Blood Brotherhoods (82 page)

A few years after the Santa was recognised, there was a certain inflation in bestowing the rank of
santista
. Indeed there were no longer just the thirty-three
santisti
envisaged by the rules: more
santisti
were created to keep everyone who aspired to hold that rank happy. So in 1978–80 I heard that a new body was created, called the Vangelo (‘Gospel’). I was awarded the rank of
vangelista
(‘gospel-ist’) between 1978 and 1980 in Fossombrone prison.

In practical terms the Vangelo was restricted to a smaller number of people than the Santa, which had gone from thirty-three people to a much higher number. But then the same thing happened with the creation of the Trequartista (‘Three-quarterist’) and Quintino (‘Fifther’).

And so it went on: the business of tweaking and bending the ’ndrangheta’s traditional rules so as to suit the needs of the moment. In the mafia world, there is nothing more traditional than that. Tradition helps bind the mafias together. But it can also be used to prepare for civil war. The First ’Ndrangheta War was only a rehearsal for what was to come when narcotics propelled the Italian mafias to the greatest riches they had ever known.

 
51 

A
BRIEF HISTORY OF JUNK

Then Zeus’ daughter Helen . . . drugged the wine with the herb nêpenthes, which banishes all care, sorrow, and anger. Whoever drinks wine thus drugged cannot shed a single tear all the rest of the day, not even though his father and mother both of them drop down dead, or he sees a brother or a son hewn in pieces before his very eyes.

HOMER,
ODYSSEY IV
, 220–21

O
PIUM IS A VERY ANCIENT ORIENTAL DRUG THAT HAS APPALLED AND ENTHRALLED
occidental civilisation since the ancient Greeks. The drug nêpenthes, which Helen administers in Homer’s
Odyssey
, is probably opium.

Heroin, by contrast, is a child of modern, global capitalism; it is a brand name that was first coined by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer at the end of the nineteenth century. What Bayer
thought
they were putting on the market was a new, safe version of the opium derivative morphine—one that did not carry the same risks of dependency. What they were
actually
selling was even more addictive than morphine. But it was so reassuringly packaged and so roundly endorsed by medical opinion that, for the next decade and more, even many children’s cough syrups contained it. No wonder that the United States could count over 200,000 heroin addicts by the time the First World War came to an end.

In China, the problem of opiate addiction was at least a century older. By the time heroin was invented, those Chinese hooked on smoking opium
numbered in the millions. Throughout the nineteenth century, British merchants had ferried opium from India to the Celestial Kingdom. At the behest of those merchants, the British government fought two wars to force China to accept the free trade in a drug that was tearing holes in its social fabric. The
Cambridge History of China
calls the British opium trafficking business ‘the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times’.

In 1912, the United States, China and Britain all signed the first international treaty aimed at controlling narcotics production and distribution; in 1919 its provisions were included in the Treaty of Versailles that sealed the peace at the end of the First World War. A new era of drug control had dawned across the world. From now on, the main suppliers and distributors of heroin and other narcotics would not be pharmaceutical companies, merchants and governments (not openly, at least), but instead criminal syndicates.

The Sicilian mafia was among the earliest players in the world’s biggest consumer market for illegal heroin, the United States. With their bases in western Sicily and New York, their transatlantic commercial ties and their wide network of contacts in the United States,
mafiosi
were ideally placed to smuggle. Between the wars, morphine was hidden in hollowed-out oranges, or in crates of other Sicilian exports like anchovies, olive oil and cheese.

But the mafia’s heroin business remained artisanal. What is more, the market shrank. By 1924 the number of addicts to all narcotics in the United States was probably no greater than 110,000. The Second World War so badly disrupted supplies of opiates that, at its end, the number of addicts had plummeted to an estimated 20,000.

Trade resumed after the Second World War, as did the mafia’s involvement in it. Italy did not have much of a domestic consumer market for drugs at the time. Moreover, until 1951, pharmaceutical companies in the peninsula were able to produce heroin legally for medicinal purposes. Some of that legal heroin found its way to the United States for sale on the black market. Lucky Luciano, like several other
mafiosi
sent back to Italy after the war, was a heroin exporter. Nevertheless, heroin use remained restricted largely to America’s black and Puerto Rican ghettoes, and as a result the drug was just one business interest among many for
mafiosi
.

Heroin started to play a more prominent role in Sicilian criminal enterprise after 1956, when the Narcotics Control Act was introduced in the United States. Because the Act established severe new penalties for drug trafficking, the heroin traders of the New York mafia were keen to outsource as much work—and risk—as possible to their Old World cousins. As we have seen, a delegation from New York’s Bonanno family came to Palermo
in 1957 for a high-level sit-down at the Hotel delle Palme. As a US Attorney would later remark, everyone at the hotel was a ‘narcotics track star’. There were other clear signs that Sicily had become a major heroin entrepôt. In 1961, the
Guardia di Finanza
(Tax Police) dismantled an international dope-smuggling ring that was based in Salemi, in the province of Trapani, but included Canadian and American Men of Honour. In February 1962, the First Mafia War was triggered when a mafia drug-dealing consortium comprising bosses from different Palermo Families fell out over a package of heroin destined for the United States. When Cosa Nostra in Palermo disbanded itself following the Ciaculli bomb in 1963, many of the most senior Men of Honour fled to the Americas to immerse themselves full-time in trafficking for the United States market. Thus in the drugs business, as in tobacco smuggling, the Sicilian mafia diaspora of the 1960s dramatically increased the geographical range and profitability of mafia enterprise.

Underlying the Sicilian mafia’s increasing commercial activism there also lay a new epidemic of heroin use in America. That epidemic gathered pace from the mid-1960s, as the drug-friendly counter-culture grew, and as American ground forces were deployed in Vietnam. During the war, Laos-based refiners linked to corrupt officers of the South Vietnamese Air Force controlled a fat heroin pipeline to Saigon. In 1971, US Army medical staff calculated that 10–15 per cent of all US troops were using heroin. By the same time, addicts back home in the American market had climbed to half a million—two and a half times the number recorded when heroin was a legal ingredient in many patent medicines. Dope was not a cottage industry anymore.

The world’s opium poppy fields are to be found almost exclusively in the highlands that snake across the southern edge of Asia: from the Anatolian Plateau of Turkey in the west, through Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, to end in the highly productive region known as the ‘Golden Triangle’, where Burma, Laos and Thailand meet. In the 1960s, most of America’s heroin came from Turkey, where the opium poppy could be cultivated legally, but where a large slice of production found its way onto the illegal market. Between Turkish farmers and American junkies there was a long, long chain of middlemen, smugglers and profiteers. Like the police and border guards paid to look the other way. And the camel drivers who fed plastic bags of opium paste to their animals in order to smuggle it over the Turkish border. Or the first-stage refiners, who boiled the raw opium paste with quicklime to precipitate out the morphine. Or the truck drivers who created secret compartments in loads of fruit and vegetables bound for Turkish markets in Germany. Or the technicians who refined the morphine into heroin—a
delicate operation that involves heating it with acetic acid to a precise temperature for a precise time. At each of these stages, the price—and the profit margin—rose in geometric progression. Depending on where you were in the chain and, just as importantly, how
many
links of that chain you controlled, heroin could generate shepherd money or oil-magnate money.

At this stage of heroin’s history, Sicilian
mafiosi
were not the dominant suppliers to the United States. In the 1960s, the bulk of the heroin consumed in North America came through Corsican hands. The Corsicans were enterprising, with a worldwide network of contacts and a secure base for their refineries in Marseille. Here the Corsican clans won a political shield for their operations by hiring themselves out as strike-breakers and anti-communist thugs, turning the French port city into one of Europe’s great criminal capitals. By 1970, Marseille heroin had become famous among American addicts.
Mafiosi
provided access to a distribution network in the United States. Thus the Sicilians were an important but essentially subordinate part of a Corsican business.

The Corsican system was thrown into chaos in the early 1970s. With American public opinion alarmed by the rise in heroin addiction, particularly among combat troops, President Richard Nixon declared a ‘war on drugs’. The Turkey–Marseille–New York channel, known as the French Connection, was picked out as the war’s strategic objective. The US first offered the Turkish government generous financial persuasion to stop legal opium cultivation, which ceased after the harvest of 1972. Meanwhile, in France, the Corsicans were losing their friends in high places. In November 1971, a French secret-service agent who had been running heroin from Marseille with the Corsicans was indicted in the United States, creating a huge political scandal in France. Moreover, the growing heroin problem in French cities increased the pressure on government to order a clampdown. One by one, the Marseille refineries were shut down and the chemists were arrested.

The Sicilians, who occupied a less strategic segment of America’s heroin supply lines than did the Corsicans, looked to have been marginalised by the destruction of the French Connection. American junkies suffered a heroin drought, and the Sicilians occupied a smaller segment of that reduced market. In 1976, the long-awaited final report of Italy’s parliamentary inquiry into the mafia used evidence from drug seizures in the States in the early 1970s to argue that ‘much of the heroin destined for the United States market is no longer forwarded through Italy as it once was’. The war on drugs, it seemed, was being won.

In reality, all that had happened was that the law of supply and demand was taking its time to work through the global narcotics system. The scarcity
of heroin on the American market pushed up the price, which made the risks of setting up new pipelines more worthwhile. Turkish production soon revived after the initial assault. Worse still, as American troops were withdrawn from Vietnam, suppliers of morphine and heroin from the Golden Triangle were avidly seeking new outlets. Between the Asian suppliers and the desperate American addicts there were tempting new opportunities for brokers and refiners. Which is where the Sicilian mafia came in. After the French Connection came the Pizza Connection. Cosa Nostra was about to become addicted.

 
52 

M
R
C
HAMPAGNE
: Heroin broker

G
ASPARE
M
UTOLO
,
SON OF A TICKET COLLECTOR ON THE
P
ALERMO TRAM SYSTEM
,
WAS
eased gently into the psychological rigours of life as a professional assassin. Not long after being initiated into Cosa Nostra, he was shown what went on inside a mafia torture chamber. Then he took a hands-on lesson in garrotting technique. He retched as blood started to come out of the victim’s nose and ears just before death. Mutolo was then taught how to truss up a body so it could be transported in the boot of a car, and how to bury it with quicklime (so that it would rapidly decompose beyond the reach of forensic science) and fertiliser (so that the site of the burial would be covered in vegetation). He was even shown what a body looks like when it has spent two or three months in one of these specially prepared pits.

The toughening-up process paid dividends when Mutolo carried out the first of many solo murders with calm efficiency, cutting the throat of a dissident Man of Honour during a carefully faked robbery. Giving death soon became routine, as it had done for so many
mafiosi
of previous generations.

I’ve never felt fear the evening before a murder. You just have to be convinced about what you are going to do. Sometimes, I’ve been more thoughtful the night before, and have reflected on how easy it is to kill and be killed . . . On occasions, I’ve experienced a strange sense of pity, especially when I’ve had to kill youngsters whose family I maybe knew.

Mutolo was then given a fast-track apprenticeship in all of the major criminal businesses that had been transforming Italy’s mafias since the 1950s:
making them richer, broadening their geographical horizons, bringing them into relationships with one another, thickening their ties with politicians. Sent to Naples, he quickly became involved in cigarette smuggling with
camorristi
. Then he was sent into the wealthy northern region of Lombardy to gather information on possible kidnapping targets. Back in Palermo, Mutolo also learned how to make money from public construction projects.