Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox (17 page)

This, as Vanessa saw it, was the start of something that Italians call
mobbing
—essentially, the slow process of making someone’s life a living hell. She noticed eyes on her when she walked into the office first thing in the morning, and more eyes on her when she left. One of her few remaining friends confirmed what she already suspected, that people were taking notes on her every move: when she
came and went, when she took a coffee break, how long she spent at lunch. Later, she even stumbled across worksheets where her movements were carefully tracked.

Officially, the workday was eight hours, with a half hour for lunch. But officers, including Vanessa’s bosses, commonly took off for two or three hours in the middle of the day and then stayed late. They would even put in for overtime for the extra hours.

Before Vanessa felt all eyes on her, she had enjoyed going to the gym for an hour or so in the middle of the day. It was longer than the rules allowed, but she was always back before her superiors and made sure not to leave any pending tasks undone. Now she didn’t dare leave at all, even if it meant sitting and staring into space for hours.

Over time, she was given less and less work, even when her bosses were present. She complained to the officer overseeing her, but he was unsympathetic. “Go to the
marescialli
”—the noncommissioned officers—“and ask them for extra work,” he said. It was a direct putdown, as the
marescialli
were junior to Vanessa, and her job was to tell them what to do, not the other way around.

*  *  *

Vanessa is not the only tough nut in the family. My aunt Sara is more than a match for her; she is one of those forceful, gregarious, elegantly turned-out Italian women whose every move lets you know she takes no crap from anyone. Sara has always been a political animal. As a young woman she fell under the spell of Giorgio Almirante, a populist rabble-rouser who took on the mantle of the defeated Italian Fascist Party after World War II and turned it into a grassroots movement to counter what he and his supporters saw as the festering corruption and self-satisfaction of the mainstream
parties in Rome. The Movimento Sociale Italiano, as Almirante’s group was known, was regarded with deep suspicion, if not outright contempt, in much of the country, which had fought hard and sacrificed much to bury the Fascist movement in the 1940s. But it had a bedrock appeal in the South, which did not enjoy many of the fruits of Italy’s postwar boom and felt nostalgic for Mussolini’s ambitious public works projects, his commitment to rooting out organized crime, and—something that rarely gets talked about—the galvanizing effect his education and labor policies had on emancipating women in our ultraconservative region.

Sara worked tirelessly as an organizer, and when the movement finally gained mainstream acceptance in the 1990s—changing its name to the Alleanza Nazionale and repudiating the more obviously unacceptable aspects of Mussolini’s legacy—she suddenly had a lot of influential friends. Giuseppe Tatarella, godfather to the
other
Raffaele Sollecito (the son of Giuseppe and Sara), was now deputy prime minister and an important vote-wrangler in the Chamber of Deputies, Italy’s lower house of parliament. Sara made an unsuccessful run for mayor of Giovinazzo, my hometown, and later served as cultural assessor in Bitonto, a Bari suburb.

The rest of my family is not especially political, but we have all been brought up to admire a strong sense of social order. We like public figures who value personal integrity above the usual Machiavellian intrigues of Italian politics; we like anyone willing to take a stand against obvious injustice. What we like, in other words, are
gente con le palle,
people with balls. Despite the terminology, these people don’t have to be men; on the contrary, as both Sara and Vanessa have shown, the people with the biggest balls are often women.

What drove Sara crazy for the first several months of my
imprisonment was that she didn’t see anyone qualified or willing to show real guts and take charge. Her role models were people like Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two fearless prosecutors who paid with their lives in their unrelenting quest to root out Sicily’s top Mafia leaders in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Those
were the sorts of people we needed, Sara felt. The person who should really be running my case was Giulia Bongiorno.

Bongiorno was accomplished and articulate and knew criminal law backward and forward. She hardly lacked for courage; we would later nickname her
la signora trentapalle,
the lady with thirty balls. She was even a member of the same political party as Sara, so they had plenty of connections.

The question was how to recruit her. Bongiorno was not only a full-time member of parliament, she was also about to assume the chairmanship of the parliamentary justice committee. The political risks she ran if she took on my case were considerable. Still, my family thought they should at least give her a try.

Soon after the Corte di Cassazione rejected my appeal, Sara and Vanessa visited Bongiorno’s elegantly appointed law office a few minutes’ walk from the Italian parliament. They were steered there by another Alleanza Nazionale member, a Sicilian senator with a legal background named Domenico Nania. Once they were in the room, though, there was no talk of political connections; it was all business.

Bongiorno said, “Give me the files and I’ll tell you whether or not I want to take this case.” She was no-nonsense, straight to the point, and did not waste time on awkward expressions of sympathy that might have sounded forced and insincere.

Would her decision be influenced by how much my family was willing to pay?

“It’s not about the price. It’s about whether I’m willing to risk my reputation.”

And that was that. We waited a couple of weeks while she read through the court documents and made an initial assessment.

And then she came back with her answer. It was a yes.

*  *  *

The first thing I noticed about Giulia Bongiorno when she came to meet me was that she had little or no bedside manner. She cut a disarming, almost boyish figure with her carefully groomed short hair, her big, round eyes, and rimless glasses. But it was obvious when she spoke that she was a person of consequence. Every word out of her mouth was effortlessly impressive. It was a little jarring, at first, how clipped and detached she was. Some might call her aloof. But, after listening to a lot of meaningless feel-good banter from Tedeschi and Maori and knowing how little good it had done me, I didn’t mind. I sensed I could trust her because she would never promise more than she could deliver.

On that first visit we talked through the basics of the case, so she could develop a feel for me and the impression I might make in court. Mostly, though, she wanted to know if I was covering for Amanda in some way.

I told her I was not.

“I believe what you are telling me,” she said. “But if you have something to say that you’re holding back for any reason, say it, because otherwise it may be too late.”

Calmly I repeated, “I have nothing to say.”

Then she left. She wrote to me regularly and asked for my input on ideas she was developing. But I didn’t have a one-on-one conversation with her again for months.

*  *  *

My father would arrive like clockwork every Friday. Sometimes he was alone; other times he would bring friends, or other members of the family. He pushed the prison authorities to expand visiting hours as much as possible and was allotted six hours a month instead of the usual four.

He had to reorganize his professional life completely after my arrest. To make sure he could drive to Terni every week, he dropped out of the roster of doctors on call to perform emergency surgeries. Soon he was no longer operating at all. That was a blow, but one he accepted with good grace. He couldn’t afford the luxury of stopping work altogether, because the legal bills were mounting and likely to get a lot steeper. But he found that if he volunteered to do house calls rather than receiving patients, he could work a more flexible schedule and earn better money too.

The visiting room at Terni had one peculiarity: a large concrete barrier, about waist-high, separating the two sides. This was specific to the protected section, presumably because they didn’t want inmates to have any inappropriate sexual contact with visitors. Having such a barrier was controversial; many in law enforcement and prison management argued that such things were illegal. It meant, above all, that I could not give my father and my other visitors a proper hug. I didn’t know how much I could miss the comfort of physical contact until I was denied it.

Papà was glad to see I was doing modestly better and that I felt more or less safe. The food in the special section was slightly more interesting than in solitary, and we could make things of our own on the gas stoves in our cells. But my father and I were both frustrated by the maddeningly slow progress of my case and talked about how best I should pass the time.

“I think I should enroll in graduate school and continue my studies,” I said.

“How are you going to do that without going to class and talking to your professors?”

“I’ll try it on my own. You can bring me the books and I can work on my laptop.”

And so things transpired. Two Italian universities, Verona and Turin, offered courses I was interested in, and I picked Verona because I thought it would be a more beautiful place to visit, if I was granted the freedom to go there. My father completed the paperwork and paid the fees, and I wrote to my new professors to explain the unusual circumstances and see if anyone might make special accommodations to teach me behind bars. Nobody rushed to volunteer.

*  *  *

Mignini’s office announced in late June that the investigation was formally over, and almost immediately the newspapers were filled with a barrage of negative stories about my family. Even before we’d had time to look over the newly available documents, we were fending off accusations that we’d tried to exploit our political connections to push for my freedom.

Some of the stories said we’d begged Sara’s highly placed friends in Rome to apply pressure to the Corte di Cassazione before our hearing in April, or to exploit Bongiorno’s prominent position. Others postulated, more wildly, that my family had approached Mafia thugs in Bari and contracted with them to intimidate the Perugia police.

The source for all these stories, we learned to our consternation, were wiretaps the police had placed on my family’s phones since
February. This was no small operation: in just a few months they intercepted close to forty thousand calls. Some of the phrases in the news stories were familiar enough; my family
had
let rip about the behavior of the Perugia police and called them pigs, bastards, and
figli di puttana.
And why not? They had every reason to be angry and had no idea that their conversations were being monitored.

But a lot of the other reporting was distorted or wrong, as though designed expressly to cast us in the worst possible light and to discredit any progress we had made in challenging the evidence. Senator Nania went public immediately to deny he had interceded on our behalf with Giulia Bongiorno, conceding only that he had mentioned her name to Sara over the phone. Bongiorno herself pointed out that she had not been hired by my family until after the Corte di Cassazione issued its ruling. These news stories were exactly the kind of political damage Bongiorno had been afraid of, and she was quick to share her alarm with us. The thing that perturbed her most was a report in
Corriere della Sera,
the country’s most prestigious newspaper, in which my father was quoted saying, “I want to get Giulia Bongiorno on our side because she can wield political influence on the case.”

If my father had really said this, even once, even casually, she warned, she would have had to withdraw as my defense attorney immediately.

Papà said he was quite sure this was a fabrication, but Bongiorno was insistent: “I want to believe you, but you’d better be quite sure.”

So we asked to see the intercepts ourselves. They were available, but we had to pay six thousand euros to have them transferred onto audio CDs. The authorities made nothing easy for us.

The transcripts vindicated us entirely and yielded something we were not even expecting: the real-time comments the Perugia police
had scribbled to each other as they listened in on our conversations. It was startling reading: incontrovertible evidence, in black and white, that they were out to get us.

Monica Napoleoni, the Squadra Mobile’s chief homicide investigator, came out with the choicest lines. She called Mara and Sara
cretine
(idiots) and
vipere
(snakes). Once, when Mara was on the line to my father’s sister, Dora, Napoleoni jotted down,
Fanno le stronze come al solito.
They’re doing their usual bitch act. Napoleoni’s sidekick Lorena Zugarini also got into the swing of things, reacting to one conversation about Mignini and how crazy he seemed to be by writing, all in upper case: “LAUGH AWAY—HE WHO LAUGHS LAST LAUGHS LONGEST.”

Some things in the wiretaps had been twisted to the point of absurdity. The story about us hiring Mafia thugs was derived from a house call my father made in the old “casbah” of central Bari. Since it was a rough neighborhood, he didn’t want to leave his car unattended, so he asked Sara, who was riding with him, to stay put while he visited his patient. Sara killed time by calling her husband. In the version later fed to the newspapers, Sara supposedly told Giuseppe she was acting as lookout while my father went in to cut a deal with a local Mafia boss. But of course, as the transcripts showed, she said nothing of the kind.

It was galling enough that my family’s phones were tapped at all. They were not suspected of any major crimes, the benchmark for ordering wiretaps under Italian law. So why were they being monitored? We never did get an adequate explanation. In the first of many authorization letters that Domenico Giacinto Profazio, the Squadra Mobile chief, addressed to Mignini, he hinted that my father was trying to tamper with the evidence. What he wrote, though, was not that explicit. “Raffaele Sollecito’s father is taking steps to lighten the
evidentiary burden against his son,” he charged, “in such a way as to compromise the outcome of the prosecution at hand.”