Blood Brotherhoods Page 6

  The political prisoners then wrote to the police authorities to remind them of the diplomatic scandal that would ensue if they were torn to pieces by a mob. The reminder worked. Aversa Joe was transferred elsewhere, then released, and finally given the chance to swap his velvet jacket for a police uniform: he had completed the transformation from treasonable patriot, to camorrista, to policeman in the space of a couple of years.

  For Scialoja, the Aversa Joe story typified everything that was bad about Bourbon rule, with its habit of co-managing crime with mobsters. The Italian Patria would stand in shining contrast to such sleaze. The new nation of Italy, whenever it came, would finally bring good government to the benighted metropolis in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.

  But Naples being Naples, forming the Patria turned out to be a much stranger and murkier business than anyone could have expected.

  3

  THE REDEMPTION OF THE CAMORRA

  THE SUMMER OF 1860 WAS THE SUMMER OF GARIBALDI’S EXPEDITION, WHEN MARVELS of patriotic heroism finally turned the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies into part of the Kingdom of Italy. In Naples, history was being made at such a gallop that journalists scarcely had time to dwell on what they saw and heard. This was a moment when the incredible seemed possible, and thus a time for narrative. Explanation would have to wait.

  There was consternation in Naples when news broke that Garibaldi and his Thousand redshirted Italian patriots had invaded Sicily. On 11 May 1860 the official newspaper announced that what it called Garibaldi’s ‘freebooters’ had landed in Marsala. By the end of the month it was confirmed that the insurgent forces had gained control of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

  The ineffectual young king, Francesco II, was scarcely a year into his reign. As the garibaldini consolidated their grip on Sicily and prepared to invade the Italian mainland and march north, Francesco dithered in Naples and his ministers argued and schemed.

  Only on 26 June did Neapolitans find out how the Bourbon monarchy planned to respond to the crisis. Early that morning, posters were plastered along the major streets proclaiming a ‘Sovereign Act’. King Francesco decreed that the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was to cease being an absolute monarchy and embrace constitutional politics. A government comprising liberal patriots had already been formed. There would also be an amnesty for all political prisoners. And the flag would henceforth comprise the Italian tricolour of red, white and green, surmounted by the Bourbon dynasty’s coat of arms.

  The early risers who came across the Sovereign Act on the morning of 26 June were afraid to be seen reading it: there was always the chance that it was a provocation intended to force liberals out into the open, and make them easy targets for the feroci. But within hours Neapolitans had absorbed what the posters really meant: the Sovereign Act was a feeble and desperate attempt to cling onto power. The gathering momentum of Garibaldi’s expedition had put Francesco in a hopeless position, and the Bourbon state was tottering.

  The day the Sovereign Act was published was a bad day to be a policeman in Naples. For years the police had been feared and despised as corrupt instruments of repression. Now they were left politically exposed when there was almost certain to be a battle for control of the streets.

  The evening of the day that the Sovereign Act posters appeared, clusters of people from the poorest alleyways came down onto via Toledo to jeer and whistle at the police. Shopkeepers pulled down their shutters and expected the worst. They had good reason to be afraid. Mass disorder visited Naples with what seemed like seasonal regularity, and pillaging inevitably accompanied it.

  Serious trouble began the following afternoon. Two rival proletarian crowds were looking for a confrontation: the royalists yelling ‘long live the King’, and the patriots marching to the call of ‘viva Garibaldi’. One colourful character, difficult to miss in the mêlée, was Marianna De Crescenzo, who went by the nickname of la Sangiovannara. One report described her as being ‘decked out like a brigand’, festooned in ribbons and flags. Responding to her yelled commands was a gang of similarly attired women brandishing knives and pistols. Loyalists to the Bourbon cause suspected that la Sangiovannara had stoked up the trouble by handing out cheap booze from her tavern, as well as large measures of subversive Italian propaganda.

  The pivotal figure in the murky Neapolitan intrigues of 1860. At age 30, Marianna De Crescenzo, a.k.a. la Sangiovannara, was a prosperous tavern owner who became famous for her charismatic leadership of the patriotic mob.

  On via Toledo, two police patrols found themselves caught between the factions. When an inspector gave the unenforceable order to disarm the crowd, fighting broke out. Some onlookers heard shots. After a running battle, the police were forced to withdraw. Only the arrival of a cavalry unit prevented the situation degenerating even further.

  There were two notable casualties of the clash. The first was the French ambassador, who was passing along via Toledo in his carriage when he was accosted and cudgelled. Although he survived, no one ever discovered who was responsible for the attack.

  The second victim was Aversa Joe, the patriot, turned prison camorrista, turned Bourbon assassin, turned policeman. He was stabbed at the demonstration and then hacked to death while he was being carried to hospital on a stretcher. The murder was clearly planned in advance, although again the culprits remained unknown.

  Everyone thought that this was only the overture to the coming terror. Fearing the worst, many policemen ran for their lives. There was no one left to resist the mob. Organised gangs armed with muskets, sword-sticks, daggers and pistols visited each of the city’s twelve police stations in turn; they broke down the doors, tossed files and furniture out of the windows, and lit great bonfires in the street.

  The Neapolitan police force had ceased to exist.

  But by the afternoon, a peculiar calm had descended. The London Times correspondent felt safe enough to go and see the ruined police station in the Montecalvario quarter and found the words ‘DEATH TO THE COPS!’ and ‘CLOSED DUE TO DEATH!’ scrawled on either side of the entrance. These bloodcurdling slogans did not match what had actually happened, though. Witness after witness related how unexpectedly peaceful, ordered and even playful the scenes of destruction were. The mob did rough up the few cops they caught. But instead of lynching their uniformed captives, they handed them over to the army. The London Daily News’s man at the scene wrote that, although rumours suggested that many policemen had been murdered, he had been unable to verify a single fatality. Around the bonfires of police paraphernalia there was cheering, laughing and dancing; street urchins cut up police uniforms and handed the pieces out as souvenirs. This was less a riot than a piece of street theatre.

  The most unexpected part of it all was that there was no stealing. On every previous occasion when political upheaval had come to Naples, a predatory mob had risen from the low city. Yet this time, outlandishly, rioters from the same slums even handed over any cash and valuables they found to army officers or parish priests. Moving through the streets from one target to the next, they shouted reassurance to the traders cowering behind their shutters. ‘Why close up your shops? We aren’t going to rob you. We only wanted to drive off the cops.’ According to the Times correspondent, one man took several watches from the wreckage of a police station. But instead of pocketing them, he threw them on the bonfire burning outside. ‘No one shall say that I stole them’, he proclaimed.

  The Neapolitan camorra’s cue to take to the streets. In desperation, on 25 June 1860, Francesco II of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies issued the Atto Sovrano (Sovereign Act).

  These were strange days, and they were about to get even stranger. The evening before the police stations were attacked in such carnivalesque style, King Francesco II appointed a new Prefect of Police, a lawyer by the name of Liborio Romano.

  Miracle worker, Liborio Romano, who kept order in Naples after June 1860 by recruiting the camorra to replace the police.

  Like Duke Sigismondo Castromediano and economist Anton
io Scialoja, Liborio Romano was sent to jail in the early 1850s for his liberal, patriotic beliefs. But he was already nearing sixty and suffered from excruciating gout so he was released early in 1852; and in 1854 he was allowed to return to Naples after signing an oath of loyalty to the throne. Romano thus owed the Bourbon monarchy a debt of honour. In June 1860 when King Francesco was looking for tame patriots to take up positions in the liberal cabinet announced by the Sovereign Act, Romano’s obligation seemed to make him the perfect candidate. So he was put in charge of the police—the toughest job of them all.

  Within hours of taking office Romano launched one of the boldest initiatives in the history of policing: he offered the camorra the chance to ‘rehabilitate itself’ (his words) by replacing the police. The Honoured Society’s bosses accepted the offer with alacrity, and soon camorristi sporting cockades in the red, white and green of the Italian flag were on patrol. Naples remained calm as a result, and Liborio Romano became a hero. The Piedmontese ambassador gushed that he ‘is deeply loved by the public and has very Italian feelings’. The Times called Romano a statesman ‘who has gained the confidence of all by his ability and firmness’, and said that, but for him, the city would be in chaos. On 23 July his saint’s day was marked with public illuminations and a lantern-lit parade. Indeed, so successful was Romano’s policy that many camorristi were subsequently recruited into the new National Guard. The risky summer between a crumbling Bourbon regime and the arrival of Garibaldi passed more peacefully than anyone could ever have hoped.

  The camorra’s extraordinary role in the Naples drama made news in Turin, the new Italy’s capital city. One magazine even marked the occasion by publishing flattering pictures of three leading camorra bosses. One of them, Salvatore De Crescenzo, is worth looking at closely.

  The redemption of the camorra. Crime bosses become patriotic heroes and have flattering portraits printed in the press. Among them is Salvatore de Crescenzo, the most notorious camorrista of the era.

  In the 1860 engraving, De Crescenzo is shown sporting a tricolour rosette, his right hand resting Napoleonically inside his waistcoat, his hair parted neatly and his earnest expression framed by a fuzzy, chin-strap beard. De Crescenzo’s police files allow us to add some facts to these impressions. They tell us that he was a shoemaker by trade, probably born in 1822. He was manifestly a violent man, first jailed in 1849 for seriously wounding a sailor, and strongly suspected of killing a fellow inmate later the same year. He spent the 1850s in and out of prison, and the last arrest before his picture appeared in the press was in November 1859. Despite this frightening CV, the Turin magazine declared that De Crescenzo and the other camorristi were now ‘honest men who were held in high regard by both the national party and the people’.

  In the south, Garibaldi was performing miracles, conquering a whole Kingdom with a handful of volunteers. In Naples, it seemed to some observers, there was a miracle before Garibaldi even arrived. The camorra had been redeemed, converted in the sacred name of the Patria.

  But in the shadows where politics, mob violence and organised crime overlap, there had been no miracle, and no redemption of the camorra. The truth—or at least fragments of it—would only emerge later. Many of those fragments were in the possession of one of the more sympathetic characters in the history of Italian organised crime, a myopic, bearded Swiss hotelier called Marc Monnier.

  Monnier never spent time in jail, and never held political office. Yet he knew the camorra as well as anyone in Naples thanks to his job: he ran the Hôtel de Genève, which stood amid the hubbub of via Medina. The hotel catered mainly for commercial travellers; Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, was one of its few notable guests. The family business put Monnier in daily contact with the camorra’s territorial control: with the porters, carriage drivers, greengrocers and butchers who paid kickbacks to the mob. From the very windows of the Hôtel de Genève, Monnier could watch hoodlums taking their 10 per cent cut on street card games.

  The hotel business gave Marc Monnier a priceless knowledge of how the city worked, as well as a reliable source of income. Reliable, but dreary. Monnier’s real passion was writing, particularly drama. In the mid-1850s he was converted to the patriotic cause and thereby acquired a journalistic mission: to explain Italy to the rest of the world. The unfolding story of Italy’s unification was by turns inspiring and confusing to foreign onlookers—not to mention to Italians themselves. Being both an insider and an outsider, Monnier had a perspective that Italians and foreigners alike could trust.

  Monnier’s The Camorra was published in 1862. As a guide to the Neapolitan Honoured Society of the nineteenth century, it has never been surpassed. One of the key testimonies in The Camorra is from a patriot, one of a number who had returned to Naples to conspire in secret for the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy. Many of these conspirators joined an underground group called the ‘Committee of Order’ (a name chosen so as to disguise the revolutionaries’ real intentions). Monnier knew the conspirators well because the Committee of Order used to hold some of its meetings in the Hôtel de Genève. And what Monnier learned from his contacts in the Committee of Order was that there was a secret pact between the movement for Italian unification and the camorra that dated back to the mid-1850s.

  Here, then, is our first lesson in Neapolitan politics: while some patriots were being persecuted by the camorra in jail and others were decrying it from exile as the worst product of the Bourbons’ sordid despotism, back in Naples still others were trying to strike a deal with the gangland leaders.

  But why on earth would the Committee of Order want to befriend the gangsters of the camorra? Because they knew the lessons of Neapolitan history. Time and time again the Bourbon monarchy had enlisted the urban poor to defend itself from change: rabble-rousers were plied with cash and told to direct the mob at political enemies. Any political revolution would fail if it could not control the streets. The camorra was organised, violent and rooted in the very alleyways that generated the notorious mobs. With the camorra on its side—or at least a substantial faction within the camorra—Italy could win Naples and thus the whole of the south. The Committee of Order was set to compete with the Bourbon police for the camorra’s friendship.

  Not all of the patriotic leaders agreed with this Machiavellian tactic. And by no means all camorristi went along with it. But the prospect of a deal between patriots and hoodlums raised genuine fears for the Bourbon authorities. In October 1853 the police (themselves of course riddled with camorristi) reported that ‘the liberals are trying to recruit from among a pernicious class of individuals from the plebs, who go by the name of camorristi.’ Among the list of politically suspect camorristi was Salvatore De Crescenzo: the boss whose ‘redemption’ would make headlines seven years later.

  Marc Monnier learned about the pact between the Committee of Order and the Honoured Society from a source he referred to only as the ‘Neapolitan gentleman’. The Neapolitan gentleman told Monnier that at some time in the mid-1850s, he himself had arranged to meet leading camorristi on the northern outskirts of the city. He watched them arrive, one by one, each with a hat pulled down low, each announcing himself with the same signal: a noise made with the lips that sounded like a kiss.

  The Neapolitan gentleman reported that his first meeting with the leaders of the Honoured Society started badly and very quickly got much worse. The camorristi began by berating him: he and his well-dressed and well-educated friends had ignored the needs of the poor. The ‘holy rabble’, they said, had no intention of letting people like him, who were already rich, glean all the fruits of revolution. After this opening verbal assault, the camorristi got down to business. It would take money to provoke a patriotic revolt against the Bourbon monarchy. A lot of money. To start with, they demanded a bounty of 10,000 ducats each. In 2010 values, by a very rough calculation, the bosses were demanding $170,000 per head to help bring down the Bourbon state.

  The Neapolitan gentleman splutteringly pleaded with the camorris
ti to take a less materialistic view of things, but his protest was in vain. The patriots agreed to pay the camorra. Thereafter, each underworld chief received regular sums according to the number of men he commanded.

  As it turned out, the camorra’s preparations for the coming revolution were less than wholehearted. They gave their followers ranks, as if they were in an army, and emblazoned large parchment signs with the patriots’ watchword: ORDER. Yet somehow they never quite made the leap from preparing for a revolt to actually starting one. In fact, they were more interested in blackmailing the patriotic conspirators by threatening to tell the Bourbon police everything unless they were given more money.

  Things were looking very bleak for the patriots of Naples, when suddenly in 1859 the situation changed, with the completion of the first stage of Italian unification in the north. In the south, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies suddenly looked very vulnerable. The relationship between the Bourbon police and street thugs broke down in the new climate of fear. In November 1859, the government ordered a big roundup of camorristi, and many of them, including Salvatore De Crescenzo, were transported to prison islands off the Italian coast.

  Anarchy in Naples? A mob orchestrated by the camorra ransacks the city’s police stations in June 1860.

  The camorra bosses—some of them at least—realised that an alliance with the Committee of Order might actually prove useful, rather than merely lucrative.

  Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily in May of the following year, and the Bourbon government’s desperate lurch towards constitutional politics, brought the situation to a climax. The police chief who had masterminded the November roundup of gangsters was sacked. Political prisoners were released, as were many camorristi—all of them spitting bile about the Bourbon police. Then the government issued the Sovereign Act, and the street theatre began.