Courts, Criminals and the Camorra

by Arthur Cheney Train

Cuffiano a chilli’ e a chisti!”

(We are not Carabinieri,

We are not royalists,

But we are Camorrists—

The devil take the others!)

Under the Bourbons the police recognized and used the Camorra as their secret agents and granted its members immunity in return for information and assistance. Both preyed on the honest citizen, and existed by extortion and blackmail. “The government and the Camorra hunted with one leash.” Yet, because the police were regarded as the instruments of despotism, the people came to look upon the Camorrists (who, technically at least, were hostile to authority) as allies against tyranny. It was at this period of Italian history that the present distrust of government and distaste for law had its rise, as well as the popular sympathy for all victims of legal process and hatred for all who wear the uniform of the police. The Camorra still appeals to the dread of tyranny in the heart of the south Italian to which in large measure, by its complicity, it contributed. Thus the love of liberty was made an excuse for traffic with criminals; thus was fostered the omertà, the perverted code of honor which makes it obligatory upon a victim to shield his assassin from the law; and thus was born the loathing of all authority which still obtains among the descendants of the victims of Ferdinand’s atrocious system, which, whatever their origin, gave the mala vita—brigandage, the Mafia, and the Camorra—their virulence and tenacity.

In 1848 the Camorra had become so powerful that Ferdinand II actually negotiated with it for support; but the society demanded too much in return and the plan fell through. On this account the Camorra threatened to bring on a revolution! In this it was not successful, but it now began openly to affect revolutionary ideas and pretend to be the friend of liberty, its imprisoned members posing as patriots, victims of tyranny.

Thus it gained enormously in prestige and membership, while the throne became less and less secure. Ferdinand II granted a general amnesty in order to heighten his popularity, and the Camorrists who had been in jail now had to be reckoned with in addition to those outside. In 1859 Ferdinand died and Francis II seated himself on the quaking throne. His prefect of police, Liborio Romano, whom history has accused of plotting the Bourbon overthrow with Garibaldi and of playing both ends against the middle, had either perforce or with malice prepense conceived the scheme of harnessing the Camorra by turning over to it the maintenance of order in the city. The police had become demoralized and needed rejuvenating, he said. Francis II thereupon had another jail delivery, and “Don Liborio” organized a “National Guard” and enlisted throngs of Camorrists in it, while in the gendarmerie he recruited the picciotti as rank and file and installed the regular Camorrists as brigadiers.

Then came the news that Garibaldi was marching upon Naples. Romano, still ostensibly acting for the best interests of his royal master, urged the latter’s departure from the capital. The revolution was coming. In some indefinable way, people who were for the Bourbons yesterday saw to-day the impossibility of the continuance of the dynasty. The cat was ready to jump, but it had not jumped yet. Whatever may have been Romano’s real motives so far as the Bourbons were concerned, the fact remains that his control over the national militia and police, during the days and nights just prior to the departure of the King and the arrival of Garibaldi, resulted in a vigilance on their part which protected property and maintained an order otherwise impossible.[9] Garibaldi at last arrived, with Romano’s Camorrist police on hand to cheer loudly for “Victor Emmanuel and Italy United!” and to knock on the head or stick a knife into the gizzard of any one who seemed lukewarm in his reception of the conquering hero. The cat jumped—assisted by the Camorra. The liberals were in, and with them the Camorrists, as the saying is, “with both feet.” Thus, perhaps for the first time in history, was a society of criminals recognized officially by the government and intrusted with the task of policing themselves.

From 1860 on the Camorra entered upon a new phase, a sort of duplex existence, having on the one hand its old criminal organization (otherwise known as the Camorra bassa) and on the other a group of politicians or ring with wide-spread ramifications, closely affiliated with the society and dealing either directly with it or through its more influential and fashionable members, much as a candidate for office in New York might have secured the support of the “Paul Kelly Gang” through the offices of the politician under whose patronage it existed. This “smart set” and the ring connected with it was known as the Camorra alta or Camorra elegante, and from the advent of Garibaldi to the present time the strictly criminal operations of the society have been secondary in importance to its political significance. Its members became not merely crooks, but “protected” crooks, since they gave office to men who would look after them in return, and the result was the alliance of politics and crime in the political history of Southern Italy during the last fifty years.