Blood Brotherhoods (66 page)

The Italian state could hardly have given a clearer demonstration of its desperately short attention span. Tambroni’s policing apparatus did not even seem keen to really understand the ’ndrangheta as an organisation. The entire chain of command, right down from the Ministry of the Interior in Rome to the junior officers on the ground in Calabria, had at their disposal much of the information needed to build up a convincing picture of the Calabrian mafia. On 28 May 1955, only three months before the start of the Marzano Operation, police and
Carabinieri
had raided a house in Rosarno and found a notebook containing the ’ndrangheta’s rules. Two and a half weeks later, the Monster of Presinaci was finally captured, and made clear his intention to tell the police everything. The authorities knew a great deal: the ’ndrangheta’s cellular, territorially based structure; its extortion rackets and culture of vendetta; the way it set itself as an alternative to the law, and its ability to forge bonds with the feuding cliques and factions of Calabrian politics. Yet there is not a jot of evidence that Police Chief Marzano was even mildly interested in putting these crucial new sources of intelligence to any practical use. Nor, in the small mountain of official correspondence generated by the Marzano Operation, is there any hint that the authorities had a historical memory of the Honoured Society’s development, or of the lessons to be learned from previous attempts to combat it. In short, no one associated with the ‘Martian invasion’ thought that to beat the ’ndrangheta, it might be a good idea to understand it from the inside.

In parliament in Rome, the Communists suspected that fighting the ’ndrangheta was never the Marzano Operation’s real aim. They were convinced that Tambroni’s promise to ‘show no favours’ was hollow and cynical from the outset. The most flagrant instances of organised criminal support for politicians involved Christian Democrats. One Socialist MP said in parliament that Vincenzo Romeo, the boss with ten dogs, had gone round with a machine gun shouting, ‘Either you vote Christian Democrat, or I’ll kill you.’ Yet Marzano was being ideologically selective in the
mafiosi
he rounded up, the Communists protested. The DC mayor of the provincial capital Reggio Calabria had not been detained, despite serious evidence of links to organised crime. By contrast the Communist mayor of the mountain village of Canolo, Nicola D’Agostino, had been arrested and sent into internal exile.

There was definitely some substance in the Communist claims that Tambroni’s Martian invasion had an ideological bias. However, the D’Agostino case was probably an unfortunate one for the Communists to cite, because it is clear that this particular mayor was a member of the PCI, while never ceasing to be an ’ndrangheta boss. The police claimed that he used the party
to exert his personal power over the town. D’Agostino was not the only case of the kind: the Monster of Presinaci’s last victim was a Communist
’ndranghetista
, for example. Communists in southern Calabria had fewer antibodies against mafia infiltration than did their comrades in western Sicily, who could count so many martyrs to the fight against organised crime. Here and there in Calabria, the ’ndrangheta had the power to hollow out even the ideology of its enemies.

That said, it seems that Tambroni had no particularly cunning political plan. He simply rushed into the Marzano Operation, and rushed out again when he realised just how profoundly rooted the ’ndrangheta was. Sensibly, Interior Minister Tambroni decided to take the plaudits for Marzano’s easy early victories, dispatch a few gangsters to penal colonies for a couple of years, and then revert to managing Calabria in the normal way. Symptomatic of that return to normality was the final outcome of the Monster of Presinaci case. In September 1957, Serafino Castagna was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was inevitable. But of the sixty-five men implicated by his evidence, forty-six were acquitted and the other nineteen received suspended sentences of between two and three years.

The story of the Marzano Operation and the Monster of Presinaci is typical of the state’s response when violence flared up from the underworld. Once that violence faded from the headlines, the authorities resorted to their old habits of cohabiting with mafia power.

 
41 

T
HE
P
RESIDENT OF
P
OTATO
P
RICES
(
AND HIS WIDOW
)

B
Y THE MID
-1950
S THERE WERE SIGNS THAT THE
I
TALIAN ECONOMY HAD ENTERED A
period of sustained growth that would finally leave the hardships of wartime behind. In 1950, industrial production overtook pre-war levels. Inflation, which had reached 73.5 per cent per year in 1947, came down to single digits. Unemployment was dropping steadily too. The South still lagged well behind the North, but in the cities of all regions Italians were beginning to spend more. Better food was the first item on the national shopping list, notably the staples of what would later become known as the Mediterranean diet: pasta, and particularly fruit and vegetables.

One place that felt the effects of increased consumption was the wholesale fruit and vegetable market in the Vasto quarter of Naples: roughly 30 per cent of Italy’s fruit and vegetable exports were funnelled through it. While other parts of Italy could manage a seasonal trade in one or two specialised crops, the hyper-fertile hinterland of Naples grew every conceivable food plant in year-round abundance. The fresh tomatoes, courgettes, potatoes, peaches and lemons emanating from the region every year were worth some 16 billion lire (roughly $300 million in today’s values). A further 12 billion lire ($220 million) came from walnuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, raisins, figs and other dried foods.

Yet, for all its wealth, the wholesale market in Naples was a shambolic spectacle. Here was one of the city’s economic nerve-centres, located at the railhead, within easy reach of the port. Yet it was little more than a cluster of skeletal hangars, where rusting wire mesh and crumbling concrete
still betrayed damage from the war. A variety of ramshackle vehicles skated through the permanent puddles in the hangars’ shade: donkey wagons and lorries, handcarts and tiny cars with comically outsized roof-racks—all of them loaded with teetering crate stacks of aubergines, lettuces, apricots and cherries. The market was serviced by a few cramped offices, a post office and a couple of bank branches in the surrounding streets. There were no teleprinters or rows of phones. Deals, however big, were done on the pavements of via Firenze and Corso Novara, face to face, in stagey exclamations of scorn and disbelief. Now and then, when a serious deal was in the offing or a major account had to be settled, a big-shot vegetable trader from a provincial market town would climb out of his sports car, smooth his hair and his suit, and receive the reverential greetings of agents and labour.

In 1955, one of the most famous murder cases of the era exposed just how powerful and dangerous a caste these fruit and vegetable dealers were. The trial of the ‘new camorra’, it was called. For, in 1955, Italy began hesitantly to use the ‘c’ word again. What the case demonstrated, to anyone who cared to look closely, was that the mafias were advancing in step with the growth of the Italian economy. Business was becoming one of the main drivers of mafia history.

Pasquale Simonetti was one of those fruit and vegetable dealers. Two metres tall and thirty-one years old, he had the bulk of a heavyweight and a physiognomy to match: his hard little eyes were pushed far apart by a thick nose (natural or broken, it was hard to tell); his square, burly head was mounted on a neck that defied his tailor’s best efforts to restrain it in a shirt collar. He was known, unimaginatively, as Pascalone ’e Nola—‘Big Pasquale from Nola’ (Nola being a market town not far from the city).

On the morning of 16 July 1955, Big Pasquale was shot twice as he peeled an orange he had just bought from a stall. The shooter, a young blond man in a slate-grey suit, fled unmolested. The victim, abandoned to haemorrhage into the gutter by his sidekicks, died in hospital near dawn the following day. Police moved his body straight to the morgue to avoid an unsightly pilgrimage of mourning by the criminal fraternity from the countryside.

As yet, nobody seemed to want to make the connection between Pasquale Simonetti’s death and the huge fruit and vegetable economy. The traditional Neapolitan reticence about mob stories was still in force. The profiles of Big Pasquale that followed his murder did not make it beyond the crime pages of the local dailies. In addition to trading in the produce of Campanian farms, Big Pasquale was already familiar to the local press as a smuggler and enforcer. Some of his deeds had been as flagrantly public as his shooting. In 1951, near the main entrance to the railway station, he had bludgeoned a man with a wrench wrapped in a newspaper; the victim told the police he had not seen anything. Then there was the gun battle in the town centre of Giugliano that had earned him his time in Poggioreale prison, where he became the boss of his wing. In short, Big Pasquale seemed like just another thug from the province, and no one knew or cared much what went on out there. If he had been killed on his home turf rather than in the centre of the city, then the story would not have merited more than a few lines.

Fruit and vegetable racket. The wholesale market in Naples was a major source of income for the camorra in the 1950s.

Nevertheless, Big Pasquale’s death was just news enough for one or two journalists to want to bulk it out with human interest. There were rumours that he had gone straight before he died. The suggested explanation for this unlikely character transformation was his new wife: a broad-hipped, small-town beauty queen from Castellammare di Stabia. While Big Pasquale was in prison, she had written to him every day, vowing to keep him off the ‘steep and painful path of sin’, and gushing her teenage daydreams: ‘I feel truly emotional, and even a little bit afraid, when I think my nice Tarzan will be able to carry me far, far away from this ugly place to go and live in an enchanted castle where fairies live.’ Baptised Assunta Maresca, Big Pasquale’s young widow was known by her family as Pupetta (‘Little Doll’). She was expecting a baby when her husband died.

On 4 October 1955, two and a half months after her Tarzan’s murder, a visibly pregnant Pupetta asked to be driven from Castellammare to the wholesale market in Naples; she stopped off on the way to put flowers on Big Pasquale’s grave. In Corso Novara, only a few metres from the point where he had fallen, she encountered another prime exemplar of the fruit-and-vegetable-trader type: Antonio Esposito, aka ‘Big Tony from Pomigliano’. An altercation ensued, it seems, during which Pupetta’s driver ran away. Then the shooting started. Pupetta’s FIAT 1100 was hit several times, including once through the seat that the driver had just vacated. Pupetta, who had been firing from the rear seat with a Beretta 7.65 that Big Pasquale had given her, was unharmed. She escaped on foot. However, her target, Big Tony from Pomigliano, caught five fatal bullets.

‘Widowed, pregnant beauty queen in gangland gun battle’: now here was a story to attract national attention to the strange world of Campanian wholesale greengrocery.