惹怒黑手党的代价：意大利记者的孤独与艰险

ROME — For many of his days over the past four years, Paolo Borrometi has lived in isolation, though he is barely ever alone. He has not walked through a park or by the beach in his native Sicily for years. He cannot go to a restaurant freely, or to a concert or the movies. He can’t drive a car alone, go shopping alone, or go out for dinner by himself.

罗马——过去四年里，保罗·博罗梅蒂(Paolo Borrometi)很多时候都生活在孤独中，尽管很少有独处的时候。他已经很多年没去过家乡西西里岛的公园或海滩了。他不能随意去餐厅、听音乐会或看电影，也不能独自开车、独自购物或独自外出去吃饭。

Before heading to work as a reporter covering the Mafia, he starts each morning with an espresso, a cigarette — and his police escort.

作为一名报道黑手党的记者，在去上班之前，他的早上是在一杯浓咖啡、一支烟和警方对他的保护中开始的。

Angering the Mafia as a journalist in Italy makes for a lonely life. And yet Borrometi, 35, is in good company. Almost 200 reporters in Italy live under police protection, making it unique among industrialized Western countries, advocacy groups say.

在意大利，惹怒黑手党会导致记者生活孤独。但像35岁的博罗梅蒂这样的情况有不少。倡导组织称，意大利有近200名记者生活在警察的保护下，这使它在西方工业化国家中独具一格。

“None of us wants to be a hero or a model,” Borrometi told an assembly of high school students on a recent morning in Rome, where he now lives. “We just want to do our job and our duty, to tell stories.”

“我们没人想当英雄或榜样，”最近一个上午，博罗梅蒂在现在生活的罗马对一群高中生说。“我们只想做自己的工作，尽自己的责任，就是讲故事。”

Yet murders connected to organized crime are rising in Italy, authorities say, and international observers consider criminal networks the principal threat to journalists in Europe.

但当局称，意大利和有组织犯罪有关的谋杀案件数量上升。国际观察人士认为，犯罪网络是欧洲记者面临的主要威胁。

“Don’t stop writing, Paolo,” read an email Borrometi received two days after he was assaulted in 2014 outside his family’s country home in Sicily by two men wearing balaclavas. “Our countries need free and investigative journalism. You have my respect.”

2014年，博罗梅蒂在西西里岛上自家的乡村庄园外被两名带面罩的男子袭击。“不要停止写作，保罗，”他在两天后收到的一封电子邮件写道。“我们的国家需要自由的调查性新闻报道。我敬重你。”

The note came from Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist who was killed in a car-bomb attack last year, after exposing her island nation’s links to offshore tax havens and reporting on local politicians’ crimes for decades. When she died at 53, she had 47 lawsuits pending against her, including one from the country’s economy minister.

发件人是马耳他的调查记者达夫妮·卡鲁阿纳·加利齐亚(Daphne Caruana Galizia)。去年，在数十年里一直坚持揭露岛国马耳他与离岸避税港的关系、报道该国政界人物罪行的卡鲁阿纳·加利齐亚，在一场汽车炸弹袭击中丧生，终年53岁。她去世时，仍有47桩以她为被告的案件未结案，其中包括该国经济部长提起的一桩诉讼。

In addition to Caruana Galizia, who was killed in October, a 27-year-old reporter, Jan Kuciak, was killed along with his fiancee in Slovakia in February. He had also been investigating corruption with suspected ties to Italian mobsters.

除了去年10月遇害的卡鲁阿纳·加利齐亚外，今年2月，27岁的记者扬·库恰克(Jan Kuciak)和未婚妻在斯洛伐克被杀。他也在调查疑似与意大利黑帮分子有关的腐败行为。

“There have already been two journalists killed by the Mafia inside the European Union, both investigating Mafia stories and stories that domestic governments were not looking into,” said Pauline Adès-Mével, who is responsible for the European desk at Reporters Without Borders, an advocacy group for press freedom.

“欧盟境内已有两名记者被黑手党杀害，两人生前都在调查黑手党以及国内政府没有在调查的故事，”新闻自由倡导组织无国界记者(Reporters Without Borders)欧洲编辑部负责人保利娜·阿德斯-梅韦尔(Pauline Ades-Mevel)说。

“Italy is historically the country that has felt the Mafia the most, and has a dozen of journalists under 24-hour police protection,” Adès-Mével said. “That doesn’t happen in other countries.”

“意大利是历史上受黑手党影响最大的国家，有12名记者受警方24小时保护，”阿德斯-梅韦尔。“这种情况不会发生在其他国家。”

For Borrometi, it took just a year of reporting on the secret businesses and clandestine political ties of the Mafia in southeastern Sicily for his independent news website, La Spia (The Spy), before criminals menaced him. In five years, he got hundreds of death threats from local mobsters.

以博罗梅蒂为例，在自己的独立新闻网站“间谍”(La Spia)上对黑手党在西西里岛东南部隐秘企业和政治关系才进行了一年的报道，他就已经受到了犯罪分子的恐吓。在五年里，他收到当地黑帮的数百次死亡威胁。

At first, his articles prompted vandalism against him and late night phone calls. But things got physical after he began writing a series of stories that showed how Sicily’s largest fruit and vegetable market was controlled by mobsters.

起初，文章只是导致他被人诋毁，在深夜遭到电话骚扰。但在他开始写一系列故事介绍黑帮如何控制西西里岛最大的果蔬市场后，攻击就变成了身体上的。

He was feeding his dog outside his country home, when two men jumped him, grabbed his right arm, and twisted it behind his back until his shoulder muscles tore in three places.

当时，他正在自家乡间住宅外面喂狗。两名男子开始袭击他，抓住他右胳膊扭到背后，直到他的肩部肌肉三处撕裂。

“The only words the attackers told me that day were, ‘Mind your own business,’ or ‘This is only the first warning,’ or a Sicilian, less polite, version of it,” Borrometi recalled.

“凶手那天和我说的唯一一句话是，‘管好你自己的事’，或者是‘这只是第一次警告’，或是这句话不那么礼貌的西西里语版本，”博罗梅蒂回忆说。

Almost five years later, he still can’t move his shoulder properly.

快五年过去了，他的肩膀还是无法自如活动。

That didn’t stop him from continuing to report on the Mafia and taking a number of the Mafiosi who threatened him to court. One night, after a fire attack almost burned down his apartment, police decided to put him under full-time protection.

这并未阻止他继续对黑手党进行报道，他还把一些曾经威胁过他的黑手党人告上法庭。一天晚上，他的公寓几乎要被一场火攻烧毁，之后警方决定对他进行全天保护。

The Mafia wasn’t cowed.

黑手党并没有退缩。

“We’ll cut your head off, even inside a police station,” the local Mafia boss said in a public post on social media.

“哪怕是在警察局里，我们都会砍下你的脑袋，”当地的黑手党老大在社交媒体上公开表示。

His reporting — and police investigations — have by now exposed a wider network of Mafia affiliates who move produce from the fruit and vegetable market in Vittoria, Sicily, to the rest of Italy and Europe, in affiliation with other criminal groups.

现在，他的报道——以及警方的调查——已经曝光了更广泛的黑手党分支网络，他们与与其他犯罪集团联系，将西西里的维多利亚蔬果市场的农产品转到意大利和欧洲各地出售。

He found out that one of the companies growing the famed Pachino tomato, a special cherry tomato certified by Italy’s Agriculture Ministry, was owned by the sons of two prominent mobsters. One of them had spent more than two decades in jail for Mafia ties, and was now working for his son’s company.

著名的帕奇诺番茄是一种得到意大利农业部认证的特殊樱桃番茄，博罗梅蒂发现，有一家种植这种番茄的公司属于两名黑帮暴徒要人的儿子们所有。其中一名要人因为同黑手党的关系，在监狱里蹲了20多年，现在正为儿子的公司工作。

The news spread, and the ministry took notice and cut the company off from the list of businesses that can sell Pachino tomatoes. Not only did the mobsters feel under attack by a reporter, they were out millions of euros in lost revenue.

消息传开后引起了农业部的注意，将该公司从可销售帕奇诺番茄的企业名单上删除。黑手党成员不仅感觉自己受了一名记者的攻击，还损失了数百万欧元的收入。

Last month, the mobsters decided to scale up their threats. Police say they intercepted a Sicilian mobster while he was discussing a plot with his sons to kill Borrometi with a car bomb.

上个月，暴徒们决定扩大威胁。警方称，他们窃听了一名西西里暴徒与成员们的对话，他们正在商量用汽车炸弹杀害博罗梅蒂。

“We need a ‘firework’ like those in the 1990s, when one couldn’t even walk on the streets,” said the man, who was caught on a police wiretap. “A death every once in a while is useful, so that all the whippersnappers calm down a little.”

“我们需要1990年代的那种‘烟火’，那时候人们根本没法走上街，”那名被警方监听电话的男子说。“时不时死个人是有好处的，这样所有狂妄的家伙都能安静一点。”

The reference was to the tense years when two Palermo prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were brutally murdered alongside their bodyguards, and car bombs exploded around Italy, killing bystanders and damaging historic buildings.

他们指的是两名巴勒莫检察官乔瓦尼·法尔科恩(Giovanni Falcone)和保罗·博尔塞利诺(Paolo Borsellino)与身旁的警卫一同被残忍谋杀的那段紧张时期，当时意大利到处都有汽车炸弹爆炸，杀死路人，毁坏历史建筑。

In the wiretapped conversation, the man was advocating for a return to that bloody time of overt intimidation of authorities and citizens alike. There hasn’t been a Mafia car bomb in Italy since then.

在这段被监听的谈话中，该男子主张重回政府和平民受公开恐吓的血腥时代。自那个时期之后，意大利一直没有出现过黑手党汽车炸弹事件。

“This shows how much investigative journalism angers the Mafia, which thrives with its business in silence,” Nino Di Matteo — a prominent Mafia prosecutor, hence also a prime target — said on national television a few days after police arrested those said to be planning the attack against Borrometi.

警方逮捕了那些据称正计划对博罗梅蒂发起袭击的人们，几天后，著名黑手党检察官——因此也成了他们的头号目标——尼诺·迪·马迪欧(Nino Di Matteo)在全国电视上说：“这证明了这些秘密发展生意的黑手党被调查新闻激怒到了什么地步。”

“Journalism has a fundamental role in the fight against the Mafia, especially in a moment like this,” said Di Matteo, who also travels with bodyguards. “I believe we are underestimating a bit of the danger that the Mafia represents to the country and to our democracy.”

“新闻报道在反对黑手党的斗争中发挥了重要作用，特别是在这样的时刻，”身边同样有保镖时刻陪同的迪·马迪欧说。“我认为我们有点低估了黑手党对我们的国家和民主的危害。”