The Dark Heart of Italy (26 page)

Recent revisionism of P2 in Italy has suggested that the aspirations
of the lodge were purely financial, and that very few of those
involved knew of the
lodge’s
more sinister operations. Others suggest
that the whole lodge, looking so sinister from the outside, was, from
the inside, a chimera that many ‘P2ers’ didn’t even realise they had
joined. Whatever the truth, the traces of Gelli and his P2 are evident
in every iconic crime from
Borghese’s
‘coup’ of 1970 until the
Bologna bombing of 1980, which claimed 85 lives. The subsequent
parliamentary enquiry wrote: ‘This committee has reached the
reasoned conclusion, shared by several courts, that the lodge …
established on-going links with subversive groups and organisations,
instigating and countenancing their criminal purposes
.’
6
Terrorist
groups had been prompted and nudged, the report said, by P2
.

As for the Banco Ambrosiano, as the investigative net closed in on
Calvi, the rogue banker, he escaped to London. There he was found
hanged under
Blackfriars
bridge in June 1982. Calvi’s secretary,
Graziella
Corrocher
, had also fallen to her death in what, by contrast,
appeared a genuine suicide. When Sindona was arrested and
imprisoned he was passed a poisoned coffee by ‘ignoti,’ unknowns,
an act that only fulfilled his prediction that he would be murdered in
prison. The Banco Ambrosiano, saddled with epic debts and no
returns, duly collapsed. The most obvious beneficiaries of the whole
affair were the Vatican and the political parties. There was no major
political party that wasn’t on Calvi’s pay-roll: the parties – the
Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Communists – received as
much as 88 billion lire from him throughout the
1970s
. Craxi’s name,
and the number of his Swiss bank account credited with $
7
million
by Calvi, was amongst
Gelli’s
documents. The Vatican, for its part,
displayed a reticence to excuse or even explain itself. The creditors
asked Paul
Marcinkus
, the American bishop, for a return on their
investment, but were met with only silence. The IOR, responsible for
creaming off millions in mysterious deals, washed its hands of the
dirty affair
.

I mention the whole episode not because it’s in any way representative
of Italy or Catholicism, but because three of the sub-plots
from the ‘Calvi case’ and P2 all re-emerged onto the scene twenty
years to the day after the shooting of John Paul II: it was 13 May
2001
, the day of the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima. The noble banker
from the Bank of Italy, a man who had fought as a partisan in the
1940s before becoming the Prime Minister in the 1990s, was by then
President of the Republic. Carlo Azeglio Ciampi was, on this election
day, expected to oversee the smooth, constitutional handover
of power. The man expected to become Prime Minister was once on
the roll-call of P2 members, and is the epitome of the
lodge’s
avowed intention to ‘rebaptise Italian democracy’ through control
of the mass media and the rewriting of the constitution: Silvio
Berlusconi. Meanwhile the Pope, twenty years after the shooting, is
celebrating mass in St Peters
.

In the
morning’s
newspapers I see that the son of Roberto Calvi is
now claiming that his father had confided in the Pope. Calvi, before
his ‘suicide’ in London, had told his son that he had spoken with
John Paul II, and that the shooting of the Pope was organised by the
same people who were hounding and threatening Calvi himself. The
Vatican was so intimately involved with Calvi, went the
son’s
theory
,
that the Pope himself almost became another victim of the banking
fiasco and its masonic connections. The entire story was, as ever, so
sinister, so confusing and secretive, that I just shrugged and decided
to ignore the whole, sordid affair in favour of something ‘simpler’:
the General Election
.

Three months before the General Election, the last Queen of Italy had been laid to rest. It was the beginning of February 2001, and the ceremony was taking place at Hautecombe, in France, because the male line of the Italian royal family – the
Principi
Savoia
– were still barred from entering Italy. They had been exiles ever since the 1946 referendum in which the country voted to become a republic. Prior to that, Maria Josè, the matriarch then being mourned, was Queen of Italy for little more than a month.

Her funeral was the occasion for the Savoia’s press relations to go into overdrive: the family wanted to return to Italy, and the funeral, just a few months before a General Election, was the perfect opportunity to publicise their case. It was a bizarre spectacle. Most of European royalty, bar the Windsors, turned out in support: the Bourbons from Spain, the Romanovs, the Prince of Monaco, Luxembourg’s Grand Duke and Duchess. Outside the church there was a huge screen conveying the service to the gathering of a few hundred Italian royalists who had arrived from Turin and Milan. Some were singing the March of the Savoia: ‘Sound glad trumpets, beat the drums: vivailrè, vivailrè!’

The funeral was, to say the least, rhetorical. ‘Nothing’s beautiful like my country’ intoned an Alpine regiment. Later, when chatting to journalists, Prince Emanuele Filiberto’s phone went off. It
didn’t ring, though: it beeped out the Italian national anthem, the
Inno di
Mameli
. His father, the ruddy, jowly-cheeked Vittorio Emanuele, is always a little less adept with the media. ‘We’ll see you in Naples in four months,’ he said optimistically. Does that mean, asked one of the journalists in a huddle around the ‘monarch’, that he’s prepared to take an oath of loyalty to the Italian republic? ‘No, no, I don’t want to talk about that, absolutely not,’ he snapped. His wife leant towards him and whispered something in French. ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ he then said stiffly.

In the still before its election storm, Italy underwent a mini Savoia revival. There was, not for the first time, much discussion about changing the Italian constitution (which currently decrees: ‘For the former king of the House of Savoia, his consorts and male descendents, entry and sojourn in national territory is forbidden.’) For most Italians, though, the Savoia are the cause of the darkest days of Italy’s twentieth century. What democratic instincts King Vittorio Emanuele III possessed quickly folded in the face of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in 1922; years later, in 1938, he signed the country’s anti-semitic race laws. The king swiftly swapped sides in 1943, after the Allied landings in Sicily, thus starting the Italian civil war between Fascists and partisans which raged until April 1945 and, some would argue, way beyond. In exile, Vittorio Emanuele has become one of Europe’s major arms dealers, and in 1978 he accidently shot and killed a German tourist from on board his yacht.

It’s a strange ‘first family’: the now
capofamiglia
, Vittorio Emanuele, is usually decked out in jeans and brogues, and is always irascible. His wife, Marina Doria, is the daughter of a biscuit magnate, and was four-times world water skiing champion in the 1950s. She’s often photographed as she slips back into Italy for a shopping trip. Most visible of the three is their son, Emanuele Filiberto, whose lanky hair and unshaven face is used to promote various products, and who occasionally commentates on Juventus matches for Italian TV from his house in Geneva. The family were a small, side-issue to the election, but in many ways their cause touched all the key issues involved. The election was to
become largely about attitudes to immigration, with the right desperate for tougher measures against everyone bar the Savoia. Welcoming back the royal family would in itself require the rewriting of the constitution; once work was then started overhauling the country’s key democratic document, many suspected that it would continue far beyond simply allowing the Savoia back into Italy. Finally, that promise radically to alter the constitution reminded many of a particular masonic lodge of which both Vittorio Emanuele and Silvio Berlusconi had once been members: P2.

A few weeks after the funeral I received a book in the post. I hadn’t ordered it, certainly hadn’t paid for it. It just arrived one morning. It was called
Una Storia Italiana, An Italian Story
. It was distributed to about twelve million Italian homes by Berlusconi’s publishing house, Mondadori, at an estimated cost of some eleven billion lire. The name of the author wasn’t on the cover. Instead there were, on the front and back of the book, a total of 114 photographs of the same man. Balding, smiling, shaking hands, cheering football teams, greeting world leaders, blessing the Pope: Silvio Berlusconi. The vanity of the book was nothing as compared to its contents. It opened, of course, with that Italian obsession – the horoscope – as if to suggest that Berlusconi’s destiny was written in the constellations. Silvio, I was told, was born a Libra, and is thus ‘a communicative person, capable of strong passions and profound loves. Charismatic, thanks to great adaptability and innate talent, he stands out in the activities which he brings before the great public, has optimum ability to judge, analyse and synthesise, constructs every reasoning with stringent logic managing to confer clarity on every debate…’

Berlusconi had previously published a collection of his speeches called
The Italy I Have in Mind
(a text which was interrupted by repeated parentheses to indicate where the audience had broken into ‘prolonged applause’). Reading
An Italian Story
was even better, like reading a rags-to-riches fairy-tale, and just as enchanting. It was impossible to put the thing down. After the horoscope, came
the opening chapter, describing Silvio’s family, his love for his mother, his ‘spiritual exercises’ in Bermuda where he retires with his friends to read the great classics of the western canon. The text was easy to read, because between every paragraph was a photo: baby Silvio, Silvio at school, Silvio singing on a cruise ship accompanied on the piano by someone called Fedele Confalonieri (now Chairman of Mediaset). It was also almost impossible to read the book and not think ‘I want to emulate this man, I want to become like him, or at least follow him, certainly vote for him’: his life is a dream, a childhood fantasy. He’s been a musician, a businessman, a TV impresario, he has a beautiful wife, good-looking children, houses and gardens and cruise ships and private planes. Most of all, he adores football, his team actually wins things, he wins things. He wins everything. Now, of course, he wants to win an election.

For many, however,
An Italian Story
was nothing more than that: a story. It was an incredibly vain, slick, seductive story, a glossy piece of propaganda. Many found it ridiculous and rather embarrassing. Friends of mine in Parma, during a rally of environmentalists, decided to put out a large bin, offering any of the passing twelve million Italians who had been sent the ‘story’ the opportunity to throw it away for recycling. ‘For a clean recycling’ read the banner. To anyone with a sense of irony, the allusion was obvious, and much repeated over the ensuing months:
riciclaggio
, recycling, was to become the key word of the election.

‘Recycling’ is an issue which has dogged Berlusconi for decades, and it came back to haunt him during the election. The allegations that his humble beginnings were aided by epic
riciclaggio
– money laundering on behalf of the Mafia – dominated the campaign; Berlusconi denied all the accusations. A rival ‘Italian Story’,
L’Odore
dei Soldi
, was published two months before the electorate went to the polls. Its claims were equally fantastic, and received ample publicity on those television channels (of the state RAI network) still outside Berlusconi’s reach. The book was based on an interview with an anti-Mafia judge, Paolo Borsellino, shortly before he was killed in 1992. During the interview Borsellino had
hinted that the Mafia, having at its disposal vast sums of money made from drugs-smuggling, laundered it through companies in the north, including (according to the authors) Berlusconi’s Fininvest holding company. The title of the book was particularly apt. The crime of Mafia collusion in Italy is called, evocatively,
odore di Mafia
(literally ‘the whiff of Mafia’). The book was called
The Whiff of Money
.

According to the authors of
L’Odore
dei Soldi
, Berlusconi had, throughout the 1970s, profited from collusion with organised crime. The allegations went that Berlusconi was a prime example not of the peasant, murderous Mafia in Sicily, but something more sophisticated exported to the north. This was something much larger, more sinister and more disguised: the ‘White Mafia’ of financial scams, money-laundering and international investment rackets. The book quoted the old notion that you enter the arena of democratic politics by leaving ‘your wallet and your pistol at the door’. The implication was not just that Berlusconi would bring his wallet into government if he won the election (some $14 billion); the allegation also went that he had friends in Sicily with some very sizeable holsters.

Both stories, Berlusconi’s own and that of his enemies, were gripping.
An Italian
Story
and
The Whiff of Money
formed a perfect symmetry, one full of implausible, heroic achievement, the other full of improbable accusations. As with the country’s press and television, there was no room for the middle-ground: Berlusconi was either a saint or a sinner, and the ordinary voter was confronted by two versions of his career both so incredible that it was hard to know what was reality and what fantasy. If, as was probable, the truth lay somewhere between the two stories, no one was willing to say so. I didn’t know what to believe. Enrico Deaglio, the editor of one political weekly, told me bluntly that he believed every word of the accusations against Berlusconi. Marcello Veneziani, a columnist on Berlusconi’s
Il
Giornale
, told me that the whole thing was ‘obscene and absurd’. Was it too incredible to think that Berlusconi really did have connections with Cosa Nostra? Where, after all, was the evidence?

I tried, not for the first time, to understand Berlusconi’s origins. Complication and confusion, as it should by now be clear, are the smokescreens of Italian life, and Berlusconi is a master of the art. When he began building the 3,500 flats on the outskirts of Milan in the 1970s, he created endless financial Chinese boxes which were entirely unfathomable to outsiders. Bizarre businesses were set up under
prestanomi
(‘nicknamed’ accounts with dummy holders) and furnished with billions of lire from businesses in Switzerland. Or else money arrived through the Banca Rasini where Berlusconi’s father had worked and which has been frequently cited in Mafia trials in recent years. Then Fininvest, the empire which was later to become the driving force behind
Forza
Italia
, was set up with 22 ‘holdings’ and mysterious offshore companies like ‘Group B’ and ‘All Iberian’. It would take an accountant an eternity to understand what was going on. To many the Chinese boxes seemed a suspiciously complicated way of building a few blocks of flats.

The story of one of Berlusconi’s gardeners on his Arcore estate is equally bizarre. Berlusconi had bought the estate after two murders, a crime of passion, prompted the owner to sell the property in the mid-1970s. Berlusconi, having moved in, employed someone called Vittorio Mangano, a
mafioso
later handed down two life sentences for murder and heroin trafficking. Berlusconi had no involvement in Mangano’s crimes, but it was certainly extraordinary company to keeep. Apart from being resident on Berlusconi’s estate, Mangano was also on close terms with Berlusconi’s business-partner and
Forza Italia
general, Marcello Dell’Utri (currently on trial in Palermo for ‘association with the Mafia’). Maybe it’s all just coincidental, maybe not. ‘For me,’ Mangano said during a prison interview in July 2000, ‘Berlusconi was like a relative. The trust he had in me was the same as that I had in him and his family. I like Berlusconi, still do. He’s an honest person, write it!’ Is a compliment of honesty from a convicted murderer an asset? Does that mean he really is honest? The extraordinarily complicated facts are all out in the open, hundreds of thousands of dubious transcripts and transactions
(dubious because they cast doubt in both directions: towards both the investigators and the investigated). It’s only the interpretation that differs.

Berlusconi’s response to the (hardly new) accusation of being a closet
mafioso
was to be indignant, aggressive and bullying. ‘Contain yourself,’ he screamed to one RAI presenter whose programme he had interrupted with a live telephone call. The programme in question was Michele Santoro’s
Il
Raggio
Verde
on RAI 2 (the channel which had originally publicised the book).
Forza
Italia’s
general, Marcello Dell’Utri, the man at the centre of the scandal, was later given a chance to defend himself. For once an Italian studio was silent rather than noisy; instead of the usual revolving glitter-ball, the lighting was low. The advertising breaks were announced by a string quartet. It takes courage for a journalist from Palermo to hint live on national TV that a man of Dell’Utri’s power was possibly guilty of collusion with the Mafia: ‘You really are a heedless Palermitan,’ said the journalist, Saverio Lodato, ‘who has been very unfortunate in his choice of friends. In those years [1970s] one smelt the Mafia. Any Palermitan sensed it.’ At the suggestion Dell’Utri, I thought, whitened visibly, his skin tightening in disbelief at the arrogance of the suggestion. ‘Not even in my dreams’, he stuttered, caught off-guard by the frankness of the frontal attack, ‘did I smell the Mafia.’