by John Dickie
There was definitely some substance in the Communist claims that Tambroni’s Martian invasion had an ideological bias. However, the D’Agostino case was probably an unfortunate one for the Communists to cite, because it is clear that this particular mayor was a member of the PCI, while never ceasing to be an ’ndrangheta boss. The police claimed that he used the party to exert his personal power over the town. D’Agostino was not the only case of the kind: the Monster of Presinaci’s last victim was a Communist ’ndranghetista, for example. Communists in southern Calabria had fewer antibodies against mafia infiltration than did their comrades in western Sicily, who could count so many martyrs to the fight against organised crime. Here and there in Calabria, the ’ndrangheta had the power to hollow out even the ideology of its enemies.
That said, it seems that Tambroni had no particularly cunning political plan. He simply rushed into the Marzano Operation, and rushed out again when he realised just how profoundly rooted the ’ndrangheta was. Sensibly, Interior Minister Tambroni decided to take the plaudits for Marzano’s easy early victories, dispatch a few gangsters to penal colonies for a couple of years, and then revert to managing Calabria in the normal way. Symptomatic of that return to normality was the final outcome of the Monster of Presinaci case. In September 1957, Serafino Castagna was sentenced to life imprisonment, as was inevitable. But of the sixty-five men implicated by his evidence, forty-six were acquitted and the other nineteen received suspended sentences of between two and three years.
The story of the Marzano Operation and the Monster of Presinaci is typical of the state’s response when violence flared up from the underworld. Once that violence faded from the headlines, the authorities resorted to their old habits of cohabiting with mafia power.
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THE PRESIDENT OF POTATO PRICES (AND HIS WIDOW)
BY THE MID-1950S THERE WERE SIGNS THAT THE ITALIAN ECONOMY HAD ENTERED A period of sustained growth that would finally leave the hardships of wartime behind. In 1950, industrial production overtook pre-war levels. Inflation, which had reached 73.5 per cent per year in 1947, came down to single digits. Unemployment was dropping steadily too. The South still lagged well behind the North, but in the cities of all regions Italians were beginning to spend more. Better food was the first item on the national shopping list, notably the staples of what would later become known as the Mediterranean diet: pasta, and particularly fruit and vegetables.
One place that felt the effects of increased consumption was the wholesale fruit and vegetable market in the Vasto quarter of Naples: roughly 30 per cent of Italy’s fruit and vegetable exports were funnelled through it. While other parts of Italy could manage a seasonal trade in one or two specialised crops, the hyper-fertile hinterland of Naples grew every conceivable food plant in year-round abundance. The fresh tomatoes, courgettes, potatoes, peaches and lemons emanating from the region every year were worth some 16 billion lire (roughly $300 million in today’s values). A further 12 billion lire ($220 million) came from walnuts, hazelnuts, peanuts, raisins, figs and other dried foods.
Yet, for all its wealth, the wholesale market in Naples was a shambolic spectacle. Here was one of the city’s economic nerve-centres, located at the railhead, within easy reach of the port. Yet it was little more than a cluster of skeletal hangars, where rusting wire mesh and crumbling concrete still betrayed damage from the war. A variety of ramshackle vehicles skated through the permanent puddles in the hangars’ shade: donkey wagons and lorries, handcarts and tiny cars with comically outsized roof-racks—all of them loaded with teetering crate stacks of aubergines, lettuces, apricots and cherries. The market was serviced by a few cramped offices, a post office and a couple of bank branches in the surrounding streets. There were no teleprinters or rows of phones. Deals, however big, were done on the pavements of via Firenze and Corso Novara, face to face, in stagey exclamations of scorn and disbelief. Now and then, when a serious deal was in the offing or a major account had to be settled, a big-shot vegetable trader from a provincial market town would climb out of his sports car, smooth his hair and his suit, and receive the reverential greetings of agents and labour.
In 1955, one of the most famous murder cases of the era exposed just how powerful and dangerous a caste these fruit and vegetable dealers were. The trial of the ‘new camorra’, it was called. For, in 1955, Italy began hesitantly to use the ‘c’ word again. What the case demonstrated, to anyone who cared to look closely, was that the mafias were advancing in step with the growth of the Italian economy. Business was becoming one of the main drivers of mafia history.
Pasquale Simonetti was one of those fruit and vegetable dealers. Two metres tall and thirty-one years old, he had the bulk of a heavyweight and a physiognomy to match: his hard little eyes were pushed far apart by a thick nose (natural or broken, it was hard to tell); his square, burly head was mounted on a neck that defied his tailor’s best efforts to restrain it in a shirt collar. He was known, unimaginatively, as Pascalone ’e Nola—‘Big Pasquale from Nola’ (Nola being a market town not far from the city).
On the morning of 16 July 1955, Big Pasquale was shot twice as he peeled an orange he had just bought from a stall. The shooter, a young blond man in a slate-grey suit, fled unmolested. The victim, abandoned to haemorrhage into the gutter by his sidekicks, died in hospital near dawn the following day. Police moved his body straight to the morgue to avoid an unsightly pilgrimage of mourning by the criminal fraternity from the countryside.
As yet, nobody seemed to want to make the connection between Pasquale Simonetti’s death and the huge fruit and vegetable economy. The traditional Neapolitan reticence about mob stories was still in force. The profiles of Big Pasquale that followed his murder did not make it beyond the crime pages of the local dailies. In addition to trading in the produce of Campanian farms, Big Pasquale was already familiar to the local press as a smuggler and enforcer. Some of his deeds had been as flagrantly public as his shooting. In 1951, near the main entrance to the railway station, he had bludgeoned a man with a wrench wrapped in a newspaper; the victim told the police he had not seen anything. Then there was the gun battle in the town centre of Giugliano that had earned him his time in Poggioreale prison, where he became the boss of his wing. In short, Big Pasquale seemed like just another thug from the province, and no one knew or cared much what went on out there. If he had been killed on his home turf rather than in the centre of the city, then the story would not have merited more than a few lines.
Fruit and vegetable racket. The wholesale market in Naples was a major source of income for the camorra in the 1950s.
Nevertheless, Big Pasquale’s death was just news enough for one or two journalists to want to bulk it out with human interest. There were rumours that he had gone straight before he died. The suggested explanation for this unlikely character transformation was his new wife: a broad-hipped, small-town beauty queen from Castellammare di Stabia. While Big Pasquale was in prison, she had written to him every day, vowing to keep him off the ‘steep and painful path of sin’, and gushing her teenage daydreams: ‘I feel truly emotional, and even a little bit afraid, when I think my nice Tarzan will be able to carry me far, far away from this ugly place to go and live in an enchanted castle where fairies live.’ Baptised Assunta Maresca, Big Pasquale’s young widow was known by her family as Pupetta (‘Little Doll’). She was expecting a baby when her husband died.
On 4 October 1955, two and a half months after her Tarzan’s murder, a visibly pregnant Pupetta asked to be driven from Castellammare to the wholesale market in Naples; she stopped off on the way to put flowers on Big Pasquale’s grave. In Corso Novara, only a few metres from the point where he had fallen, she encountered another prime exemplar of the fruit-and-vegetable-trader type: Antonio Esposito, aka ‘Big Tony from Pomigliano’. An altercation ensued, it seems, during which Pupetta’s driver ran away. Then the shooting started. Pupetta’s FIAT 1100 was hit several times, including once through the seat that the driver had just vacated. Pup
etta, who had been firing from the rear seat with a Beretta 7.65 that Big Pasquale had given her, was unharmed. She escaped on foot. However, her target, Big Tony from Pomigliano, caught five fatal bullets.
‘Widowed, pregnant beauty queen in gangland gun battle’: now here was a story to attract national attention to the strange world of Campanian wholesale greengrocery.
Pupetta toying with a string of pearls. Pupetta stroking her long dark hair. Pupetta leaning against a tree. Pupetta in a prison smock. Pupetta in happier days. Pupetta holding her prison-born baby. When both Corso Novara murders were brought to court in a unified trial, it was Pupetta’s photo that newspaper readers were hungry to gaze at, and she obliged them by posing like a Hollywood starlet. But who was the cherubic girl in the pictures, and what had turned her into a murderer? Was she a gangland vamp, or just a widowed young mother, crazed by grief?
Camorra bride. Pupetta Maresca marries her ‘President of Potato Prices’, Big Pasquale from Nola (1954). She would soon be a widow, and a killer.
Pupetta Maresca gave her own response to these questions as soon as she took the witness stand: her opening gambit was ‘I killed for love.’ She admitted shooting Big Tony from Pomigliano, and maintained that he, along with another wholesale greengrocer called Antonio Tuccillo (known, prosaically, as ’o Bosso—‘the Boss’), had ordered Big Pasquale dead. Big Pasquale had said as much to her on his deathbed, or so Pupetta claimed. Therefore this was a crime of passion, a widow’s vengeance visited on her beloved husband’s assassin. One correspondent, recalling Puccini’s tragic opera about a woman driven to avenge her murdered lover, toyed with the idea that Pupetta was a rustic Tosca.
This was the Pupetta that the public wanted to see—or at least part of it did. It was blindingly obvious that there was a mob backdrop to the story. Newspapers in the north had started a full-scale debate about the ‘new camorra’. But in Naples the idea that the camorra might not be dead after all still put people on edge. Roma, the newspaper that supported Mayor Achille Lauro, was as keen as ever to paint a sentimental gloss over organised crime. Lauro’s Naples would never give in to any prejudiced northerner who tried to use these tragic murders as a pretext to bring up the camorra again. Roma, and with it part of Neapolitan public opinion, took Tosca-Pupetta to its heart and pleaded with the judges to send her home to her baby.
But this was not the real Pupetta. To many in court, it seemed that she was deliberately playing up to the Tosca comparison. She spoke not in her habitual dialect, but in a self-consciously correct Italian. As one correspondent noted, ‘Pupetta is trying to talk with a plum in her mouth. She says, “It’s manifest that” and “That’s what fate decreed”—phrases that wouldn’t be at all out of place coming from the mouth of a heroine in a pulp novel written to have an impact on tender hearts and ignorant minds.’
The cracks in both her courtroom persona and her line of defence quickly began to show. Her melodramatic posturing did not sit easily with her lawyer’s best line of argument: that she had been threatened and attacked in Corso Novara by Big Tony from Pomigliano, and that she shot him in self-defence. Indeed Pupetta managed to put a hole in her own case with the first words she spoke to the court: ‘I killed for love. And because they wanted to kill me. I’m sure that if my husband came back to life, and they killed him again, I would go back and do what I did once more.’
The prosecution did not need to point out that a homicide could be a crime of passion, or a desperate act of self-defence. But it could never be both.
Pupetta was asked whether her family had a nickname in Castellammare. She squirmed, and dodged the issue for a while. When she finally answered she could not help the look of pride that crossed her face: ‘They call my family ’e lampetielli,’ she admitted—the ‘Flashing Blades’. The Marescas were a notoriously violent lot, with criminal records to go with their nickname. Young she may have been, but Pupetta herself had already been accused of wounding. Her victim withdrew the charges, for reasons that are not hard to imagine.
One of Pupetta’s main concerns during the trial was to absolve her sixteen-year-old brother Ciro of any involvement in the murder. Ciro, it was alleged, had been next to Pupetta in the back seat of the FIAT 1100, and had fired a pistol at Tony from Pomigliano. The boy’s defence was not helped by the fact that he was still on the run from the law at the time of the trial.
But it may not just have been her brother that Pupetta was trying to shield. Ballistics experts never ascertained exactly how many shots were exchanged—twenty-five? forty?—because the holes spattered across the walls in Corso Novara could feasibly have been the result of previous fruit-related firefights. But it is quite possible that Pupetta and her brother Ciro were not the only people attacking Big Tony. If so, then ‘Tosca’ had actually been leading a full-scale firing party, and had embarked on a military operation rather than a solitary, impulsive act of vengeance.
Through the fissures in Pupetta’s façade, post-war Italy was getting its first glimpses of a deeply rooted underworld system in the Neapolitan countryside, a system that no amount of stereotypes could conceal. Pupetta was a young woman profoundly enmeshed in the business of her clan. And that clan’s business included her marriage: far from being a union of Tarzan and a fairy princess, this was a bond between a prestigious criminal bloodline like the ‘Flashing Blades’, and an up-and-coming young hoodlum like Big Pasquale. The world of the Campanian clans was one whose driving force was not the heat of family passions, but a coldly calculating mix of diplomacy and violence. Shortly before either of the fruit-market murders, a set-piece dinner for fifty guests was held. It seems that the dinner was a celebration of a peace deal of some kind between Big Pasquale and Big Tony from Pomigliano, the man Pupetta would eventually murder. No one could say with any certainty what had been said and agreed round the dinner table. What was obvious was that the peace deal quickly broke down. Yet even after Big Pasquale’s death, the diplomatic efforts continued: there were frequent contacts between Big Tony from Pomigliano’s people and Pupetta’s family. Were they trying to buy peace with the young widow’s clan? To stop the feud interfering with business?
These and a dozen other questions were destined to remain without a clear answer at the end of the hearings, largely because, once Pupetta had given evidence, the rest of the trial was a parade of liars. The refrain was relentless: ‘I didn’t see anything’, ‘I don’t remember’. Only one man was actually arrested in court: he had flagrantly tried to sell his testimony to whichever lawyer was prepared to pay most. But many others deserved the same treatment. The presiding judge frequently lost his patience. ‘You are all lying here. We’ll write everything down, and then we’ll send up a prayer to the Lord to find out which one is the real fibber.’
As the Neapolitan newspaper Il Mattino commented, whether they lied for the prosecution or lied for the defence, most of the witnesses were people ‘from families where it is a rare accident for someone to die of natural causes’. The young blond man in the slate-grey suit who had gunned down Pupetta’s husband was called Gaetano Orlando. His father, don Antonio, had been wounded in an assassination attempt six years earlier. In revenge, Gaetano ambushed the culprit, but only succeeded in shooting dead a little girl called Luisa Nughis; he served only three years of a risible six-year sentence. Big Tony from Pomigliano’s family were even more fearsome: all three of the dead man’s brothers worked in fruit and vegetable exports with him; all three had faced murder charges; and one of them, Francesco, gave evidence in dark glasses because he had been blinded in a shotgun attack in 1946.
Jailbirds and thugs they may have been, but these were people with drivers and domestic servants, accountants and bodyguards. They owned businesses, drove luxury cars and wore well-tailored suits. Big Pasquale’s uncle, a man with an uncanny resemblance to Yul Brynner, now spent much of his time gambling in Saint Vincent and Monte Carlo—this despite having served twenty years for murder in the United States. The grey-suited Gaetano Orlando was
the son of a former mayor of Marano, and the family firm had recently won a juicy contract to supply fruit and vegetables to a city hospital consortium. The young killer himself personally took charge of selling produce in Sicily, Rome, Milan and Brescia.
By this stage, the most astute observers of the case were less interested in the beguiling figure of Pupetta than in just how these violent men were making money from the vast agricultural production of the Campania region. Something Pupetta said early in proceedings opened a chink in the wall of omertà. She referred to Big Pasquale as the ‘President of Potato Prices’. He was the man who determined the wholesale price of potatoes across the marketplace. The other man murdered in Corso Novara, Big Tony from Pomigliano, was also described as a President of Prices.
So what exactly did a President of Prices do? Pupetta put a fairy-tale gloss on her husband’s role. Her Tarzan fixed potato prices in the interests of the poor farmers, she said. He was an honest man, who was hated by other more exploitative business rivals. This account is no more credible than the rest of Pupetta’s evidence. What seems likely is that a President’s power, as is always the case with Italian mafia crime, was rooted in a given territory where he could build an organisation able to use violence without fear of punishment. His men would approach the smallholding farmers offering credit, seed, tools and whatever else was needed for the next growing season. The debt would be paid off by the crop, for which a low price was settled before it was even planted. Bosses like Big Pasquale or Big Tony were able to deploy vandalism and beatings systematically to quell any farmer who had enough cash or chutzpah to try and operate outside of the cartel. By controlling the supply of fruit and vegetables in this way, men who combined the roles of loan shark, extortionist and commercial middle-man could set the sums to be paid when the lorryfuls of produce were unloaded under the hangars in the Vasto quarter of Naples.
