Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Actually spending the reconstruction money involved a multiplicity of official roles. Technicians to estimate the work required. Commissioners to evaluate those estimates on behalf of the town councils. Planners. Administrators who had to approve the planners’ plans. Lawyers to draw up contracts. Construction entrepreneurs. Works supervisors and inspectors. And so on. But because the agencies given money to spend were largely unaccountable, many of these separate roles turned out to have been performed by the same people wearing different hats. Or by groups of friends. Or by narrow party cliques. The regime of emergency measures that had opened the door to these vultures turned into a permanent state of affairs.

  The results of the shambles were grim. At the end of 1990, ten years after the quake struck, 28,572 people were still living in emergency caravans. Few of the thousands of jobs that were promised had materialised. Costs had skyrocketed. Parasites had made fortunes. And vast new political clienteles had been created. The earthquake gave birth to the worst financial scandal in 1980s Europe. But that scandal was only in its infancy when the most violent elements in Campania decided that they too could profit from the disaster.

  The episode that exposed the camorra’s links to the catastrophe economy was a terrorist kidnapping.

  Ciro Cirillo stood at the very centre of the Christian Democrats’ patronage system in Campania. After the 1980 earthquake, he was given responsibility for handling the massive funds channelled through the Campanian regional government for reconstruction. Soon afterwards, on the evening of 27 April 1981, he was abducted by the Naples column of the Red Brigades. Five brigatisti were waiting for him as he arrived in the underground garage of his house in Torre del Greco, a town lying on the strip of land between Mount Vesuvius and the sea. When Cirillo’s bodyguard, as usual, stepped back outside to check that all was well, he was shot dead. Before the driver could react, he was also killed, and his secretary shot several times in the legs. Cirillo was pulled from the back seat, pistol-whipped, and led away.

  Italy was by then grimly familiar with the routine of terrorist kidnappings. First the call to a newspaper to claim responsibility. Then a short interlude of worry and speculation: was the claim genuine? Then the proof. The afternoon after Cirillo was kidnapped, another call was made, this time to the editorial offices of Il Mattino, the biggest circulation daily in Naples. The instructions were terse: ‘At number 275, Riviera di Chiaia, under a rubbish bin, you will find communiqué number one.’ When it was retrieved, communiqué number one contained a Polaroid photo of the captive sitting in front of the crude, five-pointed star of the Red Brigades, and a slogan, ‘The executioner will undergo a trial’. In nearly 150 typed pages of rambling pseudo-Marxist economico-political analysis of the state of Naples, Cirillo was described as ‘the point man for imperialist reconstruction in the Naples metropolitan pole’.

  The frightened face staring out from the Polaroid did not betray the power the BR attributed to him: a bald dome of a head, a toothbrush moustache and features too small for his face. Yet the brigatisti had chosen their target well, and despite their delusional ideology, there was a strategic intelligence to their ‘Cirillo campaign’ (as they termed it). The earthquake had left 50,000 homeless in Naples alone: the terrorists hoped to appeal to this pool of vulnerable and angry people. The BR’s regular communiqués denounced the earthquake profiteers and railed against what it called ‘deportation of proletarians’ from the overcrowded and quake-damaged housing of the city centre. There were other acts of propaganda too: BR posters went up in areas where the caravans of the homeless were concentrated, and two more functionaries involved in the reconstruction were kneecapped. The BR subjected Cirillo to a ‘people’s trial’, tapes of which were released to the media; it showcased DC greed and maladministration. The Christian Democrats in Campania had very good reason to worry. The kidnap victim was a man with many secrets: there was no telling what he might be terrified into saying while in the BR’s hands.

  On the face of it, Cirillo’s chances of surviving his ordeal were not at all good. The DC was officially wedded to a policy of not negotiating with political kidnappers—the same policy that it had adopted when the Party Secretary Aldo Moro had been kidnapped in 1978. Moro ended up dead, as did many other victims. On 9 July 1981 yet another BR communiqué trumpeted that the people’s trial had reached ‘the only just verdict possible’ and that Cirillo’s death sentence was ‘the most elevated humanitarian act in the circumstances’. He was doomed.

  Then, at dawn on 24 July 1981, Cirillo was released, and the BR announced that they had received a ransom of 1 billion 450 thousand lire ($2.5 million in 2011).

  The Interior Minister indignantly rejected the notion that Cirillo had been traded for money, saying that he had been freed ‘without any negotiation and without any concession on the part of organs of the state faced with blackmail from an armed band’. It would take another twelve years for Italy to learn just how unfounded those denials were. The truth would only emerge after a succession of further denials, of unreliable testimonies, of murdered witnesses and destroyed evidence. During Cirillo’s captivity, ‘organs of the state’ had not just negotiated with the Red Brigades. They had also negotiated with Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata.

  The story goes something like this. A mere sixteen hours after Cirillo’s disappearance, a secret agent from Italy’s internal intelligence and security agency, SISDE, visited Raffaele Cutolo in prison in Ascoli Piceno. There were further meetings with Cutolo, when the agent was accompanied by two people. The first was a local mayor from Cirillo’s faction of the DC who was close to the NCO. The second was the deputy leader of the NCO, Enzo Casillo. Known as ’o Nirone (‘Blacky’) because of his dark hair, Casillo was the son of a trouser-factory owner; despite these comfortable origins, he had become the NCO’s military chief during the war with the Nuova Famiglia.

  After these initial meetings, Blacky Casillo and another senior officer in the Nuova Camorra Organizzata roamed the country over the coming weeks under the protective wing of the secret services so that they could take part in negotiation between the state, the BR and the NCO—as well as carrying on their duties in the camorra war.

  Yet despite the best efforts of the secret agents of SISDE, the Professor remained standoffish. So a second phase in the negotiations opened on 9 May, when the military intelligence service, SISMI, took over. SISMI had no jurisdiction over domestic security issues, and thus no right to intervene in the Cirillo kidnapping. Nonetheless, things suddenly started to move. Imprisoned BR sympathisers were transferred to Ascoli Piceno to talk to the Professor, and then moved again to jails where BR leaders were being held. Blacky Casillo carried on his work as a roving mediator. Eventually, the ransom was paid and Cirillo was released.

  The Cirillo affair illustrated the depths to which the Italian state sank in the course of the 1980s. ‘Organs of the state’ negotiated with left-wing terrorists through the good offices of the biggest criminal organisation in the country. A dastardly list of characters took part in the talks. The final phase of the negotiations was conducted by a wheeler-dealer called Francesco Pazienza, who had somehow become a consultant for SISMI. (Among other things, he would later be convicted for misleading investigations into the 1980 right-wing terror outrage at Bologna station in which eighty-five people were killed.) Through channels like these, money changed hands—money that the BR then used to pursue its campaign of murder and kidnapping. The DC’s reconstruction money magus was saved. But shamefully and tragically, other victims paid the ultimate price instead of him.

  Although a parliamentary inquiry could find no direct evidence of a quid pro quo between the secret services and the NCO, very big questions remain unanswered. The Cirillo story is made of many profoundly worrying suspicions and relatively few certainties. A great deal of murk remains. Here are two of the reasons why.

  At the time of the Cirillo kidnapping, many senior officers in both SISDE and SISMI were mem
bers of the P2 Masonic lodge, which makes their motives very difficult to read. No combination of blackmail, right-wing subversion and corruption can be ruled out.

  When Cirillo was released, in a semi-derelict building in the Poggioreale quarter of Naples, he flagged down a passing traffic police patrol. The orders were to take Cirillo straight to police headquarters where he could be cared for and interviewed by the magistrates investigating the kidnapping. But the journey had barely begun when the car was blocked off and surrounded by four more police cars. Citing orders from on high, the officer in charge of the four cars took Cirillo home instead. Once home, Cirillo was examined by a doctor who declared that he was in a state of shock and could not be interviewed by investigating magistrates. These health problems did not, however, prevent senior figures in the DC, including Flaminio Piccoli, the party’s national leader, from going to see Cirillo forty-eight hours before the magistrates were eventually allowed access. The timing may have given Cirillo and his DC friends an opportunity to get their story straight about the whole negotiation saga.

  What did the Professor have to gain from getting himself involved in the deal to free Cirillo? One thing he definitely pocketed was the chance to boast to the criminal world that he had the ear of the authorities. Irrespective of the real nature of any bargain behind Cirillo’s release, the Professor could now present himself as a man with a seat at the top table. But did he receive anything else? And did he give the BR more than money? Several witnesses, including brigatisti and camorristi turned state’s evidence, have cited a whole list of bargaining counters. Such people may of course have been lying. But there is nonetheless evidence to back up what they said.

  Some brigatisti claimed that Cutolo passed them useful information on potential targets. There are facts that seem to support this allegation. On 15 July 1982, the BR machine-gunned police commander Antonio Ammaturo along with his driver Pasquale Paola. Ammaturo was a common enemy for both the BR and the NCO. He had investigated left-wing terrorism. Moreover, soon after being appointed to the Naples job, he had even had the impudence to raid the Professor’s castle in Ottaviano—the first policeman to do so. Ammaturo was also probing into the Cirillo affair at the time of his death. When asked about the murder in court, the Professor was his usual, slippery self:

  I did not give the BR Ammaturo’s name so that he could be killed. I’m not ruling out the fact that bumping him off would have been a pleasure for me. But I would have done it myself, directly, because it was a personal vendetta.

  The likely scenario—one that illustrates the twisted logic in force in the shadows where violent subversion and violent crime overlapped—is that a left-wing terrorist group killed two good policemen on behalf of the NCO.

  According to one camorrista, the Professor also converted his intervention as a mediator in the Cirillo affair into a series of favours that further extended his influence within the prison system. Hence, perhaps, the fact that on 27 October 1981, the Appeal Court in Naples ruled that Cutolo was ‘semi-insane’, and thus deserving of more lenient treatment.

  But the biggest item on the Professor’s shopping list was a slice of the earthquake reconstruction bonanza. It must be stressed that investigations did not reveal smoking-gun proof of such an exchange. Nevertheless, the courts ruled that entrepreneurs close to the NCO, including the Professor’s own son Roberto, were awarded contracts worth sixty-seven billion lire ($172 million in 2011 values) to put up prefabricated housing in the Avellino area.

  The question of reconstruction contracts leads us into the last, and most controversial, of the mysteries surrounding the Cirillo kidnapping: the question of who authorised the negotiations. Which politicians were involved, and how deeply?

  A parliamentary inquiry would conclude that, while there had definitely been negotiations with the BR through Cirillo, there was no absolute proof that favours were exchanged as part of a deal. A number of senior Christian Democrats emerged with their reputations badly damaged by the verdict. For example Flaminio Piccoli, the party’s national leader, must have known about the negotiations. Francesco Pazienza, the wheeler-dealer linked to right-wing terrorism who conducted the last phase of the bargaining, was a regular visitor to the DC leader’s house. But the figure at the epicentre of the controversy, and one of the most powerful politicians in Campania, was Antonio Gava. Gava had just won his first national Cabinet post when Cirillo was kidnapped, and he went on to hold a series of senior Cabinet positions, including Interior Minister and Finance Minister, in the 1980s.

  Gava was chief of the local DC faction whose main man on the ground was none other than Ciro Cirillo. Gava went on trial for having links with the camorra in 1993. No less than thirteen years passed before he was finally acquitted in 2006. Gava was suing for damages when he died in 2008. One cannot help but sympathise with the plight of a man on the receiving end of such an appallingly protracted judicial ordeal. Alas, such judicial sagas are all too common in Italy, particularly when it comes to the delicate business of ascertaining the relationship between organised crime and politics. However the final ruling that marked Gava’s acquittal, for all its opaque legal phrasing, showed him in a very poor light indeed.

  The court maintains that it has proved with certainty that Gava was aware of the arrangement of functional reciprocity between local politicians in his faction of the DC and the camorra organisation . . . There is also proof that [Gava] did nothing incisive and concrete to fight or limit that situation, and that instead he ended up enjoying the electoral benefits it brought his political faction.

  Gava’s behaviour, the judges concluded, was morally and politically reprehensible, but he had done nothing to deserve a criminal conviction.

  Camorristi had their hands on the post-earthquake reconstruction before the BR’s ‘Cirillo campaign’ began. On 11 December 1980, a mere two and a half weeks after the quake, the mayor of one damaged town was shot dead because he tried to block companies linked to organised crime from winning rubble-clearing contracts. So the Cirillo kidnapping was ultimately only one symptom of the way the camorra seized hold of the opportunities that came with the disaster of 23 November 1980. In Sicily, the mafia war of the early 1980s was fought for control of the heroin pipeline to the United States. In Campania, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia battled for control of the reconstruction riches.

  Yet the Cirillo affair would prove to be decisive in another respect: it would bring about the final defeat of Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo.

  On 18 March 1982—eleven months after the Cirillo kidnapping, and with the mysteries surrounding it still unsolved—the Italian Communist Party daily L’Unità published what purported to be an Interior Ministry document that gave full details of the negotiations leading up to Cirillo’s release. The letter turned out to be a fake—fake enough to cost the newspaper’s editor his job. But many of the details it contained were true—true enough for a formal investigation into the negotiations leading to Cirillo’s release to be launched. We now know that the Professor was the likely author of the fake. He created it because he did not feel that he had received his just reward for helping out in the Cirillo kidnapping affair. Leaking the letter to the opposition press was a sly way of sending a warning: if the Professor did not get what he wanted, new revelations, documented revelations, would follow.

  The letter backfired horribly. The President of the Republic, outraged by the stories of Cutolo’s cushy life behind bars that were then beginning to emerge, arranged for him to be sent to the forbidding prison island of Asinara. From now on, communicating with the rest of the NCO would be impossible. The Nuova Famiglia moved in for the kill. Within days of Cutolo’s being transferred to Asinara, Alfonso Rosanova, the construction entrepreneur who managed the business arm of the NCO, was shot dead in the Salerno hospital where he was recovering from a previous attempt on his life; six or seven killers entered the building, disarmed the policemen on duty at his bedside, and shot him many times where he lay.
In January 1983 came the mortal blow, when Enzo ‘Blacky’ Casillo—the Professor’s top military commander and the roving negotiator of the Cirillo affair—was blown to pieces by a car bomb in Rome. The Nuova Famiglia officer who rigged the booby trap would later turn state’s evidence and explain to a parliamentary inquiry why Casillo was dispatched in such a spectacular fashion. The message in the murder, he explained, was ‘to demonstrate to Cutolo that he was finished, and that he had to stop once and for all with blackmailing the politicians or the people in the state institutions that he had dealt with during the Cirillo kidnapping business’. The same camorrista also suspected that the secret services had been the source of the information that allowed him to identify where Blacky Casillo lived.

  Death blow. The car bomb that led to the defeat of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Enzo Casillo, the Professor’s military chief, was murdered in Rome in January 1983.

  The Professor had overplayed the hand he had been dealt in the Cirillo affair. The Nuova Famiglia were now determined to punish him, and thereby win over his political friends. The Nuova Camorra Organizzata began to fall apart. Leaderless, Cutolo’s zealous young followers were slaughtered by the Nuova Famiglia’s well-organised hit squads.