Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Canada was not the only place where wire-taps registered the way in which the Transatlantic Syndicate was upsetting the mafia balance of power in the late 1970s. In a justly famous undercover sting, FBI Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone infiltrated New York’s Bonanno Family by posing as ‘Donnie Brasco’. The memorable 1997 movie of Pistone’s story, starring Johnny Depp and Al Pacino, fails to capture the operation’s crucial historical context. Pistone/Brasco was a firsthand witness to the rise of the ‘zips’ or ‘greasers’. These were derogatory terms that local mafiosi used to refer to Sicilian Men of Honour who had recently set up shop in America. There were two reasons why New York mafiosi were anxious about the new arrivals. First, because the zips had been granted the exclusive right to supply wholesale heroin for New York’s Bonanno and Gambino Families. Second, because they formed an autonomous faction whose power within American Cosa Nostra was on the rise. What soldiers in the Bonanno Family called ‘zips’ were actually members of the Transatlantic Syndicate.

  Pistone’s body mike recorded two New York wise guys as they reacted to the news that some of the Sicilians were going to be awarded ranks within the American organisation:

  Those guys [the zips] are looking to take over everything. There’s no way we can make them captains. We’d lose all our strength.

  Them fucking zips ain’t going to back up to nobody. You give them the fucking power, if you don’t get hurt now, you get hurt three years from now. They’ll bury you. You cannot give them the power. They don’t give a fuck. They don’t care who’s boss. They got no respect.

  The zips had names and faces. John Gambino was one: he had moved from Palermo to Cherry Hills, New Jersey, in 1964. Salvatore Inzerillo was another: he was the nephew of a Palermo boss. Like the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, these were mobsters with a great many exotic stamps in their passports, and a vast international skein of relatives by blood and marriage to support them. Members of the Transatlantic Syndicate like these were responsible for what became known as the Pizza Connection, a tag coined during the huge US police investigation that eventually cut out a small part of the Transatlantic Syndicate in the mid-1980s.

  The members of the Transatlantic Syndicate were frighteningly powerful, and they also worked together. As early as 1971, the Venezuelan secret services looked into the Cuntrera-Caruana cattle ranch, and found that its shareholders included the following: Nick Rizzuto, the Cuntrera-Caruanas’ man in Montreal (he would eventually take the reins in Quebec after the murder of Paolo Violi); John Gambino from Cherry Hills; and Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco, the head of the Palermo Commission at the time of the Ciaculli bomb, who had abandoned Sicily to become a South America–based narcotics importer.

  The Transatlantic Syndicate had the keys to the United States heroin market: anyone who wanted to supply bulk dope to the East Coast had little choice but to go through them. Our Sicilian broker, Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo, knew that from experience. In 1981, the first of his ships delivered 400 kilograms of ready-refined heroin from Thailand: half of it went to the Cuntrera-Caruanas, and half to John Gambino in Cherry Hills.

  Back in Sicily, the Transatlantic Syndicate carried even more clout than it did in Canada or the United States. One member, Salvatore Inzerillo, returned to Palermo in 1973, and his uncle immediately ceded to him his job as representative of the Passo di Rigano Family and then his seat on the Commission. Other bosses who were part of the Transatlantic Syndicate included triumvirate members Tano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontate.

  The Transatlantic Syndicate enjoyed the cream of Cosa Nostra’s contacts in the world of banking. Some of their narcotics profits were laundered and invested by the notorious fly-by-night financiers and P2 Masonic Lodge members, Michele Sindona and Roberto Calvi. Both Sindona and Calvi would end up dying in circumstances that remain mysterious to this day: Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London in 1982; Sindona drank a coffee laced with cyanide in prison in 1986.

  The Transatlantic Syndicate enjoyed enormous traction in business and politics too. They were close to the Salvo cousins, fabulously wealthy barons of Sicily’s privatised tax-collection system. They were also close to Salvo Lima, the Young Turk. Through Lima and the Salvos, but also directly, they had the ear of the most powerful politician in Italy: Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister by the end of his parliamentary career, and the man whose faction in the Christian Democrat Party included Lima and his Sicilian followers. According to the Italian Supreme Court, in a verdict from 2004, Andreotti displayed ‘an authentic, stable and friendly availability’ towards Stefano Bontate et al until 1980, when Cosa Nostra’s increasing violence alienated him.

  Never in the long history of the Sicilian mafia has there been a concentration of might and opulence to compete with the Transatlantic Syndicate. That is why, in 1981, the Transatlantic Syndicate became the target of a war of extermination.

  But before war broke out once more in Sicily, the camorra in Campania was revolutionised by the most influential boss of the twentieth century.

  54

  THE PROFESSOR

  RAFFAELE CUTOLO WAS THE CREATOR OF POSSIBLY THE LARGEST CRIMINAL ORGANISATION in Italian history, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (‘New Organised Camorra’). At its peak in 1980, according to a police estimate, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (or NCO) counted 7,000 members. Its leader evaded the full force of the law with a regularity that was shocking even by Italian standards. His speciality was obtaining psychiatric reports that absolved him of full responsibility for his deeds. ‘While committing criminal acts’, one diagnosis declared, ‘Cutolo falls under the influence of a typical impulsive-aggressive crisis that completely overcomes and nullifies his will power.’ Or, in lay terms: he often gets angry and has people killed—but it isn’t his fault. The NCO boss compared himself to Christ and said he could read minds. It is unclear whether he believed this or was merely acting out the psychiatric script.

  Whatever Cutolo’s precise mental equilibrium was, in 1980 he decided to flaunt his authority architecturally. Overlooking Ottaviano, the town on the north-eastern slopes of Mount Vesuvius where the NCO boss had grown up, was the dilapidated Medici Castle; it had a room for every day of the year. Cutolo bought it through a front company and turned it into both his organisation’s HQ and the grandiose symbol of a rise to criminal power as fast and brutally successful as any in the annals of Italian organised crime. And the astonishing thing is that Raffaele Cutolo did it almost entirely from prison.

  In 1963, at the age of twenty-one, Cutolo had earned himself a twenty-four-year prison sentence for shooting a man dead in a road-rage incident of illustrative viciousness. Newspaper reports tell us that in Ottaviano’s main thoroughfare, Cutolo deliberately drove his car at four young women, braking only at the last minute. When one of the women remonstrated with Cutolo about the stupid stunt, he set about her with his fists. A passing firefighter intervened to save the woman, and Cutolo responded by pulling a Beretta 7.65 pistol from his pocket and firing twice. But what really earned Cutolo the judge’s indignation was the way in which he followed the wounded fireman as he staggered into a doorway to take refuge. There, Cutolo emptied the rest of the clip into the luckless man, who died in hospital leaving a widow and three children.

  Founder of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo was the most influential Italian criminal of the twentieth century.

  In 1970 Cutolo was freed, pending a ruling on his case by the Supreme Court, and went on the run. He became a junior camorra boss, dealing in extortion and cocaine. Upon his recapture, after a firefight with the Carabinieri in March of the following year, he was sent to the infamous penitentiary at Poggioreale. There he would begin to build what became known as the NCO. By 1974 he had already earned the nickname ‘the King of Poggioreale’ and was involved in a major drug-trafficking ring with senior mafiosi from both Sicily and Calabria. By 1977 he had enough power to have himself transferred to the cosier surroundings of the state
mental institution in Aversa near Naples. In February 1978 his men blew a wall down with TNT and he scrambled over the rubble to freedom. One plausible theory is that the breakout was staged to avoid the embarrassment that would have been caused had Cutolo merely strolled out of the main gate—as he probably could have done. Be that as it may, the fugitive was not recaptured for fifteen months. In 1981 an appeal verdict said he could not be punished for the escape because of his mental infirmity. As Cutolo himself put it, ‘I did not “escape.” I wandered away. A little noisily.’

  After his recapture, Cutolo never tasted freedom again. Thus, apart from two brief periods on the run, his entire adult life was spent in captivity. But he understood that prison was the perfect base for a criminal empire. Dominate the prison system, and you dominate the underworld. Confinement is an occupational hazard for criminals. And if they cannot go to jail without the fear of being raped in the showers or stabbed in the yard, they become acutely exposed.

  In a sense, Cutolo perfected the methods used by prison camorras since the early nineteenth century. At the simplest level, the NCO offered safety in numbers to terrified youths doing their first stretch in an adult jail. Indeed Cutolo specialised in cultivating isolated youngsters who were not affiliated to other gangs. One of his fellow prisoners in Poggioreale described him as a ‘talent scout’. Once outside, those young men would kick back part of their earnings to Cutolo so he could support others by sending cash and food to relatives, by corrupting guards and administrators, and by arranging transfers, lawyers and medical visits. So began the circulation of tributes and favours that bound the NCO together. Cutolo’s organisation extended its reach from Poggioreale to many other prisons across Italy, and gained the manpower and discipline in the outside world to manage crime on an industrial scale.

  The NCO engaged in all kinds of business, ranging from drug dealing and truck theft to defrauding the European Economic Community of agricultural subsidies and infiltrating government building projects. But for the NCO—as for the Sicilian mafia and for the Neapolitan Honoured Society of yesteryear—extortion was the key tool of authority. Cutolo’s rackets were run by trusted lieutenants, including his big sister Rosetta. She looked for all the world like the frumpy embroiderer her brother claimed she was. But this was a façade created in part because there were those within the NCO hierarchy who were reluctant to take orders from a woman. Many observers believe that Rosetta was one of the camorra’s most powerful female bosses. The money she sent to her brother allowed him to live out his confinement in luxury: in the course of just over a year in 1981–2, he received nearly 56 million lire (equivalent to $133,000 in 2011 values) to take care of his daily expenses; he reputedly spent over half of it on food and clothes.

  Cutolo’s conspicuous consumption was intended to publicise his power, as was the transparent irony he deployed in interview. During the trial for his escape from Aversa asylum, Cutolo gave an impromptu press conference. Surviving news footage shows him to be well groomed, with a face both weaselly and self-satisfied. He shifts his weight repeatedly from one foot to the other behind the bars of the defendants’ cage, and casts rapid, smirking glances to either side—as if he were a back-row schoolboy seeking complicity from his classmates during a scolding.

  ‘I’m someone who fights injustice. Me, and all my friends.’

  ‘A Robin Hood, so to speak?’

  ‘So to speak.’

  ‘What about the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the NCO?’

  ‘I dunno. Maybe NCO means “Non Conosco Nessuno”—“I don’t know anyone.”’

  ‘Are you in charge in the prison system?’

  Cutolo feigns disbelief with an unpersuasive snigger. ‘I’m not in charge, the prison governor is.’ [ . . . ]

  ‘What about the murder of the deputy prison governor? You had previously slapped him and threatened to kill him.’

  ‘Yes I did. Because he was doing some really . . . ’ There follows an oily mellowing in Cutolo’s tone. ‘But he’s dead now. It’s unkind to talk ill of the dead . . . Anyway, I may be insane, but I’m not stupid-insane. I’m intelligent-insane. So I’m hardly going to slap someone, threaten to kill him, and then go ahead and murder him. I don’t fancy collecting life sentences like that.’

  Even among professional criminals, there are very few with a public persona as odious as Raffaele Cutolo. Yet his distinctive trait as a boss was the adoration he inspired. The Nuova Camorra Organizzata was founded on a cult of personality and an ideological fervour that no other mafia in Italy has ever matched. At the height of Cutolo’s power, a legion of camorristi would gladly have died for him. What was the secret of his charisma? For one thing, he had a keen organisational intelligence and used it to construct an elaborate internal culture for the NCO. Its recruits felt they belonged, that they had a shared cause. And for the purpose of building this esprit de corps, Cutolo borrowed rituals and terminology from the Calabrian mafia. Indeed he was almost certainly affiliated into the ’ndrangheta while in prison: two ’ndranghetisti have spoken to the authorities about how Cutolo was given his ‘second baptism’ in 1974. Later, Cutolo would put the NCO’s new recruits through a very similar ceremony. From the ’ndrangheta, Cutolo also borrowed the terminology that defined ranks within the organisation: giovane d’onore, picciotto, cuntajuolo, contabile, santista, etc. Cutolo it was who, on behalf of his Calabrian friends, arranged to have the triumvir Mico Tripodo stabbed to death in Naples prison in 1976 during the First ’Ndrangheta War.

  Camorra history came full circle with Raffaele Cutolo. From Calabrian gangsters, he learned rituals and terminology that the ’ndrangheta had itself inherited from the prison camorra of the early nineteenth century. He then reimported them into the Neapolitan prison system whence they had first come, and where they had died out before the First World War.

  Indeed, for a crime boss, Cutolo had a quite extraordinary sense of history. He was dubbed ‘the Professor’ by his men, partly because he sought out books on camorra history in the prison library, and partly because he wrote verse and short meditations on life, love and omertà for his admirers. In 1980 he had his jottings published as Poems and Thoughts. The book was seized by the police and possessing it was treated as incriminating. It is not difficult to work out why: Cutolo does little to conceal the terror he wielded. Less obviously, the book also shows the Professor putting his time in the prison library to good use. By way of example, it is worth citing the verses written in praise of the NCO’s principal enforcer within the prison system, Pasquale Barra, known as ’o Sturente (‘the Student’) or, more appropriately, as ’o ’Nimale (‘the Animal’). Barra was a gaunt, darkly bearded man with a very prominent nose and eyes like a mole’s. He had been Cutolo’s devoted friend since their teenage years in Ottaviano, and was the first recruit to the NCO. His primary role was stabbing people to death on his old friend’s orders. The poem dedicated to him is called simply, ‘A Man of the Camorra’:

  Pasquale Barra: in our town

  He was called ‘the Student’

  When it comes to a zumpata, no one is better

  He can even face down an army

  He always pulls off the same move

  His knife-thrusts are totally lethal

  Up under your lungs, so you start to cough

  He makes you spit out a bit of red froth

  He sees you fall to the ground, then leaves you . . .

  In his own devious way, Cutolo was here using verse to bestow a certain literary and historical grandeur on his vicious henchman. For ‘A Man of the Camorra’ is actually cobbled together from lines stolen from a much older poem about the long-dead camorrista Gennarino Sbisà. The original author, journalist Ferdinando Russo (1866–1927), often celebrated individual camorristi, mixing just enough realistic grit into the verse to make his portraits of noble hoodlums feel authentic and dangerous. Russo it was who penned an elegy for Ciccio Cappuccio (‘Little Lord Frankie’), the camorra boss whose lavish funeral was given such sympathe
tic coverage in the Neapolitan press back in 1892. In Russo’s day, the camorra—with its hierarchical management structure and its ceremonial zumpate, or knife duels—was very unlike the loose gangs and street-corner bosses that had dominated Neapolitan criminality for most of the twentieth century. And through his poems, Ferdinando Russo became the man most responsible for creating a popular cult around the Honoured Society of Naples.

  The echoes of that popular cult still resounded in the 1970s. Cutolo devoured the dewy-eyed fables about the old-time bosses such as Salvatore De Crescenzo and Ciccio Cappuccio—the same camorristi once celebrated in the puppet theatres of Naples. As both plagiarising poet and gangster, the Professor was bent on bringing the camorra’s historical memory back to life. He explicitly sold the NCO to recruits as a revival of a proud gangster tradition. To be a cutoliano was to have roots in the past.

  On one intriguing occasion, Cutolo even stage-managed a violent close encounter with camorra history—as personified by Antonio Spavone. Born in 1926 into a family of fishermen in the Mergellina quarter, Spavone and his older brother led a band of black marketeers during the chaos of Allied Military Government in 1943–5 that had launched so many criminal careers. When Spavone’s brother was killed during a feud with a rival outfit, Antonio took vengeance in spectacular fashion, by raiding a family celebration in a restaurant and stabbing the opposing gang leader to death in front of a crowd. His gesture earned him both a long prison sentence and the right to inherit his brother’s simple but effective nickname: ’o Malommo—‘the Bad Man’.

  At some point in 1975, when both ’o Malommo and Cutolo were in Poggioreale prison, the younger man chose to issue a challenge to a zumpata, a knife duel—just like the camorristi of the old days. This may well have been a deliberately archaic gesture: the equivalent of slapping ’o Malommo in the face with a glove. Cutolo’s challenge was refused, either because ’o Malommo was about to be released, or because he did not want to dignify the uppity young hoodlum’s impudence with a response. Recalling the episode much later, a prisoner who was in Poggioreale at the time gave a shrewd analysis of how Cutolo managed the prison rumour-machine: