Спрут 4 - Спрут | La Piovra - стр. 62

The Washington Post
March 24, 1989.
https://www.washingt...7-9a77216c91e0/

ROME - The camera fades back from an all-too-familiar tableau: a young woman in black, cradling the bloody body of a man gunned down by Mafia hit men and throwing her head back in anguish and sobbing. Such lurid scenes of grief are stock footage on nightly newscasts in Italy, where Mafia violence is often chronicled. But this particular evening it is just fiction -- albeit the most successful piece of made-for-television fiction in Italian entertainment history. "The Octopus" has struck again. More than 17 million viewers -- close to 1 in 3 Italians -- tuned in to this week's dramatic finale of the fourth installment of "La Piovra" ("The Octopus"), the smash miniseries about a superheroic Lone Ranger-style police inspector locked in a struggle to the death with the tentacles of the mob. Spurred by the show's mounting popularity, its creators are already at work on a fifth installment -- to be shot in English and featuring some American talent -- aiming to corner the ever-elusive U.S. market. In Italy, meanwhile, the series has spawned weeks of discussion, putting the Mafia back on Page 1 and at the center of talk shows, columns and family dinners. With an effective blend of reality, heroism and ample doses of poetic license, director Luigi Pirelli even managed to reel in some of the more skeptical viewers, the anti-Mafia warriors on whom inspector Corrado Cattani is modeled. "Don't tell me what's going to happen tonight," said Italy's top Mafia investigator, Giovanni Falcone, as he left his Palermo, Sicily, headquarters before the series' climactic finale. Saying even a fictionalized show like "The Octopus" is important in drawing public attention to a compelling problem, he added: "We'll see if he {Cattani} is going to die." The real-life investigator's words, given an eerie emphasis as he climbed into an armored car surrounded by machine-gun-toting bodyguards, were echoed that night at Palermo police headquarters as officers gathered around a television. In silence, they watched as Cattani was finally cut down by 70 assassins' bullets, an ending that to some seemed overwrought but to others was a mirror of a sad reality.
"He died like Ninni, they killed him like poor Commisario Cassara," said one policeman, recalling the 1985 murder of Palermo police official Antonio Cassara, his body raked by 200 bullets.

Set in the northern city of Milan, the latest episode of "The Octopus" -- an Italian name for the Mafia -- charts the very real expansion of the Mafia from the heroin trade into the shadowy corridors of high finance and political power, with clear allusions to events such as Italy's biggest banking scandal and the confessions of ex-mobster Tommaso Buscetta. Executive Producer Sergio Silva, who conceived the series after prominent anti-Mafia inspector Boris Giuliano was killed in 1979, says the series drew inspiration from real events but wasn't intended to be a documentary. "Facts are only the stones with which we built an imaginary palace," he said in an interview today.

At times, however, the plot stretches even the imagination: Would a real policeman loan his gun to a mobster's wife? Would a modern woman marry a man she despised to prop up her father's failing financial empire? Above all, could a lone wolf and iconoclast like Cattani really function in a society like Italy where teamwork is prized? Falcone says no. So does Mafia expert Pino Arlacchi, who likens "The Octopus" to a cartoon strip because "a private war against the Mafia is completely unrealistic for a real police inspector.

" Cattani is certainly larger than life, in some ways resembling a less violent version of American cowboy-vigilante Clint Eastwood in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" -- a parallel reinforced by the powerful and melodramatic score of Ennio Morricone. In the words of Michele Placido, who plays the inspector: "None of us men are made like Cattani. He's a hero." Heroes, then, are forgiven a bit of excess. Placido, known to Americans as the handsome Italian businessman who seduced Bette Midler in the film comedy "Big Business," won't be around for the next "Octopus." He's willed his place to talented French actress Patricia Millardet, playing a courageous and trauma-stricken Mafia investigator last seen mourning over Cattani's dead body. Cattani's nemesis, the excruciatingly evil Mafia financier (Remo Girone), will also return for "Octopus 5," while an American actor, still to be chosen, will play alongside Millardet. The first scenes are to be shot in New York this summer, eventually returning to Italy.

Потрясающе здесь, что Фальконе, великий Фальконе, хоть он сам себя таким и не считал, говорит о невозможности в одиночку бороться против мафии. Понятно, что фигура Каттани - это художественный образ, но..

Например, сегодня 40 лет со дня убийства Пио Ла Торре, члена Палаты депутатов, который в 1980 году инициировал законопроект, вводящий "мафиозный заговор" как новое преступление в итальянскую правовую систему. 30 апреля 1982 года Ла Торре и его водитель были застрелены возле штаб-квартиры Коммунистической партии в Палермо. А в сентябре 1982 года "Закон Роньони - Ла Торре", названный так в честь Пио Ла Торре и Вирджинио Роньони, был принят. Криминализировалась связь с мафией и санкционировалась конфискация судами активов тех, кто оказывался причастен к деятельности оргпреступности. Этот закон был использован судьей Джованни Фальконе для преследования сицилийской мафии в судебном процессе, который начался в 1986 году. (по материалам wiki)

Вот и получается, что история борьбы с мафией в Италии - это история таких людей как Фальконе, Борселино или Ла Торре. И образ Каттани, при всей его мифологичности, гораздо ближе к реальности, чем может показаться на первый взгляд.