by John Hooper
Italy has three main criminal syndicates: the Camorra, Cosa Nostra in Sicily, which was the first organization to be designated with the term Mafia,* and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. There is also, on a much lesser scale, the Sacra Corona Unita (“Holy United Crown”) in Puglia.* All these groups have at least four characteristics that set them apart from ordinary criminal gangs, including Italian ones.
One is that, like the Yakuza, they are secret societies. In the 1980s, a gang known as the Banda della Magliana was active in Rome. But it was not a secret society. It did not, like Cosa Nostra, initiate its members by getting them to hold a burning image of the Virgin Mary. Nor did it have ranks and rituals that mimicked the liturgy of the Catholic Church, like the ’Ndrangheta.
A second characteristic that Italy’s four mafias have in common is that their members all feel they belong to something more than just a gang. Though the gang, or clan, is largely autonomous in its day-to-day operations, it forms part of a broader fellowship that—albeit intermittently—has a hierarchical structure.
In the case of Cosa Nostra, the cell or gang is the cosca (a telling word: in Sicilian, it refers to the head of an artichoke, with its densely overlapping leaves). Above that is the mandamento, made up of several—usually three—neighboring cosche. Each mandamento sends a representative to the commissione provinciale (known in the province of Palermo, at least to the media, as the cupola, or dome). In the six provinces of Sicily where the Mafia is active,* the commissione provinciale chooses a representative to send to a commissione interprovinciale (or regionale). That, on the evidence of most of the pentiti—Mafiosi who have turned state’s evidence—is how things are meant to work. But there seem to have been periods in which the structure has fallen apart, either because of police action or internal conflict.
The other point that needs stressing is that Cosa Nostra’s hierarchy has never really been a command structure. As far as is known, the commissioni exist—when they do exist—for the purposes of consultation, the resolution of disputes between cosche and the agreeing of rules common to the entire organization. They do not usually order specific operations. But there have been exceptions. Among them was the decision by the commissione provinciale in Palermo to assassinate two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992. There was a grim irony in their violent deaths. The killings were in reprisal for the so-called Maxi Trial of 1986–1987 in which the two men for the first time succeeded in convincing a court of law that Cosa Nostra had a hierarchical structure and that Mafia bosses could therefore be convicted of ordering crimes they did not themselves perpetrate.
For a long time, the situation in the ’Ndrangheta was less clear. It was known that, as far back as the 1950s, a supreme assembly had existed that met every year when the heads of the various cells, known as ’ndrine, assembled in and around the village of San Luca for a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi. The assembly was called, appropriately enough, the Crimine (“Crime”). But in the early 2000s investigators discovered that the ’ndranghetisti in Reggio Calabria, the biggest province in Calabria, had created a body similar to that of Cosa Nostra’s cupola. Recordings of conversations between mobsters suggested it was called the Provincia. It was assumed the old ways had been abandoned. But in 2010 an investigation established that the Crimine was still very much in existence. Domenico Oppedisano, an eighty-year-old man who had been almost unknown to the police and who lived quietly as an apparently impecunious peasant farmer, was identified as its president. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to ten years in jail.
The Camorra is less hierarchical and conflicts between clans are more frequent. But its initiates nevertheless feel they are part of a broader whole that they themselves refer to as the Sistema (System).
Like the Mafiosi and ’ndranghetisti, though to a lesser extent, the gangsters of Naples and the surrounding region of Campania look for political “cover.” This is a third way in which mafiosi differ from ordinary criminals: they are constantly on the lookout for acquiescent lawmakers who can smooth their path in exchange for the votes they can deliver. Nor is it the only means by which Italy’s mafias subvert the authorities. Yet another distinguishing feature of its organized-crime syndicates is that they attempt relentlessly—and often successfully—to replace the state. The obsession of every “boss” is to secure controllo del territorio (“control of the territory”). Ideally, nothing should be done on his turf to which he does not consent, and the people who live there should look to him as the ultimate arbiter of their fortunes. If their home has been burgled, if they need a job for their son or daughter, if they need the drains fixed in their apartment building, it should be to the boss, and not to the civil authorities, that they turn.
A sociologist writing in the late 1950s might well have concluded that Italy’s mafias were doomed. Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta were still essentially rural phenomena, and it would have been natural to assume that the immense flow of population from the countryside to the towns would rob them of their power bases. Yet more than half a century later it can be seen that this is not at all what has happened. Piero Grasso,* a former national anti-mafia prosecutor, once wrote, “As is clear from decades of investigation, in Italy the mafia is a structural component of large areas of society, politics and the business world.”
But just how extensive its activities are remains unclear. Year in, year out, Italian think tanks and other organizations come out with shocking figures to show that organized crime is the country’s biggest industry or that its mafias account for an appalling percentage of its GDP. Their press releases make for a good story and they are duly reported in the national and international media. But the question of how on earth researchers can arrive at these estimates is seldom asked. In recent years, the consensus has been that organized crime accounts for close to 9 percent of national output (though one estimate has put it at substantially more than 10 percent). In 2013, though, researchers from the Catholic University in Milan and the University of Trento presented a study that challenged the established orthodoxy.3 They concluded the figure was between about 1.2 percent and 2.2 percent of GDP.
The impact of Italy’s mafias on the life of the country is nonetheless formidable. There are more than a hundred gangs of the Camorra alone. Figures for the number of mafia affiliates are probably no more reliable than those for their revenue. But most estimates put the total at well over twenty thousand. According to the shopkeepers’ association Confesercenti, around 160,000 retailers hand over protection money (known in Italian as the pizzo). In areas traditionally associated with the mafia, the level of extortion is thought to range from 70 percent of shops in Sicily down to 30 percent in Puglia. More surprisingly perhaps, an estimated one in ten of the retail outlets in Lazio, the region that includes Rome, pays the pizzo, as does around one in every twenty in Lombardy and Piedmont.
On Sicily at least, it can be argued that the mobsters are in serious difficulties. Cosa Nostra has suffered from the shift in the market for narcotics away from heroin, in which it was a big player, toward cocaine, where the dominant importer among Italy’s mafias was—and is—the ’Ndrangheta. The arrest in 2006 of Bernardo Provenzano was the third time in thirteen years that a capo di tutti capi had been captured. Since then, police have netted a string of second-level Mafia commanders, decapitating the organization at least temporarily. In response, Cosa Nostra has striven to keep as low a profile as possible while continuing to reap the pizzo in Palermo and elsewhere in western Sicily.
Because of the Sicilian Mafia’s transatlantic connections, because of the Godfather books and films, because of its position as the eponymous Mafia, Cosa Nostra is vastly better known—and more intensively reported—than any of the other Italian organized-crime syndicates. Mesmerized by the legend of the Sicilian Mafia, international public opinion has failed to notice the extent to which it has been overtaken by the Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta since the 1990s. I know from havi
ng interviewed him twice while he was in hiding that one of the reasons Roberto Saviano wrote Gomorrah was because of his frustration at the lack of interest—not just abroad, but in Italy itself—in a trial of more than one hundred camorristi, comparable to the Maxi Trial of Mafiosi in the 1980s. The so-called Processo Spartacus centered on the activities of the Casalesi, a clan based in the town of Casal di Principe, northwest of Naples. It lasted for seven years, yet was virtually ignored by the national media.
Saviano’s book achieved its aim of focusing national and international attention on the threat posed by the Camorra. But he paid a high price for the satisfaction that brought. The Casalesi passed a death sentence on him. He still lives under police protection.
Unlike the Camorra, the ’Ndrangheta remains in the shadows. It has managed to grow almost unpublicized into what most police and prosecutors reckon to be Italy’s richest criminal fraternity. Several of its clans amassed considerable financial resources in the 1970s by kidnapping rich businessmen and holding them for ransom in the wilds of the Aspromonte, the uplands that form the rocky heart of southern Calabria. One of their victims was John Paul Getty III, the grandson of the oil tycoon. The cash they got from kidnapping was reinvested in drugs. The ’Ndrangheta was the first of Italy’s mafias to establish solid links with the Colombian cocaine cartels. And they have since played a leading—perhaps dominant—role in the import of the drug into Europe. They are known recently to have built working relationships with some of the Mexican cartels.
Not that it has done much good for Calabria. It is Italy’s poorest region after Campania. And more perhaps even than Campania, the “toe” of Italy has undergone a process that a priest working there once termed “Somali-ization.” Large parts of the region are, in effect, outside the control of the Italian state. Anyone who visits Calabria and can understand Italian cannot help but be struck by the number of crimes, obviously linked to the ’Ndrangheta, that are chronicled in the local media but that go unreported in the rest of the country. In recent years, the homicide rate in the region has been three times the national average, even higher than in Campania.
Drug trafficking has enriched all three mafias and helped fund their expansion both nationally and internationally. As far back as 1960, the Sicilian novelist Leonardo Sciascia had one of his characters speculate that
maybe the whole of Italy is becoming a sort of Sicily . . . Scientists say that the palm tree line, that is the climate suitable to growth of the palm, is moving north, five hundred meters, I think it was, every year . . . The palm tree line . . . I call it the coffee line, the strong black coffee line . . . It’s rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up throughout Italy and already passed Rome.4
It was a quite extraordinarily prescient passage, because the mechanism that would allow Cosa Nostra and the other mafias to spread through the peninsula was in its early stages. Migration from the south to the north played a role. But even more important was a well-intentioned but wholly misguided law passed in 1956 that allowed suspected or convicted mobsters to be uprooted from their home territory and forced to live under curfew in the north. It went by the name of soggiorno obbligato, or “required stay,” and, according to one estimate,5 by 1975 some thirteen hundred Mafiosi, camorristi and ’ndranghetisti had been settled within striking distance of the industrial and financial heart of Italy.
Until very recently, nevertheless, there was a generalized perception in Italy that the mafia remained an overwhelmingly southern phenomenon. Northerners, who feel themselves to be several cuts above their fellow Italians from the Mezzogiorno, indignantly denied that organized crime was any part of life in their part of the country. That myth was resolutely dispelled in 2010 when police made a wave of arrests in and around Milan after an investigation found abundant evidence of the ’Ndrangheta’s presence in the Italian business capital and the surrounding region. The most striking proof was a video made secretly by the Carabinieri of a dinner summit held by ’Ndrangheta bosses near Milan. The venue they had chosen was a left-wing social center named after Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. A few years earlier, in fact, a journalist and a prosecutor had collaborated on a book that pointed to evidence that the ’Ndrangheta’s activities had penetrated to almost every corner of Italy, including even the partly French-speaking Valle d’Aosta in the shadow of the Alps.6
But is there any particular reason the ’Ndrangheta and the other groups should have taken root and grown to such a flourishing maturity in Italy rather than in, say, Spain, Portugal or Greece? The earliest mafiosi are thought to have been so-called campieri, toughs hired to protect the land and interests of an emergent class of tenant farmers, the gabelloti. But the early, rural mafiosi soon learned they could play a useful role.
Like the rest of Italy, Sicily at the time had a judicial system that was slow and frequently corrupt. What is more, the mistrust described earlier was at least as bad as on the mainland and probably worse.* Which is where the mafiosi came in. They could guarantee a contract with the implicit threat of violence. If a farmer who had promised to sell his neighbor a horse delivered a mule instead, the uomo d’onore* and his confederates would pay the farmer a visit of a kind he would never forget.
The problems Sicilians encountered in reaching agreements have endured. In one of the most insightful books written about Cosa Nostra,7 social scientist Diego Gambetta observed that it was not until 1991 that a radio-dispatched taxi service began operating in Palermo—the last city in Italy to get one. Before the arrival of GPS, which allows the location of each cab to be pinpointed, it was easy to cheat: “Driver B can wait until driver A answers the operator’s call and then quote a pickup time shorter than A’s,” Gambetta wrote. And that is exactly what happened again and again in Palermo when the system was tried.
But if, as Gambetta argued, the taxi drivers of Palermo were no more dishonest than in the rest of Italy, the really interesting question is why they were unable to solve the problem in the same way as in Naples and Milan. There, if one driver suspected another of cheating, he could go to the pickup address and, if he arrived first, claim the ride for himself. Persistent cheaters were reported and could have their radios disconnected. The implication is that certain drivers in Palermo enjoyed the protection of the Mafia and could therefore cheat with impunity—Cosa Nostra’s arbitration is not always of the fair, if intimidating, sort described earlier.
Nor does its historical role as an agency of mediation provide a full explanation for the organization’s survival and growth. Another theory rests on the fact that the Mafia came into existence at approximately the same time as the Italian state. The first mention of the term in an official document was in 1865. The simplest—and perhaps the most convenient—explanation for this is that organized crime flourished in the south, where the young state was weak and family and clan allegiances even stronger than in the rest of the country. But there is another way of looking at what happened, which is to see organized crime as, in part, a reaction to unification. The ideologues of the Risorgimento were mostly northerners and it was northerners—and particularly Piedmontese—who carried unification through to completion. Thereafter, the Piedmontese dominated both the government and the armed forces that were sent to deal with the brigandage that plagued the south. At the same time, Naples lost its role as capital and became a provincial city on the way to nowhere very much except Sicily and North Africa. To many in the south, it must have seemed more like colonialization than unification.*
CHAPTER 17
Temptation and Tangenti
Tutti gli uomini sono corruttibili: è questione di somme.
All men are corruptible. It is just a question of amounts.
Carlo Dossi
Non abbiamo sconfitto i corrotti, abbiamo solo selezionato la specie.
We have not defeated those who are corrupt. We have merely identified the type.
Piercamillo Davigo, a prosecutor in the Mani Pulite (“Clean Hands”) team that investigated the Tangentopoli corruption scandals of the early 1990s.
Back in the 1920s, Giuseppe Prezzolini expressed a view that was to remain common until quite recently. “All the main defects of the Italians,” he wrote, listing corruption as one of them, “derive from Italian poverty in the same way that the dirtiness of so many of their villages derives from the shortage of water. When more real money and clean water are running through Italy, its redemption will be largely complete.”1
This is a view I have often heard voiced in respect of other countries in the Mediterranean: that corruption is simply a matter of economics, or rather poverty. Before Spain or Portugal joined what was to become the European Union, foreign diplomats and visiting journalists would often assert as an axiomatic truth that as soon as the two countries did so, they would become richer, and that when their inhabitants were richer, they would start to behave in exactly the same way as people in the north. But, in the case of Italy at least, time has shown that the relationship between corruption and wealth—or the lack of it—is not as straightforward as was imagined.
The 1980s, for example, were a time of rapid economic growth in Italy. As seen earlier, it is possible that toward the end of the decade Italians were richer than Britons. Yet it was precisely in those years that the tide of sleaze later uncovered by the Mani Pulite—“Clean Hands”—investigation reached its height. What the prosecutors in Milan uncovered—or rather, brought to court for the first time—was nothing less than a system of ingrained bribery, dubbed Tangentopoli, on which the country’s postwar political order had come to depend. In essence, the price of everything supplied to the public—from airports to paper table napkins in an old people’s home—had been inflated. And the difference between the inflated price and the fair one was siphoned off to provide a tangente (bribe) to the party or parties in a position to award the contract. For the most part, the cash was used to maintain the parties and pay for the patronage they dispensed. But some of it stuck to the fingers of individual unscrupulous politicians.