Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  The years since the Cuocolo trial had not been kind to Abbatemaggio. He had become a tubby little old man, almost bald. At first glance he seemed dapper in a suit and open-necked shirt, or in a dark turtle-neck, sports jacket and sunglasses. But the threadbare tailoring fooled no one who saw him up close. For don Gennaro, as journalists called him with ironic reverence, was all but indigent. He lived hand-to-mouth, on petty theft and scams. No one would have cared about his fortunes—but for the fact that he was a living relic of a once fearsome criminal power.

  After the Second World War, Abbatemaggio did everything he could to keep himself in the limelight—at least he did when he was not in prison. In 1949 he staged a suicide attempt, and a conversion to religious faith; he later gave interviews on the steps of the Roman church where he was due to receive his First Holy Communion. When religion failed, he tried show business. But his repeated efforts to get his own story turned into celluloid came to nothing. In 1952 he had to be content with being snapped with the stars at the premiere of The City Stands Trial, a 1952 film retelling the story of the 1911 case that had destroyed the Honoured Society.

  Shut out of the cinema, Abbatemaggio’s last resort was to try and revive his moment of glory. He claimed to have sensational revelations about one of the biggest murder mysteries of 1953: the death of a Roman girl, Wilma Montesi. But it soon emerged that the old stool pigeon was at it again. He was arrested and tried for false testimony. Thereafter, he was seen begging. The press began to ignore him.

  So if the word ‘camorra’ was used in post-war Naples, it was only to evoke its memory with the same mixture of amusement and pity that was conjured up by newspaper stories about the puppet theatre or Gennaro Abbatemaggio.

  Today, more than half a century after Abbatemaggio’s death, ‘camorra’ has changed its meaning. In the decades since the end of the Second World War, the camorra has re-emerged and adopted a new identity; it has become stronger and more insidious than ever. It is no longer an Honoured Society—a single sect of criminals with its initiation rituals, its formalised dagger duels, its ranks and rules. Today camorrista means an affiliate of one of many structured, but frequently unstable, gangster syndicates. The camorra is not just one secret society like the mafias of Sicily and Calabria, therefore. Rather it is a vast and constantly shifting map of gangs ruling different territories in Naples and the Campania region. Like the Honoured Society of old, these organisations run protection rackets and trafficking operations. But—at least when things are going well for them—they are far more successful than the old Honoured Society ever was at infiltrating the state institutions, politics and the economy.

  To the audiences at the San Carlino in the late 1940s, such a future incarnation of the camorra would have seemed a highly unlikely prospect. Hoodlums were certainly active in Naples in the post-war years. But they were much less powerful than they are today—or indeed than they were in Sicily or Calabria at the time. Naples could not manage anything like the great Sicilian ruling-class conspiracy of silence about the mafia. There was no Neapolitan equivalent of a senior magistrate like Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, who was prepared, in the teeth of everything he knew, to deny the mafia’s very existence. And the great and troubled city of Naples was far from politically invisible in the way the towns and villages of Calabria were.

  However, under closer examination, the hoodlums of post-war Naples do turn out to be the progenitors of today’s Kalashnikov-wielding, cocaine-smuggling, suit-wearing camorristi. The seeds of the camorra’s future revival had already been planted. Indeed, there was already something menacing there in the city’s underworld—something that made it abundantly clear that the camorra was not as dead as all the encyclopedias claimed. A careful look at Neapolitan gangland in the 1940s and early 1950s also shows that Italy in general, and Naples in particular, had a guilty conscience when it came to organised crime. This was a city that refused to use the ‘c’ word (unless it was talking about the past, of course—about the San Carlino theatre or Gennaro Abbatemaggio). In short, Naples had both its own distinctive mobsters, and its own characteristic style of forgetting that they were there.

  Stereotypes were the most powerful way to forget about the camorra. Naples is Italy’s hardest city to decipher. Countless visitors have been lured into judging it by appearances, because those appearances are so obvious and so diverting. For hundreds of years, Europe has found the sunlit spectacle of Neapolitan street life irresistible. Here was a place where squalor seemed to come in colour, and sweet music to emerge miraculously from a constant din. The poor of the city had the reputation of using any shabby trick, putting on any demeaning act, in order to fill their bellies and live a life of dolce far niente (‘sweet idleness’). The reason Gennaro Abbatemaggio appeared in the papers so often in the late 1940s was not just because he had destroyed the Honoured Society; it was also because, with his tragicomic ducking and diving, he seemed like a personification of everybody’s archetypal Neapolitan. The San Carlino attracted attention because it too seemed peculiar and typical of the city. The Neapolitan poor were viewed as imps living in paradise: mischievous, sentimental, naïve, and endlessly inventive to the point of being unabashed about playing up to all the stereotypes about them. Before the war, Neapolitan urchins would charge a fee to foreigners who wanted to photograph them eating spaghetti with their hands, as a century and more of stereotypes dictated that they should.

  The post-war generation also had its travellers keen to revive these commonplaces. The simple trick was to show a city encapsulated only in what first met the eye in the poor neighbourhoods like Forcella or Pignasecca. A city of beggars and pedlars, where from every windowsill or doorway, from orange boxes or trays, somebody would be trying to sell you something: chestnuts, or fragments of fried fish, or single cigarettes, or prickly pears, or taralli (pretzels). Poor Naples was an open-air bazaar where barbers and tailors plied their trade out in the street, and where passers-by could look in at the single-family sweatshops making shoes or gloves.

  Foreigners were not the only ones responsible for rehashing the old clichés: there were always professional Neapolitans prepared to chip in too. One such was Giuseppe Marotta. He knew precisely how hard life in Naples could be: he and his two sisters had been brought up by a seamstress in one of the notorious bassi—the one-room apartments that opened directly onto the street. In 1926 he went north to become a writer in Italy’s industrial and literary capital, Milan. By the late 1940s, after years of hack-work, he had made it: he was a regular newspaper columnist, and the man to whom editors turned when they wanted a colourful piece on some aspect of Neapolitan life.

  In the stereotypical Naples that Marotta served up for his readers, lawlessness was not really crime, it was a part of the urban spectacle. Here pickpockets and endlessly inventive rip-off artists expressed a picturesque form of dishonesty—one that grew from hardship and not malice. There was something both creative and endearing about crime here. The poor of Naples could steal your heart as easily as lift your wallet.

  In one article from 1953, Marotta marvelled at the agility of the correntisti—daring, agile young crooks who would swing themselves up onto the back of a passing lorry so as to offload the contents as it rumbled along. This type of crime was known in the alleys as la corrente (‘the stream’) because of the fluidity of the whole operation. A good correntista, Marotta remarked, needed a freakish range of skills:

  The legs of a star centre forward, the eye of a sailor, the ear of a redskin, the velvet touch of a bishop, and the iron grip of a weightlifter—as well as hooked feet, rubber ribs, and the balance of a jockey. And to coordinate it all, the brain of the conductor Arturo Toscanini.

  Marotta also smirked indulgently at the teetering pyramids of stolen tin cans that were the fruits of the corrente.

  The truth that Marotta’s stereotypes concealed was that criminal power was a threatening presence in Naples. The poor, the very inhabitants of those alleys who so charmed onlookers, were often
its first victims, as one revealing episode from the everyday life of Naples allows us to see.

  At around 6.30, one hot summer evening in 1952, Antonio Quindici, known as ‘O Grifone (the Griffon), decided to buy some mussels. He presented himself at a stall in via Alessandro Poerio, not far from the station, but he found five workers from a nearby building site in front of him. He demanded to be served first, and the mussel-seller meekly obeyed. But the builders, who were from a different part of the city, obviously did not know whom they were dealing with, because they objected loudly. ‘O Grifone responded by grabbing the mussel-seller’s knife and stabbing the most vocal builder twice in the heart. He then fled. He was chased by the victim’s friends, but their pursuit was blocked by a coordinated group of accomplices. ‘O Grifone vanished into the side streets. His victim bled to death where he lay, leaving a wife and a baby daughter.

  The story of ‘O Grifone is interesting for several reasons. First because the murderer was one of the correntisti that Giuseppe Marotta so admired. Men like ‘O Grifone had learned their skills during the war, when Naples had been the major supply port for the Allied forces in Italy: around half of those supplies found their way off the backs of army lorries and onto the black market. The crowded area around via Forcella, where ‘O Grifone came from, was where the wartime trade in stolen military supplies was concentrated: not for nothing did the Forcella area become known as the kasbah of Naples. Significantly, Forcella was once also a stronghold of the Honoured Society: it was home to all the earliest bosses. Correntisti like ‘O Grifone would become protagonists of the camorra’s revival.

  When the war ended, everyone confidently expected the correntisti to disappear. Yet they were still very much in business in 1952, when one newspaper commented:

  The corrente is fluid, as everyone knows, and omnipresent, especially in the streets where there is most traffic. Communications between the city and its outskirts are watched over by squads of criminals. Quick, well-equipped and scornful of danger, these men remove all kinds of goods from vehicles. It can be said that no road-train, lorry or car escapes the clutches of the correntisti.

  Around each correntista there was a whole organisation that included teams of spies who tracked the path of valuable cargoes, porters who smuggled the goods away once they were dropped from the lorry, and fences who put the swag on the market. Long after the great days of military contraband came to an end, goods stolen by the corrente were still openly on sale in via Forcella.

  The correntisti were not just agile, but also violent. They were often armed, for practical reasons: to protect themselves from gun-wielding truck drivers and rival gangs; and to discourage passers-by from trying to pick up anything they might have seen falling off the back of a lorry. But they were also armed because they had to impose themselves on the community around them, and establish a reputation for toughness. Back in the days of the Honoured Society, this reputation would have been referred to as ‘honour’. It is one of the key ingredients of the mafias’ power—of ‘territorial control’, as it is termed. ‘O Grifone’s row at the mussel stall displayed that ‘honour’ in an individualistic, undisciplined form.

  After the stabbing, ‘O Grifone spent several days on the run. Eventually he had a last breakfast in the bar next to the police station and gave himself up, having first concocted a story about how he had been grievously insulted and provoked by the man he knifed to death. Evidently his support network could not stand the strain of a high-profile police investigation and a public outcry. ‘O Grifone and his friends still had limits to their territorial control.

  Strikingly, the newspapers in Naples referred to ‘O Grifone as a camorrista. Or at least they did so initially. This is one of the rare occasions when the word slipped into print in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, as the manhunt for ‘O Grifone continued over the following days, the early references to the camorra disappeared. ‘O Grifone started off as a camorrista, and then became a mere criminal.

  There was a palpable unease about using the word ‘camorra’ in Naples in the years after the war, as there was about admitting just how serious the city’s crime problem was. Naples was a key political battleground, where the soul of the Italian Right was being fought over by opposing political machines. On the one hand, there was the creeping power of the Christian Democrats. On the other, there were the Monarchists, under the war profiteer, shipping magnate and soccer mogul Achille Lauro. (Naples, like many southern cities, had voted against the Republic in the referendum of 1946. Thereafter, the monarchy remained a powerful rallying cause for the city’s right wing.)

  The Naples these two political machines contested was scarred by chronic unemployment and homelessness, poor health and illiteracy. Neapolitan industry and infrastructure had not recovered from the devastations of the war, which were worse here than in any other Italian city. Yet politics found no answers because it was beset with instability and malpractice, mostly rotating around the lucrative construction industry. These were the years of ‘maccheroni politics’. At election time, political grandees would order their local agents to set up distribution centres in the kasbahs of the centre. Here, packets of pasta, or cuts of meat, or pieces of salt cod would be wrapped in the vague promise of a job or a pension and handed out in exchange for votes. Achille Lauro’s campaign managers came up with the scheme of handing out pairs of shoes to their would-be supporters: the right shoe before the poll, and the left one afterwards, when the vote had been safely recorded.

  The poor who sold their support so cheaply seemed almost as resistant to the benefits of education, social improvement and conventional party politics as they had been when Italy was unified in 1860. Their political loyalties were understandably fickle. One of the few ways of trying to win them over, other than maccheroni or shoes, was a tear-jerking local patriotism: the claim that the city’s problems were all the fault of northern neglect. Achille Lauro, who also owned the second-biggest newspaper in Naples, Roma, was a master at playing up to the stereotype of Naples as a big-hearted city that history had treated harshly. Any talk of the camorra or organised crime was just old-fashioned northern snobbery.

  There was another reason why Neapolitans insisted on confining the word camorra to the past: criminals were part of the ruling political machines. Even the old camorra stool pigeon Gennaro Abbatemaggio was an occasional electoral runner for Achille Lauro. But much more important than these grassroots agents were the so-called guappi. As we have seen, guappi were fences and loan sharks, runners of illegal lotteries: they were the puppeteers of the city’s lively criminal scene. But they were not just criminal figures: guappi also pulled political strings, fixing everyday problems by calling in favours from the politicians on whose behalf they raked in votes come election time.

  The most famous guappo of them all was Giuseppe Navarra, known as the King of Poggioreale. He was a loyal electoral chief for the Monarchists and Achille Lauro, and collected honorific titles from his political protectors: Commendatore, and Knight of the Great Cross of the Constantinian Order. During the war, he had operated in the black market, making friends with the Allied authorities. He also made a great deal of money in iron and other scrap, which his people took (mostly illegally) from bombed-out buildings.

  Navarra lived among the coffin-makers on the main thoroughfare of Poggioreale, the neighbourhood where the cemetery and the prison stand. He held court on wooden chairs on the pavement. It is said that on his saint’s day, the tram would stop outside his house so that all the passengers could sample the sweets and liqueurs he offered. Navarra drove a gigantic Lancia Dilambda limousine with running boards down the side, a car of the kind we are used to seeing in American gangster movies of the inter-war years. Navarra bought it at an auction in Rome after the fall of Fascism; it used to belong to the Duce’s oldest son, Vittorio Mussolini. In 1947, one northern newspaper gave a tongue-in-cheek portrait of this street-corner monarch:

  He is about fifty, dumpy, with a square face and t
hick salt-and-pepper hair. One of his eyes is lazy, and his nose starts off from a very wide base on his face, but comes to a rapid end in a sharp point—as if it started off wanting to be a huge Bourbon nose, and then repented along the way.

  Navarra owed his fame, and quite a part of his popularity, to an extraordinary episode earlier in 1947, when he rescued the treasure of the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro (Saint Januarius). San Gennaro is the martyr whose ‘blood’ is kept in a glass box in Naples cathedral so that it can miraculously liquefy a couple of times a year. Or not, if the citizens meet with the Almighty’s displeasure for whatever reason. The saint’s treasure is a collection of gifts from the faithful, which was taken to the Vatican for safe-keeping during the war. Firsthand details of the King of Poggioreale’s supposed act of heroism are sketchy because almost all newspapers, rather suspiciously, did not report it until later. But the story told is that, when the mayor asked the chief of police to help bring the treasure home, he was refused: the police could not spare the money or resources to send the armoured car, ten trucks and twenty-man armed escort that it would take to carry the treasure over the dangerous roads between the capital and Naples. At that point, the guappo Navarra volunteered his services, and did the job stealthily by car, with an aged Catholic aristocrat on the passenger seat next to him. He reportedly travelled in a FIAT 22, which was less conspicuous than his limo. But quite how he fitted all the treasure in its tiny boot is not entirely clear. Bizarrely, Ernest Borgnine later recreated the escapade when he played the title role in the 1961 movie, The King of Poggioreale.