Blood Brotherhoods (3 page)

Today, in the areas of Italy where criminal power is strongest, it constitutes nothing short of a criminal regime. In a secret dispatch from 2008 that found its way onto the Wikileaks site, the United States Consul General in Naples reported on Calabria. One might quibble with one or two of his statistics, but the core of the diagnosis is as true as it is dispiriting:

The ’ndrangheta organized crime syndicate controls vast portions of [Calabria’s] territory and economy, and accounts for at least three percent of Italy’s GDP (probably much more) through drug trafficking, extortion and usury . . . Much of the region’s industry collapsed over a decade ago, leaving environmental and economic ruin. The region comes in last place in nearly every category of national economic assessments. Most of the politicians we met on a recent visit were fatalistic, of the opinion that there was little that could be done to stop the region’s downward economic spiral or the stranglehold of the ’ndrangheta. A few others disingenuously suggested that organized crime is no longer a problem . . . No one believes the central government has much, if any, control of Calabria, and local politicians are uniformly seen as ineffective and/or corrupt. If Calabria were not part of Italy, it would be a failed state.

Italy is and has always been a deeply troubled society. But it is not a banana republic in South America, or an impoverished warlord demesne in Asia, or some remnant of a shattered empire in Eastern Europe. Unless our maps are all calamitously wrong, the famous boot-shaped peninsula is not located in a region of the world where one might expect to find the state’s authority undermined by a violent and rapacious alternative power. Italy is a full member of the family of Western European nations. Alone among those nations, it has the mafias. Herein lie both the urgency and the fascination of mafia history.

Yet writing mafia history is a young field of scholarship: it is predominantly a child of the unprecedented mafia savagery of the 1980s and early 1990s, when Italian researchers began to channel their sense of outrage into patient and rigorous study. Overwhelmingly, those historians, whose numbers have grown steadily, hail from the same regions of southern Italy that are worst afflicted by Italy’s permanent crime emergency—regions where
mafia history is still being made. Some researchers are lucky enough to hold university positions like I do. Others are prosecutors and officers of the law. Some are just ordinary citizens. But all of them are bent on pitting hard evidence and open debate against the lies spread by the mafias and their allies. There can be few other areas where the discipline of understanding the past can make such a direct contribution to building a better future. To defeat the mafias, one has to know what they are; and they are what their history shows us, no more and no less. Thanks to the labours of a number of historians, we can now shine lights into the obscurity of Italian organised crime’s development, revealing a narrative that is both disturbing and disturbingly relevant to the present.

Blood Brotherhoods
springs from my belief that the findings of this growing body of research are too important to be kept among specialists. It draws together the known documentation and the best research to create a ‘choral’ work, as the Italians might say: a book in which many voices tell a single tale. My own voice is one of those in the chorus, in that
Blood Brotherhoods
also incorporates substantial new findings that complement and correct the story that has emerged from the exciting work being done in Italy.

This book is also distinctive in another important respect: it seeks to tell the story of
all
the mafias of Italy. Historians have only very rarely done sustained comparative research like this. (For sociologists and criminologists, by contrast, comparison is a stock-in-trade.) Perhaps it is understandable that historians have fallen behind—and not just because writing a unified history of organised crime in Italy is a dauntingly huge job. The criminal fraternities of Sicily, Campania and Calabria each evolved to fit the characteristic features of the territory it fed off. So at various points in their history, they have differed more than the catchall tag ‘mafia’ might lead us to assume.

Yet the mafias have never existed in isolation. What they share is just as important as the many things that distinguish them. Throughout their history, all three have communicated and learned from one another. So for all their individual peculiarities, studying Italy’s underworld organisations in isolation is a bit like trying to figure out the dynamics of natural selection just by staring at beetles impaled on pins in a dusty display case. A broader, comparative context shows us that Italy does not have solitary, static criminal organisms; rather, it has a rich underworld ecosystem that continues to generate new life-forms to this day.

The traces of the mafias’ common history are visible in a shared language.
Omertà
is one example—or
umiltà
(humility) to give its original form. Across southern Italy and Sicily,
omertà-umiltà
has denoted a code of silence and submission to criminal authority. ‘Honour’ is another instance:
all three organisations invoked a code of honour and have at one time or another called themselves the Honoured Society.

The links among the mafias go far beyond words and are one of the reasons for their success and longevity. So the virtues of comparison, and of reading the histories of the mafia, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta in parallel, are perhaps the only lessons in historical method that the fable of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso has to teach us.

In 2004 I published
Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia
, in which I brought together the best Italian research on the most notorious of Italy’s criminal fraternities.
Blood Brotherhoods
is not a sequel to
Cosa Nostra
: it will stand or fall on its own terms. But readers of
Cosa Nostra
may recognise my retelling of a few episodes from that earlier book, so they deserve to know before starting why the Sicilian mafia is integral to my concerns here. There are two reasons: first, because even in the last ten years or so, new discoveries have radically changed our view of key moments in the history of organised crime in Sicily; second, because there is also a great deal to learn about the Sicilian mafia by comparing it with the camorra and the ’ndrangheta. One thing that the comparison teaches us is that the sinister fame enjoyed by Sicilian
mafiosi
is amply deserved.

Sicily gave the world the term ‘mafia’, and the fact that that term has entered daily use not just in Italy but across the world is itself a symptom of Sicilian organised crime’s pervasive influence. In the dialect of Palermo, the island’s capital, ‘mafia’ denoted beauty and self-confidence: ‘cool’ comes about as close as English can to its original meaning. In the 1860s, just after the troubled island of Sicily became part of the newly united state of Italy, ‘mafia’ began to serve as a label for an organisation whose shape briefly became visible through a fog of violence and corruption. The mafia (which would soon disappear into the fog once more) had existed for some time by then, and it had already reached a level of power and wealth that delinquents on the mainland could only aspire to. That power and wealth explains why the Sicilian word ‘mafia’ became an umbrella term for all of Italy’s underworld brotherhoods, including the camorra and ’ndrangheta. Across more than a century and a half—the arc of time covered in these pages—we can chart the fortunes of the peninsula’s other two mafias against the heights that the Sicilians reached from the outset.

These days the Sicilian mafia is usually known as Cosa Nostra (‘our thing’), a moniker that
mafiosi
in both the United States and Sicily adopted in the 1960s. (The public and the authorities in Italy did not find out about this
new name until 1984.) The name ’ndrangheta stuck to the Calabrian mafia in the mid-1950s. (It means ‘manliness’ or ‘courage’.) In both cases, the new names coalesced because post-war public opinion and law enforcement became more searching, and gradually brought into focus a picture that had been blurred by a century of muddle, negligence and downright collusion.

So the first half of
Blood Brotherhoods
, which concludes with the fall of Fascism and the Allied Liberation of Italy, tells a story of underworld regimes that were as yet, if not nameless, then certainly ignored or mysterious, surrounded either by silence (in the case of the ’ndrangheta) or by endless, inconclusive dispute (in the case of the Sicilian mafia).

The camorra had a different relationship to its name. While structured criminal power has waxed and waned through Neapolitan history, the camorra has almost always been called the camorra. The original Honoured Society of Naples was, like the mafias of Sicily and Calabria, a sworn, occult sect of gangsters. Yet it had strangely few secrets. Everyone in Naples knew all about it. Which is one reason why its history has a dramatically different trajectory to the Honoured Societies of Sicily and Calabria.

By taking a comparative approach,
Blood Brotherhoods
will offer answers to some insistent questions. The first and most obvious of those questions is, How did Italy’s mafias begin? The worst answers recycle baseless legends that blame Arab invaders in Sicily and Spanish rulers in Naples. Such stories are close to the yarns spun by the Honoured Societies themselves—suspiciously close. Scarcely any better are the answers that evoke abstractions like ‘the culture’, ‘the mentality’, or ‘the southern Italian family’.

There are explanations, for both the origins and the persistence of mafia crime, that sound rather more sophisticated. University textbooks tend to talk about the fragile legitimacy of the state, the citizens’ lack of trust in the government institutions, the prevalence of patronage and clientelism in politics and administration, and so on. As a professor of Italian history, I myself have recited phrases like this in the past. So I know only too well that they rarely leave anyone much wiser. Nonetheless there is one crucial nugget of truth underneath all this jargon: the history of organised crime in Italy is as much about Italy’s weakness as it is about the mafias’ strength.
Omertà
leads us to the heart of the issue: it is often portrayed as being an iron code of silence, a stark choice between collusion and death. In some cases, it certainly is just as harsh a law as its reputation suggests. Yet the historical sources also show that, under the right kind of pressure,
omertà
has broken again and again. Far from respecting an ancient silence,
mafiosi
have been talking to the police since they first went into business. That persistent weakness is one reason why so many of the underworld’s darkest secrets are still there
in the archives for us to unearth. And one reason why mafia history is often more about misinformation and intrigue than it is about violence and death.

The best way to divulge those secrets and reconstruct those intrigues is to begin by simply telling stories—documented stories that feature real crimes, real men and women, real choices made in specific times and places. The best historians of organised crime in Italy reconstruct those stories from fragmentary archival sources and from the accounts of people (notably criminals) who often have very good reasons to distort what they say. It is not banal to compare this kind of historical research to detective work. Detectives labour to create a coherent prosecution case by matching the material evidence to what witnesses and suspects tell them. In both tasks—the historian’s and the detective’s—the truth emerges as much from the gaps and inconsistencies in the available testimonies as it does from the facts those testimonies contain.

But the question that drives research into Italy’s long and fraught relationship to these sinister fraternities is not just who committed which crimes. The question is also who knew what. Over the last century and a half, police, magistrates, politicians, opinion formers and even the general public have had access to a surprising amount of information about the mafia problem, thanks in part to the fragility of
omertà
. Italians have also, repeatedly, been shocked and angered by mafia violence and by the way some of its police, judiciary and politicians have colluded with crime bosses. As a result, the mafia drama has frequently been played out very visibly: as high-profile political confrontation, as media event. Yet Italy has also proved positively ingenious in finding reasons to look the other way. So the story of Italy’s mafias is not just a
whodunit?
It is also a
who knew it?
and, most importantly, a
why on earth didn’t they do something about it?

I
NTRODUCTION
: Blood brothers

I
N THE EARLY HOURS OF
15 A
UGUST
2007,
IN THE
G
ERMAN STEEL TOWN OF
D
UISBURG
, six young men of Italian origin climbed into a car and a van, a few yards away from the Da Bruno restaurant where they had been celebrating a birthday. One of them was just eighteen (it was his party), and another was only sixteen. Like the rest of the group, these two boys died very quickly, where they sat. Two killers fired fifty-four shots, even taking the time to reload their 9mm pistols and administer a
coup de grâce
to each of the six in turn.

This was the worst ever mafia bloodbath outside Italy and the United States—northern Europe’s equivalent to the St Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago in 1929. As the background to the murders emerged—a long-running blood feud in a little-known region of southern Italy—journalists across the globe began struggling with what the
New York Times
called an ‘unpronounceable name’: ’ndrangheta.

For the record, the name is pronounced as follows: an-
drang
-get-ah. The ’ndrangheta hails from Calabria (the ‘toe’ of the Italian boot), and it is oldest and strongest in the province of Reggio Calabria where the peninsula almost touches Sicily. Calabria is Italy’s poorest region, but its mafia has now become the country’s richest and most powerful. In the 1990s,
’ndranghetisti
(as Calabrian Men of Honour are called) earned themselves a leading position within the European cocaine market by dealing directly with South American producer cartels. The Calabrians have the strongest regime of
omertà
—of silence and secrecy. Few informants abandon the organisation’s ranks and give evidence to the state. The Calabrian mafia has also been the most successful of the three major criminal organisations at establishing cells outside of its home territory. It has branches in the centre and north of Italy and also abroad: the existence of ’ndrangheta colonies has been confirmed in six different German cities, as well as in Switzerland, Canada and Australia. According to a recent report from Italy’s Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into mafia crime, the ’ndrangheta also has a presence in Belgium, Holland, Great Britain, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Morocco, Turkey, Venezuela and the USA. Of all southern Italy’s mafias, the ’ndrangheta is the youngest and has come the furthest to find its recent success and notoriety; over the course of time, it has learned more than any other Italian criminal group. My research suggests that it absorbed its most important lessons long before the world was even aware that it existed.