Blood Brotherhoods Page 8

  Once a new affiliate was deemed ready, he had to swear an oath over crossed knives and fight a duel by dagger against a camorrista who was chosen by lot. If the new recruit proved his courage he became a picciotto di sgarro (meaning either ‘lad who is up for a fight’ or ‘lad who rubs you up the wrong way’).

  Knife fights were so important to the Society that its members spent a great deal of time practising their skills; some camorristi even became specialised teachers of the art. Duelling to the death was relatively rare. More often the fight had a ceremonial function, so the participants would be told to aim only for the arms. A dagger fencing contest also marked each criminal’s elevation to the Society’s more senior rank: camorrista proper. Becoming a camorrista meant gaining access to decision-making power within the Society, and to a greater share of the profits of crime.

  Marc Monnier added some very important riders to this organisational sketch. He explained that the various ranks were inherently flexible.

  The members of the sect do not know how to read, and therefore do not have written laws. They hand down their customs and regulations orally, modifying them according to the time and place, and according to the bosses’ will and the decisions taken by their meetings.

  Underlying the hierarchies within the camorra there was nevertheless a single principle: exploitation. The camorristi pitilessly exploited their juniors, the picciotti di sgarro. Monnier describes the life of a ‘lad who is up for a fight’ as a blend of ‘toil, humiliation and danger’, all endured in the hope of being promoted to camorrista at some point. One common test of a picciotto di sgarro’s mettle was to take the blame for a felony committed by a senior member of the Society. Ten years of prison was a price worth paying for the chance to become a camorrista in your own right.

  What about the sect’s origins? The civil servants burrowed further into the archives, but found nothing. Spaventa was puzzled.

  Neapolitan police took action against camorristi on many occasions. Yet it is strange but true that they did not leave a single important document that might be useful in deducing the origins of this social plague.

  Spaventa did not know that in 1857, for unknown reasons, the Bourbon authorities had burned the police archives that would have told him, and us, a great deal more about how the ‘social plague’ came into being. The holes in the historical record left space only for suspicion. And suspicion, for Spaventa and his civil servants, centred on Spain.

  Monnier and Spaventa together propounded a theory that the camorra arrived in Naples at some point during the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries when the Kingdom of Naples, including Sicily, was part of the Spanish empire, ruled by Viceroys appointed in Madrid. The same theory has been in circulation ever since. The evidence Monnier and Spaventa found to support it is very thin, and comes down to four points that scarcely withstand scrutiny.

  First, that camorra is a Spanish word, meaning ‘quarrel’ or ‘fight’—which it certainly is, and certainly does. But the origins of the Spanish word are Italian anyway, putting us back where we started: in Naples.

  Second, that Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, published a short story entitled ‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’ in 1613 that is set in Seville and concerns a criminal confraternity that looks very like the camorra. The obvious problem here is that Cervantes’s story is a fiction, and even if it were based on reality, that hardly constitutes proof of any relationship with the camorra two centuries later.

  Third, that there was a secret criminal society in Spain called the Garduña, which emerged in the early 1400s. But recent research has shown that the Garduña was a fiction too, an intellectual con trick. There is no reference to the supposedly medieval sect before 1845, when it appears from nowhere in a very successful French pulp novel about the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition. The novel was translated into Italian in 1847. Its author seems to have got the idea from Cervantes’s ‘Rinconete and Cortadillo’.

  And last, that Spanish rule was proverbially corrupt, which is the weakest point of all. For our tastes, Spanish rule in Italy may well have been arrogant, ostentatious and devious. In fact, Spain became a byword for a government that showed a haughty contempt for the people it ruled. Spagnolismo (‘Spanishry’) was an Italian political insult that evoked lavish displays of power coupled with deadly manoeuvres behind the scenes. But Spain surrendered control of Naples in 1707. There is absolutely no trace of the camorra before the nineteenth century—well over a hundred years later. Spanish influence would have to be very, very devious indeed to have generated the camorra.

  The story of the camorra’s Spanish origins is nonsense. Indeed in all probability it is nonsense from the jailbird school of history, a story first put about by the camorristi themselves. Rather like the tale of the Spanish knights Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso that we have already encountered in the ’ndrangheta’s official account of its own roots, the tale of the Garduña and all that is a criminal foundation myth that was likely cobbled together in the mid-nineteenth century at precisely the time that the camorra was asserting itself outside the prison system.

  If the story of the camorra’s Spanish origins is indeed a foundation myth, how come intelligent people like Silvio Spaventa, Marc Monnier and many others after them were fooled by it? It may be that Spaventa simply lowered his formidable intellectual guard, and this piece of hooey sneaked through unanalysed. But there is an alternative theory: all the talk of Spain was a convenient cover story, and the real origins of the camorra were a little too close for comfort for Italian patriots.

  As a historical witness, the Swiss hotelier Marc Monnier had the advantage of his outsider’s capacity to be amazed by what he saw, while still being able to get close to many of the leading players. Nevertheless, there are moments when he gets too close to be entirely dispassionate. Monnier was Spaventa’s mouthpiece, and as such he dutifully repeated and elaborated what he had learned from the official reports about the camorra’s Spanish beginnings. To his credit he also hints at a much more convincing and rather more disturbing theory. As if he knows the truth unconsciously, but cannot quite allow himself to utter it, Monnier compares some camorra rituals to a ‘pseudo Masonic fantasmagoria’ without elaborating on his point. This is more than an idle comparison: the rules and rituals of the Honoured Society were almost certainly derived not from the mythical Garduña but from Freemasonry and other Masonic-style sects.

  Masonic organisations were integral to the way politics was done in the early nineteenth century. When the French were in charge in Naples they tried to recruit their elite administrators into the Freemasons as a way of flattering and controlling them. But Masonic groups subsequently became a centre of resistance to French rule and were banned in 1813. The Bourbons were highly suspicious of the secret societies when they were restored to the throne—and with good reason. A Masonic sect of patriots called the Carbonari (‘Charcoal Burners’) infiltrated the army and instigated an unsuccessful revolution in Naples in 1820. When the revolution collapsed, many Charcoal Burners ended up in jail where they came into contact with camorristi. Interestingly, Liborio Romano was once a Charcoal Burner.

  So, while we will never know exactly when and how the camorra of the prison system came to ape the patriotic secret sects of the Risorgimento, it seems certain that they did. In short Italy, and Italy’s chronic problem with organised crime, were profoundly intertwined from the nation’s birth. In 1860 the precise moment when the camorra adopted Masonic-style rituals was still recent enough for the truth to bleed through the words still used by camorristi. The camorra’s local chapters were sometimes called ‘lodges’, for example, and camorristi referred to the members of their Society as the Patria: in other words, the camorra saw itself as a ‘nation’ of elite criminals.

  Even by the 1850s, this criminal Patria had its own national anthem, a song summarising the spirit in which the Society viewed the whole business of Italian Unification. It goes something like this:

  The Charcoa
l Burners are a travesty;

  The Bourbon party’s a farce.

  We are the camorristi!

  And we take them both up the arse.

  Camorristi connived with the Bourbons against the patriots, and then with the patriots against the Bourbons. In doing so, they played a key role in making Naples into part of the new Italy. But through all those murky dealings, camorristi held true to the methods that Duke Sigismondo Castromediano had observed in jail. Their aim was to extort and smuggle, to ‘extract gold from fleas’. Politics—even the inspiring politics of the Risorgimento and Garibaldi’s heroism—were only a means to that sordid end.

  While his civil servants were researching the secrets of the camorra’s past, the incorruptible Silvio Spaventa continued his efforts to curtail its present power. One measure he adopted annoyed camorristi more than anything else: he stopped National Guardsmen wearing their uniforms when they were not on duty. For the hoodlums who had infiltrated the National Guard, this ban meant that they could not use the uniform as a cover for extortion operations.

  Revenge followed swiftly. On 26 April 1861 an angry mob comprising many camorristi invaded the ministry building. This time, the cry was not ‘Down with Spaventa!’ but ‘Death to Spaventa!’ They forced their way past the guards and into his office but his loyal secretaries managed to buy time while he escaped down a secret staircase. The mob then followed him to his house and smashed its way in. Spectators in the street looked up to see a man appear on the balcony; he waved a long knife and cried, ‘Here’s the blade I killed him with, and here is his blood!’

  In reality, Spaventa had escaped once more. But the attack was so shocking as to make him overcome his deep-seated abhorrence of public attention. The following day he put on a show of courage by going to lunch at the Caffè d’Europa. That evening he sat in a second tier box on the first night of a new production of Bellini’s Norma at the Teatro San Carlo—the theatre where the rulers of Naples had traditionally made themselves visible to the public that counted. Spaventa even left by the main staircase, under the eyes of a stupefied crowd. He had learned the hard way that Naples could not be governed without a little Spanishry, a little ostentation.

  Three months later it became clear that he had learned some other lessons too. In July 1861, in a busy street a short walk from Spaventa’s house, a senior police officer called Ferdinando Mele was stabbed behind the ear in broad daylight; he was dead within hours. Mele embodied all the contradictions of the time and place: a camorrista who had allied himself with the patriots, he was one of the chief suspects in the murder of Aversa Joe; he was then recruited into the police by Liborio Romano in June 1860 and put in charge of law and order in a whole city quarter.

  Mele’s killer was soon caught and dragged through the streets into custody. His name was De Mata; he had killed Mele out of revenge because Mele had arrested his equally thuggish brother. De Mata also embodied some very strange contradictions. Although he was not a member of the Honoured Society, he was still an extortionist who had escaped from prison. Yet somehow, thanks to a powerful friend, this dangerous man had found a no-show job at the Post Office.

  That powerful friend, it turned out, was Silvio Spaventa. Both De Mata brothers were members of Spaventa’s personal bodyguard. There were rumours that Spaventa used the De Matas and their gang to close down politically dangerous newspapers and beat up uncooperative journalists. So it seems that even the incorruptible Spaventa had ended up ‘co-managing’ Naples with criminals.

  Spaventa resigned in the wake of the scandal—although the government spun out a cover story to conceal the real reason why he had stepped down. The Times commented glumly on the whole affair for its perplexed readers back in London.

  Nothing will bear examination in Naples. Under the fairest aspects you will find nothing but rottenness; and any man who expects order and tranquillity in this province during the next generation must be very slightly acquainted with the country and the people.

  Spaventa’s story did indeed foreshadow a sombre future for law and order in Naples. Although the authorities would never again ask the camorra to keep order as Liborio Romano had done, there would be the same dreary swings of the policing pendulum for years to come: first towards repression, with mass arrests accompanied by loud anti-camorra rhetoric; then back towards ‘co-management’, as the bosses reasserted their hold over the low city. Italian unification in Naples had been a chaotic and unpredictable affair, but it had nonetheless set a simple and lasting pattern for the future history of the camorra.

  The events of 1860–61 also heralded the future in ways that were still more worrying. Marc Monnier, our Swiss hotelier, saw the evidence with his own eyes during Spaventa’s crackdown.

  I can tell all: every camorrista that was arrested could call on influential protectors who issued certificates of good conduct for him. The moment a member of the sect was led to the Vicaria prison, the Chief of Police was sure to receive twenty letters defending the ‘poor man’; the letters were all signed by respectable people!

  Politicians were prominent among these ‘respectable people’ who had befriended the camorra.

  During elections the camorristi stopped some candidates from standing; and if any voter objected to this on grounds of conscience or religion, they would appease him with their cudgels. What is more, the camorristi were not content to send a deputy to Parliament, and then just watch over his behaviour from a distance. They kept a beady eye on what he did, and had his speeches read aloud to them—since they could not read themselves. If they were not happy with what they heard, they would greet their Member of Parliament on his return from Turin with a bestial chorus of whistling and shouting that would burst out suddenly under the windows of his house.

  Clearly the Honoured Society had learned an important lesson from everything that had happened during the crisis of the Bourbon regime and the foundation of a united Italy: a lesson in wedding its own opportunism to the opportunism of the more unscrupulous politicians.

  Where once the camorra had lurked, cockroach-like, in the seamiest corners of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, now it had begun to climb up through the cracks in the social structure and infest the representative institutions of the Kingdom of Italy. At the end of all the intrigues of Italian Unification, the camorra was no longer just a problem that lay where the state could not reach: it was a problem within the state itself.

  In 1864, Marc Monnier, who had done so much to explain the camorra to readers across Italy, was awarded honorary citizenship following a recommendation by a friend and patriotic hero, Gennaro Sambiase Sanseverino, Duke of San Donato. San Donato had known prison and exile during the 1850s. He became a colonel in the National Guard under Liborio Romano in 1860. After the plebiscite, during Silvio Spaventa’s campaign against the camorra, San Donato was given charge of the city’s theatres; in the course of his duties, a camorrista stabbed him in the back outside the Teatro San Carlo. We do not know why the camorra tried to kill San Donato, but we can guess, because we have met the Duke already: he was the ‘Neapolitan gentleman’ and patriotic conspirator who told Monnier about his secret meeting with the camorra bosses in the 1850s. He was one of the minds behind the patriots’ deal with the Honoured Society. San Donato would go on to be mayor of Naples from 1876 to 1878, and was a key figure in the city’s sleazy machine politics until the end of the century. The camorra was part of his patronage network. San Donato became what the camorra’s redeemer, Liborio Romano, might have become had he not died in 1867.

  Marc Monnier had passed through the intrigues of the 1850s and early 1860s with the serenity of an inert particle in a raging chemical reaction. After receiving his honorary citizenship there was little left for him to write about in Italy, so he sold the Hôtel de Genève and moved his young family to Switzerland. He could now finally realise his ambition to be a Genevan author rather than a Neapolitan hotelier. He went on to write a great deal more journalism (for money) and tens of plays (for literary imm
ortality). None of his works has enjoyed anything like the lasting success of his book on the camorra.

  Italy was governed between 1860 and 1876 by a loose coalition known as the Right. The Right’s leaders were typically landowning, conservative free-marketeers; they favoured rigour in finance and in the application of the law; they admired Britain and believed that the vote was not a right for all but a responsibility that came in a package with property ownership. (Accordingly, until 1882, only around 2 per cent of the Italian population was entitled to vote.)

  The men of the Right were also predominantly from the north. The problem they faced in the south throughout their time in power was that there were all too few southerners like Silvio Spaventa. Too few men, in other words, who shared the Right’s underlying values.

  The Right’s fight against the Neapolitan camorra did not end with Spaventa’s undignified exit from the city in the summer of 1861. There were more big roundups of camorristi in 1862. Late in the same year Spaventa himself became deputy to the Interior Minister in Turin, and began once more to gather information on the Honoured Society. While the publication of Marc Monnier’s The Camorra kept the issue in the public mind, Spaventa made sure that the camorra was included within the terms of reference of a new Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the so-called ‘Great Brigandage’, a wave of peasant unrest and banditry that had engulfed much of the southern Italian countryside. The outcome of the Commission’s work was a notoriously draconian law passed in August 1863—a law that heralds the most enduring historical irony of Silvio Spaventa’s personal crusade against organised crime, and of the Right’s time in power. The name for that irony is ‘enforced residence’.