Blood Brotherhoods (6 page)

As if this were not complicated enough,
’ndranghetisti
disagree about how many ranks there are and what rights and responsibilities they bring with them. There has also been floral inflation in recent years: inventing new badges of status is a cheap way to resolve disputes. For instance,
gospelist
(so called because the initiation ritual for this flower involves swearing on a bible) seems to have been created recently.

None of this is harmless etiquette. The rituals and organisational structures are a liturgical apparatus that is intended to turn young men into professional delinquents and transform a mere life of crime into a calling in savagery. A calling that, despite the antique origins its members boast, is only a century and a half old. Only as old, that is, as Italy itself.

PART I

VIVA LA PATRIA!

  
1  

H
OW TO EXTRACT GOLD FROM FLEAS

S
IGISMONDO
C
ASTROMEDIANO
, D
UKE OF
M
ORCIANO
, M
ARQUIS OF
C
ABALLINO
,
LORD OF
seven baronies, sat on the ground with his right calf resting on an anvil. Rangy and blue-eyed, he seemed like an entirely distinct order of being from the Neapolitan jailers who stood before him under a lean-to roof, toying with their ironmongery. Next to the Duke, his fellow patriot Nicola Schiavoni sat in the same undignified position, with the same look of dread on his face.

One of the jailers grabbed the Duke’s foot and slipped a stirrup-shaped metal shackle over it. He then enclosed the ankle entirely by pushing a rivet through the small holes at each end of the shackle; sandwiched between them was the last link of a heavy chain. Laughing and singing, the jailer smashed the rivet flat with blows that could have splintered bones.

The Duke flinched repeatedly, and was assailed by the jailers’ mocking cheers: ‘Give ‘em some more! They’re enemies of the king. They wanted to get their hands on our women and our property.’

Ordered to stand, Castromediano and Schiavoni lifted their fetters for the first time: some twenty pounds of chain in twelve feet of oblong links. For both of them, this moment marked the beginning of a prison sentence of thirty years in irons for conspiring against the government of the Kingdom of Naples, one of the many states into which the Italian peninsula was divided. The two prisoners embraced before mustering a show of their undaunted belief in the sacred cause of Italy: ‘we kissed those chains tenderly’, the Duke wrote, ‘as if they were our brides’.

The guards were briefly taken aback. But they soon got on with the rituals that marked admission to the Castello del Carmine, one of the worst
prisons in the Kingdom of Naples. Civilian clothes were replaced by uniforms comprising brown breeches and a red tunic, both in the same rough wool. Heads were scraped bald and bloody with a sickle-shaped razor. Into each pair of hands were thrust a rag-stuffed mattress, a donkey-hair blanket, and a bowl.

It was sunset by the time the Duke and his companion were led across the prison yard and shoved through the door of the dungeon.

What they saw inside, Castromediano recalled, was a sight fit to ‘annihilate the most generous soul, the most steadfast heart’. It could have been a sewer: a long room with a low ceiling, its floor set with sharp stones, its tiny windows high and heavily barred, its air sick and clammy. A stench like rotting meat emanated from the filth smeared everywhere, and from the figures of misery skulking in the half-light.

As the new arrivals were nervously looking for a place to lay their mattresses, another shackled pair approached from among the crowd. One was tall and handsome, with a swagger in his walk. He was dressed in black plush trousers, with polished buttons at the haunches, and a brightly coloured belt; his matching waistcoat displayed a watch and chain. With elaborate civility, he addressed the two patriots.

Well, well, gentlemen! Fortune has smiled on you. All of us here have been waiting to honour you. Long live Italy! Long live Liberty! We
camorristi
, who share your sad and honourable fate, hereby exempt you from any camorra obligation . . . Gentlemen, take heart! I swear by God that no one in this place will touch a hair on your head. I am the boss of the camorra here, and so I’m the only one in charge. Absolutely everyone is at my beck and call, including the commander and his jailers.

Within an hour the new prisoners learned two stark lessons: that the camorra boss had made no hollow boasts about his power; and that his promise to exempt them from any ‘camorra obligation’ was utterly worthless. The
camorrista
did get them back their purses, which had been confiscated on arrival at the prison. But that courtesy was a self-interested one: it meant that he could cajole the bewildered Duke into paying an exorbitant sum for revolting food.

That first exaction was crushing. Castromediano visualised his future as an endless ordeal by protection racket, and found himself contemplating suicide.

The Duke of Castromediano was clapped in irons on 4 June 1851. The scene is true but also irresistibly metaphorical for it was in prison, in the mid-1800s, that Italy was first chained to the hoodlums that have hampered its every step, ever since.

The camorra was born in prison. By the time the Duke of Castromediano entered the Castello del Carmine, gang rule behind bars had been a fact of life in southern Italy for centuries. Under the
ancien régime
it was easier and cheaper to devolve day-to-day control of the prisons to the toughest inmates. Then in the 1800s the prison extortionists turned themselves into a sworn secret society and gained a foothold in the world beyond the dungeons. The story of how that happened is thick with intrigue, but in essence it involves picking out every nuance and irony in the opening encounter between Duke Castromediano and the
camorrista
. For now, that story can be summarised in one word: Italy.

In 1851, what we now call Italy was still only a ‘geographical expression’ rather than a state; it was divided between one foreign power (Austria), two Dukedoms, a Grand Dukedom, two Kingdoms, and one Papal State. The biggest of those territories was also the southernmost: the Kingdom of Naples, or the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, to use its official name.

From the Kingdom’s capital, Naples, a King born of the Bourbon dynasty reigned over the southern Italian mainland and the island of Sicily. Like most princes in Italy, the Bourbons of Naples were haunted by the memory of what had happened to them in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. In 1805 Napoleon deposed the Bourbons and put his own nominees on the throne. French rule brought a whole series of innovations in the way the Kingdom was run. Out went feudalism, and in came private property. Out went a messy assemblage of local customs, baronial and church jurisdictions, and public ordinances: in came a new code of civil law and the beginnings of a police force. The southern part of the Italian peninsula began to resemble a modern, centralised state.

In 1815 Napoleon was finally vanquished. When the Bourbons returned to power, they caught on to the big advantages that the French-style reforms could have for securing their own authority. But the theory and the practice of modern administration were hard to reconcile. The throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was still shaky. There was widespread opposition to the new, more centralised system. Moreover, the French Revolution had not only introduced continental Europe to new ways of administering a state, it had also spread volatile ideas about constitutional government, the nation, and even democracy.

Duke Castromediano was one of a generation of young men who dedicated themselves to building an Italian
Patria
, a Fatherland that would
embody the values of constitutional government, liberty, and the rule of law. After trying and failing to turn those values into a political reality during the revolts of 1848–49, many patriots like Castromediano paid for their beliefs by being hurled into the dungeon realm of the
camorristi
.

Such treatment of political prisoners, of
gentlemen
prisoners, soon became a scandal. In 1850 a highly strung Member of the British Parliament, William Ewart Gladstone—the future Grand Old Man—began a long sojourn in Naples for the sake of his daughter’s health. Gladstone was drawn into local issues by the plight of men like Castromediano. Early in 1851 the authorities in Naples unwisely allowed Gladstone to visit some of the city’s jails. He was horrified by the ‘beastly filth’ he witnessed. Here political detainees and common criminals of the worst kind mingled indiscriminately, and without any kind of supervision. The prisoners ran the place themselves.

They are a self-governed community, the main authority being that of the
gamorristi
, the men of most celebrity among them for audacious crime.

Gladstone’s unfamiliar spelling did not change the truth of what he wrote. Or indeed the polemical force of his argument: no sooner had he emerged from the Neapolitan prisons than he unleashed two open letters condemning the rule of the Bourbon King as ‘the negation of God, erected into a system of Government’.
Camorristi
were now a diplomatic stick with which to beat the Bourbons. Any government that farmed out the management of its prisons to violent thugs surely did not deserve to stand. Courtesy of Gladstone, Italy’s organised criminal gangs became what they have never ceased to be since: a detonator of political controversy.

The international sympathy aroused by the jailed patriot martyrs came to play an important role in the almost miraculous sequence of events that finally turned Italy into a
Patria
, or something like it. In 1858 the Prime Minister of the northern Italian Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia struck a secret deal with France to drive Austria out of northern Italy by force. The following year, after appalling bloodshed at the battles of Magenta and Solferino, Piedmont-Sardinia absorbed the former Austrian domain of Lombardy. Piedmont’s military success triggered uprisings further south, in the various central Dukedoms, as well as in part of the Pope’s territory. Much of the north of the peninsula had now become Italy. Europe held its breath and awaited the next move.

Then in May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi launched one of idealism’s greatest ever feats when he landed at Marsala, at Sicily’s furthest western shore, with just over 1,000 red-shirted patriotic volunteers. After his first touch-and-go victories, the momentum of revolution began to build behind Garibaldi’s
expedition. He soon conquered the Sicilian capital Palermo, and then turned his growing army eastwards to invade the Italian mainland. In early September, he entered Naples. Italy would henceforth, for the first time in history, be one country.

With Italy unified, the patriotic prisoners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies could now convert their long sufferings into political credibility. They travelled north, to the Piedmontese capital of Turin at the foot of the Alps, and joined the new country’s first national elite.

The tale of the
Risorgimento
, of how Italy was unified, has been told countless times. Much less well-known is its sinister subplot: the emergence of the camorra. Most of the multiple threads of that subplot were set in motion in the dungeons where the patriots met the
camorristi
. So the patriotic prisoners are our most important witnesses to the camorra’s early history. Not only that: some of them stepped bodily into the historical fray, as both heroes and villains.