Blood Brotherhoods (13 page)

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
Garduña
and all that is a criminal foundation myth that 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 foundation 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 convenient 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 mouthpiece, 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 mythical
Garduña
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.

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.

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
camorristi
more than anything else: he stopped National Guardsmen wearing their uniforms when they were not on duty. For the hoodlums 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 Caffè 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 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 bodyguard. 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 any man who expects order and tranquillity in this province 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 unpredictable 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 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 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 Hôtel de Genève 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.