Blood Brotherhoods (46 page)

Until Fascism, that is.

During his Ascension Day speech in 1927, Mussolini introduced parliament to the Mazzoni. He assumed, naturally enough, that his audience would not have heard of them before: who in his right mind would bother leaving the city to find out where the delicious mozzarella actually came from?

The Mazzoni are a land that lies between the provinces of Rome and Naples: they are a marshy terrain, a malarial steppe.

The inhabitants, the Duce continued, had a terrible reputation even in ancient times:
latrones
, they were called in Latin—‘highwaymen’ or ‘brigands’. As was his wont, Mussolini then hurled statistics: between 1922 and 1926, the Mazzoni had seen 169 murders and 404 instances of extortion-related vandalism. But the Fascist scalpel was already cutting away at this millennial
legacy of lawlessness. The Duce’s orders had been abrupt: ‘Free me from this delinquency with iron and fire!’ Now, with yet another salvo of statistics, the Duce could announce the triumph of state authority: 1,699 underworld figures had been arrested in the Mazzoni; just to the south, among the vines and fruit trees of Aversa, another 1,278 had been brought to book. In rural Campania, just as in Sicily, Fascism was on the verge of victory.

The press called it Fascism’s campaign of ‘moral drainage’ in the bogs of the Mazzoni. The man charged with conducting the campaign was Major Vincenzo Anceschi, a fifty-year-old
Carabiniere
. Anceschi was the son of a
Carabiniere
, and his own son would become one too: a lineage that testifies to the devotion that the
Arma
, as Italians call this military police force, can inspire in its members. Anceschi’s anti-camorra operation was huge, entirely comparable to what Mori was doing in Sicily: between December 1926 and May 1928, 9,143 people were arrested and two suspects died in gunfights with the
Carabinieri
.

Anceschi’s men patrolled the countryside in mounted squads, disarming notoriously dangerous families, arresting renegades and breaking up corrupt factions in local government. Although the toughest assignments were in the Mazzoni, their roundups also included the countryside as far east as Nola.

Anceschi could hardly have known this territory better: he was born in Giugliano, right on the edge of the Mazzoni. And on New Year’s Eve 1926 he deployed that local knowledge in his most spectacular strike, at a gangland funeral that was intended to be a show of force, just like the Honoured Society funerals of the 1890s in Naples.

Vincenzo Serra was the most notorious
camorrista
in the Aversa countryside. An elegant figure with a lordly bearing, he had spent thirty-six of his seventy years in prison, and was particularly well known for shooting two
Carabinieri
in a tea house. Serra died in Aversa hospital following a mysterious accident. His open coffin was set up in a ground-floor mortuary, surrounded by black drapes, exotic plants and fat candles. Hoods from all around came to pay their respects. They then assembled in the hospital atrium, where (according to the press) the acting boss decided their positions according to rank: first the older
camorristi
; then the
picciotti
; and finally the ‘honoured youths’ lugging large wreaths. Vincenzo Serra’s funeral procession was to be a solemn collective tableau of a structured criminal organisation.

But it never even began. The
Carabinieri
simply bolted the door of the hospital, locking the mobsters in the atrium until they could be herded onto a truck and taken to prison.

Major Anceschi made something of a speciality of raiding camorra funerals. This was a dangerous tactic: officers received frequent death threats.
Carabinieri
dressed in mufti would mingle with the crowds, while Anceschi supervised operations from an unmarked car parked nearby. He had the car wired so that anyone who tried to get in uninvited would receive an electric shock. But the rewards made the risks of this kind of operation worthwhile. The arrests were important, of course. Perhaps more important still was the chance to transform a show of force for the camorra into a show of force for the law.

What these reports suggest is that, even after the Honoured Society died out in the city of Naples as a result of the Cuocolo trial, its structures and traditions lived on in the countryside fifteen years later. Anceschi reported to Mussolini that, in the Mazzoni, the camorra had ‘a rigid system based on hierarchy and
omertà
’. ‘The country around Aversa and Nola’, he went on, ‘very close to Naples, was a daily destination for the members of the city’s underworld, which was intimately linked to the rural criminals’. The countryside had become a kind of life-support system for urban organised crime.

Anceschi and his men discovered no less than twenty criminal associations and sent 494 men for judgement in eighteen separate trials, but historians have so far managed to locate only a few pages of the resulting documentation. Until more research is done and the archives surrender more of their secrets, we cannot know exactly what kind of criminal organisations dominated the Mazzoni, or indeed the successes and failures of Fascism’s ‘moral drainage’. What seems certain is that there were no further traces of an Honoured Society in the Neapolitan countryside after the 1920s.

To his credit, Major Anceschi gave a proud but sober assessment of his own work in a report to
Carabinieri
High Command in May 1928. The roads were now safe, the fields were once again filled with peasants, and the barrels of mozzarella cheese could make their way to market without being stolen or ‘taxed’ by the camorra. Public order was normal, all the way from Mondragone to Nola—for now. But Anceschi detailed a number of things that would need to happen before peace could settle definitively over this troubled territory. Extraordinary policing would need to continue. In the ‘malign and fearful moorland’ of the Mazzoni, there would have to be education, land reclamation, and road building. Above all—and here lay the most uncomfortable message for the Fascist state—there would have to be much more careful supervision of the personnel within both the government bureaucracy and the Fascist Party. Anceschi’s operation had courageously exposed a number of corrupt functionaries who tried to influence the magistrature on behalf of
camorristi
, and who were involved in obscure dealings with the Freemasonry. The report ended with a brusque imperative: ‘Prevent political infiltration in favour of organised crime.’

Despite Major Anceschi’s caution, Mussolini decided by the late 1920s that the camorra, like the mafia, had been beaten. He also decided that he had solved the whole Southern Question—the persistent scandal of the backwardness, poverty and corruption of Italy’s south. Further public discussion of these issues was therefore pointless. So pointless that it was banned. Between 1931 and 1933, the head of the Duce’s press corps wrote frequently to newspaper editors exhorting them not to print the words ‘southern Italy’ and ‘
Mezzogiorno
’ (another term for the south). From now on, Fascism would have other concerns: building a cult of the Duce, for example, and militarising the Italian people in preparation for imperial war. From this point on, whatever surprises mafia history might have in store were to be stifled by a subservient media.

 
27 

C
ALABRIA
: The flying boss of Antonimina

D
OMENICO
N
OTO HAD A LOVELY TIME IN THE
G
REAT
W
AR
. N
OT FOR HIM THE LICE
and shrapnel that millions of his fellow soldiers endured in the trenches scoured into the Alpine foothills between 1915 and 1918. Most of the Italians recruited to fight Austria were country folk, barely literate, whose mental horizon simply could not encompass the reasons for this mechanised slaughter. Noto had a loftier perspective. He had a good secondary school education, and used it to become a non-commissioned aviator. His duty was to patrol the breathtaking skies between Calabria and Sicily on the lookout for Austrian mines in the Straits below. On one occasion he even overflew his home village of Antonimina, which clings to an Aspromonte outcrop above Calabria’s Ionian coast. Noto’s gesture won him the lasting reverence of the herdsmen who had shaded their eyes to see the local prodigy soar by. Aviators were the very epitome of a dashing, virile modernity. Domenico Noto seemed like the harbinger of a heroic Italian future. And he even had a good disciplinary record during the war.

Which is why it is striking that, on 19 December 1922 (that is, just after Mussolini became Prime Minister) Noto was convicted of being the boss of the local mafia. If the judges in the case are to be believed, Noto drew on his prestige as a wartime flyer to assume leadership of Antonimina’s underworld.

Noto’s gang had methods, rituals and a structure that were identical to those of the picciotteria discovered three decades or so earlier around
Aspromonte. Thus, despite everything that had happened since then—a communications and transport revolution, mass emigration, the destruction of the Honoured Society in Naples, and the titanic military slogging match with Austria—the ’ndrangheta’s forefathers remained obstinately themselves.

Like their predecessors of the 1880s and 1890s, Noto’s men took a blood oath and were ranked into two sub-groups: the
picciotti
and the
camorristi
. They had specific job titles, like the boss and the
contaiuolo
. They stole a great many farm animals: some of which they sent to connected livestock traders and butchers in distant towns; some they roasted and ate in banquets designed to nourish the gang’s
esprit de corps;
some they miraculously ‘found’ and returned to the rightful owners—in return for cash and a solemn promise to say nothing to the
Carabinieri
.

Whole passages of the judges’ ruling against Noto’s
’ndrina
could have been copied from documents dating from thirty years before. The gang contained a few quite wealthy members, and some who had relatives in local government: a former mayor, called Monteleone, counted at least two nephews among the affiliates. The sect had strict rules: wrongdoers were punished with fines, acts of vandalism, or a deft flick of the blade.

Noto’s men were also part of a great network of Calabrian mafia gangs. That much was clear from the occasion when he heard from his friends in Palmi, on Calabria’s other coast, that one of their brethren had been imprisoned for attempting to murder a
Carabiniere
. Noto ordered his men to make a welfare contribution, and one member who refused was heavily fined. Boasting far-lying contacts like these, the Antonimina mob could demand, and get, ‘resignation and respect’, from the people at home, as the judge put it. Thefts and beatings were not reported to the police.

So the flying
capo
of Antonimina was a throwback, not a harbinger. Or rather, the future his example heralded was a depressingly familiar one: it was a future in which even educated young men from the mafia heartlands of Calabria, those who had seen the world and taken the chances offered by the national institutions that were supposed to turn them into good Italians, would prefer the career routes afforded by mafia violence.

Domenico Noto’s group also betrayed many of the same weaknesses as the Lads with Attitude of the late nineteenth century. There was an admission fee for new members (which had now gone up to 25 or 50 lire). Like the first
picciotti
, Noto and his men browbeat the vulnerable into paying the fee. One victim of this kind of extortion was a sixteen-year-old chicken thief. If the traditional rules of the Honoured Society had been respected, this boy would never have been allowed to join at all because both his sisters were prostitutes. But he was initiated, and exploited, all
the same. Aggrieved by the treatment he received, he subsequently gave a vital testimony to the authorities. Nobody in the police and judicial system was remotely surprised by this kind of egregious breach in the code of silence. As a judge in another trial wearily opined, ‘as judicial psychology teaches us, members of criminal associations always betray one another, and the solidarity between them is only superficial’. Clearly the Calabrian mafia was still a long way from becoming the byword for
omertà
that it is today.

Across the picciotteria’s home territory the courts were encountering similar cases, similar gangs that mixed former soldiers with veteran mobsters, similar infractions of the law of silence. In Rosarno, on the plain of Gioia Tauro, ‘the population was terrorised’: in broad daylight there were knife fights, acts of sabotage, robberies, attacks on the
Carabinieri
. The picture was very similar in and around Africo, where a judge noted that there was ‘a very marked and sudden resurgence in crimes against property’ when the troops came home. In the mayhem of demobilisation and the accompanying economic crisis, the
picciotti
were resurgent.

After 1925, just as it did in Sicily and Campania, Fascism mounted an anti-mafia drive in Calabria. Once again, there were hundreds and hundreds of arrests, and some very big trials, especially in the years from 1928 to 1930. But compared to the Mori Operation in Sicily and to Major Anceschi’s roundups in the Mazzoni, Fascism’s crackdown in Calabria barely rated more than a few lines in the local press, let alone nationally—and that even before the media blackout on the ‘Southern Question’ from the early 1930s. Fighting organised crime in Italy’s most neglected region provided no more political kudos under Fascism than it had done before.

In his 1927 Ascension Day speech, Benito Mussolini gave Italy a monumentally simple picture of his anti-mafia campaign: Fascism set against organised crime—two great blocks facing one another in mutual antagonism. Yet he did not mention the picciotteria at all. The silence is telling, not least because in Calabria the reality on the ground shattered Mussolini’s marmoreal rhetoric into fragments. In some times and places, the state manifested its power in brave policework and shrewd investigation. But in others, it showed its weakness through gross naivety, cowardly brutality, idiotic posturing, and lazy collusion.