Blood Brotherhoods (68 page)

If there had been less muddle about the Sicilian mafia in the 1950s, then it might also have occurred to observers of the Pupetta Maresca trial that the camorra families of the Neapolitan hinterland bore a resemblance to the mafia cells of Sicily and Calabria. They all had power built on violence, wealth that straddled the legal and illegal economies, and an insatiable hunger for fruit and vegetables. In March 1955, just seven months before Pupetta shot her husband’s killer, a
mafioso
called Gaetano Galatolo, known as Tano Alatu, was shot dead at the entrance to Palermo’s new wholesale market in the Acquasanta quarter. A factional battle to control the market then ensued. Southern Calabria had no single wholesale market to compare with those in Naples and Palermo; nor was any blood shed in this period over lettuces and pears. But it is known that the local mob controlled the smaller local markets in Reggio Calabria, Palmi, Gioia Tauro, Rosarno, Siderno, Locri and Vibo Valentia. As Italy recovered from the hungry years of war and reconstruction, and made its first hesitant steps towards prosperity, the mafias established a stranglehold on the South’s food supply.

After the events of 1955 in Naples, some of the best current affairs commentators who were not aligned with the PCI came close to these profoundly worrying conclusions. One example was the liberal intellectual and politician Francesco Compagna: his magazine
Nord e Sud
published a number of important analyses of organised crime in the following years. But at a
time when the only women within the orbit of organised crime who made themselves visible were the black-clad mafia widows of Sicily and Calabria, even such serious observers struggled to see Pupetta Maresca as anything more than an anomaly. The overwhelming view was that any women who might happen to associate with gangsters did so only because they were typical, family-bound southern females; that they played no active part in the mafia system.

Pupetta received an eighteen-year term for the premeditated murder of Big Tony from Pomigliano. And, despite her best efforts, her brother Ciro was eventually sentenced to twelve years. Many Italians remained hypnotised by the ‘Tosca’ version of her story. In the wake of the publicity surrounding the murder, the Italian film industry developed a minor obsession with her. The first film came out before the trial, in 1958. Two years after her release, in 1967, Pupetta herself starred in
Delitto a Posillipo
(
Murder in Posillipo
), based loosely on her life. In 1982, she was played in a TV movie by Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce’s granddaughter. Another TV dramatisation was transmitted in 2013, attracting criticism for romanticising the camorra. Pupetta established a twin-track career that was destined to last for years: movie celebrity and mob queen.

PART IX

THE MAFIAS’ ECONOMIC MIRACLE

 
42 

K
ING
C
ONCRETE

I
N THE LATE
1950
S AND EARLY
1960
S
,
INDUSTRY EXPANDED FASTER IN
I
TALY THAN IN
any other Western European nation. The European Common Market was a stimulus for exporters; cheap power, cheap labour and cheap capital created the right conditions for growth at home, and the north of Italy had traditions of entrepreneurship and craftsmanship to draw on. An agricultural country, much of which had still run on cartwheels in the 1940s, was now motoring into the age of mass production. Factories in the North began churning out scooters, cars and tyres in exponentially increasing numbers. This was Italy’s ‘economic miracle’, the speediest and most profound social change in the peninsula’s entire history.

Lifestyles were transformed. As tractors and fertiliser modernised agriculture, peasants abandoned the countryside in droves. Italy contracted the consumerist bug. Television began in 1954, and with it advertising for stock cubes, tinned meat, coffee pots, toothpaste . . . Italians learned to worry about armpit odour, lank hair and dandruff. Washing machines, fridges and food mixers promised an end to domestic drudgery for millions of women. Motorways were built for the legions of new car owners.

Italy even became fashionable. Brand names like Zanussi, Olivetti and Alfa Romeo conquered the continent. The Vespa and the FIAT 500 became icons. The world started to crave the peninsula’s handbags and shoes. Soon Italy’s much sniffed-at food would begin to win converts too.

During the economic miracle, Italy rapidly made itself into one of the world’s leading capitalist economies. Here was a shining success story for the Europe that had risen from the rubble of the Second World War.

But the miracle also opened up roads to riches for the mafias. And the mafias’ favourite industries knew few of the problems that would come to dog the lawful economy when the boom eventually subsided. No cycles of surge and recession. No obstreperous unions. Little in the way of competition. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the history of the mafias traces an upward curve of relentlessly growing riches. The mafias’ economic miracle would long outlast the first spurt of growth in lawful industry.

From the mid-1950s, Italy’s three major criminal organisations followed one another into four new businesses—or at least newly lucrative businesses: construction, tobacco smuggling, kidnapping, and narcotics trafficking. The story of the mafias’ economic miracle takes the form of an intricate fugue as, following a trend that was usually set in Sicily, each of the mafias moved in turn through the same cycles of greed, and each of these four businesses in turn increased mafia influence.

The two core skills the mafias deployed to exploit the construction industry, contraband tobacco, kidnapping and drugs were both highly traditional: intimidation and networking, which are what mafia crime has been all about since the outset. All the same, the new era of criminal business did not just make bosses more moneyed than they had ever been, it also profoundly altered the landscape of mafia power.

For one thing, wealth begat wealth. The profits from one illegal enterprise were ploughed into the others, and thereby multiplied. From construction, to smuggled cigarettes, to kidnapping, to narcotics: interlocking chain reactions were set in motion over the coming three decades. The mafias became what Italy’s ‘mafiologists’ describe using an English phrase: ‘holding companies’. In some senses that is what
mafiosi
ever were: 360-degree criminals who, in the nineteenth century, would take money from extortion and invest it in stolen cattle, for example. But from the late 1950s there was a quantum leap in the diversification and integration of mafia commerce.

Burgeoning criminal wealth wrought a whole series of other changes. The liaison between organised crime and the Italian state grew both more intimate and more violent. The mafias themselves changed too. They experimented with new rules and new command structures. They grew to look more like one another.
Mafiosi
from different regions increasingly moved in the same circles, doing business together, learning lessons and, sometimes, fighting.
Mafiosi
began to operate more internationally. Entirely new mafias were spawned. In the end, these interlocking changes would plunge all of the mafias into violence of a scale and savagery that had never been seen before.

It all began with a commodity that is set hard at the very foundations of the mafias’ territorial authority, and continues to this day to build many of their bridges into the lawful economy and the system of government: concrete.

Naples and Palermo have a great deal in common. Both were glorious capital cities in their time. Both are ports. And both are marked by a long-standing struggle to find an economic
raison d’être
in the era of industrial capitalism. In the early 1950s, Palermo and Naples had ancient enclaves of poverty at their heart: the alleys of the run-down quarters were bomb-damaged, crowded, filthy and poor. Typhoid and tuberculosis were regular visitors. Here the cramped, precarious housing lacked proper kitchens and lavatories. In the alleys, barefoot children played amid open drains and rubbish. Many breadwinners, male and female, lived from hand to mouth as pickpockets, three-card tricksters, pedlars, prostitutes, chambermaids, laundresses and gatherers of firewood, rags or scrap. The bricklayers and plasterers who got occasional work, or the underemployed cobblers and tailors, were all too few. Child labour was one of the mainstays of the slum economy.

Change was urgently needed. To add to the pressure, Palermo was now Sicily’s capital again, with the new regional parliament and its army of bureaucrats to accommodate. But instead of planned rehousing and strategic urban development, both cities were ransacked. Building speculation was rampant, and local government proved utterly incapable of imposing any order on the savage concrete bonanza. In the process, through the 1960s, the economic axes of both cities were shifted. Once their livelihoods had depended on land (for the wealthy) and improvisation (for the poor). Now they were rebuilt around state employment, meagre benefits, piecework, sweatshop labour, services—and, of course, construction. For the poor, the transformation meant years of waiting, protesting, and begging for a favour from a priest or politician, before finally moving from a city-centre slum to a bleak housing project a long walk from the nearest bus stop. For the middling sort, the reward was a rented apartment in one of many indistinguishably gaudy, jerry-built stacks on what had once been green space.

But when it comes to organised crime’s part in the construction bonanza of the 1950s and 1960s, the contrasts between Naples and Palermo were more striking than the similarities.

In Naples, no one seized the mood of the building speculation boom better than film-maker Francesco Rosi, in his 1963 movie
Le mani sulla città. Hands Over the City
(as it was rather clumsily called in English) was both a prize-winning drama and a stirring denunciation of the political malpractice that fed off the construction industry in Naples. Rod Steiger snarls his way through the leading role as Edoardo Nottola, a rapacious councillor-cum-construction entrepreneur. The movie’s opening scene shows Steiger barking out his plans as he gestures with both arms in the direction of a parade of brutalist tower blocks:

That over there is gold today. And where else are you going to get it? Trade? Industry? The ‘industrial future of the
Mezzogiorno
’? Do me a favour! Go ahead and invest your money in a factory if you like! Unions, pay claims, strikes, health insurance . . . That stuff’ll give you a heart attack.

There could be no more vivid encapsulation of the cold-blooded credo of what Italians call an
affarista
: a profiteer, a wheeler-dealer, a cowboy businessman.
Affaristi
shirk the risks involved in real entrepreneurship, usually by working in the shadow of the political system where they can arrange little monopolies and sweetheart contracts.

Gangsters prefer to deal with
affaristi
rather than with real entrepreneurs. Yet, although
Hands Over the City
is a searing portrait of a Neapolitan
affarista
, it is telling that the word camorra is never used in Rosi’s film; nor does anyone who could be considered a
camorrista
play a front-of-stage role in the story. For once, that absence is not the sign of a cover-up or of moral blindness: rather, it accurately reflects the facts on the ground. In Naples,
camorristi
simply lacked the clout to force their way into a major share in the building boom. At this stage in our story, there were no
camorristi
who doubled as construction
affaristi
.

In Palermo, the situation was strikingly different: here the councillors and construction entrepreneurs were invariably flanked by Men of Honour;
affaristi
and
mafiosi
were so close as to be all but indistinguishable.