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  On 3 September 1894 I went to the Festival of the Madonna of the Mountain. There I saw several members of the criminal association from Roccaforte in the company of about sixty people from various villages who were all sitting in a circle eating and drinking. When I asked who paid for all that food and wine at the Festival, I was told that they paid for it with the camorra they collected.

  Evidently the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary at Polsi was, from the outset, a chance for the Lads to make a profit and talk shop rather than to worship.

  Sergeant Labella’s investigations also threw up more scattered evidence about how the picciotteria began. Although he could not be precise about the year of its emergence, he thought that it was no later than 1887, the year that the sect’s ‘judge’, Andrea Angelone, was released from prison. Other witnesses pushed the starting date back further. One resident of the same village said he thought Angelone had been a member of a criminal association ‘sixteen or seventeen years back’ (i.e., in about 1879).

  The elementary-schoolteacher in Africo proved to be a particularly insightful witness. He had first taken up his post in the mid-1880s and had immediately heard talk of a criminal sect in town. But ‘this association, it was said at the time, comprised three or four people’. Its numbers increased rapidly over the coming years, particularly during Domenico Callea’s recruitment drive in 1893–94.

  The story that these fragments of evidence tell—a story that was being repeated in Palmi, and indeed all around Aspromonte—goes something like this. Until the mid-1880s, a few Calabrian ex-cons, the senior camorristi from within the prison system, would keep in touch when they returned home from jail. They might offer one another help and even get together for the odd criminal venture: the trial records and other sources tell us of occasional outbreaks of gang activity in various parts of the province of Reggio Calabria in the 1870s and even before. But the picciotti as yet lacked the numbers and the strength to impose themselves on other felons in the outside world in the way that they had done in the confined environment of prison. Needless to say, they also lacked the power to browbeat whole towns. Then in the 1880s there were changes that gave Calabria’s prison camorra the chance to project itself into the outside world. The question, of course, is what exactly those changes were.

  It is telling that no representative of the state seemed at all curious to answer that question. In 1891, Palmi’s Chief Prosecutor wrote his annual report on the work of the court during the previous year. The picciotteria did not even merit a mention: it was only a superficial symptom of Calabria’s chronic backwardness, after all. The reason for the high rate of violence in the Palmi district was not organised crime, he wrote, but the ‘ardent and lively nature of this population, their touchiness, the stubborn way they stick to their plans, the unwavering tenacity of their feelings of hatred—which very often drive them to vendetta’.

  If a Sicilian Chief Prosecutor had written such claptrap we would have very good reason to be suspicious of his motives. But in Calabria, such suspicions are probably not merited. (Not yet, at any rate.) After all, the Palmi court had just sent dozens of picciotti back to jail. But the Chief Prosecutor’s stereotypical views of the Calabrian psyche are significant all the same. Railway or no railway, Calabria was still seen as a semi-barbaric, faraway land about which Italy knew very little and cared even less. Despite its ties to the international market for olive oil, wine and lemons, Palmi was simply not important enough to draw much government curiosity down on the picciotteria, which means that historians have to work harder to solve some outstanding mysteries about its emergence.

  Sworn sects have dominated prisons in many different times and places. The long-established South African number gangs, the 26s, the 27s, and the 28s, for example, who take their mythology from the story of a Zulu chief. Or the vast network of vory-v-zakone (‘thieves with a code of honour’) who infested the Soviet Gulag system from the 1920s. The vory had a ‘crowning’ ritual for new members, sported tattoos, and had a distinctive look comprising an aluminium cross round the neck and several waistcoats.

  But by no means do all of these gangs manage to establish their authority in the world outside the prison gates. The 26s, the 27s, and the 28s only did it in the 1990s, when Apartheid fell and the country was opened to narcotics traffickers who needed local manpower and a local criminal ‘brand’. When the Soviet Union collapsed the vory-v-zakone did not simply step out of the Gulag to assume leadership of the crime bonanza that ensued. Rather they had their traditions hijacked by a new breed of gangster bosses who wanted to add an air of antiquity to their territorially based bands: the result was the Russian mafia. Examples like these show just what an achievement it was for Calabria’s prison camorristi to carve up territory in the outside world between themselves.

  The economy is surely a big part of the reason why they pulled it off. An economic crisis hit Calabrian agriculture with increasing force in the 1880s. Phylloxera reached Italy and the wine boom went sour. Then a trade war with France threw agricultural exports into crisis. Some smallholders, like those in the Plain of Gioia Tauro, had run up debts to buy a plot of former Church land and plant it with vines: they now faced penury. Others had bullied or bribed their way to ownership, and now faced the wrath of their factional enemies. Meanwhile, the poorest labourers, like those in Africo, struggled even harder to feed themselves. There were plenty of recruits for the picciotteria, and plenty of landowners and peasants vulnerable or unscrupulous enough to consider striking a deal with the men of violence.

  The arrival of the steam train was also partly to blame, in Palmi at least. Contemporaries noted that the initial upsurge of razor attacks and knife fights coincided with the presence of navvies working on the Tyrrhenian branch of the railway in the spring of 1888. A dozen years later, in around 1900, some observers began to claim that the Lads with Attitude had been imported into the Plain of Gioia Tauro by Sicilian mafiosi among the navvies. But since none of the men convicted in Palmi’s court house were Sicilians, this theory is almost certainly wrong. A more likely scenario is that there were ex-con camorristi among the railway workers. The fighting in Palmi could have been the result of competition for jobs with local picciotti.

  Either way, the role that the railways played in the emergence of the Calabrian mafia makes for a bitter historical irony. As one magistrate opined at the time

  Whether the railway brought more evil than advantage is unclear. It is painful to ascertain that such a powerful influence for civilisation and progress served to trigger the cause of so much social ignominy.

  The ’ndrangheta began just when Calabria’s isolation ended.

  There is a third likely reason why the picciotteria appeared when they did. In my view, it is the most important. In 1882 and 1888 two important electoral reforms inaugurated the era of mass politics in Italy. The number of people entitled to vote increased. Local government obtained both more freedom from central control, more responsibilities for things like schooling and supervising charities, and with them, more resources to plunder. With around one quarter of adult males now entitled to have a say in who governed them, politics became a more expensive and more lucrative business.

  More violent too. Shootings, stabbings and beatings had always been part of the language of Italian politics, particularly in the south. Much of the violence was administered from Rome. On orders from the local Prefect, the police would rough up opposition supporters, arrest them or simply take away their gun licences, leaving them vulnerable to attack by goons who worked for the candidate the government wanted to win. The reforms of the 1880s greatly increased the demand for violence at election times and encouraged more aspiring power brokers to enlist support from organised enforcers.

  Strong-arm politics was not something that the police were particularly keen to investigate, understandably enough. But there are nonetheless clear signs from deep within the dusty folders of trial papers that even in Africo the picciotteria had friends among the elite. The p
ress remarked that the men who sliced up the crippled old swineherd Maviglia were defended by the best lawyers in Reggio Calabria. And among the picciotti in the case were ‘people who, because of their prosperous financial state, can only have been driven to crime because they are innately wicked’.

  The ‘innately wicked’ inhabitants of Africo included the former mayor, Giuseppe Callea, whose sons were prominent picciotti: Domenico, the sect’s bookkeeper and fencing instructor who tried to recruit the bagpiper into the gang; and his brother Bruno, the picciotto who was sent to prison for robbery on the evidence provided by the crippled swineherd Pietro Maviglia. Former mayor Callea clearly endorsed his sons’ criminal career path: he himself physically threatened Maviglia.

  The rise of the picciotteria brutally exposed the fragmentation of Calabria’s ruling class. At war with one another over local politics and land, the Calabrian social elite proved utterly incapable of treating the newly assertive criminal brotherhood as a common enemy. In Africo, some men of education and property testified against the picciotti, and were duly threatened to the music of the zampogna. Others, like Giuseppe Callea, were more than happy to ally themselves with the gang. But it would be naïve of us to think that such cases saw good citizens pitted against shady protectors of gangsters. Legality and crime were not what divided Calabrians; ideology of one colour or another was not what brought them together. On Aspromonte, family, friends and favours were the only cause of conflict, and the only social glue. The law, such as it was, was just one more weapon in the struggle. The few sociologists who took an interest in Calabria after Italian unification noted that the propertied class ‘lacked a sense of legality’, and even ‘lacked moral sense’. Whatever terms one used to describe it, the rise of the picciotteria showed that the lack was now infecting the other social classes.

  Despite this proliferation of organised criminal activity, the prosecution of the early ’ndrangheta in Africo was a success, in the very short term. The butchers of Maviglia were convicted, as were dozens and dozens of the picciotti. Across southern Calabria the police and Carabinieri registered similar results, and would continue to do so for years to come. But the struggle to assert the state’s right to rule was close to futile from the start. The Lads convicted of ‘associating for delinquency’ served their risibly short sentences in the very same jails where they had learned their Attitude in the first place. And there was no sign of an end to the fundamental weaknesses in Calabrian society that gave them their foothold outside the prisons.

  The criminal emergency in Calabria utterly failed to capture the attention of national public opinion. All too few Italians were prepared to ‘look through the microscope at the little causes that make little hearts beat’. In the long term, Italy would pay the price for this collective failure of the imagination. Nothing that happened to Calabrian shepherds and peasants could ever be news. Nothing that is, until the exploits of a woodsman called Giuseppe Musolino turned him into the Brigand Musolino, the ‘King of Aspromonte’, and perhaps the greatest criminal legend in Italian history.

  16

  THE KING OF ASPROMONTE

  THE FACTS OF GIUSEPPE MUSOLINO’S LIFE WOULD COUNT FOR LITTLE, IN THE END. BUT the facts are nonetheless where we must begin.

  Musolino was born on 24 September 1876 at Santo Stefano in Aspromonte, a village of some 2,500 inhabitants situated 700 metres up into forests overlooking the Straits of Messina. His father was a woodsman and a small-time timber dealer just successful enough to set himself up as the owner of a tavern. Musolino grew into a woodsman too. But it was the violent tendencies of his youth that would most attract the attention of later biographers: before his twentieth birthday he got into trouble several times for weapons offences and for threatening and wounding women.

  The Musolino saga really began on 27 October 1897, in his father’s tavern, when he became involved in an argument with another young man by the name of Vincenzo Zoccali. The two arranged to have a fight and Musolino suffered a badly cut right hand. Musolino’s cousin then fired two shots at Zoccali, but missed.

  Two days later, before dawn, Zoccali was harnessing his mule when someone shot at him from behind a wall. Again the bullets failed to find their target. Musolino, whose rifle and beret were found at the scene, went on the run in the wilds of Aspromonte. He was recaptured just over five months later, and in September 1898 he was given a harsh twenty-one-year sentence for attempted murder. Enraged at the verdict and proclaiming himself the innocent victim of a plot, Musolino swore vendetta. He would eat Zoccali’s liver, he cried out from the dock.

  Giuseppe Musolino, the ‘King of Aspromonte’.

  On the night of 9 January 1899 Musolino and three other inmates, including his cousin, escaped from prison in Gerace by hacking a hole in the wall with an iron bar and lowering themselves to the ground with a rope made from knotted bedsheets. The promised vendetta began on the night of 28 January, when Musolino gunned down Francesca Sidari, the wife of one of the witnesses against him. He apparently mistook her for his real target as she stooped over a charcoal mound. When the gunshots and screaming attracted the attention of her husband and another man, Musolino shot them too. He left them for dead, and fled once more into the mountains.

  The Brigand Musolino (as he soon became known) now entered a twin spiral of vengeance: his targets were both the witnesses against him in the Zoccali case and the informers recruited by the police in their efforts to catch him.

  A month after his first murder, Musolino killed again, stabbing a shepherd whom he suspected of being a police spy. In mid-May the bandit returned to Santo Stefano and caught up with Vincenzo Zoccali—the man whose liver he had vowed to eat. He planted dynamite in the walls of the house where Zoccali was sleeping with his brother and parents; but the charge failed to detonate. (The family subsequently fled to the province of Catanzaro.) Musolino badly wounded another enemy a few days later.

  The sequence of attacks continued through the summer of 1899. In July he killed one suspected informer with a single shotgun blast to the head. A week later he shot another in the buttocks.

  In August the brigand went all the way to the province of Catanzaro in pursuit of Vincenzo Zoccali and his family and succeeded in killing Zoccali’s brother. He then returned quickly to a village just below Santo Stefano where he murdered another man he may have suspected of being an informer.

  Musolino then vanished for six months.

  The next the world heard of Musolino was in February 1900 when he reappeared on Aspromonte with two young accomplices; he shot and wounded his own cousin by mistake. The brigand apparently kneeled before his bleeding cousin, offered him his rifle, and begged him to take vengeance for the error there and then. The request was declined and the brigand continued with his attacks.

  Musolino found his next prey in the Grecanico-speaking village of Roccaforte, blasting him in the legs with a shotgun. The prostrate victim then managed to convince the bandit that he was not, as suspected, a police spy. Musolino tended the man’s wounds for half an hour and then sent a passing shepherd to fetch help.

  On 9 March 1900 one of Musolino’s accomplices, a man from Africo called Antonio Princi, betrayed him to the police. As part of the plan to capture Musolino, Princi left some maccheroni laced with opium in the bandit’s hideout, which at the time was in a cave near Africo cemetery. Princi then went to get the police. Five policemen and two Carabinieri followed him back to the hideout. But the opium had been sitting on the shelf of a local pharmacy for so long that it had lost much of its narcotic power. Even after eating the maccheroni, Musolino still had sufficient command of his faculties to fire at his would-be captors and then escape across the mountain, with the police and Carabinieri in pursuit.

  In the early hours of the following morning Musolino was surprised while urinating by Pietro Ritrovato, one of the two Carabinieri; the brigand fired first from close range. The young Carabiniere suffered a gaping wound in his groin, and died in torment several hours later.r />
  After another six months of silence Musolino and another two accomplices killed again on 27 August 1900. They chased their victim, Francesco Marte, onto the threshing floor of his own house, where he stopped, turned and begged them to be allowed the time to make his peace with God before dying. They allowed him to kneel down, and then shot him repeatedly in front of his mother, continuing to fire even when he was already dead. Musolino would claim that Marte was a traitor who was involved in the maccheroni plot against him.

  Subsequently the same two accomplices, perhaps acting on his behalf, also tried and failed to kill the former mayor of Santo Stefano who had testified when Musolino went on trial for attempted murder.

  The brigand’s last violent attack came on 22 September 1900, when he wounded yet another alleged informer in Santo Stefano.

  Musolino’s bloody rampage and the continuing failure to arrest him had long since become a political scandal. The Aspromonte woodsman was discussed in parliament. The government’s credibility was at stake. Hundreds of uniformed men were sent to southern Calabria to join the hunt. Yet still, for another year and more, Musolino would manage to evade them all . . .

  There is one more important fact about Musolino: he was a Lad with Attitude.

  At the height of the political furore over the brigand, Italy’s most valiant journalist, Adolfo Rossi, took the very rare step of actually going down to Calabria to find out what was going on. From police and magistrates he learned all there was to know about the new mafia.

  Rossi toured the prisons and saw the picciotti in their grey- and tobacco-striped prison uniforms. He went to Palmi, which he learned was ‘the Calabrian district where the picciotteria was strongest’. Palmi’s Deputy Prefect glumly explained that, ‘one trial for “associating for delinquency” has not even finished by the time we have to start preparing the next one’.