Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Since the 1960s, the ’ndrangheta has profited handsomely from the mess. Yet very early on in the story of the Salerno–Reggio Calabria it became clear to law enforcement officers on the ground that the ’ndrangheta carried only part of the blame. One senior Carabiniere officer stationed in Reggio Calabria was interviewed by a national newspaper in 1970:

  When northern entrepreneurs come down to Calabria to get their projects started, the first thing they do is to go to see the man they have been told is the mafia boss. They pay him a visit out of duty, as if they were calling on the Prefect. They solicit his protection, and pay for it by giving the capomafia’s friends the sub-contract for earth moving, and by taking on mafiosi as guards on their building sites.

  Non-Calabrian construction entrepreneurs would offer other favours too: testimonies in favour of mafiosi in court; failing to report the many thefts of explosives from their building sites; offering guarantees to the bank when ’ndranghetisti bought construction machinery on credit. The northern entrepreneurs would then fail to complete their work on time, and blame the local mafia for the delays. Those delays would then allow the entrepreneurs to charge the government more money, money of which the mafia would naturally receive its share. Along the Calabrian stretches of the Salerno–Reggio Calabria, the ’ndrangheta was educated into the ways of a particularly cynical brand of capitalism.

  Construction is acutely vulnerable to the mafia’s most rudimentary methods. Buildings and roads have to be built somewhere. And in any given somewhere, by merely smashing up machinery or intimidating labour, mafiosi can force construction companies to sit down and negotiate. Nor, once those negotiations have borne fruit, does it require any great entrepreneurial nous for a boss to buy a few dumper trucks and set up an earth-moving company to take on some generously subcontracted business. More insidiously still, mafiosi do not find it hard to convince companies of the advantages that a friendship with organised crime can bring. An entrepreneur does not need to be exceptionally greedy or cynical to lapse into collusion with murderers. He just needs a preference for bending the rules, paying his workers in cash, and dodging red tape. And once he starts operating outside the law, who does he turn to when his machines are wrecked or his builders duffed up? His relief when he does a deal and the harassment stops merges easily with the satisfaction that comes when it is a competitor’s turn to suffer. The truth is that there is often a demand for the mafias’ services—a demand that the mafias themselves are past masters at cultivating.

  So muscling in on the construction business is straightforward, up to a point. But success in construction can also be the measure of just how profoundly mafia influence has insinuated itself into the entrails of the state and the capitalist system. Getting zealous policemen moved, corrupting judges, adjusting town plans on demand, manipulating the awarding of government contracts, silencing journalists, winning powerful political friends: these are not activities for mere gorillas whose skills stop at pouring sugar into the fuel tank of a dumper truck. North or South, when a mafia masters these more refined arts, it can vastly increase its power to intimidate. Just as importantly, it can vastly increase the range of services it is able to offer to friendly firms: winning contracts at inflated prices, warding off inspections by the tax authorities, making new friends . . .

  43

  GANGSTERS AND BLONDES

  ITALIANS GOT THEIR FIRST TASTE OF IMPORTED AMERICAN BLEND CIGARETTES LIKE Camel, Lucky Strike and Chesterfield during the Fascist era. They named them ‘blondes’ because they contained a lighter-coloured tobacco than the dark, air-cured varieties that could be grown in Italy.

  Blondes were immediately popular. The state had established a monopoly on the growing, importing, processing and sale of tobacco in 1862; and since that date the state had always struggled to keep pace with consumer demand and changing tastes. The arrival of blondes left the government further than ever from satisfying the public’s craving. In fact, no sooner were these glamorous new gaspers introduced in the early 1930s than they disappeared from government tobacco outlets because of the sanctions imposed following Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Rationing during the Second World War made smokers’ lives even more difficult. And when the Allies invaded in 1943, and Fascism fell, Italy’s own capacity to produce tobacco was devastated. Thus British and American troops arrived amidst a tobacco famine, and they arrived with cigarettes in their ration packs. Much of this tobacco was funnelled into the burgeoning black market. By the time rationing ended in the spring of 1948, and domestic production recovered, it was too late: Italy’s rapidly growing number of smokers (14 million by 1957) were hooked on imported cigarettes. Perhaps just as damagingly, they were also hooked on the illegal supply channels that made those cigarettes available at tax-free prices. This vast criminal market has shaped the history of organised crime in Italy ever since. It has been compared to the Prohibition period in the United States (1919–33), when the federal government banned alcoholic drinks, and in so doing created a bootleg bonanza. Naples, as the capital of the black market, is the place to watch the unfolding of the lucrative love affair between gangsters and blondes.

  In 1963, cinema committed a captivating image of the Neapolitan contraband tobacco trade to popular memory in the first episode of Vittorio De Sica’s three-part movie Ieri, oggi, domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Sophia Loren plays a girl who sells black-market cigarettes from an orange-box stall. For her, arrest is an occupational hazard. But she discovers that, by law, pregnant women cannot be held in prison, so she cajoles her husband into siring one baby after another, until their one-room apartment is bursting. Eventually, the poor man’s reproductive apparatus gives out under the strain. (He is played, with typical harried charm, by Marcello Mastroianni.)

  Sophia Loren, in the role of a Neapolitan cigarette-seller. Tobacco smuggling, a crucial business for organised crime, is portrayed sympathetically in the 1963 movie Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow.

  As a piece of cinema, the Loren episode of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow is ultimately a sentimental cliché: yet another song to the gaudy anarchy of Neapolitan street life. Yet the story was rooted in truth all the same. The Loren character was based on Concetta Muccardo, who sold bootleg cigarettes in Forcella, the ‘kasbah’ quarter of Naples. Muccardo’s reputed nineteen pregnancies (seven of them carried to term) kept her out of jail until 1957, when the police finally caught her without a baby on the way, or one in her arms. She was sent to prison for eight months and, harshly, a further two years were added to her sentence because she was unable to pay a fine. But Muccardo’s notoriety quickly earned her freedom. The generous readers of two newspapers, one from Turin and one from Rome, paid off the money she owed. And in January 1958, following an appeal by Socialist and Communist women MPs, she was granted a pardon by the head of state, the President of the Republic. When Concetta returned to her alley, vico Carbonari, pictures of President Giovanni Gronchi had been set up alongside the images of the Madonna in the local street tabernacles.

  The experience of shooting Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in the alleys of central Naples showed De Sica just how close the script came to reality. This was a city where the chronic failings of the economy had left many poor families reliant on contraband to put food on the table. De Sica gave a walk-on part to a well-known local woman with nine children: she boasted she had been in prison a record 113 times for contraband offences. In Forcella there were many other cigarette girls who entered local folklore. A certain ‘Rosetta’ was the most attractive of a number of women who charged extra for ‘fun fags’—cigarettes that customers had to rummage for in her ample cleavage. (A Sophia Loren movie based on Rosetta’s story would doubtless not have made it past the censors.)

  While De Sica was staying in the Ambassador Hotel, Muccardo’s husband introduced himself and demanded a percentage of the film’s takings. Rather obliquely, De Sica replied by pointing to a magazine photo of Sophia Loren on
set being fitted with a false baby belly. ‘Don’t you see how beautiful she is? As big as your wife was at that stage.’ The husband refused to be wowed: ‘Yes, Mr De Sica, but this is a belly full of millions: my wife’s is full of air.’ Writing to explain the episode to his family, De Sica could find nothing else to say than, ‘They are poor people.’

  Both De Sica’s film, and his reaction to what he witnessed in Naples while shooting it, are a faithful reflection of the dilemma that the Italian authorities also found themselves in. The law against tobacco-trafficking was simply unenforceable at street level. A clampdown seemed to be impossible without hurting the people who were both its operatives and its first victims: the poorest inhabitants of the Neapolitan slums. Indeed this was a dilemma that the Italian state lacked the will to tackle in any other way than by sleep-walking into repression and then recoiling towards tolerance. There was an amnesty for illegal cigarette retailers in the year that Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow came out, and another one in 1966. Policies the world over that aim to prohibit or control substances like tobacco and alcohol are difficult to implement at the best of times. When those policies are widely disobeyed, they have a way of making the law seem draconian, unrealistic and inconsistent all at the same time. The vital principle that it is in everyone’s interests for the state to create and enforce fair rules can only suffer, and the state itself falls into discredit. In Italy, where that principle has always struggled to hold its own, the damage to the state’s credibility was very serious indeed. In Naples, contraband cigarettes were openly on sale in the corridors of government buildings.

  Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow came out at a crucial historical moment for contraband tobacco, and thus for all of Italy’s mafias. For this was the time when cigarette smuggling became an industry, and that industry became the primary occupation of organised crime.

  The decisive event in the gearing up of Italy’s bootleg tobacco trade happened in North Africa. In October 1959 Mohamed V, king of a newly independent Morocco, confirmed the fears of smugglers across the Mediterranean: he gave six months’ notice that the port of Tangier was to lose its special privileges. Until that point Tangier, which is situated opposite Gibraltar at the mouth of the Mediterranean, had had a large ‘International Zone’ with few passport controls, very low taxes and no currency restrictions. Banks did not even have to present balance sheets. In short, Tangier was a smugglers’ paradise, and the very hub of illegal commerce across the Mediterranean. As one resident, American novelist Paul Bowles, observed: ‘I think all Europe’s black-market profiteers are here . . . since the whole International Zone is one huge black market.’ It was from the safe haven of Tangier that the ‘mother ships’ packed with contraband cigarettes could fan out along the southern European coastline. When they reached Naples, they would wait in international waters for tiny local craft to come and ferry the cargo to shore.

  When King Mohamed announced the closure of the International Zone, the short-term result was that cigarette smuggling became more difficult. And when smuggling becomes more difficult, only the best-organised and best-resourced of smugglers can survive. The only wholesalers who could now prosper were those with international links to shipping companies, cigarette producers and officials in places like the Balkans. For different reasons, the local operators, who ferried the cases of cigarettes from ship to shore, also had to up their game: expensive speedboats were now needed to outrun the Guardia di Finanza (Tax Police). As competition in the tobacco business increased, so too did violence. Contraband was no longer a trade for amateurs.

  Naples appealed to the new breed of professional trafficker of the 1960s for a number of reasons. One of the most important was the ready supply of cheap criminal labour in the alleys where Concetta Muccardo became a legend. Naples was also the gateway to an Italian market that was in the throes of its economic miracle, and consuming more and more cigarettes as a result. In the 1960s, Naples was also a free port, in the sense that the camorra in the city was still comparatively weak, and there was no dominant local criminal organisation able to throttle competition. So networks of big-time traffickers from Genoa, Corsica and Marseille were drawn to the city under the volcano to find outlets for their cigarettes. But the most important new arrivals after the closure of the International Zone of Tangier—men who would radically alter the course of criminal history in Italy—were from Sicily.

  44

  COSA NOSTRA: Untouchables no more

  IN THE LATE 1950S AND EARLY 1960S, ITALY OBSERVED AS THE UNITED STATES ONCE more addressed its mafia problem. First, in November 1957, there was the spectacular episode at a large estate in Apalachin, upstate New York, when the state troopers stumbled upon a summit of some one hundred mafia bosses. One or two of them came from as far away as California, Cuba and Texas. Sixty men were taken into custody, and as a result the FBI finally admitted the mafia—or national crime syndicate, or whatever name might be applied to it—was something more than a romantic myth. As a result, in 1959, Vito Genovese, chief of the New York Family that bore his name, was sentenced to fifteen years for drug trafficking: the first major blow against a senior stateside boss in the decade and a half since the end of the Second World War.

  Meanwhile Robert F. Kennedy, the energetic young chief counsel of a new Senate Labor Rackets Committee, was busy uncovering corruption in the Teamsters Union. Following the Apalachin summit, the committee again used television to good effect by interviewing several of the most prominent men who had been at Apalachin, such as Joe Profaci and Thomas Lucchese. Viewers also saw a federal agent explain the mafia’s dynastic politics:

  The intermarriages are significant in that often times you wonder whether these people want to marry each other. Yet the marriages take place. Let’s say two people of a prominent status within the Mafia if they have children, you will find that their sons and daughters get married. . . . a leader within the organization would not have his child marry someone who is a nobody within the organization.

  Bobby Kennedy’s best-selling account of the investigation he led, The Enemy Within (1960), contained vivid cameo portraits of a series of Italian-American gangsters. One such was ‘labor relations consultant’ Carmine Lombardozzi, who had been ordered to wait in the garage during the Apalachin summit while the other mafiosi decided whether to kill him or merely fine him for covertly pocketing money from a juke-box racket. (They opted for the fine.)

  In 1961, when his brother became President, Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General. The investigation and repression of organised crime was a key part of his programme. Where there had been nineteen organised crime indictments in 1960, the total rose to 687 in 1964.

  Alongside these law enforcement and political developments, the mafia became a hot topic in American culture. In 1959, ABC began transmitting a drama series, based on Eliot Ness’s The Untouchables, about Al Capone’s Prohibition-era Chicago. The show became a hit, largely because it was studded with thinly disguised references to recent gangland news.

  As always, there was a good deal of controversy and sensationalism in public discussion. The Order Sons of Italy in America, an ethnic lobby group that was desperate to play down the mafia issue, managed to get all Italian-American characters removed from The Untouchables in 1961. Deprived of this key element of authenticity, the show declined in popularity and was taken off air in 1963.

  At the other extreme, some wrote about the mafia as if it were a centralised, bureaucratic, calculating monster—an IBM of crime. Ever since then, in both Italy and the States, it has made for good journalistic copy to see the mafia as a dark mirror of cutting-edge capitalism, and to see mafiosi as executives with guns. This is an oversimplification with undoubted imaginative power, to both the law-abiding and the outlaw. The Godfather—novel and movie—would later draw part of its insidious glamour from the same idea: ‘Tell Mike it was only business.’ Nothing could be better calculated to make middle-aged, middle-American middle-managers feel dangerous and clever than the suggestion
that they and mafiosi are pretty much alike—give or take a few garrottings. Conversely, nothing could be better calculated to flatter a hoodlum’s ego, and impress his young sidekicks, than the suggestion that he is the incarnation of some sleek, lawless ideal-type of the businessman. But if mafiosi are entrepreneurs, then they are entrepreneurs who specialise not in competition, but in breaking and distorting the rules of the market.

  The season of intense political and media interest in the mafia in the early 1960s also had a curious side effect: it changed the mafia’s name. In 1962 Joe Valachi, a soldier in the Genovese Family, mistakenly suspecting that he was about to be killed on the orders of his boss, bludgeoned an innocent man to death in prison. He then began to talk to the FBI about the mafia, its initiation rituals and structure as he saw them from his lowly and relatively marginal position in the organisation. A non-Italian speaker, Valachi had heard other members of the brotherhood refer to cosa nostra—‘our thing’. Valachi took this vague description to be the mafia’s official name: Cosa Nostra, or la Cosa Nostra. So too did the FBI. And then, once Valachi’s testimony had been made public in 1963, so too did American mafiosi themselves. Only in 1984 would the world learn that this label had been adopted by the Sicilian mafia too.