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

Luca and Polsi: “Polsi basically wasn’t that far away,” she says, “but we’d never have made it in our little Fiat Uno.”
    To persuade us of the holiness of the place, Don Pino had suggested taking us to Polsi in person. You could only get there in a Land Rover, and luckily Don Pino always had a few people at hand to help him with his divine mission: an engineer and a driver, whom Don Pino called his “jack of all trades,” a silent man who drove the Land Rover and nodded when the engineer said sadly: “God knocks on our door every day, but we don’t hear him.”
    On a bend in the road the vehicle stopped so that we could enjoy the view of San Luca. Don Pino, the pious engineer, and the silent driver looked at the village with as much emotion as if they were seeing it for the first time. We drove for hours through forests of chestnut trees, past goatherds and over gravel, up and down the twisting road. “We go down so that we can come back up again,” says Don Pino. He saw it as a symbol of the holiness of the place. I thought of the ’Ndrangheta.
    In the courtyard of Polsi monastery everyone was already waiting for Don Pino: some women from the village were roasting chestnuts, a group of men were stacking wood. Don Pino dashed off through the monastery, which had been renovated thanks to the largesse of the European Union. We looked at everything, from the eight-hundredweight tufa-stone Madonna,via the coffin of the child who had been brought back to life here, to the recently installed disabled toilet. There were countless plastic bags under the altar. Because Polsi was a spiritual space, Calabrian brides brought their wedding dresses here as votive offerings. Don Pino was drowning in tulle and lace, and sent the dresses on to Africa.
    At last Don Pino led us, whispering, to his room and announced a mystery that he wanted to share with us: the sweating crucifix. The cross had been dripping for fourteen days! Jesus was sweating under his armpits! Don Pino took the crucifix from the wall and said: “Feel it, it’s really wet down at the bottom!” Even though the St Anthony right next to it was completely dry. “I’m going mad,” said Don Pino, and looked up to the sky and added: “It’s a good sign for the people here. For the purity of their hearts.”
    Later, he invited us to lunch. We sat down at a long table in the refectory, in front of a mural of the Last Supper, and ate pasta and porcini. There were only men sitting at the table with us; the women stayed in the kitchen. “You won’t find the eyes of the women of San Luca anywhere else in the world,” said Don Pino and smiled, his cheeks slightly flushed from the wine. “The family protects you against everything,” he said and looked around. “You know, the true fugitives aren’t the mafiosi, they’re the politicians. Here every civil right becomes a favor that’s granted.”
    While Don Pino said grace, I watched the men. They spoke in short, simple sentences because they were used to speaking only in dialect, and Italian sounded heavy in their mouths. They spoke of how they had worked in Germany. In Duisburg and in Wolfsburg, for Volkswagen. Their hands were tanned and blistered.And as I watched those men I wondered what it’s like when they kill someone.
    Shortly after the Duisburg massacre forty inhabitants of the village had been arrested. For membership in the Mafia, arms dealing and drug dealing, for murder, grievous bodily harm, false imprisonment. Almost all of those arrested were related to one another. Almost all claimed their right to silence.
    Since I had read all 1,150 pages of the public prosecutor’s custody order, page after page of wiretap records, I found it hard to believe the peaceful image of San Luca evoked by Don Pino. There was the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven all the way to Duisburg in June 2007 in search of weapons and an armored truck for the next assassination. There were men who talked about buying