Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  The villages of the Bova district, including Africo, were a cultural island even on Aspromonte: their inhabitants spoke not Calabrian dialect, but Greek—or at least Grecanico, an archaic dialect of Greek that survives from the early Middle Ages when Calabria was part of the Byzantine Empire. One sign of how important this cultural island is to the Calabrian mafia today is the fact that the word ’ndrangheta derives from the word for ‘manliness’ or ‘heroism’ in Grecanico.

  But boss Velonà’s prestige extended beyond the Grecanico-speaking area: further round the coast to the north-east, he was acknowledged in Bovalino, San Luca and even as far as Portigliola and Gerace. This was a huge stretch of the Calabrian coast—as big as the Plain of Gioia Tauro just over the mountains; it corresponds more or less to the Mandamento ionico, or ‘Ionian Precinct’, which is one of the three areas into which the ’ndrangheta’s jurisdiction is divided today. No wonder the rank and file called Velonà ‘President’.

  Velonà came to Africo on 12 May to initiate a new Lad with Attitude. The formalities were completed indoors. The young man ritually submitted himself to the boss’s authority by kneeling before him, kissing his hand, and uttering the following words: ‘Father forgive me if I have strayed in the past, and I promise not to stray in the future.’

  The initiation, as always, was celebrated with a banquet attended by members from across the area. They drank a great deal of wine and ate a goat purloined from the man who had been forced to put Velonà up during his stay. Everyone laughed when one picciotto loudly asked the wife of the very man from whom the animal had been stolen for some salt to preserve a piece of it. The lads clearly appreciated such a creatively framed prepotenza. Then, after eating copiously, the bosses settled down to play cards while the younger affiliates danced to the sound of the bagpipes. ‘All of this happened publicly, in front of everyone’, as one witness explained.

  By stealing animals, and eating stolen meat in such demonstrative assertions of their esprit de corps, the picciotti were proclaiming themselves to be at the top of the food chain; for this was a part of the world where the peasant diet was mostly vegetarian. Elsewhere, the picciotteria went to even greater lengths to show that its members were in the protein elite. In Bova, the town’s mayor would indignantly testify, one local mobster (a cobbler like his boss) once treated his brethren from other towns to a fish banquet. Now, Bova is only about nine kilometres from the sea, as the crow flies. But those 9 kilometres may as well have been 900: nothing perishable could be relied upon to survive the arduous trip on a mule’s back up into the mountains from the coast. As the mayor explained, fish ‘arrives only very rarely in our town, and people from a humble background are not accustomed to eating it’. For a cobbler to serve fish to his guests was the dietary equivalent of gangster bling.

  On Aspromonte, there were many who were impressed by these rudimentary advertisements for power. While the boss Velonà was in Africo he was approached by a woman who presented him with a sheep and begged him ‘to do her the honour of admitting her son to the association’.

  Callea’s crew were doing more to earn such admiration than bullying the bagpiper and pinching the odd goat for their team-building banquets. According to the mayor of Africo, seventy pigs had been stolen in 1893 alone. Many other beasts went missing too. The victims—men like the schoolteacher, the archpriest, and the mayor himself—were too afraid even to report their losses to the authorities. Rumours said that the animals were sold cheaply to butchers who were also in the association; goats had been found with their ears—and therefore their owners’ marks—cut off. Butchers in Bova later reported that the legal livestock trade had virtually collapsed because people were just too afraid to go around buying and selling animals.

  The accumulating evidence from Africo points inexorably to an important conclusion: even in the most isolated mountain villages of Grecanico-speaking Aspromonte, the Lads with Attitude were part of an organisation that was much bigger, and more coordinated, than some loose constellation of local gangs. Not only did they have common rituals and structures and a shared past behind bars, in Filippo Velonà they also had a charismatic boss whose prestige traversed a wide territory. They even placed themselves under the jurisdiction of a single judge: his name was Andrea Angelone.

  Angelone was an old prison camorrista, fifty-nine years old to be precise. He was released from jail for the last time following a twelve-year stretch in 1887 and immediately set up a branch of the picciotteria in his home village of Roccaforte del Greco, in the Grecanico-speaking district. Although he did not take an active role in the sect’s day-to-day criminal activity thereafter, he still received his regular cut of the takings in return for dispensing his wisdom at tribunals. The Grecanico-speaking Lads also had contacts in Reggio Calabria and in the district of Palmi.

  The authorities in Palmi reported similar long-range connections. The various sections of the organisation on the Plain of Gioia Tauro had ‘emissaries so they could correspond with one another’. And while the local branches each had their own boss and underboss, clusters of them operated under the authority of one gang.

  As in Sicily, cattle rustling was almost certainly one of the main reasons for these links. Many of the Calabrian mafiosi were woodcutters and herdsmen who thought nothing of spending days on end in the mountains, and who were born with a map of Aspromonte’s numberless pathways imprinted on their minds. The rustling technique was simple and virtually foolproof: steal animals in one place, and then avoid detection by sending them off through the mountains to trusted brethren in other towns who could put them on the market. The picciotti also moved around the area to exact an extortion tribute on the regular fairs that were still an important part of the Calabrian mountain economy.

  What were the authorities doing in the late 1880s and early 1890s, while the picciotteria was building its numbers and thickening its networks? The answer is, very little. Africo, Roccaforte, Bova and the other centres of gang activity were still among the many places in the peninsula where ‘Italy’ did not mean very much beyond taxes, military service and the occasional visit from Carabinieri on patrol. In April 1893, two forest guards (auxiliary policemen) sent a letter to the local magistrate denouncing the existence of ‘a terrible sect of so-called maffiosi’ in Africo and the surrounding area. Their warning was ignored and buried in a pile of paperwork.

  Which is where, more than a year later, it was found by a dynamic new representative of the Italian state’s feeble authority in Calabria: Sergeant Angelo Labella, commander of the Bova station of the Carabinieri. On 21 June 1894, Labella wrote his first report on the criminal association he had unearthed: he named fifty members, including Domenico Callea and Filippo Velonà. Over the coming weeks Labella added to his roll call of suspects, and laid the groundwork for a huge prosecution by detailing witnesses who could provide evidence against the gang. At last, it seemed, the Italian state was set to challenge the picciotteria regime in this forgotten place.

  In September 1894 investigating magistrates came to the district capital of Bova and began summoning the witnesses Labella had cited. The Lads quickly mobilised in response to this challenge to their authority. They verbally threatened anyone prepared to give evidence against them, including the wealthier citizens of Africo. They slaughtered animals and left them in the fields for the owners to find; they vandalised vines. In late October they cut down twelve fruit trees belonging to one landowner and carved funeral crosses into the stumps, just in case the message in the damage was not clear.

  The picciotti also enlisted the bagpiper to their campaign of intimidation. He was forced to play while they went through the streets improvising menacing songs about their enemies, including literate folk like town councillors, the archpriest, the tax collector, and Sergeant Angelo Labella. They were heard bellowing the following clumsy ditty outside one landowner’s balcony.

  Now take up your pen and inkpot to do a new trial. But if we win our freedom, we’ll take vengeance with our
own hands.

  While their Lads were intoning their threats, Domenico Callea and the other bosses had already decided on the fate of the most dangerous of the witnesses named in Sergeant Labella’s first report: a fifty-year-old swineherd named Pietro Maviglia.

  Maviglia did not cut a very impressive figure. His crippled leg meant that he walked with the aid of a stick and he could not hobble very far without gasping for breath. (The post-mortem would identify the signs of pleurisy in his wounded lungs.) But Maviglia’s importance lay in the fact that he was a member of the gang—one of the earliest members, in fact.

  Back in 1892 Maviglia had become involved in a dispute with Domenico Callea’s equally nasty younger brother Bruno, who had beaten him up as a result. To take revenge, Maviglia leaked news of a burglary that Bruno Callea had committed. As a result of Maviglia’s testimony, Callea was sentenced to two years for the burglary, and another fourteen months for beating the crippled old swineherd up a second time.

  Maviglia was expelled from the picciotteria. From that point on, he lived his life under the threat of death. With Sergeant Labella’s detective work continuing, and prosecuting magistrates conducting their first interrogations in the case, silencing Maviglia now became an urgent priority for the bosses.

  In a place like Africo, rumours took the place of newspapers, especially when it came to informing the citizenry about the internal affairs of the criminal fraternity. In October 1894 whispering voices began to relate the surprising news that the Calleas had settled their quarrel with Pietro Maviglia. In the face of the ongoing judicial investigation, harmony had returned to the brotherhood, it was said. Maviglia himself was unsure of how to respond to the peaceful proposals directed at him; he asked his brother for advice, confiding that the picciotti wanted to readmit him into what he referred to as ‘the sect’.

  The picciotti held the bagpipe party on the evening of All Saints for two reasons. First, to reassure Maviglia that the offer to readmit him to their fraternity was genuine. Second, to provide cover for his killers. While the members of the gang danced and drank and sang in the streets that evening, one picciotto approached Maviglia and explained to him that the Lads had stolen a goat and would eat it together in a shack out in the countryside to celebrate the swineherd’s return to the brotherhood. Pulling his fist from his pocket, he showed its contents: ‘I’ve even got some salt’, he smiled.

  About an hour after dark that night, Pietro Maviglia was seen for the last time by anyone but his assassins. Leaning on his walking stick, with his jacket slung over his shoulder, he set off along the via Anzaro that led towards the cemetery.

  Shortly afterwards, one of the Lads told the bagpiper to bring the dancing to an end and then followed the direction that his intended victim had taken.

  Late on the morning of 4 November 1894 the local deputy magistrate and doctor arrived in Africo to perform a grisly duty. They were ‘local’ in the sense that they had only had to trudge for four hours to reach Africo from the district capital of Bova, along mountain tracks that horses refused to tackle. They found Pietro Maviglia lying where he had been found the previous evening: face down on top of his walking stick, in a field about fifteen minutes from where he had last been seen among the picciotti dancing to the bagpipes.

  The doctor worked quickly once the body had been moved to the cemetery and formal identification had taken place. Five lesions spoke the likely narrative of Maviglia’s last minutes. The old man was stabbed in the small of his back first. Perhaps the head injury came next: a hatchet blow had notched the back of his skull. Maviglia was then stuck twice with a dagger, both blows entering the chest cavity just to the left of the breastbone. The heart was pierced through both ventricles. Either of these injuries would have been fatal, but the killers—at least three of them—were remorseless, inflicting the fifth and final wound when their victim was already prostrate. It seemed a reasonable deduction that, as Maviglia’s head was heaved backwards by the hair, his throat was cut by a very sharp blade: a clean-edged, ten-centimetre gash bisected his right jugular vein, his voice box and his oesophagus. ‘Undigested food is coming out’, the doctor jotted dispassionately.

  I must also point out that there was coarse cooking salt on the throat wound. The authors of the murder sprinkled it there, perhaps in order to achieve greater satisfaction for their feelings of vendetta.

  Pietro Maviglia was butchered like a goat. In the days following his death, the people of Africo said that his butterfly pompadour had been sliced off too, ‘so as to demonstrate that he was not fit to belong to the association’. The doctor neither confirmed nor denied the rumour.

  The revolting details of Pietro Maviglia’s murder give the lie to the first of many historical misconceptions about the picciotteria. The early Calabrian mafia, it is still sometimes said, had a social function. In a desperately deprived and backward part of the country, mafiosi got together to create a source of authority and a system of mutual assistance. Or so the argument goes.

  It may be true that, on the slopes of Aspromonte, the early ’ndrangheta moved into a vacuum where the state should have been. But they ruled by fear—that much is evident from one statement after another that the magistrates collected in the aftermath of Maviglia’s death. That fact is not changed if, in the absence of state authority, some people—including landowners—made the best of their situation, and allied themselves with bullies they could not fight. Pietro Maviglia’s murderers, it is worth remembering, made no attempt to hide his corpse: those horrific injuries and even the fistful of salt thrown on his slit gullet, were meant as a warning to others—a public, poetic ‘justice’.

  After the post-mortem, investigations into the picciotteria in Africo finally began to make real progress. More Carabinieri arrived in the village, and were billeted in a house right next door to Domenico Callea’s. The picciotteria’s bookkeeper and fencing instructor had gone on the run after ordering Pietro Maviglia killed. His new wife was left alone in the house. She kept the Carabinieri awake all night with the sound of her sobbing.

  The strong military presence in Africo encouraged more witnesses to come forward. With Sergeant Labella’s energetic help the magistrates preparing the prosecution case were able to tease out more and more evidence. Maviglia’s murderers were arrested. Under interrogation, they broke: blaming one another at first, and then finally confessing. In the Grecanico-speaking communities, the wall of omertà around the picciotteria collapsed.

  Perhaps the most historically significant truth to surface after Maviglia’s brutal demise was that the criminal network that the Lads with Attitude rapidly created in the 1880s and 1890s had an enthralling religious symbol at its centre.

  The Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi lies hidden in a valley in Aspromonte’s upper reaches. Legend has it that in 1144 a shepherd came to this secluded spot looking for a lost bullock. He was greeted by a miraculous vision of the Blessed Virgin. ‘I want a church erected’, she declared, ‘to spread my graces among the devout who will come here to visit me’. For centuries, in early September, poor pilgrims have made their way up the twisting mountain roads to Polsi in joyous conformity with the Virgin’s wishes.

  Calabria’s greatest writer, Corrado Alvaro, described Polsi as it would have been in the late nineteenth century, when twenty thousand men and women flooded the churchyard and the woods round about in preparation for the Festival. Some had walked barefoot all the way; others came wearing crowns of thorns. The men drank heavily and fired their guns in the air. Everyone feasted on roast goat, bellowed ancient hymns, and danced all night to the music of the bagpipe and the tambourine.

  On the day of the Festival itself, the tiny church was filled with the imploring wails of the faithful, and with the bleating and mooing of the animals brought as votive offerings. Hysterical women shrieked vows as they elbowed their way through the crowd to place eerie ex-votos at the Madonna’s feet: brass jewellery, clothes, or babies’ body parts modelled from wax. When evening came an
d the Madonna was paraded around the sanctuary on a bier, the pilgrims prayed, wept, beat their chests, and cried out ‘viva Maria!’

  The Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, on Aspromonte. Since at least 1894, the ’ndrangheta’s annual gathering has coincided with the Festival of the Madonna of the Mountain held here.

  The Festival of the Madonna of Polsi has a special symbolic significance for the ’ndrangheta. To this day the Chief Cudgels from across the province of Reggio Calabria use the Festival as cover for an annual meeting. In September 2009, prosecutors maintain, the newly elected ‘Chief of the Crime’, Domenico Oppedisano, came to have his appointment ratified at Polsi. Senior positions in the ’ndrangheta’s coordinating body, the Crime, come into force at midnight on the day of the Festival.

  The nearest town to the Sanctuary at Polsi is San Luca, where the writer Corrado Alvaro grew up, and where the ’ndrine (local mafia cells) involved in the Duisburg massacre of 2007 originated. ’Ndranghetisti refer to San Luca as their Mamma; the ’ndrangheta there is traditionally the guardian of the whole association’s rules, and the arbiter in disputes. San Luca has been called the ‘Bethlehem’ of Calabrian organised crime.

  We can now be sure that the Polsi crime summit is a tradition as old as the ’ndrangheta itself. For in June 1895 a shopkeeper from Roccaforte del Greco told the magistrates investigating Pietro Maviglia’s murder what he had seen in Polsi.