Blood Brotherhoods (19 page)

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 blood-letting 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
mafiosi
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, 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 prostitution 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 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 extraordinary 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.

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 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 ‘associations’. 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.

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’ Cusimano. 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 fratricide plot had been set in motion—a ‘double vendetta’, the old man called it.

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 though Giovanni ‘Darky’ Cusimano was now dead, the investigation implicated many other violent and well-connected
mafiosi
.

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 Salvatore 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. Cusimano 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.

Mafia morality. A very rare Cosa Nostra rulebook from 2007. Among the regulations crammed onto a single, badly typed page are: ‘Respect your wife’ and ‘The following people cannot become part of Cosa Nostra: Anyone who has a close relative in the police. Anyone who has emotional infidelities in their family. Anyone who behaves very badly or does not keep to moral values.’

The second prong involved the mafia’s womenfolk, who sidled up to the sergeant’s wife and told her