Blood Brotherhoods (61 page)

The story of
‘O Grifone
is interesting for several reasons. First because the murderer was one of the
correntisti
that Giuseppe Marotta so admired. Men like
‘O Grifone
had learned their skills during the war, when Naples had been the major supply port for the Allied forces in Italy: around half of those supplies found their way off the backs of army lorries and onto the black market. The crowded area around via Forcella, where
‘O Grifone
came from, was where the wartime trade in stolen military supplies was concentrated: not for nothing did the Forcella area become known as the kasbah of Naples. Significantly, Forcella was once also a stronghold of the Honoured Society: it was home to all the earliest bosses.
Correntisti
like
‘O Grifone
would become protagonists of the camorra’s revival.

When the war ended, everyone confidently expected the
correntisti
to disappear. Yet they were still very much in business in 1952, when one newspaper commented:

The
corrente
is fluid, as everyone knows, and omnipresent, especially in the streets where there is most traffic. Communications between the city and its outskirts are watched over by squads of criminals. Quick, well-equipped and scornful of danger, these men remove all kinds of goods from vehicles. It can be said that no road-train, lorry or car escapes the clutches of the
correntisti
.

Around each
correntista
there was a whole organisation that included teams of spies who tracked the path of valuable cargoes, porters who smuggled the goods away once they were dropped from the lorry, and fences who put the swag on the market. Long after the great days of military contraband came to an end, goods stolen by the
corrente
were still openly on sale in via Forcella.

The
correntisti
were not just agile, but also violent. They were often armed, for practical reasons: to protect themselves from gun-wielding truck drivers and rival gangs; and to discourage passers-by from trying to pick up anything they might have seen falling off the back of a lorry. But they were also armed because they had to impose themselves on the community around them, and establish a reputation for toughness. Back in the days of the Honoured Society, this reputation would have been referred to as ‘honour’. It is one of the key ingredients of the mafias’ power—of ‘territorial control’, as it is termed.
‘O Grifone
’s row at the mussel stall displayed that ‘honour’ in an individualistic, undisciplined form.

After the stabbing,
‘O Grifone
spent several days on the run. Eventually he had a last breakfast in the bar next to the police station and gave himself up, having first concocted a story about how he had been grievously insulted and provoked by the man he knifed to death. Evidently his support network could not stand the strain of a high-profile police investigation and a public outcry.
‘O Grifone
and his friends still had limits to their territorial control.

Strikingly, the newspapers in Naples referred to
‘O Grifone
as a
camorrista
. Or at least they did so initially. This is one of the rare occasions when the word slipped into print in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Curiously, as the manhunt for
‘O Grifone
continued over the following days, the early references to the camorra disappeared.
‘O Grifone
started off as a
camorrista
, and then became a mere criminal.

There was a palpable unease about using the word ‘camorra’ in Naples in the years after the war, as there was about admitting just how serious the city’s crime problem was. Naples was a key political battleground, where the soul of the Italian Right was being fought over by opposing political machines. On the one hand, there was the creeping power of the Christian Democrats. On the other, there were the Monarchists, under the war profiteer, shipping magnate and soccer mogul Achille Lauro. (Naples, like many southern cities, had voted against the Republic in the referendum of 1946.
Thereafter, the monarchy remained a powerful rallying cause for the city’s right wing.)

The Naples these two political machines contested was scarred by chronic unemployment and homelessness, poor health and illiteracy. Neapolitan industry and infrastructure had not recovered from the devastations of the war, which were worse here than in any other Italian city. Yet politics found no answers because it was beset with instability and malpractice, mostly rotating around the lucrative construction industry. These were the years of ‘
maccheroni
politics’. At election time, political grandees would order their local agents to set up distribution centres in the kasbahs of the centre. Here, packets of pasta, or cuts of meat, or pieces of salt cod would be wrapped in the vague promise of a job or a pension and handed out in exchange for votes. Achille Lauro’s campaign managers came up with the scheme of handing out pairs of shoes to their would-be supporters: the right shoe before the poll, and the left one afterwards, when the vote had been safely recorded.

The poor who sold their support so cheaply seemed almost as resistant to the benefits of education, social improvement and conventional party politics as they had been when Italy was unified in 1860. Their political loyalties were understandably fickle. One of the few ways of trying to win them over, other than
maccheroni
or shoes, was a tear-jerking local patriotism: the claim that the city’s problems were all the fault of northern neglect. Achille Lauro, who also owned the second-biggest newspaper in Naples,
Roma
, was a master at playing up to the stereotype of Naples as a big-hearted city that history had treated harshly. Any talk of the camorra or organised crime was just old-fashioned northern snobbery.

There was another reason why Neapolitans insisted on confining the word camorra to the past: criminals were part of the ruling political machines. Even the old camorra stool pigeon Gennaro Abbatemaggio was an occasional electoral runner for Achille Lauro. But much more important than these grassroots agents were the so-called
guappi
. As we have seen,
guappi
were fences and loan sharks, runners of illegal lotteries: they were the puppeteers of the city’s lively criminal scene. But they were not
just
criminal figures:
guappi
also pulled political strings, fixing everyday problems by calling in favours from the politicians on whose behalf they raked in votes come election time.

The most famous
guappo
of them all was Giuseppe Navarra, known as the King of Poggioreale. He was a loyal electoral chief for the Monarchists and Achille Lauro, and collected honorific titles from his political protectors:
Commendatore
, and Knight of the Great Cross of the Constantinian Order. During the war, he had operated in the black market, making friends with the Allied authorities. He also made a great deal of money in iron
and other scrap, which his people took (mostly illegally) from bombed-out buildings.

Navarra lived among the coffin-makers on the main thoroughfare of Poggioreale, the neighbourhood where the cemetery and the prison stand. He held court on wooden chairs on the pavement. It is said that on his saint’s day, the tram would stop outside his house so that all the passengers could sample the sweets and liqueurs he offered. Navarra drove a gigantic Lancia Dilambda limousine with running boards down the side, a car of the kind we are used to seeing in American gangster movies of the inter-war years. Navarra bought it at an auction in Rome after the fall of Fascism; it used to belong to the Duce’s oldest son, Vittorio Mussolini. In 1947, one northern newspaper gave a tongue-in-cheek portrait of this street-corner monarch:

He is about fifty, dumpy, with a square face and thick salt-and-pepper hair. One of his eyes is lazy, and his nose starts off from a very wide base on his face, but comes to a rapid end in a sharp point—as if it started off wanting to be a huge Bourbon nose, and then repented along the way.

Navarra owed his fame, and quite a part of his popularity, to an extraordinary episode earlier in 1947, when he rescued the treasure of the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro (Saint Januarius). San Gennaro is the martyr whose ‘blood’ is kept in a glass box in Naples cathedral so that it can miraculously liquefy a couple of times a year. Or not, if the citizens meet with the Almighty’s displeasure for whatever reason. The saint’s treasure is a collection of gifts from the faithful, which was taken to the Vatican for safe-keeping during the war. Firsthand details of the King of Poggioreale’s supposed act of heroism are sketchy because almost all newspapers, rather suspiciously, did not report it until later. But the story told is that, when the mayor asked the chief of police to help bring the treasure home, he was refused: the police could not spare the money or resources to send the armoured car, ten trucks and twenty-man armed escort that it would take to carry the treasure over the dangerous roads between the capital and Naples. At that point, the
guappo
Navarra volunteered his services, and did the job stealthily by car, with an aged Catholic aristocrat on the passenger seat next to him. He reportedly travelled in a FIAT 22, which was less conspicuous than his limo. But quite how he fitted all the treasure in its tiny boot is not entirely clear. Bizarrely, Ernest Borgnine later recreated the escapade when he played the title role in the 1961 movie,
The King of Poggioreale
.

Navarra was a figure enveloped in layers of legend and theatrical self-promotion—yet another picturesque landmark of the Neapolitan streets. Accordingly, the ‘professional Neapolitan’ journalist Giuseppe Marotta
penned a typically indulgent portrait of him in 1947, saying that he was ‘a man dedicated to charity work no less than he was to his wife and the Monarchist cause’. But Navarra had very real power, sustained by the threat of violence. Locals later remembered him strutting up and down the street in a fedora and waistcoat, brandishing a pistol.

So Navarra, like other
guappi
in the city, was a bridge between the streets, including the underworld, and the city’s palaces of power. One of the things that sets Italy’s mafias apart from ordinary criminal gangs is precisely this link with politics. Put the
correntisti
and the
guappi
together in a single system, and you would have every justification in using the ‘c’ word that the Neapolitan newspapers were determined not to use.

 
38 

G
ANGSTERISMO

T
HE MAFIA IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES WAS FOUNDED BY
S
ICILIAN EMIGRANTS IN THE LATE
nineteenth century. In the big cities, crooks from Calabria and Naples were also recruited into what was soon an Italian-American mob. Ever since that time, Men of Honour have shuttled back and forth across the Atlantic, trafficking, investing and killing—and then running from the law or from their mafia enemies. The story of the mafia in the United States is not one I can hope to tell here. Nevertheless, some aspects of that story have a bearing on events in Italy.

America was a synonym for modernity in the backward Italy of the years that followed the Second World War. According to their political loyalties, Italians were either grudging or wholehearted in their admiration for the United States’ awesome warrior might, inconceivable wealth and unreachable movie stars. As one commentator wrote in 1958:

People all over the world are looking to America, waiting expectantly for everything: for their daily bread or their tin of meat; for machines or raw materials; for military defence, for a cultural watchword, for the political and social system that can resolve the evils of the world. America provides the models for newspapers, scientific manuals, labour-saving devices, fashion, fiction, pop ditties, dance moves and dance tunes, and even poetry . . . Is there one single thing that we don’t expect America to provide?

In fact there
was
one thing that Italy as yet refused to accept from across the Atlantic: a lesson in how to fight the mafia. In 1950, just when Italy
had managed to forget about its organised crime problem, America started talking about the mafia again. For the first time in a very long time, Italian-American crime became news. But the perverse circumstances of the Cold War conspired to ensure that the noise surrounding the mafia in America only made the silence in Italy even more deafening.

On 6 April 1950, Kansas City gambling baron and local Democratic kingmaker Charles Binaggio, together with his enforcer Charles ‘Mad Dog’ Gargotta, were shot dead in a Democratic clubhouse. The press printed embarrassing photographs of Binaggio slumped at a desk under a large picture of President Harry S. Truman. On Capitol Hill, the Binaggio episode caused an outcry that removed the last opposition to Bible Belt Senator Estes Kefauver’s efforts to set up a Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, with the mafia as one of its main targets.

The Kefauver hearings, as they became known, were held in fourteen cities across the States over the following year. But it was the climactic nine days of testimonies in New York, in March 1951, that really propelled the mafia issue into the public domain. Underworld potentates such as Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, plus a real live gangster’s moll, and a host of other shady hangers-on, were hauled before the Senator and his sharp-tongued deputy Charles Tobey. At Kefauver’s insistence, their testimonies were televised to a national audience that peaked at seventeen million. Housewives held afternoon ‘Kefauver parties’, their husbands left bars deserted to catch the evening résumé of the day’s scandals, sales of home-popping popcorn more than doubled, and the Brooklyn Red Cross had to install a television set to prevent blood donations drying up.