Blood Brotherhoods Page 7

  The reason why the armed crowd that attacked the police stations showed such remarkable self-discipline was that many of them were camorristi allied with the patriots, who wanted to take the Bourbon police out of the game, but did not want the city to descend into anarchy. La Sangiovannara was a key figure here. She was rumoured to have helped patriotic prisoners smuggle messages out of Bourbon jails. More importantly, she was camorra boss Salvatore De Crescenzo’s cousin. As our Swiss hotelier Marc Monnier said of her

  Without being affiliated to the Society, she knew all of its members and brought them together at her house for highly risky secret parleys.

  The parleys between the patriots and the camorra entered a new phase once the Neapolitan police force melted away, and Liborio Romano took control of enforcing order in the city. Why did Romano ask the camorra to police Naples? Several different theories circulated in the aftermath. Marc Monnier, generous soul that he was, gave a very charitable explanation. Romano, like his father before him, was a Freemason, as were some other patriotic leaders, as indeed was Garibaldi himself. The typical Masonic cocktail of fellowship, high ideals and ritualistic mumbo-jumbo fitted very well with the seemingly far-fetched project of creating a common Patria out of Italy’s disjointed parts. Garibaldi’s conquest of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies seemed to be turning those ideals into a reality. Perhaps, argued Monnier, Liborio Romano saw the Honoured Society as a primitive version of his own sect, and hoped it could be turned to the same humanitarian ends. Perhaps.

  Less generous and much more realistic commentators said simply that the camorra threatened Romano that they would unleash anarchy on the streets unless they were recruited into the police. It was also claimed that the camorra threatened to kill Romano himself. Other voices—bitter Bourbon supporters it must be said—claimed that Romano was not threatened at all, and that he and some other patriots were the camorra’s willing partners all along.

  For several years Romano squirmed silently as others tried to make sense of what he had done. Over time, his public image as the saviour of Naples was upended. Most opinion-formers came to regard him as cynical, corrupt and vain; the consensus was that Romano had colluded with the camorra all along. Finally, several years later, Romano made his bid to tell his side of the story and to magnify his history-making role in the turbulent summer of 1860. But his memoir, with its mixture of self-dramatisation and evasive bluster, only served to fuel the worst suspicions, showing that at the very least he was a man with a great deal to hide.

  Romano’s explanation of how he persuaded the camorra to replace the Bourbon police is so wooden and devious as to be almost comic. He could have reasoned that Naples was an unruly city, and that to keep the peace after the fall of the Bourbons he had had to resort to any means necessary—including recruiting criminals into the police. Few would have criticised him if he had opted for that line of argument. But instead, Romano set out a curious story. He tells us that he asked the most famous capo of the Honoured Society to meet him in his office at the Prefecture. Face-to-face with the notorious crook, Romano began with a stirring speech. He explained that the previous government had denied all routes to self-improvement for hardworking people with no property. (The camorrista could be forgiven a blush of recognition as it sank in that this meant him.) Romano pressed on: the men of the Honoured Society should be given a chance to draw a veil over their shady past and ‘rehabilitate themselves’. The best of them were to be recruited into a refounded police force that would no longer be manned by ‘nasty thugs and vile stoolpigeons, but by honest people’.

  Two more redeemed camorristi: Michele ‘the Town Crier’ (left) and ‘Master Thirteen’ (right).

  Romano tells us that the mob boss was moved to tears by this vision of a new dawn. Camorra legend has it that he was none other than Salvatore De Crescenzo.

  The tale is far-fetched enough to be a scene from an opera. Indeed the whole memoir is best read in precisely that way: as an adaptation, written to impose a unity of time, place and action—not to mention a sentimental gloss—on the more sinister reality of the role that both Liborio Romano and the camorra played in the birth of a united Italian nation. The likelihood is that Romano and the Honoured Society were hand in glove from the outset. The likelihood is, in other words, that Romano and the camorra together planned the destruction of the Neapolitan police force and its replacement by camorristi.

  Ultimately the precise details of the accord that was undoubtedly struck between gangsters and patriots do not matter. As events in Naples would soon prove, a pact with the devil is a pact with the devil, whatever the small print says.

  4

  UNCLE PEPPE’S STUFF: The camorra cashes in

  THE LAST BOURBON KING OF NAPLES ABANDONED HIS CAPITAL ON 6 SEPTEMBER 1860.

  The following morning, the city’s population poured into the streets and converged on the station to hail the arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Bands played, banners fluttered. Ladies of the highest rank mixed with the rankest plebs, and everyone shouted ‘viva Garibaldi!’ until they could do little more than croak. Marc Monnier left his hotel early to join the throng. ‘I didn’t believe that national enthusiasm could ever make so much noise’, he recorded. Through a gap in the rejoicing multitude he glimpsed Garibaldi from close enough to make out the smile of tired happiness on his face. He did not have to peer to see la Sangiovannara, with her large following of armed women. Or indeed the camorristi who stood above the crowd in their carriages, waving weapons in the air.

  Liborio Romano shared Garibaldi’s glory. The camorra’s great friend had been the first to shake Garibaldi’s hand on the platform at Naples station; the two of them later climbed into the same carriage and rode together through the rejoicing crowds.

  A French journalist found la Sangiovannara (with flag) hard to pin down: ‘a young woman’s innocent smile alternates on her face with a wolfish cackle’. He described her tavern, adorned with patriotic flags and religious icons, as a hang-out for thugs. He did not know that she was a powerful figure in the Neapolitan underworld.

  Garibaldi’s Neapolitan triumph was also the cue for ‘redeemed’ camorra bosses like Salvatore De Crescenzo to cash in on the power they had won, and to turn their tricolour cockades into a licence to extort. After Garibaldi arrived in Naples a temporary authority was set up to rule in his name while the south’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy was arranged. The short period of Garibaldian rule saw the camorra reveal its true, unredeemed self. As Marc Monnier wryly noted

  When they were made into policemen they stopped being camorristi for a while. Now they went back to being camorristi but did not stop being policemen.

  The camorristi now found extortion and smuggling easier and more profitable than ever. Maritime contraband was a particular speciality of Salvatore De Crescenzo’s—he was the ‘the sailors’ generalissimo’, according to Monnier. While his armed gangs intimidated customs officials, he is said to have imported enough duty-free clothes to dress the whole city. A less well-known but no less powerful camorrista, Pasquale Merolle, came to dominate illegal commerce from the city’s agricultural hinterland. As any cartload of wine, meat or milk approached the customs office, Merolle’s men would form a scrum around it, shouting ‘È roba d’ o si Peppe’. ‘This is Uncle Peppe’s stuff. Let it through’. Uncle Peppe being Giuseppe Garibaldi. The camorra established a grip on commercial traffic with frightening rapidity; the government’s customs revenue crashed. On one day only 25 soldi were collected: enough to buy a few pizzas.

  The camorra also found entirely new places to exert its influence. Hard on the public celebrations for Garibaldi’s arrival there followed widespread feelings of insecurity. Naples was not just a metropolis of plebeian squalor. It was also a city of place-seekers and hangers-on, of underemployed lawyers and of pencil-pushers who owed their jobs to favours dished out by the powerful. Much of Naples’s precarious livelihood depended heavily on the Bourbon court and the government. If Naples lost its s
tatus as a capital it would also forfeit much of its economic raison d’être. People soon began wondering whether their jobs would be safe. A purge, or just a wave of carpet-baggers eager to give jobs to their friends could bring unemployment for thousands. But if no job seemed safe, then no job seemed beyond reach either. The sensible thing to do was to make as much fuss as possible and to constantly harass anyone in authority. That way you were less likely to be forgotten and shunted aside when it came to allocating jobs, contracts and pensions.

  In the weeks following Garibaldi’s triumphant entry the ministers and administrators trying to run the city on his behalf had to fight their way through crowds of supplicants to get into their offices. Camorristi were often waiting at the head of the queue. Antonio Scialoja, the economist who had written such an incisive analysis of the camorra back in 1857, returned to Naples in 1860 and witnessed the mess created under Garibaldi’s brief rule.

  The current government has descended into the mire, and is now smeared with it. All the ministers have dished out jobs hand over fist to anyone who pleads loudly enough. Some ministers have reduced themselves to holding court surrounded by those scoundrel chieftains of the people that are referred to here as camorristi.

  ‘Some ministers’ undoubtedly included Liborio Romano. Not even under the discredited Bourbons had camorristi had such opportunities to turn the screws of influence and profit.

  5

  SPANISHRY: The first battle against the camorra

  ON 21 OCTOBER 1860, AN AUTUMN SUNDAY BLESSED WITH JOYOUS SUNSHINE AND A clear blue sky, almost every man in Naples voted to enter the Kingdom of Italy. The scenes in the city’s biggest piazza—later to be re-baptised Piazza del Plebiscito (Plebiscite Square) in memory of that day—were unforgettable. The basilica of San Francesco di Paola seemed to stretch its vast semicircular colonnade out to embrace the crowds. Under the portico, a banner reading ‘People’s assemblies’ was stretched between the columns. Beneath there were two huge baskets labelled ‘Yes’ and ‘No’.

  In incalculable numbers, yet with patience and good humour, the poorest Neapolitans waited their turn to climb the marble steps and vote. Ragged old men too infirm to walk were carried, weeping with joy, to deposit their ballot in the ‘Yes’ basket. The tavern-owner, patriotic enforcer and camorra agent known as la Sangiovannara was again much in evidence. She was even allowed to vote—the only woman given such an honour—because of her services to the national cause. Etchings of her strong features were published in the press: she was ‘the model of Greco-Neapolitan beauty’ according to one observer.

  Shortly after, the plebiscite Garibaldi relinquished his temporary dictatorship and handed over the appalling mess that Liborio Romano had created to the interim authority managing the integration of Naples into the Kingdom of Italy. Over the coming months the camorra would face the first determined drive to break its stranglehold. Naples was set for a struggle to decide who really controlled the streets.

  Silvio Spaventa, who led the first crackdown on the Honoured Society and the first investigations into its mysterious origins.

  The man given the job of tackling the policing crisis in Naples was another southern Italian patriot, another veteran of the Bourbon jails: Silvio Spaventa. But Spaventa was a very different politician to his predecessor Liborio Romano. A squat man with a black beard suspended below his flabby cheeks, Spaventa applied moral standards as rigidly to his own behaviour as he did to other people’s. Where Romano pandered to the crowd, Spaventa was a model of self-containment with an acute aversion to self-display. On one occasion back in 1848 he had attended a political banquet held in a theatre. The climax of the evening came when he was supposed to parade across the stage. Annoyed and flustered, he failed to notice the prompter’s box and fell straight into it.

  Spaventa responded to the hardships of prison by forcing himself to pore over the philosophies of Hegel and Spinoza. Like the Duke of Castromediano, he was only freed in 1859. When the King of Naples issued the Sovereign Act he returned to Naples to work with the underground Committee of Order. But the incorruptible Spaventa would have nothing to do with any deal with camorristi. To avoid the Bourbon police he slept in a different bed every night; the Hôtel de Genève, owned by his friend Marc Monnier, was one of his refuges. Then the fall of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies gave him the long-awaited chance to implement the lofty conception of the state’s ethical role that he had learned from his prison studies. Spaventa was not just a formidable intellect, he was also an adept networker who knew how much personal loyalty could count in building a power base. But Spaventa’s character, his principles and his networking skills would all be tested to breaking point when he became the first Italian politician to face down the camorra. Where Liborio Romano had made himself the most loved politician in Naples by cosying up to organised crime, Silvio Spaventa’s crackdown earned him nothing but revulsion.

  It did not take Spaventa long to realise how hard his task was going to be. On 28 October 1860 he wrote to his brother.

  The stench and the rotting mess here are polluting my senses. You just can’t imagine what is happening, what they are up to. Everywhere you turn there are people begging and grasping for as much as they can. Everywhere there is wheeler-dealing, intrigue and theft. I see no earthly way this country can return to some reasonable state of affairs. It seems like the moral order has been torn off its hinges . . . The Kingdom is full of murders, robberies and all kinds of disorder.

  Southern Italy was sliding towards anarchy. Prices began to rise steeply as new free-market policies were implemented. The economic downturn sharpened latent conflicts between peasants and landowners. The remains of two armies—Garibaldi’s and King Francesco II’s—were roaming the countryside. Many garibaldini gravitated towards Naples, creating another source of trouble. The bulk of Garibaldi’s army resented the fact that they had conquered southern Italy only to lose it to sly political manoeuvres directed by a conservative government in far-off Turin. Mingling with them were hangers-on who hoped that putting on a red shirt might help them get a job or just beg a few coins. The new Italian government tried to create jobs in public works to soak up some of the pool of hungry labour. But as the value of government bonds fell, it proved impossible to raise the funds needed.

  Given this daunting disarray, Silvio Spaventa deserves great credit for fighting the camorra with such brio. The first mass arrests came on 16 November 1860. Large quantities of arms and police uniforms were recovered. Salvatore De Crescenzo, the ‘redeemed’ camorra chieftain and generalissimo of maritime contraband, was returned to jail. There he would continue his rise to the top. Nearly two years later, on the morning of 3 October 1862 at the very threshold of the Vicaria jail, De Crescenzo would have his main rival in the Honoured Society stabbed to death. In so doing, he became the first supreme capo of the Society who did not come from the Vicaria quarter.

  But even with De Crescenzo in prison the camorra was not about to buckle under Spaventa’s assault. On the night of 21 November 1860 camorristi attacked the Prefecture in the hope of liberating their bosses from the cells.

  Spaventa pressed on into the New Year, purging the police and sacking many of the corrupt old turnkeys in the prisons. His rigour rapidly made him the focus for Neapolitans’ frustration. Although he was a southerner, he seemed like just the kind of haughty northern politician they had feared would be imposed on them from Turin. The Times (London) reported that he was widely regarded as ‘obnoxious’. In January 1861 there was a street demonstration against him. Many of those shouting ‘Down with Spaventa!’ were camorristi in National Guard uniforms. There followed a petition with several thousand signatures calling for him to be sacked. Oblivious to his own unpopularity, Spaventa responded with more arrests.

  In April 1861, in the heat of the battle between the new Italian state and the Neapolitan camorra, Silvio Spaventa received the order from Turin to conduct an investigation into how the camorra operated. Everyone knew it had begun in the pr
isons but there were still many questions. How did it come to be a secret society, a sect? When was it founded? In search of answers, Spaventa’s civil servants began to rummage in the Neapolitan archives and speak to a number of confidential sources.

  All of this research produced two outstanding short reports: the Italian government’s first ever dossier on the camorra. Keen to generate publicity for his battle, Spaventa later passed on many of the documents he gathered to Marc Monnier. Monnier added his own material by interviewing everyone he could, including Liborio Romano and several camorristi.

  Spaventa discovered that the camorra in Naples had different chapters, one for each of the city’s twelve quarters. Its power, nevertheless, was heavily concentrated in the four quarters of the low city. The capo camorrista of each chapter was elected by his peers. Holding office at the capo’s side was a contarulo or bookkeeper, who was charged with the highly sensitive task of gathering and redistributing the Society’s money.

  Anyone who aspired to become a member of the camorra had to show that he met the Society’s criteria: there was a ban on passive homosexuals, for example, and on any man whose wife or sister was a prostitute. (Although this, more even than other clauses in the underworld’s rulebook, was honoured almost entirely in the breaking.) Candidates for membership also had to be put to the test and observed by their superiors in the Society. They might be required to commit a murder or administer a disfiguring razor slash to the face of one of the Society’s enemies. These razor slashes were used as a form of punishment both for outsiders and members who had broken the rules. They became a horribly visible trademark of the camorra’s power in the slums of Naples.