Blood Brotherhoods (62 page)

The testimony of Frank Costello (born Francesco Castiglia in Calabria) made for a particularly captivating spectacle. While he refused to have his face on screen, the camera nonetheless showed lingering close-ups of his hands as they cruelly twisted pieces of paper or fiddled deviously with a pair of spectacles. This ‘hand ballet’, together with a voice ‘like the death rattle of a seagull’, made Costello loom far larger in the public imagination than if his rather nondescript features had been visible.

In Italy, the Communist press reported with undisguised glee on the evidence of political collusion with organised crime that was being uncovered by Kefauver. ‘The “heroes” of American democracy on parade’, ran one sarcastic headline.

Everything is mixed up inextricably: political intrigues and police intrigues. The entire American system of government, both local and central, is prey to the gangs.

While the Cold War enemy was washing its dirty laundry in public, in Italy there had been no washing at all. The 1943–50 period had seen mafia violence and political collusion with organised crime on a scale greater even than the United States. Yet, in parliament as in the law courts, the Left had failed to take advantage from the mafia issue in their battle with the Christian Democrats. Kefauver, by contrast, exposed the long-standing mafia ties of William O’Dwyer, a former mayor of New York who was currently Ambassador to Mexico, and brought his political career to an end. Frank Costello, who at one time had been the ‘respectable’ face of the American mafia, its hinge with Democratic machine politics in New York, received a short stretch in prison for contempt of Congress, and his tax affairs attracted the unwelcome attentions of the Internal Revenue Service. Costello’s ‘hand ballet’ also gave him the kind of notoriety that Sicilian
mafiosi
had repeatedly managed to dodge. ‘Kefauver is a master of publicity,’
L’Unità
commented. So while the PCI relished what the Kefauver hearings exposed, it also quietly envied their impact.

Mafia media frenzy. Calabrian-born mobster Frank Costello testifies before the Kefauver Hearings, New York, 1951.

Many of the underworld figures interviewed by Estes Kefauver refused to incriminate themselves at the hearings—so many that the phrase ‘take the Fifth Amendment’ entered common parlance. To fill the huge gaps in these firsthand testimonies, the crusading Senator relied on several sources: information from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, whose ambitious head, Harry J. Anslinger, had been seeking to ramp up the mafia issue for years; the often muddled testimonies of a cluster of mafia informers; and a great deal of supposition. As a result, the profile of the mafia published in Kefauver’s findings was alarming:

Behind the local mobs which make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy, international criminal organization known as the Mafia, so fantastic that most Americans find it hard to believe it really exists. The Mafia, which has its origins and its headquarters in Sicily, is dominant in numerous fields of illegal activity . . . and it enforces its code with death to those who resist or betray it . . . The Mafia is no fairy tale. It is ominously real, and it has scarred the face of America with almost every conceivable type of criminal violence, including murder, traffic in narcotics, smuggling, extortion, white slavery, kidnapping, and labor racketeering . . . The Mafia today actually is a secret international government-within-a-government. It has an international head in Italy—believed by United States authorities to be Charles (Lucky) Luciano . . . The Mafia also has its Grand Council and its national and district heads in the countries in which it operates, including the United States.

America was living through a period of Cold War paranoia at the time, and there is more than a hint of the Reds-under-the-bed worldview in what Kefauver wrote. The mafia: a sophisticated criminal conspiracy against America; a single, global organisation whose ‘Kingpin’ or ‘Tsar of Vice’ was Lucky Luciano.

Lucky Luciano’s true story does not really fit Kefauver’s image of him. In 1946, he had been released suspiciously early from a long sentence for pimping; he was expelled from the country and set up shop in Naples. There he did a bit of drug dealing with his Sicilian and Neapolitan friends, but he was certainly not the ruler of a criminal conspiracy, a super-boss whose every order was faithfully implemented in every corner of the world.

Many in the United States remained understandably unconvinced by Kefauver’s sensationalist account, and some of them refused to believe that the mafia existed at all. Even the man charged with drafting the committee’s
recommendations called it a ‘romantic myth’. The FBI would continue to remain sceptical about the existence of the mafia for several years yet. Kefauver had overplayed his hand.

Giuseppe Prezzolini, a professor at Columbia University, was the Italian press’s most prominent American correspondent. His views on organised crime were much more representative of the most widespread attitudes in Italy than were those of the Communists. When he received calls from worried Americans wanting to know if the mafia really existed in Italy, he was moved to write a withering dismissal of Kefauver’s ‘grotesque legend’. The mafia in Sicily, Prezzolini explained, was not really a criminal organisation, but a product of centuries of bad government; it was ‘a state of mind that expressed the resentment of a people that wanted to take justice into its own hands because it believed it had not received justice from its rulers’. Only in the dynamic capitalist environment of the United States could
mafiosi
be considered hoodlums:

The modern felon in America, even if he bears an Italian name, is no longer an Italian felon. Rather he is a felon brought up in America and schooled in lawbreaking in America; he earned his degree at the American university of crime. America transformed his character.

The notorious Brooklyn waterfront gangster, Albert ‘the Mad Hatter’ Anastasia was a very good example. The fact that he was born Umberto Anastasio in Calabria in 1902 meant nothing because, ‘I have never heard it said that a mafia has taken root in Calabria.’

Early in 1953, Kefauver’s findings were translated into Italian as
Il gangsterismo in America
, the first book on the mafia to be published in Italy since the Second World War. Many commentators on all sides of the political spectrum passed over Kefauver’s mafia-as-global-conspiracy in embarrassed silence, concentrating instead on what the Senator had to say about the United States. For most Italians,
gangsterismo
, as the ugly linguistic import implied, remained an exclusively American affair.

Something spectacularly newsworthy would be needed to succeed where the Kefauver hearings had failed, and break Italy’s silence. Something like a homicidal maniac. Or a gangland beauty queen. Or an alien invasion of Calabria. Suddenly, in 1955, all three of these things arrived, exposing at last just how deep-rooted the new Republic’s mafia problem really was.

PART VIII

1955

 
39 

T
HE
M
ONSTER OF
P
RESINACI

L
ATE ON THE MORNING OF
17 A
PRIL
1955,
A PEASANT CALLED
S
ERAFINO
C
ASTAGNA
from the Calabrian village of Presinaci ate two fried eggs without even stopping to cut himself a slice of bread. He then kissed the crucifix on the wall before hugging his wife and nine-year-old son. ‘The things of this world are no longer for me,’ he told them. ‘God has given them, and God takes them away.’

Moments later, armed with a Beretta pistol, a service rifle with bayonet fixed, and a haversack of ammunition, he loped out into the Sunday sunshine to find his first victim.

In a hovel just metres away lived Castagna’s distant cousin Domenicantonio Castagna. When Serafino got there, he found only Domenicantonio’s sixty-year-old mother, so he shot her six times.

He then caught sight of Francesca Badolato, who had once been his brother’s fiancée. He fired and missed, and she managed to escape, scooping a baby into her arms as she ran. Castagna was not a quick mover because a congenital disability had made his right leg three centimetres shorter than the left. But he pursued Francesca all the same, and saw her take refuge in the house belonging to an aged barber. Castagna battered at the door and smashed a window while the barber and his wife pleaded with him to spare the girl. Finally, frustrated, he took a step back and shot the couple dead. Their names were Nicola Polito (71) and his wife, Maria (60), and only two weeks earlier they had been reunited following Nicola’s three-year stint in Argentina.

Castagna then followed the tinny murmur of a radio to the Communist Party centre. Peering in, he saw no one who had done him any harm and
moved on. When he approached the Christian Democrat HQ nearby, they saw his pistol and begged for mercy. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he told them. ‘I’m only looking for some friends of mine to say hello.’

Castagna now headed out of the village, making for the hay-barn where he had hidden more ammunition. When it dawned on him that his route ran past his father’s plot, bitter childhood memories began to flash through his mind. His father had abandoned the family for other women, and wasted what little money the Castagnas had. Minutes later, Serafino was staring at his father and uttering a tearful sentence of death: ‘Can you see what you’ve brought me to? You didn’t give us a proper upbringing. Look at the abyss I’m in, at thirty-four years old . . . As a father, I adore you. But as a man, you must die.’

A single shot left the old man writhing on the ground. Serafino bayoneted him to end the agony, and then stooped to plant a farewell kiss on his father’s hand.

On his way to the next target, he passed an old cowherd who enquired, ‘What brings you by these parts, Serafino?’ ‘I’m hunting two-footed wolves,’ came the reply. A short time later, Castagna found Pasquale Petrolo, who was sitting on the threshing floor in front of his farmhouse and chatting happily to his wife. Castagna shot him five times.

Then he went on the run.

Within hours, reporters across Italy were updating their readers on the manhunt. There were roadblocks at every crossroads. Patrols of
Carabinieri
scoured the slopes of Mount Poro, stopping to level burp guns at the goatherds, scrutinising each sun-weathered face to see if it matched the description: ‘Medium height, robust physique, blond hair, blue eyes. Affected by heart disease and a duodenal ulcer.’ The press called Castagna ‘the Monster of Presinaci’.

Castagna’s home village was a place of stunted peasants, black pigs and fat flies, a mountain hamlet of scarcely a hundred crude stone houses lost in a neglected corner of Italy’s most neglected region. Inasmuch as most Italians knew anything about Calabria, they knew it as a region whose timeless poverty generated periodic explosions of peasant savagery. Serafino Castagna’s homicidal rampage bore all the signs of being just another Calabrian tragedy. Indeed local legend even provided a script for the slaughter. ‘Castagna has certainly read the story of the brigand Musolino, and would like to imitate his deeds’, proclaimed the policeman in charge of the search. The ‘Monster of Presinaci’ became the ‘Second Musolino’, a candidate for the succession as King of Aspromonte. (At the time, the original King of Aspromonte was living out the last months of his life in the Reggio Calabria mental hospital.) Castagna even followed Musolino in issuing messages to the
authorities. Before setting out on his rampage, he scribbled a list of twenty people he intended to murder, and left it behind for his wife to hand in to the police. He later wrote to the local sergeant of the
Carabinieri
to proclaim his plan of vengeance: ‘I’ll kill until my last cartridge.’