Blood Brotherhoods Read online

  Relations between those accursed men seethed with arguments, hatred, and envy. Sudden murders and horrible acts of vengeance were perpetrated every day.

  A murder committed as a vendetta was a murder to defend one’s personal honour, and as such it could easily be sanctioned by the camorra’s shadow judicial system. Quite whether a vendetta was legitimate or not depended partly on the Society’s rules and legal precedents, which were transmitted orally from one generation of criminals to the next. More importantly, it depended on whether the vendetta was committed by a camorrista fearsome enough to impose his will. In the prison camorra, even more than anywhere else, the rules were the tool of the rich and powerful. Honour was law for those who placed themselves above the law.

  Camorra ‘taxation’. Camorra ‘justice’. Castromediano also talks of the camorra’s ‘jurisdiction’, its ‘badges of office’, and its ‘administration’. His terminology is striking, consistent and apt: it is the vocabulary of state power. What he is describing is a system of criminal authority that apes the workings of a modern state—even within a dungeon’s sepulchral gloom.

  If the camorra of the prisons was a kind of shadow state, it had a very interventionist idea of how the state should behave. Duke Castromediano saw that camorristi fostered gambling and drinking in the full knowledge that these activities could be taxed. (Indeed the practice of taking bribes from gamers was so closely associated with gangsters that it generated a popular theory about how the camorra got its name. Morra was a game, and the capo della morra was the man who watched over the players. It was said that this title was shortened at some stage to ca-morra. The theory is probably apocryphal: in Naples, camorra meant ‘bribe’ or ‘extortion’ long before anyone thought of applying the term to a secret society.)

  Card games and bottles of wine generated other moneymaking opportunities: the camorra provided the only source of credit for unlucky gamblers, and it controlled the prison’s own stinking, rat-infested tavern. Moreover, every object that the camorra confiscated from a prisoner unable to afford his interest payments, his bottle, or his bribe, could be sold on at an eye-watering markup. The dungeons echoed to the cries of pedlars selling greasy rags and bits of stale bread. A whole squalid economy sprouted from exploiting the prisoners at every turn. As an old saying within the camorra would have it, ‘Facimmo caccia’ l’oro de’ piducchie’: ‘We extract gold from fleas.’

  The camorra system also reached up into the prisons’ supposed command. Naturally, many guards were on the payroll. This corruption not only gave the camorra the freedom it needed to operate, it also put even more favours into circulation. For a price, prisoners could wear their own clothes, sleep in separate cells, eat better food, and have access to medicine, letters, books and candles. By managing the traffic in goods that came in and out of prison, the camorra both invented and monopolised a whole market in contraband items.

  So the prison camorra had a dual business model designed to extract gold from fleas: extortion ‘taxes’ on the one hand and contraband commerce on the other. The camorra of today works on exactly the same principles. All that has changed is that the ‘fleas’ have become bigger. Bribes once taken on a place to lay a mattress are now cuts taken on huge public works contracts. Candles and food smuggled into prison are now consignments of narcotics smuggled into the country.

  Duke Castromediano’s years as a political prisoner were spent in several jails but everywhere he went he found the camorra in charge. So his story is not just about the origins of what today is called the Neapolitan camorra. Prisoners from different regions mingled in jails across the southern part of the Italian peninsula, on Sicily, and on many small islands. They all referred to themselves as camorristi.

  The Duke did however notice distinctions in the dress code adopted by camorristi from different regions. Sicilians tended to opt for the black plush look. (The camorrista who introduced himself to the Duke on his first day in the Castello del Carmine was Sicilian.) Not long before, Neapolitans had dressed in the same way. But for some time now they had preferred to signal their status with clothes that could come in any colour, as long as it was of good quality and accessorised in gold: gold watch and chain; gold earrings; chunky gold finger rings; all topped off with a fez decorated with lots of braid, embroidery and a golden tassel.

  There were strong loyalties and rivalries between camorristi from different regions. In Duke Castromediano’s experience, the Neapolitans nurtured an ‘inveterate antipathy’ towards the Calabrians. When this antipathy exploded into open hostilities, camorristi from elsewhere tended to take sides in a familiar formation: with the Neapolitans would stand the men from the countryside near Naples and from Puglia; everyone else would side with the Calabrians. The Sicilians ‘loved to keep themselves to themselves’, said Castromediano. ‘But if they came down in favour of one side or the other, oh! the savage vendettas!’ In the worst cases, ‘tens of dead bodies took their places in the prison cemetery’.

  For all their vicious rivalries and their many distinctive qualities, Sicilian mafiosi, like Neapolitan camorristi and Calabrian ’ndranghetisti, have all referred to themselves as members of the ‘Honoured Society’. Their shared vocabulary is a sign of shared origins in the prison system of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In fact, everything Castromediano discovered in prison about the camorra not only still holds good—it still holds good for the Sicilian mafia and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta too. Italy’s criminal organisations both engage in illegal commerce and act as a shadow state that combines extortion ‘taxes’ and alternative judicial and political systems. If they had their way, Italy’s Honoured Societies would turn the whole world into a giant prison, run by their simple but brutally effective rules.

  Seven and a half years after Sigismondo Castromediano was admitted to the Castello del Carmine, the diplomatic pressure on the Bourbon government finally paid off for the patriotic prisoners; like others, the Duke had his sentence commuted to permanent exile. By then his hair had turned completely white. One of the last things he did before being freed was to bribe a jailor to let him keep two mournful souvenirs: his shackles and his red tunic. The humiliations of his prison years would remain with him for the rest of his life.

  The Duke spent just over a year in exile. Then came Garibaldi: the Bourbon state collapsed and its territory became part of Italy. In Turin, on 17 March 1861, Castromediano was in parliament to see Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, pronounced hereditary monarch of the new Kingdom. The ideal for which he had suffered so long was now an official reality.

  But Castromediano soon lost the parliamentary position his prison martyrdom had earned. He returned to his ancestral seat in Puglia, the region that forms the heel of the Italian boot. While he was in jail his castle near the city of Lecce had fallen into serious disrepair. But he had been leeched to near penury by the camorra and would never have the money to renovate. The Duke’s occasional visitors over the years found the castle a fitting setting for a man who had endured so much in the national cause: it became a semi-ruin like those in the romantic novels that had so fired the Duke’s patriotism when he was young. In one corner of the castle chapel, on permanent display, were what he called his ‘decorations’: the prison chain and tunic. The camorra had seeped into the Duke’s soul, infecting him with a recurring melancholy: ‘the spawn of hell’, he called it. ‘One of the most immoral and disastrous sects that human infamy has ever invented.’

  The Duke began writing a memoir of his captivity only days after he was released; yet it remained unfinished when he died in his castle thirty-six years later. Castromediano’s Political Prisons and Jails reads like the work of a man still struggling to come to terms with his past. The Duke’s narrative is occasionally jumbled and repetitive but at its best, it is a vivid firsthand account of where Italy’s mafias began.

  What Castromediano could not appreciate while in jail was that the camorra had already made its first steps out from the dungeon and into the stree
ts.

  2

  CO-MANAGING CRIME

  NAPLES TEEMED. THERE WERE JUST UNDER HALF A MILLION INHABITANTS IN THE 1850S, making the capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies the biggest city in Italy. With the highest population density in Europe, it packed more misery into each square metre than any other town on the continent. Every grotto and cellar, every nook and doorway had its ragged and emaciated inhabitants.

  The quarters of Porto, Pendino, Mercato and Vicaria held the most notorious concentrations of indigence; they made up the so-called ‘low city’. Some of the alleyways were so narrow it was impossible to open an umbrella. Many of the low city’s poorest lived in tenements known as fondaci (‘depositories’) where whole families and their animals were crammed into single, windowless rooms. Vermin were rife and the stench unholy: sewage overflowed the ancient cesspits and ran through the alleys. In the 1840s close to 30 per cent of infants in the low city died before their first birthday. None of these four quarters had a life expectancy above twenty-five years.

  But unlike London, Naples did not hide its poor away. Under the southern sun, in every street and piazza, tradesmen and pedlars of all conceivable varieties put on daily performances. Slum-dwellers scraped their living picking rags, weaving straw or singing stories; they hawked snails and pizza slices, collected cigar butts, or portered the occasional box.

  Nowhere was the variety of this starveling economy more apparent than in the via Toledo, the city’s main thoroughfare and ‘the noisiest street in Europe’. Here, each morning, the city’s life would seep from the hovels and palazzi, spill through the side streets and converge to form a roiling flood of people. Poor and wealthy, the scuttling urchin and the promenading bourgeois, all dodged the carriages on via Toledo. The din of haggling was immense. And to add to it, everyone from the sausage vendors with their braziers to the sellers of ice water in their grandly decorated pagodas, had a distinctive, sonorous cry.

  There was also a less picturesque side to the industry of the Neapolitan poor. Tourists were most vexed by the crowds of beggars who thrust their maimed limbs at anyone likely to surrender a coin. Veteran travellers considered that the child pickpockets of Naples set an international standard for dexterity. Theft, swindling and prostitution were crucial survival strategies for many of the poor. The low city, in particular, lived almost entirely outside the law.

  Not even the world’s most zealous and honest constabulary could have imposed order on this swarm. So in Naples, the nineteenth century’s proud new science of policing quickly became a modest routine of minimising the nuisance caused by the plebs. Because Naples was so vast and so poor, the police learned that the best way to contain that nuisance was to collaborate with the hardest plebeian thugs.

  In 1857 Antonio Scialoja wrote a pamphlet on policing that continued the patriotic propaganda offensive against the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Scialoja was a brilliant Neapolitan economist living in political exile in Turin. Because he was himself a veteran of the Bourbon jails, the prison camorra was a centrepiece of his polemic. He claimed that ‘the Society of camorristi’ was so powerful that it could carry out death sentences in any prison in the Kingdom. The Society made other prisoners pay for everything, Scialoja reported, even for escaping what he delicately referred to as the ‘turpitudes’ of their fellow detainees: he meant rape.

  But Scialoja’s diagnosis of the malaise in Naples went far beyond the prison walls. Using his accounting skills, he identified a slush fund that did not appear in the official police budget. He then showed how some of this cash was spent hiring ruffians and spies. Nor did the corruption stop there. For decades the Bourbons had recruited their police from among the city’s most feared criminals. The ordinary people of Naples referred to them as the feroci, the ‘ferocious ones’. There were 181 feroci at the time Scialoja was writing. Although they were paid their meagre wages out of the official police budget, they nonetheless habitually supplemented their income with bribes.

  Italian has a useful piece of jargon to describe this kind of arrangement: it is called ‘co-managing’ crime. And if the feroci who co-managed crime with the police are beginning to look rather like the camorristi who co-managed the prison system with the warders, that is because they were sometimes one and the same thing. But policing the streets with the cooperation of the toughest delinquents was always a messy affair. Some camorristi proved to be more loyal to their criminal comrades than they were to their police paymasters, while others provoked intense suspicion and hatred in the underworld. Nevertheless, thanks to co-management, the bosses who had been left in charge of the dungeons for centuries now held a government licence to be a power on the streets. By the early 1850s, camorristi decked out in the latest gangster uniform of slicked hair, velvet jacket and flared trousers were as conspicuous a part of the life of Naples as pizza-pedlars and strolling players.

  The flashy dress and strutting posture of a guappo, or street-corner boss. By the 1850s, when these illustrations were published, the camorra was already a highly visible presence on the streets of Naples.

  Once the camorra of the prisons had been given its foothold in the outside world, it began doing what it was best at: extracting gold from fleas. Just as in prison, extortion was the basis of the camorra’s power. Illegal or semi-illegal activities were particularly vulnerable. Camorristi would demand a cut of any thief’s takings and they came to occupy a dominant position in prostitution. Gambling was another lucrative racket.

  Large sections of the lawful economy also came to be subject to extortion rackets. Outsiders would often encounter camorristi in action without really understanding what they were seeing. As the visitor stepped from a hired boat, his oarsman would be approached by a gaudily dressed man, often wearing lots of jewellery, who would silently expect and receive an offering. As the visitor arrived at his hotel, his porter would discreetly slip a coin into the hand of a stocky stranger. And as the visitor stepped into a hackney carriage, the driver would pay up to yet another waiting heavy.

  Camorristi demanded their taxes at the pressure points of the urban economy: at the quays where cargo, fish, and passengers were landed; at the city gates where produce arrived from the countryside; at the markets where it was distributed. Boatmen and stevedores, customs officers and cart-drivers, wholesalers and hawkers: all were forced to pay in the same way that had long been familiar for prison inmates.

  The heart of the camorra’s Naples became the Vicaria quarter, located at what was then the city’s eastern boundary. The slums of the Vicaria were where every criminal sphere of influence overlapped, as if at the intersection of a Venn diagram. The quarter took its name from the Palazzo della Vicaria, a medieval block that housed the courtrooms and, in its basement, a notorious dungeon. The walls of the Vicaria prison looked solid enough but in reality they were a membrane through which messages, food and weapons constantly slipped into and out of the surrounding slums.

  Near the prison was the Porta Capuana, a stone archway adorned with friezes and frescos through which much of the produce from the hinterland arrived ready to be ‘taxed’. But the criminal epicentre of the Vicaria was what is now a stretch of via Martiri d’Otranto that, with the alleys running off it, was known as the Imbrecciata. The Imbrecciata was a kasbah of cheap carnal pleasures; its inhabitants were almost all involved in prostitution and live sex shows. The area was so notorious that the authorities tried several times to cordon it off by building walls at its exits.

  Camorristi settle their differences over a card game; gambling was one of the Honoured Society’s primary rackets.

  With all these opportunities for illegal income close to hand in the Vicaria, it is not surprising that the first supreme bosses of the Honoured Society in the outside world came from here.

  The ‘co-management’ of crime in Naples was indeed scandalous. But the exiled economist Antonio Scialoja was particularly angered by the way the Bourbon authorities gave their spies, feroci and camorristi a free rein to harass a
nd blackmail liberal patriots. In fact these rough and ready cops were no respecters of political affiliation: even Bourbon royalists had to cough up to avoid what the feroci smilingly called ‘judicial complications’. In this way, amid the uncertainties of the 1850s, with the Bourbon monarchy vulnerable and wary, the camorra was given the chance to meddle in politics.

  Scialoja concluded his pamphlet with an exemplary tale drawn from his own memories of life as a political prisoner in the early 1850s. He recalled that the common criminals in jail referred to the captive patriots simply as ‘the gentlemen’, because their leaders were educated men of property like him. But by no means everyone who got mixed up in liberal politics was a gentleman. Some were tough artisans. A case in point was one Giuseppe D’Alessandro, known as Peppe l’aversano—‘Aversa Joe’ (Aversa being an agricultural settlement not far north of Naples). Aversa Joe was sent to jail for his part in the revolutionary events of 1848. When he encountered the camorra, he quickly decided that joining the ranks of the extortionists was preferable to suffering alongside the gentlemen martyrs. He was initiated into the Honoured Society and was soon swaggering along the corridors in his flares.

  In the spring of 1851, at about the time when Gladstone was thundering about the gamorristi to his British readers, one particularly zealous branch of the Neapolitan police conceived a plan to kill off some of the incarcerated patriots. But not even the police could carry out such a scheme without help from the prison management—the camorra. In Aversa Joe they found the perfect man for the job; in fact they didn’t even have to pay him since he was still under sentence of death for treason and was glad simply to be spared his date with the executioner.

  Aversa Joe twice attempted to carry out his mission, with a posse of camorristi ready to answer his call to attack. But both times the gentlemen managed to stick together and face down their would-be killers.