by John Dickie
So although the Lads with Attitude had very similar rituals and a similar structure to the ’ndrangheta as it is known and feared today, they lacked the strong basis in kinship for which the ’ndrangheta is most renowned. In fact the picciotteria was slow to take on board the full criminal potential of blood relationships. From the beginning, deaths were part of the Calabrian mafia’s collective business; but it was only during the two decades of Fascism that births and marriages really entered the ledger too. The transformation was slow and patchy, but absolutely fundamental to the growing strength of the picciotteria.
By the time the Fascist dictatorship had asserted itself in Rome, judges were beginning to hear new kinds of family stories among the hoodlums of Calabria. In Vibo Valentia, to the north of the Plain of Gioia Tauro, a Carabiniere was murdered in 1927 for trying to stop a marriage alliance between two criminal kinship groups, one of which had colonised the local Fascist state.
Three years later, in Nicotera just to the south, one boy was initiated into the Honoured Society at only eleven years old.
Across the mountains to the south-east, in Grotteria in 1933, the local boss heard rumours that his fiancée was pregnant by another picciotto. So the gang met to discuss this smear on their capo’s honour, and decided to put a contract out. Contrary to what one might expect, the target was not the woman’s alleged lover, but the man thought to be spreading the rumours. Hearsay, after all, has always been the most dangerous of weapons in dynastic struggle. The chosen killer, a sixteen-year-old boy, took six goes before he managed to cut his victim’s throat properly.
Such stories are undoubtedly significant. Yet an even clearer way to trace the evolution of the early ’ndrangheta’s sexual politics is by following the changing role of women. Italy’s criminal organisations were from their inception overwhelmingly masculine and inherently sexist. Mafia honour has always been a men-only quality. Nevertheless, as we have already seen, women had important uses to mafiosi and camorristi, and there was significant variety in the ways they were used.
Whores were the women most frequently found in the company of the early ’ndranghetisti. Whereas Sicilian mafiosi have never had anything to do with prostitution, the first Calabrian picciotti tended to be ponces. As ponces do, they partied with the girls whose earnings they creamed off. (They raped and sometimes even married them too—because the business relationship between a pimp and his girls is also, very often, an intimate one.) So unlike their contemporaries in the Sicilian mafia, and unlike ’ndranghetisti of today, the Calabrian gangsters of the late 1800s and early 1900s did not view profiting from sex as dishonourable.
In this respect, the picciotteria was exactly like the Honoured Society of Naples had been in the nineteenth century. Neapolitan camorra slang bristled with derogatory synonyms for ‘prostitute’: bagascia, bambuglia, bardascia, drusiana, risgraziata, schiavuttella (‘little slave’), vaiassa and zoccola (‘sewer rat’). There was also a whole nomenclature for different kinds of streetwalkers. A new girl was a colomba (‘dove’); one from the provinces was a cafona (‘yokel’). A gallinella (‘young hen’) was a woman with kids; whereas a pollanca (‘young turkey’) was the term for a virgin set to be put on the market. In addition, there were several names for an old woman, like carcassa (‘carcass’) and calascione (‘a battered old mandolin’). This was the jargon of an exploitative industry central to the camorra economy. We know little about the family lives of Neapolitan camorristi in the 1800s. But it seems unlikely that men so profoundly embroiled in the flesh trade could sire dynasties to compare with those of the Sicilian dons.
Like their Neapolitan peers, who had accorded la Sangiovannara exceptional honour in recognition of her vital role in the events of Italian unification, the picciotti of Calabria also sometimes hung around with strong women. A few women involved with the picciotteria in its early days directly participated in criminal actions. Female names leap out now and again from among the defendants listed in the trial documents. There were two ‘Lasses with Attitude’ found guilty in Palmi in 1892, for example: Concetta Muzzopapa, age 40, and Rosaria Testa, age 26. Both were from Rosarno, at the opposite end of the Plain of Gioia Tauro from Palmi. Both had taken the oath to become members of the Calabrian mafia ‘by making blood come out of the little finger of their right hand as they promised to maintain secrecy’, the judges explained. Both also dressed up in men’s clothing to take part in robberies and violent attacks. Rosaria Testa confessed her part in the organisation, and told prosecutors many of its secrets before she retracted after being threatened by the male members of the gang.
There were other oathed women too, such as in the King of Aspromonte’s home town of Santo Stefano: investigations into the picciotteria during the brigand Musolino’s rampage found that 12 of the 166 initiated members were women; they included Musolino’s lover, Angela Surace, and his three sisters, Ippolita, Vincenza and Anna (who, it is worth recalling, were also the boss’s daughters). ‘Safe in the criminal association’s moral and material support’, the police wrote, ‘women from the members’ families are also able to issue threats and impose their will’. The oldest of the Musolino sisters, Ippolita, was particularly feared and it seems that she even advised her brother on who his targets should be. These are all fascinating cases, and we would know a lot more about the early ’ndrangheta if we had more documents on which to base a study of them. There is nothing quite like these Calabrian mafiose in the history of the other criminal organisations.
Some of the Calabrian hoodlums that came to trial in the 1920s and 1930s still displayed the same taste in women as the picciotti of the 1880s and 1890s. Like Domenico Noto, the flying boss of Antonimina: his gang pimped, forced whores to take part in robberies and regularly held meetings and parties in a hooker’s house. But Noto was not content with ‘wandering Venuses’ (in the judge’s delicate phrase). He arm-twisted his way into other beds, including those of an emigrant’s wife, her fourteen-year-old daughter, and a vulnerable deaf-mute girl. But it was hard to keep the criminal brotherhood’s secrets when you carried on like this. In court, the emigrant’s wife gave crucial evidence against Domenico Noto and more than forty of his comrades. Other Calabrian mafia cells were undone on the say-so of streetwalkers. For Calabrian judges showed no reluctance to believe evidence given by sex workers against the men who extorted money from them. As early as 1890, a judge in Reggio Calabria handed down severe sentences to a group of picciotti, and his ruling waved aside the defence’s attempts to discredit the testimonies of four prostitutes: ‘It is no use attacking what those unfortunate women have declared—for the reason that their repugnant trade cannot destroy their personality, which is the very substance of truth.’ The habit of making money from prostitution, like the technique of browbeating young boys into being initiated, was a structural weakness in the picciotteria: both were bound to generate witnesses for the prosecution.
Musolino’s sister Ippolita. According to the police, she had also been oathed into the Calabrian mafia.
But elsewhere during the Fascist era there are clear signs of change in women’s role. There are fewer prostitutes, and the gun-toting girl gangsters disappear. Instead, a cannier brand of gender politics begins to emerge. And with it, a new type of Calabrian mafia woman. Not a harlot. Or a cross-dressing brigandess. Instead a mother and wife whose nurturing energies are single-mindedly bent to building the honour of her menfolk, young and old.
It is often assumed that the ’ndrangheta’s heavy reliance on family bonds grows from the culture of ‘familism’ in Calabrian society. The available evidence suggests this is wrong. The ’ndrangheta had to learn to base itself on kinship ties. The apparently traditional function of ’ndrangheta women—as the cult of honour’s domestic priestesses—is actually a modern invention.
But even when this new model mafiosa first appears in the trial records during Fascism, she could wield real power and influence behind the scenes of picciotteria life. Maria Marvelli was one such woman. She w
as, to use a judge’s words once again, a ‘clever, forceful and wary woman’, one well used to the ways of the Honoured Society. Not even these qualities stopped her husband meeting his gory end. But they did allow her to have her revenge. The following story comes from beneath Fascism’s media blackout, and it draws heavily on Maria Marvelli’s own evidence to dramatise the role women were playing in the evolution of the picciotteria. As it happens, Maria Marvelli’s story also exposes the most savage face of Fascism’s countermeasures.
Just south west of Antonimina, home of the flying boss, lies Cirella, yet another tiny settlement clinging to the flanks of Aspromonte. Cirella was isolated in an inhospitable terrain; without roads fit for wheels, it was a village prey to the forces of nature and all but ignored by the forces of order.
The men of Cirella’s Honoured Society did all of the things that might be expected of them: they robbed, vandalised, raped, mutilated and murdered. But they were also developing softer forms of power. Remarkably, they had elbowed the local priest aside: crooks, and not the cleric, ran Cirella’s religious festivals. Anyone who wanted to do business with the local picciotti or marry one of their womenfolk had to join their ranks as a precondition.
Paolo Agostino was among the most influential men in Cirella’s Honoured Society. Even among their number his ferocity stood out, as a judge would later note:
He was one of those men who combines a robust and vigorous body with an audacious mind, a rare propensity for bullying, a strong tendency to commit all kinds of abuses, and the courage needed to make all these qualities count.
Paolo Agostino also had another quality that the judge did not identify, a quality that was becoming increasingly important for successful Calabrian bosses: he had a sharp eye for a smart woman. Those who went through the mafia initiation ritual in Cirella, as elsewhere in Calabria, had to swear to ‘renounce family affections, putting the interests of the Society before their parents, siblings and children’. But Calabrian gangsters were also beginning to learn that families have advantages. Paolo Agostino made a particularly good choice of wife: the ‘clever, forceful and wary’ Maria Marvelli.
La Marvelli had been married before; she was a widow. Her son from her first marriage, Francesco Polito, joined her as part of the new family she made with the ‘robust and vigorous’ Paolo Agostino. If the judge is to be believed, the marriage was not an equal one, at least within the walls of the Agostino home. Maria apparently ‘exercised a commanding authority over her husband and son. And she was obeyed without debate.’ Paolo Agostino’s return on the union was a new heir, and a wealthy one too: Maria’s son, Francesco Polito, had already inherited property worth one hundred thousand lire from his late father.
The marriage seems to have been happy, and Maria had more children. Moreover her older boy, Francesco Polito, was initiated into the Honoured Society when he came of age, as befitted the stepson of a senior gangster. However his mother, smart and suspicious woman that she was, would not allow him to handle any money. So he had to steal twenty-four bottles of olive oil from his grandfather by way of a membership fee.
Francesco Polito, with his money and his powerful stepfather, was clearly a catch in the mafia marriage market. Before long, no less a felon than the boss of the Honoured Society in Cirella offered young Francesco his daughter’s hand, along with a promotion from picciotto to camorrista. A marriage to the capo’s daughter and a promotion seemed like a very respectable offer. But young Francesco’s stepfather, Paolo Agostino, put a stop to the alliance. It is not clear why, or whether Maria Marvelli had anything to do with the decision. The best guess is that he preferred to bind himself to another criminal lineage. But refusing such an offer would inevitably seem like a snub. If there were no divisions within the ranks of the Cirella Honoured Society before, they certainly appeared now.
At this point in the story, Mussolini intervened. The dire state of public order in Cirella came to the attention of the authorities in 1933. The local boss—and everyone knew he was the boss, for what need would he have had to be coy about his power?—was sent to enforced residence. His destination was the tiny island penal colony of Ustica, which lies some 80 kilometres north of Palermo. But as so often, this measure proved inadequate to stem the tide of violence. So the following year Paolo Agostino was also sent to Ustica to join his capo-—the very man whose generous offer of a marriage alliance he had spurned. Rumours filtered back to Cirella that when the two had met, Paolo Agostino had smashed a bottle over the boss’s head. Although the rumours were probably false, they were also a very real symptom of a potentially explosive power struggle: the issue of who Maria Marvelli’s son was going to marry was an open sore in Cirella.
Soon other rumours began to fly in the opposite direction, from Cirella to the penal colony on Ustica, and this time sex was what generated the gossip. Before departing for Ustica, ‘robust and vigorous’ Paolo Agostino left his affairs in the hands of a trusted deputy, Nicola Pollifroni. Pollifroni very soon became very close to Agostino’s wife, Maria Marvelli—close enough to set off some wry smiles: they were seen riding the same horse and he was seen sitting on her lap. The judge, rather primly, would later say that the gossip was ‘not without plausibility’. When these reports reached Paolo Agostino on Ustica, he made his own inquiries as to how plausible they really were. Strangely, he was told by two separate witnesses, including his own brother, that nothing was wrong. Even more strangely, he believed them.
Paolo Agostino’s relaxed attitude to his wife’s infidelity contradicts all the stereotypes about the southern Italian male’s violent possessiveness. It also transgresses the behavioural norms among gangsters. The picciotteria had already shown that mere rumours about marital infidelity could easily send a mafioso to a gruesome death. Yet in this case, Paolo Agostino was prepared to discount the rumours even when everyone else saw they were at the very least ‘plausible’. One explanation of this failure to defend his own reputation is that Agostino realised that, as both a husband and a criminal, Maria Marvelli was just too valuable to him. With the tensions building within the clan, he needed to keep his family compact, and had no choice but to overlook the affair. Mafia rules of honour, as always, were elastic.
While Paolo Agostino and his boss were in the penal colony on Ustica—the one pondering the subject of his wife’s fidelity, and the other dwelling on how the offer of his daughter’s hand had been rejected—back in Cirella the political terrain within the Honoured Society shifted. Three brothers, Bruno, Rocco and Francescantonio Romeo emerged as the new centre of power. The Romeo brothers decided they needed to hide their newly acquired authority behind a figurehead leader. So they began the search for a new boss, a dummy don who would not attract attention to himself, who would not be very visible, as the Romeo brothers stipulated.
Now, visibility is one of the great themes in the history of Italian organised crime. Absolute invisibility, absolute anonymity, is not an option for mafiosi, whose aim is to control their territory. However they do it, they have to let the local people know that it is they who must be feared, they who must be paid. But there are a thousand ways to carve out a profile, to cultivate respect. A gangster, like some colourful territorial animal, can save a lot of energy by being easy to identify: potential rivals quickly learn to spot the danger signs, and learn that flight rather than fight is the wisest reaction. So early camorristi advertised their power with pompadours, bell-bottom trousers, and tattoos. As did their cousins in the Calabrian picciotteria. But of course visibility brings risks—especially when the police are in the mood to repress the mafia rather than cohabit with it. It is one thing to flash your criminal rank and battle honours in a dungeon, where everyone is a felon, or in the police no-go areas of Naples’s low city, or in some godforsaken Calabrian hill village. It is quite another to do so when the eyes of the Carabinieri are upon you, or when you want to pass through Ellis Island, or when your dealings with politicians and entrepreneurs demand a less showy façade. The ‘middle-c
lass villains’ of Sicily have always tended to dress inconspicuously and to intimate their authority with little more than a stare, a stance or a stony silence. The other criminal associations, whose origins were humbler, took a while to master the visibility game’s subtler stratagems. The learning process was already well under way by the dawn of the Fascist era. In Naples, the silly clothes and butterfly pompadours were gone by the time of the Cuocolo trial. The Calabrian mafia abandoned them not long afterwards: there is little sign of them in the Fascist era.
Faced with more unwelcome police attention than they had ever known, the Romeo brothers looked for a new and less visible patsy, one without a criminal record whose wealth put him beyond suspicion. Their chosen candidate, a young man called Francesco Macrì, accepted without hesitation, despite not having even been a member of the gang before, and despite being rich enough to provide lawyers for his new co-conspirators. The judge later said that Macrì regarded being nominated boss as a ‘special honour’. It is a telling testament to the prestige that this criminal association had now acquired that Macrì took on the job of capo so readily. As the judge explained, ‘entry into the association was an essential condition if you wanted to win public esteem’. The picciotteria, less visible than it once had been, but more poisonous, was seeping further still into the bloodstream of Calabrian life. The Romeo brothers formed a committee to ‘advise’ the enthusiastic but inexperienced appointee, while retaining the real power for themselves. And with that arrangement, the politics of organised crime in Cirella reached a new equilibrium.
Meanwhile, criminal business carried on as usual. And as usual, even the simplest criminal business could have lethal consequences. The local doctor had had a valuable yearling bull stolen a while earlier and he was still making strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to find out who had taken it. Eventually he approached Maria Marvelli, asking her to ask her exiled husband Paolo Agostino (a relative of the doctor’s) to make inquiries among the inmates on Ustica. Prison, as ever, was the great junction box of mafia communications.