Blood Brotherhoods Page 16

  The events of the strike itself can be quickly related. The cab drivers’ anger was triggered by a proposal to extend the city’s tram system. So on 22 August three thousand cabbies launched a violent street protest to coincide with patriotic demonstrations against the murder of some Italian workmen in southern France. Socialists, anarchists and a hungry mob from the low city soon joined in. Sangiorgi was in bed with a severe fever when the disorder broke out. While he was away from work, a scrum of his officers on the hunt for rioters assaulted customers in the Gambrinus, the most prestigious café in the city. Sangiorgi crawled back to his desk the following morning to find that the police had become the targets of mass fury: there were pitched battles in the alleys between rioters and the forces of order. A boy of eight, Nunzio Dematteis, was shot in the forehead by a Carabiniere defending a tram from the mob. News quickly spread that the police were to blame for the boy’s death. The crowd carried his bleeding body aloft and marched on the Prefecture. Sangiorgi’s officers blocked their path and a grotesque tug of war over the corpse ensued. Some local parliamentarians demanded that the police withdraw their ‘provocative’ presence from the streets. The army was called in to restore calm.

  Thus far, with the possible exception of the botched police operation, there is little that is particularly Neapolitan about the events of August 1893. Trams represented an obvious threat to the hackney-carriage business. A violent industrial dispute like this could have happened in any big city in Europe, where police aggression would have been the likely response. But in Naples there were of course many camorristi among the cab drivers. After all, these were the same men who had filed along behind Little Lord Frankie’s coffin just a few months earlier. Sangiorgi’s police learned that the riot of August 1893 had been planned the night before, at a meeting between camorristi and anarchists. The chief of police compiled a list of several hundred cabbies involved in the disturbances, marking out many of them as camorristi and men with criminal records.

  The camorra takes to the streets again. A mob battles with police during the hackney-cab-drivers’ strike of August 1893.

  And where the camorra had interests, so too did its eminent friends. Street gangsters may have performed the strike but it was orchestrated by city politicians. Those politicians had two notable beefs against the central government in Rome: first, the proposal to award the contract for extending the tram network to a company from Belgium, of all places; and second, the threat to take away control over the reconstruction programme set in motion after the cholera epidemic of 1884. One of Sangiorgi’s officers later reported that the origins of the riot lay in ‘the great shifting of interest groups caused by the disembowelling work’. By engineering anarchy in the streets of Naples, the interest groups clustered around city hall and the building industry hoped to win concessions from Rome.

  Over subsequent days the strike was quelled by a mixture of negotiation and deceit. First the negotiations: the cab drivers were invited to talks with the town council. Then, presumably on the orders of the Interior Ministry, and ‘in order to favour the resolution of the dispute’, as Sangiorgi put it, he released the cabbies who had been arrested—excluding the ones with criminal records. A camorra-backed politician called Alberto Casale then acted as intermediary during the talks; in all likelihood, Casale was one of the politicians who had helped orchestrate the strike in the first place. Concessions were duly made: the tram timetable would be curtailed, and the tram network would not be extended.

  Then came the deceit: a few weeks later this agreement was torn up and the original plans for the tram network were reinstated. It would later emerge that Alberto Casale had accepted a sturdy backhander from the Belgian tram company. His favourite camorristi received their share of the cash too—or at least we can surmise as much because the town council’s flagrant bad faith during the negotiations did not reignite the cab drivers’ protest. More importantly, the city council retained its control over a large chunk of the reconstruction funds. The manoeuvrings behind the scenes of the hackney-cab strike showed, as Turiello had argued, that the camorra and the political clienteles were operating at different ends of the same market for favours. The slack society was also the sly society.

  By the time the dispute was resolved, Sangiorgi had left Naples. The disastrous way the cab drivers’ protest had been tackled led to a purge in Police Headquarters. Sangiorgi was transferred to Venice only two weeks after the end of the strike. The rioting of August 1893 was one of the worst moments of his career, but he took much more than his fair share of the blame for the chaos.

  Meanwhile, among the many jails, penitentiaries and penal colonies of the peninsula, mob rule persisted unchecked throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Overhauling the prisons would have been an incisive reform directed against organised crime, drying up its traditional sump of strength. Yet the forces of law rarely concerned themselves with the mafia and camorra’s prison activities. One exception was a case in the late 1870s: following the murder of a police informer in Naples that had been ordered from behind bars, fifty-three prison camorristi were successfully convicted, a rare investment of precious institutional resources in trying to tackle this chronic problem.

  Evidently the prisons still hosted a dense gangster network. In 1893 a positivist criminologist published The Story of a Born Delinquent, an autobiography—no less—by a senior prison camorrista known only as Antonino M. Antonino M recounted taking part in several vicious battles in prison, including one that saw Neapolitans and Sicilians line up against Calabrians and Abruzzesi: many were killed and a warden was left holding his intestines in his hands.

  But it is the unity of the prison confraternity, rather than its divisions, that emerges most clearly from Antonino M’s account. He related that every time he was transferred from one jail to another (usually for violent conduct), he used code words to prove his camorra credentials. His status was duly recognised wherever he went: in jails in Puglia and the Marche, as in the Castello del Carmine in Naples (the very jail where Duke Castromediano had been clapped in irons in 1851). Nor was this the only way that camorristi in different regions were connected: punishments decreed in a prison in Cosenza, northern Calabria, could be carried out in the penal colony on Favignana, an island off the western coast of Sicily.

  There was plenty more evidence where Antonino M’s story came from. Undeniably, all the things that Duke Castromediano had observed back in the 1850s were still going on in Italy’s prisons: organised violence and vendettas; corruption, extortion, smuggling and the trade in favours; ritual initiations and knife fights; and training in the skills and protocols of the sect. But instead of reform, such information only triggered a depressingly repetitive pattern of political failure. Now and again a particularly savage prison riot or an unusually alarming government report would generate fervent calls for change. Just as predictably, those calls would echo pointlessly into silence: lack of funds and the sheer political irrelevance of the prisons issue meant that Italy’s slack society could not muster the will to tackle the problem.

  Soon Italy would pay a very heavy price for failing to reform the prisons.

  The criminologist who published Antonino M’s autobiography also subjected him to a close physical examination. Not surprisingly, the tests came up positive: Antonino M was a born delinquent, a mixture of ‘the savage, the epileptic and the moral lunatic’. He had a series of tell-tale bodily deformities, such as jug-handle ears, large testicles and slow reflexes in his pupils. He also had tattoos, including the slogan ‘DOWN WITH DISHONOURED SCUM’ across his chest. But the giveaway was the specimen’s broad, flat skull—his brachycephaly, to use the scientific term. Antonino M was Calabrian, the criminologist explained; and typical Calabrians were dolichocephalic, meaning that they had long, thin heads. Manifestly, Antonino M was a degenerate member of the Calabrian race.

  Many Italians would probably have believed the criminologist if he had said that Calabrians had four arms and a single
eye in the middle of their brow. Calabria was Italy’s poorest region, its most politically marginal. But by the time Antonino M came to have the criminological callipers applied to his cranium, born Calabrian delinquents like him had already surfaced from the prison system to form a new criminal fraternity.

  PART IV

  THE ’NDRANGHETA EMERGES

  13

  HARSH MOUNTAIN

  A SINGLE GEOGRAPHICAL FACT DEFINES THE LANDSCAPE AT THE SOUTHERNMOST TIP OF Calabria: Aspromonte. The ‘Harsh Mountain’ is a place of bitter beauty. To the south, where Aspromonte looks down past Mount Etna and out towards North Africa, its flanks are toasted by the sun. Here valleys gouge their descent, spilling cement-grey grit towards the turquoise expanse of the Ionian Sea. In spring, the more sheltered hollows host embattled blooms of pink oleander and yellow broom. Aspromonte’s higher reaches, by contrast, are dark with pine and slender beech. Among the trees, tortuous paths seek out the peaks and exquisite high meadows before skirting down into sudden gorges that springtime fills with the smell of oregano. The woodland canopy extends down the lush western and northern slopes where the panoramas are even more captivating: the Straits of Messina separating Calabria from Sicily, the smoky Aeolian Islands, and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

  Nothing in this landscape is permanent. Human inhabitants cling to the coastal strips or create improbable, eagle’s nest villages above the gorges. Every winter torrents tear rocks from the fragile valley sides and landslips rake brutal shortcuts down through the roads’ painstaking meanders. Whole villages, like Roghudi and Amendolea, have been abandoned from one day to the next, their inhabitants pushed down from the mountain to the coast.

  Massive earthquakes give history a deadly, arrhythmic beat in southern Calabria. In 1783 as many as 50,000 people died, and there was a sequence of lethal quakes in 1894, 1905, 1907 . . .

  Even to the north-east of Aspromonte the mountains hog most of the terrain in Calabria, leaving precious little space for the coastal plains, and posing a formidable obstacle for travellers. As a result, most nineteenth-century tourist guides covered the region with little more than a cursory reference to its rugged scenery and stubborn inhabitants. Baedeker, the obligatory companion volume for the well-to-do northern European traveller, all but told its readers not to bother going to Calabria in 1869.

  The length of the journey, the indifference of the inns and the insecurity of the roads, which has of late increased, at present deter all but the most enterprising.

  Such words of warning were not misplaced. At that time the railway stopped at Eboli. But Eboli was still a long way above Calabria’s northern border, and 327 miles from Reggio Calabria, the small city at the tip of Italy’s toe where Aspromonte overlooks the Straits of Messina. At Eboli, if the visitor were lucky enough to grab one of the three places available in the coach and then lucky with the roads, the weather and the outlaws, he could make the journey to Reggio in three and a half days. Along the route, he would stare nervously out at the forests and crags, recalling recent tales of bandit atrocities.

  In 1871 the government census recorded that 87 per cent of Calabrians could not read or write. Across much of the region, callous landowners imperiously exploited vast swarms of peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti, a Tuscan Jewish intellectual who was one of the few men intrepid enough to investigate Calabrian society, wrote in 1874 that

  Among the oppressed there is no middle stage between two extreme states of being: on the one hand, fear, obedience and the most abject docility; and, on the other, the most brutal and ferocious rebellion.

  Franchetti tells us that local government was a grubby and violent business in Calabria. There were many places where the mayor and his relatives cornered common land for themselves, or lived off the trade in timber stolen from common woodland. Any forest wardens who tried to impose the law, ‘ran a serious risk of getting a bullet’. The ‘grain banks’ created to lend seed corn and money to the poor at planting time often served only as a source of easy credit for the rich. As elsewhere in the south and Sicily, the government in Rome tolerated such abuses because Calabria’s corrupt mayors mustered votes for the ruling national factions. Calabria was one of the slackest parts of the slack society.

  Yet one thing that Franchetti was not particularly worried about was organised crime. In the 1860s and 1870s, at a time when copious evidence attests to the shocking extent of mafia and camorra power, there are only a few intermittent reports of gangsterism in Calabria. Together, those reports do nothing to suggest that southern Calabria would become a hoodlum fief on a par with Sicily and Campania. There is no government document from the 1860s or 1870s, no traveller’s tale, no faded local memoir that speaks of a strong and insistent mafia presence here. The region had many serious problems but delinquent fraternities were not among them.

  By the mid-1880s, there were some signs of improvement in Calabria’s fortunes. Trains now crawled to Reggio along a single-track railway that clung to the Ionian coast; and the line along the Tyrrhenian coast was under construction. Yet it was precisely at this historical moment that the first official reports tell us that ‘a nucleus of mafiosi and camorristi’ was in operation in Reggio Calabria and ‘the ranks of the maffia’s criminal associations’ were growing elsewhere in Aspromonte’s shadow. As if from nowhere, a new criminal sect was being born. By the end of the 1880s the province of Reggio Calabria and some adjoining parts of the province of Catanzaro were enduring an explosion in gang crime from which they have never recovered.

  Mafiosi and camorristi: the earliest labels were borrowed from Sicily and Naples. Other names would soon be used: Calabrian mafia, Honoured Society, Society of Camorristi, and so on. But as police and magistrates became more knowledgeable about this new threat to public order in southern Calabria, they most often referred to it as the picciotteria. The word is pronounced roughly ‘peach-otter-ear’, and there is no mystery to its derivation. Picciotto (‘peach-otto’) was a southern Italian or Sicilian dialect word for ‘lad’. Picciotti were also the lower ranking members of the Neapolitan camorra. Picciotteria sometimes means a young man’s air of arrogant self-confidence. So ‘Lads with Attitude’ is a handy translation of the new association’s informal title.

  The Lads with Attitude were a lowly bunch: herdsmen and farmhands, by and large, men whose grandest ambition was a flask of wine and a piece of goat meat. At the time when the picciotteria first appeared, the great Sicilian novelist Giovanni Verga was evoking the lives of poor people like them in some of the greatest fiction in the Italian language. Verga knew that he faced a hard task convincing his bourgeois readership to dare an imaginative leap into the mental universe of the peasantry. ‘We need to make ourselves tiny like them’, Verga pleaded. ‘We need to enclose the whole horizon between two clods of earth, and look through the microscope at the little causes that make little hearts beat.’

  From today’s perspective, we need to make a similar imaginative leap. But we have no need to be patronising towards the ‘little hearts’ of the farm hands and woodcutters who became members of the picciotteria. For these humble folk were the direct ancestors of a fearsome Calabrian criminal brotherhood whose definitive name would only become commonly used in the 1950s: the ’ndrangheta, Italy’s third mafia, and now its richest, its most secretive and the most successful at spreading vile metastases around the globe.

  Soon after it was born, the picciotteria was subjected to a judicial offensive that was sporadic but nonetheless more effective than any faced so far by organised crime in either Naples or Sicily. In the years following the first signs of alarm, around Aspromonte and on either side of the first stretch of the Apennines, hundreds of Calabrian picciotti—precisely 1,854 of them between 1885 and 1902 according to one local prosecutor—were tried, convicted and put behind bars. This fact alone tells us something significant: Calabria’s gangsters did not yet enjoy the same degree of VIP protection enjoyed by the Neapolitan camorra, let alone the Sicilian mafia.

  Yet the picciott
eria remained almost entirely unknown in the rest of Italy. Unlike the mafia and camorra, it provoked no parliamentary inquiries or debates, no bouts of national newspaper outrage, no investigations by sociologists, no poems or plays. Nobody cared: this was Calabria, after all.

  The lack of interest in the picciotteria together with Calabria’s history of maladministration and natural disaster often leaves historians with a shortage of evidence. The city of Reggio Calabria was undoubtedly where the picciotteria was first spotted in the early 1880s, but there is not enough surviving documentation to explain how and why. Yet elsewhere the early trials did deposit a thin but precious seam of paper that can now be mined for clues about how organised crime in Calabria began. And as it turns out, the ’ndrangheta’s beginnings were much more straightforward than the camorra’s or mafia’s. There are two places in particular where enough nineteenth-century policework survives to give us a clear picture of those beginnings. A later chapter deals with the most notorious of those places: the village of Africo, sited 700 metres above the Ionian coast. Until it was finally abandoned in 1953 as a result of devastating floods, Africo was a byword for the isolation and poverty of Calabria’s highland communities—and a byword for organised crime.

  But before going to Africo, the story of the ’ndrangheta’s origins takes us to the opposite flank of Aspromonte, and to a place of relative wealth and power. One of the secrets of the ’ndrangheta’s survival and success over the years has been its ability to straddle the distance between prosperity and hardship, as between the contrasting faces of the Harsh Mountain.