Letter from Rome Paddy AgnewThis is a story about the Mafia and two song festivals.This is the week of the San Remo Festival in Italy. That might not mean much to you, nor indeed to anyone but Italians, but this is a week when Italy rightly celebrates the 54th edition of a popular, glitzy music festival that runs all week on prime time TV and which combines nostalgia, comedy, politics, showbiz and occasional good music in an Oscars-type setting.
The strange thing about the San Remo Festival this year, however, is that it finds itself challenged by a rival, chronically underfunded music festival, held in Mantova. The main driving force behind the alternative festival is Nando Dalla Chiesa, a centre-left senator and son of the late Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the anti-Mafia crusader and Palermo Prefect who was gunned down by the Mafia in downtown Palermo in September 1982.
Senator Dalla Chiesa has organised the alternative festival, primarily as a protest against the San Remo Festival director, 65-year-old Tony Renis, himself a former festival winner, famous for his 1962 rendering of Quando, quando, quando. According to Dalla Chiesa, Renis has kept some spectacularly bad company over the years.
For example, a police phone tap of 1971 records a conversation between Renis and the Mafia boss Joe Adonis, then based in Milan. Adonis was not just any old Mafioso but rather an Italo-American (he emigrated to the US as a child in the early years of last century) who was a major player in organised crime in the 1920s and 1930s along with such as Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. Adonis was also someone who featured prominently in both the US Senate's Kefauver Commission (1950-1951) on organised crime and the Italian Parliament's Anti-Mafia Commission (1972-1976). Police records register the following on the phone call between Renis and Adonis: "The well-known singer Tony Renis . . . having heard that an American film production crew was looking for actors for a film version of the novel The Godfather, asked Adonis to intervene with the film director Francis Ford Coppola in order that he might get a part in the film, even a minor part, given that the main role had already gone to Marlon Brando . . ."
Some days later, according to the records, Renis phoned Adonis again, this time to say "Sam" had "sorted it all out". According to police records, "Sam" was Sam Lewin, a Mafioso sent to Italy to contact Adonis on behalf of mob boss Thomas Eboli.
In a series of public statements and articles over the winter, Senator Dalla Chiesa has continued to point an accusatory finger at Tony Renis. What exactly are the terms of Renis's self-confessed friendship with the US Gambino family, one of America's most influential Mafia families? What was the nature of his relationship with the late Michele Sindona, the convicted murderer and the business partner of Roberto Calvi in the infamous Banco Ambrosiano scandal?
Previewing his "alternative" festival this week, Dalla Chiesa confessed that he had been sparked into action by a desire to reject the notion that one can "cohabit with the Mafia". He said: "I'm still convinced that you cannot have 'good' relations with Mafiosi. The thing that really sparked me into doing the festival in Mantova was a statement by Fabrizio Del Noce [director of Channel 1 on state broadcaster RAIz\] when he said that Renis has never been convicted of anything and that, anyway, everyone knows that's how you get on, especially in American showbiz. The message was clear, we have to learn to live with the Mafia."
For his part, Tony Renis has rejected all the criticism, telling reporters earlier this week: "For the last six months, I have ignored Nando Dalla Chiesa's provocations. He is someone I have not had the honour of knowing but someone who in recent months has persecuted me on a daily basis, perhaps in an effort to refloat his mediocre political career . . ." Whatever about his alleged friendships with Mafiosi past or present, there is one friendship to which Renis has no problems admitting, namely his 40-year-long friendship with Prime Minister (and fellow singer) Silvio Berlusconi. His original appointment to run San Remo last summer led to immediate cries of "conflict of interest" and to speculation that he had got the job, thanks to that same friendship.
"If friendships between people are to considered conflicts of interest, then we won't have any more friends at all . . . As for the Prime Minister, he's a great artist, with a terrific voice and a very natural intonation . . ." said Renis.