by John Dickie
Dismayed and panic-stricken, they fell like flies, with no other gesture of resistance but a feeble attempt at flight to well-concealed hiding places. They were all struck down.
If Mori had bothered to follow the trials that had just concluded in Palermo, he would have found reams of evidence that the mafia was indeed more than a ‘mental and spiritual affinity’ between men with an ‘unhealthy attitude’. But that did not matter much now. In his book’s closing lines, Mori declared that Sicily, having won its last struggle with organised crime, had now begun an ‘irresistible march towards her victorious destiny’.
The Iron Prefect was showily magnanimous to those he had vanquished and imprisoned, expressing the hope that mafiosi would ‘come back to the bosom of their families better and wiser men, and then spend their life in honest toil until the mantle of forgiveness and oblivion is thrown over the past’. If the island had not yet had the mafia erased from its memory, as Mussolini promised, then that day could at least be envisaged with confidence. Fascism had beaten the mafia. Whatever the mafia was.
So confident was the regime of its success that, in the autumn of 1932, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Fascist March on Rome, hundreds of mafiosi convicted during the Mori Operation were released in an amnesty. The Sicilian mafia’s history was not quite over yet.
26
CAMPANIA: Buffalo soldiers
WHAT REMAINED OF THE CAMORRA AFTER IT WAS DISMANTLED BY THE CUOCOLO TRIAL? Although the trial marked the end of the Honoured Society, it did not eliminate gang crime in some of the city’s nerve centres, such as the wholesale markets or the docks at Bagnoli, where extortion and smuggling were endemic.
Another thing that survived was the myth of the good camorrista. Risen from among the poor, the good camorrista enforced a rough and ready justice in the alleyways, or so it was believed. Above everything else, such ‘men of respect’ protected the honour of women. One tale became an archetype in popular memory: the camorrista who, seeing a local girl seduced and abandoned, collars her rogue innamorato and forces him to do the decent thing. With telling and retelling, such stories hardened into a tableau utterly removed from reality and impervious to contrary evidence. What camorra honour had really meant for women was pimping, beatings, and disfigurement.
When the camorristi of the Honoured Society had gone, guappi were invested with the aura of ‘men of respect’. A guappo was a street-corner boss. He may have lacked the formal investiture of Honoured Society membership; he may have lacked contacts with a brotherhood far beyond the alleys of his tiny fief. But the typical guappo certainly carried on in much the same way as the typical camorrista had done: contraband, usury, pimping, receiving stolen goods and of course farming his turf for votes. Many guappi were former camorristi, or the sons of camorristi.
But to discover the real forebears of the cocaine barons, building industry gangsters and political fixers who make up the camorra today, we need to return for a moment to the days of the Cuocolo trial; more importantly, we need to leave Naples and explore a very different criminal landscape.
On 4 August 1911, two jewellers, father and son, were waylaid by armed robbers on the fruit-tree lined road leading out of Nola, a town perhaps 30 kilometres north-east of Naples. There was a struggle when the father refused to give up the jewellery he was carrying. The attackers responded by shooting his son several times in the face, causing the old man to faint with shock. It was the kind of crime that would not normally have generated a great deal of interest in Naples. But with the Cuocolo trial priming the public’s taste for camorra stories, journalists were drawn out into the countryside to cover the story. Nola, after all, hosted the livestock market where Big ’Enry sourced the mules he once sold to the British army fighting the Boers.
Even Il Mattino’s wonder-worn hacks were taken aback by what they found when they got there: ‘a reign of terror, a kind of martial law’. The territory around Nola displayed all the tell-tale symptoms of a well-rooted criminal organisation: large numbers of crimes unsolved and unreported (meaning that witnesses and victims were being intimidated); vines and fruit trees cut down (meaning that extortion demands had been made). Mayors who tried to do something about the growing power of the bosses had been beaten up. An uncooperative priest had had his arms broken. Any man who protested to the authorities was liable to have his wife or daughter kidnapped, or his house or business dynamited. Bandits openly patrolled the roads, their rifles slung over their shoulders. And according to the police there was an organisation of only 100–150 men behind it all; they formed a federation of gangs, and divided the booty from their crimes equally.
For all these terrifying details, Il Mattino’s exposé barely skimmed the surface. Mobsters infiltrated the fields, market towns and supply routes that enveloped and nourished Naples. Camorristi were active down the coast in Castellammare and Salerno and in Nocera, Sarno and Palma Campania just beyond Mount Vesuvius. But the problem was at its worst to the city’s north, in a vast expanse of hyper-productive land that catered for virtually every item on the Neapolitan menu. From the livestock centre of Nola in the east; to Acerra, which was particularly known for its cannellini beans and for the eel that flourished in its water courses; to the peach orchards around Giugliano; on to Marano, with its peas; and then up the coast to Mondragone, which was known for its onions, endive and chicory. All around Naples a population of farmers, guards, butchers, cart-drivers, brokers and speculators doubled as extortionists, vandals, fraudsters, smugglers, armed robbers and murderers. Out here, the line between legitimate and illegitimate business scarcely had a meaning: theft and racketeering were as valid a source of income as squeezing a profit from the peasantry.
But of all the agricultural bounty that issued from the Neapolitan hinterland, one product was more tightly controlled by hoods than any other.
South of the Garigliano river, north-west of Naples, there lay a malaria-cursed wilderness called the Mazzoni. Lush, flat, interminable and oppressively quiet, the Mazzoni were pocked by quagmires. The land’s other features were few and strange. An isolated water channel threaded through lines of poplar trees; or a dust road, white as a scar, tracing a bullet-straight path to the horizon. Solitary herders were the only travellers: they galloped with their bellies flat to their ponies’ bare backs, as if they had fled a stable fire and forgotten to stop. Once in a while the dust they kicked up would settle upon a bridge over a reed-choked ditch, with a gate propped between two posts. These marked the entrance to a difesa, in the local parlance—literally a ‘defence’—which was a kind of boggy farm. Inside, beyond holm oak and cane thicket, were the buffalo: black, short-haired and massive, they stood in filthy water and glowered at nothing through the shimmering air. At the centre of each compound there was a thatched, whitewashed single-storey shed. Inside, where the air was gamey with the reek of buffalo milk, the herders thumbed mozzarella cheese into balls and dropped them into brine tuns ready for the journey to market in Santa Maria Capua Vetere.
Sallow and sullen with fever, the herdsmen worked the difese in teams, living little better than their animals, not seeing their womenfolk for weeks or months on end. Their boss, known as a minorente, was a rough and ready entrepreneur. Naples and Caserta paid good money for the creamily fragrant cheeses that miraculously issued from the muck and stench of the Mazzoni. The boss rented his difesa from a landowner who was probably too scared to go anywhere near his property. For the Mazzoni were among the most lawless areas in the whole of Italy, and the herdsmen who made the mozzarella also made much of the trouble. In 1909, a government inquiry into agriculture evoked the teams of buffalo herdsmen in the Mazzoni in the language of folk terror. ‘For centuries these local tribes have hated one another and fought one another like prehistoric peoples.’
Yet as so often in Italy, lazy talk of ‘primitives’ served only to mask a far-from-primitive criminal logic. Violence was integral to the buffalo dairy economy. Bosses intimidated their competitors so they could ne
gotiate a lower rent with the landowner. The herders set up protection rackets: if their threatening letters were not understood, they slaughtered buffalo, cut down trees, and burned buildings until they had made their position clear. Highway robbery was a constant risk for the men taking the cheese to market, and bringing the money back. In other words, mozzarella was for the Mazzoni what lemons were for Palermo’s Conca d’Oro.
During the Cuocolo trial, Il Mattino reporters visited the Mazzoni to be cursorily horrified by the ‘crass ignorance’ and ‘bloodthirsty instincts’ of the buffalo herdsmen. What they failed to mention was that the camorra in the Mazzoni, and in the Aversa area between the Mazzoni and Naples, was integral to a political and business machine whose handles were cranked by the local Member of Parliament, Giuseppe Romano, known as Peppuccio (‘Little Joey’). It just so happened that Little Joey was a friend of Il Mattino editor, Edoardo Scarfoglio.
Despite the obliging reserve of Scarfoglio’s journalists, Little Joey’s career was doomed. Partly as a result of the fuss around the Cuocolo trial, he became too notorious to be tolerated even by Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (the ‘Minister of the Underworld’) who had been happy to accept his support in the past. During the 1913 national elections, there was an anti-camorra campaign in Little Joey’s constituency (the cavalry were sent into the Mazzoni), and he was unseated. But with Little Joey out of the way, gangster life in the Neapolitan hinterland returned to normal.
From the Mazzoni to Nola, and down beyond Mount Vesuvius, camorristi were as at home in the towns and villages around Naples as they were in the prisons and alleys of the city itself. Indeed, there were close ties between the rural and urban organisations. The tomatoes, lettuces, salami and mozzarella that camorristi cornered in the countryside went first to the criminal cartels who controlled little portions of the city’s wholesale distribution. It was all staggeringly inefficient, a system designed only to fatten the cut taken by middlemen. Poor Naples paid cruelly high food prices as a result. But official Italy hardly took any notice.
Until Fascism, that is.
During his Ascension Day speech in 1927, Mussolini introduced parliament to the Mazzoni. He assumed, naturally enough, that his audience would not have heard of them before: who in his right mind would bother leaving the city to find out where the delicious mozzarella actually came from?
The Mazzoni are a land that lies between the provinces of Rome and Naples: they are a marshy terrain, a malarial steppe.
The inhabitants, the Duce continued, had a terrible reputation even in ancient times: latrones, they were called in Latin—‘highwaymen’ or ‘brigands’. As was his wont, Mussolini then hurled statistics: between 1922 and 1926, the Mazzoni had seen 169 murders and 404 instances of extortion-related vandalism. But the Fascist scalpel was already cutting away at this millennial legacy of lawlessness. The Duce’s orders had been abrupt: ‘Free me from this delinquency with iron and fire!’ Now, with yet another salvo of statistics, the Duce could announce the triumph of state authority: 1,699 underworld figures had been arrested in the Mazzoni; just to the south, among the vines and fruit trees of Aversa, another 1,278 had been brought to book. In rural Campania, just as in Sicily, Fascism was on the verge of victory.
The press called it Fascism’s campaign of ‘moral drainage’ in the bogs of the Mazzoni. The man charged with conducting the campaign was Major Vincenzo Anceschi, a fifty-year-old Carabiniere. Anceschi was the son of a Carabiniere, and his own son would become one too: a lineage that testifies to the devotion that the Arma, as Italians call this military police force, can inspire in its members. Anceschi’s anti-camorra operation was huge, entirely comparable to what Mori was doing in Sicily: between December 1926 and May 1928, 9,143 people were arrested and two suspects died in gunfights with the Carabinieri.
Anceschi’s men patrolled the countryside in mounted squads, disarming notoriously dangerous families, arresting renegades and breaking up corrupt factions in local government. Although the toughest assignments were in the Mazzoni, their roundups also included the countryside as far east as Nola.
Anceschi could hardly have known this territory better: he was born in Giugliano, right on the edge of the Mazzoni. And on New Year’s Eve 1926 he deployed that local knowledge in his most spectacular strike, at a gangland funeral that was intended to be a show of force, just like the Honoured Society funerals of the 1890s in Naples.
Vincenzo Serra was the most notorious camorrista in the Aversa countryside. An elegant figure with a lordly bearing, he had spent thirty-six of his seventy years in prison, and was particularly well known for shooting two Carabinieri in a tea house. Serra died in Aversa hospital following a mysterious accident. His open coffin was set up in a ground-floor mortuary, surrounded by black drapes, exotic plants and fat candles. Hoods from all around came to pay their respects. They then assembled in the hospital atrium, where (according to the press) the acting boss decided their positions according to rank: first the older camorristi; then the picciotti; and finally the ‘honoured youths’ lugging large wreaths. Vincenzo Serra’s funeral procession was to be a solemn collective tableau of a structured criminal organisation.
But it never even began. The Carabinieri simply bolted the door of the hospital, locking the mobsters in the atrium until they could be herded onto a truck and taken to prison.
Major Anceschi made something of a speciality of raiding camorra funerals. This was a dangerous tactic: officers received frequent death threats. Carabinieri dressed in mufti would mingle with the crowds, while Anceschi supervised operations from an unmarked car parked nearby. He had the car wired so that anyone who tried to get in uninvited would receive an electric shock. But the rewards made the risks of this kind of operation worthwhile. The arrests were important, of course. Perhaps more important still was the chance to transform a show of force for the camorra into a show of force for the law.
What these reports suggest is that, even after the Honoured Society died out in the city of Naples as a result of the Cuocolo trial, its structures and traditions lived on in the countryside fifteen years later. Anceschi reported to Mussolini that, in the Mazzoni, the camorra had ‘a rigid system based on hierarchy and omertà’. ‘The country around Aversa and Nola’, he went on, ‘very close to Naples, was a daily destination for the members of the city’s underworld, which was intimately linked to the rural criminals’. The countryside had become a kind of life-support system for urban organised crime.
Anceschi and his men discovered no less than twenty criminal associations and sent 494 men for judgement in eighteen separate trials, but historians have so far managed to locate only a few pages of the resulting documentation. Until more research is done and the archives surrender more of their secrets, we cannot know exactly what kind of criminal organisations dominated the Mazzoni, or indeed the successes and failures of Fascism’s ‘moral drainage’. What seems certain is that there were no further traces of an Honoured Society in the Neapolitan countryside after the 1920s.
To his credit, Major Anceschi gave a proud but sober assessment of his own work in a report to Carabinieri High Command in May 1928. The roads were now safe, the fields were once again filled with peasants, and the barrels of mozzarella cheese could make their way to market without being stolen or ‘taxed’ by the camorra. Public order was normal, all the way from Mondragone to Nola—for now. But Anceschi detailed a number of things that would need to happen before peace could settle definitively over this troubled territory. Extraordinary policing would need to continue. In the ‘malign and fearful moorland’ of the Mazzoni, there would have to be education, land reclamation, and road building. Above all—and here lay the most uncomfortable message for the Fascist state—there would have to be much more careful supervision of the personnel within both the government bureaucracy and the Fascist Party. Anceschi’s operation had courageously exposed a number of corrupt functionaries who tried to influence the magistrature on behalf of camorristi, and who were involved in obscure
dealings with the Freemasonry. The report ended with a brusque imperative: ‘Prevent political infiltration in favour of organised crime.’
Despite Major Anceschi’s caution, Mussolini decided by the late 1920s that the camorra, like the mafia, had been beaten. He also decided that he had solved the whole Southern Question—the persistent scandal of the backwardness, poverty and corruption of Italy’s south. Further public discussion of these issues was therefore pointless. So pointless that it was banned. Between 1931 and 1933, the head of the Duce’s press corps wrote frequently to newspaper editors exhorting them not to print the words ‘southern Italy’ and ‘Mezzogiorno’ (another term for the south). From now on, Fascism would have other concerns: building a cult of the Duce, for example, and militarising the Italian people in preparation for imperial war. From this point on, whatever surprises mafia history might have in store were to be stifled by a subservient media.
27
CALABRIA: The flying boss of Antonimina
DOMENICO NOTO HAD A LOVELY TIME IN THE GREAT WAR. NOT FOR HIM THE LICE and shrapnel that millions of his fellow soldiers endured in the trenches scoured into the Alpine foothills between 1915 and 1918. Most of the Italians recruited to fight Austria were country folk, barely literate, whose mental horizon simply could not encompass the reasons for this mechanised slaughter. Noto had a loftier perspective. He had a good secondary school education, and used it to become a non-commissioned aviator. His duty was to patrol the breathtaking skies between Calabria and Sicily on the lookout for Austrian mines in the Straits below. On one occasion he even overflew his home village of Antonimina, which clings to an Aspromonte outcrop above Calabria’s Ionian coast. Noto’s gesture won him the lasting reverence of the herdsmen who had shaded their eyes to see the local prodigy soar by. Aviators were the very epitome of a dashing, virile modernity. Domenico Noto seemed like the harbinger of a heroic Italian future. And he even had a good disciplinary record during the war.
