyone,” says Salvo. “Or have we miscalculated?”

“Even as a child I couldn’t do sums,” I say. And I remember public prosecutor Gratteri giving me a few simple examples that even a mathematical dyslexic like me could understand, explaining the danger that the wealth of the ’Ndrangheta meant for Germany. He sat at his laptop, answering e-mails and delivering a little lecture on the financial power of the ’Ndrangheta.

The elite of the ’Ndrangheta didn’t have the problem of getting rich, just of laundering their money, he said. A small amount was spent on building a lovely house. Then a hotel was built, a holiday village, a supermarket. In northern Italy buildings were bought, and in Germany hotels, restaurants, pizzerias—all with cocaine money. The account of a typical ’Ndrangheta businessman was always in the red. He never had any money in the bank, but took out loans and then paid them back very gradually. That was how he laundered his money.

The game goes like this. The businessman buys a product for 100 euros; let’s say, coffee. So he pays 100 euros for the coffee, and by selling the coffee he makes a profit of, let’s say, 25 percent. No one can dispute that 25 percent; the financial police can’t, and the public prosecutors can’t either. With that 25 percent profit the Mafia businessman has managed to launder dirty money—not by buying the coffee, but just by presenting a receipt for it. A secretary sits there from dawn till dusk issuing false invoices, because it’s in the Mafia businessman’s interest to provide evidence of nonexistent expenditure—as if he had had huge expenses and made enormous profits—in order to justify the cocaine money. Logically, the Mafia businessman also has an interest in paying as much tax as possible. The more invoices he issues, the more tax he pays, and the more illegal money he can justify.

Of course, this game with fake invoices works particularly well in restaurants, hotels, and supermarkets, Gratteri stressed, where goods can go off and many (fake) invoices are issued to suppliers. After a few years the Mafia businessman has bought the restaurant, the hotel, the supermarket with his cocaine money—and they’re all quite legal.

The ’Ndrangheta isn’t just an Italian problem, he explains, because the fake invoice game isn’t just played in Reggio Calabria, it’s played throughout the whole of the Western world. But having great mountains of money doesn’t just mean being able to influence the market. It also means financing electoral campaigns on behalf of parliamentarians who represent Mafia interests. The whole of democratic life is infected.

While Gratteri was speaking, I thought about how it was that the then C DU representative and now minister-president of Baden-Württemberg, Günther Oettinger, had emerged unscathed from the affair surrounding the pizza-chef Mario Lavorato, even though things hadn’t looked nearly so good at the outset. Oettinger’s friendship with the dubious pizzeria owner had gotten him into difficulties; the Stuttgart public prosecutor’s office investigated the Calabrian Lavorato for drug dealing and money laundering, on the grounds that he was supposed to have used his money to support Oettinger’s election.

who had already been mentioned in a Federal Criminal Police (BKA) report in 2000, the 400-seat restaurant who, according to investigators, in the Da Bruno pizzeria. Contacts can be helpful—even if Da Bruno hasn’t been at the top of most people’s lists since the Duisburg massacre. At any rate, Pitanti nurtured his connections in Erfurt, by generously supporting the golf club. they also bumped into the then Thuringian minister-president Bernhard Vogel and his minister of the interior, Richard Dewes. Both men had been staying there by chance, claimed Pitanti—who also had an excellent relationship with the police: in the course of further searches, the police found an ID card for an Interpol conference in Rome identifying Pitanti as a translator for the Uzbek delegation. It had been issued by the minister of the interior for Saarland.

Gratteri darted a quick glance across his laptop at me, as if he wanted to check that I was following him. The arrogance of the young ‘Ndranghetisti derived on the one hand from their wealth, and on the other from their knowledge of their de facto immunity from prosecution, he said. Over the last ten years, the Italian state had weakened in its struggle against the Mafia, even gradually relaxing its anti-Mafia legislation, culminating in the large-scale amnesty under the Prodi government. The problem wasn’t that 18,000 or 25,000 criminals were allowed to leave. The problem was a different one. Italians were increasingly convinced that there was a solution for everything, but there was no longer such a thing as a bail culture. For twenty-two years he had been investigating the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria: always the same families—he had arrested the same people three or four times for Mafia membership and international drug dealing, and after a short time they had been released again thanks to an amnesty or remission of punishment. It was easy to imagine that the justice system didn’t exactly gain in credibility in this way. Besides, these people weren’t normal, small-time criminals. Being an ’Ndranghetista or a member of Cosa Nostra was a lifestyle. A philosophy. These were people who had as four-year-olds experienced the police knocking at their doors, in search of an uncle, a brother, or their father, a cocaine dealer. For them, the policeman would always be a “spy,” an enemy who had to be fought against.

Every year he arrested between thirty and forty individuals who had been accused of drug dealing and who all came from the same village. Purely theoretically, these people would be sentenced to twenty or thirty years’ imprisonment. You could imagine what that meant to a village of three or four thousand inhabitants—if the sentence was actually served. Instead, the punishment was reduced, thanks to various negotiations that were intended to shorten the process, from twenty to seven or eight years. With good behavior the prisoner could expect a further remission, and in the end an international cocaine dealer could be out of jail in five years maximum. And what was five years’ imprisonment compared with the prospect of importing a thousand kilos of cocaine? For one kilo of cocaine the ’Ndrangheta would pay 1,200 euros in Bogotá. The cocaine was cut and one kilo turned into four and a half. And a gram of cocaine would fetch 70 euros in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo.

“Work it out for yourself,” said Gratteri. And then he smiled, calmly, as if his calm was the result of long experience.

The Germans believed that the ’Ndrangheta didn’t exist in Germany, Gratteri said. It was a careless error to underestimate the situation, as had been the case over the past few years. Unlike in Italy, in Germany the mere suspicion of Mafia membership was not sufficient to justify an arrest, and spying on people in public places was not permitted. In a few years it could be too late for Germany. The German police didn’t have any of the tools required to pursue Mafia dealings. Without electronic eavesdropping, investigators in Italy would have been powerless. Germany, he said, had no time to lose. Because if a mafioso buys a hotel, a restaurant, or a stretch of road today, in a few years’ time no one will be able to prove that he bought the building with cocaine money.

It wasn’t just an ethical problem, Gratteri said, it was also a matter of the law of the marketplace. Unlike normal businessmen, who have to make sacrifices to put up a building, the Mafia businessman has only the problem of justifying his money. Or protection money: if there are three supermarkets in his area that are all paying him protection money, and the fourth supermarket belongs to the Mafia, he doesn’t have to pay protection money, and for that very reason he can sell his products 2 or 3 percent cheaper. That’s unfair competition. And when free competition breaks down, the laws of the marketplace go awry and democracy breaks down as well. Because democracy means the possibility of choice. The same possibilities for everyone.

That was what he said. And as we spoke, the electricity failed once again in the Palace of Justice in Reggio Calabria.

Seven months after our meeting it became known that the public prosecutor Nicola Gratteri was being bugged when he met with detectives in the Palace of Justice to discuss current investigations. The bug used hadn’t been very technically sophisticated and had only been able to record conversations up to a distance of twenty meters. It was said.

SILVIO BERLUSCONI AND MARCELLO DELL’UTRI

“JUST ONE MORE PHOTOGRAPH,” SAYS SHOBHA, “OVER THERE by the entrance.”

“I’m done,” says Letizia. She’s had enough of posing and being stared at by the passersby. Resigned, she lights another cigarette and walks to the other side of the Palace of Justice, where the armored limousines stand between the granite columns. Only anti-Mafia public prosecutors enjoy the privilege of being allowed to drive up the ramp of the Palace of Justice, right in front of the entrance.

“Let’s go,” says Letizia. “The Palace of Justice depresses me.”

“Me too,” says Shobha, and presses the shutter release.

When she’s packing her camera away again, we talk about how it is that every time we do interviews with public prosecutors here we have a serious-men-in-ties problem. There’s nothing more depressing than a photograph of a serious-looking man sitting at his desk. Particularly since all the offices look the same: carabinieri calendars on the wall, a picture of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, and paintings loaned from Palermo’s picture gallery—rural idylls with plowing peasants or grim-looking old women. Generally we would persuade the public prosecutors to pose for us on the roof of the Palace of Justice. But even that shot had worn itself out at some point. Photographically, the Palace of Justice doesn’t have much to offer, although its inner life is very informative. I’ve often sat in the corridors and watched the women defense counsels tottering along the marble granite with a metallic squeak. Until early afternoon, the court reporters prowl the corridors as well, sit outside the doors of the public prosecutors’ offices, listen to conversations, try to read the click of a public prosecutor’s tongue, to interpret a lawyer’s nod, spend hours waiting on the red plastic chairs outside the chief prosecutor’s office. All in the hope of being in the right place at the right time, finding that missing piece that might finally give a meaning to the puzzle made up of news, suspicions, hints, and rumors.

Perhaps one of my most remarkable meetings in the Palace of Justice was the one I had with Marcello Dell’Utri. Berlusconi’s right-hand man. The founder of Forza Italia. The senator. The Euro MP. The man accused of supporting the Mafia in Palermo. Which did nothing to dampen his mood that morning.

I had noticed Marcello Dell’Utri by chance in the corridors of the Palace of Justice. I had actually come here to talk to a public prosecutor about a Mafia boss who had gone into hiding. And then there was the senator, just standing there. The morning sun bathed the interior of the Palace of Justice in a mild light, and Marcello Dell’Utri’s head was thrown back. He pouted as he smoked his cigar and watched as the smoke wafted away. The hearing was supposed to have started ages ago, but the judge was still missing. Only a few local journalists were following the trial. Not a single Italian television channel was covering the story, and barely any nonregional daily newspapers. The fact that Senator Marcello Dell’Utri, Berlusconi’s companion from the very first, Euro MP and Sicilian, was being accused of Mafia association in Palermo, attracted less attention than a television presenter’s move from Rai Uno to Canale 5.

The senator stood in the semicircle of his lawyers, bag-carriers, and confidants, smoking a cigar. His lawyers were smoking cigars as well. When Dell’Utri laughed, they laughed too. Dell’Utri was surprisingly short and wore an azure-blue shirt with a blue suit. His lawyers were also wearing azure-blue shirts. His face seemed to sag slightly at the edges, and his heavy eyelids gave his expression a certain veiled quality. The senator gripped people by the arm as he talked to them; he slapped people cordially on the back, shook hands, and hugged people. The lawyers coughed with laughter over each of his remarks, and gigglingly spluttered, “Oh! Senatore!” The cigar smoke hung quivering and blue above their heads, drifting away into the great expanse of the marble hall.

The public prosecutor who had led the trial in the first instance had told me that on the very first day, Marcello Dell’Utri had got to his feet during the prosecution speech and left the courtroom, saying: “I’m bored stiff.” I didn’t seriously imagine that he would answer my questions, but I didn’t want to reproach myself for not having tried. So I pushed my way past his bag-carriers, who eyed me suspiciously. When I stood in front of him at last and talked to him about his Mafia indictment, he didn’t answer straightaway. He took a drag on his cigar, blew the smoke out, and said: “Bellissima signora, this trial is so boring, don’t waste your time on it. Go and look at the church of San Giovanni degli Eremiti instead.”

And true enough, the trial in the little courtroom lasted only a few minutes. There was hardly time to appreciate the dusty little fan that stood in the corner and to notice that a silver tassel was missing from the public prosecutor’s gown. As always, the microphones weren’t working. The trial had been adjourned over a formality.

A few months after our meeting, Senator Marcello Dell’Utri was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment and a lifelong exclusion from public office for supporting the Mafia. As usual in Italy, however, the sentence in the first instance had no effect on the defendant’s life: until the sentence has been confirmed in the second and third instances, Marcello Dell’Utri remains a free man. On average that takes ten years. And because the period of limitation begins with the start of the trial, like many other defendants in Italy, Marcello Dell’Utri can expect his crime to have lapsed when the final sentence is passed by the supreme court.

I will never be able to get used to this regulation. The three instances rule in Italian law is referred to as garantista: a law that respects the rights of the citizen. But it’s one that benefits the Mafia and corrupt politicians more than anyone else. I can’t get my head around the fact that someone whose guilt has been acknowledged by a court can go on strolling around the place unmolested and carry on being a politician—even in the European Parliament, as Marcello Dell’Utri has done. But equally it comes as no surprise that a judicial reform abolishing this three instances rule would never be passed by the Italian parliament.

At the end of the eight-year trial the judges have taken it as read that Marcello Dell’Utri has worked as a mediator for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra since the 1970s, in the economy and in politics. His contact was Silvio Berlusconi. “The defendant has represented the interests of the Mafia in one of the biggest companies in the country; from the 1970s until the present day he was at the disposal of the Mafia, and made a more than considerable contribution to the consolidation and reinforcement of Cosa Nostra. He has favored [it] and received favors,” the judges wrote. The public prosecutors identified Dell’Utri as a kind of insurance agent for the Mafia: he drafted the contract with his client and ensured that it was precisely adhered to.

Immediately after the proclamation of the sentence, the then president of the chamber of deputies, Pier Ferdinando Casini, phoned up the defendant and assured him of his highest esteem and friendship, and also passed this on to the Italian public in an official note. And Berlusconi assured his friend Dell’Utri that he would put both hands in the fire for him. At the same time, Berlusconi warned the public prosecutors of Palermo not to play with fire. Berlusconi has never been terribly skilled in his use of metaphors.

Only a few short steps from the courtroom where I met Dell’Utri, in a corridor that, with its rows of discarded photocopiers and dusty swivel chairs, looked like a furniture storeroom for the next intake of Bosnian refugees, Public Prosecutor Antonio Ingroia, Dell’Utri’s accuser, had his office. A bearded man with an old man’s posture, even though he wasn’t all that old.

On his desk lay a silver wolf’s head as a paperweight; on the wall there were prints and the usual carabinieri calendars that every public prosecutor is given as a present. Public Prosecutor Ingroia told me how he had come to Rome with over a hundred questions in his luggage to hear Silvio Berlusconi take the witness stand. The prime minister evoked his right to be silent. And the public prosecutor regretted this as a missed opportunity to tell the truth.

The story of the friendship between the Milanese Silvio Berlusconi and the Sicilian Marcello Dell’Utri is documented in the twenty-five hundred pages of files produced by the Palermo public prosecutors’ office. Here one can read that the two men met in 1961, both in their early twenties, at Milan University. Marcello Dell’Utri began his professional life as secretary to Silvio Berlusconi, who was only four years his senior. This first collaboration lasted only a short time, however, and a year later Dell’Utri went to Rome, where he became sports director at a sports center run by Opus Dei. From Rome he returned to Palermo, where he became sports director of an athletics club at which he became acquainted with the mafiosi Vittorio Mangano and Gaetano Cinà. Mangano was later deployed as Cosa Nostra’s middleman at Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore. Gaetano Cinà worked as a bagman between the Mafia and Berlusconi, and at Christmas expressed his thanks for his successful collaboration with Berlusconi with ten kilos of cassata cake. But that time had not yet come. In 1970 sports director Dell’Utri became a bank clerk. A particularly skillful one. Soon he was responsible for the allocation of agricultural credits in the Sicilcassa bank.

A few years later, the Mafia threatened rising businessman Silvio Berlusconi with the kidnapping of his son Piersilvio, unless Berlusconi paid protection money. Berlusconi didn’t report this blackmail, but remembered his Sicilian friend. Marcello Dell’Utri brought his contacts into play and learned that a clan from Catania was threatening Berlusconi. However, the power of Cosa Nostra traditionally lies in the hands of families from Palermo, with which Marcello Dell’Utri had excellent relations—which is why there were several meetings between Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri, and the legendary Mafia boss Stefano Bontade, known as the “Prince of Villagrazia.”

These meetings ended, to the satisfaction of all participants, with the assurance of the greatest goodwill. The mafioso Vittorio Mangano moved into Berlusconi’s villa in Arcore as guarantor of the security of the Berlusconi family, officially as a groom. Berlusconi’s flexibility was rewarded: from now on 113 billion lire (around 300 million euros in present-day terms) presumably flowed into Fininvest, the holdings in which Berlusconi has bundled his activities as major investor, building contractor, and media entrepreneur. Later, in the Mafia trial against Marcello Dell’Utri, even an adviser for the defense had to admit that these payments from Fininvest between 1975 and 1983 had not been transparent. According to the statements of various turncoat mafiosi, during that period the Mafia boss Stefano Bontade invested a considerable amount of Mafia capital in Berlusconi’s consortium and thus became an associate in the Fininvest group’s private television channels.

In 1976 a daily newspaper in Lombardy reported that a mafioso was working in Berlusconi’s villa, whereupon Mangano returned to Palermo. A year later Marcello Dell’Utri left his friend Silvio as well. He had hoped in vain for an executive position in the company, but Berlusconi didn’t think he was up to it—only for Berlusconi to change his mind a short time later. The Mafia boss Stefano Bontade had been murdered, and the new generation of bosses was no longer satisfied with flexibility and little presents, and instead exerted pressure on Berlusconi. Meanwhile, the former stable-man Vittorio Mangano had been arrested and from prison tried in vain to put in a good word for Berlusconi with the new bosses. Silvio Berlusconi was forced to bring Marcello Dell’Utri back into his enterprise so that he could take care of delicate Sicilian business relationships.

In the meantime, Dell’Utri not only had to assume responsibility for the fraudulent bankruptcy of his building consortium, but also had to establish fresh Mafia connections. Toughened by this experience, he negotiated an annual “friendship contribution” to the Mafia from his friend Silvio, to the tune of 200 million euros a year. But even that didn’t keep the bosses happy. After a bloody Mafia war, the Corleonese Totò Riina had reached the top of Cosa Nostra, and he wanted a reshuffle. As the collaboration between Cosa Nostra and the Christian Democrats no longer prevailed, Riina tried to reach Berlusconi and the head of the Socialist Party, Bettino Craxi, through Dell’Utri. To stress the urgency of this collaboration, in November 1986 he arranged for a bomb to be set off outside Berlusconi’s Milan headquarters in the Via Rovani—a bomb that, Berlusconi said, had been placed there with respect, even with a certain affection. When not even a bomb could convince Berlusconi that cooperation with the Mafia was a good idea, a series of attacks was carried out on his La Standa department store chain. After this, Marcello Dell’Utri traveled to Catania as an emissary to clarify the conditions of the collaboration.

In 1992 Italy was rocked by the bribery scandal known as Tangentopoli, which dragged the established Italian parties into the abyss. Berlusconi was concerned about how his enterprise might survive without the protection of friendly parties like the Socialists and the Christian Democrats. Marcello Dell’Utri persuaded him to enter politics himself and started to prepare for the foundation of Forza Italia. A short time afterward came the assassinations of the two anti-Mafia public prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The last interview that Paolo Borsellino gave before his death was the one in which he talked about the Mafia boss Mangano’s involvement with Dell’Utri and Berlusconi.

A year after the assassinations of the two public prosecutors, Bernardo Provenzano was made the new boss of Cosa Nostra. He negotiated a pact with Dell’Utri. He offered his support for Forza Italia, a renunciation of any further violence—and demanded certain guarantees in return: the end of criminal prosecution and political pressure on the Mafia, an end to the confiscation of Mafia property, and the abolition of the state’s-evidence witness regulations for turncoat mafiosi. Shortly after the meeting with Dell’Utri, Provenzano convened the leading bosses. We’re in good hands with Dell’Utri, Provenzano said, let’s work for Forza Italia.

So there we have the reconstruction of the charges against Marcello Dell’Utri, which would lead to a nine-year sentence. The further course of this friendship has gone down in Italian history. Forza Italia fulfilled its contract with Cosa Nostra to the letter: it declared the reform of the judiciary to be its most important political task—and this meant, among other things, the near abolition of high-security detention for mafiosi, and, thanks to the introduction of various forms of remission, life sentences no longer exist. Both life imprisonment and high-security detention were a thorn in the flesh for the mafiosi. A mafioso accepts a prison sentence without further ado, but not being kept out of the game forever. Or not being able to communicate with the outside world.

There used to be two high-security prisons, Asinara and Pianosa, in which mafiosi were actually isolated. These two prisons have now been closed down. High-security detention is practiced in normal prisons. There are certain sections there in which prisoners are isolated—always, of course, in accordance with human rights laws, which demand humane conditions even for Mafia bosses. Thus, for example, they have a right to regular association with other prisoners, which often leads to little meetings of Mafia bosses in prison. They can also communicate with the outside world because they are, after all, allowed regular family visits—even without armored glass if their children are minors. At the present day, high-security detention merely means detention that is slightly less comfortable than the normal kind.

That’s why it’s hardly worthwhile for a mafioso to leave the Mafia. And it’s become harder for public prosecutors to use the statements of turncoat mafiosi in trials. The state’s-evidence regulations have been weakened. Today the turncoat must confess to everything that he has experienced in his whole life with the Mafia during the first 180 days after his arrest; statements made later are invalid. This has halved the value of these state witnesses: twenty or thirty years of Mafia life can’t be summed up all that simply. And besides, the statement of the turncoat will only be recognized at the trial if it is confirmed by two additional turncoat mafiosi. And it sounds like a cruel irony within the history of the Italian judiciary that this state’s evidence law so craved by Berlusconi was passed not by the Berlusconi government but by the left-wing government that came after it—plainly with a view to getting rid of the label of being the party of “red judges.”

And yet time and again there are moments when the Mafia finds that its demands aren’t being satisfied quite quickly enough. The cooperation between the Christian Democrats and the Mafia came to an end in 1992 with the murders of Salvo Lima and Ignazio Salvo, Andreotti’s governors in Sicily. Many people saw a parallel to this when the mafioso Leoluca Bagarella, the brother-in-law of the imprisoned boss Totò Riina, read out a declaration during a trial in 2002. In it, he announced a hunger strike of seventy-one mafiosi protesting against their conditions of imprisonment and complained that promises made by politicians, such as the definitive revision of all Mafia trials, had not been kept. Results were expected. There was speculation about impending Mafia attacks on Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi.

For a while there was still a danger for Marcello Dell’Utri and Berlusconi that the two most important witnesses to Mafia deals might hit on the idea of turning state witnesses, with a view to having their sentences reduced. The problem was solved when the bagman, fellow defendant and Dell’Utri confidant Gaetano Cinà, died in Palermo in 2006—as his death notice put it: at the end of a difficult and honest life. The mafioso and former stable-man Vittorio Mangano had already died in 2000. Vittorio was seen as a Mafia bridgehead in northern Italy; Public Prosecutor Paolo Borsellino said as much in his last interview, twenty hours before the Mafia blew him up.

Vittorio Mangano came home from prison only once, to die in the arms of his daughters. He had no regrets. It’s not only his daughters who are grateful to him for that. His friends Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi are too. In the 2008 election campaign, Marcello Dell’Utri was even moved to celebrate Mangano as a hero: he died for me, Dell’Utri said, because he was suffering from cancer and would have been released from prison if he had incriminated me and Berlusconi.

And Berlusconi had no hesitation in standing by his friend. Mangano had heroically refused to invent anything about him or Dell’Utri. When he had been living at Berlusconi’s villa he had always behaved impeccably, and it was only because of various difficulties that Mangano had fallen into the hands of a criminal organization. But he hadn’t been found guilty of anything.

Berlusconi was wrong there. In spite of the slowness of the Italian judicial system, Mangano had been found guilty on two out of the various charges against him, including murder, drug dealing, and Mafia membership, and had been sentenced to thirteen years for Mafia membership and drug dealing—of which he had served eleven by the time of his death.

In the eyes of Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell’Utri, Mangano was quite definitely a hero.

After his victorious reelection in 2008, Silvio Berlusconi continued with his tried and tested judicial policy. He announced that he was changing the wiretapping law, which is a source of vexation not just to the mafiosi but also to politicians—which is why the left-wing government’s unfortunate justice minister, Romano Prodi, had tried to pass a law that would definitively have weakened the practice of wiretapping. Berlusconi thought he’d be more successful. And both Romano Prodi and Silvio Berlusconi announced that they were going to build a bridge between Sicily and the mainland—a project that has been craved by the clans of Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta for years, because, as the boss Provenzano said, when that happens everyone will get a slice of the pie.

As it happened, Berlusconi wasn’t successful, neither in the change of the wiretapping law nor in the building of the bridge. But it is only postponed. The next new government will doubtless try again. The interests of the Mafia are too big to be ignored.

ANNA PALMA

“BASTA,” SAYS LETIZIA. “BASTA,” SAYS SHOBHA, AND I SAY, “Basta,” too. We decided to have lunch. When we’re working, we stick slavishly to our mealtimes. Regardless of whether we’re tracking down Mafia priests, heroic public prosecutors, or fugitive bosses, we have lunch and dinner; we have starter, main, dessert, and coffee, as if our lives depended on it. For an hour we belong to ourselves again.

“Piccola Napoli,” says Shobha, and I agree. The trattoria Piccola Napoli is an eerily beautiful place with extremely effective air conditioning and fluorescent lighting that takes a bit of getting used to since it colors everything slightly blue and makes you feel like a dead fish on ice. A delicious one, though.

When we come down the steps of the Palace of Justice, we see some public prosecutors driving up and slipping out of their limousines. The public prosecutor Anna Palma greets us briefly as she walks past. I’ve known her since the trial of the murderers of Paolo Borsellino. Since she’s been working on the anti-Mafia commission in Rome and for Renato Schifani, the disputed president of the Italian Senate, she is seen more rarely in the Palace of Justice. Before that, she was in the Palermo Anti-Mafia Pool and responsible for the Mafia in Agrigento, Palma di Montechiaro, and Porto Empedocle—the clans that have the closest connections with Germany, where they launder money and hide fugitive mafiosi, who live there as ice-cream salesmen or pizza-chefs, unmolested by the German police.

Anna Palma told me about the arrest of the Sicilian hit man Joseph Focoso, who was arrested in the Saarland village of Spiesen-Elversberg, where he had fled with his wife and children. As a Sicilian son should, he was living there with his parents. The Sicilian police had suspected that Focoso was there since tapping the phones of his relatives in Porto Empedocle and hearing that Focoso’s son, who had just traveled from Germany, was given a slap for saying, “But Dad said. . . .” That was the confirmation for his pursuers that Focoso was living with his family in Germany. Since bugs have become the essential weapon of the police, every mafioso watches his tongue. Only children blab—and elderly aunts, like Aunt Giugia, who gave away on the phone the fact that she was supposed to be bringing Sicilian fish to Germany. Clearly for her fugitive nephew, because anyone else could simply have gone to Sicily for themselves. In the end it was his craving for Sicilian fish that did for Focoso. Because along with the fish and his aunt came the mobile task force from Agrigento.

Prior to this there had been years of coordination problems between German and Italian investigators. The Germans demanded proof that Focoso was actually staying with his parents in Spiesen-Elversberg. Regardless of the fish and Aunt Giugia. None of that was sufficient reason to tap the apartment, the Germans said. And the Italians said: if we had proof, we would have had Focoso arrested long ago. In the end the Italian officials demanded that the Germans let them search Focoso’s parents’ apartment. And they didn’t have to look for long, because Joseph Focoso was in bed, sleeping deeply, and presumably dreamlessly, when he was arrested.

Later, there were further delays before Focoso could be handed over to the Italians, because German legislation doesn’t allow someone to be sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment—which was the case with the multiple killer Focoso, who had been in hiding for over six years. In order for the mafioso to be handed over to Italy, the Italian investigators had to prove that the lawyers who had defended him had kept their client very well informed about all developments, so that he was able to follow the course of the trial in detail.

If you talk to Italian investigators, Germany is by no means prepared for the battle against the Mafia: membership in the organization isn’t a crime in Germany, and eavesdropping isn’t legal in public places. In addition, Mafia property can’t be confiscated—as it can in Italy, thanks to the Pio La Torre law, which states that even if a person is only under suspicion of Mafia membership, his possessions can be confiscated. In Germany, on the other hand, property can be seized only if a connection can be demonstrated with a concrete crime. German law does have the crime of criminal association, but given that the maximum sentence is five years in jail, it amounts to a trivial offense.

When Anna Palma explained the German-Italian imbroglio to me, I couldn’t help thinking about Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force in Reggio Calabria. Cortese didn’t just start working with the German police after the Duisburg massacre; he had already been involved with his German colleagues during the search for the legendary Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano. Cortese once spent Christmas in Mönchengladbach because the investigators had hoped Provenzano would spend the holiday with his brother, who lived in Germany. For two weeks, Cortese lay in wait for the boss in Mönchengladbach, but to no avail. Two years later he would arrest Provenzano, who had been in hiding for forty years, in a Corleone cheese-farmer’s hut.

After that, Cortese was promoted to the status of super-poliziotto, for which he was awarded a silver medal and transferred to Reggio Calabria. We met in a cafe not far from police headquarters, and Cortese looked as if he was one of the two bronze statues of Riace: fished from the sea, put in a pinstripe suit, and decorated with a pair of Ferragamo sunglasses.

Cortese set out the contrast between the German and Italian police for us, from his personal point of view. He pointed to the bottle of mineral water on our table and said: “If I know that this bottle here is the boss, then we go and arrest him. In Germany, they do a ‘briefing’ first. And by the time the briefing is over, the boss has gone into hiding.”

A pale noonday haze has settled on Palermo like a pillow of cotton wool, a pillow that muffles every sound, even the noise of the tires of the armored limousines on the marble surrounding the Palace of Justice. Salvo looks at his watch because Piccola Napoli always closes on time. At last we set off, past the Teatro Massimo, toward Borgo Vecchio, the heart of Palermo that lives on the drug trade and looks like a cross between Baghdad and Bogotá. With fat men in baseball caps and flip-flops, with piles of trash and blocked canals, with the burned-out carcasses of cars, mangy dogs, and a big statue of Padre Pio behind glass. The Borgo is right behind the Teatro Politeama with its jacaranda trees; sometimes tourists stray to this part of town, and little boys with iPhones take pictures of their horrified faces. The Borgo has nothing of the charming shabbiness of Palermo’s old town, which as a visitor you can imagine as beautiful; the Borgo is nothing but Mafia arrogance, just a few yards away from the upper-class elegance of the Via della Libertà.

Written on a wall are the words Honor the Dishonored, and next to that hangs one of many house altars. Between narrow curtains a haggard Jesus gazes at a pink Madonna, surrounded by offerings of plastic flowers and lit by old bedside lights. A short time ago a man was murdered here, in broad daylight, in front of the fishmonger’s stall. No one saw anything.

A few yards to the rear of the square with the statue of Padre Pio a goose runs along the road. The goose is called Candy, and she bites anyone who goes near her, because Candy doesn’t think she’s a goose, she thinks she’s a dog guarding the front door of a family house. Candy turned out like this because she grew up with a pit bull terrier, people say. Originally, in fact, there were two geese, but one of them died. Everyone remembers the other goose running out in front of a car, with its chest puffed up.

As we step inside Piccola Napoli the wind from the air conditioning falls on us like an icy cloth, making us hold our breath for a second. While outside in the Borgo the trash might be rotting in the gutter, inside Piccola Napoli everything is sterile, with white tiles, starched tablecloths, and a freshly scoured counter on which no drop of water would stand a chance.

As always, the whole family is at work. Behind the till sits an old black-clad woman with the eyes of a bird; orders are taken by her son-in-law, whose red face always looks a bit unhealthy in the fluorescent light. Behind the fish counter stands one of those Sicilian women who wouldn’t smile even under threat of torture, her brother works in the kitchen, and the usual crew are joined by an old man whose degree of kinship I don’t know. He’s leaning motionlessly by the old woman at the till, with his waistband hitched up to his armpits. Depending on the time of day, all kinds of other cousins and brothers-in-law and aunts and great-nieces and people I can’t tell apart turn up as well.

As soon as we’re sitting down, there’s white wine on our table, and green Sicilian olives the size of quail’s eggs, and oriental-scented bread with sesame seeds. The brother-in-law brings us panelle, the chickpea fritters that I fell in love with on my first day in Sicily, and sea urchins and a bit of caponata, the vegetable dish of aubergines, tomatoes, olives, and capers, which sensitive Italian stomachs find irredeemably indigeribile, completely indigestible—which is why it lies for hours, maybe days even, in my belly, formerly inured to such things by my German upbringing but softened by my time in Italy—but which we still find irresistible.

For a second we think guiltily about the heaviness of Sicilian cooking, but it doesn’t stop us going on to order tiny fried octopi, swordfish, and tuna. And if Letizia hadn’t asked about Duisburg, we’d be talking about the food for hours.

What was it like? she asks, suddenly looking like a young girl. More than most people, Letizia has preserved a childish curiosity about life. She soon tires of talking about herself, about things she knows, about repeated situations. But she loves experiencing new contexts, new things, outrageous things. She loves learning. But it all has to happen very quickly.

It’s weird talking about Duisburg in Palermo. Thinking about steelworks, blast furnaces, and housing projects when you’re surrounded by house altars, baroque churches, and palm-lined avenues. And yet the two places do have some things in common. A death toll. When I got into my old Renault 4 that time to drive from the Ruhr to Corleone, because Mario Puzo’s The Godfather had aroused my curiosity, I never imagined that I would one day make the return journey—that I would travel from Italy to the Ruhr and get out of the train in Duisburg because the Mafia had drenched the place in blood.

HEINZ SPRENGER

HEINZ SPRENGER, DIRECTOR OF THE DUISBURG MURDER Commission, is waiting for me outside the station. He told me on the phone that he was short, with a moustache. Outside the exit a man was waiting, wrapped in a black leather jacket, the kind of leather jacket I’ve only ever seen in two places in the world: the Ukraine and the Ruhr.

If I were casting a police procedural set in the Ruhr, I’d immediately book Heinz Sprenger for the role of a police inspector to whom nothing human is alien and who doesn’t waste his words. Sprenger is someone who keeps the ball close to the ground, as they say in the Ruhr. I tried to imagine him in Calabria. Heinz Sprenger in his black leather jacket next to Renato Cortese, the head of the mobile task force of Reggio Calabria, looking in his dark-blue, pinstripe suit as if he had stepped straight out of a Mafia film. Cortese, drawing on his cigarillo and watching after the smoke, and Sprenger, watching his partner with the patient attention of an ornithologist. Working with the Italians had taught him, Inspector Sprenger says, that it’s important to make a bella figura.

If he believed the newspapers, he said, the Mafia was being defeated in Italy every day. He was referring to those spectacular mass arrests of thirty or forty people that are always worth a small story even abroad: bosses, policemen disguised in ski masks, in the background a helicopter in which the mafioso is being taken away—a helicopter that has landed just for the photograph of the arrest. And that flies off again once the picture has been taken, without the mafioso.

Whole clans in Italy are regularly arrested for membership in the Mafia, he said, and no one learns that after a short time many bosses are simply put under house arrest for lack of evidence. Or leave prison as free men once their remand period is over, because the judges aren’t able to prosecute them within the designated period.

Heinz Sprenger and I drove to the scene of the crime. The Da Bruno pizzeria is only a few yards behind the station, on the ground floor of the Klöckner building, one of those 1980s buildings that you see everywhere in the Ruhr, buildings that look as if the architect had drawn his inspiration from the Star Trek movies. The restaurant looked as if it had been precipitously abandoned, the chairs were dusty and stood randomly around in the restaurant, a yucca palm withered in a corner, and above the counter there was an amateur painting of a pizza Margherita: Pizza, la specialità di Sebastiano. Outside was a big terrace with wooden benches; plainly the restaurant had been quite a success, in every respect. The pizza Margherita, and the money laundering, too.

I thought about Sebastiano Strangio’s grave in the San Luca cemetery. About that crude concrete box with rusty iron girders sticking out of it. And I thought about Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, who was a cousin of the murdered Sebastiano Strangio, and who had traveled to Duisburg with the Bishop of Locri shortly after the massacre and held a “reconciliation mass” outside the pizzeria.

“I don’t eat pizza anymore myself,” said Inspector Sprenger. He said it casually, without any particular emphasis. Just stating a fact.

The bloodbath had taken place in the drive, just a few feet away from Da Bruno. We were standing in the rain; it smelled of soil and damp leaves, and Sprenger showed me the place where the shots had fallen. It was a driveway paved with those small square pieces of shale that you only get in the Ruhr. The two hit men had hidden behind the bushes planted along the drive. One of the surveillance cameras in the Klöckner building had caught the gunfire, more of a flash behind the leaves of the trees. Sixty shots from two different firearms, followed by shots to the head of each of the victims before the perpetrators fled in separate directions.

Until that night in August 2007, Heinz Sprenger had had nothing to do with the Mafia. He was the director of the Murder Commission in Duisburg, and had, among other things, made his name by developing a system for the monitoring of child abuse. His job was to clear up murder cases. His colleagues were responsible for organized crime. And now, overnight, he was in the eye of the hurricane—a hurricane of journalists, politicians, and anti-Mafia parliamentary committees, lip service, postulations, and inferences, of ’Ndrangheta, investigating magistrates, and police. A hundred and twenty of his colleagues, half of all the investigators in Duisburg, were deployed to clear up the massacre.

At night Sprenger read books about the ’Ndrangheta. And files about the blood feud of San Luca. About the Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, who had been at war since one side had thrown an egg at the other as a carnival prank. About a village that essentially consisted of organized crime, drug dealing, arms dealing, and murder. When Sprenger went to Calabria, he always took his personal interpreter with him. Not out of suspicion, no. “Just because,” he said.

His office was in a fascistic-looking red-brick police headquarters, built in the 1930s, like the Italian Palaces of Justice. There was linoleum in the corridors; cacti and little ficus trees were lined up neatly in Sprenger’s office, and the walls were hung with organizational charts that Sprenger had drawn up: family trees of the clans of San Luca, the members of the warring Nirta-Strangio and Pelle-Vottari clans, assignments of tasks, family relationships and flows of information, arrows connecting men’s heads, women’s faces, hit men, victims, witnesses, perpetrators, getaway cars. At once a kind of wallpaper and a cartography of crime. Hanging next to it was a photograph of a trash bag with a child’s arm sticking out of it.

Heinz Sprenger had learned a lot about the family relationships of the Calabrian clan, about how almost everyone in San Luca has the same name, and you always have to know their mother’s name to distinguish one ’Ndranghetista from another. And he had learned that in the summer before the massacre, Marco Marmo had driven through Duisburg: Marco Marmo, the instigator of the Duisburg massacre, the ’Ndranghetista who had carried out at Christmas 2006 the murder of Maria Strangio, which had been intended to kill her husband, the clan head Gianluca Nirta.

Since the murder of his wife, the boss Gianluca Nirta had been seen as a time bomb by the enemy Pelle-Vottari clan, so it was the job of the hit man Marco Marmo to get rid of him as quickly as possible: “Gianluca must die, otherwise nothing here is going to work. He has nothing to lose now, you see, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, the hit man’s devoted helper, who had traveled halfway across Europe with him, all the way to Duisburg. In a car that wasn’t just full of bugs but was also fitted with a satellite transmitter that told Italian investigators its exact location—in Tonhallenstrasse in Duisburg, for example, or Saarstrasse and Mühlheimer Strasse, where the pizzeria Da Bruno stood.

Unlike the Sicilian mafiosi, who are always worried that their apartments and cars might be bugged and who therefore talk rarely or in a very coded way about their business, what is astonishing about the ’Ndrangheta is the openness with which they talk about their dealings: the wiretap records of San Luca and the ones from the car in Duisburg suggest a certain recklessness. The killer and his henchman talked quite openly about their plans; plainly they thought they had nothing to fear, from either the Italian or the German police. Who, incidentally, knew nothing about the fact that the two mafiosi were driving through Duisburg in a bugged car—and Heinz Sprenger remains angry about that, because of the not inconsiderable danger that the two men represented. After they’d been stopped at a roadblock, the hit man told his henchman that he would have fired if they had been held any longer. But because Italian wiretap records are illegal under German law, they are ineligible as evidence.

Behind this lurks what German detectives politely term “different investigative traditions and legal cultures”: the Italian police try to penetrate the structures of a whole clan, which it can then finally arrest for the crime of Mafia membership. The German police have to be able to demonstrate a concrete crime, so they must look for evidence, for DNA traces, fingerprints, traces of gunpowder. Or, as Inspector Sprenger puts it: the Italians bug everything, they tap people’s phones for years—and nothing happens.

But where the Italian police have the edge, as far as he’s concerned, is in their ability to seize Mafia property, even if Mafia membership is only suspected. How many times have the German police questioned Italians who have come to Germany without funds, worked making pizzas for six months, and then bought up half of Duisburg city center? And, when they were asked where the money came from, said, “From my uncle in Italy.”

All mafiosi cherish this hole in German legislation, and they exploit it even today. Especially, of course, since the fall of the Berlin Wall. German investigators noticed this when mafiosi from Duisburg, Cologne, or Dortmund moved to the east, to Saxony and Thuringia, and particularly to the Baltic coast, where millions of euros were laundered through the purchase of hotels, restaurants, and holiday resorts.

There isn’t a single Calabrian-run pizzeria in Germany that hasn’t got some involvement with the ’Ndrangheta, says Inspector Sprenger. But so long as there is no shift in the burden of proof, so long as the police have to demonstrate that the money comes from criminal offenses, and the investor does not have to prove that his money was acquired legally, the Mafia’s businesses in Germany will go on thriving.

What did he expect?

“I don’t think the Germans are going to change their laws because of Duisburg,” he said. “And if they don’t change anything, nothing will change between Italy and Germany.”

For me this accorded with the views of the Calabrian state prosecutors Gratteri and Boemi and the investigator Cortese: all three men were united by the oppressive feeling that Duisburg hadn’t really changed anything. That the initial enthusiasm that had inspired Germany and Italy to work very closely together had already dissipated. Cortese saw that his German colleagues were highly motivated, but that they were hampered by the legal situation. German laws were no match for the criminal reality.

“So the Mafia has a great future in Germany,” I said to Letizia, who had forgotten all about her swordfish as we talked about Duisburg. The red-faced son-in-law has been lurking for quite a while, and when finally Letizia sets down her cutlery, he immediately takes the plates away and tries to persuade us to have a dessert, wild strawberries in orange sauce, or hand-made lemon sorbet, almost compulsory at the end of a fish dinner: “To lose the fishy taste in your mouth,” he adds. We comply without much resistance and take both. Wild strawberries with lemon sorbet.

By now we’re the last guests in Piccola Napoli; the old woman at the till is already starting to cash out for the day. She’s a bit like the grim-looking old Sicilian woman that I saw in a pizzeria in Duisburg. A policeman had recommended the restaurant to me: “I can assure you that the kitchen’s clean, we searched the place only recently,” he said.

I had gone to Duisburg with my uncle, an undercover agent in a sailor’s cap. My uncle is a retired miner, so he’s the ideal companion for looking around Duisburg without drawing attention to yourself. We had lunch in the Sicilian pizzeria that had already been searched by the criminal investigation department. No one in the restaurant spoke even halfway decent German; they didn’t even speak Italian, they just communicated in a Sicilian dialect that they muttered through unmoving lips, as if they’d been catapulted into the present of Duisburg from the depths of the Sicilian past. My uncle was eagerly wolfing down a plate of salmon with prawn sauce when the old woman came out of the kitchen. She was very short, had eyes like bits of coal, and her hair was in a thin bun at the back of her neck. She poured herself a glass of mineral water at the counter. When I saw her, a film played out in my mind’s eye, showing all the encounters that I’ve ever had with Mafia wives. I couldn’t help thinking about suspicious glances behind fly-curtains, the severe faces of the black dwarves of Corleone, of Mafia mothers who call their sons vermin when they have left the Mafia. But perhaps the old woman with the coal-black eyes was just a generous Sicilian grandmother helping out in this restaurant for a few hours a day. Perhaps.

But this restaurant was actually only a warm-up. The destination for our outing was the Landhaus Milser. A hotel that was “the expression of Southern vitality,” according to the prospectus. It was on the edge of Duisburg, between meadows and little pieces of woodland.

My uncle stepped into the hotel lobby as if into a church; he crossed his arms behind his back and stepped across the terracotta tiles with great deference. Displayed in a case next to the entrance were medals won by the weightlifter Rolf Milser, who had founded the hotel along with the Calabrian Antonio Pelle. The hotel became famous in 2006 when the Italian national football team stayed there. And when the Duisburg massacre took place. During those August days there was barely an interview in which the Calabrian owner, Antonio Pelle from San Luca, didn’t endeavor to avoid arrest on grounds of kinship: not all Calabrians were mafiosi; he’d rather have been born on the moon than in San Luca.

But I said nothing of that to my uncle. We stepped through the light-drenched hotel lobby, poked our heads into the Da Vinci restaurant, and admired the photographs of the Italian national team. My uncle thought everything was very nice, very well cared for.

As we left, my eye was drawn to a gold plaque that hung in the lobby, on which Antonio Pelle was celebrated as a “successful migrant” who had brought honor on Calabria. The medal of honor had been awarded by the Pro Loco of San Giovanni di Gerace, one of those associations devoted to the fostering of local traditions. The medal was signed by the Pro Loco president, Dr. Mario Carabetta. And I’m sure it’s a coincidence that the companion of the hit man from San Luca who drove through Duisburg in a bugged car the summer before the assassination bore the same surname: Michele Carabetta.

When Don Pino, the parish priest of San Luca, had traveled to Duisburg to deliver his mass of reconciliation, he spent the night in the Landhaus Milser. As befits a Calabrian. Compatriots always look out for each other.

MAFIA WOMEN

WHEN WE LEAVE THE TRATTORIA AT LAST, THE WOMEN OF the Piccola Napoli look up for the first time. The old woman stares at us and at the money that the waiter brings her on a little silver tray; the daughter-in-law finally stops polishing the counter and wipes her hand on her apron. But not even Shobha can wrest a smile from the daughter-in-law, not even when she takes a picture of her and admires her delicate profile. The daughter-in-law shrugs carelessly, as if she thinks her symmetrical face is entirely uninteresting.

Outside, the light has softened again; we stand irresolutely in the street, Letizia lights a cigarette and looks through the smoke at the clear, endless sky as if expecting a sign.

“We could drive to Mondello,” Shobha suggests. “We could take a few pictures on Monte Pellegrino first, and then a few on Mondello beach.”

Letizia looks up in astonishment, as if remembering only now that this is all about her. “Haven’t we finished?” she asks. She hesitates for a moment between protest and resignation, and then opts for an aggressive: “Let’s get it over with.”

Shobha calls Salvo, who is clearly in the middle of his siesta, because it takes him ages to answer. He suggests that we go in the direction of Ucciardone prison, where he’ll pick us up to take us to Mondello. First he has some things to do for one of his ladies.

“Madonna,” says Shobha, as she puts the telefonino away again, “they’ve really got him over a barrel.” So that we don’t have to wait too long for Salvo, we walk through the Borgo at a leisurely pace, as slowly as tourists, past the piles of trash from the market stalls, through air that smells as if it’s fermenting. The green of artichokes lies next to burst watermelons and shimmering gray fish scales. Not a single car drives past; nothing stirs around here before five o’clock. A deep silence prevails in the street, on the artichoke-green, on the fly-curtains of the balconies. The silence of paused time. The sacred southern Italian lunch break is even respected by the dogs in the street, which lie snoring in the shade on the pavements. Beside them, fat women sit spread-legged on plastic chairs outside the front doors of their houses. The women sleep open-mouthed, hands folded on their bellies.

The plastic chairs aren’t the usual white ones that pollute the world, but chairs stretched with strips of plastic, old chairs that look almost beautiful next to the omnipresent white plastic stacking chairs. It’s not just traditions that last longer in Sicily than elsewhere, chairs do too. They remind me of Rita Atria’s mother’s chair. It was in their living room, made of white and yellow plastic strips, with an old sofa cushion on the seat.

Rita Atria was a Sicilian girl, about whom I wrote my very first book. She was eleven years old when her father, a Mafia boss, was murdered. She was sixteen when her brother was killed. She took her own life at seventeen. She had grown up in the Mafia. Rita wanted to avenge her father and brother by collaborating with the judiciary and telling them what she knew about the Mafia in her village. Since then her mother had rejected her.

Rita lived in Rome under a series of assumed names—with her sister-in-law, her brother’s widow, in an apartment that the Ministry of the Interior had rented for the two young women. They were filled with hope for a new life beyond the Mafia, until public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was murdered. A week after the assassination Rita Atria jumped from the seventh floor of a block of apartments in Rome. She would have turned eighteen four weeks later.

A state prosecutor gave me a photocopy of Rita Atria’s diary. In it she wrote:

No one can understand the emptiness that Borsellino’s death has left in my life. Everybody’s scared. But the only thing I’m scared of is that the Mafia state will always win, and the few poor idiots who tilt against windmills will be murdered too. Before you start fighting against the Mafia you have to test your own conscience—it’s only when you have defeated the Mafia within yourself that you can fight against it in your circle of friends. Because the Mafia is us and our twisted way of behaving. Borsellino. You died for what you believed in. But without you, I’m dead.

Rita’s mother didn’t come to her daughter’s funeral. Eight women from Palermo carried Rita’s coffin on their shoulders: they were the women from the committee of “Women Against the Mafia,” and one of them was Letizia. Rita Atria’s grave was marked with a small headstone with the inscription The Truth Lives. Rita’s sister-in-law had had this gravestone erected—the sister-in-law who had lived with her until her suicide. It was only months after her daughter’s death that the girl’s mother visited the grave—and shattered the gravestone with a hammer that she had hidden in her handbag. She went on striking the stone until only a few splinters remained of Rita’s photograph and the inscription The Truth Lives.

To understand Rita’s story, I had driven alone to Partanna, the village in the Belice Valley, southeast of Trapani. A taxi driver from Palermo had brought me to Partanna and promised to pick me up again when I called him. I stood in the road and watched his car disappearing into the distance, and felt as if I had been dropped off on an alien planet. I felt even more abandoned when I moved into my room at the only inn in the village, a narrow room with a metal fly-curtain outside the window, which rattled gently when the trucks drove by on the through-road below my window.

The inn was actually a pizzeria that also rented rooms—rooms without phones. You could only make phone calls from the dining room, and you could only do that with coins. The only other person staying in the inn was an old man, a Sicilian who had emigrated from Partanna to America in the 1940s and who, since he had retired, came back to his village every summer. He spent his holidays sitting in the front door of the pizzeria and hoping to fall into conversation with someone. He usually waited in vain. Because he spoke only English—and remnants of the dialect that people in Partanna had spoken in the 1940s, which hardly anyone understood now. Sometimes I translated for him from English into Italian. In the evening the old Sicilian waited for me; he sat in his vest on a plastic chair and told me his house had six bedrooms and wasn’t far from Niagara Falls. And I sat next to him and smoked and thought about the day’s encounters—with Rita’s sister-in-law, who had come back to visit her village under police protection; with Giovanna Atria, Rita’s mother.

Everyone in the village knew that I had come because of Rita’s story. I could feel their eyes glued to me as I walked along the street to buy cigarettes in the village’s single tobacconist’s shop, or when I made a call from the only phone box that took phone cards. But when I asked anyone a question, they all acted as if Rita had never existed. Every day I tried to allay the suspicions of Rita’s mother, who didn’t want to talk to anyone about her daughter. At first, she only opened the door a crack and then slammed it shut again as soon as she saw me. But I refused to be discouraged and stood outside her house every day, hoping to persuade her to give me an interview. Until she finally invited me into the living room.

Even though it was light outside, we sat behind closed shutters in the light of a fluorescent strip, in a room that looked as if it had never been lived in, with a walnut vitrine full of liqueur glasses that no one had drunk from, with a sofa that no one had sat on. I sat on one of the dining-room chairs, which had not had its plastic covering removed in all those years. The only piece of furniture that was actually used was the chair stretched with strips of plastic on which Rita’s mother sat. Her favorite place to sit was in a corner behind the living-room window, from where she could see the comings and goings in the street as she sat on her chair, peering out from behind her crooked blinds.

The mother didn’t regret rejecting her daughter, nor did she regret shattering the gravestone. The betrayal of the family had to be paid for. Washed away, scrubbed away, chopped into tiny pieces. Giovanna Atria repeated only that her daughter’s actions had been wrong, wrong, wrong—and that she had been hexed by her sister-in-law, the hated sister-in-law.

The mother spouted her accusations, her breath rattled, and I had difficulty following her through her thicket of accusations and suspicions. I saw her sitting, legs spread, on the plastic-strip chair in front of me and heard her complaining without once using the word Mafia. I dreamed about her at night. The metal chains of the fly-curtain jangled, and she came flying through the window into my room at the inn and tried to strangle me.

By day, on the other hand, she reminded me of my East Prussian grandmother. She too had done everything she could to keep her family together. The family here meaning only blood relations. Also like a Sicilian woman, my grandmother distinguished between flesh by blood and flesh by marriage contract. And my mother was flesh by marriage contract. She had been widowed at the age of twenty-seven, when my father died in a mining accident. When my mother went out dancing for the first time, six years after my father’s death, my grandmother cast her out of the family.

“I thought you’d stay on your own,” my grandmother had told my mother. I thought about that as I walked back along the main street with the villagers’ eyes on my back, and as I had my dinner in the pizzeria in the evening, eyed suspiciously by old men who were, as always, the only guests. In one corner of the pizzeria there was a television fixed to the wall, turned on all day. In the evening the old men watched soft-porn films, along with the old emigrant in his vest. And when the taxi driver picked me up at last and drove me back to Palermo, I felt as if I was going back to a city of light.

Shobha, Letizia, and I sit on a bench by the yellow stone walls of Ucciardone prison, waiting for Salvo. After dinner a wave of fatigue falls upon us, intensified by the heat. Letizia smokes a cigarette, and Shobha takes her photograph sitting next to some women. The women are waiting for visiting time at Ucciardone to begin. They sit in the shade, fanning themselves and smelling of perfume. No Mafia wife would neglect to visit her husband in prison. One of them looks like a tragic, crazed Anna Magnani. A face like a figurehead with heavy, blue bags around her eyes. Her hair comes down to her waist, and she wears a chain of pearls that falls to her lap. I wonder whether I’ve ever met her before, perhaps in the high-security court at Caltanissetta?

When the trials of the murderers of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were being held there, with perpetrators, instigators, and accomplices all in the dock, the wives didn’t miss a single day. Unlike now, when Mafia bosses are usually questioned by video link, the defendants used to be present in person; they sat in barred cages and tried to catch their wives’ eyes. They were men with the air of janitors, men in tracksuits. In front of the cages hung a red cord that was supposed to stop lawyers from getting too close to their clients and passing on messages.

The wives were called the “white widows.” They were the first in the viewing seats in the courtroom in the morning and the last to leave in the evening. It is the duty of every Mafia wife to sit through every day of the trial, from the reading of the names of everyone present to the closing of the last document folder. The crazed Anna Magnani was always first in the gallery in the morning. She always sat down in the same place on the spectators’ bench, wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, folded her hands over her belly, and didn’t rest until the end of the session. Later came the young women—with frothy perms, lilac lipstick, and azure, flight-attendant eye shadow. Two weeks’ honeymoon in the Maldives, a fitted kitchen with a microwave, and a video recorder had been enough to buy their silence. The Mafia woos the wives of arrested bosses with a lot of money. They mustn’t want for anything. Because if they are unhappy, they could start giving their husbands the wrong idea.

By half past eight in the evening, when the presiding judge declared the trial over for the day, the air conditioning had turned the women’s lips blue. That was the moment they had been waiting for since morning. Because before their husbands were led back to the cells, they managed to blow kisses from their barred cages. The women blew kisses back, kneaded their handkerchiefs, and swallowed hard. Their eyes welled up. Real Matres Dolorosae—filled with the kind of devotion that women feel only when they’re convinced they’re on the right side.

These women outside the prison walls of Palermo have, in honor of the day, put on their newest outfits, low-cut floral dresses, polka-dot skirts, and bustiers. It occurs to me that in San Luca, back in Calabria, I didn’t see a single woman who had dressed herself up, unless she was seventeen years old. All the married women wore black, or at best a pair of jeans with a black T-shirt. Did they wear the latest designer dresses at home, away from the public gaze? Like Arab women? The smart boutiques of Reggio must have some customers, after all.

The women of San Luca are also sure that they’re on the right side. Wiretap records show that they are by no means the patient, black-clad victims of potentially violent men, but that they actively support their husbands, not only in their illegal deals but also in the planning of revenge campaigns. When she visited her husband in jail, Giulia Alvaro, who would later be arrested herself, asked her husband if she should get weapons out of a hiding place for him and bring them to another clan member. Sonia Carabetta made herself useful as an intermediary between her brother and the hit man Marco Marmo. The women disguise themselves, pass on messages, hide fugitives, prepare murders, and maintain the connection between arrested bosses and the clan—which can even win them the honorific title of a sorella d’omertà, a sister of silence.

“How many misfortunes, how many tragedies in the south have been caused by women, especially the ones who become mothers,” said the Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia. As in Cosa Nostra and the Camorra, in Calabria the women pass on the Mafia culture from generation to generation; it’s the mothers who call for vendetta, who keep thoughts of the dead alive and prepare their sons for life in the ’Ndrangheta. In Calabria the clan chief arranges for the newborn child to be paid a visit at which a knife and a key are set down by its side. If the child touches the knife first, it has a future as an ’Ndranghetista, but if it touches the key first, it becomes a “flunkey,” as the police are called here. And to keep this from happening, the key is set down too far away for the child to be able to touch it. The boss also cuts the baby’s nails for the first time: that means the child has been accepted into the organization. And the mother understands the symbolism of these gestures.

Father, uncle, brother-in-law, brother, son. The Mafia sits in the living room. It lies in bed, it eats at the table, it comes home with its boots bloodied. And the wives? You can accuse Mafia women of all kinds of things, of concealing things and lying, of turning a blind eye. But you can’t accuse them of not knowing anything.

“The only really important woman for a mafioso is, and must be, the mother of his children. All the others are ‘just tarts.’ A mafioso who has been married more than once, or who is known to have had affairs, is a wild card—incapable of controlling himself sexually and emotionally. So he isn’t ‘professionally’ trustworthy either,” wrote Giovanni Falcone.

The women are the foundation of the Mafia. When he’s accepted into the organization, the mafioso must swear not to chase after other people’s wives and always to lead a blameless family life. The reason is less moral than pragmatic—a suspect family life, or even a volatile mistress, represents a threat to security. The men of honor play along with the game. They enjoy the respect that is paid to them. They know what they are worth. But they also know that rules are there to be broken. Even in Cosa Nostra. Of course you have mistresses, very discreetly. But the wife is consoled by the certainty that she takes precedence. She must be protected. Because she provides an assurance that the foundations of Mafia society are unshaken.

Formally, a woman can’t be accepted into Cosa Nostra, but even without the formalities she’s part of it. Giusy Vitale, the first female boss in the history of Cosa Nostra, and later a turncoat, didn’t just advance the businesses of the clan in the absence of her brothers, passing on messages, taking part in meetings with bosses; she also bribed politicians and gave orders for murders to be committed. Even at the age of six she knew what it meant to belong to the Mafia, Giusy Vitale said. That is the educational goal of a Mafia mother—she rules over the blood family, the core of the Mafia family itself.

It’s the mothers who pass on Mafia values: honor and shame, loyalty and betrayal. It isn’t the husband who brings up the children in blind obedience to the Mafia; it’s the wife. Even if she and the boss don’t actually have a marriage certificate. When the boss Bernardo Provenzano was finally arrested after forty-three years of invisibility, he said, when asked if he was married: “Where my conscience is concerned, yes.” But wiretap records reveal that, even while the godfather Provenzano was living underground, he didn’t have to give up the chance of a church wedding. Or the usual customs of a good Sicilian family life. A linguist who was presented with excerpts from wiretap records could tell from the accent of Provenzano’s sons, Angelo and Francesco, that they must have gone to school in Trapani. When investigators went to Trapani, some schoolchildren identified the faces of the two Provenzano sons as those of their former schoolmates. Provenzano’s wife was recognized by some of Trapani’s parish priests when they were shown photographs of her. But unfortunately they couldn’t say where the signora might have been living with her two sons.

The God-fearing godfather felt bonded, merged, allied with his wife and family—as everyone in Cosa Nostra knew, and as was revealed by the pizzini, the little notes with which Provenzano communicated with the world, and in which he always invoked God’s blessing. His wife sent him warm socks along with washing instructions—You can wash them in cold water or in the washing machine—and she wrote to him in the tone of a wife whose husband has gone to war:

My life, I end my letter with the blessing of the Almighty, that the light of the Lord may shine on you and help you, as it may give us the power and the faith to endure all this. My life, I hug you very, very tightly. My love, if I should have forgotten anything, please let me know.

Unlike the Mafia, the Italian judiciary has always had a less than flattering view of a woman’s capabilities. As if she is someone incapable of acting or thinking independently. Even if a wife is in hiding for twenty years with a documented murderer, she doesn’t count as an accomplice; she isn’t even guilty of being an accessory. A wife can’t be forced to give evidence against her husband. That’s the law. And that’s what makes her so valuable to the Mafia: wives are inviolable. They bring messages to their husbands, whether they are imprisoned or in hiding, and during their husbands’ frequent absences they keep the businesses going: drug deals, money laundering, property transfers. The few Mafia wives who have ever ended up in court have been acquitted; many Italian judges have fallen victim to their own unshakeable faith in the patriarchy: women couldn’t be held responsible for their actions, they must have been forced to act on their husbands’ instructions. Only slowly have they become aware that the image of the innocent wife with no idea of her husband’s murderous activities is a myth, and one that the Mafia at least has never believed in.

When the gate of Ucciardone prison opens at last and the women push their way through for visiting hours, Salvo drives up; his Fiat sits, indicators blinking, by the side of the road, unmoved by the furious beeping of the other cars behind it. As soon as we’ve closed the car door behind us, we talk about the women standing next to us outside the prison. Women you wouldn’t want to meet on a dark night, as Salvo says.

We drive past the jetty where people stand waving after the departing ferry, then Salvo turns off toward Mondello. As always, he looks as fresh as a daisy, his collar is turned up, his hair combed and gelled; he plainly had time to shower after his siesta, and he smells of aftershave. When we stop at a traffic light, he looks at his watch until Shobha finally asks him if it’s new. With a mixture of relief and embarrassment he admits that his brother gave it to him, a first-class imitation Rolex, because it was Salvo’s birthday last week, which none of us knew.

“You remember the Rolex in Corleone?” Shobha asks and laughs. The “Rolex in Corleone” is a phrase I just have to hear to smell again the scent of a rainy morning in Corleone, the scent of the wet paving stones, the smell of my damp leather jacket, the smell of wet cardboard. The water trickled down us in little streams and flowed along the gutters, dragging paper and trash with it.

We wanted to talk to the women of the town, to hear something about the ones who were spoken of in secret as the first ladies of the Mafia. Not the easiest thing in the world. And certainly not when the weather’s bad. Because in Corleone, even when it’s fine, you only ever see the old men sitting by the side of the road; it’s only thought seemly for women to appear in church, at the cemetery, and in the supermarket. It was too late for church, too early for the supermarket, and too wet for the cemetery. We walked gloomily along the alleyways. In the window of a haberdashery there was a display of coppole, the flat caps worn on the island. Because my hair was already drenched through, we stepped inside the shop to buy one. Inside stood two old women dressed in black, asking advice about buying thread. I noticed that one of them held her left arm at so stiff an angle that it looked as if it didn’t belong to her. Then I saw a gold, diamond-encrusted Rolex sparkling on her wrist.

A short time later we bumped into the two women again in the Iannuzzi patisserie, which has the best cannoli in Corleone—the Sicilian pastries made of cream cheese and candied fruits. The Rolex glittered in the shop’s fluorescent light, and pastry-man Iannuzzi hovered around the two black-clad women like a hummingbird: “One more marzipan cake, Signore? Try one of my delicious cannoli, tender as peach blossoms!” When Shobha asked the two women if she could take a picture of them, they just clicked their tongues dismissively. Plainly we weren’t worth an answer. The two signore were used to being treated with exaggerated respect. They condescendingly gave their orders and quickly left the shop.

Who were those two black-clad women? Signore Iannuzzi shrugged. “No idea,” he said, and we could see that he was lying. We bought two cannoli and decided to go to Totò Riina’s house on Via Scorsone so that we could at least take a picture of the place where his wife Antonietta had lived with her children since her husband’s arrest. When Antonietta came back to Corleone, she didn’t move into the house with the gilded taps, walnut doors, and the Carrara marble. The police had impounded it. Instead, she moved in with her two old, unmarried sisters, Emanuela and Maria Matilde. A narrow-fronted, two-story house on a street barely wider than a Fiat Panda.

Antonietta Bagarella had known her husband since childhood. It was a classic Mafia marriage: Ninetta was from an old Corleone family, her brother was rising through the hierarchy. He had the honor of being murdered by his future brother-in-law. Ninetta only found that out when she was already married to Riina. One thing is certain, though: it wouldn’t have got in the way of the marriage. Business is business. A woman like Ninetta, who comes from old Mafia nobility, isn’t prone to sentimentality.

Unlike her husband, who didn’t get beyond primary school, Ninetta studied and gained her teacher’s diploma. Among all the mafiosi who haven’t even got a proper command of Italian, Ninetta’s education is an invaluable advantage; for a long time she was the only one capable of reading a case file and negotiating with the lawyers. The young Mafia wife also attracted the attention of the investigating magistrates. In 1971, at the age of twenty-seven, she was the first Sicilian woman to be accused of Mafia membership. She was suspected of working as a courier for the bosses who were living in hiding. Ninetta played the part of the innocent, persecuted wife to perfection: she wrote pleading letters, collected the signatures of mothers in Corleone, and even appealed to the Human Rights Commission in The Hague. She told the court: “I am a woman, and I confess that I am guilty of loving a man that I trust. I have loved Totò Riina since I was thirteen and he was twenty-six. Since then I have borne him in my heart; that is my only crime, your Honour.”

The judge passed a lenient sentence and placed her under police supervision—which she soon escaped by going into hiding.

The Riinas’ family life was flawless, even during the years when the family was in hiding. The Mafia saw to it that they had every possible comfort: a priest to marry the couple, a honeymoon in Venice, a place in the obstetric ward, well-guarded villas in the middle of Palermo, holiday homes by the sea. Antonietta taught the children their times tables, while at the same time hit men were recruited and assassinations planned. Hear everything, see everything, just don’t say a word.

When journalists dared to ask her a question at the end of a day’s trial, she said only: “My husband isn’t what you think he is. He’s an elegant man. I wish everyone was like him, an exemplary father. He is too good, and he fell victim to circumstances.”

I was thinking about that as I stood in front of her narrow house and noticed that there were white lace curtains over the windows and a rubber tree on the tiled balcony. Suddenly I heard cries. At first I didn’t even notice that the cries were aimed at us. “Whores, wretches, damned souls,” came the shouts from the window, “you’ve been running after us all morning. Clear off, or you’ll be sorry.”

Plainly the two black-clad women were the sisters of Ninetta Bagarella. Shobha blanched, lowered her camera, and said: “Let’s get out of here.”

We ran back to our car, which was parked only a street away. I drove off as quickly as I could, toward the access road for Palermo. Shortly before I got there I noticed that we were being followed by a white Fiat Uno. As I turned off toward Palermo, I saw a heavily guarded security van driving in the distance in front of us. I tried to follow it. I stayed glued to its back bumper all the way to Palermo. At some point the white Fiat Uno turned off.

Shortly after our visit to Corleone, Giovanni, the eighteen-year-old son of Totò Riina, was arrested, for fighting, perjury, blackmail, and Mafia membership. And murder. His mother saw him as a victim. Again she sat down and, in her even, schoolteachery handwriting, wrote an appeal that she sent to La Repubblica—a masterpiece of Sicilian maternal love. “As a mother, I have decided to open my heart, overflowing with grief over the arrest of my son,” she wrote, and accused the judiciary and the public of condemning him simply because of his family. “My children are being found guilty of being born the children of father Riina and mother Bagarella, an original sin that cannot be erased. Why can my children not simply be seen as young people like any others?”

Later, Giovanni Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of four people. His younger brother, Giuseppe, who had also been arrested, was charged with Mafia membership and extortion—and got out of jail on a technicality in 2008. After six years’ imprisonment he returned to the narrow house in Via Scorsone, keenly awaited by his mother, his sisters, and his aunts. That’s what I can’t help thinking of when I see a Rolex.

Salvo drives slowly along the twists and turns of Monte Pellegrino. Palermo stretches out below us in a veil of heat haze, endless rows of houses, satellite dishes, and a sea that blurs with the horizon. Every time Shobha and I work in Palermo, we make a pilgrimage to Santa Rosalia, as if we were obeying an inner voice. And this time is no different, in spite of the mild protests of Letizia, who accuses us of heresy. For a moment we immerse ourselves in the view of the Bay of Palermo, transformed into the Conca d’Oro, the golden seashell, then we pass through a tunnel and we’ve arrived at the top of Monte Pellegrino, up by Santa Rosalia, the patron saint of the city, buried here under mountains of gold and precious stones.

As usual, I get the urge to splurge at the stall set up by the bearded dwarf-woman beside the steps below the pilgrimage church, and buy a bag full of devotional objects: Santa Rosalias supine and haloed, light-up Madonnas, oversized, glow-in-the-dark rosaries, and, of course, Santa Rosalia candles as thick as your arm. Thus equipped, we climb the steps to the chapel, and notice a woman, who has plainly climbed Monte Pellegrino barefoot, now throwing herself to the ground and sliding up the steps to Santa Rosalia on her knees. She’s young, perhaps less than thirty. Somehow her fanaticism strikes us as weird, so Shobha and I run past her, giving her a wide berth, clutching our candles as if they were amulets to ward off the evil eye.

What does the barefoot woman of Santa Rosalia wish for? Her husband’s release from prison? A child? An illness healed? The chapel is full of votive gifts: silver calves and eyes, wax hearts and legs, dangle from the walls. Every time we come here there are different gifts hanging in the chapel. This time we spot a steel-boned corset with a note that says: For the mercy you showed, Mimma. Hanging beside it is a plastic bag containing a ponytail, and beneath it children’s shirts and bibs and a rubber ring decorated with blue baby ribbons.

The chapel is in a cave in Monte Pellegrino, so cool that it makes you shiver even on the hottest days. Here two Rosalias wait for the faithful: one dressed in black, holding a death’s-head in her hand, her right arm reaching combatively into the air; and a lasciviously draped Santa Rosalia lying in a glass coffin, a Santa Rosalia who lies in her shrine full of precious objects, on a bed of rings, pearl necklaces, armbands—a sleeping beauty who has just fallen into a deep slumber.

Apart from us and the barefoot woman, there is no one in the chapel, no faithful sitting in the pews, no sexton collecting the burned-out candles—no one. Not a sound but drops of water falling from the ceiling onto metal runnels, from which they are guided to the floor. The moisture creeps not just into the silver calves but also into the countless notes bearing wishes and expressions of gratitude; the paper is curled and mottled, and I wonder who actually reads the notes.

As we stand by the saint’s glass coffin, the young woman comes sliding along on her knees. She kneels next to us, prays with her head lowered, and starts crying. She sobs till her back shudders.

CARLA MADONIA

LETIZIA IS STILL CAPTIVATED BY THE SIGHT OF THE WEEPING woman beside the glass coffin as we drive down from Monte Pellegrino toward Mondello. She looks out of the window and doesn’t notice the ash falling from her cigarette. Perhaps Letizia is thinking about the photograph that she herself once took here, showing the bare feet of a woman sliding up to Saint Rosalia on her knees. Maybe she’s also thinking of the photograph of the widows whose faces were reflected in the windscreen of a hearse; maybe she’s thinking of the picture of the men peeing against a wall. Or maybe not. Although even her photographs of shredded corpses, mouths gaping in death, and hysterical widows always look as meticulously composed as if a neorealist film director had organized the horror, her first concern was always the struggle; art came second. She fought for women and for the insane. Against men and against the powerful. She opened a theater for women, edited and continues to edit a magazine for women, published books for women. She was the leader of a revolution, because when Letizia took charge of her own life, divorce wasn’t even possible in Italy. In its place, there was the crime of honor killing: a man who killed his unfaithful wife to restore his honor could, until 1981, expect mitigating circumstances. From that point of view, in the 1960s it took a lot of courage to leave your husband and lead your own life.

As if she can read my thoughts, Letizia now says: “I have a very pronounced sense of family, but I don’t let it cramp me. And I don’t cramp the ones I love. I believe in coexistence, in love, in freedom. I’ve always been very free, even in the upbringing of my daughters, and even if that wasn’t always what they wanted. It’s complicated.”

Shobha is sitting in front of her, and I see her looking out of the window and then awkwardly cleaning the lens of her camera with a little chamois cloth. And then Salvo turns the CD back on. Antonacci: “Dream of me if it snows.”

“A woman’s thoughts revolve around flesh,” they say in Sicily. Flesh by contract and flesh of the flesh. Carne di contratto, carne di carne. And husbands often learn the hard way that their wives, when they have to make a choice, will naturally feel closer to the flesh of the flesh. It’s something learned by those mafiosi who have decided, against the will of their wives, to leave the Mafia. Giuseppina Manganaro burned her husband’s clothes when she discovered that he was collaborating with the judiciary. She could no longer stand his smell in the house, she said, and dressed in black. The sister and mother of Emanuele and Pasquale Di Filippo went so far as to call a press conference where they told the news agency Ansa of their contempt for the two traitors. The sister was so ashamed that she attempted suicide shortly afterward, the mother cursed the day she gave birth to her sons, the wives cast out their unholy husbands and cried: “Our sons no longer have fathers.” The mother and mother-in-law of the turncoat Vincenzo Scarantino chained themselves to the railings of the Palace of Justice to declare that he had been forced into becoming a traitor.

Agata Barresi said nothing when the Mafia murdered the first of her five sons. She also said nothing when the Mafia murdered the last of her five sons. She didn’t even open her mouth when the policeman asked her for her personal details. She remained silent until her death.

The mother of the mafioso Enrico Incognito wept when her son was killed. But what good did it do? The shame had to be eradicated, honor reestablished. Enrico’s brother Marcello had shot him to stop him from going over to the other side, the side of justice. The murder was accidentally captured on video, because at the very moment that his mother and his murderer entered the room, Enrico was recording his statement on tape. “No! Marcello, no!” Enrico cried, begging for his life. In vain. Then the mother left the room so that she didn’t have to watch what was about to happen.

And Vincenzina Marchese, sister-in-law of the boss Totò Riina and wife of the boss Leoluca Bagarella, disappeared when her husband was arrested. He wore her wedding ring on a chain around his neck, as one would with someone who had died, and put fresh flowers by her photograph. A note was found in her handwriting: “Forgive me, everyone, my husband is worth his weight in gold, it’s all my fault,” read the message on squared paper. Later, the police learned from two turncoat mafiosi that Vincenzina had supposedly hanged herself. Not only was she the wife of a powerful mafioso, she was also the sister of one of the most important state witnesses against the Mafia. Vincenzina had wanted to erase the shame, people said. Her body was never found.

Those bloodletting times, when the mafiosi had turned state’s evidence in droves, had been the times of the Mafia women. Of the cold-blooded mothers, the wives who were as self-sacrificing as they were vengeful. During those hard times, the Mafia women had become more valuable than ever. After all, no wave of arrests, no law, had done so much damage to the Mafia as the statements of its own men. There were men who talked about how they had strangled a little boy and dissolved his corpse in hydrochloric acid, about a man having his arm chopped off before being killed, about a pregnant woman being throttled. Now the wives were called upon to play their part, to praise the sacredness of the family, to extol the infallibility of the husband, to level accusations against the judiciary—wives who were willing to do anything to make the image of Cosa Nostra shine again. In the end, it was all about their children’s future.

We drive along the seafront of Mondello, past the pier where the Charleston restaurant stands, looking, with its turrets and curlicues, like a Russian railway station from the days of the Tsars. It smells of oysters and burned almonds. The fish restaurants are on their afternoon break, and people jostle each other at the stalls selling sunglasses and fake Vuitton bags as if there were something to be had for free. The turquoise sea looks like a tourist poster, and lovers lie embracing on the beach.

We plan to have a coffee in the piazza in Mondello, and I desperately crave some cannoli, regardless of their proven indigestibility, to which Shobha refers once again.

“I haven’t been to Mondello for ages,” Letizia announces with amazement. She stares at the passing couples, who all look as if they’ve allowed themselves a lunch in Mondello today, with their parents, their sisters and in-laws, their children. As if they’ve had swordfish at Al Gabbiano, preceded by a few oysters and sea urchins and spaghetti with clams. The son-in-law will have chosen the wine, perhaps a light Tasca d’Almerita, for which his father-in-law will have despised him because he himself drinks red wine with fish. Now they’ve taken a stroll along the shore, along the quay to the little white statue of Mary at the end, past the fishing boats and back to the stalls of the Vietnamese street traders selling cigarette lighters in the shape of hand grenades. Exhausted by this effort, they slump onto a chair in the piazza, for an ice cream, or perhaps just one tiny cannolo. In a moment the mother-in-law will say that the cannoli aren’t bad, but not nearly as good as the ones she makes herself, which are as light as a breeze. Then they will all argue about whether the cannoli from Pasticceria Alba on Piazza Don Bosco are really the best ones in the whole city, and the father-in-law will dare to announce that the best cannoli come from Piana degli Albanesi, which will put his wife in such a huff that she won’t talk to him until dinnertime. “That’s what it’ll be like,” says Shobha.

And we sit next to the couples, at one of the wobbly little tables; columns of cars drive noisily past and suddenly, at one of the neighboring tables, I think I recognize a woman whom Shobha and I met in this cafe a few years ago: Carla Cottone, daughter-in-law of one of the most powerful godfathers in Palermo, Francesco Madonia, who ruled the Resuttana clan with his four sons.

I point at her, but Shobha shakes her head. “No, that’s not her. Although it does look very like her.”

Carla Cottone, Madonia by marriage, was wearing a dark-blue suit and a pearl necklace when she collected us that time from the cafe on the piazza in Mondello. Everyone turned to stare as she crossed the piazza, because since her appearance on the Maurizio Costanzo talk show she had acquired a certain degree of celebrity. It was the first time that a woman from one of the most powerful Mafia families in Sicily had spoken publicly. But not to condemn the Mafia, as the presenter had hoped. Since her husband, Aldo, had been behind bars, Carla had embarked on a goodwill tour through the media to convince the public that her husband had fallen victim to a miscarriage of justice.

Carla Cottone had married Aldo, the youngest son of the Madonia clan, one of the most bloodthirsty Mafia families in Sicily, a clan that could boast of being involved in almost every “excellent” murder in the 1980s and 1990s: the assassinations of the regional president Piersanti Mattarella, the prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the police chief Ninni Cassarà, the public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. And the Palermo businessman Libero Grassi, who had publicly refused to go on paying protection money to the Mafia. Aldo Madonia was the last of the four Madonia sons to be still out of prison. He was also known as dottoricchio, little doctor, because he was the only one in the family to have graduated from college. His subject had been chemistry. He was arrested after a turncoat mafioso had stated that Aldo had been involved in a drug deal in which 600 kilos of cocaine from Colombia were delivered to the beach of Castellammare del Golfo. Aldo was said to have been present at a business meeting between Sicilian and Colombian drug dealers. One of the Madonia brothers who had already been sentenced tried to convince the turncoat that it was a case of mistaken identity. It was he, not his brother, who had taken part in the meeting.

In reply, the state witness said to him: “Why do you address me with the familiar tu? I don’t know you, I only know your brother Aldo.”

Carla Cottone had thought that we, too, were propagandists, who were going to deluge her with a flood of imprecations, accusations, and entreaties as soon as she’d asked us into her villa in the center of Mondello, with all its security alarms and high steel walls. She raged, as if she could prove her husband’s innocence simply by shouting. She cursed Palermo’s judges and all the turncoats who had denounced her husband. Her irreproachable husband Aldo a mafioso? All lies told by rats in return for promised privileges. Aldo was innocent, she cried. She turned into an animal when she heard those accusations; the problem was just that he bore the name of Madonia.

Until his arrest, it was in this house in Mondello that Aldo Madonia had led the blameless life as a pharmacist that his wife evoked. Shobha and I sat in the midst of an idyll of period furniture, family photographs in silver frames, and little porcelain figurines, and wondered why a respectable pharmaceutical adviser would need to protect himself with high steel walls. And as we sat there and wondered, Carla Cottone compared the Italian judiciary with the medieval Inquisition and the fascist era, and painted a romantic picture of the Mafia, which many people in Sicily joined only because they were in financial difficulties. “They’re unemployed, and life is expensive. So they choose to fit in with something,” she said.

Not a bad word about her husband’s family crossed her lips: it was all just dust that was being raised about all his supposed crimes. There was nothing behind any of it. Aldo had always said that his father was a very loving man.

On the day of our meeting with Carla Cottone, I learned that a car-bomb attack had been launched against Maurizio Costanzo, the host of the talk show on which Carla had so volubly defended her husband. Costanzo had survived only by the skin of his teeth. The bomb had gone off just before his car drove past.

Costanzo had long been a thorn in the flesh of the Mafia because of his critical attitude toward them. In his program, not only had he challenged Carla Cottone to condemn the Mafia but he had also wished a tumor upon a mafioso, after the man in question had managed to get himself transferred from jail to hospital with a faked illness. When the hard core of the Corleonesi decided, after the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, to continue with their murderous strategy, the suggestion that Costanzo become a target had been carried unanimously.

“Let’s walk along the beach for a bit,” Shobha says to Letizia and me. I feel like doing that as well. To feel the wind in my face and the water on my feet. Finally to feel a bit of movement. Because when I think about our meeting with Carla Cottone, about the attempt on Maurizio Costanzo’s life, I feel the torpor of Sicily settling on us.

“Chemistry,” Shobha says. Just that one word, and we laugh. No subject could have suited Aldo Madonia better. In the late 1980s Sicily was the center of the heroin trade and heroin refinement. At the time there were lots of rumors about the heroin refineries around Monreale, and Shobha hadn’t given them enough credence. One day when she came home to the little house not far from Monreale that she had rented shortly before, her eye fell first on the lightbulb that hung from the ceiling, which was still swinging back and forth, as if it had taken a knock—a furious, raging knock that had shattered all the furniture in her apartment, bed, cupboard, table and chairs, books, clothes, plates, and cups, all smashed and shattered. Only her saints had been left unharmed, the statues of Santa Rosalia, Santa Rita, and the Madonna of Trapani.

The next time they were a bit more polite. When Shobha came home, two men were waiting for her in a Mercedes. Men who moved as if they were being filmed. Economical movements, sparse sentences. She had half an hour to pack her things and get out, they said. No one was allowed to live in this area. Her furniture would be taken away in a truck; she could pick it up from a garage on the edge of Palermo.

Shobha packed her most necessary belongings and fled. Later she drove to the garage they had described. It was empty.

Even today Shobha is angry with herself for believing the two mafiosi. Believing in honesty, in a sense of honor.

“I left Sicily after that,” says Shobha.

You never hear from any Cosa Nostra women anymore. After the numbers of turncoats dwindled almost to nothing, the women became invisible again. They disappeared into nowhere, like rabbits that a magician had pulled out of his hat before conjuring them back again. Once again they became as invisible as Cosa Nostra itself.

The Calabrian Mafia women learned from the deployment of the Sicilian Mafia women: each time the clans are temporarily weakened by waves of arrests, the Calabrian women appear in public. A well-aimed stab to the maternal heart always works in Italy. A year after the Duisburg massacre, the wives of various arrested ’Ndranghetisti in San Luca even joined an anti-’Ndrangheta march, in which they had no hesitation in holding banners demanding True Justice—for their husbands, brothers, and sons: wanted murderers, arrested clan chiefs.

Carla Cottone and her blameless husband went on living their respectable life. Once his period in custody was over, Aldo Madonia was able to leave prison and wait comfortably at home for the further judgments of the higher-court authorities. In 2003 he was acquitted by the supreme court. He was defended by the Mafia lawyer Nino Mormino, who finally became a Forza Italia MP and worked under the Berlusconi government as vice president of the parliamentary judiciary committee. There he campaigned for an amnesty, which would apply not least to legally sentenced mafiosi. It was only when the Palermo state prosecutor’s office investigated Mormino that he stepped down from the judiciary committee. Even now Avvocato Mormino is one of the most sought-after Mafia defenders in Palermo. He defended Berlusconi’s friend Marcello Dell’Utri in the second instance against the charge of assisting the Mafia, and also the former Sicilian regional president Totò Cuffaro against the charge of helping the Mafia, both with great success. Cuffaro celebrated his lenient sentence from the court of the first instance: five years, for favoring the Mafia. Originally he was to have been sentenced for supporting the Mafia—not just a difference in the choice of words, but in the length of sentence as well. And Marcello Dell’Utri can consider himself lucky that public prosecutor Ingroia, whose indictment brought him a nine-year sentence for supporting the Mafia in the first instance, was not in charge of the trial in the second instance.

The blow of Cuffaro’s resignation as Sicilian regional president was briefly softened for him by a seat in the senate, where he could feel that he was among friends. Giulio Andreotti, sentenced for supporting the Mafia—whose support for the Mafia until 1980 was proven, and is now deemed to have lapsed—sits in the senate, as do Marcello Dell’Utri and the president of the senate, Renato Schifani. Schifani wasn’t sentenced for supporting the Mafia, but founded the company Sicula Brokers in 1979 together with a number of Mafia bosses—which, for a man appointed senate president by Prime Minister Berlusconi, and who therefore holds nothing less than the second-highest political office in Italy, is at least slightly awkward. Particularly since one of those Mafia bosses, Nino Mandalà, boasted years later of his friendship with Renato Schifani—something recorded in the files of various Mafia trials. Unlike politicians, the Mafia doesn’t forget. Not even decades on. Favors must be returned.

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.

ROSALBA DI GREGORIO

SALVO IS WAITING OUTSIDE THE CHARLESTON 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.

When he got out I was fourteen. It was a real drama. I spurned him. I was convinced that it was his fault that he wasn’t with us. I didn’t want to know why he had been in jail. I was convinced that he was the one who had left us in the lurch. “You abandoned us,” I said, “so now you have no right to hug me either. Or to say to me: ‘Come here, give me a kiss.’ Because it was your fault that you weren’t there. And that’s it.” When I last saw him in jail, he said: “I’d so love to hug you. With any luck I’ll soon be released from high security and back in normal jail.” And I—yes, I thought: No, with any luck this pane of glass will stay between us.

That was the moment when Rosalba, the mother, and the sisters lost their composure. They struck the desk with their palms and shouted: “No, no, Marina, you didn’t really think that. You didn’t think that.”

But Marina assured them: “Yes, I did think that. I really did think that.”

Then she wept. Her sisters, her mother, and Rosalba stroked her cheeks, her head, her shoulders, and Marina sobbed into the Kleenex tissues that Rosalba took from the box on the desk. And I turned off the tape recorder.

Finally things get going again on Via Ruggero Settimo, the traffic is rerouted, and Salvo curses because he has to take a detour. Suddenly we find ourselves back by the Piazza Pretoria, next to the city hall. On the steps in front of the fountain lies a bride, draped there like Santa Rosalia in her sarcophagus. The train of her wedding dress flows down the steps. The bride has, apparently just by chance, pulled the dress up to her knees. A wedding photographer is giving instructions, and Shobha calls out to Salvo: “Stop!” Because she loves throwing wedding parties into chaos. I once saw her, apparently uninterested, approach a bridal couple who were standing on Trapani beach, posing very stiffly for a wedding photographer, along with other guests. After a minute, Shobha had sent everyone climbing onto shipwrecks in their evening wear, between carcasses of boats and rusty anchor chains, and persuaded the bride to push her cleavage out for the camera, like a figurehead.

It was pretty much the same when we were guests at the wedding of the Mafia lawyer Rosalba Di Gregorio, but that time Shobha didn’t need to use her powers of persuasion all that much. Rosalba automatically assumed the right pose in front of the camera: she sat down on the aerial roots of the magnolia fig tree in the garden of the Villa Trabia and smoked. She blew smoke rings into the air, which floated quiveringly above her head until they became invisible, and sometimes Rosalba exhaled the smoke through her nose. It’s not for nothing that she’s called the devil’s lawyer.

Before the wedding, Rosalba had had a scorpion tattooed on her wrist. When she smoked—and she smoked a lot—the eye was inevitably drawn to the bluish animal on her skin. Her wedding dress was made of apricot-colored silk taffeta. It rustled with every step she took. Her copper-colored hair was piled up in one of those masterpieces of the Palermo hairdresser’s art, notable for looking studiedly casual: solidly sprayed to look like flowing drips of liquid, her curls played around the back of her neck, both artful and casual. The makeup artist had sprayed her face so that the lipstick didn’t creep into the little wrinkles around her mouth, her mascara didn’t run, her aubergine-colored eye shadow didn’t smudge the line of her eyelids.

Under her apricot-colored taffeta Rosalba wore the “ribbon of bliss,” a thin, blue satin band tied around her right thigh. When she momentarily lifted her dress for the photograph, her alabaster skin gleamed. And her tanga brief. After all, she had a reputation to lose. It’s no coincidence that she’s the best-known Mafia defender in Sicily. The only woman who defends Mafia bosses. And her groom, too, the Mafia lawyer Franco Marasà: thanks to Rosalba’s dedication, Dr. Marasà had been acquitted of favoring the Mafia. Various turncoat mafiosi had accused him of passing on messages to imprisoned bosses. Rosalba had prepared his defense; two colleagues conducted it. For a year the bar association had withdrawn his certification. Rosalba took over his clients for that period. They included Angelo Provenzano, eldest son of the boss Bernardo Provenzano, who was in hiding. Dedication that was to pay off—because when the boss was finally arrested, after forty-three years, his son Angelo turned to Dr. Marasà and asked him to undertake the defense of his father. So in the end everything stayed in the family.

The official wedding of the illustrious lawyer couple took place in Palermo, in the Villa Trabia, one of the Sicilian nobility’s feudal villas: faded glory in the midst of palm trees, box hedges, and a forest of gigantic magnolia fig trees, whose branches look like enchanted dragons and centaurs. The marriage vows were to be taken under one such monster.

Rosalba smoked, jabbed the air with her freshly manicured fingernails, and talked about high-security detention for mafiosi, about the possibilities of appeal in all Mafia trials, about turncoats—until it finally occurred to her that the wedding wasn’t a day in court. Again she flared her nostrils and expelled the smoke. She didn’t stub out her cigarette until her daughter laid the bridal bouquet of apricot-colored calla lilies in her arm and urged her to go. It was Rosalba’s second wedding at the Villa Trabia. The first had been to a bank clerk. When her son was four and she was in the fourth month of her next pregnancy, she sat her law exam. And shortly afterward dumped her husband. She still loves her former mother-in-law, even today. Rosalba invited her to the second wedding.

The groom was in pinstripes; he was slimmer than usual, and waited for Rosalba along with the registrar. Dr. Marasà knew what he had found in Rosalba. As a sign of that, he took her name: Franco Marasà-Di Gregorio.

Avvocato Marasà enjoys the greatest respect in Palermo. I once went with him to a bar in a side street off the Via della Libertà where we waited for Rosalba. When he ordered a prosecco for me, the barman emptied the open bottle down the sink in front of our eyes and opened a new one. A small but significant gesture.

Bride and groom had appointed their children from their first marriages as witnesses. Apart from the family, their colleagues from their chambers were all there: from the curvaceous, mini-skirted secretary to the legal intern who spoke and smoked like a cloned Rosalba; from the fellow lawyer who defends the Graviano brothers and always ostentatiously goes to sleep when the judge hears renegade mafiosi, to childhood friends and two journalists from the Ansa news agency. The ladies in the wedding party proved that anything is wearable—everything was represented, from tiny pink dresses with glitter straps to the silver-gray lampshade look with tassels. The two Ansa journalists couldn’t take their eyes off a blond in a tiny pink dress whose bosom seemed to have sprung from the pages of an anatomy textbook.

The registrar chewed gum. As he started his speech, the women’s heels slowly sank into the red Sicilian earth. He had been very pleased to learn that he was going to wed this famous couple, he said. They were, after all, well known in the city. He ran his hand along his official sash and gave a sphinx-like smile. Certainly, some kind of synergy could be expected from this marriage. The couple had already accomplished many wonderful things, he said. And he hoped that things would continue in that vein, so that they could still accomplish a great deal more!

He smiled cryptically, and the guests applauded when the bride and groom finally said yes. After the registrar had declared them man and wife, Franco and Rosalba kissed passionately in front of the frozen centaurs of the magnolia fig tree. Dust shimmered in the sunlight. For one brief moment Rosalba was silent. And, touched, her children smiled.

After that she stood on the first-floor balcony and threw the bouquet down among the unmarried women, to choose the next bride. But the bouquet was caught by an eight-year-old girl. Everything was different at this wedding, in fact. Unlike the usual Sicilian weddings—with at least seven hundred invited guests, Little Tony or some other Sicilian singing star, two video teams who don’t miss a single glance between the couple, and at least one member of parliament to give them a silver tray, which may one day feature in a public prosecutor’s bill of indictment as proof of Mafia involvement.

I gave Rosalba an antique table runner as a wedding present. Would it, too, one day be used as evidence? At any rate, Rosalba said that the antique table runner went very well with the antique French book, La princesse Rosalba, given to her by Marcello Dell’Utri, that éminence grise who is somehow impossible to avoid in certain circles in Sicily.

And so it is that the darkness of the Italian republic lurks within the heart of this apricot-colored bride. In Rosalba Di Gregorio’s chambers the destinies of the most important Cosa Nostra bosses cross paths with those of Italian politicians: Bernardo Provenzano and his family, Vittorio Mangano and his family, Pietro Aglieri, Marcello Dell’Utri, and Silvio Berlusconi.

A niece of the new godfather, the fugitive boss Matteo Messina Denaro, the supposed successor to Bernardo Provenzano, had recently had an internship in her chambers, Rosalba said. And I thought: Why not?

Rosalba had traveled to her wedding at Villa Trabia in her dented Renault Twingo. Her last car had been a Twingo as well. She crashed it into a wall when an accidental contact caused a short circuit. Her garage discovered that a bug, acting as a tracking device, must have been removed from her car a short time before. Her client Pietro Aglieri had just been arrested at the time. After that, her journeys clearly hadn’t been interesting enough to keep spying on her, said Rosalba. “They turned me inside out like a pillowcase, I was X-rayed, I was vivisected. But they didn’t find a thing.”

When Rosalba invited me to her wedding, we had already known each other for a few years. I had first met her in the high-security courtroom at Caltanissetta, where she was defending her client, the boss Pietro Aglieri, on one of his fifteen counts of murder. I had been struck that Rosalba was the only Mafia lawyer who had been listening during the trial. All the others ostentatiously fell asleep when a turncoat mafioso began to speak. That kind of effect was too cheap for Rosalba. She listened attentively, if reluctantly, so that she could object at the right moment.

It might indeed be the case, Rosalba said, that her client was a mafioso, but there was still no proof about the indictments of murder. And without proof there was no guilt.

And then she smiled with pursed lips. There was a principle at stake, she said. The principle of the freedom of the individual. And just by chance this individual was a mafioso. Are we not living in a constitutional, democratic state? Does a mafioso not have a right to be defended like everyone else? Well then.

Regardless of whether she is waiting for a trial in the Palace of Justice or visiting her clients in jail, Rosalba is always dressed in a way that makes respectable Sicilian women blanch. She wears jeans with holes. Or a pinstripe jacket with a studded belt. Or army boots. Or a deep cleavage. Or everything at the same time. And her lawyer’s gown is thrown casually over her arm.

Rosalba Di Gregorio doesn’t defend just any old Mafia bosses. But she does defend the ones accused of blowing up the public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino along with his bodyguards outside his mother’s front door. Some of them are in jail, others in hiding. Rosalba communicates with them via their relations. Sometimes I met them in the corridor of Rosalba’s chambers. The brothers and sisters of fugitive Mafia bosses were courteous people who greeted me cordially.

“My clients tell me they’re innocent,” Rosalba says firmly. “You can believe that or not. It doesn’t matter at all. At any rate, according to our legislation the client is deemed to be innocent until the judge delivers his judgment. The prosecution must present evidence, the defense must present counter-evidence. That’s how you get close to the truth. Or whatever the truth might be.”

When the Mafia boss Pietro Aglieri was arrested in Palermo in 1998, after eight years in hiding, he said just one sentence: “My lawyer’s name is Rosalba Di Gregorio.” In those days the papers couldn’t get enough of the fairy tale of the “Beauty and the Beast.” The Beast had the air of a seminarian and was considered the leading brains behind the current Mafia generation. The mafiosi call him u signorinu, the little gentleman. A Mafia boss of the kind that Sicily craved: an ascetic, constantly described by journalists as having read Kierkegaard in his hiding place and prayed with the priest Padre Frittitta before a house altar. Someone who could make himself understood in grammatically impeccable Italian—unlike the bosses arrested up until that point, who only had a command of Sicilian dialect and looked like the janitor next door. And a woman was defending him. That was the loveliest thing about him. Today, Pietro Aglieri is studying theology in jail, by correspondence course with Rome University. His professors are full of praise for him. He only ever gets the best marks.

Rosalba has a pragmatic view of her job: she isn’t supporting monsters, just defendants. A moral problem would arise only if someone who had already been sentenced brought guns into jail. But until a sentence is passed, she assumes that she is standing by saints in their martyrdom trials. She looks at me ironically and draws on her cigarette.

Every time I leave Rosalba’s chambers I have the feeling of being under anesthetic. This has to do on the one hand with her extreme cigarette consumption, and on the other with “mafiology,” that self-referential area of study that has blossomed into an art form in Palermo, and in which Rosalba is an expert. Sicily is a world of interpretation, in which you read things into silences, into the pauses in the wiretap notes, into raised eyebrows, into the way someone lifts his coffee cup. Where you puzzle over what is hidden, could be hidden, should be hidden, behind each tiny gesture. As if reality were only a question of interpretation. As if the truth could constantly change like the sky in springtime.

Regardless of the apricot-colored wedding dress and the ribbon of bliss, Rosalba didn’t allow the merest hint of solemnity to appear at her wedding. She talked as she always talks. As if she were sitting behind her glass desk in her chambers, amid yard after yard of files tagged with the names “Vittorio Mangano” or “Borsellino,” in the middle of a menagerie consisting of a cloth swallow that sits on the desk lamp, a cloth snake that serves as a backrest, a horned computer with a leather cover, and a fire-red rubber stiletto in which she usually rests her telefonino. Since she’s used to talking to her secretary in the outer office, Franco in the side room, the wife of a jailed mafioso on the phone, and the legal intern in the armchair opposite her all at the same time, Rosalba talked away nineteen to the dozen to the whole wedding party, witnesses and bridesmaids included. She whooped, cooed, growled, and cursed. As if what was at stake was not the cupid’s bow of her lips, the curve of which everyone praised, but paragraph 41b, the one that prescribes high-security detention for mafiosi—which Rosalba fought against tenaciously and successfully and anticonstitutionally, on the grounds that it contravened human rights.

Defending mafiosi as a lawyer is no longer the exception in Sicily but the rule, although it is an unusual career for a woman. So far Rosalba is the only one. She originally wanted to study medicine, but then it was law—for her mother’s sake. Her father died when she was sixteen and, as the only daughter of a single mother, Rosalba wanted to do everything particularly well.

Her timetable has always been dictated by the destinies of the Mafia. At the time of the maxi-trial she met her present husband, Franco. When the first turncoats appeared as witnesses in the trials, they started going out together. After the assassination of Falcone and Borsellino, they became a couple. Two years after the murders, Franco was indicted for favoring the Mafia. Ten years after the murders, they married. Rosalba doesn’t take holidays, she doesn’t participate in Palermo’s mondanità; she is so much a lawyer, to the exclusion of everything else, that all question of a life outside her job is forbidden. What a child’s first tooth might be for other people was, for Rosalba, an appeal or a reform of the code of criminal procedure. The maxi-trial of 1985 was a milestone in her life: on the one hand, because she and Franco, her former colleague in chambers and future fiancé, were defending a dozen mafiosi in the trial; on the other, because it was the first spectacular trial led by the anti-Mafia chief investigator Giovanni Falcone, who had whole clans arrested. For the first time, the Mafia was forced to experience what it was like not to have a trial “adjusted,” aggiustato, as they say in Palermo: sentences weren’t quashed in the subsequent instances, as they traditionally had been, but were confirmed in all instances—and for Public Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone that meant a death sentence. Of the mafiosi defended by Franco and Rosalba, however, only one received a life sentence.

Rosalba’s actual life is played out in chambers. When she comes back from her days in the courtroom, she often sits in her office until after midnight, preparing defense papers—below the oil painting in which horses loom in pink and turquoise, and also below a small icon. She knows what’s right and proper. After all, her clients are devoutly religious. Then, if she can chat with the court reporters, with blond Lirio from the Ansa agency, or little, round Enrico from La Repubblica who always breathes “Sei bellissima” and kisses her hand, or the reporter from Radio Capital, and can make a few mocking remarks about some public prosecutor or other, then Rosalba is in her element. Where, between the rows of files and the red rubber stiletto, she draws up strategies that might be useful to her clients.

After the arrest of Bernardo Provenzano in April 2006 and his successor Salvatore Lo Piccolo in November 2007, aftershocks were expected on planet Mafia. The power had to be redistributed. Backgrounds had to be clarified. Because in Sicily people don’t believe in chance, they believe in prophecy. They believe in the divine plan and the urgency of fate. And fate decreed that Bernardo Provenzano’s game of hide-and-seek would end, thirty-four years later, where it had begun, in Corleone. And on the day after the parliamentary elections. Not one day before. What would have happened if the godfather, the capo di tutti capi, the one everyone called “Professor,” had been arrested the day before the elections? Would Cosa Nostra have filled in their voting slips for Forza Italia even then? As it has done since the day Berlusconi’s party put itself up for election for the first time. And no one thinks it’s a coincidence that it should have been a bag of laundry—tracked by the police from his family to his hideout—that sealed his fate.

Since the statements of the turncoat Antonino Giuffrè, every child in Sicily knows that in 1993, after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, and after the arrest of his predecessor Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano negotiated a pact with Forza Italia. The Mafia boss offered his support and a renunciation of further violence and demanded guarantees in return: an end to criminal prosecution of and political pressure on the Mafia, an end to the confiscation of Mafia property, and the abolition of the state witness regulations for turncoat mafiosi. This has been on record since the Mafia trial against Berlusconi’s right-hand man Marcello Dell’Utri in November 2004, when he was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in the first instance for supporting a Mafia association.

That Provenzano should have been arrested regardless of his connections meant only that he was no longer of use—either to the Mafia or to his political friends. Now the way was open for a power struggle in the Mafia: the young, ambitious Mafia is waiting outside, while in jail the old Mafia is sitting around Totò Riina, spending years hoping their trials will be subject to appeal. The next generation is greedy for power: Matteo Messina Denaro, for example, the boss of an old Mafia family from Trapani, once a devoted ally of Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, later their competitor. Messina Denaro has been wanted since 1993 and is deemed to be the boss with the political intelligence required to lead Cosa Nostra into the modern age: when money no longer comes just from the drug trade and protection money, but from public funds—tenders on behalf of the Mafia.

Since the arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo and his son, Messina Denaro has been the undisputed number one in Cosa Nostra. Until then, Cosa Nostra had been led by both in a kind of cosovereignty—a leadership that came to an abrupt end during the hours of the morning in November 2007 when investigators arrested Lo Piccolo and his son. They had met up with other mafiosi for a business discussion, when forty officers surrounded the house and fired warning shots. Lo Piccolo tried to flush down the toilet the pizzini he was carrying, the little notes by which mafiosi communicate in these times of eavesdropping. But he didn’t get the chance to push the handle.

And yet Lo Piccolo must have been relieved to realize that it was only the police who had lain in wait for him, and not the hit man who had been waiting for months to get rid of the Mafia boss at the behest of his enemies. In times of changing allegiances, Lo Piccolo had made himself unpopular. He had facilitated the return to Palermo of the Inzerillo family, who had fled to America in the 1980s. This had brought upon him the wrath of Totò Riina, who had tried to eradicate that same family in a bloody Mafia war. Lo Piccolo hadn’t wanted to leave the drug trade in the hands of the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra any longer and hoped to use his American connections to bring back the glory days of the mid-eighties when Sicily had, through its alliance with its American cousins, risen to become the hub of the international heroin and cocaine trade.

And then Berlusconi had triumphed in the parliamentary elections and moved into parliament and the senate with fat majorities. Those are the themes that stir Rosalba; those are the scenarios that she likes to think about in peace—much more than taking part in the social life of the city. Much more than drinking a turquoise aperitif in the middle of a wedding party—even her own.

After the wedding, Rosalba had changed and was now wearing a turquoise dress that matched the aperitif. The wedding guests had driven in convoy to the Villa Giuditta, a restaurant where we sat at long tables under bitter-orange trees in a garden—a garden where nature had been tamed to the extent that it looked like a living room. The bitter-orange trees were drilled never to lose a leaf and seemed to grow not from the earth but from a parquet floor, a gleamingly beautiful parquet, with which the whole garden was laid. Between sea salad on couscous and chicken risotto with green apples, the couple were celebrated. After the three-tiered wedding cake was cut, Rosalba put one leg on the table, her heel among the plates of remnants of cream cake, and hoisted up her turquoise dress. Then she pulled the blue ribbon of bliss from her thigh and threw it among her admirers. A young agency journalist caught it, held it appreciatively under his nose, and closed his eyes. Satisfied, Rosalba got down from the table and straightened her dress. As she did so, the moonlight caught the tattoo on her wrist. The scorpion’s claws were open.

The same black-blue sky that stretched above Rosalba’s wedding party spreads over us, too—over Shobha, Letizia, Salvo, and me, and over the Piazza Pretoria. The gods and nymphs that stand on the rim of the fountain look heedlessly down on us. Shobha has managed to turn the whole wedding party into a tableau vivant. The parents of the bride, witnesses, and flower girls are in position, the bride has already decided to jump into the fountain—and then Shobha lowers the camera, thanks them politely for their cooperation, and gets back into the car. Letizia is urging us to leave, saying that her dog must feel abandoned by now.

The smell of fried meat wafts over, along with the smell of the crowd coming from the avenue and now pressing into the bars. Scraps of music fly through the air, Vasco Rossi shrills out of the speaker of an illegal CD seller, “Voglio una vita spericolata.” Salvo joins in at the top of his voice, that hymn to the fearless life: “to the unruly life, a life where nothing matters, a life in which it’s never too late and you never have to sleep, a life like a life in a film. A life, you’ll see, what a life.”

CARMINE SARNO

WHEN SALVO DROPS US OFF ON VIA CARINI, NOT FAR from Letizia and Shobha’s house, both his telefonini ring at the same time. One of the calls is his fiancée, the other one of his ladies—and both want to know when he will finally have time for them. While Salvo tries to placate both the lady and his fiancée, we gesticulate to arrange a meeting for the following morning. Then I follow Shobha and Letizia. We’ve decided to have dinner on Shobha’s terrace. The lift creaks its way up to the ninth floor.

Exhausted by the heat, we slump into the armchairs. Shobha turns on the television, and on Rai Uno we see a report on the death of a Camorrista. In Campania, the father of a turncoat has been shot, the Casalesi clan has wreaked revenge on the renegade. A country lane is shown, a bare stone farmhouse, a barn with bullet holes in the wall, a pool of blood on the ground. Mafia corpses in Italy are as inconspicuous as car-crash corpses. Then life goes on with reports of traffic jams, with people coming back from vacation, with pictures of the beach at Rimini.

“Ma,” says Letizia, stretching out the m for so long that her ma sounds like “all striving and straining is in vain.” Then she slowly walks down the steps to her apartment. When Shobha calls after her to ask if she doesn’t want to stay for dinner, she declines. She doesn’t want another bite, with all due respect to Shobha’s caponata, but the very thought of aubergines with tomatoes and pumpkin makes her feel bloated.

Shobha showers, and I turn off the sound when the news returns to the trash in Naples. “Now there’s trash on the elegant Via Chiaia, too!” I see a sea of blue, black, and white trash bags, bursting, fermenting, rotting trash bags—fruit crates, cardboard pasta boxes, detergent bottles, diapers. I don’t want to hear for the thousandth time the commentators describing the trash as some sort of mysterious force of nature that sweeps across the city like a hurricane every few months, leaving behind it a trail of devastation. Each time, politicians wholeheartedly announce an irrevocable victory over the trash: waste incineration units will be put into operation straightaway, the army moves in, special commissioners are appointed and dismissed again, special trains are loaded with trash and sent to Germany—and no one says the evil word: “Camorra.” It makes money out of the waste disposal and landfill, both legal and illegal, with which it has contaminated the whole of the Neapolitan hinterland, with industrial waste that it imports to Naples from all over Europe, and with toxic waste that is illegally burned and which has poisoned the groundwater and the air with dioxins.

“At least here in Sicily we have no problems with trash,” Shobha says, coming out of the shower with freshly washed hair and pointing to the pictures on television. She adds ironically: “Having the water supply in the hands of the Mafia is quite enough.”

When Shobha moves, her bracelets jangle. She brings them back by the kilo from India, where she spends the winter. In this way, she escapes not only the damp climate but also Sicilian reality—where people try to change things in such a way that everything stays exactly as it was. Today I sometimes wonder what it would have been like for me if I’d grown up not in the Ruhr but in Sicily. If my first apartment of my own had been not in the university district of Münster, but in Monreale, near Palermo, where mafiosi would have destroyed all my furniture. In that case I’d probably have yearned for India too.

When Shobha was back in India, I was in Naples. As befits an old married couple, we sent each other text messages and said: “Wish you were here!” Instead of Shobha, I had a bald photographer by my side, which didn’t exactly make my research easier. Men always arouse suspicion in southern Italy. Women, on the other hand, are generally underestimated, particularly if they’re blond. And being underestimated is the best thing that can happen to a journalist on an assignment.

That’s why Carmine Sarno wasn’t even slightly suspicious when I stepped into his music agency, La Bella Napoli, and asked him about the lyrics of the songs he had composed. Sometimes you can strike up an acquaintanceship as easily as that.

“You know who I am. You know my name,” Carmine Sarno said softly.

He didn’t need to say anything more than that. He sat with his legs crossed on a little gilded rococo chair, a dainty man on a dainty chair. Carmine Sarno has very small feet for a man; he’s unusually delicate overall, his waist as slender as a woman’s. His shirt was open to the navel and revealed an almost hairless chest and a heavy white-gold chain from which hung a heart-shaped medallion and a portrait engraved in gold. In his trouser pocket he carried a roll of twenty euro notes, held together with a thin rubber band. With this he was paying a man who had printed up some posters for him for a concert by the singer Antony. “Is that spelled right?” the man asked, pointing at the name “Antonj.”

“I think that should be a y,” I said.

And Carmine Sarno said: “That’s how we spell it here.”

Carmine Sarno belongs to one of the city’s most powerful Camorra clans. The Sarnos rule in Ponticelli, that peripheral quarter of Naples into which neither tourists nor Neapolitans stray: a landscape of containers, forgotten by the world, a district that consists largely of oil refineries, arterial roads on stilts, warehouses, and potholes. And that is only ever mentioned if another Camorrista is murdered. Or if a gypsy camp is set on fire, as happened that spring, after a gypsy had tried to abduct a child in Ponticelli. For respectable Neapolitans, Ponticelli is a far-off galaxy, its existence known only from the newspapers.

The Sarnos have ruled in Ponticelli since the early 1980s. Seven brothers and five sisters. Three of the brothers were in jail; altogether, sixteen members of the Sarno family were in jail. The oldest brother is called Ciro; even at the age of thirty he was one of the most dangerous Camorristi in Naples and had been in jail for almost eighteen years, with interruptions—which is why Carmine Sarno had dedicated the song “Ciro, Ciro” to him, lamenting his brother’s lot. Because Carmine Sarno wasn’t just a member of one of the most powerful Camorra clans in Naples; he was also a poet.

We had only known each other for a few minutes when Carmine awkwardly told me how his first wife had put him in prison. He had stuck the barrel of his gun in her mouth, his wife had told the carabinieri. Shortly after that, they arrested Carmine Sarno. He was behind bars for nine months for attempted murder. When he was released from prison, he really wanted to kill his wife.

“I’m telling you all this because I see you as a sister,” said Carmine Sarno.

How had we got on to the story of his wife? Oh, yes, it was all about love. Lots of his songs are about that. In “Ci soffro ancora,” “I’m Still Suffering,” an abandoned man confides in a friend. “Mi telefoni,” “Call Me,” is about a secret adulterous affair. Then there are titles like “Notte d’amore,” “Night of Love,” “Brivido,” “Shiver,” or “Estate d’amore,” “Summer of Love.” Sometimes love is not requited, sometimes it lasts only a heartbeat, sometimes it is a dead end. But it is always heartbreaking. Carmine had composed two dozen songs, at night when he couldn’t sleep because he was nervous or filled with longing, or because inspiration had suddenly come upon him.

Carmine represented the best singers in Naples. In his agency, one wall was papered with his stars’ posters. They were men whose tattoos crept from their shirt collars, men with pinsharp sideburns who called themselves Alessio or Nello Amato or Maurizio, men at the sight of whom girls in Naples started weeping as hysterically as if the blood of San Gennaro had just liquefied in front of their eyes.

“E carcerate” was the name of one of the hits from Sarno’s workshop: “The Prisoners,” a martyrs’ hymn about men who aren’t allowed to see their children growing up. Carmine Sarno is a man with a soft heart. And armored glass in his window panes. The armored glass was necessary because sinister characters made the area unsafe from time to time, he said. Which was an elegant circumlocution for the Camorra war between the Sarno and Panico clans—manifest now in a car bomb, now in a bullet to the head. The war between the clans had also killed Sarno’s nephew, whose face, engraved in gold, rested on his chest. The boy had been blown sky-high by a car bomb meant for his father: only his hands were left, Carmine Sarno said.

Later, he invited me to lunch. We ate with one of his friends, an impresario who looked as if he’d been dressed by a costume designer: with a lot of hair gel and an awful lot of artificial tan, a light-gray suit, a white shirt open to the chest, and the usual medallion with the picture of a dead person around his neck. The impresario was telling Carmine Sarno that he had been checked by the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the national anti-Mafia office. Turning to me, he added apologetically that it must have been a case of mistaken identity: “We’re always talking about various artists on the phone,” he said. The police, he explained, had confused that with some sort of secret code.

Carmine Sarno saw my interest in him as a piece of jewelry that you pin on yourself. After all, there had been bosses in Naples who had dictated legends from their lives straight into the notebooks of selected journalists. Unlike the Sicilian or Calabrian bosses, the bosses of the Camorra are not embarrassed about putting their wealth on display. Camorristi are known for building themselves Hollywood-style villas and speeding down the alleyways of the Spanish Quarter in their Ferrari Testarossas. When I accompanied a Neapolitan wedding photographer to the baptism of a Camorrista’s child in the Spanish Quarter, I witnessed the mother giving the godfather a diamond-encrusted platinum bracelet. And the godfather responding with a diamond-encrusted platinum cross for the child. The clan of the Giulianos, the legendary Camorra family that ruled Naples until the 1990s, loved making a show for the cameras: the photograph of Diego Armando Maradona, lying in the Giulianos’ scallop-shaped pool drinking champagne, became a Camorra icon.

The smart restaurant where I ate with Carmine Sarno and the impresario rose like a chimera from the wasteland of Ponticelli, with a marble terrace and brightly colored awnings; the waiters served frittered fruits de mer and we drank wine adorned with slices of fresh peach and delicate mint leaves.

“Without parsley for you, as always, Carmine,” said the waiter as he served the pasta, and Carmine Sarno’s eye drifted carelessly over the businessmen who greeted him. “Carmine, you’re the greatest!” a man called from the next table, but Sarno didn’t respond.

Unusually, he drank wine, in my honor, although he had just had a serious stomach operation. “To your health, Petra,” he said, and straightened the red ruby ring on his right hand—a present from someone thanking him for a favor he had performed. Then Carmine spoke quietly about the benefit concerts that he organizes every year: one for children at Epiphany, and one for the physically handicapped in September.

Why did he do that?

“Because I have been lame since childhood,” he said.

Carmine Sarno lived in one of those industrialized blocks on stilts of which the whole eastern edge of Naples seemed to consist, all the way inland. Ponticelli was the Sarnos’ fortress. With solariums called fuego, fire, and the Coppola bar, in which young, nervous men drank tumblers full of whisky sour even in the morning. Before going on to sing a verse from a love song. When they saw Carmine Sarno, they smiled so broadly that I could see their cocaine-eroded gums.

Nothing stirred here without the consent of the Sarnos. Bodyguards reported every suspicious movement—a hidden investigator, a turncoat clan member, a motorbike driver in a helmet. In Naples only hit men wear helmets. Unlike the old town of Naples, Ponticelli couldn’t hide behind the enchantment of Renaissance marble cornucopias, baroque churches decorated with death’s-heads, and rococo palazzi. There were no frescoes here, no marble columns scattering poetry like jewels over everyday life among the Camorra; there was nothing here but trash bags that flourished like carbuncles along the roadside ditches, and that at night, once they had been lit, blazed like beacons of perdition.

Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra is organized horizontally: there is no hierarchy and there are hardly any rules; everyone wants to be the boss, and that doesn’t happen without a murder. Every third day someone is killed in Naples. A few months before I met Carmine Sarno, the police in Ponticelli had arrested seventy-one clan members: for nine murders, two attempted murders, three instances of grievous bodily harm, and one thwarted assassination attempt; for robbery, profiteering, drug and arms dealing. Kalashnikovs, rapid-fire rifles, pistols, and explosives had been smuggled into Naples in the buses bringing Polish home helps into town. Thanks to the arrests, an attack by the Panico family on the Sarno clan had been thwarted; the prepared explosives had been impounded, along with twenty businesses, properties worth millions, cars, and yachts. And in Ponticelli you saw nothing but burned-out car wrecks, homemade house altars, and the graffito My breath belongs to you.

Carmine’s brother Ciro was called o’ sindaco, the mayor, because he had appointed himself master of the Terremotati, the people displaced by the 1980 earthquake, who occupied Ponticelli’s ruined buildings, shells left behind by Neapolitan speculators after they had cashed in their grants. Ciro o’ sindaco had allocated the apartments. And taken care of electricity, water, and gas connections. And thus won himself the unconditional devotion of people who had nothing more to lose. When Ciro Sarno was arrested in 1990 for illegal arms possession, there was a revolt: frying pans, flowerpots, and crockery rained down on the police. One clan member relieved Ciro Sarno by assuming responsibility for the illegal arms possession. Ciro was released again. Temporarily.

Carmine Sarno didn’t like to talk about such sad things. He preferred to talk about his songs, which were, he said, always inspired by true stories from Ponticelli. The song “Frate mio,” “My Brother,” is about a pair of lovers who discover they are brother and sister. Social workers make the couple part. “Sora mia,” “My Sister,” is about the death of a woman who dies of an incurable illness at the age of only thirty, leaving behind a little daughter.

Later, when we were sitting in his agency again, Carmine Sarno tried to make it clear to me he didn’t use the sources of his inspiration without their permission: of course, he always asked the families beforehand whether they minded him writing a song about them, he said. Like the parents of little Francesco Paolillo, for whom he had written the song “Insieme con Gesù,” “Together with Jesus.” Francesco died while playing in an unsafe derelict building. In memory of him, Sarno had produced a video clip and had a little altar built near the spot where he had fallen to his death.

At that thought Carmine felt silent, leaving nothing but a feeling of piety and a gentle summer wind that passed through the agency. The breeze drifted over a withered yucca tree, a Padre Pio watching over a keyboard, and a cabaret artist sitting mutely in a corner. He humbly unrolled a poster and tried to excite Carmine about his program, which was guaranteed family fare, simple lyrics, no swearing. He performed with his daughter, who was nine and a half and a natural talent; the act was capable of further development and equally suited to first communions and weddings, to baptisms and confirmations. Then he told a joke from his act. And laughed. Carmine Sarno didn’t laugh. He just looked out of the window into the street. And casually returned the greeting of a passing youth. And the cabaret artist rolled his poster back up again.

A Sarno doesn’t fritter himself away, either in words or in gestures.

Carmine Sarno didn’t lose his composure even when he received an unexpected visit in my presence: two men in sunglasses. One of them had white hair and looked like Richard Gere, the other had black hair and looked like Al Pacino. Richard Gere wore a pinstripe suit and a thin D’Artagnan beard; Al Pacino was dressed entirely in black.

“Financial police,” said Richard Gere, taking out his ID.

Because I wanted to be polite, I made as if to leave the agency, so that I wouldn’t be witness to what might turn out to be an unpleasant conversation for Sarno. “No,” he said. “Sit right where you are, Petra, it’s not a problem.”

“It’s about the income from Alessio’s concerts,” said Al Pacino. “We want to know how many tickets were sold, things like that.”

Sarno fell silent.

“Can’t you help us in any way?” asked Richard Gere.

“No,” said Sarno. “I don’t deal with that kind of thing.”

Then he went to a shelf and took out a folder. He opened it awkwardly. There were documents in it, yellowed licenses, which Carmine Sarno looked at as if seeing them for the first time.

“Perhaps your tax adviser might be able to help us. What’s his name?” asked Al Pacino.

“My what?” asked Carmine Sarno.

“Your tax adviser. You must have a tax adviser,” said Richard Gere.

“I don’t know the name of my tax adviser. My wife deals with things like that.” And then he called to the joiner across the street: “Do you know the name of my tax adviser?”

The joiner yelled back: “No idea.”

“Perhaps we could have a word with your wife,” said Al Pacino. “She might be able to drop by later,” said Richard Gere.

And Carmine Sarno answered: “No, that’s not possible. My wife is in Lourdes right now. On a pilgrimage.”

“Things like that only happen in Naples,” says Shobha. And please note that the only real question in Italy is what kind of Mafia you can live with most easily—the Sicilian, the Calabrian, or the Neapolitan?

I tap the remote control again, turn over, and see the domes of Noto cathedral. On a local channel there’s a program about Sicily’s baroque town. The presenter is currently raving about how the Sicilian baroque celebrates the moment, movement, the effimero; Shobha and I are only thinking that there’s resignation in the air today. And not only in Sicily. In Calabria and Campania, too.

While Shobha makes caponata in the kitchen, bracelets jangling, I lay the table on the terrace. Here, above the rooftops of Palermo, you can sometimes forget reality. Only recently we spent an evening on the terrace of Marzia Sabella, the Sicilian public prosecutor who led the investigating unit that arrested Bernardo Provenzano. You could have aimed at the terrace from various windows and balconies, but the prosecutor didn’t care. From here you can see the sea: that was more important to her. Marzia Sabella had decided not to be frightened.

But when Shobha and I told her about Calabria and Duisburg she shuddered. Calabria makes even Mafia-tested Sicilian prosecutors uneasy. Just as Sicilians sneer at the Neapolitan Camorra. Even the public prosecutors have a certain local patriotism; I often had the feeling that they felt a certain ironic bond with the criminal organization that they fought against every day. The Sicilian public prosecutor thought the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was criminally superior to all other Mafia organizations, at least where its political influence was concerned. The Calabrian public prosecutor thought the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta was nimbler and therefore better equipped for the future in the long term. And the Neapolitan public prosecutor was amused that the Neapolitan Camorristi had always managed to swindle Cosa Nostra whenever they smuggled cigarettes together, regularly failing to share a cargo with them.

In Naples, everyone knows that the Camorra isn’t a foreign body but has been part of the city for two hundred years. Today the reality is that a hundred Camorra clans rule the city, and that in 2006 alone one ton of cocaine and six tons of hashish were impounded in Naples—no more than 10 percent of the drugs traded in Italy, however—while politicians justify the existence of the Camorra as a kind of social shock absorber that keeps public order because it guarantees the survival of whole social classes.

The morality of lawlessness denounced by the judiciary has produced a network of Camorra, contractors, and politicians from which all three participants derive great benefits. In economic theory this is known as a win-win situation. The politicians support the Camorra to guarantee themselves votes. And they ally themselves with the contractors in order to enjoy bribes in return for public contracts. The Camorra in turn receives bribes from the businessmen for public contracts, as well as contracts for subcontractors, which enables the Camorra to create jobs and thus assure itself of social legitimacy. And the politicians guarantee the Camorra protection from prosecution by the police and the judiciary.

The benefit to the contractors in this business lies in the fact that by eliminating their competitors they always obtain public contracts, that the safety of building sites is guaranteed; no kind of pressure can be exerted by the trade unions; and the conditions for tax avoidance, slush funds, and investments in tax idylls are all in place.

And thanks to its inexhaustible sources of money, the Camorra no longer needs to resort to violence. It operates quite legally by buying up the market: every espresso drunk in a cafe is controlled by the Camorra. It dominates the markets of everyday consumption—meat, mineral water, coffee, dairy products, cattle feed—without any kind of hygiene control. Not to mention the waste business.

As I’m straightening the chairs on Shobha’s terrace, my foot bumps against something that looks like a stone in the darkness, but reveals itself to be a tortoise: the terrace is home to two tortoises that have belonged to the family for over forty years. Shobha likes to talk with them as if she still hasn’t given up hope, even after forty years, that they might one day reply.

The two tortoises stick out their little pink tongues and creep toward the food bowl. Mafia wars, murders, bloodbaths, and trials drifted across Palermo. The Corleonesi slaughtered their enemies; they murdered everyone who got in their way—“illustrious corpses,” as they say in Palermo when a politician or a civil servant is killed. The Palermo Spring came and faded; bed-sheets bearing the words Down with the Mafia! were hung out and brought back in again. Giulio Andreotti—“Uncle Giulio,” as the mafiosi called him—was accused, acquitted, and finally sentenced for supporting the Mafia, a crime that had already lapsed when the sentence was passed. Cosa Nostra sealed a pact with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Onward Italy). Minister-presidents, senators, and mayors were accused of supporting the Mafia and acquitted. And the two tortoises did nothing but eat bits of chopped apricot, banana, and tomatoes. Organically grown tomatoes—Shobha sets great store by that.

In the distance you can see the harbor, with the ferries that are lit up at night and lie there like whales with their mouths wide open. When I was in Naples, I took a drive through the mountains of containers at the harbor, with two “falcons,” the name given to the plainclothes policemen who patrol on motorbikes. Since Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra, the world knows that the Neapolitan port has no competitors when it comes to the smuggling of forged goods, which are sold in Germany and elsewhere—by Camorristi like the ones in the Licciardi clan, who not only dealt in forged trademarked products, from clothes to drills to cameras, but also in drugs, and who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, extended their area of activity from Germany to Hungary and Poland. When I talked about that with the Neapolitan public prosecutor Franco Roberti, Duisburg came up once again. Duisburg hadn’t been a coincidence, the prosecutor said; Germany was just as solid a base for the Camorra’s businesses as it was for those of the ’Ndrangheta, with restaurants and clothes shops used for money laundering.

“In Germany, if you see a Neapolitan or a Calabrian opening a shop, you should take a closer look at where the money comes from,” Public Prosecutor Roberti said.

The traffic snarls up from below, police sirens wail, and even up here on Shobha’s balcony Palermo’s breath smells of sulfur, dark soil, and corruption. And basil, oregano, and thyme, all the herbs of the Mediterranean. Shobha has transformed her terrace into a thicket, a thicket of jasmine and bougainvillea, of palms and olive trees, geraniums and little lemon trees. She loves picking off dry leaves, watering, and fertilizing. In another life, I’m sure she would have been a gardener.

“And have you seen this Carmine again since?” asks Shobha. The episode with the two financial policemen cheers her up. Is life in Naples tragicomic? Or is it more that it’s tragic, and you can only endure it by looking for comedy?

The founder of the Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples once said to me: “The lowlifes are still in power, even today. The Camorra are the bourgeoisie of Naples! They’re the people that power talks to. The state has no monopoly on force here! The evils of Naples are the evils of Italy! Europe has to get moving! It can’t afford to lose Italy!”

Just as the Bourbon King Ferdinand IV of Naples always tried to stay close to the notorious lazzaroni, the lowlifes whom he showered with gifts as a way of securing his power, even now Italian politicians are wheeling and dealing with the Camorra in just the same way.

After the financial police had left Carmine’s agency with unfinished business, Carmine Sarno had suggested showing me the video that he had had made for the boy who died in the accident. For Francesco Paolillo. Sarno closed up the agency and walked to his car, a silver S-series Mercedes. As we drove past he showed me the chapel of the Madonna dell’Arco, which he had had built between the rows of houses and that looked like a little mosque. A bit further along, at the edge of the road hung the house altar that Carmine Sarno had had built for the dead boy: For that little blossom that was stolen from the earth to flower in the hands of the Lord. That was what the inscription said. Signed by the Sarno family.

Sarno quickly climbed the stairs to the Paolillo family’s apartment. He didn’t knock, but stepped inside the apartment just as naturally as a king coming to greet his subjects.

The mother had her late son’s name tattooed on her lower arm. For months she had slept in a tent at the spot where her son had died, to demonstrate that children have to play in derelict buildings here. On the weekend a sports field was due to be opened in Ponticelli. It was that mother’s victory. Against defeatism, against resignation. Regional president Antonio Bassolino and mayoress Rosa Russo Iervolino had announced their arrival, the dead boy’s brother, Alessandro, proudly informed us—a tall, fair, unemployed kid. Neither the regional president nor the mayoress had ever set foot in Ponticelli; it was all due to his mother that the politicians were interested in their fate, he said, and his mother mutely put on the DVD of Sarno’s video.

The clip was shot in black and white. Carmine Sarno had seen it thousands of times and still had tears in his eyes at the end. “Everyone has his feelings,” he said later.

Shobha has turned up the music: David Bowie, “We can be heroes, just for one day.” The music has startled the tortoises, which are now pretending to be dead. Often when we’re traveling in Sicily or Calabria, Shobha and I feel the need to listen to music at deafening volume and sing along. Driving through Brancaccio, Castellammare, Cinisi, through all those Mafia villages with their Padre Pio statues behind glass, with the fat men sitting on plastic chairs lined up at the edge of the street, waiting for their telefonini to ring, while we screech “Is there life on Mars?” Displacement activity? Perhaps. And our only salvation.

Carmine Sarno had arranged to meet me that night. He was accompanying his singer Alessio to various performances around Naples. And I was to be there.

Sarno had discovered Alessio when he was sixteen years old and singing “Vola cardillo,” the prisoners’ hymn to freedom. Now Alessio was the best horse in his stable. Tens of thousands of people cheered him at his concerts in the Teatro Palapartenope, and Alessio couldn’t complain about performing as a star guest at family parties and discos. Forty minutes of Alessio cost 1,500 euros, and he could do as many as five performances in a single night.

Carmine Sarno was waiting for me in the car park behind his house. He drove ahead in his silver Mercedes, Alessio followed in a gray van, along with the guitarist, keyboard player, drummer, and roadie. Before the tour began, Carmine Sarno distributed Madonnas to his musicians. Key rings that his wife had brought back from Lourdes. Then he put the lock of the seat belt into the lock without the belt—so that the alert wouldn’t constantly remind him to do himself up. Seat belts aren’t for men like Sarno.

He hurtled through the night at 125 mph and was in a mind for confessions. About the fact that he was a former gambler, but had overcome that addiction. That after leaving jail he had slept in the car for eight months because he didn’t want to go back to his wife at the apartment. That apart from his four legitimate children, he had two illegitimate ones. That there had only been one turncoat in the Sarno clan—one infame, although he wasn’t a blood relation. And about the fact that his brother Ciro had got five degrees in jail and was now writing his life story. “If you see him, you’ll think he’s a professor,” said Carmine Sarno.

He’d already been offered a transfer fee of 700,000 euros for Alessio, although Sarno had turned it down. Alessio was more than a singer to him, he said.

“It was through me that Alessio was born,” said Carmine Sarno. “And he will die with me.”

That night Alessio had his first performance as a star guest at Anna Chiara’s first-communion party, in the Piccolo Paradiso restaurant, where the children had already drunk themselves into a Coca-Cola rush by the time Alessio entered the room. He was twenty-three, wore a retro-style leather jacket, a Rolex on his wrist, and a lot of gel in his hair, and said: “My songs come from my heart.”

The communicant Anna Chiara weighed about 175 pounds and wept into her napkin when she saw Alessio. When he started singing, all the females in the room between the ages of eight and eighty started screeching as if the Messiah had suddenly appeared. Twitching ecstatically, they sang along and took photographs with their mobile phones, and the mother of the communicant cried: “Take him, take him!”—until at last her daughter embraced him with her short, fat arms and kissed him, blushing, on the cheeks. At the end of the concert, Carmine Sarno applauded too, for politeness’s sake.

Then we glided on through the night, the moon hung like a bisected disc above a mountain, and Carmine put on his singers’ CDs. In the distance you could see the sea, with the moonlight reflected on it. Next stop was the bingo hall in Teverola. Here it was as silent as a church—not a sound apart from the rustle of paper and the creak of the chairs when the winning numbers were read out. It was already midnight when a security man started setting up crowd barriers for Alessio’s performance. The security man had mascara on his eyelashes and upper arms like oak trees, and didn’t reply when the girls asked him if Alessio had already arrived. The huge hall was completely packed. Fat women, whose bodies spilled like soft mountains over the edges of the chairs, chain-smoked. An orange carpet swallowed the sound of every footstep. Sometimes the women whispered to the moneylenders, who ran back and forth like stray dogs between the players’ tables.

Bingo halls are Camorra money-laundering institutions, although Carmine would never have put it like that—quite the contrary: he felt sorry for the people there, everyone has his feelings after all, he himself had been a gambler, and many of the people who win something here will be robbed when they leave the bingo hall. A woman turned to Carmine, pointed to me, and said she knew me off the television. Sarno didn’t reply; he just gave a flattered smile. Then Alessio came and a whirlwind swept through the rows of seats, a wave of weeping girls surged against the barriers, and it was all the security man with the mascaraed eyelashes could do not to be crushed.

“Sei bellissimo,” screamed the girls, “you’re gorgeous,” and Carmine Sarno looked at his watch.

The next morning the sports field in honor of the late Francesco Paolillo was opened in Ponticelli. When I arrived, there was no sign of Sarno. Presumably he was still sleeping. Or pretending to, because he doesn’t like appearing at public events. Listening to politicians’ speeches. After all, he knows the politicians better than anyone. He knows how high their price is.

Alessandro, the dead boy’s brother, was very excited; he kept running along the seats where his neighbors were all sitting, repeating that the limousines of mayoress Iervolino and the regional president Bassolino would soon be there. The sports field looked like a cage; it was laid with green artificial lawn and surrounded by high fences. The dead boy’s sister delivered a speech inside the cage. “Francesco, we’ll never forget you,” she said, and her mother bit her handkerchief. A single local politician had come; he too delivered a speech in the cage and managed not to use the word Camorra once.

While the speeches were being delivered, Alessandro, the fair-haired, unemployed kid, looked into the street. And then he turned away and said: “They haven’t come again. They’ll never come.”

MESSINA DENARO

WHEN SHOBHA STEPS ONTO THE TERRACE, SHE’S TURNED herself into a glittering apparition with sparkling earrings, a deep décolleté, and coal-black eyes. And pointed shoes. At the end of the day she always needs to get rid of the flat shoes and trousers that she makes herself wear when she’s working. Making herself feminine again. Although this time we don’t have a sense of having worked at all. It’s more as if we’d just taken a walk, like the French and American tourists who walk through Palermo, always slightly anxiously, pressed close to the walls of the houses, in the deluded hope that they won’t be recognized as tourists. Whose tour guides do everything they can to ensure that visitors to Sicily think not about fugitive bosses but about the ancient theater of Segesta, the colonnade of the cathedral of Monreale, and the oratory of Santa Cita, where myriads of angels whir about—the baroque extravagance, the Sicilian excess.

From Shobha’s roof terrace you can watch the city getting ready for nightfall. Putting on stars and bathing in moonlight. The domes of the baroque churches curve triumphantly next to Palermo’s single, rather anorexic-looking skyscraper, and in the distance the lights gleam from the illegally built houses on the hill of Mondello. Shobha has uncorked a bottle of chardonnay from Planeta; we listen to David Bowie and a jingling wind chime.

“Trapani,” says Shobha, after she has tasted the wine. Strange, it tastes like Trapani. The sea and wisteria. The way it smelled in the morning when we used to go to processions.

I hold the wine under my nose, close my eyes, and try to smell Trapani. I actually smell jasmine, rosemary, and oregano. A hint of wisteria. Perhaps some salt in the air, and, if I put my mind to it, I can also smell a bit of myrrh. For years we took a pilgrimage to the Good Friday procession of Trapani, La processione dei misteri. We set off from Palermo at night and drove, drunk with sleep, down the autostrada to reach Trapani at dawn. We parked the car in the harbor and walked shivering through the night air, always heading toward the funeral march. You could hear the music from a long way away, music that sounded beautiful and skewed and grabbed our hearts in its clutches.

When we got there, the faithful had already been following the penitential procession for hours. Men in dark suits carried the enormously heavy stations of the cross: Christ before Pilate, the scourging, the crown of thorns, the raising of the cross, the entombment, the mother of sorrows. Each time the bearers set down the bier, lit with incandescent bulbs, for a few minutes, they passed around bottles wrapped in brown paper, and the women leaned against a house wall, closed their eyes and murmured the rosary to keep from falling asleep. “Santa Maria, Madre di Dio, prega per noi peccatori.” As day palely dawned, the world stood still for a moment. Just long enough for the music to start again and the sea on the horizon to color itself pink.

We felt intoxicated. Shobha photographed angels, Roman legionnaires in shimmering gold armor, brides of Christ, and little girls carrying the crown of thorns through the streets on purple velvet cushions. She photographed mothers holding their handbags in front of them like protective shields, she photographed the notables in their sashes, all the presidents who take very small, important steps—presidente della confraternità dei pescatori, presidente dell’associazione SS. Crocefisso, presidente della società sanguinis Christi—and I walked behind the brass bands with my tape recorder, in search of funeral marches. “Una lacrima sulla tomba di mia madre” remains my favorite funeral march, “A Tear on My Mother’s Grave”—Chopin, Op. 32, with the tuba at the beginning, the tremolo clarinet, and the trumpets which, when they come in, sound as if the funeral march is about to turn into a piece of dance music.

The climax of the procession was reached when the stations of the cross were carried back into the Chiesa delle Anime del Purgatorio in the early afternoon: a finale like a never-ending act of coitus, the church struggling against it doggedly and without success. With seeming hesitancy, the individual groups of figures were carried in and out through the portal of the church, rocking back and forth, amid applause, a rain of rose petals, and out-of-tune trumpet entries. Inside the church it looked as if a weary traveling circus had collapsed: on the floor, amid damp sawdust and crushed blossoms, the bearers sat blank-faced, others hugged and wept with exhaustion—whether it was the exertion of carrying things for hours, or the contents of the bottles in their brown-paper wrappings, everything was discharged in a collective crying fit, the men wiped the tears from their eyes with white damask handkerchiefs, and we wept along too.

And just a day later Trapani was as forbidding as ever. With gleaming light and a landscape buried under concrete.

“Strange, isn’t it?” says Shobha, sniffing the wine again. “At some point I lost the desire to go there,” she says.

Was it that moment when the part-time photographers and amateur film directors gained the upper hand and kept walking into the picture? Or when, still in Trapani, we went in search of the boss Matteo Messina Denaro? At some point we lost the procession virus. Like a scab under which new skin has formed.

“Trapani,” says Shobha, who sticks her nose back in the wine glass and adds: “Have you heard about the murals?”

“What murals?” I ask, really thinking about art for a moment.

“Murals of Messina Denaro,” says Shobha. In the style of Warhol. With the inscription You’ll be hearing from me. They appeared in Palermo and in Messina Denaro’s place of birth, Castelvetrano, not far from Trapani. “The police investigated,” Shobha says and smiles ironically. The murals were immediately painted over.

Messina Denaro is a kind of icon among mafiosi. When investigators or public prosecutors talk about Messina Denaro, there’s a hint of respect for their opponent. Investigators see Messina Denaro as the boss with the greatest political foresight. In his case the word latitante, fugitive, has a different ring: it sounds like a mark of distinction, like an accolade, a higher Mafia qualification.

Certainly it’s the case that hunters would rather go after a tiger than a rabbit. Particularly since most bosses are more like rabbits. Powerful rabbits, admittedly, but rabbits nevertheless. So it’s all the more striking when a boss like Matteo Messina Denaro moves around the world as if it belonged to him—not least since he has slipped the Mafia’s moral straitjacket and consolidated his position as a ladies’ man, defying the Sicilian proverb that giving orders is better than fucking. Messina Denaro has proved that you can do both. When he was in hiding he even managed to father an illegitimate daughter, who is now ten years old, has never seen her father, and lives in her grandmother’s house in Castelvetrano—along with her mother who, as long as she lives, will never look another man in the eye. To keep from damaging the boss’s reputation. And to protect her own life. If a mafioso loses face as a result of his wife’s infidelity, she is as good as dead.

The Mafia revere Matteo Messina Denaro as a saint: “I’d love to be able to see him, touch him, just once,” they sigh on the telephone, as if they dreamed of dabbing kisses on the hem of the Madonna’s robe with their fingertips. “Everything good comes from him,” the mafiosi whisper, “we must worship him.”

His nickname is “Diabolik,” the name of an Italian comic character, an elegant gangster who lives in the grand style from his jewel robberies: a representative of evil who always maintains a certain code of honor. Diabolik basically only robs rich people from the top levels of society—although the similarity to Robin Hood stops there, because you couldn’t exactly say that he shares his booty with the poor. It’s more that evil triumphs with him in a world of weak supermen, as the mafiosi imagine the world to be in their idle moments—idle moments when they believe the singer Vasco Rossi’s hymn to the fearless life, “the exaggerated life, the life full of troubles.” Idle moments when they manage to fade out reality as if it were a film: the reality in which they smell of fear because they’re next on the hit man’s list, a hit man who boasts that he’s never worn gloves when dissolving corpses in hydrochloric acid; the reality that consists in throttling a friend, beheading and castrating him, and stuffing his genitals in his mouth. The reality is one in which children can be kept for years in an underground dungeon, like little Giuseppe di Matteo, who was locked up in a cell in San Giuseppe Jato until he was strangled and dissolved in acid.

Giuseppe’s father had become a turncoat, and the abduction of his son was supposed to keep him quiet. At the end of his imprisonment, the boy had been reduced to nothing but a “human larva,” said the mafioso who had been given the job of strangling him.

All the more important are the miracle stories about Messina Denaro, of whom the mafiosi couldn’t get enough: about how he is supposed to have driven an Alfa 164 armed with machine guns that could be activated by the push of a button from the driver’s seat; how he boasted that he could fill a cemetery with his victims; how he guarded the treasure of the arrested boss Totò Riina, a treasure that consisted not only of jewelry but also of the Mafia archive; and how he had hidden with that treasure in an underground apartment in a jeweler’s shop in Castelvetrano, entered via a strong room with an elevator built into it.

It’s a long time since Cosa Nostra produced such a pop star.

Matteo Messina Denaro comes from Castelvetrano, and in the police files his profession is given as “farmer.” He is what people here call an “artist’s son”: his father, Francesco, was one of the most powerful bosses of Cosa Nostra, a member of the cupola, the Mafia council. Both Matteo Messina Denaro and his brother Salvatore, as well as his father, Francesco, were on the payroll of one of the richest families in Trapani, the family of the Forza Italia senator and current president of the province of Trapani, Antonio D’Ali, a large landowner, banker, and businessman—Matteo and his father as estate managers, his brother Salvatore as a clerk in the family-owned bank.

“No one had any idea of Messina Denaro’s involvement with the Mafia,” the senator said. And he sued anyone who claimed otherwise—like the two Rai journalists who accused the provincial president of being behind the transfer of a prefect who was unacceptable to the Mafia.

At Trapani police headquarters we met the investigator who has been on Messina Denaro’s trail for years. The office was papered with newspaper cuttings about arrests; next to it there hung a faded list of the names of mafiosi currently in hiding. Matteo Messina Denaro was the last on the list. There was even a hint of respect in the investigator’s voice when he spoke of the boss: “If you met Messina Denaro, you’d like him,” he said. “Messina Denaro is generous, he’s an effortless conversationalist and he can judge the perlage of a fine champagne.”

Finally, a cosmopolitan boss.

Then the investigator called one of his men who did nothing more than listen in on suspicious conversations, using a mobile surveillance device, and record unusual movements, in Messina Denaro’s birthplace of Castelvetrano. The investigator was waiting for us in a parking garage just outside the town, a bearded man in jeans and running shoes. What drives these men isn’t money, it’s a hunting instinct. The thrill when they catch a boss in his sleep after lying in wait for him for months, disguised as an Albanian, as a gypsy, as a grass-mowing peasant. For a long time it didn’t occur to any of the men to claim overtime.

When we were driving through Castelvetrano, we had the impression of driving through a town where nothing ever happens; you couldn’t even hear a dog barking. The houses with the closed shutters looked like lockers. You avoided people’s eyes, as if they could pass on an infectious illness.

“They’re all friends here,” said the policeman, and drove past Messina Denaro’s parents’ house, where his mother, his partner, and their daughter live. It was in an alley not far from the church. A run-down-looking, three-story house, and the policeman cried: “Whatever you do, don’t take a photograph!” Just as he was constantly warning us not to write this and that because Messina Denaro was extremely sensitive where his family was concerned—until finally I wondered, how dangerous could it be to write that Francesco Messina Denaro’s mausoleum is a high, narrow chapel with a glass mosaic Christ, locked with a cast-iron gate, flanked by two Ficus benjamina trees, which, as the policeman observed, had recently been watered?

Messina Denaro’s mother visited the grave every day, dressed in black even ten years after her husband’s death. She often went there with her three daughters. On one occasion, the police had hidden bugs in the grave to listen to the dialogue that she liked to have with her husband. Unfortunately, one of the policemen hadn’t put one of the vases back in the right place. Messina Denaro would never forgive those sons of bitches that impious act of eavesdropping.

By the time his father died ten years ago, Matteo Messina Denaro had been underground for a long time. The boss Francesco Messina Denaro had died of a heart attack, presumably the result of the fury unleashed by the recent arrest of his eldest son, Salvatore. Someone had carefully laid the corpse beside a vineyard in Castelvetrano, dressed in a silk dressing gown. When the body was found, it had already rained on the body. His wife tore off her own Persian lamb coat to wrap her dead husband in it. And at the funeral she threw herself on the coffin and cried: “At least they didn’t manage to put handcuffs on you!”

The Messina Denaro family commemorates the day of his death every year, not just with a religious service, but also with an obituary, most recently in Latin: “There is no time to be born and to die, but only he who wants to can fly. And forever your flight was the highest.” The investigators assumed that this might be a coded message. But it was only a statement of faith—in blood, in family, in the Mafia.

Of course, it may be that the boss doesn’t live in Sicily at all but in Venezuela or Colombia, somewhere in South America—unlike the other Sicilian bosses, who are always tracked down only a few miles from their own territory. But.

But even an icon could drop his guard in his own territory, the investigator said. A young mafioso had to have seen the boss at least once. Otherwise his magic would flee.

To kiss the hem of the Madonna’s robe, just once.

“You remember how run-down the house of Messina Denaro’s family looked?” I say to Shobha, as she serves the caponata.

Messina Denaro’s house had dirty white walls and frosted glass in the windows. Clearly it was designed to give the lie to any thoughts of a worldwide Mafia organization. As if the Mafia was still controlled by a handful of shepherds. As if the Mafia wasn’t a social and political problem, but just an occasional inconvenience to public order.

“Would the children of the mafiosi, the ones who have studied—maybe even at the London School of Economics, as the children of some Catania bosses are said to do—live in rickety-looking houses like that today?” Shobha asks.

Again and again, I’m struck by the discrepancy between the pointed frugality and the vast incomes of the Mafia bosses. Mafia families have every interest in not standing out, in being accepted as part of society—that’s their shield, and their strength at the same time. Give or take their millions, the foundation of all Mafia power remains their rootedness in social consensus.

Here too, protection money has a fundamental part to play. Above all, it’s about a demonstration of power when superglue is squeezed into the greengrocer’s lock to make the urgency of the payment quite clear. If a mafioso leaves a bomb outside a shop, it’s reported in all the papers. But if he squirts superglue into fifty locks, nobody hears about it. And the Mafia don’t want to appear in the papers; they just want to get on with their business in peace.

One of the biggest Mafia bosses of recent years was the doctor Giuseppe Guttadauro, the brother-in-law of Matteo Messina Denaro. He received patients in his surgery from five till seven in the evening, and from seven onward the picciotti, the lowest-ranking mafiosi, and gave them orders about collecting protection money. And this wasn’t just about filling the war coffers of Cosa Nostra; more important, it was about control, about demonstrating presence, marking territory.

Sometimes in Palermo you see little black-rimmed stickers on waste bins: Un intero popolo che paga il pizzo è un popolo senza dignità, “A whole people that pays protection money is a people without dignity.” These are the stickers of the Addiopizzo organization, which developed out of a student group and now calls for a revolt against paying protection money to the Mafia. Thanks to the Addiopizzo, the Italian business association—the Confindustria—has finally summoned the courage to exclude those businessmen who pay protection money. Sicilian public prosecutors, on the other hand, urged the association to exclude from its ranks those businessmen who had already been legally punished for supporting the Mafia. Because they were the real criminals, while a businessman who doesn’t report the extortion of protection money is just someone who lacks moral courage. However, many Sicilian businessmen had an interest in ensuring that everything stayed as it was: what’s at stake, after all, is millions in European funding, the benefits of which they want to go on enjoying, thanks to the Mafia. After all, it is a long time since the Mafia was content to extort 500 euros in protection money. For ages now it had been sitting in the businessmen’s drawing rooms. In Calabria, even northern Italian businessmen don’t report the extortion of protection money by the ’Ndrangheta, but take the protection money into account: as a “security cost.” After all, you don’t want to turn down big public contracts, like the construction of the Salerno–Reggio motorway. The companies pay 3 percent of the contract fee directly to the ’Ndrangheta.

Because it’s late now, I decide to say a quick good-bye to Letizia before she gets ready for bed. When I go downstairs to her apartment, I hear that she’s watching television. Giulio Andreotti is a guest on a talk show again. When Letizia notices my footsteps, she turns off the television. Then she picks up a box of household matches and tries to relight her cigarette in the wind from the ceiling fan. It takes her three matches before the cigarette is finally burning. She could have got up and lit it somewhere else. But that wouldn’t be her way.

“You know, I’d really love to escape from Palermo. If my grandchildren didn’t live here, I’d get out. It’s too painful, it’s too humiliating, to watch our values being co-opted here. The bad guys have even taken over the anti-Mafia movement. On the anniversaries of Falcone and Borsellino’s killings, the whole of Palermo was full of posters saying Our heroes forever! Signed by none other than the city administration of Palermo.”

“The bad guys.” I like Letizia’s direct way of putting it. The ceiling fan cuts through the smoke, and I’m thinking about the Forza Italia caste that has triumphed in Palermo, when Letizia says that even the Italian left won’t come to the rescue, because it’s sold its soul to Berlusconi.

“In the past, the left-wing ideal was like a warming blanket to me,” she says. “Now it no longer exists. Or only among a very few young people. The ones in Antimafia Duemila, perhaps, the anti-Mafia newspaper. But otherwise? Nothing.”

Letizia bends down to me and asks if I’ve got enough material for my article about her, urges me to call her if there’s anything else I want to know, tells me about the next exhibition that she and Shobha are having together in China—even in China people are interested in the Mafia, just not in Palermo. Then she looks over at the terrace door. The night wind runs through her hair.

“They’ve thrown our dreams in the sea,” she says, “and their own as well.”

The sky over Palermo shimmers as if the stars were constantly being turned on and off in the firmament. It’s still hot and sultry; a warm damp settles on our arms. Because Salvo’s off duty, Shobha has called a taxi, but even after half an hour the woman on the switchboard can do nothing but console me. “Patience, you need to have patience,” she says, until I decide to try my luck on foot. Shobha suggests coming with me. When we step out of the cool entrance hall of the building and into the street, gasoline-filled air hits us, air that stings the lungs and would prompt a choking attack in any asthmatic. Although midnight is long past, the traffic is just as solid as it was in the morning. The nighthawks flit from one side of the road to the other like a swarm of mosquitoes. The marble pavement gleams as if it’s sweating. We walk toward Via della Libertà and those posters with the famous photograph of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Our heroes. The city of Palermo.

As we cross the piazza in front of the Teatro Politeama, little purple dots gleam on the marble paving stones, and the air suddenly smells of lemon verbena. And cooking fat. On every street corner there are vans selling fried calves’ cheeks between two slices of bread, or bread with spleen. Our pace assumes the rhythm of the revelers hurrying toward Piazza Olivella. The flower sellers who tout their wares by day are still standing on the pavement in front of the Teatro Massimo, and a newspaper vendor has spread out his piles of papers next to them.

We walk on without saying anything; our footsteps hammer on the marble. There are no taxis outside the Teatro Massimo either. So we walk on before turning off at last into one of the twisting alleys near the Piazza Olivella, where the gas-canister filler Nino sits by the door to his shop. Shobha lived opposite him for a while, so Nino greets her particularly warmly. As usual, his whole family has assembled beside him on white plastic chairs: his wife with her toothless mouth, his fat sister, his children, one grandchild, and his gaunt brother-in-law who runs a cobbler’s shop next door. They all sit there with their hands folded over their bellies, as if watching the performance of a play, while cats poke among the trash on the other side of the street.

It’s quieter at the end of Via Patania. We walk on, now along the Via Roma, past the Piazza San Domenico, where, as always, a few Nigerian prostitutes lurk, and past the steps that lead to the Vucciria market and which, even at night, smell of fish guts. Here there are no revelers, and our footsteps echo. A wind blows up. From the walls and palisades that support the derelict palazzi, it tugs at the posters. We walk on.

By way of farewell, Salvo puts on Antonacci again, “Dream of me if it snows.” “But just for you, Petra, I don’t understand what women see in him.”

We drive out of town, past palm trees and box hedges, past the enameled domes of the churches, past street after street of air raid—shelter tower blocks that look as if they might harbor life, past the dry leaves of the rubber trees blown by the wind onto the pavements.

At last we drive onto the motorway, toward Trapani, toward the Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino: it’s still called that, for how long? On our right the Isola delle Femmine bathes in the morning light. “They have thrown our dreams in the sea, and their own as well.”

I think of Montalbano—Saverio Montalbano, whom I met on my first assignment, the policeman who was once responsible for tracking down fugitive mafiosi as part of the mobile task force, and who discovered the “pizza connection.” Recently I met up with him over coffee and biscuits. He looked unchanged, which may have had something to do with the fact that Montalbano, with his bald patch and his silver-gray fringe of hair, had never looked young. The only change was a thin-rimmed pair of reading glasses, over which he looked at me ironically. As always, he asked how I managed to live in a city that consisted only of water. As a respectable Sicilian, he said, he feared the sea.

Montalbano was on the point of retirement. His last job had been as head of the local police of Termini Imerese. Before that, he had been head of the administrative police of Ragusa; he had been kept as far as possible from Mafia investigations. One day he had received an anonymous letter. In it someone expressed his admiration for him: “I like the real Montalbano better than the one in the film.” The letter was signed “Diabolik.”

Eventually he had decided no longer to address the subject of the Mafia, Montalbano said. “I fell out of love,” he says. He stopped reading the reports about arrests. Now he read books about Indians.

Salvo carries my case to the check-in desk, where a long line has formed as usual. He kisses me good-bye on both cheeks and expresses his regret at not being able to wait with me, but his ladies need to play their first game of the morning. But he hopes to see me again soon in Palermo. Then he hurries across the departure lounge. Before he steps outside he briefly waves to me again. When I turn around, the very same man who sat next to me on the outbound flight is standing right beside me.

“I’ll talk to him now,” I say to myself. But he’s ahead of me. He smiles at me. And says in an American accent: “Nice to see you again.”

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Pietro Aglieri—Sicilian Mafia boss and member of the council of Cosa Nostra; serving a life sentence since 1997 for, among other things, his involvement in the murders of the public prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.

Giulia Alvaro—Member of the Nirta-Strangio clan, the clan involved in the Duisburg massacre; arrested in 2007 for membership in the Mafia and involvement in the international drug trade.

Giuliano Amato—Italian politician; former Socialist; and several times prime minister, foreign minister, and most recently minister of the interior in the second Prodi government (2006–2008).

Giulio Andreotti—Italian Christian Democrat, seven-time prime minister; indicted for favoring the Mafia and convicted in May 2003, his support for the Mafia judged proven until 1980 and not thereafter—there was insufficient proof for further conviction.

Giovanna Atria—Mother of Rita Atria, the teenager who spoke out against the Mafia in her village.

Rita Atria—Daughter of a Sicilian Mafia boss, who decided, after the murder of her father and brother, to collaborate with the judicial system; was rejected by her mother; and, after the murder of public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino in 1992, threw herself out of a window.

Gaetano “Don Tano” Badalamenti—Mafia boss from the Sicilian Cinisi clan; built up the “pizza connection,” the heroin trade between Sicily and America; died of heart failure in 2004 in an American prison, at the age of eighty and without ever saying a word about the Mafia.

Antonietta “Ninetta” Bagarella—Wife of the Sicilian Mafia boss Salvatore “Totò” Riina and daughter of an old Corleone Mafia family; lived underground with her husband for almost twenty years, bearing him four children, with whom she returned to Corleone after the arrest of her husband in 1993.

Leoluca Bagarella—Sicilian Mafia boss of the Corleone clan, hit man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, brother of Ninetta Bagarella, and brother-in-law of the Mafia boss Totò Riina; in prison since 1995.

Agata Barresi—Sicilian mother of five sons murdered by the Mafia, famous for maintaining her silence.

Antonio Bassolino—Democratic Left regional president of Campania until 2010, who fell into disrepute for nepotism and his responsibility for the waste crisis.

Letizia Battaglia—International award-winning Sicilian photographer and publisher; city counselor for quality of life under Leoluca Orlando in Palermo; later, member of the anti-Mafia party La Rete in the Sicilian parliament.

Piersilvio Berlusconi—Son of Silvio Berlusconi, now director of his father’s private broadcasting group, Mediaset.

Silvio Berlusconi—Three-time Italian prime minister; the wealthiest businessman in Italy; founder of the Forza Italia party, now known as Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom); variously indicted for tax avoidance, false accounting, collaboration with a Mafia association, bribery of judges, and complicity in assassination attempts—accusations that ended in acquittal, cases dropped because of the statute of limitations or lack of evidence, or convictions that were later subject to an amnesty.

Salvatore Boemi—Leading senior public prosecutor in the anti-Mafia investigative authority of Reggio Calabria.

Stefano Bontade—Mafia boss from Corleone, known as the “Prince of Villagrazia”; known to have had connections with notable Italian politicians including Silvio Berlusconi; murdered in 1981.

Paolo Borsellino—Legendary anti-Mafia public prosecutor in the Palermo Anti-Mafia Pool; murdered by the Mafia in 1992.

Tommaso Buscetta—Sicilian Mafia boss and the first significant turncoat in the history of Cosa Nostra; an important witness in the maxitrials against the Mafia under Giovanni Falcone; died in New York in 2000.

Giuseppe “Pippo” Calò—Sicilian Mafia boss, also known as the “Mafia’s cashier”; thought to have murdered the banker Roberto Calvi but acquitted of the charge in 2007; serving a life sentence.

Roberto Calvi—Italian bank employee, involved not only in money laundering for the Mafia but also in secret financial operations by the Vatican, which won him the nickname “God’s banker”; found murdered in London in 1982.

Diego Cammarata—Mayor of Palermo until 2012, Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) MP.

Francesco Campanella—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso, who had as groomsmen at his wedding the former Sicilian prime minister Salvatore “Totò” Cuffaro and the former Italian justice minister Clemente Mastella—and whose statements seriously incriminated Cuffaro.

Salvatore Cancemi—Turncoat Sicilian Mafia boss; because of his statements, Marcello Dell’Utri and Silvio Berlusconi were accused of complicity in the assassinations of public prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino—the charges were dropped in 2002.

Mario Carabetta—President of Pro Loco (consortium of local tourist offices) in the Calabrian town of San Giovanni di Gerace.

Michele Carabetta—’Ndranghetista from San Luca and member of the Pelle-Vottari clan; arrested after investigations into the Duisburg massacre.

Sonia Carabetta—Sister of the ’Ndranghetista Michele Carabetta.

Antonio “Ninni” Cassarà—Deputy leader of the mobile task force of the Palermo police and a close colleague of the public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone; murdered by the Mafia in 1985.

Vito Ciancimino—Mafia boss, Christian Democrat, and former mayor of Palermo; sentenced to thirteen years’ imprisonment for assistance to the Mafia; died in 2002.

Gaetano Cinà—Businessman from Palermo, mafioso from the Malaspina family, and codefendant in the trial against Marcello Dell’Utri; according to the indictment, a bagman between the Mafia and Berlusconi; died in 2006.

Bruno Contrada—Formerly the third most senior member of the Italian domestic intelligence agency; arrested in 1992 on suspicion of having passed on to the Mafia the information needed to assassinate the public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone; in jail since 2007.

Don Agostino Coppola—Parish priest from Carini in Sicily; accused of supporting the Mafia; died while under house arrest.

Renato Cortese—Leader of the mobile task force of Rome; previously leader of the mobile task force of Reggio Calabria and Palermo; arrested the boss Bernardo Provenzano in 2006.

Gaetano Costa—Leading public prosecutor of Palermo; murdered by the Mafia in 1980.

Rita Costa—Widow of the murdered public prosecutor Gaetano Costa.

Maurizio Costanzo—Italian journalist and talk-show host; subject to an assassination attempt in 1993 for his crusade against the Mafia.

Carla Cottone—Wife of Aldo Madonia, youngest son of the notorious Madonia Mafia clan.

Bettino Craxi—Former head of the Italian Socialist Party and former Italian prime minister, known as the “Lord of Bribes”; sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment for deception, corruption, and illegal party financing, which he escaped by fleeing to Tunisia, where he died in 2000.

Salvatore “Totò” Cuffaro—Christian Democrat and former Sicilian regional president; sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for favoring the Mafia; then a senator; in jail since 2011.

Antonio D’Ali—Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) senator and current president of the senate environment commission; Sicilian businessman and owner of the Sicula Bank; former president of the Sicilian province of Trapani; and temporary employer of the Mafia bosses Francesco and Matteo Messina Denaro.

Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa—Chief of police in Palermo; he and his wife were murdered by the Mafia in 1982.

Marcello Dell’Utri—Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) senator and former member of the European parliament; Berlusconi’s right-hand man; sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment in December 2004 for supporting the Mafia.

Richard Dewes—Former Thuringian interior minister.

Rocco Dicillo—Bodyguard of Giovanni Falcone; murdered by the Mafia in 1992 along with Falcone.

Emanuele Di Filippo—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso.

Pasquale Di Filippo—Brother of Emanuele Di Filippo; also a turncoat.

Rosalba Di Gregorio—Mafia lawyer in Palermo, defender of many Cosa Nostra bosses, including Vittorio Mangano, Silvio Berlusconi’s so-called stable-keeper.

Baldassare Di Maggio—Turncoat Sicilian Mafia boss; incriminating witness in the Andreotti trial who testified to the kiss between Andreotti and the boss Totò Riina.

Giovanni Falcone—Legendary Sicilian anti-Mafia public prosecutor who led the maxi-trials against Cosa Nostra; murdered by the Mafia in 1992.

Nino Fasullo—Anti-Mafia priest, Redemptorist padre, and editor of the journal Segno.

Giuseppe Fava—Younger brother of the turncoat Sicilian mafioso Marcello Fava.

Marcello Fava—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso; formerly a member of the Porta Nuova clan in Palermo.

Don Stefano Fernando—Priest in San Luca, Calabria.

Joseph Focoso—Sicilian mafioso and multiple hit man; arrested in Saarland and handed over to Italy in 2005.

Francesco Fortugno—Calabrian regional politician; murdered by the ’Ndrangheta in Locri in 2005.

Padre Mario Frittitta—Carmelite monk from Palermo; temporarily arrested for favoring the Mafia, then released again.

Calogero Ganci—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso, multiple hit man, and murderer of his own father-in-law.

Madame Gennet—Real name Ganat Tewelde Barhe; Eritrean people-trafficker.

Elisa Giorgi—Sister of Francesco Giorgi, the youngest victim of the Duisburg massacre; daughter of Don Pino Strangio’s cousin.

Francesco Giorgi—Youngest victim of the Duisburg massacre.

Antonino Giuffrè—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso; until his arrest in 2002, seen as the number two in Cosa Nostra, after the godfather Bernardo Provenzano.

Boris Giuliano—Leader of the mobile task force of the Palermo police; discovered the heroin trade between Sicily and America; murdered by the Mafia in 1979.

Libero Grassi—Sicilian businessman who publicly refused to pay protection money; murdered by the Mafia in 1991.

Nicola Gratteri—Leading public prosecutor of the Anti-Mafia investigation unit in Reggio Calabria, in charge of the investigations surrounding the Duisburg massacre.

Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano—Arrested Sicilian Mafia bosses from Palermo’s suburb of Brancaccio; ordered the murder of the anti-Mafia priest Padre Puglisi.

Michele Greco—Sicilian Mafia boss, known as “the Pope” because of his important role as a mediator between the individual clans of Cosa Nostra; died in prison in 2008.

Salvatore Grigoli—Sicilian mafioso; shot the anti-Mafia priest Padre Puglisi in 1993.

Giuseppe Guttadauro—Surgeon and mafioso from Palermo who has excellent contacts with Sicilian politicians and businessmen; one of the “new” faces of Cosa Nostra.

Rosa Russo Iervolino—Mayor of Naples; notable for introducing a smoking ban in the city’s parks.

Enrico Incognito—Mafioso from Bronte, near Catania, who was shot by his brother Marcello to prevent him becoming a turncoat.

Marcello Incognito—Mafioso and murderer of his brother Enrico.

Antonio Ingroia—Leading senior public prosecutor with the anti-Mafia investigating authority in Palermo;among other things presided over the trial of Marcello Dell’Utri.

Mario Lavorato—Calabrian pizza-chef in Stuttgart; known as a friend of the former minister-president Oettinger; accused of being a member of the ’Ndrangheta; acquitted due to insufficient evidence.

Luciano Liggio—Mafia boss and multiple hit man from Corleone; until his arrest in 1974, head of the Corleone clan; began a painting career in prison and died there in 1993.

Monsignore Liggio—Parish priest in Corleone and cousin of the legendary Mafia boss Luciano Liggio.

Salvo Lima—Christian Democrat and Giulio Andreotti’s “proconsul” in Sicily; murdered by the Mafia in 1992.

Guido Lo Forte—Leading senior public prosecutor with the anti-Mafia investigation unit in Palermo; prosecutor in the Andreotti trial.

Salvatore Lo Piccolo—Sicilian Mafia boss; until his arrest in late 2007, seen as the successor to Bernardo Provenzano.

Pietro Lunardi—Former minister for infrastructure and transport (2001–2006).

Aldo Madonia—Youngest son of the Madonia Mafia clan.

Francesco Madonia—Father of Aldo Madonia, boss of Palermo’s Madonia Mafia clan, and member of the council of Cosa Nostra.

Nino Mandalà—Sicilian Mafia boss from Villabate, well known for his good contacts with businessmen and politicians; the face of Sicily’s “new” Mafia.

Giuseppina Manganaro—Wife of a Sicilian turncoat mafioso.

Cinzia Mangano—Middle daughter of the Mafia boss Vittorio Mangano.

Loredana Mangano—Eldest daughter of the Mafia boss Vittorio Mangano.

Marina Mangano—Youngest daughter of the Mafia boss Vittorio Mangano.

Vittorio Mangano—Sicilian Mafia boss, known as “Berlusconi’s stable-keeper,” who lived in the businessman’s villa; died in prison in 2000.

Franco Marasà-Di Gregorio—Mafia lawyer in Palermo, husband of Rosalba Di Gregorio, and defender of the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano.

Vincenzina Marchese—Sister-in-law of the Mafia boss Totò Riina and wife of the boss Leoluca Bagarella.

Francesco Marino Mannoia—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso of the Santa Maria di Gesù clan; state’s evidence in the Andreotti trial.

Marco Marmo—’Ndranghetista, victim of the Duisburg massacre and killer of Maria Strangio, wife of the ’Ndranghetista Giovanni Nirta.

Clemente Mastella—Justice minister in the second Prodi government (until 2006).

Piersanti Mattarella—Christian Democrat and regional president of Sicily; murdered in 1980 because of his fight against the Mafia.

Leonardo Messina—Turncoat Sicilian mafioso; worked closely with the public prosecutor Paolo Borsellino.

Francesco Messina Denaro—Mafia boss from Castelvetrano, member of the council of Cosa Nostra, and father of the fugitive boss Matteo Messina Denaro; died in hiding in 1998.

Matteo Messina Denaro—Mafia boss of the province of Trapani, son of the godfather Francesco Messina Denaro, and probable successor to the Mafia boss Provenzano; in hiding since 1993.

Salvatore Messina Denaro—Brother of the Mafia boss Matteo Messina Denaro; son of Francesco Messina Denaro.

Gianfranco Miccichè—Former Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) member of parliament and former president of the Sicilian regional assembly.

Rolf Milser—Former German weightlifter.

Saverio Montalbano—Former leader of the mobile task force of Trapani and “pizza connection” investigator, now retired.

Antonio Montinaro—Bodyguard of Giovanni Falcone; murdered along with Falcone in 1992.

Nino Mormino—Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) member of parliament and defender of Marcello Dell’Utri and Salvatore Cuffaro.

Francesca Morvillo—Wife of the anti-Mafia public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone; murdered with her husband in 1992.

Gioacchino Natoli—Leading public prosecutor with the anti-Mafia investigation unit in Palermo.

Michele Navarra—Doctor and Mafia boss in Corleone; murdered in 1958 by his foster-son, Luciano Liggio.

Giovanni Luca “Gianluca” Nirta—Head of the Calabrian Nirta-Strangio clan from San Luca and widower of Maria Strangio; Strangio was killed in the Christmas 2006 attack that was intended to kill her husband.

Günther Oettinger—Former minister-president of the German state of Baden-Württemberg; now commissioner for energy in the European Commission.

Leoluca Orlando—Former mayor of Palermo and former leader of the opposition in the Sicilian assembly. Reelected as mayor of Palermo in 2012.

Anna Palma—Anti-Mafia public prosecutor from Palermo, now on the anti-Mafia commission in Rome; she worked for Renato Schifani, president of the Italian senate and Popolo della Libertà member of parliament.

Roberto Pannunzi—’Ndranghetista with strong connections to the Colombian drug cartel; father of Alessandro Pannunzi, with whom he was arrested in 2004.

Alessandro Paolillo—Brother of Francesco Paolillo, the boy who died while playing in a derelict building in Ponticelli.

Francesco Paolillo—Boy who died while playing in a derelict building in the Naples suburb of Ponticelli.

Antonio Pelle—Calabrian businessman in Duisburg, originally from San Luca; proprietor of the Landhaus Milser.

Giuseppe Pelle—Head of the Pelle-Vottari clan from San Luca; arrested on charges of Mafia membership.

Spartaco Pitanti—Italian businessman; former proprietor of the Paganini restaurant in Erfurt.

Father Vincenzo Pizzitola—Parish priest in Corleone.

Romano Prodi—President of the Democratic Party; several times Italian prime minister, most recently until 2008.

Angelo Provenzano—Son of the Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano; imprisoned in 2006.

Bernardo Provenzano—Formerly the most-wanted Mafia boss; successor to Totò Riina as head of Cosa Nostra; arrested in Corleone after forty-three years of hide-and-seek.

Padre Giuseppe Puglisi—Anti-Mafia priest in the Brancaccio suburb of Palermo; murdered by the Mafia in 1993.

Rosario “Saruzzo” Riccobono—Mafia boss of the Partanna-Mondello clan and member of Cosa Nostra council; murdered by his enemy Totò Riina in 1982.

Giovanni Riina—Eldest son of the Sicilian Mafia boss Totò Riina.

Giuseppe Riina—Youngest son of Mafia boss Totò Riina.

Salvatore “Totò” Riina—Mafia boss from Corleone; for a time sole ruler of Cosa Nostra; responsible for Mafia wars and various series of assassinations in the 1980s and 1990s; serving a life sentence since 1993.

Placido Rizzotto—Trade unionist from Corleone; murdered by Luciano Liggio in 1948 on the orders of boss Michele Navarra.

Franco Roberti—Former leading senior public prosecutor with the anti-Mafia investigation unit in Naples. Now chief prosecutor in Salerno.

Antonio Romeo—Clan chief of the Calabrian Romeo family; closely associated with the Pelle-Vottari clan.

Ernesto Ruffini—Former archbishop of Palermo (1945–1967).

Salvo—Taxi driver in Palermo.

Ignazio Salvo—Christian Democrat, the richest businessman in Sicily, and representative of the bourgeois Mafia of the 1980s.

Benedetto “Nitto” Santapaola—Sicilian mafioso, clan chief in Catania, and member of Cosa Nostra council; in prison since 1993.

Carmine Sarno—Music producer from the Naples suburb of Ponticelli; member of the Sarno Camorra clan.

Ciro Sarno—Imprisoned head of the Sarno Camorra clan.

Vincenzo Scarantino—Temporary Mafia renegade who admitted involvement in the murder of Paolo Borsellino and later withdrew his statements.

Roberto Scarpinato—Leading senior public prosecutor in the anti-Mafia investigation unit of Palermo, chief prosecutor in the Andreotti trial, and now chief prosecutor in Caltanissetta.

Renato Schifani—President of the Italian senate and Forza Italia (Popolo della Libertà) member of parliament.

Rosaria Schifani—Widow of the bodyguard Vito Schifani.

Vito Schifani—Bodyguard of Giovanni Falcone; murdered in the attack on Falcone in 1992.

Antonino Scopelliti—Prosecuting magistrate with the supreme court in Rome; murdered by the Mafia in 1991.

Shobha—International award-winning Sicilian photographer; daughter of the anti-Mafia fighter Letizia Battaglia.

Heinz Sprenger—Detective chief superintendent with the criminal police in Duisburg and leader of the investigations into the Duisburg massacre.

Don Pino Strangio—Parish priest of San Luca and spiritual head of the pilgrimage site of Madonna di Polsi.

Maria Strangio—Wife of the ’Ndranghetista Gianluca Nirta; murdered by their enemy clan at Christmas 2006 in an attack intended to kill her husband.

Sebastiano Strangio—Owner of the pizzeria Da Bruno in Duisburg and victim of the Duisburg massacre.

Domenico “Don Micu” Trimboli—Boss of the Calabrian Trimboli clan; international drug dealer; arrested in 2008.

Bernhard Vogel—German Christian Democrat and, until 2003, minister-president of Thuringia.

Franco Zecchin—Italian photographer and long-term partner of Letizia Battaglia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Petra Reski was born in Unna, West Germany, in 1958. She has lived in Italy since 1989. Reski is a widely respected journalist, known for her investigative pieces about the Mafia.

INDEX

Addiopizzo organization, 247

Adultery, 90, 168, 241

Aeroporto Falcone e Borsellino, 34, 250

Agenda 2000, 59

Aglieri, Pietro, 33, 84, 85, 86, 87–88, 204, 205, 206–207

Agrigento, 142

Agrodolce, Bittersweet (TV show), 77

Alcamo clan, 24

Alessio (singer), 225, 231–233, 234

Alfano, Angelino, 77

Al-Qaeda, 50

Alvaro, Giulia, 167

Ammazzateci tutti anti-Mafia movement, 59

Amnesty, 124, 188

Andreotti, Giulio, 21, 22, 70, 75, 83, 114, 189, 228, 248

Ansa news agency, 181, 203, 209

Antimafia Duemila (newspaper), 3, 121, 248

Anti-Mafia Pool. See under Prosecutors

Antonacci, Biagio, 25, 250

Apulian Sacra Corona Unita, 28, 121

Argentina, 42

Arms dealing, 49, 55, 152, 222

Arms possession, illegal, 223

Arrests, 14, 16, 17, 18, 26, 43, 52, 55, 61, 75, 84, 87, 88, 89, 102, 104, 124, 142, 143, 150, 154, 167, 175, 181, 188, 202, 205, 219, 222, 223, 226, 243, 245

of Bernardo Provenzano, 144, 169, 209

of Vittorio Mangano, 196–197

Asinara prison, 136

Assassinations. See Murders

Attia, Giovanna, 163, 164

Atria, Rita, 161–164

Australia, 51

Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), 42

Badalamenti, Don Tano, 24–25

Bagarella, Antonietta, 173. See also Riina, Totò: wife of

Bagarella, Leoluca, 91, 100, 108, 137, 181

Bail culture, 124

Banca Ambrosiana, 9

Barhe, Ganat Tewelde (“Madame Gennet”), 75

Barresi, Agata, 181

Bassolino, Antonio, 231, 234

Battaglia, Letizia, 26–27, 65–69, 82–83, 105–106, 113, 115–116, 127, 141, 146–147, 160, 162, 165, 179–180, 247–249

apartment of, 71–72

publishing company of, 79

Benedict XVI (Pope), 97

Berlin Wall, 154, 229

Berlusconi, Silvio, 75, 76, 77, 78, 114, 117, 131, 188, 204, 212, 248

and Marcello Dell’Utri, 8–9, 132–135

threatened by Mafia, 133

and Vittorio Mangano, 193, 194

and wiretapping law, 138–139

Bernardo, Fra, 101

Bingo halls, 233–234

Bodyguards, 6, 10, 18, 30, 68, 119, 192, 206, 222

Boemi, Salvatore, 116–118, 155

Bolivia, 42

Bombings, 134, 220, 246. See also Explosives

Bontade, Stefano, 133, 134

Borsellino, Paolo, 3, 10, 29, 32, 37, 73, 86, 100, 115, 128, 135, 138, 142, 161, 184, 186, 198, 206, 248, 249, 250

memorial day for, 74

Bosses, 8, 9, 11, 25, 28, 33, 36, 64, 67, 74, 83, 85, 88, 100, 133, 134, 135, 150, 161, 168, 189, 206, 222, 241

first female boss, 169

frugality of, 246

in hiding, 25, 211, 241, 243, 244

imprisoned bosses, 10, 109, 136, 137, 150, 165, 194, 201, 207, 211

and processions, 103–104

Boutiques, 39, 193

Brazil, 42

Bribery, 91, 135, 169, 227

Bugs (electronic), 126, 153, 205. See also Wiretapping

Buscetta, Tommaso, 8, 91

Calabria, 7, 27–28, 59, 116, 158, 226, 247

Ammazzateci tutti anti-Mafia movement in, 59

deaths in, 120

percentage of population in ’Ndrangheta, 121

See also Reggio Calabria; San Luca

Calò, Pippo, 9

Calvi, Roberto, 9

Camilleri, Andrea, 68

Cammarata, Diego, 76

Camorra, 28, 79, 121, 167, 212, 215, 216, 218, 220, 222, 226–227, 230

and markets of everyday consumption, 228, 229

and politicians, 227

Campanella, Francesco, 75

Campania, 121, 215, 226

Canada, 42, 51

Cancemi, Salvatore, 8

Capaci, 29

Carabetta, Dr. Mario, 158

Carabetta, Michele, 57, 153

Carabetta, Sonia, 167

Carabinieri, 25, 56, 61, 115. See also Police

Casalesi clan, 215

Casini, Pier Ferdinando, 131

Cassarà, Ninni, 69, 184

Castellammare del Golfo clan, 24

Castelvetrano, 240, 242, 243, 244

Catania, 88, 133, 135

Catholic Church, 91–92, 95. See also Religion

Cease-fires, 59

Chiara, Anna, 233

Chile, 42

China, 248

Christian Democrats, 97. See also under Cosa Nostra

Ciancimino, Vito, 52, 68

Cinà, Gaetano, 132, 137

Cinisi clan, 24

Clothes, 2, 6, 26, 31, 46–47, 54, 60, 98, 106, 129, 166–167, 195, 203, 205–206, 229

burning of, 180

Cocaine, 42, 43, 49, 50, 77, 118, 122, 125, 185, 212, 227. See also Drugs

Collesano, 192

Colombia, 42, 43, 50, 118, 185, 245

Competition, 126

Conservatism, 97

Contractors, 227

Contrada, Bruno, 118

Coppola, Don Agostino, 104

Corleone (town), 88, 95–111, 171–172, 173, 210

Chiesa Madre church in, 100–101

Corleone family, 72

Corriere della Sera newspaper, 73

Corruption, 8, 113, 130

Cortese, Renato, 144, 149, 155

Cosa Nostra, 1, 50, 90–91, 124, 131, 139, 167, 227

betrayal of, 10, 84 (see also Turncoats)

bloodthirsty era of, 100, 108 (see also Mafia: Mafia wars of the eighties)

and Camorra, 28

and Christian Democrats, 68, 70, 134, 135, 137

commission of, 8, 49

first female boss of, 169

hierarchical structure of, 8, 28, 49

initiation ceremonies of, 7–8 (see also Fava, Marcello: initiation of)

maxi-trial for, 73–74, 88, 208, 209

and politicians, 204, 226, 228 (see also Mafia: political connections of)

See also Mafia

Costa, Rita and Gaetano, 31

Costanzo, Maurizio, 184, 186

Cottone, Carla, 183–186, 188

Craxi, Bettino, 134

Crucifixes, 54, 83, 103, 108

Cuffaro, Salvatore “Totò,” 33, 76, 114, 188–189, 192

D’Ali, Antonio, 243

Dalla Chiesa, Carlo Alberto, 184

Dell’Utri, Marcello, 76, 77, 118, 128–130, 188, 189, 204, 210

Marcello Dell’Utri Club, 78

sentencing of, 130

and Vittorio Mangano, 138, 193, 194

See also under Berlusconi, Silvio

Democracy, 123, 126

De Vasco, 108

Dewes, Richard, 123

DIA. See Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia

Dicillo, Rocco, 29

Di Filippo, Emanuele and Pasquale, 180–181

Di Gregorio, Rosalba, 194, 199, 200–212

marriage of, 202–204, 207, 208, 212

Di Maggio, Baldassare, 21–22

Di Matteo, Giuseppe, 242

Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia (DIA), 220

Dr. Erich Salomon Prize, 72

Don Pino, 41, 45–56, 151, 158

Drugs, 26, 33, 41, 42, 55, 108, 124–125, 138, 145, 152, 193, 211–212, 222, 227, 229. See also Cocaine; Heroin

Duisburg

Da Bruno pizzeria in, 57, 150–151

Landhaus Milser hotel near, 156–157

massacre in, 27, 28, 40, 45, 47, 55, 58, 115–116, 117, 119, 120, 146–147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 155, 157, 188, 226, 229

Earthquakes, 223

“E carcerate” (song), 219

Edizione della Battaglia, 79

Election fraud, 75–76

El Pais, 48

EU. See European Union European Court of Human Rights, 99

European Union (EU), 53, 59, 77, 116, 193

Explosives, 222. See also Bombings

Extortion, 196. See also Protection money

Falcone, Giovanni, 8, 10, 29, 30, 37, 73, 86, 100, 113, 115, 128, 135, 168, 184, 186, 198–199, 209, 248, 249, 250

memorial day for, 74

Family

preservation of, 90

betrayal of, 164

blood families, 169

Fasullo, Padre Nino, 96, 97, 105

Fate, 210

Fath, Jacques, 106

Fava, Marcello, 1–22, 83

brothers/children of, 14, 15, 17, 18–19

growing up, 13–14

initiation of, 7, 9–10, 13

wife of, 17–18

Feast days, 39–40

Ferdinand IV (King), 230

Fernando, Don Stefano, 45

Feuds, 39

Fininvest, 133

Focoso, Joseph, 142–143

Food, 14, 141, 146, 155, 183

Forged goods, 229

Forgiveness, 31, 48

Fortugno, Francesco, 59

Forza Italia party, 8, 9, 75, 77, 78, 128, 135–136, 188, 210, 228, 243

Frankfurt Stock Exchange, 44

Freemasons, 7, 68

Frittitta, Padre Mario, 56, 84–93, 97, 206

Ganci, Calogero, 64–65

Garantista, 130

Germany, 54, 72, 119, 123, 143, 229

criminal law issues in, 118, 120, 125, 144, 154, 155

Duisburg Murder Commission, 149 (see also Duisburg: massacre in)

German vs. Italian

investigators, 142–143, 144, 154

See also under ’Ndrangheta

Getty, Jean Paul, 49

Giorgi, Francesco, 48

Giuffrè, Antonino, 9, 210

Giuliano, Boris, 69

Giulianos clan, 221

Godfather, The, 55, 99, 147

Godfathers, 7, 9, 15–16, 17, 101, 102, 169, 184, 221

Gomorra (Saviano), 229

Grand Hotel Excelsior (Reggio Calabria), 38

Grassi, Libero, 184

Gratteri, Nicola, 116, 118–120, 121, 122, 124, 125, 126, 155

Graviano brothers, 104, 203

Greco, Michele (il Papa), 88

Grigoli, Salvatore, 104–105

Guttadauro, Giuseppe, 246

Hashish, 227

Heroin, 187, 212

and pizza connection, 68

History of the Mafia from 1943 until the Present, 19–20

Honesty, 90

Human Rights Commission in The Hague, 173

Human rights laws, 136, 208

Hungary, 229

Hunger strikes, 137

Iervolino, Rosa Russo, 231, 234

Il Giornale newspaper, 77, 79

Incaprettato, 193

Incognito, Enrico and Marcello, 181

India, 217

Ingroia, Antonio, 118, 131–132, 189

Interpol, 124

Invoices, 122

Inzerillo family, 211

Jewelry, 242

John Paul II (Pope), 97

Judiciary, 170, 175, 180, 185, 197, 198, 227

Kalsa, 81, 82

Kidnappings, 49, 50, 108, 118, 133

La Bella Napoli music agency, 216, 219, 225

La Repubblica, 61, 98, 175, 209

La Rete party, 27

La Standa supermarket chain, 134

Lavorato, Mario, 123

Lawyers, 64, 76, 85, 129, 143, 165, 173, 188, 194, 200, 201, 208

Letizia, Giuseppe, 101

Licciardi clan, 229

Liggio, Luciano, 100, 101, 103, 108, 109

Liggio (Monsignore), 109, 110, 111

Lima, Salvo, 86, 137

Lipari, Pino and Arturo, 89–90

Locri, 59–60

Bishop of Locri, 151

Lo Forte, Guido, 118

Lombardo, Raffaele, 76

London School of Economics, 246

Long Silence, The (film), 31

Lo Piccolo, Salvatore, 209, 211–212

L’Ora newspaper, 67

Lunardi, Pietro, 79

“Ma” (word), 35, 98

Madonia, Aldo, 184–185, 186, 187, 188

Madonia, Francesco, 184

Madonna del Carmine, 13

Madonna of the Clairvoyance, 59–60

Mafia, 79

annual business turnover of, 120

anti-Mafia laws, 33

arrogance of, 145 (see also ’Ndrangheta: arrogance of)

Mafia wars of the eighties, 72, 86, 134, 211

mafiology, 207

mafiosi “on the run,” 25 (see also Messina Denaro, Matteo: in hiding; Provenzano, Bernardo: in hiding)

political connections of, 9, 75–79, 117–118, 123, 128–130, 138, 169, 193, 194, 204, 228 (see also Cosa Nostra: and Christian Democrats; Dell’Utri, Marcello; Miccichè, Gianfranco)

power struggle in, 210–211

and religion, 4, 95–111 (see also Religion)

and social consensus, 246

as society/state/people, 12

values of, 169

white-collar Mafia, 74

See also Bosses; Camorra; Cosa Nostra; ’Ndrangheta; Turncoats

Mancuso, Domenico, 109, 110–111

Mandalà, Nino, 189

Manganaro, Giuseppina, 180

Mangano, Cinzia, 194, 195, 198–199

Mangano, Loredana, 194, 195, 196–197

Mangano, Marina, 194, 195, 199–200

Mangano, Vittorio, 9, 132, 133–134, 135, 138, 204

daughters of, 193–200

wife of, 193, 194, 197, 199

Mannoia, Marino, 86

Maradona, Diego Armando, 221

Marasà, Franco, 201, 202–203, 208, 209

Marchese, Vincenzina, 181–182

Marmo, Marco, 48, 55, 57, 153, 167

Mastella, Clemente, 75, 120

Mattarella, Piersanti, 184

Maxi-trial. See under Ucciardone prison

Messina, Leonardo, 88, 103

Messina Denaro, Francesco, 242–243, 244, 245

Messina Denaro, Matteo, 24–25, 52, 89, 204, 240–245

father of, 242–243

in hiding, 25, 211, 241, 243, 244

house of, 245

mother of, 244, 245

Messina Denaro, Salvatore, 243, 245

Miccichè, Gianfranco, 33–34, 76–79

Gianfranco boys, 78, 79

Milser, Rolf, 157

“Minchia,” 27

Ministry of the Interior, 4, 6, 61, 68, 161

Mondello, 182–183, 184, 185

Money laundering, 50, 121, 122, 142, 151, 154–155, 229, 234

Monreale, Archbishop of, 96

Montalbano, Saverio, 68–69, 251

Monte Pellegrino, 175–177

Montinaro, Antonio, 29

Moretti, Nanni, 195

Mormino, Nino, 188–189

Morvillo, Francesca, 29

Murders, 1, 2–3, 4, 5, 9, 10–11, 15, 21, 29, 32, 33, 37, 47, 55, 57, 59, 67, 69, 86, 101, 104, 105, 114, 134, 153, 161, 167, 173, 175, 181, 192, 193, 205, 215

of a child, 182, 242

and commandments, 90

and cooperation of Christian Democrats and Mafia, 137

and feast days, 39–40

honor killings of unfaithful wives, 180

preferred method of murder, 11, 19, 242

of public prosecutors, 115 (see also Borsellino, Paolo; Falcone, Giovanni)

and religion, 88, 91

Naples, 216, 219, 225, 230

Piccolo Paradiso restaurant in, 233

Ponticelli quarter in, 218, 221, 222, 231, 234

Natoli, Gioacchino, 118

Navarra, Michele, 101, 108

’Ndrangheta, 7, 28, 39, 40, 49, 50, 51, 59, 61, 117, 120, 139, 152, 167, 188, 212, 226, 247

as active all over the world, 42, 50, 51

arrogance of, 119, 124

and Colombian cocaine barons, 118

financial power of, 121–122

in Germany, 43–44, 45–46, 50, 121, 122, 154–155

meeting place of, 51

share of public commissions, 116

Nino (shopkeeper), 250

Nirta, Gianluca, 57, 153

Nirta-Strangio clan, 39, 42, 57, 119, 152

Novica journal, 92

Oettinger, Günther, 123

Orlando, Leoluca, 66, 70, 75, 76

Palermo, 3, 7, 13–14, 18, 21, 23, 26, 29, 70–71, 72, 74, 105, 119, 129, 147, 202, 211, 229, 237, 247, 249–250

Archbishop of Palermo, 97

Borgo Vecchio in, 145, 146, 160

Centrale Palace hotel in, 36, 63, 64, 65

governance of, 76

looting of Palermo, 68

mayors of, 52, 65–66, 68, 76, 82

mobile task force in, 68

Palace of Justice in, 113, 114, 115

Palermo Spring, 65, 66, 107, 228

Piccola Napoli in, 141, 144–145, 145–146, 155, 159

prosecutors eliminated from

Anti-Mafia Pool, 118

smell of, 70

”street of wealth” in, 193

traffic in, 35, 249

Palma, Anna, 141–142, 144

Palma di Montechiaro, 142

Panico clan, 220, 222

Pannunzi, Alessandro and Roberto, 43

Paolillo, Alessandro, 234, 235

Paolillo, Francesco, 223–224, 230–231, 234, 235

Paraguay, 42

Partanna village, 162–164

Patriarchy, 170–171

Paul VI (Pope), 97

Pelle, Antonio, 157, 158

Pelle, Giuseppe, 61–62

Pelle-Vottari clan, 39, 55, 61, 119, 152, 153

bunker of, 57–58

People trafficking, 39, 75

Peru, 42, 50

Pianos prison, 136

Piccolo, Salvatore Lo, 89

Pio La Torre law, 143

Pizzini (notes), 211

Pizzitola, Father Vincenzo, 100–101, 102

Poland, 229

Police, 5, 12, 20, 41, 57, 58, 67, 68, 69, 92, 167–168, 173, 211, 244, 251

financial police, 224–225, 230

in Germany, 125, 150, 152, 154 (see also Germany: German vs. Italian investigators)

See also Carabinieri

Politicians. See Mafia: political connections of

Polsi, 50–51. See also Santa Maria di Polsi

Popolo della Libertà party, 77

Porta Nuova family, 7, 8, 9, 11

Porto Empedocle, 142

Private clinics, 64

Processions, 59–60, 83, 93, 193, 238–240

and distribution of power, 103–104

Prodi government, 124, 139

Pro Loco of San Giovanni di Gerace, 158

Property confiscations, 43, 118, 119, 135, 143, 154, 173, 210, 223

Prosecutors, 52, 72, 86, 113, 115, 118–120, 121, 129, 131, 155, 188, 189, 226, 229, 247

Anti-Mafia Pool, 113–114, 116, 117, 118, 142

prosecutors eliminated from Anti-Mafia Pool, 118

See also Borsellino, Paolo; Falcone, Giovanni; Palma, Anna

Protection money, 50, 61, 126, 133, 184, 193, 246–247

Provenzano, Angelo, 201–202

Provenzano, Bernardo, 8, 36, 100, 103, 135, 139, 169–170, 204, 209–210, 226

in hiding, 144, 169

and religion, 88–89

sons of, 169, 201–202

wife of, 47, 102

Puglisi, Giuseppe, 104–105

Puzo, Mario, 147

Radio Capital, 209

Rai (Italian broadcaster), 48, 243

Ramazzotti, Eros, 14

Reggio Calabria, 38, 39, 40, 51, 143

Palace of Justice in, 116–117, 126, 127, 128

Religion, 4, 19, 46, 56, 85–89, 170, 209, 232

commandments, 90

See also Catholic Church; Processions; under Mafia; Murders

Respect, 7, 13, 25, 111, 134, 172

Resuttana clan, 184

Revenge campaigns, 167

Riccobono, Rosario, 11

Riina, Giovanni, 175

Riina, Giuseppe, 98–99, 175

Riina, Totò, 8, 11, 21, 22, 32, 88–89, 100, 103, 104, 108, 134, 137, 172, 181, 199, 210, 211, 242

sons of, 98–99, 175

wife of (Antonietta), 102, 173–174

Rizzotto, Placido, 101

Roberti, Franco, 229

Rome, 4, 5, 77, 161

Romeo clan, 42

Rossi, Vasco, 213, 241

Ruffini, Cardinal Ernesto, 97

Sabella, Marzia, 226

Salerno-Reggio motorway, 247

Salvo, Ignazio, 137

Salvo (taxi driver), 3, 22, 23–24, 26, 28, 70, 81, 84, 114, 120–121, 160, 213, 250–251

San Leoluca (saint), 101

San Luca, 39, 40–44, 55, 59, 117, 119, 151, 152, 153, 166, 167, 188

San Martino (saint), 101

San Placido (saint), 101, 103

Santa Maria del Carmelo, 83

Santa Maria della Pietà in Kalsa, 81, 83, 84, 85

Santa Maria di Polsi (pilgrimage site), 50–51, 53–54, 55

Santapaola, Nitto, 88

Santa Rosalia, 103

Santa Rosalia, church of, 107–108, 109, 110, 176–177

Sarno, Carmine, 217–225, 230–231, 233

Sarno, Ciro, 218, 223, 232

Saviano, Roberto, 229

Scarantino, Vincenzo, 181

Scarpinato, Roberto, 118

Schifani, Renato, 142, 189

Schifani, Rosaria, 30–33

Schifani, Vito, 29, 30

Schindler’s List (film), 197–198

Sciascia, Leonardo, 167

Scopa, 24

Scopelliti, Antonino, 86

Secret codes, 89–90

Selinunte, 52

Sentencing/imprisonment issues, 125, 130–131, 143

high-security detentions, 136, 208

Servizio Centrale in Rome, 4, 5

Shobha (photographer), 3, 24, 37–38, 41, 47, 52–53, 56, 58, 60, 62, 69–70, 72, 76, 79, 81, 82, 92–93, 97, 106–107, 113, 127, 141, 159–160, 165, 200, 213, 216–217, 229–230, 237, 239, 249–250

mother of, 26, 62. See also Battaglia, Letizia

ransacked house of, 187

Sicilcassa bank, 132

Sicilians/Sicily, 2, 10, 24, 27, 33, 42

bridge between Sicily and mainland, 139

percentage of population in Mafia, 121

Sicilian language/dialect, 13, 89, 155, 206

Sicula Brokers, 189

Slush funds, 227

Smuggling, 227, 229

Socialist Party, 134, 135

Solidarność activists, 69

South/Central America, 42, 43

Spain, 43

Sprenger, Heinz, 149–150, 151–152, 154–155

Stein, Edith, 87

Strangio, Don Pino. See Don Pino

Strangio, Maria, 153

Strangio, Sebastiano, 48, 151

Superglue, 246

Surveyors’ architecture, 29

Tangentopoli scandal, 135

Tax avoidance, 227

Terremotati, 223

Toxic waste, 216

Trapani, 68, 169, 238–240, 243

Trimboli, “Don Micu,” 43

Turncoats, 4, 6, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15–16, 21, 64, 83, 86, 88, 91, 100, 103, 133, 135, 136–137, 169, 182, 184, 185, 187, 201, 205, 210, 215, 232

father of murdered child as

turncoat, 242

first turncoat boss, 8

Marcello Fava’s godfather as turncoat, 15–16, 17

Ucciardone prison, 37, 72, 84, 165

maxi-trial in, 73–74, 208, 209

trials of Falcone and Borsellino murderers in, 165

Uruguay, 42, 50

Value systems, 95, 169

Vatican Bank, 9

Vendetta, 167

Venezuela, 42, 50, 245

Vitale, Giusy, 169

Vogel, Bernhard, 123

von Trotta, Margarethe, 31

Waste disposal, 216

Weddings, 204

Wiretaps, 57, 138–139, 142, 143, 154, 167, 169. See also Bugs

Witness regulations at trials, 135, 136–137, 210

Women, 46–47, 54, 60, 103, 146, 155–156, 159–177, 193

Calabrian Mafia women, 188

Cosa Nostra women, 187–188

first female boss, 169

first Sicilian woman accused of Mafia membership, 173

honor killings of unfaithful wives, 180

Mafia wives, 17–18, 47, 55–56, 102, 156, 166, 167, 170, 173–174, 182, 183–186, 193, 194, 197, 199, 241 (see also Women: widows)

only woman lawyer defending Mafia bosses, 201, 208

of San Luca, 167

as sorella d’omertà, 167

widows, 30–33, 72, 83, 179

Women against the Mafia (committee), 162

See also Mangano, Vittorio: daughters of

Zecchin, Franco, 67, 72