Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  The boss then kissed the new member on both cheeks and set out for him the rules of honour. There followed another surreal incantation to wind the ceremony up.

  Oh, beautiful humility! You who have covered me in roses and flowers and carried me to the island of Favignana, there to teach me the first steps. Italy, Germany and Sicily once waged a great war. Much blood was shed for the honour of the society. And this blood, gathered in a ball, goes wandering round the world, as cold as ice, as hot as fire, and as fine as silk.

  The ’ndranghetisti could at last take up arms again—in the name of Osso, Mastrosso, Carcagnosso and the Archangel Michael—and resume their day-to-day criminal activity.

  These solemn ravings make the ’ndrangheta seem like a version of the Scouts invented by the boys from The Lord of the Flies based on a passing encounter with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It would all verge on the comic if the result were not so much death and misery. Yet there is no incompatibility between the creepy fantasy world of ’ndrangheta ritual and the brutal reality of killings and cocaine deals.

  Initiation rituals are even more important to the ’ndrangheta than the story of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso that helps give it an ancient and noble aura. At whatever stage in life they are performed, mafia rites of affiliation are a baptism, to use Antonio Zagari’s word. Like a baptism, such ceremonies dramatise a change in identity; they draw a line in blood between one state of being and another. No wonder, then, that because of the rituals they undergo, ’ndranghetisti consider themselves a breed apart. A Calabrian mafioso’s initiation is a special day indeed.

  15 August 2007, in Duisburg, was one such special day. The morning after the massacre, German police searched the victims’ mutilated corpses for clues. They found a partly burned image of the Archangel Michael in the pocket of the eighteen-year-old boy who had just been celebrating his birthday.

  The mafia of Sicily, now known as Cosa Nostra, also has its myths and ceremonies. For example, many mafiosi hold (or at least held until recently) the deluded belief that their organisation began as a medieval brotherhood of caped avengers called the Beati Paoli. The Sicilian mafia uses an initiation ritual that deploys the symbolism of blood in a similar but simpler fashion to the ’ndrangheta. The same darkened room. The same assembly of members, who typically sit round a table with a gun and a knife at its centre. The aspirant’s ‘godfather’ explains the rules to him and then pricks his trigger finger and sheds a little of his blood on a holy image—usually the Madonna of the Annunciation. The image is burned in the neophyte’s hands as the oath is taken: ‘If I betray Cosa Nostra, may my flesh burn like this holy woman.’ Blood once shed can never be restored. Matter once burned can never be repaired. When one enters the Sicilian mafia, one enters for life.

  As well as being a vital part of the internal life of the Calabrian and Sicilian mafias, initiation rites are very important historical evidence. The earliest references to the ’ndrangheta ritual date from the late nineteenth century. The Sicilian mafia’s version is older: the first documentary evidence emerged in 1876. The rituals surface from the documentation again and again thereafter, leaving bloody fingerprints through history, exposing Italian organised crime’s DNA. They also tell us very clearly what happened to that evidence once it came into the hands of the Italian authorities: it was repeatedly ignored, undervalued and suppressed.

  Rituals are evidence of historical change, too. The oldest admission ceremony of all belonged to the Neapolitan camorra. Once upon a time, the camorra also signalled a young member’s new status with the shedding of blood. In the 1850s, a recruit usually took an oath over crossed knives and then had to have a dagger fight, either with a camorrista or with another aspiring member. Often the blade would be wrapped tightly in rags or string, leaving only the point exposed: too much blood and the duel might stop being a symbolic exercise in male bonding and start being a battle. When the first hit was registered, the fight was declared over, and the new affiliate received both the embraces of the other camorristi and the most junior rank in the Honoured Society’s organisational hierarchy.

  Today’s camorra bosses tend not to put their recruits through formal initiation ceremonies or oaths. The traditions have disappeared. The Neapolitan camorra is no longer a sworn sect, an Honoured Society. In fact, as we shall see later, the Honoured Society of Naples died out in 1912 in bizarre and utterly Neapolitan circumstances.

  Each of the mafias has evolved its own organisation. The primary aim of these structures is to impose discipline, which can be a huge competitive advantage in the violent turmoil of the underworld. But organisation also serves other purposes, notably that of utilising the loyalties within blood families. Mafias are not kin groups: they are systems for exploiting kin groups for criminal purposes.

  Naples and its region of Campania have seen the most dramatic organisational changes of any of the Italian mafias. The camorra that has emerged since the destruction of the Honoured Society of Naples before the First World War is not a single association. Instead it is a vast pullulating world of gangs. They form, split, descend into vicious feuds, and re-emerge in new alliances only to then be annihilated in some new internecine war or police roundup. The Neapolitan underworld is frighteningly unstable. Whereas a Sicilian capo has a decent chance of seeing his grandchildren set out on their criminal careers, a senior camorrista is lucky if he lives to forty.

  Camorra clans lack the formalised job titles, ranks and rituals that can be found in the ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra. But that has not stopped camorristi from controlling vast swathes of Campanian territory, from turning entire city blocks into fortified no-go zones and drug hypermarkets, from making millions from the trade in bootleg DVDs and designer handbags. It has not stopped them devastating the landscape of Campania with their lucrative trade in illegally dumped waste. Or from infiltrating the national construction industry and dealing internationally in narcotics and weapons.

  Camorra clans are organised nonetheless: together they form ‘the System’, as some on the inside call it. At the centre of the System in each area of the city and its hinterland is a charismatic boss: protector and punisher. Below him there are ranks and specialised roles—like zone chiefs, assassins, drug wholesalers—who are all chosen and nominated by the boss and who will almost invariably live and die with him. Like the other mafias, the camorra clans redistribute some of the profits of their crimes, often pay wages to their troops and set aside funds for those in prison.

  Blood, in the sense of kinship, is now the glue that holds the most fearsome camorra clans together. But the individual clans tend not to be led by a Grand Old Man. The core of any camorra group is usually a cluster of relatives—brothers, cousins, in-laws—all roughly the same age. Around them there are friends, neighbours and more relatives.

  So, Neapolitan organised crime has seen a great deal of change since the days when the camorra was an Honoured Society. Yet the veins of tradition have never been entirely severed. For one thing, camorristi have an enduring weakness for gangster bling. Gold accessories and expensive shirts have been in evidence since the nineteenth century. Now there are also showy cars and motorcycles. The Neapolitan boss’s bike of choice was until recently the Honda Dominator. The point of all this conspicuous consumption, then and now, is to advertise power: to proclaim territorial dominion and to be a walking symbol of success to hangers-on.

  Cosa Nostra’s bosses are generally dowdy compared to the camorra chiefs of Naples, and they spend much more of their time on the kind of organisational formalities that can have a lethal significance in their world.

  Each boss (or, strictly speaking, ‘representative’) of the Sicilian mafia presides over a cell known as a Family. But by no means everyone in a Family is related. Indeed, Cosa Nostra often invokes a rule designed to prevent clusters of relatives from becoming too influential within a Family: no more than two brothers may become members at any one time, so that the boss can’t pack the clan with his own kin.
/>   The structure of each Family is simple. (See page xxii.)The representative is flanked by an underboss and a consigliere or adviser. The ordinary members, known as soldiers, are organised into groups of ten. Each of these groups reports to a capodecina—a ‘boss of ten’—who in turn reports to the boss. So the term Family, as Cosa Nostra uses it, is a metaphor for the basic unit in its structure.

  Above its base in the Families, Cosa Nostra is shaped like a pyramid. Three mafia Families in adjoining territories form another tier of the organisation’s structure, the mandamento (precinct), presided over by a capomandamento (precinct boss). This precinct boss has a seat on the Commission, which combines the functions of a parliament, a high court, and a chamber of commerce for Cosa Nostra in each of Sicily’s four most mafia-infested provinces. Presiding over them all, at the very apex of the mafia pyramid, there is a capo di tutti i capi—the ‘boss of all bosses’. The capo di tutti i capi is invariably from the province of Palermo, the island’s capital, because about half of Cosa Nostra’s manpower, and about half of its Families, are based in the Palermo area.

  So much for the diagram. But in the underworld, more even than in the upper world inhabited by law-abiding citizens, power is invested in people, and not in the nameplates on office doors. Comparisons between a mafia boss and the managing director of a capitalist enterprise are not only trite; they completely fail to capture the acutely cagey and political world in which mafiosi operate.

  Cosa Nostra has gone through phases of greater and lesser coordination; different bosses have had different styles of leadership and have had all manner of external limits placed on their power. Confusion, double-dealing, mutual suspicion, and civil war have been constants in the mafia from the get-go. The cast of character-types is vast. There are certainly party leaders, policy-makers, reformers and legislative tinkerers. But also a good many rebels, grey eminences, impatient tycoons, Young Turks, and isolationists. And of course everyone in the mafia is also both a conspirator and a near-paranoid conspiracy theorist. All of these characters may choose to twist the mafia’s precedents, traditions and rules; they may even trample and deride them. But no boss, however powerful, can do so without calculating the political price.

  One of the big issues in the history of the Sicilian mafia is just how old the organisation’s pyramidal structure is. Some of the most disquieting recent research has shown that it is a lot older than we thought until only a couple of years ago. The mafia would not be the mafia without its inborn drive to formalise and coordinate its activities. As I write, to the best of our knowledge, the Palermo Commission of Cosa Nostra has not met since 1993, a fact that is symptomatic of the worst crisis in the organisation’s century and a half of history. Quite whether today’s crisis turns into a terminal decline depends, in part, on how well Italy absorbs the lessons of the mafia’s history, lessons that spell out the Sicilian mafia’s astonishing power to regenerate itself.

  In Calabria, just as in Sicily, there is a fraught relationship between the gangland rulebook and the expediency determined by the sheer chaos of criminal life. When I began writing this book, there was a consensus in both the law courts and the criminology textbooks that the ’ndrangheta’s structure was very different to Cosa Nostra’s. The ’ndrangheta is a federal organisation, it was said, a loose fellowship of local gangs.

  Then in July 2010 the police and Carabinieri arrested more than three hundred men, including the eighty-year-old Domenico Oppedisano, who, investigators claim, was elected to the ’ndrangheta’s highest office in August 2009. Since their arrest, Oppedisano and most of his fellows have availed themselves of the right to remain silent. So we cannot know what defence they will mount against the charges. Nor can we know whether the courts will decide that those charges have substance. Operation Crime, as the investigation is called, is in its early stages. Yet whatever its final result, it constitutes a lesson in humility for anyone trying to write about the secret world of Italian gangsterism. At any moment, historical certainties can be overturned by new policework or by discoveries in the many unexplored archives.

  The magistrates directing Operation Crime allege that Oppedisano’s official title is capocrimine, or ‘chief of the crime’. The ‘Crime’, which ’ndranghetisti also refer to as the ‘Province’, is thought to be the ’ndrangheta’s supreme coordinating body. It is subdivided into three mandamenti, or precincts, covering the three zones of the province of Reggio Calabria.

  Many newspapers in Italy and abroad that covered Operation Crime portrayed the Crime as the ’ndrangheta version of the Sicilian mafia Commission, and Domenico Oppedisano as a Calabrian capo di tutti i capi: the peak of the ’ndrangheta pyramid, as it were. But that image does not correspond to what the magistrates are claiming. Instead, they paint a picture of Oppedisano as a master of ceremonies, the speaker of an assembly, a wise old judge whose job is to interpret the rules. The head of crime’s responsibilities relate to procedure and politics, not to business.

  But then procedure and politics can easily have fatal consequences in Italian gangland. The Crime has real power: it may be based in the province of Reggio Calabria, but ’ndranghetisti across the world are answerable to it, according to the investigating magistrates. In the spring of 2008, the boss, or ‘general master’, of the ’ndrangheta’s colonies in the Lombardy region (the northern heart of the Italian economy) decided to declare independence from the Crime. In July of that year, the police bugged a conversation in which one senior boss reported to his men that the Crime had decided to ‘sack’ the insubordinate general master. A few days later the sacking took effect, when two men in motorcycle jackets shot the Lombardy boss four times just as he was getting up from his usual table at a bar in a small town near Milan. Shortly afterwards, the Carabinieri secretly filmed a meeting at which the Lombardy chiefs raised their hands in unanimous approval of their new general master; needless to say, he was the Crime’s nominee.

  It seems that the textbooks on the ’ndrangheta may have to be rewritten. And historians will have to take up a new prompt for research. My own findings suggest that the links—procedural, political and business links—between the ’ndrangheta’s local cells have been there right from the beginning and that the Crime—or something like it—may be as old as the ’ndrangheta itself.

  Despite all the new information about the Crime, much of what we knew about the lower reaches of the ’ndrangheta’s structure remains valid. (For the organisational structure and ranks of ’ndrangheta, see pages xxiii–xxiv.) The ’ndrangheta of today is closely entwined with family, in that each unit, or ’ndrina, forms the backbone of a broader clan. (The term ’ndrina may well originate from the word malandrina, which used to refer to the special cell in prison reserved for gangsters.) The boss of an ’ndrina, often called a capobastone (‘chief cudgel’), is typically a father with a good number of male children. Unlike his peers in Cosa Nostra, the chief cudgel can bring as many boys into the ’ndrangheta as he is able to sire. Clustered around the core members in the ’ndrina are the boss’s kin and other families, often bound in by blood, marriage or both. Accordingly, ’ndrangheta clans take their names from the surname(s) of its leading dynasty or dynasties, such as the Pelle-Vottari and the Strangio-Nirta—respectively the victims and perpetrators of the massacre in Duisburg.

  A number of ’ndrine report up to a locale or ‘Local’, whose boss is known as the capolocale and who is assisted by other senior officers. For example, the contabile (‘bookkeeper’) handles the gang’s common fund, or what ’ndranghetisti rather quaintly call the valigetta (‘valise’). The capocrimine (‘head of crime’) is in charge of surveillance and day-to-day criminal activity. When the time comes, the head of crime also acts as the clan’s Minister of War. For extra security the Local is divided into two compartments, insulated from one another: the lower ranking ’ndranghetisti are grouped in the Minor Society, and the higher ones in the Major Society.

  So far, so (relatively) straightforward. But at this po
int the ’ndrangheta’s peculiar fondness for arcane rules and procedures takes over again. In Cosa Nostra, holding office is the only official measure of a Man of Honour’s status. In the ’ndrangheta, if a member is to hold one of the official positions of power in a Local, a Precinct, or in the Crime, then he has to have reached a certain degree of seniority. Seniority is measured in doti, meaning ‘qualities’ or ‘gifts’, which are the ranks in the organisation’s membership hierarchy. Sometimes, more poetically, rising a rank in the ’ndrangheta is referred to as receiving a fiore—a flower. The offices in the Local are temporary appointments, whereas the flowers are permanent marks of status. As he steals, extorts and kills, an ’ndranghetista wins new flowers. Every new flower means yet another protracted induction ceremony and after it a greater share of power and secrets. The young initiate starts at the bottom as a picciotto d’onore (‘honoured youth’) and ascends through a series of other ranks like camorrista and camorrista di sgarro (which means something like ‘camorrist who is up for a fight’) and then on to the more senior ranks, such as santista, vangelista and padrino (or saintist, gospelist and godfather).

  As if this were not complicated enough, ’ndranghetisti disagree about how many ranks there are and what rights and responsibilities they bring with them. There has also been floral inflation in recent years: inventing new badges of status is a cheap way to resolve disputes. For instance, gospelist (so called because the initiation ritual for this flower involves swearing on a bible) seems to have been created recently.

  None of this is harmless etiquette. The rituals and organisational structures are a liturgical apparatus that is intended to turn young men into professional delinquents and transform a mere life of crime into a calling in savagery. A calling that, despite the antique origins its members boast, is only a century and a half old. Only as old, that is, as Italy itself.