Blood Brotherhoods (76 page)

In the 1960s a triumvirate of three bosses, one from each of these three territories, had a great influence over ’ndrangheta affairs. We have already encountered two of the three triumvirs in Judge Marino’s conclusions about the Montalto summit. The first was the venerable
tarantella
-dancing don ’Ntoni Macrì, from Siderno, the ‘living symbol of organised crime’s omnipotence and invincibility’, the underworld patriarch whose authority extended along the Ionian coast. The second member of the ’ndrangheta triumvirate was Mico Tripodo, the bigamist whose power centred on the city of Reggio Calabria and its environs.

The third member of the triumvirate was neither present nor mentioned at the Montalto summit (a fact which itself betrayed tensions within the organisation). His name was don Girolamo ‘Mommo’ Piromalli. Piromalli was the dominant boss in the plain of Gioia Tauro, where the work for the Salerno–Reggio Calabria stretch of the ‘Motorway of the Sun’ was concentrated. Roughly the same age as Mico Tripodo, he too was a major smuggler of tobacco who had been initiated into Cosa Nostra.

Mommo was the oldest of seven siblings, five of them male. His father Gioacchino, who died in 1956, sat at the root of a vast and spreading genealogy. By the 1960s the Piromallis were busily consolidating their dominant role in the plain of Gioia Tauro by marrying themselves into its major
’ndrangheta bloodlines. Across the province of Reggio Calabria, the spider’s web of kinship bonds grew both wider and thicker as the ’ndrangheta immersed itself deeper into the new economic reality.

Together, the three bosses of the triumvirate guaranteed what one
’ndranghetista
called a ‘certain equilibrium’ in the Calabrian underworld—an equilibrium that was becoming increasingly delicate as the Honoured Society grew richer on concrete and tobacco.

Coordination between the different territorially based cells of Italian criminal organisations is not new. Indeed it has been integral to the mafia landscape since the beginning. Even the most traditional of criminal affairs tend to go better when
mafiosi
from different territories cooperate: rustling cattle, hiding fugitives, borrowing killers from one another, and so on. Nevertheless, the new businesses of the mafias’ economic miracle made the rewards of coordination even greater. The Calabrian stretch of the Motorway of the Sun is an obvious example, cutting as it did through numerous ’ndrangheta fiefs along the Tyrrhenian coast. As one senior
Carabiniere
observed in 1970: ‘There is always someone who rebels against the monopoly held by some
cosche
, and who then goes and puts dynamite in a cement mixer, under a digger, or in a truck.’

Conflict like this is costly for everyone concerned. So greater cooperation between the rival criminal clans can bring big rewards. The cry for unity that went up at Montalto was one symptom of that new need. And unity, whatever form it actually took, also required more concentrated forms of power. The authority wielded by the triumvirs was a symptom of a drive for greater centralisation. Mommo Piromalli is a good example. In the 1970s, his mighty clan took 55 per cent of the earth-moving and transport subcontracts spun off from a new wave of construction on the plain of Gioia Tauro; the rest went to keep less powerful groups on adjacent territories fed.

Cosa Nostra was undergoing similar changes, a similar distillation of power. As we have already seen, in 1969 the Sicilian mafia created a triumvirate of its own to rebuild the organisation following the dramas of the 1960s. In 1974, the triumvirate was superseded by a full Commission, which was a much more powerful body than the one dissolved in 1963. It was now a direct manifestation of the power of the sixteen or so mightiest bosses in the province of Palermo. Hence the Sicilian Honoured Society underwent a top-down restructuring. Entire Families that had proved troublesome during the early 1960s were disbanded, and their cadres absorbed into neighbouring
cosche
. When a representative was arrested or killed, the Commission reserved the right to impose a temporary replacement, a ‘regent’, as he was termed.

Yet there is a lethal paradox at the heart of the drive for greater criminal unity in the 1960s and 1970s. For when power became concentrated in fewer hands, then it also brought the risk of greater violence when unity broke down. Mafia history was now caught in a terrible double bind. Criminal organisations had more reasons to negotiate and pool their resources. But greater unity meant that when mafia infighting did explode—as it inevitably would—then the blood-letting would be on a much bigger scale. Where once there had been local squabbles, now there would be all-out conflict. The Italian underworld’s intensified peace-making activity—its appeals for unity, its summits, its rules, its governing bodies, its Machiavellian politics of the marital bed—actually served to create the conditions for war. And war became all the more likely because Italy itself was descending into the worst civil strife it had seen since the fall of Fascism. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, growing political violence in Italian society helped accelerate the approach of a mafia hecatomb.

 
48 

M
AFIOSI
ON THE BARRICADES

I
N THE LATE
1960
S
, I
TALY ENTERED AN AGE OF POLITICAL TURBULENCE
. I
T ALL BEGAN IN
the autumn of 1967 with the birth of an anti-authoritarian, counter-cultural student movement; a series of occupations of university buildings followed. The protests gained pace in 1968 with a wave of working-class action that culminated in the so-called ‘hot autumn’ of 1969. There were wildcat strikes, mass meetings, pickets and street demonstrations. New groups of Marxist revolutionaries sprang up to guide the struggle, convinced that—from Vietnam, to South America, to Europe—the Revolution was just around the corner. Agitation on all fronts continued into the early 1970s.

The most sinister response to the new climate of militancy came on the afternoon of 12 December 1969: a terrorist bomb placed in a bank in piazza Fontana, a stone’s throw from Milan Cathedral, killed sixteen people and wounded eighty-eight more. Crude police attempts to blame anarchists for the massacre unravelled, but not before one anarchist suspect, Giuseppe Pinelli, had inexplicably fallen to his death from a fourth-floor window in police headquarters. (This was the ‘accidental death of an anarchist’ on which Dario Fo’s famous play is based.) Italy’s establishment showed a marked reluctance to dig for the truth about who planted the bomb in piazza Fontana. What remained was the widespread and almost certainly justified suspicion that neo-Fascists linked to the secret services were responsible. This was the ‘strategy of tension’: an attempt to create a climate of fear that would draw Italian society away from democracy and back towards authoritarianism.

A year later, Junio Valerio Borghese, a recalcitrant Fascist with friends in the military and secret services, mounted an attempted coup d’état in Rome.
The putsch was a flop in the end, but Italians did not even get to hear about it for months: there were suspicions of a secret-service cover-up.

The strategy of tension produced further outrages later in the decade. In May 1974, in Brescia’s piazza della Loggia, a bomb was detonated during a demonstration against right-wing terrorism: eight people were killed. Eighty-five people were murdered by a massive bomb placed in the second-class waiting room of Bologna station in August 1980. A familiar sequence of smokescreens and artfully laid false trails ensued. Many in Italy were convinced that these were state massacres, and the credibility of Italy’s institutions suffered enduring damage as a result.

In the South, the most shocking result of this dangerous destabilisation of Italian society came in July 1970 when the city of Reggio Calabria rose in revolt. Demonstrations led to police charges, which brought barricades and Molotov cocktails, which in turn provoked gunfire. A few days after the revolt broke out, a train derailed just outside Gioia Tauro station, killing six passengers. There were strong suspicions that a bomb had caused the accident, and troops were sent to guard Calabrian railways. Back in Reggio, there were dynamite attacks on the transport infrastructure and occupations of public buildings. No less than eight months of street fighting were only brought to an end when tanks rumbled along the seafront.

Reggio Calabria erupts. In 1970, an urban uprising marked a turning point in ’ndrangheta history. The revolt was eventually quelled by tanks.

The cause of all the violence was the decision that Reggio would
not
be the administrative headquarters of the new regional government of Calabria. People in Reggio were convinced that politicians from the other two major Calabrian cities, Catanzaro and Cosenza, had formed a devious pact to divide out the prizes of regional government between themselves. At a superficial level, what this meant was that the inhabitants of three of Italy’s poorest cities were tussling for the thousands of public-sector jobs that would come with the status of Calabrian capital. But the causes of the Reggio revolt went much deeper than that. Beset by chronic unemployment and a housing crisis that had lasted for generations, Reggio’s population had staged a mass rejection of their political representatives. National party leaders were dismayed and baffled by the uprising, which undoubtedly enjoyed widespread local support. It was led first by local dissidents within the Christian Democrat party, and then by a Committee of Action under a rabble-rouser from the Movimento Sociale Italiano, the neo-Fascist party.

Recent testimonies from Calabrian
mafiosi
who have turned state’s evidence strongly suggest that there was a criminal subplot to the story of the 1970 Reggio revolt. In the summer and autumn of the year before, Junio Valerio Borghese paid a series of provocative visits to Reggio in the run-up to the coup that he would mount in Rome in 1970. On 27 October 1969, he organised a rally that ended in a riot after a small bomb destroyed a Fascist eagle that dated back to Mussolini’s first visit to the city. It later emerged that neo-Fascists themselves had planted the charge as a pretext for the disturbances. It seems that Borghese established contacts with ’ndrangheta leaders at around this time. Some sort of deal between the ’ndrangheta and Junio Valerio Borghese’s movement may have been discussed at the ‘mushroom-picking’ summit at Montalto, which happened the day before the October rally. Sicilian
mafiosi
have also reported discussions with Borghese in the lead-up to his failed putsch.

We do not know whether there was an understanding between Borghese and the Calabrian mafia. What we do know for certain is that
’ndranghetisti
helped man the barricades in Reggio; that
’ndranghetisti
supplied guns and dynamite to the revolt’s Committee of Action; and that it was
’ndranghetisti
who provided the explosives used by Fascist terrorists to derail the train near Gioia Tauro. The ’ndrangheta, therefore, had added its weight to the strategy of tension.

But what on earth did
’ndranghetisti
have to gain by allying themselves with Fascists, or indeed with the Reggio revolt? The first thing is that they too had reason to protest about the fact that the privilege of being regional capital was awarded to another, less mafia-infested, city. Several other aspects
of this profoundly murky affair seem certain. In the first place, the revolt gave the ’ndrangheta a chance to discredit the police, which had recently stepped up its activity against organised crime. That said, support for the revolt involved only one segment of the ’ndrangheta in Reggio Calabria, whereas outside the city bosses like the old criminal patriarch don ’Ntoni Macrì wanted nothing to do with Borghese. Quite sensibly, rather than the highly risky and uncertain project of plotting an insurgency to bring authoritarian politicians to power, most
’ndranghetisti
preferred the humdrum and much more lucrative business of doing deals with corrupt politicians who already
had
power. What is more, where there
were
contacts between gangsters and right-wing insurrectionaries, they tended to be about one of the few things the two parties genuinely had in common: weaponry. Quite how far beyond this basic convergence of interests the contacts went is unclear. There is much else to this story that is still cloaked in mystery. In subsequent years, some
’ndranghetisti
undoubtedly moved in the same circles as Fascist subversives and their friends in the secret services. However, the main lines of ’ndrangheta history moved along a rather more familiar pathway following the events in Reggio in 1970.

The Reggio revolt is a lesson in how unstable a political system based on patronage, faction politics and mafia influence can be. Eruptions of popular anger are always a possibility, because there are never enough favours to go round.