The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (32 page)

Naples is a Third World city with Third World politics. It's superrich surrounded by a miserable hinterland sprawling back from the volcano and the bay, a dilapidated jungle of violence, half-finished buildings, motorways that lead nowhere, cocaine, primitive Catholicism and stinking dumped rubbish […] There is vast private wealth in the city – at night the downtown streets are crammed with new cars, mobile phones and fur coats – but this is illegal wealth, the result of the most important ingredient of the Neapolitan scandal: the Camorra.

E
D
V
ULLIAMY
, the
Guardian
, March 29, 1993

P
re-dating the Mafia by several decades, some historians have argued that the Camorra is a direct descendent of an obscure, fifteenth-century Spanish secret society called the Garduna. A more convincing theory is that the Camorra first began operating some time between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, mainly in Naples, amongst the poorest sections of society who were nearly all illiterate, hence there being very few written documents recording the origins of this largely criminal organization. What isn't in doubt is that Naples, because it was one of Europe's largest cities during this period, was also one of its most over-populated. There wasn't enough work to ensure everyone enjoyed a living wage, a situation which in turn bred extreme poverty and hardship for large sections of the Neapolitan population. But whereas the middle classes during this period banded together to form some of the most powerful secret societies known to history, such as the Freemasons and the Carboneria, for the majority of Neapolitans there was no such help at hand. Instead the rich grew richer, while the poor remained penniless; an economic reality exacerbated by the actions of the king of the region, Ferdinand II, who reigned from 1830 to 1859. However, Ferdinand was not a man of the people, particularly the poor whom he regarded as being the lowest of the low. Contemporary historian Marco Monnier wrote:

He never considered for a moment raising the people up from their level of degradation; on the contrary, he wanted to keep them there until the end of time as he knew very well that, given the nature of the period we live in, an absolute monarchy is only possible if it rules over a degraded and exhausted populace.
¹

Conditions were rife, therefore, for the emergence of an organization specifically tailored to the needs of the downtrodden, although the Camorra's name doesn't appear on any official documentation until 1820, when a written statute of a Camorra organization was made. This revealed a structured society complete with initiation rites, rules, regulations and funds, operating at the heart of the Neapolitan underworld.

Initially the Camorra appears to have made its greatest inroads into society through small monopolies, which it set up within the prison system. Once again the historian Marco Monnier is invaluable by giving us a marvelous portrait of an inmate's complicated relationship with the Camorra. Monnier states that the inmate would not be allowed either to eat, drink or gamble without the permission of a camorrista (a Camorra member), while a tenth of all the money an inmate received in jail – with which he could buy food and tobacco – had to be given to the camorrista. Failure to abide by these rules could result in the ‘risk of being clubbed to death.' On top of this, the prison authorities would also pay the Camorra a fee for keeping the prisoners under control.

It was all very lucrative and within the space of only a few years the Camorra's influence grew to include money from gambling and theft as well as a substantial rake-off from all the goods being exported and imported through Naples. The Camorra also set itself up in the role of the police. This was especially true in the less salubrious neighborhoods of Naples where they wielded the greatest influence. In short, during King Ferdinand's reign the Camorra made itself an integral part of city life, the only true representative of the city's poor. It was, of course, in no way a political organization, simply one that existed to make money.

All this was to change, however, when in 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in Sicily with one aim in mind; the unification of Italy under one ruler. As he moved from Sicily to southern Italy and onwards up the country, chaos broke out in Naples as the Bourbon king (by this time Francis II had taken on the role) attempted to quell the public's enthusiasm for Garibaldi's success, but to little avail. Soon, what few policemen there were left began breaking their ranks and joining the mob. The old order was collapsing, and on June 26 a state of siege was declared. A new Prefect of Police was elected, Liborio Romano, who immediately turned to the Camorra – one of whom, Salvatore De Crescenzo, had been convicted six times – to reinstate some sort of order over the masses. Crescenzo's former crimes (which included murder) didn't seem to matter to Romano, as long as he and his colleagues could keep control over the city. The plan worked; order was brought to the streets and the king fled Naples prior to the arrival of Garibaldi.

The Camorra were now in a semi-official position, acting as the city's main police force, a position they quickly turned into a lucrative enterprise by moving into the contraband industry, often forcing shopkeepers to buy smuggled goods, albeit at incredibly low prices. This meant that the city's tax revenue took a substantial plunge, but the shopkeepers were too frightened to refuse the Camorra's offers.

They chose the lesser of two evils. If they paid a tax to the sect [the Camorra] they only ran the risk of being discovered by tax inspectors and receiving a minor conviction; but if they paid the tax inspectors then they were certain of being caught by camorristi and given a good beating. So they paid a tax to the sect.'
²

Despite this, the new authorities in Naples did recognize that the Camorra had grown too strong, which was something they were determined to remedy, although by this point the organization was so deeply entrenched in Neopolitan society that it was impossible to destroy altogether. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1862 approximately 1,000 camorristi were rounded up and either placed under house arrest or imprisoned in the city's jail. Over the next forty years the Camorra did experience a general decline as a secret society, mainly due to the city's intolerance of corruption, but also because, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mass migration took place that deprived the Camorra of their main power base – the urban poor.

By the outbreak of the First World War, the Camorra had been all but wiped out and later, around 1922, with the arrival of Fascism in Italy, those Camorra operatives still working in Naples were quickly quashed. Benito Mussolini's regime was not one that would tolerate organized crime. While stamping out what they saw as insurgents, the Fascists did invite certain sections of the Camorra to join their cause, but this was mainly so that they could monitor the more rural areas of southern Italy and keep them under control. Prior to Mussolini's rise to power, one could almost have divided the country into two separate parts – the industrialized areas and cities to the north such as Milan and Genoa, and the south which still depended largely on agriculture for its main source of income. The gap widened even further after the war, with the south preferring to re-elect old politicians and stick to old ways, one consequence of which was that political corruption reasserted itself very quickly.

In 1943, when the Allies first invaded Sicily during the Second World War, British and American undercover agents set out to make contact with certain ‘pro-allied' forces through an intermediary known to most as Lucky Luciano – one of America's leading Mafiosi, who at this time was serving a lengthy prison sentence back in the States for running a prostitution racket. The Allies – through Luciano – appointed several Mafiosi as mayors of a selected number of Sicilian towns, quickly allowing the Mafia to re-establish its stranglehold over Sicily as a whole. Around the same time another Mafiosi operative by the name of Vito Genovese, who had earlier left America to evade an outstanding murder charge against him, settled in Naples from where he began to operate several illegal, but highly lucrative, businesses. One such involved the misappropriation of the Allies' supplies (particularly food), which was later sold on the black market.

During this trial of a Camorra group in Viterbo in March 1911, the thirty-four accused men were seated in a steel cage to keep them in order. The informer sat in a separate cage for his own safety.

But Genovese's crimes weren't the only ones haunting Naples and its environs during this period, for although there were no actual Camorra gangs operating within the city, the fact that the Mafia were making huge profits from their illegal activities meant that in very small ways new crime organizations began to establish themselves. The Camorra saw to it that the surrounding region of Campania, which comprised mainly farming land, fell under their direct control.

Their influence was particularly strong in rural areas to the north and east of Naples, especially in the rich cattle area around Nola. Sometimes gangs would shoot it out for dominance in a given market; for example, sixty-one murders were committed in the Nola area during 1954-6 alone. They also intimidated farmers who refused their services or protection, normally by burning their crops.
³

By the mid-1950s the Camorra's influence pervaded all agricultural areas, including that of milk production – a move that in real terms meant huge profits for the organization. Enjoying the steady rise in their influence, camorristi then began laying plans to extend their business practices back into Naples itself. After all, most of the produce they were handling passed through the city at one point or another, so it made perfect sense. Politically, too, the Camorra were once again making huge inroads into the fabric of Neapolitan life. One only has to look to the funeral in 1955 of one of the Camorra's major players, Pascalone 'e Nola, to see this at work, for no less than twelve Neapolitan MPs sent wreaths. But perhaps the area in which the Camorra were going to make their biggest impression over the next several years was in the Mafia-dominated contraband industry.

Cigarette smuggling was big business in the 1950s, as there were huge profits to be made. Initially, the main center for these operations was the free port of Tangiers in northern Africa. When this was closed in 1961, most of the warehouse operations selling cigarettes moved to the Yugoslavian coast, and Naples quickly became one of the world's biggest cigarette-smuggling cities. Naturally, the Mafia controlled a large part of this lucrative pie, but the Camorra weren't far behind, and soon they also became involved in the increasingly popular drug-trafficking industry. Given the large profits to be gained, this latter area inevitably resulted in a great deal of violence and internecine warfare. A notorious example of this was the slaughter of Gennaro Ferrigno (an importer of Peruvian cocaine) by Camorra boss Antonio Spavone in 1971 and, later the following year, the killing of an ex-policeman, Emilio Palamara.

Perhaps one of the most notorious camorrista to emerge from the pile was a man by the name of Michele Zaza (often referred to by the sobriquet ‘Mad Mike'). As the son of a fisherman, Zaza came from very humble beginnings, but by dealing in illegal arms and contraband cigarettes (somewhere in the region of 5,000 tons of the stuff per year) he soon made inroads into the Neapolitan underworld, becoming one of the Camorra's most feared leaders. He once boasted to an investigating magistrate:

I used to load fifty thousand cases [of cigarettes] a month. I could load a hundred thousand cases, $10 million on trust, all I had to do was make a phone call […] I'd buy $24 million worth of Philip Morris in three months, my lawyer will show you the receipts. I'm proud of that $24 million.
⁴

For all his wealth and bravado, Zaza was part of the old-style Camorra, a secret society that was soon to be overtaken by the
nuovo camorra organizzata
(NCO), or New Organized Camorra, of Raffaele Cutolo. Cutolo had, for most of his adult life, lived in jail and it was from there that he built up his organization, initially befriending young inmates who were unfamiliar with, and therefore scared of, the prison system. By winning these men's trust, Cutolo soon had a loyal following. He also befriended many inmates who were too poor to buy regular food. Another strategy Cutolo implemented was to organize payments to be made to families of those who were loyal to him inside the prison. Soon Cutolo's NCO had hundreds, if not thousands, of members, not only within the jail where he was incarcerated, but also in other prisons dotted throughout the country. He also had groups of men and women who worked for him on the outside, in towns and cities to the east of Naples such as Ottaviano. Cutolo further distinguished himself from other Camorra leaders by harboring a fierce dislike of the Mafia and any Neapolitans whom he felt were collaborating with these Sicilian thugs. In this manner, he created an extremely loyal following, all of whom identified themselves strongly with Naples and Campania. Cutolo also established a fairly traditional set of values and rules (some of which harked back to the eighteenth-century Camorra), including one that stated children should not, under any circumstances, be kidnapped or abused. This new-style Camorra began to appeal to increasing numbers of disillusioned young men. This testimony from an NCO member describes how he first became aware of the organization: