by John Dickie
Thus when Big ’Enry was arrested, the last paladin of the old order was brought down and the Honoured Society was allowed to fall into ruin. The Cuocolo trial did not exactly destroy the camorra, it destroyed the only man who still believed in the camorra, who still wanted to take the criminological textbooks on the Honoured Society and make reality fit them once more.
The street cops who gave evidence at the Cuocolo trial give us a close-up description of the Honoured Society’s decline. But being street cops, they did not have to try and explain that decline. So their vivid evidence begs a bit of educated guesswork from the historian.
In essence, it seems, the old Honoured Society could not cope with the way Naples was modernising. With Italy becoming more democratic, politicians were gaining access to greater sources of patronage of jobs, housing, and other favours. As a result, undergovernment could reach further down into the low city, competing with the camorra to win clienteles among the poor. The camorra’s bosses were unable to respond by mutating into a ‘high camorra’, by producing their own politicians, by becoming the state rather than just performing services for pieces of the state. The Honoured Society remained at heart what it had always been: a criminal elite among the ragged poor. The leap from the tenements to the salons was just too great. And in the new, more-democratic age, when Neapolitan political life became as visible as it was volatile, the camorra had no political mask, leaving it too conspicuous and isolated to survive a serious onslaught by the forces of order. In short: the top camorristi might put on their straw-yellow gloves, but they could not cover the scars on their faces.
Here a comparison with the Honoured Societies of Calabria and Sicily is instructive. The picciotteria shared the camorra’s lowly origins. But they did rapidly merge with local politics and—just as importantly—Calabria was all but invisible to public opinion in the rest of the country. The Sicilian mafia orbited around a city that rivalled Naples for its importance to national political life: Italy could not be governed if Palermo and Naples were not governed. Yet unlike the camorra, the mafia had its own politicians, its Raffaele Palizzolos and Leonardo Avellones, to say nothing of the Prime Ministers and shipping magnates who were its friends. Even the mafia’s killers could rely on being shrouded by the elite if they fell afoul of the law. Big ’Enry and the other camorristi were left naked by comparison.
Camorra legend has it that not long after the Cuocolo verdict, on the evening of 25 May 1915, the few remaining camorristi met in a cellar bar in the Sanità area of the city and dissolved the Honoured Society forever.
What of Gennaro Abbatemaggio? Once the newsreel cameras had ceased to whirr, the man who had snuffed out the Honoured Society followed an eccentric and even self-destructive path through life. The redemption parable that he tried to sell to the Viterbo jury would return to mock him.
Abbatemaggio was caught defrauding two members of the Cuocolo trial jury in a strange deal to buy some cheese, and spent time in jail as a result. Subsequently, during the Great War, he won a sergeant’s stripes with the arditi (‘the audacious’), a volunteer corps of shock troops who raided trenches with grenade and dagger. In 1919 he returned victorious from the front into the arms of the wife who had reputedly saved him from a life of crime—only to discover that she had been having an affair with one of the Carabinieri ordered to protect him from the camorra’s vengeance. His marriage fell apart, and he attempted suicide in January 1920.
Then came Fascism. Abbatemaggio embraced the Fascist revolution in Florence, murdering and plundering with one of Mussolini’s most militant and corrupt squads.
Perhaps, through all these vicissitudes, Gennaro Abbatemaggio was trying to make a fresh start, to fashion a new self. If so, his efforts failed. Something was gnawing away inside his mind. On 9 May 1927, he finally found release from the inner torment when he deposited a statement with a lawyer in Rome. The statement began as follows.
I feel it is my duty, dictated by my conscience, to make the following declaration. I do so belatedly, but still in time to bring an end to the worst miscarriage of justice in the legal annals of the world.
I proclaim that the defendants found guilty in the Cuocolo trial are innocent.
The man Big ’Enry had called ‘the gramophone’ went on to explain that he had played a pre-recorded lie of fabulous complexity and detail in Viterbo. The reason he had made up all that evidence was that the Carabinieri had threatened to charge him with the Cuocolo murders unless he helped them. They had arranged his release from prison and given him money and wedding presents. They had bribed key defence witnesses and leading journalists, spending a grand total of 300,000 lire on sweeteners during the case. In particular, they had spent 40,000 lire on a bribe for Il Mattino editor Edoardo Scarfoglio who, in return for this hearty contribution towards the cost of running his yacht, became the prosecution’s cheerleader through the whole affair.
The trial that destroyed the Honoured Society of Naples was a giant bluff. An early release was rapidly granted to the camorristi convicted a decade and a half earlier—or at least to those who had not died or gone insane in the interim.
The uncertainties about the Cuocolo case remain legion to this day. Ultimately, there is no way to tell whether even Gennaro Abbatemaggio’s 1927 confession exposed the full facts. He was an unreliable witness in Viterbo, and is doomed to remain one. We still cannot know for certain whether Big ’Enry and his crew murdered the Cuocolo couple. We still cannot explain the sheer ferocity with which the Cuocolos were slain that June night in 1906. Why stab Gennaro Cuocolo so many times? Why move his body and put it on display? Why mutilate his wife’s genitals? Why risk the public outcry and political pressure that would inevitably follow such unprecedented acts of butchery?
My own view, for what it is worth, is that Big ’Enry was indeed guilty: the Carabinieri got the right man, but fabricated the evidence they needed to convict him. Even the street cops who testified in Lucca thought that the Cuocolo murders were a camorra vendetta.
The Cuocolo murders might make sense as part of Big ’Enry’s political project, his plan to inject new vigour into the Honoured Society’s wilting traditions. Big ’Enry’s reasoning in the run-up to the murders ran along the following lines. Gennaro Cuocolo used to be a big player in the Honoured Society, an impresario of highly lucrative burglaries. But he had left the camorra and gone his own way; he now belonged to a bigger, less rule-bound criminal world. His wife could now be a partner rather than a streetwalker to be exploited and expended as camorra traditions demanded. Gennaro Cuocolo therefore represented a double threat: he was both a rival in the struggle to control the strategic market in stolen goods; and he was a living demonstration that the Honoured Society was falling apart. So camorra justice had to be done as it was in the old days. More flagrantly than the old days. More savagely than the old days. In a last, hopeless attempt to bring back the old days.
Whoever really murdered the Cuocolos, the whole affair became an awkward and contested memory for Naples. Abbatemaggio’s final confession certainly reversed the verdicts, but in doing so it only compounded the debacle. Thus, even in Italy’s epoch-making moment of victory over the Neapolitan Honoured Society, truth and the law had been disgraced. For that reason, among many others, the camorra was destined to enjoy a long and bloody afterlife.
Between the crises of the 1890s and the First World War, Italy had lurched towards democracy and an open arena for public debate in the press. At the same time it had tried to fight organised crime. The results, in both cases, were distinctly mixed.
Italy entered the Great War as a deeply divided country. It emerged from it victorious, but on the brink of falling apart: its fragile democracy soon collapsed under the political strains that were the war’s immediate legacy. Fascism took power. And where democracy failed in the battle with organised crime, Fascist dictatorship would trumpet success.
Two weeks after Gennaro Abbatemaggio’s final confession, on 26 May 1927, Benito Mussolini delivered
one of the most important speeches of his life—the Ascension Day speech, as it was known. In it he welded his political credibility to the war against gangsters with more conviction than any of his liberal predecessors. Not only that, he proclaimed that the end of mob rule on Italian territory was imminent.
PART VI
MUSSOLINI’S SCALPEL
25
SICILY: The last struggle with the mafia
FASCISM WAS FOUNDED IN MARCH 1919 BY A HANDFUL OF AGGRESSIVELY NATIONALISTIC war veterans in Milan. The first stage of the movement’s rise was the most overtly violent: Fascist squads broke strikes, ransacked trades union offices, killed and crippled selected leftists, and generally posed as defenders of the Patria against the red menace. The typical squadrista dressed in a black shirt and fez and his signature weapons were the cudgel and the can of castor-oil, an industrial lubricant that was force-fed to victims, bringing on violent stomach cramps and diarrhoea.
Many industrialists and landowners were delighted at this ruthless purge of the Left. Prefects and senior police officers often stood by and did nothing. The old schemers in parliament were confident that they could domesticate the black-shirted bully-boys once the left-wing subversives had been humbled.
Mussolini soon showed that this confidence was badly misplaced. In October 1922, the Duce staged the ‘March on Rome’, daring a vacillating government to hand over power to him, or face a black-shirted invasion of the capital and the risk of civil war. Mussolini did not blink, and was duly installed as Prime Minister.
Before the March on Rome, the Blackshirt movement was overwhelmingly concentrated in the north and centre of Italy. However, when Fascism took power, it suddenly found that it had won lots of new southern supporters. With their traditional shamelessness, the old political grandees of southern Calabria and western Sicily, along with their mafia campaign-managers and tawdry clienteles, rushed to cosy up to Fascism now that it promised access to the Roman patronage trough. In the south, the Partito Nazionale Fascista risked being hollowed out into an alibi for the same old politics of faction and favour that so suited the gangsters. The few original Fascists were dismayed. Just a few weeks after the March on Rome, the Fascist groups in Reggio Calabria and Palmi were found to be suffering from ‘acute factionitis’. In Sicily, early uptake Blackshirts decried the ‘Fascistised mafias’ that now took control of some town councils.
Fascism welcomed fair-weather supporters like these in the early days. But Mussolini had bigger ambitions. In 1924 he changed electoral law to guarantee the Partito Nazionale Fascista an outright parliamentary majority. Just a few weeks after the subsequent election victory, Fascist agents kidnapped and murdered the Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti. Outrage spread across the country. But once again the King and leading liberal politicians vacillated at the prospect of throwing the Duce out. Democracy’s last chance had gone. On 3 January 1925 Mussolini declared himself dictator. Now he looked south to find an exemplary enemy for his new regime: the mafia. The fight against criminal associations was to be a vital front in the Duce’s belligerent nation-building project.
As so often, the tempo of criminal history was set in Sicily: in October 1925 Mussolini bestowed full powers to attack the mafia across the whole island on an ambitious northern policeman called Cesare Mori. Mori had dragged himself up the career ladder from nowhere, or rather from the orphanage in Pavia, near Milan, where he had been brought up. The Sicilian mission was his chance to make history; history has come to know him as the ‘Iron Prefect’ and his anti-mafia campaign as the Mori Operation.
The Iron Prefect began with a highly publicised assault on the hilltop town of Gangi, at the very eastern edge of the province of Palermo. All access to Gangi was denied, all communications cut. Criminals were flushed out of their hiding places with flagrant ruthlessness: their women and children were taken hostage, their goods sold off for pennies, their cattle butchered in the town square. There were as many as 450 arrests.
The Mori Operation involved deploying the same methods among the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro, and among the many mafia-infested satellite towns of Palermo like Bagheria, Monreale, Corleone and Partinico. The roundups continued into the provinces of Agrigento, Caltanissetta and Enna.
The Mori Operation was still in full swing when the Duce decided it was time to tell the world about what he had achieved.
On 26 May 1927—for Catholics, the anniversary of Jesus’s ascent into heaven—Italy witnessed a little apotheosis of its own.
With his barrel chest and bull neck crammed into a frock coat and wing collar, Mussolini entered the Chamber of Deputies to be greeted with volleys of cheering and applause. The effusive reception was to be expected: this was now the Duce’s fifth year in power, and Italy’s parliament had been entirely tamed. All the same, this was not a routine institutional event. The speech Mussolini was about to give was heralded as the most important he had ever delivered: a progress bulletin on the building of the world’s first Fascist dictatorship. To mark the occasion, the ushers set a huge bouquet of roses before Mussolini’s chair. And to mark the occasion, the dictator modulated his usual pout and strut. Toying almost meditatively with one of the roses, he addressed the chamber in a low, even voice.
Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech betrayed what the New York Times diagnosed as ‘signs of increasing megalomania’. But the speech was also undeniably seductive to many Italian ears. In 1922, Mussolini asserted, the Fascists had inherited a democratic governing apparatus that was shambolic, weak and seedy; it was merely ‘a badly organised system of Prefects’ offices in which each Prefect’s only worry was how to hustle votes effectively’. In five short years, Mussolini claimed, his regime had done ‘something enormous, epoch-making, and monumental’: for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire, it had established genuine government authority over the Italian people. The Fascist regime had finally imposed order and discipline on an Italy debilitated for so long by politicking and corruption. The country now marched as one to the thumping beat of a totalitarian ideology: ‘Everything within the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state.’
The supreme authority of the state was Fascism’s blazon motif. The Sicilian mafia constituted a state within a state. Therefore Fascism and the mafia were on a collision course.
A centrepiece of the Ascension Day speech was Mussolini’s proud bulletin on the Mori Operation. Sicily, he told parliament, was lying on the operating table, its torso sliced open by the Duce’s ‘scalpel’ so that the cancer of delinquency was exposed. Thousands of suspected mafiosi had been captured in tens of Sicilian towns and villages. The result was a dramatic fall-off in crime. Murders had come down from 675 in 1923 to 299 in 1926, and episodes of cattle rustling from 696 to 126 over the same period. The Duce fired off more statistics before concluding with an oratorical flourish.
Someone is bound to ask me, ‘When will the struggle against the mafia come to an end?’
It will come to an end not just when there are no longer any mafiosi, but when Sicilians can no longer even remember the mafia.
Here was a long-awaited show of political willpower: there was to be ‘no holding back’ against the mafia that was ‘dishonouring Sicily’, in Mussolini’s words. After six decades of collusion and connivance, Italy seemed finally to have a leader who made it priority business to destroy the country’s most notorious criminal organisation.
Mussolini’s scalpel continued to slice into the island’s flesh for another two years after the Ascension Day speech: by 1928, according to some calculations, there had been 11,000 arrests. Then in June 1929, the Iron Prefect was recalled to Rome. His part of the job of eradicating the mafia, Mussolini declared, had been completed; it was up to the judiciary to finish off the task. A long cycle of major mafia trials, the biggest of them with 450 defendants, began in 1927 and would not come to an end until 1932. By that time many people felt able to talk about the Sicilian mafia in the past tense. Among them was the
Iron Prefect himself.
Cesare Mori published a memoir in 1932 and it was rapidly translated into English with the title The Last Struggle with the Mafia. Having brandished the scalpel against organised crime in Sicily, Mori now took up the chisel, with the intention of carving his own narrative of the mafia’s demise into the marble of history.
The Iron Prefect told his readers that Sicilian psychology, which he called ‘childlike’, was at the root of the mafia problem. Sicilians, Mori believed, were easily impressed by haughty figures like mafiosi. So to win the Sicilians over, the Fascist state had awed them; it out-mafiaed the mafia; it had given itself a physical presence, and become embodied in men tougher and more charismatic than the mafiosi themselves—men like Cesare Mori.
The Iron Prefect was sceptical about the theory that the mafia was a sworn criminal association, an Honoured Society.
The Mafia, as I am describing it, is a peculiar way of looking at things and of acting which, through mental and spiritual affinities, brings together in definite unhealthy attitudes men of a particular temperament, isolating them from their surroundings into a kind of caste . . . There are no marks of recognition; they are unnecessary. The mafiosi know one another partly by their jargon, but mostly by instinct. There are no statutes. The law of omertà and tradition are enough. There is no election of chiefs, for the chiefs arise of their own accord and impose themselves. There are no rules of admission.
In order to repress this ‘peculiar way of looking at things’, a certain amount of brutality was necessary, if regrettable. With their awe-inspiring toughness, Mori wrote, the great roundups of 1926 and 1927 caused the felons’ morale to crumple.
