| "And the Mafia - what's this Mafia that the newspapers are always
talking about?" "Yeah, what is the Mafia, after all?" Brescianelli
chimed in. "It's a very complicated thing to explain", Bellodi said. "It's
& incredible, that's what it is." Leonardo Sciascia, The Day of the Owl
Few modern social phenomena have been more misinterpreted and
misunderstood than the Mafia, 'ndrangheta and Camorra, the three names
designating organized criminal activity in Sicily, Calabria and Naples
respectively. In some sense it is no surprise that there should be
misunderstandings. Numerous hindrances lie in wait for the would-be
Mafia observer. Most important of these may be the secrecy in which the
Mafia shrouds itself, a secrecy assured by the vow of silence known as
omertà, which surrounds all those who, however unwillingly, come into
contact with it.
An example: at 2am, July 10, 1988, three associates of the Camorra boss
Antonio Bardellino were gunned down on the streets of his hometown of
Aversa, just outside Naples, by members of a rival clan. The gunfight
lasted thirty minutes. A few minutes after the last shots were fired,
the police arrived. While they removed one of the corpses from the
street, a man in a nearby apartment opened his window to ask in a
derisory tone - "Anything happen down there?" As Leonardo Sciascia shows
in his penetrating portrait of the Mafia world cited above, one knows
better than to witness a Mafia crime.
Another, less dramatic, hindrance to making sense of the Mafia , 'ndrangheta
and Camorra is the complexity of these phenomena. They are distinct
organizations, based in particular territories, but they also have
numerous common characteristics, not to mention continuous dealings with
one another. The Mafia and 'ndrangheta especially have similar,
interwoven, histories - unless otherwise specified, in this article the
term Mafia will be used to indicate them both. The Neapolitan Camorra,
for all its similarities, is something of a case unto itself, and will
be considered separately.
Until recently organized crime was generally viewed as a southern
problem, an issue of "special" interest to those with a criminal
curiosity. But with the Mani Pulite investigations in the 1990s it
became clear that these organizations are thoroughly enmeshed in the
fabric of Italian society as a whole, and that understanding Italy is
hardly possible without reference to them. Certainly they are not
something that can be eradicated with one trial, defeated in one year or
even in ten; indeed to move beyond the Mafia would require the total
transformation of Italian society, politics and economic life. Those
that ask what shape Italy will have in the 21st century therefore also
need to ask what role the Mafia, 'ndrangheta and Camorra will play in it.
Nelson Moe , with contributions by Rob Andrews
Mafia and 'ndrangheta
The one thing most mafiologues agree on is that the Mafia as a thing
does not exist. When a defendant in a 1960s Mafia trial was asked if he
belonged to the Mafia he responded, "I don't know what the word means".
This criminal was not so much evading the question as confessing a real
perplexity. Mafiosi never call themselves, or one another, mafiosi, but
rather amici (friends) or uomini d'onore (men of honour). In the words
of one noted mafiologue, the defendant above "knew individuals who are
called mafiosi, not because they belong to a secret sect but rather
because they behave in a particular fashion, that is in a Mafia-like
fashion".
What does it mean to behave in a Mafia-like fashion? "It means to make
oneself respected, to be a man of honour , capable of vindicating by
force any offence against his enemy," writes another Mafia expert, Pino
Arlacchi. Honour and respect clearly have rather different meanings here
than those that most people attach to them. A man is an uomo d'onore
when he acts according to the prevailing codes of courage, cleverness
and ferocity, never hesitating to resort to violence and trickery to
gain the upper hand.
What gradually emerges from this portrait, however, is a sort of
confusion between the Mafia as a "state of mind, a philosophy of life, a
moral code, prevailing among all Sicilians" (Luigi Barzini), and
organized criminal activity, delinquency and social deviance. In
southern Italy, the border between the two is often unclear.
Two aspects of southern Italian culture in particular seem to have
contributed to the birth and development of the Mafia as a criminal
organization. The first is the generally positive value this culture has
given to assertiveness, aggression and the ability to impose one's will
on others. The meek, mild and naive may be saints in their afterlives,
but in this life they are, quite simply, fools. The fundamental
Neapolitan phrase, ca'nisciun e'fesso ("I'm no fool") - with its
implication "you won't get the best of me" - sums up the milieu of
dominance and submission in which the southern Italian lives.
A second, related aspect is the southern Italian attitude towards the
state. Even today, the relationship of the southern Italian (and of many
northern Italians as well) to the state is one of profound distrust. The
state, its institution and laws, are not something in which one
participates as a citizen but are rather things which challenge the
citizen's independence, interfering with his family's sacred autonomy.
This attitude towards the state may have its origins in the long
succession of invading powers that ruled southern Italy over the
centuries (Norman, French, Catalan, and so on). And also in the distance
that separated the mass of peasant-farmers ( contadini ) working on huge
estates ( latifondi ) from their absentee landlords residing in Naples
or Palermo. Certainly Unification did little to help matters in the
south, transferring as it did the capital from Naples to Rome and
replacing the Bourbon monarchy with the Turin-based House of Savoy.
Whatever the case, the space of distrust between citizen and state is
the space in which the Mafia has prospered.
The Camorra
Though in recent years the Neapolitan Camorra has in many ways become
indistinguishable from the Mafia and ' ndrangheta , conducting similar
illicit activities in the drug trade, extortion, building speculation
and suchlike, and often working in collaboration with them, its origins
are quite distinct from its southern cousins. While the Mafia and '
ndrangheta were predominantly rural phenomena until World War II, the
Camorra has always been an urban animal, a secret underworld
organization of gambling and gaming. Today, a main Camorra activity is
that of the clandestine lottery, which shadows the official one run by
the state. Instead of buying an official ticket you buy one printed by
the Camorra. The winning numbers are those drawn by the official lottery,
but the Camorra version has significant advantages: if you win you're
paid immediately (instead of waiting a year or two); and, clearly, you
pay no taxes.
Though the Mafia has outshone, or outshot, the Camorra over the past
century, the Camorra is much older and was already a well-established
and ill-reputed criminal society at the beginning of the nineteenth
century. In the bustling Bourbon capital there were huge sums of wealth
to be controlled by aspiring men of the underworld, and there were few
commercial transactions in the city of which the camorristi did not get
a substantial cut, known as the taglio or tangente . Even today, a great
number of Neapolitan businesses pay a monthly sum to the Camorra for "protection"
- which of course means protection from the Camorra itself.
Until World War II the Camorra was a relatively traditional organization,
performing the familiar social functions of mediation and the
maintenance of a kind of harmony, by whatever violent and parasitic
means. Against a background of profound transformations in postwar
Naples, and the arrival of the American-trained gangster Lucky Luciano ,
the Camorra turned to the traffic in contraband cigarettes and drugs.
Like the Mafia, the Camorra has become entrepreneurial, and the name of
the clan which commanded Naples until recently, the New Organized
Camorra, suggests that the new Neapolitan underworld is structured more
like a commercial firm than a family.
Although Camorra practice is to retain its business in all corners of
the globe, its cardinal rule is to maintain its connection to the
culture of the region, to the popular quarters of Naples. Such is the
case of the Giuliano family, the clan based in Forcella, the district
near the train station, which controls the centre of Naples. Though
members of the family have become millionaires many times over, moving
comfortably in the international circles of high society, the family
still lives in the centre of one of Naples' most run-down quarters, in a
basso, or one-room, ground-floor apartment. A friend from Forcella once
explained this apparent contradiction: "These camorristi , for however
powerful they become, realize that outside their quarter, their
territory, they're nobodies, provincial hoods. They stay here because
this is where they count, this is where their respect and control is
beyond dispute."
Ironically, the "traditional", neighbourhood character of such a Camorra
clan as the Giuliano family creates a clash between good neighbourliness
and delinquency. By producing and dealing heroin, the Camorra, Giulianos
included, have inflicted upon Naples one of the great social tragedies
in contemporary Italy, as evidenced by the used needles that litter the
streets of the city. This paradox was brought home to the Giuliano
family in the autumn of 1987 when one of their own, seventeen-year-old
Ciro, died of a heroin overdose. What followed was unprecedented: the
grandfather/godfather of the family forbade the funeral to take place in
his native quarter, making it pass through a street behind Forcella. He
wanted to signal to his "people" that something was wrong, that
something had to change. This strange admonition, however, did not deter
the thousands of mourners from following the funeral cortege, and the 25
limousines bearing flowers from "friends" made clear that it wasn't just
any seventeen-year-old who had died.
The other ground-breaking aspect of this incident was the reaction of
Nunzio Giuliano , the boy's father. Soon after his son's death, Nunzio
began a campaign (in the papers, and at public gatherings) against the
heroin trade and the Camorra's perpetration of it - in general terms,
taking care not to incriminate any kin. Many saw this as a potential
turning point in the Camorra's operations in Naples, while others, less
optimistic, viewed it as little more than an act of showmanship, a piece
of theatre, to divert attention from the real workings of the Camorra
and an embarrassing family tragedy.
The late 1990s saw the body-count in Naples overtaking that of the Mafia
and 'ndrangheta, with the high tally of innocent victims caught in the
crossfire making the headlines. As Camorra women get in on the act for
the first time , often taking over the roles of their dead or
incarcerated husbands and brothers, the situation is as chaotic and
desperate as ever, and there is no sign yet of the same kind of
intensive investigations that the anti-Mafia commission has set in
motion in Palermo.
Recent years have seen alliances forged with criminal organizations in
Russia and the Balkans, creating a greatly expanded scope for dealing in
illegal immigration, prostitution and arms trafficking. Evidence has
surfaced of Camorra involvement in musical piracy - illegal recordings
in Italy account for some twenty percent of the total music retail
market - leading to the arrest in 1999 of 14 members of a Neapolitan
organization calling itself "Quadrifoglio", also involved in
counterfeiting and money-laundering and thought to be close to the
Contini clan. The creation of the single market in the EU has further
extended the Camorra's arm, as seen by the exposure in 2000 of a scandal
in Brussels where it was found to be bribing officials to subsidize and
market "butter" which contained beef tallow, cosmetics oils and
chemicals - but no milk products
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