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BOOK REVIEW
The triangle of
violence
Romanzo
Criminale by Giancarlo De Cataldo
Reviewed by Francesco Sisci
 It is 1978,
and a gang of young, violent, second-rate hoodlums
decides to try to play big and bring to Rome the methods
and organization of their more successful counterparts
in Sicily or Calabria.
It is a time when
terrorism is on the rise in Western Europe and it looks
as if it could be the turning point of the Cold War.
Soviet-sponsored Red Brigades are rampant in Italy and
the USSR has started its deadly involvement in
Afghanistan, a war that will eventually help drain the
Soviets' economy and morale and bring about the end of
their empire. But in 1978, that demise is still far away
and Afghanistan seems a new Soviet offensive that can be
as fortunate as the others ... and Italy is the
battleground of the most ferocious conflict being fought
in a Western developed country during the Cold War. The
destabilization of Italy could be the prize for Moscow
to leapfrog non-aligned Yugoslavia and possibly thus
even rip apart the European front of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization, as terrorism is making inroads in
France and Germany as well. Aldo Moro, the most powerful
politician in Italy, is kidnapped and then killed. It is
possibly the most serious political assassination of the
Cold War, and it looks like a moment of reckoning for
Italy. And it was not a solitary act, as two years later
a bomb will be planted in the Bologna train station. Its
blast will kill more than 80 people, making it the worst
bombing of the Cold War, and this time there will be
neo-fascist terrorists behind it.
Against this
backdrop the gang is blazing new trails in the Roman
underworld organizing a tightly knit network of drug
trafficking. The gang is the notorious Banda della
Magliana (Magliana Gang) that terrorized Rome for about
half a decade, a time still riddled with many mysteries
harking back to the very nature of the Cold War, but
also to the Byzantine plotting of Italian politics.
No one has ever before delved into this arcane
and complicated story, but now Italian writer Giancarlo
De Cataldo has produced a novel that has just come out
in Italy, Romanzo Criminale ("Crime Story"). De
Cataldo, a senior judge in Rome, changes all the names,
but the plot and the details are just too easy to
recognize, as they are based on painstaking research of
the events and police investigations of those years. And
for the first time Italy tries to come to grips with one
of the darkest moments of its recent history.
In the
book, the gang is first asked to find where Moro has
been hidden after his kidnapping, but when the gang
actually succeeds, some politicians prefer to ignore the
information. Then the same gang is used to kill a
reporter who has acquired a dossier on Moro's detention
and has possibly been trying to blackmail another
powerful politician. All in all it appears clear that
the government is so busy fighting terrorism that it has
forgotten about rising crime. Organized crime uses the
moment to expand its activities and some politicians
find it useful to ally themselves with criminals to
fight red terrorists.
This pattern is not in the
forefront, as De Cataldo doesn't aim to draw a new
conspiracy theory. In fact the writer seems more
inclined to believe that many alliances and connections
between politics and crime were rather casual, not
planned - both parties tried to use the moment and each
other for their own advantage. There are too many actors
in the scene, each with his own conflicting agenda and
each trying to use the prevailing wind and flow of
currents to sail his boat toward his own destination.
The Magliana Gang, thanks to the lucidity and intuition
of some of its leaders, is able to use the moment and
grow beyond the traditional scope of criminals in the
city of Rome. They realize that "the street", the space
outside the palaces of power, could be instrumental for
ruling the city. They try to make a leap from gang to
real economic power where legitimate and illegitimate
businesses are run in parallel, reinforcing each other.
It is a web that could well engulf and swallow up the
whole city, if a policeman and a prosecutor were not to
pull their attention away from political terrorism and
direct it toward the gang.
These two characters,
no doubt also drawn from reality, are the main drive
against the gang. But the gang is also not disciplined
like a Mafia family. It is torn by rivalry, clashing
ambitions and the inability to control violence,
including against its members. One after the other they
die, killed in acts of revenge, or they are sentenced to
long prison terms. But in the meantime a river of blood
has flooded Italian roads, the state structures are
shaken, as crime appears to be as destabilizing as red
terrorism, if not more so. And in the end the gang
disintegrates from internecine violence rather than
because of the crackdown of the state.
The
novel, written in Italian, reads as smoothly as a
Hollywood movie - the characters are violent, but also
full of doubts, strange passions, piety, friendship. No
one, no judge or policeman, comes out of the 600-page
novel crystal-clean - it is a murky moment in history
when eventually Italy manages to win the double fight
against terrorism and organized crime.
There
seems to be a very strong moral for the present, when
the West is waging a new war against a new terrorism.
Organized crime and terrorism are connected. In more
than one way terrorism can't survive without organized
crime, and it is not simply the issue of beating
countries sponsoring terrorism. Perhaps is an issue for
soul-searching: what accomplices can terrorists and
criminal gain in the state? It is clear that no
Mafia-like organization can survive without support from
some sectors of the state. Then what is the complicity
of terrorists in the Western states? Are the accomplices
attracted just by the money or also by political goals?
Were the Western states, for so many years home of
terrorists, aware of the danger but ignored it while
pursuing convoluted political goals, or they did
misunderstand the risks? Was it only tolerance and
liberty that allowed the terrorists to live, plan and
organize their acts in the United States, or did someone
turn a blind eye, perhaps thinking these people would
not be so dangerous or could be useful in the future? Et
cetera.
While we are about to go and bomb Saddam
Hussein in Iraq, many of these questions have not been
asked. They linger in some dark recess of our soul, the
heart of the Cold War, where today's enemies, al-Qaeda,
were trained and used by the West against the Soviets,
and they financed themselves by organizing possibly the
largest drug-trafficking network in the world.
Was it right to do so? Possibly yes, as the USSR
was worse than al-Qaeda, and wars are possibly a
necessary price for state security. But it is also clear
that unless international organized crime is fought,
tomorrow's terrorists can use criminal networks to
finance themselves and their goals ... as occurred in
Italy 20 years ago.
Romanzo Criminale by
Giancarlo De Cataldo, Einaudi. ISBN: 88-06 16096-6.
Price 14.50 euros, 628 pages. Currently available in
Italian only.
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