by John Dickie
Nobody witnessed the episode. It was a completely ‘virtual’ event. Somebody, maybe Cutolo himself, put the rumour into circulation that the duel had not happened because of ’o Malommo’s cowardice. In cases like this, different versions do the rounds—versions that always suit one side or the other. Cutolo went a long way thanks to a fame that was often built on made-up events. He was skilful at making exploits that never existed seem credible and legendary. He had an extraordinary talent for promoting his own image.
Even within the straitened confines of a prison, organised crime—however organised it may be—is a domain where information circulates in a confused and fragmentary form. The Professor was a master at making the gaps in any story work for him, in writing his own history.
Cutolo’s Poems and Thoughts are repulsive, and often trite and clumsy. But they would be much less dangerous if all they did was prompt fake duels in prison corridors or trumpet a killer’s feats of savage dexterity. Cutolo’s writings did much more. Copies circulated among his acolytes like the scriptures of a new messiah, and provided a seductive emotional script for the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Analysing that script brings us to the heart of the Professor’s charismatic appeal.
Nihilism is the base note of the Cutolo philosophy. We are all beasts, ready to tear one another apart for filthy money. Man is the most treacherous and cruel of all the animals; he ought not to exist. But the psychological trick that the Professor pulls off in Poems and Thoughts is to create a criminal value-system that seems redemptive when set against this background of fear and despair.
A good portion of Cutolo’s verse voices a prisoner’s yearning for his freedom, his mum, and the sights, sounds and smells of home. All of which may seem self-pitying. But it shows that Cutolo was a smart enough leader to identify with the underlying mental vulnerability of his fellow cons. His mawkishness was the first means to a very unsentimental end: moulding a disciplined criminal army.
The sentence: life imprisonment
As a youth
You entered
The tomb-like cell
The silent cell
The suffering cell
You felt alone, and lost
Cutolo blames social inequality and especially the prison system for the fact that he, like so many others, has turned to crime. But this persecution has had an ennobling effect. As in the following Cutolian maxim: ‘Take note: the best men end up as outlaws, fugitives or prisoners. While the people who have done this to them are the hypocrite defenders of the law.’
Cutolo presents the NCO as a fellowship of the downtrodden, bound together against the onslaughts of a hostile world; it is a group of Friends. For Friendship is the supreme good in the Professor’s charismatic world. ‘Friendship is sacred, because it is beautiful to share your own moments of bitterness, joy, pain and triumph with a friendly heart.’
And if Friendship came under threat, then death must become the best Friend of all: ‘When a battle begins, a boss’s first thought must be to make “Death” a Friend . . . Death, my Friend, help me to plant seeds in your land.’
On April Fool’s Day 1982, the Carabinieri in Ottaviano discovered that Friend Death had planted a seed a few hundred metres away from the Cutolo castle. The body was in the boot of a stolen car. The head, wrapped in cellophane and covered with a towel, was in a plastic basin placed on the front seat. Even in the violence-weary Italy of the early 1980s, a camorra decapitation was guaranteed to attract a deal of media attention. But in this case the victim’s name turned the event into front-page news.
Professor Aldo Semerari was the criminal psychiatrist responsible for some of the most clamorous expert opinions on Raffaele Cutolo’s mental health. He was also a prime example of the kind of figure who, in the 1970s and 1980s, seemed to be spawned from the murk where organised crime and subversive politics overlapped. An extreme right-wing agitator with links to Italian military intelligence, Semerari had tried to enlist a number of criminal organisations to his Fascist cause. But in the end he only managed to arrange a simple swap: the gangsters received the benefit of his psychiatric expertise and, in return, Semerari’s friends were given weapons. But the psychiatrist had been rash enough to try and make the same deal with both Raffaele Cutolo and his camorra enemies. When his headless corpse was found in Ottaviano, it was not clear who had punished him for playing off both sides.
The Semerari case gave Ottaviano a reputation as the town ‘where heads fly’. Ten men were murdered there in the first five months of 1982. Journalists flocked to try and diagnose the malaise. But only one of them—a young Milanese writer called Luca Rossi—was patient enough to trace just how deeply the ideas expounded in Poems and Thoughts had been imbibed by many of the locals. For the rootless youth that grew up in the ‘South Bronxes’ of the Neapolitan periphery, Cutolo’s poisonous credo was strong magic. The economic downturn of the mid-1970s put thousands of young men onto the market for criminal labour. During Cutolo’s reign, Campania was the region with the highest number of juvenile inmates in the country. These camorristi-in-the-making were poor, from dysfunctional families, and educated early to the value of violence. By the time these kids were officially recruited, and had the NCO’s five-dot insignia tattooed at the base of their right thumb, they professed an indifference to Friend Death that was as pitiful as it was terrifying:
What I’ve already seen in my twenty-three years is enough for me. I’m already dead. Now I’m just living an extra bit, a bit of life that’s been gifted to me. They can kill me if they want.
We’re already living corpses. Someone’s already got half a foot on my head. And if you put the other half of your foot on my head, then I’ll kill you.
You ask me why I behave like this, and why I do certain ‘jobs’ that even other camorristi won’t do. The reason is very simple. It doesn’t matter to me if I live or die. In fact, in some ways, I’m actually trying to get killed.
An anonymous twenty-year-old girl from Ottaviano interviewed by Luca Rossi set out the most perceptive and chilling dissection of the NCO mentality. This was the voice of a young woman both immersed in camorra culture, and yet able to distance herself from it, as if it were all just a nightmare:
The camorra has some really beautiful things about it. It’s an instinctive, animal response. We take what they don’t give us, and we take it with force. There are extraordinary, powerful feelings in the camorra. I’ve seen incredible acts of love and solidarity. They believe in what they are doing like no one believes in political ideologies . . . The strongest among them are the ones who are afraid. You see these kids with a pistol in their hand, and you realise they’re fucked. Of all the camorristi I know, the most sensitive ones are the most violent. I mean really violent: machine-gun violent, massacre violent.
Raffaele Cutolo gave sensitive, wasted youths an elemental narrative—a reason to die where there seemed no reason to live. His Poems and Thoughts was a collective manifesto for living fast and going out in an expensive shirt and a hail of gunfire. The NCO came as close as any mafia has ever done to being a death cult.
And in 1978, Cutolo sent the NCO into a battle that turned into the bloodiest underworld war in Neapolitan history—a war against the Sicilian mafia.
PART X
THE SLAUGHTER
55
BLOOD ORGY
FIRST TOBACCO. THEN CONSTRUCTION. THEN KIDNAPPING. AND FINALLY HEROIN. THE new sources of criminal wealth that developed between the late 1950s and the late 1970s offered huge rewards to mafiosi, camorristi and ’ndranghetisti who could think big and collaborate to achieve their aims. New business networks were assembled: like the joint-stock ventures that pooled investments first in tobacco and then heroin; or the kidnapping gangs that took victims in the north before smuggling them into captivity on Aspromonte; or the heroin-trafficking rings that traversed the globe, linking the Golden Triangle to the United States via Sicily. New economic partnerships were forged, including partnerships that crossed the lines between
Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta.
Alongside these cycles of commercial inventiveness, there came cycles of political inventiveness too. In Italy, no gangster would last long if he lapsed into believing that he was exclusively a criminal entrepreneur, and forgot that he has no choice but to take part in the permanent scheming and jockeying for position among his criminal peers. Thus, as the mafias grew richer, new arrangements of power were shaped: like the triumvirates in Calabria and Sicily, or Cosa Nostra’s Regional Commission, or the Sicilian mafia Families that were set up in Campania. Underworld rules and traditions were overhauled or even invented, such as the ban on kidnapping in Cosa Nostra, or Raffaele Cutolo’s revival of the nineteenth-century Honoured Society of Naples, or the ’ndrangheta’s Mamma Santissima.
The faster the wheels of the criminal economy turned, and the more frenetic the politicking became, the more the pressures in Italy’s underworld increased. The stakes and the risks grew greater and greater until, in the 1980s, there came an explosion of violence without precedent in the annals of mafia history.
How many died? Precision is impossible. Given the number of disappearances, and of mob assassinations that were artfully disguised as crimes of passion or robberies that got out of hand, we will never have an accurate sum. Not unless all the unmarked graves and skeletons in the deep can be located, and some sorcery invented to make the acid baths tell their story. Estimates for the number of fatalities during just the first two years of Sicily’s Second Mafia War range between 500 and 1,000 people. More than 900 died in the camorra wars of 1979–83. One journalist has reckoned the total number killed by organised crime across the whole of southern Italy in the 1980s at 10,000. A guess, certainly. But by no means a wild one. More conservatively, the parliamentary inquiry estimated that, between 1981 and 1990, 2,905 murders were committed in Sicily, 2,621 in Campania, 1,807 in Calabria and 757 in Puglia. The vast majority of these were committed by organised crime. If that number is near the truth, it tells us that there were about twice as many victims of organised crime in southern Italy in the 1980s as there were victims of three decades of religious and political strife in Northern Ireland.
Any chronicle of that decade of slaughter must begin in Palermo, where Corleone’s Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina was continuing his ascent. As we have seen, already in the 1970s the kidnappings perpetrated by Riina or his boss Luciano Liggio had begun to split Cosa Nostra into two factions. The make-up of the triumvirate demonstrated the balance of power clearly enough: on the one hand, Riina; and ranged against him Stefano Bontate, the Prince of Villagrazia, and Tano Badalamenti, the first head of the Palermo Commission after it was reconstituted in 1974. On the face of it, the two factions were unfairly matched. Although they were not close allies, Bontate and Badalamenti were nonetheless both part of the greatest concentration of wealth and connections that the Sicilian mafia had ever known. They had the politicians, both local and national. They had the ties with the shadowy world of Freemasonry. They had Palermo’s oldest citadels of mafia power in their hands, and—at least in Bontate’s case—the prestige that comes with a venerable mafia lineage. Crucially, they were also connected to the Transatlantic Syndicate with its near monopoly on access to the United States heroin market. Riina hailed from Corleone, which historically had been on the edges of the map of mafia power in the province of Palermo. Of the eleven men who had seats on the Commission in 1975, only three, including Riina himself, could be considered opponents of the Bontate and Badalamenti power system.
But Riina had luck and, above all, cunning on his side. Luck, because both Bontate and Badalamenti were arrested in the early 1970s, giving him the time and space to make his initial kidnapping moves. And cunning, because when the narcodollars really began to flood into Sicily, Riina was quick to divine the submerged currents of envy they set in motion.
Everyone in Cosa Nostra was involved in heroin, or at least wanted to be involved in heroin. But not everyone had access to the American market. The Transatlantic Syndicate had created a bottleneck, and was profiting handsomely from it. Many mafiosi became rich in the late 1970s drug boom, but only a few became opulent: those like Badalamenti, Bontate and Inzerillo, who were part of the transatlantic heroin elite.
Shorty planned to turn his economic weakness into political strength. He aimed to capitalise on the envy and frustration inspired by the Transatlantic Syndicate so as to win friends and territory in Sicily, and so take control of the Commission. By steadily recruiting the marginal players in the heroin industry, Riina was to transform the corleonesi from being just a Family, into being a great alliance of Men of Honour recruited from all the Families.
There was nothing startlingly new about this strategy. In New York, during the Castellammarese War of 1929–31 (the war that ended with Lucky Luciano installing himself at the apex of the New York underworld), Salvatore Maranzano’s castellammaresi were just such a cross-Family alliance. In the battle for supremacy in Palermo that happened at more or less the same time as the Castellammarese War, Ernesto ‘the generalissimo’ Marasà infiltrated the Families of the province of Palermo in his campaign to become boss of all bosses.
Like his strategy, Riina’s tactics were traditional too. The Sicilian mafia is a territorial organisation, and the cult of territory is as old as the mafia itself. As nineteenth-century mafia-fighter Ermanno Sangiorgi put it: ‘One of the mafia’s canons is respect for another man’s territorial jurisdiction. Flouting that jurisdiction constitutes a personal insult.’ The point here is that it is not just the mafia’s rules that are traditional, but also the reasons why those rules are regularly broken—the signals that mafiosi send when they break them. Riina showed himself to be a master of maintaining his own territorial authority while sending out signals that undermined other people’s. One of those signals was murder.
In January 1974, a retired policeman called Angelo Sorino was shot dead in San Lorenzo, in the Piana dei Colli. (His devotion to the cause was such that he had been helping his former colleagues with their investigations into Riina’s allies.) Whoever was responsible for Sorino’s death had not informed Cosa Nostra’s Commission beforehand, as was supposed to happen with significant hits like this. It was obvious to the police who the culprit was because of the principle of territorial jurisdiction: Filippo Giacalone, boss of the Family whose realm included the murder scene. Giacalone, a friend of Stefano Bontate’s, was duly arrested. Needless to say, Giacalone’s involvement was even more obvious to his peers in Cosa Nostra. While he was in prison, Bontate demanded an explanation on behalf of the Commission.
As it turned out, Giacalone had not ordered Sorino’s death; in fact he was only a patsy in a much bigger plot. Once he was freed, and had time to investigate, he told Bontate that a top corleonese killer called Leoluca Bagarella had carried out the murder. But before Bontate could refer these findings back to the Commission, Giacalone vanished. His place on the Commission was taken by the boss of neighbouring Resuttana, a friend of the corleonesi.
The Sorino murder was a dual-purpose homicide. It eliminated a threat to one of Riina’s friends. More importantly, it loudly proclaimed Bontate and Badalamenti’s political weakness.
In 1977, the corleonesi carried out another dual-purpose homicide. They killed a zealous colonel of the Carabinieri on their own territory, thus eliminating a threat to their own interests. But they also failed to ask permission from the Commission before acting: another political snub to their enemies.
Having used kidnappings and murders to discredit the Bontate-Badalamenti-controlled Commission, the corleonesi looked to take it over themselves. By now they already had a prestigious ally: the boss of Ciaculli, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, who proved adept at befogging Bontate with seemingly reasonable explanations for what the corleonesi were doing. Behind the smokescreen created by Michele Greco, more and more bosses were coming over to Riina’s side.
In 1978 the extent of corleonese influence within the Commission became obvious to al
l when—sensationally—Tano Badalamenti, the boss of all bosses, was expelled from Cosa Nostra. Badalamenti was almost certainly punished because he had failed to give everyone a share of the heroin bonanza. Being expelled—the word mafiosi use is posato or ‘laid down’—is a relatively rare sanction, and often a temporary one. Among men for whom one murder more or less is no cause for handwringing, this was a demonstratively mild penalty. Riina was making a show of playing by Cosa Nostra’s traditional rules; he was showing just how reasonable he was. Accordingly it was a man of reason, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, who took Badalamenti’s place as provincial representative. Greco was little more than a front for corleonese power.
Later the same year, the corleonesi once more played tricks with the rules of territorial sovereignty. A team of corleonese hit men shot dead Giuseppe Di Cristina, a boss who was particularly close to Stefano Bontate. Crucially, the murder took place on territory belonging to another Bontate ally, the zip Salvatore Inzerillo. The killers even abandoned the car used in the assassination in Inzerillo’s domain. The message in the murder humiliated a key Bontate ally, and a central figure in the Transatlantic Syndicate. Di Cristina’s death also showed that the corleonesi’s ambitions were not restricted to the province of Palermo. The son and grandson of mafia bosses, Di Cristina was from the inland town of Riesi in the province of Caltanissetta.
After central Sicily came the turn of the eastern city of Catania. In September 1978, Pippo Calderone—the local boss of Cosa Nostra and the man who had instigated the kidnapping ban at the Regional Commission in 1975—was shot dead by his deputy, another covert member of the growing corleonese alliance. At the banquet held by Calderone’s men to mark their boss’s passing, Shorty Riina had the brass to give a speech. He eulogised the dead capo as a peacemaker in the best mafia traditions. Many of the gangsters present were moved to tears.