Blood Brotherhoods

  Praise for Blood Brotherhoods

  ‘[BLOOD BROTHERHOODS] is no dry, scholarly work. Dickie writes with the same distinctive flair that made his book DELIZIA!, on the history of Italian cuisine, so readable.’

  —Daily Telegraph

  ‘It is almost certainly the most ambitious true-crime assignment ever: to lift the veil of myth, mystery and silence—omertà—shrouding Italy’s notorious criminal organisations. The result is a stunning success; a sprawling, powerful historical narrative that is the definitive story of Sicily’s Mafia, the Camorra of Naples and Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta.’

  —Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘Both fine social history and hair-raising true crime, this account of the Italian underworld clans tells a grimly fascinating tale.’

  —Independent

  ‘Exciting and well written, it plays out like a 19th-century Sopranos.’

  —Shortlist

  ‘Magisterial . . . absorbing . . . ’

  —Scotsman

  ‘[E]nthralling . . . chillingly charts the birth and rise of all three of Italy’s mafias.’

  —Dr John Guy

  ‘Italians often complain that foreigners are obsessed by the Mafia, turning a localised problem of organised crime into a stereotype that damages the image of a whole nation. Yet as John Dickie shows in this chilling and eye-opening book, the real problem is that the stereotype is correct. . . . A fine book.’

  —Bill Emmott, The Times (London)

  ‘Drawn with expertise and mastery of detail . . . [Dickie] combines narrative skills in his description of skullduggery with excellent pen-portraits of striking individuals. His reader-friendly, racy style becomes more sober and reflective when he offers points of analysis, and now no one anywhere writes with such authority on Italy’s criminal gangs.’

  —Times Literary Supplement

  ‘John Dickie’s chronicling of the Italian mafias is both fine in detail and engrossing in narrative sweep.’

  —John Lloyd, Financial Times

  BLOOD

  BROTHERHOODS

  Also by John Dickie

  Cosa Nostra

  Delizia!

  Mafia Republic

  Copyright © John Dickie, 2011, 2013, 2014

  First half published as Blood Brotherhoods in Great Britain in 2011 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK Company; then published as Mafia Brotherhoods in paperback in 2012; and second half first published as Mafia Republic in 2013

  Published in 2014 in the United States by PublicAffairs™,

  a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.

  Maps by Neil Gower and Clifford Webb

  Book Design by Linda Mark

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dickie, John, 1963–

  Blood brotherhoods : A History of Italy’s three mafias / John Dickie.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61039-428-4 (e-book)

  1. Mafia—Italy—Sicily—History. 2. ’Ndrangheta—History.

  3. Camorra—History. 4. Organized crime—Italy—History. I. Title.

  HV6453.I83M326933 2014

  364.1060945’8--dc23

  2014001947

  First Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Dedicated to the memory of Gilbert Dickie (1922-2011)

  The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.

  CORRADO ALVARO

  CONTENTS

  Maps

  The structure of Cosa Nostra

  The structure of the ’ndrangheta

  Ranks in the ’ndrangheta

  Preface to the US Edition

  Introduction: Blood brothers

  PART I: VIVA LA PATRIA!

  1.How to extract gold from fleas

  2.Co-managing crime

  3.The redemption of the camorra

  4.Uncle Peppe’s stuff: The camorra cashes in

  5.Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra

  PART II: GETTING TO KNOW THE MAFIA

  6.Rebels in corduroy

  7.The benign mafia

  8.A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered

  9.Double vendetta

  PART III: THE NEW CRIMINAL NORMALITY

  10.Born delinquents: Science and the mob

  11.An audience of hoods

  12.The slack society

  PART IV: THE ’NDRANGHETA EMERGES

  13.Harsh mountain

  14.The tree of knowledge

  15.Darkest Africo

  16.The King of Aspromonte

  PART V: MEDIA DONS

  17.Bankers and Men of Honour

  18.Floriopolis

  19.Four trials and a funeral

  20.The ‘high’ camorra

  21.The camorra in straw-yellow gloves

  22.The criminal Atlantic

  23.Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid

  24.The strange death of the Honoured Society

  PART VI: MUSSOLINI’S SCALPEL

  25.Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia

  26.Campania: Buffalo soldiers

  27.Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina

  28.Calabria: What does not kill me makes me stronger

  29.Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman

  30.Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese

  31.Sicily: The slimy octopus

  32.Master Joe dances a tarantella

  33.Liberation

  MAP SECTION APPEARS BETWEEN PAGES 284 AND 285

  PART VII: FUGGEDABOUTIT

  34.Sicily: Banditry, land and politics

  35.Sicily: In the Name of the Law

  36.Calabria: The last romantic bandit

  37.Naples: Puppets and puppeteers

  38.Gangsterismo

  PART VIII: 1955

  39.The Monster of Presinaci

  40.Mars attacks!

  41.The President of Potato Prices (and his widow)

  PART IX: THE MAFIAS’ ECONOMIC MIRACLE

  42.King Concrete

  43.Gangsters and blondes

  44.Cosa Nostra: Untouchables no more

  45.Mafia diaspora

  46.The mafia-isation of the camorra

  47.The mushroom-pickers of Montalto

  48.Mafiosi on the barricades

  49.The kidnapping industry

  50.The Most Holy Mother and the First ’Ndrangheta War

  51.A brief history of junk

  52.Mr Champagne: Heroin broker

  53.The Transatlantic Syndicate

  54.The Professor

  PART X: THE SLAUGHTER

  55.Blood orgy

  56.The New Family: A group portrait

  57.Catastrophe economy

  58.The Magliana Band and the Sacred United Crown

  PART XI: MARTYRS AND PENITENTS

  59.Mafia terror

  60.The fatal combination

  61.Doilies and drugs

  62.Walking cadavers

  63.The capital of the anti-mafia

  64.The rule of non-
law

  65.’U maxi

  66.One step forward, three steps back

  67.Falcone goes to Rome

  PART XII: THE FALL OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC

  68.Sacrifice

  69.The collapse of the old order

  70.Negotiating by bomb: Birth of the Second Republic

  PART XIII: THE SECOND REPUBLIC AND THE MAFIAS

  71.Cosa Nostra: The head of the Medusa

  72.Camorra: A geography of the underworld

  73.Camorra: An Italian Chernobyl

  74.Gomorrah

  75.’Ndrangheta: Snowstorm

  76.’Ndrangheta: The Crime

  77.Welcome to the grey zone

  Acknowledgements

  Illustration credits

  Notes on sources

  Sources consulted

  Index

  THE STRUCTURE OF COSA NOSTRA

  As first described by Tommaso Buscetta in 1984

  THE STRUCTURE OF THE ’NDRANGHETA

  (Source: ‘Operazione Crimine’, summer 2010.)

  RANKS IN THE ’NDRANGHETA

  PREFACE TO THE US EDITION

  Once upon a time, three Spanish knights landed on the island of Favignana, just off the westernmost tip of Sicily. They were called Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso and they were fugitives. One of their sisters had been raped by an arrogant nobleman, and the three knights had fled Spain after washing the crime in blood.

  Somewhere among Favignana’s many caves and grottoes, Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso found sanctuary. But they also found a place where they could channel their sense of injustice into creating a new code of conduct, a new form of brotherhood. Over the next twenty-nine years, they dreamed up and refined the rules of the Honoured Society. Then, at last, they took their mission out into the world.

  Osso dedicated himself to Saint George, and crossed into nearby Sicily where he founded the branch of the Honoured Society that would become known as the mafia.

  Mastrosso chose the Madonna as his sponsor, and sailed to Naples where he founded another branch: the camorra.

  Carcagnosso became a devotee of the Archangel Michael, and crossed the straits between Sicily and the Italian mainland to reach Calabria. There, he founded the ’ndrangheta.

  BLOOD BROTHERHOODS IS A HISTORY OF ITALY’S THREE MOST FEARED CRIMINAL organisations, or mafias, from their origins to the present day. But no historian can claim to be the first person drawn towards the mystery of how the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta began. Mafiosi got there first. Each of Italy’s major underworld fraternities has its own foundation myth. For example, the story of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso (names that mean something like ‘Bone’, ‘Masterbone’, and ‘Heelbone’) is the ’ndrangheta’s official account of its own birth: it is a tale told to Calabrian recruits when they prepare to join the local clan and embark on a life of murder, extortion and trafficking.

  As history, the three Spanish knights have about as much substance as the three bears. Their story is hooey. But it is serious, sacramental hooey all the same. The study of nationalism has given us fair warning: any number of savage iniquities can be committed in the name of fables about the past. Moreover, in the course of the last 150 years, Italy’s criminal brotherhoods have frequently occluded the truth by imposing their own narrative on events: all too often the official version of history turns out to derive from the mafias’ myths, which are a great deal more insidious than the hokum about Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso might initially suggest. No ordinary gang, however powerful, has lasted as long as the mafias, nor has it had the same drive to control how its own past is narrated. The very fact that the mafias value history so highly betrays the outrageous scale of their ambition.

  Mafia history is filled with many outrages much worse than this. Acts of appalling ferocity are the most obvious. The mafias’ cruelty is essential to what they are and what they do; there is no such thing as a mafia without murder, nor has there ever been. Yet violence is only the beginning. Through violence, and through the many tactics that it makes possible, the mafias have corrupted Italy’s institutions, drastically curtailed the life-chances of its citizens, evaded justice, and set up their own self-interested meddling as an alternative to the courts. So the real outrage of Italy’s mafias is not the countless lives that have been cruelly curtailed—including, very frequently, the lives of the mafiosi themselves. Nor is it even the livelihoods stunted, the resources wasted, the priceless landscapes defiled. The real outrage is that these murderers constitute a parallel ruling class in southern Italy. They infiltrate the police, the judiciary, local councils, national ministries, and the economy. They also command a measure of public support. And they have done all this pretty much since the Italian state was founded in 1861. As Italy grew, so too did the mafias. Despite what Fascist propaganda has led many people to believe, the criminal fraternities survived under Mussolini’s regime and even infiltrated it. They prospered as never before with the peace and democracy that have characterised the period since 1946. Indeed, when Italy transformed itself into one of the world’s wealthiest capitalist economies in the 1960s, the criminal organisations became stronger, more affluent and more violent than ever. They also multiplied and spread, spawning new mafias and new infestations in parts of the national territory that had hitherto seemed immune. Italy is a young country, a modern creation, and the mafias are one of the symptoms of modernity, Italian style.

  Today, in the areas of Italy where criminal power is strongest, it constitutes nothing short of a criminal regime. In a secret dispatch from 2008 that found its way onto the Wikileaks site, the United States Consul General in Naples reported on Calabria. One might quibble with one or two of his statistics, but the core of the diagnosis is as true as it is dispiriting:

  The ’ndrangheta organized crime syndicate controls vast portions of [Calabria’s] territory and economy, and accounts for at least three percent of Italy’s GDP (probably much more) through drug trafficking, extortion and usury . . . Much of the region’s industry collapsed over a decade ago, leaving environmental and economic ruin. The region comes in last place in nearly every category of national economic assessments. Most of the politicians we met on a recent visit were fatalistic, of the opinion that there was little that could be done to stop the region’s downward economic spiral or the stranglehold of the ’ndrangheta. A few others disingenuously suggested that organized crime is no longer a problem . . . No one believes the central government has much, if any, control of Calabria, and local politicians are uniformly seen as ineffective and/or corrupt. If Calabria were not part of Italy, it would be a failed state.

  Italy is and has always been a deeply troubled society. But it is not a banana republic in South America, or an impoverished warlord demesne in Asia, or some remnant of a shattered empire in Eastern Europe. Unless our maps are all calamitously wrong, the famous boot-shaped peninsula is not located in a region of the world where one might expect to find the state’s authority undermined by a violent and rapacious alternative power. Italy is a full member of the family of Western European nations. Alone among those nations, it has the mafias. Herein lie both the urgency and the fascination of mafia history.

  Yet writing mafia history is a young field of scholarship: it is predominantly a child of the unprecedented mafia savagery of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Italian researchers began to channel their sense of outrage into patient and rigorous study. Overwhelmingly, those historians, whose numbers have grown steadily, hail from the same regions of southern Italy that are worst afflicted by Italy’s permanent crime emergency—regions where mafia history is still being made. Some researchers are lucky enough to hold university positions like I do. Others are prosecutors and officers of the law. Some are just ordinary citizens. But all of them are bent on pitting hard evidence and open debate against the lies spread by the mafias and their allies. There can be few other areas where the discipline of understanding the past can make such a direct contr
ibution to building a better future. To defeat the mafias, one has to know what they are; and they are what their history shows us, no more and no less. Thanks to the labours of a number of historians, we can now shine lights into the obscurity of Italian organised crime’s development, revealing a narrative that is both disturbing and disturbingly relevant to the present.

  Blood Brotherhoods springs from my belief that the findings of this growing body of research are too important to be kept among specialists. It draws together the known documentation and the best research to create a ‘choral’ work, as the Italians might say: a book in which many voices tell a single tale. My own voice is one of those in the chorus, in that Blood Brotherhoods also incorporates substantial new findings that complement and correct the story that has emerged from the exciting work being done in Italy.

  This book is also distinctive in another important respect: it seeks to tell the story of all the mafias of Italy. Historians have only very rarely done sustained comparative research like this. (For sociologists and criminologists, by contrast, comparison is a stock-in-trade.) Perhaps it is understandable that historians have fallen behind—and not just because writing a unified history of organised crime in Italy is a dauntingly huge job. The criminal fraternities of Sicily, Campania and Calabria each evolved to fit the characteristic features of the territory it fed off. So at various points in their history, they have differed more than the catchall tag ‘mafia’ might lead us to assume.

  Yet the mafias have never existed in isolation. What they share is just as important as the many things that distinguish them. Throughout their history, all three have communicated and learned from one another. So for all their individual peculiarities, studying Italy’s underworld organisations in isolation is a bit like trying to figure out the dynamics of natural selection just by staring at beetles impaled on pins in a dusty display case. A broader, comparative context shows us that Italy does not have solitary, static criminal organisms; rather, it has a rich underworld ecosystem that continues to generate new life-forms to this day.

  The traces of the mafias’ common history are visible in a shared language. Omertà is one example—or umiltà (humility) to give its original form. Across southern Italy and Sicily, omertà-umiltà has denoted a code of silence and submission to criminal authority. ‘Honour’ is another instance: all three organisations invoked a code of honour and have at one time or another called themselves the Honoured Society.