There were several telephone calls after my column last Sunday, in which I wrote about the case of the three teachers in Gozo who had a sex racket going with school-girls, whom they filmed while they copulated with them. They were all from people who live in Gozo and who expressed their anger that Joseph Portelli had been let off with a suspended sentence, and that Joseph Borg had not been prosecuted at all. One woman, who lives in the same street as Joseph Portelli, was particularly fraught. “He’s not from Marsalforn,” she told me. “That’s misleading to people. He lives in Nadur, near my home, and the very morning he was sentenced he went off shooting as though nothing had happened.” She had far more serious things to say: about the sale of videos from a home and from the market, about wives who cooperate with their husbands to make money out of this perversion, and about the presence of underage children in a household where the parents are clearly a rotten influence. Though I can understand the reluctance to call the police, even anonymously, because of a fear of revenge and a wish not to get involved, it’s a great pity that people only come forward with information when matters have already gone too far. This lady is not too late to speak to the police even now. Columnists and reporters need information, but they cannot prosecute. Only the police can do that.
Several people called to apprise me of the identity of Joseph Borg, the one who “got away”, though he appears to have been the percimes. He is the brother of a well-known hotelier, and he is not, all these people told me, a teacher like his partners-in-crime. They are not quite sure what it is he does. Most of them alleged that influence was brought to bear to keep him out of the courts. And this is where I am more than happy to set the record straight, because one of the telephone calls that came in was from the police commissioner. Joseph Borg has been prosecuted, he told me, but his case is still being heard by the court. It looked as though he escaped prosecution because his case was separate to that of the other two men, only the conclusion of which had been reported in the newspapers. We will know the conclusion of Joseph Borg’s case in due course. The police commissioner also pointed out that the police have appealed against the suspended sentence handed down to Joseph Portelli as, along with the rest of us, they do not believe it to be adequate or in keeping with the crime. The ex-teacher who was imprisoned for three years has also appealed, however.
The passions stirred up by the coverage of this case indicate that the people who called me are some of many who had long been observing and suspecting, and perhaps even knowing, what was going on. Well, Gozo is a tiny place, and despite the best efforts of seemingly everyone there to keep information close to their chest, a racket involving schoolgirls and the purveying of home-made porn videos cannot be kept secret for long. For a start, if you want to sell the videos, you have to build up a market.
The gap between public and private sentiment has never been as obvious to me as in the comparison between reactions to this abhorrent case and the throwing of burnt oil on the Porte des Bombes. The politicians, NGOs and Harry-jump-on-the-bandwagons were out in force, issuing statements about the latter and taking over the public sphere to condemn it in stentorian tones. Meanwhile, the reaction of the private citizen could be summed up as wonder at all the fuss and flapping, because it’s just a bit of burnt oil on a ceremonial archway that had been neglected for years anyway, and which is still exposed to the worst traffic pollution on the island.
On the other hand, the reaction of public persons and politicians to the sex-with-teacher scandal has been zilch. Giovanna Debono’s office released a statement assuring us that these teachers are no longer employed by schools in Gozo, and that was about it. Yet the reaction of private citizens was one of overwhelming disgust and anger. They may not care about burnt oil thrown at buildings, but they certainly care about the exploitative abuse of emotionally confused girls by their teachers and amateur pornographers. I’m with them on this one. I have no doubt which is the more serious crime, and it’s not the burnt oil thrown at the arch.
From the media, politicians and organisations, there have been calls to have the perpetrators of this vandalism severely punished. Yet, except for my own last Sunday, there have been no similar expressions of outrage and calls for harsh punishment of the greater criminals who coerced confused kids into performing sex acts for their cameras. The stones in the middle of St Anne Street, stones that were ignored and neglected until a couple of years ago, are apparently more important than the issues that really affect human lives. Try as I might, I can’t whip up the slightest bit of anger about or interest in the burnt oil thrown at the Porte des Bombes, which isn’t particularly attractive or stylistically exceptional in any case, and I overheard no conversations beginning with the words: “My God, did you hear what they did to the Bombi gate?”
This is not due to ignorance, but to having the correct priorities. The use of schoolgirls by their teachers in pornographic videos is shocking, disturbing and outrageous – all the adjectives ascribed by our media and politicians to the gate-vandalism, but not to this other crime. The burnt oil thrown at the gate is just annoying. The gate is still there, still integrally whole – so please let’s keep things in perspective and stop the hysteria. It’s not the Mona Lisa, slashed down the middle, or Michelangelo’s David, hacked at with an axe. Rome has far more beautiful and historically significant monuments and remains on virtually every street in the centre, and in the 1970s, practically every one of them was sprayed with Communist slogans in red. Many of them are still sprayed today, because they are literally right there in the street. Nobody faints in dismay and the tourists are still pouring in.
The way we’re behaving about this arch is like a woman having sleepless nights and sobbing fits because her one, sole “good” dress has been ruined by the dry-cleaners. Had she more dresses, she would have shrugged and thrown the ruined one away without a second thought.
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A couple of patches of burnt oil on a ceremonial arch in the middle of one of our most polluted highways do not adversely affect tourism, as the hoteliers’ organisation has suggested. I have yet to encounter anyone insane enough to be more bothered by these two patches of oil than by, for example, the truly abysmal state of our roads, which does keep tourists away. And who can blame them? I very often feel like going away myself, and never coming back.
It is very easy to shriek about a single act of vandalism, because it stands out – unlike the daily vandalism perpetrated on our cars and our stress levels by the wrecked and ruined road surfaces. The myriad discomforts and squalid setbacks of everyday life in Malta are collectively so very much worse than any amount of burnt oil thrown at arches. What is the point of having a pristine arch in the road if the best vehicle for driving down that road is a Panzer tank? Who in his right mind is going to notice the burnt oil patches and deem them more grievously offensive than the makeshift, homemade “traffic signs” put up, unlit, around deep and dangerous holes in the middle of much-used roads? Yesterday night, I drove past a vast pit in the middle of a badly-lit road, marked only by metal posts placed precisely on its perimeter, and with pieces of red rags. I caught it in the headlights just in time. Had I driven into it, I would have had to fight the urge to throw burnt oil at everyone – from the Roads Ministry to the Roads Department downwards.
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Vandals, like terrorists, do what they do to attract attention. They want the attention, even if, conversely, they get it anonymously. The worst thing the government and the media can do in a situation like this is make such a tremendous fuss. First of all, the fuss is out of proportion to the way people really feel about it and, secondly, you’re just giving the vandals what they want.