Blood Brotherhoods (73 page)

Silent grief. Palermo turns out en masse in 1963 for the funeral of four
Carabinieri
, two military engineers and a policeman murdered by a Sicilian mafia bomb.

The Ciaculli bomb also swept away the last resistance to the idea of a parliamentary inquiry into the mafia—an Italian Kefauver, at last. But anyone who expected the inquiry to achieve the kind of spectacular results seen on the other side of the Atlantic was in for both a very long wait and a dull disappointment. The political wrangling only seemed to intensify during the inquiry’s hearings. Astonishingly, in 1966, Donato Pafundi, the Senator who chaired those hearings—a Christian Democrat by political affiliation and a prosecutor by profession—denied the existence of the mafia as a criminal organisation, and even blamed Muslims for the problem:

The mafia in Sicily is a mental state that pervades everything and everyone, at all levels of society. There are historical, geographical and social reasons behind this mentality. Above all there is a millennium of Muslim domination. It is hard to shake off the inheritance of centuries. The mafia has ended up in Sicilians’ blood, in the most intimate folds of Sicilian society.

Considering views like this, it is hardly surprising that the parliamentary inquiry took no fewer than thirteen years to finish its work.

Nor did Italian politicians have any of the flair for the media that Estes Kefauver and Robert Kennedy had shown. The parliamentary inquiry’s final report provided as good a definition of the problem as one could get without using insider sources. It certainly had none of the simplistic sensationalism of Kefauver’s vision of a vast, centralised international conspiracy, and none of Donato Pafundi’s ignorance. But its abstruse wording was indicative of the problems the inquiry had had in bringing public opinion along with it:

The mafia has continually reproposed itself as the exercise of autonomous extra-legal power and the search for a close link with all forms of power and in particular state power, so as to collaborate with it, make use of it for its own ends, or infiltrate its structure.

Anyone who was still awake after trying to read a couple of paragraphs of prose like this deserved a medal for endurance.

Predictably, the parliamentary Left also disagreed with the report and issued its own version, placing much more emphasis on the mafia’s ties to the highest spheres of Sicilian society: ‘The mafia is a ruling class phenomenon.’ This, in its own way, was also an oversimplification. The point about the Sicilian mafia, like the nineteenth-century Freemasonry on which it was based, is that it includes members of all classes: both cut-throats and counts can become Men of Honour.

Perhaps the most damning criticism to be made of the 1960s parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia is that its terms of reference did not include the camorra and the ’ndrangheta. Underestimating the organised crime issue outside Sicily would have dire consequences. And those dire consequences were set in motion scarcely two years after the parliamentary inquiry started work, when the first piece of legislation to issue from the post-Ciaculli climate was passed. Law 575 of 1965 was a parcel of anti-mafia measures that included the policy of ‘forced resettlement’: suspected
mafiosi
could be compelled to leave their homes and take up residence somewhere else in Italy. Forced resettlement was based on the highly questionable theory that the fundamental cause of the mafia was the backward social environment of western Sicily. If
mafiosi
could be transplanted from that environment into healthier surroundings, so the theory went, then their criminal inclinations would shrivel.

Rather than shrivelling, the mafia spread. As one Man of Honour would later explain: ‘Forced resettlement was a good thing for us, because it gave
us a way to contact other people, to get to know different places, other cities, zones that weren’t already contaminated by organised crime.’

It was not just ‘uncontaminated’ zones of Italy that hosted resettled
mafiosi
. Incredibly, some of them were even sent to the hinterland of Naples. Despite the fearsome traditions of criminal enterprise that had become visible during the Pupetta Maresca affair, Campania was now deemed socially healthy enough to reform the Sicilian gangster elite. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of Sicily’s most powerful criminals were forcibly resettled around Naples:
mafiosi
of the calibre of Francesco Paolo Bontate, the boss of Santa Maria di Gesù, and later his son Stefano, a future keystone of Cosa Nostra’s Palermo Commission. They were joined there by other
mafiosi
who were on the run from the law. One of these was Gerlando Alberti, who later became famous for a
bon mot
: asked about the mafia by a journalist, he replied, ‘What’s that? A brand of cheese?’

Through the repression following the Ciaculli bomb, and then by the policy of forced resettlement, Italy had involuntarily created a new diaspora of criminal talent. Naples during the contraband tobacco boom would be one of that diaspora’s favourite ports. The stage was set for a crucial new convergence of interests between Sicilian and Campanian organised crime.

 
46 

T
HE MAFIA-ISATION OF THE CAMORRA

M
ICHELE
Z
AZA
,
KNOWN AS
‘
O
P
AZZO
(‘M
AD
M
IKE
’),
WAS THE SON OF A FISHERMAN
from Portici who became the dominant Neapolitan cigarette smuggler of the 1970s. He had a vast villa in Posillipo, with one of the most splendid views over the bay of Naples—
La Glorietta
, he called it. Interviewed there by a local TV station, he once famously quipped that tobacco smuggling was ‘the FIAT of southern Italy’. What he meant was that it created as many jobs as did the Turin-based car giant. Naples could no more survive without smuggling than Turin could without the automotive industry. This was a wisecrack pitched at a ready audience, both in the alleys of central Naples, and in the communities far beyond Naples that had once enjoyed Sophia Loren’s sassy performance in
Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow
. As had been the case during Prohibition in the United States, gangsters who operated in a clandestine market, trading a commodity that had a great many non-criminal customers, could easily pose as the good guys.

Mad Mike was no Robin Hood, however. On 5 April 1973, he was part of an assassination squad that tried to kill Chief of Police Angelo Mangano, a Sicilian lawman who had distinguished himself in the fight against the mafia in Corleone. (Mangano survived, despite being shot four times, including in the head.) Why would a Neapolitan
camorrista
try to kill an enemy of the Sicilian mafia? Because that
camorrista
had recently become an initiated affiliate of Cosa Nostra.

By the early 1970s, the Sicilian
mafiosi
who had ended up in Campania had become intimate friends with a number of
camorristi
. The police and
Carabinieri
reported a regular series of meetings between Neapolitan and
Sicilian hoods in Naples. The Sicilians even acquired a taste for the sentimental pop melodies that their Neapolitan hosts adored.

The links between the mafia and the camorra were soon formalised. In the Sicilian mafia’s traditional fashion,
mafiosi
established kinship alliances with the
camorristi
, based on marriage and
comparatico
(‘co-parenthood’). Big Neapolitan smugglers were also formally initiated into Cosa Nostra. At least two Cosa Nostra Families in Campania were created and authorised by Palermo. One had its seat in the city itself, and was grouped around an extended family, the Zaza-Mazzarellas, including ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza. The other was based in Marano, a small town on the northern outreaches of Naples. Marano was home to the man who had shot dead the ‘President of Potato Prices’ in 1955. The murderer’s relatives, the Nuvoletta brothers, were now in charge in the town, and were duly initiated into Cosa Nostra.

Thus Cosa Nostra’s new Campanian Families inherited the two main criminal traditions in the region. ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza represented the urban camorra revived by the black market during the Second World War. The Nuvoletta brothers were just the type of
camorristi
who had long been involved in controlling supply routes from the countryside to the city markets. So in one sense, the novelty of Cosa Nostra’s branches in Campania was also a highly significant return to the past. For the first time since the days of the old Honoured Society of Naples, a single organisational framework embraced both the urban and rural camorras.

The scaling-up of the trade in bootleg cigarettes, and the close links between the Sicilian and Neapolitan underworlds, was ‘mafia-ising’ the camorra. Indeed, not for the first time in history, the very meaning of the word ‘camorra’ was undergoing a transformation. Once, if it was used at all, it referred to small local gangs, or networks of smugglers, or even to isolated
guappi
. Now
camorristi
were increasingly functionaries of much bigger groups, with a bigger range of criminal activities and greater financial sophistication.

To the Neapolitans, the incoming
mafiosi
brought many things, such as organisational skills, and particularly prestige. For who has not heard of the Sicilian mafia? And who, among criminals, is not afraid of it?

To the Sicilians, Neapolitans like ‘Mad Mike’ offered excellent smuggling contacts and a vast distribution network. Bringing them inside Cosa Nostra was a way of keeping a close eye on them. Indeed, they also did the same thing, and for the same reason, to a major Palermitan cigarette smuggler, Tommaso Spadaro.

The Sicilian mafia’s decision to absorb some
camorristi
also had strategic military motives. The dominant players in Neapolitan contraband during the late 1960s were multinational traffickers known collectively
as the Marseillais—because one of their previous bases had been in the French port of Marseille. Between 1971 and 1973, Cosa Nostra’s men in Campania deployed their firepower to cut out the competition. A handful of Neapolitan cigarette smugglers were executed, and at least six Marseillais. By mafia standards, this was a very small investment in violence that would reap very big returns. Soon Cosa Nostra and its Campanian friends had the contraband tobacco market to themselves.

Business ballooned. One estimate suggests that, in the late 1970s, the annual turnover of the illegal cigarette business in Campania was some 48.6 billion lire (very roughly $215 million in 2012 values), and net profit stood at somewhere between 20 and 24 billion ($88–$106 million). In 1977, the
Carabinieri
found ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza with an account book, according to which mafia-camorra tobacco smuggling turned over an astonishing 150 billion lire a year (over $620 million). Between 40,000 and 60,000 people in the Campania region are thought to have found employment in the smuggling economy. The FIAT of southern Italy indeed.

Cosa Nostra got more than its share of the bonanza. Naples, according to a
mafioso
heavily involved in contraband, became the ‘El Dorado’ of Sicilian organised crime. As Tommaso Buscetta, a veteran cigarette smuggler, recalled:

The volume of business in the illegal cigarette trade became enormous. In the 1950s, 500 cases were considered a big consignment. Now we’d reached as many as 35–40,000 cases unloaded every time a contraband ship travelled between Naples and Palermo.

Managing the flow of wealth that came to Sicily from across the Tyrrhenian Sea also had profound effects on the Sicilian mafia. For by 1969, most of the Men of Honour charged as a result of the First Mafia War had been acquitted, and they were free to pick up where they had left off at the time of the Ciaculli bomb. They wasted little time letting everyone in Palermo know they were back. At a quarter to seven on the evening of 10 December 1969, five men in stolen police uniforms machine-gunned the occupants of a construction company office in viale Lazio. Five were killed, including one of the attackers and their intended target: the mafia boss Michele Cavataio, who many within Cosa Nostra thought was the mastermind behind the car-bombing campaign of the early 1960s. We now know that the men who carried out the viale Lazio massacre were delegates from different mafia
Families—as if to demonstrate that Cavataio’s execution had been decreed by Cosa Nostra as a whole.

Thus, after a six-year hiatus following the Ciaculli bomb, the Sicilian mafia resumed its constitutional life. The first formal shape that Cosa Nostra’s politics took was a triumvirate of senior bosses who were entrusted with reawakening the organisation’s dormant structures in the province of Palermo. The first triumvir, and probably the most prestigious, was Stefano Bontate, known as the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’,
capo
of the largest Family in Palermo, a job he had inherited from his father. Bontate was mafia aristocracy. The second triumvir was Gaetano ‘Tano’ Badalamenti, the boss of Cinisi, where Palermo’s new airport provided a huge source of revenue; Badalamenti had long-standing links with Cosa Nostra in Detroit. The third was Luciano Liggio from Corleone.