by John Dickie
Enrico Alfano, or ‘Erricone’ (Big ’Enry), the camorra’s dominant boss.
The hapless thief Arena was sent to a penal colony on the island of Lampedusa, situated between Sicily and the North African coast. From there, smarting with understandable rage, he wrote two letters to a senior camorrista to demand justice.
The thief’s plea for vendetta was debated at a camorra tribunal, a meeting of the entire leadership of the Honoured Society, which took place in a trattoria in Bagnoli in late May 1906. The tribunal sentenced Cuocolo to death and ruled that his wife, who knew many of his secrets, should die too. Big ’Enry, boss of the Vicaria quarter and the most authoritative camorrista in the city, took on the job of organising the executions. He nominated six killers, in two teams, to do away with Cuocolo and his wife. Big ’Enry also set up the eel dinner in Torre del Greco so that he could keep an eye on the gruesome proceedings.
So Abbatemaggio asserted. He also said he knew all of this because he had served as a messenger to Big ’Enry in the build-up to the Cuocolo slayings. He also claimed to have been present, both when the death squads were debriefed by their boss, and when the camorristi shared out the jewellery stolen from Maria Cutinelli’s blood-spattered bedroom.
There was a subplot to Abbatemaggio’s narrative, a subplot that would become the most loudly disputed of his many claims. He said that Gennaro Cuocolo always wore a pinkie ring engraved with his initials. Cuocolo’s killers were supposed to have pulled the ring from his dead hand and sent it to the penal colony of Lampedusa as proof that camorra justice had been done. However, said Abbatemaggio, one of the killers disobeyed orders and kept the trinket for himself. Many months later, when Carabinieri following Abbatemaggio’s tip-off raided the house where the killer lived, they slit open his mattress and out fell a small ring bearing the initials G.C. Here was crucial material corroboration of the stool pigeon’s testimony.
With Abbatemaggio on their side, the Carabinieri could turn a simple murder investigation into a frontal assault on the whole Honoured Society. A huge roundup of camorristi followed. The people of Naples cheered from the side-lines.
Yet doubts about the evidence against Big ’Enry and his cohorts surfaced quickly after the Carabinieri handed over Abbatemaggio’s testimony to the magistrates who would have the job of preparing and evaluating the prosecution before the case could come to court. The Carabinieri had very obviously trampled over the procedural rule book. The search that had led to the discovery of Cuocolo’s pinkie ring looked particularly irregular. And the main motive for the murders, in Abbatemaggio’s tale, was questioned when it became clear that Gennaro Cuocolo had played no part whatsoever in getting the thief Luigi Arena sent to the penal colony of Lampedusa. Why would Arena write to the camorra asking for vengeance against Cuocolo, when Cuocolo had done nothing wrong?
For the Carabinieri who were driving the prosecution, trouble also came from within their own ranks. One officer got wind of the real story of Cuocolo’s pinkie ring. As it turned out, Abbatemaggio the stoolpigeon had bought the ring himself and arranged for it to be engraved with G.C. The Carabinieri had then planted it where their pet camorrista said it would be. This was the ‘Ring Trick’, as sympathisers with the defendants would come to call it.
The Carabiniere who discovered the Ring Trick threatened to expose it to the press. He was immediately straitjacketed and deposited in a lunatic asylum on the orders of his commanding officer. The poor man eventually proved his sanity and a sympathetic magistrate arranged for him to be released. But he decided not to tell what he knew about the Ring Trick after some comfy wadding was added to his pension package. Retirement on the grounds of ill health, went the official version.
The Naples police, fuming at having been elbowed out of the case by the Carabinieri, relaunched their investigations following a completely different line of inquiry: they believed that the Cuocolos were killed by two thieves whom Gennaro Cuocolo had cheated of some government bonds stolen in an earlier robbery.
But there was a big problem with the police’s ‘government bonds’ theory too: it was based largely on evidence from a certain don Ciro Vittozzi, an obese priest who was godfather to one of Big ’Enry’s children; don Ciro also had a record of helping camorristi evade justice. So the Carabinieri accused the police of believing a fib that the camorra had fed them. The government bonds story, they said, was fabricated by the camorra to protect the real culprits. The Carabinieri even prosecuted two police officers for falsifying evidence. They upped the stakes further still by bullying the robbers accused by the police into suing their accusers. New tangles were thus added to a case already matted with legal complexities.
Despite the best efforts of Abbatemaggio’s handlers, his story was clearly a rickety construction. So he changed it. A year after his initial testimony, he issued a new improved version. The pivotal figure in Abbatemaggio’s new narrative was now one Giovanni Rapi, known in camorra circles as ‘Johnny the Teacher’ because, when young, he had worked in local schools. He had also been a champagne dealer in France. Now in his fifties, Johnny the Teacher had risen to become Big ’Enry’s contaiuolo—bookkeeper; he also ran a prestigious social club and gambling den. According to Abbatemaggio, Johnny the Teacher side-lined in fencing stolen goods. In other words, he was a rival in the same trade as the murder victim Gennaro Cuocolo. Because of this rivalry, and because Cuocolo was blackmailing him, Johnny the Teacher had asked Big ’Enry to do away with Cuocolo and his wife.
The obvious question raised by this new story was why Abbatemaggio had not accused Johnny the Teacher before, even though he had been one of the five men known to have dined on eel at Mimì a Mare on the night of the murders. Abbatemaggio replied that he had originally been afraid of two things: that no one would believe that an apparently respectable figure like Johnny the Teacher could be capable of such a horrific deed; and that he could not point the finger at the Teacher without implicating himself in some robberies he had carried out at the Teacher’s behest. Abbatemaggio duly confessed to the robberies in question, and was arrested.
The stakes in the Cuocolo murder inquiry were rising inexorably.
Much of the prosecution evidence for the Cuocolo trial was made public while the case was still going through its drawn-out preparatory phases. (This is still the norm in Italy.) So the public followed the developing story closely, and newspapers quickly divided into opposing camps. Were Big ’Enry and his friends guilty or innocent? Who was right, the police or the Carabinieri? Some sensed a miscarriage of justice and mounted their own parallel investigations into both the crime and how the Carabinieri had obtained Abbatemaggio’s confession. Others supported a clampdown on gangsters, regardless of the legal etiquette.
Much of the Socialist press joined the hue and cry, as was predictable given the success of the campaign that had led to the Casale trial and the blows struck against the ‘high camorra’ a few years earlier. But the Socialists now found they had a very unexpected ally in the right-wing daily, Il Mattino—the biggest-selling newspaper in Naples.
As we have already seen, Il Mattino liked to give flattering coverage to the Honoured Society’s funerals; as the mouthpiece of the ‘high camorra’, it had also been among the most vocal in blasting the Saredo inquiry for throwing muck at Naples. Il Mattino’s venal but brilliant editor Edoardo Scarfoglio had close friends among the ‘high camorra’ politicians—men who helped him pay for his beloved yacht: with its permanent crew of eleven, it cost more than a Prefect’s annual salary to run. Yet just a few years later, here was Scarfoglio’s paper cheering the Carabinieri on as they launched a new drive to cleanse the city. The turnaround in the newspaper’s line was something of a mystery.
One part of the solution to that mystery is that the alliance between ‘high’ and ‘low’ camorras was inherently weak and messy. Those ‘high camorra’ politicians were quite prepared to make use of the ‘low camorra’ at election time, and to trade squalid favours and promises with them whatever the
season. But they had no second thoughts about turning on their gangland auxiliaries when there was a public outcry demanding a few felons’ heads on posts. (In Sicily, where the mafia was so intimately tied to the ruling class, such betrayals were much less likely.)
Sales are another reason for Il Mattino’s switch to an anti-camorra line. The grisly Cuocolo murders made the city flinch with fear, and turned organised crime into a red meat issue for a canny editor like Scarfoglio. Unnervingly for many Neapolitans, even the ‘low camorra’ now seemed to operate behind a façade of respectability. Gone were the bell-bottom trousers, garish waistcoats and pompadours that had marked the early camorristi out among the urban unwashed. Gangsters now blended in with the bourgeoisie and even the upper echelons. The expression ‘camorra in straw-yellow gloves’ (in guanti gialli, or in guanti paglini) was often used at the time and still provides a useful tag for the new breed of gentleman mobster. Gloves in a delicate, light-coloured suede were an accoutrement of wealth. So ‘to wear straw-yellow gloves’ meant to put on a false appearance of refinement, to disguise yourself among your social betters. If the ‘high camorra’—one lodged within the government institutions like the mafia—did not really exist, the camorra in straw-yellow gloves certainly did. By the early twentieth century, camorristi were covering their tattoos in respectable garb and turning up uninvited among the well-to-do.
Johnny the Teacher, with his high-society gambling den, was an obvious example. As were the dead couple: Gennaro Cuocolo was a gangland fence, and his wife, Maria Cutinelli, was a former dockers’ tart. Yet they lived in a well-furnished apartment across the road from the local police station. Cuocolo’s modus operandi was to win the trust of well-off families so that he could enter their homes and find out what was worth stealing. He then gave precise instructions to his team of housebreakers on how to get in and what to take: tailored burglary.
But the most alarming embodiment of the camorrista in straw-yellow gloves to be revealed by the Cuocolo investigation was Gennaro De Marinis, known in criminal circles as ‘o Mandriere (‘the Cowherd’), because he once worked in an abattoir. According to Abbatemaggio, the Cowherd had been the recipient of the letters from Lampedusa. The Cowherd certainly had an interesting underworld CV: he was now a jeweller, fence, loan shark and pimp so successful that he lived in a big house with servants.
The Cowherd was portrayed in the press as a new ‘ultra-modern’ type of camorrista. Sophisticated crooks like him infiltrated the cafés and clubs frequented by wealthy and dissolute young men. By offering introductions to attractive ‘actresses’, invitations to exclusive gambling dens, and cash loans ‘between friends’, they laid out a cushioned velvet path to blackmail and financial ruin for their victims.
There were also strong rumours in Naples that the Cowherd had inadvertently incurred the anger of royalty, and in doing so brought the wrath of the Carabinieri down upon the Honoured Society. The dashing Duke of Aosta, who was one of the most head-turning presences on the Neapolitan ball circuit, was shocked to find himself mixing with camorristi at sporting galas; and he was incandescent to hear that the Cowherd had even been bed-hopping among the ladies of the blue-blood set. So the Duke complained to his cousin the King, who had the police surrender control of the Cuocolo investigation to the Carabinieri. Faced with the camorra in straw-yellow gloves, the King told the Carabinieri to take the gloves off.
Like so much about the Cuocolo trial, these rumours are destined to remain unverified. Be that as it may, the Honoured Society had long since ceased to be confined to the slum quarters. The drama of the Cuocolo murders unfolded amid the scenery of bourgeois city life. Under the pergola of Mimì a Mare in Torre del Greco, where Big ’Enry and his men ate eel, and where the legendary tenor Caruso once lauded the maccheroni alle vongole. Or beneath the marble columns and ornamental lamps of the Galleria Umberto I, a prestigious new arcade built as part of the massive reconstruction programme following the cholera epidemic of 1884. Abbatemaggio explained that Big ’Enry and his cohorts had planned the Cuocolo murders here in the Galleria, in full view of the public, at the tables of the elegant Caffè Fortunio. The police confirmed that the Galleria was a regular camorra hang-out. Troublingly, the biggest rats from the alleyways now had the run of the city’s swankier milieus too.
These were only the most visible symptoms of the sickness. Naples may not yet have produced a ‘high camorra’ to match the ‘high mafia’ of Palermo, but the camorristi still lurked in the city’s every recess. Money lending was the key. Debt was a way of life in a city with little productive economic activity. The poor lived on the edge of destitution, addicted to the regular buzz of an illegal lottery ticket. The middle classes teetered just above the humiliations of poverty, addicted to the little luxuries that proclaimed their status to the ragged folk who lived on the lower floors. Upper-class betting addicts borrowed to keep betting. The whole town was in hock. As one local journalist commented, usury was to the Neapolitans what absinthe was to the French. The Honoured Society specialised in feeding that addiction.
As the Cuocolo investigation ground along, amid exposés and controversies, the publicity that figures like the Cowherd generated was only magnified by the squalid way the evidence was being gathered. The camorristi listed among the accused tried to buy their way out of jail—as was only to be expected. But newspapers, especially Il Mattino, were also happy to pay for a scoop, however much truth or falsity it contained. The Carabinieri seemed to be involved too. Crooks from across Naples gravitated towards the Carabinieri barracks where the investigation was based, hoping to sell a specially crafted witness statement. The shrewdest witnesses touted their story to all three sides, it was said.
The Carabinieri converted the strong rumours of a bidding war for testimonies into political leverage. In December 1910, in a secret report sent to their high command in Rome, they complained that the camorra was using every trick it knew to thwart their investigations. Even some newspapers had become hang-outs for crooks. Who could tell how high the camorra’s influence now reached? Defeat in the Cuocolo case would do ‘irreparable damage’ to the Corps, and to the future of public order in Naples. The report cashed out in a revealing plea for ‘moral and material support’.
We regard it as necessary, for now, that funds in the region of 20,000 lire be made available. We need to subsidise able, well-paid and trustworthy informants so that they do not just sell themselves to the highest bidder. Otherwise they could provide false information that could give rise to serious incidents during the trial.
Or, put bluntly: ‘Can we have more cash to pay our witnesses please?’
It is scarcely a surprise that, in the end, four years and nine months of investigation and legal preparation would be required to prosecute the camorra for the murders of Gennaro Cuocolo and Maria Cutinelli.
22
THE CRIMINAL ATLANTIC
THOSE YEARS OF INVESTIGATION WERE PACKED WITH INCIDENT. WHEN GENNARO Abbatemaggio gave his original statement to the police early in 1907, Big ’Enry fled to New York disguised as a stoker on a steamer.
By that time, Italian organised crime had long since entered a transoceanic age. The first mafia murder on American soil—the first we know about, at any rate—took place on Sunday 14 October 1888: the victim, a Palermitan by the name of Antonio Flaccomio, had just had a drink in a Sicilian restaurant when he was stabbed to death right in front of Manhattan’s celebrated Cooper Union building. But the history of the mafia in America was under way well before that date. Sicilian fugitives from justice had been hiding out in the United States since before Italy was unified; New York and New Orleans were major outlets for Sicily’s lemons, and therefore became the mafia’s first bases in the USA.
At the turn of the twentieth century the tens of thousands who crossed the Atlantic every year became hundreds of thousands: an awe-inspiring 870,000 at the peak of the exodus in 1913. Emigration transformed the economy of the rural south: migrants sent money home and their absence d
rove up the wages of those who stayed behind.
Among the new tide of migrants there were also members of all three of Italy’s major criminal associations. From being a local nuisance in New Orleans or Mulberry Bend, Italian organised crime quickly grew into a national problem for the United States.
The two shores of the criminal Atlantic were bound together by uncountable cunning threads. Just by tugging at one of those threads—Big ’Enry’s dash to New York—we can glimpse just how vast and densely woven the history of Italo-American gangsterism really is. (Too vast to be told in these pages.)
Big ’Enry’s bid for freedom did not last long: he was soon tracked down and sent back to Naples by Lieutenant Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Petrosino, a Salerno-born policeman who had risen through the ranks of the New York police by fighting Italian organised crime. We can think of Petrosino as a potential heir to the mantle just relinquished by Ermanno Sangiorgi: Petrosino was a suitably transatlantic cop for the new transatlantic crime.
In 1909, while the Cuocolo investigation was still progressing, Petrosino paid a brief visit to Italy in order to set up an independent information network on Italian-born gangsters. On 12 March 1909 he was standing under the Garibaldi statue in Palermo’s piazza Marina when two men shot him dead. He left a widow, Adelina, and a daughter of the same name who was only four months old.
No one would ever be convicted of Petrosino’s assassination. There were many lines of inquiry. The first, and most plausible, related to a gang of Sicilians whose counterfeiting operation Petrosino had disrupted in 1903 following the notorious ‘body in the barrel’ mystery—the body in question being one of the mafiosi’s victims. In 1905 the gang thought to be responsible for the ‘body in the barrel’ were joined by a mafioso and lemon dealer called Giuseppe Fontana—the same Giuseppe Fontana outrageously acquitted of killing banker Emanuele Notarbartolo the previous year. (In 1913, Fontana was shot dead in East Harlem.)
