Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  In the 1970s, many wealthy people armed themselves as a defence against mafia kidnappers. Here a young Berlusconi is pictured with a gun on his desk (circled).

  Marcello Dell’Utri has been convicted of a long-standing collaboration with Cosa Nostra that included recommending Vittorio Mangano’s services to Berlusconi. He still denies the charges, which he says are the result of a judicial plot against him. The case has gone to the Supreme Court.

  Vittorio Mangano was later sentenced to life for two murders, and died of cancer in 2000. He died like a good mafioso should, without shedding any light on the case.

  Silvio Berlusconi’s own public utterances on the affair have been disturbing, to say the least. For example, he gave his view of the mafioso in a radio interview in 2008:

  [Mangano] was a person who behaved extremely well with us. Later he had some misadventures in his life that placed him in the hands of a criminal organisation. But heroically . . . despite being so ill, he never invented any lies against me. They let him go home the day before he died. He was dying in prison. So Dell’Utri was right to say that Mangano’s behaviour was heroic.

  Quite whether the kidnapping season was the beginning of a direct long-term relationship between Berlusconi and the Sicilian mafia is not clear. It should be stressed that Berlusconi has never been charged with anything in relation to the Mangano affair.

  Every kidnapping was a clamorous demonstration of the governing institutions’ inability to protect life and property. Italy was getting visibly weaker at the very same time that the mafias were getting stronger, richer, more interlinked, and closer to descending into war. The state seemed to have lost its claim to a ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, as the jargon of sociology would have it. In the 1970s, while the wave of kidnappings spiralled out of control, a new wave of economic and political troubles brought further discredit on the state.

  Italy, like the rest of the developed world, had to face a grave economic crisis following a dramatic hike in crude oil prices in 1973. There ensued a decade of stuttering growth, high unemployment, raging inflation, steepling interest rates and massive public debt. Violent social conflict was on the rise. The trades unions that had been so pugnacious since the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969 now went on the defensive. As a result, some members of Italy’s revolutionary groups lost patience with peaceful forms of militancy; they opted instead to form clandestine armed cells. These terrorists, as ruthless as they were deluded, thought of themselves as a revolutionary vanguard who could hasten the advent of a Communist society by maiming or assassinating strategically chosen targets. Italy had entered its so-called ‘Years of Lead’ (i.e., years of bullets).

  The Red Brigades (or BR) would turn out to be the most dangerous of these groups, and many of their earliest actions were kidnappings. The victims—usually factory managers—would typically be subjected to a ‘proletarian trial’, and then chained to the factory gates with a placard daubed with a revolutionary slogan round their necks. In the spring of 1974, under the new slogan of ‘an attack on the heart of the state’, the BR hit the headlines by kidnapping a judge from Genoa. The BR’s demands were not met, but the judge was released unharmed.

  After a wave of arrests brought a lull in their activities in the middle of the decade, the Red Brigades returned with more terroristic resolve than ever. On 16 March 1978, they brought the country to a standstill by kidnapping the former Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democrat Party, Aldo Moro. Moro’s driver and his entire police escort were murdered in the assault. On 9 May Moro was himself shot dead, and his body was abandoned in a car in the centre of Rome. The BR and other groups continued their murder campaign into the following decade. Many young people, in particular, could not find it within themselves to identify with the authorities in their fight against terrorism: ‘Neither with the state, nor with the Red Brigades’ was one political slogan of the day. This was the state that would soon have to face up to unprecedented mafia violence. Calabria was to be the first place where war broke out.

  50

  THE MOST HOLY MOTHER AND THE FIRST ’NDRANGHETA WAR

  WHEN EVIDENCE OF ORGANISED CRIME’S VAST NEW WEALTH EMERGED IN THE 1960S and 1970s, many observers claimed that, in both Sicily and Calabria, the traditional mafia was being replaced by a new breed. The mafia was now no longer rural, but urban; it was a ‘motorway mafia’, rather than a donkey-track mafia; these were gangsters in ‘shiny shoes’ rather than the muddy-booted peasants of yesteryear. The new model mafioso, it was claimed, was a young, aggressive businessman. In particular, he had no time for the quaint, formalistic concerns of the Honoured Societies, or for the antediluvian cult of honour. Backward Calabria was where the transformation appeared to be most marked. Here, even many who took the mafia threat seriously thought that initiation rituals; Osso, Mastrosso, Carcagnosso; and the meeting at the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi were bound to be consigned to the folklore museum—if they hadn’t been already.

  The De Stefano brothers, Giorgio, Paolo and Giovanni, fitted most people’s idea of the emergent gangster-manager. The brothers came from Reggio Calabria, the town that was bigamist don Mico Tripodo’s realm. As we have already seen, Tripodo spent much of his time away in Campania, cementing close friendships with the camorristi of the Neapolitan hinterland. But a boss can only remain away from his territory for so long before the ground shifts behind him. In don Mico’s absence the De Stefanos emerged as a power in their own right.

  Giorgio, the oldest of the brothers and the most cunning, was referred to by one ’ndrangheta defector as ‘the Comet’—the rising star of Calabrian organised crime. The De Stefanos were the most enthusiastic participants in the Reggio revolt, and the keenest to make friends with Fascist subversives. And they were certainly young: none of them was out of his twenties at the time of the Montalto summit. The triumvirs whose authority the De Stefanos would come to challenge were from an older generation: the tarantella-dancing don ’Ntoni Macrì could just about have been their grandfather.

  One ’ndranghetista also remembered the De Stefanos as being educated, at least by the standards of the Calabrian underworld, recalling that: ‘Paolo and Giorgio De Stefano attended university for a few years. Giorgio was signed up to do medicine, and I think Paolo studied law.’ That education was visible. Pictures of Giorgio (‘the Comet’) and Paolo, the two oldest and most powerful De Stefano brothers, show men with large, sensitive faces and black hair parted neatly at the side. Their up-to-date, clean-cut image could hardly be more starkly different from the grim physiognomies of the triumvirs: Mico Tripodo and the others all had mean little eyes, cropped hair and sagging, expressionless faces; each seemed to have been assembled from the same old kit of atavistic hoodlum features.

  The face of the new ’ndrangheta? Paolo De Stefano in 1982.

  As it turned out, these contrasting faces, and the switch from tradition to modernity that they seemed to make visible, proved to be no guide to the winners and losers who would emerge from the unprecedented criminal wealth and violence of the 1970s. The simplistic ‘modernity versus tradition’ template that was used to make sense of the events of the 1970s was just a bad fit with reality. For one thing, the rise of ambitious young thugs like the De Stefanos from within the ranks of the organisation is not a novelty. For another, even in Calabria, there is nothing new about mafiosi with middle-class credentials. Nor are the mafias traditional in the sense of being very old. On the contrary, they are as modern as the Italian state.

  It is much nearer the mark to say that the ’ndrangheta, like Cosa Nostra, is traditionalist, in the sense that it has manufactured its own internal traditions that are functional to the demands of extortion and trafficking. When the ’ndrangheta grew richer, through the construction industry, tobacco smuggling and kidnapping, it did not simply abandon its traditions and embrace modernity. From their origins, Italy’s mafias have always mixed tradition and modernity. Their response to the new era was to adapt the mixture. Or indeed,
in the case of the ’ndrangheta, to invent brand-new traditions like the one that is the subject of this chapter: the Most Holy Mother. That newly minted tradition is significant for two reasons. First, it provides evidence of just how many friends the mafias, with their new wealth, were making among the Italian elite. Second, the Most Holy Mother became the trigger of the First ’Ndrangheta War. And to understand it, we need to grasp some subtle but important differences between the ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra.

  The ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra are very similar in that they are both Honoured Societies—Freemasonries of crime. Both organisations are careful about choosing whom they admit to the club. No one with family in the police or magistracy is allowed in. No pimps. No women.

  Yet there are also some differences in the way the two select their cadres. ’ndranghetisti tend to come from the same blood families. Cosa Nostra, by contrast, has rules to prevent too many brothers being recruited into a single Family, in case they distort the balance of power within it. In some cases, two brothers may even enter different Families.

  Cosa Nostra tends to monitor aspiring gangsters carefully before they cross the threshold of the organisation, often making a criminal wait until his thirties so that he can prove over the years that he is made of the right stuff. The Calabrian mafia admits many more people. A police report from 1997 estimated that in Sicily there were 5,500 mafiosi, or one for every 903 inhabitants. By comparison, there were 6,000 ’ndranghetisti in Calabria, or one for every 345 citizens. In the most ’ndrangheta-infested province, Reggio Calabria, there was one affiliate for every 160 inhabitants. In other words, proportionally speaking, the ’ndrangheta admits two and a half times as many members. The male children of a boss are initiated willy-nilly. Some even go through a ritual at birth. But that does not mean that the Calabrian mafia has watered-down membership criteria. Rather it suggests that it does much of the business of monitoring and selecting members once they are inside. A winnowing process continues through each ’ndranghetista’s entire career. Only the most criminally able of them will rise through the ranks. Young hoods may learn to specialise either in business or in violence.

  At this point, it helps to recall the stages of a Calabrian mafioso’s career. As he acquires more prestige, he progresses through a hierarchy of status levels. An ’ndranghetista starts off as a giovane d’onore (‘honoured youth’—someone marked out for admission into the organisation, but who is not yet a member). Through day-by-day service to his superiors—issuing threats and vandalising property as part of extortion demands, collecting protection payments, hiding weapons and stolen goods, ferrying food up to the mountain prisons where hostages are kept—he rises to become a picciotto (‘lad’), and then on up the ladder through a long list of other ranks.

  As we have seen, ranks are called doti (‘gifts’). Being promoted to a higher gift is referred to as receiving a fiore (a ‘flower’). The giving of each flower is marked by a ritual. But secrets, rather than gifts, are the true measure of status in the ’ndrangheta. Since it began in the nineteenth century, each ’ndrangheta cell has had a double structure made of sealed compartments: the Minor Society and the Major Society. Younger, less experienced and less trustworthy recruits belong to the Minor Society. Minor Society members are insulated from understanding what goes on in the Major Society to which the more experienced crooks belong. Promotion through the ranks, and from the Minor Society to the Major Society, implies access to more secrets.

  As profits rose within the ’ndrangheta in the early 1970s, and tensions increased, so too did the tinkering with these peculiarly complicated protocols. Until the early 1970s, the highest gift that any affiliate of the ’ndrangheta could attain was that of sgarrista. Literally, sgarrista means something like ‘a man who gives offence, or who breaks the rules’. (The terminology, like so much else about the ’ndrangheta, dates back to the nineteenth-century prison system.)

  Around 1972–3, some chief cudgels began to create a new, higher gift for themselves: santista (‘saintist’ or ‘holy-ist’). With the new status came membership of a secret elite known as the Mamma Santissima (‘Most Holy Mother’) or Santa for short. In theory, the Mamma Santissima had a very exclusive membership: no more than twenty-four chief cudgels were to be admitted.

  Becoming a santista involved a new ritual, an upmarket variant of the ’ndrangheta’s existing initiation rites. It also entitled the bearer of this new flower to certain privileges, the most important being the right to join the secret and deviant Masonic brotherhoods that were springing up in 1970s Italy.

  The most notorious of the new Masonic groups was Propaganda 2 or P2, a conspiracy of corruption and right-wing subversion that reached right to the heart of the Italian establishment. When, in March 1981, a (probably incomplete) P2 membership list of 962 people was found, it included:

  all the heads of the secret services, 195 officers of the various armed corps of the Republic, among whom were twelve generals of the Carabinieri, five of the Tax Police, twenty-two of the army, four of the air force and eight admirals. There were leading magistrates, a few prefects and Police Chiefs, bankers and businessmen, civil servants, journalists and broadcasters.

  There were also forty-four members of parliament, including three government ministers. Among the businessmen on the list was an entrepreneur who could not yet be called a member of the establishment: Silvio Berlusconi. It is often not clear what individual members of P2 like Berlusconi thought its aims really were. But the power of the lodge is not in question: in 1977 it took control of Italy’s most influential newspaper, Corriere della Sera. The very least that can be said about P2 is that it showed how, in the face of the growing influence of the Communist Party (which reached its highest ever percentage of the popular vote in the general election of 1976), key members of the elites of both power and money were closing ranks and establishing covert channels of influence.

  P2 was far from the only aberrant Masonic society to emerge at this time. Mafiosi wanted in on the act. Cosa Nostra was making similar moves to the ’ndrangheta. According to several defectors from the ranks of the Sicilian mafia, between 1977 and 1979 a number of its most senior men joined Masonic organisations too. The issue of Masonic affiliation was discussed at Cosa Nostra’s Regional Commission in 1977.

  The mafias’ alliance with Freemasonry in the 1970s showed underworld history coming full-circle. For the very origins of Italy’s secret criminal brotherhoods lay in contacts between Masonic conspirators who successfully plotted to unite Italy in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the hoodlums those patriotic conspirators recruited as revolutionary muscle. Then, as now, the thing Italy’s hoodlums prized most about Freemasonry was contacts. As Leonardo Messina, a Sicilian mafioso who defected from Cosa Nostra in 1992, explained:

  Many men in Cosa Nostra—the ones who managed to become bosses, that is—belonged to the Freemasonry. In the Masons you can have contacts with entrepreneurs, the institutions, the men who manage power. The Masonry is a meeting place for everyone.

  So for the ’ndrangheta, the Mamma Santissima was a new constitutional device for regulating the Calabrian underworld’s connections with the upper world of politics, business and policing.

  When it was first introduced, the Mamma Santissima was highly controversial: many considered it a ‘bastardisation’ of the Honoured Society’s rules. Indeed the innovation drove a wedge between the members of the triumvirate. Mommo Piromalli supported it, whereas Mico Tripodo was against it. It is said that don ’Ntoni Macrì, the ’ndrangheta’s patriarch, the ‘living symbol of organised crime’s omnipotence and invincibility’ who danced a mean tarantella, was viscerally opposed.

  Why the resistance? Some say that the grounds for don ’Ntoni’s opposition to the Mamma Santissima were simply that he was traditional, a man loyal to the old rules. This explanation seems implausible to me, dripping in nostalgia for some good old mafia that has actually never existed. If don ’Ntoni was like every other mafioso ther
e has ever been, then he obeyed the traditional rules only for as long as it suited his interests.

  No, the real reason why don ’Ntoni Macrì was opposed to the Mamma Santissima was simply that he was excluded from it. In fact, I suspect that the new gift was invented with the precise aim of cutting him out, of isolating him from important secrets. And behind that manoeuvre lay a plan to stop don ’Ntoni meddling in other people’s kidnappings, and—even more importantly—to keep his grasping hands away from the Colombo package (the publicly funded construction bonanza that came following the Reggio revolt of 1970). It was through contacts with the local ruling class, and in particular with Masonic brotherhoods, that the bonanza was to be distributed. It is no coincidence that among the main proponents of the Mamma Santissima was don Mommo Piromalli, the triumvir who hailed from Gioia Tauro where the new steelworks was going to be built. In the world of the mafias (and not just the mafias), constitutional innovation is often just a mask for skulduggery.