Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Navarra was a figure enveloped in layers of legend and theatrical self-promotion—yet another picturesque landmark of the Neapolitan streets. Accordingly, the ‘professional Neapolitan’ journalist Giuseppe Marotta penned a typically indulgent portrait of him in 1947, saying that he was ‘a man dedicated to charity work no less than he was to his wife and the Monarchist cause’. But Navarra had very real power, sustained by the threat of violence. Locals later remembered him strutting up and down the street in a fedora and waistcoat, brandishing a pistol.

  So Navarra, like other guappi in the city, was a bridge between the streets, including the underworld, and the city’s palaces of power. One of the things that sets Italy’s mafias apart from ordinary criminal gangs is precisely this link with politics. Put the correntisti and the guappi together in a single system, and you would have every justification in using the ‘c’ word that the Neapolitan newspapers were determined not to use.

  38

  GANGSTERISMO

  THE MAFIA IN THE UNITED STATES WAS FOUNDED BY SICILIAN EMIGRANTS IN THE LATE nineteenth century. In the big cities, crooks from Calabria and Naples were also recruited into what was soon an Italian-American mob. Ever since that time, Men of Honour have shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic, trafficking, investing and killing—and then running from the law or from their mafia enemies. The story of the mafia in the United States is not one I can hope to tell here. Nevertheless, some aspects of that story have a bearing on events in Italy.

  America was a synonym for modernity in the backward Italy of the years that followed the Second World War. According to their political loyalties, Italians were either grudging or wholehearted in their admiration for the United States’ awesome warrior might, inconceivable wealth and unreachable movie stars. As one commentator wrote in 1958:

  People all over the world are looking to America, waiting expectantly for everything: for their daily bread or their tin of meat; for machines or raw materials; for military defence, for a cultural watchword, for the political and social system that can resolve the evils of the world. America provides the models for newspapers, scientific manuals, labour-saving devices, fashion, fiction, pop ditties, dance moves and dance tunes, and even poetry . . . Is there one single thing that we don’t expect America to provide?

  In fact there was one thing that Italy as yet refused to accept from across the Atlantic: a lesson in how to fight the mafia. In 1950, just when Italy had managed to forget about its organised crime problem, America started talking about the mafia again. For the first time in a very long time, Italian-American crime became news. But the perverse circumstances of the Cold War conspired to ensure that the noise surrounding the mafia in America only made the silence in Italy even more deafening.

  On 6 April 1950, Kansas City gambling baron and local Democratic kingmaker Charles Binaggio, together with his enforcer Charles ‘Mad Dog’ Gargotta, were shot dead in a Democratic clubhouse. The press printed embarrassing photographs of Binaggio slumped at a desk under a large picture of President Harry S. Truman. On Capitol Hill, the Binaggio episode caused an outcry that removed the last opposition to Bible Belt Senator Estes Kefauver’s efforts to set up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, with the mafia as one of its main targets.

  The Kefauver hearings, as they became known, were held in fourteen cities across the States over the following year. But it was the climactic nine days of testimonies in New York, in March 1951, that really propelled the mafia issue into the public domain. Underworld potentates such as Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, plus a real live gangster’s moll, and a host of other shady hangers-on, were hauled before the Senator and his sharp-tongued deputy Charles Tobey. At Kefauver’s insistence, their testimonies were televised to a national audience that peaked at seventeen million. Housewives held afternoon ‘Kefauver parties’, their husbands left bars deserted to catch the evening résumé of the day’s scandals, sales of home-popping popcorn more than doubled, and the Brooklyn Red Cross had to install a television set to prevent blood donations drying up.

  The testimony of Frank Costello (born Francesco Castiglia in Calabria) made for a particularly captivating spectacle. While he refused to have his face on screen, the camera nonetheless showed lingering close-ups of his hands as they cruelly twisted pieces of paper or fiddled deviously with a pair of spectacles. This ‘hand ballet’, together with a voice ‘like the death rattle of a seagull’, made Costello loom far larger in the public imagination than if his rather nondescript features had been visible.

  In Italy, the Communist press reported with undisguised glee on the evidence of political collusion with organised crime that was being uncovered by Kefauver. ‘The “heroes” of American democracy on parade’, ran one sarcastic headline.

  Everything is mixed up inextricably: political intrigues and police intrigues. The entire American system of government, both local and central, is prey to the gangs.

  While the Cold War enemy was washing its dirty laundry in public, in Italy there had been no washing at all. The 1943–50 period had seen mafia violence and political collusion with organised crime on a scale greater even than the United States. Yet, in parliament as in the law courts, the Left had failed to take advantage from the mafia issue in their battle with the Christian Democrats. Kefauver, by contrast, exposed the long-standing mafia ties of William O’Dwyer, a former mayor of New York who was currently Ambassador to Mexico, and brought his political career to an end. Frank Costello, who at one time had been the ‘respectable’ face of the American mafia, its hinge with Democratic machine politics in New York, received a short stretch in prison for contempt of Congress, and his tax affairs attracted the unwelcome attentions of the Internal Revenue Service. Costello’s ‘hand ballet’ also gave him the kind of notoriety that Sicilian mafiosi had repeatedly managed to dodge. ‘Kefauver is a master of publicity,’ L’Unità commented. So while the PCI relished what the Kefauver hearings exposed, it also quietly envied their impact.

  Mafia media frenzy. Calabrian-born mobster Frank Costello testifies before the Kefauver Hearings, New York, 1951.

  Many of the underworld figures interviewed by Estes Kefauver refused to incriminate themselves at the hearings—so many that the phrase ‘take the Fifth Amendment’ entered common parlance. To fill the huge gaps in these firsthand testimonies, the crusading Senator relied on several sources: information from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, whose ambitious head, Harry J. Anslinger, had been seeking to ramp up the mafia issue for years; the often muddled testimonies of a cluster of mafia informers; and a great deal of supposition. As a result, the profile of the mafia published in Kefauver’s findings was alarming:

  Behind the local mobs which make up the national crime syndicate is a shadowy, international criminal organization known as the Mafia, so fantastic that most Americans find it hard to believe it really exists. The Mafia, which has its origins and its headquarters in Sicily, is dominant in numerous fields of illegal activity . . . and it enforces its code with death to those who resist or betray it . . . The Mafia is no fairy tale. It is ominously real, and it has scarred the face of America with almost every conceivable type of criminal violence, including murder, traffic in narcotics, smuggling, extortion, white slavery, kidnapping, and labor racketeering . . . The Mafia today actually is a secret international government-within-a-government. It has an international head in Italy—believed by United States authorities to be Charles (Lucky) Luciano . . . The Mafia also has its Grand Council and its national and district heads in the countries in which it operates, including the United States.

  America was living through a period of Cold War paranoia at the time, and there is more than a hint of the Reds-under-the-bed worldview in what Kefauver wrote. The mafia: a sophisticated criminal conspiracy against America; a single, global organisation whose ‘Kingpin’ or ‘Tsar of Vice’ was Lucky Luciano.

  Lucky Luciano’s true story does not really fit Kefauver’s image of him. In 1946,
he had been released suspiciously early from a long sentence for pimping; he was expelled from the country and set up shop in Naples. There he did a bit of drug dealing with his Sicilian and Neapolitan friends, but he was certainly not the ruler of a criminal conspiracy, a super-boss whose every order was faithfully implemented in every corner of the world.

  Many in the United States remained understandably unconvinced by Kefauver’s sensationalist account, and some of them refused to believe that the mafia existed at all. Even the man charged with drafting the committee’s recommendations called it a ‘romantic myth’. The FBI would continue to remain sceptical about the existence of the mafia for several years yet. Kefauver had overplayed his hand.

  Giuseppe Prezzolini, a professor at Columbia University, was the Italian press’s most prominent American correspondent. His views on organised crime were much more representative of the most widespread attitudes in Italy than were those of the Communists. When he received calls from worried Americans wanting to know if the mafia really existed in Italy, he was moved to write a withering dismissal of Kefauver’s ‘grotesque legend’. The mafia in Sicily, Prezzolini explained, was not really a criminal organisation, but a product of centuries of bad government; it was ‘a state of mind that expressed the resentment of a people that wanted to take justice into its own hands because it believed it had not received justice from its rulers’. Only in the dynamic capitalist environment of the United States could mafiosi be considered hoodlums:

  The modern felon in America, even if he bears an Italian name, is no longer an Italian felon. Rather he is a felon brought up in America and schooled in lawbreaking in America; he earned his degree at the American university of crime. America transformed his character.

  The notorious Brooklyn waterfront gangster, Albert ‘the Mad Hatter’ Anastasia was a very good example. The fact that he was born Umberto Anastasio in Calabria in 1902 meant nothing because, ‘I have never heard it said that a mafia has taken root in Calabria.’

  Early in 1953, Kefauver’s findings were translated into Italian as Il gangsterismo in America, the first book on the mafia to be published in Italy since the Second World War. Many commentators on all sides of the political spectrum passed over Kefauver’s mafia-as-global-conspiracy in embarrassed silence, concentrating instead on what the Senator had to say about the United States. For most Italians, gangsterismo, as the ugly linguistic import implied, remained an exclusively American affair.

  Something spectacularly newsworthy would be needed to succeed where the Kefauver hearings had failed, and break Italy’s silence. Something like a homicidal maniac. Or a gangland beauty queen. Or an alien invasion of Calabria. Suddenly, in 1955, all three of these things arrived, exposing at last just how deep-rooted the new Republic’s mafia problem really was.

  PART VIII

  1955

  39

  THE MONSTER OF PRESINACI

  LATE ON THE MORNING OF 17 APRIL 1955, A PEASANT CALLED SERAFINO CASTAGNA from the Calabrian village of Presinaci ate two fried eggs without even stopping to cut himself a slice of bread. He then kissed the crucifix on the wall before hugging his wife and nine-year-old son. ‘The things of this world are no longer for me,’ he told them. ‘God has given them, and God takes them away.’

  Moments later, armed with a Beretta pistol, a service rifle with bayonet fixed, and a haversack of ammunition, he loped out into the Sunday sunshine to find his first victim.

  In a hovel just metres away lived Castagna’s distant cousin Domenicantonio Castagna. When Serafino got there, he found only Domenicantonio’s sixty-year-old mother, so he shot her six times.

  He then caught sight of Francesca Badolato, who had once been his brother’s fiancée. He fired and missed, and she managed to escape, scooping a baby into her arms as she ran. Castagna was not a quick mover because a congenital disability had made his right leg three centimetres shorter than the left. But he pursued Francesca all the same, and saw her take refuge in the house belonging to an aged barber. Castagna battered at the door and smashed a window while the barber and his wife pleaded with him to spare the girl. Finally, frustrated, he took a step back and shot the couple dead. Their names were Nicola Polito (71) and his wife, Maria (60), and only two weeks earlier they had been reunited following Nicola’s three-year stint in Argentina.

  Castagna then followed the tinny murmur of a radio to the Communist Party centre. Peering in, he saw no one who had done him any harm and moved on. When he approached the Christian Democrat HQ nearby, they saw his pistol and begged for mercy. ‘Don’t be afraid,’ he told them. ‘I’m only looking for some friends of mine to say hello.’

  Castagna now headed out of the village, making for the hay-barn where he had hidden more ammunition. When it dawned on him that his route ran past his father’s plot, bitter childhood memories began to flash through his mind. His father had abandoned the family for other women, and wasted what little money the Castagnas had. Minutes later, Serafino was staring at his father and uttering a tearful sentence of death: ‘Can you see what you’ve brought me to? You didn’t give us a proper upbringing. Look at the abyss I’m in, at thirty-four years old . . . As a father, I adore you. But as a man, you must die.’

  A single shot left the old man writhing on the ground. Serafino bayoneted him to end the agony, and then stooped to plant a farewell kiss on his father’s hand.

  On his way to the next target, he passed an old cowherd who enquired, ‘What brings you by these parts, Serafino?’ ‘I’m hunting two-footed wolves,’ came the reply. A short time later, Castagna found Pasquale Petrolo, who was sitting on the threshing floor in front of his farmhouse and chatting happily to his wife. Castagna shot him five times.

  Then he went on the run.

  Within hours, reporters across Italy were updating their readers on the manhunt. There were roadblocks at every crossroads. Patrols of Carabinieri scoured the slopes of Mount Poro, stopping to level burp guns at the goatherds, scrutinising each sun-weathered face to see if it matched the description: ‘Medium height, robust physique, blond hair, blue eyes. Affected by heart disease and a duodenal ulcer.’ The press called Castagna ‘the Monster of Presinaci’.

  Castagna’s home village was a place of stunted peasants, black pigs and fat flies, a mountain hamlet of scarcely a hundred crude stone houses lost in a neglected corner of Italy’s most neglected region. Inasmuch as most Italians knew anything about Calabria, they knew it as a region whose timeless poverty generated periodic explosions of peasant savagery. Serafino Castagna’s homicidal rampage bore all the signs of being just another Calabrian tragedy. Indeed local legend even provided a script for the slaughter. ‘Castagna has certainly read the story of the brigand Musolino, and would like to imitate his deeds’, proclaimed the policeman in charge of the search. The ‘Monster of Presinaci’ became the ‘Second Musolino’, a candidate for the succession as King of Aspromonte. (At the time, the original King of Aspromonte was living out the last months of his life in the Reggio Calabria mental hospital.) Castagna even followed Musolino in issuing messages to the authorities. Before setting out on his rampage, he scribbled a list of twenty people he intended to murder, and left it behind for his wife to hand in to the police. He later wrote to the local sergeant of the Carabinieri to proclaim his plan of vengeance: ‘I’ll kill until my last cartridge.’

  On the day Castagna’s victims were buried, the only people in Presinaci who dared join the funeral procession were Carabinieri in their dark parade uniforms. A single child was spotted scuttling out from a doorway to throw a bunch of flowers onto the last coffin of the five. The sound of his mother’s imploring wail followed him into the street, and he immediately hurried back indoors.

  As the search for the Monster went on, the press began to ask questions. Something about the calm with which he had gone about the slaughter suggested that he was not entirely insane. But what logic could there possibly be to the murder of five seemingly innocent people, two of them women, and all of them old? Who
were the ‘friends’ and ‘two-footed wolves’ that he said he was looking for? Initial speculation concentrated on Castagna’s criminal record: he had served three years in prison for attempting to murder Domenicantonio Castagna, the distant cousin whose mother was the first to fall on that terrible Sunday. Some of the other victims seemed to have a connection with the same case. Was the Monster, like the King of Aspromonte all those years ago, taking vengeance on those who had testified against him? Another theory was that he was restoring his family’s slighted honour by killing the woman who had spurned his brother.

  The Communist press saw things differently, emphasising the social background to the tragedy. The correspondent for L’Unità, the Partito Comunista Italiano’s daily, interviewed a comrade from the area who complained that bourgeois journalists from the north were having fun portraying Calabrians as a ‘horde of ferocious people’. The real cause of Serafino Castagna’s madness was poverty and exploitation. Why couldn’t they make the effort to understand that?

  Fragments of a more far-fetched explanation for Serafino Castagna’s rage also surfaced from the well of village gossip. The first person to speak to journalists was, like Castagna, a farm labourer. Skulking by a wall, and refusing to give his name, he warily muttered something about a secret society in Presinaci. But the press remained sceptical:

  There have been rumours that Serafino Castagna is affiliated to the ‘Honoured Society’, a kind of Calabrian mafia. But the society’s existence is very problematic. Supposedly this ‘society’ gave Castagna until 20 April to eliminate a man who had come into conflict with it. But it seems that these reports are baseless.