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 Also by John Dickie:

Cosa Nostra
Delizia!

John Dickie is Professor of Italian Studies at University College

London and an internationally recognised expert on many aspects
of Italian history. In 2005 he was awarded the title Commendatore
dell’Ordine della Stella della Solidarieta Italiana. He is the author
of five books, including DELIZIA! which won the special commen-
dation in the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards, and
in France was voted food book of the year in RTL/Lire magazine’s
prestigious poll. COSA NOSTRA, his history of the Sicilian
mafia, has been translated into twenty-one languages, has sold
over 750,000 copies, and won the Crime Writers’ Association
Award for Non-Fiction.

www.johndickie.net
 BROTHERHOODS
Camorra, mafia, 'ndranghefa: the rise of
the Honoured Sociefies

John Dickie

94. 106094
First published as Blood Brotherhoods in Great Britain in 2011 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company

First published as Mafia Brotherhoods in paperback in 2012

Copyright © John Dickie zor

Maps by Neil Gower

The right of John Dickie to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission
of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent
purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 340 96394 4

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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRo 4YY

Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products
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are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

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www.hodder.co.uk
‘The blackest despair that can take
hold of any society is the fear
that living honestly is futile.’

Corrado Alvaro
De aa
 Author's Note

Mafia Brotherhoods is the story of a past that a beautiful and

complicated country has conspicuously failed to leave behind.
My book follows Italy’s three major criminal organisations (or
mafias) over roughly a century, from their origins in the middle
of the nineteenth-century, to the end of the Second World War.
One of the many narrative threads in Mafia Brotherhoods
concerns Italy’s shocking failure to see, understand, and remember
just how dangerous these criminal fraternities were. But try as
Italy might to unlearn the little it came to know about the mafias
in this first century, the country would subsequently carry the
burden of their history into the new age of democracy, industrial
capitalism and consumer prosperity. ;
I conceived and wrote Mafia Brotherhoods as the first book
of a two-volume chronicle of organised crime in Italy. The years
1943 to 1945 provide a natural break between the two volumes.
On the one hand, the fall of Fascism and the Allied Liberation
was the most important transition in the history of contempo-
rary Italy. On the other hand, as I will show, the years from
1943 to 1945 were also a critical time for the Neapolitan
camorra, the Sicilian mafia, and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta.
When the Italy that Fascism built fell to pieces, old criminal
continuities were exposed once more, and new powers arose
from the underworld.
The second volume will pick up the story of the three mafias
from where Mafia Brotherhoods leaves it. In 1946, Italy made what
seemed to many like a decisive break with the past: on 2 and 3
June of that year, the people voted in a referendum to reject the
“monarchy that had ruled the country since 1861. The Italian
Republic was born. Today, despite many trials and tribulations,
its institutions are still with us.
The title of my second volume, Mafia Republic, is meant to
suggest several things, among them the legacy of a past that the
Italian Republic has yet to adequately confront. Mafia Republic
also hints at my belief that the mafias must be seen as political
associations. They are political, first, in that they exist by insinu-
ating themselves into the legal institutions of government. But
they are also political because the world mafiosi inhabit — with
its curious combinations of collaboration and intrigue, of rule-
bound behaviour and savage conflict — is itself a form of
politics.
As this new paperback edition of Mafia Brotherhoods goes to
press, I am still hard at work on its sequel. I hope that the extract
from Mafia Republic included in the final pages of this volume
gives a sense of what I am trying to achieve. In particular, I hope
that it shows some of the many ways in which the story told
here would continue to haunt Italy well into our era.

John Dickie
London, September 2011
Contents

Preface
Introduction: Blood brothers

1: VIVA LA PATRIA! THE CAMORRA, 1851-1861

How to extract gold from fleas 31

Co-managing crime 46
The redemption of the camorra §2

Uncle Peppe’s stuff: The camorra cashes in 64

Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra 67

2: GETTING TO KNOW THE MAFIA, 1865-1877

Rebels in corduroy 85
The benign mafia 95
A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered 102
Double vendetta

3: THE NEW CRIMINAL NORMALITY, 1877-1900

Born delinquents: Science and the mob 141
An audience of hoods T47
The slack society 152

4: THE 'NDRANGHETA EMERGES, 1880-1902

Harsh mountain 165
The tree of knowledge 171
Darkest Africo 178
The King of Aspromonte 196
5: MEDIA DONS, 1899-1915
Bankers and Men of Honour 213
Floriopolis 222.
Four trials and a funeral 228
The ‘high’ camorra 245
The camorra in straw-yellow gloves 252
The criminal Atlantic 262
Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid 268
The strange death of the Honoured Society 278

6: MUSSOLINI'S SCALPEL, 1922-1943

Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia 293
Campania: Buffalo soldiers 299
Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina 308
Calabria: What does not kill me, makes me stronger 313
Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman 317
Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese 334
Sicily: The slimy octopus 336
Master Joe dances a tarantella 346
Liberation 2 ae

Acknowledgements 369
Picture Acknowledgements Bie.
Notes on sources 375
Sources consulted 381
Index 423
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Preface

Once upon a time, three Spanish knights landed on the

island of Favignana, just off the westernmost tip of
Sicily. They were called Osso, Mastrosso and
Carcagnosso and they were fugitives. One of their
sisters had been raped by an arrogant nobleman and
the three knights had fled Spain after washing the
crime in blood.
Somewhere among Favignana’s many caves and
grottoes, Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso found
sanctuary. But they also found a place where they
could channel their sense of injustice into creating a
new code of conduct, a new form of brotherhood.
Over the next twenty-nine years, they dreamed up and
refined the rules of the Honoured Society. Then, at
last, they took their mission out into the world.
Osso dedicated himself to Saint George, and crossed
into nearby Sicily where he founded the branch of the
Honoured Society that would become known as the
mafia.
Mastrosso chose the Madonna as his sponsor, and
sailed to Naples where he founded another branch: the
camorra.
Carcagnosso became a devotee of the Archangel
Michael, and crossed the straits between Sicily and the
Italian mainland to reach Calabria. There, he founded
the ’ndrangheta.
Mafia Brotherhoods

Mafia Brotherhoods is a history of the origins and early develop-

ment of Italy’s three most feared criminal organisations, or
mafias. But no historian can claim to be the first person drawn
toward the mystery of how the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan
camorra and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta began. Mafiosi got there
first. Each of Italy’s major underworld fraternities has its own
foundation myth. For example, the story of Osso, Mastrosso and
Carcagnosso (names that mean something like ‘Bone’, “Master-
bone’, and ‘Heelbone’ in English) is the ’ndrangheta’s official
account of its own birth: it is a tale told to Calabrian recruits
when they prepare to join the local clan and embark on a life of
murder, extortion and trafficking.
As history, the three Spanish knights have about as much
substance as the three bears. Their story is tosh. But it is serious,
sacramental tosh all the same. The study of nationalism has
given us fair warning: any number of savage iniquities can be
committed in the name of fables about the past.
The very fact that the mafias value their own history so highly
betrays the outrageous scale of their ambition. Ordinary gang-
sters, by contrast, have no such pretensions. Over the course of
the last 150 years, the criminal brotherhoods have frequently
occluded the truth by imposing their own narrative on events:
all too often the official version of history turns out to be the
mafias’ version.
The story of the mafias is filled with many other outrages.
The leading bosses in Sicily, Naples and Calabria enjoy wealth,
status, and influence. They are also men of nonchalant violence
— and have been since the outset. But they are also much, much
more than brutal criminals. The real outrage of Italy’s mafias is
not the countless lives that have been cruelly curtailed — including,
very frequently, the lives of the mafiosi themselves. Nor is it the
livelihoods stunted, the resources wasted, the priceless landscapes
defiled. The real outrage is that these murderers constitute a
parallel ruling class in southern Italy. They infiltrate the police,
the judiciary, local councils, national ministries, and the economy.
 Preface

They also have a measure of public support. Since Italy was first
created in the middle of the 1800s, organised crime has occupied
ever more of the territory that the Italian state, in theory, claims
as its own. Such outrages demand a historical explanation rooted
squarely in the facts.
Writing mafia history is a young field of scholarship: it is a
child of the unprecedented mafia savagery of the 1980s and early
1990s, when Italian researchers began to channel their own sense
of outrage into patient and rigorous study. Overwhelmingly, those
historians, whose numbers have grown steadily, hail from the
same regions of southern Italy that are worst afflicted by Italy’s
permanent crime emergency — regions where mafia history is still
being made. Some researchers are lucky enough to hold university
positions. Others are magistrates and officers of the law. Some
are just ordinary citizens. But all of them are bent on pitting
hard evidence and open debate against mafia lies and myth-
making, which are a great deal more insidious than the hokum
about the Spanish knights might initially suggest. There can be
few other branches of history in which the discipline of under-
standing the past can make such a direct contribution to building
a better future. To defeat the mafias, one has to know what they
are; and they are what their history shows us, no more and no
less. Thanks to the labours of a number of historians, we can
now shine lights into the obscurity of Italian organised crime’s
early years, revealing a narrative that is both disturbing and
disturbingly relevant to the present.
Mafia Brotherhoods springs from my belief that the findings
of this growing body of research are too important to be kept
among specialists. It draws together the known documentation
and the best research to create a ‘choral’ work, as the Italians
might say: a book in which many voices tell a single tale. My
own voice is one of those in the chorus, in that Mafia Brother-
hoods also incorporates substantial new findings that comple-
ment and correct the story that has emerged from the exciting
-work being done in Italy.
Mafia Brotherhoods

In 2004 I published Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian

Mafia, in which I brought together the best Italian research on
the most notorious of Italy’s criminal fraternities. Mafia Brother-
hoods is not a sequel to Cosa Nostra: it will stand or fall on its
own terms. But readers of Cosa Nostra may recognise my retelling
of one or two episodes from that earlier book, so they deserve
to know before starting why the Sicilian mafia is integral to my
concerns here. There are two reasons: first, because even in the
last three or four years new discoveries have radically changed
our view of key moments in the history of organised crime in
Sicily; second, because there is also much to learn about the
Sicilian mafia by comparing it with the camorra and the ’ndrang-
heta. One thing that the comparison teaches us is that the sinister
fame enjoyed by Sicilian mafiosi is amply deserved.
Sicily gave the world the term ‘mafia’, and the fact that that
term has entered daily use not just in Italy but across the world
is itself a symptom of Sicilian organised crime’s pervasive influ-
ence. In the dialect of Palermo, the island’s capital, ‘mafia’
denoted beauty and self-confidence: ‘cool’ comes about as close
as English can to its original meaning. In the 1860s, just after
the troubled island of Sicily became part of the newly united
state of Italy, ‘mafia’ began to serve as a label for an organisation
whose shape briefly became visible through a fog of violence and
corruption. The mafia (which would soon disappear into the fog
once more) had existed for some time by then, and it had already
reached a level of power and wealth that delinquents on the
mainland could only aspire to. That power and wealth explains
why the Sicilian word ‘mafia’ became an umbrella term for all
of Italy’s underworld brotherhoods, including the camorra and
*ndrangheta. Over the course of a century or so — the arc of time
covered in these pages — we can chart the fortunes of the penin-
sula’s other two mafias against the heights, that the Sicilians
reached from the outset.
These days the Sicilian mafia is usually known as Cosa Nostra
(‘our thing’), a moniker that mafiosi in both the United States

4
 Preface

and Sicily adopted in the 1960s. The name ’ndrangheta stuck to

the Calabrian mafia in the mid-1950s. (It means ‘manliness’ or
‘courage’.) In both cases, the new names coalesced because post-
war public opinion and law enforcement were becoming more
searching, bringing into focus a picture that had been blurred by
a century of muddle, negligence and downright collusion. So
Mafia Brotherhoods, which concludes with the fall of Fascism
and the Allied Liberation of Italy, is a history of underworld
regimes that were as yet, if not nameless, then certainly ignored
or mysterious, surrounded either by silence (in the case of the
*ndrangheta), or by endless, inconclusive dispute (in the case of
the Sicilian mafia).
The camorra has had a different relationship to its name. While
structured criminal power has waxed and waned through Neapol-
itan history, the camorra has always been called the camorra.
The Honoured Society of Naples may have been a sworn, occult
sect of gangsters, but it had strangely few secrets. Everyone in
Naples knew all about it. Which is one reason why its history
has a dramatically different trajectory to the Honoured Societies
of Sicily and Calabria.
Comparative research into the history of the mafias is still very
rare. Perhaps that is understandable. In the early days, the criminal
fraternities of Sicily, Naples and Calabria differed more than the
catch-all tag ‘mafia’ might lead us to assume. Each evolved to fit
the characteristic features of the territory it fed off. Yet studying
Italy’s underworld organisations in isolation, for all their indi-
vidual peculiarities, can sometimes seem like trying to figure out
the dynamics of natural selection by staring at beetles impaled
on pins in a dusty display case. Italy does not have solitary, static
criminal organisms; rather it has a rich underworld ecosystem
that continues to generate new life forms to this day.
The mafias have never existed in isolation. What they share is
just as important as the many things that distinguish them.
Throughout their history, all three have communicated and
learned from one another. The traces of that common history
Mafia Brotherhoods

are visible in a shared language. Omerta is one example — or

umilta (humility) to give its original form. Across southern Italy
and Sicily, omerta-umilta has denoted a code of silence and
submission to criminal authority. ‘Honour’ is another instance:
all three associations invoked a code of honour, and called them-
selves the Honoured Society.
But the links between these Honoured Societies go far beyond
words, and are one of the reasons for the mafias’ success and
longevity. So the virtues of comparison, and of reading the
histories of the mafia, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta in
parallel, are perhaps the only lessons in historical method that
the fable of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso has to teach us.
(The ’ndrangheta’s foundation myth does contain one other speck
of veracity, as will become clear: Favignana, the island where the
fable is set, was once a penal colony and as such, was indeed
one of the places where the Honoured Societies were hatched.)
By taking a comparative approach, Mafia Brotherhoods will offer
answers to some insistent questions. How did Italy’s secret criminal
societies begin? How were they first discovered? Why did they not
only survive being discovered, but grow in power? The worst answers
to these questions recycle baseless legends that blame Arab invaders
in Sicily and Spanish rulers in Naples. Such stories are close to the
yarns spun by the Honoured Societies themselves — suspiciously
close. Scarcely any better are the answers that evoke abstractions
like ‘the culture’, ‘the mentality’, or ‘the southern Italian family’.
Many university textbooks give responses that sound more
sophisticated: they talk about the fragile legitimacy of the state,
the citizens’ lack of trust in the government institutions, the preva-
lence of clientelism and patronage in politics and administration,
and so on. As a professor of Italian history, I myself have recited
phrases like this in the past. So I know only too well that they
rarely leave anyone much wiser. Nonetheless there is one crucial
nugget of truth underneath all this jargon: the history of organised
crime in Italy is as much about Italy’s weakness as it is about the
mafias’ strength. Omerta leads us to the heart of the issue: it is

6
 Preface

often portrayed as being an iron code of silence, a stark choice

between collusion and death. In some cases, it certainly is just as
harsh a law as its reputation suggests. Yet the historical sources
also show that, under the right kind of pressure, omerta has broken
again and again. Far from respecting an ancient silence, mafiosi
have been talking to the police since they first went into business.
That is one reason why so many of the underworld’s darkest secrets
are still there in the archives for us to unearth. And one reason
why mafia history is often more about misinformation and intrigue
than it is about violence and death.
The best way to divulge those secrets, to reconstruct those
intrigues, and in doing so to provide more satisfying answers to
the questions surrounding the mafias’ origins, is to begin by
simply telling stories. Documented stories that feature real men
and women, real choices made in specific times and places, real
crimes. The best historians of organised crime in Italy reconstruct
those stories from fragmentary archival sources, and from the
accounts of people (notably criminals) who often have very good
reasons to distort what they say. It is not banal to compare this
kind of historical research to detective work. Detectives labour
to create a coherent prosecution case by matching the material
evidence to what witnesses and suspects tell them. In both tasks
— the historian’s and the detective’s — the truth emerges as much
from the gaps and inconsistencies in the available testimonies, as
it does from the facts those testimonies contain.
But the question that drives research into Italy’s long and
fraught relationship to these sinister fraternities is not just who
committed which crimes. The question is also who knew what.
Over the last century and a half, police, magistrates, politicians,
opinion formers and even the general public have had access to
a surprising amount of information about the mafia problem,
thanks in part to the fragility of omerta. Italians have also,
repeatedly, been shocked and angered by mafia violence, and by
the way some of its police, judiciary and politicians have colluded
with crime bosses. As a result, the mafia drama has frequently
Mafia Brotherhoods

been played out very visibly: as high-profile political confronta-

tion, as media event. Yet Italy has also proved positively ingenious
in finding reasons to look the other way. So the story of Italy’s
mafias is not just a whodunit? It is also a whoknewit? and, most
importantly, a whyonearthdidn’theydosomethingaboutit?
 INTRODUCTION: Blood brothers

In the early hours of 15 August 2007, in the German steel town

of Duisburg, six young men of Italian origin climbed into a car
and a van, a few metres away from the Da Bruno restaurant
where they had been celebrating a birthday. One of them was
just eighteen (it was his party), and another was only sixteen.
Like the rest of the group, these two boys died very quickly, where
they sat. Two killers fired fifty-four shots, even taking the time
to reload their 9mm pistols and administer a coup de grdce to
each of the six in turn.
This was the worst ever mafia bloodbath outside Italy and the
United States — northern Europe’s equivalent to the St Valentine’s
Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. As the background to the
murders emerged — a long-running blood feud in a little known
region of southern Italy — journalists across the globe began
struggling with what the New York Times called an ‘unpro-
nounceable name’: ’ndrangheta.
For the record, the name is pronounced as follows: en-drang-
get-ah. The ’ndrangheta hails from Calabria (the ‘toe’ of the
Italian boot), and it is oldest and strongest in the province of
Reggio Calabria where the peninsula almost touches Sicily.
Calabria is Italy’s poorest region, but its mafia has now become
the country’s richest and most powerful. In the 1990s, ’ndrang-
hetisti (as Calabrian Men of Honour are called) earned them-
selves a leading position within the European cocaine market by
dealing directly with South American producer cartels. The
Calabrians have the strongest regime of omerta — of silence and
secrecy. Very few informants ever abandon the organisation’s
‘ranks and give evidence to the state. In recent years, the Calabrian

2
Mafia Brotherhoods

mafia has also been the most successful of the three major crim-
inal organisations at establishing cells outside of its home terri-
tory. It has branches in the centre and north of Italy, and also
abroad: the existence of ’ndrangheta colonies has been confirmed
in six different German cities, as well as in Switzerland, Canada
and Australia. According to a recent report from Italy’s Parlia-
mentary Commission of Inquiry into mafia crime, the ’ndrang-
heta also has a presence in Belgium, Holland, Great Britain,
Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Morocco,
Turkey, Venezuela and the USA. Of all southern Italy’s mafias,
the ’ndrangheta is the youngest and has come the furthest to find
its recent success and notoriety; over the course of time, it has
learned more than any other Italian criminal group. My research
suggests that it absorbed its most important lessons long before
the world was even aware that it existed.
The Duisburg massacre demonstrated with appalling clarity that
Italy, and the many parts of the world where there are mafia colo-
nies, still lives with the consequences of the story to be told here.
So before delving into the past it is essential to introduce its protago-
nists in the present, to sketch three profiles that show succinctly
what mafia history is a history of. Because, even after Duisburg,
the world is still getting used to the idea that Italy has more than
one mafia. There is only a hazy public understanding of how the
camorra and the ’ndrangheta, in particular, are organised.
Blood seeps through the pages of mafia history. In all its many
meanings, blood can also serve to introduce the obscure world
of Italian organised crime today. Blood is perhaps humanity’s
oldest and most elemental symbol, and mafiosi still exploit its
every facet. Blood as violence. Blood as both birth and death.
Blood as a sign of manhood and courage. Blood as kinship and
family. Each of the three mafias belongs to its own category — its
own blood group, as it were — that is distinct but related to the
other two in both its rituals and its organisation.
Rituals first: by taking blood oaths, becoming blood brothers,
Italian gangsters establish a bond between themselves, a bond

Io
 Introduction: Blood brothers

forged in and for violence that is loosened only when life ends.
That bond is almost always exclusively between men. Yet the act
of marriage — symbolised by the shedding of virginal blood — is
also a key ritual in mafia life. For that reason, one of the many
recurring themes in this book will be women, and how mafiosi
have learned to manage them.
And then organisation: each of the mafias has evolved its own
structure. The primary aim of structure is to impose discipline,
because discipline can be a huge competitive advantage in the
turmoil of the underworld. But structure also serves other
purposes, notably that of exploiting the loyalties within blood-
lines, within families.
One thing that the ’ndrangheta in particular has understood
from the beginning of its history is the magic of ritual. And
ritual often comes into play at the beginning of an ‘ndranghet-
ista’s life, as we know from one of the very few autobiographies
written by a member of the Calabria mafia (a multiple murderer)
who has turned state’s evidence (after developing a phobia about
blood so acute that he could not even face a rare steak).
Antonio Zagari’s career in organised crime started two
minutes into January 1, 1954. It began, that is, the very moment
he issued from his mother’s womb. He was a firstborn son, so
his arrival was greeted with particular joy: his father Giacomo
grabbed a wartime heavy machine gun and pumped a stream of
bullets toward the stars over the gulf of Gioia Tauro. The barrage
just gave the midwife time to dab the blood from the baby’s tiny
body, before he was taken by his father and presented to the
members of the clan who were assembled in the house. The
baby was gently laid down before them, and a knife and a large
key were set near his feebly flailing arms. His destiny would be
decided by which he touched first. If it were the key, symbol of
confinement, he would become a sbirro — a cop, a slave of the
law. But if it were the knife, he would live and die by the code
of honour.
It was the knife, much to everyone’s approval. (Although, truth

Il
Mafia Brotherhoods

be told, a helpful adult finger had nudged the blade under the
tiny hand.)
Delighted by his son’s bold career choice, Giacomo Zagari
hoisted the baby in the air, parted his tiny buttocks, and spat
noisily on his arsehole for luck. He would be christened Antonio.
The name came from his grandfather, a brutal criminal who
looked approvingly on at the scene from above a walrus mous-
tache turned a graveolent yellow by the cigar that jutted perma-
nently from between his teeth. Baby Antonio was now ‘half in
and half out’, as the men of the Honoured Society termed it. He
was not yet a full member — he would have to be trained, tested
and observed before that happened. But his path towards a more
than usually gruesome life of crime had been marked out.
Zagari grew up not in Calabria, but near Varese by Italy’s
border with Switzerland, where his father led the local ’ndrang-
heta cell. As a youth, during his father’s occasional jail stints,
Antonio was sent back south to work with his uncles who were
citrus fruit dealers in the rich agricultural plain of Gioia Tauro
on Calabria’s Tyrrhenian Sea coast. He came to admire his
father’s relatives and friends for the respect they commanded
locally, and even for the delicacy of their speech. Before uttering
a vaguely vulgar word like ‘feet’, ‘toilet’, or ‘underpants’, they
would crave forgiveness: ‘Speaking with all due respect . . .’
‘Excuse the phrase . . .. And when they had no alternative but
to utter genuine profanities such as ‘policeman’, ‘magistrate’, or
‘courtroom’, their sentences would topple over themselves with
pre-emptive apologies.

I have to say that — for the sake of preserving all those

present, and the fine and honoured faces of all our good
friends, speaking with all due respect, and excusing the
phrase — when the Carabinieri [military police] .. .

As the son of a boss, Antonio Zagari’s criminal apprenticeship

was a short one. He took a few secret messages into prison, hid

I2
 Introduction: Blood brothers

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The ‘social rules’. One of many pages of instructions for ’ndrangheta

initiation rituals that were found in June 1987 in the hideout of Giuseppe
Chila. Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, the three Spanish knights who
(according to criminal legend) were the founders of the mafia, camorra and
*ndrangheta, are mentioned.

13
Mafia Brotherhoods

a few weapons, and soon, at age seventeen, he was ready to make

the passage into full membership.
One day his ‘friends’, as he termed them, copied out a few
pages of the Rules and Social Prescriptions he was required to
learn by heart before being inducted. It was all, he later recalled,
like the catechism children have to memorise before Confirmation
and First Communion.
The ‘catechism’ also included lessons in ’ndrangheta history.
And having committed the deeds of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcag-
nosso to memory, Zagari was deemed ready to undergo the most
elaborate initiation rite used by any mafia. He was shown into
an isolated, darkened room and introduced to the senior members
present, who were all arrayed in a circle. For the time being, he
had to remain silent, excluded from the group.

‘Are you comfortable my dear comrades?’, the boss began.

‘Very comfortable. On what?’
‘On the social rules.’
‘Very comfortable.’
“Then, in the name of the organised and faithful society,
I baptise this place as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and
Carcagnosso baptised it, who baptised it with iron and
chains.

The boss then passed round the room, relieving each *ndrang-
hetista of the tools of his trade, and pronouncing the same
formula at each stop.

In the name of our most severe Saint Michael the Arch-

angel, who carried a set of scales in one hand and a sword
in the other, I confiscate your weaponry.

The scene was now set, and the Chief Cudgel could intone his
preamble to the ceremony proper.

14
 Introduction: Blood brothers

The society is a ball that goes wandering around the world,

as cold as ice, as hot as fire, and as fine as silk. Let us
swear, handsome comrades, that anyone who betrays the
society will pay with five or six dagger thrusts to the chest,
as the social rules prescribe. Silver chalice, consecrated
host, with words of humility I form the society.

Another ‘thank you’ was sounded, as the *ndranghetisti moved

closer together and linked arms.
Three times the boss then asked his comrades whether Zagari
was ready for acceptance into the Honoured Society. When he had
received the same affirmative reply three times, the circle opened,
and a space was made for the newcomer immediately to the boss’s
right. The boss then took a knife, and cut a cross into the initiate’s
left thumb so that blood from the wound could drip onto a playing
card sized picture of the Archangel Michael. The boss then ripped
off the Archangel’s head and burned the rest in a candle flame,
symbolising the utter annihilation of all traitors.
Only then could Zagari open his mouth to take the ’ndrangheta
oath.

I swear before the organised and faithful society, repre-

sented by our honoured and wise boss and by all the
members, to carry out all the duties for which I am respon-
sible and all those that are imposed on me — if necessary
even with my blood.

The boss then kissed the new member on both cheeks and set
out for him the rules of honour. There followed another surreal
incantation to wind the ceremony up.

Oh, beautiful humility! You who have covered me in roses

and flowers and carried me to the island of Favignana,
there to teach me the first steps. Italy, Germany and Sicily
once waged a great war. Much blood was shed for the

i)
Mafia Brotherhoods

honour of the society. And this blood, gathered in a ball,

goes wandering round the world, as cold as ice, as hot
as fire, and as fine as silk.

The ’*ndranghetisti could at last take up arms again — in the name

of Osso, Mastrosso, Carcagnosso, and the Archangel Michael
—and resume their day-to-day criminal activity.
These solemn ravings make the ’ndrangheta seem like a version
of the Scouts invented by the boys from The Lord of the Flies
based on a passing encounter with Monty Python and the Holy
Grail. It would all verge on the comic if the result were not so
much death and misery. Yet there is no incompatibility between
the creepy fantasy world of ’ndrangheta ritual, and the brutal
reality of killings and cocaine deals.
Initiation rituals are even more important to the ’ndrangheta
than the story of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso that helps
give it an ancient and noble aura. At whatever stage in life they
are performed, mafia rites of affiliation are a baptism, to use
Antonio Zagari’s word. Like a baptism, such ceremonies drama-
tise a change in identity; they draw a line in blood between one
state of being and another. No wonder, then, that because of
the rituals they undergo, ’ndranghetisti consider themselves a
breed apart. A Calabrian mafioso’s initiation is a special day
indeed.
15 August 2007, in Duisburg, was one such special day. The
morning after the massacre, German police searched the victims’
mutilated corpses for clues. They found a partly burned image
of the Archangel Michael in the pocket of the eighteen-year-old
boy who had just been celebrating his birthday.
The mafia of Sicily, now known as Cosa Nostra, also has its
myths and ceremonies. For example, many mafiosi hold (or at
least held until recently) the deluded belief that their organisation
began as a medieval brotherhood of caped avengers called the
Beati Paoli. The Sicilian mafia uses an initiation ritual that deploys
the symbolism of blood in a similar but simpler fashion to the

16
 Introduction: Blood brothers

*ndrangheta. The same darkened room. The same assembly of

members, who typically sit round a table with a gun and a knife
at its centre. The aspirant’s ‘godfather’ explains the rules to him,
and then pricks his trigger finger and sheds a little of his blood
on a holy image — usually the Madonna of the Annunciation.
The image is burned in the neophyte’s hands as the oath is taken:
‘If I betray Cosa Nostra, may my flesh burn like this holy woman.’
Blood once shed can never be restored. Matter once burned can
never be repaired. When one enters the Sicilian mafia, one enters
for life.
As well as being a vital part of the internal life of the Calab-
rian and Sicilian mafias, initiation rites are very important histor-
ical evidence. The earliest references to the ’ndrangheta ritual
date from the late nineteenth century. The Sicilian mafia’s version
is older: the first documentary evidence emerged in 1876. The
rituals surface from the documentation again and again there-
after, leaving bloody fingerprints through history, exposing Italian
organised crime’s DNA. They also tell us very clearly what
happened to that evidence once it came into the hands of the
Italian authorities: it was repeatedly ignored, undervalued and
suppressed.
Rituals are evidence of historical change, too. The oldest
admission ceremony of all belonged to the Neapolitan camorra.
Once upon a time, the camorra also signalled a young member’s
new status with the shedding of blood. In the 1850s, a recruit
usually took an oath over crossed knives, and then had to have
a dagger fight, either with a camorrista or with another aspiring
member. Often the blade would be wrapped tightly in rags or
string, leaving only the point exposed: too much blood, and the
duel might stop being a symbolic exercise in male bonding, and
start being a battle. When the first hit was registered, the fight
was declared over, and the new affiliate received both the embraces
of the other camorristi, and the most junior rank in the Honoured
Society’s organisational hierarchy.
Today’s camorra bosses tend not to put their recruits through

17
Mafia Brotherhoods

formal initiation ceremonies or oaths. The traditions have

disappeared. The Neapolitan camorra is no longer a sworn sect,
an Honoured Society. In fact, as we shall see later, the Honoured
Society of Naples died out in 1912 in bizarre and utterly
Neapolitan circumstances.
The camorra that has emerged since 1912 is not a single
association. Instead it is a vast pullulating world of gangs. They
form, split, descend into vicious feuds, and re-emerge in new
alliances only to then be annihilated in some new internecine
war or police roundup. The Neapolitan underworld is frighteningly
unstable. Whereas a Sicilian capo has a decent chance of seeing
his grandchildren set out on their criminal careers, a senior
camorrista is lucky if he lives to forty.
The camorra’s lack of formal structure and ritual has not
stopped its most successful clans from controlling vast swathes
of Campanian territory, from turning entire city blocks into
fortified police no-go zones and drug hypermarkets, from making
millions from the trade in bootleg DVDs and designer handbags.
It has not stopped them devastating the landscape of Campania
with their lucrative trade in fly-tipped waste. Or from infiltrating
the national construction industry and dealing internationally in
narcotics and weapons.
Camorra clans are nonetheless organised: together they form
‘the System’, as some on the inside call it. At the centre of the
System in each area of the city and its hinterland is a charismatic
boss: protector and punisher. Below him there are ranks, and
specialised roles — like zone chiefs, assassins, drug wholesalers
— who are all chosen and nominated by the boss, and who will
almost invariably live and die with him. Like the other mafias,
the camorra clans redistribute some of the profits of their crimes,
often pay wages to their troops, and set aside funds for those in
prison. ;
Blood, in the sense of kinship, is now the glue that holds the
most fearsome camorra clans together. But the individual clans
tend not to be led by a Grand Old Man. The core of any camorra

18
 Introduction: Blood brothers

group is usually a cluster of relatives — brothers, cousins, in-laws

—all roughly the same age. Around them there are friends, neigh-
bours, and more relatives.
So, Neapolitan organised crime has seen a great deal of
change since the days when the camorra was an Honoured
Society. Yet the veins of tradition have never been entirely
severed. For one thing, camorristi have an enduring weakness
for gangster bling. Gold accessories and expensive shirts have
been in evidence since the nineteenth century. Now there are
also showy cars and motorbikes. The Neapolitan boss’s bike
of choice was until recently the Honda Dominator. The point
of all this conspicuous consumption, then and now, is to adver-
tise power: to proclaim territorial dominion, and to be a walking
symbol of success to hangers-on.
Cosa Nostra’s bosses are generally dowdy compared to the
camorra chiefs of Naples, and they spend much more of their
time on the kind of organisational formalities that can have a
lethal significance in their world.
Each boss (or, strictly speaking, ‘representative’) of the Sicilian
mafia presides over a cell known as a Family. By no means everyone
in a Family is related. Indeed, Cosa Nostra often invokes a rule
designed to prevent clusters of relatives from becoming too influ-
ential within a Family: no more than two brothers may become
members at any one time, so that the boss can’t pack the clan
with his own kin.
The structure of each Family is simple. The representative is
flanked by an underboss and a consigliere or adviser. The ordinary
members, known as soldiers, are organised into groups of ten.
Each of these groups reports to a capodecina — a ‘boss of ten’
— who in turn reports to the boss.
Above its base in the Families, Cosa Nostra is shaped like a
pyramid. Three mafia Families in adjoining territories form
another tier of the organisation’s structure, the mandamento
(precinct), presided over by a capomandamento (precinct boss).
‘This precinct boss has a seat on the Commission, which combines

19
 COMMISSIONE PROVINCIALE
The Commission rules over the Province
of Palermo. There are Commissions for
other provinces. At the head of the
Commission sits the capo de/ capi

pg
MANDAMENTO MANDAMENTO MANDAMENTO MANDAMENTO
Each Mandamento A capomandamento
(‘Precinct’) (‘precinct boss’) is
comprises three in charge of each
Famiglie Mandamento
(‘Families’)

FAMIGLIA FAMIGLIA FAMIGLIA

The boss of a Family is formally
known as the rappresentante
(‘representative’). The underboss
is the vicerappresentante.
Consigliere
(‘adviser’)

DECINA DECINA DECINA

(Ten’.) Capodecina
The Decine are the (‘head of ten’)
mafia’s ‘platoons’.

Soldati
(‘soldiers’)

THE STRUCTURE OF COSA NOSTRA

As first described by Tommaso Buscetta in 1984

20
 Introduction: Blood brothers

the functions of a parliament, a high court, and a chamber of

commerce for Cosa Nostra in each of Sicily’s four most mafia-
infested provinces. Presiding over them all, at the very apex of
the mafia pyramid, there is a capo di tutti i capi — the ‘boss of
all bosses’. The capo di tutti i capi is invariably from the province
of Palermo, the island’s capital, because about half of Cosa
Nostra’s manpower, and about half of its Families, are based in
the Palermo area.

So much for the diagram. But in the underworld, more even than
in the upper world inhabited by law-abiding citizens, power is
invested in people, and not in the nameplates on office doors.
Comparisons between a mafia boss and the managing director
of a capitalist enterprise are not only trite, they completely fail
to capture the acutely cagey and political world in which mafiosi
operate.
Cosa Nostra has gone through phases of greater and lesser
coordination; different bosses have had different styles of leader-
ship, and have had all manner of external limits placed on their
power. Confusion, double-dealing, mutual suspicion, and civil
war have been constants in the mafia from the get-go. The cast
of character-types is vast. There are certainly party leaders, policy-
makers, reformers and legislative tinkerers. But also a good many
rebels, grey eminences, impatient tycoons, young Turks, and
isolationists. And of course everyone in the mafia is also both a
conspirator, and a near-paranoid conspiracy theorist. All of these
characters may choose to twist the mafia’s precedents, traditions
and rules; they may even trample and deride them. But no boss,
_ however powerful, can do so without calculating the: political
price.
One of the big issues in the history of the Sicilian mafia is
just how old the organisation’s pyramidal structure is. Some of
the most disquieting recent research has shown that it is a lot
older than we thought until only a couple of years ago. The
-mafia would not be the mafia without its inborn drive to formalise

21
Mafia Brotherhoods

and coordinate its activities. As I write, to the best of our knowl-

edge, the Palermo Commission of Cosa Nostra has not met since
1993, a fact that is symptomatic of the worst crisis in the organi-
sation’s century and a half of history. Quite whether today’s crisis
turns into a terminal decline depends, in part, on how well Italy
absorbs the lessons of the mafia’s history, lessons that spell out
the Sicilian mafia’s astonishing power to regenerate itself.
In Calabria, just as in Sicily, there is a fraught relationship
between the gangland rulebook and the expediency determined
by the sheer chaos of criminal life.
When I began writing this book, there was a consensus in both
the law courts and the criminology textbooks that the ’ndrangheta’s
structure was very different to Cosa Nostra’s. The ’ndrangheta
is a federal organisation, it was said, a loose fellowship of local
gangs.
Then in July 2010 the police and Carabinieri arrested more
than three hundred men, including the eighty-year-old Domenico
Oppedisano, who investigators claim, was elected to the ’ndrang-
heta’s highest office in August 2009. Since their arrest, Oppedisano
and most of his fellows have availed themselves of the right to
remain silent. So we cannot know what defence they will mount
against the charges. Nor can we know whether the courts will
decide that those charges have substance. Operation Crime, as
the investigation is called, is at its very early stages. Yet whatever
its final result, it constitutes a lesson in humility for anyone trying
to write about the secret world of Italian gangsterism. At any
moment, historical certainties can be overturned by new police-
work, or by discoveries in the many unexplored archives.
The magistrates directing Operation Crime allege that
Oppedisano’s official title is capocrimine, or ‘chief of the crime’.
The ‘Crime’ or ‘Great Crime’, which ’ndranghetisti also refer to
as the ‘Province’, is thought to be the ’ndrangheta’s supreme
coordinating body. It is sub-divided into three mandamenti, or
precincts, covering the three zones of the province of Reggio
Calabria.

22
 Introduction: Blood brothers

Many newspapers in Italy and abroad that covered Operation

Crime portrayed the Great Crime as the ’ndrangheta version of
the Sicilian mafia Commission, and Domenico Oppedisano as a
Calabrian capo di tutti i capi: the peak of the ’ndrangheta
pyramid, as it were. But that image does not correspond to what
the magistrates are claiming. Instead they paint a picture of
Oppedisano as a master of ceremonies, the speaker of an
assembly, a wise old judge whose job is to interpret the rules.
The head of crime’s responsibilities relate to procedure and poli-
tics, not to business.
But then procedure and politics can easily have fatal conse-
quences in Italian gangland. The Great Crime has real power: it
may be based in the province of Reggio Calabria, but ’ndrang-
hetisti across the world are answerable to it, according to the
investigating magistrates. In the spring of 2008, the boss, or
‘general master’, of the ’ndrangheta’s colonies in the Lombardy
region (the northern heart of the Italian economy) decided to
declare independence from the Great Crime. In July of that year,
the police bugged a conversation in which one senior boss
reported to his men that the Great Crime had decided to ‘sack’
the insubordinate general master. A few days later the sacking
took effect, when two men in motorbike jackets shot the
Lombardy boss four times just as he was getting up from his
usual table at a bar in a small town near Milan. Shortly after-
wards, the Carabinieri secretly filmed a meeting at which the
Lombardy chiefs raised their hands in unanimous approval of
their new general master; needless to say, he was the Great Crime’s
nominee.
It seems that the textbooks on the ’ndrangheta may have to
be rewritten. And historians will have to take up a new prompt
for research. My own findings suggest that the links — procedural,
political and business links — between the ’ndrangheta’s local
cells have been there right from the beginning.
Despite all the new information about the Great Crime, much
-of what we knew about the lower reaches of the ’ndrangheta’s

23
 LA PROVINCIA / IL CRIMINE
The Province (aka Crime or Great Crime) is a
supervisory body headed by the capocrimine
(boss of the crime)

MANDAMENTO CITTA’ | MANDAMENTO IONICO MANDAMENTO OTHER BRANCHES

The three Mandamenti TIRRENICO OF THE 'NDRANGHETA
(‘Precincts’) rule areas Centred on the Plain of NATIONALLY AND
in the Province of Gioia Tauro INTERNATIONALLY
Reggio Calabria: the
city, and the lonian
and Tyrrhenian coasts.

LOCALE LOCALE LOCALE

LOCALE SOCIETA’ MAGGIORE SOCIETA’ MINORE

The ‘Locals’ into which each ‘The ‘Major Society’ is run by The ‘Minor Society’, the
Mandamento is divided govern officers such as: more junior compartment
territory. For reasons of Capolocale (boss of the local) of the Locale, also has
secrecy, each Locale is sub- Contabile (bookkeeper) its officers.
divided into two compartments: — Capocrimine (head of crime)

a
'NDRINA ‘NDRINA
The ‘ndrine are the cells of
the ‘ndrangheta organization.
They are based around
families, and dominated
by a patriarch.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE 'NDRANGHETA

(Source: ‘Operazione Crimine’, summer 2010.)

24
 Introduction: Blood brothers

DOI Padrino Members of the

The ‘gifts’ (i.e. ranks) (‘godfather’) ‘ndrangheta have to
I that mark the status of attain these ‘flowers’
an ‘ndranghetista. to be eligible for the
They are also known as most senior positions,
FIOR! (‘flowers’). | Trequartino
Bone reveereesrnneeneuesenuverecsensnstervcageestaretresaesesrrencedestesreversneneasnnrre es eeese snes

Vangelista ‘Ndranghetisti have

(‘gospelist’) to reach these doti
to become officials in
Santista (‘saintist’) the Major Society

Camorrista di sgarro
(‘camorrista who is
up for a fight’, a.k.a. ‘Ndranghetisti with
sgarrista) these ranks belong to
the Minor Society

Giovane d’onore Giovani d’onore are

(‘honoured youth’) being prepared to
enter the organisation.

25
Mafia Brotherhoods

structure remains valid. The ’ndrangheta of today is built around

family, in that a kinship group forms the backbone of each unit,
or ’ndrina. (The term ’ndrina may well originate from the word
malandrina, which used to refer to the special cell.in prison
reserved for gangsters.) The boss of an ’ndrina, often called a
capobastone (‘chief cudgel’), is typically a father with a good
number of male children. Unlike his peers in Cosa Nostra, the
chief cudgel can bring as many boys into the ’ndrangheta as he
is able to sire. Clustered around the boss and his kin are other
families, often bound in by blood and/or marriage. Accordingly,
each ’ndrina takes its name from the surname(s) of its leading
dynasty or dynasties, such as the Pelle-Vottari and the Strangio-
Nirta — respectively the victims and perpetrators of the massacre
in Duisburg.
One or more ’ndrine report up to a locale or ‘Local’, whose
boss is known as the capolocale, and who is assisted by two
other senior officers. The contabile (‘bookkeeper’) handles the
gang’s common fund, or what ’ndranghetisti rather quaintly call
the valigetta (‘valise’). The capo crimine (‘head of crime’) is in
charge of surveillance and day-to-day criminal activity. When
the time comes, the head of crime also acts as the clan’s Minister
of War. For extra security the Local is divided into two compart-
ments, insulated from one another: the lower ranking ’ndrang-
hetisti are grouped in the Minor Society, and the higher ones in
the Major Society.
So far, so (relatively) straightforward. But at this point the
*ndrangheta’s peculiar fondness for arcane rules and procedures
takes over again. In Cosa Nostra, holding office is the only official
measure of a Man of Honour’s status. In the ’ndrangheta, if a
member is to hold one of the official positions of power in a
Local, a Precinct or in the Great Crime, then he has to have
reached a certain degree of seniority. Seniority is measured in
doti, meaning ‘qualities’ or ‘gifts’, which are the ranks in the
organisation’s membership hierarchy. Sometimes, more poetically,
the ranks are called fiori — ‘flowers’. The offices in the Local are

26
 Introduction: Blood brothers

temporary appointments, whereas the flowers are permanent

marks of status. As he steals, extorts and kills, an ’ndranghetista
wins new flowers. Every new flower means yet another protracted
induction ceremony, and after it a greater share of power and
secrets. The young initiate starts at the bottom as a picciotto
d’onore (‘honoured lad’) and ascends through a series of other
flowers like camorrista and camorrista di sgarro (which means
something like ‘camorrist who is up for a fight’) and then on to
the more senior flowers, such as santista, vangelista and padrino
(or saintist, gospelist, and godfather).
As if this were not complicated enough, ’ndranghetisti disagree
about how many flowers there are, and what rights and respon-
sibilities they bring with them. There also seems to have been
floral inflation in recent years: inventing new badges of status is
a cheap way to resolve disputes. For instance gospelist (so called
because the initiation ritual for this flower involves swearing on
a bible) seems to have been created recently.
None of this is harmless etiquette. The rituals and organisa-
tional structures are a liturgical apparatus that is intended to
turn young men into professional delinquents, and transform a
mere life of crime into a calling in savagery. A calling that, despite
the antique origins its members boast, is only a century and a
half old. Only as old, that is, as Italy itself.

27
VIVA LA PATRIA!
THE CAMORRA,
1851-1861
How fo extract gold from fleas

Sigismondo Castromediano, Duke of Morciano, Marquis of

Caballino, lord of seven baronies, sat on the ground with his
right calf resting on an anvil. Rangy and blue-eyed, he seemed
like an entirely distinct order of being from the Neapolitan jailers
who stood before him under a lean-to roof, toying with their
ironmongery. Next to the Duke, his fellow patriot Nicola
Schiavoni sat in the same undignified position, with the same
look of dread on his face.
One of the jailers grabbed the Duke’s foot and slipped a
stirrup-shaped metal shackle over it. He then enclosed the ankle
entirely by pushing a rivet through the small holes at each end
of the shackle; sandwiched between them was the last link of a
heavy chain. Laughing and singing, the jailer smashed the rivet
flat with blows that cou!d have splintered bones.
The Duke flinched repeatedly, and was assailed by the jailers’
mocking cheers: ‘Give ’em some more! They’re enemies of the
king. They wanted to get their hands on our women and our
property.’
Ordered to stand, Castromediano and Schiavoni lifted their
fetters for the first time: some ten kilos of chain in three and a
half metres of oblong links. For both of them, this moment
marked the beginning of a prison sentence of thirty years in irons
for conspiring against the government of the Kingdom of Naples,
one of the many states into which the Italian peninsula was
divided. The two prisoners embraced before mustering a show
of their undaunted belief in the sacred cause of Italy: ‘we kissed
those chains tenderly’, the Duke wrote, ‘as if they were our
brides’.

31
Mafia Brotherhoods

The guards were briefly taken aback. But they soon got on
with the rituals that marked admission to the Castello del
Carmine, one of the worst prisons in the Kingdom of Naples.
Civilian clothes were replaced by uniforms comprising brown
breeches and a red tunic, both in the same rough wool. Heads
were scraped bald and bloody with a sickle-shaped razor. Into
each pair of hands were thrust a rag-stuffed palliasse, a donkey-
hair blanket, and a bowl.
It was sunset by the time the Duke and his companion were led
across the prison yard and shoved through the door of the dungeon.
What they saw inside, Castromediano recalled, was a sight fit
to ‘annihilate the most generous soul, the most steadfast heart’.
It could have been a sewer: a long room with a low ceiling, its
floor set with sharp stones, its tiny windows high and heavily
barred, its air sick and clammy. A stench like rotting meat
emanated from the filth smeared everywhere, and from the figures
of misery skulking in the half-light.
As the new arrivals were nervously looking for a place to lay
their mattresses, another shackled pair approached from among
the crowd. One was tall and handsome, with a swagger in his
walk. He was dressed in black plush trousers, with polished
buttons at the haunches, and a brightly coloured belt; his
matching waistcoat displayed a watch and chain. With elaborate
civility, he addressed the two patriots.

Well, well, gentlemen! Fortune has smiled on you. All of

us here have been waiting to honour you. Long live Italy!
Long live Liberty! We camorristi, who share your sad and
honourable fate, hereby exempt you from any camorra
obligation . . . Gentlemen, take heart! I swear by God
that no one in this place will touch a hair on your head.
I am the boss of the camorra here, and.so I’m the only
one in charge. Absolutely everyone is at my beck and call,
including the commander and his jailers.

32
 How to extract gold from fleas

Within an hour the new prisoners learned two stark lessons: that
the camorra boss had made no hollow boasts about his power;
and that his promise to exempt them from any ‘camorra obliga-
tion’ was utterly worthless. The camorrista did get them back
their purses, which had been confiscated on arrival at the prison.
But that courtesy was a self-interested one: it meant that he could
cajole the bewildered Duke into paying an exorbitant sum for
revolting food.
That first exaction was crushing. Castromediano visualised his
future as an endless ordeal by protection racket, and found
himself contemplating suicide.

a
The Duke of Castromediano was clapped in irons on 4 June,
1851. The scene is true but also irresistibly metaphorical for it
was in prison, in the mid-1800s, that Italy was first chained to
the hoodlums that have hampered its every step, ever since.
The camorra was born in prison. By the time the Duke of
Castromediano entered the Castello del Carmine, gang rule behind
bars had been a fact of life in southern Italy for centuries. Under
the ancien régime it was easier and cheaper to devolve day-to-day
control of the prisons to the toughest inmates. Then in the 1800s
the prison extortionists turned themselves into a sworn secret
society and gained a foothold in the world beyond the dungeons.
The story of how that happened is thick with intrigue, but in
essence it involves picking out every nuance and irony in the
opening encounter between Duke Castromediano and the camor-
rista. For now, that story can be summarised in one word: Italy.
In 1851, what we now call Italy was still only a ‘geographical
expression’ rather than a state; it was divided between one foreign
power (Austria), two Dukedoms, a Grand Dukedom, two King-
doms, and one Papal State. The biggest of those territories was
also the southernmost: the Kingdom of Naples, or the Kingdom
‘of the Two Sicilies, to use its official name.

33
Mafia Brotherhoods

From the Kingdom’s capital, Naples, a King born of the

Bourbon dynasty reigned over the southern Italian mainland and
the island of Sicily. Like most princes in Italy, the Bourbons of
Naples were haunted by the memory of what had happened to
them in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. In
1805 Napoleon deposed the Bourbons and put his own nominees
on the throne. French rule brought a whole series of innovations
in the way the Kingdom was run. Out went feudalism, and in
came private property. Out went a messy assemblage of local
customs, baronial and church jurisdictions, and public ordi-
nances: in came a new code of civil law and the beginnings of
a police force. The southern part of the Italian peninsula began
to resemble a modern, centralised state.
In 1815 Napoleon was finally vanquished. When the Bourbons
returned to power, they caught on to the big advantages that the
French-style reforms could have for securing their own authority.
But the theory and the practice of modern administration were
hard to reconcile. The throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
was still shaky. There was widespread opposition to the new,
more centralised system. Moreover, the French Revolution had
not only introduced continental Europe to new ways of admin-
istering a state, it had also spread volatile ideas about constitu-
tional government, the nation, and even democracy.
Duke Castromediano was one of a generation of young men
who dedicated themselves to building an Italian Patria, a Father-
land that would embody the values of constitutional government,
liberty, and the rule of law. After trying and failing to turn those
values into a political reality during the revolts of 1848-49, many
patriots like Castromediano paid for their beliefs by being hurled
into the dungeon realm of the camorristi.
Such treatment of political prisoners, of gentlemen prisoners,
soon became a scandal. In 1850 a highly strung Member of the
British Parliament, William Ewart Gladstone — the future Grand
Old Man — began a long sojourn in Naples for the sake of his
daughter’s health. Gladstone was drawn into local issues by the

34
 How to extract gold from fleas

plight of men like Castromediano. Early in 1851 the authorities

in Naples unwisely allowed Gladstone to visit some of the city’s
jails. He was horrified by the ‘beastly filth’ he witnessed. Here
political detainees and common criminals of the worst kind
mingled indiscriminately, and without any kind of supervision.
The prisoners ran the place themselves.

They are a self-governed community, the main authority

being that of the gamorristi, the men of most celebrity
among them for audacious crime.

Gladstone’s unfamiliar spelling did not change the truth of what

he wrote. Or indeed the polemical force of his argument: no sooner
had he emerged from the Neapolitan prisons than he unleashed
two open letters condemning the rule of the Bourbon King as ‘the
negation of God, erected into a system of Government’. Camor-
risti were now a diplomatic stick with which to beat the Bourbons.
Any government that farmed out the management of its prisons
to violent thugs surely did not deserve to stand. Courtesy of Glad-
stone, Italy’s organised criminal gangs became what they have
never ceased to be since: a detonator of political controversy.
The international sympathy aroused by the jailed patriot
martyrs came to play an important role in the almost miraculous
sequence of events that finally turned Italy into a Patria, or
something like it. In 1858 the Prime Minister of the northern
Italian Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia struck a secret deal with
France to drive Austria out of northern Italy by force. The
following year, after appalling bloodshed at the battles of
Magenta and Solferino, Piedmont-Sardinia absorbed the former
Austrian domain of Lombardy. Piedmont’s military success trig-
gered uprisings further south, in the various central Dukedoms,
as well as in part of the Pope’s territory. Much of the north of
the peninsula had now become Italy. Europe held its breath and
awaited the next move.
Then in May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi launched one of

35
Mafia Brotherhoods

idealism’s greatest ever feats when he landed at Marsala, at Sicily’s

furthest western shore, with just over 1,000 red-shirted patriotic
volunteers. After his first touch-and-go victories, the momentum
of revolution began to build behind Garibaldi’s expedition. He
soon conquered the Sicilian capital Palermo, and then turned his
growing army eastwards to invade the Italian mainland. In early
September, he entered Naples. Italy would henceforth, for the
first time in history, be one country.
With Italy unified, the patriotic prisoners of the Kingdom of
the Two Sicilies could now convert their long sufferings into
political credibility. They travelled north, to the Piedmontese
capital of Turin at the foot of the Alps, and joined the new
country’s first national elite.
The tale of the Risorgimento, of how Italy was unified, has
been told countless times. Much less well-known is its sinister
subplot: the emergence of the camorra. Most of the multiple
threads of that subplot were set in motion in the dungeons where
the patriots met the camorristi. So the patriotic prisoners are our
most important witnesses to the camorra’s early history. Not
only that: some of them stepped bodily into the historical fray,
as both heroes and villains.

a
A united Italy was still a formless dream when Duke Sigismondo
Castromediano was clapped in irons in 1851. But-as his traumatic
first hours in prison turned into days, months, and years, he
found sources of resilience to add to his political dreams: the
companionship of his fellows in degradation; but also a deter-
mination to understand his enemy. For the Duke of Castrome-
diano, making sense of the camorra was a matter of life and
death. :
His discoveries should be ours, since they still hold good today.
In prison, Castromediano was able to observe the early camorra
in laboratory conditions as it perfected a criminal methodology

36
 How to extract gold from fleas

destined to infiltrate and subvert the very nation that Duke

Castromediano suffered so much to create.
Castromediano began his study of the camorra in the most
down to earth way: he followed the money. And the thing that
most struck him about what he called the camorra’s ‘taxes’ was
that they were levied on absolutely every aspect of a prisoner’s
life, down to the last crust of bread and the most miserable shred
of clothing.
At one end of most dungeons in the Kingdom was a tiny altar
to the Madonna. The first tax extracted from a newly arrived
prisoner was often claimed as a payment for ‘oil for the
Madonna’s lamp’ — a lamp that rarely, if ever, burned. Prisoners
even had to rent the patch of ground where they slept. In prison
slang, this sleeping place was called a pizzo. Perhaps not
coincidentally, the same word today means a bribe or a protection
payment. Anyone reluctant to pay the pizzo was treated to
punishments that ranged from insults, through beatings and
razor slashes, to murder.
Duke Castromediano witnessed one episode that illustrates
how the camorra’s prison funding system involved something far
more profound than brute robbery — and something much more
sinister than taxation. On one occasion a camorrista, who had
just eaten ‘a succulent soup and a nice hunk of roast’, threw a
turnip into the face of a man whose meagre ration of bread and
broth he had confiscated in lieu of a bribe. Insults were hurled
along with the vegetable.

Here you go, a turnip! That should be enough to keep

you alive — at least for today. Tomorrow the Devil will
take care of you.

The camorra turned the needs and rights of their fellow prisoners
(like their bread or their pizzo) into favours. Favours that had to
be paid for, one way or another. The camorra system was based
on the power to grant those favours and to take them away.

a7
Mafia Brotherhoods

Presidente di tribunale . .
Giudice .

Ispettore di p. s.

Pubblico ministero

Carabiniere

Questurino
Furto

Questore

Caposocieta .
Capintrito
Camorrista
Contajuolo
Picciuotto
Giovinotto onorato
Palo
O
tro
CHT
NMS
we

Camorra code book. Reportedly confiscated from a prison camorrista who

kept it secreted in his anus, this secret table explains the symbols camorristi
used in messages they smuggled in and out of prison. From a nineteenth-
century study of the Honoured Society of Naples.

38
 How to extract gold from fleas

Or even to throw them in people’s faces. The real cruelty of the

turnip-throwing episode is that the camorrista was bestowing a
favour that he could just as easily have withheld.
Duke Castromediano had an acute eye for episodes that drama-
tised the underlying structures of camorra power in the prisons.
He once overheard two prisoners arguing about a debt. There
were only a few pennies at stake. But before long, a camorrista
intervened. ‘What right have you got to have an argument, unless
the camorra has given you permission?’ With that, he seized the
disputed coins.
Any prisoner who asserted a basic right — like having an argu-
ment or breathing air — was insulting the camorra’s authority.
And any prisoner who tried to appeal for justice to an authority
beyond the prison was committing treason. The Duke met one
man who had had his hands plunged into boiling water for daring
to write to the government about prison conditions.
Much of what Castromediano learned about the camorra came
from his time in a prison on Procida, one of the islands that,
like its beautiful sisters Capri and Ischia,isposted at the mouth
of the Bay of Naples. When he later looked back at his time on
Procida, the Duke unleashed an undigested anger.

The biggest jail in the southern provinces. The queen of

jails, the camorra’s honey pot, and the fattest feeding
trough for the guard commanders and anyone else who
has a hand in supporting the camorra; the great latrine
where, by force of nature, society’s most abominable scum
percolates.

It was in Procida prison’s own latrine, which fed straight into

the sea, that the Duke came across another crucial facet of the
camorra system. One day he noticed two human figures sketched
in coal on the wall. The first had wide, goggling eyes and a silent
how] of rage issuing from his twisted mouth. With his right hand
he was thrusting a dagger into the belly of the second, who was

39
Mafia Brotherhoods

writhing in excruciating pain as he keeled over. Each figure had

his initials on the wall above his head. Below the scene was
written, ‘Judged by the Society’, followed by the very date on
which the Duke had come across it.
Castromediano already knew that the Society or Honoured
Society was the name that the camorra gave itself. But the doodle
on the wall was obscure. ‘What does that mean?’ he asked, with
his usual candour, of the first person he came across.

It means that today is a day of justice against a traitor.

Either the victim drawn there is already in the chapel,
breathing his last. Or within a few hours the penal colony
on Procida will have one less inmate, and hell will have
one more.

The prisoner explained how the Society had reached a decision,

how its bosses had made a ruling, and how all members except
for the victim had been informed of what was about to happen.
No one, of course, had divulged this open secret.
Then, just as he was warning the Duke to keep quiet, from
the next corridor there came a loud curse, followed by a long
and anguished cry that was gradually smothered, followed in
turn by a clinking of chains and the sound of hurried
footsteps.
‘The murder has happened,’ was all that the other prisoner
said.
In a panic, the Duke bolted for his own cell. But he had hardly
turned the first corner when he stumbled upon the victim, three
stab wounds to his heart. The only other person there was the
man the victim was chained to. The man’s attitude would remain
seared into Castromediano’s memory. Perhaps he was the killer.
At the very least he was an eyewitness. Yet he gazed down at the
corpse with ‘an indescribable combination of stupidity and
ferocity’ as he waited calmly for the guards to bring the hammer
and anvil they needed to separate him from his dead companion.

40
 How to extract gold from fleas

Castromediano called what he had witnessed a ‘simulacrum’

of justice; this was murder in the borrowed clothes of capital
punishment. The camorra not only killed the traitor. More impor-
tantly, it sought to make that killing legitimate, ‘legal’. There
was a trial with a judge, witnesses, and advocates for the prosecu-
tion and the defence. The verdict and sentence that issued from
the trial were made public — albeit on the walls of a latrine rather
than in a court proclamation. The camorra also sought a twisted
form of democratic approval for its judicial decisions, by making
sure that everyone bar the victim knew what was about to take
place.
The camorra courts did not reach their decisions in the name
of justice. Rather, their lodestar value was honour. Honour, in
the sense that the Society understood it (a sense that Castrome-
diano called an ‘aberration of the human mind’), meant that an
affiliate had to protect his fellows at all costs, and share his
fortunes with them. Disputes had to be resolved in the approved
fashion, usually by a dagger duel; oaths and pacts had to be
respected, orders obeyed, and punishment accepted when it was
due.
Despite all the talk of honour, the reality of camorra life was
far from harmonious, as Castromediano recalled.

Relations between those accursed men seethed with argu-

ments, hatred, and envy. Sudden murders and horrible
acts of vengeance were perpetrated every day.

A murder committed as a vendetta was a murder to defend one’s

personal honour, and as such it could easily be sanctioned by
the camorra’s shadow judicial system. Quite whether a vendetta
was legitimate or not depended partly on the Society’s rules and
legal precedents, which were transmitted orally from one genera-
tion of criminals to the next. More importantly, it depended on
whether the vendetta was committed by a camorrista fearsome
enough to impose his will. In the prison camorra, even more

41
Mafia Brotherhoods

than anywhere else, the rules were the tool of the rich and
powerful. Honour was law for those who placed themselves above
the law.
Camorra ‘taxation’. Camorra ‘justice’. Castromediano also
talks of the camorra’s ‘jurisdiction’, its ‘badges of office’, and
its ‘administration’. His terminology is striking, consistent and
apt: it is the vocabulary of state power. What he is describing is
a system of criminal authority that apes the workings of a modern
state — even within a dungeon’s sepulchral gloom.
If the camorra of the prisons was a kind of shadow state, it
had a very interventionist idea of how the state should behave.
Duke Castromediano saw that camorristi fostered gambling and
drinking in the full knowledge that these activities could be taxed.
(Indeed the practice of taking bribes from gamers was so closely
associated with gangsters that it generated a popular theory
about how the camorra got its name. Morra was a game, and
the capo della morra was the man who watched over the players.
It was said that this title was shortened at some stage to ca-morra.
The theory is probably apocryphal: in Naples, camorra meant
‘bribe’ or ‘extortion’ long before anyone thought of applying the
term to a secret society.)
Card games and bottles of wine generated other moneymaking
opportunities: the camorra provided the only source of credit for
unlucky gamblers, and it controlled the prison’s own stinking,
rat-infested tavern. Moreover, every object that the camorra
confiscated from a prisoner unable to afford his interest payments,
his bottle, or his bribe, could be sold on at an eye-watering
markup. The dungeons echoed to the cries of pedlars selling
greasy rags and bits of stale bread. A whole squalid economy
sprouted from exploiting the prisoners at every turn. As an old
saying within the camorra would have it, ‘Facimmo caccia’ l’oro
de’ piducchie’: ‘We extract gold from fleas.’,
The camorra system also reached up into the prisons’ supposed
command. Naturally, many guards were on the payroll. This
corruption not only gave the camorra the freedom it needed to

42
 How to extract gold from fleas

operate, it also put even more favours into circulation. For a

price, prisoners could wear their own clothes, sleep in separate
cells, eat better food, and have access to medicine, letters, books
and candles. By managing the traffic in goods that came in and
out of prison, the camorra both invented and monopolised a
whole market in contraband items.
So the prison camorra had a dual business model designed to
extract gold from fleas: extortion ‘taxes’ on the one hand and
contraband commerce on the other. The camorra of today works
on exactly the same principles. All that has changed is that the
‘fleas’ have become bigger. Bribes once taken on a place to lay a
palliasse are now cuts taken on huge public works contracts.
Candles and food smuggled into prison are now consignments
of narcotics smuggled into the country.
Duke Castromediano’s years as a political prisoner were spent
in several jails but everywhere he went he found the camorra in
charge. So his story is not just about the origins of what today
is called the Neapolitan camorra. Prisoners from different regions
mingled in jails across the southern part of the Italian peninsula,
on Sicily, and on many small islands. They all referred to them-
selves as camorristi.
The Duke did however notice distinctions in the dress code
adopted by camorristi from different regions. Sicilians tended to
opt for the black plush look. (The camorrista who introduced
himself to the Duke on his first day in the Castello del Carmine
was Sicilian.) Not long before, Neapolitans had dressed in the
same way. But for some time now they had preferred to signal
their status with clothes that could come in any colour, as long
as it was of good quality and accessorised in gold: gold watch
and chain; gold earrings; chunky gold finger rings; all topped off
with a fez decorated with lots of braid, embroidery and a golden
tassel.
There were strong loyalties and rivalries between camorristi
from different regions. In Duke Castromediano’s experience, the
Neapolitans nurtured an ‘inveterate antipathy’ towards the

43
Mafia Brotherhoods

Calabrians. When this antipathy exploded into open hostilities,

camorristi from elsewhere tended to take sides in a familiar
formation: with the Neapolitans would stand the men from the
countryside near Naples and from Puglia; everyone else would
side with the Calabrians. The Sicilians ‘loved to keep themselves
to themselves’, said Castromediano. ‘But if they came down in
favour of one side or the other, oh! the savage vendettas!’ In the
worst cases, ‘tens of dead bodies took their places in the prison
cemetery’.
For all their vicious rivalries and their many distinctive quali-
ties, Sicilian mafiosi, like Neapolitan camorristi and Calabrian
*ndranghetisti, have all referred to themselves as members of the
‘Honoured Society’. Their shared vocabulary is a sign of shared
origins in the prison system of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.
In fact, everything Castromediano discovered in prison about the
camorra not only still holds good — it still holds good for the
Sicilian mafia and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta too. Italy’s criminal
organisations both engage in illegal commerce and act as a
shadow state that combines extortion ‘taxes’ and alternative
judicial and political systems. If they had their way, Italy’s
Honoured Societies would turn the whole world into a giant
prison, run by their simple but brutally effective rules.

Seven and a half years after Sigismondo Castromediano was

admitted to the Castello del Carmine, the diplomatic pressure
on the Bourbon government finally paid off for the patriotic
prisoners; like others, the Duke had his sentence commuted to
permanent exile. By then his hair had turned completely white.
One of the last things he did before being freed was to bribe a
jailor to let him keep two mournful souvenirs: his shackles and
his red tunic. The humiliations of his prison years would remain
with him for the rest of his life.
The Duke spent just over a year in exile. Then came Garibaldi:

44
 How to extract gold from fleas

the Bourbon state collapsed and its territory became part of Italy.
In Turin, on 17 March 1861, Castromediano was in parliament
to see Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia,
pronounced hereditary monarch of the new Kingdom. The ideal
for which he had suffered so long was now an official reality.
But Castromediano soon lost the parliamentary position his
prison martyrdom had earned. He returned to his ancestral seat
in Puglia, the region that forms the heel of the Italian boot. While
he was in jail his castle near the city of Lecce had fallen into
serious disrepair. But he had been leeched to near penury by the
camorra and would never have the money to renovate. The Duke’s
occasional visitors over the years found the castle a fitting setting
for-a man who had endured so much in the national cause: it
became a semi-ruin like those in the romantic novels that had so
fired the Duke’s patriotism when he was young. In one corner
of the castle chapel, on permanent display, were what he called
his ‘decorations’: the prison chain and tunic. The camorra had
seeped into the Duke’s soul, infecting him with a recurring melan-
choly: ‘the spawn of hell’, he called it. ‘One of the most immoral
and disastrous sects that human infamy has ever invented.’
The Duke began writing a memoir of his captivity only days
after he was released; yet it remained unfinished when he died
in his castle thirty-six years later. Castromediano’s Political
Prisons and Jails reads like the work of a man still struggling to
come to terms with his past. The Duke’s narrative is occasionally
jumbled and repetitive but at its best, it is a vivid first-hand
account of where Italy’s mafias began.
What Castromediano could not appreciate while in jail was
that the camorra had already made its first steps out from the
dungeon and into the streets.

45
Co-managing crime

Naples teemed. There were just under half a million inhabitants

in the 1850s, making the capital of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies the biggest city in Italy. With the highest population
density in Europe, it packed more misery into each square metre
than any other town on the continent. Every grotto and cellar,
every nook and doorway had its ragged and emaciated
inhabitants.
The quarters of Porto, Pendino, Mercato and Vicaria held the
most notorious concentrations of indigence; they made up the
so-called ‘low city’. Some of the alleyways were so narrow it was
impossible to open an umbrella. Many of the low city’s poorest
lived in tenements known as fondaci (‘depositories’) where whole
families and their animals were crammed into single, windowless
rooms. Vermin were rife and the stench unholy: sewage overflowed
the ancient cesspits and ran through the alleys. In the 1840s close
to 30 per cent of infants in the low city died before their first
birthday. None of these four quarters had a life expectancy above
twenty-five years.
But unlike London, Naples did not hide its poor away. Under
the southern sun, in every street and piazza, tradesmen and
pedlars of all conceivable varieties put on daily performances.
Slum-dwellers scraped their living picking rags, weaving straw or
singing stories; they hawked snails and pizza slices, collected
cigar butts, or portered the occasional box.
Nowhere was the variety of this starveling economy more
apparent than in the via Toledo, the city’s main thoroughfare
and ‘the noisiest street in Europe’. Here, each morning, the
city’s life would seep from the hovels and palazzi, spill through

46
 Co-managing crime

the side streets and converge to form a roiling flood of people.

Poor and wealthy, the scuttling urchin and the promenading
bourgeois, all dodged the carriages on via Toledo. The din of
haggling was immense. And to add to it, everyone from the
sausage vendors with their braziers to the sellers of ice water
in their grandly decorated pagodas, had a distinctive, sonorous
cry.
There was also a less picturesque side to the industry of the
Neapolitan poor. Tourists were most vexed by the crowds of
beggars who thrust their maimed limbs at anyone likely to
surrender a coin. Veteran travellers considered that the child
pickpockets of Naples set an international standard for dexterity.
Theft, swindling and prostitution were crucial survival strategies
for many of the poor. The low city, in particular, lived almost
entirely outside the law.
Not even the world’s most zealous and honest constabulary
could have imposed order on this swarm. So in Naples, the
nineteenth-century’s proud new science of policing quickly
became a modest routine of minimising the nuisance caused by
the plebs. Because Naples was so vast and so poor, the police
learned that the best way to contain that nuisance was to collabo-
rate with the hardest plebeian thugs.
In 1857 Antonio Scialoja wrote a pamphlet that continued the
patriotic propaganda offensive against the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies. Scialoja was a brilliant Neapolitan economist living in
political exile in Turin. Because he was himself a veteran of the
Bourbon jails, the prison camorra was a centrepiece of his
polemic. He claimed that ‘the Society of camorristi’ was so
powerful that it could carry out death sentences in any prison
in the Kingdom. The Society made other prisoners pay for every-
thing, Scialoja reported, even for escaping what he delicately
referred to as the ‘turpitudes’ of their fellow detainees: he meant
rape.
But Scialoja’s diagnosis of the malaise in Naples went far
beyond the prison walls. Using his accounting skills, he identified

47
Mafia Brotherhoods

a slush fund that did not appear in the official police budget. He
then showed how some of this cash was spent hiring ruffians and
spies. Nor did the corruption stop there. For decades the Bour-
bons had recruited their police from among the city’s most feared
criminals. The ordinary people of Naples referred to them as the
feroci, the ‘ferocious ones’. There were 181 feroci at the time
Scialoja was writing. Although they were paid their meagre wages
out of the official police budget, they nonetheless habitually
supplemented their income with bribes.
Italian has a useful piece of jargon to describe this kind of
arrangement: it is called ‘co-managing’ crime. And if the feroci
who co-managed crime with the police are beginning to look
rather like the camorristi who co-managed the prison system
with the warders, that is because they were sometimes one and
the same thing. But policing the streets with the cooperation of
the toughest delinquents was always a messy affair. Some camor-
risti proved to be more loyal to their criminal comrades than
they were to their police paymasters, while others provoked
intense suspicion and hatred in the underworld. Nevertheless,
thanks to co-management, the bosses who had been left in charge
of the dungeons for centuries now held a government licence to
be a power on the streets. By the early 1850s, camorristi decked
out in the latest gangster uniform of slicked hair, velvet jacket
and flared trousers were as conspicuous a part of the life of
Naples as pizza-pedlars and strolling players.
Once the camorra of the prisons had been given its foothold
in the outside world, it began doing what it was best at: extracting
gold from fleas. Just as in prison, extortion was the basis of the
camorra’s power. Illegal or semi-illegal activities were particularly
vulnerable. Camorristi would demand a cut of any thief’s takings
and they came to occupy a dominant position in prostitution.
Gambling was another lucrative racket. ;
Large sections of the legal economy also came to be subject
to extortion rackets. Outsiders would often encounter camorristi
in action without really understanding what they were seeing.

48
 Co-managing crime

As the visitor stepped from a hired boat, his oarsman would be

approached by a gaudily dressed man, often wearing lots of
jewellery, who would silently expect and receive an offering. As
the visitor arrived at his hotel, his porter would discreetly slip a
coin into the hand of a stocky stranger. And as the visitor stepped
into a hackney carriage, the driver would pay up to yet another
waiting heavy.
Camorristi demanded their taxes at the pressure points of the
urban economy: at the quays where cargo, fish, and passengers
were landed; at the city gates where produce arrived from the
countryside; at the markets where it was distributed. Boatmen
and stevedores, customs officers and cart-drivers, wholesalers and
hawkers: all were forced to pay in the same way that had long
been familiar for prison inmates.
The heart of the camorra’s Naples became the Vicaria quarter,
located at what was then the city’s eastern boundary. The slums
of the Vicaria were where every criminal sphere of influence
overlapped, as if at the intersection of a Venn diagram. The
quarter took its name from the Palazzo della Vicaria, a medieval
block that housed the courtrooms and, in its basement, a noto-
rious dungeon. The walls of the Vicaria prison looked solid
enough but in reality they were a membrane through which
messages, food and weapons constantly slipped into and out of
the surrounding slums.
Near the prison was the Porta Capuana, a stone archway
adorned with friezes and frescos through which much of the
produce from the hinterland arrived ready to be ‘taxed’. But the
criminal epicentre of the Vicaria was what is now a stretch of
via Martiri d’Otranto that, with the alleys running off it, was
known as the Imbrecciata. The Imbrecciata was a kasbah of
cheap carnal pleasures; its inhabitants were almost all involved
in prostitution and live sex shows. The area was so notorious
that the authorities tried several times to cordon it off by building
walls at its exits.
With all these opportunities for illegal income close to hand

49
Mafia Brotherhoods

in the Vicaria, it is not surprising that first supreme bosses of

the Honoured Society in the outside world came from here.

oe
The ‘co-management’ of crime in Naples was indeed scandalous.
But the exiled economist Antonio Scialoja was particularly
angered by the way the Bourbon authorities gave their spies,
feroci and camorristi a free rein to harass and blackmail liberal
patriots. In fact these rough and ready cops were no respecters
of political affiliation: even Bourbon royalists had to cough up
to avoid what the feroci smilingly called ‘judicial complications’.
In this way, amid the uncertainties of the 1850s, with the Bourbon
monarchy vulnerable and wary, the camorra was given the chance
to meddle in politics.
Scialoja concluded his pamphlet with an exemplary tale drawn
from his own memories of life as a political prisoner in the early
1850s. He recalled that the common criminals in jail referred to
the captive patriots simply as ‘the gentlemen’, because their
leaders were educated men of property like him. But by no means
everyone who got mixed up in liberal politics was a gentleman.
Some were tough artisans. A case in point was one Giuseppe
D’ Alessandro, known as Peppe l’aversano — ‘Aversa Joe’ (Aversa
being a agricultural settlement not far north of Naples). Aversa
Joe was sent to jail for his part in the revolutionary events of
1848. When he encountered the camorra, he quickly decided that
joining the ranks of the extortionists was preferable to suffering
alongside the gentlemen martyrs. He was initiated into the
Honoured Society and was soon swaggering along the corridors
in his flares.
In the spring of 1851, at about the time when Gladstone was
thundering about the gamorristi to his British readers, one
particularly zealous branch of the Neapolitan police conceived
a plan to kill off some of the incarcerated patriots. But not even
the police could carry out such a scheme without help from the

5O
 Co-managing crime

prison management — the camorra. In Aversa Joe they found the

perfect man for the job; in fact they didn’t even have to pay him
since he was still under sentence of death for treason and was
glad simply to be spared his date with the executioner.
Aversa Joe twice attempted to carry out his mission, with a
scrum of camorristi ready to answer his call to attack. But both
times the gentlemen managed to stick together and face down
their would-be killers.
The political prisoners then wrote to the police authorities to
remind them of the diplomatic scandal that would ensue if they
were torn to pieces by a mob. The reminder worked. Aversa Joe
was transferred elsewhere, then released, and finally given the
chance to swap his velvet jacket for a police uniform: he had
completed the transformation from treasonable patriot, to camor-
rista, to policeman in the space of a couple of years.
For Scialoja, the Aversa Joe story typified everything that was
bad about Bourbon rule, with its habit of co-managing crime
with mobsters. The Italian Patria would stand in shining contrast
to such sleaze. The new nation of Italy, whenever it came, would
finally bring good government to the benighted metropolis in the
shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
But Naples being Naples, forming the Patria turned out to be
a much stranger and murkier business than anyone could have
expected.

51
The redemption of the camorra

The summer of 1860 was the summer of Garibaldi’s expedition,

when marvels of patriotic heroism finally turned the Kingdom
of the Two Sicilies into part of the Kingdom of Italy. In Naples,
history was being made at such a gallop that journalists scarcely
had time to dwell on what they saw and heard. This was a
moment when the incredible seemed possible, and thus a time
for narrative. Explanation would have to wait.
There was consternation in Naples when news broke that
Garibaldi and his Thousand redshirted Italian patriots had
invaded Sicily. On 11 May 1860 the official newspaper announced
that what it called Garibaldi’s ‘freebooters’ had landed in Marsala.
By the end of the month it was confirmed that the insurgent forces
had gained control of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.
The ineffectual young king, Francesco II, was scarcely a year
into his reign. As the garibaldini consolidated their grip on Sicily
and prepared to invade the Italian mainland and march north,
Francesco dithered in Naples and his ministers argued and
schemed.
Only on 26 June did Neapolitans find out how the Bourbon
monarchy planned to respond to the crisis. Early that morning,
posters were plastered along the major streets proclaiming a
‘Sovereign Act’. King Francesco decreed that the Kingdom of the
Two Sicilies was to cease being an absolute monarchy and
embrace constitutional politics. A government comprising liberal
patriots had already been formed. There.would also be an
amnesty for all political prisoners. And the flag would henceforth
comprise the Italian tricolour of red, white and green, surmounted
by the Bourbon dynasty’s coat of arms.

52
 The redemption of the camorra

The early risers who came across the Sovereign Act on the
morning of 26 June were afraid to be seen reading it: there was
always the chance that it was a provocation intended to force
liberals out into the open, and make them easy targets for the
feroci. But within hours Neapolitans had absorbed what the
posters really meant: the Sovereign Act was a feeble and desperate
attempt to cling onto power. The gathering momentum of
Garibaldi’s expedition had put Francesco in a hopeless position,
and the Bourbon state was tottering.
The day the Sovereign Act was published was a bad day to be
a policeman in Naples. For years the police had been feared and
despised as corrupt instruments of repression. Now they were
left politically exposed when there was almost certain to be a
battle for control of the streets. =
The evening of the day that the Sovereign Act posters appeared,
clusters of people from the poorest alleyways came down onto
via Toledo to jeer and whistle at the police. Shopkeepers pulled
down their shutters and expected the worst. They had good
reason to be afraid. Mass disorder visited Naples with what
seemed like seasonal regularity, and pillaging inevitably
accompanied it.
Serious trouble began the following afternoon. Two rival
proletarian crowds were looking for a confrontation: the royalists
yelling ‘long live the King’, and the patriots marching to the call
of ‘viva Garibaldi’. One colourful character, difficult to miss in
the mélée, was Marianna De Crescenzo, who went by the
nickname of la Sangiovannara. One report described her as being
‘decked out like a brigand’, festooned in ribbons and flags.
Responding to her yelled commands was a gang of similarly
attired women brandishing knives and pistols. Loyalists to the
Bourbon cause suspected that la Sangiovannara had stoked up
the trouble by handing out cheap booze from her tavern, as well
as large measures of subversive Italian propaganda.
On via Toledo, two police patrols found themselves caught
between the factions. When an inspector gave the unenforceable

hg
Mafia Brotherhoods

order to disarm the crowd, fighting broke out. Some onlookers

heard shots. After a running battle, the police were forced to
withdraw. Only the arrival of a cavalry unit prevented the situ-
ation degenerating even further.
There were two notable casualties of the clash. The first was
the French ambassador, who was passing along via Toledo in his
carriage when he was accosted and coshed. Although he survived,
no one ever discovered who was responsible for the attack.
The second victim was Aversa Joe, the patriot, turned prison
camorrista, turned Bourbon assassin, turned policeman. He was
stabbed at the demonstration and then hacked to death while he
was being carried to hospital on a stretcher. The murder was
clearly planned in advance, although again the culprits remained
unknown.
Everyone thought that this was only the overture to the coming
terror. Fearing the worst, many policemen ran for their lives.
There was no one left to resist the mob. Organised gangs armed
with muskets, sword-sticks, daggers and pistols visited each of
the city’s twelve police stations in turn; they broke down the
doors, tossed files and furniture out of the windows, and lit great
bonfires in the street.
The Neapolitan police force had ceased to exist.
But by the afternoon, a peculiar calm had descended. The
Times correspondent felt safe enough to go and see the ruined
police station in the Montecalvario quarter and found the words
‘DEATH TO THE COPS! and ‘CLOSED DUE TO DEATH!
scrawled on either side of the entrance. These bloodcurdling
slogans did not match what had actually happened, though.
Witness after witness related how unexpectedly peaceful, ordered
and even playful the scenes of destruction were. The mob did
rough up the few cops they caught. But instead of lynching their
uniformed captives, they handed them over, to the army. The
London Daily News’s man at the scene wrote that, although
rumours suggested that many policemen had been murdered,
he had been unable to verify a single fatality. Around the

54
 The redemption of the camorra

ADZO SOVEANS
+f oe

Desiderando di dare ai Nostri amatissimi sudditi un atte-

-stato. della Nostra Sovrana. benevolenza, Ci siamo. determitatr
di concedere gli Ordini. costituzionalie rappsesentativi nel. Re-
gno in: armonia co’ principii italiani e nazionali in: modo. da
garentire la sicurezza e prosperita in avvenire e da stringere
sempre pil i legami che Ci uniscono a’popoli che la. Provvi-
denza Ci ha chiamati a governare. ‘
A quest’oggetto siamo. venuti nelle seguenti determinazioni:
1. Accordiamo una. generale amnistia per tutt’i reati -
politici fine a questo giorno..
2 Abbiamo incaricato i] Commendatore D, Antonio Sbi-
nelli della formazione d’ un nuovo Ministro, il quale compile-
ra nel pid breve termine possibile gli articoli dello Statuto
sulle base delle istituzioni rappresentativi italiane ¢ nazionali.
Z 3. Sara stabilito con §. M. il Re di Sardegna’ un ac-
cordo per gl’ interessi comuni delle due Corone in Italia.
4. La Nostra bandiera sari d’ora innanzi fregiata de’co-
lori Nazionali Italiani in tre fasce verticali, conservando sem-
pre nel mezzo:le Armi della Nostra Dinastia,
5. In quanto alla Sicilia, accorderemo analoghe istitazio-
i rappresentative che possono soddisfare i bisogni dell’ Isola ;
ed uno de’ Principi della Nostra Real Casa ne sara il nostro
¥iceré,

Portici 25 Giugno 1860.

ERANCESC 0.
The Neapolitan camorra’s cue to take to the streets. In desperation, on 25
June 1860, Francesco II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies issued the Atto
Sovrano (Sovereign Act).

55
Mafia Brotherhoods

bonfires of police paraphernalia there was cheering, laughing

and dancing; street urchins cut up police uniforms and handed
the pieces out as souvenirs. This was less a riot than a piece of
street theatre.
The most unexpected part of it all was that there was no
stealing. On every previous occasion when political upheaval had
come to Naples, a predatory mob had risen from the low city.
Yet this time, outlandishly, rioters from the same slums even
handed over any cash and valuables they found to army officers
or parish priests. Moving through the streets from one target to
the next, they shouted reassurance to the traders cowering behind
their shutters. ‘Why close up your shops? We aren’t going to rob
you. We only wanted to drive off the cops.’ According to the
Times correspondent, one man took several watches from the
wreckage of a police station. But instead of pocketing them, he
threw them on the bonfire burning outside. ‘No one shall say
that I stole them’, he proclaimed.
These were strange days, and they were about to get even
stranger. The evening before the police stations were attacked in
such carnivalesque style, King Francesco I] appointed a new
Prefect of Police, a lawyer by the name of Liborio Romano.
Like Duke Sigismondo Castromediano and economist Antonio
Scialoja, Liborio Romano was sent to jail in the early 1850s for
his liberal, patriotic beliefs. But he was already nearing sixty
and suffered from excruciating gout so he was released early in
1852; and in 1854 he was allowed to return to Naples after
signing an oath of loyalty to the throne. Romano thus owed
the Bourbon monarchy a debt of honour. In June 1860 when
King Francesco was looking for tame patriots to take up posi-
tions in the liberal cabinet announced by the Sovereign Act,
Romano’s obligation seemed to make him the perfect candidate.
So he was put in charge of the police — the toughest job of
them all.
Within hours of taking office Romano launched one of the
boldest initiatives in the history of policing: he offered the

56
 The redemption of the camorra

camorra the chance to ‘rehabilitate itself’ (his words) by replacing

the police. The Honoured Society’s bosses accepted the offer with
alacrity, and soon camorristi sporting cockades in the red, white
and green of the Italian flag were on patrol. Naples remained
calm as a result, and Liborio Romano became a hero. The Pied-
montese ambassador gushed that he ‘is deeply loved by the public
and has very Italian feelings’. The Times called Romano a
statesman ‘who has gained the confidence of all by his ability
and firmness’, and said that, but for him, the city would be in
chaos. On 23 July his saint’s day was marked with public illu-
minations and a lantern-lit parade. Indeed, so successful was
Romano’s policy that many camorristi were subsequently
recruited into a new National Guard. The risky summer between
a crumbling Bourbon regime and the arrival of Garibaldi passed
more peacefully than anyone could ever have hoped.
The camorra’s extraordinary role in the Naples drama made
news in Turin, the new Italy’s capital city. One magazine even
marked the occasion by publishing flattering pictures of three
leading camorra bosses. One of them, Salvatore De Crescenzo,
is worth looking at closely.
In the 1860 engraving, De Crescenzo is shown sporting a
tricolour rosette, his right hand resting Napoleonically inside his
waistcoat, his hair parted neatly and his earnest expression
framed by a fuzzy, chin-strap beard. De Crescenzo’s police files
allow us to add some facts to these impressions. They tell us that
he was a shoemaker by trade, probably born in 1822. He was
manifestly a violent man, first jailed in 1849 for seriously
wounding a sailor, and strongly suspected of killing a fellow
inmate later the same year. He spent the 1850s in and out of
prison, and the last arrest before his picture appeared in the press
was in November 1859. Despite this frightening CV, the Turin
magazine declared that De Crescenzo and the other camorristi
were now ‘honest men who were held in high regard by both the
national party and the people’.
. In the south, Garibaldi was performing miracles, conquering

57
Mafia Brotherhoods

a whole Kingdom with a handful of volunteers. In Naples, it

seemed to some observers, there was a miracle before Garibaldi
even arrived. The camorra had been redeemed, converted in the
sacred name of the Patria.
But in the shadows where politics, mob violence and organised
crime overlap, there had been no miracle, and no redemption of
the camorra. The truth — or at least fragments of it — would only
emerge later. Many of those fragments were in the possession of
one of the more sympathetic characters in the history of Italian
organised crime, a myopic, bearded Swiss hotelier called Marc
Monnier.
Monnier never spent time in jail, and never held political office.
Yet he knew the camorra as well as anyone in Naples thanks to
his job: he ran the Hétel de Genéve, which stood amid the hubbub
of via Medina. The hotel catered mainly for commercial travel-
lers; Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, was one of its few
notable guests. The family business put Monnier in daily contact
with the camorra’s territorial control: with the porters, carriage
drivers, greengrocers and butchers who paid kickbacks to the
mob. From the very windows of the Hétel de Genéve, Monnier
could watch hoodlums taking their ro per cent cut on street card
games.
The hotel business gave Marc Monnier a priceless knowledge
of how the city worked, as well as a reliable source of income.
Reliable, but dreary. Monnier’s real passion was writing, particu-
larly drama. In the mid-1850s he was converted to the patriotic
cause and thereby acquired a journalistic mission: to explain Italy
to the rest of the world. The unfolding story of Italy’s unification
was by turns inspiring and confusing to foreign onlookers — not
to mention to Italians themselves. Being both an insider and an
outsider, Monnier had a perspective that Italians and foreigners
alike could trust. 5
Monnier’s The Camorra was published in 1862. As a guide
to the Neapolitan Honoured Society of the nineteenth century,
it has never been surpassed. One of the key testimoniesin The

58
 The redemption of the camorra

Camorra is from a patriot, one of a number who had returned

to Naples to conspire in secret for the overthrow of the Bourbon
monarchy. Many of these conspirators joined an underground
group called the ‘Committee of Order’ (a name chosen so as
to disguise the revolutionaries’ real intentions). Monnier knew
the conspirators well because the Committee of Order used to
hold some of its meetings in the Hétel de Genéve. And what
Monnier learned from his contacts in the Committee of Order
was that there was a secret pact between the movement for
Italian unification and the camorra that dated back to the
mid-18 50s.
Here, then, is our first lesson in Neapolitan politics: while
some patriots were being persecuted by the camorra in jail and
others were decrying it as the worst product of the Bourbons’
sordid despotism from exile, back in Naples still others were
trying to strike a deal with the gangland leaders.
But why on earth would the Committee of Order want to
befriend the gangsters of the camorra? Because they knew the
lessons of Neapolitan history. Time and tiine again the Bourbon
monarchy had enlisted the urban poor to defend itself from
change: rabble-rousers were plied with cash and told to direct
the mob at political enemies. Any political revolution would fail
if it could not control the streets. The camorra was organised,
violent and rooted in the very alleyways that generated the
notorious mobs. With the camorra on its side — or at least a
substantial faction within the camorra — Italy could win Naples
and thus the whole of the south. The Committee of Order was
set to compete with the Bourbon police for the camorra’s
friendship.
Not all of the patriotic leaders agreed with this Machiavellian
tactic. And by no means all camorristi went along with it. But
the prospect of a deal between patriots and hoodlums raised
genuine fears for the Bourbon authorities. In October 1853 the
police (themselves of course riddled with camorristi) reported
that ‘the liberals are trying to recruit from among a pernicious

hy
Mafia Brotherhoods

class of individuals from the plebs, who go by the name of

camorristi.’ Among the list of politically suspect camorristi was
Salvatore De Crescenzo: the boss whose ‘redemption’ would make
headlines seven years later.
Marc Monnier learned about the pact between the Committee
of Order and the Honoured Society from a source he referred to
only as the ‘Neopolitan gentleman’. The Neapolitan gentleman
told Monnier that at some time in the mid-1850s, he himself had
arranged to meet leading camorristi on the northern outskirts
of the city. He watched them arrive, one by one, each with a hat
pulled down low, each announcing himself with the same signal:
a noise made with the lips that sounded like a kiss.
The Neapolitan gentleman reported that his first meeting with
the leaders of the Honoured Society started badly and very
quickly got much worse. The camorristi began by berating him:
he and his well-dressed and well-educated friends had ignored
the needs of the poor. The ‘holy rabble’, they said, had no inten-
tion of letting people like him, who were already rich, glean all
the fruits of revolution. After this opening verbal assault, the
camorristi got down to business. It would take money to provoke
a patriotic revolt against the Bourbon monarchy. A lot of money.
To start with, they demanded a bounty of 10,000 ducats each.
In 2010 values, by a very rough calculation, the bosses were
demanding a bung of €125,000 or £105,000 per head to help
bring down the Bourbon state.
The Neapolitan gentleman splutteringly pleaded with the
camorristi to take a less materialistic view of things, but his
protest was in vain. The patriots agreed to pay the camorra.
Thereafter, each underworld chief received regular sums according
to the number of men he commanded.
As it turned out, the camorra’s preparations for the coming
revolution were less than wholehearted. They gave their followers
ranks, as if they were in an army, and emblazoned large parch-
ment signs with the patriots’ watchword: ORDER. Yet somehow
they never quite made the leap from preparing for a revolt to

60
 The redemption of the camorra

actually starting one. In fact, they were more interested in

blackmailing the patriotic conspirators by threatening to tell
the Bourbon police everything unless they were given more
money.
Things were looking very bleak for the patriots of Naples,
when suddenly in 1859 the situation changed, with the comple-
tion of the first stage of Italian unification in the north. In the
south, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies suddenly looked very
vulnerable. The relationship between the Bourbon police and
street thugs broke down in the new climate of fear. In November
1859, the government ordered a big roundup of camorristi and
many of them, including Salvatore De Crescenzo, were trans-
ported to prison islands off the Italian coast.
The camorra bosses — some of them at least — realised that
an alliance with the Committee of Order might actually prove
useful, rather than merely lucrative.
Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in May of the following year,
and the Bourbon government’s desperate lurch towards consti-
tutional politics, brought the situation to a climax. The police
chief who had masterminded the November roundup of gang-
sters was sacked. Political prisoners were released, as were many
camorristi — all of them spitting bile about the Bourbon police.
Then the government issued the Sovereign Act, and the street
theatre began.
The reason why the armed crowd that attacked the police
stations showed such remarkable self-discipline was that many
of them were camorristi allied with the patriots, who wanted to
take the Bourbon police out of the game, but did not want the
city to descend into anarchy. Marianna De Crescenzo, the tavern
owner known as la Sangiovannara who festooned herself with
ribbons and flags to lead the patriotic mob, was a key figure here.
She was rumoured to have helped patriotic prisoners smuggle
messages out of Bourbon jails. More importantly, she was
camorra boss Salvatore De Crescenzo’s cousin. As our Swiss
hotelier Marc Monnier said of her

61
Mafia Brotherhoods

Without being affiliated to the Society, she knew all of

its members and brought them together at her house for
highly risky secret parleys.

The parleys between the patriots and the camorra entered a new
phase once the Neapolitan police force melted away, and Liborio
Romano took control of enforcing order in the city. Why did
Romano ask the camorra to police Naples? Several different
theories circulated in the aftermath. Marc Monnier, generous
soul that he was, gave a very charitable explanation. Romano,
like his father before him, was a Freemason, as were some other
patriotic leaders, as indeed was Garibaldi himself. The typical
Masonic cocktail of fellowship, high ideals and ritualistic
mumbo-jumbo fitted very well with the seemingly far-fetched
project of creating a common Patria out of Italy’s disjointed
parts. Garibaldi’s conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies
seemed to.be turning those ideals into a reality. Perhaps, argued
Monnier, Liborio Romano saw the Honoured Society as a primi-
tive version of his own sect, and hoped it could be turned to the
same humanitarian ends. Perhaps.
Less generous and much more realistic commentators said
simply that the camorra threatened Romano that they would
unleash anarchy on the streets unless they were recruited into
the police. It was also claimed that the camorra threatened to
kill Romano himself. Other voices — bitter Bourbon supporters
it must be said — claimed that Romano was not threatened at all,
and that he and some other patriots were the camorra’s willing
partners all along.
For several years Romano squirmed silently as others tried to
make sense of what he had done. Over time, his public image
as the saviour of Naples was upended. Most opinion-formers
came to regard him as cynical, corrupt and vain; the consensus
was that Romano had colluded with the camorra all along. Finally,
several years later, Romano made his bid to tell his side of the
story and to magnify his history-making role in the turbulent

62
 The redemption of the camorra

summer of 1860. But his memoir, with its mixture of self-dram-

atisation and evasive bluster, only served to fuel the worst suspi-
cions, showing that at the very least he was a man with a great
deal to hide.
Romano’s explanation of how he persuaded the camorra to
replace the Bourbon police is so wooden and devious as to be
almost comic. He tells us that he asked the most famous capo
of the Honoured Society to meet him in his office at the Prefec-
ture. Face-to-face with the notorious crook, Romano began with
a stirring speech. He explained that the previous government had
denied all routes to self-improvement for hardworking people
with no property. (The camorrista could be forgiven a blush of
recognition as it sank in that this meant him.) Romano pressed
on: the men of the Honoured Society should be given a chance
to draw a veil over their shady past and ‘rehabilitate themselves’.
The best of them were to be recruited into a refounded police
force that would no longer be manned by ‘nasty thugs and vile
stoolpigeons, but by honest people’.
Romano tells us that the mob boss was ‘moved to tears by this
vision of a new dawn. Camorra legend has it that he was none
other than Salvatore De Crescenzo.
The tale is far-fetched enough to be a scene from an opera.
Indeed the whole memoir is best read in precisely that way: as
an adaptation, written to impose a unity of time, place and action
—not to mention a sentimental gloss — on the more sinister reality
of the role that both Liborio Romano and the camorra played
in the birth of a united Italian nation. The likelihood is that
Romano and the Honoured Society were hand in glove from the
outset. The likelihood is, in other words, that Romano and the
camorra together planned the destruction of the Neapolitan
police force and its replacement by camorristi.
Ultimately the precise details of the accord that was undoubt-
edly struck between gangsters and patriots do not matter. As
events in Naples would soon prove, a pact with the devil is a
pact with the devil, whatever the small print says.

63
Uncle Peppe's stuff:
The camorra cashes in

The last Bourbon King of Naples abandoned his capital on 6

September 1860.
The following morning, the city’s population poured into the
streets and converged on the station to hail the arrival of Giuseppe
Garibaldi. Bands played, banners fluttered. Ladies of the highest
rank mixed with the rankest plebs, and everyone shouted ‘viva
Garibaldi!’ until they could do little more than croak. Marc
Monnier left his hotel early to join the throng. ‘I didn’t believe
that national enthusiasm could ever make so much noise’, he
recorded. Through a gap in the rejoicing multitude he glimpsed
Garibaldi from close enough to make out the smile of tired
happiness on his face. He did not have to peer to see la Sangio-
vannara, with her large following of armed women. Or indeed
the camorristi who stood above the crowd in their carriages,
waving weapons in the air.
Liborio Romano shared Garibaldi’s glory. The camorra’s
great friend had been the first to shake Garibaldi’s hand on
the platform at Naples station; the two of them later climbed
into the same carriage and rode together through the rejoicing
crowds.
Garibaldi’s Neapolitan triumph was also the cue for ‘redeemed’
camorra bosses like Salvatore De Crescenzo to cash in on the
power they had won, and to turn their tricolour cockades into
a licence to extort. After Garibaldi arrived in Naples a temporary
authority was set up to rule in his name while the south’s incor-
poration into the Kingdom of Italy was arranged. The short

64
 Uncle Peppe’s stuff: The camorra cashes in

period of Garibaldian rule saw the camorra reveal its true, unre-
deemed self. As Marc Monnier wryly noted

When they were made into policemen they stopped

being camorristi for a while. Now they went back to
being camorristi but did not stop being policemen.

The camorristi now found extortion and smuggling easier and

more profitable than ever. Maritime contraband was a particular
speciality of Salvatore De Crescenzo’s — he was the ‘the sailors’
generalissimo’, according to Monnier. While his armed gangs
intimidated customs officials, he is said to have imported enough
duty-free clothes to dress the whole city. A less well-known but
no less powerful camorrista, Pasquale Merolle, came to dominate
illegal commerce from the city’s agricultural hinterland. As any
cartload of wine, meat or milk approached the customs office,
Merolle’s men would form a scrum around it, shouting ‘E roba
d’ o si Peppe’. ‘This is Uncle Peppe’s stuff. Let it through’. Uncle
Peppe being Giuseppe Garibaldi. The camorra established a grip
on commercial traffic with frightening rapidity; the government’s
customs revenue crashed. On one day only 25 soldi were collected:
enough to buy a few pizzas.
The camorra also found entirely new places to exert its influ-
ence. Hard on the public celebrations for Garibaldi’s arrival there
followed widespread feelings of insecurity. Naples was not just
_ a metropolis of plebeian squalor. It was also a city of place-
‘seekers and hangers-on, of underemployed lawyers and of pen-
pushers who owed their jobs to favours dished out by the
powerful. Much of Naples’ precarious livelihood depended
heavily on the spin-offs from the Bourbon court and the govern-
ment. If Naples lost its status as a capital it would also forfeit
much of its economic raison d’étre. People soon began wondering
whether their jobs would be safe. A purge, or just a wave of
carpet-baggers eager to give jobs to their friends could bring
unemployment for thousands. But if no job seemed safe, then

65
Mafia Brotherhoods

no job seemed beyond reach either. The sensible thing to do was

to make as much fuss as possible and to constantly harass anyone
in authority. That way you were less likely to be forgotten and
shunted aside when it came to allocating jobs, contracts and
pensions.
In the weeks following Garibaldi’s triumphant entry the minis-
ters and administrators trying to run the city on his behalf had
to fight their way through crowds of supplicants to get into their
offices. Camorristi were often waiting at the head of the queue.
Antonio Scialoja, the economist who had written such an incisive
analysis of the camorra back in 1857, returned to Naples in 1860
and witnessed the mess created under Garibaldi’s brief rule.

The current government has descended into the mire, and

is now smeared with it. All the ministers have dished out
jobs hand over fist to anyone who pleads loudly enough.
Some ministers have reduced themselves to holding court
surrounded by those scoundrel chieftains of the people
that are referred to here as camorristi.

‘Some ministers’ undoubtedly included Liborio Romano. Not

even under the discredited Bourbons had camorristi had such
opportunities to turn the screws of influence and profit.

66
Spanishry: The first battle
against fhe camorra

On 21 October 1860, an autumn Sunday blessed with joyous

sunshine and a clear blue sky, almost every man in Naples voted
to enter the Kingdom of Italy. The scenes in the city’s biggest
piazza — later to be re-baptised Piazza del Plebiscito (Plebiscite
Square) in memory of that day — were unforgettable. The basilica
of San Francesco di Paola seemed to stretch its vast semi-circular
colonnade out to embrace the crowds. Under the portico, a banner
reading ‘People’s assemblies’ was stretched between the columns.
Beneath there were two huge baskets labelled ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.
In incalculable numbers, yet with patience and good humour,
the poorest Neapolitans waited their turn to climb the marble
steps and vote. Ragged old men too infirm to walk were carried,
weeping with joy, to deposit their ballot in the ‘Yes’ basket. The
tavern-owner, patriotic enforcer and camorra agent known as la
Sangiovannara was again much in evidence. She was even allowed
to vote — the only woman given such an honour — because of her
services to the national cause. Etchings of her strong features were
published in the press: she was ‘the model of Greco-Neapolitan
beauty’ according to one observer.
Shortly after the plebiscite Garibaldi relinquished his tempo-
rary dictatorship and handed over the appalling mess that Liborio
Romano had created to the interim authority managing the inte-
gration of Naples into the Kingdom of Italy. Over the coming
months the camorra would face the first determined drive to
break its stranglehold. Naples was set for a struggle to decide
who really controlled the streets.

67
Mafia Brotherhoods

The man given the job of tackling the policing crisis in Naples
was another southern Italian patriot, another veteran of the
Bourbon jails: Silvio Spaventa. But Spaventa was a very different
politician to his predecessor Liborio Romano. A squat man with
a black beard suspended below his flabby cheeks, Spaventa applied
moral standards as rigidly to his own behaviour as he did to
other people’s. Where Romano pandered to the crowd, Spaventa
was a model of self-containment with an acute aversion to self-
display. On one occasion back in 1848 he had attended a political
banquet held in a theatre. The climax of the evening came when
he was supposed to parade across the stage. Annoyed and flus-
tered, he failed to notice the prompter’s box and fell straight into
it.
Spaventa responded to the hardships of prison by forcing
himself to pore over the philosophies of Hegel and Spinoza. Like
the Duke of Castromediano, he was only freed in 1859. When
the King of Naples issued the Sovereign Act he returned to Naples
to work with the underground Committee of Order. But the
incorruptible Spaventa would have nothing to do with any deal
with camorristi. To avoid the Bourbon police he slept in a different
bed every night; the Hétel de Genéve, owned by his friend Mare
Monnier, was one of his refuges. Then the fall of the Kingdom
of the Two Sicilies gave him the long-awaited chance to imple-
ment the lofty conception of the state’s ethical role that he had
learned from his prison studies. Spaventa was not just a formi-
dable intellect, he was also an adept networker who knew how
much personal loyalty could count in building a power base. But
Spaventa’s character, his principles and his networking skills
would all be tested to breaking point when he became the first
Italian politician to face down the camorra. Where Liborio
Romano had made himself the most loved politician in Naples
by cosying up to organised crime, Silvio Spaventa’s crackdown
earned him nothing but revulsion.
It did not take Spaventa long to realise how hard his task was
going to be. On 28 October 1860 he wrote to his brother.

68
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

The stench and the rotting mess here are polluting my

senses. You just can’t imagine what is happening, what
they are up to. Everywhere you turn there are people
begging and grasping for as much as they can. Everywhere
there is wheeler-dealing, intrigue and theft. I see no earthly
way this country can return to some reasonable state of
affairs. It seems like the moral order has been torn off
its hinges . . The Kingdom is full of murders, robberies
and all kinds of disorder.

Southern Italy was sliding towards anarchy. Prices began to rise

steeply as new free-market policies were implemented. The
economic downturn sharpened latent conflicts between peasants
and landowners. The remains of two armies — Garibaldi’s and
King Francesco II’s — were roaming the countryside. Many
garibaldini gravitated towards Naples, creating another source
of trouble. The bulk of Garibaldi’s army resented the fact that
they had conquered southern Italy only to lose it to sly political
manoeuvres directed by a conservative government in far-off
Turin. Mingling with them were hangers-on who hoped that
putting on a red shirt might help them get a job or just beg a
few coins. The new Italian government tried to create jobs in
public works to soak up some of the pool of hungry labour. But
as the value of government bonds fell, it proved impossible to
raise the funds needed.
Given this daunting disarray, Silvio Spaventa deserves great
credit for fighting the camorra with such brio. The first mass
arrests came on 16 November 1860. Large quantities of arms and
police uniforms were recovered. Salvatore De Crescenzo, the
‘redeemed’ camorra chieftain and generalissimo of maritime
contraband, was returned to jail. There he would continue his
rise to the top. Nearly two years later, on the morning of 3
October 1862 at the very threshold of the Vicaria jail, De
Crescenzo would have his main rival in the Honoured Society

69
Mafia Brotherhoods

stabbed to death. In so doing, he became the first supreme capo

of the Society who did not come from the Vicaria quarter.
But even with De Crescenzo in prison the camorra was not
about to buckle under Spaventa’s assault. On the night of 21
November 1860 camorristi attacked the Prefecture in the hope
of liberating their bosses from the cells.
Spaventa pressed on into the New Year, purging the police and
sacking many of the corrupt old turnkeys in the prisons. His
rigour rapidly made him the focus for Neapolitans’ frustration.
Although he was a southerner, he seemed like just the kind of
haughty northern politician they had feared would be imposed
on them from Turin. The Times reported that he was widely
regarded as ‘obnoxious’. In January 1861 there was a street
demonstration against him. Many of those shouting ‘Down with
Spaventa!’ were camorristi in National Guard uniforms. There
followed a petition with several thousand signatures calling for
him to be sacked. Oblivious to his own unpopularity, Spaventa
responded with more arrests.

a
In April 1861, in the heat of the battle between the new Italian
state and the Neapolitan camorra, Silvio Spaventa received the
order from Turin to conduct an investigation into how the
camorra operated. Everyone knew it had begun in the prisons
but there were still many questions. How did it come to be a
secret society, a sect? When was it founded? In search of answers,
Spaventa’s civil servants began to rummage in the Neapolitan
archives and speak to a number of confidential sources.
All of this research produced two outstanding short reports:
the Italian government’s first ever identikit of the camorra. Keen
to generate publicity for his battle, Spaventa Jater passed on many
of the documents he gathered to Marc Monnier. Monnier added
his own material by interviewing everyone he could, including
Liborio Romano and several camorristi.

70
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

Spaventa discovered that the camorra in Naples had different

chapters, one for each of the city’s twelve quarters. Its power,
nevertheless, was heavily concentrated in the four quarters of the
low city. The capo camorrista of each chapter was elected by his
peers. Holding office at the capo’s side was a contarulo or book-
keeper, who was charged with the highly sensitive task of gath-
ering and redistributing the Society’s money.
Anyone who aspired to become a member of the camorra had
to show that he met the Society’s criteria: there was a ban on
passive homosexuals, for example, and on any man whose wife
or sister was a prostitute. (Although this, more even than other
clauses in the underworld’s rulebook, was honoured almost
entirely in the breaking.) Candidates for membership also had
to be put to the test and observed by their superiors in the Society.
They might be required to commit a murder or administer a
disfiguring razor slash to the face of one of the Society’s enemies.
These razor slashes were used as a form of punishment both for
outsiders and members who had broken the rules. They became
a horribly visible trademark of the camorra’s power in the slums
of Naples.
Once a new affiliate was deemed ready, he had to swear an
oath over crossed knives and fight a duel by dagger against a
camorrista who was chosen by lot. If the new recruit proved his
courage he became a picciotto di sgarro (meaning either ‘lad who
is up for a fight’ or ‘lad who rubs you up the wrong way’).
Knife fights were so important to the Society that its members
spent a great deal of time practising their skills; some camor-
risti even became specialised teachers of the art. Duelling to
the death was relatively rare. More often the fight had a ceremo-
nial function, so the participants would be told to aim only for
the arms. A dagger fencing contest also marked each criminal’s
elevation to the Society’s more senior rank: camorrista proper.
Becoming a camorrista meant gaining access to decision-making
power within the Society, and to a greater share of the profits
of crime.

71
Mafia Brotherhoods

Marc Monnier added some very important riders to this organ-

isational sketch. He explained that the various ranks were inher-
ently flexible.

The members of the sect do not know how to read, and

therefore do not have written laws. They hand down their
customs and regulations orally, modifying them according
to the time and place, and according to the bosses’ will
and the decisions taken by their meetings.

Underlying the hierarchies within the camorra there was never-

theless a single principle: exploitation. The camorristi pitilessly
exploited their juniors, the picciotti di sgarro. Monnier describes
the life of a ‘lad who is up for a fight’ as a blend of ‘toil, humili-
ation and danger’, all endured in the hope of being promoted to
camorrista at some point. One common test of a picciotto di
sgarro’s mettle was to take the blame for a felony committed by
a senior member of the Society. Ten years of prison was a price
worth paying for the chance to become a camorrista in your own
right.
What about the sect’s origins? The civil servants burrowed
further into the archives, but found nothing. Spaventa was
puzzled.

Neapolitan police took action against camorristi on many

occasions. Yet it is strange but true that they did not leave
a single important document that might be useful in
deducing the origins of this social plague.

Spaventa did not know that in 1857, for unknown reasons, the
Bourbon authorities had burned the police archives that would
have told him, and us, a great deal more about how the ‘social
plague’ came into being. The holes in the historical record left
space only for suspicion. And suspicion, for Spaventa and his
civil servants, centred on Spain.

72
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

Monnier and Spaventa together assembled a theory that the

camorra arrived in Naples at some point during the sixteenth or
seventeenth centuries when the Kingdom of Naples, including
Sicily, was part of the Spanish empire, ruled by Viceroys appointed
in Madrid. The same theory has been in circulation ever since.
The evidence Monnier and Spaventa found to support it is very
thin, and comes down to four points that scarcely withstand
scrutiny.
First, that camorra is a Spanish word, meaning ‘quarrel’ or
“fight? — which it certainly is, and certainly does. But the origins
of the Spanish word are Italian anyway, putting us back where
we started: in Naples.
Second, that Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote,
published a short story entitled ‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’ in
1613 that is set in Seville and concerns a criminal confraternity
that looks very like the camorra. The obvious problem here is
that Cervantes’s story is a fiction, and even if it were based on
reality, that hardly constitutes proof of cus pence with the
camorra two centuries later.
Third, that there was a secret criminal society in Spain called
the Garduna, which emerged in the early 1400s. But recent
research has shown that the Garduna was a fiction too, an intel-
lectual con trick. There is no reference to the supposedly medieval
sect before 1845, when it appears from nowhere in a very
successful French pulp novel about the terrors of the Spanish
Inquisition. The novel was translated into Italian in 1847. Its
author seems to have got the idea from Cervantes’s ‘Rinconete
and Cortadillo’.
And last, that Spanish rule was proverbially corrupt, which is
the weakest point of all. For our tastes, Spanish rule in Italy may
well have been arrogant, ostentatious and devious. In fact, Spain
became a byword for a government that showed a haughty
contempt for the people it ruled. Spagnolismo (‘Spanishry’) was
an Italian political insult that evoked lavish displays of power
coupled with deadly manoeuvres behind the scenes. But Spain

73
Mafia Brotherhoods

surrendered control of Naples in 1707. There is absolutely no

trace of the camorra before the nineteenth century — well over a
hundred years later. Spanish influence would have to be very, very
devious indeed to have generated the camorra.
The story of the camorra’s Spanish origins is nonsense. Indeed
in all probability it is nonsense from the jailbird school of history,
a story first put about by the camorristi themselves. Rather like
the tale of the Spanish knights Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso
that we have already encountered in the ’ndrangheta’s official
account of its own roots, the tale of the Garduva and all that is
a criminal foundation myth which was likely cobbled together
in the mid-nineteenth century at precisely the time that the
camorra was asserting itself outside the prison system.
If the story of the camorra’s Spanish origins is indeed a foun-
dation myth, how come intelligent people like Silvio Spaventa,
Marc Monnier and many others after them were fooled by it? It
may be that Spaventa simply lowered his formidable intellectual
guard, and this piece of hooey sneaked through unanalysed. But
there is an alternative theory: all the talk of Spain was a conven-
ient cover story, and the real origins of the camorra were a little
too close for comfort for Italian patriots.
As a historical witness, the Swiss hotelier Marc Monnier had
the advantage of his outsider’s capacity to be amazed by what
he saw, while still being able to get close to many of the leading
players. Nevertheless, there are moments when he gets too close
to be entirely dispassionate. Monnier was Spaventa’s mouth-
piece, and as such he dutifully repeated and elaborated what
he had learned from the official reports about the camorra’s
Spanish beginnings. To his credit he also hints at a much more
convincing and rather more disturbing theory. As if he knows
the truth unconsciously, but cannot quite allow himself to utter
it, Monnier compares some camorra rituals to a ‘pseudo
Masonic fantasmagoria’ without elaborating on his point. This
is more than an idle comparison: the rules and rituals of the
Honoured Society were almost certainly derived not from the

74
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

mythical Gardura but from Freemasonry and other Masonic-

style sects.
Masonic organisations were integral to the way politics was
done in the early nineteenth century. When the French were in
charge in Naples they tried to recruit their elite administrators
into the Freemasons as a way of flattering and controlling them.
But Masonic groups subsequently became a centre of resistance
to French rule and were banned in 1813. The Bourbons were
highly suspicious of the secret societies when they were restored
to the throne — and with good reason. A Masonic sect of patriots
called the Carbonari (‘Charcoal Burners’) infiltrated the army
and instigated an unsuccessful revolution in Naples in 1820. When
the revolution collapsed, many Charcoal Burners ended up in
jail where they came into contact with camorristi. Interestingly,
Liborio Romano was once a Charcoal Burner.
So, while we will never know exactly when and how the
camorra of the prison system came to ape the patriotic secret
sects of the Risorgimento, it seems certain that they did. In short
Italy, and Italy’s chronic problem with organised crime, were
profoundly intertwined from the nation’s birth. In 1860 the precise
moment when the camorra adopted Masonic-style rituals was
still recent enough for the truth to bleed through the words still
used by camorristi. The camorra’s local chapters were sometimes
called ‘lodges’, for example, and camorristi referred to the
members of their Society as the Patria: in other words, the
camorra saw itself as a ‘nation’ of elite criminals.
Even by the 1850s, this criminal Patria had its own national
anthem, a song summarising the spirit in which the Society viewed
the whole business of Italian Unification. It goes something like this:

The Charcoal Burners are a travesty;

The Bourbon party’s a farce.
We are the camorristi!
And we take them both up the arse.

75
Mafia Brotherhoods

Camorristi connived with the Bourbons against the patriots, and

then with the patriots against the Bourbons. In doing so, they
played a key role in making Naples into part of the new Italy.
But through all those murky dealings, camorristi held true to the
methods that Duke Sigismondo Castromediano had observed in
jail. Their aim was to extort and smuggle, to ‘extract gold from
fleas’. Politics — even the inspiring politics of the Risorgimento
and Garibaldi’s heroism — were only a means to that sordid end.

a
While his civil servants were researching the secrets of the camorra’s
past, the incorruptible Silvio Spaventa continued his efforts to
curtail its present power. One measure he adopted annoyed camor-
risti more than anything else: he stopped National Guardsmen
wearing their uniforms when they were not on duty. For the hood-
lums who had infiltrated the National Guard, this ban meant that
they could not use the uniform as a cover for extortion
operations.
Revenge followed swiftly. On 26 April 1861 an angry mob
comprising many camorristi invaded the ministry building. This
time, the cry was not ‘Down with Spaventa!’ but ‘Death to
Spaventa!’ They forced their way past the guards and into his office
but his loyal secretaries managed to buy time while he escaped
down a secret staircase. The mob then followed him to his house
and smashed its way in. Spectators in the street looked up to see
a man appear on the balcony; he waved a long knife and cried,
‘Here’s the blade I killed him with, and here is his blood!’
In reality, Spaventa had escaped once more. But the attack was
so shocking as to make him overcome his deep-seated abhorrence
of public attention. The following day he put on a show of
courage by going to lunch at the Caffe d’Europa. That evening
he sat in a second tier box on the first night of a new production
of Bellini’s Norma at the Teatro San Carlo — the theatre where
the rulers of Naples had traditionally made themselves visible to

76
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

the public that counted. Spaventa even left by the main staircase,
under the eyes of a stupefied crowd. He had learned the hard
way that Naples could not be governed without a little Spanishry,
a little ostentation.
Three months later it became clear that he had learned some
other lessons too. In July 1861, in a busy street a short walk from
Spaventa’s house, a senior police officer called Ferdinando Mele
was stabbed behind the ear in broad daylight; he was dead within
hours. Mele embodied all the contradictions of the time and
place: a camorrista who had allied himself with the patriots, he
was one of the chief suspects in the murder of Aversa Joe; he
was then recruited into the police by Liborio Romano in June
1860 and put in charge of law and order in a whole city quarter.
Mele’s killer was soon caught and dragged through the streets
into custody. His name was De Mata; he had killed Mele out of
revenge because Mele had arrested his equally thuggish brother.
De Mata also embodied some very strange contradictions.
Although he was not a member of the Honoured Society, he was
still an extortionist who had escaped from’prison. Yet somehow,
thanks to a powerful friend, this dangerous man had found a
no-show job at the Post Office.
That powerful friend, it turned out, was Silvio Spaventa. Both
De Mata brothers were members of Spaventa’s personal body-
guard. There were rumours that Spaventa used the De Matas
and their gang to close down politically dangerous newspapers
and beat up uncooperative journalists. So it seems that even the
incorruptible Spaventa had ended up ‘co-managing’ Naples with
criminals,
Spaventa resigned in the wake of the scandal — although the
government spun out a cover story to conceal the real reason
why he had stepped down. The Times commented glumly on the
whole affair for its perplexed readers back in London.

Nothing will bear examination in Naples. Under the

fairest aspects you will find nothing but rottenness; and

vi
Mafia Brotherhoods

any man who expects order and tranquillity in this prov-

ince during the next generation must be very slightly
acquainted with the country and the people.

Spaventa’s story did indeed foreshadow a sombre future for law

and order in Naples. Although the authorities would never again
ask the camorra to keep order as Liborio Romano had done,
there would be the same dreary swings of the policing pendulum
for years to come: first towards repression, with mass arrests
accompanied by loud anti-camorra rhetoric; then back towards
‘co-management’, as the bosses reasserted their hold over the low
city. Italian unification in Naples had been a chaotic and unpre-
dictable affair, but it had nonetheless set a simple and lasting
pattern for the future history of the camorra.
The events of 1860-61 also heralded the future in ways that
were still more worrying. Marc Monnier, our Swiss hotelier, saw
the evidence with his own eyes during Spaventa’s crackdown.

I can tell all: every camorrista that was arrested could

call on influential protectors who issued certificates of
good conduct for him. The moment a member of the sect
was led to the Vicaria prison, the Chief of Police was
sure to receive twenty letters defending the ‘poor man’;
the letters were all signed by respectable people!

Politicians were prominent among these ‘respectable people’ who

had befriended the camorra.

During elections the camorristi stopped some candidates

from standing; and if any voter objected to this on grounds
of conscience or religion, they would appease him with
their cudgels. What is more, the camorristi were not
content to send a deputy to Parliament, and then just
watch over his behaviour from a distance. They kept a
beady eye on what he did, and had his speeches read

78
 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

aloud to them — since they could not read themselves. If

they were not happy with what they heard, they would
greet their Member of Parliament on his return from
Turin with a bestial chorus of whistling and shouting that
would burst out suddenly under the windows of his house.

Clearly the Honoured Society had learned an important lesson

from everything that had happened during the crisis of the
Bourbon regime and the foundation of a united Italy: a lesson
in wedding its own opportunism to the opportunism of the more
unscrupulous politicians.
Where once the camorra had lurked, cockroach-like, in the
seamiest corners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, now it had
begun to climb up through the cracks in the social structure and
infest the representative institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. At
the end of all the intrigues of Italian Unification, the camorra
was no longer just a problem that lay where the state could not
reach: it was a problem within the state itself.
In 1864, Marc Monnier, who had done so much to explain the
camorra to readers across Italy, was awarded honorary citizenship
following a recommendation by a friend and patriotic hero,
Gennaro Sambiase Sanseverino, Duke of San Donato. San Donato
had known prison and exile during the 1850s. He became a
Colonel in the National Guard under Liborio Romano in 1860.
After the plebiscite, during Silvio Spaventa’s campaign against
the camorra, San Donato was given charge of the city’s theatres;
in the course of his duties, a camorrista stabbed him in the back
outside the Teatro San Carlo. We do not know why the camorra
tried to kill San Donato, but we can guess, because we have met
the Duke already: he was the ‘Neapolitan gentleman’ and patriotic
conspirator who told Monnier about his secret meeting with the
camorra bosses in the 1850s. He was one of the minds behind
the patriots’ deal with the Honoured Society. San Donato would
go on to be mayor of Naples from 1876 to 1878, and was a key
figure in the city’s sleazy machine politics until the end of the

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Mafia Brotherhoods

century. The camorra was part of his patronage network. San

Donato became what the camorra’s redeemer, Liborio Romano,
might have become had he not died in 1867.
Marc Monnier had passed through the intrigues of the 1850s
and early 1860s with the serenity of an inert particle in a raging
chemical reaction. After receiving his honorary citizenship there
was little left for him to write about in Italy, so he sold the Hétel
de Genéve and moved his young family to Switzerland. He could
now finally realise his ambition to be a Genevan author rather
than a Neapolitan hotelier. He went on to write a great deal
more journalism (for money) and tens of plays (for literary
immortality). None of his works has enjoyed anything like the
lasting success of his book on the camorra.

a
Italy was governed between 1860 and 1876 by a loose coalition
known as the Right. The Right’s leaders were typically land-
owning, conservative free-marketeers; they favoured rigour in
finance and in the application of the law; they admired Britain
and believed that the vote was not a right for all but a respon-
sibility that came in a package with property ownership. (Accord-
ingly, until 1882, only around 2 per cent of the Italian population
was entitled to vote.)
The men of the Right were also predominantly from the north.
The problem they faced in the south throughout their time in
power was that there were all too few southerners like Silvio
Spaventa. Too few men, in other words, who shared the Right’s
underlying values.
The Right’s fight against the Neapolitan camorra did not end
with Spaventa’s undignified exit from the city in the summer of
1861. There were more big roundups of camorristi in 1862. Late
in the same year Spaventa himself became deputy to the Interior
Minister in Turin, and began once more to gather information
on the Honoured Society. While the-publication of Marc

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 Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

Monnier’s The Camorra kept the issue in the public mind,

Spaventa made sure that the camorra was included within the
terms of reference of a new Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry
into the so-called “Great Brigandage’, a wave of peasant unrest
and banditry that had engulfed much of the southern Italian
countryside. The outcome of the Commission’s work was a
notoriously draconian law passed in August 1863 — a law that
heralds the most enduring historical irony of Silvio Spaventa’s
personal crusade against organised crime, and of the Right’s time
in power. The name for that irony is ‘enforced residence’.
The new law of August 1863 gave small panels of government
functionaries and magistrates the power to punish certain catego-
ries of suspects without a trial. The punishment they could hand
down was enforced residence — meaning internal exile to a penal
colony on some rocky island off the Italian coast. Thanks to
Spaventa, camorristi were included in the list of people who could
be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in this way.
Enforced residence was designed to deal with camorristi
because they were difficult to prosecute by normal means, not
least because they were so good at intimidating witnesses and
could call on protectors among the elite of Neapolitan society.
But once on their penal islands, camorristi had every opportunity
to go about their usual business and also to turn younger inmates
into hardened delinquents. In 1876 an army doctor spent three
months working in a typical penal colony in the Adriatic Sea.

Among the enforced residents there are men who demand

respect and unlimited veneration from the rest. Every day
they buy, sell and meddle without provoking hatred or
rivalry. Their word is usually law, and their every gesture
a command. They are called camorristi. They have their
statutes, their rites, their bosses. They win promotion
according to the wickedness of their deeds. Each of them
has a primary duty to keep silent about any crime, and
to respond to orders from above with blind obedience.

8I
Mafia Brotherhoods

Enforced residence became the police’s main weapon against

suspected gangsters. But far from being a solution to Italy’s
organised crime emergency as Silvio Spaventa hoped, it would
turn out to be a way of perpetuating it.
In 1865, before these ironies had time to unfold, rumours of
another criminal sect began to reach the Right’s administrators
— ‘the so-called Maffia’ of Sicily. The mafia would soon penetrate
Italy’s new governing institutions far more thoroughly than did
the camorra in Naples. So thoroughly as to make it impossible
to tell where the sect ended and the state began.

82
GETTING 10 KNOW
THE MAFIA
1865-1877
Rebels in corduroy

Like the camorra, the Sicilian mafia precipitated out from the
dirty politics of Italian unification.
Before Garibaldi conquered Sicily in 1860 and handed it over
to the new Kingdom of Italy, the island was ruled from Naples
as part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In Sicily, as in Naples,
the prisons of the early nineteenth century were filthy, over-
crowded, badly managed, and run from within by camorristi.
Educated revolutionaries joined secret Masonic sects like the
Charcoal Burners. When the sect members were jailed they built
relationships with the prison gangsters and recruited them as
insurrectionary muscle. Soon those gangsters learned the benefits
of organising along Masonic lines and, sure enough, the Bourbon
authorities found it hard to govern without coming to terms with
the thugs. In Sicily, just as in Naples, Italian patriots would
overthrow the old regime only to find themselves repeating some
of its nefarious dealings with organised crime.
But the Sicilian mafia was, from the outset, far more powerful
than the Neapolitan camorra, far more profoundly enmeshed
with political power, far more ferocious in its grip on the economy.
Why? The short answer is that the mafia developed on an island
that was not just lawless: it was a giant research institute for
perfecting criminal business models.
The problems began before Italian unification, when Sicily
belonged to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The authority of
the Bourbon state was more fragile in Sicily than anywhere else.
The island had an entirely justified reputation as a crucible of
revolution. In addition to half a dozen minor revolts there were
major insurrections in 1820, 1848, and of course in May 1860,

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Mafia Brotherhoods

when Giuseppe Garibaldi’s redshirted invasion triggered the over-

throw of Bourbon rule on the island. Sicily lurched between
revolution and the restoration of order.
Under the Bourbons, Naples completely failed to impose order
on the Sicilians, and the Sicilians proved too politically divided
to impose order on themselves. Once upon a time, before the
invention of policing, private militias beholden to great land-
owners kept the peace on much of the island. In the early nine-
teenth century, despite the attempt to introduce a centralised,
modern police force, the situation began to degenerate. All too
often, rather than being impartial enforcers of the law, the new
policemen were merely one more competing source of power
among many — racketeers in uniform. Alongside the cops were
private armies, groups of bandits, armed bands of fathers and
sons, local political factions, cattle rustlers: all of them murdered,
stole, extorted and twisted the law in their own interests.
To make matters worse, Sicily was also going through the
turmoil brought about by the transition from a feudal to a capi-
talist system of land ownership. No longer would property only
be handed down from noble father to noble firstborn son. It
could now be bought and sold on the open market. Wealth was
becoming more mobile than it had ever been. In the west of Sicily
there were fewer great landowners than in the east and the market
for buying land, and particularly for renting and managing it,
was more fluid. Here becoming a man of means was easier — as
long as you were good with a gun and could buy good friends
in the law and politics.
By the 1830s there were already signs of which criminal busi-
ness model would eventually emerge victorious. In Naples the
members of patriotic sects made a covenant with the street toughs
of the camorra. But in lawless Sicily, scattered documentary
records tell us that the revolutionary sects themselves sometimes
turned to crime. One official report from 1830 tells of a Charcoal
Burner sect that was muscling its way into local government
contracts. In 1838 a Bourbon investigating magistrate sent a

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 Rebels in corduroy

report from Trapani with news of what he called ‘Unions or

brotherhoods, sects of a kind’: these Unions formed ‘little govern-
ments within the government’; they were an ongoing conspiracy
against the efficient administration of state business. Were these
Unions the mafia, or at least forerunners of the mafia? They may
have been. But the documentary record is just too fragmentary
and biased for us to be sure.
The condition of Sicily only seemed to worsen after it became
part of Italy in 1860. The Right governments faced even graver
problems imposing order here than they did in the rest of the
south. A good proportion of Sicily’s political class favoured
autonomy within the Kingdom of Italy. But the Right was highly
reluctant to grant that autonomy. How could Sicily govern its
own affairs, the Right reasoned, when the political landscape
was filled with a parade of folk demons? A reactionary clergy
who were nostalgic for the Bourbon kings; revolutionaries who
wanted a republic and were prepared to ally themselves with
outlaws in order to achieve it; local political cliques who stole,
murdered and kidnapped their way to powet. However, the Right’s
only alternative to autonomy was military law. The Right ruled
Sicily with both an iron fist and a wagging finger. In doing so,
it made itself hated.
In 1865 came the first news of ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal
association’. The Maffia was powerful, and powerfully enmeshed
in Sicilian politics, or so one government envoy reported. What-
ever this new word ‘Maffia’ or ‘mafia’ meant (and the uncertainty
in the spelling was symptomatic of all manner of deeper
mysteries), it provided a very good excuse for yet another crack-
down: mass roundups of deserters, draft dodgers and suspected
maffiosi duly followed.
Then, on Sunday 16 September 1866, the Right paid the price
for the hatred it inspired in Sicily. On that morning, Italy — and
history — got its first clear look at what is now the world’s most
notorious criminal band.
Palermo in 1866. Almost the entire city was sliced into four

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Mafia Brotherhoods

quarters by two rectilinear streets, each lined with grimy-grand

palaces and churches, each perhaps fifteen minutes’ walk from
one gated end to the other. At the city’s centre, the meeting point
of its two axes, was the piazza known as the Quattro Canti. The
via Maqueda pointed north-west from here, aiming towards
the only gap in the surrounding ring of mountains. Palermo’s
one true suburb, the Borgo, ran along the north shore from near
the Maqueda gate. The Borgo connected the city to its port and
to the looming, bastioned walls of the Ucciardone — the great
prison.
Palermo’s other principal thoroughfare, the Cassaro, ran
directly inland from near the bay, across the Quattro Canti, and
left the city at its south-western entrance adjacent to the massive
bulk of the Royal Palace. In the middle distance it climbed
the flank of Monte Caputo to Monreale, a city famed for its
cathedral’s golden, mosaic-encrusted vault which is dominated
by the figure of Christ ‘Pantocrator’ — the ruler of the universe,
in all his kindly omnipotence.
The magnificent view inside Monreale cathedral was matched
by the one outside: from this height the eye scanned the expanse
of countryside that separated Palermo from the mountains.
Framed by the blue of the bay, the glossy green of orange groves
was dappled with the grey of the olives; one-storey cottages threw
out their white angles among the foliage, and water towers
pointed at the sky. This was the Conca d’Oro (‘golden hollow’
or ‘golden shell’).
More than any other aspect of Palermo’s beautiful setting, it
was the Conca d’Oro that earned the city the nickname Ia felice
— ‘the happy’, or ‘the lucky’. Yet any outsider unwise enough to
wander along the lanes of the Conca d’Oro would have soon
detected that there was something seriously wrong behind the
Edenic fagade. At many points along the walls surrounding the
orange groves a sculpted crucifix accompanied by a crude inscrip-
tion proclaimed the point where someone had been murdered for
reporting a crime to the authorities. The Conca d’Oro was the

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 Rebels in corduroy

most lawless place in the lawless island of Sicily; it was the

birthplace of the Sicilian mafia.
So no one was surprised that when trouble entered Palermo
on the-morning of 16 September 1866, it came from the Conca
d’Oro. Specifically, it came down the long, straight, dusty road
from Monreale, through the citrus gardens, and past the Royal
Palace. The vanguard of the revolt was a squad from Monreale
itself; it comprised some 300 men, most of them armed with
hunting guns and wearing the corduroy and fustian that were
habitual for farmers and agricultural labourers. Similar squads
marched on Palermo from the satellite villages of the Conca
d’Oro and from the small towns in the mountains behind. Some
sported caps, scarves and flags in republican red, or carried
banners with the image of the city’s patron, Saint Rosalia.
By seven o’clock even the heaviest sleepers in the furthest
corners of Palermo had been woken by the sound of musketry
and shouting. There was confusion. But the urban masses quickly
grabbed the chance to vent their frustrations.
Seven and a half days passed before tfoops restored order.
Seven and a half days when barricades went up in the streets,
when arms depots and official buildings were ransacked, when
police stations and law courts were raided and criminal records
burned, when respectable citizens were robbed at gunpoint in
their homes, or forced to make contributions to support the
insurrection.
The revolt of September 1866 came at a terrible time for Italian
national morale. One of the reasons for the rebels’ initial success
was that Palermo was lightly garrisoned. All available military
forces had been sent to the north-eastern frontier where the
Austrians inflicted humiliation by both land and sea at the battles
of Custoza and Lissa. The anarchy down in western Sicily was
a stab in the back.
Things could easily have been much worse. One of the revolt’s
primary targets was the Ucciardone, housing two and a half
thousand prisoners; many of them would have swollen the ranks

89
Mafia Brotherhoods

of the squads. The rebels surrounded the jail and tried to blow
a breach in the walls. But just in time, on the morning of 18
September, the steam corvette Tancredi arrived to shower the
besiegers with grapeshot and grenades. One of the first men to
be hit in this bombardment, his legs grotesquely mangled by
shrapnel, was Turi Miceli, the fifty-three-year-old leader of the
Monreale crew that had spearheaded the rebellion; he took hours
to die of his injuries, and did so without uttering the slightest
murmur of complaint.
Turi Miceli was a mafioso. He was a tall, imposing figure with
a distinctive large scar on his face. Violence was his livelihood.
The very sight of him, with his arquebus over his shoulder, had
struck terror into the countryside around Palermo. Yet by the
time Miceli died he was also a man of money and property, one
of the wealthiest people in Monreale.
The camorra was, in its origins, a proletarian criminal associa-
tion, incubated among the scum of the Neapolitan jails and
slums. Mafiosi like Turi Miceli were, by contrast, ‘middle-class
villains’ — as one early mafia expert would term them. In much
of the rest of western Europe this would have sounded like a
contradiction in terms: ‘it seemed to subvert every single principle
of political economy and social science’, as one bewildered
observer noted. Men of property had a stake in maintaining the
law — that much was surely a self-evident truth. Yet in Palermo’s
environs, landowners had become criminals and accomplices. In
western Sicily, violence was a profession for the upwardly mobile.
So before we retrace the path of mafioso Turi Miceli’s rise up
the social ranks, it is worth highlighting the other striking
contrasts between him and someone like Salvatore De Crescenzo,
the ‘redeemed’ camorra boss. Early camorristi like De Crescenzo
-almost invariably had a long stretch inside on their underworld
curriculum vitae. Yet prison does not appear in the documentary
records that Turi Miceli left in his wake. As far as we know,
Miceli did not spend a single day in jail, and the same can be
said of many of the other bosses we will meet. Sicily certainly

90
 Rebels in corduroy

had its prison camorristi, and the mafia’s leaders willingly

recruited such men. But some of the most important bosses
perfected their skills elsewhere.
The first secret of Turi Miceli’s upward mobility lay in the
_business he was involved in. The land around Miceli’s hometown
of Monreale was typical of the Conca d’Oro. It was divided up
into smallholdings and the dominant crops were olives, vines and
particularly oranges and lemons. Citrus fruit trees certainly
appealed to the aesthetic senses of visitors, but they also furnished
Sicily’s most important export business. From Palermo the lemons
were mainly shipped across the Atlantic to the burgeoning market
of the United States. There was serious money in citrus fruit: in
1860 it was calculated that Palermo’s lemon plantations were the
most profitable agricultural land in Europe.
The big profits attracted big investment. To create an orange
or lemon garden from nothing involved far more than just sticking
a few trees in the ground; it was an expensive, long-term project.
High walls had to be built to protect the plants from cold. There
were roads to lay, storage facilities to coristruct and irrigation
channels to dig. In fact, sophisticated irrigation was vital because
if they were watered correctly, citrus fruit trees could crop twice
a year instead of once. Yet after all this groundwork was done,
it still took around eight years for the trees to start to produce
fruit, and several more before the investment turned a profit.
In the Conca d’Oro, as everywhere else in the world, invest-
ment and profit came with a third indispensible ingredient of
capitalism: risk. But in the Conca d’Oro, risk came dressed in
corduroy.
The mafiosi of the Palermo hinterland learned the art of the
protection racket by vandalising fruit groves, or threatening to
vandalise them. Rather than extracting gold from fleas, they
squeezed it from lemons. The options were many and varied:
they could cut down trees, intimidate farmhands, starve irrigation
channels of water at crucial moments of the season, kidnap
landowners and their families, threaten wholesalers and cart

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Mafia Brotherhoods

drivers, and so on. So mafiosi wore many hats: they were the
men who controlled the sluices of the precious irrigation chan-
nels; the guards who protected the groves at night; they were the
brokers who took the lemons to market; the contractors who
managed the groves on behalf of landowners; and they were also
the bandits who kidnapped farmers and stole their highly valu-
able crops. By creating risk with one hand, and proffering protec-
tion with the other, mafiosi could infiltrate and manipulate the
citrus fruit business in myriad ways. Some of them, like Turi
Miceli, could even vandalise and murder their way to ownership
of a lemon grove.
Turi Miceli the mafioso was both a criminal and a market
gardener. But, as the events of September 1866 showed, he was
a revolutionary too — as were the other early mafia bosses. Sicily’s
revolutions provided the other crucial propellant for the mafia’s
ascent.
For when revolution came along, as it regularly did, it proved
good for criminal business. The typical mafioso understood that
fact better even than the typical camorrista. The inevitable confu-
sion of revolution offered men like Turi Miceli the chance to
open prisons, burn police records, kill off cops and informers
and rob and blackmail wealthy people associated with the fallen
regime. Then, once the bloodletting had passed, new revolu-
tionary governments whose leaders needed enforcers would grant
amnesties to powerful men ‘persecuted’ under the old order. In
Sicily, much more than in Naples, revolution was the test bed of
organised crime, and the launch pad for many a mobster’s rise
up the social scale.
Turi Miceli’s rebel opportunism during the Risorgimento was
breathtaking. When revolution against the Bourbons broke out
in January 1848, Miceli was a known bandit — meaning that he
indulged in cattle rustling and armed robbery. But he grasped
the chance offered by the revolt with impressive daring: his squad,
mostly comprising market gardeners, captured the Bourbon
garrison in Monreale before trooping down the hill to Palermo.

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 Rebels in corduroy

There, Miceli was celebrated by local poets and lauded in official

dispatches for defeating a Bourbon cavalry unit near the Royal
Palace. Despite disturbing reports of crimes committed by his
men, Miceli was awarded the rank of Colonel by the new revo-
lutionary government, partly because his goons packed the
meeting at which the officers were elected. The Monreale bandit
had ‘remade his virginity’, as the Sicilian saying goes.
The following year, when the revolution began to fall apart
and Bourbon troops were advancing on Palermo, Miceli promptly
swapped sides: he toured the main streets and defensive entrench-
ments persuading the populace not to offer any resistance. His
reward from the restored Bourbon authorities was yet another
virginity: he was amnestied and given the chance to stuff his
pockets. First he was made customs officer, paid 30 ducats a
month to pick his own band of men and patrol a long stretch
of coastline in eastern Sicily, presumably confiscating contraband
and taking hefty bribes at the same time. Not long after that he
won the tax-collecting franchise in Lercara Friddi, a sulphur-
mining town not too far from Palermo. A senior government
official gave him a job reference that said — in blatant contradic-
tion of the facts — that Miceli played no part whatsoever in the
1848 revolution.
In 1860 Miceli nonchalantly changed sides once more and
supported Garibaldi’s fight against the Bourbons. Naturally, he
was then recruited into the National Guard. Under Miceli’s
control, the National Guard in Monreale was described in an
official report of July 1862 as being made up of ‘robbers,
cammoristi [sic], Bourbon royalists and corrupt men’.
Miceli did not have the same success in building his career
under the Italian government as he had done under the Bourbons.
And like everyone else, he could see how detested Italian govern-
ment authority in Sicily was. So in September 1866, Miceli staked
his fortunes on revolution for what turned out to be the last time.
The revolt’s aims were confused: Bourbon restoration, or a
republic — no one was very sure. That did not matter to Turi

BS
Mafia Brotherhoods

Miceli. Politics, of whatever stripe, was just a way to convert

ferocity into influence, position and money.
-In September 1866, for the first and last time, Turi Miceli
backed the wrong side and found an agonising death. The revolt
was crushed. There were to be no more revolutions in Sicily. For
good or ill, Italy was in the island to stay. Other mafia bosses
understood that better than Miceli. Instead of forming squads
and leading the revolt, they formed what were called ‘counter-
squads’ and defended the Italian status quo. Their strategy echoed
the moves made by ‘redeemed’ camorra boss of Naples, Salvatore
De Crescenzo: like De Crescenzo, most top mafiosi calculated
that supporting the cause of Italy was now the surest way to
guarantee their criminal fortunes. September 1866 was to be a
crucial transitional moment in the history of the mafia.

24
The benign mafia

In nineteenth-century Naples, nobody ever questioned whether

the camorra existed. Of course there was occasional reticence
about the contacts between the early camorra and the Masonic
societies of the Risorgimento, But nobody ever tried to pretend
that ‘camorra’ meant anything other than what it really was: a
secret criminal sect.
Yet for most of the Sicilian mafia’s history, most people did
not believe it was a sworn criminal fraternity, a Freemasonry of
delinquents. ‘Mafia’, or better, ‘mafiosity’ — it was said — was a
characteristic Sicilian mentality, an island syndrome. If you were
mafioso you suffered from a swelling of the ego that made you
reluctant to settle your disputes through official channels. The
symptoms of this strange malady were probably inherited from
Sicily’s ninth-century Arab invaders.
Late-twentieth-century sociologists had their own versions of
the same spurious theory. Mafiosi were affiliates of self-help
groups in poor, isolated villages — who just happened to kill
people occasionally. Or they were local problem solvers and
mediators, judges whose courtroom was the piazza and whose
law book was an ancient, unwritten code of honour. Meadow
Soprano, daughter of TV mafia boss Tony, summed up the theory
nicely when she said that the mafia was ‘an informal method of
conflict resolution in Mediterranean societies’.
As we shall see, this tangle of mystifications was deliberately
spun by the mafia and its allies in the Sicilian ruling class. One
of the main reasons why the Sicilian mafia was for so long Italy’s
most powerful criminal organisation was because of its ability
to perpetuate the illusion that it did not even exist. The illusion

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Mafia Brotherhoods

was first created in the years following the Palermo revolt of

1866.
From the Right government’s point of view, the miserable story
of the 1866 revolt did at least have a hero in Antonio Starabba,
Marquis of Rudini, and Mayor of Palermo. Like all mayors at
this time, he was appointed directly by the king rather than being
elected by the local people. Rudini got the Palermo job because
despite being a Sicilian, indeed one of the island’s biggest land-
owners, he was a man of the Right. His rectitude and courage
amid the mayhem did honour to the Italian flag, and drew the
admiration of the European press.
When the squads descended on the city Rudini mustered the
members of his administration to defend the town hall from the
rebels. His house at the Quattro Canti was ransacked; his father
died from shock as a result; and his wife only just escaped by
clambering through a window with their baby in her arms. When
the town hall became indefensible, Rudini led its occupants to
the safer surroundings of the Royal Palace. There, with other
beleaguered government loyalists, he survived for the rest of the
week on horse meat, and shot back at the insurgents with musket
balls made from melted down gas pipes. Tall, blonde and hand-
some, with an easy authority to his manner, Rudini was not yet
thirty years old but his political career was set on a steep, upward
trajectory. He was now a poster boy for the Right’s project to
civilise Sicily. Soon after the revolt he was promoted from Mayor
to Prefect. In other words, he was the eyes and ears of central
government in the provinces, an official with access to high-level
police intelligence. When it came to the problems of Sicily, nobody
could command the attention of central government more than
him.
Marquis Rudini was given a platform for his opinions eight
months after the Palermo revolt of September 1866, when a
parliamentary commission of inquiry came to Sicily to learn the
lessons. The commissioners assembled in the comfort of the
Hotel Trinacria set back from the marina, its doors protected by

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 The benign mafia

a picket of troops. They heard Rudini give a testimony that

addressed the mafia issue with shocking clarity.

The Mafia is powerful — perhaps even more powerful than

people believe. Uncovering it and punishing it is very often
impossible, because there is no proof, either of the crimes,
or of who is to blame . . . We’ve never been able to pull
together enough evidence to prepare a trial and bring it
to a successful conclusion.
Only people who have the Mafia’s protection can move
around freely in the countryside . . . The lack of security
has brought about the following situation: anyone who
wants to go into the countryside and live there has to
become a brigand. There is no alternative. To defend
yourself and your property, you have to obtain protection
from the criminals, and tie yourself to them in some way.
The Ucciardone — the Palermo prison — is a kind of
government. That’s where rules, orders, etc. are issued.
In the Ucciardone they know everything. So that might
lead us to believe that the Mafia has formally recognised
bosses.
In the countryside around Palermo criminal gangs are
very widespread, and there are many different bosses. But
they often act in agreement with one another and look
to the Ucciardone for leadership.
Their aim is to get rich in the disorder and bump off
their enemies. Robbery and vendetta, in short.

Rudini was right. Or at least he was as right as he could feasibly

be at this early stage in the mafia’s history. Granted, talking about
the mafia was politically convenient for the young Marquis. For
one thing, it saved his having to address his own share of the
blame for the revolt. His high-handed policies as mayor had made
him as loathed in Palermo as Silvio Spaventa was in Naples.
Nevertheless, we can now appreciate just how far towards a

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Mafia Brotherhoods

full understanding of the mafia Rudini had advanced. He was

particularly astute in identifying how the property owners of the
area had to ‘tie themselves’ to the mafia. The threats and promises
that won the mafia such a big slice of the citrus fruit business
also won them freedom from the law and friends in high places.
Here lay the genuine shock effect of Rudini’s words: the land-
owners who had become ‘brigands’ were also the ruling class of
the province of Palermo, its political leadership.
The self-assured young Marquis Rudini did not have all the
answers, of course. He was sensible enough to acknowledge as
much: he confessed that he could not tell how many bosses and
affiliates the mafia had, for instance. ‘To really appreciate the
Mafia’s power and influence, we would need to get to know this
mysterious organisation better.’
A decade later, another parliamentary inquiry squinted into
the murk of Sicilian affairs. In March 1876, this time in Rome
(which had become the capital city in 1870), Marquis Rudini was
called to demonstrate whether he had indeed managed to get to
know the mysterious mafia organisation any better.
Rudini’s political career had made further progress in the mean-
time: he became Minister of the Interior for a while in 1869. Yet
the years seemed to have eroded his confidence. His views on the
mafia were now hesitant, slippery, and confusing.
He began by saying that, in Sicily, public opinion had been
‘led astray’ in such a way that criminals had become ‘likeable’
to the local population. Perhaps sensing that these words might
not play well in Sicily, he tried to claim that the same thing
‘happens in every country in the world’. Ignoring the puzzled
frowns of the commission members sitting before him, he blun-
dered on.

Now when public opinion and indeed the very moral

sense of any population is led astray in the way I have
described, the result is the maffia. The famous maffia!
But what is this maffia? Let me say first of all that there

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 The benign mafia

is a benign maffia. The benign maffia is a sort of bravado.

It is a strange inclination not to allow yourself to be
bullied; instead, you bully others. It’s about striking an
attitude — the attitude of the farceur, or practical joker,
as the French would say. Thus I myself could be a benign
maffioso. Not that I am one. But, in a nutshell, anyone
who respects himself, who has a dash of exaggerated
haughtiness, could be one.

Rudini’s waffling testimony then moved onto what he called the

‘malign maffia’, which was, he asserted, the unfortunate result
of the ‘atmosphere’ created by the benign maffia. As if he had
not already done enough to baffle his listeners, he further divided
the malign mafia into two distinct and apparently unconnected
types. First there was the prison mafia — but that had all but
disappeared anyway; then there was what he called a ‘high mafia’.
Unlike the prison mafia, the high mafia was not a genuine criminal
association. Instead, it was what he termed a ‘solidarity in crime’.
It was all about as clear as a glass of black Sicilian wine. No
mention of an organisation. No mention of bosses or links
between the prisons and criminals on the outside. No reference
to landowners who become ‘brigands’ or to protection rackets.
No mention of lemon groves, witnesses being intimidated, or
robbery and vendetta. Not even a suggestion that there might be
more to learn.
Between 1867 and 1876, Marquis Rudini’s views on the mafia
had retreated from clarity into muddle, from forthright condem-
nation into woolly apologia.
Rudini was not the only witness to spin out such verbiage in
1876. Some flatly denied that the mafia even existed. Many others
talked about a ‘good mafia’ and a ‘bad mafia’, about the islanders’
proud way of taking the law into their own hands, and so on.
If the mafia did exist, it was something shapeless and hard to
explain to an outsider, something that Sicilians felt in their bones.
Nobody could ever hope to get to know the mafia better.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Rudini had very good reasons for being flustered when he came
before the 1876 commission of inquiry. The commission itself
had been instituted in the aftermath of a scandal involving the
Chief of Police of Palermo, a man called Giuseppe Albanese. In
1871 Albanese went on the run to avoid being arrested for
arranging several murders in concert with the mafia chief of
Monreale, who was presumably Turi Miceli’s successor as boss
of the town. While in hiding, Police Chief Albanese was received
in Rome by no less than the Prime Minister, who promised him
the government’s protection. Not surprisingly there was an outcry
in Sicily when Albanese was acquitted for lack of evidence some
months later. Then in June 1875 further scandalous details about
the Police Chief emerged. His favourite underworld informer led
a gang of criminals who had perpetrated a series of burglaries
from aristocratic palaces, from the offices of the Court of Appeal,
from a pawnbroker’s, and even from the city museum. The loot
was recovered in the house of a policeman who worked in Alba-
nese’s office.
Rudini was profoundly implicated in the scandal since he had
appointed Albanese in the first place. Rudini had also been
Interior Minister, with direct responsibility for law and order
policy, when Albanese was employing the mafia to murder people
in Monreale. (Albanese’s aim, once more, was to co-manage
crime with the underworld elite.)
Rudini also had political reasons for unlearning what he knew
about the mafia. As Member of Parliament for a Sicilian constitu-
ency, he was one of only a small handful of Right MPs that the
island had sent to Rome in the last general election. The Right
had bludgeoned Sicily to get rid of the mafia, but then hired the
mafia to help in its repressive work. Now it was paying the
political price for its hypocrisy and double-dealing. Rudini was
trying desperately to fit in with the new moad, but his efforts
proved futile. Eight days after Rudini’s testimony, on 18 March
1876, the Right coalition government split over the issue of
railway nationalisation and the Left entered government for the

I0O
 The benign mafia

first time. Rudini was destined for a long spell in the political
wilderness.
Like the Right, the Left was a very loose coalition: its unifying
themes were the desire to extend democracy and to invest more
money in the country’s backward infrastructure. The Left was
also more southern than the Right, and in particular more
Sicilian. With the advent of the Left, Sicilian politicians gained
access to power, and the Italian state finally won consent for its
authority on the island. Yet among the politicians who now
represented Sicily in a Left-dominated chamber were the ‘brig-
ands’ that Rudini had spoken of in 1867 — landowners who,
willingly or not, had struck a deal with the mafiosi to protect
and manage their land. The mafia was now able to offer other
services to its patrons: election management, for one. Once the
Left was in power, the mafia’s political sponsors enjoyed purchase
with central government.
After the Bourbons, the Right. After the Right, the Left.
Whether in times of revolution or in times of peace, no govern-
ment could control Sicily without goifig through mafiosi.

IOI
A sect with a life of its own:
The mafia’s rituals discovered

On 29 February 1876, eleven days before Marquis Rudini put

forward his abstruse theories about the ‘benign mafia’, the Italian
government discovered the most important piece of evidence in
the entire history of Sicilian organised crime. The Palermo Police
Chief wrote to the Minister of the Interior to describe, for the
first time, the initiation ritual used by mafiosi in a settlement in
the Conca d’Oro called Uditore.
Uditore was a suburban village, a borgata, of only 700-800
souls, but there had been no less than thirty-four murders there
in 1874, as rival mafia factions fought for a monopoly over the
lucrative business of ‘protecting’ the market gardens. The local
boss was don Antonino Giammona, described by the Chief of
Police as ‘almost completely lacking in education, but with a
natural intelligence’. Another witness described him as ‘taciturn,
puffed up, and wary’. Giammona even fancied himself as some-
thing of a poet and wrote verse in Sicilian dialect.
He also made each of his gang’s members-to-be undergo a
kind of baptism into a new, more exalted life of crime, the Chief
of Police explained. The aspiring mafioso was taken to a secluded
spot and shown into the company of Giammona and his under-
bosses. The recruit offered his finger or arm to be punctured with
a dagger, and then dripped blood onto a small picture of a saint.
The picture was then burned and its ashes scattered to signify
the total obliteration of traitors, while the recruit swore eternal
loyalty to the sect.
The Police Chief of Palermo was in no doubt about how

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 A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered

significant this find was: it utterly discredited all the waffle about
the ‘benign mafia’, the mafia as an inborn Sicilian egotism.

It shows that the maffia is not only an individual mani-

festation of an instinctive tendency to bully people, but
is instead a sect with a life of its own, which operates in
the shadows.

The same ritual recurs throughout the history of the mafia in

Sicily and North America. But the rules by which individual
mafia gangs or cosche (pronounced kos-keh) live are very rarely
written down. So, because they are transmitted by word of mouth,
they are susceptible to minor local variations: in the wording of
the oath taken by the initiate, for example. Sometimes the bottom
lip was pierced, more often the trigger finger. Most cosche use
a pin to draw blood, some use the thorn from a Seville orange-
tree. Different figures appeared on the sacred image that was
consumed by the flames, although the Madonna of the Annun-
ciation is by far the most frequent. Thére is nevertheless a strong
family resemblance between all the variants. That family resem-
blance is the clearest possible demonstration that the mafia is
not just a haughty attitude or some vague ‘solidarity in crime’,
as Marquis Rudini would try to claim. It is an organisation. And
that organisation has a history —a single line of continuity that
runs from the lemon groves of the Palermo hinterland to the
streets of New York and beyond.
In the months following the first unearthing of the initiation
rite, news of very similar oaths arrived from elsewhere in the
province of Palermo and even across the island in the province
of Agrigento. Curiously, one of the cosche using these rites was
discovered in the town of Canicatti, where Marquis Rudini had
his constituency.
The resemblances between the different mafia gangs were
striking. Like the Giammona crew in Uditore, the other cosche
also used a coded dialogue so that mafiosi who did not know

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Mafia Brotherhoods

one another personally could recognise one another as brothers

in crime. The dialogue began when one mafioso complained
about a toothache and pointed to one of the canines in his upper
jaw. The second mafioso would reply that he too had a toothache.
The two would proceed to tell one another where they were when
the tooth began to hurt, who was present, and so on. The ‘tooth-
ache’ signified membership of the mafia; and the references to
the time and place the toothache began recalled the moment
when the mafioso was initiated.
All of this evidence arrived at a politically sensitive time. The
Left was consolidating itself in power and discovering that the
mafia was something rather more menacing than a peculiar
Sicilian form of bravado. Then in November 1876 the state of
law and order in Sicily became an international embarrassment
when the English manager of a sulphur company was kidnapped
in the province of Palermo; there were strong suspicions of mafia
involvement.
The Left’s new Prefect of Palermo, Antonio Malusardi, became
convinced that there was a link, or as he termed it ‘a real corre-
spondence’ between the various mafia cells. On 30 January 1877
the Prefect wrote to the Chief Prosecutor, the man in charge of
the whole judicial system in Palermo, and urged him to unify the
different mafia investigations so that the connections between
the different cosche could be explored. In short, the Prefect of
Palermo was asking the Chief Prosecutor to answer a simple but
crucial question. Were there many criminal sects in Sicily, or was
there just one single Freemasonry of delinquency? One Sicilian
mafia, or many?
No Sicilian old enough to remember the r98os can read Prefect
Malusardi’s words without a shiver of recognition. For only in
1983, amid a terrifying upsurge in mafia violence, did Palermo
investigators finally begin to base their strategy on the ‘real
correspondences’ between the mafia gangs across western Sicily.
To trace and document those correspondences, they formed an
anti-mafia ‘pool’ of four specialised prosecutors.

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 A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered

In the summer of the following year, a leading Man of Honour

called Tommaso Buscetta, who had lost many of his relatives in
the ongoing slaughter, turned state’s witness. Buscetta, who was
known as the ‘boss of the two worlds’ because of his transatlantic
influence, gave the pool of investigators a deeper insight into the
mafia than they had ever had. Among the many vital revelations
provided by Buscetta was the initiation ritual that he, like every
other Man of Honour, had undergone. In 1992, a verdict from
the Court of Cassation, Italy’s highest court, finally accepted the
boss of two worlds’ testimony; it confirmed for the first time in
history that the mafia was not a loose ensemble of local gangs
but a single organisation, bound by an oath of loyalty until death.
There was only one Sicilian mafia.
Two of Italy’s most courageous and able men would soon pay
for this truth with their lives. Within weeks of the Court of
Cassation’s ruling, the leading members of the anti-mafia pool,
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were both blown up.
Tragically, Prefect Malusardi’s hunch had finally been proven
incontrovertibly — more than a centuryof bloodshed later. New
research tells us that Italy could and should have answered Malu-
sardi’s question shortly after he asked it.
The Chief Prosecutor’s reply to Prefect Malusardi’s letter about
the mafia’s rituals took more than a month to arrive — a strange
delay given the importance of the matter. Its conclusions were
absolutely categorical.

Doubtless there are groups or associations of criminals

of various sizes here and there in Sicily. But they are not
confederated or bound to one another by links of mutual
complicity.

The Chief Prosecutor was very hostile to the suggestion that

there should be large-scale mafia prosecutions — Italians today
call them ‘maxi-trials’. Such trials would trample on the autonomy
_ of the magistracy, he-protested, and open the way for politically

I0§
Mafia Brotherhoods

motivated abuses of the law by the government. This argument

won the day. In courts across Sicily over the following six years,
a few mafiosi were put on trial, many of them for the first time.
But they were tried as members of separate, locally based criminal
organisations.
The Chief Prosecutor’s letter has often been cited by historians
sceptical about the existence of a unified criminal network called
‘the mafia’. Falcone and Borsellino may have demonstrated
beyond doubt the existence of the organisation known as Cosa
Nostra, they argue, but it is naive to project that finding back
into the past. In 1877 the far-fetched theory that there was only
one mafia suited the government’s purposes all too well, it has
been claimed. There are few better pretexts for an authoritarian
crackdown than the fantasy of a mysterious clandestine sect of
murderers with links right across western Sicily. The Chief Pros-
ecutor had access to all the available police evidence on the early
mafia, much of which has since been lost. So if someone as
knowledgeable as him thought that the different gangs were not
‘confederated’, who are we, at more than a century’s distance,
to cast doubt on his conclusions?
Yet on closer inspection, the Chief Prosecutor’s letter is hardly -
a shining example of forensic logic. The different associations
could not be linked, he argued, because fighting often broke out
between them. The toothache dialogue was not a recent discovery,
he added: tough guys across the island had been using the same
formulaic exchange for a while to check whether the people they
met shared a similar mindset; they had started doing it in the
prison in Milazzo, and had probably copied the idea from a story
about a noble bandit written by Alexandre Dumas, author of
The Three Musketeers. The Chief Prosecutor concluded by
conceding that on one occasion, and one only, the different gangs
had indeed shown a sense of shared purpose: in the revolt of
September 1866, when they united in the cause of overthrowing
what they called the ‘despicable government’.
Quite why these points make for a decisive rebuttal of the

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 A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered

theory that there was a single, unified mafia network is not

entirely clear.
Maftosi killed one another before 1877, and they have done
so ever since. But that does not stop them being members of the
same brotherhood.
The fact that the toothache routine may have been invented
in prison does nothing to diminish the suspicions that surround
it — quite the contrary. Nor indeed does the fact that it may have
been copied from a novel, an opera, or whatever. As we know
from the fable of the camorra’s Spanish origins, Italian criminal
organisations like to create a rich mythology for themselves; we
can hardly be surprised if they are unscrupulous enough to do
it by plagiarising bits and pieces from the culture around them.
Last but not least, if many of the gangs were able to coordinate
sufficiently well to rise up in simultaneous revolt in September
1866, did that not provide deeply worrying evidence of the links
between them?
It is time we met the Chief Prosecutor who put his name to
these shaky arguments. He was Carlo Morena, a highly respected
magistrate who had been given many decorations during his
distinguished career. He came from a place immune to Sicily’s
‘exaggerated haughtiness’, its proudly truculent attitude to official
legality: he was born in 1821 in a village in the north, not far
from the Ligurian coastal town of Savona.
In March 1876, just after being appointed to the most senior
judicial position in Sicily, Morena was interviewed by a Parlia-
mentary inquiry about the state of justice in the Palermo area.
His replies were frank — as befitted a magistrate who clearly
believed in upholding the rule of law. Sicilian magistrates were
weak or corrupt, Morena said; there was a wall of omerta among
witnesses and even victims; and the courts handed out feeble
punishments for violent crimes that undermined the authority
of the state.
But by the time he came to reply to Prefect Malusardi ten
_ months later, Carlo Morena was a mafioso. He did not have a

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Mafia Brotherhoods

‘toothache’, and was not part of the sworn criminal fraternity.

Nor was he necessarily even a willing aide to the gangsters. But
he was nonetheless a ‘friend of the friends’, as the Sicilian expres-
sion has it.
Quite what the mafia did to win Morena over in 1876 is not
known. He may have been subjected to any mixture of threats,
bribery, blackmail, and political pressure. As with the landowners
that Marquis Rudini labelled ‘brigands’, or indeed with Rudini
himself, many different scenarios are possible. But we can at least
be sure that Chief Prosecutor Morena was working for the
Honoured Society of Sicily. To find out why, we need to move
much, much deeper into the world of the mafia — deeper than was
ever possible before the discovery in 2009 of a quite exceptionally
revealing document. That document is in the neat handwriting of
the first genuine hero in the history of Italian organised crime, a
man whose long and eventful career we will follow from now on.
If there is one thing that the mafia fears, it is good police.
Despite all the co-management of crime in Naples and Palermo,
nineteenth-century Italy did produce some very good police.
Among the best of them was a blonde, square-jawed officer called
Ermanno Sangiorgi. Sangiorgi’s bulky personal file is kept among
the endless Ministry of the Interior papers in Rome’s Central
State Archive. It covers a career that lasted nearly five decades.
Sangiorgi retired in 1907, by which time he was the country’s
most experienced and decorated mafia-fighter. Sangiorgi embodies
all the tribulations of the fight against the mafia after Italian
unification.
For very good personal and professional reasons, Sangiorgi
had no doubts about what the mafia was: a clandestine sect of
murderers with links right across western Sicily. For one thing,
it was Sangiorgi who led the inquiry into the Uditore mafia whose
boss was the dialect poet, don Antonino, Giammona, and
Sangiorgi who first discovered the initiation ritual and the ‘tooth-
ache’ dialogue.
What follows in the next chapter is the story of a previously

ro8
 A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered

unknown investigation that ran in parallel to the case of the

Uditore mob. The mafia did not lightly forgive Ermanno Sangiorgi
for exposing its initiation ritual. As the mafia’s vengeance played
itself out, Sangiorgi was to discover just how subtle and ramified
was its authority, and just how wrong Carlo Morena was to deny
the existence of a unified criminal brotherhood in western Sicily.
Sangiorgi’s investigation also reveals the sinister manoeuvrings
during the early years of the Left, which saw the mafia put on
trial for the first time, but which also saw Sicilian politicians,
among them the mafia’s friends, step onto the national political
stage.
There is one background political issue that is worth keeping
in mind from the outset of this story: discontinuity. The problem
has bedevilled Italy’s response to organised crime for much of
the last century and a half. After 1860, whether under the Right
or the Left, the Italian system generated one fragile coalition
government after another, and therefore a dizzying turnover of
officials and policies.
Policing policy is a prime example. The short chain of
command that concerns us here descends as follows: from the
Prime Minister and then the Interior Minister in Rome, down to
the Prefect of Palermo and then through the city’s Chief of Police
to his officers on the ground. The following story is set over three
and a half years, from November 1874 to June 1878. It was a
bad period for policy discontinuity, but not unrepresentative:
there were three Prime Ministers, four Interior Ministers, six
Prefects of Palermo and three Chiefs of Police. Some of them
barely had time to hang their jackets up before they were trans-
ferred. All the time, at every level, policy swung unpredictably
between repressing the mafia and cultivating it. For front-line
policemen like Ermanno Sangiorgi, these rapid changes in the
political weather could have terrifying consequences.

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Double vendetta

Like most Italian policemen, Ermanno Sangiorgi badly wanted to

win the favour of the civil servants who controlled his destiny and
monitored every detail of his private life. Pay was poor. Conditions
were tough. The Public Security Service had a national career
structure and a habit of moving its officers rapidly between post-
ings, so that even the rank and file could spend their entire careers
in wandering exile among alien communities where the locals spoke
incomprehensible dialects and regarded the cops with contempt.
Sangiorgi was from the centre-north of the country; he was
born in 1840 in the Romagnol spa town of Riolo. He knew only
too well how a police career could play havoc with family life.
His first wife died, probably in childbirth, leaving him with a
son, Achille, to care for on his own when he was not yet out of
his teens. He got married for a second time in 1861, to Enrica
Ricci, a girl from a respectable lower-middle-class Faenza family,
and the couple gave their children the patriotic names of Italo
and Italia. After 1863, much of Sangiorgi’s service was spent
fighting brigand bands in the south. Posted to primitive mountain
communities, he and his wife could not keep Achille with them
much of the time. Promotion was the only path to a less arduous
life, yet every step up the career ladder had to be twisted from
the grasp of politicians and bureaucrats by means of strenuous
hard work, string pulling, and sob stories. Sangiorgi had a high
sense of his own worth and was dogged in the pursuit of his
ambition. As a Prefect would later write of him, ‘he seeks out
every possible means of getting himself noticed’.
In December 1874 Sangiorgi tried to get himself noticed by
the Minister of the Interior, no less. For nine months he had been

IIo
 Double vendetta

acting Inspector in Trapani, on the westernmost tip of Sicily, he

wrote. The permanent promotion to Inspector that he had been
promised had not yet materialised. Of course he had absolute
confidence that this promise would be kept — so much so that
he had not hesitated to dip into his own pocket to supplement
his police pay. After all, he had a wife and three children to
support. But his ‘intense desire’ was to show his gratitude to the
minister with further services, and ‘to make himself ever more
worthy of the Royal Government’s consideration’. Would it be
possible, therefore, for him to be transferred ‘to a place where
the conditions of law and order leave more to be desired’?
Sangiorgi was looking for action, and he got all the action he
could ever have hoped for. In March 1875 he took charge of the
biggest, most heavily populated, and most mafia-infested police
district in Sicily: Castel Molo, covering the northern part of the
Conca d’Oro. Within its administrative boundaries lay the Piana
dei Colli — a fertile plain bounded on one side by the small
mountains to Palermo’s north-west, and on the other by Monte
Pellegrino, an isolated mass of rock that surges from the shore
just to the city’s north. The Piana dei Colli was dotted with the
villas and gardens of the wealthy. Yet, like the rest of the Conca
d’Oro, its settlements had a fearsome reputation for lawlessness.
A little further to the west, Castel Molo cops also policed the
lemon groves of Passo di Rigano and Uditore. These satellite
villages were, in Sangiorgi’s words, ‘sadly renowned for criminal
associations and bloody crimes’. Sangiorgi diagnosed the cause
of the bloodshed in Castel Molo with incisive calm.

The mafia dominated the situation, and it had even

managed to infect the police station. In fact the main
mafia bosses had all been granted gun licences. When
murders and other serious crimes happened in the Castel
Molo district, as they did frequently, the police chose its
informers from among these men... They turned to the
most notorious mafiosi for confidential information on

IIl
Mafia Brotherhoods

who was guilty, with the frequent result that poor, honest
families were sacrificed, criminals went unpunished, and
the general public was disheartened and distrustful.

Clearly the policy of co-managing crime with the mafia was still
fully operative. One of the most egregious cases of this policy
concerned Sangiorgi’s immediate predecessor in charge of the
Castel Molo police station, Inspector Matteo Ferro. Ferro had a
close friendship with the mafioso who was to occupy a central
role in Sangiorgi’s story: Giovanni Cusimano, known as il nero
(‘Darky’) because of his complexion.
Inspector Ferro had already done a great deal to obstruct
investigations into the Uditore mafia before Sangiorgi arrived; he
had also gone on record to defend Darky, denying that he was a
capomafia, calling him instead ‘an upright man, an individual
who is completely devoted to law and order’. This despite the
fact that Darky, among many other crimes, had recently terrorised
one landowner into granting him a lease on a villa worth 200,000
Lire for the derisory annual fee of one hundred litres of olive
oil. (A rent which, needless to say, Darky did not even deign to
pay.) Once installed in the villa, Darky regularly received visits
not only from the friendly local police Inspector, Matteo Ferro,
but also from a sergeant in the Carabinieri, and the editor of the
local newspaper, L’Amico del Popolo (The People’s Friend).
Everyone with any influence in the Piana dei Colli was a friend
of Darky’s.
Soon after establishing himself in Castel Molo police station,
Sangiorgi acted.

I quickly grasped that I needed to adopt a method diame-

trically opposed to the one that the police had used thus
far. So at once I started openly fighting the mafia.

An open fight against the mafia. The simplicity of these words

should not mislead as to just how difficult the task really was.

TI2
 Double vendetta

When Sangiorgi revoked the mafia bosses’ gun licences and

handed out police cautions to them all, he had to overcome
opposition on a scale that the police fighting the camorra in
Naples had never encountered: Sangiorgi referred to ‘the inter-
vention of Senators, MPs, senior magistrates and other notables’
in defence of the crime bosses. In other words, the mafia was
already part of a network that reached up towards the higher
echelons of Italy’s governing institutions. Sangiorgi’s story is a
parable of just how difficult an open fight against that network
can be.
At first, Sangiorgi achieved excellent results. ‘The mafia went
into its shell’, he later recalled, ‘there was a positive reawakening
of public morale, and a marked reduction in the number of
crimes.’
Then in November 1875, eight months after Sangiorgi arrived
in Palermo, a crippled old man, leaning heavily on a lawyer’s
arm, was shown into his office. His name was Calogero Gambino,
and he was the owner of a lemon grove in the Piana dei Colli,
near the borgata of San Lorenzo. He ‘began by saying that he
had heard of Sangiorgi’s reputation as an honest and energetic
cop, and so was now turning to him to obtain justice against the
mafia.
Gambino had two sons, Antonino and Salvatore. Some eighteen
months earlier, on 18 June 1874, Antonino had been ambushed
and killed — shot in the back from behind the wall of a lemon
‘grove as he was on his way to spray the family’s vines with
sulphur. Gambino’s other son Salvatore was about to stand trial
for his brother’s murder. But this ‘fratricide’ was nothing of the
sort, old man Gambino explained. The mafia, in the shape of
Darky Cusimano, had killed one son and framed the other: this
was its last, cunning act of vengeance against his family.
Without needing to be told, Sangiorgi understood why
Gambino had come to see him now: Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano
was dead, a recent victim of the semi-permanent mafia war to
_ control the lemon groves. The bloody end to Cusimano’s reign

113
Mafia Brotherhoods

in the Piana dei Colli left Calogero Gambino free to tell his
extraordinary story.
A story that was a stick of political dynamite with a fizzing
fuse. For old man Gambino also claimed that the police had
helped the mafia arrange the fake fratricide. The national scandal
surrounding former Chief of Police Albanese had reached its
peak only a few months earlier. If what Gambino said was true,
it would prove that the corruption had not ended with Albanese;
it would prove that the mafia’s infiltration of the police in Palermo
was still well-nigh systematic.

The ‘fratricide’ plot against Gambino’s surviving son was only

the climactic moment of a campaign of vengeance that stretched
back over fourteen years, to the time when Garibaldi’s expedi-
tion to Sicily made the island part of a unified Italian kingdom.
The old man said that the mafia had originally targeted him
because he was a well-to-do outsider who was not born in San
Lorenzo. His son-in-law, Giuseppe Biundi, was the original
source of his troubles; Biundi was the nephew of Darky’s under-
boss. In 1860 Biundi kidnapped and raped Gambino’s daughter
to force a marriage. A few months after the wedding, Gambino’s
new son-in-law stole several thousand Lire from his house. The
young man’s family connections made old man Gambino too
afraid to report the burglary to the authorities, he said.
Then, in 1863, Giuseppe Biundi kidnapped and murdered
Gambino’s own brother. The old man could no longer keep quiet:
following his tip-off to the police, Biundi and his accomplice
were caught and sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour.
Sitting in Sangiorgi’s office eleven years later, Gambino
explained the dread consequences of his actians.

First the mafia persecuted me for vile reasons of economic

speculation. But after what I revealed to the police, there

II4
 Double vendetta

came another, much more serious reason for turning the

screw on me: personal vendetta.

But vendetta did not arrive immediately: Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusi-

mano had to wait three years, until the revolt of September 1866.
At the outbreak of the revolt, Gambino was confidentially
warned that he was in grave danger, and had to leave San Lorenzo
immediately. His sons threw the family’s cash, clothes, linen,
cooking implements and chickens onto a mule cart, and set off
to take refuge at another farm managed by a friend of theirs.
On the way, they were attacked by a party of seventeen mafiosi.
A fierce gun battle followed; Salvatore Gambino was wounded
in the left thigh. But both brothers knew the area well, and
managed to escape over the wall of a nearby estate, abandoning
the family’s possessions to be ransacked by their tormentors.
The Palermo countryside was by then almost completely in
the hands of the rebellious squads. Fearing that their chosen
place of safety no longer offered sufficient protection, the
Gambino family went to Resuttana, ‘the village next to San
Lorenzo in the Piana dei Colli. There they were taken in by one
Salvatore Licata. It was in Salvatore Licata’s house, the following
day, that the Gambinos took delivery of a package from Giovanni
‘Darky’ Cusimano: it contained a hunk of meat from their own
mare. As a mafia message, the horse flesh may not have had
the cinematic flair of the decapitated stallion deployed in The
Godfather, but its meaning was very similar all the same: Darky
had not yet concluded his business with the Gambino family.
Inspector Sangiorgi does not tell us what his thoughts were as
he listened to old man Gambino — he was far too savvy a
policeman to write those thoughts down. Yet to appreciate the
full drama of what Sangiorgi was hearing, and the intrigue that
he was being drawn into, we have no choice but to figure out
how his mind began to work when he learned who had offered
sanctuary to the beleaguered Gambinos in Resuttana in September
_ 1866. Sangiorgi was an outsider to Sicily, a northerner. But he

II5
Mafia Brotherhoods

had been in Palermo long enough to know the baleful power of

the Licatas. The very mention of the Licata name told him, more
clearly than any other detail, that Gambino was hiding a crucial
part of the truth.
Salvatore Licata, aged sixty-one at the time he took in the
Gambinos, was one of the most venerable and best-connected
mafiosi in the Conca d’Oro.
Like many important mafia bosses, including Turi Miceli from
Monreale, Darky Cusimano from San Lorenzo, and don Antonino
Giammona from Uditore, Licata had led a revolutionary squad
into Palermo in 1848 and 1860. But during the 1866 revolt Licata
mobilised his heavies to oppose the insurgents. They formed a
‘counter-squad’, as such gangs were termed at the time. Licata,
in other words, was one of the smart mafiosi who realised that
he had more to lose than to gain by rebelling.
His son Andrea was an officer in the Horse Militia, a notori-
ously corrupt mounted police force. His three other sons were
armed robbers and extortionists who were guaranteed impunity
by the family’s connections.
Like the Licatas, and like don Antonino Giammona who was a
pillar of the National Guard, many Palermo bosses broke their
remaining links with revolutionary politics during the revolt of 1866.
Old man Gambino’s friendship with the fearsome Licata clan
raises the very strong suspicion that Gambino and his sons were
also mafiosi. Several aspects of his story stretched credulity too
far. He was asking Inspector Sangiorgi to believe that he was
entirely an innocent victim. Fear alone, according to Gambino,
had kept him from going to the law when persecuted by Darky,
even though that persecution had been going on for nearly a
decade and a half. The way he described his murdered son
Antonino was also suspicious.

My son Antonino was a young man who was full of

courage. He had too much respect for himself to lose his
composure and allow his enemies, and his family’s

I16
 Double vendetta

enemies, to assume too much familiarity with him. That

is why Darky and his allies were constantly worried, afraid
that my son had in mind to take out his revenge against
them.

A man of bravado and self-respect who would not stand for being
bullied. A ‘benign maffioso’, to use Marquis Rudini’s term. This
is how the mafia likes to represent itself to the outside world.
The conclusion forming in Sangiorgi’s mind was inexorable:
old man Gambino and his two sons were not being persecuted
by the mafia, they were participants in a struggle for power within
the mafia. It was only when they faced final defeat in that struggle
that old man Gambino got his lawyer to take him to the police.
Sangiorgi was to be his instrument of revenge against his former
comrades; turning to the state was a vendetta of last resort.
Fear must have honed Sangiorgi’s concentration as he listened
to the rest of the story.
Once again, after sending the hunk of horse-flesh to old man
Gambino, Darky Cusimano was forced to postpone his campaign
against the Gambino family. When the revolt of September 1866
was subdued there was a brutal crackdown by the authorities.
Fearing that they had exposed themselves with their open assault
on the Gambinos, Cusimano’s people made peace overtures.
Emissaries approached Gambino, who was still living with
‘counter-squad’ leader Salvatore Licata, to propose what Darky
termed a ‘spiritual kinship’: two of his lieutenants were to become
godfathers to Gambino’s grandchildren.
Reluctantly — according to his own very selective narrative of
events — old man Gambino agreed to the proposal, and decided
not to report the attack he had suffered to the authorities. Much
more likely, the ‘spiritual kinship’ was in reality an alliance
between mafia bloodlines.
In Sicily, and in much of the southern Italian mainland, a
godfather is called a compare, literally a ‘co-father’. Comparatico
(‘co-fatherhood’) was a way of cementing a family’s important

ky
 Mafia Brotherhoods

friendships, of extending the blood bond further out into society.

Often a poor peasant would ask a wealthy and powerful man to
become ‘co-father’ to his child as a sign of deference and loyalty.
But ever since the days of old man Gambino and ‘Darky’ Cusi-
mano, mafiosi too have taken advantage of comparatico: senior
bosses establish ‘spiritual kinships’ as a way of building their
following within the sect.
The Gambino family’s enforced stay with Salvatore Licata
during the 1866 revolt produced another intriguing development:
old man Gambino’s son Salvatore married one of Licata’s
daughters.
Naturally Gambino did not say as much to Sangiorgi, but this
marriage was in all probability as political as the ‘spiritual kinship’
with Darky Cusimano: it bound the Gambinos firmly into the
Licata clan. Mafia bosses in more recent and better documented
times have used marriages in exactly the same way that the
crowned heads of Europe did for centuries: to end or prevent
wars, to forge military alliances, to earn money and prestige, and
to secure their power and wealth down the generations.
Sangiorgi was learning that, through ‘co-fatherhood’ and
marriage, the bosses of the Conca d’Oro were developing a
dynastic strategy. Although they were profoundly immersed in
short-term mafia politics, in the bloodletting and alliance building
that are a constant in the mafia’s world, they were also thinking
for the long term, trying to project their power into the future.
Mafia patriarchs shaped their families to meet the peculiar needs
of their business in a way that made their behaviour very distinct
from other Sicilians. (Contrary to a widespread stereotype, in
Sicily at this time the nuclear family was dominant, rather than
the extended family.)
Calogero Gambino’s story tells us that, where women and
. marriage were concerned, the difference between early camorristi
and early maftosi was striking and very important. Mafiosi used
their wives and daughters as political pawns and by doing so
built their illicit gains into patrimonies. Camorristi, by contrast,

118
 Double vendetta

consorted with prostitutes and spent money as soon as they had

stolen it.
Marc Monnier (as always the Swiss hotelier is one of the most
insightful sources on the Honoured Society of Naples) tells us
that the average camorrista’s wife was ‘a power in her own right’
who had the authority to collect protection racket payments.

Even the toughest among the common people would

tremble before the petticoats of these female hoods.
Everyone knew that one day their husbands would leave
prison and, cudgel in hand, visit reluctant payers to
demand an explanation for the outstanding debts.

Such camorriste also ensured that their children ‘made themselves

respected right from the cradle’. So the camorra was trying to
use its women and to think to the future too. But they were not
as strategic, either in their use of marriage as a dynasty-building
tool, or in their preservation of family life from the potentially
destabilising effects of contact with prostitution.
The early crime bosses of Naples almost invariably had pimping
on their criminal records, whereas profiting from the sex trade
was notably absent from the biographies of the Sicilian mafia’s
first bosses. Palermo certainly had its pimps, known by the
revolting nickname of ricottari — literally ‘ricotta cheese makers’.
But Turi Miceli, don Antonino Giammona and the other mafia
chieftains of the 1860s and 1870s never had anything to do with
the ricottari. In the city of Palermo, just as in Naples, many
prostitutes and their pimps could be seen wearing the serpentine
facial scars that were the sex trade’s ugly signature. But just outside
Palermo, among the lemon groves where the mafia dominated,
the sfregio, or disfiguring razor slash, was all but unknown.
Cosa Nostra today forbids its members to profit from prostitu-
tion because, as murdered anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone
explained, they have to ensure that their womenfolk ‘are not
humiliated in their own social environment’. A disaffected

119
Mafia Brotherhoods

woman, as the bearer of gruesome family secrets, is a great

danger to the organisation.
It seems that it was always thus: the Sicilian mafia of the 1860s
may have brutalised and used women domestically but it did not
humiliate them publicly — as any involvement with prostitution
would have done — because it needed them; it needed them to keep
quiet, breed sons and educate those sons in the ways of honour.
It is noticeable that no female personality in Sicily earned the
upper world fame or underworld status that surrounded some of
the women in the early camorra’s orbit: like la Sangiovannara and
her armed female band, or the brothel keepers who won the title
of matrona annurrata — ‘honoured madam’. It seems that the
mafia’s women wielded less overt power because, in their domestic
role, they were more important to the organisation. The mafia’s
iron strategic control over women is a vital secret of its extraor-
dinary resilience over time. A resilience that the Honoured Society
of Naples, with its persistent weakness for the short-term profits
of pimping, would ultimately prove unable to match.

or
Old man Gambino’s tale was moving towards its conclusion. The
‘spiritual kinship’ between the Gambinos and Darky Cusimano
held for six years. Then, on 17 December 1872, the Gambino
brothers were once more ambushed in the Piana dei Colli.
Following an initial volley of shots, they fought the six assailants
hand-to-hand. Again the brothers escaped through the lemon
groves. Despite receiving a head wound, Antonino Gambino
managed to wrestle a rifle away from one of the attackers.
The Gambinos knew who had waylaid them: they recognised
all six attackers. Predictably, five of them were Darky’s men. Less
predictably, and much more worryingly, a mafioso called Giuseppe
‘Thanks be to God’ Riccobono was also part of the firing party.
Riccobono was son-in-law to Antonino Giammona, the poet-
capo of Uditore. What this meant to old man Gambino was that

I20
 Double vendetta

his family now faced the combined wrath of two mafia factions
based in different borgate: their old enemies the Cusimano group
from San Lorenzo; but now also the Giammona group from
Uditore. Gambino referred to these factions as ‘parties’ or ‘asso-
ciations’. Today we would refer to them as mafia Families.
Yet at the same time that the attack revealed a worrying new
alliance ranged against the Gambinos, it also offered them a
potentially devastating weapon against their enemies: the rifle
that Antonino Gambino had captured. Here was concrete proof
of the attackers’ identity — as long as the Gambinos could find
the right person in law enforcement to offer that proof to.
Still pretending to Sangiorgi that he was an innocent victim
of mafia persecution, old man Gambino explained that he turned
to the Licatas, his dynastic allies, to make the best use of the
rifle captured from Darky Cusimano’s men.
But what seemed like a smart move only exposed the Gambinos’
isolation even more cruelly. The senior police connected to the
Licatas ignored the rifle. Much worse than that, they made moves
that suggested to old man Gambino that they were going to try
and frame him for stealing it.
The Gambinos were now being targeted by the three most
powerful mafia cosche in the Piana dei Colli. Their protection,
the web of ‘spiritual kinships’ and marriage pacts, had been torn
apart, isolating the family completely. Eighteen months later, at
dawn on 18 June 1874, the lethal consequences of that isolation
hit home, when Antonino Gambino was shot dead.
As Sangiorgi listened, the old man described his response to
his son’s death in tones that were both genuinely moving and
creepily manipulative. When news of the murder reached him,
grimly certain that Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano had accomplished
his vendetta, Gambino hobbled as fast as he could to embrace
the bleeding corpse. He then sat holding his son for hours.
After a while, Darky himself appeared. Leaning over the corpse,
he roughly pushed back an eyelid, turned to the distraught father
_and told him that there was nothing more to be done.

I21
Mafia Brotherhoods

Some time later the police arrived in the person of Inspector

Matteo Ferro, Sangiorgi’s predecessor as Inspector in the Castel
Molo district, and the very man who had defined Darky as ‘an
individual completely devoted to law and order’.
By this time, Gambino was ‘crying out as if he was obsessed’.
He heard Inspector Ferro tell him to pull himself together, and
felt Darky’s hands try to tug him to his feet. Gambino scrambled
away from them, yelling ‘Get back! Don’t touch me!’ He then
listened, in rage and despair, as Inspector Ferro asked him if he
could ‘shed any light’ on the murder. Of course, with the mafioso
who ordered the killing looking on, he could say nothing in reply.
Inspector Ferro left old man Gambino to his grief and went
to the nearby villa that was ‘rented’ by Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusi-
mano. He was joined by the sergeant of the local Carabinieri
who, as we know, was also a regular guest of Darky’s.
At that point, Calogero Gambino’s other son Salvatore also
came to weep for the murdered Antonino. Word of Salvatore’s
arrival quickly reached the mafiosi and police in Darky’s villa.
At which point, the Carabiniere sergeant came out and promptly
arrested Salvatore for killing his own brother. The mafia’s frat-
ricide plot had been set in motion — a ‘double vendetta’, the old
man called it.

er
Many times, through forty-eight years of service to the cause of
law and order, Sangiorgi would make pleas for promotion. Many
times, his superiors would give him glowing references: brave,
able and tactful, they called him. These were precisely the
attributes that he had to call on during his first months as a
mafia-fighter when Calogero Gambino hobbled into his office on
his lawyer’s arm.
Brave. Sangiorgi knew that, even shiciighe Giovanni ‘Darky’
Cusimano was now dead, the investigation implicated many other
violent and well-connected mafiosi.

I22
 SAN MAURO CASTELVERDE.
Double vendetta

Mafia morality. A very rare Cosa Nostra rulebook from 2007. Among the
regulations crammed onto a single, badly typed page are: ‘Respect your wife’

who has a close relative in the police. Anyone who has emotional infidelities
and ‘The following people cannot become part of Cosa Nostra: Anyone

in their family. Anyone who behaves very badly or does not keep to moral
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Mafia Brotherhoods

Able. Sangiorgi needed all his investigative skills to verify what

old man Gambino had told him. He quickly ascertained that the
old man’s story tallied perfectly with the facts.
And, most of all, tactful. The case took Sangiorgi deeper and
deeper into the sinister nexus between the state and the criminal
sect that had brought death to the lemon groves of the Conca
d’Oro.
Sangiorgi found damning evidence about the Carabiniere
sergeant who emerged directly from Darky’s villa to arrest Salva-
tore Gambino. His source within the Carabinieri explained how
the mafia had entrapped the sergeant by using a two-pronged
strategy it deployed frequently against law enforcement. Cusi-
mano and other mafia bosses first buttered the sergeant up: they
took him out into the countryside on what Sangiorgi referred to
as ‘frequent tavulidde’. The Inspector had evidently picked up
some Sicilian dialect during his time on the island. A tavulidda
was (and is) a languorous al fresco lunch at which men bond
over roast goat, artichokes, macco (broad bean purée), and wine
as dark as treacle. The mafia was introducing the sergeant to a
bit of local culture.
The second prong involved the mafia’s womenfolk, who sidled
up to the sergeant’s wife and told her

In the Piana dei Colli, any woman who likes to keep out
of all sorts of bother needs to stay close to her husband.

An oblique threat, but a blood-freezingly clear one all the same.

Over a century and a half this form of wheedling intimidation
has done more to protect the mafia than any other form of
corruption in its wide repertoire. There is no better way to inca-
pacitate the state than to nullify the effectiveness of its operatives
on the ground. :
Sangiorgi’s investigations then concentrated on the key pros-
ecution witness in the fratricide case. Standing guard not far
from the point where Antonino Gambino was murdered was a

124
 Double vendetta

soldier who heard the shots and ran to the scene. When he arrived,
he saw two men standing over the victim, who was still emitting
his dying groans. The two men took to their heels. But the soldier
got a good view of one of them, who was wearing a straw hat
with a black ribbon round it. Later he picked Salvatore Gambino
out of an identity parade and said that he was the man in the
straw hat.
Old man Gambino told Sangiorgi that the witness was lying,
and that the identity parade was fixed. Sangiorgi soon found
evidence to back up the old man’s accusations. He discovered
that, when Darky Cusimano was shot dead, a receipt for a 200
Lire loan was found on his body. The beneficiary of the loan was
the commander of an army platoon stationed in San Lorenzo
— the same platoon that the key witness came from. The loan
made the framing of Salvatore Gambino look very much like one
token in a murky exchange of favours between the mafia boss
and the platoon commander. Sangiorgi could add the army to
the long list of organisations that had been infiltrated by the
mafia of the Conca d’Oro.
Tact, indeed.
Inspector Sangiorgi now faced the delicate task of telling the
magistrates what he knew. If he exposed the Gambino case as a
mafia plot, he risked trampling on some very important toes
inside the Palace of Justice, because the ‘fratricide’ prosecution
was already scheduled to come before the Court of Assizes.
When Sangiorgi approached the magistrates he received a
reassuring response: they told him he was right to let them know,
and asked him to submit a full report. In the meantime, the
fratricide case kept being adjourned because the soldier who was
supposed to have recognised Salvatore Gambino in the straw hat
twice failed to appear as a witness.
During this delay, there was a change in the political weather.
In March 1876 the Right fell from government, and the first
Left administration, including Sicilian politicians, took office in
‘Rome. A new Prefect was sent to Palermo, and the Right’s senior

125
Mafia Brotherhoods

personnel were rapidly purged, irrespective of their competence

and honesty. The Chief of Police under whom Sangiorgi had
worked was sent to Tuscany.
Sangiorgi was now exposed: he, more than any officer in Sicily,
had been in the front line of the struggle against the mafia; he
had even discovered the mafia’s secret initiation ritual. Without
the backing of his superiors, his career, and possibly his life, were
in danger. The corrupt elements within the Palermo police were
already lobbying against him, pouring poison in the new Prefect’s
ear. In July 1876 the Prefect sent an urgent telegram to the
Minister of the Interior.

Above all, I beg you, get rid of young Sangiorgi for me.
He is able, but a schemer and gossiper who boasts that
he has protectors in the Ministry and in Parliament. I
prefer timewasters to cops like him.

Sangiorgi put in a transfer request which was quickly granted:

in August 1876 he took up a posting in Syracuse, the least crime-
ridden province of Sicily, in the opposite corner of the island to
Palermo. The mafia was both very well informed of this develop-
ment and delighted by it: even before confirmation of the transfer
came through, the news was trumpeted to the Piana dei Colli by
L’Amico del Popolo, whose editor had been spotted consorting
with Darky in his ‘rented’ villa. The mafia’s rumour mill spread
the falsehood that Sangiorgi had been moved for disciplinary
reasons.
While Sangiorgi was in Syracuse the Gambino case dragged
on in perfunctory hearings, through 1876 and into 1877. Old
man Gambino got the chance to tell his story directly to the
magistrates. But the new atmosphere in Palermo began to turn
the case against Sangiorgi. Some of the witnesses he had inter-
viewed lost confidence and changed their stories. Nothing was
done to verify whether the soldier had really seen Salvatore
Gambino in a straw hat at the murder scene. Corrupt cops, whom

126
 Double vendetta

Sangiorgi had removed for incompetence or collusion with the

mafia, seemed to get their fingers into the case again. As Sangiorgi
noted wistfully

If I were fatalistic, I would regrettably have to admit that

an evil spirit, an arcane and pernicious influence overcame
all the procedures I went through to investigate the deduc-
tions I had based on old man Gambino’s evidence.

Inspector Sangiorgi had yet to experience just how pernicious

that ‘evil spirit’ could be.
A few more months passed and once again the political weather
around Sangiorgi changed. The Left found that it was not as easy
to enforce the law in Sicily as it had been led to believe during
fifteen years of noisy Sicilian protests against the hated Right’s
repressive measures. The kidnap of the English sulphur-mining
company manager in November 1876 meant that something had
to be done. So early in 1877 the Left reversed its policy and sent
yet another new Prefect to Palermo to,crack the whip. Across
Sicily, a vast new anti-mafia campaign — as big as anything under
the Right — was set in motion.
Given this transformation in the Left’s official attitude to
organised crime in Sicily, Inspector Sangiorgi was too valuable
an asset to be parked in peaceful Syracuse. Early in 1877 he was
re-assigned to the province of Agrigento, home turf of yet
another recently discovered mafia sect. He was given a pay rise
and recommended for a decoration. Sangiorgi was back in the
front line, and soon renewed his ‘open fight against the mafia’ —
and against one mafioso in particular: Pietro De Michele, the
boss of the town of Burgio, near Agrigento, where Sangiorgi
was now stationed. De Michele insisted on being called ‘Baron’,
although he seems to have had no real claim on the title. His
CV displayed the mafioso’s typical combination of crime and
opportunistic political thuggery. More than that, it showed that
the province of Palermo was not the only place where Men of

127
Mafia Brotherhoods

Honour had used sexual violence as a short-cut to wealth and

position, and indeed that there were close business links between
mafiosi from different provinces.
In 1847 De Michele kidnapped and raped the daughter of a
rich landowner who had refused his advances. But the rape back-
fired. De Michele’s reputation was so bad that the girl’s family’
refused to repair the damage to her honour by conceding a
wedding: family disgrace was far better than a marriage to a
known hood. But De Michele would not accept defeat. In 1848,
he allied himself to the revolution of that year, and took advan-
tage of it to take back the girl, forcibly marry her and rob her
family of a large dowry. He served a short time in jail after the
authority of the Bourbon state was restored; and he was suspected
of many murders after being released.
The ‘Baron’ joined the revolution again in 1860 when Garibaldi
invaded. At some point during the upheaval, all the town’s police
and judicial documents were burned.
When Sicily became part of Italy, De Michele went on to
manage the cattle rustlers and bandits who operated between the
provinces of Palermo, Agrigento and Trapani in the 1860s and
1870s. He armed them, fed them and hid them from the authori-
ties. Most importantly, he used his mafia connections to sell their
stolen cattle in far distant cities: animals robbed near Palermo
would end up butchered in Trapani, where they could never be
traced.
This was an exceptionally lucrative traffic. By the time Sangiorgi
caught up with De Michele, he was the richest landowner in
town and completely controlled the local council. The fearless
Inspector showed no deference to De Michele. Sangiorgi took
away his firearms licence, placed him under police surveillance,
and ordered his arrest when he went on the run. Baron or not,
the boss of Burgio was to be subject to the law like everyone
else.

a
128
le Duisburg massacre. Europe finally takes notice of the 'ndrangheta, Italy's richest and most powerful mafia, on
5 August 2007. One of the six victims, Tommaso Venturi, had just celebrated both his eighteenth birthday and
S admission into the Honoured Society of Calabria. The partially burned image of the Archangel Michael (inset
p), used during the ‘ndrangheta initiation ritual, was found in his pockef.
Camorrisfi settle their differences over a card game; gambling was one of the Honoured Society's
primary rackets.

The flashy dress and strutting posture of a

guappo, or street-corner boss. By the 1850s,
when these illustrations were published, the
camorra was already a highly visible presence
on the streets of Naples.
 Duke Sigismondo Miracle worker. Liborio Romano, who kept order in
‘Castromediano who analysed the camorra’s Naples after June 1860 by recruiting the camorra fo
methods while in prison in the 1850s. He called it replace the police.
‘one of the most immoral and disastrous sects that
human infamy has ever invented.’

Anarchy in Naples! A mob orchestrated by the camorra ransacks the city’s police stations in June 1860.

2)
zi

=&

|
 The pivotal figure in the murky Neapolitan
intriques of 1860. At age 30, Marianna De
Crescenzo a.k.a. /a Sangiovannara, became famous
for her charismatic leadership of a patriotic mob. A
prosperous tavern owner, she also led the
celebrations when Garibaldi entered the city
(below with flag).

A French journalist found /a Sangiovannara hard to pin down: ‘a young woman's innocent smile alternates on her
face with a wolfish cackle’. He described her tavern, adorned with patriotic flags and religious icons, as being a
hang-out for thugs. He did not know that she was a powerful figure in the Neapolitan underworld.
 The redemption of the camorra. Crime bosses
become patriotic heroes and have flattering
portraits printed in the press. Among them is
Salvatore De Crescenzo (left), the most
notorious camorrisfa of the era.

Salvatore De Crescienzo, camorrista.

Mastro ‘Tredici, camovrista.

Silvio Spaventa, who led the first crackdown on the Two more redeemed camorristf. Michele ‘the
Honoured Society and the first investigations into its Town Crier’ and ‘Master Thirteen’.
mysterious origins.
Palermo 1860: freed prisoners parade their warder through the streets before shooting him. The Sicilian mafia
was incubated in the political violence of the early-to-mid- 1800s.

The play that gave the Sicilian mafia its

name. A poster advertising The Mafiosi
of Vicaria Prison (1863). Set in the
1850s, it fells the story of an
LA VICARIA DI) PALERMo 1250 honourable sect of prison extortionists
who are recruited fo the cause of a
oN
's d.

M4 unified Italy.
Day-to-day criminal business in Naples.

A youngster gets his first criminal

insignia. A street tattooist at work
in Naples.
 lies =| = y si Paes’ z SSS £=

The camorra fakes to the streets again. A mob battles with police during the hackney cab drivers’ strike of
August 1893.

The Honoured Society of Naples conducts its first ever inifiation ritual. A scene from Edoardo Minichini’s highly
successful play, The Foundation of the Camorra, from 1899.
 Double vendetta

The bad news about the Gambino fratricide case arrived soon
after 28 August 1877. In Agrigento, Inspector Sangiorgi read the
report on the long-delayed trial in the Gazzetta di Palermo. It is
not hard to imagine his emotions as he did so. Disappointment
first: the court had not believed old man Gambino’s story; Salva-
tore Gambino was found guilty of murdering his brother and
sentenced to hard labour for life. Then resignation: the outcome
was not a surprise.
Sangiorgi’s eyes then moved down the page to read the Gazzetta
di Palermo’s admiring paraphrase of the prosecution’s summing
up. As they did, his heart began to thump with shock.

The honourable magistrate then had extremely grave

things to say about the behaviour of a Police Inspector,
a certain Ermanno Sangiorgi. Because he wanted to take
advantage of the position that he still undeservedly holds,
Sangiorgi tried to throw justice off its course by denying
that Salvatore Gambino had committed the crime, and
claiming instead that the culprit was someone or other
called Darky Cusimano.
This is not the first case that shows us that there are
police officers who have become the maffia’s protectors.
They make a big show of wanting to strike at some other,
hypothetical maffia; and to do so they contrive investiga-
tions that have no basis in fact.
Then the prosecuting magistrate said that Sangiorgi
had deceived, mystified and duped justice by trying to
find a way to give someone else the blame. On the eve of
the first hearings Sangiorgi haughtily sent a report to the
Chief Prosecutor’s Office that made out that Gambino
was not guilty of his brother’s murder.
Sangiorgi’s dishonest conduct (the word is the prosecu-
tor’s) was motivated by his desire to pay back the dirty
services that Calogero Gambino had provided to the
police.

129
Mafia Brotherhoods

Thus, in effect, the prosecuting magistrate’s eloquent

speech to the court was making two separate accusations:
the first against Salvatore Gambino, and the second
against Ermanno Sangiorgi who has made himself into
the maffia’s protector. He signs off gun licences for people
who have police cautions hanging over them and he
releases dangerous criminals from police surveillance.
Any policing system that is represented by men like
Sangiorgi is absolutely pitiful. This is government banditry
—no more and no less. It is the police maffia that has
imposed itself on the law.
The presiding judge used the prosecutor’s own solemn
words to bring his highly fluent précis of the case to a
conclusion: ‘If the jury award the accused a verdict of
not guilty, it will amount to a crown of plaudits awarded
to this corrupt police officer for the dirty services
performed by Calogero Gambino.’

Dishonest. Corrupt. Deceiver of justice. Broker of dirty services.

Protector of the maffia. There was an unnervingly symmetrical
irony to the charges against Sangiorgi, as if the judicial system
and the Gazzetta di Palermo were mocking his ‘open fight’ against
the mafia. It was alleged that he had indulged in precisely the
kind of shady policing that he had overturned when he first came
to the Castel Molo district. That he was precisely the kind of
double-dealing cop that he had expelled from among his
subordinates.
Police like Albanese and Ferro had used mafiosi by siding with
the winners in the underworld’s internal power struggles; they
had co-managed crime with the victorious mafia bosses. What
Sangiorgi had done with old man Gambino was very different:
he had sought to adopt the mafia’s losers so as to attack the very
basis of the sect’s authority. The difference between these two
approaches was as clear as the difference between wrong and
right.

130
 Double vendetta

Yet together, the judiciary and the Gazzetta di Palermo had

obliterated any distinction. The new villain of the story, Inspector
Sangiorgi, came out as just another scheming northern cop. Mean-
while, the real mafia, the mafia of Darky Cusimano, of the poet-
boss Giammona, of Salvatore Licata and his sons, the mafia
whose blood-spattered victims Sangiorgi had seen lying among
the lemon trees, was dismissed as a ‘hypothetical maffia’, a mere
pretext, a fiction dreamed up by a policeman in the cynical pursuit
of power and influence.
Inspector Ermanno Sangiorgi was in very serious trouble.
The mortifying allegations made against Inspector Sangiorgi
in the Palermo Court of Assizes were bound to reach the ears
of his superiors. Dispatches were duly sent, reports were requested
and collated: the Gambino case became the Sangiorgi case. The
Minister of the Interior asked the Minister of Justice to make
inquiries. On 12 October 1877 the Minister of Justice gave his
verdict: ‘the accusations against Inspector Sangiorgi are, alas,
true’. Sangiorgi now faced disgrace, dismissal and possibly jail.
The principal witness against him, the man who investigated
the case on behalf of the Minister of Justice, was also the magis-
trate to whom Sangiorgi had turned when Calogero Gambino’s
testimony first raised such grave doubts about the ‘fratricide’:
Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena — the same Carlo Morena who
just a few months earlier had dismissed the theory that there
could be any kind of ‘confederation’ between the different mafia
cells across Sicily. Carlo Morena, a man with responsibility for
supervising the justice system across the whole of Sicily, was
exacting a vendetta on behalf of the mafia against Ermanno
Sangiorgi.
On behalf of one mafioso in particular: ‘Baron’ Pietro De
Michele, the Burgio boss. Chief Prosecutor Morena knew all
about the Baron’s past, but spent his credibility in spadefuls to
defend him from Sangiorgi. De Michele had made a few mistakes
in the past, Morena reported. But now he was. a friend of the
law and the government, who had become a victim of political

131
Mafia Brotherhoods

persecution. To accuse the Baron of raping his future wife back

in 1847 was unfair: the families had made peace afterwards. So
the accusation of rape was based on an ignorance of Sicilian
customs, Morena argued.

Kidnap and rape of this kind constitute a primitive

phenomenon that occasionally crops up even in the most
civilised societies. Sometimes there are no bad conse-
quences arising from it. Indeed sometimes the very family
who were supposedly harmed by the rape actually
approve of it by agreeing to a subsequent marriage.
Society readily approves of such arrangements. When
that happens, the state should forget about the whole
affair.

Morena went on to explain that the mafia was a local tradition

of the same kind as kidnapping and raping young girls, albeit a
much vaguer one.

The word mafia is such an ill-defined concept, which is

spoken much more often than its meaning is
understood.

Thanks to Chief Prosecutor Morena, the order to arrest capomafia

‘Baron’ De Michele was rescinded.
Of course Morena knew perfectly well that the mafia was
no ‘ill-defined concept’. It was a secret criminal organisation
whose influence stretched right across western Sicily. At the
lowest level, the network linking the local mafia gangs was held
together by the long-distance business of banditry and cattle
rustling. Sangiorgi discovered that the same cattle rustlers who
were sheltered by De Michele were also friends with Palermo
mafiosi like don Antonino Giammona, the Licatas, and Darky
Cusimano. At an intermediate level, the mafia sought to control
the market for buying and renting land, which had its hub in

132
 Double vendetta

Palermo. At the highest level, the mafia network’s strength came

from the favours it could call in from ‘friends of the friends’
in politics and the legal system. Favours like persecuting
policemen who had the temerity to mount an open fight against
organised crime and the foolish courage to discover the
Honoured Society’s secret initiation ceremony.
There was only one Sicilian mafia.

a
On 18 October 1877, the Minister of the Interior wrote to
Sangiorgi’s boss, the Prefect of Agrigento, relaying the details of
the case exactly as it had been set out in the Gazzetta di Palermo.
Sangiorgi could and perhaps should have been prosecuted, the
Minister explained. But he was still an important witness in some
outstanding cases. Did the Prefect consider that a severe repri-
mand was sufficient punishment for his behaviour?
Only then did Sangiorgi’s luck change. The Prefect of Agri-
gento urged the Minister to hear the’other side of the story.
Sangiorgi rapidly put together a long and precise account of the
‘fratricide’ affair. This is the documentation I have drawn on to
tell his story here.
The Prefect backed up Sangiorgi’s report by telling the Minister
that Sangiorgi was one of his most intelligent and energetic officers,
one who had gone beyond the call of duty to fight organised crime
and to bring order to the province of Agrigento. He even recom-
mended the supposed ‘protector of the mafia’ for a promotion.
Meanwhile the Minister of the Interior also received alarming
reports on Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena. In addition to defending
the mafia boss De Michele, Morena had been sending urgent memos
to magistrates around western Sicily, digging up every technicality
possible to secure the release of mafiosi subject to police surveil-
lance and ‘enforced residence’. The Minister pronounced himself
‘profoundly shocked’ by Morena’s behaviour.
The Interior Ministry now held a compelling body of evidence.

133
Mafia Brotherhoods

The saga of Sangiorgi’s dealings with old man Gambino exposed

gangland infiltration not only of the police, but also of the
magistrature; it provided new evidence that the different cosche
that used the same rituals were actually part of one criminal
brotherhood; it made for the most vivid picture of the mafia yet
assembled by any police investigation. For a moment, it seemed
that someone in power in Rome was going to take notice.
But nothing happened. The Minister of the Interior who was
‘profoundly shocked’ by Morena was soon toppled, and his
successor had other priorities.
There was no inquiry into the systematic mafia infiltration of
the police and magistrature that Sangiorgi had uncovered. No
one took the time to make the connection between the whole
‘fratricide’ affair and the crucial role that Chief Prosecutor Carlo
Morena had played in blocking any attempt to treat the mafia
as a single criminal brotherhood. Morena kept his job, but for
unknown reasons he volunteered for early retirement in 1879, at
age fifty-eight. He was granted all the honours his prestigious
legal career had earned.
Old man Gambino was left to the tender mercies of the Piana
dei Colli mafia; it is not known what happened to him. His son
Salvatore, aged thirty-four when he was wrongly convicted of
murdering his own brother, broke rocks for the rest of his life.
The two mafiosi that Sangiorgi believed were the real culprits
in the Antonino Gambino murder were not investigated; neither
were the people responsible for framing his brother, Salvatore.
‘Baron’ De Michele became mayor of Burgio in 1878; his son
would become a Member of Parliament.
Then there were the unspoken victims of the tragedy. Victims
on whom not even Sangiorgi wastes enough ink for the historian
to be able to cite their names: the women. We have no resource
but the imagination to reconstruct their hellish fate. First, in
Palermo, there was the Gambino daughter forced to marry the
mafioso who raped her — a mafioso who was part of the same
Cusimano clan that would end up murdering both her uncle and

134
 Double vendetta

her brother. Then there was the Licata girl given in expedient
marriage to a Gambino son who was destined to be framed for
fratricide. Finally, in Burgio, there was the wife of ‘Baron’ De
Michele: kidnapped, disgraced, kidnapped again, and forcibly
married to the man who robbed her family. We can only presume
that all of these women spent the rest of their lives performing
their marital duties — duties which, as Sangiorgi had learned,
included issuing smiling threats to the wives of policemen.
It is a sad truth that Inspector Sangiorgi himself bears some
of the responsibility for the fact that the ‘fratricide’ affair went
nowhere but the archives. Responsibility, but not blame. It was
a question of tact. It seems certain that Sangiorgi believed that
the Gambinos were mafiosi. But he was hardly stupid enough to:
say so in his report to the Minister of the Interior, when his
career was on the line. For that would have given ammunition
to those who accused him of being a protector of the mafia. He
pitched his report with the utmost care, making it clear that he
knew that the Gambinos were no angels, or no ‘saint’s shin-
bones’, as the Italian phrase has it. But he had to stop short of
drawing the obvious conclusion that they were deeply immersed
in the mafia world.
Inspector Sangiorgi’s tact helped preserve his career. It may, just
may, have helped preserve his life too. An obvious question that
arises from the ‘fratricide’ affair is why the mafia did not just
kill Sangiorgi. The answer is probably a cost-benefit calculation:
killing a prominent cop would probably have brought more
trouble than rewards for the Honoured Society. Far better to
just discredit him. But then, for the mafia, discrediting someone
is often only a prelude to killing them. Shamed murder victims
are not mourned and not remembered.
As it was, the police authorities gave Sangiorgi the very mildest
of warnings about his future conduct but turned him down for
a promotion on the grounds that he was not old enough. In
1878, he had to defend himself again when the same accusations
_of colluding with the mafia appeared once more in the press.

135
Mafia Brotherhoods

It turned out that ‘Baron’ De Michele was the author of the

defamatory pieces. But Sangiorgi had much graver worries at this
point: his life was thrown into turmoil when his wife died; he
was a single parent once more. But he did not stop fighting the
mafia. In 1883 he dismantled a cosca known as the Brotherhood
of Favara, which controlled the infernal sulphur mines of the
Agrigento area by using the same tactics the mafiosi of the
Conca d’Oro used in the lemon groves. Hereafter, Sangiorgi’s
unfolding career will lead us through another twenty-five years
of mafia history.

a
The Left’s 1877 crackdown did not destroy the mafia, far from
it. Granted, most of the bandits who roamed the Sicilian coun-
tryside were shot down or betrayed to the authorities. But the
mafiosi who protected them — men like ‘Baron’ De Michele — were
left unmolested. With a relative calm now restored in Sicily, the
political agenda could move on. The Left’s great law and order
campaign was to be the last for two decades. As in the low city
of Naples, in Sicily it proved easier to govern with organised
crime than against it. Mafiosi learned to keep their violence
within levels that were suited to the new political environment.
With the Left in power, Sicilian politicians could exercise their
elbows in jostling for a share of the funds now being spent on
roads, railways, sewers, and the like. With the help of their friends
in the mafia, they could convert those funds from Lire into the
south’s real currency: the Favour.
Meanwhile the trials that had been triggered by Sangiorgi’s
discovery of the mafia initiation ritual went ahead, with very
mixed results. Many juries were profoundly and understandably
suspicious of the police and were reluctant to issue guilty verdicts.
As a rule, only the losers in mafia wars were successfully pros-
ecuted. Losers like the Gambinos: mafiosi who had spent all their
favours, who had lost their ‘friends of friends’, whose ‘spiritual

136
 Double vendetta

kinships’ and marriage alliances had broken down, and whose

enemies within the mafia proved shrewder, more violent and
better connected than them. And above all, thanks to Chief
Prosecutor Carlo Morena, the trials treated the mafia as an
unconnected and temporary ensemble of local gangs.
The country had been on a long journey between the Palermo
revolt of 1866 and the anti-mafia campaign of 1877. Two parlia-
mentary commissions of inquiry and countless police and judicial
investigations had tried to define the mafia. But despite all the
compelling evidence that had surfaced, the mafia was destined
to remain what Carlo Morena had called it: ‘an ill-defined
concept’. Within a few years, the Honoured Society’s initiation
ritual would slip from Italy’s institutional memory. I/ tempo é
galantuomo, as they say in Italy: ‘Time heals all wounds’ or,
more literally, ‘Time is a gentleman’. Perhaps it would be better
to say that, in Sicily, time is a Man of Honour.

137
5 NEEoeRios ;
tae
ne
THE NEW CRIMINAL
NORMALITY
1877-1900
 Born delinquents: Science and the mob

In both Naples and Palermo, the late 1870s inaugurated a

quiet period in the history of organised crime. Successive Left
governments seemed to find an accommodation with the
camorra and mafia. The underlying problems that had made
the new state such a welcoming host to the underworld sects
became endemic: political instability and malpractice; police
co-management of delinquency with gangsters; criminal rule
within the prison system. But the issue of underworld sects
did not disappear from public debate. Indeed mafiosi and
camorristi loomed large in Italian culture during the 1880s
and 1890s. Their deeds, their habits, and above all their faces
were displayed for all to see — whether on the page or on stage.
Italians were often fascinated and horrified by what they saw.
But they deluded themselves that the spectacle was merely a
primitive hangover, a monument to old evils that was about
to crumble into the dust of history. Thus, while Italy could
not eradicate the gangs, it could at least change the way it
thought about them: the organised crime issue became a matter
of perceptions. Unfortunately, illegal Italy showed itself to be
even more adept at perception management than legal Italy.
This was the new criminal normality. A normality that, with
all its ironies, was set to welcome a third criminal brotherhood
into its midst.
The Right had viewed criminal organisations, understandably
enough, as something much more threatening than mere crime.
The camorra and the mafia (at least to those prepared to accept
that the mafia was something more than an ‘ill-defined concept’)
constituted a challenge to the state’s very right to rule its own

141
Mafia Brotherhoods

territory; they were a kind of state within the state that no

modern society could tolerate.
This view had always faced opposition, not least from lawyers
who thought that the fight against the ‘anti-state’ did not give
the government the right to trample over individual rights. One
piece of legislation, passed in 1861, made lawyers particularly
nervous: it targeted ‘associations of wrongdoers’. This was the
law used in the anti-mafia trials of the late 1870s and early 1880s.
It stipulated that any group of five or more people who came
together to break the law were now deemed to be committing
an extra crime — that of forming an ‘association of wrongdoers’.
The government’s tendency to use this law as a catch-all for
clamping down on groups of political dissidents helped increase
the lawyers’ anxiety.
The law was revised in 1889, and rephrased as a measure
against ‘associating for delinquency’. But some fundamental
legal dilemmas survived the rewrite. What exactly was an ‘asso-
ciation for delinquency’? How could it be proved, beyond
reasonable doubt, that one existed? Rivers of legal ink were
spilt in the search for a solution. The crime of ‘associating for
delinquency’ only attracted quite minor penalties in any case
— a couple of extra years in prison. So it was much easier to
forget the elaborate business of dragging the mafia and camorra
before a judge. Better to fall back on ‘enforced residence’, and
send any conspicuous offenders off to a penal colony without
a trial. Put another way, organised crime was to be pruned, and
not uprooted.
The nitpicking legalistic approach to the mafia and camorra
was a dead end. From the late 1870s until the end of the century,
sociology seemed to have far greater purchase on the problem.
And at that time, sociology largely meant positivist sociology
— positivism being a school of thought that dreamed of applying
science to society. From a properly scientific perspective, the
positivists reasoned, lawbreakers were creatures of flesh and
blood; they were human animals to be observed, prodded,

142
 Born delinquents: Science and the mob

weighed, measured, photographed, and catalogued. If only

science could identify these ‘born delinquents’ physically, then
it could defend society against them — irrespective of what the
legal quibblers said.
The most optimistic, and most notorious, attempt to identify
a ‘delinquent man’ and a ‘delinquent woman’ by their physical
appearance was articulated by the Turinese doctor Cesare
Lombroso. He claimed to have identified certain anomalies in
criminal bodies, like sticky-out ears or a bulky jaw. These ‘stig-
mata’, as he termed them, revealed that criminals actually
belonged to an earlier era of human development, somewhere
between apes and negroes on the evolutionary ladder. Lombroso
made a great career out of his theory and defended it doggedly,
even when some other sociologists demonstrated what claptrap
it was.
Lombroso was not the only academic who thought science
could unlock the crime issue. Others sought the key in factors
like diet, overcrowding, the weather, and of course race. Southern
Italians and Sicilians seemed to be made of different stuff from
other Europeans, if not physically, then at least psychologically.
In 1898 one celebrated young sociologist, Alfredo Niceforo, gave
a derogatory twist to the mafia’s own propaganda when he argued
that the Sicilian psyche and the mafia were one and the same
thing.

In many respects the Sicilian is a true Arab: proud, often

cruel, vigorous, inflexible. Hence the fact that the indi-
vidual Sicilian does not allow others to give him orders.
Hence also the fact that Saracen pride, conjoined with
the feudal hankering after power, turned the Sicilian into
a man who always has rebellion and the unbounded
passion of his own ego in his bloodstream. The mafioso
in a nutshell.

Neapolitans emerged in just as unflattering a light from Niceforo’s

143
Mafia Brotherhoods

research: they were ‘frivolous, fickle and restless’ — just like

women, in fact. But the camorra was distinct from the Neapolitan
‘woman-people’ among which it lived. After all, there was wide
agreement that the camorra, unlike the mafia, was a secret society.
The camorra’s weird rituals, its duels and the elaborate symbolic
language with which picciotti addressed their capo-camorrista
showed that the camorra was nothing less than a savage clan,
identical to the tribes of central Africa as described by Livingstone
or Stanley.
Camorra tattoos particularly fascinated ‘scientists’ like
Lombroso and Niceforo. As far as anyone knew, camorristi had
always adorned their skin with the names of the prostitutes
they protected, the vendettas they had sworn to perform and
the badges of their criminal rank. Tattoos served a double
purpose: they were a sign of loyalty to the Honoured Society
that also helped intimidate its victims. Like the flashy clothes
early camorristi wore, tattoos tell us a great deal about the
nature and limits of camorra power. At a time when the Society
was rooted in places where the state scarcely bothered to extend
its reach — in prison, or among the plebeian labyrinth of central
Naples — it mattered little that these bodily pictographs could
also be deciphered by the prison authorities and the police.
However, needless to say, these subtleties escaped the criminolo-
gists, who just took tattoos to be one more bodily symptom of
degeneracy.
Positivist criminology became a fashion; in the name of scien-
tific inquiry it pandered to the public’s fascination for secret
societies and gruesome misdemeanours. A hungry readership was
fed with titles like: The Maffia in its Factors and Manifestations:
a Study of Sicily’s Dangerous Classes (1886); The Camorra Duel
(1893); Habits and Customs of Camorristi (1897); and Hereditary
and Psychical Tattoos in Neapolitan Camorristi (1898). Naples
had a particularly avid market for guides to the structure and
special vocabulary of the camorra. It was as if these were text-
books, part of an informal curriculum on the Honoured Society

144
 Born delinquents: Science and the mob

‘Loge.

‘Camorra pimp’, with signature ‘Bloodthirsty camorrista.’

body adornments. Taken from
one of many prurient studies
of gangland tattooing published
in the late nineteenth century.

145
Mafia Brotherhoods

that the locals had to digest before they could lay claim to
knowing Naples, to being truly Neapolitan.
Some of the authors of these guides were police officers and
lawyers who brought a great deal of hard evidence to the debate
about organised crime. For instance, it was shown that for reasons
of secrecy, affiliates of the Honoured Society were actually
grouped into two separate compartments: the junior picciotti
belonged to the ‘Minor Society’ and the more senior camorristi
formed the ‘Major Society’. Yet the same authors who relayed
insights such as this also blithely threw in recycled folklore (about
the camorra’s Spanish origins, for example), pseudo-scientific
speculation, and plain old titillation. Many of the books carried
garish illustrations of delinquent ears, prostitutes disfigured by
horrendous scars, or torsos tattooed with arcane gang motifs.
Underlying it all was the simplistic but seductive belief that seeing
and knowing are the same thing. As one police officer-cum-
sociologist wrote

The majority of camorristi have a dark complexion with

pale tones, and abundant frizzy hair. Most have dark,
sparkling, darting eyes, although a few have clear, frosty
eyes. Their facial hair is sparse. Apart from a few harmo-
nious physiognomies (which are in any case often spoiled
by long scars), one can observe many noses that are
misshapen, large or snubbed. There are also many low
or bulbous foreheads, large cheekbones and jaws, ears
that are either enormous or tiny, and finally rotten or
crooked teeth.

Positivist criminology treated crime as if it were no more compli-

cated than a smear on the bottom of a Petri dish. Yet mafiosi
and camorristi, just like the rest of us, are capable of rational,
strategic planning. And, more even than the rest of us, they have
every reason to be fascinated by tales of secret societies and
gruesome misdemeanours . .

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An audience of hoods

Among the more intriguing items held in the National Library

in Naples is a photograph, no less, of the moment when the
camorra was founded. Or at least, that is what it appears to be.
With remarkable clarity it shows the camorra’s founding members
— all nine of them — arranged in a semi-circle in a large prison
cell. They are evidently taking an oath by swearing on the sacred
objects that lie on the floor before them: a crucifix with crossed
daggers arranged at its foot. The new members have their gaze
fixed on the man who seems to be leading the ceremony. He is
a confident figure with a brimmed hat pushed to the back of his
head, who is shown pointing at the dagger and crucifix and
placing a reassuring hand on the shoulder of one nervous looking
novice.
The photograph was taken during rehearsals for The Founda-
tion of the Camorra, a play first performed on the evening of
18 October 1899. It may well have been a publicity shot. If so,
it certainly did the trick. Interest in the play was such that tickets
for the second night sold out by midday and the Carabinieri had
to be called in to calm the scrum of frustrated theatregoers.
The script for The Foundation of the Camorra is lost, alas.
But the reviews give us some idea of why it generated such
excitement.

The audience was intensely interested in the episodes

that led to the establishment among us of the evil sect.
Returned travellers came here to transplant it from Spain,
and chose the Vicaria prison as the place to found what
someone, perhaps ironically, once called the ‘Dishonoured

147
Mafia Brotherhoods

Society’. In any case, the Vicaria was for some time after
that the seat of its supreme command and its tribunal.
The drama reproduces the affiliates’ first feats, their
first oaths, their first acts of extortion, their first ritualised
knife fights, and their fierce early struggle to establish
themselves and spread their rule. Their brand of crimi-
nality disguised as heroism was designed to unnerve and
frighten the weak. The second performance is tonight.

The Foundation of the Camorra could have been scripted from

one of the criminological guidebooks to the Honoured Society.
The audience captivated by this spectacle was peculiarly knowl-
edgeable. For The Foundation of the Camorra was staged at the
San Ferdinando theatre, which stood just a few metres from the
infamous Vicaria prison where the play was set. During any given
performance the spectacle in the auditorium was as colourful as
whatever happened on stage. And as noisy: the din of chatter,
catcalls and fragments of song was incessant. In the stalls, under
a constant rain of orange peel and seed husks from above, ink-
stained printers argued with smoke-blackened railwaymen, and
breastfeeding mothers gossiped with fat prostitutes. Surveying it
all from the rickety boxes just above was what passed for a middle
class in the Vicaria quarter: shabby-smart teachers, or pawn-
brokers with their wives and kids decked out lavishly in
unreclaimed loan collateral. Here in the San Ferdinando was a
hyper-condensation of the already impossibly cramped life of
the Vicaria quarter. So it is hardly surprising that when The
Foundation of the Camorra was on, camorristi came to see it
too.
So many camorristi came, in fact, that the play drew the atten-
tion of law enforcement. On 4 November the local inspector
wrote to the Chief of Police to express his concerns.

Given that the aforementioned theatre is frequented by

an audience entirely made up of members of the

148
 An audience of hoods

underworld and men with prison records, the action being

performed there is one big lesson at the school of crime.

What worried him was the play’s dangerously ambiguous

message. Of course it had a happy and morally instructive ending,
as did everything else staged at the San Ferdinando. But the audi-
ence seemed far more excited by what came before: displays of
delinquent bravado that mirrored their own twisted values. Worse
still, certain passages in the play were little more than propaganda
for the Honoured Society. The police inspector’s letter quotes
from one offending speech by the stage capo.

Our rulers act like camorristi on a big scale. So there’s

nothing wrong if the people do it on a small scale.

Nonsense, of course; but alluring nonsense all the same.

Popular melodramas were churned out at staggering speed for
the unruly punters at the San Ferdinando. Edoardo Minichini,
the author of The Foundation of the Camorra, is thought to
have written around 400 plays; he died in poverty, leaving his
wife and ten children to fend for themselves. (The fact that the
camorra notoriously took protection payments from theatres
probably helps explain his economic difficulties.) Many of Mini-
chini’s plays featured camorristi. In fact there was a fashion for
such dramas in 1890s Naples. Titles like The Boss of the Camorra
(1893) and Blood of a Camorrista (1894) sucked in large and
enthusiastic audiences from the tenements. In fact these plays
were only the latest manifestations of Honoured Society folklore.
Ever since the 1860s, singers, storytellers and puppet shows had
been thrilling plebeian audiences with phoney tales of camorra
honour and derring-do.
The star of the San Ferdinando stage, an actor appropriately
named Federigo Stella, always played the good guy, and always
played him in the same histrionic, declamatory style. One of
-Stella’s stock characters became what one contemporary man of

149
Mafia Brotherhoods

the theatre called the ‘old-school, valorous camorrista who dishes

out good deeds, clubbings and oratory with the same spirit of
fair play’. It mattered little to Stella’s audience that there was no
such thing as the noble camorrista, nor had there ever been.
Mafiosi and camorristi have always had a narcissistic fascina-
tion with their own image as reflected on stage, in verse and in
fiction. There is nothing at all new about the feedback loop that
links gangster art and gangster life. The Hollywood filmmakers
who are fascinated by the mob, and the mobsters who make
their villas look like the house in the climactic scene of Scarface
(I know of two cases in Italy), are both heirs to a tradition as
old as organised crime itself. As we have already seen, the
camorra assembled a myth of its own Spanish origins from
whatever cultural flotsam and jetsam it could find. The mafia
was scarcely less stage-struck. The very name ‘mafia’ almost
certainly entered common use in Palermo because of an enor-
mously successful play in Sicilian dialect first performed in 1863,
I mafiusi di la Vicaria (‘The mafiosi of Vicaria prison’ — the
Vicaria being, as well as the notorious Naples prison, the other
name for Palermo’s Ucciardone jail). | mafiusi is the sentimental
tale of an encounter between prison camorristi and a patriotic
conspirator in the years before Italian unification. In other words,
the play that gave the mafia its name has eerie echoes of the
real meetings between patriots and prisoners that played such a
crucial role in the history of Italian gangland. It is said that a
Man of Honour was consulted on the script.
Mafiosi also loved adventure stories. Their favourite author
was not Alexandre Dumas, as Chief Prosecutor Morena
claimed, but the Sicilian, Vincenzo Linares, famous for his
fictional tale of The Beati Paoli, which was first published in
1836.
The Beati Paoli of Linares’s imagination, was a mysterious
brotherhood in the Palermo of the 1600s. They would meet before
a statue of the goddess justice in a grotto full of weaponry under
a church in piazza San Cosimo; here they would pass solemn

150
 An audience of hoods

and lethal judgement on anyone who abused the weak and

innocent.
The fable proved so popular in Palermo that in 1873 piazza
San Cosimo was renamed piazza Beati Paoli. Then in April 1909
the police discovered that mafiosi were holding their own tribunals
in a cellar just off piazza Beati Paoli—the very cellar that popular
legend identified with the HQ of the secret society in Linares’s
story. Later still, in the 1980s, many Sicilian Men of Honour who
turned state’s evidence would tell the authorities, with not a hint
of irony, that the mafia and the Beati Paoli were the same thing.
Clearly, mafiosi had long since begun to believe their own
propaganda.

151
The slack society

Pseudo-scientific criminologists and opportunistic men of the

theatre did not have a monopoly on public discussion of the mob
in the new criminal normality of the 1880s and 1890s. A pioneer
of serious-minded analysis of the issue was Pasquale Villari, a
Neapolitan historian who held a university chair in Florence.
Villari was a lifelong campaigner for good government and
social progress in the south. The squalor of the low city and the
camorra that grew out of it was his consistent concern. In 1875
he created a furore by writing an open letter in which he claimed
that the state of Naples was so desperate that the camorra was
‘the only normal and possible state of things, the natural form
that the city takes’. One of the most revealing passages in the
letter was an interview with a former deputy mayor who told
him that most public works contracts were impossible to imple-
ment without the approval of the camorra.
Villari’s call to moralise Naples from top to bottom gained
new resonance when the Left assumed power, with a brand of
pork-barrel politics that gave camorristi even greater access to
public spending. Villari inspired a generation of radical conserva-
tive campaigners to raise what became known as the ‘Southern
Question’. One of those to follow Villari’s call was Pasquale
Turiello, who in 1882 diagnosed what he termed the individu-
alism, indiscipline and ‘slackness’ in Neapolitan society. Turiello
argued that the Left’s shambolic sleaze both reflected and culti-
vated Neapolitan ‘slackness’. The city was, being divided up
between bourgeois political clienteles from above and proletarian
camorra gangs from below.
The events of the 1880s and 1890s would confirm Turiello’s

152
 The slack society

grim diagnosis and demonstrate his belief that it applied across

much of southern Italy and Sicily, and even to the national polit-
ical institutions. In 1882, the right to vote in general elections
was finally extended to include about 7 per cent of the popula-
tion. Anyone who paid some tax or had a couple of years of
primary school education could now go to the polls. Another
reform followed in 1888: the electorate for town and provincial
councils was broadened; and the mayors of larger towns were
now to be elected. The spread of democracy swelled the market
_in political favours. Mafiosi and camorristi — either directly, or
through their friends in national and local government — gained
the power to share out such appetising perks as exemptions from
military service, reduced local authority tax assessments, and
town hall jobs. Other quasi-public bodies, like charities, banks
and hospitals, helped grease the wheels of patronage.
Meanwhile, in Naples, the paradigm of the slack society, an
appalling cholera epidemic struck in 1884. The entire bourgeoisie
and aristocracy fled in panic. Some 7,000 people died, most of
them from the alleys and tenements of the low city, which one
contemporary said were like ‘bowels brimming with ordure’. In
the epidemic’s aftermath the call went up to ‘disembowel’ the
city. Tax incentives and public money were quickly allocated to
support ambitious plans for slum clearance and sewer construc-
tion. For the next twenty-five years, the modernisation of Naples
proceeded with agonising slowness and inefficiency. All the while,
the city’s political cliques squabbled over the trough.
At every level of government, the slack society had enormous
trouble creating and enforcing good reforms that benefitted
everyone. Instead, it produced endless political fudges that fed
temporary alliances of greedy politicians and their hangers on.
Indeed, when it came to dealing with the mafia and the camorra,
the most important reforms were often the least likely to be
implemented: policing is a prime example. On this point, as on
others, there is no clearer way to illustrate the weaknesses of the
slack society than through the life of an individual policeman.

153
Mafia Brotherhoods

am
In 1888 Ermanno Sangiorgi, the policeman who had first discov-
ered the Sicilian mafia’s initiation ritual, was working in Rome
as a special inspector at the Ministry of the Interior. By that time
he had found happiness in his personal life, although that happi-
ness once more brought down trouble from above. While he was
still in Sicily, six years after his wife’s death, he began an affair
with a colleague’s wife. He was punished for what a senior civil
servant called his ‘scandalous conduct’ by being transferred imme-
diately, in December 1884. (The Ministry evidently regarded
sexual morality as a more serious matter than consorting with
gangsters.) Sangiorgi’s new love, a Neapolitan called Maria Vozza,
twenty years his junior, followed him. She had to live in separate
accommodation to avoid damaging his career any further. The
two would remain together for the rest of his life.
In September 1888 Sangiorgi was sent back to Sicily on a secret
mission to inspect the island’s unique mounted police corps, in
preparation for a root and branch reform. He found that Palermo
police headquarters was ‘in a complete state of confusion and
disorder’; Trapani was worse. The mounted police corps did not
even keep proper records of what crimes had been committed.
Two of its most senior officers in Palermo had ‘intimate relation-
ships with people from the mafia’. The result was not a surprise.
As Sangiorgi wrote, ‘It would be dangerous to be deceived: the
mafia and banditry have incontrovertibly raised their heads.’
No action was taken. Not for the last time, Sangiorgi’s hard
work failed to produce any political effects.
The results for Sangiorgi’s career were positive, however. In
1888 he was picked to manage security when the King visited the
turbulent region of Romagna. He did the. job so well that in
1889, in Milan, he became Italy’s youngest Chief of Police. His
rapid progress earned him the rare accolade of a newspaper
profile.

154
 The slack society

Sangiorgi is only forty-eight. He is reddish-blonde, like-

able, and knows how to conceal the cunning required by
his job beneath a layer of affable bourgeois calm. He is
as alert as a squirrel, an investigator endowed with a
steady perspicacity.

The year after this profile was published he was transferred to

Naples, a city where the police still enjoyed one of the worst
reputations of any force in Italy, a city in ferment in the aftermath
of the cholera epidemic of 1884 and the ‘disembowelling’ that
followed it. As he had done in Sicily, Sangiorgi immediately set
about breaking up the traditionally cosy relationship between
the police and organised crime. On 21 February 1891, one of
Sangiorgi’s officers, Saverio Russo by name, paid the ultimate
price for this ‘open fight’ against the camorra when he was
murdered by a camorrista he was trying to arrest. One well-
informed newspaper commentator warned his readers against
taking this shocking incident as an indication that gangsterism
was out of control. Indeed, crime had decreased considerably in
recent months:

Without any doubt a great deal of the credit for this must
be given to the new Police Chief Sangiorgi. Of course it
is no easy matter purifying the environment inside Police
Headquarters and the local stations. Nor is it an easy job
to shake up officers who are not always diligent and who
previously went as far as to protect gangland. But the
good results that Police Chief Sangiorgi has obtained so
far, his sharp sagacity and great experience, constitute a
guarantee for the government and citizenry alike.

Trouble cropped up in Sangiorgi’s personal life while he was in

Naples. In February 1893 he was mortified to learn that his son
from his first marriage, Achille, by now a coal merchant in Venice,
had been arrested for cheque fraud; to Sangiorgi’s great shame,

E55
Mafia Brotherhoods

the story was reported in the press. The Ministry of the Interior
looked into the case, but could only express sympathy for a
hard-pressed father’s lot.
The supreme boss of the Honoured Society when Sangiorgi
arrived in Naples was Ciccio Cappuccio, known as ‘Little Lord
Frankie’. His specialism was a traditional area of camorra domi-
nance: the market in horses, particularly the army surplus nags
that were occasionally auctioned off to the general public.
Rigging auctions was easy: the camorristi only had to bully
other bidders. But the camorra’s control over the horse trade
was also more insidious.
Marc Monnier’s father had been a keen equestrian and occa-
sional horse dealer back in the 1840s and 1850s, so the Swiss
hotelier had witnessed first hand how camorristi used the uncer-
tainties of the business to wheedle themselves into every possible
economic transaction. Buying a horse from a stranger in Naples
was always risky. No one could guarantee that, once the money
had been handed over, the animal would not turn out to be
frightened of the city’s clamour or too weak to cope with its
hills. No one, that is, except a camorrista. For a share of the
price, camorristi promised to make business deals run smoothly
— on pain of a beating, or worse. The camorra also controlled
the supply of horse fodder: many bosses, including Little Lord
Frankie, doubled as dealers in bran and carobs. From this base
they could exercise total control over the city’s ragged army of
hackney-carriage drivers.
Little Lord Frankie passed away, of natural causes, in early
December 1892. His death became the occasion for a disturbing
display of just how deeply dyed by illegality was the slack fabric
of Neopolitan society. From Police Headquarters, Sangiorgi could
do little more than watch.
Little Lord Frankie’s obituary in an important new Neapolitan
daily, I! Mattino, was lavish in its praise. Here was a righter of
wrongs, a proletarian justice of the peace. With a flush of pride,
Il Mattino recalled the time when he had single-handedly downed

156
 The slack society

twelve Calabrian camorristi in a knife fight in prison. But it was

wrong to call him a ‘bloodthirsty, born delinquent’.

He was exceptionally nice: a model of decorum, respectful

and deferential. He had a grim look in his grey eyes. But
he strove constantly to moderate it by applying the sweet-
ness and docility of a man who knows his own strength
—a man who is absolutely sure that nothing in the world
can resist his will.

Evidently it was not only the lumpenproletariat of the Vicaria

quarter who embraced the myth of the noble, old-style camor-
rista. Il Mattino, like its notorious editor Edoardo Scarfoglio,
was hysterically right wing and utterly corrupt — the mouthpiece
of the worst elements in the Neapolitan political class. But what
is both shocking and revealing about its coverage of Little Lord
Frankie’s death is the way it tolerates, and even celebrates, the
private statelets that camorra bosses were able to carve out in
large areas of the city.
Little Lord Frankie’s last journey was a statelet funeral. Six
horses drew an elaborate hearse, covered in wreaths, on a tour
of half the city. The mourners were led by every cab driver in
Naples, and a procession of sixty hackney carriages. Then came
a huge crowd of awestruck followers, all telling tales of the
dead man’s ‘heroic and chivalrous deeds’, according to Il
Mattino. The paper even published a poetic lament for Little
Lord Frankie.

Who will defend us now?

Without him, what will we do?
Whoever can you run to
If a wrong is done to you?

Naples was still a city where the rule of law and honesty in public
affairs seemed alien concepts.

157
Mafia Brotherhoods

A few months after Little Lord Frankie’s posthumous show of

force, Sangiorgi found himself at the centre of a riot that, for
one brief moment, laid bare the contorted entrails of the slack
society. And despite his ‘steady perspicacity’, and ‘sharp sagacity’,
the notorious hackney cab drivers’ strike of August 1893 would
prove too tough an assignment for the determined Police Chief.
For the first time in decades, the camorra took to the streets in
force.
The events of the strike itself can be quickly related. The cab
drivers’ anger was triggered by a proposal to extend the city’s
tram system. So on 22 August 3,000 cabbies launched a violent
street protest to coincide with patriotic demonstrations against
the murder of some Italian workmen in southern France. Social-
ists, anarchists and a hungry mob from the low city soon joined
in. Sangiorgi was in bed with a severe fever when the disorder
broke out. While he was away from work, a scrum of his officers
on the hunt for rioters assaulted customers in the Gambrinus,
the most prestigious café in the city. Sangiorgi crawled back to
his desk the following morning to find that the police had become
the targets of mass fury: there were pitched battles in the alleys
between rioters and the forces of order. A boy of eight, Nunzio
Dematteis, was shot in the forehead by a Carabiniere defending
a tram from the mob. News quickly spread that the police were
to blame for the boy’s death. The crowd carried his bleeding
body aloft and marched on the Prefecture. Sangiorgi’s officers
blocked their path and a grotesque tug of war over the corpse
ensued. Some local parliamentarians demanded that the police
withdraw their ‘provocative’ presence from the streets. The army
was called in to restore calm.
Thus far, with the possible exception of the botched police
operation, there is little that is particularly Neapolitan about the
events of August 1893. Trams represented an obvious threat to
the hackney-carriage business. A violent industrial dispute like
this could have happened in any big city in Europe, where police
aggression would have been the likely response. But in Naples

158
 The slack society

there were of course many camorristi among the cab drivers.

After all, these were the same men who had filed along behind
Little Lord Frankie’s coffin just a few months earlier. Sangiorgi’s
police learned that the riot of August 1893 had been planned the
night before, at a meeting between camorristi and anarchists.
The Chief of Police compiled a list of several hundred cabbies
involved in the disturbances, marking out many of them as camor-
risti and men with criminal records.
And where the camorra had interests, so too did its eminent
friends. Street gangsters may have performed the strike but it was
orchestrated by city politicians. Those politicians had two notable
beefs against the central government in Rome: first, the proposal
to award the contract for extending the tram network to a
company from Belgium, of all places; and second, the threat to
take away control over the reconstruction programme set in
motion after the cholera epidemic of 1884. One of Sangiorgi’s
officers later reported that the origins of the riot lay in ‘the great
shifting of interest groups caused by the disembowelling work’.
By engineering anarchy in the streets of Naples, the interest
groups clustered around city hall and the building industry hoped
to win concessions from Rome.
Over subsequent days the strike was quelled by a mixture of
negotiation and deceit. First the negotiations: the cab drivers
were invited to talks with the town council. Then, presumably
on the orders of the Interior Ministry, and ‘in order to favour
the resolution of the dispute’, as Sangiorgi put it, he released the
cabbies who had been arrested — excluding the ones with criminal
records. A camorra-backed politician called Alberto Casale then
acted as intermediary during the talks; in all likelihood, Casale
was one of the politicians who had helped orchestrate the strike
in the first place. Concessions were duly made: the tram timetable
would be curtailed, and the tram network would not be extended.
Then came the deceit: a few weeks later this agreement was
torn up and the original plans for the tram network were re-
instated. It would later emerge that Alberto Casale had accepted

159
Mafia Brotherhoods

a sturdy backhander from the Belgian tram company. His

favourite camorristi received their share of the cash too — or at
least we can surmise as much because the town council’s flagrant
bad faith during the negotiations did not reignite the cab drivers’
protest. More importantly, the city council retained its control
over a large chunk of the reconstruction funds. The manoeuvrings
behind the scenes of the hackney-cab strike showed, as Turiello
had argued, that the camorra and the political clienteles were
operating at different ends of the same market for favours. The
slack society was also the sly society.
By the time the dispute was resolved, Sangiorgi had left Naples.
The disastrous way the cab drivers’ protest had been tackled led
to a purge in Police Headquarters. Sangiorgi was transferred to
Venice only two weeks after the end of the strike. The rioting
of August 1893 was one of the worst moments of his career,
but he took much more than his fair share of the blame for the
chaos.

or
Meanwhile, among the many jails, penitentiaries and penal colo-
nies of the peninsula, mob rule persisted unchecked throughout
the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Overhauling the prisons
would have been an incisive reform directed against organised
crime, drying up its traditional sump of strength. Yet the forces
of law rarely concerned themselves with the mafia and camorra’s
prison activities. One exception was a case in the late 1870s:
following the murder of a police informer in Naples that had
been ordered from behind bars, fifty-three prison camorristi were
successfully convicted, a rare investment of precious institutional
resources in trying to tackle this chronic problem.
Evidently the prisons still hosted a dense gangster network. In
1893 a positivist criminologist published The Story of a Born
Delinquent, an autobiography — no less — by a senior prison
camorrista known only as Antonino M. Antonino M recounted

160
 The slack society

taking part in several vicious battles in prison, including one that

saw Neapolitans and Sicilians line up against Calabrians and
Abruzzesi: many were killed and a warden was left holding his
intestines in his hands.
But it is the unity of the prison confraternity, rather than its
divisions, that emerges most clearly from Antonino M’s account.
He related that every time he was transferred from one jail to
another (usually for violent conduct), he used code words to
prove his camorra credentials. His status was duly recognised
wherever he went: in jails in Puglia and the Marche, as in the
Castello del Carmine in Naples (the very jail where Duke Castro-
mediano had been clapped in irons in 1851). Nor was this the
only way that camorristi in different regions were connected:
punishments decreed in a prison in Cosenza, northern Calabria,
could be carried out in the penal colony on Favignana, an island
off the western coast of Sicily.
There was plenty more evidence where Antonino M’s story
came from. Undeniably, all the things that Duke Castromediano
had observed back in the 1850s were still going on in Italy’s
prisons: organised violence and vendettas; corruption, extortion,
smuggling and the trade in favours; ritual initiations and knife
fights; and training in the skills and protocols of the sect. But
instead of reform, such information only triggered a depressingly
repetitive pattern of political failure. Now and again a particu-
larly savage prison riot or an unusually alarming government
report would generate fervent calls for change. Just as predictably,
those calls would echo pointlessly into silence: lack of funds and
the sheer political irrelevance of the prisons issue meant that
Italy’s slack society could not muster the will to tackle the
problem.
Soon Italy would pay a very heavy price for failing to reform
the prisons.
The criminologist who published Antonino M’s autobiography
also subjected him to a close physical examination. Not surpris-
ingly, the tests came up positive: Antonino M was a born

I6I
Mafia Brotherhoods

delinquent, a mixture of ‘the savage, the epileptic and the moral

lunatic’. He had a series of telltale bodily deformities, such as
jug-handle ears, large testicles and slow reflexes in his pupils. He
also had tattoos, including the slogan ‘DOWN WITH DISHON-
OURED SCUM’ across his chest. But the giveaway was the speci-
men’s broad, flat skull — his brachycephaly, to use the scientific
term. Antonino M was Calabrian, the criminologist explained;
and typical Calabrians were dolichocephalic, meaning that they
had long, thin heads. Manifestly, Antonino M was a degenerate
member of the Calabrian race.
Many Italians would probably have believed the criminologist
if he had said that Calabrians had four arms and a single eye in
the middle of their brow. Calabria was Italy’s poorest region, its
most politically marginal. But by the time Antonino M came to
have the criminological callipers applied to his cranium, born
Calabrian delinquents like him had already surfaced from the
prison system to form a new criminal fraternity.
THE ‘NDRANGHETA
EMERGES
1880-1902
Harsh mountain

A single geographical fact defines the landscape at the south-

ernmost tip of Calabria: Aspromonte. The ‘Harsh Mountain’
is a place of bitter beauty. To the south, where Aspromonte
looks down past Mount Etna and out towards North Africa,
its flanks are toasted by the sun. Here valleys gouge their
descent, spilling cement-grey grit towards the turquoise expanse
of the Ionian Sea. In spring, the more sheltered hollows host
embattled blooms of pink oleander and yellow broom.
Aspromonte’s higher reaches, by contrast, are dark with pine
and slender beech. Among the trees, tortuous paths seek out
the peaks and exquisite high meadows before skirting down
into sudden gorges that springtime fills with the smell of
oregano. The woodland canopy extends down the lush western
and northern slopes where the panoramas are even more capti-
vating: the Straits of Messina separating Calabria from Sicily,
the smoky Aeolian Islands, and the Tyrrhenian Sea.
Nothing in this landscape is permanent. Human inhabitants
cling to the coastal strips or create improbable, eagle’s nest
villages above the gorges. Every winter torrents tear rocks from
the fragile valley sides and landslips rake brutal shortcuts down
through the roads’ painstaking meanders. Whole villages, like
Roghudi and Amendolea, have been abandoned from one day to
the next, their inhabitants pushed down from the mountain to
the coast.
Massive earthquakes give history a deadly, arrhythmic beat
in southern Calabria. In 1783 as many as 50,000 people died,
and there was a sequence of lethal quakesin 1894, 1905,
TOOF o's

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Even to the north-east of Aspromonte the mountains hog

most of the terrain in Calabria, leaving precious little space for
the coastal plains, and posing a formidable obstacle for travel-
lers. As a result, most nineteenth-century tourist guides covered
the region with little more than a cursory reference to its rugged
scenery and stubborn inhabitants. Baedeker, the obligatory
companion volume for the well-to-do northern European trav-
eller, all but told its readers not to bother going to Calabria in
1869.

The length of the journey, the indifference of the inns

and the insecurity of the roads, which has of late
increased, at present deter all but the most enterprising.

Such words of warning were not misplaced. At that time the

railway stopped at Eboli. But Eboli was still a long way above
Calabria’s northern border, and 327 miles from Reggio Calabria,
the small city at the tip of Italy’s toe where Aspromonte overlooks
the Straits of Messina. At Eboli, if the visitor were lucky enough
to grab one of the three places available in the coach and then
lucky with the roads, the weather and the outlaws, he could make
the journey to Reggio in three and a half days. Along the route,
he would stare nervously out at the forests and crags, recalling
recent tales of bandit atrocities.
In 1871 the government census recorded that 87 per cent of
Calabrians could not read or write. Across much of the region,
callous landowners imperiously exploited vast swarms of peas-
ants. Leopoldo Franchetti, a Tuscan Jewish intellectual who was
one of the few men intrepid enough to investigate Calabrian
society, wrote in 1874 that

Among the oppressed there is no middle stage between

two extreme states of being: on the one hand, fear, obedi-
ence and the most abject docility; and, on the other, the
most brutal and ferocious rebellion.

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 Harsh mountain

Franchetti tells us that local government was a grubby and violent

business in Calabria. There were many places where the mayor
and his relatives cornered common land for themselves, or lived
off the trade in timber stolen from common woodland. Any
forest wardens who tried to impose the law, ‘ran a serious risk
of getting a bullet’. The ‘grain banks’ created to lend seed corn
and money to the poor at planting time often served only as a
source of easy credit for the rich. As elsewhere in the south and
Sicily, the government in Rome tolerated such abuses because
Calabria’s corrupt mayors mustered votes for the ruling national
factions. Calabria was one of the slackest parts of the slack
society.
Yet one thing that Franchetti was not particularly worried
about was organised crime. In the 1860s and 1870s, at a time
when copious evidence attests to the shocking extent of mafia
and camorra power, there are only a few intermittent reports of
gangsterism in Calabria. Together, those reports do nothing to
suggest that southern Calabria would become a hoodlum fief on
a par with Sicily and Campania. There is no government docu-
ment from the 1860s or 1870s, no traveller’s tale, no faded local
memoir that speaks of a strong and insistent mafia presence here.
The region had many serious problems but delinquent fraternities
were not among them.
By the mid 1880s, there were some signs of improvement in
Calabria’s fortunes. Trains now crawled to Reggio along a single-
track railway that clung to the Ionian coast; and the line along
the Tyrrhenian coast was under construction. Yet it was precisely
at this historical moment that the first official reports tell us that
‘a nucleus of mafiosi and camorristi’ was in operation in Reggio
Calabria and ‘the ranks of the maffia’s criminal associations’
were growing elsewhere in Aspromonte’s shadow. As if from
nowhere, a new criminal sect was being born. By the end of the
1880s the province of Reggio Calabria and some adjoining parts
of the province of Catanzaro were enduring an explosion in gang
crime from which they have never recovered.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Mafiosi and camorristi: the earliest labels were borrowed

from Sicily and Naples. Other names would soon be used:
Calabrian mafia, Honoured Society, Society of Camorristi, and
so on. But as police and magistrates became more knowledge-
able about this new threat to public order in southern Calabria,
they most often referred to it as the picciotteria. The word is
pronounced roughly ‘peach-otter-ear’, and there is no mystery
to its derivation. Picciotto (‘peach-otto’) was a southern Italian
or Sicilian dialect word for ‘lad’. Picciotti were also the lower
ranking members of the Neapolitan camorra. Picciotteria some-
times means a young man’s air of arrogant self-confidence. So
‘Lads with Attitude’ is a handy translation of the new associa-
tion’s informal title.
The Lads with Attitude were a lowly bunch: herdsmen and
farm hands, by and large, men whose grandest ambition was a
flask of wine and a piece of goat meat. At the time when the
picciotteria first appeared, the great Sicilian novelist Giovanni
Verga was evoking the lives of poor people like them in some of
the greatest fiction in the Italian language. Verga knew that he
faced a hard task convincing his bourgeois readership to dare an
imaginative leap into the mental universe of the peasantry. ‘We
need to make ourselves tiny like them’, Verga pleaded. ‘We need
to enclose the whole horizon between two clods of earth, and
look through the microscope at the little causes that make little
hearts beat.’
From today’s perspective, we need to make a similar imagina-
tive leap. But we have no need to be patronising towards the ‘little
hearts’ of the farm hands and woodcutters who became members
of the picciotteria. For these humble folk were the direct ances-
tors of a fearsome Calabrian criminal brotherhood whose defini-
tive name would only appear for the first time in the 1950s: the
’ndrangheta, Italy’s third mafia, and now ts richest, its most
secretive and the most successful at spreading vile metastases
around the globe.
Soon after it was born, the picciotteria was subjected to a

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 Harsh mountain

judicial offensive that was sporadic but nonetheless more effective

than any faced so far by organised crime in either Naples or
Sicily. In the years following the first signs of alarm, around
Aspromonte and on either side of the first stretch of the Apen-
nines, hundreds of Calabrian picciotti — precisely 1,854 of them
between 1885 and 1902 according to one local prosecutor — were
tried, convicted and put behind bars. This fact alone tells us
something significant: Calabria’s gangsters did not yet enjoy the
same degree of VIP protection enjoyed by the Neapolitan
camorra, let alone the Sicilian mafia.
Yet the picciotteria remained almost entirely unknown in the
rest of Italy. Unlike the mafia and camorra, it provoked no parlia-
mentary inquiries or debates, no bouts of national newspaper
outrage, no investigations by sociologists, no poems or plays.
Nobody cared: this was Calabria, after all.
The lack of interest in the picciotteria together with Calab-
ria’s history of maladministration and natural disaster often
leaves historians with a shortage of evidence. The city of Reggio
Calabria was undoubtedly where the ‘picciotteria was first
spotted in the early 1880s, but there is not enough surviving
documentation to explain how and why. Yet elsewhere the early
trials did deposit a thin but precious seam of paper that can
now be mined for clues about how organised crime in Calabria
began. And as it turns out, the ’ndrangheta’s beginnings were
much more straightforward than the camorra’s or mafia’s. There
are two places in particular where enough nineteenth-century
policework survives to give us a clear picture of those begin-
nings. A later chapter deals with the most notorious of those
places: the village of Africo, sited 700 metres above the Ionian
coast. Until it was finally abandoned in 1953 as a result of
devastating floods, Africo was a byword for the isolation and
poverty of Calabria’s highland communities — and a byword
for organised crime.
But before going to Africo, the story of the ’ndrangheta’s
origins takes us to the opposite flank of Aspromonte, and to a

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Mafia Brotherhoods

place of relative wealth and power. One of the secrets of the

*ndrangheta’s survival and success over the years has been its
ability to straddle the distance between prosperity and hardship,
as between the contrasting faces of the Harsh Mountain.

170
The free of knowledge

Palmi sits on a shelf where Aspromonte meets the Tyrrhenian

Sea. Gazing to the north-east, it affords a seductive panorama
over the Plain of Gioia Tauro, a fertile amphitheatre of land
descending gently from the mountains. The Plain was Calabria’s
answer to the ‘Golden Shell’ around Palermo in the late nineteenth
century. Land was owned in smaller farms rather than great
estates, partly because a great deal of Church property was
confiscated and privatised after Italian unification. There were
many citrus fruit groves in the Plain too, although the irrigation
was not as sophisticated as it was in Sicily. More important to
the economy of towns like Palmi were the famous olive trees, as
tall and venerable as oaks. Recently the wine industry had come
to the fore, after French vineyards were devastated by phylloxera,
an aphid-like insect that feasted on the roots and leaves of vines.
Italian producers moved to fill the gap in supply, and in the plain
of Gioia Tauro they even cut down olive trees to make room for
the grape.
In the 1880s Palmi was a town of some eleven or twelve thou-
sand inhabitants, which was not small by the standards of the
region. Southern Calabria is a place where the population is
spread out in little centres, and in the 1880s few of them housed
more than five thousand people. Even the provincial capital,
Reggio Calabria, could only muster its 40,000 population by
including the villages that surrounded it. Palmi was the admin-
istrative capital for the whole of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, an
area encompassing 130,000 souls. And as the administrative
capital it had an outpost of the Prefecture, a police station, a
courtroom, and a prison. Men from that prison would turn Palmi

171
Mafia Brotherhoods ~

into Calabria’s most notorious mafia stronghold in the 1880s and

1890s.
It all began in the spring of 1888. The local newssheet started
to report razor slashings and ritual knife duels. In Palmi’s taverns
and brothels, gang members battled it out with clubs and blades.
In classic mafia and camorra fashion, the bleeding losers refused
point blank to name the men who had wounded them.
Within weeks of these first reports, Palmi’s hoodlum problem
was out of control. Ordinary citizens were afraid to leave their
homes. Anyone who stood up to the thugs received the razor
treatment. The picciotti settled their bloody accounts in the centre
of town, on corso Garibaldi and in piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
They had begun by extorting money from gamblers and prosti-
tutes. Now they also fleeced landowners who were afraid to report
thefts and vandalism for fear of worse: the Lads with Attitude
were setting up. protection rackets, the very foundation of any
mafia’s territorial authority. The gang threatened a local Carab-
iniere, and pelted him with stones; they even silenced the local
newspaper, whose editor received a threatening letter telling him
not to ‘persecute the lads’. From Palmi the sect spread to the
smaller towns and villages right across the Plain of Gioia Tauro,
and up onto the surrounding mountain slopes.
Only in June 1888, when a clerk at the local branch of the
Prefecture was slashed across the face as he came out of the
theatre, did the police round up the first large batch of suspects.
The twenty-four men arraigned early in 1889 give us our first
glimpse of the kind of person who became a Lad with Attitude.
Many of them were young — late teens or early twenties — and
all of them were labourers or artisans: the legal documents list
job titles such as peasant, carter, waiter, tailor, mule driver, shep-
herd. There were also one or two men who farmed their own
plot. The boss, one Francesco Lisciotto, was a cobbler; at sixty,
he was comfortably the oldest man in the gang. More importantly,
like all but three of the Palmi picciotti, he had already spent time
behind bars.

L772
 The tree of knowledge

The police and magistrature continued their fight. In June 1890

one trial targeted a picciotteria network based in Jatrinoli and
Radicena, two towns that sat one just above the other about
fifteen kilometres from the coast at Gioia Tauro. Many of the
ninety-six defendants were workers and craftsmen like their fellow
picciotti in Palmi. The judges in the case explained that the sect
began in 1887; they had no doubts about where it came from.

The association originated in the district prisons [in

Palmi], under the name of ‘Sect of camorristi’. From
there, as and when its bosses and promoters were released,
it spread to other towns and villages where it found fertile
soil among the callow youth, old jailbirds, and especially
goatherds. The Society, with the protection it afforded to
its comrades, offered this last group a way to pasture their
animals illegally on other people’s land, and to impose
themselves on landlords.

Men like the Palmi capo Francesco Lisciotto came out of jail
with their status in the Society already well established. The
*ndrangheta was not founded, in other words; it emerged almost
fully formed from inside the prison system.
More arrests and further trials followed over the coming years.
Early in 1892 the court in Palmi tried some 150 men from right
across the Plain of Gioia Tauro. The picciotti did their best to
evade justice by killing one witness and threatening many others
into silence. But the evidence against them proved overwhelming.
The new boss of Palmi, Antonio Giannino, aged only 20, was
his gang’s knife-fencing instructor. Indeed he was so proud of
his skills that he had himself photographed in fighting pose. The
image helped convict him.
The 1892 trial added more detail to what the police knew
about the picciotteria: the characteristic appearance of its affili-
ates, for example. The picciotti had tattooed hieroglyphs that
signalled their rank. They also wore tight trousers that flared

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Mafia Brotherhoods

over their shoes, tied their silk scarves in a special way to leave
the ends fluttering as they swaggered, and combed their hair into
a distinctive butterfly-shaped quiff.
If peace returned to Palmi following the huge and successful
prosecution of 1892, it certainly did not return for long. In 1894
the town was reduced to rubble by an earthquake. By the following
year the picciotteria was active again, robbing and extorting
among the temporary shacks in which much of the population
still lived. Yet the police seemed inert. Commentators in the press
muttered that the police in Palmi had ‘evening conversations’ in
the very wine cellars where the hoods hung out, and that the
forces of law and order were less interested in tackling organised
crime than they were in arresting opposition voters during elec-
tions. In Calabria’s bigger towns, just as in Naples and Sicily, the
police soon learned to co-manage crime with gangsters.
Eventually, in September 1896, another wave of arrests elicited
more confessions. Early in 1897 the resulting trial provided full
details of the Calabrian mafia’s ranks and rituals for the first
time. The picciotteria formed itself into locally based cells or
‘sections’. Each cell was subdivided between a Minor Society and
a Major Society. The Minor Society contained men bearing the
lower rank of picciotto. The Major Society contained the more
senior criminals, known as camorristi. Both the Major and the
Minor had their own boss and a contaiolo, or bookkeeper, who
gathered and redistributed the gang’s income from crime. Each
new member had to undergo an initiation ritual to join the Society
before he was awarded the lowest rank of all, that of ‘Honoured
Youth’. The boss of the Major Society would call his men into
a darkened room, form them into a circle and begin the long
ceremony with the words, ‘Are you comfortable?’ to which the
assembled gangsters would reply, ‘Very comfortable!’
On 24 February 1897 a crucial witness in the resulting trial, a
man by the name of Pasquale Trimboli, took the stand in Palmi’s
courthouse. The defendants in their cage, and the public squeezed
into the tiny gallery, all craned to hear what he had to say.

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 The tree of knowledge

Trimboli had been a member of the picciotteria, and therefore

knew everything about the sect — including the terrible secret of
its origins. Mention of the mysterious genesis of the picciotteria
transfixed the court. But the mood of intense concentration soon
gave way to puzzled laughter as he told his childish tale of how
the Calabrian mafia was born.

The society was born from three knights, one from Spain,
one from Palermo, and one from Naples. All three of
them were camorristi. The Spanish knight took a camorra,
a bribe, on every hand of cards the other two played.
With time, he gathered in all their money and the others
could not play any more. So he gave 10 Lire back to each
one, and told them, ‘Here are ro Lire for you, and I’ve
got all the rest in my hand, so that means that I’m the
strongest.’
Metaphorically speaking, these three camorristi were
a tree. The boss, the Spanish knight, was the trunk of
the tree. The Palermo knight, who was the oldest, was
the masterbone, Mastrosso. And the third knight, the one
from Naples, was the bone, Osso. The other members
were the branches and the leaves. The ‘honoured youths’,
who aspired to become picciotti, were the flowers.

To my knowledge, this is the first recorded (and garbled) version

of the ’ndrangheta’s founding myth. What it suggests is that
Calabrian gangsters were seeking out fables to build their esprit
de corps, to endow their newly surfaced fraternity with the same
aura as their brethren in Campania and Sicily.
The success of the judicial assault on the picciotteria can be
judged from the testimony of a priest who was called to give evidence
in yet another trial just three years later. He said that in Palmi,

the criminals’ audacity makes walking through the streets

extremely dangerous, even before the Angelus [i-e. sunset].

ie)
Mafia Brotherhoods

Honest people are now in the habit of going home as

soon as they can, because at any time in the busiest parts
of town you can hear the wails of the wounded and dying.

But if the trials in Palmi failed to shake the grip of the picciot-
teria in the Plain of Gioia Tauro, they did at least provide histor-
ical documentation that has a familiar ring. Doubly familiar, in
fact. On the one hand there is a great deal about the picciotteria
that resembles the Honoured Society of Naples. (One early
picciotteria trial in 1884 even found that the criminal boss of the
small town of Nicastro ‘had relations with the famous Neapolitan
camorrista Ciccillo [“Little Lord Frankie”] Cappuccio’.) Like
their Neapolitan cousins, the Calabrians duelled with knives, and
slashed their victims’ faces with razors. Both sects exploited
prostitution and gambling; both blew their illicit earnings on
feasting and getting drunk; both had a similar dress code (flared
trousers and all that); and both divided their gangs between a
Minor Society and a Major Society, between aspiring ‘Honoured
Youths’, junior picciotti, and senior camorristi. Like the Neapoli-
tans, the Calabrians punished their members’ transgressions with
a distinctively disgusting punishment they called tartaro (‘Tartarus’
or ‘Hell’): it involved daubing the culprit with urine and faeces.
There are many, many other similarities that it would be tiresome
to list here: in the coded jargon they spoke to try and conceal
what they were talking about, for example. What these likenesses
confirm is that both the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian
mafia share the same genealogy. Both were born from the same
prison camorra.
On the other hand the picciotteria is also familiar in that it
closely resembles the ’ndrangheta of today, with its Minor Society
and its Major Society, its foundation myth of the three Spanish
knights, and so on. In fact even the most confused bits of Pasquale
Trimboli’s testimony chime strongly with what we know about
the ’ndrangheta’s contemporary practices. ’Ndranghetisti habitu-
ally refer to their organisation metaphorically, as what they call

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 Tie tree of knowledge

a “Tree of Knowledge’: the trunk being the boss, the branches

the officers, and so on.
The ’ndrangheta of today, with its unique admission rituals
for every rank in the organisation, is more obsessed with cere-
mony than any other Italian mafia. The archival papers tell us
that the Calabrian mafia of the late 1800s was developing the
same obsession. Today’s ’ndrangheta also has a great variety of
specialised job titles within each local gang — far more than either
the Sicilian mafia or the Neapolitan camorra. Echoes of that
level of specialisation reach us from the nineteenth century too.
Both the Minor Society and the Major Society of the Palmi
section of the picciotteria had other posts in addition to the boss
and the bookkeeper: such as the ‘Camorrista of the Day’, whose
duty was to inform the boss of local goings on; and the ‘Picciotto
of Correspondence’ who handled communications between
members in prison and members at large. In short, there can be
no doubt that the Lads with Attitude were the ’ndrangheta by
an earlier name. :
A long and gruesome history had begun.

£77
Darkest Africo

The zampogna, or southern Italian bagpipe, is an ancient and

unlovely instrument. It is made from a whole goat- or sheepskin
that has been cured, turned wool side in, and sealed. A cluster
of wooden pipes lolls where the sheep’s head was once attached
and a mouthpiece protrudes from the stump of a front leg. When
the zampogna is pressed under the player’s arm, nasal melodies
are emitted over a hypnotic wheeze that sounds like the infinite
bleat of the departed animal’s soul.
In the hilltop towns of nineteenth-century Calabria, dancing
to the zampogna was one of the few things that passed for enter-
tainment. So any student of Calabrian folklore who had ventured
into the streets of Africo on the mild evening of All Saints, 1
November 1894, would not have been surprised to see a circle of
men taking turns to perform a skipping dance around the local
zampogna-player. But as the zampognaro himself — his name was
Giuseppe Sagoleo — would later tell an investigating magistrate,
there was nothing folkloristic about his performance that evening.
This bagpipe party was a carefully choreographed prelude to a
murder that would precipitate one of the biggest early picciot-
teria trials. By luck, the complete papers from that trial have
survived the upheavals of Calabrian geology and history to give
us a priceless insight into this newly emerged criminal organisa-
tion in one of its heartlands.
But to make sense of the bagpipe party of All Saints, we need
to take a few steps further back in time. For the brutal execution
carried out that evening was the culmination of a campaign by
the recently established Africo section of the picciotteria to take
control of the town for the first time. The zampogna had a central

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 Darkest Africo

role in that campaign. Combined with the testimonies of

witnesses, Giuseppe Sagoleo’s story takes us deep into the world
of the ’ndrangheta in its primitive form.
The zampognaro’s woes began, he testified, early the same
year when Domenico Callea, age 34, returned to his home town
after serving ten years in prison for the kidnap and violent rape
of a woman. Once his hair grew back from his prison crew cut,
Callea cultivated a butterfly-shaped quiff. He made the transition
from prison camorrista to senior Lad with Attitude smoothly:
he immediately became both the bookkeeper for the Africo
section, and also its duelling instructor.
Domenico Callea approached the zampognaro, offering to
propose him for membership of a ‘society’ that existed in Africo.
Because Callea was one of the society’s leaders, he said, he could
even offer to waive the 7% Lire enrolment fee. But Sagoleo was
smart enough to make inquiries about the society before accepting
Callea’s invitation. When he was told that the members were
obliged to follow the bosses’ orders, even if that meant commit-
ting robbery or murder, he refused to join.
Across southern Calabria, Lads like Callea were making similar
offers. They nearly always charged a membership fee of 7% Lire
— about three quarters of the value of a goat, or about 8 per cent
of the price of a pig. They usually claimed that the society just
existed to drink wine and have a good time. And very frequently
they beat people up or flicked them with a razor if they refused
to pay. Sagoleo the zampognaro was lucky.
This simple method of squeezing money from new recruits
was a classic prison camorra technique. The picciotteria would
use it for years to come. So the early ’ndrangheta was based
partly on a kind of pyramid selling scam that benefitted only
the bosses at the top. As the case of the bagpipe player of Africo
also illustrated, this method had an inbuilt weakness in that it
created a great many new members who had little genuine loyalty
to the picciotteria. One of the reasons we can know so much
about the early ’ndrangheta is that so many of these new recruits

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Mafia Brotherhoods

would confess everything to the police. The ’ndrangheta came

into the world with a birth defect that would take decades to
shed.
Although the zampognaro refused Domenico Callea’s offer, he
did not save himself from the attentions of Callea’s friends. As
he explained to the investigating magistrate

The association’s members were always coming to me

and asking me to play. There were times when they told
me I had to do it whether I wanted to or not because
they were in charge. Sometimes they paid me, and some-
times they didn’t. And I couldn’t complain because they
threatened to break my bagpipes.

Domenico Callea’s picciotti were subjecting the bagpipe player

to what the police called a prepotenza, an act of petty bullying
— like refusing to pay in a shop or pestering another man’s wife.
But this prepotenza had a clear strategic purpose. The picciot-
teria may have been a secret sect, but its secrecy, like that of other
Italian criminal fraternities, was of a paradoxical kind: the Lads
were, after all, not yet so guarded that they could resist sporting
distinctive haircuts and trousers. This is because their power
depended on their ability to make their presence felt in the most
public of ways. Indeed by strong-arming the poor zampognaro
into playing at their parties, the Lads were imposing themselves
on one of the few expressions of a collective social life in Africo.
This was a flagrant prepotenza committed against the whole
community. More than that, it was a deliberate attempt to under-
mine any sense of community, and replace it with fear.
On 12 May 1894, the day devoted to Africo’s patron, Saint
Leo, Domenico Callea called upon the bagpiper to welcome a
very important guest: Filippo Velona, a 38-year-old cobbler from
the nearby village of Staiti. The official files on Velona give us a
clear but hardly very expressive description: he was 1.70m tall
with brown hair and eyes, a ‘regular’ forehead, a ‘natural’

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 Darkest Africo

complexion, a ‘robust’ physique and no distinguishing marks. In

short, Velona could have been any one of the countless artisans
who eked out a life by servicing the poor mountain communities
of Calabria. The only clue to his real identity is in the local
mayor’s description of his conduct as cattivissima — ‘exception-
ally bad’. This after all, was a man who had two convictions for
wounding and who had served seven years in jail for dishing out
a beating from which the victim subsequently died. When he was
released in 1892 he led the emergence of the picciotteria in the
district of Bova which lay either side of the rugged valley blasted
out by the Amendolea torrent.
The villages of the Bova district, including Africo, were a
cultural island even on Aspromonte: their inhabitants spoke not
Calabrian dialect, but Greek — or at least Grecanico, an archaic
dialect of Greek that survives from the early Middle Ages when
Calabria was part of the Byzantine Empire. One sign of how
important this cultural island is to the Calabrian mafia today is
the fact that the word ’ndrangheta derives from the word for
‘manliness’ or ‘heroism’ in Grecanico. ~
But boss Velona’s prestige extended beyond the Grecanico-
speaking area: further round the coast to the north-east, he was
acknowledged in Bovalino, San Luca and even as far as Portigliola
and Gerace. This was a huge stretch of the Calabrian coast — as
big as the Plain of Gioia Tauro just over the mountains; it corre-
sponds more or less to the Mandamento ionico, or ‘Ionian
Precinct’, which is one of the three areas into which the ’ndrang-
heta’s jurisdiction is divided today. No wonder the rank and file
called Velona ‘President’.
Velona came to Africo on 12 May to initiate a new Lad with
Attitude. The formalities were completed indoors. The young
man ritually submitted himself to the boss’s authority by kneeling
before him, kissing his hand, and uttering the following words:
‘Father forgive me if I have strayed in the past, and I promise not
to stray in the future.’
_The initiation, as always, was celebrated with a banquet

18t
Mafia Brotherhoods

attended by members from across the area. They drank a great

deal of wine and ate a goat purloined from the man who had
been forced to put Velona up during his stay. Everyone laughed
when one picciotto loudly asked the wife of the very man from
whom the animal had been stolen for some salt to preserve a
piece of it. The lads clearly appreciated such a creatively framed
prepotenza. Then, after eating copiously, the bosses settled down
to play cards while the younger affiliates danced to the sound of
the bagpipes. ‘All of this happened publicly, in front of everyone’, |
as one witness explained.
By stealing animals, and eating stolen meat in such demonstra-
tive assertions of their esprit de corps, the picciotti were
proclaiming themselves to be at the top of the food chain; for
this was a part of the world where the peasant diet was mestly
vegetarian. Elsewhere, the picciotteria went to even greater lengths
to show that its members were in the protein elite. In Bova, the
town’s mayor would indignantly testify, one local mobster (a
cobbler like his boss) once treated his brethren from other towns
to a fish banquet. Now, Bova is only about nine kilometres from
the sea, as the crow flies. But those 9 kilometres may as well have
been 900: nothing perishable could be relied upon to survive the
arduous trip on a mule’s back up into the mountains from the
coast. As the mayor explained, fish ‘arrives only very rarely in
our town, and people from a humble background are not accus-
tomed to eating it’. For a cobbler to serve fish to his guests was
the dietary equivalent of gangster bling.
On Aspromonte, there were many who were impressed by these
rudimentary advertisements for power. While the boss Velona
was in Africo he was approached by a woman who presented
him with a sheep and begged him ‘to do her the honour of
admitting her son to the association’.
Callea’s crew were doing more to earn such admiration than
bullying the bagpiper and pinching the odd goat for their team-
building banquets. According to the mayor of Africo, seventy
pigs had been stolen in 1893 alone. Many other beasts went

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missing too. The victims — men like the schoolteacher, the arch-
priest, and the mayor himself — were too afraid even to report
their losses to the authorities. Rumours said that the animals
were sold cheaply to butchers who were also in the association;
goats had been found with their ears — and therefore their owners’
marks — cut off. Butchers in Bova later reported that the legal
livestock trade had virtually collapsed because people were just
too afraid to go around buying and selling animals.
The accumulating evidence from Africo points inexorably to
an important conclusion: even in the most isolated mountain
villages of Grecanico-speaking Aspromonte, the Lads with Atti-
tude were part of an organisation that was much bigger, and
more coordinated, than some loose constellation of local gangs.
Not only did they have common rituals and structures and a
shared past behind bars, in Filippo Velona they also had a char-
ismatic boss whose prestige traversed a wide territory. They even
placed themselves under the jurisdiction of a single judge: his
name was Andrea Angelone.
Angelone was an old prison camorrista, fifty-nine years old to
be precise. He was released from jail for the last time following
a twelve-year stretch in 1887 and immediately set up a branch
of the picciotteriain his home village of Roccaforte del Greco,
in the Grecanico-speaking district. Although he did not take an
active role in the sect’s day-to-day criminal activity thereafter, he
still received his regular cut of the takings in return for dispensing
his wisdom at tribunals. The Grecanico-speaking Lads also had
contacts in Reggio Calabria and in the district of Palmi.
The authorities in Palmi reported similar long-range connec-
tions. The various sections of the organisation on the Plain of
Gioia Tauro had ‘emissaries so they could correspond with one
another’. And while the local branches each had their own boss
and underboss, clusters of them operated under the authority of
one gang.
As in Sicily, cattle rustling was almost certainly one of the
main reasons for these links. Many of the Calabrian mafiosi

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Mafia Brotherhoods

were woodcutters and herdsmen who thought nothing of

spending days on end in the mountains, and who were born
with a map of Aspromonte’s numberless pathways imprinted on
their minds. The rustling technique was simple and virtually
foolproof: steal animals in one place, and then avoid detection
by sending them off through the mountains to trusted brethren
in other towns who could put them on the market. The picciotti
also moved around the area to exact an extortion tribute on the
regular fairs that were still an important part of the Calabrian
mountain economy.
What were the authorities doing in the late 1880s and early
1890s, while the picciotteria was building its numbers and thick-
ening its networks? The answer is, very little. Africo, Roccaforte,
Bova and the other centres of gang activity were still among the
many places in the peninsula where ‘Italy’ did not mean very
much beyond taxes, military service and the occasional visit from
Carabinieri on patrol. In April 1893, two forest guards (auxiliary
policemen) sent a letter to the local magistrate denouncing the
existence of ‘a terrible sect of so-called maffiosi’ in Africo and
the surrounding area. Their warning was ignored and buried in
a pile of paperwork.
Which is where, more than a year later, it was found by a
dynamic new representative of the Italian state’s feeble authority
in Calabria: Sergeant Angelo Labella, commander of the Bova
station of the Carabinieri. On 21 June 1894, Labella wrote his
first report on the criminal association he had unearthed: he
named fifty members, including Domenico Callea and Filippo
Velona. Over the coming weeks Labella added to his roll call of
suspects, and laid the groundwork for a huge prosecution by
detailing witnesses who could provide evidence against the gang.
At last, it seemed, the Italian state was set to challenge the picci-
otteria regime in this forgotten place.
In September 1894 investigating magistrates came to the district
capital of Bova and began summoning the witnesses Labella had
cited. The Lads quickly mobilised in response to this challenge

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 Darkest Africo

to their authority. They verbally threatened anyone prepared to

give evidence against them, including the wealthier citizens of
Africo. They slaughtered animals and left them in the fields for
the owners to find; they vandalised vines. In late October they
cut down twelve fruit trees belonging to one landowner and
carved funeral crosses into the stumps, just in case the message
in the damage was not clear.
The picciotti also enlisted the bagpiper to their campaign of
intimidation. He was forced to play while they went through the
streets improvising menacing songs about their enemies, including
literate folk like town councillors, the archpriest, the tax collector,
and Sergeant Angelo Labella. They were heard bellowing the
following clumsy ditty outside one landowner’s balcony.

Now take up your pen and inkpot to do a new trial. But

if we win our freedom, we’ll take vengeance with our
own hands.

While their Lads were intoning their threats, Domenico Callea

and the other bosses had already decided on the fate of the most
dangerous of the witnesses named in Sergeant Labella’s first
report: a fifty-year-old swineherd named Pietro Maviglia.
Maviglia did not cut a very impressive figure. His crippled leg
meant that he walked with the aid of a stick and he could not
hobble very far without gasping for breath. (The post-mortem
would identify the signs of pleurisy in his wounded lungs.) But
Maviglia’s importance lay in the fact that he was a member of
the gang — one of the earliest members, in fact.
Back in 1892 Maviglia had become involved in a dispute with
Domenico Callea’s equally nasty younger brother Bruno, who
had beaten him up as a result. To take revenge, Maviglia leaked
news of a burglary that Bruno Callea had committed. As a result
of Maviglia’s testimony, Callea was sentenced to two years for
the burglary, and another fourteen months for beating the crip-
pled old swineherd up a second time.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Maviglia was expelled from the picciotteria. From that point

on, he lived his life under the threat of death. With Sergeant
Labella’s detective work continuing, and prosecuting magistrates
conducting their first interrogations in the case, silencing Maviglia
now became an urgent priority for the bosses.
In a place like Africo, rumours took the place of newspapers,
especially when it came to informing the citizenry about the
internal affairs of the criminal fraternity. In October 1894 whis-
pering voices began to relate the surprising news that the Calleas
had settled their quarrel with Pietro Maviglia. In the face of the
ongoing judicial investigation, harmony had returned to the
brotherhood, it was said. Maviglia himself was unsure of how
to respond to the peaceful proposals directed at him; he asked
his brother for advice, confiding that the picciotti wanted to
readmit him into what he referred to as ‘the sect’.
The picciotti held the bagpipe party on the evening of All
Saints for two reasons. First, to reassure Maviglia that the offer
to readmit him to their fraternity was genuine. Second, to provide
cover for his killers. While the bequiffed members of the gang
danced and drank and sang in the streets that evening, one picci-
otto approached Maviglia and explained to him that the Lads
had stolen a goat, and would eat it together in a shack out in
the countryside to celebrate the swineherd’s return to the broth-
erhood. Pulling his fist from his pocket, he showed its contents:
‘lve even got some salt’, he smiled.
About an hour after dark that night, Pietro Maviglia was seen
for the last time by anyone but his assassins. Leaning on his
walking stick, with his jacket slung over his shoulder, he set off
along the via Anzaro that led towards the cemetery.
Shortly afterwards, one of the Lads told the bagpiper to bring
the dancing to an end and then followed the direction that his
intended victim had taken.

or
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 Darkest Africo

Late on the morning of 4 November 1894 the local deputy magis-

trate and doctor arrived in Africo to perform a grisly duty. They
were ‘local’ in the sense that they had only had to trudge for
four hours to reach Africo from the district capital of Bova, along
mountain tracks that horses refused to tackle. They found Pietro
Maviglia lying where he had been found the previous evening:
face down on top of his walking stick, in a field about fifteen
minutes from where he had last been seen among the picciotti
_ dancing to the bagpipes.
The doctor worked quickly once the body had been moved to
the cemetery and formal identification had taken place. Five lesions
spoke the likely narrative of Maviglia’s last minutes. The old man
was stabbed in the small of his back first. Perhaps the head injury
came next:.a hatchet blow had notched the back of his skull.
Maviglia was then stuck twice with a dagger, both blows entering
the chest cavity just to the left of the breastbone. The heart was
pierced through both ventricles. Either of these injuries would have
been fatal, but the killers — at least three of them — were remorse-
less, inflicting the fifth and final wound when their victim was
already prostrate. It seemed a reasonable deduction that, as
Maviglia’s head was heaved backwards by the hair, his throat was
cut by a very sharp blade: a clean-edged, ten-centimetre gash
bisected his right jugular vein, his voice box and his oesophagus.
‘Undigested food is coming out’, the doctor jotted dispassionately.

I must also point out that there was coarse cooking salt
on the throat wound. The authors of the murder sprinkled
it there, perhaps in order to achieve greater satisfaction
for their feelings of vendetta.

Pietro Maviglia was butchered like a goat. In the days following

his death, the people of Africo said that his butterfly quiff had
been sliced off too, ‘so as to demonstrate that he was not fit to
belong to the association’. The doctor neither confirmed nor
denied the rumour.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The revolting details of Pietro Maviglia’s murder give the lie

to the first of many historical misconceptions about the picciot-
teria. The early Calabrian mafia, it is still sometimes said, had
a social function. In a desperately deprived and backward part
of the country, mafiosi got together to create a source of
authority and a system of mutual assistance. Or so the argument
goes.
It may be true that, on the slopes of Aspromonte, the early
*ndrangheta moved into a vacuum where the state should have
been. But they ruled by fear — that much is evident from one state-
ment after another that the magistrates collected in the aftermath
of Maviglia’s death. That fact is not changed if, in the absence of
state authority, some people — including landowners — made the
best of their situation, and allied themselves with bullies they could
not fight. Pietro Maviglia’s murderers, it is worth remembering,
made no attempt to hide his corpse: those horrific injuries and
even the fistful of salt thrown on his slit gullet, were meant as a
warning to others — a public, poetic ‘justice’.
After the post-mortem, investigations into the picciotteria in
Africo finally began to make real progress. More Carabinieri
arrived in the village, and were billeted in a house right next
door to Domenico Callea’s. The picciotteria’s bookkeeper and
fencing instructor had gone on the run after ordering Pietro
Maviglia killed. His new wife was left alone in the house. She
kept the Carabinieri awake all night with the sound of her
sobbing.
The strong military presence in Africo encouraged more
witnesses to come forward. With Sergeant Labella’s energetic
help the magistrates preparing the prosecution case were able to
tease out more and more evidence. Maviglia’s murderers were
arrested. Under interrogation, they broke: blaming one another
at first, and then finally confessing. In the Grecanico-speaking
communities, the wall of omerta around the picciotteria collapsed.
Perhaps the most historically significant truth to surface after
Maviglia’s brutal demise was that the criminal network that the

188
 Darkest Africo

Lads with Attitude rapidly created in the 1880s and 1890s had
an enthralling religious symbol at its centre.
The Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi lies hidden in a valley
in Aspromonte’s upper reaches. Legend has it that in 1144 a shep-
herd came to this secluded spot looking for a lost bullock. He was
greeted by a miraculous vision of the Blessed Virgin. ‘I want a
church erected’, she declared, ‘to spread my graces among the devout
who will come here to visit me’. For centuries, in early September,
poor pilgrims have made their way up the twisting mountain roads
to Polsi in joyous conformity with the Virgin’s wishes.
Calabria’s greatest writer, Corrado Alvaro, described Polsi as
it would have been in the late nineteenth century when twenty
thousand men and women flooded the churchyard and the woods
round about in preparation for the Festival. Some had walked
barefoot all the way; others came wearing crowns of thorns. The
men drank heavily and fired their guns in the air. Everyone feasted
on roast goat, bellowed ancient hymns, and danced all night to
the music of the bagpipe and the tambourine.
On the day of the Festival itself, the tiny church was filled with
the imploring wails of the faithful, and with the bleating and
mooing of the animals brought as votive offerings. Hysterical
women shrieked vows as they elbowed their way through the
crowd to place eerie ex-votos at the Madonna’s feet: brass jewel-
lery, clothes, or babies’ body parts modelled from wax. When
evening came and the Madonna was paraded around the sanc-
tuary on a bier, the pilgrims prayed, wept, beat their chests, and
cried out ‘viva Maria!’
The Festival of the Madonna of Polsi has a special symbolic
significance for the ’ndrangheta. To this day the Chief Cudgels
from across the province of Reggio Calabria use the Festival as
cover for an annual meeting. In September 2009, prosecutors
maintain, the newly elected ‘Chief of the Crime’, Domenico
Oppedisano, came to have his appointment ratified at Polsi. Senior
positions in the ’ndrangheta’s coordinating body, the Great Crime,
come into force at midnight on the day of the Festival.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The nearest town to the Sanctuary at Polsi is San Luca, where

the writer Corrado Alvaro grew up, and where the ’ndrine (local
mafia gangs) involved in the Duisburg massacre of 2007 origi-
nated. ’Ndrangetisti refer to San Luca as their Mamma; the
’ndrangheta there is traditionally the guardian of the whole asso-
ciation’s rules, and the arbiter in disputes. San Luca has been
called the ‘Bethlehem’ of Calabrian organised crime.
We can now be sure that the Polsi crime summit is a tradition
as old as the ’ndrangheta itself. For in June 1895 a shopkeeper
from Roccaforte del Greco told the magistrates investigating
Pietro Maviglia’s murder what he had seen in Polsi.

On 3 September 1894 I went to the Festival of the

Madonna of the Mountain. There I saw several members
of the criminal association from Roccaforte in the
company of about sixty people from various villages who
were all sitting in a circle eating and drinking. When I
asked who paid for all that food and wine at the Festival,
I was told that they paid for it with the camorra they
collected.

Evidently the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary at Polsi was, from the

outset, a chance for the Lads to make a profit and talk shop
rather than to worship.
Sergeant Labella’s investigations also threw up more scattered
evidence about how the picciotteria began. Although he could not
be precise about the year of its emergence, he thought that it was
no later than 1887, the year that the sect’s ‘judge’, Andrea Angelone,
was released from prison. Other witnesses pushed the starting date
back further. One resident of the same village said he thought
Angelone had been a member of a criminal association ‘sixteen
or seventeen years back’ (i.e. in about 1879)..
The elementary-schoolteacher in Africo proved to be a particu-
larly insightful witness. He had first taken up his post in the
mid 1880s and had immediately heard talk of a criminal sect in

190
 Darkest Africo

town. But ‘this association, it was said at the time, comprised

three or four people’. Its numbers increased rapidly over the
coming years, particularly during Domenico Callea’s recruitment
drive in 1893-94.
The story that these fragments of evidence tell — a story that
was being repeated in Palmi, and indeed all around Aspromonte
— goes something like this. Until the mid 1880s, a few Calabrian
ex-cons, the senior camorristi from within the prison system,
would keep in touch when they returned home from jail. They
might offer one another help and even get together for the odd
criminal venture: the trial records and other sources tell us of
occasional outbreaks of gang activity in various parts of the
province of Reggio Calabria in the 1870s and even before. But
the picciotti as yet lacked the numbers and the strength to impose
themselves on other felons on the outside world in the way that
they had done in the confined environment of prison. Needless
to say, they also lacked the power to browbeat whole towns. Then
in the 1880s there were changes that gave Calabria’s prison
camorra the chance to project itself into the outside world. The
question, of course, is what exactly those changes were.
It is telling that no representative of the state seemed at all
curious to answer that question. In 1891, Palmi’s Chief Prosecutor
wrote his annual report on the work of the court during the
previous year. The picciotteria did not even merit a mention: it
was only a superficial symptom of Calabria’s chronic backward-
ness, after all. The reason for the high rate of violence in the
Palmi district was not organised crime, he wrote, but the ‘ardent
and lively nature of this population, their touchiness, the stub-
born way they stick to their plans, the unwavering tenacity of
their feelings of hatred — which very often drive them to vendetta’.
If a Sicilian Chief Prosecutor had written such claptrap we
would have very good reason to be suspicious of his motives. But
in Calabria, such suspicions are probably not merited. (Not yet,
at any rate.) After all, the Palmi court had just sent dozens of
picciotti back to jail. But the Chief Prosecutor’s stereotypical

191
Mafia Brotherhoods

views of the Calabrian psyche are significant all the same. Railway
or no railway, Calabria was still seen as a semi-barbaric, faraway
land about which Italy knew very little and cared even less.
Despite its ties to the international market for olive oil, wine and
lemons, Palmi was simply not important enough to draw much
government curiosity down on the picciotteria, which means that
historians have to work harder to solve some outstanding
mysteries about its emergence.
Sworn sects have dominated prisons in many different times
and places. The long-established South African number gangs,
the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s, for example, who take their
mythology from the story of a Zulu chief. Or the vast network
of vory-v-zakone (‘thieves with a code of honour’) who infested
the Soviet Gulag system from the 1920s. The vory had a ‘crowning’
ritual for new members, sported tattoos, and had a distinctive
look comprising an aluminium cross round the neck and several
waistcoats.
But by no means all of these gangs manage to establish their
authority in the world outside the prison gates. The 26s, the 27s,
and the 28s only did it in the 1990s, when Apartheid fell and the
country was opened to narcotics traffickers who needed local
manpower and a local criminal ‘brand’. When the Soviet Union
collapsed the vory-v-zakone did not simply step out of the Gulag
to assume leadership of the crime bonanza that ensued. Rather they
had their traditions hijacked by a new breed of gangster bosses who
wanted to add an air of antiquity to their territorially based bands:
the result was the Russian mafia. Examples like these show just what
an achievement it was for Calabria’s prison camorristi to carve up
territory in the outside world between themselves.
The economy is surely a big part of the reason why they pulled
it off. An economic crisis hit Calabrian agriculture with increasing
force in the 1880s. Phylloxera reached Italy and the wine boom
went sour. Then a trade war with France threw agricultural
exports into crisis. Some smallholders, like those in the Plain of
Gioia Tauro, had run up debts to buy a plot of former Church

192
 Darkest Africo

land and plant it with vines: they now faced penury. Others had
bullied or bribed their way to ownership, and now faced the
wrath of their factional enemies. Meanwhile, the poorest
labourers, like those in Africo, struggled even harder to feed
themselves. There were plenty of recruits for the picciotteria.
The arrival of the steam train was also partly to blame, in
Palmi at least. Contemporaries noted that the initial upsurge of
razor attacks and knife fights coincided with the presence of
navvies working on the Tyrrhenian branch of the railway in the
spring of 1888. A dozen years later, in around 1900, some
observers began to claim that the Lads with Attitude had been
imported into the Plain of Gioia Tauro by Sicilian mafiosi among
the navvies. But since none of the men convicted in Palmi’s court
house were Sicilians, this theory is almost certainly wrong. A
more likely scenario is that there were ex-con camorristi among
the railway workers. The fighting in Palmi could have been the
result of competition for jobs with local picciotti.
Either way, the role that the railways played in the emergence
of the Calabrian mafia makes for a bitter historical irony. As one
magistrate opined at the time

Whether the railway brought more evil than advantage is

unclear. It is painful to ascertain that such a powerful
influence for civilisation and progress served to trigger
the cause of so much social ignominy.

The ’ndrangheta began just when Calabria’s isolation ended.

There is a third likely reason why the picciotteria appeared
when they did. In my view, it is the most important. In 1882 and
1888 two important electoral reforms inaugurated the era of
mass politics in Italy. The number of people entitled to vote
increased. Local government obtained both more freedom from
central control, more responsibilities for things like schooling
and supervising charities, and with them, more resources to
plunder. With around one quarter of adult males now entitled

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Mafia Brotherhoods

to have a say in who governed them, politics became a more

expensive and more lucrative business. ;
More violent too. Shootings, stabbings and beatings had always
been part of the language of Italian politics, particularly in the
south. Much of the violence was administered from Rome. On
orders from the local Prefect, the police would rough up opposi-
tion supporters, arrest them or simply take away their gun
licences, leaving them vulnerable to attack by goons who worked
for the candidate the government wanted to win. The reforms
of the 1880s greatly increased the demand for violence at election
times and encouraged more aspiring power brokers to enlist
support from organised enforcers.
Strong-arm politics was not something that the police were
particularly keen to investigate, understandably enough. But there
are nonetheless clear signs from deep within the dusty folders of
trial papers that even in Africo the picciotteria had friends among
the elite. The press remarked that the men who sliced up the
crippled old swineherd Maviglia were defended by the best
lawyers in Reggio Calabria. And among the picciotti in the case
were ‘people who, because of their prosperous financial state,
can only have been driven to crime because they are innately
wicked’,
The ‘innately wicked’ inhabitants of Africo included the former
mayor, Giuseppe Callea, whose sons were prominent picciotii:
Domenico, the sect’s bookkeeper and fencing instructor who tried
to recruit the bagpiper into the gang; and his brother Bruno, the
picciotto who was sent to prison for robbery on the evidence
provided by the crippled swineherd Pietro Maviglia. Former
mayor Callea clearly endorsed his sons’ criminal career path: he
himself physically threatened Maviglia.
The rise of the picciotteria brutally exposed the fragmentation
of Calabria’s ruling class. At war with one another over local
politics and land, the Calabrian Social élite pfoved utterly inca-
pable of treating the newly assertive criminal brotherhood as a
common enemy. In Africo, some men of education and property

194
 Darkest Africo

testified against the picciotti, and were duly threatened to the

music of the zampogna. Others, like Giuseppe Callea, were more
than happy to ally themselves with the gang. But it would be
naive of us to think that such cases saw good citizens pitted
against shady protectors of gangsters. Legality and crime were
not what divided Calabrians; ideology of one colour or another
was not what brought them together. On Aspromonte, family,
friends and favours were the only cause of conflict, and the only
social glue. The law, such as it was, was just one more weapon
in the struggle. The few sociologists who took an interest in
Calabria after Italian unification noted that the propertied class
‘lacked a sense of legality’, and even ‘lacked moral sense’. What-
ever terms one used to describe it, the rise of the picciotteria
showed that the lack was now infecting the other social classes.
Despite this proliferation of organised criminal activity, the pros-
ecution of the early ’ndrangheta in Africo was a success, in the very
short term. The butchers of Maviglia were convicted, as were dozens
and dozens of the picciotti. Across southern Calabria the police and
Carabinieri registered similar results, and would continue to do so
for years to come. But the struggle to assert the state’s right to rule
was close to futile from the start. The Lads convicted of ‘associating
for delinquency’ served their risibly short sentences in the very same
jails where they had learned their Attitude in the first place. And
there was no sign of an end to the fundamental weaknesses in
Calabrian society that gave them their foothold outside the prisons.
The criminal emergency in Calabria utterly failed to capture
the attention of national public opinion. All too few Italians
were prepared to ‘look through the microscope at the little causes
that make little hearts beat’. In the long term, Italy would pay
the price for this collective failure of the imagination. Nothing
that happened to Calabrian shepherds and peasants could ever
be news. Nothing that is, until the exploits of a woodsman called
Giuseppe Musolino turned him into the Brigand Musolino, the
‘King of Aspromonte’, and perhaps the greatest criminal legend
in Italian history.

" 193
The King of Aspromonte

The facts of Giuseppe Musolino’s life would count for little, in

the end. But the facts are nonetheless where we must begin.
Musolino was born on 24 September 1876 at Santo Stefano in
Aspromonte, a village of some 2,500 inhabitants situated 700
metres up into forests overlooking the Straits of Messina. His
father was a woodsman and a small-time timber dealer just
successful enough to set himself up as the owner of a tavern.
Musolino grew into a woodsman too. But it was the violent
tendencies of his youth that would most attract the attention of
later biographers: before his twentieth birthday he got into trouble
several times for weapons offences and for threatening and
wounding women.
The Musolino saga really began on 27 October 1897, in his
father’s tavern, when he became involved in an argument with
another young man by the name of Vincenzo Zoccali. The two
arranged to have a fight and Musolino suffered a badly cut right
hand. Musolino’s cousin then fired two shots at Zoccali, but
missed.
Two days later, before dawn, Zoccali was harnessing his mule
when someone shot at him from behind a wall. Again the bullets
failed to find their target. Musolino, whose rifle and beret were
found at the scene, went on the run in the wilds of Aspromonte.
He was recaptured just over five months later, and in September
1898 he was given a harsh twenty-one year sentence for attempted
murder. Enraged at the verdict and proclaiming himself the inno-
cent victim of a plot, Musolino swore vendetta. He would eat
Zoccali’s liver, he cried out from the dock.
On the night of 9 January 1899 Musolino and three other

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 ‘The King of Aspromonte

inmates, including his cousin, escaped from prison in Gerace by

hacking a hole in the wall with an iron bar and lowering them-
selves to the ground with a rope made from knotted bedsheets.
The promised vendetta began on the night of 28 January, when
Musolino gunned down Francesca Sidari, the wife of one of the
witnesses against him. He apparently mistook her for his real
target as she stooped over a charcoal mound. When the gunshots
and screaming attracted the attention of her husband and another
man, Musolino shot them too. He'left them for dead, and fled
once more into the mountains.
The brigand Musolino (as he soon became known) now entered
a twin spiral of vengeance: his targets were both the witnesses
against him in the Zoccali case and the informers recruited by
the police in their efforts to catch him.
A month after his first murder, Musolino killed again, stabbing
a shepherd whom he suspected of being a police spy. In mid-May
the bandit returned to Santo Stefano and caught up with Vincenzo
Zoccali — the man whose liver he had vowed to eat. He planted
dynamite in the walls of the house where Zoccali was sleeping
with his brother and parents; but the charge failed to detonate.
(The family subsequently fled to the province of Catanzaro.)
Musolino badly wounded another enemy a few days later.
The sequence of attacks continued through the summer of
1899. In July he killed one suspected informer with a single
shotgun blast to the head. A week later he shot another in the
buttocks.
In August the brigand went all the way to the province of
Catanzaro in pursuit of Vincenzo Zoccali and his family and
succeeded in killing Zoccali’s brother. He then returned quickly
to a village just below Santo Stefano where he murdered another
man he may have suspected of being an informer.
Musolino then vanished for six months.
The next the world heard of Musolino was in February 1900
when he reappeared on Aspromonte with two young accomplices;
he shot and wounded his own cousin by mistake. The brigand

59/7
Mafia Brotherhoods

apparently kneeled before his bleeding cousin, offered him his

rifle, and begged him to take vengeance for the error there and
then. The request was declined and the brigand continued with
his attacks.
Musolino found his next prey in the Grecanico-speaking village
of Roccaforte, blasting him in the legs with a shotgun. The
prostrate victim then managed to convince the bandit that he
was not, as suspected, a police spy. Musolino tended the man’s
wounds for half an hour and then sent a passing shepherd to
fetch help.
On 9 March 1900 one of Musolino’s accomplices, a man from
Africo called Antonio Princi, betrayed him to the police. As part
of the plan to capture Musolino, Princi left some maccheroni laced
with opium in the bandit’s hideout, which at the time was in a
cave near Africo cemetery. Princi then went to get the police. Five
policemen and two Carabinieri followed him back to the hideout.
But the opium had been sitting on the shelf of a local pharmacy
for so long that it had lost much of its narcotic power. Even after
eating the maccheroni, Musolino still had sufficient command of
his faculties to fire at his would-be captors and then escape across
the mountain, with the police and Carabinieri in pursuit.
In the early hours of the following morning Musolino was
surprised while urinating by Pietro Ritrovato, one of the two
Carabinieri; the brigand fired first from close range. The young
Carabiniere suffered a gaping wound in his groin, and died in
torment several hours later.
After another six months of silence Musolino and another
two accomplices killed again on 27 August 1900. They chased
their victim, Francesco Marte, onto the threshing floor of his
own house, where he stopped, turned and begged them to be
allowed the time to make his peace with God before dying. They
allowed him to kneel down, and then shot him repeatedly in
front of his mother, continuing to fire even when he was already
dead. Musolino would claim that Marte was a traitor who was
involved in the maccheroni plot against him.

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 The King of Aspromonte

Subsequently the same two accomplices, perhaps acting on his

behalf, also tried and failed to kill the former mayor of Santo
Stefano who had testified when Musolino went on trial for
attempted murder.
The brigand’s last violent attack came on 22 September 1900,
when he wounded yet another alleged informer in Santo
Stefano.
Musolino’s bloody rampage and the continuing failure to arrest
him had long since become a political scandal. The Aspromonte
woodsman was discussed in parliament. The government’s cred-
ibility was at stake. Hundreds of uniformed men were sent to
southern Calabria to join the hunt. Yet still, for another year and
more, Musolino would manage to evade them all...
There is one more important fact about Musolino: he was a
Lad with Attitude.
At the height of the political furore over the brigand, Italy’s
most valiant journalist, Adolfo Rossi, took the very rare step of
actually going down to Calabria to find out what was going on.
From police and magistrates he learned. all there was to know
about the new mafia.
Rossi toured the prisons and saw the picciotti in their grey- and
tobacco-striped prison uniforms. He went to Palmi, which he
learned was ‘the Calabrian district where the picciotteria was
strongest’. Palmi’s Deputy Prefect glumly explained that, ‘one
trial for “associating for delinquency” has not even finished by
the time we have to start preparing the next one’.
Rossi visited Santo Stefano, Musolino’s home village, and even
climbed all the way up to Africo. He was shocked by the squalor
he found there, writing that ‘the cabins are not houses being used
as pig sties, but pig sties used as houses for humans’. The Cara-
binieri told him how, a few years earlier, members of the sect
had ‘cut a man to pieces, and then put salt on him like you do
with pork’.
Adolfo Rossi’s long series of reports from Calabria is still the
best thing ever written about the early ’ndrangheta; it deserved

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Mafia Brotherhoods

to be read far more widely than in the local Venetian newspaper

in which it appeared. And everyone Rossi interviewed agreed that
Musolino was an oathed member of the picciotteria — albeit that
opinions varied on when exactly Musolino was oathed, and what
rank he held. Rossi saw reports that showed how the Carabinieri
in Santo Stefano had Musolino down for a gangster from the
beginning. On the day after Musolino’s first knife fight with
Vincenzo Zoccali, they wrote that he belonged to the ‘so-called
maffia’.
While Musolino was in custody awaiting trial for attempted
murder, the jailers observed him behaving like a camorrista. One
guard stated to Rossi that

Musolino entered this prison on 8 April 1898. Later some

of his cellmates informed me that in June of the same
year he was elected a camorrista [i.e. a senior member of
the Society].

In Africo Rossi spoke to a police commander who explained that

Musolino had avoided capture for so long because he had the
support of the picciotteria network across Aspromonte and
beyond. One man who confessed to Rossi that he had sheltered
Musolino was the mayor of Africo, a shady figure who testified
against the picciotteria back in 1894. In Santo Stefano, Rossi
learned that some of the brigand’s accomplices were Lads, and
that some of his escapades, including his original spat with
Vincenzo Zoccali, had more to do with the internal politics of
the mob than with his personal programme of vengeance.
Despite these facts Musolino became a hero: a wronged
avenger, a solitary knight of the forest, a Robin Hood, the ‘King
of Aspromonte’.
His fame began to grow rapidly after his prison breakout in
1899. It was a local phenomenon at first. Most people on Asprom-
onte firmly believed that Musolino was innocent of the charge
for which he was originally imprisoned — that of attempting to

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 The King of Aspromonte

murder Vincenzo Zoccali. And, in truth, there are one or two

residual doubts about how sound the conviction was. Musolino’s
‘innocence’, genuine or not, proved to be the seed of his fame.
The peasants of Aspromonte, ignorant and pitiably poor,
regarded the state with inborn suspicion. For such people, in
such circumstances, a renegade hero who only killed false
witnesses was all too captivating a delusion.
Musolino found food and shelter everywhere he went on
Aspromonte. For his sake, women kept lanterns lit for the
Madonna of Polsi and for Saint Joseph (San Giuseppe, the patron
saint of woodworkers, from whom Musolino took his Christian
name). Much of this support was managed by the picciotteria.
Much of it can be explained by perfectly understandable fear.
Some of it — and it is impossible to tell just how much — was
down to the brigand’s burgeoning popular aura.
Stories soon spread that aura further afield. Stories about how,
while Musolino was in prison, Saint Joseph came to him in a
miraculous vision and revealed the weak points in his cell wall.
Stories about how he never stole from anyone, always paid for
what he ate, never abused women, and always outwitted the
clodhopping Carabinieri.
From Aspromonte, the Musolino legend was broadcast by the
oral folklore of the entire south. He became a star of the puppet
theatre. Children played at being Musolino in the street.
Wandering players dressed up as brigands to sing of his adven-
tures or had their poems in praise of him printed on grubby
sheets of paper to be sold for coppers. The authorities arrested
some of these minstrels, but the cult was now unstoppable. The
‘King of Aspromonte’ himself capitalised on it. Musolino sent
a letter to a national newspaper in which he impudently put
himself on the side of the ordinary people against authority.

I am a worker, and the son of a worker. I love people

who have to sweat in the fields from morning until night
so as to produce society’s riches. In fact I envy them,

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Mafia Brotherhoods

because my misfortune means I cannot make a contribu-

tion with my own hands.

The Italian state now found itself losing a propaganda war against
the delinquent artisans and peasants of Aspromonte. The whole
Musolino affair was turning into what today we would call a PR
disaster for the rule of law. Perhaps its most worrying dimension
was that the illiterate were not the only people seduced by the
myth. Although right-thinking opinion-formers of all political
persuasions condemned the popular cult of Musolino as a sign
of Italy’s backwardness, books and pamphlets about him still
sold in their thousands. In Calabria, only one newspaper dared
to suggest that the King of Aspromonte might actually have been
guilty of attempting to murder Vincenzo Zoccali. In Naples,
where the myth of the noble camorrista had such currency, the
Corriere di Napoli reported fables about the brigand’s supposed
acts of generosity without critical comment and came very close
to justifying his campaign of retribution.

Musolino only harms his enemies, because he thinks he

has a mission and wants to carry it through to the end.

Between the brigand and the law, there was right and wrong on
both sides — so went the argument. Accordingly, some press
commentators entertained the idea that a fair solution would be
to offer Musolino safe passage to the United States.
Eventually the authorities acted on the intelligence that told
them Musolino was no lone wolf. Early in 1901, a zealous young
police officer, Vincenzo Mangione, was sent to Santo Stefano to
implement a more radical strategy than blindly chasing the bandit
around the mountain and trying to bribe informants (especially
picciotti) to betray him.
Mangione compiled a series of highly revealing reports on the
picciotteria in Musolino’s home village. Drawing on sources who
were mostly disaffected picciotti, he describes a ‘genuine criminal

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 The King of Aspromonte

institution’, with its own social fund, tribunal, and so on. It was
founded in the early 1890s by Musolino’s father and uncle, who
both now sat on the organisation’s ‘supreme council’. There were
166 affiliates of the mafia in Santo Stefano.
Musolino’s possible motives emerged with a new clarity from
Mangione’s research. The bandit was of course an affiliate like
his father. Nothing he had done could be separated from his role
inside the criminal brotherhood. For example, the attempt on
Zoccali’s life that began the Musolino saga was ordered by the
picciotteria as punishment because Zoccali had tried to duck out
of his duties as a picciotto. Musolino was now a roving contract
killer for the whole sect.
Most revealingly of all, Mangione learned how the Lads earned
favours from ‘respectable people . . . political personalities,
lawyers, doctors, and landowners’. The most important of those
favours were character references and false witness statements.
A more tangible example of the favours that the picciotteria
could command stood, ruined and smoke-blackened, at the very
entrance of the village. It was the Zoccali family’s house. When
Musolino failed to dynamite it, the picciotti simply burned it to
the ground and then persuaded the town council to deny the
Zoccali family a grant to rebuild.
The notables of Santo Stefano were not remotely concerned
to keep their friendship with the picciotteria secret. When the
King of Aspromonte’s sister Anna got married, the new mayor
and his officers, the town councillors, the general practitioners,
teachers, municipal guards, and the town band all came to the
wedding reception. The mayor chose the occasion to circulate a
petition asking the Queen to grant Musolino a pardon.
The outcome of Mangione’s intelligence was a two-pronged
strategy to capture Musolino: first, his support network would be
attacked; second, the whole picciotteria in Santo Stefano would be
prosecuted. Accordingly, there was a series of mass arrests in the
spring and summer of 1901. With many of his supporters in custody,
Musolino struggled to find a place to hide on his home territory.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

On the afternoon of 9 October 1901, in the countryside near

Urbino — more than 900 kilometres from Santo Stefano — a young
man in a hunting jacket and cyclist’s cap was spotted acting
suspiciously by two Carabinieri. He fled across a vineyard when
they hailed him and then tripped over some wire. He pulled out
a revolver but was smothered before he could pull the trigger.
‘Kill me’, he said as the handcuffs went on. He then tried bribery,
unsuccessfully. When searched he was found to be carrying a
knife, ammunition and a large number of amulets, including a
body pouch full of incense, a crucifix, a medallion showing the
Sacred Heart, a picture of Saint Joseph, and an image of the
Madonna of Polsi. Five days later he was identified as the brigand
Giuseppe Musolino.
Musolino was sent for trial in the pretty Tuscan city of Lucca
for fear that a Calabrian jury might be too swayed by the myth
surrounding him. His long-delayed encounter with justice was
set to be one of the most sensational trials of the age.
But before it could begin, the second arm of the government’s
strategy failed. The witnesses Mangione had relied upon to gather
evidence about the picciotteria in Santo Stefano were intimidated
into retracting their statements. The case never even reached
court.
So when national and international correspondents gathered
in Lucca to report on the eagerly awaited Musolino trial in the
spring of 1902, what they witnessed turned out to be a prolonged
exercise in self-harm for the law’s reputation in Italy. The problem
was that Musolino’s lawyers objected vociferously every time the
prosecution tried to demonstrate that he was a sworn member
of a local criminal sect. After all, had not the case against this
supposed sect in Santo Stefano been thrown out before it reached
court? Where was the evidence? In this way, the real context of
the Musolino saga was obscured. So a multiple murderer was
largely left free to pose as the heroic outlaw that the marionette
theatres of southern Italy had made him out to be.
Musolino had spent the time since his capture the previous

204
 Wanted poster for
Giuseppe Musolino, the
‘King of Aspromonte’.

cs
fear : %
The original cause of the ee
‘3
King of Aspromonte’s :
ee
33
2g
ae é
killing spree? A diagram
showing the damage
inflicted on Musolino’s r
skull in infancy by a
\
falling flowerpot.

Sketches of
Musolino made
in court.

205
Mafia Brotherhoods

October writing a verse narrative of his adventures and having

his body meticulously measured by positivist criminologists. Over
the same period he received countless admiring letters and post-
cards, particularly from women. They pledged their love, sent
him religious tokens and sweets, promised to pray for him and
begged for locks of his hair. The judge in Lucca was so concerned
about Musolino’s effect on the morals of the town’s womenfolk
that he stipulated that only men would be allowed into the
hearing. But the stream of fan mail only increased once the trial
started. Mysteriously, signed postcard portraits of the King of
Aspromonte went on sale near the courtroom. Interviewed by
journalists in his cell, Musolino would relish recounting his erotic
adventures while he was on the run.
From the outset, Musolino’s lawyers did not contest the fact
that he had committed a long trail of murders and attempted
murders after escaping from prison. Their defence rested instead
on the claim that he was innocent of the crime for which he had
been imprisoned in the first place: the attempted murder of
Vincenzo Zoccali. The lawyers reasoned that his bloody deeds
could be explained, and perhaps even justified, by the conspiracy
against him in the Zoccali case.
A visiting French judge was understandably astonished that
this argument could even be considered a defence at all; it seemed
like evidence of Italy’s ‘moral backwardness’ to him. Musolino
did not share the same doubts. When he was called to the dock
he told the court that he had concluded his campaign of righteous
retaliation now, and would never break the law again if he were
allowed to go free. He claimed to be the descendant of a French
prince and compared his plight to that of Jesus Christ.
Now and again Musolino did blot the script that portrayed
him as a noble desperado: such as when he repeatedly screamed
‘slut!’ at Vincenzo Zoccali’s mother as she came to the witness
stand. But that did not prevent many onlookers from sympa-
thising with him. One of Italy’s greatest poets, a sentimental
socialist called Giovanni Pascoli, lived in the countryside not far

206
 The King of Aspromonte

from Lucca and observed the trial with his habitual compassion.
‘Poor Musolino!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘You know, I’d like to
write a poem that shows how every one of us has a Musolino
inside.’
Many commentators on the trial argued that the underlying
problem in the Musolino case was not one lone brigand but the
isolation of Calabrian society as a whole. Modern means of
communication like the railway would surely bring the light of
civilisation to the primitive obscurity of Aspromonte. The sun-
weathered peasant witnesses who came up to Lucca for the case
made for a spectacle that seemed only to confirm this view. Most
of them were Calabrian dialect speakers who had to testify
through an interpreter. There was loud laughter on one occasion
when, as a witness started to talk, the interpreter turned to the
judge and admitted that even he could not understand a word
of what was being said. There was probably not a single
Grecanico-Italian interpreter available in the whole of Italy.
Positivist criminologists were called on to explain the results
of their painstaking physical and psychological examination of
Musolino. He had a contradictory mix of symptoms, they
explained. There seemed to be no clear aetiology for his crimi-
naloid tendencies. Musolino had suffered a head injury at age
six when a flowerpot fell on his head. The accident caused a dent
in his skull, and may have given him epilepsy — an obvious delin-
quent trait. But then again he did not masturbate at all frequently
and was very intelligent. Racially speaking, they concluded
lamely, he was an exaggeration of the ‘average Calabrian type’.
The most moving speech of the trial came from the lawyer
representing the parents of Pietro Ritrovato, the young Carab-
iniere who had died of the horrible injuries inflicted on him by
Musolino the morning after the drugged maccheroni episode.
The old Ritrovato couple had filed a civil suit against the ‘King
of Aspromonte’. But they sobbed so much in court that they
often had to withdraw. Their lawyer explained that his aim was
not to ask for money, but to ‘bring a flower to the memory of a

207
Mafia Brotherhoods

victim who fell in the line of duty’. To that end, he wanted to

destroy what he called ‘the legend of Musolino’ by insisting on
the one crucial thing that the trial had neglected: Musolino was
a member of a criminal association called the picciotteria.
The most squalid testimony came from the mayor of Santo
Stefano — the one who had attended Musolino’s sister’s wedding
and circulated a petition for a royal pardon. Aurelio Romeo was
a chubby man with a sleek black beard who was a major player
in one of the two dominant political factions in Reggio Calabria.
In court he affected a flaming moral outrage about how the
people of Santo Stefano had been mistreated by brutal and incom-
petent police. ‘The picciotteria is an invention, an excuse for the
police’s weakness,’ he said. Asked about the character of
Musolino’s two accomplices who were accused of trying to kill
his predecessor as mayor, he said they were just honest, hard-
working men.
The trial’s outcome was inevitable: Musolino was found guilty
and sentenced to life imprisonment. But equally inevitably Italy
had lost a priceless opportunity to draw public attention to the
acute criminal emergency in southern Calabria. The early
*ndrangheta would remain shrouded in obscurity and confusion,
a little known curiosity of a little known region.
Musolino, by contrast, was destined for enduring fame, even
as he languished in confinement. Just before the First World War,
the English writer Norman Douglas went walking on Aspromonte
and heard tale after tale about the brigand’s adventures from his
peasant guides.

God alone can tell how many poor people he helped in

their distress. And if he met a young girl in the mountains,
he would help with her load, and escort her home, right
into her father’s house. Ah, if you could have seen him,
sir! He was young, with curly blonde hait, and a face like
a rose.

208
 The King of Aspromonte

Musolino’s hair was actually black. That, at least, the criminolo-

gists at the trial had demonstrated beyond doubt.
Under Fascism, Benito Mussolini blocked any attempt to make
a film of Musolino’s life because of the similarity in their
surnames. A biopic finally came out in 1950: it presented
Musolino as a man who suffered such wrongs at the hands of
the Calabrian mafia that he was forced to take the law into his
own hands.

209
MEDIA DONS
1899-1915
Bankers and Men of Honour

One reason why Italy barely noticed the rise of the picciotteria
was that the country had much graver worries. In the late 1880s
a building bubble burst, leaving lending institutions with huge
liabilities. In 1890 the economy went into recession, piling further
pressure on the financial system. Several banks subsequently
failed, including two of Italy’s biggest. Another, the Banca
Romana, tried to stavé off implosion by effectively forging its
own money and then using the phoney cash to buy off dozens
of politicians. ‘Loans’ from the Banca Romana also helped the
King maintain his lavish lifestyle. The Prime Minister was forced
to resign in November 1893 when his involvement in the scandal
was exposed in parliament.
To many, it seemed as if it was not just the Italian banking
system that was about to collapse, but the monarchy and even
the state itself. The politician called upon to save the nation was
Francesco Crispi, an old warhorse of the Left, a Sicilian who had
been one of the heroes of Garibaldi’s expedition back in 1860.
Crispi also faced an unprecedented political challenge in the form
of the trades unions, the Socialist Party and other organisations
recruiting among the peasants and labourers. Crispi responded
with repression, proclaiming martial law in some areas of the
country and banning the Socialist Party in 1894. Desperate for
military glory to reinforce the feeble credibility of the state, Crispi
launched a reckless colonial adventure in East Africa. In March
1896, at the battle of Adowa, the Italian army that Crispi had
spurred into action was destroyed by a vastly superior Ethiopian
force. Crispi resigned soon after the news from Adowa reached
Rome.

213
Mafia Brotherhoods

After Crispi the clampdown on the labour movement was

relaxed, but politics continued on its reactionary course. For the
next few years conservative politicians would talk openly of
putting Italy’s slow and hesitant advance towards democracy into
a brusque reverse. In the spring of 1898 a hike in food prices
caused rioting. Cannon fire resounded in the streets of Milan as
troops mowed down demonstrators. Another new Prime Minister
then embarked on a long parliamentary battle to pass legislation
restricting press and political freedoms.
In the summer of 1900 a Tuscan anarchist called Gaetano
Bresci returned to Italy from his home in Patterson, New Jersey;
he was bent on revenge for the cannonades of 1898. On 20 July
he set a suitably violent seal on the most turbulent decade in
Italy’s short history when he went to Monza and assassinated
the King.
By that time, though, Italy was already striding into a very
different age. An overhauled banking system, including the newly
established Bank of Italy, helped the economy revive. The north-
west was industrialising rapidly: in Turin, FIAT started making
cars in 1899; in Milan, Pirelli started making car tyres in 1901.
Over the next few years Italian cities would fill with noise and
light: automobiles, electric trams, department stores, bars,
cinemas, and football stadia. In politics, reform was the order
of the day. More people became literate and thereby earned the
right to vote. The Socialist Party, though still small, was strong
enough to bargain for concessions in parliament. In 1913, Italy
would hold its first general election in which, by law, all adult
men were entitled to vote.
A surge in newspaper readerships was another symptom of
the new vitality. In 1900, the year that Bresci shot the King, the
Corriere della Sera had a print run of 75,000 copies. By 1913, it
was up to 350,000. So the Italy that followed the King of Asprom-
onte’s trial in 1902 was a country undergoing:a media revolution.
Indeed all three of Italy’s Honoured Societies now had to test
their aptitude for brutality, networking and misinformation in a

214
 Bankers and Men of Honour

much more democratic society — one where public opinion shaped

the political decisions that in turn shaped criminal destinies.
The Neapolitan camorra would not survive the challenge.
But in the case of the Sicilian mafia, the new media era made
no more impact than the puff of a photographer’s flash powder:
it illuminated a crepuscular landscape of corruption and violence
for an instant, and then plunged it back into a darkness deeper
than before.
The Sicilian mafia dramas of the early twentieth century all
arose from the single most sinister moment of the banking crisis
of the early 1890s, a murder that would remain the most noto-
rious of mafia crimes for the best part of the next century.
Notorious partly because the victim was one of Sicily’s outstanding
citizens, and partly because the killers got away with it, but
mostly because the resultant scandal, known as the Notarbartolo
affair, briefly exposed the mafia’s influence in the highest reaches
of Sicilian society.

grrr
Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo di San Giovanni fought with
Garibaldi in 1860 but he was constitutionally averse to violence.
In an age when questions of honour were often settled with
swords at sunrise, Notarbartolo was only ever drawn into one
duel: it lasted three hours because he only fought defensively. He
was a devoted family man who wrote his wife short, tender notes
every day of their life together. Notarbartolo was also a public
servant of rare dedication. As Mayor of Palermo between 1873
and 1876, he tackled corruption. In 1876 he began a long stint
as Director General of the Bank of Sicily, where he made himself
unpopular with a policy of tight credit. The reputation for rigour
that Notarbartolo earned at the Bank of Sicily would lead directly
to his atrocious murder.
Notarbartolo’s fine record found its malevolent shadow in the
career of don Raffaele Palizzolo, whom the police would define

215
Mafia Brotherhoods

as ‘the mafia’s patron in the Palermo countryside, especially to

the south and east of the city’. Palizzolo’s fiefdom centred on
the notorious borgate of Villabate and Ciaculli, where he owned
and leased land, and where his friends exerted their characteristic
control over the citrus fruit groves and coordinated the activities
of bandits and cattle rustlers.
In the 1870s don Raffaele began amassing a fortune by
installing himself in town and provincial councils and on the
boards of countless charities and quangos. When Notarbartolo
was mayor of Palermo, he caught Palizzolo palming money from
a fund that stockpiled flour for the poor.
Palizzolo was a master of what Italians now call sottogoverno
— literally ‘under government’ — meaning the bartering of shady
favours for political influence. Come election time he would tour
the area on horseback, flanked by the mafia bosses and their
heavies. Indeed the Villabate mafia would often disguise their
sect summit as political meetings in support of their patron. In
1882 Palizzolo was elected to parliament.
At the Bank of Sicily, Emanuele Notarbartolo also found Paliz-
zolo in his path. As Director General, Notarbartolo was supposed
to be supervised in his work by a General Council of forty-eight
dignitaries from local government, chambers of commerce and
the like. Palizzolo was one of them, as were other notorious
shysters linked to organised crime, and a number of businessmen
with a manifest conflict of interests: they were among the people
that owed money to the bank. No wonder Notarbartolo’s policy
of tight credit was unpopular.
In 1882 Notarbartolo was kidnapped by four men dressed as
soldiers, and only released on payment of a ransom. Acting on
a tip-off, the police found the kidnappers hiding out in any empty
house. The ransom was never recovered, although we can make
a good guess at who took a hefty share of it: both the site of
the kidnapping and the kidnappers’ hideout lay on territory
controlled by the same Villabate mafiosi who made Palizzolo the
guest of honour at their banquets.

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 Bankers and Men of Honour

In 1888 Notarbartolo found himself working alongside his

great enemy day-to-day when Palizzolo was voted onto the Bank
of Sicily’s board. The smouldering confrontation between the
Director General and the General Council exploded when Italy’s
building boom collapsed. Notarbartolo tried to persuade minis-
ters to have the Bank of Sicily’s constitution amended so as to
lessen the power of the General Council and give the Director
General the power to respond to the credit crisis. But he was
out-lobbied by Palizzolo et al, and lost his job in February 1890.
His victorious enemies then tried to withhold his pension.
With Emanuele Notarbartolo out of the way, the bank’s money
was used illegally to inflate the share price of Italy’s biggest ship-
ping company, Navigazione Generale Italiana, or NGI. NGI’s
major shareholder happened to be the wealthiest man in Sicily.
Who happened to be a great supporter of the dominant politi-
cian of the moment, the Sicilian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi.
Who happened to have a close ally in the Bank of Sicily’s new
Director General. Who happened to have a pot of NGI shares
of his own. P
Palizzolo greased the cogs of this mechanism. As a Member
of Parliament, don Raffaele lobbied hard, as he had always done,
for NGI’s cause. As a member of the Bank of Sicily’s board, he
approved the NGI share operation. As a member of the mafia,
he took some of the bank’s cash to buy more of those artificially
boosted NGI shares, and made generous loans to friends of his
who exported lemons and oranges for a living.
Then, late in 1892, the sleaze at the Banca Romana (the bank
that was forging its own money) was exposed in parliament.
Credit institutions across the country were wobbling. The calls
for a clean-up in the banking system were now too loud to ignore.
Emanuele Notarbartolo was strongly tipped to return to the Bank
of Sicily with a mandate to crack down on corruption once more.
And if Notarbartolo regained his job as Director General of the
Bank of Sicily, he would surely expose a fraud that implicated
the most powerful economic and political interest group on the

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Mafia Brotherhoods

island — and linked them squarely with Raffaele Palizzolo and

the mafia.
At dusk on x February 1893 Emanuele Notarbartolo was
stabbed twenty-seven times on a train heading for Palermo; his
body was thrown out onto the track.
Months later, Notarbartolo’s wife was seen, still in tears, as
she burned the hundreds of notes he had sent her. While she wept,
and Italy descended into a financial, social and political crisis that
threatened to bring the young country to its knees, the mafia and
its accomplices quietly covered the murderers’ tracks, burying the
story in artful layers of deceit and obfuscation.
The reason we know all about the shenanigans at the Bank
of Sicily, indeed the reason why Emanuele Notarbartolo’s murder
ever came to court at all, was because of the grief-stricken deter-
mination of his son Leopoldo, a young naval officer who was a
man in his father’s mould.
Right from the outset, no one seriously doubted that Emanuele
Notarbartolo was a victim of the mafia, although the mafia had
never killed anyone of such status before. (Nor would it do so
again until the 1970s.) Right from the outset, the authorities
heard the strong rumours that the Honourable don Raffaele
Palizzolo had orchestrated the murder. Leopoldo Notarbartolo,
well aware of Palizzolo’s long history of run-ins with his father,
had more reasons than anyone to suspect the notorious MP of
being involved. Yet nothing was done. In 1894, just over a year
after Notarbartolo was found lying on the trackside, a senior
magistrate wrote to the Minister of Justice to explain the reasons
why no one had yet been charged.

This failure can be attributed to the following two causes:

first, the high mafia planned the murder long in advance,
and carried it out with the greatest of care; second, the
authorities receive no help from society, because all the
witnesses are either reticent or afraid.

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 Bankers and Men of Honour

Knowing what we know about the mafia’s history so far, we can

also add a third cause that the magistrate neglected to mention:
the police and judiciary in Palermo were profoundly
infiltrated.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo witnessed the scandalously lax
handling of the investigation and began to make inquiries of his
own. He was one of many Italians whose quest for truth and
justice was a long and solitary one: it took over a decade out of
his life. Like most such quests, Notarbartolo’s was a tale of
meticulous endeavour: sifting through his father’s papers, inter-
viewing reluctant witnesses, travelling far and wide to check
dubious alibis. And like most such quests, it was also a search
for political help.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo knew that his only chance of exposing
the high-level intrigues that had led to his father’s death, and
protected the murderers from the law, would come if he exploited
high-level contacts of his own. Sometimes, in Italy, the forces for
good have to operate through the same personal channels as the
forces for evil. :
When Francesco Crispi — the Prime Minister close to the NGI
shipping lobby — fell from power following Italy’s humiliating
defeat at the battle of Adowa in March 1896, his successor as
Prime Minister was another Sicilian: someone that Leopoldo
thought he might just be able to talk to; someone who has already
had a part to play in the history of the mafia.
Antonio Starabba, Marquis of Rudini, was the mayor of
Palermo who made his name by defending the Royal Palace during
the Palermo revolt of September 1866. Standing side-by-side with
Rudini during the siege was Emanuele Notarbartolo — indeed
Notarbartolo had carved the mould from which the Royal Palace’s
defenders made musket balls out of lead piping. We last saw
Rudini as he stood on the edge of the political wilderness, desper-
ately expounding his baffling theory about the ‘benign maffia’
to the parliamentary inquiry of 1876. By the 1890s Rudini’s trim
blonde beard had become broad, grizzled and forked. The

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Mafia Brotherhoods

financial and political crises of the day had pushed Italy right-
wards, and in doing so had revived the Marquis’s fortunes.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo had few illusions about Rudini: ‘slimy’
was the adjective he used to describe him. In truth Rudini was
now so powerful he could rely on someone else to wade through
the slime on his behalf. His constituency election manager at the
time was one Leonardo Avellone, a local mayor. In 1892 a Sicilian
newspaper gave an unforgettable portrait of Avellone.

Commendatore Avellone is a well-to-do man who is

nearing sixty. He is chubby, friendly, with the cunning of
a peasant and the polite, helpful nature of a Jesuit priest.
But he is also vengeful and treacherous with everyone,
especially his friends. He is ignorant, but quick-witted
and equally adept in doing good as in doing harm. He
makes friends with the virtuous and the wicked alike,
without the slightest distinction. He is a father figure not
just to his numerous children, but also to his relatives and
hangers-on who, in his shadow, exercise an absolute tyran-
nical dominion in the Termini area. He always strikes the
pose of a man of order who is extremely conservative, a
classic figure of the Right. On occasion, he has given the
police some excellent assistance. But then at other times
he has had no scruples about helping or setting free crimi-
nals of all kinds who are either employed by him or have
placed themselves under his protection.

Avellone, in short, was the very archetype of a mafia boss; he

was happy to take care of local business — both legal and criminal
— while his sponsor Rudini dealt with grand affairs of state in
Rome. Avellone did very well out of Rudini’s return to the fore-
front of Italian politics. He acquired a decisive influence over
everything that moved in his little realm: from giving out licences
to sell lottery tickets and tobacco to awarding government posi-
tions and public sector jobs; he was even said to control policing

220
 Bankers and Men of Honour

policy. This then, was what Rudini had meant by a ‘benign

maffioso’ back in 1876. There were many such benign maffiosi
in western Sicily — don Raffaele Palizzolo being the most influ-
ential of them all.
The one thing that persuaded Leopoldo Notarbartolo that it
was worth talking to Rudini was that the new Prime Minister
was a sworn political enemy of the previous premier, Francesco
Crispi. So Notarbartolo used his family name to get access to
Rudini’s study and then set out the gist of his case against Raffaele
Palizzolo. Could Rudini do anything to bring justice?
Rudini’s reply was brief, jocular and chilling: Notarbartolo
should find ‘a good mafioso’, pay him well, and let him take care
of Palizzolo.
The Prime Minister subsequently called on don Raffaele’s
services in Palermo when it came to ousting Crispi’s supporters
from their positions in the city.
Only in 1898, more than five years after his father’s death, did
Leopoldo finally find the political help he needed. Rudini fell
from power soon after the events of May of that year, when
troops fired cannons into the crowds in Milan. His successor was
a military man, General Luigi Pelloux. Pelloux had no political
interests in Sicily and he was also a friend of the Notarbartolos.
Through General Pelloux, Leopoldo Notarbartolo got access to
the documentation he needed: from inside the Bank of Sicily,
from Palermo police headquarters, and even the Interior Ministry.
Finally, the murdered banker’s son could look forward to his day
in court.
Within weeks of taking office, General Pelloux also opened
another front against the mafia. He recruited the country’s fore-
most mafia-fighter to lead the most serious assault on organised
crime’s territorial dominance in Sicily since the 1870s.

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Floriopolis

On 4 August 1898 the new Prime Minister telegraphed a peremp-

tory order to the Prefect of Genoa: ‘Chief Police Ermanno
Sangiorgi transferred Palermo. He must go as soon as. With
expenses.’
Ermanno Sangiorgi was now fifty-eight years old and Italy’s
most experienced senior police officer. Since leaving Naples
following the cab drivers’ strike in 1893 he had been posted to
Venice, Bologna, Livorno and Genoa. While his career resumed
its upward course, he found moments of great happiness in his
personal life. He had another daughter, Maria Luigia, in 1890.
In 1895 he married her mother, Maria Vozza, in a civil ceremony:
the two could finally live together without causing a scandal. But
Sangiorgi’s older children were still a source of anguish. His
daughter Italia was often unwell. His son Italo had turned out
to be a ne’er-do-well: abandoning one steady job after another,
roaming the Orient in search of something to do, constantly
begging his father for cash to save him from what he called his
‘squalid poverty’.
Sangiorgi’s transfer to Palermo was to be his last posting, the
culmination of nigh on four decades of service to the cause of
law and order. A month after he arrived back in Sicily, a new
Prefect was installed too. The Prefect announced the radical new
policy that he and Sangiorgi would be implementing: an attack
on the protection rackets that were the very base of mafia power.

The crime of extorting money with menaces is the most

terrible curse pervading the rural territory of the province
of Palermo. The mafia has found a way to live an easy

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 Floriopolis

life by shaking down landowners; it has organised what

amounts to nothing less than a tax system in its own
favour.

Suddenly, in the middle of Italy’s darkest political crisis, Sangiorgi

had the political backing to carry through the ‘open fight against
the mafia’ he had first embarked on all those years ago. His
efforts would be concentrated in the Piana dei Colli, to the north-
west of Palermo — the same beautiful and dangerous landscape
that was the theatre of Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano’s persecution
of old man Gambino and his sons in the 1860s and 1870s.
Sangiorgi arrived in Palermo in the middle of a mafia civil
war. At stake, as always, was territory in the rich citrus fruit
groves of the Conca d’Oro. The trail of death and bereavement
was not particularly long by the mafia’s standards: five mafiosi
shot dead, another driven to suicide and a seventh poisoned when
he escaped to New Orleans. There were also two innocent victims:
an eighteen-year-old shop girl and a seventeen-year-old cowherd
who were both murdered in case they talked. But what was
historically unprecendented about the mafia war of the late 1890s
was that Sangiorgi skilfully used it to recruit witnesses, among
both the mafiosi and their innocent casualties. He then used their
evidence to put together the most detailed and convincing descrip-
tion of the criminal sect’s structure that had ever been compiled.
Sangiorgi set out that description in a report he sent back to
Rome in instalments between November 1898 and January 1900.
The first striking thing about Sangiorgi’s report is that it started
from scratch. He had to assume that his readers (notably senior
magistrates and the Prime Minister) knew nothing about the
mafia because nothing had yet been proved. Accordingly he began
with the basics.

The association’s aim is to bully landowners, and thereby

to force them to hire stewards, guards, and labourers, to
impose contractor-managers on them, and to determine

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Mafia Brotherhoods

the price paid for citrus fruit and other produce.

From these simple first steps, Sangiorgi advanced a long way. He

got the chance to confirm what he knew about the mafia’s initia-
tion ritual. And he ended by listing the bosses, underbosses and
over two hundred soldiers in eight separate mafia cells. He
exposed their links beyond Palermo — even as far as Tunisia, an
outpost of the citrus fruit business. He explained how they came
together for meetings and trials, and how they performed collec-
tive executions of any members deemed to have broken the rules
— especially the rule that stipulated blind obedience to the bosses’
wishes. Sangiorgi even named the mafia’s ‘regional or supreme
boss’, the fifty-year-old citrus fruit dealer and capo of the
Malaspina cosca, Francesco Siino.
The Siino name echoed in Sangiorgi’s memory. Francesco’s
older brother Alfonso, now in charge of the Uditore branch of
the sect, was one of the two hit men who shot dead old man
Gambino’s son in 1874, and then went unpunished thanks to the
‘fratricide’ plot. Many other names in Sangiorgi’s report rang a
malevolent bell: names like Cusimano, and above all Giammona.
Antonino Giammona was the poetry-writing boss whose gang’s
initiation ritual Sangiorgi had exposed in 1876. The old mobster
was now close to eighty, but he still carried huge authority.

He gives direction through advice based on his vast expe-

rience and his long criminal record. He offers instructions
on the way to carry out crimes and construct a defence,
especially alibis.

Linking these surnames there was now much more than a shared
history of murder and extortion. The hoodlum families of the
Palermo hinterland had intermarried, and many had passed on
their wealth and authority to their offspring: Antonino Giam-
mona’s son Giuseppe was capo in Passo di Rigano; Alfonso
Siino’s boy Filippo was underboss in Uditore. A generation on

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 Floriopolis

from his last encounter with the Palermo mob, Sangiorgi could
see that the mafia’s marriage strategising had founded criminal
dynasties. If the structure of bosses, underbosses and cosche gave
the mafia its skeleton, then these kinship ties were its
bloodstream.
Sangiorgi also identified intimate ground-level contacts between
this new criminal nobility and some of Palermo’s longer estab-
lished dynasties, among them the richest family in Sicily, the
Florios. The head of the house of Florio, Ignazio, was a fourth
generation entrepreneur whose father had married into some of
the bluest blood in Sicily. The fortune that Ignazio inherited
included the principal stake in NGI, the shipping company whose
share price was covertly pumped up with Bank of Sicily money.
A man of dash and style who was not yet out of his twenties
when Sangiorgi became Chief of Police, Ignazio set the decadent
tone in the Sicilian monde. Florio turned Palermo — or Floriopolis,
as it became known — into a prime destination for the European
yacht set. His sumptuous villa, located in its own parkland amid
the fragrant hues of the Conca d’Oro, was,the epicentre of polite
society. But as Sangiorgi discovered, the Florio villa was also an
important place for the Sicilian Honoured Society.
The men responsible for security at the Florio villa were the
‘gardener’, Francesco Noto and his younger brother Pietro —
respectively the boss and underboss of the mafia’s Olivuzza cosca.
Sangiorgi did not discover just what were the terms of the deal
between the Noto brothers and Ignazio Florio. But protection
was almost always how mafiosi got their foot in the garden gate.
Kidnapping was a serious risk, the Notos would have explained
to Ignazio Florio, deferentially. But we can make sure of your
safety. And once the Florios’ safety was in the hands of the mafia,
there was no limit to the turns the relationship might take — many
of them mutually beneficial. Having murderers to call on can be
a very tempting resource.
One morning in 1897 Ignazio Florio woke to learn that his
safety had been scandalously compromised: the villa had been

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Mafia Brotherhoods

broken into, and a large number of objets d’art were missing.

He summoned the Noto brothers and delivered a humiliating
tirade. A few days later, Florio woke up again and found that
the stolen valuables had reappeared during the night — in exactly
their original positions. This was a criminal gesture of astonishing
finesse: both an apology, and a serene reminder of just how deeply
the mafia had penetrated the Florio family’s domestic
intimacies.
Sangiorgi learned that the culprits in the Florio burglary were
two of the Notos’ own soldiers, who were unhappy because they
felt they had not received a fair share of some loot from a kidnap-
ping. The Notos strung the burglars along, promising more
money on condition that the Florios’ property was put back —
which it duly was. Then they reported the episode to a sitting
of the mafia tribunal, which ruled that it was an outrageous act
of insubordination. Several months later, in October 1897, an
execution squad comprising representatives from each of the
eight mafia cosche lured the burglars into a trap, shot them dead,
and heaved their bodies into a deep grotto on a lemon grove.
What shocked even Sangiorgi about the whole story was that
the Noto brothers had told the Florios just what they had done
to the burglars. In November 1897, soon after the police had
found the bodies in the grotto, but before anyone outside the
mafia had the slightest idea how and why they had ended up
there, Ignazio Florio’s mother was heard explaining that the dead
men had been punished for the break-in earlier in the year. Justice
had been done — discreetly and with due force — to the satisfac-
tion of both the Florios and the hoodlums they sponsored. A
kind of justice that could never have anything to do with the
police.
The Florios inhabited a world of garden parties and gala balls,
of royal receptions and open-top carriage rides, of whist soirées
and opera premieres. An inconceivable distance separated their
milieu from the rat-run tenements where the Neapolitan camorra
was incubated, or from the dung-strewn hovels of Africo’s

226
 Floriopolis

picciotti. Yet between the Florios and the Sicilian mafia there was
almost no distance at all. If it came to an ‘open fight’ between
the state and the mafia, there was little doubt about which side
the House of Florio would take.
On the night of 27 April 1900 Sangiorgi ordered the arrest en
masse of the Men of Honour named in his reports. He hand-
picked his officers, trusting his judgement of their honesty and
courage. Even so, Sangiorgi had to keep the operation a secret
until the last minute to avoid leaks: the mafia’s spies were every-
where. By October the Prefect of Palermo reported that Sangiorgi
had reduced the mafia to ‘silence and inactivity’. That silence
was the reward for months of brilliant policework. But it was
also the mafia’s response to what had now happened to its
favourite Member of Parliament, don Raffaele Palizzolo.

227
Four trials and a funeral

Between November 1899 and July 1904 the mafia issue went on
a national tour. Prime Minister General Luigi Pelloux had to put
direct pressure on the Palermo prosecutors’ office to make sure
the Notarbartolo murder finally came to court. The case was
transferred away from Palermo lest the peculiar local atmosphere
influence the outcome. There would, in the end, be three
Notarbartolo murder trials, each in a different Italian city, each
covered in depth by the country’s growing press corps. For the
first time, Sicily’s shadiest machinations became a scandal across
the whole country.
The first trial took place in the north, in foggy Milan, which
was still a political tinderbox following the army massacre of
the previous year. Here the ground itself seemed to throb with
industry: hydroelectric power, Italy’s ‘white coal’, was cabled in
from the Alps; smoke stacks were reaching skywards in the
periphery; and a grand stock exchange building was taking shape
in the city’s core. Milan was Italy’s shop window to the world.
With its strong radical traditions, home of the Socialist Party
and its mordant newspaper Avanti!, Milan would also turn into
the perfect resonance chamber for the Notarbartolo scandal.
Yet when the trial finally opened, only two people were in the
dock: the brakeman and the ticket collector on the train where
Notarbartolo had been stabbed to death more than six and a
half years earlier. General Pelloux would only apply so much
leverage on the Palermo judiciary. For the prosecution, the two
railwaymen were accomplices to the mafia’s assassins. For the
defence, they were, at worst, merely terrified witnesses. For
Leopoldo Notarbartolo, they were a chance to spark a publicity

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 Four trials and a funeral

firestorm that would finally drive don Raffaele Palizzolo into the
open.
On 16 November 1899, from the witness stand in Milan,
Leopoldo Notarbartolo gave an assured testimony of which his
father would have been proud. Speaking briskly in his deep voice,
Leopoldo explicitly accused Palizzolo of ordering his father’s
murder and then went on to set out everything he had learned
about the mafia and the Bank of Sicily. He also cast grave suspi-
cions over the police and magistrates who had never even inter-
viewed Palizzolo about the case.
Calls for Palizzolo to resign began immediately. The political
pressure on him intensified day-by-day, until Parliament voted in
a special session to remove his immunity from prosecution. The
very same evening, Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi enacted
the order to arrest him.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo got the publicity firestorm he wanted.
The newspapers at home and abroad carried lurid stories about
Palizzolo, real or imagined. He seemed like a satirical grotesque
come to life. One American resident in Italy, who understandably
chose to remain anonymous, claimed to have gained access to
one of the open receptions that Palizzolo held every morning at
his sumptuous house on Palermo’s main thoroughfare.
Palizzolo’s bed was his throne: its heavy mahogany frame was
inlaid with mother of pearl and surmounted by a baldachin; it
stood, surrounded by numerous gaudily ornamented spittoons
and shaving mirrors on stands, at the centre of a hall hung with
pink silks. A crowd of petitioners gathered round about: council
commissioners in search of seats on committees, policemen who
wanted to get on in the force, and former convicts still sporting
their penitentiary crew cuts. One by one, Palizzolo’s major-domo
would pick out the supplicants and guide them to a perch on one
of the great bed’s broad, upholstered flanks. Palizzolo greeted
them all effusively, sitting up in his nightgown, holding a cup of
chocolate with one hand and making extravagant gestures with
the other.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Palizzolo is a small man with the short, thick neck of a

bull and black, shining hair, parted in the middle. Except
for his bushy eyebrows, he has few masculine features.
His chin is weak and his forehead denotes cunning rather
than breadth of thought and strength of character.
The fingers of both his fat, stubby hands were covered
with rings — rings of all sorts, marquis, snake and signet
rings, set with diamonds, rubies and opals, a whole jewel-
ler’s tray full. Yet under this rather vulgar display, under
this half-womanish, half-foppish mask, lies hidden a
shrewd personality and a calculating mind of no mean
order.

As the trial in Milan progressed, there were more and more

sensational revelations. A stationmaster turned out to have recog-
nised one of the killers in an identity parade, but his testimony
was ignored until he was frightened into retracting it. A police
Inspector close to Palizzolo was arrested in the witness stand for
concealing evidence; some twenty other witnesses faced charges
of perjury. The Minister of War was forced to resign when a
Republican paper exposed that he had lobbied to have an influ-
ential mafioso released from jail in time for the elections. The
court learned that former Prime Minister Rudini had bestowed
an official decoration on Palizzolo in 1897.
One of the men suspected of actually stabbing Emanuele
Notarbartolo to death was named in the Milan courtroom too:
Giuseppe Fontana was a lemon trader and a member of Paliz-
zolo’s favourite Villabate cosca of the mafia. He also turned out
to be the manager on an estate owned by an aristocrat and
Member of Parliament.
When the order went out to arrest Fontana, his aristocratic
sponsor had to have his arm twisted by Chief of Police Sangiorgi
before he would agree to talk to Fontana about surrendering. In
the end, the mafioso Fontana did give himself up to Sangiorgi;
but only on his own terms, and only in a style that confirmed

2.30
 Four trials and a funeral

the wildest journalistic guesswork about the mafia’s influence in

high places. Fontana came to town in a coach bearing his protec-
tor’s family crest, in the company of his protector’s lawyers. He
then refused to enter Police Headquarters, insisting instead that
Sangiorgi receive him in his own home. On hearing how Fontana
dictated the terms of his own surrender, Leopoldo Notarbartolo
acidly quipped that the mafioso had forgotten to demand that
the guard at Sangiorgi’s gate present arms as he passed.
The whole country was shocked by what was emerging in
Milan. Even Prime Minister Pelloux began to worry about how
far the scandal might reach, and thought it might be necessary
to call a general election early. The Notarbartolo case reeked of
a cover-up, and that reek increased public revulsion at the political
system: while politicians were ordering troops to shoot at starving
demonstrators and trying to quash press freedom, they were also
pocketing illegal loans from banks and consorting with mafiosi.
Palizzolo had become a political leper. On 15 December 1899
an estimated 30,000 people filed through the streets of Palermo
to show their support for the Notarbartolo cause. A hastily
sculpted bust of the murdered banker was born aloft at the head
of the procession and then set in a little temple opposite the
Politeama theatre in the city centre; soon afterwards it was moved
to the atrium of the Bank of Sicily’s headquarters. As well as
the Socialists and representatives from Palermo schools and clubs,
the city’s political class were out in force — even many whose
conduct was called into question in the Milan hearings. Clearly
there had been some shamelessly swift conversions to the cause
of law and order in recent weeks. London’s Morning Post
pinpointed the hypocrisy.

If any one of the numerous politicians who now compete

in doing honour to Signor Notarbartolo’s memory had
energetically set about forcing the Government to punish
his murderers, justice would have been done long since.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

In January 1900, two months after the Milan trial began, proceed-
ings were halted to allow a much more far-reaching case to be
prepared. Here was a significant victory for the Notarbartolo
cause, and for the struggle against Sicilian organised crime.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo later recalled these moments as ‘the
culmination of the short-lived tide in our favour’.
In the summer of 1900 Prime Minister General Pelloux
resigned. Leopoldo Notarbartolo had lost his key supporter in
the Roman palaces of power. But the public indignation at the
Notarbartolo cover-up was still strong. The destiny of the whole
case hung in the balance.

—
The second important mafia trial of the day began back in
Palermo in the spring of rgor. It did not arise directly from the
Notarbartolo-Palizzolo affair, but from the determined police-
work of Chief of Police Sangiorgi: the mafiosi named in his
reports stood accused of forming a criminal association.
Because Sangiorgi’s investigations had no direct bearing on the
banking scandal he did not benefit from the public fury that still
resonated from Milan. There were no foreign correspondents in
Palermo when the trial began, and proceedings barely rated a
mention in the mainland press. Yet in many ways the Sangiorgi
trial was just as historically important as the Notarbartolo affair:
this was a case that could have proved once and for all that the
mafia existed.
Sangiorgi, veteran of Sicilian affairs that he was, must have
had a weary sense of inevitability about the outcome of the trial
he had spent the best part of three years preparing. With General
Pelloux gone Sangiorgi was once more vulnerable to the system
of friendships that the mafia had created to protect itself in its
capital. Most of the mafiosi, including the venerable capo
Antonino Giammona, were acquitted before the case even reached
court. The likely explanation for these acquittals was that, just

232
 The great enemy of the early Sicilian mafia:
Ermanno Sangiorgi. A newspaper described
this career cop as being ‘as alert as a squirrel,
an investigator endowed with a steady
perspicacity’.

Giuseppe Giammona, boss of Francesco Siino, the recently

Passo di Rigano, and son of the deposed ‘regional or supreme boss’.
venerable capo Antonino
Giammona.

Brothers Francesco and

Pietro Noto, respectively
boss and underboss in
Olivuzza, and responsible
for ‘security’ at the home
of Sicily’s wealthiest
family, the Florios.

Courtroom sketches from newspapers of the day.

233
Mafia Brotherhoods

as during the ‘fratricide’ affair in 1876-77, Sangiorgi faced insid-

ious opposition from Sicily’s most senior magistrate. Days before
proceedings began, the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, one
Vincenzo Cosenza, wrote to the Minister of Justice to explain
that ‘in the course of exercising my duties I have never noticed
the mafia, because the mafia has no desire to ensnare the priests
of Themis’. (He meant magistrates, because Themis was the
ancient Greek personification of order and justice.) Any Palermo
judge who was incapable of imagining why the mafia might want
to corrupt the legal system was, at best, culpably naive. But
Vincenzo Cosenza was not naive: he was identified by Leopoldo
Notarbartolo as a protector of Palizzolo’s, the main obstacle in
the way of bringing don Raffaele and his hitmen to justice.
The trial itself went as badly as Sangiorgi feared. One after
another, most of his key witnesses retracted their statements.
The mafia’s protectors among the elite took the stand to give
immaculate character references for their friends in the criminal
sect: ‘the Giammonas are highly esteemed in the area’, one local
politician explained. Another man of property was effusive.

The Giammonas have been very generous to anyone who

has a business relationship with them, and no one has a
bad word to say about them.

An utterly implausible statement, of course, but understandable

given that this particular witness owned land next to both Franc-
esco Siino and the Giammona clan.
The House of Florio was simply too powerful to get mixed
up in the case: no one from the shipping baron’s family was
called to court to explain what exactly the Florios’ relationship
was with the Olivuzza mafia. Ignazio Florio limited himself to
a written statement, denying everything. :
Defence lawyers portrayed the mafia war as a feud between
unconnected families. One after another, they ridiculed Sangiorgi’s
theory that men who had been at one another’s throats could

234
 Four trials and a funeral

secretly be members of the same sect. Omertd, they said, was

not part of the rulebook of an organisation. As anthropologists
had ascertained, it was a typically Sicilian ‘hypertrophy of indi-
vidualism — something that undoubtedly has its positive side’.
Mafia was a kind of cavalleria rusticana, of ‘rustic chivalry’, and
as such it was merely the degenerate form sometimes taken by
the most noble features of the Sicilian character; getting rid of
it — if that were even possible — would mean changing Sicily
entirely.
Most of the mafiosi were acquitted, and the rest received the
usual short prison terms that went with the crime of ‘associating
for delinquency’. Sangiorgi had been beaten again.

oe
In September 1901 the second Notarbartolo murder trial opened.
The city chosen to host the eagerly awaited proceedings was
Bologna. With its arcades and ancient university, Bologna was
one of the best-administered towns in Italy. Like Milan, it was
still safely distant from the judicial snake pit in Palermo. But
unlike Milan, it was conservative: a Bolognese jury was unlikely
to be swayed by subversive propaganda.
Perhaps it was an optical illusion generated by the publicity.
Or perhaps it was the toll taken by months of confinement before
the trial. But when don Raffaele Palizzolo stood up to give
evidence just a few days into proceedings, he seemed to have
shrunk. There were no rings on his fingers and for a prop he
only had the back of a chair rather than his mahogany bed.
Whether he was pleading with the jury, shouting to the gallery
or rambling to himself, Palizzolo seemed incapable of striking
the right tone. It was as if he were so habituated to the body
language of pork-barrelling — the glad-hands and corridor
mutters — that he could find no pose to strike for open, public
discourse.

235
Mafia Brotherhoods

I was the only Member of Parliament who was accessible

to the voters... |went down and lived among the people,
trying to be their adviser and friend. And the people felt
grateful.

In London The Times commented on his uneasy performance

with typical understatement, saying that Palizzolo’s testimony
lacked the ‘element of simple straightforwardness which carries
conviction’. Leopoldo Notarbartolo, still dressed in his navy
uniform, was the same assured witness in Bologna that he had
been in Milan. The Times again:

The statement of Lieutenant Notarbartolo, with its

sobriety, scrupulous attention to fact and careful separa-
tion of deduction from premise, held the Court
spellbound.

Chief of Police Sangiorgi was also called to the witness stand,

although to my knowledge his testimony did not rate a single
mention in any foreign newspaper. At least he was well known
in Bologna, where he had served as Chief of Police in the mid
1890s. The local press commented that he had changed little:
only a few more grey hairs in the blonde of his beard and receding
hair. He was forthright in his account of the mafia’s power.

The mafia is powerful and it has relations across five

Sicilian provinces and also abroad, where there are colo-
nies of Sicilians.

Lawyers for the defence swept his testimony aside: the recent
trial in Palermo hardly backed up this highly improbable
assertion. :
Sicily’s wealthiest man, Ignazio Florio, may not have appeared
in court in Palermo, but he could not avoid giving evidence in
Bologna. He said that the mafia was ‘an invention created to

236
 Four trials and a funeral

calumny Sicily’. An ‘invention’, of course, that was protecting

his luxurious villa and helping him boost the share price of his
shipping line, NGI. Florio was a figure at the very heart of the
prosecution case. The NGI stocks scam involving the Bank of
Sicily’s money was thought to be the whole reason why Palizzolo
ordered Emanuele Notarbartolo murdered. Yet Florio somehow
avoided being interrogated on the whole subject. One historian
has wryly called his easy ride ‘miraculous’.
The verdict, which finally arrived after nearly eleven months
of hearings, came as a surprise to most. Palizzolo folded his arms
and laughed convulsively when he heard that he, like the alleged
assassin Giuseppe Fontana, had been sentenced to thirty years
in jail. By a majority, the jury had evidently deduced that Paliz-
zolo’s guilt was the only possible explanation for the whole
cover-up, despite the lack of positive proof against him.

a
Palizzolo’s conviction marked the climax of a countrywide debate
about the mafia that had been set in motion two and a half years
earlier in Milan. There was a minor publishing boom, and a
major outbreak of muddle. Most commentators agreed that the
mafia could not possibly be a single criminal fraternity. That was
surely preposterous. But if there was broad agreement about what
the mafia was not, then only riddles lay in store for any Italian
reader curious to know what the mafia actually was.
The very worst book on the subject was one of the most
prominent. Its author was Napoleone Colajanni, a firebrand
Republican MP from central Sicily who had been the first to lift
the lid on the scandal at the Banca Romana back in 1892. Cola-
janni explained that the mafia was a ‘particular moral criterion’
left over from feudal times, an underlying feature of the Sicilian
character. The isolated gangs that cropped up in Sicilian villages
from time to time were merely surface manifestations of this
archaic mentality. The Arab invasions of the early Middle Ages

237
Mafia Brotherhoods

were a factor here, probably. Poverty and illiteracy were obviously

to blame, mostly. Although there were sometimes rich and well-
educated mafiosi. And politicians. And aristocrats. But in any
case, Colajanni mused

The mafia does not always have evil as its aim; on occa-
sion, indeed not infrequently, it works towards what is
good and just. But the methods it uses are immoral and
criminal — especially when its actions include violent
crime. It would also be false to say that all mafiosi are
shirkers who live an easy life based on violence, deceit
and intimidation. In fact often a mafioso, in order to keep
his standing as a mafioso and show it off, will deliberately
stop being wealthy and embrace poverty.

_The hopelessly misinformed public debate over the Notarbartolo

affair raises one of the most vexing puzzles about the mafia —
one that would become more vexing over the decades as Italy’s
other criminal fraternities acquired power to rival the Sicilian
mafia’s. The Notarbartolo trial triggered the first organised crime
scandal to take place in the era of modern media and mass
politics. The vast majority of Italians did not take kindly to the
murder and corruption that the word ‘mafia’conjured up — what-
ever that word really meant. So why did the mafia not shrivel,
like a vampire, when it was trapped by the rays of the media
dawn?
The befuddlement created by books like Colajanni’s counted
for a great deal. And although Colajanni was not one of. them,
the mafia also had its own ideologists — lawyers and hired pens
keen to spread fallacies about ‘mafiosity’ and the Sicilian
mentality. Their views were eagerly amplified by one of Sicily’s
most important newspapers, L’Ora, which was founded, owned
and controlled by none other than Ignazio Florio.
The mafia’s influence on the fourth estate could also be brutally
direct. On the day after the Milan trial was suspended, the head

238
 Four trials and a funeral

of the Sicilian press association wrote to Prime Minister General

Pelloux to explain that he had twice been threatened, and chal-
lenged to a duel, by Palizzolo supporters. ‘Timid journalists are
keeping quiet, and honest ones are afraid’, he warned.
But it is the political backstory to the Notarbartolo affair that
really explains why media attention does not hurt the mafia
nearly as much as one might expect. The new press of the early
1900s in Italy was ideologically riven, and its divisions reflected
a divided nation.
The Notarbartolo cause had the Socialists among its most
vocal supporters. Most grass-roots Sicilian Socialists were invet-
erate enemies of mafiosi. In the 1890s the mafia had used all of
its tricks — corruption, infiltration and violence — to undermine
new labour organisations that recruited among the peasantry. So
we should not be surprised that Leopoldo Notarbartolo, despite
being a man of the Right like his father, employed a highly able
Socialist lawyer.
But other conservatives, who lacked Leopoldo’s intimate
yearning for justice, were loath to reach out across the political
gulf. The barricades of 1898 may have come down, but early
twentieth-century Italy remained a country permanently at risk
of internal conflict. For men of both Right and extreme Left, the
Italian state was a ramshackle edifice that could only be salvaged
by being rebuilt. Both sides thought it was naive to invest much
hope in such a state when it came to enforcing real justice. As a
result, when mafia issues were at stake in the game of political
power, ideology trumped legality.
And Italy’s notorious regional divisions often trumped them
both. Even the bestselling newspapers, like Milan’s Corriere della
Sera, spoke overwhelmingly to a local readership. There was no
such thing as a ‘national’ public opinion. Prejudices were rife. In
Milan, even some of the Socialist Party’s leaders viewed the whole
south with open disgust, as a land peopled by aristocratic reac-
tionaries, parliamentary pettifoggers, and racially degenerate
peasant morons. All the inscrutable talk about how ‘mafiosity’

239
Mafia Brotherhoods

was part of Sicilians’ make-up only served to harden the

stereotypes.
Even the most open-minded Italians from the north and centre
did not feel that the mafia, however dastardly it might be, had
much bearing on their lives. Sure, they were indignant when they
read how Sicilian politicians got into bed with toughs and crooks.
But it was hard to sustain that indignation when the people they
themselves voted for then got into bed with suspect Sicilian MPs.
For most Italians outside the south and Sicily, the mafia lay at
two removes.
Regionalism worked in both directions. The Florio family
organ, L’Ora, stuck to a consistent line throughout the Notarbar-
tolo affair: the mafia was a fiction, a pretext for northerners to
get one over on Sicily. Partly because of L’Ora’s influence, when
Raffaele Palizzolo was found guilty in Bologna in the summer of
1902, a broad section of opinion in Sicily greeted the news with
a show of hurt regional pride. The Notarbartolo murder verdict,
they lamented, was only the latest haughty swipe that the north
had taken at the island. A Pro Sicilia Committee was set up,
recruiting quickly from the constituency created by Florio wealth
and mafia traction, but also drawing in support from many
conservatives. The Palizzolo cause became the latest excuse to
crank up Sicilian indignation, and thereby lever more money and
favours out of the government in Rome. As a side effect of the
Pro Sicilia turn in the island’s politics, Palizzolo was cured of his
leprosy and converted into a martyr to northern prejudices.
The old regionalist ploy worked. Someone in Rome almost
certainly had a quiet word with the senior judiciary, and within
six months Italy’s Supreme Court quashed the whole Bologna
trial on a tiny and highly questionable technicality.
Palizzolo and the mafia cut-throat Giuseppe Fontana faced a
third jury, amid the Renaissance glories of Florence this time.
But by now public opinion was exhausted. Not even the death
of a crucial new witness, who was found hanging from the stairs
of his Florence hotel, raised many eyebrows.

240
 Four trials and a funeral

Ermanno Sangiorgi, still Chief of Police in Palermo, testified

once more in Florence, despite the recent death of his beloved
daughter Italia following a long illness. For his pains, Sangiorgi
immediately became the target of a mafia smear campaign. The
allegations — a convoluted yarn about bad debts, bully-boy
policing, and favours to mafiosi — appeared first in a long letter
published in the Florios’ newspaper L’Ora. The story was soon
picked up in Naples where the Tribuna Giudiziaria, a local rag
specialising in courtroom dramas, told its readers that the episode
shed a disturbing light on Sangiorgi, who had attracted such
attention to himself by delivering ‘a testimony against the defend-
ants in Florence that was as fierce as it was slanderous’.

Our conclusion? In Palermo, you won’t find the real mafia

among the People, but among the police. Just like in Flor-
ence, where the real camorristi are standing outside the
dock, not inside it.

The original slurs were made by an ex-con'in the orbit of organ-

ised crime. The brains behind him belonged to Palizzolo’s lawyer,
and possibly also to Vincenzo Cosenza, the Chief Prosecutor of
Palermo who claimed never to have noticed the mafia during his
career as a ‘priest of Themis’ — Cosenza was known to be close
to the Tribuna Giudiziaria’s editors.
The Florentine jury acquitted Palizzolo and Fontana in July
1904. In London, the Daily Express gave the news in a few weary
lines, under the title ‘Victory for the mafia’. In Palermo, that
victory was celebrated by a procession with flags and music: men
wore Palizzolo’s picture on their lapels, women waved handker-
chiefs from the balconies. The mafia-backed Pro Sicilia Committee
hailed the verdict as a great confirmation of patriotic harmony,
and sent the mayor of Florence a telegram of thanks.

A most solemn and imposing meeting of this Committee

acclaims the city of Florence, which, by giving heart to

241
Mafia Brotherhoods

Sicily’s juridical conscience, has reunited the Italian People

in the ideal of ‘justice.

Leopoldo Notarbartolo was almost destroyed psychologically by

the outcome of his eleven-year struggle. In 1900, after the Milan
trial, when Palizzolo was first arrested and Chief of Police
Sangiorgi rounded up the mafiosi of the Conca d’Oro, the
murdered banker’s son had been lured into believing that the
mafia could be defeated in one swift strike, like a monster run
through by a knight’s lance. The second and third trials ground
those illusions into a bitter dust.

What is the result of my efforts? Palizzolo free and serene.

As for the mafia and its methods: the Pro Sicilia Committee
proclaims and glorifies them; the government bows down
to them and sustains them; and the wretched island of
Sicily reinforces them ever more . . . Do I live on an earth
that is watched over by God the Father, or amid a chaos
of brutal forces unleashed by loathsome, wicked gnomes
like the ones in Scandinavian legends?

Leopoldo continued his naval career but spent a further seven

years reflecting on his experience, and then another five pouring
his anguish into a meticulous and moving account of his father’s
story, and his own. He found little consolation other than in
contemplating sea life, which offered him a less heroic metaphor
of how the forces of good might one day defeat the mafia. He
observed how, over generations and generations, tiny undersea
creatures live and die, all the while creating their miniature dwell-
ings from limestone deposits, piling them higher and higher until,
following some minor seismic shift, an entirely new island appears
above the waves.

The people working humbly in the cause of good are like

those ocean creatures. One day, the marvellous little island

242
 Four trials and a funeral

will emerge! God has written his promise in the holy book
of nature.

Back on the ‘wretched island’ of Sicily, Ermanno Sangiorgi, one

of the people working in the cause of good, took until the summer
of 1905, a year after the conclusion of the Notarbartolo affair,
to win a libel suit against his accuser.
Italy reserves a peculiar cruelty to those that love it the most.
Soon afterwards Sangiorgi’s son-in-law, who worked in Pisa as
an administrator for the royal family, the House of Savoy,
committed suicide after being caught with his hand in the till.
Sangiorgi was entirely blameless in the disgrace of his daughter’s
widower. But the Royal Household held him liable for some of
the losses, which cost him more than a month’s salary.
In March 1907, Sangiorgi formally requested permission to
retire from his position as Chief of Police of Palermo; he was
showing signs of ill health, in the form of a creeping paralysis.
His life in law enforcement — forty-eight years of service,
eighteen of them as Chief of Police — had begun even before
Italian unification. But passing time had not made him any
coyer: he bluntly asked for a special pension and the honorary
title of Prefect. He concluded the letter in a typically patriotic
fashion.

I began my career during the war of Italian Independence

when Northern Italy was echoing to the cry of ‘Long live
King Victor Emmanuel II!’ I now end it with another cry
on my lips and in my heart, ‘Long live Victor Emmanuel
III! Long live the House of Savoy!’

Sangiorgi retired in May 1907, with his honorary title but without
his special pension. The creeping paralysis that had hastened his
retirement also hastened him to his death, in November 1908.
The press in Naples and Palermo recalled him to readers as the

2.43
Mafia Brotherhoods

Police Chief whose botched handling of the cab drivers’ strike

in 1893 had brought anarchy to the streets.
Sangiorgi’s passing marked the loss of a unique store of exper-
tise on the mafia’s early years: the hugely important report on
the mafia that he had written for Prime Minister Pelloux would
remain hidden in the archives until the 1980s. Fundamentally, the
knowledge he had worked so hard to accumulate would remain
valid long after his death: as times changed, the Sicilian mafia
changed remarkably little. Nevertheless, the ingenuity and ferocity
with which the mafia adapted to the changing times to come
would have astonished even Sangiorgi.
Sangiorgi had played by the rules in Palermo; he had fought
a clean, ‘open fight’ against the mafia, and it had ended in defeat.
He died in his wife’s city, in Naples, where the Carabinieri had
already begun a campaign against the camorra that was both
devious and very dirty — a campaign that would end in victory.

244
The ‘high’ camorra

In Naples, just as in Palermo, corruption and organised crime

reached the top of the news agenda as the economic and political
crises of the 1890s petered out. In 1899 a new Socialist newspaper,
La Propaganda, began a campaign against sleaze and gang-
sterism. Certain high-minded politicians joined in from the Right.
The campaign was such a success that a Socialist MP was elected
in Vicaria — the most densely populated constituency in Naples
and, of course, the very cradle of the camorra.
The main target of La Propaganda’s vitriol was Alberto Casale,
a Member of Parliament and influential local government power
broker who had extensive contacts with the Neapolitan under-
world. We have already had a passing encounter with Casale:
back in 1893, he used his purchase with the Honoured Society
to bring an end to the camorra-backed cab drivers’ strike. Casale
responded to La Propaganda’s attacks by reporting the newspaper
to the authorities for slandering him, and a criminal trial ensued.
The outcome of the Casale case was a disaster for a whole
crooked system that linked the city’s politicians, bureaucrats,
businessmen and journalists. La Propaganda successfully defended
itself against the slander charge by proving that Casale, among
many other corrupt deals, had banked a kickback from a Belgian
tram company for his role in the cab drivers’ strike.
The shock waves from Casale’s judicial humiliation sped to
Rome. Casale resigned, the Naples city council was dissolved,
and an official investigation into corruption in city government
was launched under the leadership of an owlish old law professor
from Liguria, Senator Giuseppe Saredo. The Saredo inquiry
would once more lay bare the ‘slack society’; indeed it would

245
Mafia Brotherhoods

prove to be one of the starkest portraits of political and bureau-

cratic malpractice in Italian history.
Shining a light into the tenebrous passages of Naples city hall
was no easy task. Senator Saredo and his team needed to study
the paperwork to discover why the system was so corrupt and
inefficient. But the paperwork was in chaos because of all the
corruption and inefficiency. Bagfuls of official files had been
smuggled away by bureaucrats keen to cover their tracks. The
commissioners received a sullen or angry response from many
of the key people it interviewed.
Despite all the obstacles, after ten months of wading through
a slob-land of documents and testimonies, Senator Saredo and
his team dredged up hard evidence aplenty. Appointments to
public service were supposed to be made on an impartial, compet-
itive basis. In Naples the regulations had been systematically
evaded. Half of all local government employees had no educa-
tional qualifications whatsoever. Staggeringly, even the chief
accountant whose job it was to draw up the council’s budget had
no qualifications. Some local government employees drew two
or even three separate salaries. Several well-known journalists
had no-show jobs with the council.
The reason why government posts in Naples existed was not
so that services could be carried out for the citizenry. Services
like fighting fires, teaching children, caring for the parks, collecting
taxes and rubbish, building sewers: these were secondary concerns,
at best. For that reason, they were left to the minority of idiots
who actually felt bound to do an honest day’s work. No, the real
reason a job existed in Naples was so it could be handed out to
people who had the right friends or relatives. A post with the
council was a favour bestowed in return for other favours. In a
package with these posts came the power to give and withhold
yet more favours: to move an application for a trading licence to
the top of the in-tray, or to consign it in perpetuity to the bottom;
to give a contract to one tram company rather than to another.
Because most local government bureaucrats were not particularly

246
 The ‘high’ camorra

interested in doing anything for anyone they did not know, a

whole parasitical swarm of intermediaries grew up: the faccend-
ieri, they were called. (They still are.) The term means ‘hustlers’,
‘wheeler-dealers’. The only expertise these faccendieri had was
knowing which ear to whisper in. In return for a small considera-
tion, they would arrange for someone they knew to get you what
you wanted — as a favour.
A system of political patronage made this foul mess possible.
Politicians stood at the business end of the chains of favours that
snaked through the corridors of the Naples municipality. Explo-
sively, the Saredo report referred to the men who operated this
- patronage system as ‘the high camorra’.

The original low camorra held sway over the poor plebs
in an age of abjection and servitude. Then there arose a
high camorra comprising the most cunning and audacious
members of the middle class. They fed off trade and
public works contracts, political meetings and government
bureaucracy. This high camorra strikes deals and does
business with the low camorra, swapping promises for
favours and favours for promises. The high camorra thinks
of the state bureaucracy as being like a field it has to
harvest and exploit. Its tools are cunning, nerve and
violence. Its strength comes from the streets. And it is
rightly considered to be more dangerous, because it has
re-established the worst form of despotism by founding
a regime based on bullying. The high camorra has replaced
free will with impositions; it has nullified individuality
and liberty; and it has defrauded the law and public trust.

As a direct result of the inquiry’s findings a corruption trial was

launched and twelve people, including Alberto Casale and the
former Mayor of Naples, were convicted.
Low camorra/ high camorra. No encapsulation of the Neapol-
itan malaise could have been better calculated to make headlines.

247
Mafia Brotherhoods

Whereas ‘mafia’ was still a vague notion, one enmeshed in woolly

fibs about Sicilian culture, the term ‘camorra’ carried the distinc-
tive reek of the dungeon, the tavern, and the brothel; it spoke
clearly of primitive rituals and knife fights; it conjured up stark
pictures of violent men with crude tattoos on their torsos and
arabesques of scar tissue on their faces.
At the very same time, during the Notarbartolo affair, the
press were referring constantly to a ‘high mafia’. Raffaele Paliz-
zolo was without doubt a mafioso, who profited from cattle
rustling and kidnapping; and he was also, without doubt, at
home in the ‘high’ world of banking and politics. So the label
‘high mafioso’ fitted him as snugly as did his expensively tailored
frock coat.
But was ‘high camorra’ really an accurate description of the
systematic spivvery the Saredo inquiry had unearthed in Naples?
The politician at the centre of the whole scandal, Alberto Casale,
was a proven crook and a master of undergovernment like Paliz-
zolo. But it was not strictly true to call him a camorrista. While
Casale was certainly a politician who was shameless about doing
business with the camorra, he was not an integral part of the
camorra in the same way that don Raffaele was an integral part
of the mafia. _
“What this amounts to saying is that the camorra was not as
powerful as the mafia. The camorra certainly had a steady part-
nership with pieces of the state. But it had not become the state
in the way that the mafia had done in Sicily.
Senator Saredo did not give any evidence to back up his use
of the phrase ‘high camorra’. His inquiry found no trail of blood
or money leading from the upper world of politics down into
the underworld where the camorra, in the strict sense, operated.
In fact the low camorra remained a mere peripheral blur in
Saredo’s field of vision. :
Saredo’s provocative language was therefore misleading, but
understandable. Ever since Italy had found out about the criminal
sect called the camorra, it had also used ‘camorra’ in a much

248
 The ‘high’ camorra

vaguer way, as an insult. The c-word was a label for any shady
clique or faction — for other people’s cliques or factions. As the
nineteenth century drew to a close, this term of abuse was steeped
in new bile. Italians were growing bitterly frustrated with the
way their politics worked. The mysterious deal brokering, the
jobbery, the strong-arm tactics: ‘camorra’, it sometimes seemed,
was everywhere in the country’s institutional life. A hostility
towards politics — antipolitica as it is sometimes called — has been
a constant feature of Italian society ever since. With his talk of
a ‘high camorra’, the old law professor showed that he had a
mischievous streak: he was knowingly appealing to what was by
now a conditioned reflex in public opinion.
As soon as it became clear that the Saredo inquiry was doing
its job seriously, some leading politicians began briefing against
it: what Saredo had termed the ‘high camorra’ was mobilising
to defend itself. Tame journalists heaped abuse on Senator Saredo.
Knowing the threat posed by a wave of ‘antipolitics’, they
appealed to another conditioned reflex of Italian collective life:
a suspicious, defensive local pride. So the northerner Saredo had
besmirched the image of Naples, the editorials wailed. There
may have been a few cases of corruption. But that was because
Naples was poor and backward. What the city needed was not
haughty lectures, but more money from government. Lots more.
In Italy, public indignation has a short half-life. When it fails
to catalyse change, it steadily decays into less volatile states of
mind: fatigue, forgetting, and sullen indifference. By 1904 the
indignation about political corruption and organised crime that
marked the turn of the century had all but totally degenerated.
Raffaele Palizzolo was finally acquitted of ordering the murder
of banker Emanuele Notarbartolo in July of that year. In Naples
too, the Casale trial and the Saredo inquiry no longer provoked
the same anger. The Socialist Party, having tried to ride the scan-
dals, was now divided and discredited by a failed general strike.
The chiefs of the ‘high camorra’ could now go on the
offensive.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The Prime Minister of the day was Giovanni Giolitti — the

dominant figure in Italian politics between the turn of the century
and the First World War. Giolitti was a master of parliamentary
tactics, better than anyone else at the devious game of coaxing
factions into coalitions.
In the early 1900s Giolitti presided over an unprecedented
period of economic growth and introduced some very welcome
social reforms. But his cynicism made him as loathed as he was
indispensable. ‘For your enemies, you apply the law. For your
friends, you interpret it’, Giolitti once said: a manifesto for under-
mining public trust in the institutions, and all too accurate an
encapsulation of the pervading values within the Italian state.
He also compared governing Italy to the job of making a suit of
clothes for a hunchback. It was pointless for a tailor to try and
correct the hunchback’s bodily deformities, he explained. Better
just to make a deformed suit. Italy’s biggest deformity was of
course organised crime, and Giolitti showed himself to be as
expedient as any previous statesman in tailoring his policies
around it. One later critic, incensed at the way the Prefects used
thugs to influence elections in the south, called Giolitti ‘the
Minister of the Underworld’.
In the general election of November 1904, Giolitti (whose
lieutenants in Naples had orchestrated the drive to undermine
the Saredo inquiry’s authority) deployed all the dark arts of the
Interior Ministry to turn the vote. In Vicaria, the constituency
in Naples that had elected a Socialist MP in 1900, camorristi —
real low camorristi — were enlisted to bully Socialist supporters.
On polling day, alongside the police, gangsters stood guard
outside the places where votes were changing hands for govern-
ment cash.
Someone deep within police headquarters that day was
endowed with a cynical historical wit. For camorristi who enjoyed
official approval were given tricolour cockades to wear in their
hats. So, just as they had done in the days before Garibaldi’s
Neapolitan triumph in 1860, camorristi in patriotic red, white

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and green favours formed a flagrant alliance with the police. The
traditional trade in promises and favours between the ‘low
camorra’ and the ‘high camorra’ had resumed. Nothing; it
seemed, had changed.
Barely eighteen months later, things changed more dramatically
than they had done at any point in the camorra’s history.
Among the camorristi in tricolour cockades on election day
in 1904 was the boss of the Vicaria chapter of the Honoured
Society, Enrico Alfano, known as Erricone — ‘Big ’Enry’. In the
summer of 1906, Big ’Enry became caught up in what the New
York Times would call ‘the greatest criminal trial of the age’.
The Cuocolo trial, as it was known, was the stuff of a news-
paperman’s dreams. Tales of a secret sect risen from the brothels
and taverns of the slums to infiltrate the salons and clubs of the
elite. Police corruption and political malpractice. A cast of heroic
Carabinieri, villainous gangsters, histrionic lawyers and even a
camorra priest. The drama that unfolded in Viterbo seemed to
have been fashioned expressly for the new media age. Foreign
correspondents, news agencies, and the fibrillating images of
Pathé’s Gazette could now relay the excitement to every corner
of the globe. Nor was the Cuocolo trial just a media event: unlike
the Notarbartolo affair, it was a turning point in the history of
organised crime. Not only did it reignite the political controversy
and emotion that the Saredo inquiry had generated. Not only
did it threaten, once more, to expose the sordid deals between
camorristi and politicians. It actually killed off the camorra. With
the Cuocolo case, the secret sect known as the camorra ceased
to exist. Big "Enry was to be the last supreme boss of the
Honoured Society in Naples. And it all began with the discovery
of two bodies.

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Just before 9 a.m. on 6 June 1906 police entered an apartment

in via Nardones, central Naples. They found the occupant, a
former prostitute called Maria Cutinelli, on a bed soaked in
blood; she was in her nightshirt and had died of multiple stab
wounds — thirteen in total — to her chest, stomach, thighs and
genitals. The police suspected a crime of passion and imme-
diately began looking for the victim’s husband, Gennaro
Cuocolo.
The hunt was over before it began. News soon arrived from
Torre del Greco, a settlement squeezed between Mount Vesuvius
and the sea some fifteen kilometres from the city: Gennaro
Cuocolo had been found dead at dawn. His body lay in a lane
that ran along the coast behind the slaughterhouse. He had
been stabbed forty-seven times and his skull had been smashed
with a club. Much of Torre del Greco was still smothered in
ash from a recent volcanic eruption. Traces of a struggle in
the black-grey carpet allowed Cuocolo’s last seconds to be
outlined: there were several attackers; after killing their victim,
they lugged the body onto a low wall overlooking the sea — as
if to put it on display. Cuocolo’s blood mingled with the gore
seeping through a gutter that ran from the slaughterhouse onto
the crags.
There were good grounds for guessing the real motive for the
murders. Cuocolo made his living commissioning burglaries and
fencing the resulting booty. He was notoriously enmeshed with
organised crime — a former member of the Honoured Society in
the Stella quarter, in fact. The conclusion was surely plain: the
camorra killed the Cuocolo couple.

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 The camorra in straw-yellow gloves

The chief suspects were soon identified. At the same time that
Gennaro Cuocolo was being stabbed and bludgeoned to death,
five men were eating a leisurely dinner of roasted eel at Mimi a
Mare, a picturesque trattoria only a couple of hundred metres
from the murder scene. The five were arrested: at least three of
them were known gangsters, including Big ’Enry who, as the
police were well aware, was the effective supreme boss of the
Honoured Society.
Yet initial investigations failed to unearth anything concrete to
connect the diners at Mimi a Mare with the carnage behind the
slaughterhouse. None of the five had left the dinner table long
enough to kill Cuocolo. Big ’Enry and his friends walked free,
much to the outrage of the Neapolitan public.
The decisive breakthrough came only at the beginning of the
following year, as a result of the longstanding rivalry between
the two branches of Italian policing. The Pubblica Sicurezza, or
ordinary police force, was run from the Ministry of the Interior.
The Carabinieri, or military police, operated under the Ministry
of War. In theory the two forces patrolled different: areas: the
police were based in the towns and cities and the Carabinieri in
the countryside. In practice, their duties often overlapped. The
Cuocolo investigation was to be a classic case of the tensions
and turf wars that often resulted.
In 1907, the Carabinieri wrested control of the Cuocolo murder
probe from the police, and soon submitted a startling testimony
by what we would now call a supergrass: he was a young horse
trader, groom, habitual thief, and camorrista called Gennaro
Abbatemaggio.
Gennaro Abbatemaggio made history when he broke the code
of omerta. He recounted every detail of the Cuocolo murders:
motive, plan and execution. But his evidence was far more impor-
tant than that. There had never been a witness like him. Of
course plenty of gangsters had spoken to the authorities before,
and plenty of trials had drawn on evidence from deep within the
Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra, and the Calabrian

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picciotteria. But no one before Gennaro Abbatemaggio had stood

up in court to denounce a whole sect. Before him, no self-
confessed mobster had made his own life and psychology into
an object of public fascination and forensic scrutiny. Gennaro
Abbatemaggio would become the biggest of the many celebrities
created by the Cuocolo affair.
Abbatemaggio explained to the Carabinieri that the murder
victim, Gennaro Cuocolo, first became the target of the camor-
ra’s anger because he broke its most sacred rule by talking to
the authorities. Cuocolo’s breach of omerta came after he
commissioned a burglary by one Luigi Arena. In order to keep
all the loot, Cuocolo betrayed his partner in crime to the
police.
The hapless thief Arena was sent to a penal colony on the
island of Lampedusa, situated between Sicily and the North
African coast. From there, smarting with understandable rage,
he wrote two letters to a senior camorrista to demand justice.
The thief’s plea for vendetta was debated at a camorra tribunal,
a meeting of the entire leadership of the Honoured Society, which
took place in a trattoria in Bagnoli in late May 1906. The tribunal
sentenced Cuocolo to death and ruled that his wife, who knew
many of his secrets, should die too. Big ’Enry, boss of the Vicaria
quarter and the most authoritative camorrista in the city, took
on the job of organising the executions. He nominated six killers,
in two teams, to do away with Cuocolo and his wife. Big ’Enry
also set up the eel dinner in Torre del Greco so that he could
keep an eye on the gruesome proceedings.
So Abbatemaggio asserted. He also said he knew all of this
because he had served as a messenger to Big ’Enry in the build-
up to the Cuocolo slayings. He also claimed to have been present,
both when the death squads were debriefed by their boss, and
when the camorristi shared out the jewellery stolen from Maria
Cutinelli’s blood-spattered bedroom.
There was a subplot to Abbatemaggio’s narrative, a subplot
that would become the most loudly disputed of his many claims.

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He said that Gennaro Cuocolo always wore a pinkie ring engraved

with his initials. Cuocolo’s killers were supposed to have pulled
the ring from his dead hand and sent it to the penal colony of
Lampedusa as proof that camorra justice had been done.
However, said Abbatemaggio, one of the killers disobeyed orders
and kept the trinket for himself. Many months later, when Cara-
binieri following Abbatemaggio’s tip-off raided the house where
the killer lived, they slit open his mattress and out fell a small
ring bearing the initials G.C. Here was crucial material corrobo-
ration of the stoolpigeon’s testimony.
With Abbatemaggio on their side, the Carabinieri could turn
a simple murder investigation into a frontal assault on the whole
Honoured Society, A huge roundup of camorristi followed. The
people of Naples cheered from the sidelines.
Yet doubts about the evidence against Big ’Enry and his
cohorts surfaced quickly after the Carabinieri handed over
Abbatemaggio’s testimony to the magistrates who would have
the job of preparing and evaluating the prosecution before the
case could come to court. The Carabinieti had very obviously
trampled over the procedural rule book. The search that had
led to the discovery of Cuocolo’s pinkie ring looked particularly
irregular. And the main motive for the murders, in Abbatemag-
gio’s tale, was questioned when it became clear that Gennaro
Cuocolo had played no part whatsoever in getting the thief
Luigi Arena sent to the penal colony of Lampedusa. Why would
Arena write to the camorra asking for vengeance against
Cuocolo, when Cuocolo had done nothing wrong?
For the Carabinieri who were driving the prosecution, trouble
also came from within their own ranks. One officer got wind of
the real story of Cuocolo’s pinkie ring. As it turned out,
Abbatemaggio the stoolpigeon had bought the ring himself and
arranged for it to be engraved with G.C. The Carabinieri had
then planted it where their pet camorrista said it would be. This
was the ‘Ring Trick’, as sympathisers with the defendants would
come to call it.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The Carabiniere who discovered the Ring Trick threatened to

expose it to the press. He was immediately straitjacketed and
deposited in a lunatic asylum on the orders of his commanding
officer. The poor man eventually proved his sanity and a sympa-
thetic magistrate arranged for him to be released. But he decided
not to tell what he knew about the Ring Trick after some comfy
wadding was added to his pension package. Retirement on the
grounds of ill health, went the official version.
The Naples police, fuming at having been elbowed out of the
case by the Carabinieri, relaunched their investigations following
a completely different line of inquiry: they believed that the
Cuocolos were killed by two thieves whom Gennaro Cuocolo
had cheated of some government bonds stolen in an earlier
robbery.
But there was a big problem with the police’s ‘government
bonds’ theory too: it was based largely on evidence from a certain
don Ciro Vittozzi, an obese priest who was godfather to one of
Big ’Enry’s children; don Ciro also had a record of helping
camorristi evade justice. So the Carabinieri accused the police
of believing a fib that the camorra had fed them. The government
bonds story, they said, was fabricated by the camorra to protect
the real culprits. The Carabinieri even prosecuted two police
officers for falsifying evidence. They upped the stakes further
still by bullying the robbers accused by the police into suing their
accusers. New tangles were thus added to a case already matted
with legal complexities.
Despite the best efforts of Abbatemaggio’s handlers, his story
was clearly a rickety construction. So he changed it. A year after
his initial testimony, he issued a new improved version. The pivotal
figure in Abbatemaggio’s new narrative was now one Giovanni
Rapi, known in camorra circles as ‘Johnny the Teacher’ because,
when young, he had worked in local schools. He had also been
a champagne dealer in France. Now in his fifties, Johnny the
Teacher had risen to become Big ’Enry’s contaiuolo — bookkeeper;
he also ran a prestigious social club and gambling den. According

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to Abbatemaggio, Johnny the Teacher sidelined in fencing stolen

goods. In other words, he was a rival in the same trade as the
murder victim Gennaro Cuocolo. Because of this rivalry, and
because Cuocolo was blackmailing him, Johnny the Teacher had
asked Big ’Enry to do away with Cuocolo and his wife.
The obvious question raised by this new story was why
Abbatemaggio had not accused Johnny the Teacher before, even
though he had been one of the five men known to have dined on
eel at Mimi a Mare on the night of the murders. Abbatemaggio
replied that he had originally been afraid of two things: that no
one would believe that an apparently respectable figure like Johnny
the Teacher could be capable of such a horrific deed; and that he
could not point the finger at the Teacher without implicating
himself in some robberies he had carried out at the Teacher’s
behest. Abbatemaggio duly confessed to the robberies in question,
and was arrested.
The stakes in the Cuocolo murder inquiry were rising
inexorably.
Much of the prosecution evidence for the Cuocolo trial was
made public while the case was still going through its drawn-
out preparatory phases. (This is still the norm in Italy.) So the
public followed the developing story closely, and newspapers
quickly divided into opposing camps. Were Big ’Enry and his
friends guilty or innocent? Who was right, the police or the
Carabinieri? Some sensed a miscarriage of justice and mounted
their own parallel investigations into both the crime and how
the Carabinieri had obtained Abbatemaggio’s confession.
Others supported a clampdown on gangsters, regardless of the
legal etiquette.
Much of the Socialist press joined the hue and cry, as was
predictable given the success of the campaign that had led to the
Casale trial and the blows struck against the ‘high camorra’ a
few years earlier. But the Socialists now found they had a very
unexpected ally in the right-wing daily, I/ Mattino — the biggest-
selling newspaper in Naples.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

As we have already seen, I/ Mattino liked to give flattering

coverage to the Honoured Society’s funerals; as the mouthpiece
of the ‘high camorra’, it had also been among the most vocal in
blasting the Saredo inquiry for throwing muck at Naples. I/
Mattino’s venal but brilliant editor Edoardo Scarfoglio had close
friends among the ‘high camorra’ politicians — men who helped
him pay for his beloved yacht: with its permanent crew of eleven,
it cost more than a Prefect’s annual salary to run. Yet just a few
years later, here was Scarfoglio’s paper cheering the Carabinieri
on as they launched a new drive to cleanse the city. The turna-
round in the newspaper’s line was something of a mystery.
One part of the solution to that mystery is that the alliance
between ‘high’ and ‘low’ camorras was inherently weak and
messy. Those ‘high camorra’ politicians were quite prepared to
make use of the ‘low camorra’ at election time, and to trade
squalid favours and promises with them whatever the season.
But they had no second thoughts about turning on their gangland
auxiliaries when there was a public outcry demanding a few
felons’ heads on posts. (In Sicily, where the mafia was so intimately
tied to the ruling class, such betrayals were much less likely).
Sales are another reason for I/ Mattino’s switch to an anti-
camorra line. The grisly Cuocolo murders made the city flinch
with fear, and turned organised crime into a red meat issue for
a canny editor like Scarfoglio. Unnervingly for many Neapolitans,
even the ‘low camorra’ now seemed to operate behind a facade
of respectability. Gone were the bell-bottom trousers, garish
waistcoats and quiffs that had marked the early camorristi out
among the urban unwashed. Gangsters now blended in with the
bourgeoisie and even the upper echelons. The expression ‘camorra
in straw-yellow gloves’ (in guanti gialli, or in guanti paglini) was
often used at the time and still provides a useful tag for the new
breed of gentleman mobster. Gloves in a delicate, light-coloured
suede were an accoutrement of wealth. So ‘to wear straw-yellow
gloves’ meant to put on a false appearance of refinement, to
disguise yourself among your social betters. If the ‘high camorra’

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— one lodged within the government institutions like the mafia

— did not really exist, the camorra in straw-yellow gloves certainly
did. By the early twentieth century, camorristi were covering their
tattoos in respectable garb and turning up uninvited among the
well-to-do.
Johnny the Teacher, with his high-society gambling den, was
an obvious example. As were the dead couple: Gennaro Cuocolo
was a gangland fence and his wife Maria Cutinelli was a former
dockers’ tart. Yet they lived in a well-furnished apartment across
the road from the local police station. Cuocolo’s modus operandi
was to win the trust of well-off families so that he could enter
their homes and find out what was worth stealing. He then gave
precise instructions to his team of housebreakers on how to get
in and what to take: tailored burglary.
But the most alarming embodiment of the camorrista in straw-
yellow gloves to be revealed by the Cuocolo investigation was
Gennaro De Marinis, known in criminal circles as ’°0 Mandriere
(‘the Cowherd’), because he once worked in an abattoir. According
to Abbatemaggio, the Cowherd had been the recipient of the
letters from Lampedusa. The Cowherd certainly had an interesting
underworld CV: he was now a jeweller, fence, loan shark and
pimp so successful that he lived in a big house with servants.
The Cowherd was portrayed in the press as a new ‘ultra-
modern’ type of camorrista. Sophisticated crooks like him infil-
trated the cafés and clubs frequented by wealthy and dissolute
young men. By offering introductions to attractive ‘actresses’,
invitations to exclusive gambling dens, and cash loans ‘between
friends’, they laid out a cushioned velvet path to blackmail and
financial ruin for their victims.
There were also strong rumours in Naples that the Cowherd
had inadvertently incurred the anger of royalty, and in doing so
brought the wrath of the Carabinieri down upon the Honoured
Society. The dashing Duke of Aosta, who was one of the most
head-turning presences on the Neapolitan ball circuit, was
shocked to find himself mixing with camorristi at sporting galas;

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 Mafia Brotherhoods

and he was incandescent to hear that the Cowherd had even been
bed-hopping among the ladies of the blue-blood set. So the Duke
complained to his cousin the King, who had the police surrender
control of the Cuocolo investigation to the Carabinieri. Faced
with the camorra in straw-yellow gloves, the King told the Cara-
binieri to take the gloves off.
Like so much about the Cuocolo trial, these rumours are
destined to remain unverified. Be that as it may, the Honoured
Society had long since ceased to be confined to the slum quarters.
The drama of the Cuocolo murders unfolded amid the scenery
of middle-class city life. Under the pergola of Mimi a Mare in
Torre del Greco, where Big ’Enry and his men ate eel, and where
the legendary tenor Caruso once lauded the maccheroni alle
vongole. Or beneath the marble columns and ornamental lamps
of the Galleria Umberto I, a prestigious new arcade built as part
of the massive reconstruction programme following the cholera
epidemic of 1884. Abbatemaggio explained that Big ’Enry and
his cohorts had planned the Cuocolo murders here in the
Galleria, in full view of the public, at the tables of the elegant
Caffe Fortunio. The police confirmed that the Galleria was a
regular camorra hang-out. Troublingly, the biggest rats from the
alleyways now had the run of the city’s swankier milieus too.
These were only the most visible symptoms of the sickness.
Naples may not yet have produced a ‘high camorra’ to match
the ‘high mafia’ of Palermo, but the camorristi still lurked in the
city’s every recess. Money lending was the key. Debt was a way
of life in a city with little productive economic activity. The poor
lived on the edge of destitution, addicted to the regular buzz of
- an illegal lottery ticket. The middle classes teetered just above
the humiliations of poverty, addicted to the little luxuries that
proclaimed their status to the ragged folk who lived on the lower
floors. Upper-class betting addicts borrowed to keep betting. The
whole town was in hock. As one local journalist commented,
usury was to the Neapolitans what absinthe was to the French.
The Honoured Society specialised in feeding that addiction.

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 The camorra in straw-yellow gloves

As the Cuocolo investigation ground along, amid exposés and

controversies, the publicity that figures like the Cowherd generated
was only magnified by the squalid way the evidence was being
gathered. The camorristi listed among the accused tried to buy
their way out of jail—as was only to be expected. But newspapers,
especially I/ Mattino, were also happy to pay for a scoop, however
much truth or falsity it contained. The Carabinieri seemed to be
involved too. Crooks from across Naples gravitated towards the
Carabinieri barracks where the investigation was based, hoping
to sell a specially crafted witness statement. The shrewdest
witnesses touted their story to all three sides, it was said.
The Carabinieri converted the strong rumours of a bidding
war for testimonies into political leverage. In December r910, in
a secret report sent to their high command in Rome, they
complained that the camorra was using every trick it knew to
thwart their investigations. Even some newspapers had become
hang-outs for crooks. Who could tell how high the camorra’s
influence now reached? Defeat in the Cuocolo case would do
‘irreparable damage’ to the Corps, and to the future of public
order in Naples. The report cashed out in a revealing plea for
‘moral and material support’.

We regard it as necessary, for now, that funds in the region

of 20,000 Lire be made available. We need to subsidise
able, well-paid and trustworthy informants so that they
do not just sell themselves to the highest bidder. Otherwise
they could provide false information that could give rise
to serious incidents during the trial.

Or, put bluntly: ‘can we have more cash to pay our witnesses
please?’
It is scarcely a surprise that, in the end, four years and nine
months of investigation and legal preparation would be required
to prosecute the camorra for the murders of Gennaro Cuocolo
and Maria Cutinelli.

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Those years of investigation were packed with incident. When

Gennaro Abbatemaggio gave his original statement to the police
early in 1907, Big ’Enry fled to New York disguised as a stoker
on a steamer.
By that time, Italian organised crime had long since entered a
transoceanic age. The first mafia murder on American soil — the
first we know about, at any rate — took place on Sunday 14
October 1888: the victim, a Palermitan by the name of Antonio
Flaccomio, had just had a drink in a Sicilian restaurant when he
was stabbed to death right in front of Manhattan’s celebrated
Cooper Union building. But the history of the mafia in America
was under way well before that date. Sicilian fugitives from justice
had been hiding out in the United States since before Italy was
unified; New York and New Orleans were major outlets for
Sicily’s lemons, and therefore became the mafia’s first bases in
the USA.
At the turn of the twentieth century the tens of thousands
who crossed the Atlantic every year became hundreds of thou-
sands: an awe-inspiring 870,000 at the peak of the exodus in
1913. Emigration transformed the economy of the rural south:
migrants sent money home and their absence drove up the wages
of those who stayed behind.
Among the new tide of migrants there were also members of
all three of Italy’s major criminal associations. From being a local
nuisance in New Orleans or Mulberry Bend, Italian organised
crime quickly grew into a national problem for the United States.
The two shores of the criminal Atlantic were bound together
by uncountable cunning threads. Just by tugging at one of those

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threads — Big ’Enry’s dash to New York — we can glimpse just

how vast and densely woven the history of Italo-American gang-
sterism really is. (Too vast to be told in these pages.)
Big ’Enry’s bid for freedom did not last long: he was soon
tracked down and sent back to Naples by Lieutenant Giuseppe
‘Joe’ Petrosino, a Salerno-born policeman who had risen through
the ranks of the New York police by fighting Italian organised
crime. We can think of Petrosino as a potential heir to the mantle
just relinquished by Ermanno Sangiorgi: Petrosino was a suitably
transatlantic cop for the new transatlantic crime.
In 1909, while the Cuocolo investigation was still progressing,
Petrosino paid a brief visit to Italy in order to set up an inde-
pendent information network on Italian-born gangsters. On
12 March 1909 he was standing under the Garibaldi statue in
Palermo’s piazza Marina when two men shot him dead. He left
a widow, Adelina, and a daughter of the same name who was
only four months old.
No one would ever be convicted of Petrosino’s assassination.
There were many lines of inquiry. The first, and most plausible,
related to a gang of Sicilians whose counterfeiting operation
Petrosino had disrupted in 1903 following the notorious ‘body
in the barrel’ mystery — the body in question being one of the
mafiosi’s victims. In 1905 the gang thought to be responsible for
the ‘body in the barrel’ were joined by a mafioso and lemon
dealer called Giuseppe Fontana — the same Giuseppe Fontana
outrageously acquitted of killing banker Emanuele Notarbartolo
the previous year. (In 1913, Fontana was shot dead in East
Harlem.)
The chief suspect for the murder of Lieutenant Petrosino was,
and still is, don Vito Cascio-Ferro, a Man of Honour who shut-
tled back and forth across the Atlantic in the early 1900s. Cascio-
Ferro never stood trial because he had a seemingly impregnable
alibi provided for him by a Sicilian MP who said that Cascio-
Ferro was at his house when Petrosino died. The MP in question
-was called Domenico De Michele; as chance would have it, he

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was the son of ‘Baron’ Pietro De Michele, the Burgio rapist and
capomafia involved in the ‘fratricide’ plot against Ermanno
Sangiorgi in 1877.
In the course of their protracted investigations into the
Petrosino murder, Italian police also questioned a Calabrian gang-
ster: Antonio Musolino, the younger brother of the King of
Aspromonte, whose cousin was suspected of having taken the
contract to kill Lieutenant Petrosino. With surprising candour
Antonio Musolino said he fled Santo Stefano in 1906 because he
was afraid that his family’s many enemies were trying to kill him.
In Brooklyn, he joined up with some of his brother’s former
support team, among them the cousin suspected of the Petrosino
murder. In a basement room in Elizabeth Street, the heart of
Manhattan’s Italian community, Musolino was initiated into a
mafia gang that included both Calabrians and Sicilians. His name °
for the gang was the Black Hand — a catch-all label for Italian
gangsterism in America that derived from the menacing symbols
(bloody daggers, black hands, and the like) that mafiosi some-
times drew on their extortion letters.
Musolino’s brief story is typical of the way that the picciotti
who travelled from Aspromonte to New York were absorbed into
a much more powerful and well-established Sicilian organisation:
the poor Lads with Attitude came under the influence of the
‘middle-class criminals’. Where the Sicilian presence was not so
strong, such as amid the lunar landscape of the mining districts
of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Calabrians brought across the
Atlantic to cut coal were able to organise among themselves, and
directly apply the methods and traditions they had learned at
home.

a
Big ’Enry’s brief trip to New York set in motion a third theory
about the murder of Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, one implicating
the camorra: Big ’Enry himself was the suspect. Interest in the

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 The criminal Atlantic

Cuocolo case in the United States became intense after the

Petrosino murder. The huge investigation in Naples seemed to
have exposed something much more powerful than even the most
disquieting speculation about the Black Hand in the United States.
In the New York Times, journalist Walter Littlefield boldly
asserted that Big ’Enry had issued the order to kill Petrosino, and
that the Honoured Society he ruled was the umbrella organisation
for all Italian-American criminals on both sides of the Atlantic.

It is the fond hope of modern, civilised Italy that the trial

will stamp out forever the largest and most perfectly
organised society of criminals on earth, with its profitable
ramifications in America and its willing slaves in Sicily.
If this object shall be attained, it will be like severing the
head from the body. It will mean the dissolution of the
brains of the Black Hand in America and the Mafia in
Sicily.

Around the world, the expectations surrounding the Cuocolo

affair were becoming as acute as they were unrealistic.
The latest historical research reaches less panic-striken conclu-
sions than Walter Littlefield. Camorristi from Naples and its
surrounds were certainly operative in the United States at the
time of Big ’Enry’s visit, and some of them even created autono-
mous territorial pockets in Brooklyn, next door to the dominant
Sicilian gangs. Johnny the Teacher, Big ’Enry’s bookkeeper, seem-
ingly had links with a savings institute in New York that gathered
immigrants’ money and sent it back home. Once Big ’Enry had
been extradited, New York camorristi toured Italian-owned
restaurants to pay for his lawyers.
Meanwhile the man at the centre of the approaching Cuocolo
trial, the stoolpigeon Gennaro Abbatemaggio, spent his time in
custody reading a serialised life of Joe Petrosino.

jr
265
Mafia Brotherhoods

As the preparations for the Cuocolo trial ground on, the most
newsworthy event of Italy’s new media era occurred shortly after
5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 when a massive earthquake, with
its epicentre in the narrow Straits separating Sicily and Calabria,
devastated Messina, Reggio Calabria, and many of the towns
and villages of Aspromonte. It is estimated that some 80,000
people died; many of the traumatised survivors emigrated to the
New World. This cataclysm, the most lethal seismic event in the
history of the west, aroused the whole world’s sympathy for
weeks.
Once the media agenda had moved on, the drab and sorry
story of the reconstruction began. The stricken zones of Calabria
had been a slack society before the disaster, they became slacker
still in its aftermath. In Reggio Calabria, it took eleven years to
rebuild the Prefecture, and six more to finish the Palace of Justice
where the criminal courts were housed. The protracted struggle
over reconstruction funding from the state became the new centre
of gravity of political and economic life in much of the disaster
area. The picciotteria wanted a share of the spoils. In Reggio
Calabria, mobsters were spotted in the shebeens where the
builders drank: such a large workforce offered plentiful oppor-
tunities to profit from gambling, extortion, robbery and gang-
mastering. In 1913 the police would go on to successfully
prosecute eighty-three members of a mafia group operating across
the city. They had a hierarchy of ranks, like picciotto, camorrista,
bookkeeper and fiorillo — little flower. But of course this was a
matter of interest only for the local press, as were other trials of
the early twentieth century that showed that the picciotteria was
spreading north into the other provinces of Calabria.
Of the people who saw the way the picciotteria was quietly
entrenching itself in Calabrian society in the years before the
First World War, precious few have left us any kind of testimony.
One of them is the San Luca-born writer Corrado Alvaro. In
1955 he retrieved a vivid memory from his adolescence which
encapsulated how the picciotteria had become what he called an

266
 The criminal Atlantic

‘aspect of the ruling class’, a normal and broadly accepted part

of community life — scarcely a generation after it emerged. On
one occasion Alvaro returned home to San Luca, which had
avoided the worst of the 1908 earthquake, from a term spent at
his distant grammar school. His mother casually told him that
his father was busy in the upstairs room with ‘men from the
association’. Alvaro, full of his textbook notions of public-spir-
itedness, assumed she meant a group promoting some kind of
local interest. ‘So. there is an association in our village at long
last?? His mother gave a flat reply: ‘It’s the association for
delinquency’.

267
Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

At last, in March rgor1, the Cuocolo trial opened in the cavernous

Baroque church that served as the Court of Assizes in Viterbo,
a small city between Rome and Florence that had been chosen
to host the whole show for fear that a Naples jury might be
swayed either by camorra threats, or by the camorra fever the
case was generating.
Newspaper readers and newsreel viewers around the world
could finally see the eloquent pictures of the defendants crammed
into a large cage in the court, and put faces to the quirky nick-
names in the Cuocolo story.
For his own protection, Gennaro Abbatemaggio was confined
to a smaller cage by himself. Now twenty-eight years old, small
and well-dressed, he had a long razor-slash scar running down
his cheek to the point of his chin. He wore a short, pomaded
moustache that turned perkily upwards at its points to form
inverted commas around his mouth.
‘The camorra is a career’, he began in an attractive baritone,
‘which: goes from the rank of picciotto to that of camorrista,
passing through intermediate ranks.’ He joined the camorra in
1899, at age sixteen, as a picciotto. In 1903 he was promoted to
the rank of camorrista in the Stella section of the Honoured
Society.

Camorristi in Naples exploit prostitution greedily .. .

They demand a camorra [a bribe] on everything, and
especially on all the shady activities that, precisely because
they are illegal, have to pay the camorra’s tax. They extort
the camorra on illegal betting, on the gambling dens that

268
 Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

cover Naples like a rash. They extort the camorra on sales

at public auctions, and even show their arrogance during
national and local elections . . . The camorra is so base
that it takes money, sometimes even really tiny payments,
to massacre or disfigure people. The camorra is involved
in loan sharking. In fact its biggest influence is on loan
sharking.

Abbatemaggio went on to describe the camorra as ‘a kind of

low-grade Freemasonry’. His description of the camorra’s rules,
structure and methods confirmed the criminological ‘textbooks’
that had been so popular in Naples for years. He ended with a
passionate plea.

My assertions are the absolute truth. I want to carry my

head high, and look anyone who might dare to doubt
them straight in the face.

Abbatemaggio then began to reel off his account of how the

Cuocolos came to be so brutally slain on that June night nearly
five years previously. The letters from the Lampedusa penal colony.
The lobbying by Johnny the Teacher and the Cowherd to have
Gennaro Cuocolo punished. How the plenary meeting of the
camorra’s top brass at the Bagnoli trattoria approved the deci-
sion. How Big ’Enry organised the executions in a series of
meetings in the Galleria. The savage actions of the two teams
of killers. The dinner at Mimi a Mare. The story of Cuocolo’s
G.C. pinkie ring.
Abbatemaggio stood and spoke for so long that he had to cut
a hole in his shoe to relieve the pressure on a severe blister. During
breaks he passed his fan mail on to friendly hacks and explained
that, if he had ever had the chance to study, he too would have
become a journalist.
Il Mattino’s correspondent had no doubts about Abbatemag-
_gio’s sincerity. Here was ‘a man endowed with marvellous physical

269
Mafia Brotherhoods

and mental solidity, and with balanced and robust willpower’ the
Neapolitan daily opined. It was inconceivable that he could have
dreamed everything up as the defence claimed.

Even the most audacious imagination would not have

been able to create all the interconnecting lines of this
judicial drama. Every detail he gives is a page taken
directly from life — albeit from a life of crime: it is intense,
keen, overwhelming.

The defence also thought that Abbatemaggio’s testimony was

dramatic, although in a very different sense. In cross-examination,
one lawyer announced that he would prove that this supposed
inside witness had gleaned all he knew about the Honoured
Society from downmarket plays. ‘Has Abbatemaggio ever been
to the San Ferdinando Theatre to see a performance of The
Foundation of the Camorra?’ Abbatemaggio replied calmly that
he only liked comic opera — The Merry Widow and the like.
‘Besides, why would I need to watch the camorra performed in
the theatre, when I was part of it?’
The quip was greeted with approving laughs from the public
gallery.
The defence also tried to discredit Abbatemaggio by ques-
tioning his sanity: he was a ‘hysterical epileptic’, they claimed,
in the dubious psychological jargon of the day. One expert who
closely examined him disagreed, but said nonetheless that he was
a particularly fascinating case. Again and again Abbatemaggio
responded to those who doubted his evidence with names, dates,
and a torrent of other particulars. Perhaps he could be classified
as a ‘genialoid’, a rare blend of the genius and the lunatic; his
‘mnemonic and intuitive capacities are indeed phenomenal’.
Abbatemaggio’s credibility as a witness also depended on his
ability to tell a story about himself, a story of redemption. He
claimed to have found personal moral renewal by exposing the
camorra’s secrets to the law. He had been saved, he said, by his

270
 Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

love for the young girl he had recently married. ‘Camorrist told
all to win his bride’, was the New York Times headline.
Meanwhile, in the defendants’ cage, camorra boss Big ’Enry
scowled and scoffed. Wiry, sunken eyed and heavy jawed, he had
a disconcerting horizontal scar that ran from the corner of his
mouth out towards his right ear. He wore mourning black because
his younger brother Ciro, one of the five men who ate at Mimi
a Mare on the night of the murders, had died of a heart attack
in custody. During Abbatemaggio’s testimony Big ’Enry was heard
to mutter the occasional comment. ‘This louse is like a gramo-
phone, and if you turn his handle he goes on and on’. The label
stuck: for the rest of the trial, the defendants would refer to
Abbatemaggio as ‘the gramophone’.
When Big ’Enry’s own turn to give evidence came he made an
impression that initially surprised many by how eloquent and
convincing it was. He explained that he ran a shop in piazza San
Ferdinando selling horse fodder — bran and carobs. He was also
a horse dealer who traded with military supply bases in Naples
and surrounding towns; he had made a lot of money exporting
mules to the British army in the Transvaal during the Boer war.
He denied being a camorrista but admitted that he was rather
hot-headed and did sometimes lend money at very high interest
rates. It was all a question of character.

Gentlemen of the jury, you need to bear in mind that we

are Neapolitans. We are sons of Vesuvius. There is a
strange violent tendency in our blood that comes from
the climate.

The Carabinieri, Big ’Enry concluded, were victimising him and

had bribed witnesses. He had suffered so much in prison that he
was losing his hair.
Several policemen of various ranks were subsequently called
to testify, and reeled off Big ’Enry’s catalogue of convictions. He
had begun his career as a small-time pimp. Like many other

27%
Mafia Brotherhoods

camorristi, Big ’Enry dealt in horse fodder because it provided

a good front for extorting money from hackney carriage drivers
and rigging the market in horses and mules. They explained that
he provided the protection for the high society gambling den run
by Johnny the Teacher, and confirmed that he was the effective
boss of the camorra. They noted that the nominal boss was one
Luigi Fucci, known as ’o gassusaro — ‘the fizzy drink man’ — for
the prosaic reason that he ran a stall selling fizzy drinks. Big
’Enry used him as a patsy, while keeping the real power in his
own hands.
Big ’Enry began to look like what he really was: a villain barely
concealed behind a gentlemanly facade. Not many of the other
defendants came across much better. Arthur Train, a former
assistant District Attorney in New York, was one of many Amer-
ican observers at the trial. He noted that

the Camorrists are much the best dressed persons in the

court room. Closer scrutiny reveals the merciless lines in
most of the faces, and the catlike shiftiness of the eyes.
One fixed impression remains — that of the aplomb, intel-
ligence, and cleverness of these men, and the danger to
a society in which they and their associates follow crime
as a profession.

The Cowherd, the ‘ultra-modern camorrista’ whose sexual

conquests among the ladies of the aristocracy had reputedly so
enraged the Duke of Aosta, was a particularly elegant figure. He
too tried to present himself as an honest businessman who had
begun by selling bran and carobs and had risen to become a
successful jeweller. Only a freakish chain of bad luck had led
him to spend several short spells in jail for extortion, theft and
taking part in a gunfight, he said. The Cowherd’s refined appear-
ance was compromised by the two long scars on his cheek.
‘Fencing wounds’, he protested. He did at least make a telling
point about the notorious ring engraved with Gennaro Cuocolo’s

272
 Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

Individui della mala vita sfregiati

(Riproduzione dal vero mercé il metodo foto-xilografico)

The sfregio, or disfiguring scar, was one of many visible signs of camorra
power in Naples. Camorristi handed out sfregi as punishments both to one
another and to the prostitutes they pimped. Sicilian mafiosi, by contrast,
refrained from both pimping and the sfregio.

273
Mafia Brotherhoods

initials: he demonstrated that it was not big enough to fit on his

own little finger — and he was a much smaller man than Cuocolo.
Few of the accused had plausible alibis. Some denied knowing
Abbatemaggio, only to be flatly contradicted by other credible
witnesses. One camorrista thought it was a good idea to have
his defence printed in pamphlet form. In it he admitted that the
camorra existed but claimed that it was a brotherhood of well-
meaning individuals who liked to defend the weak against bullies.
This brotherhood’s ruling ethos was what he termed cavalleria
rusticana — ‘rustic chivalry’. Evidently this particular defendant
was trying to apply the lessons from the Sicilian mafia’s successful
ploy in earlier trials. He cited camorra history too, concluding
his pamphlet on a patriotic note by recalling how, half a century
ago, when Italy was unified, camorristi had fought Bourbon
tyranny and contributed to ‘the political redemption of Southern
Italy’.
The judge in Viterbo attracted much criticism for allowing the
defendants themselves to cross-examine witnesses. These
exchanges prolonged proceedings enormously, and sometimes
descended into verbal brawls. One camorrista, a fearsome one-
eyed brute who stood accused of smashing Gennaro Cuocolo’s
skull with a club, shrieked colourful insults across the court at
Abbatemaggio.

You’re a piece of treachery! And you’ve sold yourself just

so you can eat good maccheroni in prison. But you’ll
choke on those nice tasty bits of mozzarella. You’ll see,
you lying hoaxer!
Shut up you louse! Shut up you pederast! I’d spit in
your face if I wasn’t afraid of dirtying my spit.

Abbatemaggio had no such worry, and spat back across the court
into the defendants’ cage.

er
274
 Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

Weeks and weeks of witness statements, angry cross-examina-

tions, and scuffles went by. Public interest slowly flagged as spring
turned to summer. But it revived in July and August r911 when
the two great heroes of the Cuocolo spectacular were called to
give their statements. In the words of the New York Times, these
were the Carabinieri who ‘finally succeeded in penetrating the
black vitals of the criminal hydra and are now ready to exhibit-
the foul, noxious mass at the Viterbo Assizes’. They were Sergeant
Erminio Capezzuti and Captain Carlo Fabroni.
Sergeant Capezzuti was Abbatemaggio’s handler: he had
persuaded the informant to break the code of omertd and
protected him afterwards; he had also led the search team that
claimed to have found the G.C. pinkie ring.
Ludicrously overblown tales of Capezzuti’s heroism had circled
the globe between the murders and the trial. It was said that he
had disguised himself as a camorrista and even undergone a
ritual knife fight and been oathed into membership of the
Honoured Society. The New York Times claimed he had pulled
off ‘one of the most remarkable feats of detection ever accom-
plished’. The Washington Times reported that Capezzuti was set
to become a monk after the trial because this was the only way
he could protect himself from the camorra’s revenge. Every news-
paper in the world seemed to compare Capezzuti to Sherlock
Holmes.
It is not clear quite where some of these fables about the
‘Sherlock Holmes’ of Naples began. Certainly little to justify
them surfaced when Capezzuti came to Viterbo. The Sergeant
stuck calmly to every detail of the prosecution case, including
the G.C. ring story. His evidence was measured and, for those
expecting Sherlock Holmes, rather dull.
Captain Carlo Fabroni’s time on his feet was anything but dull.
The Carabiniere officer who was in charge of the whole Cuocolo
investigation hailed from the Marche region, and had arrived in
Naples only shortly after the Cuocolo murders. One of the first
things he did, he explained, was to read up on all the criminology

275
Mafia Brotherhoods

published about the camorra. What he had learned during the

course of his investigations precisely corresponded with what he
had read.
As Captain Fabroni’s testimony continued, his self-confidence
tumesced into arrogance. He brushed aside any suspicions that
Abbatemaggio might not be telling the whole truth.

With my extremely honourable past in the military I would

blush at the very thought of inducing a man to commit
an act of nameless infamy by inventing an accusation.

Under cross-examination, Fabroni provoked the defence at every

opportunity, and scattered accusations that the police, politicians
and even the judiciary were in cahoots with the camorra. On
one occasion, he claimed that Big Enry had only been acquitted
on an earlier extortion charge because his defence lawyer was
the judge’s brother; the lawyers all took off their togas and walked
out in protest at this collective insult to their profession.
But Captain Fabroni’s most startling move was to drop a hand
grenade in the lap of his key witness. Since the first hearings,
there had been much comment on the sheer vividness of
Abbatemaggio’s narrative. The ‘gramophone’ told the court the
order in which the camorristi stabbed each of the victims, and
even the abuse they had shouted while they were doing it. Was
it really plausible that the killers would tell Abbatemaggio about
their own bloody actions in such detail?
Captain Fabroni’s counter to this question was a highly risky
move to undercut the stoolpigeon’s character, but keep the testi-
mony intact. Abbatemaggio had not broken the code of omertd
because he wanted a cleaner life with his new wife, Fabroni
explained: that was just a cover story. Fear was Abbatemaggio’s
real motive — fear that the camorra would kill him as it had done
the Cuocolos. The reason for this fear was that he had tried to
blackmail his fellow criminals. And the reason he knew enough
to blackmail them was because, in all probability, he had been

276
 Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

present at one or both of the murder scenes. Perhaps Abbatemaggio

was himself one of the killers. As Captain Fabroni concluded,
‘It’s just not possible to reconstruct such an appalling tragedy in
every particular unless you have taken part in it in some way.’
Having taken in Captain Fabroni’s words, the world’s ptess
immediately upended their sentimental opinions of the ‘gramo-
phone’. One Australian newspaper called the informer ‘a rascal
of almost inconceivably deep dye’. Nor was Captain Fabroni the
only man in Viterbo to point the finger at Abbatemaggio: the
Cowherd also accused him of the murders, and referred to him
constantly as ‘the assassin’. Thus both prosecution and defence
seem to have believed that Abbatemaggio was one of the Cuocolo
hitmen. Quite what proportions of truth and cynical tactics were
in these allegations may never be known. What is certain is that
Abbatemaggio was never formally indicted with the murders.

a
The Viterbo trial still had a year to run"when Captain Fabroni
finished giving evidence. Through the months that followed, each
of the defendants and many of the witnesses were called back
time and again to answer further questions. But a decisive shift
in the burden of proof had already taken place. For all its unfath-
omable obscurities, the Cuocolo case was now a simple credibility
contest: either the accused were guilty, or the Carabinieri were
slanderers. On one side was a cage full of crooked figures with
scarred faces who gave mutually contradictory statements. On
the other side were Captain Fabroni and Sergeant Capezzuti.
Granted, these two Carabinieri had failed to live up to their
‘Sherlock Holmes’ billing. But it was hard to believe that they
could be so devious as to fabricate the whole prosecution case.

277
The strange death
of the Honoured Society

At just after five thirty in the afternoon of 8 July 1912, the forty-
one accused were summoned back into the packed Viterbo court-
room to hear their fate. Almost all of them failed to move,
immobilised by dread. Their nerves were understandable given
the scale of the proceedings that were about to reach a climax:
779 witnesses had been heard in the course of sixteen exhausting
months of hearings.
Finally, the familiar gaunt figure of Big Enry appeared, alone,
in the defendants’ cage. He looked around him. The lugubrious
tension was broken only by the staccato sobs emitted by one of
the defence lawyers. Big ’Enry saw, heard and understood which
way the verdict had gone. He then destroyed the silence by aiming
a shrill cackle across at the elevated box where the jury sat.

You’ve found us guilty. So we are murderers? But why, if

you are our judges, have you got your heads bowed? Why
won’t you look me in the face? We are the ones who have
been murdered! You are the murderers!

More of the accused filed into the cage and began bawling,
pleading with the jury and the public, screaming at Abbatemaggio.
Suddenly a long jet of blood spurted out onto the marble floor.
The Cowherd had used a piece of glass to cut his own throat.
Doctors rushed to save him and the guards carried him away to
recover.
One by one the defendants gave up their protests and flopped

278
 The strange death
of the Honoured Society

down onto their benches to weep. The loudest and angriest of

them, Johnny the Teacher, also took the longest to exhaust
himself. He alone was still raving when the Clerk of the Court
could finally make himself audible and read out the guilty verdicts.
The judge handed down more than four centuries of prison to
those found guilty of murder and membership of a criminal
association, among other crimes.

oe
A crusade for justice, with no prisoners taken? Or a gross abuse
of the state’s power? In the aftermath of the Cuocolo trial, public
opinion remained divided as to what this courtroom spectacular
actually meant. The Cuocolo trial certainly achieved the highly
desirable aim of striking at the camorra. Yet everyone in Italy
could see that it had achieved that aim by lengthy, shambolic and
perhaps even dubious means. The Cuocolo murders presented
the Italian state with a unique opportunity to show off its fight
against organised crime to a vast new audience at home and
abroad. The result was confusion at home and national embar-
rassment abroad. Newspaper leader writers all over the globe
lamented the state of Italian justice. The press in the United
States was scornful: the trial had been a ‘bear garden’, a ‘circus’,
a ‘cage of monkeys’. Even an observer more sympathetic to Italy,
like Arthur Train, could only plead with his readers to understand
how difficult it was to administer justice when ‘every person
participating in or connected with the affair is an Italian, sharing
in the excitability and emotional temperament of his fellows’.
Still more sober, and no less damning, was the appraisal of the
Bulawayo Chronicle in what is now Zimbabwe, where cinema-
goers had seen newsreels from Viterbo.

The Camorra trial stands as monumental evidence to the

incapacity and inadequacy of the present system of crim-
inal procedure in Italy.

27?
Mafia Brotherhoods

Had more than a tiny minority of magistrates and lawyers been

ready to heed them, there were plenty of legal lessons about the
fight against camorra-type crime to be learned from the Cuocolo
trial: about Italy’s hazy laws against criminal associations; about
the ungainly, agonisingly slow, and peculiarly Italian marriage of
investigative justice with an adversarial system.
The most important lessons came from the story of Gennaro
Abbatemaggio. Even on the Carabinieri’s account, his treatment
was a legal outrage: for example, after first talking to the Cara-
binieri, he spent many months hiding out in a remote part of
Campania in what happened to be Sergeant ‘Sherlock Holmes’
Capezzuti’s home village. As Ermanno Sangiorgi found out as
long ago as the ‘fratricide’ case of the 1870s, the authorities had
absolutely no guidelines on how to handle defectors from the
ranks of the criminal brotherhoods. What kind of deal should
the law strike with them in return for what they knew? How
could there be any certainty that what they said was true? Italian
legislation offered no answers to these questions, and no way of
distinguishing good police intelligence gathering from
co-managing crime. Because the lessons of the Cuocolo trial were
never learned, those questions would continue to vex, and
continue to undermine the struggle against organised crime in
southern Italy.
And yet remarkably, after the trial in Viterbo, there were to be
no more reports of criminal activity by the sect that had plagued
Naples since before Italy was unified. Somehow Gennaro
Abbatemaggio, and the judicial monster he helped create, ended
the history of the Honoured Society.
The trial in Viterbo left a legacy of puzzles. The hardest of
them all is why, when so many earlier camorra prosecutions had
merely pruned the branches of the Honoured Society, the Cuocolo
case actually struck at its root. ¢
One possible answer lies in the evidence given by the Neapolitan
police, who had not enjoyed a good press in the build up to the
Viterbo trial. Not only had they been overshadowed by the

280
 The strange death of the Honoured Society

Carabinieri, in the persons of Sergeant Capezzuti and Captain

Fabroni; but they had been discredited by the insinuation that
some of them were hand in glove with camorristi. Italians were
quite ready to believe that this charge had purchase. Everyone
knew that the police used the camorra to lend a hand at election
time on behalf of the Interior Ministry. In Naples, as in Palermo,
the police and gangsters co-managed crime. For all these reasons,
evidence from policemen received only desultory media coverage.
Yet for the same reasons, the police understood better than
anyone else how the Honoured Society worked. Just as impor-
tantly, because of their acrimonious rivalry with the Carabinieri,
the police who gave evidence in the Cuocolo trial had no corpo-
rate interest in backing up either the Carabinieri’s textbook
account of the camorra, or Abbatemaggio’s story. So, in retro-
spect, the picture of the camorra the police gave the Viterbo jury
becomes all the more credible — a picture of a criminal organisa-
tion that was already in serious decline before Gennaro Cuocolo
and his wife were knifed to death.
Take agent Ludovico Simonetti, who spent four years as a
street cop in Big ’Enry’s own quarter of the city. Simonetti had
no problem admitting to the judge in Lucca that the police
regularly used camorra informers, and he was happy to confirm
Big ’Enry’s leading rank inside the criminal organisation. But
Simonetti’s evidence was most interesting where it diverged from
the prosecution’s line; it displays none of the frozen, ‘idiot’s
guide’ quality of what Captain Fabroni and the ‘gramophone’
testified.
Agent Simonetti explained that the Honoured Society was
founded on two principles: dividing the profits of crime out
among the members; and blind obedience or omerta. ‘The
camorra was so powerful that it could be called a state within a
state.’ Was so powerful: the camorra’s supremacy was emphati-
cally a thing of the past. Simonetti went on to say that the
principles upon which the criminal sect had been founded were
crumbling.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Now the booty goes to whoever did the job, not to the
collectivity. Except on the odd occasion when some more
energetic boss manages to extract a bribe. The underworld
doesn’t have the blind obedience it once did: there are no
longer any punishments.

Agent Simonetti pinpoints a crucial new weakness here. The

Honoured Society had lost its ability systematically to ‘tax’ crimi-
nals — to extract bribes from them, in other words. Once, by
means of this kind of extortion, camorristi had presided over
petty criminals in the same way that a state presides over its
subjects. Now that the power to tax crime had faded, the camorra
was beginning to look like just one gang among many. For that
reason, it had become more vulnerable to the kind of humdrum
underworld rivalries that regularly tore other gangs apart. Blind
obedience had gone.
Simonetti made it clear that clusters of camorristi still did all
the things they had done for decades: robbing, pimping, loan
sharking, rigging auctions, bullying voters, extorting money from
traders, running the numbers racket. Almost all the most impor-
tant fences in the city were still members of the Honoured Society.
Camorristi still respected one another. The individual camorra
cells in each quarter of the city still existed. But these days their
power came simply from the ferocity and charisma of the indi-
vidual criminals. In Simonetti’s words, the camorra as an ‘organ-
ised collectivity’ did not exist any more.
The old sacraments were losing their magic. In the past, for a
criminal to be elevated to membership of the Honoured Society
was a life-changing rite of passage. Now existing members used
the initiation ritual as a way of flattering other hoods and whee-
dling cash out of them. As agent Simonetti put it, ‘Once it was
a serious business that required a blood baptism. Now it’s just
a baptism in wine.’
Other grassroots police officers enriched Simonetti’s account.
One of them, Giovanni Catalano, had often seen Abbatemaggio

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eating pizza with Big ’Enry, Johnny the Teacher and other top
camorristi in the old days. The camorra certainly still existed,
Catalano went on to stress: in virtually every convicted felon’s
police file there was a telegram from a prison governor wanting
to know if the crook in question was a member of the Honoured
Society so he could be put in the segregated wing reserved for
camorristi. But, Catalano went on, the potboilers on the camorra
that filled the shelves of Neapolitan bookshops were based on
out of date sources, and designed only to satisfy ‘readers’ morbid
curiosity’. The chiefs of the Honoured Society were simply not
capable of imposing total obedience now. Camorra tribunals had
gone for good. The very fact that a camorrista like Gennaro
Abbatemaggio could go over to the law was itself a sign of how
much things had changed.
The most vivid police testimony of all was the last. A third
officer, Felice Ametta, began by joking that he had started his
career at the same time as many of the men in the cage had
started theirs. He reeled off a list of the Honoured Society’s top
bosses since he had first arrived in Naples in 1893; he knew them
all. But this was a time of crisis for the organisation, a time of
infighting. Ametta then recalled the bizarre and revealing incident
that led directly to the rise of the new supreme boss, Big ’Enry,
an incident that beautifully encapsulates the divided state of the
camorra in the early years of the twentieth century.
Needless to say, Big ’Enry was listening intently as Ametta
began to tell his tale to the court.
The story revolved around a thief who wanted to be admitted
to the Honoured Society. What made his case unusual and contro-
versial was that many camorristi suspected the thief of being a
pederast. In the old days there would have been no debate: cuck-
olded husbands, thieves and pederasts were all banned. Accord-
ingly, the then contaiuolo (bookkeeper) of the Honoured Society
invoked the old rules and obstinately refused to make him a
member. But opinion within the camorra was split; the ‘pederast’
-was lobbying hard among his camorrista friends. The dispute

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Mafia Brotherhoods

rumbled on until one evening, in a tavern in the Forcella quarter,

the ‘pederast’ provoked a fight in which the contaiuolo suffered
serious head injuries. The Honoured Society was suddenly on
the brink of a civil war.
Felice Ametta heard news of this potentially explosive rift soon
after the fight. Hard-nosed cop that he was, and very used to the
business of using the camorra to manage crime, he called Big
’Enry in for a meeting in a coffee bar in via Tribunali.
Hardly had these words sounded across the Lucca courtroom,
than the jury swivelled in their seats at the sound of Big ’Enry
detonating with rage.

Called me in for a meeting? I’m no stoolie! Never! I’'d go

to jail a thousand times before I stained myself by
arranging a meeting with a policeman!

From a man who denied even being a camorrista, this was a

highly revealing outburst.
When calm was restored, Ametta went on to explain that Big
’Enry took control of the Honoured Society at precisely this
delicate moment, presenting himself as the man who could bring
about peace. His leadership platform involved turning the clock
back. In Ametta’s words

Big "Enry wanted to found a kind of old-style camorra,

with rigid regulations and statutes, with a tribunal
including two advocates for first trials, four advocates for
appeal hearings and a general secretary.

There were guffaws when the court heard this elevated legal
vocabulary being applied to the sordid affairs of hoodlums. But
Ametta’s point was a serious and extremely insightful one. What
he was implying was that the textbook camorra as Captain
Fabroni and Gennaro Abbatemaggio had portrayed it in Viterbo
was no longer a reality on the streets of Naples. Instead it existed

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only as a political project put forward by a new leader desperate

— for his own selfish reasons, no doubt — to hold the Honoured
Society’s rapidly fragmenting structure together.
Thus when Big ’Enry was arrested, the last paladin of the old
order was brought down and the Honoured Society was allowed
to fall into ruin. The Cuocolo trial did not exactly destroy the
camorra, it destroyed the only man who still believed in the
camorra, who still wanted to take the criminological textbooks
on the Honoured Society and make reality fit them once more.
The street cops who gave evidence at the Cuocolo trial give
us a close-up description of the Honoured Society’s decline. But
being street cops, they did not have to try and explain that decline.
So their vivid evidence begs a bit of educated guesswork from
the historian.
In essence, it seems, the old Honoured Society could not cope
with the way Naples was modernising. With Italy becoming more
democratic, politicians were gaining access to greater sources of
patronage of jobs, housing, and other favours. As a result, under-
government could reach further down inté the low city, competing
with the camorra to win clienteles among the poor. The camorra’s
bosses were unable to respond by mutating into a ‘high camorra’,
by producing their own politicians, by becoming the state rather
than just performing services for pieces of the state. The
Honoured Society remained at heart what it had always been: a
criminal elite among the ragged poor. The leap from the tene-
ments to the salons was just too great. And in the new more
democratic age, when Neapolitan political life became as visible
as it was volatile, the camorra had no political mask, leaving it
too conspicuous and isolated to survive a serious onslaught by
the forces of order. In short: the top camorristi might put on
their straw-yellow gloves, but they could not cover the scars on
their faces.
Here a comparison with the Honoured Societies of Calabria
and Sicily is instructive. The picciotteria shared the camorra’s
lowly origins. But they did rapidly merge with local politics

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Mafia Brotherhoods

and — just as importantly — Calabria was all but invisible to

public opinion in the rest of the country. The Sicilian mafia
orbited around a city that rivalled Naples for its importance to
national political life: Italy could not be governed if Palermo
and Naples were not governed. Yet unlike the camorra, the
mafia had its own politicians, its Raffaele Palizzolos and Leon-
ardo Avellones, to say nothing of the Prime Ministers and
shipping magnates who were its friends. Even the mafia’s killers
could rely on being shrouded by the elite if they fell foul of the
law. Big ’Enry and the other camorristi were left naked by
comparison.
Camorra legend has it that not long after the Cuocolo verdict,
on the evening of 25 May rors, the few remaining camorristi
met in a cellar bar in the Sanita area of the city and dissolved
the Honoured Society forever.

What of Gennaro Abbatemaggio? Once the newsreel cameras

had ceased to whirr, the man who had snuffed out the Honoured
Society followed an eccentric and even self-destructive path
through life. The redemption parable that he tried to sell to the
Viterbo jury would return to mock him.
Abbatemaggio was caught defrauding two members of the
Cuocolo trial jury in a strange deal to buy some cheese, and
spent time in jail as a result. Subsequently, during the Great War,
he won a sergeant’s stripes with the arditi (‘the audacious’), a
volunteer corps of shock troops who raided trenches with grenade
and dagger. In 1919 he returned victorious from the front into
the arms of the wife who had reputedly saved him from a life
of crime — only to discover that she had been having an affair
with one of the Carabinieri ordered to protect him from the
camorra’s vengeance. His marriage fell apart, and he attempted
suicide in January 1920.
Then came Fascism. Abbatemaggio embraced the Fascist

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 The strange death of the Honoured Society

revolution in Florence, murdering and plundering with one of

Mussolini’s most militant and corrupt squads.
Perhaps, through all these vicissitudes, Gennaro Abbatemaggio
was trying to make a fresh start, to fashion a new self. If so, his
efforts failed. Something was gnawing away inside his mind. On
9 May 1927, he finally found release from the inner torment when
he deposited a statement with a lawyer in Rome. The statement
began as follows.

I feel it is my duty, dictated by my conscience, to make

the following declaration. I do so belatedly, but still in
time to bring an end to the worst miscarriage of justice
in the legal annals of the world.
I proclaim that the defendants found guilty in the
Cuocolo trial are innocent.

The man Big ’Enry had called ‘the gramophone’ went on to

explain that he had played a pre-recorded lie of fabulous
complexity and detail in Viterbo. The reason he had made up
all that evidence was that the Carabinieri had threatened to charge
him with the Cuocolo murders unless he helped them. They had
arranged his release from prison and given him money and
wedding presents. They had bribed key defence witnesses and
leading journalists, spending a grand total of 300,000 Lire on
sweeteners during the case. In particular, they had spent 40,000
Lire on a bung for I/ Mattino editor Edoardo Scarfoglio who, in
return for this hearty contribution towards the cost of running
his yacht, became the prosecution’s cheerleader through the whole
affair. °
The trial that destroyed the Honoured Society of Naples was
a giant bluff. An early release was rapidly granted to the camor-
risti convicted a decade and a half earlier — or at least to those
who had not died or gone insane in the interim.
The uncertainties about the Cuocolo case remain legion to
this day, Ultimately, there is no way to tell whether even Gennaro

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Abbatemaggio’s 1927 confession exposed the full facts. He was

an unreliable witness in Viterbo, and is doomed to remain one.
We still cannot know for certain whether Big ’Enry and his crew
murdered the Cuocolo couple. We still cannot explain the sheer
ferocity with which the Cuocolos were slain that June night in
1906. Why stab Gennaro Cuocolo so many times? Why move his
body and put it on display? Why mutilate his wife’s genitals?
Why risk the public outcry and political pressure that would
inevitably follow such unprecedented acts of butchery?
My own view, for what it is worth, is that Big Enry was indeed
guilty: the Carabinieri got the right man, but fabricated the
evidence they needed to convict him. Even the street cops who
testified in Lucca thought that the Cuocolo murders were a
camorra vendetta.
The Cuocolo murders might make sense as part of Big ’Enry’s
political project, his plan to inject new vigour into the Honoured
Society’s wilting traditions. Big ’Enry’s reasoning in the run-up
to the murders ran along the following lines. Gennaro Cuocolo
used to be a big player in the Honoured Society, an impresario
of highly lucrative burglaries. But he had left the camorra and
gone his own way; he now belonged to a bigger, less rule-bound
criminal world. His wife could now be a partner rather than a
streetwalker to be exploited and expended as camorra traditions
demanded. Gennaro Cuocolo therefore represented a double
threat: he was both a rival in the struggle to control the strategic
market in stolen goods; and he was a living demonstration that
the Honoured Society was falling apart. So camorra justice had
to be done as it was in the old days. More flagrantly than the
old days. More savagely than the old days. In a last, hopeless
attempt to bring back the old days.
Whoever really murdered the Cuocolos, the whole affair
became an awkward and contested memory for Naples.
Abbatemaggio’s final confession certainly reversed the verdicts,
but in doing so it only compounded the debacle. Thus, even in
Italy’s epoch-making moment of victory over the Neapolitan

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 The strange death of the Honoured Society

Honoured Society, truth and the law had been disgraced. For that
reason, among many others, the camorra was destined to enjoy
a long and bloody afterlife.

oe
Between the crises of the 1890s and the First World War, Italy
had lurched towards democracy and an open arena for public
debate in the press. At the same time it had tried to fight organ-
ised crime. The results, in both cases, were distinctly mixed.
Italy entered the Great War as a deeply divided country. It
emerged from it victorious, but on the brink of falling apart: its
fragile democracy soon collapsed under the political strains that
were the war’s immediate legacy. Fascism took power. And where
democracy failed in the battle with organised crime, Fascist dicta-
torship would trumpet success.
Two weeks after Gennaro Abbatemaggio’s final confession, on
26 May 1927, Benito Mussolini delivered one of the most impor-
tant speeches of his life — the Ascension Day speech, as it was
known. In it he welded his political credibility to the war against
gangsters with more conviction than any of his liberal predeces-
sors. Not only that, he proclaimed that the end of mob rule on
Italian territory was imminent.

289
MUSSOLINI'S SCALPEL
1922-1943
Sicily: The last struggle with the
mafia

Fascism was founded in March 1919 by a handful of aggressively

nationalistic war veterans in Milan. The first stage of the move-
ment’s rise was the most overtly violent: Fascist squads broke
strikes, ransacked trades union offices, killed and crippled selected
leftists, and generally posed as defenders of the Patria against
the red menace. The typical squadrista dressed in a black shirt
and fez and his signature weapons were the cudgel and the can
of castor-oil, an industrial lubricant that was force-fed to victims,
bringing on violent stomach cramps and diarrhoea.
Many industrialists and landowners were delighted at this
ruthless purge of the Left. Prefects and senior police officers often
stood by and did nothing. The old schemers in parliament were
confident that they could domesticate the black-shirted bully-boys
once the left-wing subversives had been humbled.
Mussolini soon showed that this confidence was badly
misplaced. In October 1922, the Duce staged the ‘March on
Rome’, daring a vacillating government to hand over power to
him, or face a black-shirted invasion of the capital and the risk
of civil war. Mussolini did not blink, and was duly installed as
Prime Minister.
Before the March on Rome, the Blackshirt movement was
overwhelmingly concentrated in the north and centre of Italy.
However, when Fascism took power, it suddenly found that it
had won lots of new southern supporters. With their traditional
shamelessness, the old political grandees of southern Calabria
and western Sicily, along with their mafia election-managers and

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Mafia Brotherhoods

tawdry clienteles, rushed to cosy up to Fascism now that it prom-

ised access to the Roman patronage trough. In the south, the
Partito Nazionale Fascista risked being hollowed out into an alibi
for the same old politics of faction and favour that so suited the
gangsters. The few original Fascists were dismayed. Just a few
weeks after the March on Rome, the Fascist groups in Reggio
Calabria and Palmi were found to be suffering from ‘acute factio-
nitis’. In Sicily, early uptake Blackshirts decried the ‘Fascistised
mafias’ that now took control of some town councils.
Fascism welcomed fairweather supporters like these in the early
days. But Mussolini had bigger ambitions. In 1924 he changed
electoral law to guarantee the Partito Nazionale Fascista an
outright parliamentary majority. Just a few weeks after the subse-
quent election victory, Fascist agents kidnapped and murdered
the Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti. Outrage spread
across the country. But once again the King and leading liberal
politicians vacillated at the prospect of throwing the Duce out.
Democracy’s last chance had gone. On 3 January 1925 Mussolini
declared himself dictator. Now he looked south to find an exem-
plary enemy for his new regime: the mafia. The fight against
criminal associations was now a vital front in the Duce’s bellig-
erent nation-building project.
As so often, the tempo of criminal history was set in Sicily:
in October 1925 Mussolini bestowed full powers to attack the
mafia across the whole island on an ambitious northern policeman
called Cesare Mori. Mori had dragged himself up the career
ladder from nowhere, or rather from the orphanage in Pavia,
near Milan, where he had been brought up. The Sicilian mission
was his chance to make history; history has come to know him
as the ‘Iron Prefect’ and his anti-mafia campaign as the Mori
Operation.
The Iron Prefect began with a highly publicised assault on the
hilltop town of Gangi, at the very eastern edge of the province
of Palermo. All access to Gangi was denied, all communications
cut. Criminals were flushed out of their hiding places with flagrant

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 Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia

ruthlessness: their women and children were taken hostage, their

goods sold off for pennies, their cattle butchered in the town
square. There were as many as 450 arrests.
The Mori Operation involved deploying the same methods
among the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro, and among the
many mafia-infested satellite towns of Palermo like Bagheria,
Monreale, Corleone and Partinico. The roundups continued into
the provinces of Agrigento, Caltanissetta and Enna.
The Mori Operation was still in full swing when the Duce
decided it was time to tell the world about what he had achieved.

jo
On 26 May 1927 — for Catholics, the anniversary of Jesus’s ascent
into heaven — Italy witnessed a little apotheosis of its own.
With his barrel chest and bull neck jemmied into a frock coat
and wing collar, Mussolini entered the Chamber of Deputies to
be greeted with volleys of cheering and applause. The effusive
reception was to be expected: this was now the Duce’s fifth year
in power, and Italy’s parliament had been entirely tamed. All the
same, this was not a routine institutional event. The speech
Mussolini was about to give was heralded as the most important
he had ever delivered: a progress bulletin on the building of the
world’s first Fascist dictatorship. To mark the occasion, the ushers
set a huge bouquet of roses before Mussolini’s chair. And to
mark the occasion, the dictator modulated his usual pout and
strut. Toying almost meditatively with one of the roses, he
addressed the chamber in a low, even voice.
Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech betrayed what the New York
Times diagnosed as ‘signs of increasing megalomania’. But the
speech was also undeniably seductive to many Italian ears. In 1922,
Mussolini asserted, the Fascists had inherited a democratic governing
apparatus that was shambolic, weak and seedy; it was merely ‘a
badly organised system of Prefects’ offices in which each Prefect’s
only worry was how to hustle votes effectively’. In five short years,

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Mussolini claimed, his regime had done ‘something enormous,

epoch-making, and monumental’: for the first time since the fall
of the Roman Empire, it had established genuine government
authority over the Italian people. The Fascist regime had finally
imposed order and discipline on an Italy debilitated for so long by
politicking and corruption. The country now marched as one to
the thumping beat of a totalitarian ideology: ‘Everything within
the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state.’
The supreme authority of the state was Fascism’s blazon motif.
The Sicilian mafia constituted a state within a state. Therefore
Fascism and the mafia were on a collision course.
A centrepiece of the Ascension Day speech was Mussolini’s
proud bulletin on the Mori Operation. Sicily, he told parliament,
was lying on the operating table, its torso sliced open by the
Duce’s ‘scalpel’ so that the cancer of delinquency was exposed.
Thousands of suspected mafiosi had been captured in tens of
Sicilian towns and villages. The result was a dramatic fall-off in
crime. Murders had come down from 675 in 1923 to 299 in 1926,
and episodes of cattle rustling from 696 to 126 over the same
period. The Duce fired off more statistics before concluding with
an oratorical flourish.

Someone is bound to ask me, ‘When will the struggle

against the mafia come to an end?’
It will come to an end not just when there are no longer
any mafiosi, but when Sicilians can no longer even
remember the mafia.

Here was a long-awaited show of political willpower: there was

to be ‘no holding back’ against the mafia that was ‘dishonouring
Sicily’, in Mussolini’s words. After six decades of collusion and
connivance, Italy seemed finally to have a leader who made it
priority business to destroy the country’s most notorious criminal
organisation.
Mussolini’s scalpel continued to slice into the island’s flesh for

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 Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia

another two years after the Ascension Day speech: by 1928,

according to some calculations, there had been 11,000 arrests.
Then in June 1929, the Iron Prefect was recalled to Rome. His
part of the job of eradicating the mafia, Mussolini declared, had
been completed; it was up to the judiciary to finish off the task.
A long cycle of major mafia trials, the biggest of them with 450
defendants, began in 1927 and would not come to an end until
1932. By that time many people felt able to talk about the Sicilian
mafia in the past tense. Among them was the Iron Prefect himself.
Cesare Mori published a memoir in 1932 and it was rapidly
translated into English with the title The Last Struggle with the
Mafia. Having brandished the scalpel against organised crime in
Sicily, Mori now took up the chisel, with the intention of carving
his own narrative of the mafia’s demise into the marble of history.
The Iron Prefect told his readers that Sicilian psychology, which
he called ‘childlike’, was at the root of the mafia problem. Sicil-
ians, Mori believed, were easily impressed by haughty figures like
mafiosi. So to win the Sicilians over, the Fascist state had awed
them; it out-mafiaed the mafia; it had’ given itself a physical
presence, and become embodied in men tougher and more char-
ismatic than the mafiosi themselves — men like Cesare Mori.
The Iron Prefect was sceptical about the theory that the mafia
was a sworn criminal association, an Honoured Society.

The Mafia, as I am describing it, is a peculiar way of

looking at things and of acting which, through mental
and spiritual affinities, brings together in definite unhealthy
attitudes men of a particular temperament, isolating them
from their surroundings into a kind of caste . . . There
are no marks of recognition; they are unnecessary. The
mafiosi know one another partly by their jargon, but
mostly by instinct. There are no statutes. The law of
omerta and tradition are enough. There is no election of
chiefs, for the chiefs arise of their own accord and impose
themselves. There are no rules of admission.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

In order to repress this ‘peculiar way of looking at things’, a

certain amount of brutality was necessary, if regrettable. With
their awe-inspiring toughness, Mori wrote, the great roundups
of 1926 and 1927 caused the felons’ morale to crumple.

Dismayed and panic-stricken, they fell like flies, with no

other gesture of resistance but a feeble attempt at flight
to well-concealed hiding places. They were all struck
down.

If Mori had bothered to follow the trials that had just concluded
in Palermo, he would have found reams of evidence that the
mafia was indeed more than a ‘mental and spiritual affinity’
between men with an ‘unhealthy attitude’. But that did not matter
much now. In his book’s closing lines, Mori declared that Sicily,
having won its last struggle with organised crime, had now begun
an ‘irresistible march towards her victorious destiny’.
The Iron Prefect was showily magnanimous to those he had
vanquished and imprisoned, expressing the hope that mafiosi
would ‘come back to the bosom of their families better and wiser
men, and then spend their life in honest toil until the mantle of
forgiveness and oblivion is thrown over the past’. If the island
had not yet had the mafia erased from its memory, as Mussolini
promised, then that day could at least be envisaged with confi-
dence. Fascism had beaten the mafia. Whatever the mafia was.
So confident was the regime of its success that, in the autumn
of 1932, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Fascist
March on Rome, hundreds of mafiosi convicted during the Mori
Operation were released in an amnesty. The Sicilian mafia’s
history was not quite over yet.

298
Campania: Buffalo soldiers

What remained of the camorra after it was dismantled by the

Cuocolo trial? Although the trial marked the end of the Honoured
Society, it did not eliminate gang crime in some of the city’s nerve
centres, such as the wholesale markets or the docks at Bagnoli,
where extortion and smuggling were endemic.
Another thing that survived was the myth of the good camor-
rista. Risen from among the poor, the good camorrista enforced
a rough and ready justice in the alleyways, or so it was believed.
Above everything else, such ‘men of respect’ protected the honour
of women. One tale became an archetype in popular memory:
the camorrista who, seeing a local girl seduced and abandoned,
collars her rogue innamorato and forces him to do the decent
thing. With telling and retelling, such stories hardened into a
tableau utterly removed from reality and impervious to contrary
evidence. What camorra honour had really meant for women
was pimping, beatings, and disfigurement.
When the camorristi of the Honoured Society had gone, guappi
were invested with the aura of ‘men of respect’. A guappo was
a street-corner boss. He may have lacked the formal investiture
of Honoured Society membership; he may have lacked contacts
with a brotherhood far beyond the alleys of his tiny fief. But the
typical guappo certainly carried on in much the same way as the
typical camorrista had done: contraband, usury, pimping,
receiving stolen goods and of course farming his turf for votes.
Many guappi were former camorristi, or the sons of
camorristt.
But to discover the real forebears of the cocaine barons,
building industry gangsters and political fixers who make up the

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camorra today, we need to return for a moment to the days of

the Cuocolo trial; more importantly, we need to leave Naples
and explore a very different criminal landscape.
On 4 August 1911, two jewellers, father and son, were waylaid
by armed robbers on the fruit-tree lined road leading out of
Nola, a town perhaps 30 kilometres north-east of Naples. There
was a struggle when the father refused to give up the jewellery
he was carrying. The attackers responded by shooting his son
several times in the face, causing the old man to faint with shock.
It was the kind of crime that would not normally have generated
a great deal of interest in Naples. But with the Cuocolo trial
priming the public’s taste for camorra stories, journalists were
drawn out into the countryside to cover the story. Nola, after all,
hosted the livestock market where Big ’Enry sourced the mules
he once sold to the British army fighting the Boers.
Even I] Mattino’s wonder-worn hacks were taken aback by
what they found when they got there: ‘a reign of terror, a kind
of martial law’. The territory around Nola displayed all the
telltale symptoms of a well-rooted criminal organisation: large
numbers of crimes unsolved and unreported (meaning that
witnesses and victims were being intimidated); vines and fruit
trees cut down (meaning that extortion demands had been made).
Mayors who tried to do something about the growing power of
the bosses had been beaten up. An uncooperative priest had had
his arms broken. Any man who protested to the authorities was
liable to have his wife or daughter kidnapped, or his house or
business dynamited. Bandits openly patrolled the roads, their
rifles slung over their shoulders. And according to the police there
was an organisation of only too-150 men behind it all; they
formed a federation of gangs, and divided the booty from their
crimes equally.
For all these terrifying details, I/ Mattino’s exposé barely
skimmed the surface. Mobsters infiltrated the fields, market towns
and supply routes that enveloped and nourished Naples. Camor-
risti were active down the coast in Castellammare and Salerno

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 Campania: Buffalo soldiers

and in Nocera, Sarno and Palma Campania just beyond Mount

Vesuvius. But the problem was at its worst to the city’s north, in
a vast expanse of hyper-productive land that catered for virtually
every item on the Neapolitan menu. From the livestock centre of
Nola in the east; to Acerra, which was particularly known for
its cannellini beans and for the eel that flourished in its water
courses; to the peach orchards around Giugliano; on to Marano,
with its peas; and then up the coast to Mondragone, which was
known for its onions, endive and chicory. All around Naples a
population of farmers, guards, butchers, cart-drivers, brokers
and speculators doubled as extortionists, vandals, fraudsters,
smugglers, armed robbers and murderers. Out here, the line
between legitimate and illegitimate business scarcely had a
meaning: theft and racketeering were as valid a source of income
as squeezing a profit from the peasantry.
But of all the agricultural bounty that issued from the Neapol-
itan hinterland, one product was more tightly controlled by hoods
than any other.
South of the Garigliano river, north-west of Naples, there lay
a malaria-cursed wilderness called the Mazzoni. Lush, flat, inter-
minable and oppressively quiet, the Mazzoni were pocked by
quagmires. The land’s other features were few and strange. An
isolated water channel threaded through lines of poplar trees; or
a dust road, white as a scar, tracing a bullet-straight path to the
horizon. Solitary herders were the only travellers: they galloped
with their bellies flat to their ponies’ bare backs, as if they had
fled a stable fire and forgotten to stop. Once in a while the dust
they kicked up would settle upon a bridge over a reed-choked
ditch, with a gate propped between two posts. These marked the
entrance to a difesa, in the local parlance — literally a ‘defence’
— which was a kind of boggy farm. Inside, beyond holm oak and
cane thicket, were the buffalo: black, short-haired and massive,
they stood in filthy water and glowered at nothing through the
shimmering air. At the centre of each compound there was a
thatched, whitewashed single-storey shed. Inside, where the air

301
Mafia Brotherhoods

was gamey with the reek of buffalo milk, the herders thumbed
mozzarella cheese into balls and dropped them into brine tuns
ready for the journey to market in Santa Maria Capua Vetere.
Sallow and sullen with fever, the herdsmen worked the difese
in teams, living little better than their animals, not seeing their
womenfolk for weeks or months on end. Their boss, known as
a minorente, was a rough and ready entrepreneur. Naples and
Caserta paid good money for the creamily fragrant cheeses that
miraculously issued from the muck and stench of the Mazzoni.
The boss rented his difesa from a landowner who was probably
too scared to go anywhere near his property. For the Mazzoni
were among the most lawless areas in the whole of Italy, and the
herdsmen who made the mozzarella also made much of the
trouble. In 1909, a government inquiry into agriculture evoked
the teams of buffalo herdsmen in the Mazzoni in the language
of folk terror. ‘For centuries these local tribes have hated one
another and fought one another like prehistoric peoples.’
Yet as so often in Italy, lazy talk of ‘primitives’ served only to
mask a far-from-primitive criminal logic. Violence was integral
to the buffalo dairy economy. Bosses intimidated their competi-
tors so they could negotiate a lower rent with the landowner.
The herders set up protection rackets: if their threatening letters
were not understood, they slaughtered buffalo, cut down trees,
and burned buildings until they had made their position clear.
Highway robbery was a constant risk for the men taking the
cheese to market, and bringing the money back. In other words,
mozzarella was for the Mazzoni what lemons were for Palermo’s
Conca d’Oro.
During the Cuocolo trial, I/ Mattino reporters visited the |
Mazzoni to be cursorily horrified by the ‘crass ignorance’ and
‘bloodthirsty instincts’ of the buffalo herdsmen. What they failed
to mention was that the camorra in the Mazzoni, and in the
Aversa area between the Mazzoni and Naples, was integral to a
political and business machine whose handles were cranked by
the local Member of Parliament, Giuseppe Romano, known as

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 Campania: Buffalo soldiers

Peppuccio (‘Little Joey’). It just so happened that Little Joey was

a friend of I/ Mattino editor, Edoardo Scarfoglio.
Despite the obliging reserve of Scarfoglio’s journalists, Little
Joey’s career was doomed. Partly as a result of the fuss around
the Cuocolo trial, he became too notorious to be tolerated even
by Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (the ‘Minister of the Under-
world’) who had been happy to accept his support in the past.
During the 1913 national elections, there was an anti-camorra
campaign in Little Joey’s constituency (the cavalry were sent into
the Mazzoni), and he was unseated. But with Little Joey out of
the way, gangster life in the Neapolitan hinterland returned to
normal.
From the Mazzoni to Nola, and down beyond Mount Vesuvius,
camorristi were as at home in the towns and villages around
Naples as they were in the prisons and alleys of the city itself.
Indeed, there were close ties between the rural and urban organi-
sations. The tomatoes, lettuces, salami and mozzarella that camor-
risti cornered in the countryside went first to the criminal cartels
who controlled little portions of the city’s wholesale distribution.
It was all staggeringly inefficient, a system designed only to fatten
the cut taken by middlemen. Poor Naples paid cruelly high food
prices as a result. But official Italy hardly took any notice.
Until Fascism, that is.
During his Ascension Day speech in 1927, Mussolini introduced
parliament to the Mazzoni. He assumed, naturally enough, that
his audience would not have heard of them before: who in his
right mind would bother leaving the city to find out where the
delicious mozzarella actually came from?

The Mazzoni are a land that lies between the provinces

of Rome and Naples: they are a marshy terrain, a malarial
steppe.

The inhabitants, the Duce continued, had a terrible reputation

even in ancient times: latrones, they were called in Latin

393
Mafia Brotherhoods

— ‘highwaymen’ or ‘brigands’. As was his wont, Mussolini then

hurled statistics: between 1922 and 1926, the Mazzoni had seen
169 murders and 404 instances of extortion-related vandalism.
But the Fascist scalpel was already cutting away at this millennial
legacy of lawlessness. The Duce’s orders had been abrupt: ‘Free
me from this delinquency with iron and fire!’ Now, with yet
another salvo of statistics, the Duce could announce the triumph
of state authority: 1,699 underworld figures had been arrested in
the Mazzoni; just to the south, among the vines and fruit trees
of Aversa, another 1,278 had been brought to book. In rural
Campania, just as in Sicily, Fascism was on the verge of victory.
The press called it Fascism’s campaign of ‘moral drainage’ in
the bogs of the Mazzoni. The man charged with conducting the
campaign was Major Vincenzo Anceschi, a fifty-year-old Carab-
iniere. Anceschi was the son of a Carabiniere, and his own son
would become one too: a lineage that testifies to the devotion
that the Arma, as Italians call this military police force, can
inspire in its members. Anceschi’s anti-camorra operation was
huge, entirely comparable to what Mori was doing in Sicily:
between December 1926 and May 1928, 9,143 people were
arrested and two suspects died in gunfights with the
Carabinieri.
Anceschi’s men patrolled the countryside in mounted squads,
disarming notoriously dangerous families, arresting renegades
and breaking up corrupt factions in local government. Although
the toughest assignments were in the Mazzoni, their roundups
also included the countryside as far east as Nola.
Anceschi could hardly have known this territory better: he was
born in Giugliano, right on the edge of the Mazzoni. And on
New Year’s Eve 1926 he deployed that local knowledge in his
most spectacular strike, at a gangland funeral that was intended
to be a show of force, just like the Honoured Society funerals
of the 1890s in Naples.
Vincenzo Serra was the most notorious camorrista in the Aversa
countryside. An elegant figure with a lordly bearing, he had spent

304
 Musolino’s sister Ippolita.
According fo police, she
had also been oathed
into the Calabrian mafia.

{ i i * 4

) | BBR < e 2 A
I wee | cy
i i " } La u On a ‘ bs is r Be gy p Ue.

A scene from the Musolino frial in Lucca, 1902. Despite his ferocious deeds, he aroused much public sympathy.
‘Poor Musolino!’ wrote one leading man of letters. ‘I'd like fo write a poem that shows how every one of us has a!
Musolino inside.’
 Emanuele Notarbartolo, the honest Sicilian
banker stabbed to death by the mafia in 1893.

Giuseppe Fontana, citrus

fruit entrepreneur, mafioso
and alleged assassin of
Emanuele Notarbarfolo.

Raffaele Patizolo, the mafia politician strongly

suspected of ordering the Notarbartolo murder.
He was phofographed only reluctantly, complaining,
"We have become the object of public curiosity’.

Poor Sicilians summoned to

chilly Milan to give evidence in
the first Notarbartolo murder
trial. Fourteen of them were
hospitalised with bronchitis, and
one died. A local newspaper
took pity on them and arranged
a collection.
 Ses
SS

The accused arrive in Viterbo for the most sensational camorra trial in history, 1911. Following the brutal slaying
of a former camorrista and his wife, the Cuocolo case generated worldwide interest. The man in the bowler hat is
Luigi Fucci, ‘the fizy drink man’, and nominally the supreme boss of the Honoured Society.

The stool-pigeon who

destroyed the camorra:
a dapper Gennaro
Abbatemaggio gives
evidence from the cage
built to protect him from
his former comrades,
1911.

axe
i
 Captain Carlo Fabroni, who turned the
Cuocolo murder case info an assault on
the whole Honoured Society.

Enrico Alfano, or ‘Erricone’ (’Big ‘Enry’).

The camorra’s dominant boss, and the
principal defendant in Viterbo.

| A CONTRAST TO THE DECORUM OF A BRITISH CRIMINAL TRIAL: TURBULENCE IN THE CAMORRA CASE.

visorder in court. The chaofic scenes at the Cuocolo trial baffle and repulse observers across the world. From The
Ulustrated London News.
 The many faces of ‘Iron Prefect’ Cesare Mori, who spearheaded Mussolini's attack on the Sicilian mafia in
the 1920s.

Wannabe socialite . . . . and friend to the Sicilian aristocracy. i

 ‘Master Joe’ (seated). The Carabiniere who fought the
Calabrian mafia under Mussolini.

Don 'Nfoni Macri (inset), the most powerful of post-war

'ndranghetisti, and Master Joe's dance partner at Polsi.

‘The Fascist Vito Genovese’ (right), the New York boss who enjoyed a
profitable homecoming in Campania in the 1930s and 1940s.

:Afterthe mafia’s defeat 1937: Mussolini pays a triumphal visit fo Sicily to open a new aqueduct. By this time the
island's criminal Families had returned fo full operation under the leadership of Ernesto ‘the generalissimo’
Marasa.
 Wn?

Salvatore Lo Piccolo (above), arrested in November

2007, in possession of a mafia rulebook
(see p.123). Lo Piccolo’s territory included the
Piana dei Colli, where many of the earliest dramas
of the Sicilian mafia’s history took place.

the camorra’s casalesi clan. He was known as

‘Sandokan’, because he looked like a heroic pirate
from a 1970s TV series, Schiavone’s brother Walter
modelled his villa (above) on the house from the final
scene of Scarface. But in Italy, the interplay between
gangster fiction and gangster reality is nothing new.
 Campania: Buffalo soldiers

thirty-six of his seventy years in prison, and was particularly well

known for shooting two Carabinieri in a tea house. Serra died
in Aversa hospital following a mysterious accident. His open
coffin was set up in a ground-floor mortuary, surrounded by
black drapes, exotic plants and fat candles. Hoods from all around
came to pay their respects. They then assembled in the hospital
atrium, where (according to the press) the acting boss decided
their positions according to rank: first the older camorristi; then
the picciotti; and finally the ‘honoured youths’ lugging large
wreaths. Vincenzo Serra’s funeral procession was to be a solemn
collective tableau of a structured criminal organisation.
But it never even began. The Carabinieri simply bolted the
door of the hospital, locking the mobsters in the atrium until
they could be herded onto a truck and taken to prison.
Major Anceschi made something of a speciality of raiding
camorra funerals. This was a dangerous tactic: officers received
frequent death threats. Carabinieri dressed in mufti would mingle
with the crowds, while Anceschi supervised operations from an
unmarked car parked nearby. He had the'car wired so that anyone
who tried to get in uninvited would receive an electric shock. But
the rewards made the risks of this kind of operation worthwhile.
The arrests were important, of course. Perhaps more important
still was the chance to transform a show of force for the camorra
into a show of force for the law.
What these reports suggest is that, even after the Honoured
Society died out in the city of Naples as a result of the Cuocolo
trial, its structures and traditions lived on in the countryside
fifteen years later. Anceschi reported to Mussolini that, in the
Mazzoni, the camorra had ‘a rigid system based on hierarchy
and omerta’. ‘The country around Aversa and Nola’, he went
on, ‘very close to Naples, was a daily destination for the members
of the city’s underworld, which was intimately linked to the rural
criminals’. The countryside had become a kind of life-support
system for urban organised crime.
Anceschi and his men discovered no less than twenty criminal

305
Mafia Brotherhoods

associations and sent 494 men for judgement in eighteen separate

trials, but historians have so far managed to locate only a few
pages of the resulting documentation. Until more research is done
and the archives surrender more of their secrets, we cannot know
exactly what kind of criminal organisations dominated the
Mazzoni, or indeed the successes and failures of Fascism’s ‘moral
drainage’. What seems certain is that there were no further traces
of an Honoured Society in the Neapolitan countryside after the
19208.
To his credit, Major Anceschi gave a proud but sober assess-
ment of his own work in a report to Carabinieri High Command
in May 1928. The roads were now safe, the fields were once again
filled with peasants, and the barrels of mozzarella cheese could
make their way to market without being stolen or ‘taxed’ by the
camorra. Public order was normal, all the way from Mondragone
to Nola — for now. But Anceschi detailed a number of things that
would need to happen before peace could settle definitively over
this troubled territory. Extraordinary policing would need to
continue. In the ‘malign and fearful moorland’ of the Mazzoni,
there would have to be education, land reclamation, and road
building. Above all — and here lay the most uncomfortable
message for the Fascist state — there would have to be much more
careful supervision of the personnel within both the government
bureaucracy and the Fascist Party. Anceschi’s operation had
courageously exposed a number of corrupt functionaries who
tried to influence the magistrature on behalf of camorristi, and
who were involved in obscure dealings with the Freemasonry. The
report ended with a brusque imperative: ‘Prevent political infil-
tration in favour of organised crime.’
Despite Major Anceschi’s caution, Mussolini decided by the
late 1920s that the camorra, like the mafia, had been beaten. He
also decided that he had solved the whole Southern Question —
the persistent scandal of the backwardness, poverty and corrup-
tion of Italy’s south. Further public discussion of these issues
was therefore pointless. So pointless that it was banned. Between

306
 Campania: Buffalo soldiers

1931 and 1933, the head of the Duce’s press corps wrote frequently
to newspaper editors exhorting them not to print the words
‘southern Italy’ and ‘Mezzogiorno’ (another term for the south).
From now on, Fascism would have other concerns: building a
cult of the Duce, for example, and militarising the Italian people
in preparation for imperial war. From this point on, whatever
surprises mafia history might have in store were to be stifled by
a subservient media.

397
Calabria: The flying boss of
Antonimina

Domenico Noto had a lovely time in the Great War. Not for him
the lice and shrapnel that millions of his fellow countrymen
endured in the trenches scoured into the Alpine foothills between
1915 and 1918. Most of the Italians recruited to fight Austria
were country folk, barely literate, whose mental horizon simply
could not encompass the reasons for this mechanised slaughter.
Noto had a loftier perspective. He had a good secondary school
education, and used it to become a non-commissioned aviator.
His duty was to patrol the breathtaking skies between Calabria
and Sicily on the look out for Austrian mines in the Straits below.
On one occasion he even overflew his home village of Antonimina,
which clings to an Aspromonte outcrop above Calabria’s Ionian
coast. Noto’s gesture won him the lasting reverence of the
herdsmen who had shaded their eyes to see the local prodigy
soar by. Aviators were the very epitome of a dashing, virile
modernity. Domenico Noto seemed like the harbinger of a heroic
Italian future. And he even had a good disciplinary record during
the war.
Which is why it is striking that, on 19 December 1922 (that
is, just after Mussolini became Prime Minister) Noto was
convicted of being the boss of the local mafia. If the judges in
the case are to be believed, Noto drew on his prestige as a wartime
flyer to assume leadership of Antonimina’s underworld.
Noto’s gang had methods, rituals and a structure that were
identical to those of the picciotteria discovered three decades or
so earlier around Aspromonte. Thus, despite everything that had

308
 Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina

happened since then — a communications and transport revolu-

tion, mass emigration, the destruction of the Honoured Society
in Naples, and the titanic military slogging match with Austria
— the ’ndrangheta’s forefathers remained obstinately
themselves.
Like their predecessors of the 1880s and 1890s, Noto’s men
took a blood oath and were ranked into two sub-groups: the
picciotti and the camorristi. They had specific job titles, like the
boss and the contaiuolo. They stole a great many farm animals:
some of which they sent to connected livestock traders and
butchers in distant towns; some they roasted and ate in banquets
designed to nourish the gang’s esprit de corps; some they miracu-
lously ‘found’ and returned to the rightful owners — in return for
cash and a solemn promise to say nothing to the Carabinieri.
Whole passages of the judges’ ruling against Noto’s ’ndrina
could have been copied from documents dating from thirty years
before. The gang contained a few quite wealthy members, and
some who had relatives in local government: a former mayor,
called Monteleone, counted at least two nephews among the
affiliates. The sect had strict rules: wrongdoers were punished
with fines, acts of vandalism, or a deft flick of the blade.
Noto’s men were also part of a great network of Calabrian
mafia gangs. That much was clear from the occasion when he
heard from his friends in Palmi, on Calabria’s other coast, that
one of their brethren had been imprisoned for attempting to
murder a Carabiniere. Noto ordered his men to make a welfare
contribution, and one member who refused was heavily fined.
Boasting far-lying contacts like these, the Antonimina mob could
demand, and get, ‘resignation and respect’, from the people at
home, as the judge put it. Thefts and beatings were not reported
to the police.
So the flying capo of Antonimina was a throwback, not a
harbinger. Or rather, the future his example heralded was a
depressingly familiar one: it was a future in which even educated
young men from the mafia heartlands of Calabria, those who

309
Mafia Brotherhoods

had seen the world and taken the chances offered by the national
institutions that were supposed to turn them into good Italians,
would prefer the career routes afforded by mafia violence.
Domenico Noto’s group also betrayed many of the same weak-
nesses as the Lads with Attitude of the late nineteenth century.
There was an admission fee for new members (which had now
gone up to 25 or 50 Lire). Like the first picciotti, Noto and his
men browbeat the vulnerable into paying the fee. One victim of
this kind of extortion was a sixteen-year-old chicken thief. If the
traditional rules of the Honoured Society had been respected,
this boy would never have been allowed to join at all because
both his sisters were prostitutes. But he was initiated, and
exploited, all the same. Aggrieved by the treatment he received,
he subsequently gave a vital testimony to the authorities. Nobody
in the police and judicial system was remotely surprised by this
kind of egregious breach in the code of silence. As a judge in
another trial wearily opined, ‘as judicial psychology teaches us,
members of criminal associations always betray one another, and
the solidarity between them is only superficial’. Clearly the Calab-
rian mafia was still a long way from becoming the byword for
omerta that it is today.
Across the picciotteria’s home territory the courts were encoun-
tering similar cases, similar gangs that mixed former soldiers
with veteran mobsters, similar infractions of the law of silence.
In Rosarno, on the plain of Gioia Tauro, ‘the population was
terrorised’: in broad daylight there were knife fights, acts of
sabotage, robberies, attacks on the Carabinieri. The picture was
very similar in and around Africo, where a judge noted that there
was ‘a very marked and sudden resurgence in crimes against
property’ when the troops came home. In the mayhem of demo-
bilisation and the accompanying economic crisis, the picciotti
were resurgent. ‘
After 1925, just as it did in Sicily and Campania, Fascism
mounted an anti-mafia drive in Calabria. Once again, there were
hundreds and hundreds of arrests, and some very big trials,

310
 Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina

especially in the years from 1928 to 1930. But compared to the

Mori Operation in Sicily and to Major Anceschi’s roundups in
the Mazzoni, Fascism’s crackdown in Calabria barely rated more
than a few lines in the local press, let alone nationally — and that
even before the media blackout on the ‘Southern Question’ from
the early 1930s. Fighting organised crime in Italy’s most neglected
region provided no more political kudos under Fascism than it
had done before.
In his 1927 Ascension Day speech, Benito Mussolini gave Italy
a monumentally simple picture of his anti-mafia campaign:
Fascism set against organised crime — two great blocks facing
one another in mutual antagonism. Yet he did not mention the
picciotteria at all. The silence is telling, not least because in
Calabria the reality on the ground shattered Mussolini’s marmor-
eal rhetoric into fragments. In some times and places, the state
manifested its power in brave policework and shrewd investiga-
tion. But in others, it showed its weakness through gross naivety,
cowardly brutality, idiotic posturing, and lazy collusion.
The archives from the Fascist era allow historians to identify
a pattern in the fragments of Fascist anti-mafia policy. Continuity
is undoubtedly part of that pattern: in some areas of southern
Calabria the picciotti were still behaving like the flying boss of
Antonimina and his men did after the First World War, and they
would continue to do so after Fascism fell. But elsewhere the
picciotteria was growing, transforming itself into something alto-
gether more formidable than the sect of ex-cons and tavern rats
of the 1880s and 1890s.
Calabrian hoodlums were not new to the mass arrests and
major trials that came with Fascism. Comparatively unprotected
from the state’s wrath, they had always been vulnerable to the
kind of repression that the Sicilian mafia eluded as a matter of
course. Italy cut them back, but never managed to eliminate
them. Under Fascism, the picciotti began to show that they were
learning from this long and harsh experience. Wherever they
could avoid the capricious swing of the Fascist axe, they infiltrated

311
Mafia Brotherhoods

the institutions and bent justice to their own ends. If they had
first emerged as a provincial version of the prison camorra of
Naples, by the end of Fascism the most powerful Calabrian
gangsters looked rather more like Sicilian mafiosi.
Looking back at the Lads with Attitude during the Fascist era
is like watching ants. With an energy that at first seems utterly
myopic, each indistinguishable insect scuttles, explores, fights and
dies. Yet somehow, from their multiplied frenzy, the colony as a
whole grows stronger and more numerous. Somewhere in the
DNA of all Italy’s mafias is the ability to think strategically and
not just tactically, to evolve over time. A form of natural selection
— namely the constant and ferocious competition for predomi-
nance within the ranks of each criminal organisation — partly
explains this ability. But collective adversity can play a part too:
it seems to me that the ’ndrangheta’s long-term success was in
good part the result of what it endured early in its history at the
hands of the state. If *ndranghetisti had a motto, it would be
one drawn from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ironically,
it was a maxim of which the Duce himself approved: what does
not destroy me, makes me stronger.

312
Calabria: What does nof kill me,
makes me stronger

Fascist repression hit home across the various mob nurseries of

Calabria. For example, in 1931 the Chief of Police of Catanzaro
felt able to report that the mafia had ‘almost been crushed’ in
his area, although he did add that the ‘impetuous and primitive
character’ of the locals meant that there was still a very high
level of bloodshed. Another notable success came in 1932 when
the police in Reggio Calabria dismantled a whole criminal system:
the bosses of five *ndrine were convicted.
But Fascism’s early operations against the picciotteria were
temporary successes at best. In fact in’some places, ironically,
they merely created a power vacuum in which other criminals
could wreak havoc. Take the particularly nasty gang who ran
riot on the plain of Gioia Tauro in the mid 1930s. As well as
committing many robberies and acts of violence, their boss, a
certain Michele Barone, was also convicted of smothering an old
lady in her bed and throwing a prostitute off a bridge for giving
him syphilis. Nasty this crew may have been, but it was not a
cell of the picciotteria.
Michele Barone was a former member of the tax and customs
branch of the police — a CV that would automatically have
debarred him from membership of the picciotteria. Yet Barone
and his friends operated unmolested for three years in the tradi-
tional mafia towns of Polistena and Taurianova. In other words,
for a while, in this highly significant corner of Calabria, Fascist
repression took away the mafia’s monopoly of thuggery.
The picciotteria would not accept defeat. The crackdown had

313
Mafia Brotherhoods

to continue throughout the Fascist era: there was another peak in

the number of trials in 1937 and 1938. During the mid and late
19308, the police and Carabinieri were sending suspects into internal
exile in greater numbers than almost anywhere else in Italy.
Fascism’s drive against the Calabrian mob all too often lost
its momentum where it really counted: in court. Already in 1923,
one judge remarked that the picciotti relied on the ‘acquiescence
of the wealthiest classes who often use the criminals to further
their own goals of personal supremacy and to guard their estates’.
Just as in Sicily, the Lads with Attitude had used the subtle art
of the protection racket to win friends among the upper echelons
— friends who, as witnesses, could swing trials in the gangsters’
favour. But as time went on, an increasing number of strange
rulings were handed down by judges themselves, suggesting
strongly that the picciotteria was beginning to subvert the work-
ings of justice from the inside. One example comes from Villa
San Giovanni, a port township that lies just north of Reggio
Calabria. In 1927 a group of local mafiosi were acquitted of
forming a criminal association, despite the fact that some of the
mobsters had had themselves photographed, pistols pointed and
palms raised, as they took an oath.
Among the big gangster trials of 1928 was the prosecution of
fifty-two men from Africo. Some of them were almost certainly
the sons and nephews of the picciotti whose killing crew took a
razor to Pietro Maviglia’s oesophagus in 1894. Africo was still,
as one Fascist official admitted, ‘real barbarian country, isolated
from the world’; there were few places in Calabria with such a
notorious history of mafia activity. Yet the judge’s ruling in the
1928 case shows absolutely no memory of the criminal associa-
tion’s deep roots in the town. He even handed out reduced
sentences on the grounds that

The criminal association was partly the result of social

causes such as the poverty of the Great War’s aftermath
and the moral upheaval that resulted from the war itself.

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 Calabria: What does not kill me, makes me stronger

Obligingly, the judge went on to declare that the defendants were

now ‘changed men, morally and socially’. No Fascist iron and
fire in Africo then, because society was to blame.
Two cases from the notorious Locri area on the Ionian coast
also betray a suspicious degree of judicial leniency. In 1928
copious testimony from an insider who had gone through the
picciotteria initiation ritual was not enough to convince the judge
that a mafia gang was actually a criminal organisation. Yes, they
were an association, the judge conceded. But they could have
just got together, as they claimed, ‘to defend one another from
other people’s violent attacks’. Acquittal on the grounds of insuf-
ficient evidence was the decision.
In 1929 two prosperous citizens were among forty-eight
suspected mafiosi charged with ‘associating for delinquency’ and
extortion in Ardore: one was an entrepreneur, the other a former
cobbler who had become politically powerful. Both were freed
on no more solid grounds than that ‘it was implausible that they
would have shady dealings with what was essentially a bunch of
beggars’. The chief ‘beggar’, as it happens, was caught with a
mafia rule book in his house.
Some of these rulings may be down to ignorant judges, or to
displays of class prejudice. More likely, they are the end product
of the Calabrian mafia’s increasing power to infiltrate the judicial
system through the state administration. For since Fascism’s
earliest months in power, when Blackshirts in the region had gone
down with ‘acute factionitis’, the Partito Nazionale Fascista in
Calabria had proved exasperatingly prone to the local vices of
corruption, cronyism, and in-fighting. In Calabria, Fascism not
only struggled to govern society, it struggled to govern its own
ranks.
Predictably, the malaise was worst around Aspromonte, where
cliques still squabbled over the funds allocated to repair the
damage caused by the catastrophic 1908 earthquake a generation
earlier. Mussolini dispatched a rapid succession of special
commissioners from Rome to put an end to jobbery and

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mud-slinging. But what passed for ‘Fascism’ in the toe of the

peninsula remained obstinately unruly throughout the twenty-
year regime.
So the single most important weakness in Fascism’s campaign
against the Calabrian mafia was that it could not cut the tendrils
that organised crime had wound around the hollow branches of
the state. As early as 1933 the national Fascist Party Secretary in
Rome was told that the local Party Secretary in Reggio was
‘notoriously affiliated to the organised crime that still infects the
province’; the man in question had a strong influence within the
Prefect’s office and police headquarters. In 1940 a special commis-
sioner reported that a ‘high number’ of citizens were members
of criminal associations, or had relatives who were members.
Even his predecessor as special commissioner had several men in
his circle who were suspected of involvement in organised crime.
The picciotti were growing stronger by sucking energy from
the Fascist state. But their increasing vigour also came from
within, from bonds that made the ’ndrine even tougher to prise
from the mountain crags and coastal plains where they had first
marked out their territory. The Lads with Attitude were learning
how to make crime a family business.

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Calabria: A clever, forceful and
wary woman

Italy’s underworld networks have always been woven from many

different strands, all of them stolen from other parts of the social
fabric: Masonic rituals, male bonding, patronage, godparent-
hood, the language and rituals of a religion hollowed of any
spiritual meaning, feasting, the glamour reflected back from
literature . . . Anything will do, as long as it knits the organisa-
tion together. But the strongest criminal ties of all have been
those braided from the purloined threads of kinship. Families
lend gangs the kind of loyalty that more impersonal forms of
organisation can rarely match. It is one thing to betray a comrade
to the police: it is quite another when that comrade is also your
cousin, your uncle, or your father-in-law.
Among Sicilian mafiosi, births, marriages and baptisms have
never been private; that is, they are not purely domestic affairs
that a gangland leader only turns his mind to once the day’s
extorting and smuggling are done. Rather, family is at the heart
of quotidian underworld scheming: a wedding can seal a pact
ready for war or end a season of bloodshed and signal the birth
of a new alliance. Dynastic politics have always been integral to
what the mafia is about. The mafiosi that Inspector Sangiorgi
encountered during the ‘fratricide’ affair already cultivated the
arts required to sire their own criminal bloodlines, to make their
surnames echo fear down through the generations. Sangiorgi also
discovered the first known occasion on which a Man of Honour
was offered the distinctively Sicilian choice between murdering
a relative and being killed himself: it was in 1883, when an uncle

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was made to take part in the murder of his own nephew, who
was also a mafioso. In the Brotherhood of Favara, the mafia of
the sulphur mines, those were the rules.
In Calabria, back in the 1880s and 1890s, family matters were
handled very differently. The ’ndrangheta was originally a sect
in which prisoner enlisted prisoner, rather than father enlisting
son. Once they emerged from jail, picciotti did begin to spread
along the pathways of kinship. The earliest picciotteria trial
papers list brothers, cousins and other relatives among the
members — it could hardly be otherwise given the tangle of
intermarriage in some of the isolated Calabrian communities.
Before long, a first generation of sons were joining their fathers
in the criminal ranks. For example, if the police were right about
the King of Aspromonte, Giuseppe Musolino, then his father
founded the picciotteria in Santo Stefano. So family and gang
crime were interlaced very quickly. But in the early days there
seems to have been little strategic and legislative thought behind
that interlacing: the picciotti did not call meetings about family
matters; they did not make rules about who could marry whom;
they did not cut faces for breaches of dynastic etiquette.
Today the ’ndrangheta is more resistant to repression than the
Sicilian mafia or the Neapolitan camorra; its secrets are more
closely guarded, because fewer of its members turn state’s
evidence. Ask any magistrate or policeman in Calabria why that
should be, and they will reply with one word: family. These days,
the ’ndrangheta is even more family-oriented than the Sicilian
mafia: each ’ndrina is deliberately built around one clan, often
a single boss and his numerous male offspring. In bugged conver-
sations from 2010, ’ndranghetisti can be heard discussing what
they call the principle of ‘the line’, meaning the hereditary prin-
ciple, when it comes to deciding who will become the boss (of
Roghudi, in this case). The rule that a son should inherit from
his father is not inviolable but it is a rule all the same. No such
statute exists in the Sicilian mafia, although the sons of bosses
often follow their fathers into leadership positions.

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 Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman

So although the Lads with Attitude had very similar rituals

and a similar structure to the ’ndrangheta as it is known and
feared today, they lacked the strong basis in kinship for which
the ’ndrangheta is most renowned. In fact the picciotteria was
slow to take on board the full criminal potential of blood rela-
tionships. From the beginning, deaths were part of the Calabrian
mafia’s collective business; but it was only during the two decades
of Fascism that births and marriages really entered the ledger
too. The transformation was slow and patchy, but absolutely
fundamental to the growing strength of the picciotteria.
By the time the Fascist dictatorship had asserted itself in Rome,
judges were beginning to hear new kinds of family story among
the hoodlums of Calabria. In Vibo Valentia, to the north of the
Plain of Gioia Tauro, a Carabiniere was murdered in 1927 for
trying to stop a marriage alliance between two criminal kinship
groups, one of which had colonised the local Fascist state.
Three years later, in Nicotera just to the south, one boy was
initiated into the Honoured Society at only eleven years old.
Across the mountains to the south-east, in Grotteria in 1933,
the local boss heard rumours that his fiancée was pregnant by
another picciotto. So the gang met to discuss this smear on their
capo’s honour, and decided to put a contract out. Contrary to
what one might expect, the target was not the woman’s alleged
lover, but the man thought to be spreading the rumours. Hearsay,
after all, has always been the most dangerous of weapons in
dynastic struggle. The chosen killer, a sixteen-year-old boy, took
six goes before he managed to cut his victim’s throat properly.
Such stories are undoubtedly significant. Yet an even clearer
way to trace the evolution of the early ’ndrangheta’s sexual poli-
tics is by following the changing role of women. Italy’s criminal
organisations were from their inception overwhelmingly mascu-
line and inherently sexist. Mafia honour has always been a men-
only quality. Nevertheless, as we have already seen, women had
important uses to mafiosi and camorristi, and there was signifi-
cant variety in the ways they were used.

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Whores were the women most frequently found in the company

of the early *ndranghetisti. Whereas Sicilian mafiosi have never
had anything to do with prostitution, the first Calabrian picciotti
tended to be ponces. As ponces do, they partied with the girls
whose earnings they creamed off. (They raped and sometimes
even married them too.) So unlike their contemporaries in the
Sicilian mafia, and unlike ’ndranghetisti of today, the Calabrian
gangsters of the late 1800s and early 1900s did not view profiting
from sex as dishonourable.
In this respect, the picciotteria was exactly like the Honoured
Society of Naples had been in the nineteenth century. Neapolitan
camorra slang bristled with derogatory synonyms for ‘prostitute’:
bagascia, bambuglia, bardascia, drusiana, risgraziata, schiavut-
tella (‘little slave’), vaiassa, and zoccola (‘sewer rat’). There was
also a whole nomenclature for different kinds of streetwalker. A
new girl was a colomba (‘dove’); one from the provinces was a
cafona (‘yokel’). A gallinella (‘young hen’) was a woman with
kids; whereas a pollanca (‘young turkey’) was the term for a
virgin set to be put on the market. In addition, there were several
names for an old woman, like carcassa (‘carcass’) and calascione
(‘a battered old mandolin’). This was the jargon of an exploita-
tive industry central to the camorra economy. We know little
about the family lives of Neapolitan camorristi in the 1800s. But
it seems unlikely that men so profoundly embroiled in the flesh
trade could sire dynasties to compare with those of the Sicilian
dons.
Like their Neapolitan peers, who had accorded la Sangiovan-
nara exceptional honour in recognition of her vital role in the
events of Italian unification, the picciotti of Calabria also some-
times hung around with strong women. A few women involved
with the picciotteria in its early days directly participated in
criminal actions. Female names leap out now and again from
among the defendants listed in the trial documents. There were
two ‘Lasses with Attitude’ found guilty in Palmi in 1892, for
example: Concetta Muzzopapa, age 40, and Rosaria Testa, age 26.

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 Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman

Both were from Rosarno, at the opposite end of the Plain of

Gioia Tauro from Palmi. Both had taken the oath to become
members of the Calabrian mafia ‘by making blood come out of
the little finger of their right hand as they promised to maintain
secrecy’, the judges explained. Both also dressed up in men’s
clothing to take part in robberies and violent attacks. Rosaria
Testa confessed her part in the organisation, and told prosecutors
many of its secrets before she retracted after being threatened by
the male members of the gang.
There were other oathed women too, such as in the King of
Aspromonte’s home town of Santo Stefano: investigations into
the picciotteria during the brigand Musolino’s rampage found
that 12 of the 166 initiated members were women; they included
Musolino’s lover, Angela Surace, and his three sisters, Ippolita,
Vincenza and Anna (who, it is worth recalling, were also the
boss’s daughters). ‘Safe in the criminal association’s moral and
material support’, the police wrote, ‘women from the members’
families are also able to issue threats and impose their will’. The
oldest of the Musolino sisters, Ippolita, was particularly feared
and it seems that she even advised her brother on who his targets
should be. These are all fascinating cases, and we would know
a lot more about the early ’ndrangheta if we had more documents
on which to base a study of them. There is nothing quite like
these Calabrian mafiose in the history of the other criminal
organisations.
Some of the Calabrian hoodlums that came to trial in the
1920s and 1930s still displayed the same taste in women as the
picciotti of the 1880s and 1890s. Like Domenico Noto, the flying
boss of Antonimina: his gang pimped, forced whores to take part
in robberies and regularly held meetings and parties in a hooker’s
house. But Noto was not content with ‘wandering Venuses’ (in
the judge’s delicate phrase). He arm-twisted his way into other
beds, including those of an emigrant’s wife, her fourteen-year-old
daughter, and a vulnerable deaf-mute girl. But it was hard to
keep the criminal brotherhood’s secrets when you carried on like

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Mafia Brotherhoods

this. In court, the emigrant’s wife gave crucial evidence against

Domenico Noto and more than forty of his comrades. Other
Calabrian mafia cells were undone on the say-so of streetwalkers.
The habit of making money from prostitution, like the technique
of browbeating young boys into being initiated, was a structural
weakness in the picciotteria: both were bound to genicrate
witnesses for the prosecution.
But elsewhere during the Fascist era there are clear signs of
change in women’s role. There are fewer prostitutes, and the
gun-toting girl gangsters disappear. Instead, a cannier brand of
gender politics begins to emerge. And with it, a new type of
Calabrian mafia woman. Not a harlot. Or a cross-dressing brig-
andess. Instead a mother and wife whose nurturing energies are
single-mindedly bent to building the honour of her menfolk,
young and old.
It is often assumed that the ’ndrangheta’s heavy reliance on
family bonds grows from the culture of ‘familism’ in Calabrian
society. The available evidence suggests this is wrong. The.
*ndrangheta had to learn to base itself on kinship ties. The appar-
ently traditional function of ’ndrangheta women — as the cult of
honour’s domestic priestesses — is actually a modern invention.
But even when this new model mafiosa first appears in the trial
records during Fascism, she could wield real power and influence
behind the scenes of picciotteria life. Maria Marvelli was one
such woman. She was, to use a judge’s words once again, a ‘clever,
forceful and wary woman’, one well used to the ways of the
Honoured Society. Not even these qualities stopped her husband
meeting his gory end. But they did allow her to have her revenge.
The following story comes from beneath Fascism’s media
blackout, and it draws heavily on Maria Marvelli’s own evidence
to dramatise the role women were playing in the evolution of
the picciotteria. As it happens, Maria Marvelli’s story also
exposes the most savage face of Fascism’s countermeasures.
Just south west of Antonimina, home of the flying boss, lies
Cirella, yet another tiny settlement clinging to the flanks of

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Aspromonte. Cirella was isolated in an inhospitable terrain;

without roads fit for wheels, it was a village prey to the forces
of nature and all but ignored by the forces of order.
The men of Cirella’s Honoured Society did all of the things
that might be expected of them: they robbed, vandalised, raped,
mutilated and murdered. But they were also developing softer
forms of power. Remarkably, they had elbowed the local priest
aside: crooks, and not the cleric, ran Cirella’s religious festivals.
Anyone who wanted to do business with the local picciotti or
marry one of their womenfolk had to join their ranks as a
- precondition.
Paolo Agostino was among the most influential men in Cirella’s
Honoured Society. Even among their number his ferocity stood
out, as a judge would later note.

He was one of those men who combines a robust and

vigorous body with an audacious mind, a rare propensity
for bullying, a strong tendency to commit all kinds of
abuses, and the courage needed to make all these qualities
count.

Paolo Agostino also had another quality that the judge did not
identify, a quality that was becoming increasingly important for
successful Calabrian bosses: he had a sharp eye for a smart
woman. Those who went through the mafia initiation ritual in
Cirella, as elsewhere in Calabria, had to swear to ‘renounce family
affections, putting the interests of the Society before their parents,
siblings and children’. But Calabrian gangsters were also begin-
ning to learn that families have advantages. Paolo Agostino made
a particularly good choice of wife: the ‘clever, forceful and wary’
Maria Marvelli.
La Marvelli had been married before; she was a widow. (Like
most Italian women then as now, she kept her maiden name.)
Her son from her first marriage, Francesco Polito, joined her as
part of the new family she made with the ‘robust and vigorous’

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Paolo Agostino. If the judge is to be believed, the marriage was

not an equal one, at least within the walls of the Agostino home.
Maria apparently ‘exercised a commanding authority over her
husband and son. And she was obeyed without debate.’ Paolo
Agostino’s return on the union was a new heir, and a wealthy
one too: Maria’s son, Francesco Polito, had already inherited
property worth one hundred thousand Lire from his late father.
The marriage seems to have been happy, and Maria had more
children. Moreover her older boy, Francesco Polito, was initiated
into the Honoured Society when he came of age, as befitted the
stepson of a senior gangster. However his mother, smart and
suspicious woman that she was, would not allow him to handle
any money. So he had to steal twenty-four bottles of olive oil
from his grandfather by way of a membership fee.
Francesco Polito, with his money and his powerful stepfather,
was clearly a catch in the mafia marriage market. Before long,
no less a felon than the boss of the Honoured Society in Cirella
offered young Francesco his daughter’s hand, along with a promo-
tion from picciotto to camorrista. A marriage to the capo’s
daughter and a promotion seemed like a very respectable offer.
But young Francesco’s stepfather, Paolo Agostino, put a stop to
the alliance. It is not clear why, or whether Maria Marvelli had
anything to do with the decision. The best guess is that he
preferred to bind himself to another criminal lineage. But refusing
such an offer would inevitably seem like a snub. If there were no
divisions within the ranks of the Cirella Honoured Society before,
they certainly appeared now.
At this point in the story, Mussolini intervened. The dire state
of public order in Cirella came to the attention of the authorities
in 1933. The local boss — and everyone knew he was the boss,
for what need would he have had to be coy about his power? —
was sent to enforced residence. His destination was the tiny island
penal colony of Ustica, which lies some 80 kilometres north of
Palermo. But as so often, this measure proved inadequate to stem
the tide of violence. So the following year Paolo Agostino was

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also sent to Ustica to join his capo — the very man whose generous
offer of a marriage alliance he had spurned. Rumours filtered
back to Cirella that when the two had met, Paolo Agostino had
smashed a bottle over the boss’s head. Although the rumours
were probably false, they were also a very real symptom of a
potentially explosive power struggle: the issue of who Maria
Marvelli’s son was going to marry was an open sore in Cirella.
Soon other rumours began to fly in the opposite direction,
from Cirella to the penal colony on Ustica, and this time sex was
what generated the gossip. Before departing for Ustica, ‘robust
and vigorous’ Paolo Agostino left his affairs in the hands of a
trusted deputy, Nicola Pollifroni. Pollifroni very soon became
very close to Agostino’s wife, Maria Marvelli — close enough to
set off some wry smiles: they were seen riding the same horse
and he was seen sitting on her lap. The judge, rather primly,
would later say that the gossip was ‘not without plausibility’.
When these reports reached Paolo Agostino on Ustica, he made
his own inquiries as to how plausible they really were. Strangely,
he was told by two separate witnesses, including his own brother,
that nothing was wrong. Even more strangely, he believed them.
Paolo Agostino’s relaxed attitude to his wife’s infidelity contra-
dicts all the stereotypes about the southern Italian male’s violent
possessiveness. It also transgresses the behavioural norms among
gangsters. The picciotteria had already shown that mere rumours
about marital infidelity could easily send a mafioso to a gruesome
death. Yet in this case, Paolo Agostino was prepared to discount
the rumours even when everyone else saw they were at the very
least ‘plausible’. One explanation of this failure to defend his
own reputation is that Agostino realised that, as both a husband
and a criminal, Maria Marvelli was just too valuable to him.
With the tensions building within the ’ndrina, he needed to keep
his family compact, and had no choice but to overlook the affair.
Mafia rules of honour, as always, were elastic.
While Paolo Agostino and his boss were in the penal colony
on Ustica — the one pondering the subject of his wife’s fidelity,

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and the other dwelling on how the offer of his daughter’s hand
had been rejected — back in Cirella the political terrain within
the Honoured Society shifted. Three brothers, Bruno, Rocco and
Francescantonio Romeo emerged as the new centre of power.
The Romeo brothers decided they needed to hide their newly
acquired authority behind a figurehead leader. So they began the
search for a new boss, a dummy don who would not attract
attention to himself, who would not be very visible, as the Romeo
brothers stipulated.
Now, visibility is one of the great themes in the history of
Italian organised crime. Absolute invisibility, absolute anonymity,
is not an option for mafiosi, whose aim is to control their terri-
tory. However they do it, they have to let the local people know
that it is they who must be feared, they who must be paid. But
there are a thousand ways to carve out a profile, to cultivate
respect. A gangster, like some colourful territorial animal, can
save a lot of energy by being easy to identify: potential rivals
quickly learn to spot the danger signs, and learn that flight rather
than fight is the wisest reaction. So early camorristi advertised
their power with quiffs, bell-bottom trousers, and tattoos. As did
their cousins in the Calabrian picciotteria. But of course visibility
brings risks — especially when the police are in the mood to
repress the mafia rather than cohabit with it. It is one thing to
flash your criminal rank and battle honours in a dungeon, where
everyone is a felon, or in the police no-go areas of Naples’ low
city, or in some godforsaken Calabrian hill village. It is quite
another to do so when the eyes of the Carabinieri are upon you,
or when you want to pass through Ellis Island, or when your
dealings with politicians and entrepreneurs demand a less showy
facade. The ‘middle-class villains’ of Sicily have always tended
to intimate their authority with little more than a stare, a stance
or a stony silence. The other criminal associations, whose origins
were humbler, took a while to master the visibility game’s subtler
stratagems. The learning process was already well under way by
the dawn of the Fascist era. In Naples, the silly clothes and

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butterfly quiffs were gone by the time of the Cuocolo trial. The
Calabria mafia abandoned them not long afterwards: there is
little sign of them in the Fascist era.
Faced with more unwelcome police attention than they had
ever known, the Romeo brothers looked for a new and less visible
patsy, one without a criminal record whose wealth put him beyond
suspicion. Their chosen candidate, a young man called Francesco
Macri, accepted without hesitation, despite not having even been
a member of the gang before, and despite being rich enough to
provide lawyers for his new co-conspirators. The judge later said
that Macri regarded being nominated boss as a ‘special honour’.
It is a telling testament to the prestige that this criminal associa-
tion had now acquired that Macri took on the job of capo so
readily. As the judge explained, ‘entry into the association was
an essential condition if you wanted to win public esteem’. The
picciotteria, less visible than it once had been, but more poisonous,
was now seeping further still into the bloodstream of Calabrian
life. The Romeo brothers formed a committee to ‘advise’ the
enthusiastic but inexperienced appointee, while retaining the real
power for themselves. And with that arrangement, the politics
of organised crime in Cirella reached a new equilibrium.
Meanwhile, criminal business carried on as usual. And as usual,
even the simplest criminal business could have lethal conse-
quences. The local doctor had had a valuable yearling bull stolen
a while earlier and he was still making strenuous and unsuccessful
efforts to find out who had taken it. Eventually he approached
Maria Marvelli, asking her to ask her exiled husband Paolo
Agostino (a relative of the doctor’s) to make inquiries among the
inmates on Ustica. Prison, as ever, was the great junction box of
mafia communications.
A letter soon came back from Ustica: Paolo Agostino wrote
that the thieves were Bruno, Rocco, and Francescantonio Romeo
— the men behind the ‘invisible boss’ who were now the most
influential picciotti in Cirella.
Naively, the doctor passed Paolo Agostino’s letter on to the

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Mafia Brotherhoods

Carabinieri. Someone from inside the Carabinieri — whether a

spy or an agent provocateur — told the three Romeo brothers that
Paolo Agostino had tried to get them into trouble. Even before
this tip-off arrived, the Romeos knew that Agostino would pose
a threat to them once he was released from Ustica. So they swiftly
issued a warning by burning down Maria Marvelli’s house and
stealing thirty of her goats.
As Agostino’s return from Ustica neared, the Romeo brothers
began to plan for more drastic action to defend their position.
They tabled a motion with the Honoured Society to kill Maria
Marvelli’s husband; in support of it, they cited the impeccable
legal logic that he had broken the code of omerta by telling the
doctor who had stolen the yearling bull.
After two years away, Paolo Agostino finally arrived home on
2 March 1936. He was immediately summoned to a meeting of
the Honoured Society: how could he justify his breach of the
rules? His self-defence was a desperate show of chutzpah. He
said that he no longer feared anyone in Cirella, because on Ustica
he had found ‘new and more powerful friendships by joining a
mighty association that was represented there’.
What was this ‘mighty association’ on Ustica? A bluff? Or
was Paolo Agostino hinting that he had become a member of
the Sicilian mafia since last he saw Aspromonte? Ustica was
more than usually full of Sicilian mafiosi at the time. Whether
Agostino was bluffing or not, the Romeo brothers became even
more determined to eliminate him. When Paolo Agostino
flagrantly insulted the Honoured Society’s protocols by failing
to turn up for a second hearing into his case, the Romeos got
their motion through, and a death sentence against Agostino
was passed. The problem now for the Romeo brothers became
a practical rather than a political one: how to carry out the hit
—a task that would require both a carefully, prepared trap and
a narrative to bait it.
While waiting for their opportunity, the Romeo brothers had
to content themselves with insults. They broke Paolo Agostino’s

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gramophone at a gangland celebration to mark the engagement

of his stepson, Francesco Polito. (After turning down the boss’s
daughter, Maria Marvelli’s boy had finally found a suitable girl
from a suitably delinquent family.) Only the presence of so many
witnesses stopped the gramophone incident degenerating into a
bloodbath.
If Paolo Agostino did not realise before that his time was
running out, he certainly realised now. He became gloomy. Among
friends he referred to himself wistfully as ‘a bird just passing
through life’. He refused to thrash his children, saying that he
did not want to leave them with bad memories of him. His
despondency was apparent to Maria Marvelli, who took charge
of security at home, forcing her husband to sleep elsewhere when
danger threatened.
The first attempt on Agostino’s life involved the staged theft
of his ox. The Romeo brothers sent men to steal the animal,
making plenty of noise as they did, in the hope that Agostino
would rush out of his house. If all went well, he could then be
shot down, as if by anonymous robbers. But in the event it was
the redoubtable Maria Marvelli who came out of the house, gun
in hand, and chased off the would-be assassins.
A far more rigorously conceived plot would be needed to do
away with Paolo Agostino. The Romeo brothers called a meeting
of senior mafiosi in an abandoned shack on 30 April 1936. After
much discussion their plan was agreed and a ten-man firing party
picked to execute it. The dummy don, Francesco Macri, volun-
teered to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Romeo brothers in
the upcoming action; evidently he wanted to earn the lofty rank
that he had so recently been given. But the crucial figure in the
scheme, the man set up to betray Paolo Agostino to his enemies,
was to be Nicola Pollifroni — the man who had a ‘plausible’ affair
with Maria Marvelli. Pollifroni was made to kneel before his
brethren, with his arms crossed flat on his chest, and swear to
help kill his friend.
On 2 May Pollifroni invited Paolo Agostino along on an

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expedition to raid some beehives, thereby insulting their owner

with whom Pollifroni had an old beef. No member of the
Honoured Society could refuse such an invitation. The raid was
a success, and Pollifroni and Agostino returned along an isolated
path, carrying pots of fragrant honey. The route took them
through a narrow pass between two giant boulders covered in
gorse. The judge would subsequently explain that the path
reminded him of the ever-narrowing gulleys in an abattoir floor
that isolate a single pig, forcing it to walk between two walls
until it can no longer turn round or go back. By the time the
butcher’s knife comes into view, there is no longer any escape.
The pass had a name locally: Agonia (‘Agony’).
Just as the two honey thieves were entering the pass, Pollifroni
stopped. He had to take a pee. Agostino should walk on ahead,
into the narrow walls of the pass.
The last thing Agostino ever heard came from somewhere on
the boulder above him: a strangled cry of warning, both sudden
and familiar. Agostino’s stepson Francesco Polito was being forced
to watch the murder, a dagger pressed to his throat. He had the
courage and desperation to cry out a warning before a large hand
was clamped over his mouth, and a shotgun chorus drowned out
all other sound.
What gives an undeniably Fascist flavour to the story of the
Cirella mafia was what happened to the Romeo brothers, the
dummy don Francesco Macri, and the others once they were
arrested. Under interrogation, as their blood oaths dictated, they
denied any knowledge of the criminal association they belonged
to. So they were punched and whipped and beaten with anything
that came to hand, like a heavy ruler and a blotter. They were
forced to drink a clay pot full of piss. To muffle their screams,
their own socks were stuffed in their mouths and secured with
their own belts. Then they were pushed to the floor, and their
legs chained up on chairs so that the soles of their feet could be
beaten and their toenails pulled out. (Later, some would have
amputations as a result.) Their wounds were doused in salt and

52
 Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman

vinegar. The most uncooperative among them were electrocuted:

wires attached to a car battery were applied to their inner thighs,
leaving them barely conscious. They were then hurled into damp,
filthy cells in Locri jail with no food or water. All requests for
medical visits were denied.
One by one, they confessed. Every time they were called on
to confirm their confessions, the beatings began again. The men
of Cirella’s Honoured Society had found their own place called
Agony.
Only in court could the allegation of police violence finally
emerge. When the judge heard of the horrors he treated them as
just that: mere allegation. Somehow, he deemed it no job of his
to weigh up whether what the defendants alleged was true. Not
even, it seems, by checking on their amputated toes. But the sheer
detail of the judge’s description, and the squirming of his logic,
tell us he knew what had really happened: the accused before
him had been brutally tortured by the Carabinieri.
Of course the judge had plenty of other evidence to draw on:
the testimonies of Maria Marvelli and her son Francesco Polito;
the suspects’ utterly unconvincing alibis; and the jumble of
patently false testimonies, mostly from their womenfolk, that
the mafiosi had marshalled in their defence. The prosecution
could also point out that the dummy don Francesco Macri kept
a list of the Honoured Society’s members in a suitcase, and
wrote down the names of the ten men chosen to kill Paolo
Agostino.
The judge concluded that all of the evidence confirmed the
confessions, ‘without any regard to the way in which the suspects’
initial statements were gathered’. So he felt able to ‘put his
conscience to rest’, and take no further action about a blindingly
clear case of police brutality. Torture or no torture, the verdict
against the Lads with Attitude in Cirella was guilty.
Everything within the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing
outside the state. Fascism’s totalitarian ideology clearly gave the
cops a licence to go far beyond any acceptable means of

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Mafia Brotherhoods

interrogation. No doubt the torture used here was also deployed

elsewhere against mafiosi and camorristi. But it is rare to find
such graphic and unambiguous evidence of it as there is in the
trial papers from Cirella. More often, false claims about police
brutality were made by mobsters. Fascism’s battle with organised
crime could be a very dirty fight indeed, but quite how frequently
the authorities really abused their power is anyone’s guess.
Maria Marvelli’s story is but an isolated tableau of the piece-
meal changes happening in Calabrian organised crime: the
marriage politics that the picciotti were learning, and the new
power behind the scenes that some women gained as a result.
Marvelli was, without doubt, a loser: her house had been torched;
her husband murdered. She lost her son too: despite his confes-
sion, the boy who had once been the most eligible criminal
batchelor in Cirella was sentenced to six years and eight months
under new, tougher Fascist laws against criminal associations. It
is not known whether he was among the men who had their
toenails extracted by the Carabinieri; it is not known what
happened to him in prison.
But Maria Marvelli did at least have something to put-in the
scales to counterbalance her losses. The satisfaction of vendetta,
for one thing. And even some money: she sued the defendants
on her children’s behalf, and won 26,000 Lire — roughly equal to
the value of her house.
We do not know what happened to Maria Marvelli later. She
is like thousands of other faceless mafia women in history, in
that we can only wonder what became of her after the court
records fall silent. If she did go back to Cirella, she would
certainly have found a village still in the grip of the picciotteria.
The same judge who was too timid to confront the Carabinieri
about their repeated assaults on the prisoners was also too timid
to pass a harsh verdict on the mafia: he acquitted 104 of the
picciotti whose names appeared on the dummy don’s list, on the
less than convincing grounds that ‘public rumour’ was the only
evidence against them. What this amounted to saying was that

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 Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman

everyone in Cirella had seen these men strutting around the

square; everyone knew at the very least that they were in cahoots
and up to no good. They were visible, in other words. But even
under Fascism, visibility alone was not enough to convict.

333
Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese

On 8 July 1938 the Neapolitan daily IJ Mattino published the

following short notice.

FASCIST NEWSBOARD
The Fascist Vito Genovese, enlisted in the New York
branch of the Fascist Party and currently resident in
Naples, has donated 10,000 Lire. The Roccarainola branch
received 5,000 Lire as a contribution to the cost of the
land required to build the local party headquarters. The
other 5,000 Lire is for building Nola’s Heliotherapy
Centre.

Vito Genovese would later reportedly subsidise the building of

Nola’s Fascist party HQ to the tune of $25,000. Visitors to Nola
— and there are not many — can still see the building in piazza
Giordano Bruno: a white block, long since stripped of its Musso-
linian badges, it houses a local branch of the University of Naples,
the Faculty of Law in fact.
Genovese was born in Risigliano, near Nola, on 21 November
1897. We do not know whether his family had any connections
with the Campanian underworld before they emigrated to the
United States in 1912. Nonetheless, New York offered bounteous
opportunities for violent young immigrants. Vito rose rapidly
through the ranks of gangland, alongside his friend, the Sicilian-
born Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano. A now famous mugshot of
Genovese from this period shows a bug-eyed enforcer with a
skewed crest of black hair.
In 1936, Lucky Luciano received a thirty-to-fifty year sentence

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 Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese

on compulsory prostitution charges. (Which of course he would

have avoided had he followed the conventions in force in the
mafia’s homeland.) Vito Genovese was scheduled to take over
from Luciano at the apex of the New York mafia, an organisa-
tion still dominated by Sicilians. But he was also afraid that a
pending murder charge might result in comparably harsh treat-
ment. So in 1937 he fled to a gilded exile in the land of his birth.
In Italy, Vito Genovese’s generosity, like his Fascism, were self-
interested. Strong rumours suggest that he was busy shipping
narcotics back to the United States. With the profits, Genovese
made his contribution to the Fascist architectural legacy in
Campania and lavishly entertained both Mussolini and Count
Galeazzo Ciano, the Duce’s son-in-law and Foreign Minister. It
is only logical to assume that Genovese had excellent top-level
contacts in Nola too.
Evidently, in Campania Fascism lacked the integrity and the
attention span needed to follow up on Major Anceschi’s recom-
mendations following his operations in the Mazzoni in 1926-28.
One way or another, in Campania Fascism lapsed from the
crusading zeal of the Ascension Day speech into a quiet political
accommodation with gangsters. As later events would prove, Vito
Genovese was now part of a flourishing criminal landscape.

335
Sicily: The slimy octopus

We have known for a long time that Cesare Mori’s boast that he
had beaten the mafia would turn out hollow, and that the Mori
Operation was a failure in the long-term. After all, once Fascism
fell and democracy was restored, Sicily’s notorious criminal
fraternity began a new phase of its history that would prove
more arrogant and bloodthirsty than any yet seen. A great deal
of energy has been devoted to dishing out responsibility for the
mafia’s revival after the Second World War. Conspiracy theorists
said it was all the Americans’ fault: the mafia returned with the
Allied invasion in 1943. Pessimists put the blame on Italian democ-
racy: without a dictator in charge, the country was just not
capable of staging a thoroughgoing repression of organised crime.
Whoever was to blame for the subsequent revival in the mafia’s
fortunes, most memories of the campaign to eradicate it were
more or less in tune with Fascism’s own trumpet calls. Even some
mafiosi recalled the alarums of the late 1920s with a shudder.
One Man of Honour, despite being too young to remember the
Mori Operation, said in 1986 that

The music changed [under Fascism]. Mafiosi had a hard

life... After the war the mafia hardly existed any more.
The Sicilian Families had all been broken up. The mafia
was like a plant they don’t grow any more.

So, until recently, the historical memory of the Iron Prefect’s

titanic campaign of repression in Sicily was fundamentally united:
even if the mafia had not been destroyed, it had at least bowed
its head before the thudding might of the Fascist state.

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 Sicily: The slimy octopus

Until recently. Until 2007, that is, when Italy’s leading historian
of the mafia unearthed a startling report that had lain forgotten
in the Palermo State Archive. Because of that report — many
hundreds of pages long if one includes its 228 appendices — the
story of Fascism’s ‘last struggle’ with the mafia must now be
completely rewritten. Some of the best young historians in Sicily
are busy rewriting it. The Mori Operation, it turns out, involved
the most elaborate lie in the history of organised crime.
The report dates from July 1938, and it addresses the state of
law and order in Sicily since the last big mafia trial concluded
late in 1932. It had no less than forty-eight authors, all of them
members of a special combined force of Carabinieri and
policemen known by the unwieldy title of the Royal General
Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily — the Inspectorate, for
short. And the majority of its members were Sicilians, to judge
by their surnames.
The report begins as follows.

Despite repeated waves of vigorous measures taken by

the police and judiciary [during the Mori Operation], the
criminal organisation known in Sicily and elsewhere by
the vague name of ‘mafia’ has endured; it has never really
ceased to exist. All that happened is that there were a few '
pauses, creating the impression that everything was
calm... It was believed — and people who were in bad
faith endeavoured to make everyone believe — that the
mafia had been totally eradicated. But all of that was
nothing more than a cunning and sophisticated manoeuvre
designed by the mafia’s many managers — the ones who
had succeeded in escaping or remaining above suspicion
during the repression. Their main aim was to deceive the
authorities and soften up so-called public opinion so that
they could operate with ever greater freedom and
perversity.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The mafia had sold Fascism an extravagant dummy, the Inspec-

torate claimed. Some bosses had used the very force and propa-
gandistic éclat of the Mori Operation to make believe that they
had gone away. The mafia had its own propaganda agenda — to
appear beaten — and its message was broadcast by the Fascist
regime’s obliging megaphones. The Palermo capi may just as well
have ghostwritten Cesare Mori’s The Last Struggle with the
Mafia.
The story of the 1938 report dates back to 1933, well within
a year of the last Mori trial, when there was a crime wave so
overwhelming as to make it obvious that the police structures
put in place by the Iron Prefect were no longer fit for purpose.
The police and Carabinieri were reorganised into an elite force
to combat it: the Royal General Inspectorate for Public Security
for Sicily. Thus the Fascist state started the struggle with the
mafia all over again. Only this time the national and interna-
tional public that had lapped up reports of the Iron Prefect’s
heroics were not allowed to know anything about what was
going on.
The men of the Inspectorate picked up again where Mori’s
police had left off in 1929. As they did, they slowly assembled
proof that the mafia across western Sicily was more organised
than anyone except perhaps Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi
would ever have dared imagine: the ‘slimy octopus’, they called
it.
The chosen starting point was the province of Trapani, at the
island’s western tip, where the Mori Operation had made least
impact and where criminal disorder was now at its worst: here
the mafia ‘reigned with all of its members in place’, the Inspec-
torate found. When they arrested large numbers of Trapani
mafiosi, the bosses still at liberty held a provincial meeting to
decide on their tactical response. A letter was sent urging everyone
in the organisation to keep violence to a minimum until this new
wave of repression had crested and broken.
The Inspectorate’s next round of investigations discovered a

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 Sicily: The slimy octopus

mafia livestock-smuggling network, 300 strong, that extended

across the whole of the west of the island; mafiosi referred to it
as the Abigeataria — something like ‘The Cattle Rustling Depart-
ment’. As they always had done, Sicilian mafiosi worked together
to steal animals in one place and move them to market far away.
Then came the southern province of Agrigento. The Inspector-
ate’s investigations into an armed attack on a motor coach gradu-
ally revealed that the mafia had a formal structure here too.
Mafiosi interrogated by the Inspectorate used the term ‘Families’
for the structure’s local cells. The Families often coordinated their
activities. For example, the men who attacked the motor coach
came from three different Families; they had never met one
another before their bosses ordered them to participate in the
raid, but they nonetheless carried it out in harmony. Even more
alarmingly, the Inspectorate discovered that, just as the Mori
Operation trials were coming to their conclusion in 1932, bosses
in Agrigento received a circular letter from Palermo telling them
‘to close ranks, and get ready for the resumption of large-scale
crimes’. |
Among the most revealing testimonies gathered by the Inspec-
torate was that of Dr Melchiorre Allegra, a GP, radiographer
and lung specialist who ran a clinic in Castelvetrano, in the
province of Trapani. Allegra was arrested in the summer of 1937,
and dictated a dense twenty-six-page confession that shone the
light of the Inspectorate’s policework back into the past. Allegra
was initiated in Palermo in 1916 so he could provide phoney
medical certificates for Men of Honour who wanted to avoid
serving in the First World War. The mafiosi who were formally
presented to Dr Allegra as ‘brothers’ included men of all stations,
from coach drivers, butchers and fishmongers, right up to
Members of Parliament and landed aristocrats. After the Great
War, the provincial and Family bosses would often come from
across Sicily to meet in the Birreria Italia, a polished café, pastry
shop and bar situated at the junction of via Cavour and via
Maqueda, in the very centre of Palermo. For a few years, until

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Mafia Brotherhoods

the Fascist police became suspicious, the Birreria Italia was the
centre of the mafia world, a social club for the island’s gangster
elite.
The Inspectorate were well aware that the men Dr Allegra
called brothers were in a permanent state of war among them-
selves, whether open or declared. The mafia was prone to ‘inter-
necine struggles deriving from grudges which, whether they were
recent and remote, nearly always revolved around who was to
gain supremacy when it came to distributing the various positions
within the organisation’. An ‘internecine struggle’ of just this
kind would give the Inspectorate its route into the mafia’s very
nucleus, the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro around Palermo.
When the Iron Prefect first came to Palermo in October 1925,
his attention was immediately drawn to the Piana dei Colli, the
northern part of the Conca d’Oro where Inspector Ermanno
Sangiorgi first tussled with the mafia in the 1870s. Half a century
later, the Piana dei Colli was the site of a particularly ferocious
battle between two mafia factions. The conflict left cadavers in
the streets of central Palermo, many of them belonging to senior
bosses. Some of the mafia dynasties that had ruled the area since
the 1860s did not survive the carnage. Those that did, and who
didn’t manage to escape to America, Tunisia or London, were
rounded up by the Iron Prefect’s cops. Then Mori left, and calm
returned.
The Inspectorate discovered that the mafiosi from the Piana
dei Colli who had been released, or returned from exile after the
Mori Operation ended, could not reorganise their Families
because of the residual tensions between them. The tit for tat
killings resumed. In 1934, a boss named Rosario Napoli was
slain; the culprits tried to frame Napoli’s own nephew for the
murder. This nephew was the first Palermitan mafioso to give
information to the Inspectorate. His testimony slowly tipped into
a cascade of confessions from other mobsters, some of whom
described the initiation ritual they had undergone when they were
first admitted. As so often, omerta had cracked. By bringing

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 Sicily: The slimy octopus

together these confessions, and patiently corroborating them, the

Inspectorate then assembled a narrative of the war in the Conca
d’Oro that shed an even more withering light on Mussolini’s
portentous Ascension Day claims.
The protagonists of this new narrative were the Marasa
brothers, Francesco, Antonino, and above all Ernesto — the gener-
alissimo, as the Inspectorate dubbed him. The Marasa brothers
had their power base in the western section of the Conca d’Oro,
between Monreale and Porta Nuova. That is, along the road
travelled by Turi Miceli and his mafia squad when they launched
the Palermo revolt back in September 1866. Like Turi Miceli, the
Marasa brothers had money. In fact the Inspectorate estimated
that they owned property, livestock and other assets worth ‘quite
a few million Lire’. One million Lire was worth some $52,000
at the time, and that amount in 1938 had the purchasing power
of some $1.7 million today: so it is fair to conclude that the
Marasas were very rich criminals indeed.
What the men of the Inspectorate found most disturbing about
the Marasa brothers was their ability to collect friendships among
the island’s ruling class, to place themselves above suspicion, to
cloak the power they had won through violence, and to cover
the bloody tracks that traced their ascent.

By poisoning the political system under the pre-Fascist

governments, they carried out their shady criminal busi-
ness on the agricultural estates, in the lemon groves, in
the city, in the suburban townships, in the villages. They
always managed to stay hidden in the shadows cast by
baronial and princely coats of arms, by medals and titles.
Thanks to the shameful complaisance shown by men who
are supposed to be responsible for the fair and efficient
administration of the law, they always slipped away from
punishment. But behind the politician’s mask, behind the
honorific title, behind the all-pervasive hypocrisy and the
imposing wealth, there lurked the coarsest kind of

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Mafia Brotherhoods

criminal, with evil, grasping instincts, whose warlike early

years in the ranks of the underworld have left an indelible
mark of infamy.

It is a testament to the Marasa brothers’ success in shrouding

their ‘indelible mark of infamy’ that, until the discovery of the
Inspectorate’s report in 2007, their names had hardly been
mentioned in the chronicles of mafia history. No photographs,
no police descriptions, hardly even any rumours: a criminal power
all the more pervasive for being unseen and unnamed.
In the late 1920s, while the bosses of the Piana dei Colli were
busy ambushing one another, and then falling victim to the Mori
Operation, Ernesto Marasa and his brothers remained entirely
untouched. Indeed, generalissimo Ernesto showed a breathtaking
Machiavellian composure in the face of the Fascist onslaught: he
actually fed incriminating information about his mafia rivals to
the Iron Prefect’s investigators. Mussolini’s Fascist scalpel had
been partially guided by a mafioso’s hand.
Ernesto Marasa’s rise to power continued after the Mori Opera-
tion ended. While his enemies were held in jail, seething about
being betrayed, Marasa constructed an alliance of supporters
across the mafia Families of Palermo’s entire hinterland, including
the Piana dei Colli where he continued to undermine his enemies
by passing information to the police. His plan was, quite simply,
to become the mafia’s boss of all bosses. The Inspectorate spied
on the generalissimo as he ran his campaign from room 2 of the
Hotel Vittoria just off via Maqueda, Palermo’s main artery. Now
and again, he and two or three of his heavies would clamber
aboard a little red FIAT Balilla and set off to meet friends and
arrange hits in one of Palermo’s many mafia-dominated borgate.
After five years of work, the Inspectorate could conclude its
1938 report with a chillingly clear description of the mafia’s
structure that reads like a line-by-line demolition of the Iron
Prefect’s own views.

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 Sicily: The slimy octopus

The mafia is not just a state of mind or a mental habit. It

actually spreads this state of mind, this mental habit, from
within what is a genuine organisation. It is divided into
so-called ‘Families’, which are sub-divided into ‘Tens’, and
it has ‘bosses’ or ‘representatives’ who are formally elected.
The members, or ‘brothers’, have to go through an oath
to prove their unquestioning fidelity and secretiveness.

The oath, no one will be surprised to learn, involved pricking

the finger with a pin, dripping blood on a sacred image, and then
burning the image in the hands while swearing loyalty until death.
The mafia was organised ‘in the form of a sect, along the lines
of the Freemasons’. Its Families in each province had an overall
‘representative’ whose responsibilities included contacts with the
organisation’s branches abroad, in the United States, France and
Tunisia. The Families in the provinces of Trapani, Agrigento and
Caltanissetta looked to Palermo for leadership at crucial times.
The mafia, declared the Inspectorate, ‘had an organic and harmo-
nious structure, regulated by clearly defined norms, and managed
by people who were utterly beyond suspicion’. At the centre of
the mafia web, there was a ‘boss of all bosses’ or ‘general presi-
dent’: generalissimo Ernesto Marasa.
The Inspectorate’s 1938 report was sent in multiple copies to
senior figures in the judiciary and law enforcement. The forty-
eight brave men who put their names to the document were
desperate for their sleuthing to make a real difference in Sicily.
Their desperation was evident in an indignant, impassioned turn
of phrase: in the lurid talk of a ‘slimy octopus’ (as if a beast as
sophisticated as the mafia could ever have just one head); and
also in the conclusion, which deliberately parroted the catch-
phrases of Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech. Somewhere, they
hoped, their plea would meet the eyes of someone determined
to make Fascism’s results match up to its battle cries: there must
be ‘no holding back’ against an evil that was ‘dishonouring Sicily’;
the state must once again wield the ‘scalpel’ against the mafia.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The passion and insight that went into the Inspectorate’s

1938 report makes its every word chilling, for two reasons. First,
because it provides the earliest absolutely indisputable evidence
that the Sicilian mafia was a single highly structured organisation
that extended right across western Sicily. Terms like ‘Family’,
‘representative’, and ‘boss of all bosses’ had never appeared
before in the historical record. Second, because many years
would pass, and the lives of many brave police, Carabinieri and
magistrates would be sacrificed, before the moment in 1992
when a diagram of the Sicilian mafia that was identical to the
one assembled by the Inspectorate would finally be accepted as
the truth within the Italian legal system.
But in 1938 there was not the slightest hope that the Fascist
state would return to a war footing against organised crime. In
fact the signs that Fascism would fail to beat the mafia were there
to be seen all along. In the Iron Prefect’s refusal to believe that his
enemy was an Honoured Society, for example. Or in his crass view
of Sicilian psychology. Or in Fascism’s preference for bundling
suspects off into enforced residence on penal colonies: no noise,
and no judicial process. For, as anyone with a historical memory
for anti-mafia measures would have known, fighting organised
crime in this way was like fighting weeds in your garden by trans-
planting them into your greenhouse.
The Mori Operation was only ever going to be a short-term
measure. The aim was to draw a decisive line between the new
regime and the corrupt democratic past; it was to show that Fascism
was still vigorous even though the cudgels and the castor oil had
been cast to one side. Fascist ‘surgery’ on Sicily was never intended
to prepare the patient for a life of law and order. It was about
putting on a propagandistic spectacle; it was about winning for
Mussolini the support of the island’s landed elite — the very aris-
tocrats whose ‘baronial and princely coats of arms’ had shielded
the Marasa brothers, like so many other mafiosi before them.
The Iron Prefect, the orphan boy from Pavia, was besotted
with the sumptuous decadence of Palermo’s beau monde. When

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Mori socialised in the Sicilian capital, he went out in a luxurious

carriage, its lustrous black bodywork bristling with gilt, intaglio,
and all manner of baroque ornamentation. He was ‘on heat for
the nobility’ — to use an enemy’s crude phrase — as he swished
from ball to ball, from salon to salon. The Iron Prefect believed,
or chose to believe, that the landowners he played baccara with
were exactly what their lawyers had always said they were when,
from time to time, their underworld connections were exposed:
they were victims of the thugs, and not their strategic
protectors.
The charges against the ‘slimy octopus’ that were meticulously
assembled in the Inspectorate’s 1938 report took until 1942 to
come to court. By that time the Men of Honour who had told
their secrets to the Inspectorate had retracted their confessions.
Before the trial most of the mafiosi named in the 1938 report
were released for lack of evidence — including the generalissimo
Ernesto Marasa, with his brothers. And in the trial itself, most
of the fifty-three men who were eventually convicted received
only short sentences. The case set out in the 1938 report had
slowly crumbled until it became a comparatively minor incon-
venience for the Sicilian mob. As Ermanno Sangiorgi could have
told the men of the Inspectorate, many earlier anti-mafia cases
had fallen apart in the same way. What was different in 1942 was
that the Fascist regime, which was busy crowing about dazzling
feats of bravura by the Italian army in the Second World War,
completely suppressed all mention of the Inspectorate’s report
and the resultant court proceedings. Once again, Italy had proved
just how resourceful it could be when it came to denying the
truth about the Sicilian mafia.

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Master Joe dances a faranfella

If there is a servant of the state who encapsulates all the contra-

dictions of Fascism’s long fight against the Honoured Society in
Calabria, but also elsewhere, then perhaps it is Giuseppe Delfino.
Delfino was a homespun hero of law enforcement. In August
1926, just as Fascism was first cranking up its clampdown, he
took command of the Carabiniere station in Plati, overlooking
the Ionian Coast. This was the territory where Delfino was born
and he knew it as well as anyone. Both the picciotteria citadel
of San Luca and the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi were
on his beat. Cussed and smart, Delfino would.disguise himself
as a shepherd to patrol the mountain unobserved, or slip into
taverns so he could overhear the picciotti as they bragged. Among
the peasants he earned the respectful nickname Massaru Peppi
(‘Master Joe’) — massaru being the word for a farm overseer or
factor. Master Joe dismantled a cattle-rustling network centred
on San Luca in January 1927, and thereby — despite the murder
of his key witness — brought seventy-six mafiosi to justice. Among
them were men called Strangio, Pelle and Nirta: perhaps not
coincidentally, families with these surnames would much later
be caught up in the blood feud that led to the massacre at Duis-
berg on 15 August 2007.
The Calabrian press, which was generally sparing in its
coverage of the anti-organised crime campaign, said that Delfino
had ‘brought honour on himself’.

Meanwhile this resourceful station commander has not

even allowed himself a day’s rest, and is pressing on with
his pursuit of the lawbreakers.

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 Master Joe dances a tarantella

Shortly afterwards, once the rustlers he had arrested had their

convictions confirmed on appeal, ‘Master Joe’ Delfino even
earned himself a walk-on part in the canon of Italian literature.
Corrado Alvaro, the San Luca-born author who was our witness
to the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary at Polsi, also wrote a vignette
about Master Joe’s relentless hunt for a small-time goat thief.
Borrowing the peasants’ own spare vocabulary, Alvaro evoked
the holy terror that Delfino inspired on Aspromonte throughout
Fascism’s twenty-year rule.

Delfino was the Carabiniere who couldn’t hear a robber’s

name mentioned without setting off in pursuit as if he’d
staked money on it .. . with his short cloak, his rifle, and
his sparkly eyes, he rummaged everywhere: he knew all
the hiding places, he knew every renegade’s habits like he
knew his own pocket — the hollow trunks, the grottoes
that no one apart from the mountain folk could find, the
perches high in ancient trees.

As publicity goes, this may not seem much. Indeed, compared

to the Iron Prefect, the inveterate blowhard whose battle with
the mafia in Sicily received glowing worldwide press, Master Joe’s
profile was positively meek. But the odd line in local newspapers
and the hushed respect of the peasants amounted to about as
much fame as anyone could possibly hope to accumulate by
serving the law in far-off Calabria, even at the height of Fascism’s
short-lived enthusiasm for facing down the bosses.
Local legend and family memory are the only source we have
to draw on to reconstruct much of Master Joe’s long career
on Aspromonte. But that memory, however much time may
have embroidered it, gives us access to a truth that the news-
papers and trial documents disguise. Even Master Joe’s son,
the current guardian of Delfino lore, portrays him as a man
with very violent methods. This was a part of the world where
there were two paths in life — ‘Either you became a Carabiniere,

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Mafia Brotherhoods

or you entered the ’ndrangheta’ — and brutality lay along both

of them.
The story goes that Master Joe once waited until Christmas
for a runaway picciotto to return home, and did not swoop until
his target had hunkered down over a plate of maccheroni with
goat meat sauce. Master Joe then stood below the window,
disguised as a shepherd, and played a wistful song on the bagpipes.
The picciotto was so moved that he stopped eating and leaned
out of the window to offer the minstrel a drink of wine, only to
find a pistol pointed at his face. Recognising Master Joe, he said,
‘Let me finish my maccheroni, at least’. The reply was blunt.
‘That would be pointless, because back at the barracks we’d only
make you vomit them all up again anyway’. Master Joe, it is
said, was as good as his word: the thief spent a week on his back
being punched and forced to drink salt water. When a doctor
was finally allowed in, he saw the man’s grotesquely swollen
stomach, shook his head, and said, ‘You don’t need a GP here,
you need an obstetrician’.
If this story sounds far-fetched then perhaps we should recall
that Cirella, where the members of the picciotteria who killed
Maria Marvelli’s husband were tortured until they confessed,
was also part of Master Joe’s beat.
There is another family memory of Master Joe who shows us
another side of his, and Fascism’s, battle with the ’ndrangheta.
In the autumn of 1940 station commander ‘Master Joe’ Delfino
was still on duty. With only one officer to help him maintain
order during the annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the
Madonna of Polsi, it is said that he took a Chief Cudgel aside
and made a deal so that there would be no trouble. If there were
any murders decreed at Polsi that year, then they were performed
at a polite distance in time and space from the Sanctuary. Indeed
Delfino’s son later recalled that, ‘for all the years my father was
in charge, nothing happened’ at Polsi. The station commander
would even join the celebrating crowds during the pilgrimage,
taking his turn to dance a tarantella with the members of the

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 Master Joe dances a tarantella

Honoured Society. The picture Delfino’s son paints in our mind’s

eye is vivid. The sanctuary set amid the chestnut trees. The hectic
trilling of a squeeze box. A circle of swarthy grins, some of them
traversed by ghastly razorblade tracery. And there in the middle,
the Carabiniere, kicking out the bold red stripes on his black
uniform trousers.
Se non é vero, é molto ben trovato: if the picture isn’t true,
it’s a very smart invention — one that historians should cherish.
What official sources can scarcely ever record is just this kind of
informal accord between the authorities and the mob. A cagey
mutual respect. An improvised agreement to share power and
territory. At Polsi, as in so many other parts of Sicily and southern
Italy, after the roundups, and the beatings, and the trials, and
the propagandistic speeches had passed, the Fascist state settled
back into Italy’s traditional dance with organised crime.

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Liberation

The Second World War was the greatest collective tragedy ever
endured by the Italian people. Between 1935 and 1942, Italian
armies visited death and destruction on Ethiopia, Albania, France,
Greece and Russia. In 1943, death and destruction came home
to the peninsula with vengeful fury.
Italian territory was invaded for the first time on ro July when
seven Allied divisions launched a seaborne assault on Sicily. Up
in Rome, in the early hours of 25 July, a meeting of the Fascist
Grand Council voted to bring twenty years of Fascist rule to an
end; Benito Mussolini was arrested the following evening. As
news spread across the country, Italians tore down Fascist
symbols; many people thought the war was over. But the catas-
trophe had only just begun.
On 17 August the last Axis troops completed their evacuation
of Sicily. On 3 September the Allies crossed the Straits of Messina
into Calabria, where they met only token resistance. On 8
September the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D.
Eisenhower, announced Italy’s surrender. The very next day saw
the beginning of Operation Avalanche — the landing at Salerno,
just south of Naples. The Germans — no longer allies but invaders
— rumbled down the peninsula to carry on their war. Italy’s king
fled. All semblance of his government’s civil and military authority
dissolved and the Italian people were left to find their own path
to survival.
Naples was liberated on 1 October. But the Allied advance
ground to a halt soon afterwards. For the next twenty months
Italy was a battleground, as the Reich and the Allies slogged out
a slow and bloody contest. Behind German lines in the north

35>
 Liberation

and centre, a civil war pitted recalcitrant Fascists against the

Resistance. There were collective reprisals and atrocities, mass
deportations of Italian workers and troops, and a campaign of
racial extermination directed at Italy’s Jews.
The south scarcely fared better under Allied Military Govern-
ment in the Occupied Territories, known as AMGOT. In prepar-
ation for AMGOT, the War Office had drafted Zone Handbooks
on the society and mores of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. Those
Handbooks are revealing in two ways. First, they tell us what the
world knew about organised crime after a century of history.
Second, they allow us to measure how shocked the Allies were
by the chaos that followed liberation and the rapid collapse of
the Italian state. Score settling, hunger, contagion, corruption,
black-marketeering and banditry: these were ideal conditions in
which Italy’s gangsters could shake off their Fascist-induced
torpor.

i
War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.
Sicily Zone Handbook.
Secret.
The information contained herein is believed to be correct
as at May Ist, 1943.

The head of the Palermo police has said that if a cross

were to be placed on every spot where a victim lies
buried in the plain of Palermo, the Conca d’Oro would
appear as a vast cemetery.
Mafia never was a compact criminal association, but
a complex social phenomenon, the consequence of
centuries of misgovernment. The Mafiuso is governed
by a sentiment akin to arrogance, which imposes a
special line of conduct upon him. A Mafiuso is thus
not a thief or a rascal in any simple sense. He desires

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Mafia Brotherhoods

to be respected, and nearly always he respects others.

Mafia is the consciousness of one’s individuality, the
exaggerated conceit of one’s strength.
All Italian governments have been anxious to
suppress this scourge of Sicilian life. The Fascist regime
did its best to destroy Mafia, and the ruthless efforts of
Mori, the Prefect of Palermo, resulted in many arrests.
However, it is difficult to change the spirit of a people
by mere police measures, and the Mafia may still exist
in Sicily.

Nicola (Nick) Gentile was born in 1885 in Siculiana, in the prov-

ince of Agrigento, Sicily’s notorious sulphur country. In 1906 he
was initiated into the Honoured Society in Philadelphia, USA.
An extortionist, murderer, bootlegger and drug dealer, he spent
the next three decades of his life shuttling to and fro across the
Atlantic as the demands of his criminal business, and the need
to avoid his enemies in the police and mafia, dictated. Arrested
on a narcotics charge in New Orleans in 1937, Gentile jumped
bail and fled to Sicily.
Gentile was back in the province of Agrigento in the momen-
tous month of July 1943, in his wife’s hometown of Raffadali.
When the American troops passed through, he smilingly offered
them his services as a translator and guide to their commanding
officer. Soon he and the officer had formed what he called ‘an
administration, a government’ across many of the surrounding
towns.
Thus began the Allies’ crash course in the techniques for infil-
trating state authority that the mafia had refined over the previous
century. Nick Gentile’s story is typical: across western Sicily
mafiosi made friends with combat troops and then with the
utterly bewildered military administrators who followed in
behind. Amid an explosion of prison breakouts and armed
robbery, AMGOT sought authority figures untainted by Musso-
lini’s regime to help them deal with the anarchy. As ‘middle-class

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 Liberation

villains’, Men of Honour are very good at creating the respect-

able facade that AMGOT was looking for. Nick Gentile could
even pose as a victim of Fascist oppression because he had spent
a couple of years on remand during the Iron Prefect’s anti-mafia
drive of the late 1920s. Many of his brethren had similar tales
of woe to tell. So when AMGOT looked to replace Blackshirted
mayors with more friendly locals, there was often an obvious
candidate to hand. As Major General Lord James Rennell Rodd,
the British head of AMGOT, later admitted

With the people clamouring to be rid of a Fascist Podesta

[mayor], many of my officers fell into the trap of selecting
the most forthcoming self-advertiser . . . The choices in
more than one instance fell on the local ‘Mafia’ boss or
his shadow, who in one or two cases had graduated in an
American gangster environment.

Lord Rennell had a huge amount to cope with, in an uncertain

and fast-moving situation. But he was also being parsimonious
with the truth. The most insidious overtures to AMGOT were
those made by the members of the island’s landowning elite. Lord
Rennell, the 2nd Baron Rennell, could hardly have been more
patrician: a multilingual former diplomat and banker who was
educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford, he was also an
enthusiastic member of the Royal Geographical Society who had
travelled among the Touareg in the Sahara as a young man, and
was a devoted Italophile. To a man of Lord Rennell’s breeding it
would scarcely have seemed credible that the suave noblemen who
invited him to dinner in their grand palazzi in Palermo could have
intimate connections with mafia thuggery.
One of those aristocrats was Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, Count
of Almerita, who emanated a distinct odour of mafia (as the
Italian phrase has it). Back in 1926-27, with the Mori Operation
rounding up hoodlums by the hundred, a mob war was raging
_in the Conca d’Oro and threatening to bring the Fascist axe

353
Mafia Brotherhoods

crashing down on the very cradle of the Honoured Society. No

less than three special commissions of mafiosi had come over
from the United States, but failed to bring the warring factions
together. The Inspectorate discovered that Count Tasca then
approached the Iron Prefect on the mafia’s behalf. He promised
on his honour that the violence would soon end. So what need
was there to go to all the trouble of arresting everyone involved?
In the summer of 1943, Lord Rennell, unaware of Count Tasca’s
record as a mafia mediator, appointed him Mayor of Palermo.
Seeing the mafia’s intimacy with the Allies, Sicilians quickly
lost faith in AMGOT?’s ability to impose law and order. And a
state that has lost the faith of its citizens is just the kind the
mafia likes. 3
Some American intelligence agents working for the Office of
Strategic Services (or OSS, the forerunner of the CIA) came up
with what they clearly thought was a smart and highly original
scheme to address the crisis. Less than a week after Allied armies
occupied the last corner of Sicily, in an enthusiastic bid to win
more clout for his young and hitherto unimportant intelligence
corps, the OSS’s man in Palermo reported as follows.

Only the Mafia is able to bring about suppression of

black market practices and influence the ‘contadini’ [peas-
ants] who constitute a majority of the population... We
have had conferences with their [the mafia’s] leaders and
a bargain has been struck that they will be doing as we
direct or suggest. A bargain once made here is not easily
broken . . . We lent a sympathetic ear to their troubles
and assured them, however feeble our cooperation, that
it was theirs for the asking.

In other words, the OSS was suggesting, the, Allies should use
the mafia to co-manage crime. Throughout the AMGOT period
in Sicily, as former agents have since confessed, the OSS continued
to lend a ‘sympathetic ear’ to mafia bosses. The understanding

354
 Liberation

between them, it seems, was based on an exchange of favours:

the OSS received information in return for precious little tokens
of trust — like tyres, which the mafiosi needed for the trucks they
deployed in black market operations. In short, with the kind of
naivety of which only those most determined to be cunning are
capable, the OSS had fallen for the mafia’s oldest trick. As had
always been the case, robbery and smuggling did not just fill the
mafia’s coffers; they also had a handy political purpose from the
bosses’ point of view. A crime wave weakened the state and meant
that the state had to seek help in ruling Sicily. Help from the
mafia, that is.
Within weeks of the Allied landings in Sicily, much of what
little Fascism had achieved against the mafia was obliterated. The
AMGOT authorities had little time for the OSS’s cynicism. Once
Lord Rennell realised the terrifying speed with which the mafia
had reasserted its grip, he took what countermeasures he could.
But it was already too late. Where a mafia mayor was dismissed,
other leading citizens were often afraid to take his place. Sicily’s
Men of Honour could now plot their course into a post-war
world that would bring them greater power and wealth than even
they had ever known before.

a
War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.
Calabria Zone Handbook.
Secret.
The information contained herein is believed to be correct
as at May rsth, 1943.

Physically, the Calabrian has his own look and build.

He is dark and whiskered, short and wiry; and in
Calabria it is the man who counts. The wife is a beast
of burden or a slave, the mother a nurse . . . Flirting
and courting in the English manner are not understood,

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Mafia Brotherhoods

and may cost you your life ... The tough natural
conditions in which a Calabrian lives and works have
made him hard and matter-of-fact . . . The Calabrian is
a man of few words, and those straight to the point.
He is scornful of comfort and luxury, which never
enter his own life, and indifferent to pain and
suffering . . . Public justice according to English ideals
the Calabrian does not understand, never having
experienced it... Thus no Calabrian, however well
born and bred, can be expected to be on the side of
the police as a matter of course.
It is natural that in a country where feelings are apt
to run high, crimes committed on a sudden violent
impulse are far more numerous than those arising from
cool deliberate malice. Indeed the latter class of crime
is almost unknown in Calabria.

The fighting between the Allies and the Germans in much of

Calabria was brief. And after the fighting was over, AMGOT
kept only a skeleton staff there. The Calabria Zone Handbook
made no mention of a mafia in the region. No intelligence
reports identified any organised criminal activity in 1943-44.
Even Lord Rennell, who toured Calabria in early October
1943, failed to spot anything seriously amiss. If mayors linked
to the picciotteria were appointed, which seems certain to have
been the case, nobody noticed. The Honoured Society of
Calabria entered the post-war era stronger than ever, and — as
it had always been — far, far below the radar of public
awareness.
The rise of one Calabrian Chief Cudgel gives us the measure
of what the Allies could not see. Don Antonio (’Ntoni) Macri
was born in 1904 in Siderno, the economic heart of the noto-
rious Locri region on the Ionian Coast. His career began in
the late 1920s with repeated arrests for assault and carrying
an illegal weapon — the classic profile of the enforcer. In 1933,

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 Liberation

with Fascism now claiming victory over the mafias, he was

released from a five-year prison sentence on an amnesty. The
obliging governor of his prison said that he had been ‘well
behaved and assiduously hard-working’, and therefore deserved
to be encouraged further along the path to complete rehabilita-
tion. There was no rehabilitation: in 1937, he was categorised
as a ‘habitual delinquent’, convicted of being the boss of a
criminal association known by its members as the Honoured
Society, and sent to an agricultural colony for three and a half
years.
Once this ‘habitual delinquent’ was free again, the Carabinieri
reports suddenly change their tone dramatically: ‘irreproachable
and hard-working’, he was called. Don ’Ntoni was the boss that
Master Joe danced the tarantella with in the last years of Fascism.
So now we have an idea what he received in return for keeping
control of his men during the pilgrimage to Polsi.
In August 1944, with the AMGOT period over and Calabria
back under Italian control, don ’Ntoni was once more identified
as the leader of a criminal organisation and recommended for
enforced residence. The reports on him say that he was running
protection rackets in the most valuable agricultural land of the
Ionian Coast. A judge wrote that he ‘dictated the price of oranges
and lemons to suit his own whim and to serve his own interest
as a dealer in the citrus fruit sector’.
Don ’Ntoni ‘went on the run’, but such was the control he
exercised over his territory that he was able to stay exactly where
he was. In April 1946 he was finally spotted and arrested in the
centre of Locri, near to the Palace of Justice, with a revolver and
a dagger in his pockets. In July of the same year magistrates
dismissed the case against him because of ‘insufficient evidence’.
Insufficient evidence: since the 1870s, this had been the proud
motto beneath many a Sicilian crime dynasty’s family crest. Now
don ’Ntoni Macri had acquired the same degree of power and
influence. Along with the same self-interested strain of family
- values. When don ’Ntoni’s wife passed away not long after, his

BT
Mafia Brotherhoods

men forced large numbers of local people to attend her funeral.

In a judge’s words, the ceremony became ‘the opportunity to stage
a public demonstration of the Honoured Society’s omnipotence’.
In this corner of Calabria at least, the humble picciotteria, the
sect of brawlers, pimps and petty extortionists that had crawled
out from the prisons in the 1880s, had completed its ascent.
By the 1960s don ’Ntoni had a criminal record — a shelf-bowing
900 pages long — that read like the bill for the decades since the
1880s in which Calabria’s gangster emergency had been ignored.
He was murdered in 1975, just after finishing a game of bowls
in what was the most significant hit in ’ndrangheta history. For
by that time, don ’Ntoni Macri had become the most notorious
’*ndranghetista of them all — referred to by some Men of Honour
as the boss of all bosses, and probably also an initiated member
of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra. But then that is a story for another era.

War Office, London: Directorate of Civil Affairs.

Campania Zone Handbook.
Secret.
The information contained herein is believed to be correct
as on July rst, 1943.

Chapter VI, ‘Folklore and Feasts’

The real camorra, once a powerful secret society, does

in fact no longer exist, though there is much
underground life in Naples. One must beware of
pickpockets; if one is on the lookout for the singers
one can listen to the songs in the streets, ‘o
bambeniello nasciuto’ or ‘amore non é pit bagnato’,
when many people cluster round, or, if one can
stomach it, one can even eat mussels and snails at a
‘bancarella de maruzzaro’ or ‘purpetielli veraci’.

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 Liberation

The war brought horrors of all kinds on Italy, from the most
viciously personal (mass rape), to the most terrifyingly imper-
sonal (carpet bombing). In September 1943 Naples was a
hungry city battered by air raids that left some 200,000 people
homeless and destroyed much of the sewage system. The
Germans then began a policy of deportation and summary
executions. The Neapolitans rose in revolt, and freedom was
already within their grasp when they greeted the first Allied
tanks on 1 October.
But the traumas of war did not cease with the Wehrmacht’s
departure. Naples had always been a shambolic city, one that
seemed to teeter on the edge of breakdown. Under AMGOT, it
tipped headlong into squalor and degradation. To many in Naples
at the time it felt as if all standards of human self-respect had
been abandoned in the scramble to get a little food to eat, a little
water to drink, and something to wear. The scenes of misery made
a profound impression on the great movie director John Huston,
who was in Naples making army newsreels. He later recalled that

Naples was like a whore suffering from the beating of a

brute — teeth knocked out, eyes blackened, nose broken,
smelling of filth and vomit. There was an absence of soap,
and even the bare legs of the girls were dirty. Cigarettes
were the medium of exchange commonly employed, and
anything could be had for a package. Little boys were
offering their sisters and mothers for sale. At night, during
the blackouts, rats appeared in packs outside the buildings
and simply stood there, looking at you with red eyes, not
moving. You walked around them. Fumes came out of
the alleyways, down which there were establishments
featuring ‘flesh’ acts between animals and children. The
men and women of Naples were a bereft, starving,
desperate people who would do absolutely anything to
survive. The souls of the people had been raped. It was
indeed an unholy city.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The facts from the archives back up Huston’s memories. Prostitu-

tion was a very common survival tactic. The British Psychological
Warfare Branch (PWB) which had responsibility for keeping tabs
on civilian morale, estimated that there were around 40,000 pros-
titutes in Naples — about ro per cent of the city’s women. Nor
was it just women. In the alleys, pimps were heard shouting ‘Two
dollars the boys, three dollars the girls!’ to uniformed men who
were openly eyeing and pawing the children lined up before them.
Needless to say, venereal disease joined typhus among the scourges
assailing liberated Naples.
Kleptomania gripped the city too. Anything of any conceivable
value vanished: telegraph wires, manhole covers, railway tracks,
even whole trams. It is said that a Papal Legate’s car was found
to be running on pilfered tyres.
Profiteers controlled much of the food supply from what the
PWB called ‘the almost miraculously fertile land in the low-lying
ground around Naples’. The PWB referred to a ‘fantastic gang-
land situation’ between Nola and the coast north of the city.
There were armed bands, many of them made up of deserters,
but with widespread backing in this ‘traditionally violent’ area:
‘they have the support of a whole organisation which includes
prostitutes, receivers, Black Market specialists, etc.’
Among the worst offenders in Naples itself were rich indus-
trialists, especially pasta manufacturers and millers. Spaghetti
factories took to producing two varieties of product: a good one
for the black market, and one that was ‘almost black and of an
unpleasant taste’ for legal distribution. In March 1944 Antonio
and Giuseppe Caputo, the owners of one of the city’s biggest
flour mills in the industrial quarter of San Giovanni a Teduccio,
were sentenced to seven years for black market activities; inves-
tigators discovered machine guns and grenades in their house.
Floating comfortably on this tide of illegality, at least for a
few months, was the Fascist Vito Genovese. ‘Fascist’, that is, only
until the Allied armies reached Campania, at which point he shed
his Mussolinian credentials like a worn-out suit, and stepped

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into a new disguise as a translator and guide to the US Army.

In May 1944 a sergeant from the US Army’s Criminal Inves-
tigation Division received a tip-off and began looking hard at
Genovese’s interests. Before the war, the sergeant in question —
Orange C. Dickey — had a job patrolling the leafy campus of
Pennsylvania State College. His new assignment took him into
the even leafier but rather more dangerous surroundings of Nola.
Sergeant Dickey’s first breakthrough came when he found an
elephants’ graveyard of burned out military trucks in a vineyard
outside Nola. He then heard two Canadian soldiers confess that
they had delivered the trucks, with their priceless cargo of flour
and sugar, with the transparent password ‘Genovese sent us’.
By the end of August 1944 Sergeant Dickey had enough
evidence to make an arrest: he picked Genovese up just after
watching him collect a travel permit from the Mayor of Nola. A
search of the gangster’s wallet brought to light several enthusiastic
letters of reference written by American officials in Nola on
Genovese’s behalf.

Mr Genovese met me and acted as my interpreter for over

a month. He would accept no pay; paid his own expenses;
worked day and night and rendered most valuable assist-
ance to the Allied Military Government.

Despite these letters, and a great deal more alarming evidence

of Genovese’s influence within the US Army, Sergeant Dickey’s
investigations would prove arduous and ultimately futile. After
long months during which nobody seemed to want to take respon-
sibility for the case, Genovese was eventually escorted back to
the United States to face the murder charge that had originally
provoked his flight to Italy. But one poisoned witness later, he
was freed to resume his stellar career in American
gangsterdom.
The intriguing thing about the Genovese story, from the Italian
- point of view, is the glimpse it affords of re-emergent criminal

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Mafia Brotherhoods

organisations in the Neapolitan hinterland. Sergeant Dickey’s

evidence showed that Genovese’s black market network ran in
many directions. The branches that most concerned Dickey were
in AMGOT, of course. But Genovese also sheltered local thieves
and smugglers from prosecution, assiduously cultivated friends
in the Neapolitan judiciary, and even found protection from the
Chief of Police of Rome. Sergeant Dickey also believed that
Genovese partly controlled the electricity supply in the Nola area,
giving him a stranglehold on manufacturing.
But if Genovese had links with existing criminal gangs in Nola,
the signs are that things were not always friendly between them.
Among the letters of recommendation written by Allied military
officials for Genovese was one, dated June 1944, that contained
the following curious phrase.

[Vito Genovese] has been invaluable to me — is absolutely

honest, and as a matter of fact, exposed several cases of
bribery and blackmarket operations among so-called
trusted civil personnel.

In traditional mafia fashion, Genovese was using his contacts

with the authorities to eliminate his rivals.
Then there also is the mysterious informer whose tip-off first
put Sergeant Dickey onto Genovese’s black market empire. The
man in question is likely to remain anonymous — his name was
removed from the documentation for his own protection. Whoever
he was, he spun Sergeant Dickey a particularly intriguing story.
He said he was ‘a former member of the Camorra’ who had
bought himself out of the organisation after marrying an Amer-
ican girl. The Camorra, he went on to explain, was ‘the Italian
counterpart of the Mafia Sicilian Union of the United States’,
and Vito Genovese was now its supreme boss.
At least two things about this story are odd. First, in 1944
there was almost certainly no such thing as the camorra, in the
traditional sense of an Honoured Society. Second, the camorra

362
 Liberation

— even if it did exist — was nothing like Italy’s equivalent of the

mafia in the United States. It sounds to me as if the informer
cooked his story to suit the tastes of his American interlocutor.
If so, we can only guess at his motives. But it would be no surprise
if he turned out to be an emissary of one of Genovese’s local
competitors. Perhaps the valiant Sergeant Dickey was lured into
action by hoods from Nola or the Mazzoni who were eager to
expel the American cuckoo from their Campanian nest. With the
Fascist repression a fading memory, and Vito Genovese out of
the way, the gangs of the Neapolitan hinterland could begin their
history anew.
Meanwhile, in the hovels of the city centre, a contraband
bonanza was changing the urban ground rules. In each tiny quarter,
the street-corner boss or guappo was at the hub of the black
market. Anyone who had under-the-counter goods to sell would
turn to the guappo whose assistants would dart out into the
alleys to find the right outlet at the right price. The profits to be
made were enormous. PWB reported that the illiterate lumpen
proletarians of the low city who made itrich in profiteering were
too ignorant to count the bags of money they collected, so they
weighed them instead. ‘I have 3 kilos of thousand Lire notes’.
On one occasion a passing bank clerk was stopped by an old
crone and asked to help her count a great wicker basket of cash;
when he had finished, she gave him a tip of 2,000 Lire. The story
is poignant because it was so typical: bank clerks, factory workers,
pensioners and bureaucrats — people on fixed incomes that is —
suffered worst in the wild black market inflation of the Liberation
period. In Naples, the PWB noted, ‘class distinctions are disap-
pearing’. Crime paid.
For much of the war in Italy Naples was the most important
port of arrival for the colossal volume of provisions consumed
by the advancing Allied armies. That deluge was simultaneously
the city’s deliverance and its damnation. By April 1944 an aston-
ishing 45 per cent of Allied military cargo was being stolen. Only
- systemic corruption within Allied Military Government and

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Mafia Brotherhoods

among the Anglo-American forces can account for the industrial

scale of the robbery. In September 1944 the PWB reported that
Allied troops were openly ferrying packages of goods to market,
and that the Military Police were doing nothing to stop them.
The Italian police and Carabinieri who served under AMGOT
at least had the defence of being as hungry as the rest of the
local population. But they were just as likely to be venal as their
British and American superiors. In May 1944 the PWB said that
policemen were taking a cut of 20-30,000 Lire on every lorry
load of goods that disappeared from the port. Everyone in Naples
acquired a wily expertise on the relative merits of American and
Canadian blankets, or British and French army boots. There was
such a big racket in penicillin that the soldiers at the front went
short.
The most visible retail outlets for stolen Allied goods were
in via Forcella, near an American military depot. The street
became a multinational, open-air, army surplus bazaar where
anything intended for the Allied forces could be bought. And
‘anything’ included weaponry, it was said, as long as you knew
who to ask.
Via Forcella runs through the cramped heart of the city; it lies
only a few metres from the old Palazzo della Vicaria, the former
prison and court house where, on 3 October 1862, Salvatore De
Crescenzo, the gangland chieftain ‘redeemed’ at the time of Italian
unification, had his rival stabbed to death and became the supreme
boss of the Honoured Society of Naples. Eighty-one years later,
at the time of AMGOT, the guappi in charge of via Forcella were
the Giuliano boys, Pio Vittorio, Guglielmo and Salvatore. Today
the Giuliano family name means only one thing: camorra.
In the ensuing decades new clans like the Giulianos, drawing
on their experiences during the chaos of Liberation, would find
different answers to the challenges that had ultimately defeated
the old Honoured Society of Salvatore De Crescenzo, of Ciccio
‘Little Lord Frankie’ Cappuccio, of Enrico ‘Big ’Enry’ Alfano.
How to organise tightly and network widely. How to infiltrate

364
 Liberation

the economy and the political apparatus of the state. How to

tame the police and courts. How to control and exploit women,
and with them breed sons, and even daughters, able to perpetuate
the system’s power. How, by all these means, to turn mere delin-
quency into enduring territorial authority. 1943 was year zero for
the rule of law in Naples. The Allied Liberation re-started the
clock of camorra history.

a
Organised crime is Italy’s congenital disease. The Honoured
Societies of Naples and Sicily were born from the prison system
in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The violence
and conspiratorial politics of Italian unification gave the hood-
lums their passage out of the dungeons and into history.
The legacy of the Risorgimento in parts of the South and
Sicily was a sophisticated and powerful model of criminal organi-
sation. The members of these brotherhoods deployed violence
for three strategic purposes. First: to control other felons, to farm
them for money, information and talent. Second: to leech the
legal economy. And third: to create contacts among the upper
echelons — the landowners, politicians, and magistrates. In the
environs of Palermo the mafia, boosted by the island’s recent
history of revolution, did not just have contacts with the upper
class, it formed an integral facet of the upper class.
The new Kingdom of Italy failed to address that legacy. Worse,
it lapsed into sharing its sovereignty with the local bosses. Italy
allowed a criminal ecosystem to develop. It tried to live out the
dream of being a modern state; but it did so with few of the
resources that its wealthier neighbours could draw on, and with
many more innate disadvantages. The result was political frag-
mentation and instability: an institutional life driven less by
policies designed to address collective problems than by haggling
for tactical advantage and short-term favours. This was a political
- system that frequently gave leverage to the worst pressure groups

365
Mafia Brotherhoods

in the country — the ones sheltering men of violence. At election

time the government sometimes used gangsters to make sure the
right candidates won. Parliament produced bad legislation,
which was then selectively enforced: the practice of dealing with
mafiosi and camorristi by sending them into ‘enforced residence’
is one prime instance. Urgently needed reforms never material-
ised: an example being the utter legislative void around the likes
of Calogero Gambino (from the ‘fratricide’ case of the 1870s)
and Gennaro Abbatemaggio (from the Cuocolo trial of the early
1900s) — mafiosi and camorristi who abandoned the ranks of
their brotherhoods and sought refuge with the state. Italy also
had enough lazy and cynical journalists, wrong-headed intel-
lectuals and morally obtuse writers to mask the real nature of
the emergency, give resonance and credibility to the underworld’s
own twisted ideology, and allow gangsters to gaze at flattering
reflections of themselves in print.
The criminal ecosystem spawned a new Honoured Society, the
picciotteria, to retrace the evolutionary path of its older cousins:
in the 1880s, it quickly progressed from prison to achieve territo-
rial dominance in the outside world.
Yet to say that Italy harboured a criminal ecosystem is not to
say that the country was run by gangsters. Italy has never been
a failed state, a mafia regime. The reason why the mafias of
Southern Italy and Sicily have such a long history is not because
they were and are all-powerful, even in their heartlands. The rule
of law was not a dead letter in the peninsula, and Italy did fight
the mafias. Omerta broke frequently. Sometimes the mafias’ terri-
torial control broke too, leading to a reawakening in what good
police like Ermanno Sangiorgi called the spirito pubblico — the
‘public spirit’: in other words, the belief that people could trust
the state to enforce its own rules. Such moments offered a glimpse
of an underlying public hunger for legality,:and showed what
could have been achieved had there been a more consistent anti-
mafia effort.
But alas, Italy fought the Honoured Societies only for so long

366
 Liberation

as their overt violence kept them at the top of the political agenda.
It fought them only until the mafias’ wealthy and powerful protec-
tors could exert an influence. It fought them only enough to
sharpen the gangster domain’s internal process of natural selec-
tion. Over the years, weaker bosses and dysfunctional criminal
methodologies were weeded out. Hoodlums were obliged to
change and develop. The Sicilian mafia had the least to learn. In
Naples, the Honoured Society failed to learn enough. Perhaps
against the odds, the Calabrian picciotteria, that working museum
of the oldest traditions of the prison camorras, proved itself
capable of adapting to survive and grow.
In the underworld competition not just to dominate, but to
endure, the mafias found perhaps their most important resource
in family. Through their kin, mafiosi, camorristi and picciotti
gained their strongest foothold in society, the first vehicle for
their pernicious influence. Thus the lethal damage that the mafias
caused to so many families — their own and their victims’ — is
the most poignant measure of the evil they did.
From 1925 Benito Mussolini styled his regime as the antithesis
of the squalid politicking of the past, the cure for Italy’s weak-
willed concessions to the gangs. But Fascism ended up repeating
many of the mistakes committed during earlier waves of repres-
sion. The same short attention span. The same reliance on
‘enforced residence’. The same reluctance to prosecute the mafias’
protectors among the elite. The same failure to tackle the endemic
mafia presence in the prisons. Political internees in the 1920s and
19308 told exactly the same stories of mob influence behind bars
as poor Duke Sigismondo Castromediano and the other patriotic
prisoners of the Risorgimento had done three generations earlier.
The only thing that Mussolini did markedly better than his
liberal predecessors was to pump up the publicity and smother
the news. With a little help from the Sicilian mafia, he created
the lasting illusion that Fascism had, at the very least, suppressed
the mob.
So when it came to organised crime, Fascism’s most harmful

367
Mafia Brotherhoods

legacy was forgetfulness. The Zone Handbooks with which the

Allied forces arrived in Sicily, Calabria and Campania accurately
reflect the desperately limited state of public knowledge that
Fascism bequeathed. (They were based on Italian sources after
all.)
When the Second World War ended, Italy would quickly
become a democratic republic and, not long afterwards, a major
industrial power. Here was a very different country from the
Italietta — the ‘mini Italy’ — that had first confronted the mafias
after 1860, or from the deluded, strutting Italy of the Blackshirt
decades. But a forgetful democracy would prove that the country
was as badly prepared to face the mafia threat as it had ever
been. If there is one overriding lesson that the history of the
mafias has to impart, it is that these organisations are modern
— no less modern than the Italian state. Yet after the Second
World War, just as it had done repeatedly over the previous
century, official Italy tried all over again to convince itself that
organised crime in the south was a residue of backwardness that
would vanish of its own accord as the country progressed.
Perhaps the simplest and most telling symptom of post-war
Italy’s forgetfulness is how often public opinion would be
surprised. Surprised, for example, in April 1955, when a
mysterious homicidal rampage by a lone peasant from a mountain
village in Calabria generated rumours of a strange criminal
brotherhood in the region. Surprised, in October of the same
year, when a young mother, the widow of a fruit and vegetable
wholesaler from Nola, shot dead her husband’s assassin near the
main market in Naples, leading to a debate about the ‘new
camorra’. Or surprised yet again, late in 1962, when an outbreak
of car bombs and city-centre slayings in Palermo showed that,
whatever Sicily’s mafia really was, it had greedily embraced the
age of motorways and jet planes. But then these, and the many
other ‘surprises’ of the post-war era, deserve deeper analysis, and
a book of their own.

368
Acknowledgements

Much of the time spent researching and writing Mafia Brother-

hoods was awarded to me by the Leverhulme Trust: without a
generous Research Fellowship, the book may never have been
written, and so I am deeply grateful to everyone associated with
the Trust. My academic home, the Italian Department at UCL,
provides a wonderful environment for research and teaching, so
my thanks must go to my colleagues on the academic and admin-
istrative staff there.
It was a pleasure and a privilege to meet a number of people
in the front line of trying to understand and combat the ’ndrang-
heta in Reggio Calabria. The magistrates Nicola Gratteri and
Michele Prestipino both impressed me with their courage, energy
and rigour — and sent me away laden with fascinating documents.
Peppe Baldessarro knows as much about the ’ndrangheta as any
journalist, and has paid the price for his expertise with a death
threat.
It is rare to find a historian who is as open-handed with his
time and knowledge as Enzo Ciconte. Enzo sent me some docu-
mentation I had had trouble finding, and scrutinised an important
chunk of the manuscript, making valuable suggestions. I discussed
some of the ideas in Mafia Brotherhoods at length with both
Marcella Marmo and Gabriella Gribaudi. The book is much
better as a result of their consideration and their profound under-
standing of the camorra. Since the very earliest stages of my
research into the ’ndrangheta, I have been having exceptionally
useful exchanges with Antonio Nicaso. Antonio also read a
section of the manuscript, patiently and insightfully.
My friend Fabio Cuzzola was also my go-to guy in Reggio.

369
Mafia Brotherhoods

His generosity extended far beyond the intellectual, and even

involved his developing an appreciation of Rory Delap’s throw-
ins and Ricardo Fuller’s footwork. The great Nino Sapone was
invaluable to me in many different ways. He knows his way
around the Archivio di Stato di Reggio Calabria like few others,
and he has a documented feeling for Aspromonte, its people and
history; I will never forget our visits to Amendolea, S. Stefano,
Montalto, and the Sanctuary at Polsi. Joseph Condello was an
extremely helpful and friendly guide when we toured the Plain
of Gioia Tauro together.
Several intrepid and shrewd researchers have helped me locate
the archival and other sources on which Mafia Brotherhoods is
based; some of them also chipped in with precious ideas: Nick
Dines, Nicola Crinniti, Manoela Patti, Vittorio Coco, Joe Figliulo,
Salvo Bottari, Azzurra Fibbia. Fabio Truzzolillo not only hunted
down some important material for me, but contributed positively
to the content of the book: I hope by now that he has found the
right home for his passion for research. Fabio Caffarena and
Tenente Colonnello Massimiliano Barlattani of the Ufficio
Storico dell’Aeronautica Militare helped me find the flying boss
of Antonimina’s war record. For certain localised but important
aspects of my research I relied on the help of David Critchley,
Tim Newark, and Eleanor Chiari. Christian De Vito was particu-
larly insightful on the history of the prison system. Roger Parker
found out what Silvio Spaventa went to see at the opera. Peter
Y. Herchenroether generously sent me the results of his research
into early Calabrian mafiosi in the United States. Alex Sansom,
UCL’s resident expert on early modern Spain, helped me find out
more about Cervantes and the Gardufia. Jonathan Dunnage was
the source of some very useful prompts on the history of policing.
My friend and colleague Florian Mussgnug generously surfed the
German press on my behalf. A number of people in Australia
offered tips on studying Calabrian organised crime in their
country. David Brown was remarkably generous in letting me see
his collection of material on the same subject: I regret only that

370
 Acknowledgements

I was not able to analyse that area properly in Mafia Brother-

hoods. In Sicily, Attilio Bolzoni, Salvo Palazzolo, Dino Paternostro
and Marcello Saija also offered advice and/or material. Pietro
Comito passed on a rare copy of Serafino Castagna’s autobiog-
raphy. He is one of all too many courageous and professional
Calabrian journalists who has had to face a death threat from
the clans.
I owe a special debt to Lesley Lewis for allowing me to consult
her late husband Norman’s diaries — the notes he drew on while
writing his profoundly compassionate and yet disillusioned obser-
vations in Naples °44.
Laura and Giulio Lepschy were for me, as for so many Italian-
ists in the UK, an endless source of linguistic wisdom. Maria
Novella Mercuri helped me work out some of the trickier,
ungrammatical passages in some manuscripts.
Very many archivists and librarians have assisted me during
the course of my work, but some of them were especially kind:
Maria Pia Mazzitelli and the staff at the Archivio di Stato di
Reggio Calabria; Salvatore Maffei at the marvellous Emeroteca
Vincenzo Tucci in Naples; Maresciallo Capo Salerno and Col.
Giancarlo Barbonetti at the Carabinieri Archive; and, once again,
the staff in Humanities 2 at the British Library.
Several people read the manuscript of Mafia Brotherhoods at
various stages of its development. Theirs is a contribution to the
cogency and readability of my work that I particularly appreciate:
Laura Mason, Caz Carrick, Robert Gordon, Prue James, Vittorio
Mete, Federico Varese, John Foot, Nino Blando.
I am lucky enough to have no fewer than four editors who
were happy to listen to my ruminations about the project as it
developed, and even to give sharp feedback on early drafts: Rupert
Lancaster, Giuseppe Laterza and Peter Sillem. Marc Parent was
particularly patient and incisive, and was excellent running
company on the beach at St-Malo. Copy editor Helen Coyle had
a much greater influence on the development of the typescript
‘than her official responsibilities imply. My alchemical agent

371
Mafia Brotherhoods

Catherine Clarke has been a terrific source of support and insight,

as always.
Yet again my biggest thank you goes to my wife, Sarah Penny.
I am constantly astonished by her ability to juggle work, family
and my seemingly endless demands for time. She has my gratitude
and my love, always. The book is dedicated to her and to our
two children, Elliot and Charlotte.

Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge the owner-

ship of the copyrighted material included in this volume. Any
errors that may have occurred are inadvertent, and will be
corrected in subsequent editions provided notification is sent to
the author.
I would like to thank the following:
Aliberti Editore, for permission to quote from Antonio Zagari,
Ammazzare stanca, Aliberti editore, 2008; the Society of Authors
as the Literary Representative of the Estate of Norman Douglas,
for permission to quote from Norman Douglas, Old Calabria,
M. Secuer, 1915; Edizioni Reno Sandron for permission to quote
from Alfredo Niceforo, L’Italia barbara contemporanea: studi e
appunti, R. Sandron, 1898.

372
Picture Acknowledgements

Reproduced by kind permission of Archivio dello Stato di Reggio

Calabria: text page 201 above left.
Carlo Del Balzo, Napoli e i napoletani, Milan, 1885: 7 above.
Biblioteca Nazionale ‘Vittorio Emanuele III’, Naples, reproduced
by kind permission of the Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita
Culturali, Italy: 8 below
Abele de Blasio, Usi e Costumi dei Camorristi, 1897: 7 below,
text pages 36, 270.
Ablel de Blasio, Il Tatuaggio, 1905: text page 141.
© The British Library: 2 (from Francesco de Bourcard, Usi e
costumi de Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti, Volume I,
1858).
© The British Library Newspapers, Colindale: 5 above left and
right and below right ( from I/ Mondo Illustrato, 1860),
8 above ( from Le Monde Illustré, 1893).
Alfredo Comandini, L’Italia nei centro anni del secolo XIX (1801-
1900) Volume 3: 3 below, text page 53.
© Corbis: 1 above/photo Ina Fassbender, 1 below/photo Armin
Thiemer, £6 left.
Reproduced by kind permission of Gazzetta del Sud, 1986:
15 above left.
© Getty Images: 15 centre right, 16 above right.
Il Mattino, 1911: 13 above right.
Illustrated London News: 3 above left (1859), 4 below (1860),
5 below left (1859), 6 above (1860), 10 centre left and below
(1902), 13 below (1911).
© John Dickie: 9.
La Scintilla, 1911: 12 above, 13 above left.

373
Mafia Brotherhoods

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,

Washington DC: 12 below.
L’Illustration, 1860: 3 above right, 4 above.
L’Ilustrazione Italiana: 11 above right and left centre (1901), below
(1899).
Reproduced by kind permission of Istituto Luce, Rome/Archivio
Fotografico: 15 below.
Enrico Morselli, Biografia di un bandito, 1903: 10 above left and
right, text page 201 centre and below.
Museo Pitré, Palermo, reproduced by kind permission of the
Comune di Palermo: 6 below.
Private Collections: 11 above left, 14 above left and right and
below left, 15 centre left, 16 centre right and below right, text
Pages 13, 121, 229.
TopFoto Topham Picturepoint: 14 below right.

374
NOTES ON SOURCES

The following notes take a slightly unusual form. In the absence of

footnotes, which would be little more than clutter for most readers,
I have opted to list my sources and include a few brief and eclectic
observations on some of them. I hope that these observations will
be helpful for specialists and interesting for the non-historian, and
that they will go some way to recognising my many academic debts.
I have erred on the side of incltsiveness. Some of the sources cited
are not referred to or quoted from explicitly in the text. But I have
included them here all the same, generally for one of two reasons:
first, because they make points that I did not have the space to
explore and illustrate in the text; second, because they add evidential
weight. Mafia Brotherhoods, as a comparative history, can have no
pretentions to being an encyclopedic account of the camorra, the
Sicilian mafia and the ’ndrangheta. My approach has been to choose
stories that I consider to be exemplary. By including the full range
of my archival sources on the picciotteria, for example, I hopeto
show that my choice of exemplary stories has a broad foundation
in first-hand research, whether by me or by other people.
I have used the following abbreviations:

ACS = Archivio Centrale dello Stato

ASC = Archivio di Stato di Catanzaro
ASRC = Archivio di Stato di Reggio Calabria
ASN = Archivio di Stato di Napoli
ASPA = Archivio di Stato di Palermo

The following account of my sources begins with a short para-

graph on the state of historical research on each of the three

a75
Mafia Brotherhoods

main criminal organisations. The texts cited are intended to be

a guide for further reading, and a recognition of where I have
drawn most heavily from other scholars.

CAMORRA
In the r980s Marcella Marmo was among the pioneers of the
new history of organised crime in Italy, and she is still the
authority on the camorra from its origins to the Cuocolo trial.
Her many essays should be the first items on any reading list
about the camorra. Accordingly, I have drawn on them heavily
and cited them in the appropriate chapters below. For now it is
worth highlighting three essays that offer a broad survey of the
Neapolitan Honoured Society: M. Marmo, “Tra le carceri e il
mercato. Spazi e modelli storici del fenomeno camorrista’, in P.
Macry and P. Villani (eds), La Campania, part of Storia d'Italia.
Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi, Turin, 1990; M. Marmo, ‘La camorra
dell’Ottocento: il fenomeno e i suoi confini’, in A. Musi (ed.),
Dimenticare Croce? Studi e orientamenti di storia del Mezzo-
giorno, Naples, 1991; M. Marmo, ‘La citta camorrista e i suoi
confini: dall’Unita al processo Cuocolo’, in G. Gribaudi (ed.),
Traffici. criminali. Camorra, mafie e reti internazionali
dell’illegalita, Turin, 2009. This third essay makes some important
observations about women in the camorra.
Marmo’s essay on honour is also essential on one of the key
themes that run through organised crime history: M. Marmo,
‘L’onore dei violenti, l’onore delle vittime. Un’estorsione camor-
rista del 1862 a Napoli’, in G. Fiume (ed.), Onore e storia nelle
societa mediterranee, Palermo, 1989.
Francesco Barbagallo is best known for his work on the post-
war camorra, but he has recently published a much needed
summary of the entire history of organised crime in Campania:
F. Barbagallo, Storia della camorra, Rome-Bari, 2010. As well as
this excellent new book, I have also drawn on other books by
Barbagallo that are cited in the appropriate places below.

376
 Notes on sources

Before Barbagallo’s book, the only available single volume

overview was Isaia Sales’s collection of essays, La camorra, le
camorre, Rome, 1988 (republished in a revised edition in 1993).
Although Sales has been criticised (by Marmo among others) for
his suggestion that the camorra was an expression of plebeian
discontent that could find no political outlet, his book remains
an important reference point in historical writing about the
camorra and | have drawn on it in various passages.

MAFIA
Several scholars contributed to the foundation of a new school
of history-writing on the Sicilian mafia in the 1980s — they are
the people I cited in the bibliography to my Cosa Nostra. Mafia
Brotherhoods tries to apply the many lessons I absorbed from
those historians to new material, and to the other criminal organi-
sations. So if space prevents me from citing them and their works
all over again here, my debt to them is nonetheless profound.
One name does stand out among historians of organised crime
in Sicily to an extent that demands explicit recognition once
more: with his Storia della mafia (Rome, 1993) Salvatore Lupo
confirmed his pre-eminence in the field. It is an indicator of the
quality of Lupo’s research that newly discovered material — like
the documentation from Ermanno Sangiorgi’s career that I found
in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato — all too often confirms
Lupo’s fundamental insights. Lupo’s recent Quando la mafia
trovo l’America. Storia di un intreccio intercontinentale, 1888—
2008 (Turin, 2008) has brought a new analytical rigour to the
study of the ‘transatlantic mafia’. His book-length interview with
Gaetano Savatteri, Potere criminale. Intervista sulla storia della
mafia (Rome-Bari, 2010) is, among many other things, a persua-
sive argument for the importance of studying the mafia with the
tools of the historian.
Salvatore Lupo it was who unearthed the 1938 report by the
‘Royal General Inspectorate for Public Security for Sicily that I

D8.
Mafia Brotherhoods

have used here. Two researchers working with Lupo, Manoela

Patti and Vittorio Coco have analysed the report thoroughly and
gone on to make huge advances in the understanding of the mafia
under Fascism. Important essays by them, and by other scholars,
are collected in a special issue of the journal Meridiana. Rivista
di storia e scienze sociali, ‘Mafia e fascismo’ (63, 2008). The
Inspectorate’s report will have been published by the time Mafia
Brotherhoods appears: V. Coco and M. Patti, Relazioni mafiose.
La mafia ai tempi del fascismo, Rome, 2010.
Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi’s extraordinarily insightful
report into the mafia at the turn of the twentieth century — another
discovery of Lupo’s —is also due out in print: S. Lupo, I/ tenebroso
sodalizio. La mafia d’inizio novecento nel rapporto Sangiorgi,
Rome, 2010. If all goes to plan, the book will also include my
short biography of Sangiorgi.

'NDRANGHETA
The ’ndrangheta is the least known and least studied of the three
major criminal organisations. And although there has been a
recent wave of new publications on the ’ndrangheta today, histor-
ical research remains very rare indeed. For a long time, Gaetano
Cingari was the only professional historian who took an interest
in the Calabrian mafia. I have drawn on the precious pages in his
Storia della Calabria dall’Unita a oggi (Rome-Bari, 1983), Reggio
Calabria (Rome-Bari, 1988), and of course on his essay on the
‘brigand’ Musolino: “Tra brigantaggio e “picciotteria”: Giuseppe
Musolino’, in G. Cingari, Brigantaggio, proprietari e contadini
nel Sud, Reggio Calabria, 1976. Enzo Ciconte’s pioneering book
’"Ndrangheta dall’Unita a oggi (Rome-Bari, 1992) was the first
systematic overview. Anyone who wants to find out about the
history of organised crime in Calabria must start with Ciconte.
As well as drawing the main outlines of ’ndrangheta history,
Ciconte also brought together for the first time a vast quantity
of evidence from the Archivio di Stato di Catanzaro. My approach

378
 Notes on sources

has been to return to the same documentation, but to add a great

deal of previously unstudied or understudied material from the
Archivio di Stato di Reggio Calabria and the press that I think
allows us to reach firmer and clearer conclusions on the early
*ndrangheta than either Ciconte or Cingari felt able to.
Ciconte also wrote the first comparative history of the three
mafias: Storia criminale. La resistibile ascesa di mafia, ’ndrang-
heta e camorra dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri, Soveria Mannelli,
2008. His approach is very distinctive — it is thematic rather than
chronological — but it has given me a great many leads in preparing
Mafia Brotherhoods.
Two other important contributions to the early history of the
*ndrangheta deserve mention. The first is by a magistrate, Saverio
Mannino: ‘Criminalita nuova in una societa in trasformazione:
il Novecento e i tempi attuali’, in A. Placanica (ed.), La Calabria
moderna e contemporanea, Rome, 1997. Mannino’s richly docu-
mented essay is particularly insightful on the Fascist era. The
second contribution, just as richly documented, but with a focus
on the pre-Fascist period, is by journalist and campaigner,
Antonio Nicaso: Alle origini della ’ndrangheta. La picciotteria,
Soveria Mannelli, 1990.

WOMEN IN ITALIAN ORGANISED CRIME

There is now a good body of scholarly work on the role that
women and family relations play in mafia life, although it is all
about the contemporary period. I hope that my study, whether
the conclusions it draws are correct or not, at least shows that
the comparative historical study of women and the mafia can
yield insights about what Alessandra Dino has called the
‘submerged centrality’ of women in the underworld. The following
four studies are recommended as essential starting points:
A. Dino and T. Principato, Mafia donna. Le vestali del sacro
e dell’onore, Palermo, 1997.
A. Dino, Mutazioni. Etnografia del mondo di Cosa Nostra,

579
 Mafia Brotherhoods

Palermo, 2002. Remarkable, amongst many other reasons,

because it shows how much strategic thinking goes into the
management of families within the Sicilian mafia.
_ ©. Ingrasci, Donne d’onore, Storie di mafia al femminile,
Milan, 2007.
R. Siebert, Le donne. La mafia, Milan, 1994.

380
SOURCES CONSULTED

Preface
S. Lupo, Quando la mafia trovo l’America. Storia di un intreccio inter-
continentale, 1888—2008, Turin, 2008. Explains how the name ‘Cosa
Nostra’ took hold among mafiosi both in Sicily and the United States
following Joe Valachi’s testimony to the McClellan committee in
1963.
L. Malafarina, Il codice della ’ndrangheta, Reggio Calabria, 1978. There
is no canonical form of the legend of the three Spanish knights: it
seems never to be reproduced in the same form twice in ’ndrangheta
mythology. References to it in ’ndrangheta rituals are reproduced in
many sources including Malafarina.
P. Natella, La parola ‘mafia’, Florence, 2002. Suggests the derivation
of Carcagnosso from calcagna.
‘Books of The Times; Journey to a Strange Land That Seems Like
Home’, New York Times, 18/7/2003. On the ‘unpronounceable name’
of the ’ndrangheta.

To my knowledge the name ’ndrangheta or ’ndranghita does not

make a consistent public appearance before press coverage of the
so-called ‘Marzano operation’ in the autumn of 1955. One can see it
surfacing, in tentative inverted commas, in ‘I! Ministro Tambroni e il
sottosegretario Capua in disaccordo nel valutare la situazione esistente
nelle province calabresi’, L’Unita, 10/9/1955; or ‘Latitanti che si costi-
tuiscono e altri che vengono arrestati’, I] Mattino, 14/9/1955. The man
who seems likely to have been responsible for giving the name a broad
currency was Corrado Alvaro, with his article ‘La fibbia’, Corriere della
Sera, 17/9/1955.

381
Mafia Brotherhoods

Introduction: Blood brothers

Relazione annuale della Commissione parlamentare d’inchiesta sul
fenomeno della criminalita organizzata mafiosa o similare. ’ndrang-
heta. Relatore On. Francesco Forgione, 2008. On the Duisburg
massacre and the ’ndrangheta’s international reach. Can be down-
loaded from: http://www.camera.it/_dati/leg1 5/lavori/documenti
parlamentari/indiceetesti/o23/005/intero.pdf
Procura della Repubblica Presso il Tribunale di Reggio Calabria,
Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia, Decreto di Fermo di indiziato di
delitto — artt. 384 e segg. c.p.p. Agostino Anna Maria + 155. I have
drawn on this document, which is better known as ‘Operazione
Crimine’, for an up-to-date insight into the ’ndrangheta’s structure
based on the most recent investigations.
F. Barbagallo, Storia della camorra, Rome-Bari, 2010. Another very
good source on the contemporary situation.
G. Gribaudi, ‘Guappi, camorristi, killer. Interpretazioni letterarie,
immagini sociali, e storie giudiziarie’, in Donne, uomini, famiglie,
Naples, 1999. Also the source for my remarks on the guappi after
the demise of the Neapolitan Honoured Society.
G. Gribaudi, ‘Clan camorristi a Napoli: radicamento locale e traffici
internazionali’, in G. Gribaudi (ed.), Traffici criminali. Camorra,
mafie e reti internazionali dell’illegalita, Turin, 2009. An excellent
short summary of the camorra today based on judicial sources. Here
I owe the observation about the Honda ‘Dominator’, along with
many other points, to Gribaudi’s essay.
P. Martino, Per la storia della ’ndranghita, Rome, 1988. Suggests the
most plausible derivation of ’ndrina.
L. Paoli, Fratelli di mafia. Cosa Nostra e ’ndrangheta, Bologna, 2000.
A fine comparative study of the Sicilian and Calabrian
organisations.
R. Saviano, Gomorra. Viaggio nell’impero economico e nel sogno di
dominio della camorra, Milan, 2006. Saviano’s powerful, impas-
sioned and enormously successful book is a shocking denunciation
of camorra power today. Compared to Gribaudi and Barbagallo,

382
 Sources consulted

however, it has the disadvantage for historians of not citing its

sources. Readers who do not know Italian will be hampered by the
book’s dreadful English translation.
A. Zagari, Ammazzare stanca. Autobiografia di uno ’ndranghetista
pentito, Cosenza 1992.

1: VIVA LA PATRIA! THE CAMORRA, 1851-1861

ASN, Ministero della Polizia, Gabinetto, f. 1702, incart. 38. Ministero
e Real segreteria di Stato della polizia generale, Affari di conferenze
con S.M. il Re Nostro Padrone D.G. Undated report, but c.
20/10/1853. On the links between liberals and camorristi.
ASN, Ministero della Polizia, Gabinetto, f. 1648, incart. 295. Corris-
pondenza tra il Prefetto di polizia Farina e il Ministro Romano. On
the setting up of a new police force in the summer of 1860.
ASN, Dicastero di polizia e delle luogotenenze, f. 202, inc. 4. Letter
from Prefettura di Polizia signed by Filippo De Blasio to Luogote-
nente del Re Luigi Carlo Farini dated 22/11/1860. On the ‘pernicio-
sissima peste della Camorra’ and on Romano’s policy of co-opting
camorristi into the police.
ASN, Dicastero dell’Interno e Polizia della Luogotenenza, f. 202, incart.
112. Componimento dello stato dei camorristi in questa citta.. .
Trasmesso il 21/6/1861 dal questore Tajani al Dicastero di Polizia.
A list of ‘gamorristi’, by city quarter, drawn up under Spaventa.
ASN, Questura di Napoli. Archivio Generale ra serie. Archivio dei
pregiudicati. Fascicoli personali (1860-1887). B. 158t, numerazione
autonoma 53. Salvatore De Crescenzo. Contains De Crescenzo’s
lengthy criminal record.

Foreign press sources (UK unless stated): The Times; London Daily
News; Morning Chronicle.

383
Mafia Brotherhoods

Other sources drawn on throughout this section:

G. Machetti, ‘Cultura liberale e prassi repressiva verso la camorra a

Napoli degli anni 1860-70’, in M. Marmo (ed.), Mafia e camorra:
storici a confronto, Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali
dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale, 2, 1988.
G. Machetti, ‘Camorra e criminalita popolare a Napoli (1860—1880)’,
Societa e Storia, 51, 1991.
G. Machetti, ‘L’impossibile ordine. Camorra e ordine pubblico a Napoli
nella congiuntura unitaria’, ParoleChiave, 7-8, 1995.
M. Marmo and O. Casarino, ‘“Le invincibili loro relazioni”: identifi-
cazione e controllo della Camorra napoletana nelle fonti giudiziarie
di eta postunitaria’, Studi Storici, 2, 1988.
M. Marmo, ‘Camorra anno zero’, Contemporanea. Rivista di storia
dell’800 e del ‘900, 1999/3. Reproduces and comments on the two reports
on the camorra compiled under Spaventa from ASN, Alta polizia,
f. 202, f. lo 4, Luogotenenza generale del Re (Carignano), Gabinetto
del Segretario Generale di Stato (Nigra) a Dicastero di Polizia, 5/4/186t.
M. Marmo, ‘I disordini della capitale’, Bollettino del Diciannovesimo
Secolo, 6, 2000.
M. Marmo, ‘Quale ordine pubblico? Notizie e opinioni da Napoli tra
il luglio ’60 e la legge Pica’, in Macry, P. (ed), Quando croila lo
Stato. Studi sull’Italia preunitaria, Naples, 2003. Among Marmo’s
essays (already cited above), this one is crucial for its narrative of
the events of 1860-63, which I have substantially followed here.
M. Monnier, La camorra. Notizie storiche raccolte e documentate,
Lecce, 1994 (1862). This edition has a useful introduction by Gabri-
ella Gribaudi.
A. Scirocco, Governo e paese nel Mezzogiorno nella crisi dell’unificazione
(1860-61), Milan, 1963.

How to extract gold from fleas

L. Agnello, ‘Castromediano, Sigismondo’, in Dizionario biografico degli
Italiani, vol. 22, Rome, 1979.

384
 Sources consulted

P. Bourget, Sensations d’Italie. (Toscane — Ombrie — Grande-Gréce),

Paris, 1891.
R. Canosa and I. Colonnello, Storia del carcere in Italia dalla fine
del ‘500 all’Unita, Rome, 1984. This remarkable study traces some
of the traditions of prison extortionists back to the early modern
era.
S. Castromediano, Carceri e galere politiche, 2 vols, Lecce, 1895.
W.E. Gladstone, ‘First Letter to the Earl of Aberdeen, on the state
prosecutions of the Neapolitan government’ (1851), in Gleanings of
Past Years, 1843-78, vol. IV, London, 1879.
E. Martinengo Cesaresco, ‘Sigismondo Castromediano’, in Italian Char-
acters in the Epoch of Unification, London, 1901 (2nd edn).
FE Montuori, Lessico e camorra. Storia della parola, proposte etimo-
logiche e termini del gergo ottocentesco, Napoli, 2008. This is the
best source on the etymology of ‘camorra’ and the history of Neapol-
itan underworld slang more generally. Montuori argues that camorra
meant ‘extortion’ or ‘extortion payment’ for many decades before
we hear of the existence of a secret society called the camorra.
R. Shannon, Gladstone, vol. 1, 1809-1865, London 1982.
S. Zazzera, Procida. Storia, tradizioni e immagini, Naples, 1984.
G. Neppi Modona, ‘Carcere e societa civile’ in Storia d'Italia, v. 5, I
documenti, t. 2, Turin, 1973. Still the best starting-point for the
history of the prison system in Italy.

There are many sources on the prison camorra in the nineteenth century,
and on the continuing influence of organised crime behind bars into
the twentieth century:
M. Beltrani Scalia, Sul governo e sulla riforma delle carceri in Italia,
Turin, 1867.
A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Turin, 1947. Especially the letter of
11/4/1927.
I. Invernizzi, I] carcere come scuola di rivoluzione, Turin, 1973.
J.W. Mario, ‘Il sistema penitenziario e il domicilio coatto in Italia’, I,
Nuova Antologia, 1/7/1896.
L. Settembrini, Lettere dall’ergastolo, Milan, 1962.

385
Mafia Brotherhoods

L. Settembrini, Ricordanze della mia vita, vol. Il, Bari, 1934.

V. Susca, Le isole Tremiti. Ricordi, Bari, 1876.

Co-managing crime
G. Alessi, ‘Polizia e spirito pubblico tra il 1848 ed il 1860. Un’ipotesi
di ricerca’, Bollettino del Diciannovesimo Secolo, 6, 2000.
C.T. Dalbono, ‘Il camorrista e la camorra’, in F. De Bourcard (ed.),
Usi e costumi di Napoli e contorni descritti e dipinti, vol. II,
Naples, 1858. Interesting on how widespread knowledge of the
camorra was before 1860. Blames the Spanish for the camorra’s
origins. The essay also reproduces the camorra’s ‘national anthem’
(see chapter 5).
A. De Blasio, Nel paese della camorra. L’Imbrecciata, Naples, 1973
(1901).
S. De Renzi, Topografia e Statistica medica della citta di Napoli...
ossia Guida medica per la citta di Napoli e pel Regno, 4th edn,
Naples, 1845.
C.A. Mayer, Vita popolare a Napoli nell’eta romantica, Bari, 1948.
J. Murray, Southern Italy, London, 1853. Describes via Toledo as the
busiest street in the world, and gives sound advice to wary
travellers.
C. Petraccone, Napoli dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento. Problemi di storia
demografica e sociale, Naples, 1974.
A. Scialoja, I bilanci del Regno di Napoli e degli Stati Sardi con note
e confronti, Turin, 1857.
C. Spadaccini, Pensieri sulla polizia detta pubblica sicurezza, Naples, 1820.
An early discussion of the feroci and their role in policing Naples.

The redemption of the camorra /

Uncle Peppe’s stuff: The camorra cashes in
K. Baedeker, Italie. Manuel du voyageur, Il, Italie du Sud et la Sicile,
Coblenz, 1872. Gives an authoritative assessment of Marc Monnier’s
hotel.

386
 Sources consulted

S. Baridon, Marc Monnier e I’Italia, Turin, 1942.

‘I camorristi’, in Giornale Universale, 15/9/1860.
C. Cavour, La liberazione del Mezzogiorno e la formazione del
Regno d'Italia, Carteggi di Camillo Cavour con Villamarina,
Scialoja, Cordova, Farini, ecc. 5 vols, Bologna, 1949-54. Vol. 3.
Contains Scialoja’s letter to Cavour on the camorristi being
received by ministers under Garibaldi’s dictatorship. Vol. 4
contains much material on Spaventa. ‘Memorie di Giuseppe
Ricciardi’ in vol. 5 explains the role of Monnier’s hotel for the
Comitato d’Ordine.
P. De Riccardis, ‘Una guardia nazionale inquinata: primo esame
delle fonti archivistiche per Napoli e provincia, 1861-1870’, in M.
Marmo (ed.), Mafia e camorra: storici a confronto, Quaderni del
Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali dell’Istituto Universitario Orientale,
25 1988.
R. De Cesare, La fine di un regno, I, Regno di Ferdinando II, 3rd edn,
Citta di Castello, 1908.
R. De Cesare, La fine di un regno, Il, Regno di Francesco II, 3rd edn,
Citta di Castello, 1909.
G. De’ Sivo, Storia delle Due Sicilie dal 1847 al 1861, vol. 2, Naples,
1964. De Cesare and De’ Sivo, two chroniclers from opposite political
points of view, are among the richest contemporary sources on the
fall of the Bourbons in Naples. Naturally enough they have very
different takes on Liborio Romano.
G. Ghezzi, Saggio storico sull’attivita politica di Liborio Romano,
Florence, 1936.
G. Lazzaro, Liborio Romano, Turin, 1863.
M. Monnier, Garibaldi. Rivoluzione delle Due Sicilie, Naples, 186r.
M. Monnier, Garibaldi. Histoire de la conquéte des Deux Siciles, Paris,
1861.
L. Romano, II mio rendiconto politico, Locorotondo, 1960.
L. Romano, Memorie politiche, Milan, 1992.
XX (i.e. anon), ‘Corrispondenza di Napoli’, Al Direttore della Rivista
Contemporanea, Napoli 20/8/1860, in Rivista Contemporanea,
September 1860. On /a Sangiovannara.

387
Mafia Brotherhoods

Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

L. Arsenal and H. Sanchiz Alvarez de Toledo, Una historia de las socie-
dades secretas espanolas, Barcelona, 2006. On the myth of the Gardufia.
FE. Barbagallo, I] Mattino degli Scarfoglio, 1892-1928, Milan, 1979. On
San Donato’s political career.
P. Bevilacqua, ‘La camorra e la Spagna’, Meridiana, 9, 1992. Praise-
worthy for its scepticism about the story of the camorra’s Spanish
origins.
M. de Cervantes, ‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’ (1613), in Exemplary
Stories, Oxford, 2008.
P. Costantini, Silvio Spaventa e la repressione del brigantaggio, Pescara,
1960.
Il Carteggio Cavour-Nigra dal 1858 al 1861, vol. IV, La liberazione del
Mezzogiorno, Bologna, 1929.
E. Croce, Silvio Spaventa, Milan, 1969.
J. Davis, Naples and Napoleon. Southern Italy and the European Revo-
lutions (1780-1860), Oxford, 2006. For a good summary of the role
of the Carbonari (Charcoal Burners) in early nineteenth-century poli-
tics in Southern Italy.
V. de Féréal (pseud. of Madame Suberwick), Mystéres de l’inquisition
et autres sociétés secretes d’Espagne, par V. de EF, avec notes histo-
riques et une introduction de M. de Cuendias, Paris, 1845.The origin
of the supposedly medieval sect of the Gardufia.
D. Fozzi, ‘Una “specialita italiana”: le colonie coatte nel Regno d'Italia’,
in M. Da Passano (ed.), Le colonie penali nell’ Europa dell’Ottocento,
Rome, 2004. A good study of domicilio coatto.
G. Machetti, ‘Le leggi eccezionali post-unitarie e la repressione della
camorra: un problema di ordine pubblico?’, in FE. Barbagallo (ed.),
Camorra e criminalita organizzata in Campania, Naples, 1988.
C. Magni, Vita parlamentare del Duca di San Donato patriota e difen-
sore di Napoli, Padova, 1968.
L. Musella, Individui, amici, clienti. Relazioni personali e circuiti
politici in Italia meridionale tra Otto e Novecento, Bologna, 1994.
On Spaventa.

388
 Sources consulted

E. Peters, “The Inquisition in Literature and Art’ in idem, Inquisition,

Berkeley, 1989. On Mme Suberwick’s novel’s place in anti-Catholic
polemic.
S. Ricci, ‘La difesa della rivoluzione unitaria, 1860-64’, in S. Ricci and
C. Scarano (eds), Silvio Spaventa. Politico e statista dell’ltalia unita
nei documenti della biblioteca civica “A. Mai”’, special issue of
Bergomum, 2-3, 1990.
P. Romano, Silvio Spaventa. Biografia Politica, Bari, 1942.
S. Spaventa, Dal 1848 al 1861. Lettere, scritti, documenti, Naples, 1898.

2: GETTING TO KNOW THE MAFIA, 1865-1877

Sources cited throughout this section:
S. Carbone and R. Grispo (eds), L’inchiesta sulle condizioni sociali ed
economiche della Sicilia, 1875-1876, 2 vols, Bologna, 1968-69. The
papers of the 1875-76 inquiry into Sicily. Contains the material on the
Uditore cosca and Antonino Giammona; Carlo Morena’s testimony on
the state of justice in Sicily; Rudini’s testimony about the ‘benign mafia’;
and much information on prominent early mafiosi mentioned here.
S. Lupo, Storia della mafia, Rome, 1996 edn.

Rebels in corduroy
P Alatri, Lotte politiche in Sicilia sotto il governo della Destra (1866-
74), Turin, 1954.
O. Cancila, Palermo, Bari, 2000. Also includes much interesting infor-
mation on the figure of Rudini.
P. Catalanotto, ‘Dal carcere della Vicaria all’Ucciardone. Una riforma
europea nella Palermo borbonica’, Nuovi Quaderni del Meridione,
79, 1982. 1 have referred to the Palermo prison as the Ucciardone
here to avoid confusion with the Vicaria in Naples.
G. Ciotti, | casi di Palermo. Cenni storici sugli avvenimenti di settembre
1866, Palermo, 1866.
G. Pagano, Sette giorni d’insurrezione a Palermo. Cause — fatti—rimedi,
Palermo, 1867.

389
Mafia Brotherhoods

M. Da Passano (ed.), I moti di Palermo del 1866. Verbali della

Commissione parlamentare di inchiesta, Rome, 198t. Includes both
Rudini’s testimony and Chief of Police Albanese’s notorious state-
ments about ‘getting the mafia interested’ in helping maintain
order.
W. Dickinson, ‘Diario della rivoluzione siciliana dalla notte del 9 al 10
gennaio 1848 sino al 2 giugno 1849’, in vol. 1 of Memorie della
rivoluzione. siciliana dell’anno MDCCCXLVIII pubblicate nel
cinquantesimo anniversario del XII gennaio di esso anno, 2 vols,
Palermo, 1898. On Turi Miceli in the revolution of 1848.
G. Fiume, Le bande armate in Sicilia (1819-1849). Violenza e organiz-
zazione del potere, Palermo, 1984.
Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d'Italia, 18/10/1866, ‘Relazione del
marchese Rudini, Sindaco di Palermo, sugli ultimi avvenimenti di
quella citta’.
Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d'Italia, Supplemento al n. 302, 3/11/1866,
‘Relazione del Sindaco di Palermo, marchese Di Rudini, sui fatti
avvenuti in quella citta nel settembre scorso.’
Gazzetta Ufficiale del Regno d'Italia, 20/11/1866, ‘Relazione al Ministro
dell’Interno del questore della citta e circondario di Palermo sui fatti
del settembre 1866’.
N. Giordano, ‘Turi Miceli. Il brigante-eroe monrealese nei moti del
1848, 1860 e 1866’, Il Risorgimento in Sicilia, 1, 1, 1965.
S. Lupo, Il giardino degli aranci: il mondo degli agrumi nella storia del
Mezzogiorno, Venice, 1990. On organised crime and the citrus fruit
business.
A. Maurici, La genesi storica della rivolta del 1866 in Palermo, Palermo,
1916.
G. Moncalvo, Alessandra Di Rudini. Dall’amore per D’Annunzio al
Carmelo, Milan, 1994.
‘The Week’s Republic in Palermo, 1866’, Quarterly Review, vol. 122,
no. 243, January 1867. .
L. Riall, Sicily and the Unification of Italy. Liberal Policy and Local
Power, 1859-1866, Oxford, 1998. Also includes the quotation about
camorristi in Turi Miceli’s entourage.

Be a
 Sources consulted

U. Santino, La cosa e il nome. Materiali per lo studio dei fenomeni

premafiosi, Catanzaro, 2000. One of the many places that cites the
1838 report from Trapani on the ‘Unions or brotherhoods, sects of
a kind’.

The benign mafia / A sect with a life of its own:

The mafia’s rituals discovered
ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale Affari Generale e del
Personale, Fascicoli del personale del Ministero, Ia e IIa Serie, B.
542. Albanese, Giuseppe. Personal papers on the shady figure of
Chief of Police Albanese showing how Rudini was responsible for
appointing him.
ACS, Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia, Direzione generale degli affari
penali. Miscellanea B. 44, Fasc. 558, 1877 Sicilia. Associazioni di
malfattori. Including the files on the various associations discovered
across Sicily, and Carlo Morena’s letter denying any link between
them.
ACS, Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia, Ufficio superiore personale e
affari generali, Ufficio secondo, Magistrati, fascicoli personali, primo
versamento 1860-1905, Morena, Carlo.
ASPA, Gabinetto Prefettura serie I (1860-1905), b. 35, fasc. 10, 1876,
Denuncia Galati — Malfattori all’Uditore. Il Questore Rastelli al
Procuratore del Re, Palermo 29/2 (1876). The first document repro-
ducing the mafia’s initiation ritual.
A. Crisantino, Della segreta e operosa associazione. Una setta all’origine
della mafia, Palermo, 2000. Contains a great deal that is useful
about policing and the mafia between the Right and the Left.
P. Pezzino, ‘Stato violenza societa. Nascita e sviluppo del paradigma
mafioso’, in idem, Una certa reciprocita di favori. Mafia e moderniz-
zazione violenta nella Sicilia postunitaria, Milan, 1990.
D. Tajani, Mafia e potere. Requisitoria (1871), P. Pezzino (ed.), Pisa,
1993. On the Albanese affair.

391
Mafia Brotherhoods

Double vendetta
ACS, Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione Generale Affari Generale e del
Personale, Fascicoli del personale del Ministero (1861-1952) Ila
Serie, B. 256. Sangiorgi Ermanno, Questore. Sangiorgi’s career file,
containing the documentation on the ‘fratricide’ case and much else
besides. Most of what I have written about Sangiorgi is from this
source,
ACS, Ministero di Grazia e Giustizia, Dir. Gen. Aff. Penali, Miscellanea,
b. 46, fasc. 589. The correspondence concerning Carlo Morena’s
defence of Pietro De Michele, including Sangiorgi’s evidence against
the latter.
A. Cutrera, I ricottari. La mala vita di Palermo, Palermo, 1979 (1896).
On the differences between ricottari and mafiost.
J. A. Davis, Conflict and Control, London, 1988. Good for contextual
information on policing in Liberal Italy.
J. Dunnage, The Italian Police and the Rise of Fascism, London, 1997.
Contains a good brief summary of policing history in Italy before
Fascism.
I. Fazio, ‘The family, honour and gender in Sicily: models and new
research’, Modern Italy, 9 (2), 2004. An exceptionally useful survey
of the vast literature on the Sicilian family.
C. Guerrieri, ‘L’azione repressiva di Giovanni Nicotera contro mafia e
camorra’, in A. Bagnato, G. Masi and V. Villella (eds), Giovanni
Nicotera nella storia italiana dell’Ottocento, Soveria Mannelli, 1999.
For the background to the whole Sangiorgi-Morena-De Michele
story told here.
P. Pezzino, ““La Fratellanza” di Favara’, in idem, Una certa reciprocita
di favori. Mafia e modernizzazione violenta nella Sicilia postunitaria,
Milan, 1990.
‘Processo Amoroso e compagni’, in Giornale di Sicilia. Series of
articles covering the trial begins on 29/8/1883 and ends on
20/10/1883. The trial is a classic instance of the way only the mafia’s
losers were successfully prosecuted. The trial is, among other
things, an unexplored source on the role of women in the mafia.

392
 Sources consulted

G. Vaccaro, Notizie su Burgio, Palermo, 1921. One of the few published

sources of information on the history of this Sicilian agrotown.
Suspiciously, it portrays De Michele as a victim of the 1848
rebellion.

3: THE NEW CRIMINAL NORMALITY, 1877-1900

Born delinquents: Science and the mob
G. Alongi, ‘Polizia e criminalita in Italia’, Nuova ‘Antologia, 1/1/1897.
Summarises police accommodation with organised crime after the
crucial years of 1876-77.
G. Alongi, La camorra. Studio di sociologia criminale, Turin,
1890.
G. Alongi, La maffia nei suoi fattori e nelle sue manifestazioni: studio
sulle classi pericolose della Sicilia, Rome, 1886.
A. Cutrera, La mafia e i mafiosi. Origini e manifestazioni, Palermo,
1900. The best of the policemen writing in the era of positivism.
C. D’Addosio, I/ duello dei camorristi, Naples, 1893.
A. De Blasio, Usi e costumi dei camorristi, 2nd edn, Naples, 1897.
A. De Blasio, Nel paese della camorra. (L’Imbrecciata), Naples,
1901.
A. De Blasio, I] tatuaggio, Naples, 1905.
A. De Blasio, I/ tatuaggio ereditario e psichico dei camorristi napoletani,
Naples, 1898.
E Manduca, Studii sociologici, Naples, 1888. An interesting and contra-
dictory text by a leading former magistrate with experience in both
Sicily and Naples. In positivist style he blames ethnic factors for the
mafia and camorra, but runs against the consensus of the time by
believing that the mafia, like the camorra, is an organisation with
a hierarchy.
C. Fiore, ‘Il controllo della criminalita organizzata nello Stato liberale:
strumenti legislativi e atteggiamenti della cultura giuridica’, Studi
_ Storici, 2, 1988.

393
Mafia Brotherhoods

C. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente in rapporto all’antropologia, alla

giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie, 4th edn, 2 vols, Turin,
1889.
A. Niceforo, L’Italia barbara contemporanea, Milan, 1898.

An audience of hoods
La fondazione della camorra is covered in Il Mattino, Roma and
Corriere di Napoli, October-November, 1899.

The photograph of a scene from La fondazione della camorra can be

viewed at:
http://archiviteatro.napolibeniculturali.it/atn/foto/dettagli_foto?oid
=127417&descrizione=stella& query_start=10
The letter from the Ispettorato Vicaria to the Questura (Police HQ) in
Naples on the Fondazione della camorra, dated 4/11/1899 was avail-
able on the same site, but now seems to have been taken down.
V. Bianco, La mala vita ovvero I camorristi nella Vicaria, manuscript
play held in Biblioteca Lucchesi Palli, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.
V. Bianco, La mala vita o ’E carcere ‘a Vicaria, manuscript play held
in Biblioteca Lucchesi Palli, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.
V. Bianco, La mala vita 0 ’O zelluso d’ ’o Mercato (1923) manuscript
play held in Biblioteca Lucchesi Palli, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.
G. Castellano, ’E guappe ’a Vicaria, manuscript play held in Biblioteca
Lucchesi Palli, Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples.
EP. Castiglione, Il segreto cinquecentesco dei Beati Paoli, Palermo, 1999.
E. De Mura (ed.), Enciclopedia della canzone napoletana, Naples, 1969,
vol. III. See the entries on the San Ferdinando and on Eduardo
Minichini.
S. Di Giacomo and G. Cognetti, Mala vita, Naples, 1889. A camorra
play by one of the best known Neapolitan authors of the era.
S. Di Giacomo in (various authors), Napoli d’oggi, Naples, 1900. On
the camorra in the theatre, the San Ferdinando, Stella, etc.
S. Di Giacomo, ‘Il “San Ferdinando”’, in idem, Napoli. Figure e paesi,
Naples, 1909.

394
 Sources consulted

V. Linares, ‘I Beati Paoli’, in idem, Racconti popolari, Palermo,

1886.
F Mancini, ‘I teatri minori’ in E Mancini and S. Ragni (eds), Donizetti
e i teatri napoletani nell’Ottocento, Naples, 1997. On the San
Ferdinando.
G. Montemagno, Luigi Natoli e i Beati Paoli, Palermo, 2002.
F. Renda, I Beati Paoli. Storia, letteratura e leggenda, Palermo, 1988.
G. Tessitore, I] nome e la cosa. Quando la mafia non si chiamava mafia,
Milan, 1997. On modern-day mafiosi — men of the criminal calibre
of Totuccio Contorno, Gaetano Badalamenti, Toto Riina and
Gaspare Mutolo — who believe, or profess to believe, that their
organisation is the modern form of the Beati Paoli.
G. Trevisani (ed.), Teatro napoletano. Dalle origini a Edoardo Scarpetta,
2 vols, Bologna, 1957.
V. Viviani, Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples, 1969.

The slack society

ACS, Archivio di Francesco Crispi, Crispi Roma, fasc. (79) 320,
Relazioni e promemoria relativi alla organizzazione della PS e dei
CC specie in Sicilia, 1888.
ACS, Archivio di Francesco Crispi, Crispi Roma, fasc. (222) 321,
Relazione d’inchiesta sul personale e sull’organizzazione delle
guardie a cavallo di Pubblica Sicurezza nelle provincie di Palermo,
Trapani, Girgenti e Caltanissetta, 1887. Contains Sangiorgi’s report
dated 25/10/1888. There is also material on Sangiorgi’s mission to
Sicily at this time in his career file (see above). Davis, Conflict and
Control, also covers the mission.
Il Mattino. For coverage of Ciccio Cappuccio’s funeral, 7—8/12/1892; and
9—10/12/1892 for Ferdinando Russo’s poem about the camorrista.
La Gazzetta Piemontese is a very useful press source on the disturbances
of August 1893. The profile of Sangiorgi when he was appointed
Police Chief in Milan is in the issue of 14/2/1889.
A.G. Bianchi (ed.), I/ romanzo di un delinquente nato. Autobiografia
di Antonino M., Milan, 1893.

395
Mafia Brotherhoods

G. Fortunato, Corrispondenze napoletane, Cosenza, 1990. A collection

of classic writings on the Southern Question originally published
1878-80. See particularly, ‘La camorra’.
M. Marmo, II proletariato industriale a Napoli in eta liberale, Naples,
1978. On the camorra-backed cab drivers’ strike. Davis, Conflict and
Control is also useful on this.
S. Pucci, ‘Schizzo monografico della camorra carceraria’, in Allegazioni
e discorsi in materia penale, Florence, 1881. Article by a magistrate
involved in prosecuting the prison camorra.
EM. Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, Cambridge,
1995.
P. Turiello, Governo e governati in Italia, P. Bevilacqua (ed.), Turin,
1980 (1882).
P. Villari, ‘La camorra’, in idem., Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti
sulla questione sociale in Italia, Florence, 1878.

4: THE 'NDRANGHETA EMERGES, 1880-1902

Court rulings on the emergence of the ’ndrangheta:
ASRC:
Tribunale Reggio Calabria, Sentenze, 16/7/1890, n. 301, Arnone Ales-
sandro + 36. Based in Reggio. One of several cases where prostitutes
testify against the picciotti.
Ditto, 12/3/1896, Triveri Giacomo + 4. A group tried for petty thefts
in Gherio. The criminal association element of the prosecution is
not proven.
Ditto, 16/11/1896, n. 1028, Attina Domenico + 18. A group based in
Condofuri, Casalnuovo and Roccaforte. One witness blames the
railways for the spread of the picciotteria. Several local notables
testify against the picciotti, despite having relatives in the gang,
whose members have ‘trying it on with women’ among their aims.
Ditto, 7/9/1897, Arena Michele + 57. A large group based in Reggio.
Ditto, 7/10/1899, n. 22. A case based in Melito, which sees picciotto
Beniamino Capri sentenced to six months for rape and membership
of a criminal association.

396
 Sources consulted

ASG:
Corte di Appello delle Calabrie, Guzzi Giovanni + 2, 4/9/1877. A case
in Nicastro involving ex-cons.
Sezione accusa, Zema Demetrio + 5, 23/10/1878. A case in Gallina
(just outside Reggio Calabria) where a man imprisoned for assault
in 1872 was released in 1876 and formed a criminal association. The
gang, who practised extortion, are accused of shooting a man in
the head for offending Zema’s ‘concubine’.
Sezione accusa, Serraino Giuseppe + 7, 23/12/1879. Here the ‘criminal
association’ charge is dismissed.
Sezione accusa, Battista Antonino + 16, 17/12/1879. A group of thieves,
one of whom had a record as a prison camorrista, but who do not
create a formal criminal association; based in the Palmi area.
Sezione accusa, Voce Vincenzo + 2, 30/06/1882. A classic tale of
factional rivalry between wealthy families rather than an organised
crime episode. Three brothers in Bruzzano are accused of hiring a
killer to eliminate one of the opposing clan; one of the brothers is
a judge.
Sezione accusa, Barbaro Felice + 6, 23/4/1883. Municipal corruption
in the Locride. As yet no criminal association element, it would
seem. This case and the previous one show the Calabria that would
prove vulnerable to the emergence of the picciotteria.
Sezione accusa, Anania Giuseppe + 27, 21/4/1884. The first signs of
the picciotteria in Nicastro, dating back to 1883. All of the accused
are ex-cons, and they have links with Ciccio Cappuccio, the ‘Little
Lord Frankie’ of the Neapolitan camorra. Pimping is their primary
source of income.
Corte di Appello delle Calabrie, Crocé Paolo + 3, 22/3/1884. Four
picciotti from Reggio Calabria appeal against their convictions.
Sezione accusa, Romeo Bruno + 27, 7/12/1899. Picciotti from S.
Cristina.
Sezione accusa, Auteri Felice + 316, 7/12/1899. The picciotteria centred
in Iatrinoli, Radicena and Cittanova in the Plain of Gioia Tauro. A
vast prosecution based on the evidence of a killer from the gang
who was not offered help by his comrades once he had been arrested.

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Mafia Brotherhoods

The leader is a 39-year-old shepherd. He and his men stole cattle

and forced landowners to take picciotti on as guards.
Corte di Appello delle Calabrie, Auteri Felice + 229, 25/2/1901. A later
stage in the same trial — the document is particularly insightful on
the picciotti’s attitude to women. Ciconte reads this trial as an
example of dynastic marriages in the picciotteria. But while there
are two marriages mentioned, it seems to me that we are still clearly
in a milieu dominated by face-slashings and petty conflicts of
‘honour’ over prostitutes, of a kind familiar from the world of the
Neapolitan camorra. The bosses, nonetheless, are said to have ‘risen
from squalor’ and ‘accumulated a fortune’.

Sources consulted throughout this section:

Cronaca di Calabria. This weekly has occasionally good coverage of

the picciotteria emergency. For the quotation from the initiation
ritual (‘Are you comfortable? Very comfortable!), see ‘La mala vita
a Palmi’, 30/09/1896. The Trimboli testimony on the myth of the
Spanish knights is in ‘La mala vita a Palmi’ 11/03/97. On the ‘innately
wicked’ well-to-do africoti, see 12/03/96.

Cingari, Storia della Calabria dall’Unita a oggi, Rome-Bari, 1983.

2) Cingari, Reggio Calabria, Rome-Bari, 1988.
Cingari, ‘Tra brigantaggio e “picciotteria”: Giuseppe Musolino’, in
idem, Brigantaggio, proprietari e contadini nel Sud, Reggio Calabria,
1976.
. Ciconte, "Ndrangheta dall’Unita a oggi, Rome-Bari, 1992. Ciconte
in particular identifies evidence of what he believes is a mafia pres-
ence in Calabria before the 1880s. My interpretation of that evidence,
broadly speaking, is that it represents localised instances where the
prison camorra established a temporary bridgehead in the outside
world — a bridgehead that would turn into a full-scale colonisation
in the 1880s and 1890s. The quotation about the ‘the wails of the
wounded and dying’ being audible before the Angelus is cited from
Ciconte, p. 211.

398
 Sources consulted

E Piselli and G. Arrighi, ‘Parentela, clientela e comunita’, in P. Bevi-

lacqua and A. Placanica, Storia d'Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi.
La Calabria, Turin, 1985. Important on society and the economy in
the Plain of Gioia Tauro, but does not square that socio-economic
profile with the available evidence on the nature of the early
picciotteria.
P. Bevilacqua, ‘Uomini, terre, economie’ in P. Bevilacqua and A.
Placanica, Storia d'Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi, La Calabria,
Turin, 1985. Another fundamental study, which is particularly good
on the vulnerability of the peasantry. Again it would be interesting
to match this account of the family’s role in the peasant economy
with what we know about the nature of the picciotteria. For the
moment, it is the contrast between the peasant family and the gangs
that is most striking.
V. Cappelli, ‘Politica e politici’, in P. Bevilacqua and A. Placanica, Storia
d'Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi, La Calabria, Turin, 1985. Particu-
larly important for the effects of the electoral reforms of the 188os.

Harsh mountain
K. Baedeker, Italy. Handbook for Travellers. Third Part: Southern Italy
and Sicily, London, 1869.
P. Borzomati, La Calabria dal 1882 al 1892 nei rapporti dei prefetti,
Reggio Calabria, 2001. Contains the first reports on a substantial
mafia presence in Reggio.
L. Costanzo, Storia delle ferrovie in Calabria, Cosenza, 2005.
L. Franchetti, Condizioni economiche ed amministrative delle prov-
ince napoletane, Florence, 1875. Franchetti does use the m-word
on one occasion, on p. 155. ‘I hear tell that quite a few big land-
owners who live in the big cities are, as it were, excluded from
their estates by a kind of maffia of middle-class people who rent
those estates. But this phenomenon is not as generalised as some
people seem to believe’. Franchetti does not give enough informa-
tion for us to be able to interpret this observation. We know of
course that he would go on to write a famous study of the

399
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‘middle-class villains’ of Sicily (his term), so we can be sure that

the Tuscan intellectual had no qualms about denouncing the mafia
when he saw it. The best we can do, perhaps, is to add this isolated
note to the list of fragmentary sightings of Calabrian mafiosi before
the 1880s.
FE Manduca, Studii sociologici, Naples, 1888. Manduca, a magistrate,
tells us that as chief prosecuting magistrate (procuratore del Re) in
Reggio Calabria he was friends with some politicians who had been
imprisoned under the Bourbons who, they alleged, put mafiosi and
camorristi in their cells to provoke them and cause trouble; they had
to defend themselves with knives. We can add this reference to the
list of early mentions of organised crime in Calabria.
G. Verga, ‘Fantasticheria’, in idem, Vita dei campi, Milan, 1880.
U. Zanotti-Bianco, ‘Tra la perduta gente — Africo’, in idem, Tra la
perduta gente, Milan, 1959.

The following maps allow one to trace the progress of railway construc-
tion through the areas of ‘high mafia density’ (to use an Italian
phrase) in Calabria:
Corpo di Stato Maggiore, Carta delle strade ferrate del Regno d'Italia
in esercizio nell’Aprile del 1869.
Comando del Corpo di Stato Maggiore (Direzione Trasporti), Carta
delle ferrovie e delle linee di navigazione del Regno d'Italia, Istituto
Topografico Militare, gennaio 1877.
Ditta Artaria, Carta speciale delle ferrovie e della navigazione in
Europa, Milan, 1878.
Comando del Corpo di Stato Maggiore (Direzione Trasporti), Carta
della ferrovie e della linee di navigazione del Regno d'Italia, Istituto
Geografico Militare, 1883.
Carta delle ferrovie, telegrafi, tramways a vapore e corsi d’acqua navi-
gabili del Regno, Milan, 1886.
Cesare Ramoni, Ferrovie italiane nel 1890. Carta completa delle reti
ferroviarie, Milan, 1890.
Istituto Geografico Militare, Carta delle ferrovie e delle linee di navi-
gazione del Regno d'Italia, Edizione giugno 1891.

400
 Sources consulted

Carta della ferrovie e delle linee di navigazione del Regno d'Italia,

Istituto Geografico Militare, gennaio 1894.

The figure of 1,854 people successfully prosecuted for membership of

the picciotteria between 1885 and 1902 comes from a speech by the
prosecutor Sansone in the Musolino trial, as reported in Giornale
d'Italia, 1/5/1902.

The tree of knowledge

I have used the following documents to try and reconstruct the emergence
of the ’ndrangheta in the Plain of Gioia Tauro chronologically:
ASC, Sezione Accusa. Corte d’appello di Catanzaro, Lisciotto Francesco
+ 23, v. 133, 18/1/1889.
ASC, Sezione Accusa. Corte d’appello di Catanzaro, Sciarrone Giovan-
battista + 95, v. 137, 21/2/1890.
ASC, Corte d’appello delle Calabrie. Tripodi Carmine, v. 323, 27/8/1890.
ASC, Corte d’appello delle Calabrie. Calia Michelangelo + 65, v. 324,
14/10/1890.
ASC, Corte d’appello delle Calabrie. Marino Francesco + 147, v. 336,
9/9/1892. The trial that mentions the two oathed women members
of the picciotteria.
ASC, Corte d’appello delle Calabrie. Sacca Rocco + 45, v. 364,
31/5/1897. This is the trial based on the testimony of Pasquale
Trimboli, who gives us our first evidence of the myth of the three
Spanish knights.
La Ragione. This local paper was threatened by the picciotti and covered
its emergence in Palmi in 1888 closely. The paper was also concerned
about the relationship between the police and the gangs: ‘the police
should not trust anyone they pay for information, because such
people perhaps belong to the gangs themselves: instead of uncovering
the criminal cabals, these informers help cover them up’ (1/4/1888).
Zivi. A radical paper that on 16/6/1895 complains about the overly
_ friendly relations between the police and picciotti in Palmi.

401
Mafia Brotherhoods

F. Arca, Calabria vera. Appunti statistici ed economici sulla provincia

di Reggio, Reggio Calabria, 1907.
G.A. Carbone, ‘Cennisull’agricoltura ed industrie agrarie del circondario
di Palmi’, L’Agricoltura e le Industrie Agrarie, 15/4/1893. The first
of a series of articles running until 15/10/1893 that are essential on
the economic background to the emergence of the picciotteria.
N. Marcone, Un viaggio in Calabria. Impressioni e ricordi, Roma, 1885.

Darkest Africo
The following court documents from the ASRC constitute the most
concentrated documentation from any early ’ndrangheta trial. They
include the voluminous court papers, including witness statements,
and the judges’ rulings from the four trials of the Africo picciotteria:
three groups of defendants prosecuted separately as part of the same
criminal association and a smaller group accused of murdering the
main witness in the case, Pietro Maviglia.
ASRC, Tribunale penale di Reggio, b. 750, inv. 68, vol. 1, 2. Associazione
a delinquere 1887-1894.
ASRC, Tribunale penale di Reggio, b. 154, inv. 68, fasc. 4. Assise RC.
Procedimento contro Callea Domenico +10 per l’omicidio di Mavi-
glia Pietro 1894.
ASRC, Tribunale penale di Reggio, b. 543, inv. 68, no. 3069. Procedi-
mento contro loffrida Domenico di Roghudi + 39 associazione a
delinquere 1896.
ASRC, Tribunale Reggio Calabria, Sentenza 25/3/1896, Velona Filippo
+ 29.
ASRC, Tribunale Reggio Calabria, Sentenza 27/4/1896, n. 210, Ioffrida
Domenico + 39.
ASRC, Tribunale Reggio Calabria, Sentenza 26/5/1896, n. 444, Favasuli
Bartolo + 29.

C. Alvaro, Polsi nell’arte, nella leggenda, nella storia, Reggio Calabria,

2005 (1912).
G. Chirico, Una vicenda giudiziaria di associazione per delinquere di

402
 Sources consulted

tipo mafioso nella provincia di Reggio Calabria (1890-1900), Tesi di

Laurea, Facolta di Scienze Politiche, Universita degli Studi di Messina,
1989-90. A precocious analysis of part of the above material.
P. Martino, ‘Per la storia della ’ndranghita’, Biblioteca di Ricerche
Linguistiche e Filologiche, vol. 25, no. 1, 1988. Very useful on the
jargon of the picciotteria and its derivation.
G. Postiglione, Relazione statistica dei lavori compiuti nel circondario
del tribunale civile e penale di Palmi nell’anno 1890, Palmi, 189r.
J. Steinberg, The Number. One man’s search for identity in the Cape
underworld and prison gangs, Johannesburg, 2004.
E Varese, The Russian Mafia. Private Protection in a New Market
Economy, Oxford, 2001. An excellent account of the Russian mafia.

The King of Aspromonte

Archival sources:
ASRC, Gabinetto di Prefettura, n. 1089, Associazione a delinquere in
S. Stefano, b. 27, inv. 34. Mangione’s reports on the picciotteria in
Musolino’s hometown. Includes remarkable material on Musolino’s
sisters.
ASRC, Gabinetto di Prefettura, Serie prima, affari riservati. Bandito
Musolino. The vast collection of documents on the Musolino case.
See for example:
Ditto, b. 2, fasc. 11. Delegati di PS impegnati nella cattura di Musolino,
sottofasc. Mangione. On the policeman who investigated the picciot-
teria in Santo Stefano.
Ditto, b. 2, fasc. 23. Stampa. Notizie sul brigante Musolino. Press clip-
pings on Musolino that show how worried the authorities were
about the growth of his mythical status as an innocent avenger.
Ditto, b. 2, fasc. 13. Favoreggiatori. A collection of false leads from
all over Italy and the USA.

Press: I have followed the Musolino trial in Giornale d’Italia and Avanti!
(April-June, 1902).

403
Mafia Brotherhoods

G. Cingari, ‘Tra brigantaggio e “picciotteria”: Giuseppe Musolino’, in

idem, Brigantaggio, proprietari e contadini nel Sud, Reggio Calabria,
1976. Fundamental for all aspects of the Musolino case. The brig-
and’s open letter to La Tribuna, dated 28/3/1900, is quoted from
Cingari.
N. Douglas, Old Calabria, London, 1983 (1915).
E. Morselli and S. De Sanctis, Biografia di un bandito. Giuseppe
Musolino di fronte alla psichiatria ed alla sociologia, Milan, 1903.
M. Pascoli, Lungo la vita di Giovanni Pascoli, Milan, 1961.
A. Rossi, ‘Alla ricerca di Musolino’, L’Adriatico, 11/2/1901. The first
of a brilliant series of twenty articles (most published under the title
‘Nel regno di Musolino’) running until 6/4/1901.

5: MEDIA DONS, 1899-1915

Bankers and Men of Honour / Floriopolis / Four trials and a funeral
ACS, DGPS, aa.gg.rr. Atti speciali (1898-1940), b. 1, fasc. 1, “The
Sangiorgi Report’. It is worth noting that there were some links
between Palizzolo and the maftosi detailed in Sangiorgi’s report. The
MP provided character references for some of the Men of Honour
whose gun licences the Chief of Police confiscated. Palizzolo’s
favourite Villabate cosca sold stolen cattle through the same Palermo
butcher who hosted summits attended by Antonino Giammona,
Francesco Siino, et al.

There is information on Sangiorgi’s activities as Chief of Police of

Palermo in the Sangiorgi career files, including the transfer notification
telegram I quote.

The best accounts of the Notarbartolo affair are in:

S. Lupo, Storia della mafia, Rome, 1996. The quote from the police on
Palizzolo as ‘the mafia’s patron’ is quoted on p. 115. Lupo also
describes Ignazio Florio’s free ride during the trial as ‘miraculous’.
G. Barone, ‘Egemonie urbane e potere locale (1882—1913)’, in M.

404
 Sources consulted

Aymard and G. Giarrizzo (eds), Storia d'Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita

a oggi. La Sicilia, Turin, 1987. Florio on the mafia as ‘an invention
created to calumny Sicily’ is quoted on p. 317. The quotation about
the fear among honest journalists is from p. 314. Cosenza quoted
on the ‘priests of Themis’ is on p. 325.

There are also useful points in:

F. Renda, Socialisti e cattolici in Sicilia (1900-1904), Caltanissetta, 1972.
F. Renda, Storia della mafia, Palermo, 1997. The quotation on ‘the high
mafia planned the murder long in advance’ is on p. 147.

N. Colajanni, La Sicilia dai borboni ai sabaudi (1860-1900), Milan, 195r.

L. Notarbartolo, Memorie della vita di mio padre, Pistoia, 1949. On
the Tribuna Giudiziaria being close to Cosenza, see p. 365.
R. Poma, Onorevole alzatevi!, Florence, 1976. Quotes the lines on the
Florence verdict hailed as a sign of national unity.
S. Sonnino, Diario 1866-1912, vol. 1, Bari, 1972. On the possibility of
an early election due to the first Notarbartolo trial.

I followed the various trials in a number of newspapers:

Avanti! On Palizzolo’s convulsive laughter at the verdict 1/8/1902.
Corriere della Sera. On Palizzolo ‘accessible to the voters’, 1—2/10/1901
(quoted in Lupo, Storia della mafia, p. 111).
Daily Express. On the Florence verdict, 25/7/1904.
Giornale di Sicilia. ‘La questione Avellone’, 2—3/4/1892 (quoted in
O. Cancila, Palermo, Bari, 2000, pp. 234-5). For the new prefect’s
proclamation of a campaign against extortion, see 14—15/9/1898.
On how well respected the Giammona family were, 13—14/5/r1901.
On the Giammonas’ generosity: 20-21/5/1901. On the mafia as a
‘hypertrophy of individualism’, 24-25/5/1901. Interestingly the full
quote comes word-for-word from Cosenza’s 1900 speech opening
the judicial year (see Renda, Socialisti e cattolici, p. 408). Cosenza
also quotes Giuseppe Falcone, a lawyer of Palizzolo’s and the man
responsible for trying to smear Sangiorgi at the end of the story. On
Sangiorgi’s death, 4—5/11/1908.

405
Mafia Brotherhoods

Il Mattino. On Sangiorgi’s death, 4-5/11/1908.

Morning Post. On the hypocrisy at the pro-Notarbartolo demonstra-
tion, see 22/12/1899.
L’Ora. On the mafia as ‘rustic chivalry’ 5—6/6/1901. For the letter
slandering Sangiorgi, 19—-20/11/1903. On Sangiorgi’s death,
4/11/1908.
Resto del Carlino. Sangiorgi on ‘the mafia is powerful’, 30-31/10/1901.
The St Louis Republic. ‘The bandit-king’s levee’ (anon), 14/1/1900. For
the scene at Palizzolo’s bedroom receptions.
The Times. On Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s ‘sobriety, scrupulous attention
to fact’, 18/10/1901.
Tribuna Giudiziaria. See 29/11/1903 and the article ‘Commedia poli-
ziesca’ for Sangiorgi’s ‘slanderous’ testimony.

The criminal Aflantic

C. Alvaro, ‘La fibbia’, Corriere della Sera, 17/9/1955. For the anecdote
about the ‘association’ in San Luca.
G. Cingari, Storia della Calabria dall’Unita a oggi, Rome-Bari, 1983.
G. Cingari, Reggio Calabria, Rome-Bari, 1988. On the picciotteria in
the aftermath of the earthquake of 1908.
D. Critchley, The Origin of Organised Crime in America. The New
York City Mafia, 1891-1931, London, 2009. Marshalls a vast
amount of excellent documentation but is marred by its lack of
knowledge of the best Italian studies on the mafia, which leads,
for example, to his taking the Sicilians like Joe Bonanno at their
word on ‘honour’ and such like. All the same, Critchley’s book is
important in that it is the first to assemble an overview involving
both Campanian and Calabrian gangs as well as Sicilians. I have
drawn on Critchley for Erricone’s time in New York, among other
things.
PY. Herchenroether, Helltown. The Story of the Hillsville Black Hand,
unpublished typescript, kindly provided by the author. On piccio-
tteria-style gangs among miners in Pennsylvania.
S. Lupo, Quando la mafia trove l’America. Storia di un intreccio

406
 Sources consulted

intercontinentale, 1888-2008, Turin, 2008. Among many other

things, Lupo quotes Antonio Musolino’s statement to the police.
New York Times. ‘By order of the mafia’, 22/10/1888. Salvatore
Lupo identifies this first mafia murder in the USA. Walter Little-
field, ‘Criminal band that murdered Petrosino in police coils’,
11/9/1910.
The ASRC contains some interesting files on the re-importation of the
Black Hand into Calabria and on links between Calabrian gangs
and the mining communities of the USA:
Tribunale penale Reggio Calabria, 1906, b. 981, fasc. 11156, Leone
Antonino +63, Associazione a delinquere mano nera.
Ditto, b. 993, fasc. 11732. Ignoti: minacce.
Ditto, b. 1028, fasc. 12896. Romeo Francesco e altri (11/1907).

The ‘high’ camorra / The camorra in straw-yellow gloves / Gennaro

Abbatemaggio: Genialoid / The strange death of the Honoured Society
E. Barbagallo, I] Mattino degli Scarfoglio, 1892-1928, Milan, 1979.
E Barbagallo, Stato, parlamento e lotte politico-sociali nel Mezzogiorno
(1900-1914), Naples, 1980. On Peppuccio Romano, among other
things.
FE. Barbagallo, Storia della camorra, Rome-Bari, 2010.
R. Canosa, Storia della criminalita in Italia, 1845-1945, Turin, 1991.
The request from the carabinieri for more money to pay witnesses
is quoted on p. 291.
E. Ciccotti, Come divenni e come cessai di essere deputato di Vicaria,
Naples, 1909. On the election and the camorra in tricolour cockades
once more.
E. De Cosa, Camorra e malavita a Napoli agli inizi del Novecento,
Cerchio, 1989 (1908).
G. Garofalo, La seconda guerra napoletana, Naples, 1984.
G. Machetti, ‘La lobby di piazza Municipio: gli impiegati comunali
nella Napoli di fine Ottocento’, Meridiana, 38-39, 2000.
M. Marmo, ““Processi indiziari non se ne dovrebbero mai fare”. Le
manipolazioni del processo Cuocolo (1906—1930)’, in M. Marmo

407
Mafia Brotherhoods

and L. Musella (eds), La costruzione della verita giudiziaria, Naples,

2003.
M. Marmo, ‘Il reato associativo tra costruzione normativa e prassi
giudiziaria’, in G. Civile and G. Machetti (eds), La citta e il tribunale.
Diritto, pratica giudiziaria e societa napoletana tra Ottocento e
Novecento, Naples, 2004.
M. Marmo, ‘L’opinione pubblica nel processo penale: Giano bifronte,
ovvero la verita giudiziaria contesa’, Meridiana, 63, 2008.
E Russo and E. Serao, La camorra. Origini, usi, costumi e riti dell’
‘annorata soggieta’, Naples, 1907. The source of the quote on
absinthe and debt.
R. Salomone, Il processo Cuocolo, Arpino, 1930. Contains Abbatemag-
gio’s recantation and information on his life; also Erricone’s speech
at the verdict, p. 102.
FE. Snowden, The fascist revolution in Tuscany, 1919-1922, Cambridge,
1989. On Abbatemaggio’s life under Fascism.
EM. Snowden, Naples in the time of cholera, 1884-1911, Cambridge,
1995.
A. Train, Courts, Criminals and the Camorra, London, 1912. The ‘bear
garden’ quote is from p. 184. The ‘best dressed’ camorristi from
p. 211. The ‘excitability’ of Italians, p. 202.

The press on the Cuocolo trial:

The Advertiser (Australia). Abbatemaggio as ‘a rascal of almost incon-
ceivably deep dye’ 13/7/1912.
Bulawayo Chronicle. For the damning verdict on the Cuocolo trial,
8/9/1912.
Il Mattino. Unless otherwise stated, I have quoted from I/ Mattino’s
copious coverage. For example: Abbatemaggio’s initial testimony
begins on 25-6/3/1911; Abbatemaggio questioned on his theatre-
going, 3—4/5/1911; Abbatemaggio’s ‘mnemonic and intuitive capaci-
ties’, testimony of Prof Polidori 14-15/3/1911; Erricone on ‘the
gramophone’, 29—30/3/1911; Erricone on the ‘sons of Vesuvius’,
1-2/4/1911; on the pederast / spitting episode, 3—4/5/1911; Fabroni’s
testimony, with its accusations against Abbatemaggio, begins on

408
 Sources consulted

13-14/7/1911; Simonetti testimony, 9—10/6/1911; Catalano testimony,

22-23/6/1911; Ametta testimony and Erricone’s outburst,
23-24/6/1911; on the camorrista’s printed defence and ‘rustic chiv-
alry’, 20-21/3/r9r1.
New York Times. ‘The greatest criminal trial of the age’, 11/9/1910;
‘Camorrist told all to win his bride’, 6/3/1911; ‘the black vitals of
the criminal hydra’, 11/9/1910; ‘one of the most remarkable feats of
detection’, 15/1/1912.
Otautau Standard and Wallace County Chronicle (New Zealand). One
of many papers across the world to use the Sherlock Holmes parallel.
La Stampa. Curiously, Gennaro Abbatemaggio kept himself in the
headlines by claiming to know important inside details of the Matte-
otti murder; he gave evidence at the trial. See ‘Le rivelazioni di
Abbatemaggio sulla premeditazione dell’assassinio Matteotti’, La
Stampa, 7/9/1924. After the war, Abbatemaggio tried and failed to
get a film of the Cuocolo trial made, and was also prosecuted in
1954 for falsely claiming to have crucial information on the notorious
Montesi murder case. See ‘Gennaro Abbatemaggio arrestato per le
sue false dichiarazioni’, La Stampa, 24/8/1954.
Washington Times, 12/9/1910.

6: MUSSOLINI'S SCALPEL, 1922-1943

Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia / Sicily: The slimy octopus
ASPA, Questura, Affari generali, 1935, b. 2196. Questura di Palermo.
Archivio Generale b. 2196 Anno 1935. R. Ispettorato generale di PS
per la Sicilia — Nucleo centrale Carabinieri reali, Processo verbale
di denunzia di 175 individui responsabili di associazione per delin-
quere (16 luglio 1938).
Manchester Guardian. Ascension Day speech, 27/5/1927.
New York Times. 27/5/1927; ‘signs of increasing megalomania’,
29/5/1927.
M. Allegra, ‘Come io, medico, diventai un mafioso’, Giornale di Sicilia,
22-23/1/1962.

409
 Mafia Brotherhoods

M. Allegra, ‘La mafia mi ordino di entrare in politica’, Giornale di

Sicilia, 23-24/1/1962.
M. Allegra, ‘Tutti gli uomini della “cosca”’, Giornale di Sicilia,
24-25/1/1962. Intriguingly, Allegra mentions Ernesto Marasa, says
he has more to say about him, and then does not return to the
subject.
M. Andretta, ‘I corleonesi e la storia della mafia. Successo, radicamento
e continuita’, Meridiana, 54, 2005.
_ A. Blando, ‘L’avvocato del diavolo’, Meridiana, 63, 2008.
A. Calderone, Gli uomini del disonore, (ed. P. Arlacchi), Milan, 1992.
V. Coco, ‘Dal passato al futuro: uno sguardo dagli anni trenta’, Merid-
iana, 63, 2008.
V. Coco and M. Patti, ‘Appendice’, Meridiana, 63, 2008. A breakdown
of trials following the Mori operation.
V. Coco, ‘La mafia dell’agro palermitano nei processi del periodo
fascista’, in G. Gribaudi (ed.), Traffici criminali. Camorra, mafie e
reti internazionali dell’illegalita, Turin, 2009.
FE. Di Bartolo, ‘Imbrigliare il conflitto sociale. Mafiosi, contadini, lati-
fondisti’, Meridiana, 63, 2008.
M. Di Figlia, ‘Mafia e nuova politica fascista’, Meridiana, 63, 2008.
C. Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, New Haven, 1989. Duggan’s study
remains important for the context to the Mori Operation. But the
book is best known for the thesis that the mafia-as-organisation was
invented by Fascism as a pretext to exert political control over Sicily.
That thesis was controversial at the time of publication, and it is
now contradicted by a crushing weight of evidence.
S. Lupo, Storia della mafia, Rome, 1996. Mori ‘on heat’ for the nobility,
quoted p. 182.
C. Mori, The Last Struggle with the Mafia, London, 1933.
C. Mori, Con la mafia ai ferri corti, Naples, 1993 (1932).
B. Mussolini, “Discorso dell’Ascensione’, 26/5/1927, in idem, Opera
Omnia, ed. E. Susmel and D. Susmel, 44 vols, Florence, 1951-80,
vol. 22. :
M. Patti, ‘Sotto processo. Le cosche palermitane’, Meridiana, 63,
2008.

410
 Sources consulted

V. Scalia, ‘Identita sociali e conflitti politici nell’area dell’interno’,

Meridiana, 63, 2008.
A. Spano, Faccia a faccia con la mafia, Milan, 1978. For Mori’s lifestyle
in Palermo, p. 38.

I have estimated the extent of Marasa’s wealth using www.measuring

worth.com (the unskilled wage index) 1938-2009.

Campania: Buffalo soldiers /

Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese
Comando Generale dell’Arma dei Carabinieri. Ufficio Storico, various
reports from the career of Vincenzo Anceschi, including Bollettino
Ufficiale dei Carabinieri Reali 1919 (p. 214), 1927 (p. 109), 1929 (pp.
330, 461, 585, 871), 1930 (p. 882).

E. Anceschi, I Carabinieri reali contro la camorra, Rome, 2003. Includes

the article from I] Mezzogiorno, 2-3/6/27 on which I base my descrip-
tion of the Mazzoni.
L. Avella, Cronaca nolana. Dalla Monarchia alla Repubblica, vol. 7,
1926-1943, Naples, 2002. For the quote on Vito Genovese’s
donation.
FE. Barbagallo, Storia della camorra, Rome-Bari, 2010. On ‘Little Joey’,
pp. 86-88.
O. Bordiga, Inchiesta parlamentare sulle condizioni dei contadini nelle
provincie meridionali e nella Sicilia, vol. 1V, Campania, tomo I,
Relazione, Rome 1909. On the ‘tribes’ of the Mazzoni.
P. Frascani, ‘Mercato e commercio a Napoli dopo I’Unita’, in P. Macry,
and P. Villani, (eds.), Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi. La
Campania, Turin, 1990.
G. Gribaudi, ‘Guappi, camorristi, killer. Interpretazioni letterarie,
immagini sociali, e storie giudiziarie’, in Donne, uomini, famiglie,
Naples, 1999. On the guappo.
M. Marmo, ‘Tra le carceri e il mercato. Spazi e modelli storici del
fenomeno camorrista’, in P. Macry and P. Villani (eds), La Campania,

411
Mafia Brotherhoods

part of Storia d'Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita a oggi, Turin, 1990. The

best starting point for the history of the camorra outside Naples
itself.
P. Monzini, Gruppi criminali a Napoli e a Marsiglia. La delinquenza
organizzata nella storia di due citta (1820-1990), Rome, 1999. On
the obscure fate of the camorra after the Honoured Society, pp.
53>.
H.S. Nelli, The Business of Crime. Italians and Syndicate Crime in the
United States, New York, 1976. On Genovese and Fascism.
C. Petraccone, Le «due Italie». La questione meridionale tra realta e
rappresentazione, Rome-Bari, 2005. On Fascism’s ban on ‘Mezzo-
giorno’, p. 190.

Il Mattino. The articles triggered by the Nola murders run through

August and September, rorr. See esp., 9—10/8/1911 ‘Il brigantaggio
nell’Agro nolano’; and on the ‘crass ignorance’ and ‘bloodthirsty
instincts’ in the Mazzoni, ‘Brigantaggio nei Mazzoni di Capua’,
18—19/9/1911. I have followed Anceschi’s operation in I] Mattino
(November 1926 to May 1927).
Roma. Also contains extensive coverage of Anceschi’s operation (November
1926 to June 1927). On the funeral interrupted by Anceschi’s men,
1/1/1927, ‘I maggiori maladrini avversani tratti in arresto mentre
accompagnano in camposanto la salma del loro “capintesta”’. ”»>

Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina /

Calabria: What does not kill me, makes me stronger /
Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman/
Master Joe dances a farantella
Overview of archival sources on the ’ndrangheta under Fascism:

ASRC:
Tribunale di Reggio Calabria, Sentenze, 6/6/1923 n. 15, Battaglia
Giuseppe + 46, vol. 206.
Ditto, 1/12/1924, Callea Giovanni + 8, vol. 210.

412
 Sources consulted

Ditto, 18/2/1924, Cal Clemente + 25, vol. 208.

Ditto, 23/9/1924, Palamara Francesco + 6, vol. 210. A Casalnuovo-based
group that decide to punish anyone who voted Fascist in the local
elections. They are acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence.
Ditto, 15/4/1926, n. 192, Minniti Antonio, vol. 215.
Ditto, 2/8/1926 n. 395, Mafrici Stefano + 13, vol. 216.
Ditto, 7/5/1927 n. 153, De Gaetano Andrea + 28, vol. 218. Three of
the accused get themselves photographed with pistols pointing at a
sheet of paper and raising hands as if to take an oath. They are all
acquitted.
Ditto, 29/3/1927, Schimizzi Giacomo + 64, vol. 217. In Melito the gang
initiation oath emerges from insider evidence: ‘before us there is a
tomb covered in flowers, and he who breaches secrecy will receive
five dagger blows to the chest’. The judge explains why such insider
evidence often emerges: ‘judicial psychology teaches us, members of
criminal associations always betray one another’.
Ditto, 13/7/1928 n. 395, Bruzzaniti Giovanni + 51, vol. 224. A case in
Africo where there was an upsurge in picciotteria violence after the
First World War. The judge lamely blames ‘social causes’ and reduces
the sentences on the grounds that the culprits are reformed
characters.
Ditto, 19/6/1928, Putorti Vittorio +5, vol. 223.
Ditto, 14/8/1930, Passalacqua Giuseppe + 19, vol. 234. A nasty case
involving the rape of a retarded prostitute.
Ditto, 26/5/1930 n. 341, Curatola Francesco, vol. 232.
Ditto, 12/6/1931 n. 524, Altomonte Carmelo + 8, vol. 238.
Ditto, 16/7/1931 n. 752, De Gaetano Domenico + 20, vol. 239. Describes
a battle for territory in San Roberto (nr Villa San Giovanni) between
Fascists and picciotti. The latter have a close web of kinship and
marriage ties between them.
Ditto, 6 aprile 1933 n. 174, Spano Demetrio + 106, vol. senza numero
Anno 1933 — dal 15 gennaio al 30 aprile. Trial of a whole network
of picciotteria groups in Reggio Calabria. The leaders pimp and
extort money from junior members. A detailed picture of the organi-
sation emerges. There is, as always, a Societa minore and a Societa

413
Mafia Brotherhoods

maggiore, but the latter is further divided between the Societa in

testa a.k.a. Gran criminale grouped around the boss, and the Societa
indrina of which there are several based in different quarters of the
city.

ASG;
Corte di Appello di Catanzaro, Sentenze, 7/6/1922, De Paola Gregorio
+ 11, vol. 486.
Ditto, 8/8/1923, Noto Domenico + 46, vol. 489. The flying boss.
Ditto, 14/11/1923, Alfinito Donato + 36, vol. 489. Prosecution of a
group in Petrona. Two women accused of being in the cosca are
acquitted for insufficient evidence. The boss was unseated because
his wife betrayed him, ostensibly.
Ditto, 16/4/1923, Costa Salvatore + 6 , vol. 488.
Ditto, 19/7/1924, Bruzzi Camillo + 18, vol. 491. From Radicena and
Gioia Tauro. The gang’s practice of forced initiation produces a
witness for the prosecution.
Ditto, 11/3/1925, Cotela Giuseppe + 14, vol. 492. Some members admit
the existence of the association, based in Serrata. Forcible enlisting
of members still practised, at least according to some witnesses.
Ditto, 19/12/1925, Barbara Antonio + 35, vol. 494.
Ditto, 26/1/1925, Panucci Gesuele + 17, vol. 492.
Ditto, 22/5/1926, Fabrizio Giuseppe + 26, v. 495. Like many rulings,
this one shows an organisation divided between picciotti and
camorristi. Once again the evidence is from turncoats inside the
group.
Ditto, 6/2/1926, Pandurri Pietro + 14, vol. 495.
Ditto, 10/2/1926, Facchineri Giuseppe + 18, vol. 495.
Ditto, 12/4/1926, Notarianni Vincenzo + 34, vol. 495. Dagger duels.
Ditto, 13/2/1926, Mascaro Camillo + 3, vol. 495.
Ditto, 17/3/1926, De Caro Vincenzo, vol. 495. A group in the ethnically
Albanian village of Santa Sofia d’Epiro. The group kept women’s
clothes for disguise purposes. ;
Ditto, 26/4/1926, Albanese Domenico + 26, vol. 495. The ruling
describes the disorder following demobilisation in Rosarno.

414
 Sources consulted

Ditto, 28/6/1926, Gulla Francesco, v. 496. Gulla, from Celico in the

province of Cosenza, has ties with the Black Hand in the USA.
Ditto, 10/10/1927, Biancamaro Arturo + 6, vol. 500.
Ditto, 4/12/1928, Bumbaca Vincenzo + 45, vol. 505. One of several
cases where the prosecution case fails to stand up.
Ditto, 8/6/1928, De Santis Giuseppe + 21, vol. 503.
Ditto, 9/7/1928, Luca Luigi + 38, vol. 504. In Gioiosa Jonica the picci-
otteria calls itself the ‘Montalbano family’.
Ditto, 12/11/1928, Speranza Stefano + 26, vol. 505.
Ditto, 17/12/1928, Cristiano Giuseppe + 13, vol. 505. The Carabinieri
fail to produce enough evidence against this group from Staiti.
Ditto, 18/8/1928, Saccomanno Antonio + 11, vol. 504. The defendants
are acquitted because, in the judge’s view, the prosecution has not
proved that this society was a criminal association, despite several
confessions.
Ditto, 2/5/1929, Palermo Rinaldo + 48, vol. 507. Interesting case from
Gerace in which the picciotteria extort bribes on marriages. Two
wealthy members were acquitted on the flimsy grounds that ‘it was
implausible that they would have shady. dealings with what was
essentially a bunch of beggars’.
Ditto, 17/5/1929, Napoli Pasquale + 7, vol. 507. A spike in thefts follows
the return of a picciotto from the United States.
Ditto, 25/11/1929, Gareri Domenico + 13, vol. 509.
Ditto, 26/9/1929, Romeo Stefano + 75, vol. 508. Important trial of the
picciotteria in San Luca. Giuseppe Delfino uses the evidence of an
informer (subsequently murdered) to dismantle the local cattle
rustling operation.
Ditto, 1/4/1930, Gullace Domenico + 20, vol. 512.
Ditto, 6/12/1930, Spand Vincenzo + 33, vol. 517.
Ditto, 11/7/1930, Vallone Giuseppe + 6, vol. 514.
Ditto, 13/6/1930, Carioti Francesco, vol. 513.
Ditto, 15/11/1930, Corio Santo + 144, vol. 516. Several women are
involved in this clan from Palmi, Gioia Tauro and Rosarno.
Ditto, 20/10/1930, Sorace Salvatore + 9, vol. 515.
Ditto, 25/11/1930, Annacorato Vincenzo + 93, vol. 516. A ‘Montalbano

415
Mafia Brotherhoods

family’ in Nicotera, Polistena and Gioia Tauro. One boy is initiated

at age eleven. The judge is unsurprised that most of the evidence
comes from turncoats inside the picciotteria: ‘It is natural that
underworld trials grow from the revelations of gangsters who betray
the secrets of the sect that they were affiliated to’.
Ditto, 29/11/1930, Mollica Vincenzo + 41, vol. 516.
Ditto, 29/8/1931, Ponzano Gaetano+ tro, vol. 521.
Ditto, 1/3/1932, Lupino Giovanni + 16, vol. 525.
Ditto, 25/11/1932, Argentano Menotti + 12, vol. 529.
Ditto, 12/5/1933, Piccione Francesco + to, vol. 531.
Ditto, 21/9/1934, Pollifrone Rocco + 22, vol. 536. The picciotteria in
the Locride smuggles its stolen animals to market in the Plain of
Gioia Tauro.

ASC:
Corte di Assise di Catanzaro, Sentenze, 2/11/1931, Pugliese Francesco
+ 4, vol. 62.
Ditto, 21/5/1932, Rosello Francesco + 2, vol. 63. A Carabiniere is
murdered for trying to prevent an underworld marriage alliance. He
may have got too close to one of the factions involved.

ASC:
Corte di Assise di Locri, Sentenze, 2/2/1933, Andriano Vincenzo+ 8, b. r.
Ditto, 19/7/1937, Commisso Francescantonio + 56, b. 3. The boss rules
that a man spreading rumours about his wife must die, and orders
a sixteen-year-old boy to perform the deed.
Ditto, 8/2/1938, Oppedisano Francesco + 5, b. 3.
Ditto, 6/9/1939, Macri Francesco + 141, b. 4. The case involving Maria
Marvelli.
Ditto, 9/2/1939, Canario Vincenzo + 26, b. 4.

ASC:
Corte di Assise di Palmi, Sentenze, 11/6/1937, Vicari Francesco, b. 3.
Ditto, 18/3/1937 Romeo Procopio +2, b. 3. A butcher in a frazione of
Oppido Mamertina is hit by shotgun pellets in the thighs, genitals,

416
 Sources consulted

scrotum, penis and left hand while excreting in an olive grove. There
follows a chain of attacks that the judge puts down to family
rivalries.
Ditto, 6/12/1938 Vinci Alfonso + ro, b. 3. Acquittals despite an outbreak
of razor slashes to the face in Cittanova.
Ditto, 8/4/1938 Corso Rocco + 1, b. 3.
Ditto, 7/3/1940 Barone Michele + 37, b. 4. The gang, under the leader-
ship of Michele Barone convicted of smothering an old lady in her
bed and throwing a prostitute off a bridge, seems not to have been
part of the picciotteria, despite operating in the classic ’ndrangheta
territories of Polistena and Taurianova.

ASC:
Gabinetto di prefettura, Affari gen. e disposizioni riguardanti la PS.
—b. 14. On the picciotteria that has ‘almost been crushed’, see letter
from Chief of Police to the Prefect, 21/11/1931.
Gabinetto di prefettura, Ordine Pubblico — b. 609.
Ufficio Storico Stato Maggiore Aeronautica (USSMA), Fondo aviatori
Grande Guerra, b. 132, fasc. 14. Noto Domenico. The flying boss’s
war record.

Comando Generale dell’ Arma dei Carabinieri. Ufficio Storico, various

documents on the career of Giuseppe Delfino including: Bollettino
Ufficiale dei Carabinieri Reali 1911 (p. 289), 1919 (p. 285), 1927
(p. 104); Comune di San Luca, ‘Deliberazione del consiglio comunale’,
4/12/1915 and another dated 14/7/1921; Partito Nazionale Fascista,
Sezione de Plati, ‘Deliberazione’ 20/12/1926; letter from the Procuratore
del Re, Gerace Marina, 3/6/1929.

Cronaca di Calabria. Has low-key coverage of the picciotteria during

the early Fascist years, 1922—28. On the actions of Giuseppe Delfino,
see ‘Vasta associazione a delinquere’, 8/12/1927.
Gazzetta di Messina e delle Calabrie, 1924-27. On Giuseppe Delfino’s
tireless work, see, ‘Da Plati. Un maresciallo dei carabinieri che si fa
onore’, 3/4/1927.

417
Mafia Brotherhoods

Il Popolo di Calabria, 1927-30. More low-key coverage.

G. Buccini, ‘I due Delfino, carabinieri, e i boss Nirta: un’epopea a
Plati’, Corriere della Sera, 16/10/1993. Delfino family lore.
L. Malafarina, ‘La leggenda di Massaro Peppe’, Gazzetta del Sud,
9/9/1986. An interview with Delfino’s son.

P. Bevilacqua, Le campagne del Mezzogiorno tra Fascismo e dopoguerra.

Il caso della Calabria, Turin, 1980.
V. Cappelli, I/ fascismo in periferia. La Calabria durante il Ventennio,
Lungro di Cosenza, 1998.
E. Cordova, II fascismo nel Mezzogiorno: le Calabrie, Soveria Mannelli,
2003.
L. Izzo, Agricoltura e classi rurali in Calabria dall’Unita al Fascismo,
Geneva, 1974.
E. Miséfari, L’avvento del fascismo in Calabria, Cosenza, 1980. On
‘acute factionitis’, p. 116.
A. Placanica, Storia della Calabria, Rome, 1999 (1993).
J. Steinberg, ‘Fascism in the Italian South: the case of Calabria’, in
D. Forgacs (ed.), Rethinking Italian Fascism. Capitalism, Populism
and Culture, London, 1986.

33. Liberation
ASRC, Tribunale di Locri, Sentenza 20/3/1937, Macri Antonio + 12,
vol. 286. Don ’Ntoni has one of his early brushes with the law.
La mafia a Montalto. Sentenza 2 ottobre 1970 del Tribunale di Locri,
Reggio Calabria, 1971. Includes a detailed criminal profile of don
’Ntoni Macri.

National Archive, London

Italy. Zone Handbook Sicily. WO 220/277.
Italy. Zone Handbook no. 3. Calabria. WO 220/278.
Italy. Zone Handbook no. 6. Campania. WO 252/804.
WO 204/9719, Sicily and Southern Italy: reports on social, economic
and political aspects of provincial living conditions. 1943 Oct.-1944

418
 Sources consulted

Jan. Includes Lord Rennell’s report from Calabria.

WO 204/11462, Psychological Warfare Branch. PWB and OSS activities
reports. 1944 Dec—1945 May. Includes accounts of food riots in
traditional picciotteria areas but no mention of gang activity.
WO 204/12625, Italy. Political situation. Naples and Campania. For
figures on prostitution in Naples see the report reviewing the situ-
ation since Liberation, dated 19/4/1945. On the food supply from
the hinterland see report dated 2/5/1945.
WO 204/12627, Italy. Political situation. Naples and Campania. On the
‘fantastic gangland situation’ in the hinterland north of the city see
report of 21/2/1946 .
WO 204/6313, Psychological Warfare Branch. Naples: weekly reports
on economic and political conditions. 1944 Apr.-Aug. Report dated
3/5/1944 on the police cut on goods coming out of the port, and on
the main black market sales points in the city. Report of 23/6/1944
on the problems of those on fixed incomes. Report of 30/6/1944 on
class distinctions disappearing.
WO 204/6314, Psychological Warfare Branch. Naples: weekly reports
on economic and political conditions. 1944 Aug.-Oct. Report of
16/8/1944 on two kinds of spaghetti. Report of 28/9/1944 on the
inactivity of the Military Police. Report of 5/10/1944 on the old crone
tipping a bank clerk for counting her money. Report of 26/10/1944
(interview with woman) for the role of street-corner bosses.
WO 204/6315, Psychological Warfare Branch. Naples: weekly reports
on economic and political conditions. 1944 Nov.-1945 Jan. Report
of 23/11/1944 on a Casoria gang that stages train robberies between
Rome and Naples.
WO 204/6277, Psychological Warfare Branch. Italy: reports on condi-
tions in liberated areas. 1944 Jan.-Mar. Report of 28/3/1944 on the
Caputos sentenced to seven years.

C. Alvaro, ‘Il canto di Cosima’, in idem, L’amata alla finestra, Milan,

1994.
E Barbagallo, Storia della camorra, Rome-Bari, 2010. On the Giuliano
boys in Forcella, p. 103.

419
Mafia Brotherhoods

E. Ciconte, Ndrangheta dall’Unita a oggi, Rome-Bari, 1992. On mafia

mayors and what little we know about this under-researched period
of ’ndrangheta history, pp. 239-44.
E. Ciconte, Storia criminale. La resistibile ascesa di mafia, ’ndrangheta
e camorra dall’Ottocento ai giorni nostri, Soveria Mannelli, 2008.
On Delfino pp. 283-4.
D. Ellwood, Italy 1943-1945, Leicester, 1985. Also inti Lord Rennell
on mayors from an ‘American gangster environment’, p. 59.
N. Gentile, Vita di capomafia, Rome, 1993.
A. Gramsci, Lettere dal carcere, Turin, 1947. For an example of the
prison gangs as viewed by a political prisoner under Fascism. When
Antonio Gramsci, the founding member and leader of the Italian
Communist Party, was jailed by Mussolini, he witnessed a camorra
initiation in a Naples prison. He also saw a ‘fencing academy’ and
a friendly duelling tournament conducted according to the rules of
what he termed the ‘four realms of the southern Italian underworld
(the Sicilian realm, the Calabrian realm, the Puglian realm, and the
Neapolitan realm)’. The weapons, in this case, were harmless:
spoons rubbed against the wall so that whitewash marked hits on
the duellers’ clothing. But even so, the rivalry between Sicilians and
Calabrians was so intense that they did not even fight with spoons
in case the battle escalated. See particularly the letter dated
11/4/1927.
J. Huston, An Open Book, London, 1988 (1980).
N. Lewis, Naples ’44, London, 2002 (1978). I have used Lewis’s classic
work of reportage here, but sparingly. After reading the manuscript
notes upon which the text is based, I felt that the references to the
‘zona di camorra’ in Naples ’44 were not sufficiently reliable to be
used as historical evidence, and that they may well have been a
product of literary licence based on Lewis’s later visits to Naples
and his encounters with films such as La sfida.
C. Malaparte, La pelle, Rome-Milan, 1950. “Two dollars the boys, three
dollars the girls!’ p. ro.
T. Newark, The Mafia at War: Allied collusion with the mob, London,
2007. Quotes the OSS report (‘theirs for the asking’, dated 13/8/1943),

420
 Sources consulted

pp. 209-10. On 45 per cent of Allied military cargo stolen, Newark

quotes the report from Allied Civil Affairs to the War Cabinet in
London 19/4/1944 (National Archive, MAF 83/1338), p. 217.
V. Paliotti, Forcella. La Casbah di Napoli, Naples, 2005.
E. Reid, Mafia, revised edn, New York, 1964. Reproduces Dickey’s
testimony, pp. 163-89.
C. Stajano, Africo, 1979. On Delfino’s dancing.

‘Lord Rennell’, obituary in The Geographical Journal, vol. 144, No. 2

(July 1978).

A421
ALY
nan ete
pe
Index

Abbatemaggio, Gennaro 253-7, 260, legislation and mafia trials 142

265, 268-71, 274, 276-7, 280, 282-3, limits of Italy’s fight against the
286-7, 366 mafias 366-7
Adowa, battle of 213, 219 in the Mazzoni 303-6
Africo 169, 178-91, 193-5, 199, 314-15 Mori Operation 294-8, 336-45
mayor of 182, 200 against Musolino 198, 199-200, 202-4
Agostino, Paolo 323-6, 327-30 ‘open fight’ against the camorra 155
Agrigento 103, 127, 129, 136, 339, 343 Peloux’s initiation of 221
Prefect of 133 police torture 330-2, 348
Albanese, Giuseppe 100, 130 pool of prosecutors 104, 105
Alfano, Enrico, (‘Big Enry’) 251, 253, power struggles in Naples against the
254, 260, 262, 263, 264-5, 269, camorra 67—82
271-2, 276, 278, 281, 283, 284, 285, Sangiorgi’s ‘open fight’ against the
286, 288 Sicilian mafia 111-13, 127, 130,
Allegra, Melchiorre 339-40 133, 222-7, 232-5, 244
Allied Military Government in the Antonimina 308
Occupied Territories see AMGOT Noto, ‘flying boss’ of 308-10, 321-2
Alvaro, Corrado 189, 266-7, 347 Antonino M 160-2
America, Italian organised crime 262-4, Aosta, Duke of 259-60
2.65, 334-5; 352 Arab invasions of Sicily (early Middle
Ametta, Felice 283, 284-5 Ages) 6, 95, 237-8
AMGOT (Allied Military Government Ardore 315
in the Occupied Territories) 351, Arena, Luigi 254, 255
352-3, 354-6, 359; 362, 364 Aspromonte, the ‘Harsh Mountain’
L’Amico del Popolo 112, 126 165-70, 182, 183, 184, 188, 195,
Anceschi, Vincenzo 304, 305-6 266
Angelone, Andrea 183, 190 Africo see Africo
anti-mafia measures Delfino and 346-9
in Africo 184-8, 195 Musolino, ‘King of Aspromonte’
arising from Cuocolo case 255 196-209
Fascist 367-8 Avellone, Leonardo 220-1
in Calabria 310-12, 313-16, 322, Aversa 302, 304-5

324-33, 346-9 ‘Aversa Joe’ (Giuseppe D’Allessandro)

in Campania 303-6 59, SI; $4
in Sicily 294-8, 336-45
the Left’s campaign against Sicilian Baedeker, K. 166
mafia 127, 136 Banca Romana 213, 217

423
Mafia Brotherhoods

Bank of Italy 214 Plain of Gioia Tauro 12, 171-3, 183,

Bank of Sicily 215, 216, 217-18, 221 192-3, 313
bankers 215-21 Reggio Calabria (city) 166, 167, 169,
banking system of Italy 213, 214, 217 I7I, 208, 266, 294, 313, 316
and the Notarbartolo affair 215-21, Reggio Calabria (province) 9, 22,
228-32, 235-7, 240-2 167, 189, I91
Barone, Michele 313 World War Il 355, 356
Beati Paoli 16, 150-1 Calabria Zone Handbook (War Office)
‘Big ’Enry’ see Alfano, Enrico 355-6, 368
Birreria Italia, Palermo 339-40 Callea, Bruno 185, 186, 194
Biundi, Giuseppe 114 Callea, Domenico 179-80, 184, 185,
Black Hand 264 186, 194
black market 351, 354, 355, 360, 362, Callea, Giuseppe 195
363-4 Caltanissetta 295, 343
Blackshirt movement 293-4, 315 camorra
see also Fascism advertisement of power 19, 326
blood, kinship of 10, 18-19 after dismantlement by Cuocolo trial
blood oaths/rituals to—r11 299-307
camorra 17 blood and kinship 18—19
*ndrangheta 15-16, 309, 330 bosses 17, 32-3, 61, 71
Sicilian mafia 16-17, 102-3, 343 guappi (street-corner bosses) 299,
significance of 10-11 364
Blood of a Camorrista 149 and Campania 18 see also Campania
Bolgna, Notarbartolo murder trial chapters 71,75
235-7 code book 38
Bordonaro, Lucio Tasca 353-4 and the Cuocolo case see Cuocolo
Borsellino, Paolo 105, 106 trial
The Boss of the Camorra 149 death of the Honoured Society 18,
Bourbon dynasty 34, 75-6 251, 278-86
1848 revolution against 92-3 dress 43
Miceli and 92~—4 exploitation principle 72
in Sicily 85-6, 92-3 Fascist war on 303-6
and the Sovereign Act (1860) 52-63 favours 37, 43, 65, 251
Bova 182, 184 and Garibaldi in Naples 64-6
Bresci, Gaetano 214 hierarchies 71-2
Brotherhood of Favara 136 ‘high’ camorra 245-51, 258-9
buffalo herdsmen 301-2 historical admission ceremony 17,
Bulawayo Chronicle 279 71
Buscetta, Tommaso to05 honour 41-2, 299
and horses 156
Calabria 9, 165-70, 195 and Italian Unification 59, 61-3,
earthquake 266 rig)
Fascist anti-mafia campaign in ‘justice’ 40~2
310-12, 313-16 knife fights 17, 71
Cirella mafia and 322, 324-33, 348 ‘low’ camorra 247-8, 250, 251, 258
Delfino and 346-9 in the Mazzoni 301-6
mafia of see ’ndrangheta and the media era 215

424
 Index

membership criteria 71 camorra of see camorra

modern lack of initiation rituals Fascist anti-mafia campaign in
7-18 303-6
murder 40-1, 71, 155, 160 Genovese and Campania Fascism
Cuocolo case see Cuocolo trial 334-5
myth of Spanish origin 72-4 World War II 358-65
myth of the good camorrista 299 Campania Zone Handbook (War
name 5, 42,73 Office) 358, 368
in the Naples hinterland 300-6 Capezzuti, Erminio 275, 277, 281
in Nola area 300 Cappuccio, Ciccio (‘Little Lord
notes on sources 376-7 Frankie’) 156-7, 176
‘open fight’ against 155 Caputo, Antonio 360
origins 33-6, 72-4 Caputo, Giuseppe 360
as Patria 75-6 Carbonari (Charcoal Burners) 75, 85, 86
plays on 147-50 Carcagnosso I, 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 74
police corruption by 281 Casale, Alberto 159-60, 245, 247, 248
political patronage 247-51 trial 247, 249
and positivist criminology 144, 160, Cascio-Ferro, don Vito 263
161-2 Castel Molo 111-12
power struggles in Naples against Castello del Carmine 32, 161
67-82 Castromediano, Sigismondo, Duke of
and prisons 32-3, 36-43, 47-8, 49, Morciano 31-4, 36-45
160-1 Political Prisons and Jails 45
and prostitutes 119 Catalano, Giovanni 282-3
protection racket 119, 149, 302 “‘catechisms’ 14
razor slashing 37, 71 cattle rustling 183-4, 339, 346
re-emergence after 1912 demise of Cervantes, Miguel de 73
the Honoured Society of Naples Charcoal Burners (Carbonari) 75, 85, 86
18 Chief Prosecutor 104, 105-6, 107-8,
and the Right 80-2 109
Romano and the rehabilitation of the cholera 153
camorra 57-63 Ciano, Galeazzo, Count 335
similarities to "ndrangheta 176 Cirella 322-33, 348
and the slack society of Naples co-fatherhood 117—18
152-62 ‘co-management’ of crime 48-51
spending of money 119 Colajanni, Napoleone 237-8
‘in straw-yellow gloves’ 258-60 Committee of Order 59, 61, 68
‘the System’ 18-19 Conca d’Oro 88-9, 91, 340-1
tattoos 144, 145, 162 Castel Molo 111-12
‘taxation’/extortion 33, 37, 42, 48-9, citrus plantations 91-2, 113, 223,
65, 282, 300, 301, 304 340
textbooks on 144-6 mafia 89, 91-2, 111-18, 120-2,
wives 119 124-5, 223
and women 199, 219, 320 Mori Operation in 295
World War II 358-65 Uditore see Uditore
The Camorra (Monnier) 58—9 Corriere della Sera 214, 239
Campania 18 Corriere di Napoli 202

425
Mafia Brotherhoods

Cosa Nostra see Sicilian mafia East Africa 213

Cosenza, Vincenzo 234, 241 . Eisenhower, Dwight D. 350
Court of Cassation 105 extortion/‘taxation’ 44
“the Cowherd’ (Gennaro De Marinis) camorra 33, 37; 42, 43, 48-9, 65,
259-61, 269, 272-4, 277, 278 282, 300, 301, 304
Crime/Great Crime 22-6, 189 *ndrangheta/picciotteria 184, 266,
Crispi, Franceso 213, 217, 219, 221 310, 315
Cuocolo, Gennaro 252, 254, 255; 257; in prisons 33, 161
259, 288
Cuocolo trial 251, 268-86 Fabroni, Carlo 275-7, 281
Abbatemaggio and 253-7, 260, faccendieri 247
268-71, 274, 276-7, 280, 282-3, Falcone, Giovanni 105, 106, 119
287-8 Fascism 286-7, 289, 293-4, 295-6,
and the death of the camorra 251, 306-7, 367-8
278-86 Genovese and Campania Fascism
investigation leading to 252-61,
334-5
265-8 torture by Fascist police 330-2, 348
Cusimano, Giovanni (‘Darky’/‘il nero’) war on the mafia
II2, II3, 115, 116, 117, 121-2, 124, camorra 303-6
126, 132 *ndrangheta/picciotteria 310-12,
Cutinelli, Maria 252, 259, 288
313-16, 322, 324-33, 346-9
Sicilian mafia 294-8, 336-45
Daily Express 241 and World War II 350, 351, 352-3,
D’Alessandro, Giuseppe (Aversa Joe)
355
59, 51; $4 Favignana 6
De Crescenzo, Marianna (la Sangiovan- favours 153, 160, 161, 216, 240, 246-7,
nara) 53, 61-2, 64, 67
258, 285, 294, 365
De Crescenzo, Salvatore 57, 60, 61, 63, camorra 37, 43, 65, 251
64, 65, 69-70,
90, 94 *ndrangheta/picciotteria 203
De Marinis, Gennaro (‘the Cowherd’) Sicilian mafia 125, 133, 136, 355
259-61, 269, 272-4, 277, 278 Ferro, Matteo 112, 122, 130
De Mata brothers 77 FIAT 214
De Michele, Domenico 263—4 financial system of Italy 213
De Michele, Pietro (‘Baron’) 127-8, see also Italian economy
131-2, 134, 136, 264
Flaccomio, Antonio 262
Delfino, Giuseppe (‘Master Joe’) 346-9 Florence, Notarbartolo murder trial
delinquency, positivist identifications of 240-2
142-6, 161-2, 207
Florio, Ignazio 225-6, 234, 236-7,
democracy 153, 214-15, 289, 294, 336
238
Dickey, Orange C. 361, 362, 363 Florio family 225, 226-7, 234, 240
Dickie, John: Cosa Nostra 4 Florio villa 225, 226
discipline 1x Floriopolis 225-7
Douglas, Norman 208 see also Palermo
dress code 43, 176 Fontana, Giuseppe 230-1, 237, 240,
Duisburg massacre 9, 10 263
Dumas, Alexandre 106, 150 The Foundation of the Camorra
(Minichini) 147-9

426
 Index

Franceso II of the Two Sicilies 52, 56, 64 Honoured Society of Calabria see
Sovereign Act of see Sovereign Act *ndrangheta
(1860) Honoured Society of Naples see
Franchetti, Leopoldo 166-7 camorra
Freemasons 75, 85 Honoured Society of Sicily see Sicilian
French Revolution 34 mafia
Fucci, Luigi 272 Hotel de Genéve 59, 68, 80
Huston, John 359
Gambino, Antonino 113, 116-17, 120,
I21, 124-5 initiation rituals
Gambino, Calogero 113-18, 120~4, 126, camorra 17-18, 71
129, 130, 134, 366 *ndrangheta 13, 14-16, 17, 174,
Gambino, Salvatore 113, 115, 118, 120, 181-2
G22, E255 126, 129, 130,134 Sicilian mafia 16-17, 102-3, 105, 133
Garduna 73 Inspectorate for Public Security for
Garibaldi, Giuseppe 35-6, 44, 53, 57-8, Sicily, Royal General 337-45, 354
62 ‘Iron Prefect’ (Cesare Mori) 294, 297-8,
invasion of Sicily 52, 61, 86 336, 340; 344-5
in Naples 64-6 see also Mori Operation
Gazetto di Palermo 129-31 Italian economy 213, 214, 218
Genovese, Vito 334-5, 360-3 Italian Patria 34, 35, 51, 58, 62, 75-6,
Gentile, Nicola (Nick) 352-3 293
Giammona, don Antonino 102, 108, Italian Unification 58, 78, 79, 85
I16, 119, I20, 132, 224, 232 and the camorra 59, 61-3, 75-6
Giammona, Giuseppe 224, 233 mafia as legacy of Risorgimento 365
Giammona clan 234 Micheli and the Risorgimento 92-4
Giannino, Antonio 173 Italo-American gangsterism 262-4, 265,
Gioia Tauro, Plain of 12, 171-3, 183, 334-59 352
192-3, 313
Giolitti, Giovanni 250, 303 jails see prisons
Giuliano, Guglielmo 364 ‘Johnny the Teacher’ (Giovanni Rapi)
Giuliano, Pio Vittorio 364 256-7, 2595 269, 279, 283
Giuliano, Salvatore 364 Joseph, Saint 201, 204
Gladstone, William Ewart 34-5
godfathers 17, 117-18 kidnapping 104
‘Great Brigandage’ 81 Fascist 294
Great Crime 22-6, 189 and protection 225
Grecanico (archaic Greek dialect) Sicilian mafia 91, 92, 114, 127, 128,
132, 135,216
18r
guappi (camorra street-corner bosses)
Kingdom of the Two Sicilies 33-4, 36,
52, 61, 62, 85
299, 364
kinship
of blood 10, 18-19
honour 6, 319, 325
the family and dynastic politics in
camorra 41-2, 299
the Sicilian mafia 118—20, 225,
*ndrangheta 11, 15-16
317-18
Sicilian mafia 120
and loyalty 317
of women 128, 299, 319

427
Mafia Brotherhoods

as the mafias’ most important mafia structure It

resource 367 camorra hierarchies 71-2
by marriage see marriage ’ndrangheta 22-7, 174, 177
*ndrangheta and the family 318—19, Sicilian mafia 19-21, 339, 342-3,
322, 323 344
‘spiritual’ 117—18, 120, 121 I mafiusi di la Vicaria 150
knife fights Magenta, battle of 35
camorra 17,71 Malusardi, Antonio 104, 105
*ndrangheta/picciotteria 172, 176, Mangione, Vincenzo 202-3
196, 310 Marasa, Antonino 341-2, 345
Marasa, Ernesto 341-2, 343, 345
Labella, Angelo 184-6, 188, 190 Marasa, Franceso 341-2, 345
The Last Struggle with the Mafia (Mori) March on Rome 293
297-8 marriage
the Left (Italian coalition) roz, 104, and the Cirella Honoured Society
125-6, 127, 136, 41 324-5
Fascist purge of 293 forced 114, 134-5
legislation, in anti-mafia trials 142 marital infidelity 325
Lercara Friddi 93 and ritual rr
Licata, Andrea 116 Sicilian mafia and 118-20, 225
Licata, Salvatore 115, 116 Marsala 36, 52
Licata Clan 116, 118, 121, 132 Marte, Francesco 198
Linares, Vincenzo 150 Marvelli, Maria 322-9, 331, 332
Lisciotto, Francesco 172, 173 Masonic sects 75, 85
‘Little Joey’ (‘Peppuccio’, Giuseppe Mastrosso 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 74, 175

Romano) 302-3 Matteotti, Giacomo 294

Littlefield, Walter 265 Il Mattino 156-7, 257-8, 261, 269-70,
Locri 315 300, 302, 334
jail 331 Maviglia, Pietro 185-8, 194
Lombardy 35 Mazzoni 301-6
Lombroso, Cesare 143 media
Luciano, Charles (‘Lucky’) 334-5 Sicilian mafia’s influence on
238-9
surge in readership 214-15
Macri, don Antonio (’Ntoni, Chief
see also specific newspapers
Cudgel) 348, 356-8
Mele, Ferdinando 77
Macri, Francesco 327, 329, 330-1
Melville, Herman 58
Madonna 1, 37
Mercato, Naples 46
of the Annunciation 17, 103
Merolle, Pasquale 65
of Polsi 201, 204
Miceli, Turi 90-1, 92-4, 116, 119
Sanctuary/Festival of 189-90,
Michael, Archangel 1, 14, 15, 16
346, 348-9 Milan 214, 221, 293
mafia discipline 11
Notarbartolo murder trial 228-32
mafia organisations see camorra;
Minichini, Edoardo 149
*ndrangheta; picciotteria; Sicilian
Monnier, Mare 58-9, 61-2, 65, 70, 72,
mafia
mafia plays 147-50 73> 74-53 78-9, 80-1, 119
Monreale 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 100, 295

428
 Index

Morena, Carlo, Chief Prosecutor 104, prostitution 360

105—6, 107-8, 109, 131-2, 133, 134, Sangiorgi in 155-6, 158, 159
137, 150 the slack society 153-60
Mort, Cesare (the ‘Iron Prefect’) 294, and the Sovereign Act (1860) 52-63
297-8, 336, 340, 344-5, 352 strike and rioting (1893) 158-60
Mori Operation 294-8, 336-45 Teatro San Carlo 76-7
murder Vicaria see Vicaria, Naples
camorra 40-1, 71, 155, 160 Villari’s call to moralise the city
Cuocolo case see Cuocolo trial 152
Fascist 294 World War II 359-60, 363-5
*ndrangheta/picciotteria 9, 179, NapoleonI 34
187-8, 197, 198, 319, 328-30 Napoli, Rosario 340
Sicilian mafia 92, 100, 102, 113, 114, National Guard 76, 93, 116
I2I-2, 134-5, 218, 226, 340 nationalism 2
murder trials 254 see also Fascism
Cuocolo see Cuocolo trial Navigazione Generale Italiana (NGI)
Gambino 113, 129-30 27s 22.5, 237.
Musolino’s trial for attempted *ndrangheta 9-10
murder 204-8 in Africo 178-91, 193-5, 199, 314-15
Notarbartolo 228-32, 235-7, 240-2 bosses
Musolino, Anna 203, 321 capo crimine (Head of Crime)
Musolino, Antonio 264 22, DAs 26)
Musolino, Giuseppe (‘King of Asprom- capobastone (Chief Cudgel)
onte’) 196-209 14-16, 189, 356-8
Musolino, Ippolita 321 capolocale (Local boss) 24, 26
Musolino, Vincenza 321 contabile/contaiolo (bookkeeper)
Mussolini, Benito 209, 293, 294, 295-7, 24, 26; 174
306-7, 315-16, 324, 335, 350, 367 ‘catechism’ 14
Ascension Day speech (1927) 289, cattle rustling 183-4
295-6, 303-4, 311 in Cirella 322-33, 348
Muzzopapa, Concetta 320-1 Duisburg massacre 9, 10
extortion 184, 266, 310, 315
Naples 34, 36, 46-8 and the family 316, 318-19, 322, 323
Allied liberation of 350 Fascist war on 310-12, 313-16
Bourbons of see Bourbon dynasty Cirella mafia and 324-33, 348
Castello del Carmine 32, 161 Delfino and 346-9
cholera epidemic (1884) 153 flowers 25, 26-7, 175
‘co-management’ of crime 48—51 Great Crime 22-6, 189
entry into Kingdom of Italy 67 honour 11, 15-16
Garibaldi in 64-6 international spread 10
and the ‘high’ camorra 245-51 knife fights 172, 176, 196, 310
market for textbooks on the camorra Locals 26-7
144-6 capolocale (Local boss) 24, 26
Neapolitan camorra see camorra Major and Minor Societies 26,
power struggles against the camorra 174
67-82 offices 24, 26-7
prisons 35 ’*Ntoni Macri 356-8

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Mafia Brotherhoods

murder 9, 179, 187-8, 197, 198, 319, Notarbartolo di San Givanni, Emanuele,
328-30 Marquis 215-21
name 5 trial over murder of 228-32, 235-7,
pronunciation 9 240-2
*ndrina units 26, 190 Notarbartolo, Leopoldo 218, 219-21,
notes on sources 378-9 228-9, 232, 234, 236, 239, 242-3
Noto and his mob 308-10 Noto, Domenico (‘flying boss of
origins 168-70, 171-7 Antonimina’) 308—1o, 321-2
foundation myth 1, 2, 6, 14, 175 Noto, Francesco 225, 226, 233
and Palmi 172-7, 183, 191-2, 193, Noto, Pietro 225, 226, 233
199
picciotteria, the early manifestat- Office of Strategic Services (OSS)
ion of 168-9, 172-7, 178-95, 354-5
196-209, 266-7, 285-6, 319, omerta (umilta) 6,7, 9, 107, 235, 254,
323-33, 366, 367 see also 281, 305, 328, 340, 366
picciotteria (“Lads with Operation Crime 22-3
attitude’) Oppedisano, Domenico 22, 23, 189
under Fascism 308-12, 313-16, L’Ora 238, 240, 241
323-33 OSS (Office of Strategic Services) 354-5
prepotenza (bullying) 180, 182 Osso 1, 2, 6, 13, 14, 16, 74, 175
protection racket 172, 314
and the railways 193 Palermo 4, 21, 22, 36, §2, 339-42, 343,
razor slashing 172, 176, 179
344-5
recruitment 179 Birreria Italia 339-40
rituals 11-12, 27
citrus plantations 91—2, 113, 223,
blood oaths 15—16, 309, 330
initiation 13, 14-16, 17, 174,
340
Commission of Cosa Nostra 22
181-2 Conca d’Oro see Conca d’Oro
seniority ranking 26-7, 174 Court of Assizes 129-31
similarities to camorra 176 Floriopolis 225-7
‘social rules’ 13, 14, 15 investigators 104-5
state infiltration 315-16 Miceli and 92-3
and the story of Osso, Mastrosso Mori Operation in province of
and Carcagnosso 1, 2, 6, 14, 16
structure 22-7, 174
294-5
and the Notarbartolo affair 218-21
Tree of Knowledge 177 Piana dei Colli see Piana dei Colli
tartaro punishment 176 piazza Beati Paoli 151
and women 320-33 prostitutes 119
World War II 355, 356 Sangiorgi in 222-7
New York Times 9, 251, 265, 271, 295 Sangiorgi’s mafia trial 232~5
NGI (Navigazione Generale Italiana) September 1866 revolt 87-90, 94, 96,
277,225,237 106, II5, 116, 117
Niceforo, Alfredo 143-4 Ucciardone‘prison 88, 89-90, 97, 150
Nietzsche, Friedrich 312 Palizzolo, don Raffaele 215-18, 221,
Nola 300, 304, 305, 334-5, 361, 362
229-30, 231, 234, 235-6, 237, 240,
Notarbartolo affair 215-21, 228-32, 241, 248, 249
235-7, 238-42 Palmi 171~-7,.183, 191-2, 193, 199, 294

430
 Index

parliamentary commissions of inquiry prisons 31-3, 34-5, 70, 147-8, 150, 331
IO, 19-21, 81, 96-100, 137 and the camorra 32-3, 36-43, 47-8,
Partito Nazionale Fascista 294, 315 49, 160-1
Pascoli, Giovanni 206-7 emergence of the *ndrangheta from
Passo di Rigano rri—12 the prison system 172-3, 176
Patria 34, 35, 51, 58, 62, 293 in the late nineteenth century 160-1
camorra 75-6 in Sicily 43, 85, 88, 89-90
Pelle-Vottari dynasty 26, 346 Pro Sicilia Committee 240, 241-2
Pelloux, Luigi, General 221, 228, 231, Procida 39
232 La Propaganda 245
Pendino, Naples 46 prostitution I19, 176, 320, 321, 322,
Petrosino, Adelina 263 335, 360
Petrosino, Giuseppe (‘Joe’) 263, 264-5 see also pimping
Piana dei Colli 111-12, 113-14, 120-5, protection racket
126, 134, 223-7,340, 342 camorra 119, 149, 302
picciotteria (“Lads with attitude’) in the Mazzoni 302
168-9, 172-7, 178-95, 266-7, *ndrangheta/picciotteria 172, 314
285-6, 366, 367 Sicilian mafia 91-2, 97, 222-3, 225
in America 264 Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB)
command of favours 203 360, 363, 364
under Fascism 308—12, 313-16, public spirit 366
323-33
lack of strong basis in kinship 319 railways 100, 193
*Ntoni Macri 356-8 rape 134, 320
Musolino, ‘King of Aspromonte’ mass 359
196-209 in prisons 47
Piedmont-Sardinia 35 Sicilian mafia 114, 128, 132, 134
pimping 119, 120, 145, 282, 299, 321, Rapi, Giovanni (‘Johnny the Teacher’)
360 256-7; 259, 269, 279, 283
Pirelli 214 razor slashing
police brutality 330-2, 348 camorra 37,71
police corruption *ndrangheta 172, 176, 179
and the camorra 281 sfregio (disfiguring scar) 273
charges against Sangiorgi 129-31 Reggio Calabria (city) 166, 167, 169,
and the Sicilian mafia 100, 112, 114, I71, 208, 266, 294, 313, 316
I22, 124, 126-7, 154, 219 Reggio Calabria (province) 9, 22, 167,
Polito, Francesco 323-4, 329, 330, 331, 189, 191
332 regionalism 239, 240
Pollifroni, Nicola 325, 329-30 Rennell, Francis James Rennell Rodd,
Polsi 189 2nd Baron 353, 354, 355 356
Madonna of 201, 204 Ricci, Enrica 110
Sanctuary/Festival of 189-90, Riccobono, Giuseppe 120
346, 348-9 the Right (Italian coalition) 80-2, 87,
Porto, Naples 46 100, 125-6, 141
positivist criminology 142-6, 160, Risorgimento see Italian Unification
I61I-2, 206, 207 Ritrovato, Pietro 198
Princi, Antonio 198 parents of 207-8

431
Mafia Brotherhoods

rituals and the Notarbartolo murder trial

blood see blood oaths/rituals 229, 230-1, 236, 241
camorra’s lack of 17-18 ‘open fight’ against the Sicilian mafia
infants and 11-12 ITI—13, 127, 130, 133, 222-7,
initiation see initiation ritual 232-§, 244
marriage II Sangiorgi, Italia 110, 222, 241
*ndrangheta see ’ndrangheta: rituals Sangiorgi, Italo 110, 222
prison 32 Sangiorgi, Maria Luigia 222
Sicilian mafia see Sicilian mafia: la Sangiovannara (Marianna De
rituals Crescenzo) 53, 61-2, 64, 67
Roccaforte del Greco 183, 184, 190, 198 Santo Stefano 196, 197, 199-200, 202-3,
Romano, Giuseppe (‘Little 204, 321
Joey’/‘Peppuccio’) 302-3 mayors of 199, 203, 208
Romano, Liborio 56-7, 62-3, 64, 66, 67, Saredo, Giuseppe 245, 246, 248, 249
68, 70 Saredo inquiry 245—6, 248-9, 250
and the rehabilitation of the camorra Scarface 150
57-63 Scarfoglio, Edoardo 157, 258, 287, 303
Rome 350 Schiavoni, Nicola 31
March on Rome 293 Scialoja, Antonio 47-8, 50, 66
Romeo, Aurelio, mayor of Santo Stefano science, identifications of delinquency
203, 208 142-6, 161-2, 207
Romeo, Bruno 326, 327—9, 330-1 Serra, Vincenzo 304-5
Romeo, Francescantonio 326, 327-9, sfregio (disfiguring scar) 273
330-1 see also razor slashing
Romeo, Rocco 326, 327-9, 330-1 Sicilian mafia (Cosa Nostra) 4-5
Rosarno 310, 321 ‘benign’ mafia 99, 117, 221
Rossi, Adolfo 199-200 bosses/Representatives 19-21
Royal General Inspectorate for Public capo di tutti i capi (Boss of All
Security for Sicily 337-45, 354 Bosses) 21
Rudini, Antonio Starabba, Marquis of capomandamento (Precinct Boss)
96-101, 103, 108, 219-21, 230 19-21
Russian mafia 192 citrus grove operations 91—2, 113,
Russo, Saverio 155 217, 223, 340
Commission 19-21
Sagoleo, Giuseppe 178-80 dynastic strategy 118, 225
San Donato, Gennaro Sambiase Families 19-21, 339, 340, 343
Sanseverino, Duke of 79-80 the family and dynastic politics
San Ferdinando theatre 148-9 118-20, 225, 317-18
San Luca 190, 267, 346 Fascist war on 294-8, 336-45
Sangiorgi, Achille 110, 155-6 favours 125, 133, 136, 355
Sangiorgi, Ermanno 108, 109, 110-13, honour 120
II§—18, I21, 122-36, 160, 222, infiltration of the police roo, 112,
243-4, 317, 366 I14, 1225 124, 126-7, 154, 219
corruption charges against influence/network in governing
129-31 institutions 112, 113, 114, 124-5,
mafia trial 232-5 126-7, 129-33, 154, 219, 230-1,
in Naples 154-6, 158, 159 234

432
 Index

influence on the media 238-9 under the Left ror, 104, 127, 136
kidnapping 91, 92, 104, 114, 127, and ‘rustic chivalry’ 235
128, 132, 135, 216 Palermo see Palermo
and marriage 118-20, 225 prisons 43, 85, 88, 89-90
and the media era 215 under the Right 87, roo
membership restrictions 123 and the rise of the mafia 85-7
murder 92, 100, 102, 113, 114, Sicily Zone Handbook (War Office)
I2I—2, 134-5, 218, 226, 340 351-2, 368
mystifications concerning 95-9 Sidari, Francesca 197
and the Notarbartolo affair 215-21, Siino, Alfonso 224
228-32 Siino, Filippo 225, 233
notes on sources 377-9 Siino, Francesco 224
orbiting around Palermo 286 see Simonetti, Ludovico 281-2
also Palermo Socialist Party 213, 214, 239, 249
origins 85-7, 91-2 sociology, positivist 142-6, 160, 161-2,
Palermo Commission 22 206, 207
protection racket 91-2, 97, 222-3, Solferino, battle of 35
225 Soprano, Meadow 95
renaming as Cosa Nostra 4-5 South Africa 192
and revolutions 92-4 Sovereign Act (1860) 52-3, 55, 56, 61
rituals and the rehabilitation of the camorra
blood oaths/rituals 16-17, 102-3, 57-63
343 Spain 73-4
discovery of 102-9, 133 Spanishry (Spagnolismo) 73,77
initiation ritual 16-17, 102-3, Spaventa, Silvio 68-9, 70-1, 72-3, 74,
105, 133 76-8, 80-2
of recognition 104 spirito pubblico 366
Rudini’s views of 97-9 ‘spiritual kinship’ 117—18, 120, 121
rulebook 123 Starabba, Antonio see Rudini, Antonio
Sangiorgi’s ‘open fight’ against Starabba, Marquis of
III—13, 127, 130, 133, 222-7, Stella, Federigo 149-50
232-5, 244 The Story of a Born Delinquent 160-1
as the ‘slimy octopus’ 338-45 Strangio-Nirta dynasty 26, 346
structure 19-21, 339, 342-3, 344 Surace, Angela 321
toothache dialogue 104, 106, 107
Uditore mafia 108-9, 111-12 Tancredi 90
use/treatment of women 118-20, tartaro punishment 176
123, 124, 134-5 Tasca, Lucio Bordonaro, Count of
forced marriage 114, 134-5 Almerita 353-4
kidnapping 114, 128, 132, 135 tattoos 144, 145, 162, 173
rape 114, 128, 132, 134 ‘taxation’ see extortion/‘taxation’
World War II 351-5 Testa, Rosaria 320-1
Sicily The Times 54, 56; 575 70, 77-85 236
Bourbon dynasty and 85-6 Torre del Greco 252, 254, 260
and Fascism 293-8, 336-45 torture, by Fascist police 330-2, 348
Garibaldi’s invasion of 52, 61, 86 Train, Arthur 272, 279
land ownership 86 Trapani 87, 111, 128, 154, 338, 339, 343

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Tree of Knowledge 177 Viterbo, Cuocolo trial 268-86

Tribuna Giudiziaria 241 Vittozzi, don Ciro 256
Trimboli, Pasquale 174-5 vory-v-zakone (‘thieves with a code of
Turiello, Pasquale 152-3 honour’) 192
Turin 36, 45, 57, 69, 70, 214 voting rights 153, 193
Vozza, Maria 154, 222
Ucciardone prison 88, 89-90, 97, 150
Uditore 102, rrr Washington Times 275
mafia 108-9, 111-12 women
United States of America, Italian organ- camorra and 119, 299, 320
ised crime 262-4, 265, 334-5, 352 during the Fascist era 322
Ustica penal colony 324-5, 327, 328 honour of 128, 299, 319
and marriage see marriage
Velona, Filippo 180-2, 183, 184 *ndrangheta/picciotteria and 320-33
vendetta 41-2, 44, 97, 110-37, 187, 191, notes on sources for women in
196-9, 254, 288, 332 Italian organised crime 379-80
Verga, Giovanni 168 power of wives
Vicaria, Naples 46, 49, 250 camorra 119
prison 49, 78, 148 Marvelli 324, 325
Victor Emmanuel, King of Piedmont- prostitutes 119, 320, 360
Sardinia 45 rape of 114, 128, 132, 134, 320, 359
Villa San Giovanni 314 Sicilian mafia’s use/treatment of
Villabate 216, 230 118-20, 123, 124
Villari, Pasquale 152 World War II 350-1
violence Calabria 355, 356
knife fights see knife fights Campania 358-65
murder see murder Sicily 351-5
police brutality 330-2, 348
rape see rape Zagari, Antonio 11-15
slashing see razor slashing Zagari, Giacomo 11-14
strategic purposes of 365 zampogna 178-9
visibility 326, 333
Zoccali, Vincenzo 196, 197, 200, 201,
advertisement of power 19, 326 203, 206

434
Extract from MAFIA REPUBLIC by John Dickie.
Publishing in 2013. For more information see www.johndickie.net.

The Professor

Raffaele Cutolo was the creator of possibly the largest criminal

organisation in Italian history, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata
(“New Organised Camorra’). At its peak in 1980, according to a
police estimate, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (or NCO)
counted 7,000 members. Its leader evaded the full force of the law
with a regularity that was shocking even by Italian standards. His
speciality was obtaining psychiatric reports that absolved him of
full responsibility for his deeds. ‘While committing criminal acts’,
one diagnosis declared, ‘Cutolo falls under the influence of a typical
impulsive-aggressive crisis that completely overcomes and nullifies
his will power.’ Or, in lay terms: he often gets angry and has people
killed — but it isn’t his fault. The NCO boss compared himself to
Christ and said he could read minds. But it is unclear whether he
believed this or was merely acting out the psychiatric script.
Whatever Cutolo’s precise mental equilibrium was, in 1980 he
decided to flaunt his authority architecturally. Overlooking Otta-
viano, the town on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Vesuvius
where the NCO boss had grown up, was the dilapidated Medici
Castle; it had a room for every day of the year. Cutolo bought
it through a front company and turned it into both his organisa-
tion’s HQ and the grandiose symbol of a rise to criminal power
as fast and brutally successful as any in the annals of Italian
organised crime. And the astonishing thing is that Raffaele Cutolo
did it almost entirely from prison.
In 1963, at the age of twenty-one, Cutolo earned himself

435
Mafia Republic

a twenty-four-year prison sentence for shooting a man dead in a

road-rage incident of illustrative vicilousness. Newspaper reports
tell us that in Ottaviano’s main thoroughfare Cutolo deliberately
drove his car at four young women, breaking only at the last
minute. When one of the women remonstrated with Cutolo about
the stupid stunt, he set about her with his fists. A passing
fire-fighter intervened to save the woman, and Cutolo responded
by pulling a Beretta 7.65 pistol from his pocket and firing twice.
But what really earned Cutolo the judge’s indignation was the
way in which he followed the wounded fireman as he staggered
into a doorway to take refuge. There, Cutolo emptied the rest
of the clip into the luckless man, who died in hospital leaving a
widow and three children.
In 1970 Cutolo was freed, pending a ruling on his case by the
Supreme Court, and went on the run. He became a junior camorra
boss, dealing in extortion and cocaine. Upon his recapture, after
a fire-fight with the carabinieri in March of the following year,
he was sent to the infamous penitentiary at Poggioreale. There
he would begin to build what became known as the NCO. By
1974 he had already earned the nickname ‘the King of Poggioreale’
and was involved in a major drug-trafficking ring with senior
mafiosi from both Sicily and Calabria. By 1977 he had enough
power to have himself transferred to the cosier surroundings of
the state mental institution in Aversa near Naples. In February
1978 his men blew a wall down with TNT and he scrambled
over the rubble to freedom. One plausible theory is that the
breakout was staged to avoid the embarrassment that would have
been caused had Cutolo merely strolled out of the main gate — as
he probably could have done. Be that as it may, the fugitive was
not recaptured for fifteen months. In 1981 an appeal verdict said
he could not be punished for the escape because of his mental
infirmity. As Cutolo himself put it, ‘I did not “escape”. I wandered
away. A little noisily.’
After his recapture, Cutolo never tasted freedom again. Thus,
apart from two brief periods on the run, his entire adult life was

436
 The Professor

spent in captivity, But he understood that prison was the perfect

base for a criminal empire. Dominate the prison system, and you
dominate the underworld. Confinement is an occupational hazard
for criminals. And if they cannot go to jail without the fear of
being raped in the showers or stabbed in the yard, they become
acutely exposed.
In a sense, Cutolo perfected the methods used by prison
camorras since the early nineteenth century. At the simplest level,
the NCO offered safety in numbers to terrified youths doing their
first stretch in an adult jail. Indeed Cutolo specialised in culti-
vating isolated youngsters who were not affiliated to other gangs.
One of his fellow prisoners in Poggioreale described him as a
‘talent scout’. Once outside, those young men would kick back
part of their earnings to Cutolo so he could support others by
sending cash and food to relatives, by corrupting guards and
administrators, and by arranging transfers, lawyers and medical
visits. So began the circulation of tributes and favours that bound
the NCO together. Cutolo’s organisation extended its reach from
Poggioreale to many other prisons across Italy, and gained the
manpower and discipline in the outside world to manage crime
on an industrial scale.
The NCO engaged in all manner of business, ranging from
drug dealing and truck theft, to defrauding the European
Economic Community of agricultural subsidies, and infiltrating
government building projects. But for the NCO — as for the
Sicilian mafia and for the Neapolitan Honoured Society of yester-
year — extortion was the key tool of authority, Cutolo’s rackets
were run by trusted lieutenants, including his big sister Rosetta.
She looked for all the world like a frumpy embroiderer her brother
claimed she was. But this was a facade created in part because
there were those within the NCO hierarchy who were reluctant
to take orders from a woman. Many observers believe that Rosetta
was one of the camorra’s most powerful female bosses. The
money she sent to her brother allowed him to live out his confine-
ment in pharaonic luxury: in the course of just over a year in

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Mafia Republic

1981-82, he received nearly 56 million Lire (equivalent to $55,000

in 1982 values) to take care of his daily expenses; he reputedly
spent over half of it on food and clothes.
Cutolo’s conspicuous consumption was intended to publicise his
power. As was the transparent irony he deployed in interview. During
the trial for his escape from Aversa asylum, Cutolo gave an
impromptu press conference. Surviving news footage shows him
to be well groomed, with a face both weaselly and self-satisfied.
He shifts his weight repeatedly from one foot to the other behind
the bars of the defendants’ cage, and casts rapid, smirking glances
to either side — as if he were a back-row schoolboy seeking
complicity from his classmates during a scolding.

‘I’m someone who fights injustice. Me, and all my friends.’

‘A Robin Hood, so to speak?’
‘So to speak.’
‘What about the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the NCO?’
‘I dunno. Maybe NCO means “Non Conosco Nessuno”
— “I don’t know anyone”.’
‘Are you in charge in the prison system?’
Cutolo feigns disbelief with an unpersuasive snigger. ‘I’m
not in charge, the-prison governor is... .
‘What about the murder of the deputy prison governor?
You had previously slapped him and threatened to kill him.’
“Yes I did. Because he was doing some really . . .’ There
follows an oily mellowing in Cutolo’s tone.‘But he’s dead
now. It’s unkind to talk ill of the dead... . Anyway, I may
be insane, but I’m not stupid-insane. I’m intelligent-insane.
So I’m hardly going to slap someone, threaten to kill him,
and then go ahead and murder him. I don't fancy collecting
life sentences like that.’

Even among professional criminals, there are very few with

a public persona as odious as Raffaele Cutolo. Yet his distinc-
tive trait as a boss was the genuine adoration he inspired. The

438
 The Professor

Nuova Camorra Organizzata was founded on a cult of person-

ality and an ideological fervour that no other mafia in Italy has
ever matched. At the height of Cutolo’s power, a legion of
camorristi would gladly have died for him. What was the secret
of his charisma? For one thing, he had a keen organisational
intelligence and used it to construct an elaborate internal culture
for the NCO. Its recruits felt they belonged, that they had a
shared cause. And for the purpose of building this esprit de
corps, Cutolo borrowed rituals and terminology from the
Calabrian mafia. Indeed he was almost certainly affiliated into
the ’ndrangheta while in prison: two ’ndranghetisti have spoken
to the authorities about how Cutolo was given his ‘second
baptism’ in 1974. Later, Cutolo would put the NCO’s new
recruits through a very similar ceremony. From the ’ndrangheta,
Cutolo also borrowed the terminology that defined ranks within
the organisation: giovane d’onore, picciotto, cuntajuolo, conta-
bile, santista, etc.
So it was that camorra history came full circle with Raffaele
Cutolo. From Calabrian gangsters, he learned rituals and termi-
nology that the ’ndrangheta had itself inherited from the prison
camorra of the early nineteenth century. He then reimported
them into the Neapolitan prison system whence they had first
come, and where they had died out before the First World War.
Indeed, for a crime boss, Cutolo had a quite extraordinary
sense of history. He was dubbed ‘the Professor’ by his men, partly
because he sought out books on camorra history in the prison
library, and partly because he wrote verse and short meditations
on life, love and omerta for his admirers. In 1980 he had his
jottings published as Poems and Thoughts. The book was seized
by the police and possessing it was treated as incriminating. It
is not difficult to work out why: Cutolo does little to conceal the
terror he wielded. Less obviously, the book also shows the
Professor putting his time in the prison library to good use. By
way of example, it is worth citing the verses written in praise of
the NCO’s principal enforcer within the prison system, Pasquale

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Mafia Republic

Barra, known as ’o sturente (‘the Student’) or, more appropriately,

as ’o’nimale (‘the Animal’). Barra was a gaunt, darkly bearded
man with a very prominent nose and eyes like a mole’s. He had
been Cutolo’s devoted friend since their teenage years in Otta-
viano, and was the first recruit to the NCO. His primary role
was stabbing people to death on his old friend’s orders. The
poem dedicated to him is called simply, ‘A Man of the Camorra’:

Pasquale Barra: in our town

He was called ‘the Student’
When it comes to a zumpata, no one is better
He can even face down an army
He always pulls off the same move
His knife-thrusts are totally lethal
Up under your lungs, so you start to cough
He makes you spit out a bit of red froth
He sees you fall to the ground, then leaves you

In his own devious way, Cutolo was here using verse to bestow
a certain literary and historical grandeur on his vicious henchman.
For ‘A Man of the Camorra’ is actually cobbled together from
lines stolen from a much older poem about the long dead camor-
rista Gennarino Sbisa. The original author, journalist Ferdinando
Russo (1866-1927), often celebrated individual camorristi, mixing
just enough realistic grit into the verse to make his portraits of
noble hoodlums feel authentic and dangerous.
In Russo’s day, the camorra — with its hierarchical management
structure and its ceremonial zumpate, or knife-duels — was very
unlike the loose gangs and street-corner bosses that had domi-
nated Neapolitan criminality for most of the twentieth century.
Before it was destroyed by the Cuocolo trial in r911-12, the
camorra was an Honoured Society. And through his poems,
Ferdinando Russo became the man most responsible for creating
a popular cult around it.
The echoes of that popular cult still resounded in the 1970s.

440
 The Professor

Cutolo devoured the dewy-eyed fables about the old-time bosses

like Salvatore De Crescenzo and Ciccio Cappuccio (‘Little Lord
Frankie’). As both plagiarising poet and gangster, the Professor
was bent on bringing the camorra’s historical memory back to
life. He explicitly sold the NCO to recruits as a revival of a proud
gangster history. To be a cutoliano was to have roots in the past.
On one intriguing occasion, Cutolo even stage-managed a
violent close encounter with camorra history — as personified by
Antonio Spavone. Born in 1926 into a family of fishermen in the
Mergellina quarter, Spavone and his older brother had formed
the hub of a band of black marketeers during the chaos of Allied
Military Government in 1943-45 that had launched so many
criminal careers. When Spavone’s brother was killed during a
feud with a rival outfit, Antonio took vengeance in spectacular
fashion, by raiding a family celebration in a restaurant and stab-
bing the opposing gang leader to death in front of a crowd. His
gesture earned him both a long prison sentence, and the right to
inherit his brother’s simple but effective nickname: ’°0 Malommo
— ‘the Bad Man’. .
At some point in 1975, when both ’°o Malommo and Cutolo
were in Poggioreale, the younger man chose to issue a challenge to
a zumpata, a knife duel — just like the camorristi of the old days.
This may well have been a deliberately archaic gesture: the equiva-
lent of slapping 0 Malommo in the face with a glove. Cutolo’s
challenge was refused, either because °0 Malommo was about to
be released, or because he did not want to dignify the uppity young
hoodlum’s impudence with a response. Recalling the episode much
later, a prisoner who was in Poggioreale at the time gave a shrewd
analysis of how Cutolo managed the prison rumour-machine:

Nobody witnessed the episode. It was a completely ‘virtual’

event. Somebody, maybe Cutolo himself, put the rumour
into circulation that the duel had not happened because
of ’o Malommo’s cowardice. In cases like this, different
versions do the rounds — versions that always suit one side

441
Mafia Republic

or the other. Cutolo went a long way thanks to a fame

that was often built on made-up events. He was skilful at
making exploits that never existed seem credible and
legendary. He had an extraordinary talent for promoting
his own image.

Even within the strait confines of a prison, organised crime —

however organised it may be — is a domain where information
circulates in a confused and fragmentary form. The Professor
was a master at making the gaps in any story work for him, in
writing his own history.
Cutolo’s Poems and Thoughts are repulsive, and often trite
and clumsy. But they would be much less dangerous if all they
did was prompt fake duels in prison corridors or celebrate a
killer’s feats of savage dexterity. Cutolo’s writings did much more.
Copies circulated among his acolytes like the scriptures of a new
messiah, and provided a seductive emotional script for the Nuova
Camorra Organizzata. Analysing that script brings us to the
heart of the Professor’s charismatic appeal.
Nihilism is the base note of the Cutolo philosophy. We are all
beasts, ready to tear one another apart for filthy money. Man is
the most treacherous and cruel of all the animals; he ought not
to exist. But the psychological trick that the Professor pulls off in
Poems and Thoughts is to create a criminal value-system that seems
redemptive when set against this background of fear and despair.
A good portion of Cutolo’s verse voices a prisoner’s yearning
for his freedom, his mum, and the sights, sounds and smells of
home. All of which may seem self-pitying. But it shows that
Cutolo was a smart enough leader to identify with the underlying
mental vulnerability of his fellow cons. His mawkishness was
the first means to a very unsentimental end: moulding a disci-
plined criminal army.

The sentence: life imprisonment

As a youth

442
 The Professor

You entered
The tomb-like cell
The silent cell
The suffering cell
You felt alone, and lost

Cutolo blames social inequality and especially the prison system

for the fact that he, like so many others, has turned to crime.
But this persecution has had an ennobling effect. As in the
following Cutolian maxim:

Take note: the best men end up as outlaws, fugitives or

prisoners. While the people who have done this to them
are the hypocrite defenders of the law.

Cutolo presents the NCO as a fellowship of the downtrodden,

bound together against the onslaughts of a hostile world; it is a
group of Friends. For Friendship is the supreme good in the
Professor’s charismatic world:

Friendship is sacred, because it is beautiful to share your

own moments of bitterness, joy, pain and triumph with
a friendly heart.

And if Friendship came under threat, then death must become

the best Friend of all:

When a battle begins, a boss’s first thought must be to

make ‘Death’ a Friend.

Death, my Friend, help me to plant seed in your land.

On April Fool’s Day 1982, the carabinieri in Ottaviano discov-

ered that Friend Death had planted a seed a few hundred metres
away from the Cutolo castle. The body was in the boot of a

443
Mafia Republic

stolen car. The head, wrapped in cellophane and covered with a

towel, was in a plastic basin placed on the ground in front of
the car. Even in the violence-weary Italy of the early 1980s, a
camorra decapitation was guaranteed to attract a deal of media
attention. But in this case the victim’s name turned the event into
front-page news.
Professor Aldo Semerari was the criminal psychiatrist respon-
sible for some of the most clamorous expert opinions on Raffaele
Cutolo’s mental health. He was also a prime example of the kind
of figure who, in the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to be spawned
from the murk where organised crime and subversive politics
overlapped. An extreme right-wing agitator with links to Italian
military intelligence, Semerari had tried to enlist a number of
criminal organisations to his Fascist cause. But in the end he only
managed to arrange a simple swap: the gangsters received the
benefit of his psychiatric expertise and, in return, Semerari’s
friends were given weapons. But the psychiatrist had been rash
enough to try and make the same deal with both Raffaele Cutolo
and his camorra enemies. When his headless corpse was found
in Ottaviano, it was not clear who had punished him for playing
off both sides.
The Semerari case gave Ottaviano a reputation as the town
‘where heads fly’. Ten men were murdered there in the first five
months of 1982. Journalists flocked to try and diagnose the malaise.
But only one of them — a young Milanese writer called Luca Rossi
— was patient enough to trace just how deeply the ideas expounded
in Poems and Thoughts had been imbibed by many of the locals.
For the rootless youth that grew up in the ‘South Bronxes’ of the
Neapolitan periphery, Cutolo’s poisonous credo was strong magic.
The economic downturn of the mid-1970s put thousands of young
men onto the market for criminal labour. During Cutolo’s reign,
Campania was the region with the highest number of juvenile
inmates in the country. These camorristi-in-the-making were poor,
from dysfunctional families and educated early to the value of
violence. By the time these kids were officially recruited, and had

444
 The Professor

the NCO’s five-dot insignia tattooed at the base of their right

thumb, they professed an indifference to Friend Death that was as
pitiful as it was terrifying:

What I’ve already seen in my twenty-three years is enough

for me. I’m already dead. Now I’m just living an extra
bit, a bit of life that’s been gifted to me. They can kill
me if they want.

We're already living corpses. Someone’s already got half

a foot on my head. And if you put the other half of your
foot on my head; then I’ll kill you.

You ask me why I behave like this, and why I do certain

‘jobs’ that even other camorristi won’t do. The reason
is very simple. It doesn’t matter to me if I live or die.
In fact, in some ways, I’m actually trying to get killed.

A twenty-year-old girl from Ottaviano set out the most perceptive

and chilling dissection of the NCO mentality. This was the voice
of a young woman both immersed in camorra culture, and yet
able to distance herself from it, as if it were all just a
nightmare:

The camorra has some really beautiful things about it.

It’s an instinctive, animal response. We take what they
don’t give us, and we take it with force. There are extraor-
dinary, powerful feelings in the camorra. I’ve seen incred-
ible acts of love and solidarity. They believe in what they
are doing like no one believes in political ideologies . .
The strongest among them are the ones who are afraid.
You see these kids with a pistol in their hand, and you
realise they’re fucked. Of all the camorristi I know, the
most sensitive ones are the most violent. I mean really
violent: machine-gun violent, massacre violent.

445
Mafia Republic

Raffaele Cutolo gave sensitive, wasted youths an elemental narra-

tive — a reason to die where there seemed no reason to live. His
Poems and Thoughts was a collective manifesto for living fast
and going out in an expensive shirt and a hail of gunfire. The
NCO came as close as any mafia has ever done to being a death
cult.
And in 1978 Cutolo sent the NCO into a battle that turned
into the bloodiest underworld war in Neapolitan history — a war
against the Sicilian mafia.

446
SOURCES FOR THE PROFESSOR

FE. Barbagallo, Il potere della camorra, (1973-1998), Turin, 1999, cites

7,000 NCO affiliates (p. 13).
E. Ciconte, Processo alla *ndrangheta, Rome-Bari, 1996, pp. 108-10 for
Cutolo’s initiation into the ’ndrangheta.
R. Cutolo, Poesie e pensieri, Naples, 1980.
S. De Gregorio, Camorra, Naples, 1981, quotes the extracts from the
psychiatric analyses of Cutolo (p. 34).
M. Jacquemet, Credibility in Court. Communicative Practices in
Camorra Trials, Cambridge, 1996, for juvenile inmates in Campania
(p. 29) and Cutolo’s living expenses in prison (p. 43).
M. Jouakim, °O Malommo, Naples, 1979.
A. Lamberti, ‘“Imposture” letterarie e “simulacra” poetici’. I] ruolo di
Ferdinando Russo nella costruzione dell’immaginario di massa sulla
“camorra”’ in P. Bianchi and P. Sabbatino (eds), Le rappresentazioni
della camorra, Naples, 2009.
L. Rossi, Camorra. Un mese a Ottaviano il paese in cui la vita di un
uomo non vale nulla, Milan, 1983. Contains the harrowing interviews
with young camorristi I have quoted here, and has a very useful
introduction on the ‘South Bronxes’ of Campania by Pino Arlacchi.
M. Savio (with FE. Venditti), La mala vita. Lettera di un boss della
camorra al figlio, Milan, 2006. This camorrista close to Cutolo is
the source for Cutolo’s challenge to °0 Malommo and his aptitudes
as a ‘talent scout’ (pp. 35-7).

Press sources:
La Stampa, On Cutolo’s first murder, ‘Sfiora una ragazza con l’auto,
provoca un litigio e uccide il paciere’, 26 February 1963 and ‘Ergas-
tolo all’automobilista che uccise a rivoltellate un passante dopo un
incidente’, 29 December 1965. On Cutolo as drug-dealer, ‘Dirigevano
dal manicomio il traffico di stupefacenti’, 13 October 1974.

447
 A an!

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