Friday, March 16, 2012

Mafia

Friday afternoon, after visiting the Apple Store to figure out how to delete unnecessary e-mails and regain the capacity to receive new e-mails, Manuel and I go to the central train station in Bologna to make a reservation for my trip to Vienna on Sunday. I have a first class Eurail pass (first class is obligatory for those over twenty-five), but many European trains require a reservation in addition to a ticket, for which there is a charge.

I have two choices of travel: I can take an overnight train to Vienna leaving at eleven in the evening, arriving at Vienna at 8:30 a.m. If I want this I have to buy a sleeping accommodation, in addition to the twenty-one Euro reservation charge. For one hundred and five Euros I can have a private compartment, for about forty I can share a compartment with two other women. This is a direct train to Vienna.

In the alternative, I can take the train leaving at 10:05 a.m. on Sunday. This is not a direct train. I choose this train, because I want to see the countryside, and the connections intrigue me: I arrive in Mestre, the Venice train station at 11:21 a.m.; at 11:40 a.m. I take Bus #832 to the Hauptbahnhof of Villach in Austria, a three-hour journey that leaves me there at ten minutes of three p.m.. From Villach at 3:14 p.m. I take a train to Vienna that arrives at the Meidling station at 7:28 p.m. in the evening.

The mere idea of being in Venice works on me like a charm. I know I will not see Venice, that Mestre is a rather ugly station at the northernmost end of the lagoon, but I am susceptible. The "Corriere della Sera" says the weather will be a mixture of sun and clouds Sunday, but on a train it will be immaterial. My greater concern is whether WiFi will be available. I would do best to assume not, but that means that the e-books I downloaded will be unavailable. Which in turn means that I will need a book to read on the trip, which in turn means that I have to carry a book, which I had pledged not to do to keep the weight of my pack down. Having purchased a pair of driving shoes at the Prada outlet outside Florence, I have already started on the road to hell. I hope I can make it a bearable experience.

I write this outside of the Colazione da Bianca, a lovely tea room under a colonnade on one of Bologna's central shopping streets. Manuel has gone back to the Apple Store: the downloading of updates and adjustment of the core settings of his Macbook has not restored connectivity. Monday at two p.m. Manuel has a class for which the professor has required that students bring their laptops, so he is bound to get the computer working again.

We have tickets for the symphony at 8:30 p.m., a program of Bernstein and Dvorak given by Bologna's Symphony in the Teatro Massimo, not far from Manuel's apartment. There seems nothing to worry about, sitting here under the colonnade. I watch neatly dressed Bolognese take their evening stroll, "la passegiata": numerous middle-aged men walk by eating an ice cream cone, young men walking together, one arm over the other's shoulder, likewise pairs of young women. As in Rome, many, many people are on their cellphones, chatting busily away.

However, three men have stationed themselves in front of the tea parlor: they are undercover police. Five more are in and around two cars that brought three men having tea at a table with five female companions inside: Italian Senators. The force projected outside is to ward off would-be assassins from one of Italy's four crime syndicates.

The Mafia, which began as "The Black Hand", an association to protect peasants from marauders in the turbulent years when Italy was going from a collection of principalities to a unified nation, is best known because of its international reach, but the Camorra operates separately in Naples province, N'Dragheta in Calabria, and Sacra Corona Unita, in Apulia province in the heel of the boot.

Anyone who thinks these are minor players in Italian political life is out of touch with the reality of how far the organizations reach: last week, one of the news briefs in "The Italian Insider", a savvy broadsheet in English, reported matter-of-factly that a priest waging war against corruption in Sicily received a package containing the head of a dead dog, meant as a warning of the fate he could expect if he continued his efforts.

The Vatican is not immune from the threat of organized crime either. Unscrupulous, if not criminally active contractors have bilked the Holy See, overcharging for jobs billed at considerably lower prices outside the sovereign state. The Vatican's own bank, the Institute for Works of Religion, has, it is alleged, been used for money laundering by agents of crime syndicates posing as donors. Cardinal Bertone, the day-today administrator of the Vatican, and a favorite of Pope Benedict's, has been criticized for being insufficiently vigorous in weeding out malfeasance and fraud, a fact which may affect his chances in the apostolic succession race, now that Pope Benedict is showing signs of nearing the end of his reign. The Pope himself is more concerned with his forthcoming trip to Cuba and other Caribbean countries, leaving administration to Bertone, who seems disinclined to institute reforms that would make the Vatican impermeable to the bilge that is seeping the rest of Italy.

There was a Vatican bank scandal in 1978, when Banco Ambrosiano collapsed to the detriment of the Vatican, the bank's largest shareholder, which paid out 250 million dollars to defrauded depositors. The Vatican's status as a sovereign state means Italian authorities must try to exercise extraterritorial jurisdiction against it when pursuing cases against organized crime in Italy linked to the Vatican.

And the fact is, organized crime's use of the Vatican for nefarious purposes is only one layer of the anti-corruption puzzle: Italy is a country where family associations trump associations of a civic or fraternal or professional or charitable nature. Francis Fukuyama described Italy as a "low social capital country", in contrast with, say Japan, or the United States. Rooting out organized crime is always going to be harder in a country where it is worse to turn in your murderous relatives than it is to shelter them. That, in a nutshell, is Italy's problem.