Blood Brotherhoods (12 page)

Shortly after, the plebiscite Garibaldi relinquished his temporary dictatorship and handed over the appalling mess that Liborio Romano had created to the interim authority managing the integration 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.

Silvio Spaventa, who led the first crackdown on the Honoured Society and the first investigations into its mysterious origins.

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 flustered, 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 Hôtel de Genève, owned by his friend Marc Monnier, was one of his refuges. Then the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies gave him the long-awaited chance to implement the lofty conception of the state’s ethical role that he had learned from his prison studies. Spaventa was not just a formidable 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.

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 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
(London) 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.

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 dossier on the camorra. Keen to generate publicity for his battle, Spaventa later 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
.

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 bookkeeper, who was charged with the highly sensitive task of gathering 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
camorristi
even became
specialised teachers of the art. Duelling to the death was relatively rare. More often the fight had a ceremonial 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.

Marc Monnier added some very important riders to this organisational sketch. He explained that the various ranks were inherently 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 nevertheless 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, humiliation 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.

Monnier and Spaventa together propounded 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 any relationship with the camorra two centuries later.

Third, that there was a secret criminal society in Spain called the
Garduña
, which emerged in the early 1400s. But recent research has shown that the
Garduña
was a fiction too, an intellectual 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 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.