“But what has this got to do with the Fenice fire?”
“I’m giving you the broad picture. Renato Carella is a man with connections to lots of companies. Not just Argenti.”
“I understand,” I said.
“But inside that broad picture, there are some very curious specifics. We know, for instance, that at the time of the fire, the son had debts of a hundred and fifty million lire [$75,000]. Mysteriously, seven months after the fire, Renato Carella gives him the money to pay off the debts. That’s on the record. If he’s only a foreman, how can he afford to do that? Where did he get the money?”
“So you think,” I said, “that the money might have come from whoever paid Carella to set the fire, assuming somebody did.”
“No, no!” Seno raised his right hand, as if swearing an oath. “Don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying that! I never said that! You’ll have to draw your own conclusions.” He looked around again. “But here’s another curious fact: Renato Carella hired one of the most expensive attorneys in Italy, a guy who works for Prime Minister Berlusconi.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“This was for his own defense,” said Seno.
“And for his son?”
“Nothing.”
“What about his nephew?”
“Even less.”
AT THE END OF HIS SUMMATION, Casson asked the court to find Carella and Marchetti guilty of arson and send them to prison for seven years. As to the possibility that the fire was ordered and paid for by others, he said an investigation was continuing and would perhaps lead to another trial later on.
Before the judges would issue their verdict, the trial would go into its second phase: charges against eight defendants for negligence and dereliction of duty.
Casson opened by arguing that convictions for arson did not automatically rule out criminal negligence.
“Attacks on works of art,” he said, “especially theaters, are unfortunately not unusual in the Italian panorama. Since October 1991, when the Petruzzelli Opera House in Bari burned, there have been a dozen instances of damage to theaters and art galleries by arson. Therefore, in 1996, a fire at the Fenice was within the realm of possibility, and those responsible for its security should have known this. But nobody gave a damn.”
He read the names of the defendants and the prison terms he had selected for each. The list was headed by ex-mayor Massimo Cacciari: nine months in jail. A sentence of that length was purely symbolic, however, since any jail term of less than two years was automatically suspended. The only other of the eight to draw a proposed sentence of less than two years was the Fenice’s custodian, Gilberto Paggiaro. Casson considered Paggiaro’s absence from his post on the night of the fire to be negligence of a less serious nature, because it had not contributed to the hazardous conditions at the theater before the fire. Casson asked that Paggiaro, who had suffered two heart attacks and depression since the fire, be given a sentence of eighteen months.
The other six were charged with a long list of derelictions and malfeasances, from failure to control the handling and storage of flammable materials to allowing the fire-extinguisher system to be dismantled before a new one was installed.
The most serious offender, in Casson’s view, was the chief engineer of the Comune of Venice, who was the top executive in charge of the theater’s renovation. For him, Casson proposed a four-year prison term; for his two assistants, two years; and for the top management of the Fenice, the general manager and the secretary-general, three years.
Arguments for the defense all had one theme in common: the denial of responsibility. Officials at the top pointed sideways and downward. Those at the bottom pointed up.
The most novel defense was offered by the lawyer for Gianfranco Pontel, the Fenice’s general manager. Pontel’s attorney claimed, at great length and with a straight face, that his client was responsible for the safety and security of the Fenice theater and that when the Fenice was not putting on productions, it ceased to be a theater and became a mere complex of buildings for which his client had no legal obligations at all. The theater had vanished, at least where Gianfranco Pontel was concerned, and would reappear only when productions once again were mounted on its stage. The lawyer’s speech drew laughter from the gallery and could have fit seamlessly into
Alice in Wonderland
or any number of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. Gianfranco Pontel had been a political appointee, one who was always thought to have been an odd choice as general manager of the Fenice, as he had no musical background and spent most of his time in Rome. In any case, since the fire, Pontel had moved on to become secretary-general of the Venice Biennale.
When the second phase of the trial was finished, the judges retired to consider all the evidence. At the end of the month, the presiding judge read the verdicts to a crowded courtroom:
Enrico Carella—guilty of arson, seven years in jail. Massimiliano Marchetti—guilty of arson, six years in jail. All eight negligence defendants—not guilty. Arson had been the sole cause of the fire.
Giovanni Seno was incensed. “The verdict was written by the end of the first day in court!” he told reporters. Carella, who had not been present at the reading of the verdict, gave a statement to the
Gazzettino,
proclaiming his innocence. Marchetti said nothing. The two would remain free, pending appeal.
Two months later, the judges filed the
motivazione,
their explanation of how they reached their verdict. Their report contained a chilling revelation:
“Carella and Marchetti were not alone,” the judges said. “They were surrogates for others who remained in the shadows, people with financial interests of such magnitude that, by comparison, the sacrifice of a theater would have seemed a small thing.”
The judges had put the weight of their authority behind the notion that the arson had been paid for by persons unknown. “For the judges,” the
Gazzettino
reported, “what had once been merely an investigative theory has now become a certainty.”
A presumptive spotlight fell on Renato Carella. But three months later, Renato Carella was dead of lung cancer. I called on Casson at his office in the Tribunal building to ask what effect this would have on the investigation.
“It’s over,” he said simply. “Renato Carella was the focus of our investigation. We thought he might have been the link between the boys and the money. He had contacts with a number of companies outside Venice. We were investigating him and also looking into every contractor and subcontractor that was hired to work on the Fenice, but we were never able to come up with any concrete evidence. And now, with his death, all trace has been lost.”
“What about the boys?” I asked. “Have they shown any inclination to talk?”
“On several occasions, they told us they would give us further information about him, but they changed their minds every time. And, unfortunately, we have a huge number of cases that demand our attention. Until there is something new—like a statement from Carella or Marchetti—the case won’t be reopened. We simply don’t have the time to pursue it.”
“THE FATHER’S DEAD, THE TRAIL GOES COLD, and the mystery lingers on,” said Ludovico De Luigi with a chuckle. “It’s all about money, as usual. Not love—money. The perfect ending, for Venice.”
De Luigi was sitting in his ground-floor studio in front of an unfinished painting of a jeweled dress floating against a barren landscape, as if it were being worn by an invisible woman.
“I’m painting a portrait of Peggy Guggenheim’s self-esteem,” he said. “It’s the gold evening gown she was wearing in the famous photograph Man Ray took of her in the 1920s. It’s a Poiret dress.” The photograph had appeared on the dust jacket of Peggy Guggenheim’s autobiography,
Out of This Century,
which De Luigi had tacked to the side of his easel.
“Why a perfect ending?” I asked. “Things are left hanging.”
“Yes, but this is the sort of ending Venice can live with, happily and forever.” He daubed gold paint on the canvas. “Look what the story offers: a great fire, a cultural calamity, the spectacle of public officials blaming each other, an unseemly rush for the money to rebuild the theater, the satisfaction of a trial with guilty verdicts and jail sentences, the pride of the Fenice’s rebirth, and”—he lifted his brush and looked up—“an unsolved mystery. Money secretly changing hands. Unnamed culprits hiding in the shadows. It stimulates the imagination, gives people the freedom to make up any scenario they want. What more could anyone ask?”
THE DIGITAL CLOCK outside the Fenice stood at 537 on the day Laura Migliori found traces of green paint exactly where she had hoped to find them, meaning that the truncated figure in the foreground
had
been Virgil after all. At one o’clock that same day, an appellate court in Mestre upheld the guilty verdicts of Enrico Carella and Massimiliano Marchetti. Lawyers for the two young men announced they would take their case to a higher court, the court of
cassazione
in Rome, for the second and final appeal.
A year later, in midsummer 2003, the theater resembled a life-size plywood model of itself: bare ceiling, bare walls, and five tiers of bare wooden boxes. It seemed impossible that the Fenice would be finished in four months, but construction managers assured the press that the rebuilding was still on target. Shortly after noon on day 140, word came from Rome that the
cassazione
court had rejected the final appeal of Carella and Marchetti. They would go to jail.
The police arrived at Marchetti’s house at 4:00 P.M. and led him away in handcuffs to begin serving a sentence of six years.
“That
cassazione
court really busted my balls,” said Marchetti’s lawyer, Giovanni Seno, when I called him a week afterward. “They usually give a person a couple of days to get his affairs in order before they finalize the sentence and lock him up. Ball-breakers! Last year I had a guy sentenced to nine years for drug trafficking, and they let a month go by before they arrested him. But that’s nothing. My associate has a woman defendant who’s a drug addict/robber/prostitute, and she’s still free after a year and a half, because they can’t find the paperwork from the appeals court, so they haven’t finalized her sentence. Marchetti they grab in a couple of hours! Tell me, where was he going to run off to with a newborn baby girl and a wife? But
Carella!
”
Enrico Carella had not been home when the police came to get him, nor did he turn up later on in the day, or the next day. In an interview two months earlier, he had told Gianluca Amadori of the
Gazzettino
that if his appeal failed, he would serve his term. Carella’s defense attorney said shortly after the appeal was rejected that he had already spoken with Carella and that he would surrender himself soon. On the third day, the Venetian authorities pronounced Carella “missing” but not “in hiding.” At the end of the week, they declared him a fugitive.
“So who forfeits the bail money?” I asked Seno. “And how much was it?”
“What bail?” he said. “We don’t have a bail system in Italy. We had one for two or three years, but there weren’t any bail bondsmen, like you have in America, so only the rich defendants were able to get off. It became a social issue.”
“Do you think the police are still looking for him?”
“I know they are, because obviously it’s a humiliating defeat for them. They didn’t catch the one they should have caught. In my opinion, Carella behaved like someone who was going to take off. He prepared for it. Even the interview he gave the
Gazzettino
was part of the setup, saying he’d serve his term if the
cassazione
went against him.
“It ’s not over yet. I’ve been in this business thirty years, and I’m not used to losing cases. I haven’t shelved the file. I have it all on computer. And I promise you that if something happens, I’ll let you know. I haven’t told you everything. I have to be honest with you. I haven’t told you everything.”