Blood Brotherhoods (43 page)

And yet remarkably, after the trial in Viterbo, there were to be no more reports of criminal activity by the sect that had plagued Naples since before Italy was unified. Somehow Gennaro Abbatemaggio, and the judicial monster he helped create, ended the history of the Honoured Society.

The trial in Viterbo left a legacy of puzzles. The hardest of them all is why, when so many earlier camorra prosecutions had merely pruned the branches of the Honoured Society, the Cuocolo case actually struck at its root.

One possible answer lies in the evidence given by the Neapolitan police, who had not enjoyed a good press in the build up to the Viterbo trial. Not only had they been overshadowed by the
Carabinieri
, in the persons of Sergeant Capezzuti and Captain Fabroni; but they had been discredited by the insinuation that some of them were hand in glove with
camorristi
. Italians were quite ready to believe that this charge had purchase. Everyone knew that the police used the camorra to lend a hand at election time on behalf of the Interior Ministry. In Naples, as in Palermo, the police and gangsters co-managed crime. For all these reasons, evidence from policemen received only desultory media coverage.

Yet for the same reasons, the police understood better than anyone else how the Honoured Society worked. Just as importantly, because of their acrimonious rivalry with the
Carabinieri
, the police who gave evidence in the Cuocolo trial had no corporate interest in backing up either the
Carabinieri
’s textbook account of the camorra, or Abbatemaggio’s story. So, in retrospect, the picture of the camorra the police gave the Viterbo jury becomes all the more credible—a picture of a criminal organisation that was already in serious decline before Gennaro Cuocolo and his wife were knifed to death.

Take agent Ludovico Simonetti, who spent four years as a street cop in Big ’Enry’s own quarter of the city. Simonetti had no problem admitting to the judge in Lucca that the police regularly used camorra informers, and he was happy to confirm Big ’Enry’s leading rank inside the criminal organisation.
But Simonetti’s evidence was most interesting where it diverged from the prosecution’s line; it displays none of the frozen, ‘idiot’s guide’ quality of what Captain Fabroni and the ‘gramophone’ testified.

Agent Simonetti explained that the Honoured Society was founded on two principles: dividing the profits of crime out among the members; and blind obedience or
omertà
. ‘The camorra was so powerful that it could be called a state within a state.’
Was
so powerful: the camorra’s supremacy was emphatically a thing of the past. Simonetti went on to say that the principles upon which the criminal sect had been founded were crumbling.

Now the booty goes to whoever did the job, not to the collectivity. Except on the odd occasion when some more energetic boss manages to extract a bribe. The underworld doesn’t have the blind obedience it once did: there are no longer any punishments.

Agent Simonetti pinpoints a crucial new weakness here. The Honoured Society had lost its ability systematically to ‘tax’ criminals—to extract bribes from them, in other words. Once, by means of this kind of extortion,
camorristi
had presided over petty criminals in the same way that a state presides over its subjects. Now that the power to tax crime had faded, the camorra was beginning to look like just one gang among many. For that reason, it had become more vulnerable to the kind of humdrum underworld rivalries that regularly tore other gangs apart. Blind obedience had gone.

Simonetti made it clear that clusters of
camorristi
still did all the things they had done for decades: robbing, pimping, loan sharking, rigging auctions, bullying voters, extorting money from traders, running the numbers racket. Almost all the most important fences in the city were still members of the Honoured Society.
Camorristi
still respected one another. The individual camorra cells in each quarter of the city still existed. But these days their power came simply from the ferocity and charisma of the individual criminals. In Simonetti’s words, the camorra as an ‘organised collectivity’ did not exist anymore.

The old sacraments were losing their magic. In the past, for a criminal to be elevated to membership of the Honoured Society was a life-changing rite of passage. Now existing members used the initiation ritual as a way of flattering other hoods and wheedling cash out of them. As agent Simonetti put it, ‘Once it was a serious business that required a blood baptism. Now it’s just a baptism in wine.’

Other grassroots police officers enriched Simonetti’s account. One of them, Giovanni Catalano, had often seen Abbatemaggio eating pizza with Big ’Enry, Johnny the Teacher and other top
camorristi
in the old days. The
camorra certainly still existed, Catalano went on to stress: in virtually every convicted felon’s police file there was a telegram from a prison governor wanting to know if the crook in question was a member of the Honoured Society so he could be put in the segregated wing reserved for
camorristi
. But, Catalano went on, the potboilers on the camorra that filled the shelves of Neapolitan bookshops were based on out of date sources, and designed only to satisfy ‘readers’ morbid curiosity’. The chiefs of the Honoured Society were simply not capable of imposing total obedience now. Camorra tribunals had gone for good. The very fact that a
camorrista
like Gennaro Abbatemaggio could go over to the law was itself a sign of how much things had changed.

The most vivid police testimony of all was the last. A third officer, Felice Ametta, began by joking that he had started his career at the same time as many of the men in the cage had started theirs. He reeled off a list of the Honoured Society’s top bosses since he had first arrived in Naples in 1893; he knew them all. But this was a time of crisis for the organisation, a time of infighting. Ametta then recalled the bizarre and revealing incident that led directly to the rise of the new supreme boss, Big ’Enry—an incident that beautifully encapsulates the divided state of the camorra in the early years of the twentieth century.

Needless to say, Big ’Enry was listening intently as Ametta began to tell his tale to the court.

The story revolved around a thief who wanted to be admitted to the Honoured Society. What made his case unusual and controversial was that many
camorristi
suspected the thief of being a pederast. In the old days there would have been no debate: cuckolded husbands, thieves and pederasts were all banned. Accordingly, the then
contaiuolo
(bookkeeper) of the Honoured Society invoked the old rules and obstinately refused to make him a member. But opinion within the camorra was split; the ‘pederast’ was lobbying hard among his
camorrista
friends. The dispute rumbled on until one evening, in a tavern in the Forcella quarter, the ‘pederast’ provoked a fight in which the
contaiuolo
suffered serious head injuries. The Honoured Society was suddenly on the brink of a civil war.

Felice Ametta heard news of this potentially explosive rift soon after the fight. Hard-nosed cop that he was, and very used to the business of using the camorra to manage crime, he called Big ’Enry in for a meeting in a coffee bar in via Tribunali.

Hardly had these words sounded across the Lucca courtroom, than the jury swivelled in their seats at the sound of Big ’Enry detonating with rage.

Called
me
in for a meeting? I’m no stoolie! Never! I’d go to jail a thousand times before I stained myself by arranging a meeting with a policeman!

From a man who denied even being a
camorrista
, this was a highly revealing outburst.

When calm was restored, Ametta went on to explain that Big ’Enry took control of the Honoured Society at precisely this delicate moment, presenting himself as the man who could bring about peace. His leadership platform involved turning the clock back. In Ametta’s words

Big ’Enry wanted to found a kind of old-style camorra, with rigid regulations and statutes, with a tribunal including two advocates for first trials, four advocates for appeal hearings and a general secretary.

There were guffaws when the court heard this elevated legal vocabulary being applied to the sordid affairs of hoodlums. But Ametta’s point was a serious and extremely insightful one. What he was implying was that the textbook camorra as Captain Fabroni and Gennaro Abbatemaggio had portrayed it in Viterbo was no longer a reality on the streets of Naples. Instead it existed only as a political project put forward by a new leader desperate—for his own selfish reasons, no doubt—to hold the Honoured Society’s rapidly fragmenting structure together.

Thus when Big ’Enry was arrested, the last paladin of the old order was brought down and the Honoured Society was allowed to fall into ruin. The Cuocolo trial did not exactly destroy the camorra, it destroyed the only man who still believed in the camorra, who still wanted to take the criminological textbooks on the Honoured Society and make reality fit them once more.

The street cops who gave evidence at the Cuocolo trial give us a close-up description of the Honoured Society’s decline. But being street cops, they did not have to try and
explain
that decline. So their vivid evidence begs a bit of educated guesswork from the historian.

In essence, it seems, the old Honoured Society could not cope with the way Naples was modernising. With Italy becoming more democratic, politicians were gaining access to greater sources of patronage of jobs, housing, and other favours. As a result, undergovernment could reach further down into the low city, competing with the camorra to win clienteles among the poor. The camorra’s bosses were unable to respond by mutating into a ‘high camorra’, by producing their
own
politicians, by
becoming
the state rather than just performing services for
pieces
of the state. The Honoured Society remained at heart what it had always been: a criminal elite among the ragged poor. The leap from the tenements to the salons was just too great. And in the new, more-democratic age, when Neapolitan political life became as visible as it was volatile, the camorra had no political mask, leaving it too conspicuous and isolated to survive a serious onslaught by the forces of
order. In short: the top
camorristi
might put on their straw-yellow gloves, but they could not cover the scars on their faces.

Here a comparison with the Honoured Societies of Calabria and Sicily is instructive. The picciotteria shared the camorra’s lowly origins. But they did rapidly merge with local politics and—just as importantly—Calabria was all but invisible to public opinion in the rest of the country. The Sicilian mafia orbited around a city that rivalled Naples for its importance to national political life: Italy could not be governed if Palermo and Naples were not governed. Yet unlike the camorra, the mafia had its own politicians, its Raffaele Palizzolos and Leonardo Avellones, to say nothing of the Prime Ministers and shipping magnates who were its friends. Even the mafia’s killers could rely on being shrouded by the elite if they fell afoul of the law. Big ’Enry and the other
camorristi
were left naked by comparison.

Camorra legend has it that not long after the Cuocolo verdict, on the evening of 25 May 1915, the few remaining
camorristi
met in a cellar bar in the Sanità area of the city and dissolved the Honoured Society forever.

What of Gennaro Abbatemaggio? Once the newsreel cameras had ceased to whirr, the man who had snuffed out the Honoured Society followed an eccentric and even self-destructive path through life. The redemption parable that he tried to sell to the Viterbo jury would return to mock him.

Abbatemaggio was caught defrauding two members of the Cuocolo trial jury in a strange deal to buy some cheese, and spent time in jail as a result. Subsequently, during the Great War, he won a sergeant’s stripes with the
arditi
(‘the audacious’), a volunteer corps of shock troops who raided trenches with grenade and dagger. In 1919 he returned victorious from the front into the arms of the wife who had reputedly saved him from a life of crime—only to discover that she had been having an affair with one of the
Carabinieri
ordered to protect him from the camorra’s vengeance. His marriage fell apart, and he attempted suicide in January 1920.

Then came Fascism. Abbatemaggio embraced the Fascist revolution in Florence, murdering and plundering with one of Mussolini’s most militant and corrupt squads.

Perhaps, through all these vicissitudes, Gennaro Abbatemaggio was trying to make a fresh start, to fashion a new self. If so, his efforts failed. Something was gnawing away inside his mind. On 9 May 1927, he finally found release from the inner torment when he deposited a statement with a lawyer in Rome. The statement began as follows.

I feel it is my duty, dictated by my conscience, to make the following declaration. I do so belatedly, but still in time to bring an end to the worst miscarriage of justice in the legal annals of the world.