Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  To the Neapolitans, the incoming mafiosi brought many things, such as organisational skills, and particularly prestige. For who has not heard of the Sicilian mafia? And who, among criminals, is not afraid of it?

  To the Sicilians, Neapolitans like ‘Mad Mike’ offered excellent smuggling contacts and a vast distribution network. Bringing them inside Cosa Nostra was a way of keeping a close eye on them. Indeed, they also did the same thing, and for the same reason, to a major Palermitan cigarette smuggler, Tommaso Spadaro.

  The Sicilian mafia’s decision to absorb some camorristi also had strategic military motives. The dominant players in Neapolitan contraband during the late 1960s were multinational traffickers known collectively as the Marseillais—because one of their previous bases had been in the French port of Marseille. Between 1971 and 1973, Cosa Nostra’s men in Campania deployed their firepower to cut out the competition. A handful of Neapolitan cigarette smugglers were executed, and at least six Marseillais. By mafia standards, this was a very small investment in violence that would reap very big returns. Soon Cosa Nostra and its Campanian friends had the contraband tobacco market to themselves.

  Business ballooned. One estimate suggests that, in the late 1970s, the annual turnover of the illegal cigarette business in Campania was some 48.6 billion lire (very roughly $215 million in 2012 values), and net profit stood at somewhere between 20 and 24 billion ($88–$106 million). In 1977, the Carabinieri found ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza with an account book, according to which mafia-camorra tobacco smuggling turned over an astonishing 150 billion lire a year (over $620 million). Between 40,000 and 60,000 people in the Campania region are thought to have found employment in the smuggling economy. The FIAT of southern Italy indeed.

  Cosa Nostra got more than its share of the bonanza. Naples, according to a mafioso heavily involved in contraband, became the ‘El Dorado’ of Sicilian organised crime. As Tommaso Buscetta, a veteran cigarette smuggler, recalled:

  The volume of business in the illegal cigarette trade became enormous. In the 1950s, 500 cases were considered a big consignment. Now we’d reached as many as 35–40,000 cases unloaded every time a contraband ship travelled between Naples and Palermo.

  Managing the flow of wealth that came to Sicily from across the Tyrrhenian Sea also had profound effects on the Sicilian mafia. For by 1969, most of the Men of Honour charged as a result of the First Mafia War had been acquitted, and they were free to pick up where they had left off at the time of the Ciaculli bomb. They wasted little time letting everyone in Palermo know they were back. At a quarter to seven on the evening of 10 December 1969, five men in stolen police uniforms machine-gunned the occupants of a construction company office in viale Lazio. Five were killed, including one of the attackers and their intended target: the mafia boss Michele Cavataio, who many within Cosa Nostra thought was the mastermind behind the car-bombing campaign of the early 1960s. We now know that the men who carried out the viale Lazio massacre were delegates from different mafia Families—as if to demonstrate that Cavataio’s execution had been decreed by Cosa Nostra as a whole.

  Thus, after a six-year hiatus following the Ciaculli bomb, the Sicilian mafia resumed its constitutional life. The first formal shape that Cosa Nostra’s politics took was a triumvirate of senior bosses who were entrusted with reawakening the organisation’s dormant structures in the province of Palermo. The first triumvir, and probably the most prestigious, was Stefano Bontate, known as the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’, capo of the largest Family in Palermo, a job he had inherited from his father. Bontate was mafia aristocracy. The second triumvir was Gaetano ‘Tano’ Badalamenti, the boss of Cinisi, where Palermo’s new airport provided a huge source of revenue; Badalamenti had long-standing links with Cosa Nostra in Detroit. The third was Luciano Liggio from Corleone.

  The triumvirate gave way to the full Commission in 1974, with Cinisi mobster Tano Badalamenti sitting at the head of the table. It was now a subtly different kind of body. When the Commission was set up in the late 1950s, there was a rule that no Family capo could have a seat. The ostensible objective was to hear complaints from individual Men of Honour about their bosses, and to protect them from unwarranted bullying. The Commission activated in 1974, by contrast, was composed of the most important bosses in the province of Palermo. It is no coincidence that this new shape emerged at the time that smuggling cigarettes through Naples was one of the mafia’s major sources of income. For as well as being a body devoted to managing relations between the Families, the Commission became a tobacco-smuggling joint-stock company.

  Mafia sources have given us a remarkable insight into the tense politics of contraband tobacco within Cosa Nostra in the 1970s. Each of the interested parties would take it in turns to take possession of a shipload coming into Campania: one for the Neapolitans, one for each of the groups of mafiosi operating in Naples, and then one as a tribute to the Commission. Thus every two months or so, the ship carrying the cigarettes for Palermo would make its way towards Sicily. Tano Badalamenti, in his role as head of the Commission or ‘provincial representative’, would take responsibility for divvying up the cargo: 1,000 cases for Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco from Ciaculli; 1,000 for the Corleone Family; 2,000 for the Bontate group, and so on. In other words, each boss who was prestigious enough to be included on the Commission, and rich enough to have the capital to buy cigarettes upfront, became a stakeholder in the portion of the cigarette market that the Commission claimed as its right.

  In addition to the Commission’s ‘joint-stock company’, many mafiosi ran contraband cigarettes independently, as traffickers in their own right. Rings of smugglers were formed by Men of Honour from different Families, as and when business opportunities presented themselves. The picture was further complicated by the need to work closely with non-mafiosi who were not as dependable, and not subject to the mafia’s rules. Initiating men like ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza did not entirely solve the problem.

  Mad Mike had manifestly not undergone the same rigorous selection process as the Palermo criminal elite, and he occasionally needed reminding of the self-discipline he was expected to show now that he was a Man of Honour. On one occasion, he was spotted playing cards for large sums in the casino of a luxury hotel on the island of Ischia. The Catania boss Pippo Calderone, one of his partners in the cigarette business, angrily reminded him that ostentatious gambling on that scale was not permitted behaviour for a member of Cosa Nostra.

  Mad Mike and other smugglers never lost their reputation for slipperiness within Cosa Nostra. According to Tommaso Buscetta, they had a ‘fraudster mentality’, and tended ‘to play it sly’. Of course, sly behaviour was not an exclusively Neapolitan trait. It is likely that Mad Mike’s semi-detached status vis-à-vis Cosa Nostra also made him the perfect accomplice and scapegoat for Men of Honour who were just as sly as him, and who wanted to get more than their allotted share of any given cargo.

  Thus the mafia-camorra cigarette oligopoly was born already fissured by mutual suspicion. Some years later, it would become clear that the tensions in the contraband tobacco business had also exposed fault lines within Cosa Nostra that would open up into the bloodiest conflict in mafia history.

  But in 1978 the tobacco-smuggling boom slowed because an international accord now allowed the authorities to pursue smugglers into international waters. Seizures of cigarettes hit a peak in that year. More significantly, by that time, heroin was opening up a new, more profitable, and much more divisive chapter in Italy’s underworld history.

  There is a postscript to the story of Concetta Muccardo, the Forcella cigarette-seller played by Sophia Loren in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. On 27 June 1992, aged sixty-seven, she was arrested for retailing heroin from a doorway in the Sanità neighbourhood; behind the door the police found another fifty wraps of heroin and 350,000 lire ($375 in 2011 values). Long before that date, narcotics were being funnelled through the same channels once used to bring contraband cigarettes into Italy.

  47

  THE
MUSHROOM-PICKERS OF MONTALTO

  MEANWHILE, IN CALABRIA . . .

  The ’ndrangheta, as we have seen, had begun to make inroads into the construction industry in the 1960s. Southern Calabria’s long coastline also afforded plenty of sheltered places where cases of contraband cigarettes could be off-loaded. Just as was happening in Sicily and Campania, the money flowing in from concrete and tobacco created a new political climate in Calabrian organised crime.

  In 1969, the judicial authorities were given a rare glimpse of the Calabrian mafia’s internal politics when, for the first time in history, the police mounted a full-scale raid on the ’ndrangheta’s annual general meeting on Aspromonte. The episode briefly propelled Italy’s least visible mafia into the headlines for the first time since the ‘Martian invasion’ of 1955. The story of that 1969 raid, and the trial that resulted from it, allows us to catch up on a crucial process of political change under way within the Calabrian underworld. Just as importantly, it illustrates how the Italian law viewed the sworn criminal sects of both Calabria and Sicily at a time when they were becoming both richer and more dangerous.

  At nearly 2,000 metres, Montalto is the highest point on Aspromonte. From here, a statue of the redeeming Christ—were he able to revolve on his axis to follow the line of the horizon—would enjoy one of the most beautiful 360-degree panoramas on the planet: the Aeolian Islands off the northern coast of Sicily, the wooded slopes of Calabria’s Serre mountains to the north-east, and the quietly smoking peak of Mount Etna across the Straits. Somewhere in the woods below lies the Sanctuary of the Madonna of the Mountain at Polsi, where the ’ndrangheta has always held an annual reunion early in September. In 1969, the increased attentions of the police had forced a change of date and venue. This year, the chief cudgels of the Calabrian underworld convened in a woodland clearing just below Montalto, on a damp Sunday morning, 26 October. But their countermeasures turned out to be in vain.

  A team of twenty-four police and Carabinieri, acting on clues derived from weeks of surveillance, came across thirty-five cars parked higgledy-piggledy on the edge of the road near Montalto. Moving swiftly and silently, the police overpowered and gagged the five lookouts. Advancing further into the forest, they heard shouting and applause: the underworld conference was still in session.

  The team split into two groups to try and encircle the broad clearing where they could glimpse more than a hundred men, sitting in a circle in animated discussion. But someone gave the alarm. Six officers advanced into the clearing shouting, ‘Nobody move! Police!’ The gangsters ran off in every direction, firing wildly with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles and machine guns. No one was hit and, amid chaotic scenes, the police managed to arrest twenty-one of the men at the summit. They also had the cars abandoned by the fleeing ’ndranghetisti to work with. Eventually seventy-two of the estimated 130 men in attendance would face trial. Most of them claimed they had been out picking mushrooms. Some of the younger affiliates cracked under interrogation. One of them, a builder from Bagnara, told police of his initiation ceremony. He and a few others also revealed the gist of what had been discussed at Montalto.

  The first striking thing about the debate is how procedural some of it was. Before the summit got under way, as tradition dictated, each man present had to stand up and formally greet the others in the name of the clan he represented. An important item on the agenda was the annual meeting itself. Should the Honoured Society continue to gather at the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi every year, now that the police were clearly taking a close interest? Someone proposed a change of location. And surely, with a change of location should come a change of name: it should now be termed the ‘Aspromonte meeting’ and no longer the ‘Polsi meeting’. After much discussion, the conservatives won out: Polsi would remain the venue of choice, although the date could be switched to throw the authorities off. Perhaps understandably, when the men arrested at Montalto came to court, the judge described this discussion as ‘formalistic’ and ‘pedantic’.

  Yet there were more substantive issues discussed at the summit, like how to respond to the threat posed by the forces of law and order. The circle of bosses complained loudly about the activism recently shown by the chief of police of Reggio Calabria. This called for a united response, for a show of force. A variety of tactical options were tabled, such as blowing up police vehicles with dynamite, or ambushing the chief of police’s car.

  Planning dynamite outrages against the common enemy may well have lightened the mood among the ‘mushroom-pickers’ of Montalto. But the main issue at the summit was potentially much more explosive: addressing the potential for disunity within the ’ndrangheta’s ranks. Investigators learned that one of the older bosses from Taurianova in the plain of Gioia Tauro, a veteran felon called Giuseppe Zappia who had been entrusted with the task of chairing the meeting, made a passionate appeal for unity: ‘There’s no Mico Tripodo’s ’ndrangheta here! There’s no ’Ntoni Macrì’s ’ndrangheta here! There’s no Peppe Nirta’s ’ndrangheta here! We should all be united. Anyone who wants to stay, stays. Anyone who doesn’t want to stay, goes.’

  Giuseppe Zappia, pictured after his arrest at the 1969 Calabrian underworld Summit, where he made this famous plea for unity: ‘There’s no Mico Tripodo’s ’ndrangheta here! There’s no ’Ntoni Macrì’s ’ndrangheta here! There’s no Peppe Nirta’s ’ndrangheta here! We should all be united.’

  Apart from what is probably a veiled threat in the last line (one wonders what the price of leaving the meeting would have been), this plea sounds very bland: the gangland equivalent of motherhood and apple pie. The police and magistrates looking into the Montalto summit sensed that the appeal was in reality highly significant. But before they could find out much more, the few men arrested at Montalto who had confessed retracted their statements: they had been bullied by the police, they said. As had almost always been the case in the first century of organised crime history in Italy, such vital witnesses were not properly cultivated and protected by the magistrates handling the case; no one will ever know how much more they could have told us about the ’ndrangheta. Instead they joined the chorus of gangsters who claimed to have been picking mushrooms.

  To his great credit, the judge in the case, one Guido Marino, would have none of these feeble alibis. Nor did he take very seriously the defence’s claims that the ’ndrangheta was like the Rotary Club or the Lions. Judge Marino meant business. He made some devastating criticisms of the way the fight against the ’ndrangheta was being conducted. Investigations were ‘superficial’ and ‘desultory’, meaning that the mafia remained ‘elusive’ in court. Rather than ‘solid and patient’ investigation, the police all too often fell back on police cautions and internal exile. These preventive measures were entirely counterproductive, he said. ‘They have acted like a restorative vaccine in the bodies of these criminal societies, which today are more vigorous and efficient than ever.’

  It was the same scandalous story that had been carrying on since Italy had become one country in the nineteenth century. In Calabria, as elsewhere in southern Italy, mafia organisations were thriving on the half-cocked tactics designed to contain them.

  Astutely, Judge Marino latched on to what might seem the least sinister aspect of the Montalto summit: the ‘formalistic’ and ‘pedantic’ procedural discussion. In his view, this betrayed the fact that the ’ndrangheta was an ‘institutionalised’ association. Moreover, Judge Marino went on to argue, the gangsters’ debate about shared traditions showed that the world of Calabrian organised crime was much more than a scattering of isolated gangs. There was only one ’ndrangheta, and it was a criminal organisation with a long history behind it. (At this point, no one knew how long that history was.)

  There is a striking contrast here with the ‘Martian invasion’ of Calabria in 1955, when the authorities seemed to have only a passing interest in the ’ndrangheta’s history and structure. Judge Marino’s ruling is the first small sign of what the Italian judicial system cou
ld learn by treating the mafias of Calabria and Sicily as what they were: criminal sects that had been embedded in society for decades.

  Judge Marino was so keen to delve into the ’ndrangheta’s secrets that he compiled biographies of the two most powerful bosses named in the plea for unity at Montalto. Those biographies—the first ever detailed portraits of ’ndrangheta chief cudgels—are worth looking at closely.

  The ’Ntoni Macrì invoked by Zappia at Montalto was, of course, the very same don ’Ntoni who had danced the tarantella with Master Joe, and had then gone on (reputedly!) to save the Bishop of Locri from being murdered by a gang of vengeful priests. Don ’Ntoni was rich. Apart from his strictly illegal businesses, he induced the local landowners to use his own henchmen as guards on their olive groves; he forcibly regulated lemon prices to suit his own needs as a trader in agricultural commodities; he also had interests in agricultural machinery and construction. In 1957 his wealth and political protection rescued him from the internal exile he had been sentenced to during the Marzano Operation.

  A year later he was on the run, charged with murder. In 1961 he was found not guilty, and also acquitted of the supplementary charge of being a member of a criminal association. An arrest for attempted murder came in 1965. Then, in 1967, three of his rivals were shot dead and another two wounded in what became known as the ‘massacre of piazza Mercato’ in Locri: two men armed with a shotgun and a machine gun opened fire on a group of people who were striking a deal in the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. As always, Macrì was found not guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence.