Blood Brotherhoods (64 page)

The networks of patronage, including mafia patronage, that supported many politicians in southern Italy were an inherently unstable power base. Inevitably, every so often, mafia activity would get out of hand, the violence would escalate, and loyal Christian Democrat supporters would begin to protest. At such times, even governments that were constitutionally averse to drawing attention to the mafia problem were forced to respond. It turned out that the Monster of Presinaci affair was by no means an isolated episode. The year 1955 was a very violent one in Calabria.

One or two journalists picked up signs that all was not well. A correspondent from the Naples newspaper
Il Mattino
, the most influential Christian Democrat daily in the South, visited Calabria a few weeks after Castagna was captured. He discovered that the province of Reggio Calabria was undergoing an alarming crime wave—or at least a crime wave that would have been alarming if it had being going on in any other Italian region. Buses and cars were being hijacked in the countryside, extortion payments demanded from farmers and factory owners, and witnesses were intimidated. Then there was the shocking case of Francesco Cricelli, a
mafioso
from San Calogero in the province of Catanzaro, who was beheaded for stealing a razor from his boss.
Il Mattino
demanded government action to reassert the authority of the law.

By the time these reports were published, somewhere within the courtyards, the loggias and the criss-crossing corridors of the Ministry of the Interior in Rome, the government machinery was already slowly turning its attention to the problem of law and order in the southernmost point of the Italian mainland.

Giuseppe Aloi was an entrepreneur from Reggio Calabria who employed some 150 people making bricks. The day before Serafino Castagna’s rampage, Aloi wrote a letter to the Minister of the Interior. He was frightened and angry: his son had recently fought off a kidnapping attempt in the very centre of Reggio. Since then, the family had received threats and demands for money, and the police locally had not been able to identify the culprits. The situation was so bad that he was considering closing down his business. Aloi’s letter also pointed out the rising crime in the area and said:

It is a notorious fact that the underworld organisation has reappeared in almost every town in the province. There are numerous
mafiosi
who, despite not having any profession or trade that is useful to society, flaunt an easy and luxurious lifestyle based on suspect wealth; they offer their services to farmers or impose extraordinary tributes on them in return for assurances that property and belongings will be respected.

Two days after the brick-maker wrote his letter, plain-clothes police in two unmarked cars tried to trap the extortionists on a winding mountain road on the northern slopes of Aspromonte. One of the unmarked cars was targeted from the wooded slopes by bursts of machine-gun and hunting-rifle fire. Miraculously, four officers suffered only slight wounds. The Calabrian mafia was heavily armed and prepared to confront the forces of order directly.

Following a request for further information, the Prefect of Reggio Calabria (the Minister of the Interior’s eyes and ears on the ground) responded with a report that confirmed Aloi’s picture. Calabria had ‘a vast network of underworld affiliates’ that was able to assure its own immunity from the law through
omertà
and ‘a well-ordered system of protection that even reached into politics’; ‘often, at election time, these individuals [i.e.,
mafiosi
] transform themselves into propagandists for one party or another, and try to influence the election results with the weight of their clienteles’. The Calabrian mafia was beginning to present a problem of public order that could not be dismissed as the work of a single, psychologically fragile peasant.

Soon after taking office in July, a new Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior decided that urgent action was required. There would be an anti-mafia crackdown on a scale that Italy had not seen since the days of the Fascist repression of the late 1920s. A dynamic new chief of police, Carmelo Marzano, was lined up to lead what would become known as the Marzano Operation. Local wags, who could not resist a pun, joked that it was as if Martians (
Marziani
) had landed. Calabria was about to greet invaders from planet law and order.

 
40 

M
ARS ATTACKS
!

T
HE
M
INISTER WHO ORDERED THE CRACKDOWN IN
C
ALABRIA WAS
F
ERNANDO
Tambroni, a Christian Democrat from the Marche region. A timid man in public, Tambroni attracted little press attention. His policy utterances were cagey and abstruse, even by Christian Democrat standards. The only obviously distinctive things about him were his alabaster good looks and his elegance. (He was a loyal customer of Del Rosso, the elite Roman tailor.) In private, Tambroni had a belief system with three pillars: the cult of San Gabriele dell’Addolorata, the influence of his personal astrologer, and a bent for compiling secret dossiers on his allies and enemies.

Despite these personal foibles, when Tambroni announced the beginning of the Marzano Operation it seemed like a good, old-fashioned, right-wing, law-and-order policy of a kind that could be witnessed in other Western European countries. The Marzano Operation was presented as a test run of Tambroni’s law-and-order platform—a drive to reinforce the citizens’ trust in the state (and thereby in the Christian Democrats). Early in the operation, Minister Tambroni gave a newspaper interview in which he denounced a ‘government by organised crime’ in Calabria, and promised that he would ‘get to the bottom of things’ and ‘show no favours to anyone’.

Chief of Police Carmelo Marzano’s early reports to Tambroni from Calabria were the manifesto of an ambitious man primed for vigorous action. It was no exaggeration, Marzano wrote, to say that the population was ‘literally in the grip of terror’. The crime rate was alarmingly high. But many, many more offences went unreported because of public fear. Racketeering was systematic: forestry, taverns and restaurants, the state lottery, the bus
service—nothing was allowed to work unless what Marzano called ‘certain compromises’ were reached. Hundreds of convicted criminals were at large in the province, including fifty-nine murderers; these fugitives paraded the state’s failure to impose itself on the territory. One of them, the notorious Brooklyn-born Angelo Macrì, had walked up to a
Carabiniere
in the centre of Delianova and shot him in the head; his status within the Honoured Society had grown immeasurably as a result. Another convicted murderer on the run was the equally notorious boss of Bova, Vincenzo Romeo. Romeo lived openly in his territory, married in the presence of the bosses of the Honoured Society, fathered children, managed his business affairs and cared for his ten beloved dogs. On one occasion, when the
Carabinieri
came looking for him, the women of Bova simultaneously waved sheets from their windows to warn him of the danger.

The new police chief found the state of law enforcement even more shocking than the state of public order. He was horrified by his headquarters, the
Questura
: this poky, filthy building seemed half abandoned; it had no shutters on the windows to keep out the summer heat, and not even any railings on the balconies. Whereas a town of comparable size in the north or centre of Italy might have five or six local stations in addition to the
Questura
, in Reggio, a city that now had one of the highest crime rates in the country, there were no other police stations. So the
Questura
was permanently overrun by citizens from across the province clamouring to report a crime, or to apply for a licence or certificate. There were no cells, and no secluded space where a witness or informer could be interviewed. Visits from grandees making special pleas for arrested supporters were a regular occurrence. The
Questura
seemed less a command centre than a bazaar.

Many of the men now under Marzano’s command had taken on the same dilapidated and immobile air as the furniture they sat on. They had close contacts in the community—friendships, family ties, business interests—and thus placed living a quiet life before applying themselves to their more abrasive duties. One officer suspected of conniving with criminals was still doing his job years after a transfer order had been issued. The Flying Squad—the plain-clothes unit whose responsibilities were supposed to include chasing after those fifty-nine convicted murderers—numbered only fourteen men, and less than half of them actually turned up to work with any regularity. Law enforcement in the province lacked even the most basic tools of modern policing: dogs, bicycles, or the radios that were essential if officers searching the wilds of Aspromonte were to coordinate their moves.

The Festival of the Madonna of the Mountain at Polsi was an obvious early opportunity for Police Chief Marzano to show that Minister Tambroni’s alien invaders were no joke. The authorities were well aware that the festival was
used by the Honoured Society to conceal an annual general meeting of some kind, although quite what happened at the meeting and why was not clear. In 1954, as so often in the past, the pilgrimage had seen a settling of mafia accounts: after the pilgrims had gone home, the corpses of two young men with multiple gunshot wounds were found near the sanctuary. This year, with Marzano in charge, there were roadblocks and patrols in the woods. Fourteen men were taken into custody on charges ranging from carrying weapons to attempted murder and kidnapping. Marzano’s line manager, the Prefect of Reggio, telegraphed the Ministry to announce that the pilgrimage had passed off without incident.

Over the coming days and weeks, Minister Tambroni was scatter-gunned with telegrams announcing the recapture of one convicted Calabrian
mafioso
after another. Police arrested two of the men who had tried to blackmail Giuseppe Aloi, the brick manufacturer, and recovered numerous weapons in the same operation. They even managed to collar a town hall employee in Gioia Tauro who was stealing blank identity cards for gangsters who needed to become someone else. Vincenzo Romeo—the fugitive with ten dogs—was arrested, as (eventually) was Angelo Macrì, who had fled back to his native America. Marzano even went on a lone expedition up into Aspromonte, by car and on foot, and single-handedly brought back a renegade murderer from Bova.

Five weeks after arriving in Reggio, hyperactive Police Chief Marzano felt entitled to dictate a toadying dispatch to Minister Tambroni:

The face of the whole province has been transformed. The citizenry approve of the operation. There has been a tide of beneficial renewal, and trust in the state’s authority has been reborn. The citizens know that they owe it all
exclusively
to Your Excellency’s decisiveness and resolution. Without any trace of rhetorical exaggeration, I can guarantee that if Your Excellency came to visit Reggio, You would be literally carried shoulder-high.

The public seemed to like what was going on; the press certainly did. Correspondents arrived in Calabria in the kind of numbers previously only attracted by one of the region’s frequent natural disasters. Remarkably, as a result of the Marzano Operation, Italy began its first-ever national debate about organised crime in Calabria. Naturally enough, journalists filed copy that contained lots of colourful material about the secret criminal sect that went by the name of ‘mafia’, or ‘Honoured Society’, or ‘Fibbia’ (‘Buckle’). Indeed a new name emerged from interviews with local people: ’ndrangheta. Pronounced an-
dran
-get-ah, it means ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’ in the Greek-based dialect of the southern slopes of Aspromonte. The word has a long
history, but its known association with the Honoured Society only begins in the 1930s. ‘’Ndrangata’ was one of many names used by Calabrian
mafiosi
to surface during Fascist police operations. The publicity created by the Marzano Operation in 1955 ensured that ’ndrangheta soon won out as the brotherhood’s official moniker, used by members and non-members alike. After some three-quarters of a century of growing in the shadows, Calabria’s version of the mafia had at last attracted enough public attention to merit a commonly agreed-upon name of its own.

The Marzano Operation also caused some Calabrians to recover their memories. One notable example was Corrado Alvaro, the region’s best-known writer. He was born in San Luca, the ‘Bethlehem of organised crime’ on the slopes of Aspromonte whose criminals act as guardians of the Honoured Society’s customs. Alvaro was no ’ndrangheta sympathiser. But he could scarcely avoid learning about it as he grew up. The stories from his early life that Alvaro would later publish make it clear that he knew a great deal about Calabria’s Honoured Society. After the Second World War, when Alvaro moved to Rome, he became an unofficial spokesman for the voiceless poor of his home region; he turned Aspromonte’s downtrodden peasants into archetypes of human resilience. Perhaps through a misguided desire to protect Calabria from bad publicity, or perhaps for darker and more mysterious reasons, Alvaro kept a long silence about the region’s criminal brotherhood. In 1949, denouncing the feudal squalor still endured by shepherds and peasants, he wrote that, ‘There were attempts to set up criminal societies in imitation of the mafia, but they never took root. Still today, Calabria is one of the safest parts of the country, at any time, and in any isolated corner.’ The jotted notes in Alvaro’s diary show that these remarks were in bad faith: