On the 26th of July 1992, a young seventeen year old Italian girl committed suicide. This is Rita Atria's story.
Where talking is met with deadly silence: In a small town on a Sicilian hilltop, a young woman could no longer keep quiet after the Mafia shot dead first her father, then her brother. Clare Longrigg reports on the courage, the fear and the tragic death of Rita Atria.
by Clare Longrigg, The Independent, Monday 21 September 1992.
NICOLO ATRIA and Piera Aiello were married in Partanna, a little hilltop town in the beautiful and fertile Val del Bellice, in western Sicily. When their baby was three, they moved to Montevago, a village near Agrigento, and set up their own pizzeria.
On the day of the opening, in June last year, they held a modest celebration, and invited a few neighbours. The guests departed early. As Nicolo was clearing away, a man walked into the restaurant and shot him. Nicolo died in Piera's arms. He was 24.
It was a settling of scores between Mafia clans, and people knew better than to interfere. Nicolo's father, Vito, a shepherd, had been shot dead in 1985 by a hitman from a rival family. Nicolo was 18 at the time, the only son, and he talked obsessively about avenging his father. He probably knew who the murderer was; perhaps, in his eagerness to be taken seriously, he had talked too much about his vendetta.
The police made half-hearted inquiries into Nicolo's death, but were greeted by silence. This is Mafia heartland, and nobody talks to the police, not even to ask the time of day. That would have been the end of it, had it not been for Nicolo's sister. Rita was 18, a quiet girl, ordinary-looking, short, with dark brown hair and black eyes. Her father and now her brother had been murdered, and she knew that the killers were free and had nothing to fear: Mafia hitmen are seldom arrested and almost never tried for murder.
Rita had been timid and unassuming, always in the background of small-town life. Unable to suppress her grief and anger any longer, she took her revenge. She disobeyed the Mafia's most powerful, unwritten law - instilled into her from her earliest childhood. A month after her brother's murder, she went to the police with his widow, and talked.
The police took the women straight to Paolo Borsellino, the magistrate conducting investigations into Mafia activity in the west of Sicily. Rita's anger came out in a torrent of words. She told Borsellino about the war between the Mafia families of Partanna, in which 30 people have died in the past few years; she named the heads of the most powerful families. She named the men who had killed her father and her brother. Borsellino questioned her about Partanna's most notorious unsolved murder: the shooting of the deputy mayor in 1983. Rita told him what every other resident of Partanna believed, but would not say: that the former mayor had killed his own deputy.
Last October the police made their move. Ten people were imprisoned for Mafia crimes on the evidence of Rita Atria's testimony, and in the following months, 20 more mafiosi were behind bars. When her mother found out that Rita was collaborating with the police, she threw her out. It did not matter that her own son's killer was to be brought to justice; as far as she was concerned, the police were on the wrong side of the law. Borsellino was afraid the Mafia would discover the identity of his source and try to silence her. Rita was taken to a seventh-floor flat on the outskirts of Rome, where the only people she knew were her police guards. Borsellino became her lifeline.
On Sunday 19 July, Paolo Borsellino was blown up on the doorstep of his mother's house in Palermo. Italy reeled with the shock. Rita, alone in the apartment in Rome, read the papers and saw the mangled cars and bodies on television. A week later, she locked herself into the apartment and wrote a note, which said: 'I am devastated by the killing of Judge Borsellino. Now there's no one to protect me, I'm scared and I can't take any more.' Then she threw herself out of the window.
It took two days for the newspapers to trace this anonymous suicide - no one in the apartment block knew the girl on the seventh floor, and no one but Borsellino and his colleagues had seen her for months. Anti-Mafia campaigners instantly adopted Rita as a martyr. The unknown heroine was splashed across every front page, but no one had a picture of her.
The road to Partanna winds through the rich countryside, past fields of melons and corn. As you approach the small hilltop town, the road rises in a grandiose arc and curls into a massive spaghetti junction. But this astonishing construction does not actually lead into the town. You have to circle the summit and go down again, turn down a side street and enter the town on the old, broken road.
Partanna was partially destroyed by earthquakes in 1968, and, after almost 10 years, the money began to arrive to rebuild it. Rivers of money, from the EC and the state, went straight into the pockets of the Mafia. Individuals were paid to rebuild their own palatial villas. The approach road with no exit appeared, while the church roof still lies where it fell.
On the day of Rita Atria's funeral, journalists and anti-Mafia campaigners arrived from Palermo and wandered about in the blistering heat, trying to find out when the ceremony would take place. There was a confusion about the proceedings that heightened the mutual suspicion between the townsfolk of Partanna and the unwelcome visitors. At the town hall, they said Mass would be held at noon. At the church, a man said there would be no funeral for Rita.
At one o'clock, Don Calogero Russo, the parish priest, stepped out to the vestry in the middle of another funeral, and was taken aback to find a group of women waiting for him, demanding to know what was happening and when the funeral would be. 'These are terrible times. It's a cruel world. What a dreadful thing to happen,' he said in an unctuous voice. 'We won't be saying Mass for the poor girl, her family doesn't want us to.'
This was difficult to believe: there had been no sign of a single member of Rita's family since the news of her death had broken, and her sister-in-law, who had gone to the police with her, was still in hiding. The women were indignant. As they walked away, one remarked that a priest who would not say Mass for a girl who had betrayed the Cosa Nostra must be a mafioso. Another said that because Rita had committed suicide, the priest would not bury her in holy ground.
The citizens of Partanna seemed rather inclined to forget who Rita Atria was. But a bar owner was more helpful. She said that Rita's mother was in the local hospice for the poor, being looked after by the nuns. 'She's only 50, but they say she's gone mad. I'm not surprised after what has happened.'
The hospice is surrounded by 20ft walls, with a solid steel gate and electronic surveillance. A voice on the entryphone beneath the eye of a video camera shrieked at the outsiders to go away.
At five o'clock the entrance to the cemetery was blocked by television cameras and press photographers. Journalists and anti-Mafia campaigners outnumbered the local mourners, and searched frantically for anyone who had known the dead girl. A strangled howl among the tombs sent the press corps half-running towards Rita's family grave. The mother? But the old woman in black, grey hair wild about her crumpled face, was not related. A group of women from Partanna looked on uneasily. They all said they didn't know Rita Atria, but it was a pity, such a young girl . . .
To a brief burst of applause, Rita's coffin came unsteadily down the path. It was carried by a dozen women from Palermo, heroines of the anti-Mafia movement who jostled for position to pay homage to their dead sister. At the rear was Michela Buscemi, who had taken her brothers' mafioso killers to court; leading the mourners was Letizia Battaglia, who spent two years photographing the shattered corpses of Mafia victims, in protest against Cosa Nostra.
The coffin was followed by the mayor and three carabinieri in uniform, bearing a standard - it had been decided, at short notice, that Rita was an official heroine. Father Russo celebrated Mass under a piercing blue sky, the cyprus trees rustled by a gentle breeze. The small crowd filtered through the graves, standing on the tombs to get a better view. The mayor gave a long speech about Rita's bravery, without once mentioning the Mafia.
Father Russo recited: 'Pardon your servant for her sins. . . .' 'Rita non ha peccato, ha parlato,' cried out one of the protesters. 'Rita did not sin, she talked. And what she said was the truth.' There was a shocked silence, then a ripple of cautious applause.
Rita was not the first to talk. In recent years, a number of women from Mafia families have denounced the killers of their husbands or sons. All of them have been ostracised by their families as a result, many have had their livelihoods destroyed. When Michela Buscemi testified against the killers of her brothers, Salvo and Rodolfo, her bar in Palermo was blown up and her mother disowned her; it was not until her four-year-old daughter's life was threatened that she withdrew her case. Pietra Lo Verso's husband fell foul of a Mafia boss and was shot dead in a massacre that killed eight people. She took his killers to court; as a result, customers deserted her shop, her parents cut her out of their lives, and her sons will not allow her to speak to anyone.
During his last investigations, Judge Borsellino maintained that the only effective weapons in the war against the Mafia were the pentiti - the 'penitent' mafiosi who, out of fear or revenge, revealed the inside workings of the impenetrable organisation - and the innocent members of Mafia families who knew the names of killers and bosses. He knew what would happen to a woman who betrayed her family to the police, and he used to give his 'penitents' personal support, remembering birthdays and Christmas presents for the children. Just before he died, he had requested better protection for these informers.
When Rita Atria's funeral was over, the journalists, giving up hope of finding anyone who had known her, interviewed each other outside the cemetery gate. But as the people of Partanna edged back up the hill to their homes, one woman spoke up. 'I didn't know Rita, but I came to her funeral because I believe in what she did,' she said rapidly as the reporters closed in around her, wielding microphones. 'We are all to blame for her death, because of our silence. But what happened to her is not going to change anything around here. It's not going to make anyone else talk.'
Source: The Independent
