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

parabellum ammunition as if they were discussing the artichoke harvest. There were mothers who moved Kalashnikovs from house to house, wives who patrolled in camouflage suits, sisters who ran messages and transported their brothers from A to B in the trunks of their cars—if those brothers weren’t actually living in bunkers, like some members of the Pelle-Vottari clan, in the midst of an arsenal of Luger pistols, Berettas and Scorpion machine guns, ammunition and cash, statues of the saints, an altar bearing the photographs of murdered clan members, and The Godfather on DVD.
    He was glad to be able to help people, said Don Pino, adding: “People come to Polsi with tears in their eyes. And who is better at drying tears than the mother of God?” At any rate, he had dedicated an anti-Mafia field at the pilgrimage site. And at that event the bishop had announced: “If Polsi is a Mafia meeting place, then I’m the head mafioso!” Polsi was, in fact, a holy, miraculous place. “Lots of women whose husbands are in jailcome here to pray,” he said, and, via the prison priest, Don Pino was in constant contact with the prisoners: “Things happen there that you wouldn’t imagine!” And I thought, so much for high security.
    On the way back, Don Pino whispered to us: “If these meetings of the ’Ndrangheta really did take place, in spite of the presence of the carabinieri , then we’re not just talking about people who have this mindset—something’s not working.”
    In referring so openly to collaboration between carabinieri and ’Ndrangheta, he was being very like Padre Frittitta, one of the many Sicilian priests who secretly heard confessions of refugee mafiosi in their hiding places, always justifying themselves by saying that it wasn’t earthly justice that would deliver the final judgment, it was the divine kind—and as its humble drudges they were merely performing a service. They were saving souls. That was Don Pino’s argument in a nutshell. That was all he was interested in. The soul of the man who drove the Land Rover, for example, and who was a kind of odd-job man in Polsi. The judge had entrusted this young man to him after he had been condemned to two years’ imprisonment for attempted murder. He had shot a carabiniere in the face.
    “But only with buckshot,” Don Pino said, by way of exculpation.
    Back in San Luca, he dropped us off at the bar decorated with the glittering image of the Madonna. It was already dark, and there was no one to be seen in the streets except for the village idiot, who was standing by the fountain playing the mouth organ. Shobha hadn’t said a word on the way back. While Don Pino had been delivering his monologue, she had looked out of the window. When we got to the bar she went straight to the toilet and threw up.
    The image of the Madonna of Polsi had also been found in the Da Bruno restaurant in Duisburg. Along with a .223 caliber American assault rifle, a statue of the Archangel Michael, a picture of the same saint with its head burned, a prayer book, some .280 caliber ammunition, various replacement magazines, and the receipt for a payment of more than 300 euros for an armored Peugeot truck, made out to the hit man Marco Marmo, who had driven to Duisburg to get hold of weapons for the next attack on the Nirta-Strangio clan. Marmo had killed the wife of the boss Gianluca Nirta: that was the notorious Christmas assassination that had to be avenged by the bloodbath in Duisburg. Marmo knew that his days were numbered so long as Gianluca Nirta was still alive.
    “He has nothing more to lose, and that’s what makes him so dangerous,” said Michele Carabetta, Marco Marmo’s assistant, who drove with him to Duisburg. There’s something unreal about standing in the bar in San Luca and thinking about the wiretap records of the conversations held there. When Michele Carabetta had talked to his sister Sonia, all they spoke about was weapons, “deer” that had appeared in