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The Good Mothers. Alex Perry
Читать онлайн.Название The Good Mothers
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780008222123
Автор произведения Alex Perry
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство HarperCollins
Alessandra would carry the feel of the Straits with her all her life. It was there in the way a winter’s chill would remind her of the morning breeze off the city docks or how the first days of summer would almost instantly change her forearms from alabaster to honey. It was there, too, in her distaste for the way people often seemed to prefer fiction over truth. While most children were delighted to find themselves growing up in a world of gods and castles in the sky, Alessandra was unmoved. Stories of monsters and fairies were entertaining, but they also obscured the deadly reality of the Straits. Every summer, she watched as Messina’s coastguards heaved a steady procession of dripping, blanketed stretchers onto the docks. How could these regrettable, preventable deaths be part of some mystical grand plan? There was little logic, either, in the other spurious legends that Sicilians would spin to glorify their island. In 1975, when Alessandra was seven, a twenty-six-year-old from Messina called Giovanni Fiannacca swam to Calabria in 30 minutes and 50 seconds, a record that was to stand for forty years. Alessandra’s neighbours proclaimed Fiannacca the greatest distance swimmer in Sicily, perhaps even of all time. The reality, as most Siciliens knew, was that he had timed his crossing to coincide with a particularly strong east–west tide which would have carried a rubber duck to Calabria.
In another life, in another land, Alessandra might have forgiven these illusions and the credulous adults who repeated them. But her home was the birthplace of Cosa Nostra. By the 1970s, the Sicilian mafia was operating all but unopposed on the island. It was a state-within-a-state, extracting taxes via extortion, dividing up public contracts among mafia companies, settling disputes, delivering punishments – and lying, cheating and murdering to preserve its position. Yet no one said a thing. To inquisitive outsiders, Sicilians would claim the mafia was a fable, a cliché or even a groundless slur. Among themselves, proponents would characterise it in more mythic terms, as an ancient Sicilian brotherhood built on courage, honour and sacrifice. Never mind that it was the mafia itself which cooked up these romantic legends and embellished them with more recent folklore, such as their story about how mafiosi rode Allied tanks to liberate Sicily in the Second World War. Never mind that in their hearts most Sicilians knew they were being lied to. Just as the islanders found it hard to accept the indifference shown to their city by Nature and Man, so most preferred not to confront the truth that their fellow Sicilians had grown rich by robbing and killing them.
Alessandra lamented her neighbours’ complicity in these deceptions, even as she understood it. Decades later, reading sensational newspaper accounts of mafia adventures, she would react the same way she had as a child. The facts about the tyranny and the killing were plain. Why dress them up as something else? What Alessandra truly detested, however, was the way outsiders assisted the mafia’s myth-making. A year after she was born, Mario Puzo, an American pulp magazine writer, sold the screenplay adapted from his book, The Godfather, to Paramount for $100,000. Two years later, Francis Ford Coppola was directing Al Pacino in the movie on location in Savoca, twenty-five miles south of Messina.
The film, one of the most successful of all time, contained elements of truth. The Corleone family was a crime syndicate from south of Palermo. There also had been a disagreement inside the mafia in the 1950s over whether to enter narcotics trafficking, a dispute which did lead to an internal war. What Alessandra found unforgivable was the way Hollywood used southern Italians’ daily tragedy as a device to make its dramas more compelling. She shared none of Coppola’s empathy for the men who murdered their wives and girlfriends. She could make no sense of the women either, passive, giddy creatures who allowed their men to lead them from love to betrayal to an early death. Nor did she recognise any of the film’s sombre majesty or mournful grandiloquence in the blood that stained the gutters as she walked to school. When Alessandra was ten, two ambitious bosses, Salvatore Riina (‘the butcher of Corleone’) and Bernardo Provenzano (‘the tractor’, so-called because, in the words of one informer, ‘he mows people down’), began what became an all-out mafia war by assassinating several Sicilian rivals.2 The decade and a half that followed, spanning most of Alessandra’s adolescence, became known as la mattanza, ‘the slaughter’. More than 1,700 Sicilians died. Mafiosi were shot in their cars, in restaurants, as they walked down the street. In a single day in Palermo in November 1982, twelve mafiosi were killed in twelve separate assassinations. Yet through it all, foreign tourists would arrive in Messina asking for directions to The Godfather’s village. No, thought Alessandra. This was a hideous, wilful delusion. It was a lie. It had to be corrected.
When Alessandra was eight, her teacher asked her class to write an essay about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Let your minds wander, said the teacher. You can be anything at all, anywhere in the world. Excited by the chance to escape Messina’s violence and fear, most of Alessandra’s classmates wrote whimsies about becoming princesses or moving to America or flying a rocket to the moon. Alessandra said she would be staying put. I want to be an anti-mafia prosecutor, she wrote. I want to put gangsters behind bars.
It was to pursue her ambition that in 1987, at the age of nineteen, Alessandra took the train north to become a law student. Pulling into Rome’s central station the next day, she found herself in a different nation. But Alessandra quickly assimilated. She graduated from Milan University in 1990, qualified as a magistrate in 1997 and quickly became a specialist in organised crime. Over the next twelve years, she investigated the ’Ndrangheta’s expansion across northern Italy, assisted the prosecution of billion-euro tax evasion in the art world, sat as a judge in a high-profile terrorist recruitment case and, on a quiet weekend, married a rising anti-mafia carabinieri officer.3
No one was surprised that Alessandra married into the job. Few outsiders would tolerate the life of a mafia prosecutor’s spouse. The wide autonomy Italy’s anti-mafia prosecutors enjoyed in their investigations was about the only freedom they possessed. The constant threat to her life required Alessandra to exist in isolation behind a wall of steel – literally, in the case of her office door and her armour-plated car – and for her to be escorted by four bodyguards twenty-four hours a day. Spontaneity was out of the question; all her movements were planned a day in advance. A normal life – meeting friends and family, eating out, shopping – was next to impossible. ‘We go nowhere with crowds because of the risk to others,’ said Alessandra. For the same reason, she and her husband – whose identity she kept secret – had long ago decided against children. ‘I would have to fear for them,’ she said. ‘As we are, I have no fear for me or my husband.’
Alessandra didn’t relish the sacrifices the job demanded. But she had come to accept them as useful to developing the character she needed to face the mafia. Her response to the mafia’s romanticism and glamour remained what it had been in Messina: an insistence on the facts. To some, Alessandra knew, she could seem cold and aloof, living a grey half-life ruled by procedure, discipline and evidence. She told herself she needed this distance – from mafiosi, from their victims, even from life – to preserve her perspective. Passion and blood and family and tragedy – that was the mafia, and the mafia was enemy. She had to be the opposite: intellectual, forensic and dispassionate.
By forty-one, what once had been girlish obstinacy had matured into poise, stoicism and self-possession. In her office in the Palace of Justice, Alessandra kept her desk clear and her office spartan. Besides a photograph of the legendary Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, she hung only a graphite drawing of Lady Justice and a pastel of the Straits of Messina. Among her staff, the young female prosecutor’s icy focus was a