Blood Brotherhoods Page 24

  Sangiorgi’s passing marked the loss of a unique store of expertise on the mafia’s early years: the hugely important report on the mafia that he had written for Prime Minister Pelloux would remain hidden in the archives until the 1980s. Fundamentally, the knowledge he had worked so hard to accumulate would remain valid long after his death: as times changed, the Sicilian mafia changed remarkably little. Nevertheless, the ingenuity and ferocity with which the mafia adapted to the changing times to come would have astonished even Sangiorgi.

  Sangiorgi had played by the rules in Palermo; he had fought a clean, ‘open fight’ against the mafia, and it had ended in defeat. He died in his wife’s city, in Naples, where the Carabinieri had already begun a campaign against the camorra that was both devious and very dirty—a campaign that would end in victory.

  20

  THE ‘HIGH’ CAMORRA

  IN NAPLES, JUST AS IN PALERMO, CORRUPTION AND ORGANISED CRIME REACHED THE top of the news agenda as the economic and political crises of the 1890s petered out. In 1899 a new Socialist newspaper, La Propaganda, began a campaign against sleaze and gangsterism. Certain high-minded politicians joined in from the Right. The campaign was such a success that a Socialist MP was elected in Vicaria—the most densely populated constituency in Naples and, of course, the very cradle of the camorra.

  The main target of La Propaganda’s vitriol was Alberto Casale, a Member of Parliament and influential local government power broker who had extensive contacts with the Neapolitan underworld. We have already had a passing encounter with Casale: back in 1893, he used his purchase with the Honoured Society to bring an end to the camorra-backed cab drivers’ strike. Casale responded to La Propaganda’s attacks by reporting the newspaper to the authorities for slandering him, and a criminal trial ensued.

  The outcome of the Casale case was a disaster for a whole crooked system that linked the city’s politicians, bureaucrats, businessmen and journalists. La Propaganda successfully defended itself against the slander charge by proving that Casale, among many other corrupt deals, had banked a kickback from a Belgian tram company for his role in the cab drivers’ strike.

  The shock waves from Casale’s judicial humiliation sped to Rome. Casale resigned, the Naples city council was dissolved, and an official investigation into corruption in city government was launched under the leadership of an owlish old law professor from Liguria, Senator Giuseppe Saredo. The Saredo inquiry would once more lay bare the ‘slack society’; indeed it would prove to be one of the starkest portraits of political and bureaucratic malpractice in Italian history.

  Shining a light into the tenebrous passages of Naples city hall was no easy task. Senator Saredo and his team needed to study the paperwork to discover why the system was so corrupt and inefficient. But the paperwork was in chaos because of all the corruption and inefficiency. Bagfuls of official files had been smuggled away by bureaucrats keen to cover their tracks. The commissioners received a sullen or angry response from many of the key people it interviewed.

  Despite all the obstacles, after ten months of wading through a slob-land of documents and testimonies, Senator Saredo and his team dredged up hard evidence aplenty. Appointments to public service were supposed to be made on an impartial, competitive basis. In Naples the regulations had been systematically evaded. Half of all local government employees had no educational qualifications whatsoever. Staggeringly, even the chief accountant whose job it was to draw up the council’s budget had no qualifications. Some local government employees drew two or even three separate salaries. Several well-known journalists had no-show jobs with the council.

  The reason why government posts in Naples existed was not so that services could be carried out for the citizenry. Services like fighting fires, teaching children, caring for the parks, collecting taxes and rubbish, building sewers: these were secondary concerns, at best. For that reason, they were left to the minority of idiots who actually felt bound to do an honest day’s work. No, the real reason a job existed in Naples was so it could be handed out to people who had the right friends or relatives. A post with the council was a favour bestowed in return for other favours. In a package with these posts came the power to give and withhold yet more favours: to move an application for a trading licence to the top of the in-tray, or to consign it in perpetuity to the bottom; to give a contract to one tram company rather than to another. Because most local government bureaucrats were not particularly interested in doing anything for anyone they did not know, a whole parasitical swarm of intermediaries grew up: the faccendieri, they were called. (They still are.) The term means ‘hustlers’, ‘wheeler-dealers’. The only expertise these faccendieri had was knowing which ear to whisper in. In return for a small consideration, they would arrange for someone they knew to get you what you wanted—as a favour.

  A system of political patronage made this foul mess possible. Politicians stood at the business end of the chains of favours that snaked through the corridors of the Naples municipality. Explosively, the Saredo report referred to the men who operated this patronage system as ‘the high camorra’.

  The original low camorra held sway over the poor plebs in an age of abjection and servitude. Then there arose a high camorra comprising the most cunning and audacious members of the middle class. They fed off trade and public works contracts, political meetings and government bureaucracy. This high camorra strikes deals and does business with the low camorra, swapping promises for favours and favours for promises. The high camorra thinks of the state bureaucracy as being like a field it has to harvest and exploit. Its tools are cunning, nerve and violence. Its strength comes from the streets. And it is rightly considered to be more dangerous, because it has re-established the worst form of despotism by founding a regime based on bullying. The high camorra has replaced free will with impositions; it has nullified individuality and liberty; and it has defrauded the law and public trust.

  As a direct result of the inquiry’s findings a corruption trial was launched and twelve people, including Alberto Casale and the former Mayor of Naples, were convicted.

  Low camorra / high camorra. No encapsulation of the Neapolitan malaise could have been better calculated to make headlines. Whereas ‘mafia’ was still a vague notion, one enmeshed in woolly fibs about Sicilian culture, the term ‘camorra’ carried the distinctive reek of the dungeon, the tavern, and the brothel; it spoke clearly of primitive rituals and knife fights; it conjured up stark pictures of violent men with crude tattoos on their torsos and arabesques of scar tissue on their faces.

  At the very same time, during the Notarbartolo affair, the press were referring constantly to a ‘high mafia’. Raffaele Palizzolo was without doubt a mafioso, who profited from cattle rustling and kidnapping; and he was also, without doubt, at home in the ‘high’ world of banking and politics. So the label ‘high mafioso’ fitted him as snugly as did his expensively tailored frock coat.

  But was ‘high camorra’ really an accurate description of the systematic malfeasance the Saredo inquiry had unearthed in Naples? The politician at the centre of the whole scandal, Alberto Casale, was a proven crook and a master of undergovernment like Palizzolo. But it was not strictly true to call him a camorrista. While Casale was certainly a politician who was shameless about doing business with the camorra, he was not an integral part of the camorra in the same way that don Raffaele was an integral part of the mafia.

  What this amounts to saying is that the camorra was not as powerful as the mafia. The camorra certainly had a steady partnership with pieces of the state. But it had not become the state in the way that the mafia had done in Sicily.

  Senator Saredo did not give any evidence to back up his use of the phrase ‘high camorra’. His inquiry found no trail of blood or money leading from the upper world of politics down into the underworld where the camorra, in the strict sense, operated. In fact the low camorra remained a mere peripheral blur in Saredo’s field of vision.

  Saredo’s provocative language was therefo
re misleading, but understandable. Ever since Italy had found out about the criminal sect called the camorra, it had also used ‘camorra’ in a much vaguer way, as an insult. The c-word was a label for any shady clique or faction—for other people’s cliques or factions. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, this term of abuse was steeped in new bile. Italians were growing bitterly frustrated with the way their politics worked. The mysterious deal brokering, the jobbery, the strong-arm tactics: ‘camorra’, it sometimes seemed, was everywhere in the country’s institutional life. A hostility towards politics—antipolitica as it is sometimes called—has been a constant feature of Italian society ever since. With his talk of a ‘high camorra’, the old law professor showed that he had a mischievous streak: he was knowingly appealing to what was by now a conditioned reflex in public opinion.

  As soon as it became clear that the Saredo inquiry was doing its job seriously, some leading politicians began briefing against it: what Saredo had termed the ‘high camorra’ was mobilising to defend itself. Tame journalists heaped abuse on Senator Saredo. Knowing the threat posed by a wave of ‘antipolitics’, they appealed to another conditioned reflex of Italian collective life: a suspicious, defensive local pride. So the northerner Saredo had besmirched the image of Naples, the editorials wailed. There may have been a few cases of corruption. But that was because Naples was poor and backward. What the city needed was not haughty lectures, but more money from government. Lots more.

  In Italy, public indignation has a short half-life. When it fails to catalyse change, it steadily decays into less volatile states of mind: fatigue, forgetting, and sullen indifference. By 1904 the indignation about political corruption and organised crime that marked the turn of the century had all but totally degenerated. Raffaele Palizzolo was finally acquitted of ordering the murder of banker Emanuele Notarbartolo in July of that year. In Naples too, the Casale trial and the Saredo inquiry no longer provoked the same anger. The Socialist Party, having tried to ride the scandals, was now divided and discredited by a failed general strike. The chiefs of the ‘high camorra’ could now go on the offensive.

  The Prime Minister of the day was Giovanni Giolitti—the dominant figure in Italian politics between the turn of the century and the First World War. Giolitti was a master of parliamentary tactics, better than anyone else at the devious game of coaxing factions into coalitions.

  In the early 1900s Giolitti presided over an unprecedented period of economic growth and introduced some very welcome social reforms. But his cynicism made him as loathed as he was indispensable. ‘For your enemies, you apply the law. For your friends, you interpret it’, Giolitti once said: a manifesto for undermining public trust in the institutions, and all too accurate an encapsulation of the pervading values within the Italian state. He also compared governing Italy to the job of making a suit of clothes for a hunch-back. It was pointless for a tailor to try and correct the hunchback’s bodily deformities, he explained. Better just to make a deformed suit. Italy’s biggest deformity was of course organised crime, and Giolitti showed himself to be as expedient as any previous statesman in tailoring his policies around it. One later critic, incensed at the way the Prefects used thugs to influence elections in the south, called Giolitti ‘the Minister of the Underworld’.

  In the general election of November 1904, Giolitti (whose lieutenants in Naples had orchestrated the drive to undermine the Saredo inquiry’s authority) deployed all the dark arts of the Interior Ministry to turn the vote. In Vicaria, the constituency in Naples that had elected a Socialist MP in 1900, camorristi—real low camorristi—were enlisted to bully Socialist supporters. On polling day, alongside the police, gangsters stood guard outside the places where votes were changing hands for government cash.

  Someone deep within police headquarters that day was endowed with a cynical historical wit. For camorristi who enjoyed official approval were given tricolour cockades to wear in their hats. So, just as they had done in the days before Garibaldi’s Neapolitan triumph in 1860, camorristi in patriotic red, white and green favours formed a flagrant alliance with the police. The traditional trade in promises and favours between the ‘low camorra’ and the ‘high camorra’ had resumed. Nothing, it seemed, had changed.

  Barely eighteen months later, things changed more dramatically than they had done at any point in the camorra’s history.

  Among the camorristi in tricolour cockades on election day in 1904 was the boss of the Vicaria chapter of the Honoured Society, Enrico Alfano, known as Erricone—‘Big ’Enry’. In the summer of 1906, Big ’Enry became caught up in what the New York Times would call ‘the greatest criminal trial of the age’.

  The Cuocolo trial, as it was known, was the stuff of a newspaperman’s dreams. Tales of a secret sect risen from the brothels and taverns of the slums to infiltrate the salons and clubs of the elite. Police corruption and political malpractice. A cast of heroic Carabinieri, villainous gangsters, histrionic lawyers and even a camorra priest. The drama that unfolded in Viterbo seemed to have been fashioned expressly for the new media age. Foreign correspondents, news agencies, and the fibrillating images of Pathé’s Gazette could now relay the excitement to every corner of the globe. Nor was the Cuocolo trial just a media event: unlike the Notarbartolo affair, it was a turning point in the history of organised crime. Not only did it reignite the political controversy and emotion that the Saredo inquiry had generated. Not only did it threaten, once more, to expose the sordid deals between camorristi and politicians. It actually killed off the camorra. With the Cuocolo case, the secret sect known as the camorra ceased to exist. Big ’Enry was to be the last supreme boss of the Honoured Society in Naples. And it all began with the discovery of two bodies.

  21

  THE CAMORRA IN STRAW-YELLOW GLOVES

  JUST BEFORE 9 A.M. ON 6 JUNE 1906 POLICE ENTERED AN APARTMENT IN VIA Nardones, central Naples. They found the occupant, a former prostitute called Maria Cutinelli, on a bed soaked in blood; she was in her nightshirt and had died of multiple stab wounds—thirteen in total—to her chest, stomach, thighs and genitals. The police suspected a crime of passion and immediately began looking for the victim’s husband, Gennaro Cuocolo. (Like most Italian women then as now, Maria Cutinelli had kept her maiden name.)

  The hunt was over before it began. News soon arrived from Torre del Greco, a settlement squeezed between Mount Vesuvius and the sea some fifteen kilometres from the city: Gennaro Cuocolo had been found dead at dawn. His body lay in a lane that ran along the coast behind the slaughterhouse. He had been stabbed forty-seven times and his skull had been smashed with a club. Much of Torre del Greco was still smothered in ash from a recent volcanic eruption. Traces of a struggle in the black-grey carpet allowed Cuocolo’s last seconds to be outlined: there were several attackers; after killing their victim, they lugged the body onto a low wall overlooking the sea—as if to put it on display. Cuocolo’s blood mingled with the gore seeping through a gutter that ran from the slaughterhouse onto the crags.

  There were good grounds for guessing the real motive for the murders. Cuocolo made his living commissioning burglaries and fencing the resulting booty. He was notoriously enmeshed with organised crime—a former member of the Honoured Society in the Stella quarter, in fact. The conclusion was surely plain: the camorra killed the Cuocolo couple.

  The chief suspects were soon identified. At the same time that Gennaro Cuocolo was being stabbed and bludgeoned to death, five men were eating a leisurely dinner of roasted eel at Mimì a Mare, a picturesque trattoria only a couple of hundred metres from the murder scene. The five were arrested: at least three of them were known gangsters, including Big ’Enry who, as the police were well aware, was the effective supreme boss of the Honoured Society.

  Yet initial investigations failed to unearth anything concrete to connect the diners at Mimì a Mare with the carnage behind the slaughterhouse. None of the five had left the dinner table long enough to kill Cuocolo. Big ’Enry and his friends walked free, much to
the outrage of the Neapolitan public.

  The decisive breakthrough came only at the beginning of the following year, as a result of the longstanding rivalry between the two branches of Italian policing. The Pubblica Sicurezza, or ordinary police force, was run from the Ministry of the Interior. The Carabinieri, or military police, operated under the Ministry of War. In theory the two forces patrolled different areas: the police were based in the towns and cities and the Carabinieri in the countryside. In practice, their duties often overlapped. The Cuocolo investigation was to be a classic case of the tensions and turf wars that often resulted.

  In 1907, the Carabinieri wrested control of the Cuocolo murder probe from the police, and soon submitted a startling testimony by an informer: he was a young horse trader, groom, habitual thief, and camorrista called Gennaro Abbatemaggio.

  Gennaro Abbatemaggio made history when he broke the code of omertà. He recounted every detail of the Cuocolo murders: motive, plan and execution. But his evidence was far more important than that. There had never been a witness like him. Of course plenty of gangsters had spoken to the authorities before, and plenty of trials had drawn on evidence from deep within the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra, and the Calabrian picciotteria. But no one before Gennaro Abbatemaggio had stood up in court to denounce a whole sect. Before him, no self-confessed mobster had made his own life and psychology into an object of public fascination and forensic scrutiny. Gennaro Abbatemaggio would become the biggest of the many celebrities created by the Cuocolo affair.

  Abbatemaggio explained to the Carabinieri that the murder victim, Gennaro Cuocolo, first became the target of the camorra’s anger because he broke its most sacred rule by talking to the authorities. Cuocolo’s breach of omertà came after he commissioned a burglary by one Luigi Arena. In order to keep all the loot, Cuocolo betrayed his partner in crime to the police.