Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  The Monster of Presinaci could not be a member of the Calabrian mafia for the simple reason that there was no such thing. On that count, the most authoritative voices were unanimous.

  Then, some three weeks after going on the run, Castagna sent a forty-page memoir to the Carabinieri that explained that he was a sworn affiliate of what he called the ‘Honoured Society of the Buckle’; he also referred to it as the ‘mafia’.

  Castagna was finally arrested after sixty days. Once in the hands of the law, he told everything he knew about the Honoured Society, supplying the authorities with a great many names and evidence to incriminate them. Within forty-eight hours of Castagna’s capture, fifty members of the criminal brotherhood were detained. More arrests followed. Apparently the existence of the Calabrian mafia was not quite so ‘problematic’ after all.

  In jail, the Monster of Presinaci even went on to convert the memoir he had sent to the Carabinieri into an autobiography. Indeed, he was the first member of the Calabrian mafia ever to tell his own story. You Must Kill, as Castagna’s autobiography is called, solved the mystery of why its author embarked on his desperate rampage. But it is also a very important historical document: it is post-war Italy’s primer on the organisational culture of the criminal brotherhood that is now known as the ’ndrangheta.

  Serafino Castagna wrote that he was born in 1921, and grew up in a downtrodden peasant family. He was taken out of school to herd goats, constantly taunted for his disability, and maltreated by his violent father. He first heard about the Honoured Society when he was fifteen. Already, at that age, he would spend long days hoeing the family’s field. Working in the adjacent plot was Castagna’s cousin, Latino Purita, who was ten years older, and who had just been released from a jail sentence for assault. One day, when the time came for a rest, Latino started to talk to Castagna about ‘the honesty that a man must always have’, and said that ‘to be honest, a man had to be part of the mafia’. Captivated by what his cousin had said, Castagna underwent a five-year apprenticeship, stealing chickens and burning haystacks on Latino’s orders. He asserted his manhood by stabbing another youth who had poked fun at his walk. Then, on Easter Monday 1941, he underwent the long oathing ritual that began as follows:

  ‘Are you comfortable, my dear comrades?’ the boss asked.

  ‘Very comfortable,’ came the reply from the chorus of picciotti and ranking mafiosi around him.

  ‘Are you comfortable?’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘On the social rules.’

  ‘Very comfortable.’

  ‘In the name of the organised and faithful society, I baptise this place as our ancestors Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso baptised it, who baptised it with iron and chains.’

  Respecting the ‘social rules’ in Presinaci was a low-key business. There were meetings to attend, of course, and procedures to learn. But Presinaci mafiosi also spent a great deal of time hanging out in the tavern and spinning yarns. Castagna particularly loved to hear tales of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, the Spanish knights who were the legendary founders of all three Honoured Societies.

  The Presinaci gang had a court, known as the ‘Tribunal of Humility’. Among the minor penalties that could be handed down by the tribunal were shallow stab wounds, or the degrading punishment known as tartaro—‘hell’. The leadership inflicted ‘hell’ on any affiliate who displayed cowardice, or arrogance towards his fellows. They summoned him to the centre of a circle of affiliates and told him to remove his jacket and shirt. A senior member then took a brush and daubed his head and torso with a paste made from excrement and urine.

  Sex and marriage generated many of the tensions that the Tribunal of Humility tried to manage. One of Castagna’s brothers was banned from the tavern for ten days and given a fine of one thousand lire. His offence was to have violated an agreement with another mafioso to take it in turns sleeping with a girl they both coveted.

  The Monster of Presinaci. Following his murderous rampage in 1955, Serafino Castagna told the authorities about the Honoured Society of Calabria.

  In Presinaci, the Honoured Society always made its presence felt in public spaces, key moments of community life; it monopolised folk dancing, for example. Castagna recalled: ‘During religious festivals we in the society always tried to take charge of the dancing, so as to keep the non-members away from the fun.’ The mastro di giornata (‘master of the day’, the boss’s spokesman) would call each of the gang’s members to dance in order of rank. On one occasion that Serafino Castagna recalled, a non-member who tried too hard to join in was clubbed brutally to the ground.

  In January 1942, the war brought an early interruption to Castagna’s criminal career. Despite his health problems, which included recurrent malaria, he was conscripted into an artillery regiment. After the collapse of the Italian army in September 1943, he managed to escape through both German and Allied lines until, ragged and hungry, he reached home to resume his journey towards the bloodbath of 17 April 1955.

  With the Second World War over, life in Presinaci returned to its grindingly poor normality. The Honoured Society began to intensify activities as its leaders came back from wherever they had been scattered by the conflict. The number of arson attacks and robberies increased. Contacts with branches in other places became more regular. The Tribunal of Humility held more frequent sessions. Crimes became more ambitious and violence more frequent: Castagna confronted and stabbed a man against whom he bore a petty grudge. A readiness to kill increasingly became an almost routine test that the gang’s leaders set for the members. The climate grew more thuggish still when Latino Purita, Castagna’s ‘honest’ cousin, became boss after his predecessor emigrated.

  Castagna first got into serious trouble when he was ordered to exact a fine of one thousand lire from a new affiliate who had been gossiping about the society’s affairs to a non-mafioso. Castagna’s instructions were to execute the offender if the money was not forthcoming. The affiliate in question was Domenicantonio Castagna, the distant cousin whom Castagna tried to kill first of all on the day, five years later, that he committed his outrages. Castagna and Domenicantonio got into a scuffle over money, a municipal guard intervened, and Castagna ended up shooting Domenicantonio in the chest. As luck would have it, Domenicantonio survived. But Castagna was caught and imprisoned for wounding him.

  Castagna tells us that the Society failed to help him in prison as he had been promised. Not only that, but when he was released in the final days of 1953, the Society immediately reprimanded him for failing to kill Domenicantonio. He was told that the only way to restore his reputation was by killing the municipal guard who had intervened in the scuffle. Castagna appealed against the decision, and obtained a little breathing space: the bosses decreed that he still had to kill the guard, but that he could wait until his period of police surveillance came to an end in the spring of 1955.

  Castagna was trapped. If he committed the murder of a public official, he knew that he would probably spend the rest of his life in prison. But he could also envisage the catastrophic loss of face that would ensue if he betrayed his mafia identity and talked to the authorities: ‘Nobody would give me any respect, not even people who did not belong to the Society.’ As the deadline for vendetta grew near, he began to be tortured by nightmares about cemeteries, ghosts and wars. In the end, he made the irrevocable decision to refuse to obey, and to kill those who had ordered him to kill. He prepared himself for the coming battle by writing down everything he knew about the Honoured Society, and with it a list of the twenty members he wanted to murder. Then he prepared his last meal of fried eggs.

  Castagna’s plans misfired grotesquely. Only one of his victims, the last, was a member of the Honoured Society. The others were only obliquely connected to his real targets, if they had any connection at all. This was no grand gesture, but a venting of accumulated rage and desperation.

  Much of the criminal subculture that the Monster of Presinaci described in his memoir is still
in use in today’s ’ndrangheta. Rituals and fables help forge powerful fraternal bonds, moulding the identity of young criminals, giving them the sense of entitlement they need to dominate their communities. If Serafino Castagna’s five murders teach us one thing, it is that the ’ndrangheta subculture can exert extreme psychological pressures.

  But to the police and judiciary of the 1950s, much of Castagna’s account seemed like so much mumbo jumbo. Indeed, this was a picture of the Calabrian mafia that flattered one of Italy’s most enduring and misleading misconceptions. Even many of those who were prepared to admit that the mafia existed in places like Calabria and Sicily were convinced that it was a symptom of backwardness. At the time, it was not the problem of organised crime that dominated public discussion of southern Italy, but the issue of poverty. In the South average income stood at about half of levels in the North. In 1951, a government inquiry found that 869,000 Italian families had so little money that they never ate sugar or meat; 744,000 of those families lived in the South. If anyone thought about the mafias at all, they thought of them mostly as the result of poverty, and of a primitive peasant milieu characterised by superstition and isolated episodes of bestial violence. In the end, the story of the Monster of Presinaci raised few eyebrows.

  The networks of patronage, including mafia patronage, that supported many politicians in southern Italy were an inherently unstable power base. Inevitably, every so often, mafia activity would get out of hand, the violence would escalate, and loyal Christian Democrat supporters would begin to protest. At such times, even governments that were constitutionally averse to drawing attention to the mafia problem were forced to respond. It turned out that the Monster of Presinaci affair was by no means an isolated episode. The year 1955 was a very violent one in Calabria.

  One or two journalists picked up signs that all was not well. A correspondent from the Naples newspaper Il Mattino, the most influential Christian Democrat daily in the South, visited Calabria a few weeks after Castagna was captured. He discovered that the province of Reggio Calabria was undergoing an alarming crime wave—or at least a crime wave that would have been alarming if it had being going on in any other Italian region. Buses and cars were being hijacked in the countryside, extortion payments demanded from farmers and factory owners, and witnesses were intimidated. Then there was the shocking case of Francesco Cricelli, a mafioso from San Calogero in the province of Catanzaro, who was beheaded for stealing a razor from his boss. Il Mattino demanded government action to reassert the authority of the law.

  By the time these reports were published, somewhere within the courtyards, the loggias and the criss-crossing corridors of the Ministry of the Interior in Rome, the government machinery was already slowly turning its attention to the problem of law and order in the southernmost point of the Italian mainland.

  Giuseppe Aloi was an entrepreneur from Reggio Calabria who employed some 150 people making bricks. The day before Serafino Castagna’s rampage, Aloi wrote a letter to the Minister of the Interior. He was frightened and angry: his son had recently fought off a kidnapping attempt in the very centre of Reggio. Since then, the family had received threats and demands for money, and the police locally had not been able to identify the culprits. The situation was so bad that he was considering closing down his business. Aloi’s letter also pointed out the rising crime in the area and said:

  It is a notorious fact that the underworld organisation has reappeared in almost every town in the province. There are numerous mafiosi who, despite not having any profession or trade that is useful to society, flaunt an easy and luxurious lifestyle based on suspect wealth; they offer their services to farmers or impose extraordinary tributes on them in return for assurances that property and belongings will be respected.

  Two days after the brick-maker wrote his letter, plain-clothes police in two unmarked cars tried to trap the extortionists on a winding mountain road on the northern slopes of Aspromonte. One of the unmarked cars was targeted from the wooded slopes by bursts of machine-gun and hunting-rifle fire. Miraculously, four officers suffered only slight wounds. The Calabrian mafia was heavily armed and prepared to confront the forces of order directly.

  Following a request for further information, the Prefect of Reggio Calabria (the Minister of the Interior’s eyes and ears on the ground) responded with a report that confirmed Aloi’s picture. Calabria had ‘a vast network of underworld affiliates’ that was able to assure its own immunity from the law through omertà and ‘a well-ordered system of protection that even reached into politics’; ‘often, at election time, these individuals [i.e., mafiosi] transform themselves into propagandists for one party or another, and try to influence the election results with the weight of their clienteles’. The Calabrian mafia was beginning to present a problem of public order that could not be dismissed as the work of a single, psychologically fragile peasant.

  Soon after taking office in July, a new Christian Democrat Minister of the Interior decided that urgent action was required. There would be an anti-mafia crackdown on a scale that Italy had not seen since the days of the Fascist repression of the late 1920s. A dynamic new chief of police, Carmelo Marzano, was lined up to lead what would become known as the Marzano Operation. Local wags, who could not resist a pun, joked that it was as if Martians (Marziani) had landed. Calabria was about to greet invaders from planet law and order.

  40

  MARS ATTACKS!

  THE MINISTER WHO ORDERED THE CRACKDOWN IN CALABRIA WAS FERNANDO Tambroni, a Christian Democrat from the Marche region. A timid man in public, Tambroni attracted little press attention. His policy utterances were cagey and abstruse, even by Christian Democrat standards. The only obviously distinctive things about him were his alabaster good looks and his elegance. (He was a loyal customer of Del Rosso, the elite Roman tailor.) In private, Tambroni had a belief system with three pillars: the cult of San Gabriele dell’Addolorata, the influence of his personal astrologer, and a bent for compiling secret dossiers on his allies and enemies.

  Despite these personal foibles, when Tambroni announced the beginning of the Marzano Operation it seemed like a good, old-fashioned, right-wing, law-and-order policy of a kind that could be witnessed in other Western European countries. The Marzano Operation was presented as a test run of Tambroni’s law-and-order platform—a drive to reinforce the citizens’ trust in the state (and thereby in the Christian Democrats). Early in the operation, Minister Tambroni gave a newspaper interview in which he denounced a ‘government by organised crime’ in Calabria, and promised that he would ‘get to the bottom of things’ and ‘show no favours to anyone’.

  Chief of Police Carmelo Marzano’s early reports to Tambroni from Calabria were the manifesto of an ambitious man primed for vigorous action. It was no exaggeration, Marzano wrote, to say that the population was ‘literally in the grip of terror’. The crime rate was alarmingly high. But many, many more offences went unreported because of public fear. Racketeering was systematic: forestry, taverns and restaurants, the state lottery, the bus service—nothing was allowed to work unless what Marzano called ‘certain compromises’ were reached. Hundreds of convicted criminals were at large in the province, including fifty-nine murderers; these fugitives paraded the state’s failure to impose itself on the territory. One of them, the notorious Brooklyn-born Angelo Macrì, had walked up to a Carabiniere in the centre of Delianova and shot him in the head; his status within the Honoured Society had grown immeasurably as a result. Another convicted murderer on the run was the equally notorious boss of Bova, Vincenzo Romeo. Romeo lived openly in his territory, married in the presence of the bosses of the Honoured Society, fathered children, managed his business affairs and cared for his ten beloved dogs. On one occasion, when the Carabinieri came looking for him, the women of Bova simultaneously waved sheets from their windows to warn him of the danger.

  The new police chief found the state of law enforcement even more shocking than the state of public order. He was horrified by his headqu
arters, the Questura: this poky, filthy building seemed half abandoned; it had no shutters on the windows to keep out the summer heat, and not even any railings on the balconies. Whereas a town of comparable size in the north or centre of Italy might have five or six local stations in addition to the Questura, in Reggio, a city that now had one of the highest crime rates in the country, there were no other police stations. So the Questura was permanently overrun by citizens from across the province clamouring to report a crime, or to apply for a licence or certificate. There were no cells, and no secluded space where a witness or informer could be interviewed. Visits from grandees making special pleas for arrested supporters were a regular occurrence. The Questura seemed less a command centre than a bazaar.

  Many of the men now under Marzano’s command had taken on the same dilapidated and immobile air as the furniture they sat on. They had close contacts in the community—friendships, family ties, business interests—and thus placed living a quiet life before applying themselves to their more abrasive duties. One officer suspected of conniving with criminals was still doing his job years after a transfer order had been issued. The Flying Squad—the plain-clothes unit whose responsibilities were supposed to include chasing after those fifty-nine convicted murderers—numbered only fourteen men, and less than half of them actually turned up to work with any regularity. Law enforcement in the province lacked even the most basic tools of modern policing: dogs, bicycles, or the radios that were essential if officers searching the wilds of Aspromonte were to coordinate their moves.

  The Festival of the Madonna of the Mountain at Polsi was an obvious early opportunity for Police Chief Marzano to show that Minister Tambroni’s alien invaders were no joke. The authorities were well aware that the festival was used by the Honoured Society to conceal an annual general meeting of some kind, although quite what happened at the meeting and why was not clear. In 1954, as so often in the past, the pilgrimage had seen a settling of mafia accounts: after the pilgrims had gone home, the corpses of two young men with multiple gunshot wounds were found near the sanctuary. This year, with Marzano in charge, there were roadblocks and patrols in the woods. Fourteen men were taken into custody on charges ranging from carrying weapons to attempted murder and kidnapping. Marzano’s line manager, the Prefect of Reggio, telegraphed the Ministry to announce that the pilgrimage had passed off without incident.