by John Dickie
Under Fascism, as on many previous occasions, police and magistrates had painstakingly assembled a composite image of the mafia organisation, the ‘criminal system’. Now, in the era of the Cold War and the Christian Democrats, that picture was broken up and reassembled to compose the Buddha-like features of Turi Passalacqua. Better the mafia than the Communists. Better the Hollywood cowboy fantasy land of In the Name of the Law than a serious attempt to understand and tackle the island’s criminal system of which many of the governing party’s key supporters were an integral part.
Thanks to the success of In the Name of the Law, and to his prestigious career as a magistrate, Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo went on to become Italy’s leading mafia pundit in the 1950s. He never missed an opportunity to restate the same convenient falsehoods that he had first articulated in his novel. More worryingly still, he became a lecturer in law at the Carabinieri training school, the chairman of the national board of film censorship, and a Supreme Court judge.
In 1954 Lo Schiavo even wrote a glowing commemoration of the venerable capomafia don Calogero Vizzini, who had just passed away peacefully in his home town of Villalba. Vizzini had been a protagonist in every twist and turn of the mafia’s history in the dramatic years following the Liberation. By 1943, when he was proclaimed mayor of Villalba under AMGOT, the then sixty-six-year-old boss had already had a long career as an extortionist, cattle-rustler, black-marketeer and sulphur entrepreneur. In September of the following year, Vizzini’s men caused a national sensation by throwing hand grenades at a Communist leader who had come to Villalba to give a speech. Vizzini was a leader of the Separatist movement. But when Separatism’s star waned, he joined the Christian Democrats. The old man’s grand funeral, in July 1954, was attended by mafia bosses from across the island.
Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo took Calogero Vizzini’s death as a chance to reiterate his customary flummery about the mafia. But intriguingly, he also revealed that, one Sunday in Rome in 1952, the fat old boss had paid a visit to his house. He vividly recalled opening the door to his guest and being struck by a pair of ‘razor-sharp, magnetic’ eyes. The magistrate issued a polite but nervy welcome: ‘Commendatore Vizzini, my name is—’
‘For you, I am not commendatore,’ came the reply, as Vizzini waddled into the book-lined study and lowered his meaty frame onto the sofa. ‘Call me Uncle Calò.’
Uncle Calò’s tone was firm, but his manner open-hearted. He praised Lo Schiavo as a man of the law who had played hard but fair. The two men shook hands as a sign of mutual respect. Lo Schiavo tells us that, as he gazed at Uncle Calò, he was reminded of a picture from the past, from his first years as an anti-mafia magistrate in Sicily, when he first met a corpulent old mafia boss who always rode a white mare. He concluded his memories of Uncle Calò with good wishes for his successor within the mafia: ‘May his efforts be directed along the path of respect for the state’s laws, and of social improvement for all.’
Lo Schiavo’s account of the conversation between himself and don Calogero Vizzini is as heavily embroidered as any of his novels. But the meeting itself really happened. The reason for Uncle Calò’s visit was that he was caught up in a series of trials for the hand-grenade attack back in 1944. Only three days earlier, the Supreme Court had issued a guilty verdict against him. But the legal process was due to run on for a long time yet, and Uncle Calò knew that he would almost certainly die before he saw the inside of a jail. The real reason that he called in on Lo Schiavo may simply have been to say thank you. For the celebrated magistrate-novelist was involved in presenting the prosecution evidence at the Supreme Court. The suspicion lingers that, behind the scenes, he gave the mafia boss a helping hand with his case.
In today’s Italy, if any magistrate received a social call from a crime boss he would immediately be placed under investigation. But in the conservative world of Christian Democrat Italy, affairs between the Sicilian mafia and magistrates were conducted in a more friendly way. The state and the mafia formed a partnership, in the name of the law.
36
CALABRIA: The last romantic bandit
WHEN IT CAME TO ORGANISED CRIME, POST-WAR ITALY’S AMNESIA WAS AS DEEP AND complex as the country’s geology: its layers were the accumulated deposits of incompetence and negligence; the pressures of collusion and political cynicism sculpted its elaborate folds. By the time the Second World War ended, this geology of forgetfulness had created one of its most striking formations in Calabria.
In 1945, Italy’s best-loved criminal lunatic returned to the land where he had made his name. Aged seventy, and now deemed harmless, Giuseppe Musolino, the ‘King of Aspromonte’, was transferred from a penal asylum in the north to a civil psychiatric hospital way down south in Calabria.
Musolino’s new home was an infernal place. Although it was a Fascistera building, it was already crumbling by the time the Fascist dictator’s battered corpse was swinging by its heels from the gantry of a Milanese petrol station. Bare, unsanitary and overcrowded, the psychiatric hospital’s rooms and corridors echoed with the gibbering and shrieking of afflicted souls. But in the late 1940s and early 1950s, before today’s encrustation of motorways and jerry-built apartments had sprouted around the Calabrian coast, the hospital did at least afford a lovely panorama: before it, the view down to the city of Reggio Calabria, across the Straits of Messina, and over towards Sicily; behind it, the wooded shoulders of Aspromonte—the ‘harsh mountain’ that had once been Musolino’s realm.
The new arrival attracted a great deal more attention and sympathy than the other patients. He was, after all, one of the most famous Calabrians alive. ‘Don Peppino’, the doctors and nurses all called him, combining a respectful title and a fond nickname. Despite his mind’s desolation, his frail body did its best to live up to this lingering aura. Musolino was thin, but unbowed by decades of incarceration. His scraggy beard stood out strikingly white against the olive darkness of his skin, making him look part Athenian philosopher and part faun, as one journalist noted. An actress drawn to visit the hospital was struck breathless by his resemblance to Luigi Pirandello, the great Sicilian dramatist, whose tales of masks and madness had earned him a Nobel Prize.
Musolino’s own madness bore the blundering labels of mid-twentieth century psychiatry: ‘progressive chronic interpretative delirium’ and ‘pompous paranoia’. He thought he was the Emperor of the Universe. He spent most of his day outside, smoking, reading, and contemplating the shadow of the cypress trees in the nearby cemetery. Yet when he found anyone with the patience to talk, he would grasp the chance to expound the hierarchy over which he presided: from the kings, queens and princes enthroned at his feet, to the cops and stoolies who grovelled far below.
Don Peppino had an obsessive loathing of cops and stoolies. And somehow, when he spoke to visitors, that very loathing often became a pathway to the corners of his mind that were still lucid. ‘Bandits have to kill,’ he would concede, ‘but they must be honourable.’ For Musolino, honour meant vendetta: all the crimes that had led to his imprisonment had been carried out to avenge the wrong he had endured at the hands of the police and their informers. Even in his insanity, he prized honesty above all: he would proudly point out that he had never denied any of his murders. After all, the victims were only cops and stoolies.
The newspapermen who made the long journey to the mental hospital in Reggio relished the chance to delve into the past and fill the gaps in don Peppino’s fragmented memory for their readers. They told how this woodcutter’s son had escaped his wrongful imprisonment in 1899, and spent two and a half years as a renegade up in the Aspromonte massif. They told how he killed seven people and tried to kill six more, all the while proclaiming that he was the victim of an injustice. The longer he evaded capture, the more his reputation grew: he came to be seen as the ‘King of Aspromonte’, a wronged hero of the oppressed peasantry, a symbol of desperate resistance to a heartless state.
But the heartless state, the journalists explained, had it
s revenge in the end. During the years of solitary confinement that followed his capture, Musolino lost his mind. His insanity only threw his tragic stature into starker relief.
Then, in 1936, a Calabrian-born emigrant to the United States made a deathbed confession: it was he, and not Musolino, who had shot at Vincenzo Zoccali all those years ago. The King of Aspromonte had stuck heroically to the same story from the start of his murderous rampage, during his trial, and even through his descent into insanity. Now that story had been proved right.
A noble and tragic desperado? Giuseppe Musolino was known as the ‘King of Aspromonte’. His famous story was acted out by major Italian star, Amedeo Nazzari, in the 1950 crime drama, The Brigand Musolino.
Perhaps it is no wonder that the psychiatrist in Reggio Calabria was so angry on his behalf. ‘Was Musolino antisocial?’ he asked in one newspaper interview. ‘Or was it society that forced him to become what he became?’
Don Peppino received many presents. The most generous—food, clothes and dollars—came from Calabrians who had emigrated to America and made it big. Occasionally, he was even allowed day release—when a sentimental Italian-American businessman in a fedora and pinstriped suit turned up to take the old bandit out on a motor tour of the mountain.
Looking back now, one has to suspect that the Americans who came to pay homage to Giuseppe Musolino may have known the truth. He was no lone bandit hero: he was a member of the Calabrian mafia, an Honoured Society killer. And the whole fable of the ‘King of Aspromonte’ had served only to keep what was really going on in Calabria hidden from the public eye.
After 1945, with the war over, the transition to democracy under way, and the King of Aspromonte residing in Reggio Calabria mental hospital, the organisation that is today known as the ’ndrangheta operated in very much the same way that it had done when he was in his murderous prime. Carabinieri ‘co-managed’ petty crime with the underworld bosses. Grandees used the mafia to round up electors, and then returned the favour by testifying in court that there was no such organisation. For successive governments, it proved easy to just bank the votes of Calabria’s mafia-backed members of parliament, and ignore the Honoured Society. And while politicians looked the other way, the police and magistracy had time to forget all they had learned about the Calabrian mafia during the Fascist era from—among other people—the King of Aspromonte’s own brother, Antonio Musolino. In the early 1920s, Antonio engaged in a long battle with his cousin and capo Francesco Filastò (the same cousin suspected of killing Lieutenant Joe Petrosino in 1909). In the end, defeated, impoverished and paralysed (a revolver shot cost him the use of his left leg and arm), Antonio Musolino went over to the state. He told the authorities everything he knew about the criminal organisation to which he, like his infamous brother, belonged. In 1932, his evidence fed into the trial of ninety men. Prosecutors in the 1932 case believed that the Calabrian mafia had its own governing body, known as the Gran Criminale (the Great Criminal), which intervened to settle disputes within the various ’ndrine across the province of Reggio Calabria—but which had failed to settle the dispute between Antonio Musolino and his cousin. The surviving evidence suggests that the Great Criminal served the same purposes as what is now called the Crime, which would only finally be revealed to the world by investigators in 2010. In other words, post-war amnesia may well have cost Italy eighty wasted years when it came to understanding the unitary structure of Calabria’s Honoured Society.
Meanwhile, the real Musolino lived out his last years in a Reggio Calabria mental hospital.
Meanwhile, just as during Giuseppe Musolino’s homicidal rampage, lazy journalists were content to churn out the King of Aspromonte fable, even now that their primary source was a crazy geriatric killer. Musolino, for his part, lived as the Emperor of the Universe, commanding interplanetary ships and deploying devices more destructive than the atomic bomb. In his psychologically damaged state, he became a metaphor for Italy’s own cognitive failure. The reasons for that failure were ultimately very simple. In southern Calabria, the conflict between Left and Right had nowhere near the explosiveness that propelled Sicily up the political agenda and created such devilish intrigues between mafiosi and men of the law. Calabria remained Italy’s poorest and most neglected region. The ’ndrangheta could be forgotten because the region it came from simply did not count.
Cinema proved unable to resist the story of the King of Aspromonte, however. Under Fascism, Benito Mussolini blocked any attempt to make a film of Musolino’s life because of the similarity in their surnames. Finally, in 1950, two of Italy’s biggest stars, Amedeo Nazzari and Silvana Mangano, were cast in Il brigante Musolino. Filmed on location on Aspromonte, the movie told how Musolino was unjustly imprisoned for murder on the basis of false testimonies, and then escaped to become an outlaw hero. The film did well among the Italian community in the United States.
Giuseppe Musolino died in January 1956 aged seventy-nine. Up and down Italy, the newspapers told his story one more time, and called him ‘the last romantic bandit’.
The wealthy Italian-American visitors who came to pay him homage may just have known the truth behind the myth: Musolino was an ’ndrangheta killer.
37
NAPLES: Puppets and puppeteers
IN 1930, ITALY’S FIRST GREAT NATIONAL ENCYCLOPEDIA, THE ENCICLOPEDIA TRECCANI, included the following entry under Camorra:
The camorra was an association of lower class men, who used extortion to force the vice-ridden and the cowardly to surrender tribute. Its branches spread through the old Kingdom of Naples; it had laws and customs, a rigidly organised hierarchy, specific obligations and duties, and a jargon and court system of its own . . . Moral education and environmental improvements succeeded, in the end, in destroying the camorra . . . Only the word remains today, to indicate abuses or acts of bullying.
The camorra was dead: for once, this proud claim had a strong basis in truth rather than in the propaganda needs of the Fascist regime. Whereas Calabria’s gangsters had climbed the social ladder until they merged with the state, camorristi in Naples never quite left the alleys behind. Unable to call on the kind of political protection that the mafias of Sicily and Calabria could boast, the camorra was vulnerable. By the time the First World War broke out, the Honoured Society (in the city, at least) had collapsed.
In Naples in the late 1940s, one of the few places where the word ‘camorra’ was regularly used was in a tiny theatre, the San Carlino. Its entrance was hard to find: a doorway hidden among the bookstalls that crowded about the Porta San Gennaro. Inside, the auditorium could barely contain seven dilapidated benches. The stage was only just wider than the upright piano standing before it. This was the last poky outpost of a beleaguered art form for the illiterate: the only remaining puppet playhouse in the city.
Puppet theatre had been popular in Sicily and southern Italy for more than a century. Its stock stories told of chivalry and treachery among Charlemagne’s knights as they battled against their Saracen foes. The marionettes, in tin armour and with bright red lips, would speechify endlessly about honour and betrayal, and then launch into a wobbly dance that signified mortal combat.
In Naples, the puppet theatres had another speciality too: tales of chivalry and treachery set in the world of the Honoured Society. Indeed, if the San Carlino was still holding out against the cinemas, it was largely because of the enduring appeal of camorra dramas. Outside, badly printed posters proclaimed the dramatic delights on offer:
TONIGHT
THE DEATH OF PEPPE AVERZANO THE WISE GUY.
WITH REAL BLOOD
Inside, the audience was integral to the spectacle. The loud cries of ‘Traitor!’ and ‘Watch out!’ from the stalls could as well have been written into the script. The audience knowledgeably applauded the knife-fighting skills of some camorristi, and angrily denounced the cowardly tricks of others: ‘You should be ashamed of yourself! Ten against one!’ The plots were repetitive: camorristi taking blood oaths, or fighting
dagger duels, or saving marionette maidens from dishonour. The dramatic pay-off was always the same: good versus evil, the surge of righteous indignation versus the prurient thrill of violence. When the action was particularly moving, the San Carlino rocked and creaked like a railway carriage trundling over points.
Everyone knew the camorra heroes’ names: the gentleman gangster, don Teofilo Sperino, and the mighty boss Ciccio Cappuccio (‘Little Lord Frankie’); the devious Nicola Jossa, endlessly pitting his wits against the greatest camorrista of them all, Salvatore De Crescenzo. All of these puppet heroes and villains had once been real gangsters rather than gaudily painted puppets. Genuine episodes of nineteenth-century camorra history were re-imagined on the stage of the San Carlino. The ‘real blood’ that spurted from the puppet’s chest at the dramatic conclusion of the piece was in fact a bladder full of aniline dye. And whereas the good-guy camorristi would be given bright red gore, the bad guys bled a much darker shade, almost black.
Outside the San Carlino, in the bomb-ravaged streets of Naples, the real Honoured Society had not been seen for over thirty years. There were still a few old camorristi around. The most notorious of them was a familiar and pitiful sight, who recalled both the old camorra and the strange story of its demise: he was Gennaro Abbatemaggio, the controversial ‘gramophone’ whose testimony during the Cuocolo trial in 1911–12 had inflicted a fatal blow on the Honoured Society.