Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Campania Zone Handbook.

  Secret.

  The information contained herein is believed to be correct as on July 1st, 1943.

  Chapter VI, ‘Folklore and Feasts’

  The real camorra, once a powerful secret society, does in fact no longer exist, though there is much underground life in Naples. One must beware of pickpockets; if one is on the lookout for the singers one can listen to the songs in the streets, ‘o bambeniello nasciuto’ or ‘l’amore non è più bagnato’, when many people cluster round, or, if one can stomach it, one can even eat mussels and snails at a ‘bancarella de maruzzaro’ or ‘purpetielli veraci’.

  The war brought horrors of all kinds on Italy, from the most viciously personal (mass rape), to the most terrifyingly impersonal (carpet bombing). In September 1943 Naples was a hungry city battered by air raids that left some 200,000 people homeless and destroyed much of the sewage system. The Germans then began a policy of deportation and summary executions. The Neapolitans rose in revolt, and freedom was already within their grasp when they greeted the first Allied tanks on 1 October.

  But the traumas of war did not cease with the Wehrmacht’s departure. Naples had always been a shambolic city, one that seemed to teeter on the edge of breakdown. Under AMGOT, it tipped headlong into squalor and degradation. To many in Naples at the time it felt as if all standards of human self-respect had been abandoned in the scramble to get a little food to eat, a little water to drink, and something to wear. The scenes of misery made a profound impression on the great movie director John Huston, who was in Naples making army newsreels. He later recalled that

  Naples was like a whore suffering from the beating of a brute—teeth knocked out, eyes blackened, nose broken, smelling of filth and vomit. There was an absence of soap, and even the bare legs of the girls were dirty. Cigarettes were the medium of exchange commonly employed, and anything could be had for a package. Little boys were offering their sisters and mothers for sale. At night, during the blackouts, rats appeared in packs outside the buildings and simply stood there, looking at you with red eyes, not moving. You walked around them. Fumes came out of the alleyways, down which there were establishments featuring ‘flesh’ acts between animals and children. The men and women of Naples were a bereft, starving, desperate people who would do absolutely anything to survive. The souls of the people had been raped. It was indeed an unholy city.

  The facts from the archives back up Huston’s memories. Prostitution was a very common survival tactic. The British Psychological Warfare Branch (PWB), which had responsibility for keeping tabs on civilian morale, estimated that there were around 40,000 prostitutes in Naples—about 10 per cent of the city’s women. Nor was it just women. In the alleys, pimps were heard shouting ‘Two dollars the boys, three dollars the girls!’ to uniformed men who were openly eyeing and pawing the children lined up before them. Needless to say, venereal disease joined typhus among the scourges assailing liberated Naples.

  Kleptomania gripped the city too. Anything of any conceivable value vanished: telegraph wires, manhole covers, railway tracks, even whole trams. It is said that a Papal Legate’s car was found to be running on pilfered tyres.

  Profiteers controlled much of the food supply from what the PWB called ‘the almost miraculously fertile land in the low-lying ground around Naples’. The PWB referred to a ‘fantastic gangland situation’ between Nola and the coast north of the city. There were armed bands, many of them made up of deserters, but with widespread backing in this ‘traditionally violent’ area: ‘they have the support of a whole organisation which includes prostitutes, receivers, Black Market specialists, etc.’

  Among the worst offenders in Naples itself were rich industrialists, especially pasta manufacturers and millers. Spaghetti factories took to producing two varieties of product: a good one for the black market, and one that was ‘almost black and of an unpleasant taste’ for legal distribution. In March 1944 Antonio and Giuseppe Caputo, the owners of one of the city’s biggest flour mills in the industrial quarter of San Giovanni a Teduccio, were sentenced to seven years for black market activities; investigators discovered machine guns and grenades in their house.

  Floating comfortably on this tide of illegality, at least for a few months, was the Fascist Vito Genovese. ‘Fascist’, that is, only until the Allied armies reached Campania, at which point he shed his Mussolinian credentials like a worn-out suit, and stepped into a new disguise as a translator and guide to the US Army.

  In May 1944 a sergeant from the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Division received a tip-off and began looking hard at Genovese’s interests. Before the war, the sergeant in question—Orange C. Dickey—had a job patrolling the leafy campus of Pennsylvania State College. His new assignment took him into the even leafier but rather more dangerous surroundings of Nola.

  Sergeant Dickey’s first breakthrough came when he found an elephants’ graveyard of burned out military trucks in a vineyard outside Nola. He then heard two Canadian soldiers confess that they had delivered the trucks, with their priceless cargo of flour and sugar, with the transparent password ‘Genovese sent us’.

  By the end of August 1944 Sergeant Dickey had enough evidence to make an arrest: he picked Genovese up just after watching him collect a travel permit from the Mayor of Nola. A search of the gangster’s wallet brought to light several enthusiastic letters of reference written by American officials in Nola on Genovese’s behalf.

  Mr Genovese met me and acted as my interpreter for over a month. He would accept no pay; paid his own expenses; worked day and night and rendered most valuable assistance to the Allied Military Government.

  Despite these letters, and a great deal more alarming evidence of Genovese’s influence within the US Army, Sergeant Dickey’s investigations would prove arduous and ultimately futile. After long months during which nobody seemed to want to take responsibility for the case, Genovese was eventually escorted back to the United States to face the murder charge that had originally provoked his flight to Italy. But one poisoned witness later, he was freed to resume his stellar career in American gangsterdom.

  The intriguing thing about the Genovese story, from the Italian point of view, is the glimpse it affords of re-emergent criminal organisations in the Neapolitan hinterland. Sergeant Dickey’s evidence showed that Genovese’s black market network ran in many directions. The branches that most concerned Dickey were in AMGOT, of course. But Genovese also sheltered local thieves and smugglers from prosecution, assiduously cultivated friends in the Neapolitan judiciary, and even found protection from the chief of police of Rome. Sergeant Dickey also believed that Genovese partly controlled the electricity supply in the Nola area, giving him a stranglehold on manufacturing.

  But if Genovese had links with existing criminal gangs in Nola, the signs are that things were not always friendly between them. Among the letters of recommendation written by Allied military officials for Genovese was one, dated June 1944, that contained the following curious phrase.

  [Vito Genovese] has been invaluable to me—is absolutely honest, and as a matter of fact, exposed several cases of bribery and blackmarket operations among so-called trusted civil personnel.

  In traditional mafia fashion, Genovese was using his contacts with the authorities to eliminate his rivals.

  Then there also is the mysterious informer whose tip-off first put Sergeant Dickey onto Genovese’s black market empire. The man in question is likely to remain anonymous—his name was removed from the documentation for his own protection. Whoever he was, he spun Sergeant Dickey a particularly intriguing story. He said he was ‘a former member of the Camorra’ who had bought himself out of the organisation after marrying an American girl. The camorra, he went on to explain, was ‘the Italian counterpart of the Mafia Sicilian Union of the United States’, and Vito Genovese was now its supreme boss.

  At least two things about this story are odd. First, in 1944 there was almost certainly no such thing as the camorra, in t
he traditional sense of an Honoured Society. Second, the camorra—even if it did exist—was nothing like Italy’s equivalent of the mafia in the United States. It sounds to me as if the informer cooked his story to suit the tastes of his American interlocutor. If so, we can only guess at his motives. But it would be no surprise if he turned out to be an emissary of one of Genovese’s local competitors. Perhaps the valiant Sergeant Dickey was lured into action by hoods from Nola or the Mazzoni who were eager to expel the American cuckoo from their Campanian nest. With the Fascist repression a fading memory, and Vito Genovese out of the way, the gangs of the Neapolitan hinterland could begin their history anew.

  Meanwhile, in the hovels of the city centre, a contraband bonanza was changing the urban ground rules. In each tiny quarter, the street-corner boss or guappo was at the hub of the black market. Anyone who had under-the-counter goods to sell would turn to the guappo, whose assistants would dart out into the alleys to find the right outlet at the right price. The profits to be made were enormous. PWB reported that the illiterate lumpen proletarians of the low city who made it rich in profiteering were too ignorant to count the bags of money they collected, so they weighed them instead. ‘I have 3 kilos of thousand lire notes.’ On one occasion a passing bank clerk was stopped by an old crone and asked to help her count a great wicker basket of cash; when he had finished, she gave him a tip of 2,000 lire. The story is poignant because it was so typical: bank clerks, factory workers, pensioners and bureaucrats—people on fixed incomes that is—suffered worst in the wild black market inflation of the Liberation period. In Naples, the PWB noted, ‘class distinctions are disappearing’. Crime paid.

  For much of the war in Italy Naples was the most important port of arrival for the colossal volume of provisions consumed by the advancing Allied armies. That deluge was simultaneously the city’s deliverance and its damnation. By April 1944 an astonishing 45 per cent of Allied military cargo was being stolen. Only systemic corruption within Allied Military Government and among the Anglo-American forces can account for the industrial scale of the robbery. In September 1944 the PWB reported that Allied troops were openly ferrying packages of goods to market, and that the Military Police were doing nothing to stop them. The Italian police and Carabinieri who served under AMGOT at least had the defence of being as hungry as the rest of the local population. But they were just as likely to be venal as their British and American superiors. In May 1944 the PWB said that policemen were taking a cut of 20–30,000 lire on every lorry load of goods that disappeared from the port. Everyone in Naples acquired a wily expertise on the relative merits of American and Canadian blankets, or British and French army boots. There was such a big racket in penicillin that the soldiers at the front went short.

  The most visible retail outlets for stolen Allied goods were in via Forcella, near an American military depot. The street became a multinational, open-air, army surplus bazaar where anything intended for the Allied forces could be bought. And ‘anything’ included weaponry, it was said, as long as you knew whom to ask.

  Via Forcella runs through the cramped heart of the city; it lies only a few metres from the old Palazzo della Vicaria, the former prison and court house where, on 3 October 1862, Salvatore De Crescenzo, the gangland chieftain ‘redeemed’ at the time of Italian unification, had his rival stabbed to death and became the supreme boss of the Honoured Society of Naples. Eighty-one years later, at the time of AMGOT, the guappi in charge of via Forcella were the Giuliano boys, Pio Vittorio, Guglielmo and Salvatore. Today the Giuliano family name means only one thing: camorra.

  In the ensuing decades new clans like the Giulianos, drawing on their experiences during the chaos of Liberation, would find different answers to the challenges that had ultimately defeated the old Honoured Society of Salvatore De Crescenzo, of Ciccio ‘Little Lord Frankie’ Cappuccio, of Enrico ‘Big ’Enry’ Alfano. How to organise tightly and network widely. How to infiltrate the economy and the political apparatus of the state. How to tame the police and courts. How to control and exploit women, and with them breed sons, and even daughters, able to perpetuate the system’s power. How, by all these means, to turn mere delinquency into enduring territorial authority. 1943 was year zero for the rule of law in Naples. The Allied Liberation restarted the clock of camorra history.

  Organised crime is Italy’s congenital disease. The Honoured Societies of Naples and Sicily were born from the prison system in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The violence and conspiratorial politics of Italian unification gave the hoodlums their passage out of the dungeons and into history.

  The legacy of the Risorgimento in parts of the South and Sicily was a sophisticated and powerful model of criminal organisation. The members of these brotherhoods deployed violence for three strategic purposes. First: to control other felons, to farm them for money, information and talent. Second: to leech the legal economy. And third: to create contacts among the upper echelons—the landowners, politicians and magistrates. In the environs of Palermo the mafia, boosted by the island’s recent history of revolution, did not just have contacts with the upper class, it formed an integral facet of the upper class.

  The new Kingdom of Italy failed to address that legacy. Worse, it lapsed into sharing its sovereignty with the local bosses. Italy allowed a criminal ecosystem to develop. It tried to live out the dream of being a modern state; but it did so with few of the resources that its wealthier neighbours could draw on, and with many more innate disadvantages. The result was political fragmentation and instability: an institutional life driven less by policies designed to address collective problems than by haggling for tactical advantage and short-term favours. This was a political system that frequently gave leverage to the worst pressure groups in the country—the ones sheltering men of violence. At election time the government sometimes used gangsters to make sure the right candidates won. Parliament produced bad legislation, which was then selectively enforced: the practice of dealing with mafiosi and camorristi by sending them into ‘enforced residence’ is one prime instance. Urgently needed reforms never materialised: an example being the utter legislative void around the likes of Calogero Gambino (from the ‘fratricide’ case of the 1870s) and Gennaro Abbatemaggio (from the Cuocolo trial of the early 1900s)—mafiosi and camorristi who abandoned the ranks of their brotherhoods and sought refuge with the state. Italy also had enough lazy and cynical journalists, wrong-headed intellectuals and morally obtuse writers to mask the real nature of the emergency, give resonance and credibility to the underworld’s own twisted ideology, and allow gangsters to gaze at flattering reflections of themselves in print.

  The criminal ecosystem spawned a new Honoured Society, the picciotteria, to retrace the evolutionary path of its older cousins: in the 1880s, it quickly progressed from prison to achieve territorial dominance in the outside world.

  Yet to say that Italy harboured a criminal ecosystem is not to say that the country was run by gangsters. Italy has never been a failed state, a mafia regime. The reason why the mafias of southern Italy and Sicily have such a long history is not because they were and are all-powerful, even in their heartlands. The rule of law was not a dead letter in the peninsula, and Italy did fight the mafias. Omertà broke frequently. Sometimes the mafias’ territorial control broke too, leading to a reawakening in what good police like Ermanno Sangiorgi called the spirito pubblico—the ‘public spirit’: in other words, the belief that people could trust the state to enforce its own rules. Such moments offered a glimpse of an underlying public hunger for legality, and showed what could have been achieved had there been a more consistent anti-mafia effort.

  But alas, Italy fought the Honoured Societies only for so long as their overt violence kept them at the top of the political agenda. It fought them only until the mafias’ wealthy and powerful protectors could exert an influence. It fought them only enough to sharpen the gangster domain’s internal process of natural selection. Over the years, weaker bosses and dysfunctional criminal
methodologies were weeded out. Hoodlums were obliged to change and develop. The Sicilian mafia had the least to learn. In Naples, the Honoured Society failed to learn enough. Perhaps against the odds, the Calabrian picciotteria, that working museum of the oldest traditions of the prison camorras, proved itself capable of adapting to survive and grow.

  In the underworld competition not just to dominate, but to endure, the mafias found perhaps their most important resource in family. Through their kin, mafiosi, camorristi and picciotti gained their strongest foothold in society, the first vehicle for their pernicious influence. Thus the lethal damage that the mafias caused to so many families—their own and their victims’—is the most poignant measure of the evil they did.

  From 1925 Benito Mussolini styled his regime as the antithesis of the squalid politicking of the past, the cure for Italy’s weak-willed concessions to the gangs. But Fascism ended up repeating many of the mistakes committed during earlier waves of repression. The same short attention span. The same reliance on ‘enforced residence’. The same reluctance to prosecute the mafias’ protectors among the elite. The same failure to tackle the endemic mafia presence in the prisons. Political internees in the 1920s and 1930s told exactly the same stories of mob influence behind bars as poor Duke Sigismondo Castromediano and the other patriotic prisoners of the Risorgimento had done three generations earlier.

  The only thing that Mussolini did markedly better than his liberal predecessors was to pump up the publicity and smother the news. With a little help from the Sicilian mafia, he created the lasting illusion that Fascism had, at the very least, suppressed the mob. So when it came to organised crime, Fascism’s most harmful legacy was its determination to keep quiet about the problem. The Zone Handbooks with which the Allied forces arrived in Sicily, Calabria and Campania accurately reflect the desperately limited state of public knowledge that Fascism bequeathed. (They were based on published Italian sources after all.)