Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  PART I

  VIVA LA PATRIA!

  1

  HOW TO EXTRACT GOLD FROM FLEAS

  SIGISMONDO CASTROMEDIANO, DUKE OF MORCIANO, MARQUIS OF CABALLINO, LORD OF seven baronies, sat on the ground with his right calf resting on an anvil. Rangy and blue-eyed, he seemed like an entirely distinct order of being from the Neapolitan jailers who stood before him under a lean-to roof, toying with their ironmongery. Next to the Duke, his fellow patriot Nicola Schiavoni sat in the same undignified position, with the same look of dread on his face.

  One of the jailers grabbed the Duke’s foot and slipped a stirrup-shaped metal shackle over it. He then enclosed the ankle entirely by pushing a rivet through the small holes at each end of the shackle; sandwiched between them was the last link of a heavy chain. Laughing and singing, the jailer smashed the rivet flat with blows that could have splintered bones.

  The Duke flinched repeatedly, and was assailed by the jailers’ mocking cheers: ‘Give ‘em some more! They’re enemies of the king. They wanted to get their hands on our women and our property.’

  Ordered to stand, Castromediano and Schiavoni lifted their fetters for the first time: some twenty pounds of chain in twelve feet of oblong links. For both of them, this moment marked the beginning of a prison sentence of thirty years in irons for conspiring against the government of the Kingdom of Naples, one of the many states into which the Italian peninsula was divided. The two prisoners embraced before mustering a show of their undaunted belief in the sacred cause of Italy: ‘we kissed those chains tenderly’, the Duke wrote, ‘as if they were our brides’.

  The guards were briefly taken aback. But they soon got on with the rituals that marked admission to the Castello del Carmine, one of the worst prisons in the Kingdom of Naples. Civilian clothes were replaced by uniforms comprising brown breeches and a red tunic, both in the same rough wool. Heads were scraped bald and bloody with a sickle-shaped razor. Into each pair of hands were thrust a rag-stuffed mattress, a donkey-hair blanket, and a bowl.

  It was sunset by the time the Duke and his companion were led across the prison yard and shoved through the door of the dungeon.

  What they saw inside, Castromediano recalled, was a sight fit to ‘annihilate the most generous soul, the most steadfast heart’. It could have been a sewer: a long room with a low ceiling, its floor set with sharp stones, its tiny windows high and heavily barred, its air sick and clammy. A stench like rotting meat emanated from the filth smeared everywhere, and from the figures of misery skulking in the half-light.

  As the new arrivals were nervously looking for a place to lay their mattresses, another shackled pair approached from among the crowd. One was tall and handsome, with a swagger in his walk. He was dressed in black plush trousers, with polished buttons at the haunches, and a brightly coloured belt; his matching waistcoat displayed a watch and chain. With elaborate civility, he addressed the two patriots.

  Well, well, gentlemen! Fortune has smiled on you. All of us here have been waiting to honour you. Long live Italy! Long live Liberty! We camorristi, who share your sad and honourable fate, hereby exempt you from any camorra obligation . . . Gentlemen, take heart! I swear by God that no one in this place will touch a hair on your head. I am the boss of the camorra here, and so I’m the only one in charge. Absolutely everyone is at my beck and call, including the commander and his jailers.

  Within an hour the new prisoners learned two stark lessons: that the camorra boss had made no hollow boasts about his power; and that his promise to exempt them from any ‘camorra obligation’ was utterly worthless. The camorrista did get them back their purses, which had been confiscated on arrival at the prison. But that courtesy was a self-interested one: it meant that he could cajole the bewildered Duke into paying an exorbitant sum for revolting food.

  That first exaction was crushing. Castromediano visualised his future as an endless ordeal by protection racket, and found himself contemplating suicide.

  The Duke of Castromediano was clapped in irons on 4 June 1851. The scene is true but also irresistibly metaphorical for it was in prison, in the mid-1800s, that Italy was first chained to the hoodlums that have hampered its every step, ever since.

  The camorra was born in prison. By the time the Duke of Castromediano entered the Castello del Carmine, gang rule behind bars had been a fact of life in southern Italy for centuries. Under the ancien régime it was easier and cheaper to devolve day-to-day control of the prisons to the toughest inmates. Then in the 1800s the prison extortionists turned themselves into a sworn secret society and gained a foothold in the world beyond the dungeons. The story of how that happened is thick with intrigue, but in essence it involves picking out every nuance and irony in the opening encounter between Duke Castromediano and the camorrista. For now, that story can be summarised in one word: Italy.

  In 1851, what we now call Italy was still only a ‘geographical expression’ rather than a state; it was divided between one foreign power (Austria), two Dukedoms, a Grand Dukedom, two Kingdoms, and one Papal State. The biggest of those territories was also the southernmost: the Kingdom of Naples, or the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, to use its official name.

  From the Kingdom’s capital, Naples, a King born of the Bourbon dynasty reigned over the southern Italian mainland and the island of Sicily. Like most princes in Italy, the Bourbons of Naples were haunted by the memory of what had happened to them in the years following the French Revolution of 1789. In 1805 Napoleon deposed the Bourbons and put his own nominees on the throne. French rule brought a whole series of innovations in the way the Kingdom was run. Out went feudalism, and in came private property. Out went a messy assemblage of local customs, baronial and church jurisdictions, and public ordinances: in came a new code of civil law and the beginnings of a police force. The southern part of the Italian peninsula began to resemble a modern, centralised state.

  In 1815 Napoleon was finally vanquished. When the Bourbons returned to power, they caught on to the big advantages that the French-style reforms could have for securing their own authority. But the theory and the practice of modern administration were hard to reconcile. The throne of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was still shaky. There was widespread opposition to the new, more centralised system. Moreover, the French Revolution had not only introduced continental Europe to new ways of administering a state, it had also spread volatile ideas about constitutional government, the nation, and even democracy.

  Duke Castromediano was one of a generation of young men who dedicated themselves to building an Italian Patria, a Fatherland that would embody the values of constitutional government, liberty, and the rule of law. After trying and failing to turn those values into a political reality during the revolts of 1848–49, many patriots like Castromediano paid for their beliefs by being hurled into the dungeon realm of the camorristi.

  Such treatment of political prisoners, of gentlemen prisoners, soon became a scandal. In 1850 a highly strung Member of the British Parliament, William Ewart Gladstone—the future Grand Old Man—began a long sojourn in Naples for the sake of his daughter’s health. Gladstone was drawn into local issues by the plight of men like Castromediano. Early in 1851 the authorities in Naples unwisely allowed Gladstone to visit some of the city’s jails. He was horrified by the ‘beastly filth’ he witnessed. Here political detainees and common criminals of the worst kind mingled indiscriminately, and without any kind of supervision. The prisoners ran the place themselves.

  They are a self-governed community, the main authority being that of the gamorristi, the men of most celebrity among them for audacious crime.

  Gladstone’s unfamiliar spelling did not change the truth of what he wrote. Or indeed the polemical force of his argument: no sooner had he emerged from the Neapolitan prisons than he unleashed two open letters condemning the rule of the Bourbon King as ‘the negation of God, erected into a system of Government’. Camorristi were now a diplomatic stick with which to beat the Bourbons. Any government that farmed out
the management of its prisons to violent thugs surely did not deserve to stand. Courtesy of Gladstone, Italy’s organised criminal gangs became what they have never ceased to be since: a detonator of political controversy.

  The international sympathy aroused by the jailed patriot martyrs came to play an important role in the almost miraculous sequence of events that finally turned Italy into a Patria, or something like it. In 1858 the Prime Minister of the northern Italian Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia struck a secret deal with France to drive Austria out of northern Italy by force. The following year, after appalling bloodshed at the battles of Magenta and Solferino, Piedmont-Sardinia absorbed the former Austrian domain of Lombardy. Piedmont’s military success triggered uprisings further south, in the various central Dukedoms, as well as in part of the Pope’s territory. Much of the north of the peninsula had now become Italy. Europe held its breath and awaited the next move.

  Then in May 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi launched one of idealism’s greatest ever feats when he landed at Marsala, at Sicily’s furthest western shore, with just over 1,000 red-shirted patriotic volunteers. After his first touch-and-go victories, the momentum of revolution began to build behind Garibaldi’s expedition. He soon conquered the Sicilian capital Palermo, and then turned his growing army eastwards to invade the Italian mainland. In early September, he entered Naples. Italy would henceforth, for the first time in history, be one country.

  With Italy unified, the patriotic prisoners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies could now convert their long sufferings into political credibility. They travelled north, to the Piedmontese capital of Turin at the foot of the Alps, and joined the new country’s first national elite.

  The tale of the Risorgimento, of how Italy was unified, has been told countless times. Much less well-known is its sinister subplot: the emergence of the camorra. Most of the multiple threads of that subplot were set in motion in the dungeons where the patriots met the camorristi. So the patriotic prisoners are our most important witnesses to the camorra’s early history. Not only that: some of them stepped bodily into the historical fray, as both heroes and villains.

  A united Italy was still a formless dream when Duke Sigismondo Castromediano was clapped in irons in 1851. But as his traumatic first hours in prison turned into days, months, and years, he found sources of resilience to add to his political dreams: the companionship of his fellows in degradation; but also a determination to understand his enemy. For the Duke of Castromediano, making sense of the camorra was a matter of life and death.

  His discoveries should be ours, since they still hold good today. In prison, Castromediano was able to observe the early camorra in laboratory conditions as it perfected a criminal methodology destined to infiltrate and subvert the very nation that Duke Castromediano suffered so much to create.

  Castromediano began his study of the camorra in the most down-to-earth way: he followed the money. And the thing that most struck him about what he called the camorra’s ‘taxes’ was that they were levied on absolutely every aspect of a prisoner’s life, down to the last crust of bread and the most miserable shred of clothing.

  At one end of most dungeons in the Kingdom was a tiny altar to the Madonna. The first tax extracted from a newly arrived prisoner was often claimed as a payment for ‘oil for the Madonna’s lamp’—a lamp that rarely, if ever, burned. Prisoners even had to rent the patch of ground where they slept. In prison slang, this sleeping place was called a pizzo. Perhaps not coincidentally, the same word today means a bribe or a protection payment. Anyone reluctant to pay the pizzo was treated to punishments that ranged from insults, through beatings and razor slashes, to murder.

  Duke Sigismondo Castromediano, who analysed the camorra’s methods while in prison in the 1850s. He called it ‘one of the most immoral and disastrous sects that human infamy has ever invented’.

  Duke Castromediano witnessed one episode that illustrates how the camorra’s prison funding system involved something far more profound than brute robbery—and something much more sinister than taxation. On one occasion a camorrista, who had just eaten ‘a succulent soup and a nice hunk of roast’, threw a turnip into the face of a man whose meagre ration of bread and broth he had confiscated in lieu of a bribe. Insults were hurled along with the vegetable.

  Here you go, a turnip! That should be enough to keep you alive—at least for today. Tomorrow the Devil will take care of you.

  The camorra turned the needs and rights of their fellow prisoners (like their bread or their pizzo) into favours. Favours that had to be paid for, one way or another. The camorra system was based on the power to grant those favours and to take them away. Or even to throw them in people’s faces. The real cruelty of the turnip-throwing episode is that the camorrista was bestowing a favour that he could just as easily have withheld.

  Duke Castromediano had an acute eye for episodes that dramatised the underlying structures of camorra power in the prisons. He once overheard two prisoners arguing about a debt. There were only a few pennies at stake. But before long, a camorrista intervened. ‘What right have you got to have an argument, unless the camorra has given you permission?’ With that, he seized the disputed coins.

  Any prisoner who asserted a basic right—like having an argument or breathing air—was insulting the camorra’s authority. And any prisoner who tried to appeal for justice to an authority beyond the prison was committing treason. The Duke met one man who had had his hands plunged into boiling water for daring to write to the government about prison conditions.

  Camorra code book. Reportedly confiscated from a prison camorrista who kept it secreted in his anus, this secret table explains the symbols camorristi used in messages they smuggled in and out of prison. From a nineteenth-century study of the Honoured Society of Naples.

  Much of what Castromediano learned about the camorra came from his time in a prison on Procida, one of the islands that, like its beautiful sisters Capri and Ischia, is posted at the mouth of the Bay of Naples. When he later looked back at his time on Procida, the Duke unleashed an undigested anger.

  The biggest jail in the southern provinces. The queen of jails, the camorra’s honey pot, and the fattest feeding trough for the guard commanders and anyone else who has a hand in supporting the camorra; the great latrine where, by force of nature, society’s most abominable scum percolates.

  It was in Procida prison’s own latrine, which fed straight into the sea, that the Duke came across another crucial facet of the camorra system. One day he noticed two human figures sketched in coal on the wall. The first had wide, goggling eyes and a silent howl of rage issuing from his twisted mouth. With his right hand he was thrusting a dagger into the belly of the second, who was writhing in excruciating pain as he keeled over. Each figure had his initials on the wall above his head. Below the scene was written, ‘Judged by the Society’, followed by the very date on which the Duke had come across it.

  Castromediano already knew that the Society or Honoured Society was the name that the camorra gave itself. But the doodle on the wall was obscure. ‘What does that mean?’ he asked, with his usual candour, of the first person he came across.

  It means that today is a day of justice against a traitor. Either the victim drawn there is already in the chapel, breathing his last. Or within a few hours the penal colony on Procida will have one less inmate, and hell will have one more.

  The prisoner explained how the Society had reached a decision, how its bosses had made a ruling, and how all members except for the victim had been informed of what was about to happen. No one, of course, had divulged this open secret.

  Then, just as he was warning the Duke to keep quiet, from the next corridor there came a loud curse, followed by a long and anguished cry that was gradually smothered, followed in turn by a clinking of chains and the sound of hurried footsteps.

  ‘The murder has happened,’ was all that the other prisoner said.

  In a panic, the Duke bolted for his own cell. But he had hardly turned the fi
rst corner when he stumbled upon the victim, three stab wounds to his heart. The only other person there was the man the victim was chained to. The man’s attitude would remain seared into Castromediano’s memory. Perhaps he was the killer. At the very least he was an eyewitness. Yet he gazed down at the corpse with ‘an indescribable combination of stupidity and ferocity’ as he waited calmly for the guards to bring the hammer and anvil they needed to separate him from his dead companion.

  Castromediano called what he had witnessed a ‘simulacrum’ of justice; this was murder in the borrowed clothes of capital punishment. The camorra not only killed the traitor. More importantly, it sought to make that killing legitimate, ‘legal’. There was a trial with a judge, witnesses, and advocates for the prosecution and the defence. The verdict and sentence that issued from the trial were made public—albeit on the walls of a latrine rather than in a court proclamation. The camorra also sought a twisted form of democratic approval for its judicial decisions, by making sure that everyone bar the victim knew what was about to take place.

  The camorra courts did not reach their decisions in the name of justice. Rather, their lodestar value was honour. Honour, in the sense that the Society understood it (a sense that Castromediano called an ‘aberration of the human mind’), meant that an affiliate had to protect his fellows at all costs, and share his fortunes with them. Disputes had to be resolved in the approved fashion, usually by a dagger duel; oaths and pacts had to be respected, orders obeyed, and punishment accepted when it was due.

  Despite all the talk of honour, the reality of camorra life was far from harmonious, as Castromediano recalled.