Blood Brotherhoods (49 page)

Soon other rumours began to fly in the opposite direction, from Cirella to the penal colony on Ustica, and this time sex was what generated the gossip. Before departing for Ustica, ‘robust and vigorous’ Paolo Agostino left his affairs in the hands of a trusted deputy, Nicola Pollifroni. Pollifroni very soon became very close to Agostino’s wife, Maria Marvelli—close enough to set off some wry smiles: they were seen riding the same horse and he was seen sitting on her lap. The judge, rather primly, would later say that the gossip was ‘not without plausibility’. When these reports reached Paolo Agostino on Ustica, he made his own inquiries as to how plausible they really were. Strangely, he was told by two separate witnesses, including his own brother, that nothing was wrong. Even more strangely, he believed them.

Paolo Agostino’s relaxed attitude to his wife’s infidelity contradicts all the stereotypes about the southern Italian male’s violent possessiveness. It also transgresses the behavioural norms among gangsters. The picciotteria had
already shown that mere rumours about marital infidelity could easily send a
mafioso
to a gruesome death. Yet in this case, Paolo Agostino was prepared to discount the rumours even when everyone else saw they were at the very least ‘plausible’. One explanation of this failure to defend his own reputation is that Agostino realised that, as both a husband and a criminal, Maria Marvelli was just too valuable to him. With the tensions building within the
clan
, he needed to keep his family compact, and had no choice but to overlook the affair. Mafia rules of honour, as always, were elastic.

While Paolo Agostino and his boss were in the penal colony on Ustica—the one pondering the subject of his wife’s fidelity, and the other dwelling on how the offer of his daughter’s hand had been rejected—back in Cirella the political terrain within the Honoured Society shifted. Three brothers, Bruno, Rocco and Francescantonio Romeo emerged as the new centre of power. The Romeo brothers decided they needed to hide their newly acquired authority behind a figurehead leader. So they began the search for a new boss, a dummy don who would not attract attention to himself, who would not be very
visible
, as the Romeo brothers stipulated.

Now,
visibility
is one of the great themes in the history of Italian organised crime. Absolute invisibility, absolute anonymity, is not an option for
mafiosi
, whose aim is to control their territory. However they do it, they have to let the local people know that it is
they
who must be feared,
they
who must be paid. But there are a thousand ways to carve out a profile, to cultivate respect. A gangster, like some colourful territorial animal, can save a lot of energy by being easy to identify: potential rivals quickly learn to spot the danger signs, and learn that flight rather than fight is the wisest reaction. So early
camorristi
advertised their power with pompadours, bell-bottom trousers, and tattoos. As did their cousins in the Calabrian picciotteria. But of course visibility brings risks—especially when the police are in the mood to repress the mafia rather than cohabit with it. It is one thing to flash your criminal rank and battle honours in a dungeon, where everyone is a felon, or in the police no-go areas of Naples’s low city, or in some godforsaken Calabrian hill village. It is quite another to do so when the eyes of the
Carabinieri
are upon you, or when you want to pass through Ellis Island, or when your dealings with politicians and entrepreneurs demand a less showy façade. The ‘middle-class villains’ of Sicily have always tended to dress inconspicuously and to intimate their authority with little more than a stare, a stance or a stony silence. The other criminal associations, whose origins were humbler, took a while to master the visibility game’s subtler stratagems. The learning process was already well under way by the dawn of the Fascist era. In Naples, the silly clothes and butterfly pompadours were gone by the time of the Cuocolo trial. The Calabrian
mafia abandoned them not long afterwards: there is little sign of them in the Fascist era.

Faced with more unwelcome police attention than they had ever known, the Romeo brothers looked for a new and less visible patsy, one without a criminal record whose wealth put him beyond suspicion. Their chosen candidate, a young man called Francesco Macrì, accepted without hesitation, despite not having even been a member of the gang before, and despite being rich enough to provide lawyers for his new co-conspirators. The judge later said that Macrì regarded being nominated boss as a ‘special honour’. It is a telling testament to the prestige that this criminal association had now acquired that Macrì took on the job of
capo
so readily. As the judge explained, ‘entry into the association was an essential condition if you wanted to win public esteem’. The picciotteria, less visible than it once had been, but more poisonous, was seeping further still into the bloodstream of Calabrian life. The Romeo brothers formed a committee to ‘advise’ the enthusiastic but inexperienced appointee, while retaining the real power for themselves. And with that arrangement, the politics of organised crime in Cirella reached a new equilibrium.

Meanwhile, criminal business carried on as usual. And as usual, even the simplest criminal business could have lethal consequences. The local doctor had had a valuable yearling bull stolen a while earlier and he was still making strenuous and unsuccessful efforts to find out who had taken it. Eventually he approached Maria Marvelli, asking her to ask her exiled husband Paolo Agostino (a relative of the doctor’s) to make inquiries among the inmates on Ustica. Prison, as ever, was the great junction box of mafia communications.

A letter soon came back from the prison island: Paolo Agostino wrote that the thieves were Bruno, Rocco, and Francescantonio Romeo—the men behind the ‘invisible boss’ who were now the most influential
picciotti
in Cirella.

Naively, the doctor passed Paolo Agostino’s letter on to the
Carabinieri
. Someone from inside the
Carabinieri
—whether a spy or an agent provocateur—told the three Romeo brothers that Paolo Agostino had tried to get them into trouble. Even before this tip-off arrived, the Romeos knew that Agostino would pose a threat to them once he was released from Ustica. So they swiftly issued a warning by burning down Maria Marvelli’s house and stealing thirty of her goats.

As Agostino’s return from Ustica neared, the Romeo brothers began to plan for more drastic action to defend their position. They introduced a motion with the Honoured Society to kill Maria Marvelli’s husband; in support of it, they cited the impeccable legal logic that he had broken the code of
omertà
by telling the doctor who had stolen the yearling bull.

After two years away, Paolo Agostino finally arrived home on 2 March 1936. He was immediately summoned to a meeting of the Honoured Society: how could he justify his breach of the rules? His self-defence was a desperate show of chutzpah. He said that he no longer feared anyone in Cirella, because on Ustica he had found ‘new and more powerful friendships by joining a mighty association that was represented there’.

What was this ‘mighty association’ on Ustica? A bluff? Or was Paolo Agostino hinting that he had become a member of the Sicilian mafia since last he saw Aspromonte? Ustica was more than usually full of Sicilian
mafiosi
at the time. Whether Agostino was bluffing or not, the Romeo brothers became even more determined to eliminate him. When Paolo Agostino flagrantly insulted the Honoured Society’s protocols by failing to turn up for a second hearing into his case, the Romeos got their motion through, and a death sentence against Agostino was passed. The problem now for the Romeo brothers became a practical rather than a political one: how to carry out the hit—a task that would require both a carefully prepared trap and a narrative to bait it.

While waiting for their opportunity, the Romeo brothers had to content themselves with insults. They broke Paolo Agostino’s gramophone at a gangland celebration to mark the engagement of his stepson, Francesco Polito. (After turning down the boss’s daughter, Maria Marvelli’s boy had finally found a suitable girl from a suitably delinquent family.) Only the presence of so many witnesses stopped the gramophone incident degenerating into a bloodbath.

If Paolo Agostino did not realise before that his time was running out, he certainly realised now. He became gloomy. Among friends he referred to himself wistfully as ‘a bird just passing through life’. He refused to spank his children, saying that he did not want to leave them with bad memories of him. His despondency was apparent to Maria Marvelli, who took charge of security at home, forcing her husband to sleep elsewhere when danger threatened.

The first attempt on Agostino’s life involved the staged theft of his ox. The Romeo brothers sent men to steal the animal, making plenty of noise as they did, in the hope that Agostino would rush out of his house. If all went well, he could then be shot down, as if by anonymous robbers. But in the event it was the redoubtable Maria Marvelli who came out of the house, gun in hand, and chased off the would-be assassins.

A far more rigorously conceived plot would be needed to do away with Paolo Agostino. The Romeo brothers called a meeting of senior
mafiosi
in an abandoned shack on 30 April 1936. After much discussion their plan was agreed and a ten-man firing party picked to execute it. The dummy
don, Francesco Macrì, volunteered to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Romeo brothers in the upcoming action; evidently he wanted to earn the lofty rank that he had so recently been given. But the crucial figure in the scheme, the man set up to betray Paolo Agostino to his enemies, was to be Nicola Pollifroni—the man who had a ‘plausible’ affair with Maria Marvelli. Pollifroni was made to kneel before his brethren, with his arms crossed flat on his chest, and swear to help kill his friend.

On 2 May Pollifroni invited Paolo Agostino along on an expedition to raid some beehives, thereby insulting their owner with whom Pollifroni had an old beef. No member of the Honoured Society could refuse such an invitation. The raid was a success, and Pollifroni and Agostino returned along an isolated path, carrying pots of fragrant honey. The route took them through a narrow pass between two giant boulders covered in gorse. The judge would subsequently explain that the path reminded him of the ever-narrowing gulleys in an abattoir floor that isolate a single pig, forcing it to walk between two walls until it can no longer turn round or go back. By the time the butcher’s knife comes into view, there is no longer any escape. The pass had a name locally: Agonia (‘Agony’).

Just as the two honey thieves were entering the pass, Pollifroni stopped. He had to take a pee. Agostino should walk on ahead, into the narrow walls of the pass.

The last thing Agostino ever heard came from somewhere on the boulder above him: a strangled cry of warning, both sudden and familiar. Agostino’s stepson Francesco Polito was being forced to watch the murder, a dagger pressed to his throat. He had the courage and desperation to cry out a warning before a large hand was clamped over his mouth, and a shotgun chorus drowned out all other sound.

What gives an undeniably Fascist flavour to the story of the Cirella mafia was what happened to the Romeo brothers, the dummy don Francesco Macrì, and the others once they were arrested. Under interrogation, as their blood oaths dictated, they denied any knowledge of the criminal association they belonged to. So they were punched and whipped and beaten with anything that came to hand, like a heavy ruler and a blotter. They were forced to drink a clay pot full of piss. To muffle their screams, their own socks were stuffed in their mouths and secured with their own belts. Then they were pushed to the floor, and their legs chained up on chairs so that the soles of their feet could be beaten and their toenails pulled out. (Later, some would have amputations as a result.) Their wounds were doused in salt and vinegar. The most uncooperative among them were electrocuted: wires attached to a car battery were applied to their inner thighs, leaving them barely conscious. They were then hurled
into damp, filthy cells in Locri jail with no food or water. All requests for medical visits were denied.

One by one, they confessed. Every time they were called on to confirm their confessions, the beatings began again. The men of Cirella’s Honoured Society had found their own place called Agony.

Only in court could the allegation of police violence finally emerge. When the judge heard of the horrors he treated them as just that: mere allegation. Somehow, he deemed it no job of his to weigh up whether what the defendants alleged was true. Not even, it seems, by checking on their amputated toes. But the sheer detail of the judge’s description, and the squirming of his logic, tell us he knew what had really happened: the accused before him had been brutally tortured by the
Carabinieri
.

Of course the judge had plenty of other evidence to draw on: the testimonies of Maria Marvelli and her son Francesco Polito; the suspects’ utterly unconvincing alibis; and the jumble of patently false testimonies, mostly from their womenfolk, that the
mafiosi
had marshalled in their defence. The prosecution could also point out that the dummy don Francesco Macrì kept a list of the Honoured Society’s members in a suitcase, and wrote down the names of the ten men chosen to kill Paolo Agostino.

The judge concluded that all of the evidence confirmed the confessions, ‘without any regard to the way in which the suspects’ initial statements were gathered’. So he felt able to ‘put his conscience to rest’, and take no further action about a blindingly clear case of police brutality. Torture or no torture, the verdict against the Lads with Attitude in Cirella was guilty.

Everything within the state. Nothing against the state. Nothing outside the state
. Fascism’s totalitarian ideology clearly gave the cops a licence to go far beyond any acceptable means of interrogation. No doubt the torture used here was also deployed elsewhere against
mafiosi
and
camorristi
. But it is rare to find such graphic and unambiguous evidence of it as there is in the trial papers from Cirella. More often, false claims about police brutality were made by mobsters. Fascism’s battle with organised crime could be a very dirty fight indeed, but quite how frequently the authorities really abused their power is anyone’s guess.