Blood Brotherhoods
Page 42
Over the coming days and weeks, Minister Tambroni was scatter-gunned with telegrams announcing the recapture of one convicted Calabrian mafioso after another. Police arrested two of the men who had tried to blackmail Giuseppe Aloi, the brick manufacturer, and recovered numerous weapons in the same operation. They even managed to collar a town hall employee in Gioia Tauro who was stealing blank identity cards for gangsters who needed to become someone else. Vincenzo Romeo—the fugitive with ten dogs—was arrested, as (eventually) was Angelo Macrì, who had fled back to his native America. Marzano even went on a lone expedition up into Aspromonte, by car and on foot, and single-handedly brought back a renegade murderer from Bova.
Five weeks after arriving in Reggio, hyperactive Police Chief Marzano felt entitled to dictate a toadying dispatch to Minister Tambroni:
The face of the whole province has been transformed. The citizenry approve of the operation. There has been a tide of beneficial renewal, and trust in the state’s authority has been reborn. The citizens know that they owe it all exclusively to Your Excellency’s decisiveness and resolution. Without any trace of rhetorical exaggeration, I can guarantee that if Your Excellency came to visit Reggio, You would be literally carried shoulder-high.
The public seemed to like what was going on; the press certainly did. Correspondents arrived in Calabria in the kind of numbers previously only attracted by one of the region’s frequent natural disasters. Remarkably, as a result of the Marzano Operation, Italy began its first-ever national debate about organised crime in Calabria. Naturally enough, journalists filed copy that contained lots of colourful material about the secret criminal sect that went by the name of ‘mafia’, or ‘Honoured Society’, or ‘Fibbia’ (‘Buckle’). Indeed a new name emerged from interviews with local people: ’ndrangheta. Pronounced an-dran-get-ah, it means ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’ in the Greek-based dialect of the southern slopes of Aspromonte. The word has a long history, but its known association with the Honoured Society only begins in the 1930s. ‘’Ndrangata’ was one of many names used by Calabrian mafiosi to surface during Fascist police operations. The publicity created by the Marzano Operation in 1955 ensured that ’ndrangheta soon won out as the brotherhood’s official moniker, used by members and non-members alike. After some three-quarters of a century of growing in the shadows, Calabria’s version of the mafia had at last attracted enough public attention to merit a commonly agreed-upon name of its own.
The Marzano Operation also caused some Calabrians to recover their memories. One notable example was Corrado Alvaro, the region’s best-known writer. He was born in San Luca, the ‘Bethlehem of organised crime’ on the slopes of Aspromonte whose criminals act as guardians of the Honoured Society’s customs. Alvaro was no ’ndrangheta sympathiser. But he could scarcely avoid learning about it as he grew up. The stories from his early life that Alvaro would later publish make it clear that he knew a great deal about Calabria’s Honoured Society. After the Second World War, when Alvaro moved to Rome, he became an unofficial spokesman for the voiceless poor of his home region; he turned Aspromonte’s downtrodden peasants into archetypes of human resilience. Perhaps through a misguided desire to protect Calabria from bad publicity, or perhaps for darker and more mysterious reasons, Alvaro kept a long silence about the region’s criminal brotherhood. In 1949, denouncing the feudal squalor still endured by shepherds and peasants, he wrote that, ‘There were attempts to set up criminal societies in imitation of the mafia, but they never took root. Still today, Calabria is one of the safest parts of the country, at any time, and in any isolated corner.’ The jotted notes in Alvaro’s diary show that these remarks were in bad faith:
Boss of the Festival of the Madonna (Polsi, San Luca). A provincial boss could not be elected in 1948 because **** [name omitted] had just got out of jail, wanted to live in tranquillity, and did not accept the job. From that moment on the Honoured Society has been divided into three zones: the Ionian coast, the Tyrrhenian coast, and the Straits, with no overall capo.
The ’ndrangheta’s high-level internal politics were evidently an open secret in San Luca, and even beyond. But in public, Alvaro kept his silence. At around the same time, he jotted an aphorism in his diary that would later become famous: ‘The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.’ Perhaps Alvaro, better than many, knew what that fear felt like.
In 1955, following the Marzano Operation, Alvaro changed his mind. He wrote about the ’ndrangheta in a column in the Corriere della Sera, and memories of the ’ndrangheta from his youth surfaced in his other writings. Indeed he probably did more than anyone to help the new name catch on.
In the end, restoring Corrado Alvaro’s memory and naming the ’ndrangheta turned out to be the Marzano Operation’s only long-term achievements. And the key obstacle to achieving anything more lasting was Minister Tambroni’s refusal to seriously tackle the ’ndrangheta’s friends in politics.
The papers from Interior Ministry archives now allow us to peer behind the scenes of the Marzano Operation. Those documents show just how much information Tambroni’s civil servants gathered about politicians who were hand in glove with gangsters in Calabria. The Martian invasion of 1955 revealed some darkly comic cameos of bad faith and connivance.
One case in point involved a typical southern grandee: Antonio Capua, an MP from the Liberal Party, one of the Christian Democrats’ coalition partners. Indeed, what passed for the ‘Liberal Party’ in Calabria was actually Capua’s personal clientele. Capua also sat across the Cabinet table from Fernando Tambroni, as Junior Minister for Agriculture and Forestry. Given that both agriculture and forestry played a big role in the local economy, Capua’s job meant that he had a great many tax-funded favours to bestow on his friends. Tambroni discovered that Capua often pressed officials in private to grant driving and gun licences to known ’ndranghetisti, and his local election agents mingled closely with thugs from the Honoured Society.
Capua was already in the headlines in Calabria before the Marzano Operation began. In a mysterious incident that reeked of the ’ndrangheta, a group of men fired shots at his wife’s car as she was driving high on Aspromonte. Capua tried to cover the whole story up. When the press got hold of it, they published a garbled but even more worrying version, saying that Capua himself had been the target of a would-be assassination. An attempt on the life of a government minister was more than local news, and the national newspapers duly took an interest.
When Tambroni’s Martians landed in the autumn, the new chief of police investigated both the shooting episode and Capua’s underworld friends. But worse was to follow for the Junior Minister: many people jumped to the conclusion that Capua had called the Martians in as a result of the assassination attempt. The ’ndrangheta took the same view, and began to wonder why their favourite grandee had brought so much trouble down on their heads. The Junior Minister was in a desperate predicament; he looked like a crook to the police and a traitor to the ’ndrangheta.
On 14 September 1955, Junior Minister Capua made a desperate bid to save his credibility with both the ’ndrangheta and the police. He arranged to meet with Police Chief Marzano because he wanted to discuss the case of a suspect that Marzano was interrogating at the time. The suspect, an ’ndranghetista called Pizzi who was also the mayor of Condofuri, was Capua’s election agent for the whole Ionian coast of the province of Reggio Calabria. Capua presumably hoped that his prestige as a Junior Minister would intimidate the chief of police. That, after all, is just how countless mafiosi had been protected over the previous century. But the new chief of police was confident enough in his own political backing not to be intimidated. Instead, he calmly showed Capua the damning evidence he had already accumulated against Mayor Pizzi, who was sitting in the room with them. The Junior Minister responded with the kind of brass neck of which only a certain kind of Italian politician is capable. First, he feigned surprise and disappointment. Then he calmly told Marzano that his friend
Mayor Pizzi was an honest man who had, despite good intentions, been corrupted by his environment. At that, he turned to Mayor Pizzi and gave him a finger-wagging in tones of plaintive sincerity, telling him to change his ways and collaborate with the police ‘from now on’.
Alas, the records do not tell us Fernando Tambroni’s reactions when he read this story about his Cabinet colleague. We do not know whether he was shocked, or whether he laughed fit to strain the seams on his Del Rosso suit. But we can make a guess at his thinking. Tambroni might have reasoned that exposing Capua would upset the delicate balance of the coalition government. Or perhaps he simply followed one of the old, unwritten rules of Italian institutional life. Every governing faction, every party clique, had to get into bed at some point or another with politicians who were ‘friends of the friends’ in Sicily, Campania or Calabria. Start a serious investigation into one of them, and there was no telling where it would end. No matter that law enforcement on the ground in southern Italy said that the mafias could never be eradicated if their political protectors remained untouched. Better to let it all lie. The evidence against Junior Minister Capua was buried.
Capua also managed to smooth things over with his friends in the ’ndrangheta. Or so we must assume, for he was re-elected at the next poll.
Another politician whose nefarious dealings came to light during the Marzano Operation came from the Minister of the Interior’s own party, the Christian Democrats. A top-secret report to Tambroni indicated that Domenico Catalano was part of a close-knit group of three DC chiefs who had managed to insert themselves into powerful positions in local quangos and Catholic organisations. There were strong suspicions that all three of these Christian Democrats had links to organised crime. Catalano even boasted publicly that he had arranged for a previous chief of police to be transferred away from Calabria when he became too enthusiastic in his pursuit of ’ndranghetisti. Most worryingly of all, Catalano had a seat on the ‘Provincial Commission for Police Measures’. This was a crucial body that ruled on cases in which the police asked for a dangerous suspect to be whisked off into internal exile on a penal colony without a proper trial. (As we have seen, internal exile had been in use in Italy since the days when the Carabinieri were equipped with muskets and horses rather than machine guns and jeeps. It was not only highly dubious from a legal point of view, it was also totally counter-productive, since the penal colonies were notorious recruiting grounds for the mafias.)
During the Marzano Operation, the police filed requests for batches of ’ndrangheta suspects to be shipped to the remote penal colony of Ustica, off the northern coast of Sicily. But Minister Tambroni’s man on the ground, the Prefect of Reggio Calabria, noticed that Domenico Catalano displayed what they called a ‘certain indulgence’ towards men with particularly bloodcurdling criminal records. A number of parish priests also gave evidence before the Provincial Commission for Police Measures in the same strangely indulgent fashion. But rather than make trouble, the Prefect decided to act in a classic Christian Democrat fashion, and had a quiet word with the Archbishop.
Now the Archbishop of Reggio Calabria at the time was certainly no friend of the ’ndrangheta. He had only recently penned a pastoral letter denouncing ‘shadowy secret societies that, under the pretext of honour and strength, teach and impose crime, vendetta and abuse of power’. We can only imagine how disturbed he would have been at the news that Domenico Catalano, a politician who was a senior member of local Church-backed organisations, was in league with organised crime. But rather than create a fuss, the Archbishop decided to act in classic Italian Church fashion, and have a quiet word with Catalano himself. The Archbishop gently persuaded Catalano to take his responsibilities on the Provincial Commission for Police Measures more seriously.
The little chain of quiet words seemed to work. For a while, Catalano voted the same way as everyone else on the commission, which began to send ’ndranghetisti into internal exile.
But then the Provincial Commission for Police Measures was asked to rule on the case of a notoriously powerful criminal who has already played (or rather danced) an important role in our story: Antonio Macrì, known as don ’Ntoni, who reputedly joined the Carabiniere Master Joe in a tarantella at the Festival of the Madonna of Polsi during the last years of Fascism. By 1955, don ’Ntoni was not only the ‘chief cudgel’ in the market town of Siderno, he was also one of the most powerful bosses in the whole of Calabria. In the autumn of 1953, don ’Ntoni was known to have presided over a plenary meeting of the ’ndrangheta during the Polsi Festival. (A fact that constitutes yet more evidence that the ’ndrangheta has always had coordinating structures of some kind.)
Now, sending a rank-and-file ’ndranghetista to a penal colony was one thing; confining don ’Ntoni was quite another. On 3 September 1955, with the chief cudgel waiting in the corridor outside the room where the Provincial Commission for Police Measures was sitting, Domenico Catalano got to his feet. He solemnly informed the commission’s other members that he felt it was his duty to make a declaration that ‘concerned the Vatican’. He then told a tale that left everyone else in the room open-mouthed.
Catalano’s tale went something like this. Some years ago, the Bishop of Locri discovered that a number of priests had been stealing money from a Church charity. The Bishop forced the priests to give back the money, Catalano explained. At which the priests hired an assassin to do away with the Bishop. Luckily the Bishop heard tell of the plot to kill him, and wisely sought protection from the dominant ’ndranghetista in the area, don ’Ntoni Macrì. Don ’Ntoni, Domenico Catalano revealed, had used his good offices to save the Bishop’s life. Surely a man capable of such a noble gesture deserved merciful treatment from the Provincial Commission for Police Measures?
The other commissioners were not convinced. Don ’Ntoni Macrì was promptly dispatched to a penal colony, forcing a brief pause in his formidable criminal career. A full report was sent to Minister Tambroni in Rome.
Quite whether there really was any truth in Catalano’s highly unlikely story about the plan to kill the Bishop of Locri we will never know, short of a documented declaration by the Papacy. But the whole affair is nonetheless exemplary. Italy’s problem with organised crime was not just that mafia influence seeped into the state through private channels. It was also that prefects, politicians and archbishops preferred to use the very same private channels. Instead of respecting the law, they preferred to have a quiet word.
Once again, Minister of the Interior Tambroni read this report and did nothing. No matter that the case involved a clear instance of a politician trying to bend the law in an ’ndranghetista’s favour. Domenico Catalano, the spinner of the strange tale of the bishop saved by the mafia boss, kept his seat on the Provincial Commission for Police Measures for years to come.
On 27 October 1955—a mere fifty-four days after landing—Police Chief Marzano got back into his flying saucer and left Calabria for good. It was hopeless to imagine that less than two months of intensive police activity could make any long-term difference. All too soon, the ’ndranghetisti would return from their penal colonies and everything would return to normal.
The Italian state could hardly have given a clearer demonstration of its desperately short attention span. Tambroni’s policing apparatus did not even seem keen to really understand the ’ndrangheta as an organisation. The entire chain of command, right down from the Ministry of the Interior in Rome to the junior officers on the ground in Calabria, had at their disposal much of the information needed to build up a convincing picture of the Calabrian mafia. On 28 May 1955, only three months before the start of the Marzano Operation, police and Carabinieri had raided a house in Rosarno and found a notebook containing the ’ndrangheta’s rules. Two and a half weeks later, the Monster of Presinaci was finally captured, and made clear his intention to tell the police everything. The authorities knew a great deal: the ’ndrangheta’s cellular, territorially based structure; its extortion rackets and culture of vendetta;
the way it set itself as an alternative to the law, and its ability to forge bonds with the feuding cliques and factions of Calabrian politics. Yet there is not a jot of evidence that Police Chief Marzano was even mildly interested in putting these crucial new sources of intelligence to any practical use. Nor, in the small mountain of official correspondence generated by the Marzano Operation, is there any hint that the authorities had a historical memory of the Honoured Society’s development, or of the lessons to be learned from previous attempts to combat it. In short, no one associated with the ‘Martian invasion’ thought that to beat the ’ndrangheta, it might be a good idea to understand it from the inside.
In parliament in Rome, the Communists suspected that fighting the ’ndrangheta was never the Marzano Operation’s real aim. They were convinced that Tambroni’s promise to ‘show no favours’ was hollow and cynical from the outset. The most flagrant instances of organised criminal support for politicians involved Christian Democrats. One Socialist MP said in parliament that Vincenzo Romeo, the boss with ten dogs, had gone round with a machine gun shouting, ‘Either you vote Christian Democrat, or I’ll kill you.’ Yet Marzano was being ideologically selective in the mafiosi he rounded up, the Communists protested. The DC mayor of the provincial capital Reggio Calabria had not been detained, despite serious evidence of links to organised crime. By contrast the Communist mayor of the mountain village of Canolo, Nicola D’Agostino, had been arrested and sent into internal exile.