Blood Brotherhoods (42 page)

Abbatemaggio had no such worry, and spat back across the court into the defendants’ cage.

Weeks and weeks of witness statements, angry cross-examinations, and scuffles went by. Public interest slowly flagged as spring turned to summer. But it revived in July and August 1911 when the two great heroes of the Cuocolo spectacular were called to give their statements. In the words of the
New York Times
, these were the
Carabinieri
who ‘finally succeeded in penetrating the black vitals of the criminal hydra and are now ready to exhibit the foul, noxious mass at the Viterbo Assizes’. They were Sergeant Erminio Capezzuti and Captain Carlo Fabroni.

Sergeant Capezzuti was Abbatemaggio’s handler: he had persuaded the informant to break the code of
omertà
and protected him afterwards; he had also led the search team that claimed to have found the G.C. pinkie ring.

Ludicrously overblown tales of Capezzuti’s heroism had circled the globe between the murders and the trial. It was said that he had disguised himself as a
camorrista
and even undergone a ritual knife fight and been oathed into membership of the Honoured Society. The
New York Times
claimed he had pulled off ‘one of the most remarkable feats of detection ever accomplished’. The
Washington Times
reported that Capezzuti was set to become a monk after the trial because this was the only way he could protect himself from the camorra’s revenge. Every newspaper in the world seemed to compare Capezzuti to Sherlock Holmes.

It is not clear quite where some of these fables about the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ of Naples began. Certainly little to justify them surfaced when Capezzuti came to Viterbo. The Sergeant stuck calmly to every detail of the prosecution case, including the G.C. ring story. His evidence was measured and, for those expecting Sherlock Holmes, rather dull.

Captain Carlo Fabroni’s time on his feet was anything but dull. The
Carabiniere
officer who was in charge of the whole Cuocolo investigation hailed from the Marche region, and had arrived in Naples only shortly after the Cuocolo murders. One of the first things he did, he explained, was to read up on all the criminology published about the camorra. What he had learned during the course of his investigations precisely corresponded with what he had read.

As Captain Fabroni’s testimony continued, his self-confidence tumesced into arrogance. He brushed aside any suspicions that Abbatemaggio might not be telling the whole truth.

With my extremely honourable past in the military I would blush at the very thought of inducing a man to commit an act of nameless infamy by inventing an accusation.

Under cross-examination, Fabroni provoked the defence at every opportunity, and scattered accusations that the police, politicians and even the judiciary were in cahoots with the camorra. On one occasion, he claimed that Big ’Enry had only been acquitted on an earlier extortion charge because his defence lawyer was the judge’s brother; the lawyers all took off their robes and walked out in protest at this collective insult to their profession.

Captain Carlo Fabroni, who turned the Cuocolo murder case into an assault on the whole Honoured Society.

But Captain Fabroni’s most startling move was to drop a hand grenade in the lap of his key witness. Since the first hearings, there had been much comment on the sheer vividness of Abbatemaggio’s narrative. The ‘gramophone’ told the court the order in which the
camorristi
stabbed each of the victims, and even the abuse they had shouted while they were doing it. Was it really plausible that the killers would tell Abbatemaggio about their own bloody actions in such detail?

Captain Fabroni’s counter to this question was a highly risky move to undercut the stoolpigeon’s character, but keep the testimony intact. Abbatemaggio had not broken the code of
omertà
because he wanted a cleaner life with his new wife, Fabroni explained: that was just a cover story. Fear was Abbatemaggio’s real motive—fear that the camorra would kill him as it had done the Cuocolos. The reason for this fear was that he had tried to blackmail his fellow criminals. And the reason he knew enough to blackmail them was because, in all probability, he had been present at one or both of the murder scenes. Perhaps Abbatemaggio was himself one of the killers. As Captain Fabroni concluded, ‘It’s just not possible to reconstruct such an appalling tragedy in every particular unless you have taken part in it in some way.’

Having taken in Captain Fabroni’s words, the world’s press immediately upended their sentimental opinions of the ‘gramophone’. One Australian newspaper called the informer ‘a rascal of almost inconceivably deep dye’. Nor was Captain Fabroni the only man in Viterbo to point the finger at Abbatemaggio: the Cowherd also accused him of the murders, and referred to him constantly as ‘the assassin’. Thus both prosecution and defence seem to have believed that Abbatemaggio was one of the Cuocolo hit men. Quite what proportions of truth and cynical tactics were in these allegations may never be known. What is certain is that Abbatemaggio was never formally indicted with the murders.

The Viterbo trial still had a year to run when Captain Fabroni finished giving evidence. Through the months that followed, each of the defendants and many of the witnesses were called back time and again to answer further questions. But a decisive shift in the burden of proof had already taken place. For all its unfathomable obscurities, the Cuocolo case was now a simple credibility contest: either the accused were guilty, or the
Carabinieri
were slanderers. On one side was a cage full of crooked figures with scarred faces who gave mutually contradictory statements. On the other side were Captain Fabroni and Sergeant Capezzuti. Granted, these two
Carabinieri
had failed to live up to their ‘Sherlock Holmes’ billing. But it was hard to believe that they could be so devious as to fabricate the whole prosecution case.

 
24 

T
HE STRANGE DEATH OF THE
H
ONOURED
S
OCIETY

A
T JUST AFTER FIVE THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON OF
8 J
ULY
1912,
THE FORTY-ONE ACCUSED
were summoned back into the packed Viterbo courtroom to hear their fate. Almost all of them failed to move, immobilised by dread. Their nerves were understandable given the scale of the proceedings that were about to reach a climax: 779 witnesses had been heard in the course of sixteen exhausting months of hearings.

Finally, the familiar gaunt figure of Big ’Enry appeared, alone, in the defendants’ cage. He looked around him. The lugubrious tension was broken only by the staccato sobs emitted by one of the defence lawyers. Big ’Enry saw, heard and understood which way the verdict had gone. He then destroyed the silence by aiming a shrill cackle across at the elevated box where the jury sat.

You’ve found us guilty. So we are murderers? But why, if you are our judges, have you got your heads bowed? Why won’t you look me in the face?
We
are the ones who have been murdered!
You
are the murderers!

More of the accused filed into the cage and began bawling, pleading with the jury and the public, screaming at Abbatemaggio. Suddenly a long jet of blood spurted out onto the marble floor. The Cowherd had used a piece of glass to cut his own throat. Doctors rushed to save him and the guards carried him away to recover.

One by one the defendants gave up their protests and flopped down onto their benches to weep. The loudest and angriest of them, Johnny the Teacher, also took the longest to exhaust himself. He alone was still raving when the Clerk of the Court could finally make himself audible and read out the guilty verdicts. The judge handed down more than four centuries of prison to those found guilty of murder and membership of a criminal association, among other crimes.

A crusade for justice, with no prisoners taken? Or a gross abuse of the state’s power? In the aftermath of the Cuocolo trial, public opinion remained divided as to what this courtroom spectacular actually meant. The Cuocolo trial certainly achieved the highly desirable aim of striking at the camorra. Yet everyone in Italy could see that it had achieved that aim by lengthy, shambolic and perhaps even dubious means. The Cuocolo murders presented the Italian state with a unique opportunity to show off its fight against organised crime to a vast new audience at home and abroad. The result was confusion at home and national embarrassment abroad. Newspaper leader writers all over the globe lamented the state of Italian justice. The press in the United States was scornful: the trial had been a ‘bear garden’, a ‘circus’, a ‘cage of monkeys’. Even an observer more sympathetic to Italy, like Arthur Train, could only plead with his readers to understand how difficult it was to administer justice when ‘every person participating in or connected with the affair is an Italian, sharing in the excitability and emotional temperament of his fellows’. Still more sober, and no less damning, was the appraisal of the
Bulawayo Chronicle
in what is now Zimbabwe, where cinemagoers had seen newsreels from Viterbo.

The Camorra trial stands as monumental evidence to the incapacity and inadequacy of the present system of criminal procedure in Italy.

Had more than a tiny minority of magistrates and lawyers been ready to heed them, there were plenty of legal lessons about the fight against camorra-type crime to be learned from the Cuocolo trial: about Italy’s hazy laws against criminal associations; about the ungainly, agonisingly slow, and peculiarly Italian marriage of investigative justice with an adversarial system.

The most important lessons came from the story of Gennaro Abbatemaggio. Even on the
Carabinieri
’s account, his treatment was a legal outrage: for example, after first talking to the
Carabinieri
, he spent many months hiding
out in a remote part of Campania in what happened to be Sergeant ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Capezzuti’s home village. As Ermanno Sangiorgi found out as long ago as the ‘fratricide’ case of the 1870s, the authorities had absolutely no guidelines on how to handle defectors from the ranks of the criminal brotherhoods. What kind of deal should the law strike with them in return for what they knew? How could there be any certainty that what they said was true? Italian legislation offered no answers to these questions, and no way of distinguishing good police intelligence gathering from co-managing crime. Because the lessons of the Cuocolo trial were never learned, those questions would continue to vex, and continue to undermine the struggle against organised crime in southern Italy.