Blood Brotherhoods (88 page)

Although the Sicilian blood-letting peaked in the years 1981–3, it did not abate entirely, but transformed itself into an endless state of terror. As Riina’s power grew, so did his fear. He began to see the young killers who had taken a leading role in the first waves of killings as a potential threat.
The prime case in point was Pino Greco, known as ‘Little Shoe’. Little Shoe was the man whose Kalashnikov had put paid to both Stefano Bontate and Salvatore Inzerillo. He was also the Kalashnikov-wielding pillion passenger who led the attempt to eliminate Totuccio Contorno. Little Shoe it was who cut off the sixteen-year-old Inzerillo brother’s arm. He is thought to have killed some eighty people. But he was more than just a sadistic butcher. He was also a power in his own right. While he was formally the underboss of Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco’s Ciaculli Family, Pino Greco was in reality the power behind the Pope’s throne, making sure that Corleone’s will was done. At some point, late in 1985, Little Shoe’s own men decided to eliminate him before his ambitions put them in the way of Shorty Riina’s wrath.

Such was the dread inspired by the Corleone boss. Shorty had established a kind of military dictatorship. Cosa Nostra would never be the same again. By the time of Little Shoe’s death, the new tide of underworld war in Italy had long since engulfed Campania too, and the Sicilian mafia had been drawn into a proxy war against the Professor and his Nuova Camorra Organizzata.

 
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T
HE
N
EW
F
AMILY
: A group portrait

W
HEN
R
AFFAELE
C
UTOLO
‘
NOISILY WANDERED AWAY
’
FROM THE MENTAL HOSPITAL IN
Aversa in February 1978, the growth of his Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) accelerated. The Professor recruited hundreds more young followers, reorganised his command structure, vastly increased the pressure of his extortion rackets, and even made a trip to the United States to seek closer business ties with his contacts in the American Cosa Nostra. All of these initiatives prepared the ground for the audacious demand he then issued to every other camorra organisation: he wanted tribute, in the form of 20,000 lire (equal to some $87 in 2011) for every case of contraband cigarettes that was unloaded in the region. There was no mistaking the scale of the ambition implicit in Cutolo’s ultimatum: he was making a bid to become the absolute ruler of the whole Campanian underworld.

Cosa Nostra was the biggest force standing in Cutolo’s way. In the early 1970s, the clans affiliated to the Sicilian mafia held the criminal balance of power in Campania, a region traversed by many different gang territories. Canny propagandist that he was, the Professor sold his campaign to his followers as underworld patriotism: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, heir to the traditions of the Neapolitan Honoured Society of old, was to lead a crusade to free the region of Sicilian influence: ‘One day the people of Campania will understand that a crust of bread eaten in freedom is worth more than a steak eaten as a slave. And that day Campania will truly have victory.’ Cutolo branded
camorristi
who were loyal to any outside criminal force as traitors: ‘In my eyes they were “half
mafiosi
,” because they took orders from Sicilian bosses and in that way sold out their own land.’ The
Professor’s rhetoric was backed by the firepower of his legions of young gunmen. Fighting began to break out across Campania.

The first clans to bond together to resist Cutolo were those from central Naples. The anti-Cutolo front then grew to embrace Cosa Nostra’s Campanian Families and other clans in the Neapolitan hinterland too. As it did so, it adopted the name Nuova Famiglia—the New Family—or NF. By early in 1980, the whole of the region was divided between two armed camps, the NF and the NCO. The scale of the armies was absolutely unprecedented in the whole long history of Campanian organised crime. So too was the scale of the bloodshed: an estimated 1,000 dead in the course of five years.

The battle in Campania in the early 1980s was a much messier affair than Shorty Riina’s coup d’état in Sicily. Most of the confusion derived from the fact that Nuova Famiglia was a loose alliance rather than a single underworld organisation. It did use improvised initiation rituals. But that fact tells that its leaders were desperate to use any means they could to manufacture loyalty among the recruits they needed to stand up to the greatly superior numbers of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The Nuova Famiglia was held together (when it did hold together) only by its opposition to the Professor. Some of the underworld barons within it soft-pedalled on the war-making when it suited their own selfish purposes. Some switched sides halfway through. Cosa Nostra tried to manage the conflict from the outside, while going through a savage conflict of its own back in Palermo.

In 1980, Cosa Nostra first tried to drum up the kind of united resistance to Cutolo’s ambitions that would have brought a quick end to the struggle. But the Commission found that even some of the Sicilian mafia’s own affiliates in Campania were loath to throw men and money into a war. The leading tobacco smuggler Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza had been one of the founding members of the anti-Cutolo alliance. But by now he preferred to strike a deal with the Professor based on dividing out territory: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata could have the province to itself, as long as it left the city alone. Lorenzo Nuvoletta, leader of the other Campanian Family of Cosa Nostra, probably had different motives. For narcotics were more important to him than the declining revenue from tobacco smuggling that the Professor wanted to tax.

Frustrated by this lack of warrior zeal, the Palermo Commission sent a killer to dispatch the Professor. But someone must have leaked news of the assassin’s arrival, because the assassin himself was shot dead by two men on a motorbike not long after arriving in Naples.

In the summer of 1980 Cosa Nostra tried a different approach. Having failed to nudge Zaza and Nuvoletta into the attack, it urged them to broker
an accommodation. But the resultant peace-making seems to have been almost as half-hearted as the war-making, for the cycle of punitive expeditions was not interrupted for long. In the end, Cosa Nostra would sponsor at least three peace conferences attended by large numbers of representatives from both the NCO and NF. Two of those conferences were attended personally by Shorty Riina and his lieutenants, despite the massacre that they were orchestrating in Sicily. But it was all in vain. Once started, the fighting in Campania proved too bitter to stop.

The camorra would go on to murder 364 people in 1982—very nearly one a day. And lest the many innocent victims get lost in the tales of gangland retribution, it is worth citing the case of someone else who died in January 1982: Annamaria Esposito, aged thirty-three, a mother of two who was executed for the sole reason that she witnessed a
camorrista
being murdered in her bar.

A group portrait of the Nuova Famiglia bosses who were fighting against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata for control of this territory tells us a great deal about the past, the present and the future of Campanian organised crime. The story of the camorra stretching forwards into the twenty-first century has its roots in the NF.

The camorra war of the early 1980s brought Pupetta Maresca back to the national headlines again. In 1955, she had first made herself notorious by killing the man who killed her husband, the President of Potato Prices. Pupetta’s fame carried weight in the Campanian underworld. In 1970, she started a long-term relationship with a major narcotics trafficker, Umberto Ammaturo. With her new beau, Pupetta was able to turn her fame into a luxurious prominence as a
femmena ’e conseguenza
(a woman with stature), a First Lady of the underworld. The police believed that ‘many of the crimes carried out by Umberto Ammaturo were, in reality, dreamed up in her head’.

Pupetta’s consort, Umberto Ammaturo, was one of the most aggressive members of the NF. Near Christmas in 1981, he planted a bomb outside Cutolo’s Ottaviano palace as a provocation. He would later confess to being the man behind the murder of criminal psychiatrist Aldo Semerari, whose beheaded corpse was also found near Cutolo’s palace on April Fool’s Day 1982. Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo demanded Ammaturo’s own head as the price for any peace deal with the NF.

In February 1982, in the middle of this confrontation between Ammaturo and Cutolo, Pupetta Maresca’s brother Ciro was arrested and sent to the very maw of the NCO monster: Poggioreale prison. Although he was kept in
isolation, his life was in obvious and immediate danger. Pupetta’s response showed that she had lost none of her gift for publicity. On 13 February 1982 she called a media conference, no less, in the Naples press association headquarters. Arriving alone, she made a statement entrance: nearly an hour late, her jewels sparkling as the camera flashbulbs ignited, she was dressed in a black leather skirt and black fur coat, with a leopard-skin choker at her throat and a white blouse that exposed her cleavage. No sooner had she come into the room than she started picking fights with the journalists, responding angrily to queries about her jewellery (‘I’d like to see anyone with the courage to mug me’) and then demanding order: ‘Gentlemen, a bit of silence please! If Cutolo was here instead of me, you wouldn’t be making such a racket. Of course, it’s because you’re afraid. He has shut your mouths with lead.’

The Professor was the target of her unrestrained rage: ‘bastard’, ‘madman’, ‘he wants to become the emperor of the city’. When journalists asked Pupetta if she was speaking on behalf of the Nuova Famiglia, she replied: ‘I’m not part of any group. But if some people think like I do—and you tell me that means the Nuova Famiglia—then they are my partners.’

Fighting back tears, she returned to the main purpose of the press conference: to issue an ultimatum to Cutolo. ‘I want to let that gentleman know that, if he dares touch anyone close to me, I will destroy him and his family down to the seventh generation, women and children included.’

We can only wonder about the emotions that helped drive this extraordinary performance. Rage or sorrow? Defiance or fear? Nor do we have an idea whether these emotions were real or staged. Yet it seems certain that they were at least partially the symptom of the psychological strains of a lifetime spent as a camorra queen. Maresca enjoyed status and very probably real power. She also paid a heavy price. She had two children by Ammaturo, twins. She also lost a child: her first son Pasqualino (the baby she had been carrying during the notorious events of 1955) vanished in 1974 during the tobacco-smuggling war between Cosa Nostra and the Marseillais. Pupetta herself strongly suspected that Ammaturo had killed him. Yet she stayed with her man, either because he beat her (above the hairline, so the damage would not show) or because she was too attached to her furs and jewels.

The Professor was even less shy of publicity than Pupetta, and much better than her at getting under his enemies’ skin. Dressed in a grey double-breasted suit, he issued his response to her challenge from a Naples courtroom: ‘Maybe Pupetta said those things to attract attention. Maybe she wants to make another film. You have to say that she’s chosen the right moment: Carnival kicks off in a few days’ time.’

As the spat between Pupetta Maresca and the Professor demonstrated, the war in Naples was an extraordinarily
public
affair. In Sicily, where Shorty Riina’s death squads emerged from nowhere to exterminate his enemies, the citizenry and even the police struggled to make out who was fighting whom. In Campania, by contrast, there were open challenges and proclamations, and nobody was in any doubt where the battle lines were drawn. These contrasting styles of warfare corresponded to a long-standing difference between the public images of the two crime fraternities. The soberly dressed Sicilian
mafioso
has traditionally had a much lower public profile than the
camorrista
.
Mafiosi
are so used to infiltrating the state and the ruling elite that they prefer to blend into the background rather than strike poses of defiance against the authorities. The authorities, after all, were often on their side.
Camorristi
, by contrast, often played to an audience.