Blood Brotherhoods (86 page)

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 

B
LOOD ORGY

F
IRST TOBACCO
. T
HEN CONSTRUCTION
. T
HEN KIDNAPPING
. A
ND FINALLY HEROIN
. T
HE
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.