Blood Brotherhoods (90 page)

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.

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.