Sicilian journalist Lirio Abbate, 42, has been threatened more than once for his investigations into the mafia. He has also received warnings for founding the very successful antimafia literary festival in Lamezia Terme, Calabria, where we meet on a hot June afternoon.
Most people who have been threatened by the mafia normally back down. But Lirio Abbate is challenging the idea of what is normal in a country governed from behind the scenes by criminal forces.
Since publishing a book revealing the political and financial connections of mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, titled I Complici (The Accomplices), Abbate has gone everywhere under armed guard. His bodyguards, pistols tucked into their jeans, wait outside the door while we talk. It turns out he was threatened not to come to Trame literary festival this year. ‘They told me to stay away,’ he tells a crowded piazza later that evening (to resounding applause). ‘I told them to fuck off!’
In his book on Provenzano’s support system, Abbate shone the spotlight on doctors, politicians and financiers who allow the mafia to function unchecked. Now he is prepared to stir up a hornets’ nest about the role of complicit police, lawyers and magistrates who fail to protect the mafia’s victims.
‘Let’s talk about real life. The mafia’s idea of ‘normal’ needs to be eradicated,’ he tells me.
‘Is it normal for a doctor to visit a woman who’s been badly beaten and not report the fact to the authorities? Is it normal to kill your daughter and pass it off as suicide? Is it normal for a newspaper editor to publish a story that supports the ‘Ndrangheta’s campaign against collaborators?’
When I met one woman who testified against the mafia, she revealed that of the many things she had to get used to in her new life as a protected witness, one was a completely new idea of ‘normal’. Mafia families contain an entrenched idea of ‘them’ (law abiding public servants, campaigning priests, journalists etc) and ‘us’. For anyone who leaves the mafia, crossing that line takes courage, and causes many doubts, especially when the children suffer from a sense of betrayal and miss their home, their friends and grandparents.
When sociologist Ombretta Ingrascì interviewed a collaborator for her book Donne d’onore (Mondadori), the woman (whom she called Rosa) explained that she had grown up with a different concept of normal:
‘When you are in a family like mine, nothing can stop you. You may understand that what you’re doing is wrong, you might be against everything your family does, but there you are, you’ve got to do what you’re told, I had no way of saying, “I’m sick of this, I’m leaving”; I had no way out.’
‘For this reason,’ Ingrascì explains, ‘she didn’t feel guilty: “If you think about it, I haven’t got anything to feel guilty about, I did nothing abnormal, because I lived in that family, that was what I had to do.”
Rosa explained to Ingrascì that when she talked to the sociologist, or to a lawyer or magistrate, she had to remind herself that they were not normal, and wouldn’t understand things she considered part of everyday life.
It’s certainly not normal for an investigative journalist to go everywhere under armed guard. But Abbate’s example shows that it can be normal to speak out against the mafia’s outrages. And for one week every June, in the mafia’s heartland in Calabria, it has become normal for writers and magistrates, antimafia campaigners and students to talk about how to defeat the mafia.
Abbate currently works for the weekly news magazine l’Espresso, based in Rome. Follow him on Twitter @LirioAbbate