Blood Brotherhoods (45 page)

Someone is bound to ask me, ‘When will the struggle against the mafia come to an end?’

It will come to an end
not just
when there are no longer any
mafiosi
, but when Sicilians can no longer even
remember
the mafia.

Here was a long-awaited show of political willpower: there was to be ‘no holding back’ against the mafia that was ‘dishonouring Sicily’, in Mussolini’s words. After six decades of collusion and connivance, Italy seemed finally to have a leader who made it priority business to destroy the country’s most notorious criminal organisation.

Mussolini’s scalpel continued to slice into the island’s flesh for another two years after the Ascension Day speech: by 1928, according to some calculations, there had been 11,000 arrests. Then in June 1929, the Iron Prefect was recalled to Rome. His part of the job of eradicating the mafia, Mussolini declared, had been completed; it was up to the judiciary to finish off the task. A long cycle of major mafia trials, the biggest of them with 450 defendants, began in 1927 and would not come to an end until 1932. By that time many people felt able to talk about the Sicilian mafia in the past tense. Among them was the Iron Prefect himself.

Cesare Mori published a memoir in 1932 and it was rapidly translated into English with the title
The Last Struggle with the Mafia
. Having brandished the scalpel against organised crime in Sicily, Mori now took up the chisel, with the intention of carving his own narrative of the mafia’s demise into the marble of history.

The Iron Prefect told his readers that Sicilian psychology, which he called ‘childlike’, was at the root of the mafia problem. Sicilians, Mori believed, were easily impressed by haughty figures like
mafiosi
. So to win the Sicilians over, the Fascist state had awed them; it out-mafiaed the mafia; it had given itself a physical presence, and become embodied in men tougher and more charismatic than the
mafiosi
themselves—men like Cesare Mori.

The Iron Prefect was sceptical about the theory that the mafia was a sworn criminal association, an Honoured Society.

The Mafia, as I am describing it, is a peculiar way of looking at things and of acting which, through mental and spiritual affinities, brings together in definite unhealthy attitudes men of a particular temperament, isolating them from their surroundings into a kind of caste . . . There are no marks of recognition; they are unnecessary. The
mafiosi
know one another partly by their jargon, but mostly by instinct. There are no statutes. The law of
omertà
and tradition are enough. There is no election of chiefs, for the chiefs arise of their own accord and impose themselves. There are no rules of admission.

In order to repress this ‘peculiar way of looking at things’, a certain amount of brutality was necessary, if regrettable. With their awe-inspiring toughness, Mori wrote, the great roundups of 1926 and 1927 caused the felons’ morale to crumple.

Dismayed and panic-stricken, they fell like flies, with no other gesture of resistance but a feeble attempt at flight to well-concealed hiding places. They were all struck down.

If Mori had bothered to follow the trials that had just concluded in Palermo, he would have found reams of evidence that the mafia was indeed more than a ‘mental and spiritual affinity’ between men with an ‘unhealthy attitude’. But that did not matter much now. In his book’s closing lines, Mori declared that Sicily, having won its last struggle with organised crime, had now begun an ‘irresistible march towards her victorious destiny’.

The Iron Prefect was showily magnanimous to those he had vanquished and imprisoned, expressing the hope that
mafiosi
would ‘come back to the bosom of their families better and wiser men, and then spend their life in honest toil until the mantle of forgiveness and oblivion is thrown over the past’. If the island had not yet had the mafia erased from its memory, as Mussolini promised, then that day could at least be envisaged with confidence. Fascism had beaten the mafia. Whatever the mafia was.

So confident was the regime of its success that, in the autumn of 1932, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, hundreds of
mafiosi
convicted during the Mori Operation were released in an amnesty. The Sicilian mafia’s history was not quite over yet.

 
26 

C
AMPANIA
: Buffalo soldiers

W
HAT REMAINED OF THE CAMORRA AFTER IT WAS DISMANTLED BY THE
C
UOCOLO TRIAL
? Although the trial marked the end of the Honoured Society, it did not eliminate gang crime in some of the city’s nerve centres, such as the wholesale markets or the docks at Bagnoli, where extortion and smuggling were endemic.

Another thing that survived was the myth of the good
camorrista
. Risen from among the poor, the good
camorrista
enforced a rough and ready justice in the alleyways, or so it was believed. Above everything else, such ‘men of respect’ protected the honour of women. One tale became an archetype in popular memory: the
camorrista
who, seeing a local girl seduced and abandoned, collars her rogue
innamorato
and forces him to do the decent thing. With telling and retelling, such stories hardened into a tableau utterly removed from reality and impervious to contrary evidence. What camorra honour had really meant for women was pimping, beatings, and disfigurement.

When the
camorristi
of the Honoured Society had gone,
guappi
were invested with the aura of ‘men of respect’. A
guappo
was a street-corner boss. He may have lacked the formal investiture of Honoured Society membership; he may have lacked contacts with a brotherhood far beyond the alleys of his tiny fief. But the typical
guappo
certainly carried on in much the same way as the typical
camorrista
had done: contraband, usury, pimping, receiving stolen goods and of course farming his turf for votes. Many
guappi
were former
camorristi
, or the sons of
camorristi
.

But to discover the real forebears of the cocaine barons, building industry gangsters and political fixers who make up the camorra today, we need to return for a moment to the days of the Cuocolo trial; more importantly, we need to leave Naples and explore a very different criminal landscape.

On 4 August 1911, two jewellers, father and son, were waylaid by armed robbers on the fruit-tree lined road leading out of Nola, a town perhaps 30 kilometres north-east of Naples. There was a struggle when the father refused to give up the jewellery he was carrying. The attackers responded by shooting his son several times in the face, causing the old man to faint with shock. It was the kind of crime that would not normally have generated a great deal of interest in Naples. But with the Cuocolo trial priming the public’s taste for camorra stories, journalists were drawn out into the countryside to cover the story. Nola, after all, hosted the livestock market where Big ’Enry sourced the mules he once sold to the British army fighting the Boers.

Even
Il Mattino
’s wonder-worn hacks were taken aback by what they found when they got there: ‘a reign of terror, a kind of martial law’. The territory around Nola displayed all the tell-tale symptoms of a well-rooted criminal organisation: large numbers of crimes unsolved and unreported (meaning that witnesses and victims were being intimidated); vines and fruit trees cut down (meaning that extortion demands had been made). Mayors who tried to do something about the growing power of the bosses had been beaten up. An uncooperative priest had had his arms broken. Any man who protested to the authorities was liable to have his wife or daughter kidnapped, or his house or business dynamited. Bandits openly patrolled the roads, their rifles slung over their shoulders. And according to the police there was an organisation of only 100–150 men behind it all; they formed a federation of gangs, and divided the booty from their crimes equally.

For all these terrifying details,
Il Mattino
’s exposé barely skimmed the surface. Mobsters infiltrated the fields, market towns and supply routes that enveloped and nourished Naples.
Camorristi
were active down the coast in Castellammare and Salerno and in Nocera, Sarno and Palma Campania just beyond Mount Vesuvius. But the problem was at its worst to the city’s north, in a vast expanse of hyper-productive land that catered for virtually every item on the Neapolitan menu. From the livestock centre of Nola in the east; to Acerra, which was particularly known for its cannellini beans and for the eel that flourished in its water courses; to the peach orchards around Giugliano; on to Marano, with its peas; and then up the coast to Mondragone, which was known for its onions, endive and chicory. All around Naples a population of farmers, guards, butchers, cart-drivers, brokers and speculators doubled as extortionists, vandals, fraudsters, smugglers, armed robbers and murderers. Out here, the line between legitimate and illegitimate business scarcely had a
meaning: theft and racketeering were as valid a source of income as squeezing a profit from the peasantry.

But of all the agricultural bounty that issued from the Neapolitan hinterland, one product was more tightly controlled by hoods than any other.

South of the Garigliano river, north-west of Naples, there lay a malaria-cursed wilderness called the Mazzoni. Lush, flat, interminable and oppressively quiet, the Mazzoni were pocked by quagmires. The land’s other features were few and strange. An isolated water channel threaded through lines of poplar trees; or a dust road, white as a scar, tracing a bullet-straight path to the horizon. Solitary herders were the only travellers: they galloped with their bellies flat to their ponies’ bare backs, as if they had fled a stable fire and forgotten to stop. Once in a while the dust they kicked up would settle upon a bridge over a reed-choked ditch, with a gate propped between two posts. These marked the entrance to a
difesa
, in the local parlance—literally a ‘defence’—which was a kind of boggy farm. Inside, beyond holm oak and cane thicket, were the buffalo: black, short-haired and massive, they stood in filthy water and glowered at nothing through the shimmering air. At the centre of each compound there was a thatched, whitewashed single-storey shed. Inside, where the air was gamey with the reek of buffalo milk, the herders thumbed mozzarella cheese into balls and dropped them into brine tuns ready for the journey to market in Santa Maria Capua Vetere.

Sallow and sullen with fever, the herdsmen worked the
difese
in teams, living little better than their animals, not seeing their womenfolk for weeks or months on end. Their boss, known as a
minorente
, was a rough and ready entrepreneur. Naples and Caserta paid good money for the creamily fragrant cheeses that miraculously issued from the muck and stench of the Mazzoni. The boss rented his
difesa
from a landowner who was probably too scared to go anywhere near his property. For the Mazzoni were among the most lawless areas in the whole of Italy, and the herdsmen who made the mozzarella also made much of the trouble. In 1909, a government inquiry into agriculture evoked the teams of buffalo herdsmen in the Mazzoni in the language of folk terror. ‘For centuries these local tribes have hated one another and fought one another like prehistoric peoples.’

Yet as so often in Italy, lazy talk of ‘primitives’ served only to mask a far-from-primitive criminal logic. Violence was integral to the buffalo dairy economy. Bosses intimidated their competitors so they could negotiate a lower rent with the landowner. The herders set up protection rackets: if their threatening letters were not understood, they slaughtered buffalo, cut down trees, and burned buildings until they had made their position clear. Highway robbery was a constant risk for the men taking the cheese to market, and
bringing the money back. In other words, mozzarella was for the Mazzoni what lemons were for Palermo’s Conca d’Oro.

During the Cuocolo trial,
Il Mattino
reporters visited the Mazzoni to be cursorily horrified by the ‘crass ignorance’ and ‘bloodthirsty instincts’ of the buffalo herdsmen. What they failed to mention was that the camorra in the Mazzoni, and in the Aversa area between the Mazzoni and Naples, was integral to a political and business machine whose handles were cranked by the local Member of Parliament, Giuseppe Romano, known as Peppuccio (‘Little Joey’). It just so happened that Little Joey was a friend of
Il Mattino
editor, Edoardo Scarfoglio.

Despite the obliging reserve of Scarfoglio’s journalists, Little Joey’s career was doomed. Partly as a result of the fuss around the Cuocolo trial, he became too notorious to be tolerated even by Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (the ‘Minister of the Underworld’) who had been happy to accept his support in the past. During the 1913 national elections, there was an anti-camorra campaign in Little Joey’s constituency (the cavalry were sent into the Mazzoni), and he was unseated. But with Little Joey out of the way, gangster life in the Neapolitan hinterland returned to normal.

From the Mazzoni to Nola, and down beyond Mount Vesuvius,
camorristi
were as at home in the towns and villages around Naples as they were in the prisons and alleys of the city itself. Indeed, there were close ties between the rural and urban organisations. The tomatoes, lettuces, salami and mozzarella that
camorristi
cornered in the countryside went first to the criminal cartels who controlled little portions of the city’s wholesale distribution. It was all staggeringly inefficient, a system designed only to fatten the cut taken by middlemen. Poor Naples paid cruelly high food prices as a result. But official Italy hardly took any notice.