Blood Brotherhoods (75 page)

Astutely, Judge Marino latched on to what might seem the least sinister aspect of the Montalto summit: the ‘formalistic’ and ‘pedantic’ procedural discussion. In his view, this betrayed the fact that the ’ndrangheta was an ‘institutionalised’ association. Moreover, Judge Marino went on to argue, the gangsters’ debate about shared traditions showed that the world of Calabrian organised crime was much more than a scattering of isolated gangs. There was only one ’ndrangheta, and it was a criminal organisation with a long history behind it. (At this point, no one knew how long that history was.)

There is a striking contrast here with the ‘Martian invasion’ of Calabria in 1955, when the authorities seemed to have only a passing interest in the ’ndrangheta’s history and structure. Judge Marino’s ruling is the first small sign of what the Italian judicial system could learn by treating the mafias of Calabria and Sicily as what they were: criminal sects that had been embedded in society for decades.

Judge Marino was so keen to delve into the ’ndrangheta’s secrets that he compiled biographies of the two most powerful bosses named in the plea for unity at Montalto. Those biographies—the first ever detailed portraits of ’ndrangheta chief cudgels—are worth looking at closely.

The ’Ntoni Macrì invoked by Zappia at Montalto was, of course, the very same don ’Ntoni who had danced the
tarantella
with Master Joe, and had then gone on (reputedly!) to save the Bishop of Locri from being murdered by a gang of vengeful priests. Don ’Ntoni was rich. Apart from his strictly illegal businesses, he induced the local landowners to use his own henchmen as guards on their olive groves; he forcibly regulated lemon prices to suit his own needs as a trader in agricultural commodities; he also had interests in agricultural machinery and construction. In 1957 his wealth and political protection rescued him from the internal exile he had been sentenced to during the Marzano Operation.

A year later he was on the run, charged with murder. In 1961 he was found not guilty, and also acquitted of the supplementary charge of being a member of a criminal association. An arrest for attempted murder came in 1965. Then, in 1967, three of his rivals were shot dead and another two wounded in what became known as the ‘massacre of piazza Mercato’ in Locri: two men armed with a shotgun and a machine gun opened fire on a group of people who were striking a deal in the wholesale fruit and vegetable market. As always, Macrì was found not guilty on the grounds of insufficient evidence.

But don ’Ntoni’s most jaw-dropping coup was yet to come. In 1967, he defrauded the Bank of Naples with the help of the Siderno branch manager. Although the manager was sacked as a result, the Bank of Naples refused to help the police with their investigations. Reviewing the evidence in that case, Judge Marino could only conclude that there was a mafia in the Bank of Naples alongside the mafia run by don ’Ntoni Macrì. The judge was shocked by the number of times, through the 900 pages of don ’Ntoni’s criminal record, that he had been shown leniency after important people had defined him as a reformed character. By the time of the summit at Montalto in 1969, the Siderno boss had become what Judge Marino called a ‘living symbol of organised crime’s omnipotence and invincibility’.

Don Domenico ‘Mico’ Tripodo was the second boss invoked at the Montalto summit whose biography was assembled by Judge Marino. In the judge’s words, Mico Tripodo was a ‘proud and indomitable villain, entirely devoted to the mafia cause’. He derived his income from extortion, fruit-market racketeering, armed robbery, counterfeit money and cheques, and, of course, tobacco smuggling and construction. One of the more remarkable features of Tripodo’s career is that he escaped confinement three times by the same trick of feigning illness and getting himself transferred to clinics, which were less well guarded and much easier to slip away from. Much of the rest of his time was spent in hiding: he changed his name several times, and even contracted
a bigamous marriage in Umbria before finally being recaptured in Perugia. The fact that he was behind bars at the time of the Montalto summit did not stop him running his empire and ordering murders on his turf.

Poring over these biographies understandably left Judge Marino angry and disbelieving. The authorities knew an awful lot about the ’ndrangheta: the summit at Polsi had been an open secret for a while, for example. Yet, as Judge Marino observed, they seemed incapable of making any progress towards hampering its operations and resisting the rise of don ’Ntoni, Mico Tripodo and their ilk.

Judge Marino’s diligent and penetrating analysis of the mushroom-pickers of Montalto contrasts strikingly with the trials against Cosa Nostra that took place around the same time. A notable example is the 1968 trial that was intended to bring to justice the participants in the First Mafia War, when Palermo’s delinquent elite had blown one another up with booby-trapped Alfa Romeo Giuliettas. The prosecutor who prepared the case against the participants in the mafia war, Cesare Terranova, was certain that the mafia had a centralised coordinating council of some kind. According to a report prepared by the
Carabinieri
in 1963, fifteen senior
mafiosi
, of whom six came from the city of Palermo and nine from the towns and villages of the province, had seats around the table. This council, of course, was what we now know is called the Commission. Yet, as so often in mafia history, this picture of the mafia’s inner workings was based on confidential information leaked from within the mafia rather than on formal testimony given in open court. For that reason, it was all but useless as prosecution evidence.

Accordingly, the judge in this case remained agnostic on the question of whether the Sicilian mafia existed or not. He discounted the far-fetched theory that the mafia had ‘norms’ and ‘criteria’ common to all its members. He also made concessions to the defence’s argument that the mafia was ‘a psychological attitude or the typical expression of an exaggerated individualism’. But he also thought it was something more, something illegal but hard to define with any clarity. So he concluded, fuzzily, that it was a ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’. All but ten of the 114 defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence.

Law enforcement took its cue from this verdict. In 1974, the very year when, as we now know, the Palermo Commission of Cosa Nostra was reconstituted, the chief of police of Palermo argued that the mafia was only a loose set of unstructured local gangs that coalesced for specific criminal enterprises and then quickly dissolved. It was hopeless to try and fight the mafia
as such
, because it was just a part of Sicilian culture. ‘It is impossible to repress the general phenomenon of the mafia! Repress what? An idea?
A mentality?’ Cosa Nostra, as so often in its history, was proving very, very adept at concealing its real nature.

So Judge Marino’s account of the Montalto summit case gave the Italian authorities a picture of a highly structured and ritualised ’ndrangheta. Moreover, the criminal records of don ’Ntoni Macrì and Mico Tripodo bore a striking resemblance to those of many Sicilian mafia bosses of their generation and earlier: the same violence, the same powerful friends, the same curious train of acquittals for lack of evidence, the same ability to insinuate themselves into the richest sectors of the lawful economy. Yet no one seems to have wondered whether a similar picture of a structured and ritualised criminal brotherhood might fit the evidence in Sicily. The raw truth was that nothing that happened in far-off Calabria was ever likely to wake Italy up to the gravity of its organised crime problem.

Alas, when it came down to it, the revelations that followed the Montalto case did not change anything in Calabria either. Even Judge Marino, who had proved so painstaking in his research and so withering in his condemnation of the state’s failings, handed out risible sentences to the ’ndrangheta’s leaders. Italy’s laws against mafia organisations were feeble. Although a crime of ‘mafia association’ existed, and made membership of a mafia group illegal, it carried very light penalties. Most of the ‘mushroom-pickers’ were given two and a half years, and most had two of those two and a half years commuted. The bosses invoked in the chair’s appeal for unity, including don ’Ntoni Macrì, were all acquitted of belonging to a criminal association: lack of evidence, yet again. Don ’Ntoni and the others had been
mentioned
at the summit, but they were not arrested at the scene, and there was no proof that they had actually been there. Mico Tripodo was acquitted because he was in prison at the time of the meeting. The judge seemed to be speaking to his own conscience when he tried to explain his reasoning:

This is an argument that might seem like a travesty if one takes into account the reality that is felt and seen by everyone in this part of the world. But that reality has not been recognised by the criminal justice system in the few extremely serious cases that it has dealt with.

The judge, in other words, was a prisoner of history. The authorities’ repeated failure to create a legal precedent by describing the ’ndrangheta accurately, and to convict men like don ’Ntoni, meant that they could not be convicted now.

As well as feeble legislation, Italian law enforcement would continue to betray the same weaknesses that Judge Marino had so acutely identified in his account of the ’ndrangheta’s Montalto summit. The mafias would continue
to be policed in the haphazard and discontinuous way that had allowed the ’ndrangheta to grow so strong. Much blood would have to be shed before Italy was ready, finally, to create investigating methods and laws that were adequate to the threat it faced.

Years after the summit at Montalto was raided, the memories of a small group of
’ndranghetisti
who turned state’s evidence helped magistrates understand just how quickly the threat of organised crime was growing in the late 1960s.

For example, the criminal profiles of don ’Ntoni and Mico Tripodo were even more alarming than Judge Marino could know. For, as well as being chief cudgels of the ’ndrangheta, both were also fully initiated members of Cosa Nostra. Here is how one ’ndrangheta defector later recalled don ’Ntoni:

This man was the overall boss. He embodied what people thought was the Honoured Society—and he wasn’t unworthy of embodying it, in my view. We could say that he was the boss of all bosses, and I’m not the only one who has magnified his qualities . . . He was the one and only representative, a fully qualified member of Cosa Nostra . . . He was a personal friend of Sicilian mafia bosses like Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera, Pietro Torretta, Luciano Liggio, and the Grecos from Ciaculli.

Don ’Ntoni’s relationship with the Sicilian hoodlum elite was close. He smuggled cigarettes with them. He also borrowed killers from them: it is thought that the shooters in the massacre of piazza Mercato were Sicilians.

Mico Tripodo was a member of Cosa Nostra too. But the Sicilians were not his only friends. Later in his career, Mico Tripodo would spend periods of ‘forced resettlement’ in various regions. He was arrested for the last time in 1975 in Mondragone, on the northern coast of Campania—a town that had been one of the region’s most notorious camorra strongholds for a century. When he was caught, Tripodo was in hiding with two leading
camorristi
. This was just one indicator of the way in which cigarette smuggling and other businesses were weaving high-level ties between the camorra and the ’ndrangheta that were almost as densely meshed as those between Cosa Nostra and the other two organisations.

Gradually, southern Italy was developing a criminal system that was much more unified than it had ever been in the past. Members of Italy’s three historic mafias have always had contacts with one another, chiefly through
the prison system. But from the 1960s, the cases of ‘double affiliation’ and even ‘triple affiliation’ would become more and more common. What was happening was
not
the development of a single master mafia, an umbrella organisation of the underworld. Rather it was something much more subtle and efficient: the pooling of contacts, resources and expertise. Because of cigarette smuggling,
mafiosi, camorristi
and
’ndranghetisti
were rapidly learning how to work together. The new economic frontiers of mafia power could be exploited more thoroughly when Men of Honour from different criminal organisations worked together.

The evidence of later ’ndrangheta defectors also revealed more about the crucial political changes going on in the Calabrian mob. For about a decade before Montalto, the ’ndrangheta in the province of Reggio Calabria was divided into three territories. Those territories corresponded to the three coastal areas at the bony toe of the Italian boot, and thus to what is almost the natural geographical layout of ’ndrangheta power. In Sicily, about half of Cosa Nostra’s total numerical strength is concentrated around the island’s capital, Palermo. In southern Calabria, power was and is shared roughly equally between the strip of land facing Sicily that includes the provincial capital of Reggio Calabria; the Ionian coast, looking out into the Mediterranean; and the Tyrrhenian coast, or the top of the boot’s toe, which included the plain of Gioia Tauro—the largest and most fertile lowland in the region.