by John Dickie
The chief suspect for the murder of Lieutenant Petrosino was, and still is, don Vito Cascio-Ferro, a Man of Honour who shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic in the early 1900s. Cascio-Ferro never stood trial because he had a seemingly impregnable alibi provided for him by a Sicilian MP who said that Cascio-Ferro was at his house when Petrosino died. The MP in question was called Domenico De Michele; as chance would have it, he was the son of ‘Baron’ Pietro De Michele, the Burgio rapist and capomafia involved in the ‘fratricide’ plot against Ermanno Sangiorgi in 1877.
In the course of their protracted investigations into the Petrosino murder, Italian police also questioned a Calabrian gangster: Antonio Musolino, the younger brother of the King of Aspromonte, whose cousin was suspected of having taken the contract to kill Lieutenant Petrosino. With surprising candour Antonio Musolino said he fled Santo Stefano in 1906 because he was afraid that his family’s many enemies were trying to kill him. In Brooklyn, he joined up with some of his brother’s former support team, among them the cousin suspected of the Petrosino murder. In a basement room in Elizabeth Street, the heart of Manhattan’s Italian community, Musolino was initiated into a mafia gang that included both Calabrians and Sicilians. His name for the gang was the Black Hand—a catchall label for Italian gangsterism in America that derived from the menacing symbols (bloody daggers, black hands, and the like) that mafiosi sometimes drew on their extortion letters.
Musolino’s brief story is typical of the way that the picciotti who travelled from Aspromonte to New York were absorbed into a much more powerful and well-established Sicilian organisation: the poor Lads with Attitude came under the influence of the ‘middle-class criminals’. Where the Sicilian presence was not so strong, such as amid the lunar landscape of the mining districts of Pennsylvania and Ohio, the Calabrians brought across the Atlantic to cut coal were able to organise among themselves, and directly apply the methods and traditions they had learned at home.
Big ’Enry’s brief trip to New York set in motion a third theory about the murder of Lieutenant Joe Petrosino, one implicating the camorra: Big ’Enry himself was the suspect. Interest in the Cuocolo case in the United States became intense after the Petrosino murder. The huge investigation in Naples seemed to have exposed something much more powerful than even the most disquieting speculation about the Black Hand in the United States. In the New York Times, journalist Walter Littlefield boldly asserted that Big ’Enry had issued the order to kill Petrosino, and that the Honoured Society he ruled was the umbrella organisation for all Italian-American criminals on both sides of the Atlantic.
It is the fond hope of modern, civilised Italy that the trial will stamp out forever the largest and most perfectly organised society of criminals on earth, with its profitable ramifications in America and its willing slaves in Sicily. If this object shall be attained, it will be like severing the head from the body. It will mean the dissolution of the brains of the Black Hand in America and the Mafia in Sicily.
Around the world, the expectations surrounding the Cuocolo affair were becoming as acute as they were unrealistic.
The latest historical research reaches less panic-striken conclusions than Walter Littlefield. Camorristi from Naples and its surrounds were certainly operative in the United States at the time of Big ’Enry’s visit, and some of them even created autonomous territorial pockets in Brooklyn, next door to the dominant Sicilian gangs. Johnny the Teacher, Big ’Enry’s bookkeeper, seemingly had links with a savings institute in New York that gathered immigrants’ money and sent it back home. Once Big ’Enry had been extradited, New York camorristi toured Italian-owned restaurants to pay for his lawyers.
Meanwhile the man at the centre of the approaching Cuocolo trial, the stoolpigeon Gennaro Abbatemaggio, spent his time in custody reading a serialised life of Joe Petrosino.
As the preparations for the Cuocolo trial ground on, the most newsworthy event of Italy’s new media era occurred shortly after 5.20 a.m. on 28 December 1908 when a massive earthquake, with its epicentre in the narrow Straits separating Sicily and Calabria, devastated Messina, Reggio Calabria, and many of the towns and villages of Aspromonte. It is estimated that some 80,000 people died; many of the traumatised survivors emigrated to the New World. This cataclysm, the most lethal seismic event in the history of the west, aroused the whole world’s sympathy for weeks.
Once the media agenda had moved on, the drab and sorry story of the reconstruction began. The stricken zones of Calabria had been a slack society before the disaster, they became slacker still in its aftermath. In Reggio Calabria, it took eleven years to rebuild the Prefecture, and six more to finish the Palace of Justice where the criminal courts were housed. The protracted struggle over reconstruction funding from the state became the new centre of gravity of political and economic life in much of the disaster area. The picciotteria wanted a share of the spoils. In Reggio Calabria, mobsters were spotted in the shebeens where the builders drank: such a large workforce offered plentiful opportunities to profit from gambling, extortion, robbery and gangmastering. In 1913 the police would go on to successfully prosecute eighty-three members of a mafia group operating across the city. They had a hierarchy of ranks, like picciotto, camorrista, bookkeeper and fiorillo—little flower. But of course this was a matter of interest only for the local press, as were other trials of the early twentieth century that showed that the picciotteria was spreading north into the other provinces of Calabria.
Of the people who saw the way the picciotteria was quietly entrenching itself in Calabrian society in the years before the First World War, precious few have left us any kind of testimony. One of them is the San Luca–born writer Corrado Alvaro. In 1955 he retrieved a vivid memory from his adolescence that encapsulated how the picciotteria had become what he called an ‘aspect of the ruling class’, a normal and broadly accepted part of community life—scarcely a generation after it emerged. On one occasion Alvaro returned home to San Luca, which had avoided the worst of the 1908 earthquake, from a term spent at his distant grammar school. His mother casually told him that his father was busy in the upstairs room with ‘men from the association’. Alvaro, full of his textbook notions of public-spiritedness, assumed she meant a group promoting some kind of local interest. ‘So there is an association in our village at long last?’ His mother gave a flat reply: ‘It’s the association for delinquency’.
23
GENNARO ABBATEMAGGIO: Genialoid
AT LAST, IN MARCH 1911, THE CUOCOLO TRIAL OPENED IN THE CAVERNOUS BAROQUE church that served as the Court of Assizes in Viterbo, a small city between Rome and Florence that had been chosen to host the whole show for fear that a Naples jury might be swayed either by camorra threats, or by the camorra fever the case was generating.
Newspaper readers and newsreel viewers around the world could finally see the eloquent pictures of the defendants crammed into a large cage in the court, and put faces to the quirky nicknames in the Cuocolo story.
For his own protection, Gennaro Abbatemaggio was confined to a smaller cage by himself. Now twenty-eight years old, small and well-dressed, he had a long razor-slash scar running down his cheek to the point of his chin. He wore a short, pomaded moustache that turned perkily upwards at its points to form inverted commas around his mouth.
The stool pigeon who destroyed the camorra: a dapper Gennaro Abbatemaggio gives evidence from the cage built to protect him from his former comrades, 1911.
‘The camorra is a career’, he began in an attractive baritone, ‘which goes from the rank of picciotto to that of camorrista, passing through intermediate ranks.’ He joined the camorra in 1899, at age sixteen, as a picciotto. In 1903 he was promoted to the rank of camorrista in the Stella section of the Honoured Society.
Camorristi in Naples exploit prostitution greedily . . . They demand a camorra [a bribe] on everything, and especially on all the shady activities that, precisely because they are illegal, have to pay the camorra’s tax. They extort the camorra on illeg
al betting, on the gambling dens that cover Naples like a rash. They extort the camorra on sales at public auctions, and even show their arrogance during national and local elections . . . The camorra is so base that it takes money, sometimes even really tiny payments, to massacre or disfigure people. The camorra is involved in loan sharking. In fact its biggest influence is on loan sharking.
Abbatemaggio went on to describe the camorra as ‘a kind of low-grade Freemasonry’. His description of the camorra’s rules, structure and methods confirmed the criminological ‘textbooks’ that had been so popular in Naples for years. He ended with a passionate plea.
My assertions are the absolute truth. I want to carry my head high, and look anyone who might dare to doubt them straight in the face.
Abbatemaggio then began to reel off his account of how the Cuocolos came to be so brutally slain on that June night nearly five years previously. The letters from the Lampedusa penal colony. The lobbying by Johnny the Teacher and the Cowherd to have Gennaro Cuocolo punished. How the plenary meeting of the camorra’s top brass at the Bagnoli trattoria approved the decision. How Big ’Enry organised the executions in a series of meetings in the Galleria. The savage actions of the two teams of killers. The dinner at Mimì a Mare. The story of Cuocolo’s G.C. pinkie ring.
Abbatemaggio stood and spoke for so long that he had to cut a hole in his shoe to relieve the pressure on a severe blister. During breaks he passed his fan mail on to friendly hacks and explained that, if he had ever had the chance to study, he too would have become a journalist.
Il Mattino’s correspondent had no doubts about Abbatemaggio’s sincerity. Here was ‘a man endowed with marvellous physical and mental solidity, and with balanced and robust willpower’ the Neapolitan daily opined. It was inconceivable that he could have dreamed everything up as the defence claimed.
Even the most audacious imagination would not have been able to create all the interconnecting lines of this judicial drama. Every detail he gives is a page taken directly from life—albeit from a life of crime: it is intense, keen, overwhelming.
The defence also thought that Abbatemaggio’s testimony was dramatic, although in a very different sense. In cross-examination, one lawyer announced that he would prove that this supposed inside witness had gleaned all he knew about the Honoured Society from downmarket plays. ‘Has Abbatemaggio ever been to the San Ferdinando Theatre to see a performance of The Foundation of the Camorra?’ Abbatemaggio replied calmly that he only liked comic opera—The Merry Widow and the like. ‘Besides, why would I need to watch the camorra performed in the theatre, when I was part of it?’
The quip was greeted with approving laughs from the public gallery.
The defence also tried to discredit Abbatemaggio by questioning his sanity: he was a ‘hysterical epileptic’, they claimed, in the dubious psychological jargon of the day. One expert who closely examined him disagreed, but said nonetheless that he was a particularly fascinating case. Again and again Abbatemaggio responded to those who doubted his evidence with names, dates, and a torrent of other particulars. Perhaps he could be classified as a ‘genialoid’, a rare blend of the genius and the lunatic; his ‘mnemonic and intuitive capacities are indeed phenomenal’.
Abbatemaggio’s credibility as a witness also depended on his ability to tell a story about himself, a story of redemption. He claimed to have found personal moral renewal by exposing the camorra’s secrets to the law. He had been saved, he said, by his love for the young girl he had recently married. ‘Camorrist told all to win his bride’, was the New York Times headline.
Meanwhile, in the defendants’ cage, camorra boss Big ’Enry scowled and scoffed. Wiry, sunken eyed and heavy jawed, he had a disconcerting horizontal scar that ran from the corner of his mouth out towards his right ear. He wore mourning black because his younger brother Ciro, one of the five men who ate at Mimì a Mare on the night of the murders, had died of a heart attack in custody. During Abbatemaggio’s testimony Big ’Enry was heard to mutter the occasional comment. ‘This louse is like a gramophone, and if you turn his handle he goes on and on.’ The label stuck: for the rest of the trial, the defendants would refer to Abbatemaggio as ‘the gramophone’.
When Big ’Enry’s own turn to give evidence came he made an impression that initially surprised many by how eloquent and convincing it was. He explained that he ran a shop in piazza San Ferdinando selling horse fodder—bran and carobs. He was also a horse dealer who traded with military supply bases in Naples and surrounding towns; he had made a lot of money exporting mules to the British army in the Transvaal during the Boer war. He denied being a camorrista but admitted that he was rather hot-headed and did sometimes lend money at very high interest rates. It was all a question of character.
Gentlemen of the jury, you need to bear in mind that we are Neapolitans. We are sons of Vesuvius. There is a strange violent tendency in our blood that comes from the climate.
The Carabinieri, Big ’Enry concluded, were victimising him and had bribed witnesses. He had suffered so much in prison that he was losing his hair.
Several policemen of various ranks were subsequently called to testify, and reeled off Big ’Enry’s catalogue of convictions. He had begun his career as a small-time pimp. Like many other camorristi, Big ’Enry dealt in horse fodder because it provided a good front for extorting money from hackney carriage drivers and rigging the market in horses and mules. They explained that he provided the protection for the high society gambling den run by Johnny the Teacher, and confirmed that he was the effective boss of the camorra. They noted that the nominal boss was one Luigi Fucci, known as ‘o gassusaro—‘the fizzy drink man’—for the prosaic reason that he ran a stall selling fizzy drinks. Big ’Enry used him as a patsy, while keeping the real power in his own hands.
Big ’Enry began to look like what he really was: a villain barely concealed behind a gentlemanly façade. Not many of the other defendants came across much better. Arthur Train, a former assistant District Attorney in New York, was one of many American observers at the trial. He noted that
the Camorrists are much the best dressed persons in the court room. Closer scrutiny reveals the merciless lines in most of the faces, and the catlike shiftiness of the eyes. One fixed impression remains—that of the aplomb, intelligence, and cleverness of these men, and the danger to a society in which they and their associates follow crime as a profession.
The Cowherd, the ‘ultra-modern camorrista’ whose sexual conquests among the ladies of the aristocracy had reputedly so enraged the Duke of Aosta, was a particularly elegant figure. He too tried to present himself as an honest businessman who had begun by selling bran and carobs and had risen to become a successful jeweller. Only a freakish chain of bad luck had led him to spend several short spells in jail for extortion, theft and taking part in a gunfight, he said. The Cowherd’s refined appearance was compromised by the two long scars on his cheek. ‘Fencing wounds’, he protested. He did at least make a telling point about the notorious ring engraved with Gennaro Cuocolo’s initials: he demonstrated that it was not big enough to fit on his own little finger—and he was a much smaller man than Cuocolo.
The accused arrive in Viterbo for the most sensational camorra trial in history, 1911. Following the brutal slaying of a former camorrista and his wife, the Cuocolo case generated worldwide interest. The man in the bowler hat is Luigi Fucci, ‘the fizzy drink man’, and nominally the supreme boss of the Honoured Society.
The sfregio, or disfiguring scar, was one of many visible signs of camorra power in Naples. Camorristi handed out sfregi as punishments both to one another and to the prostitutes they pimped. Sicilian mafiosi, by contrast, refrained from both pimping and the sfregio.
Few of the accused had plausible alibis. Some denied knowing Abbatemaggio, only to be flatly contradicted by other credible witnesses. One camorrista thought it was a good idea to have his defence printed in pamphlet form. In it he admitted that the camorra existed but claimed that it was a brot
herhood of well-meaning individuals who liked to defend the weak against bullies. This brotherhood’s ruling ethos was what he termed cavalleria rusticana—‘rustic chivalry’. Evidently this particular defendant was trying to apply the lessons from the Sicilian mafia’s successful ploy in earlier trials. He cited camorra history too, concluding his pamphlet on a patriotic note by recalling how, half a century ago, when Italy was unified, camorristi had fought Bourbon tyranny and contributed to ‘the political redemption of Southern Italy’.
Disorder in court. The chaotic scenes at the Cuocolo trial baffle and repulse observers across the world. From the Illustrated London News.
The judge in Viterbo attracted much criticism for allowing the defendants themselves to cross-examine witnesses. These exchanges prolonged proceedings enormously, and sometimes descended into verbal brawls. One camorrista, a fearsome one-eyed brute who stood accused of smashing Gennaro Cuocolo’s skull with a club, shrieked colourful insults across the court at Abbatemaggio.
You’re a piece of treachery! And you’ve sold yourself just so you can eat good maccheroni in prison. But you’ll choke on those nice tasty bits of mozzarella. You’ll see, you lying hoaxer!
Shut up you louse! Shut up you pederast! I’d spit in your face if I wasn’t afraid of dirtying my spit.
Abbatemaggio had no such worry, and spat back across the court into the defendants’ cage.
Weeks and weeks of witness statements, angry cross-examinations, and scuffles went by. Public interest slowly flagged as spring turned to summer. But it revived in July and August 1911 when the two great heroes of the Cuocolo spectacular were called to give their statements. In the words of the New York Times, these were the Carabinieri who ‘finally succeeded in penetrating the black vitals of the criminal hydra and are now ready to exhibit the foul, noxious mass at the Viterbo Assizes’. They were Sergeant Erminio Capezzuti and Captain Carlo Fabroni.
