Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  The Professor was the target of her unrestrained rage: ‘bastard’, ‘madman’, ‘he wants to become the emperor of the city’. When journalists asked Pupetta if she was speaking on behalf of the Nuova Famiglia, she replied: ‘I’m not part of any group. But if some people think like I do—and you tell me that means the Nuova Famiglia—then they are my partners.’

  Fighting back tears, she returned to the main purpose of the press conference: to issue an ultimatum to Cutolo. ‘I want to let that gentleman know that, if he dares touch anyone close to me, I will destroy him and his family down to the seventh generation, women and children included.’

  We can only wonder about the emotions that helped drive this extraordinary performance. Rage or sorrow? Defiance or fear? Nor do we have an idea whether these emotions were real or staged. Yet it seems certain that they were at least partially the symptom of the psychological strains of a lifetime spent as a camorra queen. Maresca enjoyed status and very probably real power. She also paid a heavy price. She had two children by Ammaturo, twins. She also lost a child: her first son Pasqualino (the baby she had been carrying during the notorious events of 1955) vanished in 1974 during the tobacco-smuggling war between Cosa Nostra and the Marseillais. Pupetta herself strongly suspected that Ammaturo had killed him. Yet she stayed with her man, either because he beat her (above the hairline, so the damage would not show) or because she was too attached to her furs and jewels.

  The Professor was even less shy of publicity than Pupetta, and much better than her at getting under his enemies’ skin. Dressed in a grey double-breasted suit, he issued his response to her challenge from a Naples courtroom: ‘Maybe Pupetta said those things to attract attention. Maybe she wants to make another film. You have to say that she’s chosen the right moment: Carnival kicks off in a few days’ time.’

  As the spat between Pupetta Maresca and the Professor demonstrated, the war in Naples was an extraordinarily public affair. In Sicily, where Shorty Riina’s death squads emerged from nowhere to exterminate his enemies, the citizenry and even the police struggled to make out who was fighting whom. In Campania, by contrast, there were open challenges and proclamations, and nobody was in any doubt where the battle lines were drawn. These contrasting styles of warfare corresponded to a long-standing difference between the public images of the two crime fraternities. The soberly dressed Sicilian mafioso has traditionally had a much lower public profile than the camorrista. Mafiosi are so used to infiltrating the state and the ruling elite that they prefer to blend into the background rather than strike poses of defiance against the authorities. The authorities, after all, were often on their side. Camorristi, by contrast, often played to an audience.

  There is no clearer illustration of this point than the Giulianos, a clan centred on Pio Vittorio Giuliano and a number of his eleven children, plus some of their male cousins. With its criminal roots in the smuggling boom that took place during the Allied military occupation, the family hailed from Naples’s notorious ‘kasbah’, Forcella.

  ‘Ice Eyes’, early 1980s. Luigi Giuliano led his crime family from their base in the Forcella quarter of Naples—the historical home of the camorra in the city.

  The Giulianos’ reign would persist into the 1980s and 1990s, when the clan eventually began to fall apart amid arrests, deaths and defections to the state. The brashness of their power—the family occupied an apartment block that loomed like the prow of a huge ship at a fork in the road at the very centre of Forcella—would not have been unfamiliar to nineteenth-century camorristi with their gold rings, braided waistcoats and flared trousers. The second Giuliano boy, Luigi (born in 1949), took charge of the family business in his twenties. He was a wannabe actor and poet, a medallion man whose success with the ladies earned him the nickname ‘Lovigino’—an untranslatable coupling of the English word ‘Love’ and the affectionate form of Luigi. Lovigino’s menacing good looks and his startlingly blue irises explain his other moniker: ‘Ice Eyes’.

  It is no coincidence that the Giulianos have left many eloquent photographs of their pomp. By far the most famous image from the Giuliano family album was confiscated during a police raid in February 1986. It shows two of the curly-haired Giuliano boys, Carmine ‘the Lion’ in a bright red V-neck, and Guglielmo ‘the Crooked One’ in white jeans. Both are beaming with delight as they recline in the most flamboyant bathtub in the history of plumbing: it takes the form of a giant conch-shell, its top half lifted back to reveal a gold-leaf interior, its surround in black stone, its base in pink marble with a pattern like stone-washed jeans. But the most remarkable thing about the photo is not the questionable taste of the Giulianos’ bathroom fixtures and fittings. Lounging between the brothers is a muscular little man wearing a grey and red tracksuit and an even bigger grin than them: Diego Armando Maradona, the greatest talent ever to lace up a pair of soccer boots.

  The greatest soccer player of the age, Diego Armando Maradona, poses with members of the Giuliano camorra clan, who were keen to show off their taste in bathroom fittings (mid-1980s).

  Argentinian superstar Maradona played for Napoli at his peak, between 1984 and 1992, and won the Serie A national championship twice. He became a demigod in the city, worshipped as no other sportsman anywhere has ever been: still now, his picture adorns half the bars in Naples. The notorious bathtub photo was not the only occasion during his time in the sky-blue shirt of Napoli when his name was associated with organised crime. In March 1989, he put in an appearance at the swish restaurant where Lovigino’s cousin was getting married: ‘Maradona at the boss’s wedding’ ran one headline. Four months later, he claimed that the camorra was threatening him and his family, and that he was too afraid to return to Naples for the start of the new season. There were unsubstantiated rumours of match-fixing. This was the summer when the conch-shell bathtub photo was made public. (Mysteriously, it was kept in a drawer in police headquarters for over three years.) It is also worth recalling that it was in Naples that Maradona’s well-documented problems with cocaine took a grip.

  At the time, ‘the Hand of God’ denied knowing that the Giulianos were gangsters. His autobiography, published in 2000, is more forthcoming:

  I admit it was a seductive world. It was something new for us Argentinians: the Mafia. It was fascinating to watch . . . They offered me visits to fan clubs, gave me watches, that was the link we had. But if I saw it wasn’t all above board I didn’t accept. Even so it was an incredible time: whenever I went to one of those clubs they gave me gold Rolexes, cars . . . I asked them: ‘But what do I have to do?’ They said: Nothing, just have your picture taken. ‘Thank you,’ I would say.

  The point here is not whether Maradona’s links to organised crime were more substantial than he claims. His very visible friendship with the Giulianos was more than enough for their purposes. Many camorristi, particularly urban camorristi, have always sought good publicity; they have always sought to win the admiration of the section of the Neapolitan population that identifies with well-meaning miscreants. Whether by loud, expensive clothes and flagrant generosity, by shows of piety, by grand public funerals and weddings, or by rubbing shoulders with singers and sportsmen, generations of camorristi have won legitimacy in the eyes of the very people they exploit. Maradona’s own story, as the pocket genius risen from a shanty suburb of Buenos Aires, was a perfect fit with the camorra’s traditional claim that it was rooted in, and justified by, poverty. If the camorra from the slums of Naples had an official ideology, it would be the kind of pseudo-sociology that Lovigino ‘Ice Eyes’ Giuliano himself articulated:

  In Forcella it isn’t possible to live without breaking the state’s laws. But we Forcella folk aren’t to blame. The blame goes to the people who prevent us doing a normal job. Because no one from a normal company is prepared to take on someone from Forcella, we are forced to find a way to get by.

  Needless to say, ‘getting by’ involved extorting money from every money-making activity in Forcella; it involved illegal lotteries and
ticket touting for Napoli games; it involved mass-producing fake branded clothes; it involved theft and drug dealing on a huge scale; and it involved appalling acts of violence. When Lovigino ‘Ice Eyes’ eventually turned state’s evidence in 2002, he confessed to the murder of an NCO killer called Giacomo Frattini. Frattini’s fresh-faced looks earned him the nickname of Bambulella—Doll Face—despite a body covered in jailhouse tattoos. The NF spent a long time planning what they would do to him. One idea was to crucify him in front of the Professor’s palace on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. In the end, in January 1982, an execution party lured him into a trap, tortured him, and then summoned a friendly butcher to lop off his head and hands and cut out his heart. They left the pieces in separate plastic bags in a FIAT 500 Belvedere just off piazza Carlo III. A note from an imaginary left-wing terrorist group was left in a telephone box nearby: it called him the ‘prison executioner’, the slave of a ‘demented, diabetic fanatic’—meaning Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo.

  Being flash like the Giulianos has never been the only style of criminal authority in Naples. Historically, the area to the city’s north is home to a quieter brand of camorrista who would also become part of the Nuova Famiglia.

  Marano is a small agricultural centre that has long been notorious for camorra influence. In 1955, the son of the town’s former mayor, Gaetano Orlando, shot dead Big Pasquale, the ‘President of Potato Prices’. During the 1970s and 1980s, Gaetano Orlando’s nephews, Lorenzo, Gaetano, Angelo and Ciro Nuvoletta, became the most powerful criminals in Campania. They were initiated into Cosa Nostra during the tobacco-smuggling boom. Their farmhouse, which stood shrouded by trees on a hill just outside town, was the theatre of all the most important meetings during the war between the NCO and the NF.

  The Nuvolettas preferred the subdued public image of their brethren in Cosa Nostra. Their wealth was vast, and as was the case with the many criminal fortunes built in the same part of Campania over the previous century, it straddled the divide between lawful business and crime. The clan earned from construction as well as smuggling, property as well as extortion, farming as well as fraud. Sicilian heroin broker Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo was initiated into Cosa Nostra on the Nuvolettas’ farm. He saw their riches at firsthand: they had warehouses of battery hens because they had a contract to feed all the military barracks in Naples. Thus, even during the new wealth of the 1970s, camorristi from the hinterland had not relinquished their traditional grip on the city’s food supplies.

  This combination of lawful and illegal income explains the Nuvolettas’ preference for passing unobserved. For all their riches, their profile was so low that when, in December 1979, the Carabinieri captured Corleone mafioso Leoluca Bagarella in possession of a photograph of a businessman with salt-and-pepper hair, it took them months to put Lorenzo Nuvoletta’s name to the face. No wonder, then, that Lorenzo Nuvoletta was entrusted with being the capomandamento (‘precinct boss’) of the three Campanian Families of Cosa Nostra, the man whose job was to represent Neapolitan interests to the Palermo Commission, through his prime contact, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco.

  So the Nuova Famiglia reflected all the traditional diversity of organised crime in Naples and Campania. And that diversity also explains why it seemed that the atrocities might carry on without anyone ever achieving a military victory.

  57

  CATASTROPHE ECONOMY

  GIUSEPPE TORNATORE’S 1986 FILM IL CAMORRISTA IS A RAMBLING, RISE-AND-FALL gangster melodrama based on the career of Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo. It plays back the embellished highlights of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata story to a soundtrack of plaintive trumpet and clarinet melodies that owe more than a little to The Godfather’s genre-defining score. Since Il camorrista first came out in 1986, endless reshowings through local TV, bootleg videos, and now YouTube, have irretrievably confused reality and myth in the popular memory of the Professor’s reign. The movie’s most resonant lines (‘Tell the Professor I did not betray him’ and ‘Malacarne is a cardboard guappo’) have become slogans—the Neapolitan equivalent of ‘I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse’ and ‘Leave the gun, take the cannoli.’

  Perhaps Il camorrista’s most visually arresting scene takes place in prison. The Professor is shown reading a history book in bed, in an immaculately pressed pair of sky-blue pyjamas. A low rumble in the background causes him to look up. The rumble becomes a shaking: first the ornaments on his bedside chest vibrate, then his metal bed frame starts clanking repeatedly against the wall, and his cell window shatters. Wails of panic rise in the background: ‘Earthquake!’ Staggering to his feet, Cutolo opens his cell door to watch Poggioreale prison plunge into anarchy. Clouds of dust rise from the floor of his wing, and chunks of plaster drop from the ceiling. The guards run hither and thither releasing screaming inmates from the cells. Within seconds, Cutolo has his arms around his two chief enforcers: ‘This is a chance sent to us by the Lord above! It’s gotta be the apocalypse for the old camorra!’

  There then follows a ghastly chiaroscuro carnival of stabbings, clubbings, lynchings and garrottings, as Cutolo’s men take advantage of the chaos to dispatch their enemies. From the din and mass panic inside the prison, we then cut to the morning after, to watch a dozen or so pine coffins being loaded into vans in the prison yard.

  The earthquake of 23 November 1980 was no cinematic fantasy. With its epicentre in the mountains east of Naples, it killed 2,914 people across Campania. But the film director’s job is what it is: Tornatore used a deal of artistic licence when he edited the disaster into his mob movie. The historian’s job being what it is, I must indicate a couple of the points at which art and fact diverge. The numbers murdered for example: there were ‘only’ three fatalities in Poggioreale; plus another three on 14 February 1981 when Cutolo’s men went hunting again following a major aftershock. Tornatore makes room for all the extra deaths by stretching the ninety seconds that the real quake lasted into nearly three minutes; he also adds in a few implausible thunderclaps and lightning flashes for effect. In reality, the reign of terror in Poggioreale was more prolonged. NCO killers did not pursue their victims while the quake itself was happening, but rather during the night that followed, after the guards abandoned many wings, leaving the rival criminal factions to battle it out.

  Il camorrista embroiders the truth in more insidious ways than these. For example, it turns the squalid road-rage murder that earned Cutolo his first life sentence into an episode where he kills a man for groping his sister. Since the very origins of Italy’s mafias, underworld prestige has constantly been confused in the public mind with the defence of women’s sexual honour.

  Yet even the most nit-picking historian would have to admit that Tornatore’s artistic licence was justified in some cases. He was absolutely right to make the earthquake one of the movie’s major set pieces, for example. The twenty-third of November 1980, when Cutolo, dressed in his silk dressing gown, directed his teams of killers to eliminate his enemies, was indeed an important date in the Nuova Camorra Organizzata’s war. The reason the NF hated Giacomo ‘Doll Face’ Frattini so much that they beheaded him was because he was one of the Professor’s prison killers in November 1980.

  The earthquake also marked a seismic shift in the nature of camorra power in Naples. After the earthquake, because of the earthquake, the camorra at last joined the mafia and the ’ndrangheta in plundering the construction business and thereby merging with the political class. One of the many remarkable things about the Professor is that his organisation made that leap into construction while his war against the NF was still going on.

  Back in the 1950s, Italy had great hopes that state investment could help the backward South industrialise. By the mid-1970s, the international economic crisis and a long history of politicking, corruption and incompetence in the allocation of the cash had brought these hopes to an end. Italian governments abandoned the long-term ideal of economic development and instead embraced the short-term aims of propping up
consumer spending while giving politicians enough money to keep their constituents happy. From now on, the stream of taxpayer’s money that went towards the South would no longer be directed in targeted squirts at training and infrastructure. Instead, it would descend as a fine drizzle of benefits and pensions. The same system would prevail even when the Italian economy recovered in the 1980s.

  The earthquake of 23 November 1980 cruelly exposed Campania’s ills. Prestigious buildings put up with central government money turned out to have been too shoddily built to resist the tremors. An entire wing of one public hospital in the village of Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi flopped to the ground, killing dozens. Clearly, in this, as in many other cases, distributing contracts and jobs had been a higher priority than actually providing an edifice worthy of the name.

  The state’s response to the challenges of post-earthquake reconstruction was a lesson in bad planning. The professed aim was not just to rebuild, but also to create new economic opportunities for the stricken area. But a proliferation of confused emergency laws created a messy ensemble of spending programmes. Powers and responsibilities were scattered among different special commissars, ministries, regions, provinces and town councils, so that it became impossible to monitor the reconstruction programme properly. Avid politicians rushed to cash in. Two months after the earthquake, in February 1981, 316 town councils were deemed eligible for reconstruction funds; nine months later, the total had risen to 686. The number of damaged buildings reported increased from 70,000 to more than 350,000 over roughly the same period. Either the earthquake had had some very peculiar delayed effects, or a lot of people were telling fibs about the extent of the destruction.