Blood Brotherhoods Page 20

  Rossi visited Santo Stefano, Musolino’s home village, and even climbed all the way up to Africo. He was shocked by the squalor he found there, writing that ‘the cabins are not houses being used as pig sties, but pig sties used as houses for humans’. The Carabinieri told him how, a few years earlier, members of the sect had ‘cut a man to pieces, and then put salt on him like you do with pork’.

  Adolfo Rossi’s long series of reports from Calabria is still the best thing ever written about the early ’ndrangheta; it deserved to be read far more widely than in the local Venetian newspaper in which it appeared. And everyone Rossi interviewed agreed that Musolino was an oathed member of the picciotteria—albeit that opinions varied on when exactly Musolino was oathed, and what rank he held. Rossi saw reports that showed how the Carabinieri in Santo Stefano had Musolino down for a gangster from the beginning. On the day after Musolino’s first knife fight with Vincenzo Zoccali, they wrote that he belonged to the ‘so-called maffia’.

  While Musolino was in custody awaiting trial for attempted murder, the jailers observed him behaving like a camorrista. One guard stated to Rossi that

  Musolino entered this prison on 8 April 1898. Later some of his cellmates informed me that in June of the same year he was elected a camorrista [i.e., a senior member of the Society].

  In Africo Rossi spoke to a police commander who explained that Musolino had avoided capture for so long because he had the support of the picciotteria network across Aspromonte and beyond. One man who confessed to Rossi that he had sheltered Musolino was the mayor of Africo, a shady figure who testified against the picciotteria back in 1894. In Santo Stefano, Rossi learned that some of the brigand’s accomplices were Lads, and that some of his escapades, including his original spat with Vincenzo Zoccali, had more to do with the internal politics of the mob than with his personal programme of vengeance.

  Despite these facts Musolino became a hero: a wronged avenger, a solitary knight of the forest, a Robin Hood, the ‘King of Aspromonte’.

  His fame began to grow rapidly after his prison breakout in 1899. It was a local phenomenon at first. Most people on Aspromonte firmly believed that Musolino was innocent of the charge for which he was originally imprisoned—that of attempting to murder Vincenzo Zoccali. And, in truth, there are one or two residual doubts about how sound the conviction was. Musolino’s ‘innocence’, genuine or not, proved to be the seed of his fame. The peasants of Aspromonte, ignorant and pitiably poor, regarded the state with inborn suspicion. For such people, in such circumstances, a renegade hero who only killed false witnesses was all too captivating a delusion.

  Musolino found food and shelter everywhere he went on Aspromonte. For his sake, women kept lanterns lit for the Madonna of Polsi and for Saint Joseph (San Giuseppe, the patron saint of woodworkers, from whom Musolino took his Christian name). Much of this support was managed by the picciotteria. Much of it can be explained by perfectly understandable fear. Some of it—and it is impossible to tell just how much—was down to the brigand’s burgeoning popular aura.

  Stories soon spread that aura further afield. Stories about how, while Musolino was in prison, Saint Joseph came to him in a miraculous vision and revealed the weak points in his cell wall. Stories about how he never stole from anyone, always paid for what he ate, never abused women, and always outwitted the clodhopping Carabinieri.

  From Aspromonte, the Musolino legend was broadcast by the oral folklore of the entire south. He became a star of the puppet theatre. Children played at being Musolino in the street. Wandering players dressed up as brigands to sing of his adventures or had their poems in praise of him printed on grubby sheets of paper to be sold for coppers. The authorities arrested some of these minstrels, but the cult was now unstoppable. The ‘King of Aspromonte’ himself capitalised on it. Musolino sent a letter to a national newspaper in which he impudently put himself on the side of the ordinary people against authority.

  I am a worker, and the son of a worker. I love people who have to sweat in the fields from morning until night so as to produce society’s riches. In fact I envy them, because my misfortune means I cannot make a contribution with my own hands.

  The Italian state now found itself losing a propaganda war against the delinquent artisans and peasants of Aspromonte. The whole Musolino affair was turning into what today we would call a PR disaster for the rule of law. Perhaps its most worrying dimension was that the illiterate were not the only people seduced by the myth. Although right-thinking opinion-formers of all political persuasions condemned the popular cult of Musolino as a sign of Italy’s backwardness, books and pamphlets about him still sold in their thousands. In Calabria, only one newspaper dared to suggest that the King of Aspromonte might actually have been guilty of attempting to murder Vincenzo Zoccali. In Naples, where the myth of the noble camorrista had such currency, the Corriere di Napoli reported fables about the brigand’s supposed acts of generosity without critical comment and came very close to justifying his campaign of retribution.

  Musolino only harms his enemies, because he thinks he has a mission and wants to carry it through to the end.

  Between the brigand and the law, there was right and wrong on both sides—so went the argument. Accordingly, some press commentators entertained the idea that a fair solution would be to offer Musolino safe passage to the United States.

  Eventually the authorities acted on the intelligence that told them Musolino was no lone wolf. Early in 1901, a zealous young police officer, Vincenzo Mangione, was sent to Santo Stefano to implement a more radical strategy than blindly chasing the bandit around the mountain and trying to bribe informants (especially picciotti) to betray him.

  Mangione compiled a series of highly revealing reports on the picciotteria in Musolino’s home village. Drawing on sources who were mostly disaffected picciotti, he describes a ‘genuine criminal institution’, with its own social fund, tribunal, and so on. There were 166 affiliates of the mafia in Santo Stefano. It was founded in the early 1890s by Musolino’s father and uncle, who both now sat on the organisation’s ‘supreme council’. In other words, the evidence collected by Mangione, together with the fact that Musolino was able to rely on a region-wide support network, strongly indicate that the ’ndrangheta has always been a single organisation, and not a rag-bag ensemble of village gangs.

  Musolino’s possible motives emerged with a new clarity from Mangione’s research. The bandit was of course an affiliate like his father. Nothing he had done could be separated from his role inside the criminal brotherhood. For example, the attempt on Zoccali’s life that began the Musolino saga was ordered by the picciotteria as punishment because Zoccali had tried to duck out of his duties as a picciotto. Musolino was now a roving contract killer for the whole sect.

  Most revealingly of all, Mangione learned how the Lads earned favours from ‘respectable people . . . political personalities, lawyers, doctors, and landowners’. The most important of those favours were character references and false witness statements. A more tangible example of the favours that the picciotteria could command stood, ruined and smoke-blackened, at the very entrance of the village. It was the Zoccali family’s house. When Musolino failed to dynamite it, the picciotti simply burned it to the ground and then persuaded the town council to deny the Zoccali family a grant to rebuild.

  The notables of Santo Stefano were not remotely concerned to keep their friendship with the picciotteria secret. When the King of Aspromonte’s sister Anna got married, the new mayor and his officers, the town councillors, the general practitioners, teachers, municipal guards, and the town band all came to the wedding reception. The mayor chose the occasion to circulate a petition asking the Queen to grant Musolino a pardon.

  The outcome of Mangione’s intelligence was a two-pronged strategy to capture Musolino: first, his support network would be attacked; second, the whole picciotteria in Santo Stefano would be prosecuted. Accordingly, there was a series of mass arrests in the spring and summer of 1901. With
many of his supporters in custody, Musolino struggled to find a place to hide on his home territory.

  On the afternoon of 9 October 1901, in the countryside near Urbino—more than 900 kilometres from Santo Stefano—a young man in a hunting jacket and cyclist’s cap was spotted acting suspiciously by two Carabinieri. He fled across a vineyard when they hailed him and then tripped over some wire. He pulled out a revolver but was smothered before he could pull the trigger. ‘Kill me’, he said as the handcuffs went on. He then tried bribery, unsuccessfully. When searched he was found to be carrying a knife, ammunition and a large number of amulets, including a body pouch full of incense, a crucifix, a medallion showing the Sacred Heart, a picture of Saint Joseph, and an image of the Madonna of Polsi. Five days later he was identified as the brigand Giuseppe Musolino.

  Musolino was sent for trial in the pretty Tuscan city of Lucca for fear that a Calabrian jury might be too swayed by the myth surrounding him. His long-delayed encounter with justice was set to be one of the most sensational trials of the age.

  But before it could begin, the second arm of the government’s strategy failed. The witnesses Mangione had relied upon to gather evidence about the picciotteria in Santo Stefano were intimidated into retracting their statements. The case never even reached court.

  So when national and international correspondents gathered in Lucca to report on the eagerly awaited Musolino trial in the spring of 1902, what they witnessed turned out to be a prolonged exercise in self-harm for the law’s reputation in Italy. The problem was that Musolino’s lawyers objected vociferously every time the prosecution tried to demonstrate that he was a sworn member of a criminal sect. After all, had not the case against this supposed sect in Santo Stefano been thrown out before it reached court? Where was the evidence? In this way, the real context of the Musolino saga was obscured. So a multiple murderer was largely left free to pose as the heroic outlaw that the marionette theatres of southern Italy had made him out to be.

  Musolino had spent the time since his capture the previous October writing a verse narrative of his adventures and having his body meticulously measured by positivist criminologists. Over the same period he received countless admiring letters and postcards, particularly from women. They pledged their love, sent him religious tokens and sweets, promised to pray for him and begged for locks of his hair. The judge in Lucca was so concerned about Musolino’s effect on the morals of the town’s womenfolk that he stipulated that only men would be allowed into the hearing. But the stream of fan mail only increased once the trial started. Mysteriously, signed postcard portraits of the King of Aspromonte went on sale near the courtroom. Interviewed by journalists in his cell, Musolino would relish recounting his erotic adventures while he was on the run.

  From the outset, Musolino’s lawyers did not contest the fact that he had committed a long trail of murders and attempted murders after escaping from prison. Their defence rested instead on the claim that he was innocent of the crime for which he had been imprisoned in the first place: the attempted murder of Vincenzo Zoccali. The lawyers reasoned that his bloody deeds could be explained, and perhaps even justified, by the conspiracy against him in the Zoccali case.

  A visiting French judge was understandably astonished that this argument could even be considered a defence at all; it seemed like evidence of Italy’s ‘moral backwardness’ to him. Musolino did not share the same doubts. When he was called to the dock he told the court that he had concluded his campaign of righteous retaliation now, and would never break the law again if he were allowed to go free. He claimed to be the descendant of a French prince and compared his plight to that of Jesus Christ.

  Wanted poster for Giuseppe Musolino, the ‘King of Aspromonte’.

  At right, a diagram showing the damage inflicted on Musolino’s skull in infancy by a falling flowerpot.

  Sketches of Musolino made in court.

  A scene from the Musolino trial in Lucca, 1902. Despite his ferocious deeds, he aroused much public sympathy. ‘Poor Musolino!’ wrote one leading man of letters. ‘I’d like to write a poem that shows how every one of us has a Musolino inside.’

  Now and again Musolino did blot the script that portrayed him as a noble desperado: such as when he repeatedly screamed ‘slut!’ at Vincenzo Zoccali’s mother as she came to the witness stand. But that did not prevent many onlookers from sympathising with him. One of Italy’s greatest poets, a sentimental socialist called Giovanni Pascoli, lived in the countryside not far from Lucca and observed the trial with his habitual compassion. ‘Poor Musolino!’ he wrote to a friend. ‘You know, I’d like to write a poem that shows how every one of us has a Musolino inside.’

  Many commentators on the trial argued that the underlying problem in the Musolino case was not one lone brigand but the isolation of Calabrian society as a whole. Modern means of communication like the railway would surely bring the light of civilisation to the primitive obscurity of Aspromonte. The sun-weathered peasant witnesses who came up to Lucca for the case made for a spectacle that seemed only to confirm this view. Most of them were Calabrian dialect speakers who had to testify through an interpreter. There was loud laughter on one occasion when, as a witness started to talk, the interpreter turned to the judge and admitted that even he could not understand a word of what was being said. There was probably not a single Grecanico-Italian interpreter available in the whole of Italy.

  Musolino’s weapons displayed for an avid press.

  Positivist criminologists were called on to explain the results of their painstaking physical and psychological examination of Musolino. He had a contradictory mix of symptoms, they explained. There seemed to be no clear aetiology for his criminaloid tendencies. Musolino had suffered a head injury at age six when a flowerpot fell on his head. The accident caused a dent in his skull, and may have given him epilepsy—an obvious delinquent trait. But then again he did not masturbate at all frequently and was very intelligent. Racially speaking, they concluded lamely, he was an exaggeration of the ‘average Calabrian type’.

  The most moving speech of the trial came from the lawyer representing the parents of Pietro Ritrovato, the young Carabiniere who had died of the horrible injuries inflicted on him by Musolino the morning after the drugged maccheroni episode. The old Ritrovato couple had filed a civil suit against the ‘King of Aspromonte’. But they sobbed so much in court that they often had to withdraw. Their lawyer explained that his aim was not to ask for money, but to ‘bring a flower to the memory of a victim who fell in the line of duty’. To that end, he wanted to destroy what he called ‘the legend of Musolino’ by insisting on the one crucial thing that the trial had neglected: Musolino was a member of a criminal association called the picciotteria.

  The most squalid testimony came from the mayor of Santo Stefano—the one who had attended Musolino’s sister’s wedding and circulated a petition for a royal pardon. Aurelio Romeo was a chubby man with a sleek black beard who was a major player in one of the two dominant political factions in Reggio Calabria. In court he affected a flaming moral outrage about how the people of Santo Stefano had been mistreated by brutal and incompetent police. ‘The picciotteria is an invention, an excuse for the police’s weakness,’ he said. Asked about the character of Musolino’s two accomplices who were accused of trying to kill his predecessor as mayor, he said they were just honest, hard-working men.

  The trial’s outcome was inevitable: Musolino was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. But equally inevitably Italy had lost a priceless opportunity to draw public attention to the acute criminal emergency in southern Calabria. The early ’ndrangheta would remain shrouded in obscurity and confusion, a little-known curiosity of a little-known region.

  Musolino, by contrast, was destined for enduring fame, even as he languished in confinement. Just before the First World War, the English writer Norman Douglas went walking on Aspromonte and heard tale after tale about the brigand’s adventures from his peasant guides.

  God alo
ne can tell how many poor people he helped in their distress. And if he met a young girl in the mountains, he would help with her load, and escort her home, right into her father’s house. Ah, if you could have seen him, sir! He was young, with curly blonde hair, and a face like a rose.

  Musolino’s hair was actually black. That, at least, the criminologists at the trial had demonstrated beyond doubt.

  PART V

  MEDIA DONS

  17

  BANKERS AND MEN OF HONOUR

  ONE REASON WHY ITALY BARELY NOTICED THE RISE OF THE PICCIOTTERIA WAS THAT THE country had much graver worries. In the late 1880s a building bubble burst, leaving lending institutions with huge liabilities. In 1890 the economy went into recession, piling further pressure on the financial system. Several banks subsequently failed, including two of Italy’s biggest. Another, the Banca Romana, tried to stave off implosion by effectively forging its own money and then using the phoney cash to buy off dozens of politicians. ‘Loans’ from the Banca Romana also helped the King maintain his lavish lifestyle. The Prime Minister was forced to resign in November 1893 when his involvement in the scandal was exposed in parliament.

  To many, it seemed as if it was not just the Italian banking system that was about to collapse, but the monarchy and even the state itself. The politician called upon to save the nation was Francesco Crispi, an old warhorse of the Left, a Sicilian who had been one of the heroes of Garibaldi’s expedition back in 1860. Crispi also faced an unprecedented political challenge in the form of the trades unions, the Socialist Party and other organisations recruiting among the peasants and labourers. Crispi responded with repression, proclaiming martial law in some areas of the country and banning the Socialist Party in 1894. Desperate for military glory to reinforce the feeble credibility of the state, Crispi launched a reckless colonial adventure in East Africa. In March 1896, at the battle of Adowa, the Italian army that Crispi had spurred into action was destroyed by a vastly superior Ethiopian force. Crispi resigned soon after the news from Adowa reached Rome.