Blood Brotherhoods (37 page)

Ermanno Sangiorgi, still chief of police in Palermo, testified once more in Florence, despite the recent death of his beloved daughter Italia following a long illness. For his pains, Sangiorgi immediately became the target of a mafia smear campaign. The allegations—a convoluted yarn about bad debts, bully-boy policing, and favours to
mafiosi
—appeared first in a long letter published in the Florios’ newspaper
L’Ora
. The story was soon picked up in Naples where the
Tribuna Giudiziaria
, a local rag specialising in courtroom dramas, told its readers that the episode shed a disturbing light on Sangiorgi, who had attracted such attention to himself by delivering ‘a testimony against the defendants in Florence that was as fierce as it was slanderous’.

Our conclusion? In Palermo, you won’t find the real mafia among the People, but among the police. Just like in Florence, where the real
camorristi
are standing outside the dock, not inside it.

The original slurs were made by an ex-con in the orbit of organised crime. The brains behind him belonged to Palizzolo’s lawyer, and possibly also to Vincenzo Cosenza, the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo who claimed never to have noticed the mafia during his career as a ‘priest of Themis’—Cosenza was known to be close to the
Tribuna Giudiziaria
’s editors.

The Florentine jury acquitted Palizzolo and Fontana in July 1904. In London, the
Daily Express
gave the news in a few weary lines, under the title ‘Victory for the mafia’. In Palermo, that victory was celebrated by a procession with flags and music: men wore Palizzolo’s picture on their lapels, women waved handkerchiefs from the balconies. The mafia-backed
Pro Sicilia
Committee hailed the verdict as a great confirmation of patriotic harmony, and sent the mayor of Florence a telegram of thanks.

A most solemn and imposing meeting of this Committee acclaims the city of Florence, which, by giving heart to Sicily’s juridical conscience, has reunited the Italian People in the ideal of justice.

Leopoldo Notarbartolo was almost destroyed psychologically by the outcome of his eleven-year struggle. In 1900, after the Milan trial, when Palizzolo was first arrested and Chief of Police Sangiorgi rounded up the
mafiosi
of the Conca d’Oro, the murdered banker’s son had been lured into believing that the mafia could be defeated in one swift strike, like a monster run through by a knight’s lance. The second and third trials ground those illusions into a bitter dust.

What is the result of my efforts? Palizzolo free and serene. As for the mafia and its methods: the
Pro Sicilia
Committee proclaims and glorifies them; the government bows down to them and sustains them; and the wretched island of Sicily reinforces them ever more . . . Do I live on an earth that is watched over by God the Father, or amid a chaos of brutal forces unleashed by loathsome, wicked gnomes like the ones in Scandinavian legends?

Leopoldo continued his naval career but spent a further seven years reflecting on his experience, and then another five pouring his anguish into a meticulous and moving account of his father’s story, and his own. He found little consolation other than in contemplating sea life, which offered him a less heroic metaphor of how the forces of good might one day defeat the mafia. He observed how, over generations and generations, tiny undersea creatures live and die, all the while creating their miniature dwellings from limestone deposits, piling them higher and higher until, following some minor seismic shift, an entirely new island appears above the waves.

The people working humbly in the cause of good are like those ocean creatures. One day, the marvellous little island will emerge! God has written his promise in the holy book of nature.

Back on the ‘wretched island’ of Sicily, Ermanno Sangiorgi, one of the people working in the cause of good, took until the summer of 1905, a year after the conclusion of the Notarbartolo affair, to win a libel suit against his accuser.

Italy reserves a peculiar cruelty to those that love it the most. Soon afterwards Sangiorgi’s son-in-law, who worked in Pisa as an administrator for
the royal family, the House of Savoy, committed suicide after being caught with his hand in the till. Sangiorgi was entirely blameless in the disgrace of his daughter’s widower. But the Royal Household held him liable for some of the losses, which cost him more than a month’s salary.

In March 1907, Sangiorgi formally requested permission to retire from his position as chief of police of Palermo; he was showing signs of ill health, in the form of a creeping paralysis. His life in law enforcement—forty-eight years of service, eighteen of them as chief of police—had begun even before Italian unification. But passing time had not made him any coyer: he bluntly asked for a special pension and the honorary title of Prefect. He concluded the letter in a typically patriotic fashion.

I began my career during the war of Italian Independence when Northern Italy was echoing to the cry of ‘Long live King Victor Emmanuel II!’ I now end it with another cry on my lips and in my heart, ‘Long live Victor Emmanuel III! Long live the House of Savoy!’

Sangiorgi retired in May 1907, with his honorary title but without his special pension. The creeping paralysis that had hastened his retirement also hastened him to his death, in November 1908. The press in Naples and Palermo recalled him to readers as the police chief whose botched handling of the cab drivers’ strike in 1893 had brought anarchy to the streets.

Sangiorgi’s passing marked the loss of a unique store of expertise on the mafia’s early years: the hugely important report on the mafia that he had written for Prime Minister Pelloux would remain hidden in the archives until the 1980s. Fundamentally, the knowledge he had worked so hard to accumulate would remain valid long after his death: as times changed, the Sicilian mafia changed remarkably little. Nevertheless, the ingenuity and ferocity with which the mafia adapted to the changing times to come would have astonished even Sangiorgi.

Sangiorgi had played by the rules in Palermo; he had fought a clean, ‘open fight’ against the mafia, and it had ended in defeat. He died in his wife’s city, in Naples, where the
Carabinieri
had already begun a campaign against the camorra that was both devious and very dirty—a campaign that would end in victory.

 
20 

T
HE
‘
HIGH
’
CAMORRA

I
N
N
APLES
,
JUST AS IN
P
ALERMO
,
CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME REACHED THE
top of the news agenda as the economic and political crises of the 1890s petered out. In 1899 a new Socialist newspaper,
La Propaganda
, began a campaign against sleaze and gangsterism. Certain high-minded politicians joined in from the Right. The campaign was such a success that a Socialist MP was elected in Vicaria—the most densely populated constituency in Naples and, of course, the very cradle of the camorra.

The main target of
La Propaganda
’s vitriol was Alberto Casale, a Member of Parliament and influential local government power broker who had extensive contacts with the Neapolitan underworld. We have already had a passing encounter with Casale: back in 1893, he used his purchase with the Honoured Society to bring an end to the camorra-backed cab drivers’ strike. Casale responded to
La Propaganda
’s attacks by reporting the newspaper to the authorities for slandering him, and a criminal trial ensued.

The outcome of the Casale case was a disaster for a whole crooked system that linked the city’s politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and journalists.
La Propaganda
successfully defended itself against the slander charge by proving that Casale, among many other corrupt deals, had banked a kickback from a Belgian tram company for his role in the cab drivers’ strike.

The shock waves from Casale’s judicial humiliation sped to Rome. Casale resigned, the Naples city council was dissolved, and an official investigation into corruption in city government was launched under the leadership of an owlish old law professor from Liguria, Senator Giuseppe Saredo. The Saredo inquiry would once more lay bare the ‘slack society’; indeed it would prove
to be one of the starkest portraits of political and bureaucratic malpractice in Italian history.

Shining a light into the tenebrous passages of Naples city hall was no easy task. Senator Saredo and his team needed to study the paperwork to discover why the system was so corrupt and inefficient. But the paperwork was in chaos because of all the corruption and inefficiency. Bagfuls of official files had been smuggled away by bureaucrats keen to cover their tracks. The commissioners received a sullen or angry response from many of the key people it interviewed.

Despite all the obstacles, after ten months of wading through a slob-land of documents and testimonies, Senator Saredo and his team dredged up hard evidence aplenty. Appointments to public service were supposed to be made on an impartial, competitive basis. In Naples the regulations had been systematically evaded. Half of all local government employees had no educational qualifications whatsoever. Staggeringly, even the chief accountant whose job it was to draw up the council’s budget had no qualifications. Some local government employees drew two or even three separate salaries. Several well-known journalists had no-show jobs with the council.

The reason why government posts in Naples existed was
not
so that services could be carried out for the citizenry. Services like fighting fires, teaching children, caring for the parks, collecting taxes and rubbish, building sewers: these were secondary concerns, at best. For that reason, they were left to the minority of idiots who actually felt bound to do an honest day’s work. No, the real reason a job existed in Naples was so it could be handed out to people who had the right friends or relatives. A post with the council was a favour bestowed in return for other favours. In a package with these posts came the power to give and withhold yet more favours: to move an application for a trading licence to the top of the in-tray, or to consign it in perpetuity to the bottom; to give a contract to one tram company rather than to another. Because most local government bureaucrats were not particularly interested in doing anything for anyone they did not know, a whole parasitical swarm of intermediaries grew up: the
faccendieri
, they were called. (They still are.) The term means ‘hustlers’, ‘wheeler-dealers’. The only expertise these
faccendieri
had was knowing which ear to whisper in. In return for a small consideration, they would arrange for someone they knew to get you what you wanted—as a
favour
.

A system of political patronage made this foul mess possible. Politicians stood at the business end of the chains of favours that snaked through the corridors of the Naples municipality. Explosively, the Saredo report referred to the men who operated this patronage system as ‘the high camorra’.

The original
low camorra
held sway over the poor plebs in an age of abjection and servitude. Then there arose a
high camorra
comprising the most cunning and audacious members of the middle class. They fed off trade and public works contracts, political meetings and government bureaucracy. This high camorra strikes deals and does business with the low camorra, swapping promises for favours and favours for promises. The high camorra thinks of the state bureaucracy as being like a field it has to harvest and exploit. Its tools are cunning, nerve and violence. Its strength comes from the streets. And it is rightly considered to be more dangerous, because it has re-established the worst form of despotism by founding a regime based on bullying. The high camorra has replaced free will with impositions; it has nullified individuality and liberty; and it has defrauded the law and public trust.

As a direct result of the inquiry’s findings a corruption trial was launched and twelve people, including Alberto Casale and the former Mayor of Naples, were convicted.

Low camorra
/
high camorra
. No encapsulation of the Neapolitan malaise could have been better calculated to make headlines. Whereas ‘mafia’ was still a vague notion, one enmeshed in woolly fibs about Sicilian culture, the term ‘camorra’ carried the distinctive reek of the dungeon, the tavern, and the brothel; it spoke clearly of primitive rituals and knife fights; it conjured up stark pictures of violent men with crude tattoos on their torsos and arabesques of scar tissue on their faces.

At the very same time, during the Notarbartolo affair, the press were referring constantly to a ‘high mafia’. Raffaele Palizzolo was without doubt a
mafioso
, who profited from cattle rustling and kidnapping; and he was also, without doubt, at home in the ‘high’ world of banking and politics. So the label ‘high
mafioso
’ fitted him as snugly as did his expensively tailored frock coat.

But was ‘high camorra’ really an accurate description of the systematic malfeasance the Saredo inquiry had unearthed in Naples? The politician at the centre of the whole scandal, Alberto Casale, was a proven crook and a master of undergovernment like Palizzolo. But it was not strictly true to call him a
camorrista
. While Casale was certainly a politician who was shameless about doing business with the camorra, he was not an integral part of the camorra in the same way that don Raffaele was an integral part of the mafia.

What this amounts to saying is that the camorra was not as powerful as the mafia. The camorra certainly had a steady partnership with pieces of the state. But it had not
become
the state in the way that the mafia had done in Sicily.