Blood Brotherhoods (23 page)

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

The audience captivated by this spectacle was peculiarly knowledgeable. 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 pawnbrokers 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 attention 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 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 audience 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 Minichini’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 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 fascination 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 three 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 enormously 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).
I 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 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.

Francesco Schiavone, arrested in 1998, was boss of 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 (left, below) on the house from the final scene of
Scarface
. But in Italy, the interplay between gangster fiction and gangster reality is nothing new.

The play that gave the Sicilian mafia its name. A poster advertising
The Mafiosi of Vicaria Prison
(1863). Set in the 1850s, it tells the story of an honourable sect of prison extortionists who are recruited to the cause of a unified Italy.

 
12 

T
HE SLACK SOCIETY

P
SEUDO-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 implement without the approval of the camorra.