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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
Inside this narrow, monotone life, Alessandra permitted herself a few indulgences. Every August she and her husband took off on a foreign holiday without their bodyguards, telling no one where they were going – ‘the only time I can be free,’ she said. On a shelf in her office, she kept a collection of snow globes sent to her by friends from their travels in Europe. Alessandra also liked to dress well. To court, she wore slim dark suits over a plain white blouse. To the office, she wore woollen winter shawls with leather boots, or stretch jeans with a biker’s jacket, or heels with a sleeveless summer dress, her toes and fingernails painted chocolate in winter and tangerine in summer. This was not about looking good to the world. Anti-mafia prosecutors were rarely seen by anyone. Rather, this was about freedom. To do her job and not be defined by it, to accept its restrictions and not be beaten by them, to face the threats of ten thousand mafiosi and respond with a woman’s grace and elegance – that was true style and, in a world of male brutality, a display of adamant and unyielding femininity.
Throughout her time in the north, Alessandra had kept a close watch on the southern battle against the mafia. It had been a long and bloody fight. After the state intervened to try to stem la mattanza in the 1980s, judges, policemen, carabinieri, politicians and prosecutors became targets too. On 23 May 1992, the mafia detonated half a ton of explosives under an elevated highway outside the city on which Giovanni Falcone, Italy’s most celebrated anti-mafia prosecutor, was driving with his wife and three police bodyguards. The explosion was so big it registered on Sicily’s earthquake monitors. Hearing the news of Falcone’s assassination, his co-prosecutor Paolo Borsellino, who had grown up in the same Palermo neighbourhood and had always been somewhat in Falcone’s shadow, remarked, ‘Giovanni beat me again.’ Two months later, Borsellino and five policemen were killed by a car bomb outside the home of Borsellino’s mother in Palermo. Six houses were levelled and fifty-one cars, vans and trucks set on fire.
Falcone’s death was to Italians what President John F. Kennedy’s was to Americans: everyone can remember where they were when they heard the news. To the tight group of Sicilians like Alessandra who had taken up the fight against Cosa Nostra, the loss of their two champions was deeply personal. At the time, Alessandra was a twenty-four-year-old law graduate in Rome who had just begun training to be a magistrate. Falcone’s and Borsellino’s sacrifice only made the two prosecutors seem more heroic. ‘They were the inspiration for a generation,’ she said. ‘Their deaths made us stronger.’ To this day, the two prosecutors remain the titans against whom all Italian prosecutors measure themselves. A picture of either Falcone or Borsellino, and generally both, hangs on the wall of every anti-mafia prosecutor’s office in Italy, often accompanied by a famous Falcone one-liner. ‘The mafia is a human phenomenon and, like all human phenomena, it had a beginning, an evolution and will also have an end,’ was one favourite. ‘He who doesn’t fear death dies only once,’ was another.
In time, even Cosa Nostra would acknowledge that the murders had been a miscalculation. They gave the prosecutors’ political masters no choice but to abandon attempts to negotiate a peace with the mafia and try to crush it instead. Tens of thousands of soldiers were dispatched to Sicily. The two prosecutors’ deaths also prompted renewed appreciation of their achievements. The chief accomplishment of Falcone, Borsellino and their two fellow prosecutors, Giuseppe di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta, was finally to disprove the grand Sicilian lie. After decades of denial, Cosa Nostra was exposed not as a myth or a movie but a global criminal organisation, headquartered in Sicily, with extensive links to business and politics in Italy and around the world. The climax of their investigations, the Maxi Trial, saw 475 mafiosi in court, accused of offences ranging from extortion to drug smuggling to 120 murders.
How had Falcone and Borsellino succeeded? Many of their accomplishments hinged on a new 1982 law, the crime of mafia association, which outlawed a mere relationship with the mafia, even without evidence of a criminal act. That effectively made it a crime just to be born into a mafia family and was aimed squarely at the omertà and close blood relations on which the mafia was built. The new legislation worked. First a handful, then scores, then hundreds of mafiosi turned pentiti (literally ‘penitents’). A host of otherwise innocent family members did the same. From their evidence, Italy’s prosecutors were able to construct a picture of Cosa Nostra’s internal structure for the first time.
The Sicilians’ other innovation was to abandon the mercurial autonomy traditionally enjoyed by individual prosecutors. Independence from political masters, who were often the target of anti-mafia investigations, remained essential. But prosecutors’ habitual individualism had often found expression in less helpful fashion, such as fighting each other for position. By contrast, Palermo’s anti-mafia prosecutors worked as an indivisible team, the ‘anti-mafia pool’, as they called themselves, which shared information, diffused responsibility and co-signed all warrants. In that way, they ensured their work was coordinated and efficient, and never depended on the continuing good health of any one of them.
So it was that in the months after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, other prosecutors – first Gian Carlo Caselli; then the Sicilians Piero Grasso, Giuseppe Pignatone and his deputy Michele Prestipino – picked up where their storied predecessors left off. And in a further decade and a half, the Palermo prosecutors and Palermo’s elite flying squad largely finished what their predecessors had started. By the mid-2000s, nearly all Cosa Nostra’s bosses were in jail, its links to senior politicians were exposed and its rackets, while they still existed, were a shadow of what they had once been. Capping the prosecutors’ success, in April 2006 at a small, sparsely furnished cottage outside Corleone, Pignatone and Prestipino were present for the arrest of Cosa Nostra’s remaining capo tutti, seventy-three-year-old Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for forty-three years.
On visits back to Sicily, Alessandra saw the transformation in her homeland. In the streets of Palermo and Messina, a new popular movement called Addiopizzo (‘Goodbye Pizzo’, mafia slang for extortion) united shopkeepers, farmers and restaurateurs in a refusal to pay protection. Thousands of anti-mafia protesters marched arm-in-arm through the streets. Cosa Nostra, in its weakened state, was unable to respond. When mafiosi firebombed an anti-mafia trattoria in Palermo, the city’s residents found the owners new premises on a busy junction in the centre of town where they opened up again and quickly became one of the city’s most celebrated destinations. In time, Palermo and Messina could boast city-centre shops run by an activist group called Libera (‘Free’), which sold olive oil, sauces, wine and pasta made exclusively by farmers who refused to pay protection to Cosa Nostra.
But as the war on Cosa Nostra wound down, a fresh threat took its place. During la mattanza, across the water in Calabria the ’Ndrangheta had initially toyed with joining Cosa Nostra’s war on the state, and even killed a couple of policemen for itself. But the Calabrians soon realised that with the Sicilians and the government so distracted, the strategic play was not to side with Cosa Nostra but to take its narco-business. The ’Ndrangheta paid the Sicilians’ debts to the Colombian cocaine cartels, effectively buying them out as the Latin Americans’ smuggling partners.
Carlo Cosco arrived in the north in 1987, the same year as Alessandra. Carlo’s intention was not to fit into northern Italy, however, but to conquer it – and his timing was perfect. The ’Ndrangheta was pushing its drug empire north across Europe. Milan, Cosco’s new patch, was a key beachhead in that expansion. And there had never been a business like cocaine smuggling in Europe in the 1990s and 2000s. After saturating the US market, South American producers were looking to other territories for growth. Europe, with twice the population of North America and a similar standard of living but, in the 1980s, a quarter of its cocaine consumption, was the obvious opportunity. With the ’Ndrangheta’s help, the cartels flooded the continent with cocaine. By 2010, the European cocaine market, at 124 tons a year, was close to matching the American one. In Spain and Britain, the drug became as middle class as Volvos and weekend farmers’ markets.
In the estimate of Italy’s prosecutors, the ’Ndrangheta accounted for three-quarters of that. So rich, and so fast, did the ’Ndrangheta