Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  The Professor’s legacy was nonetheless enormous. His reign saw the camorra reach a level of wealth and influence that bore comparison with the mafias of Calabria and Sicily. He also had lasting effects outside his own region of Campania. Indeed, the Professor was one of the main reasons why Italy witnessed the birth of two entirely new mafias.

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  THE MAGLIANA BAND AND THE SACRED UNITED CROWN

  THE LATE 1970S AND 1980S WERE NOT JUST A PERIOD OF RECORD VIOLENCE WITHIN Italy’s historic mafias. They were also a time when, for the first time in a century, entirely new criminal organisations were created in regions outside the home turf of the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta.

  Rome was a special case when it came to the spread of mafia power. All three major mafias were present there, kidnapping, dealing in drugs, laundering money, and the rest. Yet none of the three tried to oust the others. Contrary to what one might expect of such ferocious clans, there was no direct military confrontation between camorristi, mafiosi and ’ndranghetisti on Roman soil. In Rome, as elsewhere, the three major mafias preferred to profit from peaceful cohabitation rather than endure the costs and dangers of a ‘foreign’ war. The capital became a kind of free port of criminal influence, its riches open to all for exploitation. In those peculiar circumstances, Rome generated a criminal fraternity of its own in the late 1970s—one entirely independent from the mafia, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, although deeply indebted to them when it came to methods and contacts.

  On 7 November 1977 Duke Massimiliano Grazioli Lante della Rovere, the former owner of Rome’s major newspaper, Il Messaggero, was kidnapped just outside the city. One night the following March, after months of negotiations, his son heaved a bag containing two billion lire (more than $9 million in 2011 values) over the parapet of a road bridge. From below came a voice: ‘Go home and wait. Your father will be freed in a few hours.’

  The Duke was never freed. In fact, when the ransom was handed over he was already dead, killed by his kidnappers because he had seen one of them without a mask. His body was propped in a chair, his eyes forced open, and a recent newspaper lodged in his hands so that a photograph proving that he was alive could be sent to his relatives.

  The macabre abduction of Duke Grazioli was the first major action carried out by a group named the Banda della Magliana (the Magliana Band), after the newly built suburban neighbourhood of Rome whence some of its members came. The Banda della Magliana’s chiefs—variously loan sharks, drug dealers, fences and, particularly, armed robbers—explicitly set themselves the goal of dominating the capital’s underworld. Before long, they achieved their aim.

  The Banda della Magliana bore many similarities to the mafias of Sicily and Calabria. Its leaders divided out the capital into districts for the purposes of drug distribution, and eliminated any dealers who refused to come under their control. They had a common fund, and used it to support imprisoned members and their families, to corrupt policemen and Carabinieri, and to make important friends. Like the traditional mafias, the Banda della Magliana decided its murders centrally, keeping in mind the organisation’s strategic aims. They were also a ‘holding company’ that exploited opportunities for money-making wherever they came, reinvested their profits in new criminal enterprises, and laundered cash through formally lawful ventures, notably property.

  From its origins, the Banda della Magliana had an intense pattern of relationships with the traditional mafias. It sourced wholesale heroin from Cosa Nostra—both from the group close to Stefano Bontate and, once Bontate and his friends were exterminated, from Shorty Riina’s corleonesi. As early as 1975, the police spotted one of the band’s future leaders chatting in a Roman restaurant called Il Fungo with ’ndranghetisti of the highest level, including Giuseppe Piromalli from Gioia Tauro and Paolo De Stefano from Reggio.

  The Banda della Magliana also drew inspiration from the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. One of its founders had known the Professor in prison and was a great admirer. Some of the others shared his vision: as one would later confess, ‘We decided to try to carry out the same operation in Rome that Raffaele Cutolo was carrying out in Naples.’ In 1979, when the Professor was on the run after ‘noisily wandering away’ from Aversa asylum, he hired a whole floor of a hotel in Fiuggi, a spa town south of Rome, and there held discussions with the Banda della Magliana. The aim of the meeting was to ‘find a strategy that was compatible with both groups’ aims’. Shortly after the meeting, the Banda della Magliana deferentially did the Neapolitans a favour by disposing of a metallic green BMW 733 whose interior was covered in bloodstains—the blood in question had belonged to a construction entrepreneur that Cutolo himself had shot. The NCO and the Banda della Magliana shared a useful friendship with Aldo Semerari, the fascist subversive, ally of the secret services, and professor of forensic psychology who would end up being decapitated near Cutolo’s Ottaviano villa. As with the NCO, the Banda della Magliana was offered the chance to take an active part in violent right-wing politics by Semerari; the Romans declined the offer but exchanged weapons for favours instead—just as the NCO had done.

  Unlike the NCO or the traditional mafias of Sicily and Calabria, the Banda della Magliana did not use initiation rituals or arcane mythology. Perhaps partly for this reason, despite its wealth and its violence, it failed to set down roots for the long term: in that narrow sense, the Banda della Magliana did not constitute a mafia. By the mid-1980s, it had begun to fall apart, amid the kind of internecine bloodletting and snitching that the traditional mafias have always shown a remarkable ability to survive.

  The Sacra Corona Unita (‘Sacred United Crown’) or SCU is the mafia of Puglia, the region that forms the stacked ‘heel’ of the Italian boot. Its story begins in 1978 when the conflict between the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia got under way in neighbouring Campania. The prison authorities tried to defuse the tensions in prisons by moving camorra-affiliated inmates to facilities in other regions, including Puglia. Once installed in Puglian jails in numbers, the Professor’s pupils quickly put themselves at the top of the jailbird pecking order, and then began to initiate local crooks into the NCO. In January 1979, Cutolo himself visited Puglia, and held a meeting in a hotel in Lucera at which he ‘legalised’ more than forty local criminals—meaning he put them through the Nuova Camorra Organizzata initiation ritual. At a second meeting, this time near Lecce, another ninety Puglian criminals were initiated.

  In 1981 the Professor, by now back in prison, formally instituted a Puglian branch of the NCO, the Nuova Camorra Pugliese, whose leaders were obliged to kick back 40–50 per cent of their profits to Cutolo. Not content with trying to establish his hegemony over Campania, in other words, the Professor was trying to dominate the entire Puglian underworld too. But in Puglia, as in Campania, the Professor’s megalomania was eventually thwarted. As the NCO began its slide to defeat in the wake of the Cirillo kidnapping, some Puglian camorristi increasingly hankered after greater autonomy.

  The authorities found the first signs that something strange was happening in the Puglian criminal fraternity early in 1984 when a handwritten document was found in a prison cell. Entitled ‘The S Code’, it listed the articles of faith of a new brotherhood of crime called the Famiglia Salentina Libera (Free Family of Salento—Salento being the farthest part of the ‘heel’ of Italy). Article 7 of the S Code stipulated that the organisation’s aim was ‘never to allow any family from other regions to lord it over our territory’. The resistance to the Professor was beginning to take organisational form.

  Just a few weeks later, in a prison in Bari, Puglia’s biggest city, another statute of another new mafia was found: the Sacra Corona Unita. The statute’s author, and SCU’s founder and supreme leader, was a murderer called Giuseppe Rogoli. Rogoli was partly driven to found the SCU in 1981 by a desire to resist the Nuova Camorra Organizzata’s power in prison. As he would later remark:

  At the time, Cutolo’s men felt like th
ey were Lord God Almighty, and wherever they entered the prisons they wanted to commit abuses—things that didn’t go down well with us. So a group of us, not just me, decided to constitute this Sacra Corona Unita in opposition to the NCO’s excessive power in the prisons.

  Looking for a counterweight to the Professor’s influence in his region, Rogoli sought backing for his new fraternity from the ’ndrangheta. Rosarno ’ndrangheta boss Umberto Bellocco initiated Rogoli into the Calabrian mafia, and then dictated the rules of the Sacra Corona Unita to him. The Calabrians reserved the right to preside over the rituals that marked the promotion of SCU members to the highest ranks within the Puglian organisation, and also demanded the SCU’s collaboration in a series of kidnappings. The SCU, in other words, was a semi-autonomous Puglian branch of the ’ndrangheta.

  Rogoli’s men embraced the SCU’s borrowed mystical rituals with the zeal of converts. One of the new mafia’s early leaders, Romano Oronzo, commissioned a painting crammed with the new mafia’s symbols. The artist who took the commission would later describe it to a court:

  He wanted me to draw a triangle, the sign of the Holy Trinity, with Jesus’s face and a dove, plus the world, and his own eyes, and a hand stopping a bolt of lightning. Before painting it, I asked him to explain why he wanted those themes, and he told me he felt that he had been sent by God to help the world.

  Like the Professor whose power over Puglian territory he sought to resist, Rogoli built his organisation behind bars in the first instance, and then moved on to seek territorial dominance in the outside world. The SCU soon grew to absorb the Famiglia Salentina Libera, and unite criminals from all the provinces of Puglia.

  The Sacra Corona Unita did not have a tranquil life, all the same. Members from different parts of Puglia were often reluctant to submit to Rogoli’s authority. Rivalries over the growing income from narcotics were also a cause of friction. New mini-mafias were set up in Puglia in opposition to the SCU. In 1986, the internal wrangling had become so bad that Rogoli felt obliged to refound the SCU, renaming his new brainchild, imaginatively, the Nuova Sacra Corona Unita. The SCU was given a command body, the Società Riservatissima (or ‘Very Confidential Society’), which comprised eight senior bosses—‘eight unknown, invisible and well-armed men’, in Rogoli’s words. They were well armed because they could call on a dedicated death squad, paid for out of the organisation’s central fund, to enforce discipline. But even these drastic measures did not stop the internecine conflict and fragmentation.

  Thus the Sacra Corona Unita repeated the same basic developments that other mafias had been going through since the 1950s: more profits, greater centralisation and more bloody divisions. Between 1984 and 1992, the number of mafia-related homicides in Puglia tripled, from 45 to 135 per year.

  The SCU is still an underworld force today, albeit one that has suffered some heavy blows in recent years. It is too early to tell whether the Sacra Corona Unita will pass the ultimate test of mafia longevity and allow some of its leaders to hand their authority down through the generations.

  Puglia, like Rome, was a territory where all three major mafias had a presence. The region’s Adriatic coast was a vital point of entry for bootleg cigarettes, as well as other illegal goods. Geographically speaking, it was in the back yard of the ’ndrangheta and the camorra. One of the striking things about the story of the Sacra Corona Unita is that, as in Rome, camorristi, mafiosi and ’ndranghetisti did not come to blows on Puglian soil. There was even diplomatic cooperation between them. It seems that emissaries from the ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra were present as observers when the Professor ceremonially initiated ninety Puglian criminals in Lecce.

  Nonetheless, Cosa Nostra, camorra and ’ndrangheta took different approaches to the business of operating on new terrain. As the number and power of mafia outposts in other regions grew during the 1960s and 1970s, through businesses like kidnapping and narcotics, one of the three showed itself to be markedly more successful than the other two at occupying new ground.

  Perhaps surprisingly, given that it was the richest and most powerful of the mafias, Cosa Nostra showed only an intermittent interest in formally establishing branches in other regions. In various parts of Italy there were authorised decine (ten-man platoons) of Cosa Nostra that were mostly run and staffed by Sicilians. But when they left Sicily for whatever reason, Men of Honour tended not to set up their own formalised embassies. Instead, they got along very well by relying on their personal criminal prestige to bind collaborators in the local underworld to them on an ad hoc basis. That is just what Corleone capo Luciano Liggio did in the kidnapping phase of his career. Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo operated in a similar way when he ran his heroin trafficking from a base near his prison in the Marche region.

  Only in Naples were Families of Cosa Nostra established, and non-Sicilians like the Nuvolettas and Zazas put in charge. That unusual move was due to the importance of Naples as the ‘El Dorado’ of contraband cigarettes. And, as we have seen, Cosa Nostra’s influence generated violent resistance from the Professor’s NCO. It also spread resentment even among the Sicilian mafia’s Neapolitan allies. ‘The Sicilians looked down their noses at us,’ one camorra boss recalled. ‘But what a race there was to suck up to Cosa Nostra. And you call these people camorristi! They were ready to offer their arses to the Sicilians just so they could feel a little bit stronger.’

  Despite his opposition to the Sicilian influence in his homeland, Raffaele Cutolo adopted a centralised and rather dictatorial strategy when it came to operating outside Campania. Hence the Puglian branch of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata had to pay a heavy tribute to the Professor. His high-handedness backfired when the Sacra Corona Unita was formed to resist him.

  The ’ndrangheta took a more subtle and yet also more thorough approach to the problem of expanding outside its home territory. It had powerful emissaries in Campania and Puglia. Yet none of the local criminal groups revolted against the Calabrian presence. Indeed, like the SCU’s founder Giuseppe Rogoli, they actively sought it out. A minor mafia, the Rosa dei Venti (‘Wind Rose’) was set up in Lecce prison in 1990 and also asked for the ’ndrangheta’s blessing. Clearly, recognition from Calabria was a great prize for newly formed gangs.

  The ’ndrangheta is the mafia that has the richest and most complex repertoire of symbols, traditions, ranks and rituals: it has been collecting them since the nineteenth century. The ’ndrangheta is the last survivor of a broad kin group of Honoured Societies from the Italian mainland that included the original Honoured Society of Naples, and even an organisation called the Mala Vita (literally ‘Bad Life’, but more accurately, ‘the Criminal Underworld’), which was a short-lived nineteenth-century forerunner of the Puglian mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita. Some of the most important new mafias of the 1970s and 1980s, including the NCO and the SCU, drew on the ’ndrangheta’s great library of gangland style and structure.

  Together with a great many business opportunities in drugs, kidnapping and the like, these cultural offerings were enough to satisfy both the Puglians of the SCU and the ’ndranghetisti they adopted as sponsors. The ’ndrangheta, in short, preferred a hands-off approach. It did not want an empire, just a select band of reliable business partners. Perhaps ‘franchising’ is the best way to describe the Calabrian approach to the Puglian crime scene.

  In the wealthy regions of the North, the ’ndrangheta had long been setting down roots through its involvement in construction and kidnapping. Here the ’ndrangheta spread directly and not by recognising local gangs like the SCU. By the 1980s, ’ndranghetisti had established branches called Locals in many towns and cities across Lombardy and Piedmont. These northern colonies were closely linked to individual Locals back in Calabria by blood ties, organisation and business: through such channels, a regular to-and-fro of drugs, money, assassins, fugitives and kidnap victims was established. Young men born into ’ndrangheta families in the North would come back home to be initiated into the brotherhood. The northern �
�ndranghetisti also met among themselves to settle disputes and make sure that Calabrian rules were applied. As one ’ndrangheta defector from the North testified:

  In 1982 I took part in a meeting of all the Locals in Piedmont. About 700 people were there . . . The reason for the meeting was because in Turin at that time many Calabrians who were affiliated to the ’ndrangheta were pimping—an activity that the ’ndrangheta considers dishonourable . . . It was decided to order the affiliates to stop pimping. And if they did not obey the order, they would either be expelled from the ’ndrangheta or physically eliminated.

  The ’ndrangheta’s strategy made it by far the most successful of the three major mafias in other regions. According to one Sicilian mafioso who did business in the North: ‘In Piedmont, the Calabrians have taken over the region. The little groups of Sicilians don’t give any trouble to their organisation.’ The Calabrians were so confident in their power in the North that they accommodated groups of Sicilian mafiosi within their structure. The ’ndrangheta, once the poor relation of the mighty Sicilian mafia, had come a long, long way.

  While all this was actually going on, the Italian authorities had very little idea of just how far the ’ndrangheta had spread. The Calabrian mafia’s softly-softly brand of colonisation proved to be the right formula for expansion into the regions at the heart of the national economy.

  However colonisation was not the only measure of mafia reach. The ’ndrangheta may have planted its piratical flag in towns and cities across the North, but Cosa Nostra’s narcodollars had earned it a place at the highest tables of Italian finance. Aldo Ravelli was a famously ruthless stockbroker who ran into trouble with the law on several occasions in the course of a career on the Milan stock exchange that traversed the decades. In an interview he ordered to be published only after his death, he gave an insider’s take on Italy’s financial bourgeoisie, dividing it into three camps. The first was ‘semi-clean’. The second was ‘unscrupulous’. The third was the Sicilian mafia.