Blood Brotherhoods (60 page)

The wealthy Italian-American visitors who came to pay him homage may just have known the truth behind the myth: Musolino was an ’ndrangheta killer.

 
37 

N
APLES
: Puppets and puppeteers

I
N
1930, I
TALY
’
S FIRST GREAT NATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA
,
THE
E
NCICLOPEDIA
T
RECCANI
, included the following entry under
Camorra
:

The camorra was an association of lower class men, who used extortion to force the vice-ridden and the cowardly to surrender tribute. Its branches spread through the old Kingdom of Naples; it had laws and customs, a rigidly organised hierarchy, specific obligations and duties, and a jargon and court system of its own . . . Moral education and environmental improvements succeeded, in the end, in destroying the camorra . . . Only the word remains today, to indicate abuses or acts of bullying.

The camorra was dead: for once, this proud claim had a strong basis in truth rather than in the propaganda needs of the Fascist regime. Whereas Calabria’s gangsters had climbed the social ladder until they merged with the state,
camorristi
in Naples never quite left the alleys behind. Unable to call on the kind of political protection that the mafias of Sicily and Calabria could boast, the camorra was vulnerable. By the time the First World War broke out, the Honoured Society (in the city, at least) had collapsed.

In Naples in the late 1940s, one of the few places where the word ‘camorra’ was regularly used was in a tiny theatre, the San Carlino. Its entrance was hard to find: a doorway hidden among the bookstalls that crowded about the Porta San Gennaro. Inside, the auditorium could barely contain seven dilapidated benches. The stage was only just wider than the upright piano
standing before it. This was the last poky outpost of a beleaguered art form for the illiterate: the only remaining puppet playhouse in the city.

Puppet theatre had been popular in Sicily and southern Italy for more than a century. Its stock stories told of chivalry and treachery among Charlemagne’s knights as they battled against their Saracen foes. The marionettes, in tin armour and with bright red lips, would speechify endlessly about honour and betrayal, and then launch into a wobbly dance that signified mortal combat.

In Naples, the puppet theatres had another speciality too: tales of chivalry and treachery set in the world of the Honoured Society. Indeed, if the San Carlino was still holding out against the cinemas, it was largely because of the enduring appeal of camorra dramas. Outside, badly printed posters proclaimed the dramatic delights on offer:

TONIGHT

THE DEATH OF PEPPE AVERZANO THE WISE GUY
.

WITH REAL BLOOD

Inside, the audience was integral to the spectacle. The loud cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Watch out!’ from the stalls could as well have been written into the script. The audience knowledgeably applauded the knife-fighting skills of some
camorristi
, and angrily denounced the cowardly tricks of others: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself! Ten against one!’ The plots were repetitive:
camorristi
taking blood oaths, or fighting dagger duels, or saving marionette maidens from dishonour. The dramatic pay-off was always the same: good versus evil, the surge of righteous indignation versus the prurient thrill of violence. When the action was particularly moving, the San Carlino rocked and creaked like a railway carriage trundling over points.

Everyone knew the camorra heroes’ names: the gentleman gangster, don Teofilo Sperino, and the mighty boss Ciccio Cappuccio (‘Little Lord Frankie’); the devious Nicola Jossa, endlessly pitting his wits against the greatest
camorrista
of them all, Salvatore De Crescenzo. All of these puppet heroes and villains had once been real gangsters rather than gaudily painted puppets. Genuine episodes of nineteenth-century camorra history were re-imagined on the stage of the San Carlino. The ‘real blood’ that spurted from the puppet’s chest at the dramatic conclusion of the piece was in fact a bladder full of aniline dye. And whereas the good-guy
camorristi
would be given bright red gore, the bad guys bled a much darker shade, almost black.

Outside the San Carlino, in the bomb-ravaged streets of Naples, the real Honoured Society had not been seen for over thirty years. There were still a few old
camorristi
around. The most notorious of them was a familiar and pitiful sight, who recalled both the old camorra and the strange story of its demise: he was Gennaro Abbatemaggio, the controversial ‘gramophone’ whose testimony during the Cuocolo trial in 1911–12 had inflicted a fatal blow on the Honoured Society.

The years since the Cuocolo trial had not been kind to Abbatemaggio. He had become a tubby little old man, almost bald. At first glance he seemed dapper in a suit and open-necked shirt, or in a dark turtle-neck, sports jacket and sunglasses. But the threadbare tailoring fooled no one who saw him up close. For don Gennaro, as journalists called him with ironic reverence, was all but indigent. He lived hand-to-mouth, on petty theft and scams. No one would have cared about his fortunes—but for the fact that he was a living relic of a once fearsome criminal power.

After the Second World War, Abbatemaggio did everything he could to keep himself in the limelight—at least he did when he was not in prison. In 1949 he staged a suicide attempt, and a conversion to religious faith; he later gave interviews on the steps of the Roman church where he was due to receive his First Holy Communion. When religion failed, he tried show business. But his repeated efforts to get his own story turned into celluloid came to nothing. In 1952 he had to be content with being snapped with the stars at the premiere of
The City Stands Trial
, a 1952 film retelling the story of the 1911 case that had destroyed the Honoured Society.

Shut out of the cinema, Abbatemaggio’s last resort was to try and revive his moment of glory. He claimed to have sensational revelations about one of the biggest murder mysteries of 1953: the death of a Roman girl, Wilma Montesi. But it soon emerged that the old stool pigeon was at it again. He was arrested and tried for false testimony. Thereafter, he was seen begging. The press began to ignore him.

So if the word ‘camorra’ was used in post-war Naples, it was only to evoke its memory with the same mixture of amusement and pity that was conjured up by newspaper stories about the puppet theatre or Gennaro Abbatemaggio.

Today, more than half a century after Abbatemaggio’s death, ‘camorra’ has changed its meaning. In the decades since the end of the Second World War, the camorra has re-emerged and adopted a new identity; it has become stronger and more insidious than ever. It is no longer an Honoured Society—a single sect of criminals with its initiation rituals, its formalised dagger duels, its ranks and rules. Today
camorrista
means an affiliate of
one of many structured, but frequently unstable, gangster syndicates. The camorra is not just one secret society like the mafias of Sicily and Calabria, therefore. Rather it is a vast and constantly shifting map of gangs ruling different territories in Naples and the Campania region. Like the Honoured Society of old, these organisations run protection rackets and trafficking operations. But—at least when things are going well for them—they are far more successful than the old Honoured Society ever was at infiltrating the state institutions, politics and the economy.

To the audiences at the San Carlino in the late 1940s, such a future incarnation of the camorra would have seemed a highly unlikely prospect. Hoodlums were certainly active in Naples in the post-war years. But they were much less powerful than they are today—or indeed than they were in Sicily or Calabria at the time. Naples could not manage anything like the great Sicilian ruling-class conspiracy of silence about the mafia. There was no Neapolitan equivalent of a senior magistrate like Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, who was prepared, in the teeth of everything he knew, to deny the mafia’s very existence. And the great and troubled city of Naples was far from politically invisible in the way the towns and villages of Calabria were.

However, under closer examination, the hoodlums of post-war Naples do turn out to be the progenitors of today’s Kalashnikov-wielding, cocaine-smuggling, suit-wearing
camorristi
. The seeds of the camorra’s future revival had already been planted. Indeed, there was already something menacing there in the city’s underworld—something that made it abundantly clear that the camorra was not as dead as all the encyclopedias claimed. A careful look at Neapolitan gangland in the 1940s and early 1950s also shows that Italy in general, and Naples in particular, had a guilty conscience when it came to organised crime. This was a city that refused to use the ‘c’ word (unless it was talking about the past, of course—about the San Carlino theatre or Gennaro Abbatemaggio). In short, Naples had
both
its own distinctive mobsters,
and
its own characteristic style of forgetting that they were there.

Stereotypes were the most powerful way to forget about the camorra. Naples is Italy’s hardest city to decipher. Countless visitors have been lured into judging it by appearances, because those appearances are so obvious and so diverting. For hundreds of years, Europe has found the sunlit spectacle of Neapolitan street life irresistible. Here was a place where squalor seemed to come in colour, and sweet music to emerge miraculously from a constant din. The poor of the city had the reputation of using any shabby trick, putting on any demeaning act, in order to fill their bellies and live a life of
dolce far niente
(‘sweet idleness’). The reason Gennaro Abbatemaggio appeared in
the papers so often in the late 1940s was not just because he had destroyed the Honoured Society; it was also because, with his tragicomic ducking and diving, he seemed like a personification of everybody’s archetypal Neapolitan. The San Carlino attracted attention because it too seemed peculiar and typical of the city. The Neapolitan poor were viewed as imps living in paradise: mischievous, sentimental, naïve, and endlessly inventive to the point of being unabashed about playing up to all the stereotypes about them. Before the war, Neapolitan urchins would charge a fee to foreigners who wanted to photograph them eating spaghetti with their hands, as a century and more of stereotypes dictated that they should.

The post-war generation also had its travellers keen to revive these commonplaces. The simple trick was to show a city encapsulated only in what first met the eye in the poor neighbourhoods like Forcella or Pignasecca. A city of beggars and pedlars, where from every windowsill or doorway, from orange boxes or trays, somebody would be trying to sell you something: chestnuts, or fragments of fried fish, or single cigarettes, or prickly pears, or
taralli
(pretzels). Poor Naples was an open-air bazaar where barbers and tailors plied their trade out in the street, and where passers-by could look in at the single-family sweatshops making shoes or gloves.

Foreigners were not the only ones responsible for rehashing the old clichés: there were always professional Neapolitans prepared to chip in too. One such was Giuseppe Marotta. He knew precisely how hard life in Naples could be: he and his two sisters had been brought up by a seamstress in one of the notorious
bassi
—the one-room apartments that opened directly onto the street. In 1926 he went north to become a writer in Italy’s industrial and literary capital, Milan. By the late 1940s, after years of hack-work, he had made it: he was a regular newspaper columnist, and the man to whom editors turned when they wanted a colourful piece on some aspect of Neapolitan life.

In the stereotypical Naples that Marotta served up for his readers, lawlessness was not really crime, it was a part of the urban spectacle. Here pickpockets and endlessly inventive rip-off artists expressed a picturesque form of dishonesty—one that grew from hardship and not malice. There was something both creative and endearing about crime here. The poor of Naples could steal your heart as easily as lift your wallet.

In one article from 1953, Marotta marvelled at the agility of the
correntisti
—daring, agile young crooks who would swing themselves up onto the back of a passing lorry so as to offload the contents as it rumbled along. This type of crime was known in the alleys as
la corrente
(‘the stream’) because of the fluidity of the whole operation. A good
correntista
, Marotta remarked, needed a freakish range of skills:

The legs of a star centre forward, the eye of a sailor, the ear of a redskin, the velvet touch of a bishop, and the iron grip of a weightlifter—as well as hooked feet, rubber ribs, and the balance of a jockey. And to coordinate it all, the brain of the conductor Arturo Toscanini.

Marotta also smirked indulgently at the teetering pyramids of stolen tin cans that were the fruits of the
corrente
.

The truth that Marotta’s stereotypes concealed was that criminal power was a threatening presence in Naples. The poor, the very inhabitants of those alleys who so charmed onlookers, were often its first victims, as one revealing episode from the everyday life of Naples allows us to see.

At around 6.30, one hot summer evening in 1952, Antonio Quindici, known as
‘O Grifone
(the Griffon), decided to buy some mussels. He presented himself at a stall in via Alessandro Poerio, not far from the station, but he found five workers from a nearby building site in front of him. He demanded to be served first, and the mussel-seller meekly obeyed. But the builders, who were from a different part of the city, obviously did not know whom they were dealing with, because they objected loudly.
‘O Grifone
responded by grabbing the mussel-seller’s knife and stabbing the most vocal builder twice in the heart. He then fled. He was chased by the victim’s friends, but their pursuit was blocked by a coordinated group of accomplices.
‘O Grifone
vanished into the side streets. His victim bled to death where he lay, leaving a wife and a baby daughter.