by John Dickie
Sergeant Capezzuti was Abbatemaggio’s handler: he had persuaded the informant to break the code of omertà and protected him afterwards; he had also led the search team that claimed to have found the G.C. pinkie ring.
Ludicrously overblown tales of Capezzuti’s heroism had circled the globe between the murders and the trial. It was said that he had disguised himself as a camorrista and even undergone a ritual knife fight and been oathed into membership of the Honoured Society. The New York Times claimed he had pulled off ‘one of the most remarkable feats of detection ever accomplished’. The Washington Times reported that Capezzuti was set to become a monk after the trial because this was the only way he could protect himself from the camorra’s revenge. Every newspaper in the world seemed to compare Capezzuti to Sherlock Holmes.
It is not clear quite where some of these fables about the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ of Naples began. Certainly little to justify them surfaced when Capezzuti came to Viterbo. The Sergeant stuck calmly to every detail of the prosecution case, including the G.C. ring story. His evidence was measured and, for those expecting Sherlock Holmes, rather dull.
Captain Carlo Fabroni’s time on his feet was anything but dull. The Carabiniere officer who was in charge of the whole Cuocolo investigation hailed from the Marche region, and had arrived in Naples only shortly after the Cuocolo murders. One of the first things he did, he explained, was to read up on all the criminology published about the camorra. What he had learned during the course of his investigations precisely corresponded with what he had read.
As Captain Fabroni’s testimony continued, his self-confidence tumesced into arrogance. He brushed aside any suspicions that Abbatemaggio might not be telling the whole truth.
With my extremely honourable past in the military I would blush at the very thought of inducing a man to commit an act of nameless infamy by inventing an accusation.
Under cross-examination, Fabroni provoked the defence at every opportunity, and scattered accusations that the police, politicians and even the judiciary were in cahoots with the camorra. On one occasion, he claimed that Big ’Enry had only been acquitted on an earlier extortion charge because his defence lawyer was the judge’s brother; the lawyers all took off their robes and walked out in protest at this collective insult to their profession.
Captain Carlo Fabroni, who turned the Cuocolo murder case into an assault on the whole Honoured Society.
But Captain Fabroni’s most startling move was to drop a hand grenade in the lap of his key witness. Since the first hearings, there had been much comment on the sheer vividness of Abbatemaggio’s narrative. The ‘gramophone’ told the court the order in which the camorristi stabbed each of the victims, and even the abuse they had shouted while they were doing it. Was it really plausible that the killers would tell Abbatemaggio about their own bloody actions in such detail?
Captain Fabroni’s counter to this question was a highly risky move to undercut the stoolpigeon’s character, but keep the testimony intact. Abbatemaggio had not broken the code of omertà because he wanted a cleaner life with his new wife, Fabroni explained: that was just a cover story. Fear was Abbatemaggio’s real motive—fear that the camorra would kill him as it had done the Cuocolos. The reason for this fear was that he had tried to blackmail his fellow criminals. And the reason he knew enough to blackmail them was because, in all probability, he had been present at one or both of the murder scenes. Perhaps Abbatemaggio was himself one of the killers. As Captain Fabroni concluded, ‘It’s just not possible to reconstruct such an appalling tragedy in every particular unless you have taken part in it in some way.’
Having taken in Captain Fabroni’s words, the world’s press immediately upended their sentimental opinions of the ‘gramophone’. One Australian newspaper called the informer ‘a rascal of almost inconceivably deep dye’. Nor was Captain Fabroni the only man in Viterbo to point the finger at Abbatemaggio: the Cowherd also accused him of the murders, and referred to him constantly as ‘the assassin’. Thus both prosecution and defence seem to have believed that Abbatemaggio was one of the Cuocolo hit men. Quite what proportions of truth and cynical tactics were in these allegations may never be known. What is certain is that Abbatemaggio was never formally indicted with the murders.
The Viterbo trial still had a year to run when Captain Fabroni finished giving evidence. Through the months that followed, each of the defendants and many of the witnesses were called back time and again to answer further questions. But a decisive shift in the burden of proof had already taken place. For all its unfathomable obscurities, the Cuocolo case was now a simple credibility contest: either the accused were guilty, or the Carabinieri were slanderers. On one side was a cage full of crooked figures with scarred faces who gave mutually contradictory statements. On the other side were Captain Fabroni and Sergeant Capezzuti. Granted, these two Carabinieri had failed to live up to their ‘Sherlock Holmes’ billing. But it was hard to believe that they could be so devious as to fabricate the whole prosecution case.
24
THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE HONOURED SOCIETY
AT JUST AFTER FIVE THIRTY IN THE AFTERNOON OF 8 JULY 1912, THE FORTY-ONE ACCUSED were summoned back into the packed Viterbo courtroom to hear their fate. Almost all of them failed to move, immobilised by dread. Their nerves were understandable given the scale of the proceedings that were about to reach a climax: 779 witnesses had been heard in the course of sixteen exhausting months of hearings.
Finally, the familiar gaunt figure of Big ’Enry appeared, alone, in the defendants’ cage. He looked around him. The lugubrious tension was broken only by the staccato sobs emitted by one of the defence lawyers. Big ’Enry saw, heard and understood which way the verdict had gone. He then destroyed the silence by aiming a shrill cackle across at the elevated box where the jury sat.
You’ve found us guilty. So we are murderers? But why, if you are our judges, have you got your heads bowed? Why won’t you look me in the face? We are the ones who have been murdered! You are the murderers!
More of the accused filed into the cage and began bawling, pleading with the jury and the public, screaming at Abbatemaggio. Suddenly a long jet of blood spurted out onto the marble floor. The Cowherd had used a piece of glass to cut his own throat. Doctors rushed to save him and the guards carried him away to recover.
One by one the defendants gave up their protests and flopped down onto their benches to weep. The loudest and angriest of them, Johnny the Teacher, also took the longest to exhaust himself. He alone was still raving when the Clerk of the Court could finally make himself audible and read out the guilty verdicts. The judge handed down more than four centuries of prison to those found guilty of murder and membership of a criminal association, among other crimes.
A crusade for justice, with no prisoners taken? Or a gross abuse of the state’s power? In the aftermath of the Cuocolo trial, public opinion remained divided as to what this courtroom spectacular actually meant. The Cuocolo trial certainly achieved the highly desirable aim of striking at the camorra. Yet everyone in Italy could see that it had achieved that aim by lengthy, shambolic and perhaps even dubious means. The Cuocolo murders presented the Italian state with a unique opportunity to show off its fight against organised crime to a vast new audience at home and abroad. The result was confusion at home and national embarrassment abroad. Newspaper leader writers all over the globe lamented the state of Italian justice. The press in the United States was scornful: the trial had been a ‘bear garden’, a ‘circus’, a ‘cage of monkeys’. Even an observer more sympathetic to Italy, like Arthur Train, could only plead with his readers to understand how difficult it was to administer justice when ‘every person participating in or connected with the affair is an Italian, sharing in the excitability and emotional temperament of his fellows’. Still more sober, and no less damning, was the appraisal of the Bulawayo Chronicle in what is now Zimbabwe, where cinemagoers had seen newsreels from Viterbo.
The Camorra trial stands as monumen
tal evidence to the incapacity and inadequacy of the present system of criminal procedure in Italy.
Had more than a tiny minority of magistrates and lawyers been ready to heed them, there were plenty of legal lessons about the fight against camorra-type crime to be learned from the Cuocolo trial: about Italy’s hazy laws against criminal associations; about the ungainly, agonisingly slow, and peculiarly Italian marriage of investigative justice with an adversarial system.
The most important lessons came from the story of Gennaro Abbatemaggio. Even on the Carabinieri’s account, his treatment was a legal outrage: for example, after first talking to the Carabinieri, he spent many months hiding out in a remote part of Campania in what happened to be Sergeant ‘Sherlock Holmes’ Capezzuti’s home village. As Ermanno Sangiorgi found out as long ago as the ‘fratricide’ case of the 1870s, the authorities had absolutely no guidelines on how to handle defectors from the ranks of the criminal brotherhoods. What kind of deal should the law strike with them in return for what they knew? How could there be any certainty that what they said was true? Italian legislation offered no answers to these questions, and no way of distinguishing good police intelligence gathering from co-managing crime. Because the lessons of the Cuocolo trial were never learned, those questions would continue to vex, and continue to undermine the struggle against organised crime in southern Italy.
And yet remarkably, after the trial in Viterbo, there were to be no more reports of criminal activity by the sect that had plagued Naples since before Italy was unified. Somehow Gennaro Abbatemaggio, and the judicial monster he helped create, ended the history of the Honoured Society.
The trial in Viterbo left a legacy of puzzles. The hardest of them all is why, when so many earlier camorra prosecutions had merely pruned the branches of the Honoured Society, the Cuocolo case actually struck at its root.
One possible answer lies in the evidence given by the Neapolitan police, who had not enjoyed a good press in the build up to the Viterbo trial. Not only had they been overshadowed by the Carabinieri, in the persons of Sergeant Capezzuti and Captain Fabroni; but they had been discredited by the insinuation that some of them were hand in glove with camorristi. Italians were quite ready to believe that this charge had purchase. Everyone knew that the police used the camorra to lend a hand at election time on behalf of the Interior Ministry. In Naples, as in Palermo, the police and gangsters co-managed crime. For all these reasons, evidence from policemen received only desultory media coverage.
Yet for the same reasons, the police understood better than anyone else how the Honoured Society worked. Just as importantly, because of their acrimonious rivalry with the Carabinieri, the police who gave evidence in the Cuocolo trial had no corporate interest in backing up either the Carabinieri’s textbook account of the camorra, or Abbatemaggio’s story. So, in retrospect, the picture of the camorra the police gave the Viterbo jury becomes all the more credible—a picture of a criminal organisation that was already in serious decline before Gennaro Cuocolo and his wife were knifed to death.
Take agent Ludovico Simonetti, who spent four years as a street cop in Big ’Enry’s own quarter of the city. Simonetti had no problem admitting to the judge in Lucca that the police regularly used camorra informers, and he was happy to confirm Big ’Enry’s leading rank inside the criminal organisation. But Simonetti’s evidence was most interesting where it diverged from the prosecution’s line; it displays none of the frozen, ‘idiot’s guide’ quality of what Captain Fabroni and the ‘gramophone’ testified.
Agent Simonetti explained that the Honoured Society was founded on two principles: dividing the profits of crime out among the members; and blind obedience or omertà. ‘The camorra was so powerful that it could be called a state within a state.’ Was so powerful: the camorra’s supremacy was emphatically a thing of the past. Simonetti went on to say that the principles upon which the criminal sect had been founded were crumbling.
Now the booty goes to whoever did the job, not to the collectivity. Except on the odd occasion when some more energetic boss manages to extract a bribe. The underworld doesn’t have the blind obedience it once did: there are no longer any punishments.
Agent Simonetti pinpoints a crucial new weakness here. The Honoured Society had lost its ability systematically to ‘tax’ criminals—to extract bribes from them, in other words. Once, by means of this kind of extortion, camorristi had presided over petty criminals in the same way that a state presides over its subjects. Now that the power to tax crime had faded, the camorra was beginning to look like just one gang among many. For that reason, it had become more vulnerable to the kind of humdrum underworld rivalries that regularly tore other gangs apart. Blind obedience had gone.
Simonetti made it clear that clusters of camorristi still did all the things they had done for decades: robbing, pimping, loan sharking, rigging auctions, bullying voters, extorting money from traders, running the numbers racket. Almost all the most important fences in the city were still members of the Honoured Society. Camorristi still respected one another. The individual camorra cells in each quarter of the city still existed. But these days their power came simply from the ferocity and charisma of the individual criminals. In Simonetti’s words, the camorra as an ‘organised collectivity’ did not exist anymore.
The old sacraments were losing their magic. In the past, for a criminal to be elevated to membership of the Honoured Society was a life-changing rite of passage. Now existing members used the initiation ritual as a way of flattering other hoods and wheedling cash out of them. As agent Simonetti put it, ‘Once it was a serious business that required a blood baptism. Now it’s just a baptism in wine.’
Other grassroots police officers enriched Simonetti’s account. One of them, Giovanni Catalano, had often seen Abbatemaggio eating pizza with Big ’Enry, Johnny the Teacher and other top camorristi in the old days. The camorra certainly still existed, Catalano went on to stress: in virtually every convicted felon’s police file there was a telegram from a prison governor wanting to know if the crook in question was a member of the Honoured Society so he could be put in the segregated wing reserved for camorristi. But, Catalano went on, the potboilers on the camorra that filled the shelves of Neapolitan bookshops were based on out of date sources, and designed only to satisfy ‘readers’ morbid curiosity’. The chiefs of the Honoured Society were simply not capable of imposing total obedience now. Camorra tribunals had gone for good. The very fact that a camorrista like Gennaro Abbatemaggio could go over to the law was itself a sign of how much things had changed.
The most vivid police testimony of all was the last. A third officer, Felice Ametta, began by joking that he had started his career at the same time as many of the men in the cage had started theirs. He reeled off a list of the Honoured Society’s top bosses since he had first arrived in Naples in 1893; he knew them all. But this was a time of crisis for the organisation, a time of infighting. Ametta then recalled the bizarre and revealing incident that led directly to the rise of the new supreme boss, Big ’Enry—an incident that beautifully encapsulates the divided state of the camorra in the early years of the twentieth century.
Needless to say, Big ’Enry was listening intently as Ametta began to tell his tale to the court.
The story revolved around a thief who wanted to be admitted to the Honoured Society. What made his case unusual and controversial was that many camorristi suspected the thief of being a pederast. In the old days there would have been no debate: cuckolded husbands, thieves and pederasts were all banned. Accordingly, the then contaiuolo (bookkeeper) of the Honoured Society invoked the old rules and obstinately refused to make him a member. But opinion within the camorra was split; the ‘pederast’ was lobbying hard among his camorrista friends. The dispute rumbled on until one evening, in a tavern in the Forcella quarter, the ‘pederast’ provoked a fight in which the contaiuolo suffered serious head injuries. The Honoured Society was suddenly on the brink of a civil war.
Felice Ametta h
eard news of this potentially explosive rift soon after the fight. Hard-nosed cop that he was, and very used to the business of using the camorra to manage crime, he called Big ’Enry in for a meeting in a coffee bar in via Tribunali.
Hardly had these words sounded across the Lucca courtroom, than the jury swivelled in their seats at the sound of Big ’Enry detonating with rage.
Called me in for a meeting? I’m no stoolie! Never! I’d go to jail a thousand times before I stained myself by arranging a meeting with a policeman!
From a man who denied even being a camorrista, this was a highly revealing outburst.
When calm was restored, Ametta went on to explain that Big ’Enry took control of the Honoured Society at precisely this delicate moment, presenting himself as the man who could bring about peace. His leadership platform involved turning the clock back. In Ametta’s words
Big ’Enry wanted to found a kind of old-style camorra, with rigid regulations and statutes, with a tribunal including two advocates for first trials, four advocates for appeal hearings and a general secretary.
There were guffaws when the court heard this elevated legal vocabulary being applied to the sordid affairs of hoodlums. But Ametta’s point was a serious and extremely insightful one. What he was implying was that the textbook camorra as Captain Fabroni and Gennaro Abbatemaggio had portrayed it in Viterbo was no longer a reality on the streets of Naples. Instead it existed only as a political project put forward by a new leader desperate—for his own selfish reasons, no doubt—to hold the Honoured Society’s rapidly fragmenting structure together.
