Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  The links among the mafias go far beyond words and are one of the reasons for their success and longevity. So the virtues of comparison, and of reading the histories of the mafia, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta in parallel, are perhaps the only lessons in historical method that the fable of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso has to teach us.

  In 2004 I published Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, in which I brought together the best Italian research on the most notorious of Italy’s criminal fraternities. Blood Brotherhoods is not a sequel to Cosa Nostra: it will stand or fall on its own terms. But readers of Cosa Nostra may recognise my retelling of a few episodes from that earlier book, so they deserve to know before starting why the Sicilian mafia is integral to my concerns here. There are two reasons: first, because even in the last ten years or so, new discoveries have radically changed our view of key moments in the history of organised crime in Sicily; second, because there is also a great deal to learn about the Sicilian mafia by comparing it with the camorra and the ’ndrangheta. One thing that the comparison teaches us is that the sinister fame enjoyed by Sicilian mafiosi is amply deserved.

  Sicily gave the world the term ‘mafia’, and the fact that that term has entered daily use not just in Italy but across the world is itself a symptom of Sicilian organised crime’s pervasive influence. In the dialect of Palermo, the island’s capital, ‘mafia’ denoted beauty and self-confidence: ‘cool’ comes about as close as English can to its original meaning. In the 1860s, just after the troubled island of Sicily became part of the newly united state of Italy, ‘mafia’ began to serve as a label for an organisation whose shape briefly became visible through a fog of violence and corruption. The mafia (which would soon disappear into the fog once more) had existed for some time by then, and it had already reached a level of power and wealth that delinquents on the mainland could only aspire to. That power and wealth explains why the Sicilian word ‘mafia’ became an umbrella term for all of Italy’s underworld brotherhoods, including the camorra and ’ndrangheta. Across more than a century and a half—the arc of time covered in these pages—we can chart the fortunes of the peninsula’s other two mafias against the heights that the Sicilians reached from the outset.

  These days the Sicilian mafia is usually known as Cosa Nostra (‘our thing’), a moniker that mafiosi in both the United States and Sicily adopted in the 1960s. (The public and the authorities in Italy did not find out about this new name until 1984.) The name ’ndrangheta stuck to the Calabrian mafia in the mid-1950s. (It means ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’.) In both cases, the new names coalesced because post-war public opinion and law enforcement became more searching, and gradually brought into focus a picture that had been blurred by a century of muddle, negligence and downright collusion.

  So the first half of Blood Brotherhoods, which concludes with the fall of Fascism and the Allied Liberation of Italy, tells a story of underworld regimes that were as yet, if not nameless, then certainly ignored or mysterious, surrounded either by silence (in the case of the ’ndrangheta) or by endless, inconclusive dispute (in the case of the Sicilian mafia).

  The camorra had a different relationship to its name. While structured criminal power has waxed and waned through Neapolitan history, the camorra has almost always been called the camorra. The original Honoured Society of Naples was, like the mafias of Sicily and Calabria, a sworn, occult sect of gangsters. Yet it had strangely few secrets. Everyone in Naples knew all about it. Which is one reason why its history has a dramatically different trajectory to the Honoured Societies of Sicily and Calabria.

  By taking a comparative approach, Blood Brotherhoods will offer answers to some insistent questions. The first and most obvious of those questions is, How did Italy’s mafias begin? The worst answers recycle baseless legends that blame Arab invaders in Sicily and Spanish rulers in Naples. Such stories are close to the yarns spun by the Honoured Societies themselves—suspiciously close. Scarcely any better are the answers that evoke abstractions like ‘the culture’, ‘the mentality’, or ‘the southern Italian family’.

  There are explanations, for both the origins and the persistence of mafia crime, that sound rather more sophisticated. University textbooks tend to talk about the fragile legitimacy of the state, the citizens’ lack of trust in the government institutions, the prevalence of patronage and clientelism in politics and administration, and so on. As a professor of Italian history, I myself have recited phrases like this in the past. So I know only too well that they rarely leave anyone much wiser. Nonetheless there is one crucial nugget of truth underneath all this jargon: the history of organised crime in Italy is as much about Italy’s weakness as it is about the mafias’ strength. Omertà leads us to the heart of the issue: it is often portrayed as being an iron code of silence, a stark choice between collusion and death. In some cases, it certainly is just as harsh a law as its reputation suggests. Yet the historical sources also show that, under the right kind of pressure, omertà has broken again and again. Far from respecting an ancient silence, mafiosi have been talking to the police since they first went into business. That persistent weakness is one reason why so many of the underworld’s darkest secrets are still there in the archives for us to unearth. And one reason why mafia history is often more about misinformation and intrigue than it is about violence and death.

  The best way to divulge those secrets and reconstruct those intrigues is to begin by simply telling stories—documented stories that feature real crimes, real men and women, real choices made in specific times and places. The best historians of organised crime in Italy reconstruct those stories from fragmentary archival sources and from the accounts of people (notably criminals) who often have very good reasons to distort what they say. It is not banal to compare this kind of historical research to detective work. Detectives labour to create a coherent prosecution case by matching the material evidence to what witnesses and suspects tell them. In both tasks—the historian’s and the detective’s—the truth emerges as much from the gaps and inconsistencies in the available testimonies as it does from the facts those testimonies contain.

  But the question that drives research into Italy’s long and fraught relationship to these sinister fraternities is not just who committed which crimes. The question is also who knew what. Over the last century and a half, police, magistrates, politicians, opinion formers and even the general public have had access to a surprising amount of information about the mafia problem, thanks in part to the fragility of omertà. Italians have also, repeatedly, been shocked and angered by mafia violence and by the way some of its police, judiciary and politicians have colluded with crime bosses. As a result, the mafia drama has frequently been played out very visibly: as high-profile political confrontation, as media event. Yet Italy has also proved positively ingenious in finding reasons to look the other way. So the story of Italy’s mafias is not just a whodunit? It is also a who knew it? and, most importantly, a why on earth didn’t they do something about it?

  INTRODUCTION: Blood brothers

  IN THE EARLY HOURS OF 15 AUGUST 2007, IN THE GERMAN STEEL TOWN OF DUISBURG, six young men of Italian origin climbed into a car and a van, a few yards away from the Da Bruno restaurant where they had been celebrating a birthday. One of them was just eighteen (it was his party), and another was only sixteen. Like the rest of the group, these two boys died very quickly, where they sat. Two killers fired fifty-four shots, even taking the time to reload their 9mm pistols and administer a coup de grâce to each of the six in turn.

  This was the worst ever mafia bloodbath outside Italy and the United States—northern Europe’s equivalent to the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. As the background to the murders emerged—a long-running blood feud in a little-known region of southern Italy—journalists across the globe began struggling with what the New York Times called an ‘unpronounceable name’: ’ndrangheta.

  For the record, the name is pronounced as follows: an-drang-get-ah. The ’ndrangheta
hails from Calabria (the ‘toe’ of the Italian boot), and it is oldest and strongest in the province of Reggio Calabria where the peninsula almost touches Sicily. Calabria is Italy’s poorest region, but its mafia has now become the country’s richest and most powerful. In the 1990s, ’ndranghetisti (as Calabrian Men of Honour are called) earned themselves a leading position within the European cocaine market by dealing directly with South American producer cartels. The Calabrians have the strongest regime of omertà—of silence and secrecy. Few informants abandon the organisation’s ranks and give evidence to the state. The Calabrian mafia has also been the most successful of the three major criminal organisations at establishing cells outside of its home territory. It has branches in the centre and north of Italy and also abroad: the existence of ’ndrangheta colonies has been confirmed in six different German cities, as well as in Switzerland, Canada and Australia. According to a recent report from Italy’s Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into mafia crime, the ’ndrangheta also has a presence in Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Turkey, Venezuela and the USA. Of all southern Italy’s mafias, the ’ndrangheta is the youngest and has come the furthest to find its recent success and notoriety; over the course of time, it has learned more than any other Italian criminal group. My research suggests that it absorbed its most important lessons long before the world was even aware that it existed.

  The Duisburg massacre. Europe finally takes notice of the ’ndrangheta, Italy’s richest and most powerful mafia, on 15 August 2007. One of the six victims, Tommaso Venturi, had just celebrated both his eighteenth birthday and his admission into the Honoured Society of Calabria. The partially burned image of the Archangel Michael (inset top), used during the ’ndrangheta initiation ritual, was found in his pocket.

  The Duisburg massacre demonstrated with appalling clarity that Italy, and the many parts of the world where there are mafia colonies, still lives with the consequences of the story to be told here. So before delving into the past it is essential to introduce its protagonists in the present, to sketch three profiles that show succinctly what mafia history is a history of. Because, even after Duisburg, the world is still getting used to the idea that Italy has more than one mafia. There is only a hazy public understanding of how the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, in particular, are organised.

  Blood seeps through the pages of mafia history. In all its many meanings, blood can also serve to introduce the obscure world of Italian organised crime today. Blood is perhaps humanity’s oldest and most elemental symbol, and mafiosi still exploit its every facet. Blood as violence. Blood as both birth and death. Blood as a sign of manhood and courage. Blood as kinship and family. Each of the three mafias belongs to its own category—its own blood group, as it were—that is distinct but related to the other two in both its organisation and its rituals.

  Rituals first: by taking blood oaths, becoming blood brothers, Italian gangsters establish a bond among them, a bond forged in and for violence that is loosened only when life ends. That bond is almost always exclusively between men. Yet the act of marriage—symbolised by the shedding of virginal blood—is also a key ritual in mafia life. For that reason, one of the many recurring themes in this book will be women and how mafiosi have learned to manage them.

  The magic of ritual is one thing that the ’ndrangheta in particular has understood from the beginning of its history. And ritual often comes into play at the beginning of an ’ndranghetista’s life, as we know from one of the very few autobiographies written by a member of the Calabria mafia (a multiple murderer) who has turned state’s evidence (after developing a phobia about blood so acute that he could not even face a rare steak).

  Antonio Zagari’s career in organised crime started two minutes into January 1, 1954. It began, that is, the very moment he issued from his mother’s womb. He was a firstborn son, so his arrival was greeted with particular joy: his father, Giacomo, grabbed a wartime heavy machine gun and pumped a stream of bullets towards the stars over the gulf of Gioia Tauro. The barrage just gave the midwife time to dab the blood from the baby’s tiny body before he was taken by his father and presented to the members of the clan who were assembled in the house. The baby was gently laid down before them, and a knife and a large key were set near his feebly flailing arms. His destiny would be decided by which he touched first. If it were the key, symbol of confinement, he would become a sbirro—a cop, a slave of the law. But if it were the knife, he would live and die by the code of honour.

  It was the knife, much to everyone’s approval. (Although, truth be told, a helpful adult finger had nudged the blade under the tiny hand.)

  Delighted by his son’s bold career choice, Giacomo Zagari hoisted the baby in the air, parted his tiny buttocks, and spat noisily on his arsehole for luck. He would be christened Antonio. The name came from his grandfather, a brutal criminal who looked approvingly on at the scene from above a walrus moustache turned a graveolent yellow by the cigar that jutted permanently from between his teeth. Baby Antonio was now ‘half in and half out’, as the men of the Honoured Society termed it. He was not yet a full member—he would have to be trained, tested and observed before that happened. But his path towards a more than usually gruesome life of crime had been marked out.

  The ‘social rules’. One of many pages of instructions for ’ndrangheta initiation rituals that were found in June 1987 in the hideout of Giuseppe Chilà. Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, the three Spanish knights who (according to criminal legend) were the founders of the mafia, camorra and ’ndrangheta, are mentioned.

  Zagari grew up not in Calabria, but near Varese by Italy’s border with Switzerland, where his father led the local ’ndrangheta cell. As a youth, during his father’s occasional jail stints, Antonio was sent back south to work with his uncles who were citrus fruit dealers in the rich agricultural plain of Gioia Tauro on Calabria’s Tyrrhenian Sea coast. He came to admire his father’s relatives and friends for the respect they commanded locally, and even for the delicacy of their speech. Before uttering a vaguely vulgar word like ‘feet’, ‘toilet’, or ‘underpants’, they would crave forgiveness: ‘Speaking with all due respect . . . ’ ‘Excuse the phrase . . . ’ And when they had no alternative but to utter genuine profanities such as ‘police officer’, ‘magistrate’, or ‘courtroom’, their sentences would topple over themselves with pre-emptive apologies.

  I have to say that—for the sake of preserving all those present, and the fine and honoured faces of all our good friends, speaking with all due respect, and excusing the phrase—when the Carabinieri [military police] . . .

  As the son of a boss, Antonio Zagari’s criminal apprenticeship was a short one. He took a few secret messages into prison, hid a few weapons, and soon, at age seventeen, he was ready to make the passage into full membership.

  One day his ‘friends’, as he termed them, copied out a few pages of the Rules and Social Prescriptions he was required to learn by heart before being inducted. It was all, he later recalled, like the catechism children have to memorise before Confirmation and First Communion.

  The ‘catechism’ also included lessons in ’ndrangheta history. And having committed the deeds of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso to memory, Zagari was deemed ready to undergo the most elaborate initiation rite used by any mafia. He was shown into an isolated, darkened room and introduced to the senior members present, who were all arrayed in a circle. For the time being, he had to remain silent, excluded from the group.

  ‘Are you comfortable my dear comrades?’, the boss began.

  ‘Very comfortable. On what?’

  ‘On the social rules.’

  ‘Very comfortable.’

  ‘Then, in the name of the organised and faithful society, I baptise this place as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso baptised it, who baptised it with iron and chains.’

  The boss then passed round the room, relieving each ’ndranghetista of the tools of his trade, a
nd pronouncing the same formula at each stop.

  In the name of our most severe Saint Michael the Archangel, who carried a set of scales in one hand and a sword in the other, I confiscate your weaponry.

  The scene was now set, and the Chief Cudgel could intone his preamble to the ceremony proper.

  The society is a ball that goes wandering around the world, as cold as ice, as hot as fire, and as fine as silk. Let us swear, handsome comrades, that anyone who betrays the society will pay with five or six dagger thrusts to the chest, as the social rules prescribe. Silver chalice, consecrated host, with words of humility I form the society.

  Another ‘thank you’ was sounded, as the ’ndranghetisti moved closer together and linked arms.

  Three times the boss then asked his comrades whether Zagari was ready for acceptance into the Honoured Society. When he had received the same affirmative reply three times, the circle opened, and a space was made for the newcomer immediately to the boss’s right. The boss then took a knife and cut a cross into the initiate’s left thumb so that blood from the wound could drip onto a playing card sized picture of the Archangel Michael. The boss then ripped off the Archangel’s head and burned the rest in a candle flame, symbolising the utter annihilation of all traitors.

  Only then could Zagari open his mouth to take the ’ndrangheta oath.

  I swear before the organised and faithful society, represented by our honoured and wise boss and by all the members, to carry out all the duties for which I am responsible and all those that are imposed on me—if necessary even with my blood.