Blood Brotherhoods (26 page)

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 document 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.

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 knowledgeable 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 sometimes means a young man’s air of arrogant self-confidence. So ‘Lads with Attitude’ is a handy translation of the new association’s informal title.

The Lads with Attitude were a lowly bunch: herdsmen and farmhands, 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 imaginative 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 ancestors of a fearsome Calabrian criminal
brotherhood whose definitive name would only become commonly used in the 1950s: the ’ndrangheta, Italy’s third mafia, and now its 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 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 Apennines, 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 parliamentary 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 Calabria’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 beginnings. 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 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.

 
14 

T
HE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

P
ALMI SITS ON A SHELF WHERE
A
SPROMONTE MEETS THE
T
YRRHENIAN
S
EA
. G
AZING
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 thousand 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 administrative 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 into Calabria’s most notorious mafia stronghold in the 1880s and 1890s.

Christ and the thieves overlook an ’ndrangheta heartland. Palmi, one of the centres from which the ’ndrangheta first emerged in the 1880s, can be seen in the middle distance. Beyond and below it lies the notorious plain of Gioia Tauro.

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 prostitutes. 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
Carabiniere
, 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, wagon driver, waiter, tailor, mule driver, shepherd. 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.

The police and magistrature continued their fight. In June 1890 one trial targeted a picciotteria network based in Iatrìnoli 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 affiliates, for example. The
picciotti
had tattooed hieroglyphs that signalled their rank. They also wore tight trousers that flared 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 pompadour.

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 elections. In Calabria’s bigger towns, just as in Naples and Sicily, the police soon learned to co-manage crime with gangsters.