Blood Brotherhoods (65 page)

Boss of the Festival of the Madonna (Polsi, San Luca). A provincial boss could not be elected in 1948 because **** [name omitted] had just got out of jail, wanted to live in tranquillity, and did not accept the job. From that moment on the Honoured Society has been divided into three zones: the Ionian coast, the Tyrrhenian coast, and the Straits, with no overall
capo
.

The ’ndrangheta’s high-level internal politics were evidently an open secret in San Luca, and even beyond. But in public, Alvaro kept his silence. At around the same time, he jotted an aphorism in his diary that would later become famous: ‘The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.’ Perhaps Alvaro, better than many, knew what that fear felt like.

In 1955, following the Marzano Operation, Alvaro changed his mind. He wrote about the ’ndrangheta in a column in the
Corriere della Sera
, and
memories of the ’ndrangheta from his youth surfaced in his other writings. Indeed he probably did more than anyone to help the new name catch on.

In the end, restoring Corrado Alvaro’s memory and naming the ’ndrangheta turned out to be the Marzano Operation’s only long-term achievements. And the key obstacle to achieving anything more lasting was Minister Tambroni’s refusal to seriously tackle the ’ndrangheta’s friends in politics.

The papers from Interior Ministry archives now allow us to peer behind the scenes of the Marzano Operation. Those documents show just how much information Tambroni’s civil servants gathered about politicians who were hand in glove with gangsters in Calabria. The Martian invasion of 1955 revealed some darkly comic cameos of bad faith and connivance.

One case in point involved a typical southern grandee: Antonio Capua, an MP from the Liberal Party, one of the Christian Democrats’ coalition partners. Indeed, what passed for the ‘Liberal Party’ in Calabria was actually Capua’s personal clientele. Capua also sat across the Cabinet table from Fernando Tambroni, as Junior Minister for Agriculture and Forestry. Given that both agriculture and forestry played a big role in the local economy, Capua’s job meant that he had a great many tax-funded favours to bestow on his friends. Tambroni discovered that Capua often pressed officials in private to grant driving and gun licences to known
’ndranghetisti
, and his local election agents mingled closely with thugs from the Honoured Society.

Capua was already in the headlines in Calabria before the Marzano Operation began. In a mysterious incident that reeked of the ’ndrangheta, a group of men fired shots at his wife’s car as she was driving high on Aspromonte. Capua tried to cover the whole story up. When the press got hold of it, they published a garbled but even more worrying version, saying that Capua himself had been the target of a would-be assassination. An attempt on the life of a government minister was more than local news, and the national newspapers duly took an interest.

When Tambroni’s Martians landed in the autumn, the new chief of police investigated both the shooting episode and Capua’s underworld friends. But worse was to follow for the Junior Minister: many people jumped to the conclusion that Capua had called the Martians in as a result of the assassination attempt. The ’ndrangheta took the same view, and began to wonder why their favourite grandee had brought so much trouble down on their heads. The Junior Minister was in a desperate predicament; he looked like a crook to the police and a traitor to the ’ndrangheta.

On 14 September 1955, Junior Minister Capua made a desperate bid to save his credibility with
both
the ’ndrangheta and the police. He arranged to meet with Police Chief Marzano because he wanted to discuss the case of a suspect that Marzano was interrogating at the time. The suspect, an
’ndranghetista
called Pizzi who was also the mayor of Condofuri, was Capua’s election agent for the whole Ionian coast of the province of Reggio Calabria. Capua presumably hoped that his prestige as a Junior Minister would intimidate the chief of police. That, after all, is just how countless
mafiosi
had been protected over the previous century. But the new chief of police was confident enough in his own political backing not to be intimidated. Instead, he calmly showed Capua the damning evidence he had already accumulated against Mayor Pizzi, who was sitting in the room with them. The Junior Minister responded with the kind of brass neck of which only a certain kind of Italian politician is capable. First, he feigned surprise and disappointment. Then he calmly told Marzano that his friend Mayor Pizzi was an honest man who had, despite good intentions, been corrupted by his environment. At that, he turned to Mayor Pizzi and gave him a finger-wagging in tones of plaintive sincerity, telling him to change his ways and collaborate with the police ‘from now on’.

Alas, the records do not tell us Fernando Tambroni’s reactions when he read this story about his Cabinet colleague. We do not know whether he was shocked, or whether he laughed fit to strain the seams on his Del Rosso suit. But we can make a guess at his thinking. Tambroni might have reasoned that exposing Capua would upset the delicate balance of the coalition government. Or perhaps he simply followed one of the old, unwritten rules of Italian institutional life. Every governing faction, every party clique, had to get into bed at some point or another with politicians who were ‘friends of the friends’ in Sicily, Campania or Calabria. Start a serious investigation into one of them, and there was no telling where it would end. No matter that law enforcement on the ground in southern Italy said that the mafias could never be eradicated if their political protectors remained untouched. Better to let it all lie. The evidence against Junior Minister Capua was buried.

Capua also managed to smooth things over with his friends in the ’ndrangheta. Or so we must assume, for he was re-elected at the next poll.

Another politician whose nefarious dealings came to light during the Marzano Operation came from the Minister of the Interior’s own party, the Christian Democrats. A top-secret report to Tambroni indicated that Domenico Catalano was part of a close-knit group of three DC chiefs who had managed to insert themselves into powerful positions in local quangos and Catholic organisations. There were strong suspicions that all three of these Christian Democrats had links to organised crime. Catalano even boasted publicly that he had arranged for a previous chief of police to be
transferred away from Calabria when he became too enthusiastic in his pursuit of
’ndranghetisti
. Most worryingly of all, Catalano had a seat on the ‘Provincial Commission for Police Measures’. This was a crucial body that ruled on cases in which the police asked for a dangerous suspect to be whisked off into internal exile on a penal colony without a proper trial. (As we have seen, internal exile had been in use in Italy since the days when the
Carabinieri
were equipped with muskets and horses rather than machine guns and jeeps. It was not only highly dubious from a legal point of view, it was also totally counter-productive, since the penal colonies were notorious recruiting grounds for the mafias.)

During the Marzano Operation, the police filed requests for batches of ’ndrangheta suspects to be shipped to the remote penal colony of Ustica, off the northern coast of Sicily. But Minister Tambroni’s man on the ground, the Prefect of Reggio Calabria, noticed that Domenico Catalano displayed what they called a ‘certain indulgence’ towards men with particularly bloodcurdling criminal records. A number of parish priests also gave evidence before the Provincial Commission for Police Measures in the same strangely indulgent fashion. But rather than make trouble, the Prefect decided to act in a classic Christian Democrat fashion, and had a quiet word with the Archbishop.

Now the Archbishop of Reggio Calabria at the time was certainly no friend of the ’ndrangheta. He had only recently penned a pastoral letter denouncing ‘shadowy secret societies that, under the pretext of honour and strength, teach and impose crime, vendetta and abuse of power’. We can only imagine how disturbed he would have been at the news that Domenico Catalano, a politician who was a senior member of local Church-backed organisations, was in league with organised crime. But rather than create a fuss, the Archbishop decided to act in classic Italian Church fashion, and have a quiet word with Catalano himself. The Archbishop gently persuaded Catalano to take his responsibilities on the Provincial Commission for Police Measures more seriously.

The little chain of quiet words seemed to work. For a while, Catalano voted the same way as everyone else on the commission, which began to send
’ndranghetisti
into internal exile.

But then the Provincial Commission for Police Measures was asked to rule on the case of a notoriously powerful criminal who has already played (or rather
danced
) an important role in our story: Antonio Macrì, known as don ’Ntoni, who reputedly joined the
Carabiniere
Master Joe in a
tarantella
at the Festival of the Madonna of Polsi during the last years of Fascism. By 1955, don ’Ntoni was not only the ‘chief cudgel’ in the market town of Siderno, he was also one of the most powerful bosses in the whole of Calabria.
In the autumn of 1953, don ’Ntoni was known to have presided over a plenary meeting of the ’ndrangheta during the Polsi Festival. (A fact that constitutes yet more evidence that the ’ndrangheta has always had coordinating structures of some kind.)

Now, sending a rank-and-file
’ndranghetista
to a penal colony was one thing; confining don ’Ntoni was quite another. On 3 September 1955, with the chief cudgel waiting in the corridor outside the room where the Provincial Commission for Police Measures was sitting, Domenico Catalano got to his feet. He solemnly informed the commission’s other members that he felt it was his duty to make a declaration that ‘concerned the Vatican’. He then told a tale that left everyone else in the room open-mouthed.

Catalano’s tale went something like this. Some years ago, the Bishop of Locri discovered that a number of priests had been stealing money from a Church charity. The Bishop forced the priests to give back the money, Catalano explained. At which the priests hired an assassin to do away with the Bishop. Luckily the Bishop heard tell of the plot to kill him, and wisely sought protection from the dominant
’ndranghetista
in the area, don ’Ntoni Macrì. Don ’Ntoni, Domenico Catalano revealed, had used his good offices to save the Bishop’s life. Surely a man capable of such a noble gesture deserved merciful treatment from the Provincial Commission for Police Measures?

The other commissioners were not convinced. Don ’Ntoni Macrì was promptly dispatched to a penal colony, forcing a brief pause in his formidable criminal career. A full report was sent to Minister Tambroni in Rome.

Quite whether there really was any truth in Catalano’s highly unlikely story about the plan to kill the Bishop of Locri we will never know, short of a documented declaration by the Papacy. But the whole affair is nonetheless exemplary. Italy’s problem with organised crime was not just that mafia influence seeped into the state through private channels. It was also that prefects, politicians and archbishops preferred to use the very same private channels. Instead of respecting the law, they preferred to have a quiet word.

Once again, Minister of the Interior Tambroni read this report and did nothing. No matter that the case involved a clear instance of a politician trying to bend the law in an
’ndranghetista
’s favour. Domenico Catalano, the spinner of the strange tale of the bishop saved by the mafia boss, kept his seat on the Provincial Commission for Police Measures for years to come.

On 27 October 1955—a mere fifty-four days after landing—Police Chief Marzano got back into his flying saucer and left Calabria for good. It was hopeless to imagine that less than two months of intensive police activity
could make any long-term difference. All too soon, the
’ndranghetisti
would return from their penal colonies and everything would return to normal.