Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  The many slippery testimonies at the Pupetta Maresca trial mean that we have to use educated guesswork to put more detail into the picture. It seems likely that the various Presidents from perhaps fifteen different towns in the Naples hinterland (Big Pasquale from Nola, Big Tony from Pomigliano, and so on) met regularly in Naples to hammer out prices between them. Because they all controlled the supply of a variety of different foodstuffs, they agreed to give the initiative in deciding the price of single fruits and vegetables to Presidents whose territory gave them a particular strength in that particular crop: hence Big Pasquale’s potatoes.

  While this might seem a corrupt and inefficient system, it had distinct advantages for any national or international company that came to source produce at the wholesale market in Naples. Firms such as the producers of the canned tomatoes used on pasta and pizza would look to the Presidents of Prices for guarantees: that supply would be maintained; that prices would be predictable; and that the deals done face to face on the pavements of Corso Novara would be honoured. In return for these services, the Presidents of Prices took a personal bribe. Big Pasquale is reputed to have taken a 100 lire kickback on every 100 kilos of potatoes unloaded at the market. According to one testimony, the President of Potato Prices could send as many as fifty lorry-loads of spuds a day to the market—equivalent to some 750,000 kilos. If these figures are right, Big Pasquale could earn as much as $12,000 (in 2012 values) on a good day. And this does not take into account the money he was bleeding from the poor farmers, and the profit he made on the fruit and vegetables he traded in.

  Later investigations showed that livestock, seafood and dairy produce were as thoroughly controlled by the camorra as was the trade in fruit and vegetables. Indeed, Naples did not even have a wholesale livestock market—all the deals were done in the notorious country town of Nola from which Big Pasquale took his name. According to one expert observer, ‘The underworld in the Nola area willed and imposed the moving of the cattle market from Naples to Nola.’

  Among the questions that remained unanswered by the Pupetta affair was one concerning the links between the rural clans and politicians. It is highly likely that the mobsters of the country towns acted as vote-hustlers in the same way as the guappi of the city.

  Then there was the question of the relationship between these country clans and the urban crime scene. The wholesale greengrocery gangsters certainly made the correntisti of the urban slums look like small-time operators by comparison. The past may provide a few clues as to the links between the two. Big Pasquale from Nola, Tony from Pomigliano and their ilk have a history that remains largely unwritten to this day. Nevertheless, in the days of the old Honoured Society of Naples, the strongest Neapolitan camorristi were always the ones who had business links to country towns like Nola. The real money was to be made not in shakedowns of shops and stalls in the city, but upstream, where the supplies of animals and foodstuffs originated. Outside Naples, major criminal organisations certainly survived the death of the Honoured Society, and may well have continued their power right through the Fascist era. So the ‘new camorra’ revealed by the Pupetta case was not new at all.

  If there had been less muddle about the Sicilian mafia in the 1950s, then it might also have occurred to observers of the Pupetta Maresca trial that the camorra families of the Neapolitan hinterland bore a resemblance to the mafia cells of Sicily and Calabria. They all had power built on violence, wealth that straddled the legal and illegal economies, and an insatiable hunger for fruit and vegetables. In March 1955, just seven months before Pupetta shot her husband’s killer, a mafioso called Gaetano Galatolo, known as Tano Alatu, was shot dead at the entrance to Palermo’s new wholesale market in the Acquasanta quarter. A factional battle to control the market then ensued. Southern Calabria had no single wholesale market to compare with those in Naples and Palermo; nor was any blood shed in this period over lettuces and pears. But it is known that the local mob controlled the smaller local markets in Reggio Calabria, Palmi, Gioia Tauro, Rosarno, Siderno, Locri and Vibo Valentia. As Italy recovered from the hungry years of war and reconstruction, and made its first hesitant steps towards prosperity, the mafias established a stranglehold on the South’s food supply.

  After the events of 1955 in Naples, some of the best current affairs commentators who were not aligned with the PCI came close to these profoundly worrying conclusions. One example was the liberal intellectual and politician Francesco Compagna: his magazine Nord e Sud published a number of important analyses of organised crime in the following years. But at a time when the only women within the orbit of organised crime who made themselves visible were the black-clad mafia widows of Sicily and Calabria, even such serious observers struggled to see Pupetta Maresca as anything more than an anomaly. The overwhelming view was that any women who might happen to associate with gangsters did so only because they were typical, family-bound southern females; that they played no active part in the mafia system.

  Pupetta received an eighteen-year term for the premeditated murder of Big Tony from Pomigliano. And, despite her best efforts, her brother Ciro was eventually sentenced to twelve years. Many Italians remained hypnotised by the ‘Tosca’ version of her story. In the wake of the publicity surrounding the murder, the Italian film industry developed a minor obsession with her. The first film came out before the trial, in 1958. Two years after her release, in 1967, Pupetta herself starred in Delitto a Posillipo (Murder in Posillipo), based loosely on her life. In 1982, she was played in a TV movie by Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce’s granddaughter. Another TV dramatisation was transmitted in 2013, attracting criticism for romanticising the camorra. Pupetta established a twin-track career that was destined to last for years: movie celebrity and mob queen.

  PART IX

  THE MAFIAS’ ECONOMIC MIRACLE

  42

  KING CONCRETE

  IN THE LATE 1950S AND EARLY 1960S, INDUSTRY EXPANDED FASTER IN ITALY THAN IN any other Western European nation. The European Common Market was a stimulus for exporters; cheap power, cheap labour and cheap capital created the right conditions for growth at home, and the north of Italy had traditions of entrepreneurship and craftsmanship to draw on. An agricultural country, much of which had still run on cartwheels in the 1940s, was now motoring into the age of mass production. Factories in the North began churning out scooters, cars and tyres in exponentially increasing numbers. This was Italy’s ‘economic miracle’, the speediest and most profound social change in the peninsula’s entire history.

  Lifestyles were transformed. As tractors and fertiliser modernised agriculture, peasants abandoned the countryside in droves. Italy contracted the consumerist bug. Television began in 1954, and with it advertising for stock cubes, tinned meat, coffee pots, toothpaste . . . Italians learned to worry about armpit odour, lank hair and dandruff. Washing machines, fridges and food mixers promised an end to domestic drudgery for millions of women. Motorways were built for the legions of new car owners.

  Italy even became fashionable. Brand names like Zanussi, Olivetti and Alfa Romeo conquered the continent. The Vespa and the FIAT 500 became icons. The world started to crave the peninsula’s handbags and shoes. Soon Italy’s much sniffed-at food would begin to win converts too.

  During the economic miracle, Italy rapidly made itself into one of the world’s leading capitalist economies. Here was a shining success story for the Europe that had risen from the rubble of the Second World War.

  But the miracle also opened up roads to riches for the mafias. And the mafias’ favourite industries knew few of the problems that would come to dog the lawful economy when the boom eventually subsided. No cycles of surge and recession. No obstreperous unions. Little in the way of competition. Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s the history of the mafias traces an upward curve of relentlessly growing riches. The mafias’ economic miracle would long outlast the first spurt of growth in lawful industry.

  From the mid-1950s, Italy’s three major criminal organisations fol
lowed one another into four new businesses—or at least newly lucrative businesses: construction, tobacco smuggling, kidnapping, and narcotics trafficking. The story of the mafias’ economic miracle takes the form of an intricate fugue as, following a trend that was usually set in Sicily, each of the mafias moved in turn through the same cycles of greed, and each of these four businesses in turn increased mafia influence.

  The two core skills the mafias deployed to exploit the construction industry, contraband tobacco, kidnapping and drugs were both highly traditional: intimidation and networking, which are what mafia crime has been all about since the outset. All the same, the new era of criminal business did not just make bosses more moneyed than they had ever been, it also profoundly altered the landscape of mafia power.

  For one thing, wealth begat wealth. The profits from one illegal enterprise were ploughed into the others, and thereby multiplied. From construction, to smuggled cigarettes, to kidnapping, to narcotics: interlocking chain reactions were set in motion over the coming three decades. The mafias became what Italy’s ‘mafiologists’ describe using an English phrase: ‘holding companies’. In some senses that is what mafiosi ever were: 360-degree criminals who, in the nineteenth century, would take money from extortion and invest it in stolen cattle, for example. But from the late 1950s there was a quantum leap in the diversification and integration of mafia commerce.

  Burgeoning criminal wealth wrought a whole series of other changes. The liaison between organised crime and the Italian state grew both more intimate and more violent. The mafias themselves changed too. They experimented with new rules and new command structures. They grew to look more like one another. Mafiosi from different regions increasingly moved in the same circles, doing business together, learning lessons and, sometimes, fighting. Mafiosi began to operate more internationally. Entirely new mafias were spawned. In the end, these interlocking changes would plunge all of the mafias into violence of a scale and savagery that had never been seen before.

  It all began with a commodity that is set hard at the very foundations of the mafias’ territorial authority, and continues to this day to build many of their bridges into the lawful economy and the system of government: concrete.

  Naples and Palermo have a great deal in common. Both were glorious capital cities in their time. Both are ports. And both are marked by a long-standing struggle to find an economic raison d’être in the era of industrial capitalism. In the early 1950s, Palermo and Naples had ancient enclaves of poverty at their heart: the alleys of the run-down quarters were bomb-damaged, crowded, filthy and poor. Typhoid and tuberculosis were regular visitors. Here the cramped, precarious housing lacked proper kitchens and lavatories. In the alleys, barefoot children played amid open drains and rubbish. Many breadwinners, male and female, lived from hand to mouth as pickpockets, three-card tricksters, pedlars, prostitutes, chambermaids, laundresses and gatherers of firewood, rags or scrap. The bricklayers and plasterers who got occasional work, or the underemployed cobblers and tailors, were all too few. Child labour was one of the mainstays of the slum economy.

  Change was urgently needed. To add to the pressure, Palermo was now Sicily’s capital again, with the new regional parliament and its army of bureaucrats to accommodate. But instead of planned rehousing and strategic urban development, both cities were ransacked. Building speculation was rampant, and local government proved utterly incapable of imposing any order on the savage concrete bonanza. In the process, through the 1960s, the economic axes of both cities were shifted. Once their livelihoods had depended on land (for the wealthy) and improvisation (for the poor). Now they were rebuilt around state employment, meagre benefits, piecework, sweatshop labour, services—and, of course, construction. For the poor, the transformation meant years of waiting, protesting, and begging for a favour from a priest or politician, before finally moving from a city-centre slum to a bleak housing project a long walk from the nearest bus stop. For the middling sort, the reward was a rented apartment in one of many indistinguishably gaudy, jerry-built stacks on what had once been green space.

  But when it comes to organised crime’s part in the construction bonanza of the 1950s and 1960s, the contrasts between Naples and Palermo were more striking than the similarities.

  In Naples, no one seized the mood of the building speculation boom better than film-maker Francesco Rosi, in his 1963 movie Le mani sulla città. Hands Over the City (as it was rather clumsily called in English) was both a prize-winning drama and a stirring denunciation of the political malpractice that fed off the construction industry in Naples. Rod Steiger snarls his way through the leading role as Edoardo Nottola, a rapacious councillor-cum-construction entrepreneur. The movie’s opening scene shows Steiger barking out his plans as he gestures with both arms in the direction of a parade of brutalist tower blocks:

  That over there is gold today. And where else are you going to get it? Trade? Industry? The ‘industrial future of the Mezzogiorno’? Do me a favour! Go ahead and invest your money in a factory if you like! Unions, pay claims, strikes, health insurance . . . That stuff’ll give you a heart attack.

  There could be no more vivid encapsulation of the cold-blooded credo of what Italians call an affarista: a profiteer, a wheeler-dealer, a cowboy businessman. Affaristi shirk the risks involved in real entrepreneurship, usually by working in the shadow of the political system where they can arrange little monopolies and sweetheart contracts.

  Gangsters prefer to deal with affaristi rather than with real entrepreneurs. Yet, although Hands Over the City is a searing portrait of a Neapolitan affarista, it is telling that the word camorra is never used in Rosi’s film; nor does anyone who could be considered a camorrista play a front-of-stage role in the story. For once, that absence is not the sign of a cover-up or of moral blindness: rather, it accurately reflects the facts on the ground. In Naples, camorristi simply lacked the clout to force their way into a major share in the building boom. At this stage in our story, there were no camorristi who doubled as construction affaristi.

  In Palermo, the situation was strikingly different: here the councillors and construction entrepreneurs were invariably flanked by Men of Honour; affaristi and mafiosi were so close as to be all but indistinguishable.

  In the late 1950s and 1960s, the mafia rebuilt Palermo in its own gruesome image in a frenzied wave of building speculation that became known as the ‘sack of Palermo’. There were two particularly notorious mafia-backed politicians who were key agents of the sack. The first was Salvo Lima, a tight-lipped, soft-featured young man whose only affectation was to smoke through a miniature cigarette holder. He looked like the middle-class boy he was—the son of a municipal archivist. Except that his father was also a mafia killer in the 1930s. (That little detail of Lima’s background had been buried, along with all the other important information from the Fascist campaigns against the mafia.) In 1956, Lima came from nowhere to win a seat on the city council, a post as director of the Office of Public Works, and the title of deputy mayor. Two years later, when Lima became mayor, he was succeeded at the strategic Office of Public Works by the second key mafioso politician, Vito Ciancimino. Ciancimino was brash, a barber’s son from Corleone whose cigarette habit had given him a rasping voice to match his abrasive personality. In the course of their uneasy alliance, Lima and Ciancimino would wreak havoc in Palermo, and reap vast wealth and immense power in the process.

  Men like Lima and Ciancimino were known as ‘Young Turks’—representatives of a thrusting new breed of DC machine politician which, across Sicily and the South, was beginning to elbow the old grandees aside. In the 1950s, the range of jobs and favours that were available to patronage politicians began to increase dramatically. The state grew bigger. Government enlarged its already sizeable presence in banking and credit, for example. Meanwhile, local councils set up their own agencies to handle such services as rubbish disposal and public transport. Sicily’s new regional government invented its own series of quangos. As the economy grew,
and with it the ambitions for state economic intervention, more new bureaucracies were added. In 1950, faced with the scandal of southern Italy’s poverty and backwardness, the DC government set up the ‘Fund for the South’ to sluice large sums into land reclamation, transport infrastructure and the like. Money from the Fund for the South helped win the DC many supporters, and put food on many southern tables. But its efforts to promote what it was hoped would be a dynamic new class of entrepreneurs and professionals were a dismal failure. As things turned out, the only really dynamic class in the South was the DC’s own Young Turks. The Fund for the South would turn into a gigantic source of what one commentator called ‘state parasitism and organised waste’. Government ‘investment’ in the South became, in reality, the centrepiece of a geared-up patronage system. Young Turks began to inveigle their way into new and old posts in local government and national ministries. Journalists of the day dubbed the Christian Democrat party ‘the white whale’ (i.e., Moby Dick) because it was white (i.e., Catholic), vast, slow, and consumed everything in its path.

  In Palermo, for all these new sources of patronage, it was the simple business of controlling planning permission that gave Young Turks like Lima and Ciancimino and their mafia friends such a large stake in the building boom.

  The sack of Palermo was at its most swift and brutal in the Piana dei Colli, the flat strip of land that extends northwards between the mountains from the edge of Palermo. It has always been a ‘zone of high mafia density’, in the jargon of Italian mafiologists. Indeed, it has as good a claim as anywhere to being the very cradle of the mafia: its beautiful lemon groves were where the earliest mafiosi developed their protection racket methods; the Piana dei Colli was the theatre for the ‘double vendetta’ intrigues of the 1870s that had been investigated by Ermanno Sangiorgi. A century on from those beginnings, the mafia smothered its birthplace in a concrete shroud. The scale of the ruin was immense. The gorgeous landscape of the Conca d’Oro, which for Goethe had offered ‘an inexhaustible wealth of vistas’, was transformed into an undifferentiated swathe of shoddily built apartment blocks without pavements or proper amenities.