Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Which is why it is striking that, on 19 December 1922 (that is, just after Mussolini became Prime Minister) Noto was convicted of being the boss of the local mafia. If the judges in the case are to be believed, Noto drew on his prestige as a wartime flyer to assume leadership of Antonimina’s underworld.

  Noto’s gang had methods, rituals and a structure that were identical to those of the picciotteria discovered three decades or so earlier around Aspromonte. Thus, despite everything that had happened since then—a communications and transport revolution, mass emigration, the destruction of the Honoured Society in Naples, and the titanic military slogging match with Austria—the ’ndrangheta’s forefathers remained obstinately themselves.

  Like their predecessors of the 1880s and 1890s, Noto’s men took a blood oath and were ranked into two sub-groups: the picciotti and the camorristi. They had specific job titles, like the boss and the contaiuolo. They stole a great many farm animals: some of which they sent to connected livestock traders and butchers in distant towns; some they roasted and ate in banquets designed to nourish the gang’s esprit de corps; some they miraculously ‘found’ and returned to the rightful owners—in return for cash and a solemn promise to say nothing to the Carabinieri.

  Whole passages of the judges’ ruling against Noto’s ’ndrina could have been copied from documents dating from thirty years before. The gang contained a few quite wealthy members, and some who had relatives in local government: a former mayor, called Monteleone, counted at least two nephews among the affiliates. The sect had strict rules: wrongdoers were punished with fines, acts of vandalism, or a deft flick of the blade.

  Noto’s men were also part of a great network of Calabrian mafia gangs. That much was clear from the occasion when he heard from his friends in Palmi, on Calabria’s other coast, that one of their brethren had been imprisoned for attempting to murder a Carabiniere. Noto ordered his men to make a welfare contribution, and one member who refused was heavily fined. Boasting far-lying contacts like these, the Antonimina mob could demand, and get, ‘resignation and respect’, from the people at home, as the judge put it. Thefts and beatings were not reported to the police.

  So the flying capo of Antonimina was a throwback, not a harbinger. Or rather, the future his example heralded was a depressingly familiar one: it was a future in which even educated young men from the mafia heartlands of Calabria, those who had seen the world and taken the chances offered by the national institutions that were supposed to turn them into good Italians, would prefer the career routes afforded by mafia violence.

  Domenico Noto’s group also betrayed many of the same weaknesses as the Lads with Attitude of the late nineteenth century. There was an admission fee for new members (which had now gone up to 25 or 50 lire). Like the first picciotti, Noto and his men browbeat the vulnerable into paying the fee. One victim of this kind of extortion was a sixteen-year-old chicken thief. If the traditional rules of the Honoured Society had been respected, this boy would never have been allowed to join at all because both his sisters were prostitutes. But he was initiated, and exploited, all the same. Aggrieved by the treatment he received, he subsequently gave a vital testimony to the authorities. Nobody in the police and judicial system was remotely surprised by this kind of egregious breach in the code of silence. As a judge in another trial wearily opined, ‘as judicial psychology teaches us, members of criminal associations always betray one another, and the solidarity between them is only superficial’. Clearly the Calabrian mafia was still a long way from becoming the byword for omertà that it is today.

  Across the picciotteria’s home territory the courts were encountering similar cases, similar gangs that mixed former soldiers with veteran mobsters, similar infractions of the law of silence. In Rosarno, on the plain of Gioia Tauro, ‘the population was terrorised’: in broad daylight there were knife fights, acts of sabotage, robberies, attacks on the Carabinieri. The picture was very similar in and around Africo, where a judge noted that there was ‘a very marked and sudden resurgence in crimes against property’ when the troops came home. In the mayhem of demobilisation and the accompanying economic crisis, the picciotti were resurgent.

  After 1925, just as it did in Sicily and Campania, Fascism mounted an anti-mafia drive in Calabria. Once again, there were hundreds and hundreds of arrests, and some very big trials, especially in the years from 1928 to 1930. But compared to the Mori Operation in Sicily and to Major Anceschi’s roundups in the Mazzoni, Fascism’s crackdown in Calabria barely rated more than a few lines in the local press, let alone nationally—and that even before the media blackout on the ‘Southern Question’ from the early 1930s. Fighting organised crime in Italy’s most neglected region provided no more political kudos under Fascism than it had done before.

  In his 1927 Ascension Day speech, Benito Mussolini gave Italy a monumentally simple picture of his anti-mafia campaign: Fascism set against organised crime—two great blocks facing one another in mutual antagonism. Yet he did not mention the picciotteria at all. The silence is telling, not least because in Calabria the reality on the ground shattered Mussolini’s marmoreal rhetoric into fragments. In some times and places, the state manifested its power in brave policework and shrewd investigation. But in others, it showed its weakness through gross naivety, cowardly brutality, idiotic posturing, and lazy collusion.

  The archives from the Fascist era allow historians to identify a pattern in the fragments of Fascist anti-mafia policy. Continuity is undoubtedly part of that pattern: in some areas of southern Calabria the picciotti were still behaving like the flying boss of Antonimina and his men did after the First World War, and they would continue to do so after Fascism fell. But elsewhere the picciotteria was growing, transforming itself into something altogether more formidable than the sect of ex-cons and tavern rats of the 1880s and 1890s.

  Calabrian hoodlums were not new to the mass arrests and major trials that came with Fascism. Comparatively unprotected from the state’s wrath, they had always been vulnerable to the kind of repression that the Sicilian mafia eluded as a matter of course. Italy cut them back, but never managed to eliminate them. Under Fascism, the picciotti began to show that they were learning from this long and harsh experience. Wherever they could avoid the capricious swing of the Fascist axe, they infiltrated the institutions and bent justice to their own ends. If they had first emerged as a provincial version of the prison camorra of Naples, by the end of Fascism the most powerful Calabrian gangsters looked rather more like Sicilian mafiosi.

  Looking back at the Lads with Attitude during the Fascist era is like watching ants. With an energy that at first seems utterly myopic, each indistinguishable insect scuttles, explores, fights and dies. Yet somehow, from their multiplied frenzy, the colony as a whole grows stronger and more numerous. Somewhere in the DNA of all Italy’s mafias is the ability to think strategically and not just tactically, to evolve over time. A form of natural selection—namely the constant and ferocious competition for predominance within the ranks of each criminal organisation—partly explains this ability. But collective adversity can play a part too: it seems to me that the ’ndrangheta’s long-term success was in good part the result of what it endured early in its history at the hands of the state. If ’ndranghetisti had a motto, it would be one drawn from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ironically, it was a maxim of which the Duce himself approved: what does not destroy me makes me stronger.

  28

  CALABRIA: What does not kill me makes me stronger

  FASCIST REPRESSION HIT HOME ACROSS THE VARIOUS MOB NURSERIES OF CALABRIA. For example, in 1931 the chief of police of Catanzaro felt able to report that the mafia had ‘almost been crushed’ in his area, although he did add that the ‘impetuous and primitive character’ of the locals meant that there was still a very high level of bloodshed. Another notable success came in 1932 when the police in Reggio Calabria dismantled a whole criminal system: the bosses of five ’ndrine were convicted.

  But Fascism�
�s early operations against the picciotteria were temporary successes at best. In fact in some places, ironically, they merely created a power vacuum in which other criminals could wreak havoc. Take the particularly nasty gang who ran riot on the plain of Gioia Tauro in the mid-1930s. As well as committing many robberies and acts of violence, their boss, a certain Michele Barone, was also convicted of smothering an old lady in her bed and throwing a prostitute off a bridge for giving him syphilis. Nasty this crew may have been, but it was not a cell of the picciotteria.

  Michele Barone was a former member of the tax and customs branch of the police—a CV that would automatically have debarred him from membership of the picciotteria. Yet Barone and his friends operated unmolested for three years in the traditional mafia towns of Polistena and Taurianova. In other words, for a while, in this highly significant corner of Calabria, Fascist repression took away the mafia’s monopoly of thuggery.

  The picciotteria would not accept defeat. The crackdown had to continue throughout the Fascist era: there was another peak in the number of trials in 1937 and 1938. During the mid and late 1930s, the police and Carabinieri were sending suspects into internal exile in greater numbers than almost anywhere else in Italy.

  Fascism’s drive against the Calabrian mob all too often lost its momentum where it really counted: in court. Already in 1923, one judge remarked that the picciotti relied on the ‘acquiescence of the wealthiest classes who often use the criminals to further their own goals of personal supremacy and to guard their estates’. Just as in Sicily, the Lads with Attitude had used the subtle art of the protection racket to win friends among the upper echelons—friends who, as witnesses, could swing trials in the gangsters’ favour. But as time went on, an increasing number of strange rulings were handed down by judges themselves, suggesting strongly that the picciotteria was beginning to subvert the workings of justice from the inside. One example comes from Villa San Giovanni, a port township that lies just north of Reggio Calabria. In 1927 a group of local mafiosi were acquitted of forming a criminal association, despite the fact that some of the mobsters had had themselves photographed, pistols pointed and palms raised, as they took an oath.

  Among the big gangster trials of 1928 was the prosecution of fifty-two men from Africo. Some of them were almost certainly the sons and nephews of the picciotti whose killing crew took a razor to Pietro Maviglia’s oesophagus in 1894. Africo was still, as one Fascist official admitted, ‘real barbarian country, isolated from the world’; there were few places in Calabria with such a notorious history of mafia activity. Yet the judge’s ruling in the 1928 case shows absolutely no memory of the criminal association’s deep roots in the town. He even handed out reduced sentences on the grounds that

  The criminal association was partly the result of social causes such as the poverty of the Great War’s aftermath and the moral upheaval that resulted from the war itself.

  Obligingly, the judge went on to declare that the defendants were now ‘changed men, morally and socially’. No Fascist iron and fire in Africo then, because society was to blame.

  Two cases from the notorious Locri area on the Ionian coast also betray a suspicious degree of judicial leniency. In 1928 copious testimony from an insider who had gone through the picciotteria initiation ritual was not enough to convince the judge that a mafia gang was actually a criminal organisation. Yes, they were an association, the judge conceded. But they could have just got together, as they claimed, ‘to defend one another from other people’s violent attacks’. Acquittal on the grounds of insufficient evidence was the decision.

  In 1929 two prosperous citizens were among forty-eight suspected mafiosi charged with ‘associating for delinquency’ and extortion in Ardore: one was an entrepreneur, the other a former cobbler who had become politically powerful. Both were freed on no more solid grounds than that ‘it was implausible that they would have shady dealings with what was essentially a bunch of beggars’. The chief ‘beggar’, as it happens, was caught with a mafia rule book in his house.

  Some of these rulings may be down to ignorant judges, or to displays of class prejudice. More likely, they are the end product of the Calabrian mafia’s increasing power to infiltrate the judicial system through the state administration. For since Fascism’s earliest months in power, when Blackshirts in the region had gone down with ‘acute factionitis’, the Partito Nazionale Fascista in Calabria had proved exasperatingly prone to the local vices of corruption, cronyism, and infighting. In Calabria, Fascism not only struggled to govern society, it struggled to govern its own ranks.

  Predictably, the malaise was worst around Aspromonte, where cliques still squabbled over the funds allocated to repair the damage caused by the catastrophic 1908 earthquake a generation earlier. Mussolini dispatched a rapid succession of special commissioners from Rome to put an end to jobbery and mud-slinging. But what passed for ‘Fascism’ in the toe of the peninsula remained obstinately unruly throughout the twenty-year regime.

  So the single most important weakness in Fascism’s campaign against the Calabrian mafia was that it could not cut the tendrils that organised crime had wound around the hollow branches of the state. As early as 1933 the national Fascist Party Secretary in Rome was told that the local Party Secretary in Reggio was ‘notoriously affiliated to the organised crime that still infects the province’; the man in question had a strong influence within the Prefect’s office and police headquarters. In 1940 a special commissioner reported that a ‘high number’ of citizens were members of criminal associations, or had relatives who were members. Even his predecessor as special commissioner had several men in his circle who were suspected of involvement in organised crime.

  The picciotti were growing stronger by sucking energy from the Fascist state. But their increasing vigour also came from within, from bonds that made the ’ndrine even tougher to prise from the mountain crags and coastal plains where they had first marked out their territory. The Lads with Attitude were learning how to make crime a family business.

  29

  CALABRIA: A clever, forceful and wary woman

  ITALY’S UNDERWORLD NETWORKS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WOVEN FROM MANY DIFFERENT strands, all of them stolen from other parts of the social fabric: Masonic rituals, male bonding, patronage, godparenthood, the language and rituals of a religion hollowed of any spiritual meaning, feasting, the glamour reflected back from literature . . . Anything will do, as long as it knits the organisation together. But the strongest criminal ties of all have been those braided from the purloined threads of kinship. Families lend gangs the kind of loyalty that more impersonal forms of organisation can rarely match. It is one thing to betray a comrade to the police: it is quite another when that comrade is also your cousin, your uncle, or your father-in-law.

  Among Sicilian mafiosi, births, marriages and baptisms have never been private; that is, they are not purely domestic affairs that a gangland leader only turns his mind to once the day’s extorting and smuggling are done. Rather, family is at the heart of quotidian underworld scheming: a wedding can seal a pact ready for war or end a season of bloodshed and signal the birth of a new alliance. Dynastic politics have always been integral to what the mafia is about. The mafiosi that Inspector Sangiorgi encountered during the ‘fratricide’ affair already cultivated the arts required to sire their own criminal bloodlines, to make their surnames echo fear down through the generations. Sangiorgi also discovered the first known occasion on which a Man of Honour was offered the distinctively Sicilian choice between murdering a relative and being killed himself: it was in 1883, when an uncle was made to take part in the murder of his own nephew, who was also a mafioso. In the Brotherhood of Favara, the mafia of the sulphur mines, those were the rules.

  In Calabria, back in the 1880s and 1890s, family matters were handled very differently. The ’ndrangheta was originally a sect in which prisoner enlisted prisoner, rather than father enlisting son. Once they emerged from jail, picciotti did begin to spread along the pathways of kinsh
ip. The earliest picciotteria trial papers list brothers, cousins and other relatives among the members—it could hardly be otherwise given the tangle of intermarriage in some of the isolated Calabrian communities. Before long, a first generation of sons were joining their fathers in the criminal ranks. For example, if the police were right about the King of Aspromonte, Giuseppe Musolino, then his father founded the picciotteria in Santo Stefano. So family and gang crime were interlaced very quickly. But in the early days there seems to have been little strategic and legislative thought behind that interlacing: the picciotti did not call meetings about family matters; they did not make rules about who could marry whom; they did not cut faces for breaches of dynastic etiquette.

  Today the ’ndrangheta is more resistant to repression than the Sicilian mafia or the Neapolitan camorra; its secrets are more closely guarded, because fewer of its members turn state’s evidence. Ask any magistrate or policeman in Calabria why that should be, and they will reply with one word: family. These days, the ’ndrangheta is even more family-oriented than the Sicilian mafia: each ’ndrina is deliberately built from one clan, often a single boss and his male offspring. In bugged conversations from 2010, ’ndranghetisti can be heard discussing what they call the principle of ‘the line’, meaning the hereditary principle, when it comes to deciding who will become the boss (of Roghudi, in this case). The rule that a son should inherit from his father is not inviolable but it is a rule all the same. No such statute exists in the Sicilian mafia, although the sons of bosses often follow their fathers into leadership positions.