Praise for Blood Brotherhoods
‘[BLOOD BROTHERHOODS] is no dry, scholarly work. Dickie writes with the same distinctive flair that made his book DELIZIA!, on the history of Italian cuisine, so readable.’
—Daily Telegraph
‘It is almost certainly the most ambitious true-crime assignment ever: to lift the veil of myth, mystery and silence—omertà—shrouding Italy’s notorious criminal organisations. The result is a stunning success; a sprawling, powerful historical narrative that is the definitive story of Sicily’s Mafia, the Camorra of Naples and Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta.’
—Adelaide Advertiser
‘Both fine social history and hair-raising true crime, this account of the Italian underworld clans tells a grimly fascinating tale.’
—Independent
‘Exciting and well written, it plays out like a 19th-century Sopranos.’
—Shortlist
‘Magisterial . . . absorbing . . . ’
—Scotsman
‘[E]nthralling . . . chillingly charts the birth and rise of all three of Italy’s mafias.’
—Dr John Guy
‘Italians often complain that foreigners are obsessed by the Mafia, turning a localised problem of organised crime into a stereotype that damages the image of a whole nation. Yet as John Dickie shows in this chilling and eye-opening book, the real problem is that the stereotype is correct. . . . A fine book.’
—Bill Emmott, The Times (London)
‘Drawn with expertise and mastery of detail . . . [Dickie] combines narrative skills in his description of skullduggery with excellent pen-portraits of striking individuals. His reader-friendly, racy style becomes more sober and reflective when he offers points of analysis, and now no one anywhere writes with such authority on Italy’s criminal gangs.’
—Times Literary Supplement
‘John Dickie’s chronicling of the Italian mafias is both fine in detail and engrossing in narrative sweep.’
—John Lloyd, Financial Times
BLOOD
BROTHERHOODS
Also by John Dickie
Cosa Nostra
Delizia!
Mafia Republic
Copyright © John Dickie, 2011, 2013, 2014
First half published as Blood Brotherhoods in Great Britain in 2011 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton, an Hachette UK Company; then published as Mafia Brotherhoods in paperback in 2012; and second half first published as Mafia Republic in 2013
Published in 2014 in the United States by PublicAffairs™,
a Member of the Perseus Books Group
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.
PublicAffairs books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases in the U.S. by corporations, institutions, and other organizations. For more information, please contact the Special Markets Department at the Perseus Books Group, 2300 Chestnut Street, Suite 200, Philadelphia, PA 19103, call (800) 810-4145, ext. 5000, or e-mail special.markets@perseusbooks.com.
Maps by Neil Gower and Clifford Webb
Book Design by Linda Mark
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dickie, John, 1963–
Blood brotherhoods : A History of Italy’s three mafias / John Dickie.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61039-428-4 (e-book)
1. Mafia—Italy—Sicily—History. 2. ’Ndrangheta—History.
3. Camorra—History. 4. Organized crime—Italy—History. I. Title.
HV6453.I83M326933 2014
364.1060945’8--dc23
2014001947
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to the memory of Gilbert Dickie (1922-2011)
The blackest despair that can take hold of any society is the fear that living honestly is futile.
CORRADO ALVARO
CONTENTS
Maps
The structure of Cosa Nostra
The structure of the ’ndrangheta
Ranks in the ’ndrangheta
Preface to the US Edition
Introduction: Blood brothers
PART I: VIVA LA PATRIA!
1.How to extract gold from fleas
2.Co-managing crime
3.The redemption of the camorra
4.Uncle Peppe’s stuff: The camorra cashes in
5.Spanishry: The first battle against the camorra
PART II: GETTING TO KNOW THE MAFIA
6.Rebels in corduroy
7.The benign mafia
8.A sect with a life of its own: The mafia’s rituals discovered
9.Double vendetta
PART III: THE NEW CRIMINAL NORMALITY
10.Born delinquents: Science and the mob
11.An audience of hoods
12.The slack society
PART IV: THE ’NDRANGHETA EMERGES
13.Harsh mountain
14.The tree of knowledge
15.Darkest Africo
16.The King of Aspromonte
PART V: MEDIA DONS
17.Bankers and Men of Honour
18.Floriopolis
19.Four trials and a funeral
20.The ‘high’ camorra
21.The camorra in straw-yellow gloves
22.The criminal Atlantic
23.Gennaro Abbatemaggio: Genialoid
24.The strange death of the Honoured Society
PART VI: MUSSOLINI’S SCALPEL
25.Sicily: The last struggle with the mafia
26.Campania: Buffalo soldiers
27.Calabria: The flying boss of Antonimina
28.Calabria: What does not kill me makes me stronger
29.Calabria: A clever, forceful and wary woman
30.Campania: The Fascist Vito Genovese
31.Sicily: The slimy octopus
32.Master Joe dances a tarantella
33.Liberation
MAP SECTION APPEARS BETWEEN PAGES 284 AND 285
PART VII: FUGGEDABOUTIT
34.Sicily: Banditry, land and politics
35.Sicily: In the Name of the Law
36.Calabria: The last romantic bandit
37.Naples: Puppets and puppeteers
38.Gangsterismo
PART VIII: 1955
39.The Monster of Presinaci
40.Mars attacks!
41.The President of Potato Prices (and his widow)
PART IX: THE MAFIAS’ ECONOMIC MIRACLE
42.King Concrete
43.Gangsters and blondes
44.Cosa Nostra: Untouchables no more
45.Mafia diaspora
46.The mafia-isation of the camorra
47.The mushroom-pickers of Montalto
48.Mafiosi on the barricades
49.The kidnapping industry
50.The Most Holy Mother and the First ’Ndrangheta War
51.A brief history of junk
52.Mr Champagne: Heroin broker
53.The Transatlantic Syndicate
54.The Professor
PART X: THE SLAUGHTER
55.Blood orgy
56.The New Family: A group portrait
57.Catastrophe economy
58.The Magliana Band and the Sacred United Crown
PART XI: MARTYRS AND PENITENTS
59.Mafia terror
60.The fatal combination
61.Doilies and drugs
62.Walking cadavers
63.The capital of the anti-mafia
64.The rule of non-
law
65.’U maxi
66.One step forward, three steps back
67.Falcone goes to Rome
PART XII: THE FALL OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC
68.Sacrifice
69.The collapse of the old order
70.Negotiating by bomb: Birth of the Second Republic
PART XIII: THE SECOND REPUBLIC AND THE MAFIAS
71.Cosa Nostra: The head of the Medusa
72.Camorra: A geography of the underworld
73.Camorra: An Italian Chernobyl
74.Gomorrah
75.’Ndrangheta: Snowstorm
76.’Ndrangheta: The Crime
77.Welcome to the grey zone
Acknowledgements
Illustration credits
Notes on sources
Sources consulted
Index
THE STRUCTURE OF COSA NOSTRA
As first described by Tommaso Buscetta in 1984
THE STRUCTURE OF THE ’NDRANGHETA
(Source: ‘Operazione Crimine’, summer 2010.)
RANKS IN THE ’NDRANGHETA
PREFACE TO THE US EDITION
Once upon a time, three Spanish knights landed on the island of Favignana, just off the westernmost tip of Sicily. They were called Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso and they were fugitives. One of their sisters had been raped by an arrogant nobleman, and the three knights had fled Spain after washing the crime in blood.
Somewhere among Favignana’s many caves and grottoes, Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso found sanctuary. But they also found a place where they could channel their sense of injustice into creating a new code of conduct, a new form of brotherhood. Over the next twenty-nine years, they dreamed up and refined the rules of the Honoured Society. Then, at last, they took their mission out into the world.
Osso dedicated himself to Saint George, and crossed into nearby Sicily where he founded the branch of the Honoured Society that would become known as the mafia.
Mastrosso chose the Madonna as his sponsor, and sailed to Naples where he founded another branch: the camorra.
Carcagnosso became a devotee of the Archangel Michael, and crossed the straits between Sicily and the Italian mainland to reach Calabria. There, he founded the ’ndrangheta.
BLOOD BROTHERHOODS IS A HISTORY OF ITALY’S THREE MOST FEARED CRIMINAL organisations, or mafias, from their origins to the present day. But no historian can claim to be the first person drawn towards the mystery of how the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta began. Mafiosi got there first. Each of Italy’s major underworld fraternities has its own foundation myth. For example, the story of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso (names that mean something like ‘Bone’, ‘Masterbone’, and ‘Heelbone’) is the ’ndrangheta’s official account of its own birth: it is a tale told to Calabrian recruits when they prepare to join the local clan and embark on a life of murder, extortion and trafficking.
As history, the three Spanish knights have about as much substance as the three bears. Their story is hooey. But it is serious, sacramental hooey all the same. The study of nationalism has given us fair warning: any number of savage iniquities can be committed in the name of fables about the past. Moreover, in the course of the last 150 years, Italy’s criminal brotherhoods have frequently occluded the truth by imposing their own narrative on events: all too often the official version of history turns out to derive from the mafias’ myths, which are a great deal more insidious than the hokum about Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso might initially suggest. No ordinary gang, however powerful, has lasted as long as the mafias, nor has it had the same drive to control how its own past is narrated. The very fact that the mafias value history so highly betrays the outrageous scale of their ambition.
Mafia history is filled with many outrages much worse than this. Acts of appalling ferocity are the most obvious. The mafias’ cruelty is essential to what they are and what they do; there is no such thing as a mafia without murder, nor has there ever been. Yet violence is only the beginning. Through violence, and through the many tactics that it makes possible, the mafias have corrupted Italy’s institutions, drastically curtailed the life-chances of its citizens, evaded justice, and set up their own self-interested meddling as an alternative to the courts. So the real outrage of Italy’s mafias is not the countless lives that have been cruelly curtailed—including, very frequently, the lives of the mafiosi themselves. Nor is it even the livelihoods stunted, the resources wasted, the priceless landscapes defiled. The real outrage is that these murderers constitute a parallel ruling class in southern Italy. They infiltrate the police, the judiciary, local councils, national ministries, and the economy. They also command a measure of public support. And they have done all this pretty much since the Italian state was founded in 1861. As Italy grew, so too did the mafias. Despite what Fascist propaganda has led many people to believe, the criminal fraternities survived under Mussolini’s regime and even infiltrated it. They prospered as never before with the peace and democracy that have characterised the period since 1946. Indeed, when Italy transformed itself into one of the world’s wealthiest capitalist economies in the 1960s, the criminal organisations became stronger, more affluent and more violent than ever. They also multiplied and spread, spawning new mafias and new infestations in parts of the national territory that had hitherto seemed immune. Italy is a young country, a modern creation, and the mafias are one of the symptoms of modernity, Italian style.
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 contr
ibution 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.