The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski Read Free Book Online Page A

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.

S AN L UCA
    “ M A ,” SAYS S ALVO , AS IF HE COULD READ MY MIND . M A 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 LosAngeles. 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