The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (34 page)

Nor, these days, do the youngsters joining the Camorra have to undergo any type of initiation ceremony or prove their ‘family credentials' like most Mafiosi recruits do. Family ties are important to the Camorra, but they are not essential. What is necessary is a willingness to engage in any or all of the Camorra-style businesses such as money laundering, drug dealing, usury, intimidation or extortion, the latter apparently constituting a huge business in the Naples area of Italy. In 1992 a shop owner's forum stated that an estimated 46 percent of shops in Naples were paying extortion money to the Camorra (whereas the national average was only 12 percent).

Usury is also frequently employed by Camorra organizations as a means of bringing in revenue. In an area that boasts notoriously high levels of unemployment, where credit is difficult to acquire for people without any regular income, private money-lending has almost become a way of life. Again, in Tom Bean's book on the Camorra, he states that the Association of Italian Bank and Finance customers has estimated that the practice of usury accounts for a national total of US$10 billion business. Illegal gambling is another huge Camorra-run enterprise with large numbers of illicit gaming houses set up throughout Naples and the region of Campania. The Camorra also operates several illegal betting systems, the revenue from which in 1989 was estimated to have been in the region of US$4 billion, resulting in a clear $16 million profit.

Huge profits are also to be made from the construction industry. In this respect politicians in the Camorra's pay were of vital importance in securing the contracts, sub-contracts and authorizations. ‘The relationship between politicians and bureaucrats, businessmen, and then camorristi,' said a senior member of the Alfieri Camorra gang, Pasquale Galasso, during an Anti-Mafia Commission enquiry, ‘is ultimately realized and achieves total fusion in the mechanism of public sector contracts. On the basis of all that I have noticed personally in my legitimate business activities and my work with Carmine Alfieri and other camorristi and businessmen, it is clear to me that the politician who manages the financing of a contract, is a mediator between the Camorra and a large company, which is nearly always from northern or central Italy. Such mediation takes the form of demanding a bribe from the company for himself or his representatives, and the awarding of sub-contracts to companies directly controlled by Camorra groups.'
¹⁰

So, with the Camorra so deeply entrenched in the socio-economic fabric of Italian life, is there any chance that this secretive organization can ever be brought to account or eradicated?

In short, the answer is ‘no', although the reasons for this are manifold. First and foremost, with so many politicians, policemen and judges in the Camorra's pocket, it would hardly be in the government's interest to crack down hard on them. Institutionalized corruption runs rife in Italy. Numerous politicians have been accused of serious crimes only to avoid being either arrested or tried on these charges. In the late 1990s, the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tried to facilitate a law which allowed for the freeing of all politicians facing trial. Due to a huge public outcry the bill was eventually dropped, but in 2001 Berlusconi announced he wanted the crime of false accounting struck off the statute books – the Prime Minister was at the time facing three separate trials for this crime. Neither are the police immune from criticism, with one government report in 1997 showing that any effort to stamp out Camorra-related crimes was impossible when several senior police officers were being paid monthly ‘salaries' by the Camorra.

In direct contrast, the general public seems far more willing to stamp out organized crime, and are far more effective in doing so, because they are the ones who ultimately vote politicians, governments and judges in and out of office. Large groups of students, particularly in the Naples area, have mounted mass demonstrations against the presence of the Camorra in their city, often with the backing of Neapolitan shopkeepers, who close their premises as a sign of solidarity with the students and as a demonstration of their disgust at having to pay protection money. The church has also, to a certain extent, made a stand against the Camorra, organizing marches and distributing anti-Camorra literature.

Yet, despite all of this – the arrest of several senior Camorra players in the mid1990s and the death of several others, the rise in the number of super-grasses willing to talk to the authorities, and the groundswell of public opinion against organized crime – no political strategy that leaves the foundations of the existing system untouched will ultimately work, and may even give rise to a far stronger Camorra in the future.

Franklin knew Le Despencer very well. He was fully aware of an enterprise which the Englishman had been conducting for some years more or less surreptitiously, known as the Hell Fire Club. Its activities were familiar to Franklin and he occasionally joined in them.

C
ECIL
B. C
URREY
,
Road to Revolution: Benjamin Franklin in England

T
he eighteenth century in England was a strange and exciting period, one in which the concept of democracy constantly battled against ever-threatening tyranny, where the divide between rich and poor was monumental and over which, towards the end of the era, hovered the terrible cloud of the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Great men of letters jostled for acclaim with painters, philosophers and architects, the like of which few previous centuries had ever witnessed. Laurence Sterne was writing
Tristram Shandy
(published 1760), Jonathan Swift published
Gulliver's Travels
(1726), Dr. Johnson was compiling his dictionary, while Sir Joshua Reynolds produced some of his greatest paintings. Other artists of the period included Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Thomas Lawrence and of course, William Hogarth. Architects such as Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Adam were designing some of that century's most noteworthy buildings, including St. Paul's Cathedral, and Capability Brown quietly revolutionized garden design to the extent that we can still see his influence in landscaped gardens and parks today. This, then, was an innovative, turbulent period, aptly described by Charles Dickens as being, ‘the best of times and the worst of times,' during which one of the most colorful, not to mention bizarre, secret societies was first established in Britain.

There had been other secretive British groups, clubs such as the Hectors, the Mohawks and the Blasters, but unlike these organizations, the Hell Fire Club's membership included some of the most influential men of the day; men who included a Prime Minister, a Lord Mayor of London, a Chancellor of the Exchequer, a son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as a handful of some of the country's finest artists. So who was it that first conceived the idea of this highly secretive, positively influential club?

Sir Francis Dashwood, baronet and heir to one of the greatest of all eighteenth- century fortunes, was born at the turn of the century in 1708. His father was an extremely wealthy businessman who had married into the aristocracy. Dashwood Senior pushed his son hard, and, as was the vogue in those days, when young Francis reached the age of twenty, he was sent on a Grand Tour of Europe with a tutor in tow to complete his education. The pair traveled through many countries, but it was while in Italy that young Dashwood's spirits soared and his curiosity became aroused when he fell in love with the country's classical architecture, the Renaissance paintings and sculptures and the romantic myths and legends of Italian history. Francis also became intrigued by the Catholic Church, although he later developed a deep hatred for this institution, but the greatest influence upon Dashwood while sojourning in Italy came when he was introduced to Prince Charles Edward Stuart, the pretender to the British throne. Following their meeting, or so it is claimed, Sir Francis became a Jacobite secret agent and his fascination with intrigue and secrecy might explain his later involvement with the Rosicrucian movement and the Freemasons.

By 1746 Dashwood was ready to form his own secret society, which would be known by a variety of names, such as the Order of the Knights of St. Francis, the Monks of Medmenham and the Order of the Knights of West Wycombe. Initial meetings were held at an old inn called the George and Vulture (later immortalized by Charles Dickens in
Pickwick Papers
) in Cornhill in the City of London.

Sir Francis Dashwood, founder of the Hell Fire Club, is depicted here by Hogarth in a symbolic, quasi-religious pose with a halo above his head but his crucifix set aside. The open book may be a Bible, or may be something far more sinister. The mask at his elbow represents the secrecy of his society and the near-naked nymph with which he is toying the magic and debauchery in which he indulged. The spilled wine and ruined fruit again symbolize the Hell Fire Club's drunken debauchery.

Sir Francis's knights, of whom there were thirteen in total, each named after one of the twelve apostles with Sir Francis taking the role of Christ, were loyal servants, all of whom appreciated meeting at the George and Vulture. But while the inn was at first suitable for the society's purposes, by 1752 Dashwood decided to move his club to a ruined medieval abbey, Medmenham, on the banks of the Thames near Marlow, a mere six miles from his ancestral home at West Wycombe.

Originally the abbey had been a twelfth-century Cistercian monastery, before falling into secular hands and being converted into a Tudor manor house. Dashwood, far from wishing to preserve the abbey, instead planned that most eighteenth-century of changes, converting the building in the trend-setting style of the ‘Gothic revival'. This, after all, was the era that would later produce Walpole's
Castle of Otranto
and M.G. Lewis's
The Monk
, both of which were packed full of ghostly happenings, apparitions, murders and vampires. Dashwood spent vast sums of money installing stained-glass windows picturing the twelve apostles in often extremely indecent poses, ornate stone carvings, frescoes and a motto engraved about the main door stating, ‘Do As Thou Wilt.' Other changes to the abbey included a room devoted to Roman mythology, the walls of which were reputedly painted with copies of indecent frescoes from that period. Adjacent to this room was the library, said to contain the finest collection of pornographic books in the country. There was also a small Robing Room and a Withdrawing Room. In the main dining hall stood a statue of the Egyptian god of silence, Harpocrates, with a finger to his lips, no doubt reminding everyone who entered the abbey that what occurred within its walls was not to be spoken of on the outside. Nor was statuary confined to the abbey building, for the extensive gardens were replete with little temples in the Grecian style and hundreds of stone and marble figures of nymphs, gods and goddesses scattered everywhere one cared to look.

Yet if the house and gardens were impressive, the arrival of the monks themselves at the abbey, which always took place at night, was a truly awesome sight to behold. Journeying by gondola up the Thames, dressed in snow-white robes with hoods lined with scarlet silk and holding lighted torches, they made some onlookers imagine that they were watching the spirits of the original monks returning to haunt them.

Once inside the abbey, however, there were no outside spectators for the ceremonies and rituals played out within the abbey walls. The group's antics involved debauchery, black magic and Satanism. Satanism has, over the centuries, attracted people from all walks of life, due no doubt in part to the theory that Satan was an heroic figure who refused to bow down to any higher authority. Milton reflected on just this attitude in his greatest work,
Paradise Lost
(1667), in which Satan (who is arguably the most charismatic figure in the whole piece) states, ‘Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.' A rebel to the last, so it is easy to see why Satanism appealed to the members of what was now called the Hell Fire Club, who also prided themselves on their own rebelliousness. What cannot be so easily documented is the extent to which the club practiced this black art, or how seriously they took it. The artist William Hogarth, who was a member of the club, did make a now very famous print showing Sir Francis partaking of his rather dubious devotions, dressed in the habit of a Franciscan monk, kneeling before a naked nymph. It was also common knowledge that a large part of belonging to the Hell Fire group consisted of partaking of licentious pleasures, normally with prostitutes. Despite this, most members had wives, including Sir Francis, who married a woman called Sara Gould (known to everyone as ‘Lady Mary') in 1745. The prostitutes, however, and the games they played with Hell Fire members, usually while dressed up as nuns, were the mainstay of these men's earthly pleasures. During the eighteenth century there were countless brothels catering to the gentry's every need. One of the most famous was Charlotte Hayes's establishment in London and, due to her having kept a ledger recording the comings and goings of her girls, we have been left documentary evidence that she provided ‘nuns' for the abbey. ‘June 18, 1759. Twelve vestals for the Abbey. Something discreet and Cyprian for the friars.'
¹
The kind of antics in which they indulged involved pretty much every kind of sexual fantasy imaginable. The ‘Abbot of the Day' would get first pick of the ladies, who wore nun's costumes and masks, after which everyone else would pair off. Normally couples then retired to single cells in the Withdrawing Room. Alternatively, they could use the abbey's extensive gardens, or if they preferred they could stay in the Roman Room, where they could practice the type of voyeurism so favored by John Cleland in his pornographic novel
Fanny Hill
, written in 1749. Brothels of the period also encouraged this type of behavior, positioning couches round the walls of the main ‘play' area so that onlookers could be accommodated.