Blood Brotherhoods (71 page)

So muscling in on the construction business is straightforward, up to a point. But success in construction can also be the measure of just how profoundly mafia influence has insinuated itself into the entrails of the state and the capitalist system. Getting zealous policemen moved, corrupting judges, adjusting town plans on demand, manipulating the awarding of government contracts, silencing journalists, winning powerful political friends: these are not activities for mere gorillas whose skills stop at pouring sugar into the fuel tank of a dumper truck. North or South, when a mafia masters these more refined arts, it can vastly increase its power to intimidate. Just as importantly, it can vastly increase the range of services it is able to offer to friendly firms: winning contracts at inflated prices, warding off inspections by the tax authorities, making new friends . . .

 
43 

G
ANGSTERS AND BLONDES

I
TALIANS GOT THEIR FIRST TASTE OF IMPORTED
A
MERICAN BLEND CIGARETTES LIKE
Camel, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield during the Fascist era. They named them ‘blondes’ because they contained a lighter-coloured tobacco than the dark, air-cured varieties that could be grown in Italy.

Blondes were immediately popular. The state had established a monopoly on the growing, importing, processing and sale of tobacco in 1862; and since that date the state had always struggled to keep pace with consumer demand and changing tastes. The arrival of blondes left the government further than ever from satisfying the public’s craving. In fact, no sooner were these glamorous new gaspers introduced in the early 1930s than they disappeared from government tobacco outlets because of the sanctions imposed following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Rationing during the Second World War made smokers’ lives even more difficult. And when the Allies invaded in 1943, and Fascism fell, Italy’s own capacity to produce tobacco was devastated. Thus British and American troops arrived amidst a tobacco famine, and they arrived with cigarettes in their ration packs. Much of this tobacco was funnelled into the burgeoning black market. By the time rationing ended in the spring of 1948, and domestic production recovered, it was too late: Italy’s rapidly growing number of smokers (14 million by 1957) were hooked on imported cigarettes. Perhaps just as damagingly, they were also hooked on the illegal supply channels that made those cigarettes available at tax-free prices. This vast criminal market has shaped the history of organised crime in Italy ever since. It has been compared to the Prohibition period in the United States (1919–33), when the federal government
banned alcoholic drinks, and in so doing created a bootleg bonanza. Naples, as the capital of the black market, is the place to watch the unfolding of the lucrative love affair between gangsters and blondes.

In 1963, cinema committed a captivating image of the Neapolitan contraband tobacco trade to popular memory in the first episode of Vittorio De Sica’s three-part movie
Ieri, oggi, domani
(
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Sophia Loren plays a girl who sells black-market cigarettes from an orange-box stall. For her, arrest is an occupational hazard. But she discovers that, by law, pregnant women cannot be held in prison, so she cajoles her husband into siring one baby after another, until their one-room apartment is bursting. Eventually, the poor man’s reproductive apparatus gives out under the strain. (He is played, with typical harried charm, by Marcello Mastroianni.)

Sophia Loren, in the role of a Neapolitan cigarette-seller. Tobacco smuggling, a crucial business for organised crime, is portrayed sympathetically in the 1963 movie
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
.

As a piece of cinema, the Loren episode of
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
is ultimately a sentimental cliché: yet another song to the gaudy anarchy of Neapolitan street life. Yet the story was rooted in truth all the same. The Loren character was based on Concetta Muccardo, who sold bootleg cigarettes in Forcella, the ‘kasbah’ quarter of Naples. Muccardo’s reputed nineteen pregnancies (seven of them carried to term) kept her out of jail until 1957, when the police finally caught her without a baby on the way, or one in her
arms. She was sent to prison for eight months and, harshly, a further two years were added to her sentence because she was unable to pay a fine. But Muccardo’s notoriety quickly earned her freedom. The generous readers of two newspapers, one from Turin and one from Rome, paid off the money she owed. And in January 1958, following an appeal by Socialist and Communist women MPs, she was granted a pardon by the head of state, the President of the Republic. When Concetta returned to her alley, vico Carbonari, pictures of President Giovanni Gronchi had been set up alongside the images of the Madonna in the local street tabernacles.

The experience of shooting
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
in the alleys of central Naples showed De Sica just how close the script came to reality. This was a city where the chronic failings of the economy had left many poor families reliant on contraband to put food on the table. De Sica gave a walk-on part to a well-known local woman with nine children: she boasted she had been in prison a record 113 times for contraband offences. In Forcella there were many other cigarette girls who entered local folklore. A certain ‘Rosetta’ was the most attractive of a number of women who charged extra for ‘fun fags’—cigarettes that customers had to rummage for in her ample cleavage. (A Sophia Loren movie based on Rosetta’s story would doubtless not have made it past the censors.)

While De Sica was staying in the Ambassador Hotel, Muccardo’s husband introduced himself and demanded a percentage of the film’s takings. Rather obliquely, De Sica replied by pointing to a magazine photo of Sophia Loren on set being fitted with a false baby belly. ‘Don’t you see how beautiful she is? As big as your wife was at that stage.’ The husband refused to be wowed: ‘Yes, Mr De Sica, but this is a belly full of millions: my wife’s is full of air.’ Writing to explain the episode to his family, De Sica could find nothing else to say than, ‘They are poor people.’

Both De Sica’s film, and his reaction to what he witnessed in Naples while shooting it, are a faithful reflection of the dilemma that the Italian authorities also found themselves in. The law against tobacco-trafficking was simply unenforceable at street level. A clampdown seemed to be impossible without hurting the people who were both its operatives and its first victims: the poorest inhabitants of the Neapolitan slums. Indeed this was a dilemma that the Italian state lacked the will to tackle in any other way than by sleep-walking into repression and then recoiling towards tolerance. There was an amnesty for illegal cigarette retailers in the year that
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
came out, and another one in 1966. Policies the world over that aim to prohibit or control substances like tobacco and alcohol are difficult to implement at the best of times. When those policies are widely disobeyed, they have a way of making the law seem draconian, unrealistic
and inconsistent all at the same time. The vital principle that it is in everyone’s interests for the state to create and enforce fair rules can only suffer, and the state itself falls into discredit. In Italy, where that principle has always struggled to hold its own, the damage to the state’s credibility was very serious indeed. In Naples, contraband cigarettes were openly on sale in the corridors of government buildings.

Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
came out at a crucial historical moment for contraband tobacco, and thus for all of Italy’s mafias. For this was the time when cigarette smuggling became an industry, and that industry became the primary occupation of organised crime.

The decisive event in the gearing up of Italy’s bootleg tobacco trade happened in North Africa. In October 1959 Mohamed V, king of a newly independent Morocco, confirmed the fears of smugglers across the Mediterranean: he gave six months’ notice that the port of Tangier was to lose its special privileges. Until that point Tangier, which is situated opposite Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean, had had a large ‘International Zone’ with few passport controls, very low taxes and no currency restrictions. Banks did not even have to present balance sheets. In short, Tangier was a smugglers’ paradise, and the very hub of illegal commerce across the Mediterranean. As one resident, American novelist Paul Bowles, observed: ‘I think all Europe’s black-market profiteers are here . . . since the whole International Zone is one huge black market.’ It was from the safe haven of Tangier that the ‘mother ships’ packed with contraband cigarettes could fan out along the southern European coastline. When they reached Naples, they would wait in international waters for tiny local craft to come and ferry the cargo to shore.

When King Mohamed announced the closure of the International Zone, the short-term result was that cigarette smuggling became more difficult. And when smuggling becomes more difficult, only the best-organised and best-resourced of smugglers can survive. The only wholesalers who could now prosper were those with international links to shipping companies, cigarette producers and officials in places like the Balkans. For different reasons, the local operators, who ferried the cases of cigarettes from ship to shore, also had to up their game: expensive speedboats were now needed to outrun the
Guardia di Finanza
(Tax Police). As competition in the tobacco business increased, so too did violence. Contraband was no longer a trade for amateurs.

Naples appealed to the new breed of professional trafficker of the 1960s for a number of reasons. One of the most important was the ready supply of cheap criminal labour in the alleys where Concetta Muccardo became a legend. Naples was also the gateway to an Italian market that was in the
throes of its economic miracle, and consuming more and more cigarettes as a result. In the 1960s, Naples was also a free port, in the sense that the camorra in the city was still comparatively weak, and there was no dominant local criminal organisation able to throttle competition. So networks of big-time traffickers from Genoa, Corsica and Marseille were drawn to the city under the volcano to find outlets for their cigarettes. But the most important new arrivals after the closure of the International Zone of Tangier—men who would radically alter the course of criminal history in Italy—were from Sicily.

 
44 

C
OSA
N
OSTRA
: Untouchables no more

I
N THE LATE
1950
S AND EARLY
1960
S
, I
TALY OBSERVED AS THE
U
NITED
S
TATES ONCE
more addressed its mafia problem. First, in November 1957, there was the spectacular episode at a large estate in Apalachin, upstate New York, when the state troopers stumbled upon a summit of some one hundred mafia bosses. One or two of them came from as far away as California, Cuba and Texas. Sixty men were taken into custody, and as a result the FBI finally admitted the mafia—or national crime syndicate, or whatever name might be applied to it—was something more than a romantic myth. As a result, in 1959, Vito Genovese, chief of the New York Family that bore his name, was sentenced to fifteen years for drug trafficking: the first major blow against a senior stateside boss in the decade and a half since the end of the Second World War.

Meanwhile Robert F. Kennedy, the energetic young chief counsel of a new Senate Labor Rackets Committee, was busy uncovering corruption in the Teamsters Union. Following the Apalachin summit, the committee again used television to good effect by interviewing several of the most prominent men who had been at Apalachin, such as Joe Profaci and Thomas Lucchese. Viewers also saw a federal agent explain the mafia’s dynastic politics: