Blood Brotherhoods Page 15

  The Foundation of the Camorra could have been scripted from one of the criminological guidebooks to the Honoured Society.

  The Honoured Society conducts its first ever initiation ritual. A scene from Edoardo Minichini’s highly successful play, The Foundation of the Camorra, from 1899.

  The audience captivated by this spectacle was peculiarly knowledgeable. For The Foundation of the Camorra was staged at the San Ferdinando theatre, which stood just a few metres from the infamous Vicaria prison where the play was set. During any given performance the spectacle in the auditorium was as colourful as whatever happened on stage. And as noisy: the din of chatter, catcalls and fragments of song was incessant. In the stalls, under a constant rain of orange peel and seed husks from above, ink-stained printers argued with smoke-blackened railwaymen, and breastfeeding mothers gossiped with fat prostitutes. Surveying it all from the rickety boxes just above was what passed for a middle class in the Vicaria quarter: shabby-smart teachers, or pawnbrokers with their wives and kids decked out lavishly in unreclaimed loan collateral. Here in the San Ferdinando was a hyper-condensation of the already impossibly cramped life of the Vicaria quarter. So it is hardly surprising that when The Foundation of the Camorra was on, camorristi came to see it too.

  So many camorristi came, in fact, that the play drew the attention of law enforcement. On 4 November the local inspector wrote to the chief of police to express his concerns.

  Given that the aforementioned theatre is frequented by an audience entirely made up of members of the underworld and men with prison records, the action being performed there is one big lesson at the school of crime.

  What worried him was the play’s dangerously ambiguous message. Of course it had a happy and morally instructive ending, as did everything else staged at the San Ferdinando. But the audience seemed far more excited by what came before: displays of delinquent bravado that mirrored their own twisted values. Worse still, certain passages in the play were little more than propaganda for the Honoured Society. The police inspector’s letter quotes from one offending speech by the stage capo.

  Our rulers act like camorristi on a big scale. So there’s nothing wrong if the people do it on a small scale.

  Nonsense, of course; but alluring nonsense all the same.

  Popular melodramas were churned out at staggering speed for the unruly punters at the San Ferdinando. Edoardo Minichini, the author of The Foundation of the Camorra, is thought to have written around 400 plays; he died in poverty, leaving his wife and ten children to fend for themselves. (The fact that the camorra notoriously took protection payments from theatres probably helps explain his economic difficulties.) Many of Minichini’s plays featured camorristi. In fact there was a fashion for such dramas in 1890s Naples. Titles like The Boss of the Camorra (1893) and Blood of a Camorrista (1894) sucked in large and enthusiastic audiences from the tenements. In fact these plays were only the latest manifestations of Honoured Society folklore. Ever since the 1860s, singers, storytellers and puppet shows had been thrilling plebeian audiences with phoney tales of camorra honour and derring-do.

  The star of the San Ferdinando stage, an actor appropriately named Federigo Stella, always played the good guy, and always played him in the same histrionic, declamatory style. One of Stella’s stock characters became what one contemporary man of the theatre called the ‘old-school, valorous camorrista who dishes out good deeds, clubbings and oratory with the same spirit of fair play’. It mattered little to Stella’s audience that there was no such thing as the noble camorrista, nor had there ever been.

  Mafiosi and camorristi have always had a narcissistic fascination with their own image as reflected on stage, in verse and in fiction. There is nothing at all new about the feedback loop that links gangster art and gangster life. The Hollywood filmmakers who are fascinated by the mob, and the mobsters who make their villas look like the house in the climactic scene of Scarface (I know of three cases in Italy), are both heirs to a tradition as old as organised crime itself. As we have already seen, the camorra assembled a myth of its own Spanish origins from whatever cultural flotsam and jetsam it could find. The mafia was scarcely less stage-struck. The very name ‘mafia’ almost certainly entered common use in Palermo because of an enormously successful play in Sicilian dialect first performed in 1863, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (‘The mafiosi of Vicaria prison’—the Vicaria being, as well as the notorious Naples prison, the other name for Palermo’s Ucciardone jail). I mafiusi is the sentimental tale of an encounter between prison camorristi and a patriotic conspirator in the years before Italian unification. In other words, the play that gave the mafia its name has eerie echoes of the real meetings between patriots and prisoners that played such a crucial role in the history of Italian gangland. It is said that a Man of Honour was consulted on the script.

  Mafiosi also loved adventure stories. Their favourite author was not Alexandre Dumas, as Chief Prosecutor Morena claimed, but the Sicilian, Vincenzo Linares, famous for his fictional tale of The Beati Paoli, which was first published in 1836.

  The Beati Paoli of Linares’s imagination was a mysterious brotherhood in the Palermo of the 1600s. They would meet before a statue of the goddess Justice in a grotto full of weaponry under a church in piazza San Cosimo; here they would pass solemn and lethal judgement on anyone who abused the weak and innocent.

  The fable proved so popular in Palermo that in 1873 piazza San Cosimo was renamed piazza Beati Paoli. Then in April 1909 the police discovered that mafiosi were holding their own tribunals in a cellar just off piazza Beati Paoli—the very cellar that popular legend identified with the HQ of the secret society in Linares’s story. Later still, in the 1980s, many Sicilian Men of Honour who turned state’s evidence would tell the authorities, with not a hint of irony, that the mafia and the Beati Paoli were the same thing. Clearly, mafiosi had long since begun to believe their own propaganda.

  Francesco Schiavone, arrested in 1998, was boss of the camorra’s casalesi clan. He was known as ‘Sandokan’, because he looked like a heroic pirate from a 1970s TV series.

  Schiavone’s brother Walter modelled his villa (left, below) on the house from the final scene of Scarface. But in Italy, the interplay between gangster fiction and gangster reality is nothing new.

  The play that gave the Sicilian mafia its name. A poster advertising The Mafiosi of Vicaria Prison (1863). Set in the 1850s, it tells the story of an honourable sect of prison extortionists who are recruited to the cause of a unified Italy.

  12

  THE SLACK SOCIETY

  PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC CRIMINOLOGISTS AND OPPORTUNISTIC MEN OF THE THEATRE DID not have a monopoly on public discussion of the mob in the new criminal normality of the 1880s and 1890s. A pioneer of serious-minded analysis of the issue was Pasquale Villari, a Neapolitan historian who held a university chair in Florence.

  Villari was a lifelong campaigner for good government and social progress in the south. The squalor of the low city and the camorra that grew out of it was his consistent concern. In 1875 he created a furore by writing an open letter in which he claimed that the state of Naples was so desperate that the camorra was ‘the only normal and possible state of things, the natural form that the city takes’. One of the most revealing passages in the letter was an interview with a former deputy mayor who told him that most public works contracts were impossible to implement without the approval of the camorra.

  Villari’s call to moralise Naples from top to bottom gained new resonance when the Left assumed power, with a brand of pork-barrel politics that gave camorristi even greater access to public spending. Villari inspired a generation of radical conservative campaigners to raise what became known as the ‘Southern Question’. One of those to follow Villari’s call was Pasquale Turiello, who in 1882 diagnosed what he termed the individualism, indiscipline and ‘slackness’ in Neapolitan society. Turiello argued that the Left’s shambolic sleaze both reflected and cultivated Neapolitan ‘slackness’. The city was being divided up bet
ween bourgeois political clienteles from above and proletarian camorra gangs from below.

  The events of the 1880s and 1890s would confirm Turiello’s grim diagnosis and demonstrate his belief that it applied across much of southern Italy and Sicily, and even to the national political institutions. In 1882, the right to vote in general elections was finally extended to include about 7 per cent of the population. Any male who paid some tax or had a couple of years of primary school education could now go to the polls. Another reform followed in 1888: the electorate for town and provincial councils was broadened; and the mayors of larger towns were now to be elected. The spread of democracy swelled the market in political favours. Mafiosi and camorristi—either directly, or through their friends in national and local government—gained the power to share out such appetising perks as exemptions from military service, reduced local authority tax assessments, and town hall jobs. Other quasi-public bodies, like charities, banks and hospitals, helped grease the wheels of patronage.

  Meanwhile, in Naples, the paradigm of the slack society, an appalling cholera epidemic struck in 1884. The entire bourgeoisie and aristocracy fled in panic. Some 7,000 people died, most of them from the alleys and tenements of the low city, which one contemporary said were like ‘bowels brimming with ordure’. In the epidemic’s aftermath the call went up to ‘disembowel’ the city. Tax incentives and public money were quickly allocated to support ambitious plans for slum clearance and sewer construction. For the next twenty-five years, the modernisation of Naples proceeded with agonising slowness and inefficiency. All the while, the city’s political cliques squabbled over the trough.

  At every level of government, the slack society had enormous trouble creating and enforcing good reforms that benefitted everyone. Instead, it produced endless political fudges that fed temporary alliances of greedy politicians and their hangers-on. Indeed, when it came to dealing with the mafia and the camorra, the most important reforms were often the least likely to be implemented: policing is a prime example. On this point, as on others, there is no clearer way to illustrate the weaknesses of the slack society than through the life of an individual policeman.

  In 1888 Ermanno Sangiorgi, the policeman who had first discovered the Sicilian mafia’s initiation ritual, was working in Rome as a special inspector at the Ministry of the Interior. By that time he had found happiness in his personal life, although that happiness once more brought down trouble from above. While he was still in Sicily, six years after his wife’s death, he began an affair with a colleague’s wife. He was punished for what a senior civil servant called his ‘scandalous conduct’ by being transferred immediately, in December 1884. (The Ministry evidently regarded sexual morality as a more serious matter than consorting with gangsters.) Sangiorgi’s new love, a Neapolitan called Maria Vozza, twenty years his junior, followed him. She had to live in separate accommodation to avoid damaging his career any further. The two would remain together for the rest of his life.

  In September 1888 Sangiorgi was sent back to Sicily on a secret mission to inspect the island’s unique mounted police corps, in preparation for a root and branch reform. He found that Palermo police headquarters was ‘in a complete state of confusion and disorder’; Trapani was worse. The mounted police corps did not even keep proper records of what crimes had been committed. Two of its most senior officers in Palermo had ‘intimate relationships with people from the mafia’. The result was not a surprise. As Sangiorgi wrote, ‘It would be dangerous to be deceived: the mafia and banditry have incontrovertibly raised their heads.’

  No action was taken. Not for the last time, Sangiorgi’s hard work failed to produce any political effects.

  The results for Sangiorgi’s career were positive, however. In 1888 he was picked to manage security when the King visited the turbulent region of Romagna. He did the job so well that in 1889, in Milan, he became Italy’s youngest chief of police. His rapid progress earned him the rare accolade of a newspaper profile.

  Sangiorgi is only forty-eight. He is reddish-blonde, likeable, and knows how to conceal the cunning required by his job beneath a layer of affable bourgeois calm. He is as alert as a squirrel, an investigator endowed with a steady perspicacity.

  The year after this profile was published he was transferred to Naples, a city where the police still enjoyed one of the worst reputations of any force in Italy, a city in ferment in the aftermath of the cholera epidemic of 1884 and the ‘disembowelling’ that followed it. As he had done in Sicily, Sangiorgi immediately set about breaking up the traditionally cosy relationship between the police and organised crime. On 21 February 1891, one of Sangiorgi’s officers, Saverio Russo by name, paid the ultimate price for this ‘open fight’ against the camorra when he was murdered by a camorrista he was trying to arrest. One well-informed newspaper commentator warned his readers against taking this shocking incident as an indication that gangsterism was out of control. Indeed, crime had decreased considerably in recent months:

  Without any doubt a great deal of the credit for this must be given to the new Police Chief Sangiorgi. Of course it is no easy matter purifying the environment inside Police Headquarters and the local stations. Nor is it an easy job to shake up officers who are not always diligent and who previously went as far as to protect gangland. But the good results that Police Chief Sangiorgi has obtained so far, his sharp sagacity and great experience, constitute a guarantee for the government and citizenry alike.

  Trouble cropped up in Sangiorgi’s personal life while he was in Naples. In February 1893 he was mortified to learn that his son from his first marriage, Achille, by now a coal merchant in Venice, had been arrested for cheque fraud; to Sangiorgi’s great shame, the story was reported in the press. The Ministry of the Interior looked into the case, but could only express sympathy for a hard-pressed father’s lot.

  The supreme boss of the Honoured Society when Sangiorgi arrived in Naples was Ciccio Cappuccio, known as ‘Little Lord Frankie’. His specialism was a traditional area of camorra dominance: the market in horses, particularly the army surplus nags that were occasionally auctioned off to the general public. Rigging auctions was easy: the camorristi only had to bully other bidders. But the camorra’s control over the horse trade was also more insidious.

  Marc Monnier’s father had been a keen equestrian and occasional horse dealer back in the 1840s and 1850s, so the Swiss hotelier had witnessed firsthand how camorristi used the uncertainties of the business to wheedle themselves into every possible economic transaction. Buying a horse from a stranger in Naples was always risky. No one could guarantee that, once the money had been handed over, the animal would not turn out to be frightened of the city’s clamour or too weak to cope with its hills. No one, that is, except a camorrista. For a share of the price, camorristi promised to make business deals run smoothly—on pain of a beating, or worse. The camorra also controlled the supply of horse fodder: many bosses, including Little Lord Frankie, doubled as dealers in bran and carobs. From this base they could exercise total control over the city’s ragged army of hackney-carriage drivers.

  Little Lord Frankie passed away, of natural causes, in early December 1892. His death became the occasion for a disturbing display of just how deeply dyed by illegality was the slack fabric of Neapolitan society. From Police Headquarters, Sangiorgi could do little more than watch.

  Day-to-day criminal business in Naples: a camorrista, in typical flared trousers, takes protection money from a cab driver (1880s).

  Little Lord Frankie’s obituary in an important new Neapolitan daily, Il Mattino, was lavish in its praise. Here was a righter of wrongs, a proletarian justice of the peace. With a flush of pride, Il Mattino recalled the time when he had single-handedly downed twelve Calabrian camorristi in a knife fight in prison. But it was wrong to call him a ‘bloodthirsty, born delinquent’.

  He was exceptionally nice: a model of decorum, respectful and deferential. He had a grim look in his grey eyes. But he strove constantly to moderate it by app
lying the sweetness and docility of a man who knows his own strength—a man who is absolutely sure that nothing in the world can resist his will.

  Evidently it was not only the lumpenproletariat of the Vicaria quarter who embraced the myth of the noble, old-style camorrista. Il Mattino, like its notorious editor Edoardo Scarfoglio, was hysterically right wing and utterly corrupt—the mouthpiece of the worst elements in the Neapolitan political class. But what is both shocking and revealing about its coverage of Little Lord Frankie’s death is the way it tolerates, and even celebrates, the private statelets that camorra bosses were able to carve out in large areas of the city.

  Little Lord Frankie’s last journey was a statelet funeral. Six horses drew an elaborate hearse, covered in wreaths, on a tour of half the city. The mourners were led by every cab driver in Naples, and a procession of sixty hackney carriages. Then came a huge crowd of awestruck followers, all telling tales of the dead man’s ‘heroic and chivalrous deeds’, according to Il Mattino. The paper even published a poetic lament for Little Lord Frankie.

  Who will defend us now?

  Without him, what will we do?

  Whoever can you run to

  If a wrong is done to you?

  Naples was still a city where the rule of law and honesty in public affairs seemed alien concepts.

  A few months after Little Lord Frankie’s posthumous show of force, Sangiorgi found himself at the centre of a riot that, for one brief moment, laid bare the contorted entrails of the slack society. And despite his ‘steady perspicacity’, and ‘sharp sagacity’, the notorious hackney-cab-drivers’ strike of August 1893 would prove too tough an assignment for the determined Police Chief. For the first time in decades, the camorra took to the streets in force.