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  14

  THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

  PALMI SITS ON A SHELF WHERE ASPROMONTE MEETS THE TYRRHENIAN SEA. GAZING to the north-east, it affords a seductive panorama over the Plain of Gioia Tauro, a fertile amphitheatre of land descending gently from the mountains. The Plain was Calabria’s answer to the ‘Golden Shell’ around Palermo in the late nineteenth century. Land was owned in smaller farms rather than great estates, partly because a great deal of Church property was confiscated and privatised after Italian unification. There were many citrus fruit groves in the Plain too, although the irrigation was not as sophisticated as it was in Sicily. More important to the economy of towns like Palmi were the famous olive trees, as tall and venerable as oaks. Recently the wine industry had come to the fore, after French vineyards were devastated by phylloxera, an aphid-like insect that feasted on the roots and leaves of vines. Italian producers moved to fill the gap in supply, and in the plain of Gioia Tauro they even cut down olive trees to make room for the grape.

  In the 1880s Palmi was a town of some eleven or twelve thousand inhabitants, which was not small by the standards of the region. Southern Calabria is a place where the population is spread out in little centres, and in the 1880s few of them housed more than five thousand people. Even the provincial capital, Reggio Calabria, could only muster its 40,000 population by including the villages that surrounded it. Palmi was the administrative capital for the whole of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, an area encompassing 130,000 souls. And as the administrative capital it had an outpost of the Prefecture, a police station, a courtroom, and a prison. Men from that prison would turn Palmi into Calabria’s most notorious mafia stronghold in the 1880s and 1890s.

  Christ and the thieves overlook an ’ndrangheta heartland. Palmi, one of the centres from which the ’ndrangheta first emerged in the 1880s, can be seen in the middle distance. Beyond and below it lies the notorious plain of Gioia Tauro.

  It all began in the spring of 1888. The local newssheet started to report razor slashings and ritual knife duels. In Palmi’s taverns and brothels, gang members battled it out with clubs and blades. In classic mafia and camorra fashion, the bleeding losers refused point blank to name the men who had wounded them.

  Within weeks of these first reports, Palmi’s hoodlum problem was out of control. Ordinary citizens were afraid to leave their homes. Anyone who stood up to the thugs received the razor treatment. The picciotti settled their bloody accounts in the centre of town, on corso Garibaldi and in piazza Vittorio Emanuele. They had begun by extorting money from gamblers and prostitutes. Now they also fleeced landowners who were afraid to report thefts and vandalism for fear of worse: the Lads with Attitude were setting up protection rackets, the very foundation of any mafia’s territorial authority. The gang threatened a local Carabiniere, and pelted him with stones; they even silenced the local newspaper, whose editor received a threatening letter telling him not to ‘persecute the lads’. From Palmi the sect spread to the smaller towns and villages right across the Plain of Gioia Tauro, and up onto the surrounding mountain slopes.

  Only in June 1888, when a clerk at the local branch of the Prefecture was slashed across the face as he came out of the theatre, did the police round up the first large batch of suspects. The twenty-four men arraigned early in 1889 give us our first glimpse of the kind of person who became a Lad with Attitude. Many of them were young—late teens or early twenties—and all of them were labourers or artisans: the legal documents list job titles such as peasant, wagon driver, waiter, tailor, mule driver, shepherd. There were also one or two men who farmed their own plot. The boss, one Francesco Lisciotto, was a cobbler; at sixty, he was comfortably the oldest man in the gang. More importantly, like all but three of the Palmi picciotti, he had already spent time behind bars.

  The police and magistrature continued their fight. In June 1890 one trial targeted a picciotteria network based in Iatrìnoli and Radicena, two towns that sat one just above the other about fifteen kilometres from the coast at Gioia Tauro. Many of the ninety-six defendants were workers and craftsmen like their fellow picciotti in Palmi. The judges in the case explained that the sect began in 1887; they had no doubts about where it came from.

  The association originated in the district prisons [in Palmi], under the name of ‘Sect of camorristi’. From there, as and when its bosses and promoters were released, it spread to other towns and villages where it found fertile soil among the callow youth, old jailbirds, and especially goatherds. The Society, with the protection it afforded to its comrades, offered this last group a way to pasture their animals illegally on other people’s land, and to impose themselves on landlords.

  Men like the Palmi capo Francesco Lisciotto came out of jail with their status in the Society already well established. The ’ndrangheta was not founded, in other words; it emerged almost fully formed from inside the prison system.

  More arrests and further trials followed over the coming years. Early in 1892 the court in Palmi tried some 150 men from right across the Plain of Gioia Tauro. The picciotti did their best to evade justice by killing one witness and threatening many others into silence. But the evidence against them proved overwhelming. The new boss of Palmi, Antonio Giannino, aged only 20, was his gang’s knife-fencing instructor. Indeed he was so proud of his skills that he had himself photographed in fighting pose. The image helped convict him.

  The 1892 trial added more detail to what the police knew about the picciotteria: the characteristic appearance of its affiliates, for example. The picciotti had tattooed hieroglyphs that signalled their rank. They also wore tight trousers that flared over their shoes, tied their silk scarves in a special way to leave the ends fluttering as they swaggered, and combed their hair into a distinctive butterfly-shaped pompadour.

  If peace returned to Palmi following the huge and successful prosecution of 1892, it certainly did not return for long. In 1894 the town was reduced to rubble by an earthquake. By the following year the picciotteria was active again, robbing and extorting among the temporary shacks in which much of the population still lived. Yet the police seemed inert. Commentators in the press muttered that the police in Palmi had ‘evening conversations’ in the very wine cellars where the hoods hung out, and that the forces of law and order were less interested in tackling organised crime than they were in arresting opposition voters during elections. In Calabria’s bigger towns, just as in Naples and Sicily, the police soon learned to co-manage crime with gangsters.

  Eventually, in September 1896, another wave of arrests elicited more confessions. Early in 1897 the resulting trial provided full details of the Calabrian mafia’s ranks and rituals for the first time. The picciotteria formed itself into locally based cells or ‘sections’. Each cell was subdivided between a Minor Society and a Major Society. The Minor Society contained men bearing the lower rank of picciotto. The Major Society contained the more senior criminals, known as camorristi. Both the Major and the Minor had their own boss and a contaiuolo, or bookkeeper, who gathered and redistributed the gang’s income from crime. Each new member had to undergo an initiation ritual to join the Society before he was awarded the lowest rank of all, that of ‘Honoured Youth’. The boss of the Major Society would call his men into a darkened room, form them into a circle and begin the long ceremony with the words, ‘Are you comfortable?’ to which the assembled gangsters would reply, ‘Very comfortable!’

  On 24 February 1897 a crucial witness in the resulting trial, a man by the name of Pasquale Trimboli, took the stand in Palmi’s courthouse. The defendants in their cage, and the public squeezed into the tiny gallery, all craned to hear what he had to say. Trimboli had been a member of the picciotteria, and therefore knew everything about the sect—including the terrible secret of its origins. Mention of the mysterious genesis of the picciotteria transfixed the court. But the mood of intense concentration soon gave way to puzzled laughter as he told his childish tale of how the Calabrian mafia was born.

  The society was born from three
knights, one from Spain, one from Palermo, and one from Naples. All three of them were camorristi. The Spanish knight took a camorra, a bribe, on every hand of cards the other two played. With time, he gathered in all their money and the others could not play anymore. So he gave 10 lire back to each one, and told them, ‘Here are 10 lire for you, and I’ve got all the rest in my hand, so that means that I’m the strongest.’

  Metaphorically speaking, these three camorristi were a tree. The boss, the Spanish knight, was the trunk of the tree. The Palermo knight, who was the oldest, was the masterbone, Mastrosso. And the third knight, the one from Naples, was the bone, Osso. The other members were the branches and the leaves. The ‘honoured youths’, who aspired to become picciotti, were the flowers.

  To my knowledge, this is the first recorded (and garbled) version of the ’ndrangheta’s founding myth. What it suggests is that Calabrian gangsters were seeking out fables to build their esprit de corps, to endow their newly surfaced fraternity with the same aura as their brethren in Campania and Sicily.

  The success of the judicial assault on the picciotteria can be judged from the testimony of a priest who was called to give evidence in yet another trial just three years later. He said that in Palmi,

  the criminals’ audacity makes walking through the streets extremely dangerous, even before the Angelus [i.e., sunset]. Honest people are now in the habit of going home as soon as they can, because at any time in the busiest parts of town you can hear the wails of the wounded and dying.

  But if the trials in Palmi failed to shake the grip of the picciotteria in the Plain of Gioia Tauro, they did at least provide historical documentation that has a familiar ring. Doubly familiar, in fact. On the one hand there is a great deal about the picciotteria that resembles the Honoured Society of Naples. (One early picciotteria trial in 1884 even found that the criminal boss of the small town of Nicastro ‘had relations with the famous Neapolitan camorrista Ciccillo [“Little Lord Frankie”] Cappuccio’.) Like their Neapolitan cousins, the Calabrians duelled with knives, and slashed their victims’ faces with razors. Both sects exploited prostitution and gambling; both blew their illicit earnings on feasting and getting drunk; both had a similar dress code (flared trousers and all that); and both divided their gangs between a Minor Society and a Major Society, between aspiring ‘Honoured Youths’, junior picciotti, and senior camorristi. Like the Neapolitans, the Calabrians punished their members’ transgressions with a distinctively disgusting punishment they called tartaro (‘Tartarus’ or ‘Hell’): it involved daubing the culprit with urine and faeces. There are many, many other similarities that it would be tiresome to list here: in the coded jargon they spoke to try and conceal what they were talking about, for example. What these likenesses confirm is that both the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian mafia share the same genealogy. Both were born from the same prison camorra.

  On the other hand the picciotteria is also familiar in that it closely resembles the ’ndrangheta of today, with its Minor Society and its Major Society, its foundation myth of the three Spanish knights, and so on. In fact even the most confused bits of Pasquale Trimboli’s testimony chime strongly with what we know about the ’ndrangheta’s contemporary practices. ’ndranghetisti habitually refer to their organisation metaphorically, as what they call a ‘Tree of Knowledge’: the trunk being the boss, the branches the officers, and so on.

  The ’ndrangheta of today, with its unique admission rituals for every rank in the organisation, is more obsessed with ceremony than any other Italian mafia. The archival papers tell us that the Calabrian mafia of the late 1800s was developing the same obsession. Today’s ’ndrangheta also has a great variety of specialised job titles within each local gang—far more than either the Sicilian mafia or the Neapolitan camorra. Echoes of that level of specialisation reach us from the nineteenth century too. Both the Minor Society and the Major Society of the Palmi section of the picciotteria had other posts in addition to the boss and the bookkeeper: such as the ‘Camorrista of the Day’, whose duty was to inform the boss of local goings on; and the ‘Picciotto of Correspondence,’ who handled communications between members in prison and members at large. In short, there can be no doubt that the Lads with Attitude were the ’ndrangheta by an earlier name.

  A long and gruesome history had begun.

  15

  DARKEST AFRICO

  THE ZAMPOGNA, OR SOUTHERN ITALIAN BAGPIPE, IS AN ANCIENT AND UNLOVELY instrument. It is made from a whole goat- or sheepskin that has been cured, turned wool side in, and sealed. A cluster of wooden pipes lolls where the sheep’s head was once attached and a mouthpiece protrudes from the stump of a front leg. When the zampogna is pressed under the player’s arm, nasal melodies are emitted over a hypnotic wheeze that sounds like the infinite bleat of the departed animal’s soul.

  In the hilltop towns of nineteenth-century Calabria, dancing to the zampogna was one of the few things that passed for entertainment. So any student of Calabrian folklore who had ventured into the streets of Africo on the mild evening of All Saints, 1 November 1894, would not have been surprised to see a circle of men taking turns to perform a skipping dance around the local zampogna-player. But as the zampognaro himself—his name was Giuseppe Sagoleo—would later tell an investigating magistrate, there was nothing folkloristic about his performance that evening. This bagpipe party was a carefully choreographed prelude to a murder that would precipitate one of the biggest early picciotteria trials. By luck, the complete papers from that trial have survived the upheavals of Calabrian geology and history to give us a priceless insight into this newly emerged criminal organisation in one of its heartlands.

  But to make sense of the bagpipe party of All Saints, we need to take a few steps further back in time. For the brutal execution carried out that evening was the culmination of a campaign by the recently established Africo section of the picciotteria to take control of the town for the first time. The zampogna had a central role in that campaign. Combined with the testimonies of witnesses, Giuseppe Sagoleo’s story takes us deep into the world of the ’ndrangheta in its primitive form.

  The zampognaro’s woes began, he testified, early the same year when Domenico Callea, age thirty-four, returned to his home town after serving ten years in prison for the kidnap and violent rape of a woman. Once his hair grew back from his prison crew cut, Callea cultivated a butterfly-shaped pompadour. He made the transition from prison camorrista to senior Lad with Attitude smoothly: he immediately became both the bookkeeper for the Africo section, and also its duelling instructor.

  Domenico Callea approached the zampognaro, offering to propose him for membership of a ‘society’ that existed in Africo. Because Callea was one of the society’s leaders, he said, he could even offer to waive the 7½ lire enrolment fee. But Sagoleo was smart enough to make inquiries about the society before accepting Callea’s invitation. When he was told that the members were obliged to follow the bosses’ orders, even if that meant committing robbery or murder, he refused to join.

  Across southern Calabria, Lads like Callea were making similar offers. They nearly always charged a membership fee of 7½ lire—about three quarters of the value of a goat, or about 8 per cent of the price of a pig. They usually claimed that the society just existed to drink wine and have a good time. And very frequently they beat people up or flicked them with a razor if they refused to pay. Sagoleo the zampognaro was lucky.

  This simple method of squeezing money from new recruits was a classic prison camorra technique. The picciotteria would use it for years to come. So the early ’ndrangheta was based partly on a kind of pyramid selling scam that benefitted only the bosses at the top. As the case of the bagpipe player of Africo also illustrated, this method had an inbuilt weakness in that it created a great many new members who had little genuine loyalty to the picciotteria. One of the reasons we can know so much about the early ’ndrangheta is that so many of these new recruits would confess everything to the police. The ’ndrangheta came into
the world with a birth defect that would take decades to shed.

  Although the zampognaro refused Domenico Callea’s offer, he did not save himself from the attentions of Callea’s friends. As he explained to the investigating magistrate

  The association’s members were always coming to me and asking me to play. There were times when they told me I had to do it whether I wanted to or not because they were in charge. Sometimes they paid me, and sometimes they didn’t. And I couldn’t complain because they threatened to break my bagpipes.

  Domenico Callea’s picciotti were subjecting the bagpipe player to what the police called a prepotenza, an act of petty bullying—like refusing to pay in a shop or pestering another man’s wife. But this prepotenza had a clear strategic purpose. The picciotteria may have been a secret sect, but its secrecy, like that of other Italian criminal fraternities, was of a paradoxical kind: the Lads were, after all, not yet so guarded that they could resist sporting distinctive haircuts and trousers. This is because their power depended on their ability to make their presence felt in the most public of ways. Indeed by strong-arming the poor zampognaro into playing at their parties, the Lads were imposing themselves on one of the few expressions of a collective social life in Africo. This was a flagrant prepotenza committed against the whole community. More than that, it was a deliberate attempt to undermine any sense of community, and replace it with fear.

  On 12 May 1894, the day devoted to Africo’s patron, Saint Leo, Domenico Callea called upon the bagpiper to welcome a very important guest: Filippo Velonà, a 38-year-old cobbler from the nearby village of Staiti. The official files on Velonà give us a clear but hardly very expressive description: he was 5’7” tall with brown hair and eyes, a ‘regular’ forehead, a ‘natural’ complexion, a ‘robust’ physique and no distinguishing marks. In short, Velonà could have been any one of the countless artisans who eked out a life by servicing the poor mountain communities of Calabria. The only clue to his real identity is in the local mayor’s description of his conduct as cattivissima—‘exceptionally bad’. This after all, was a man who had two convictions for wounding and who had served seven years in jail for dishing out a beating from which the victim subsequently died. When he was released in 1892 he led the emergence of the picciotteria in the district of Bova, which lay either side of the rugged valley blasted out by the Amendolea torrent.