Courts, Criminals and the Camorra

by Arthur Cheney Train

Yet the traditions of the Camorra still obtain, and in many of the prisons its influence is supreme. Witness the deadly duel between twelve Camorrists and twelve Mafiusi in 1905 in the Pozzuoli penitentiary, in which five men were killed and the remainder had to be torn apart at the muzzles of the infantry. Witness also, and more strikingly, the trial and execution of Lubrano, who, confined in jail with other Camorristi, betrayed their secrets. In formal session behind prison walls, the “brothers” sentenced him to death, and he was stabbed by a picciotto, who was thereupon “raised” to the highest grade of the society.

The Camorrists still turn out in force for their religious holidays, and visit Monte Vergine and other shrines in gala costume, accompanied by their women. Drunken rioting, debauchery, and knifings mark the devotions of this most religious sect. But they are a shoddy lot compared to the “bravos” of the last century. At best, they are a lot of cheap crooks—“pikers” compared to a first-class cracksman—pimps, sharpers, petty thieves, and dealers in depravity, living off the proceeds of women and by the blackmail of the ignorant and credulous.

It would be ridiculous to deny that the Camorra exists in Naples, but it would be equally absurd to claim that it has the picturesqueness or virility of ancient times. Yet it is dreaded by all—by the Contessa in her boudoir, by the manager of the great trans-oceanic line, by the ragazzo on the street. The inquiry of the traveller reveals little concerning it. One will be confidently told that no such society or sect any longer exists, and with equal certainty that it is an active organization of criminals in close alliance with the government. Then, suddenly, some trifling incident occurs and your eyes are opened to the truth, at first hardly realized, that the crust of modern civilization is, in the case of southern Italy, superimposed upon conditions of life no more enlightened than they were a thousand years ago, and that hatred and distrust of government, ignorance, bigotry, and poverty make it a field fertile for any sort of superstition or belief, be it in the potency of the pulverized bones of young children for rheumatism, the efficacy of a stuffed dove sliding down a wire as a giver of fat harvest, or the deadly power of the Camorra. And where several million people believe in and fear the Camorra, if for no other reason, the Camorra or something akin to it is bound to exist.

Before long you will begin to find out things for yourself. You may have your watch filched from your waistcoat pocket, and you may perhaps get it back through the agency of a shabby gentleman—introduced by the hotel porter—who, in spite of his rough exterior and threadbare clothing, proves marvellously skilful in tracing the stolen property—for a consideration.

You may observe that sometimes, when you take a cab, a mysterious stranger will spring up beside the driver and accompany you to your destination. This is the “collector” for the Camorra—the parasite that feeds on every petty trade and occupation in the city. For the boatman shares his hire with a man who loiters on the dock; the porter gives up a soldo or two on every job; and the beggar divides with the Camorra the profit from la misericordia.[10] Last of all, you may stumble into one of the quarters of Naples where the keeping of order is practically intrusted to the Camorra; where the police do not go, save in squads; and where each householder or dive-keeper pays a weekly tax to the society for its supposed “protection,” part of which goes higher up—to some “delegato” or “commissary” of the “P. S.”[11]

Or you may enter into the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine and find a throng of evil-faced men and women worshipping at the shrines and calling for the benediction of the Holy Trinity upon their criminal enterprises. It is said that sometimes they hang votive offerings of knives and daggers upon the altars, and religiously give Heaven its share out of the proceeds of their crimes, much as some of our own kings of finance and merchant princes, after a lifetime of fraud and violation of law, will seek to salve their consciences and buy an entrance to Paradise by founding a surgical hospital or endowing a chair of moral philosophy. But until, by chance, you meet a Camorrist funeral, you will have no conception of the real horror of the Camorra, with its procession of human parasites with their blinking eyes, their shuffling gait, their artificial sores and deformities, all crawling from their holes to shamble in the trail of the hearse that carries a famous basista, a capo paranze, or a capo in testa to his grave.

It is undoubtedly a fact that ease of living, which generates indolence, induces moral laxity, and a society composed in part of a hundred thousand homeless people, so poor that a few soldi represent a feast or a festival, who sleep in alleys, on the wharves, in the shrubbery of parks, or wherever night finds them, is a fertile recruiting ground for criminals. The poverty of the scum of Naples passes conception. Air and sky, climate and temperature, combine to induce a vagabondage which inevitably is hostile to authority. The strong bully the weak; the man tyrannizes the woman; the padrone easily finds a ragged crew eager to do his bidding for a plate of macaroni and a flask of unspeakable wine; a well-dressed scoundrel becomes a demi-god by simple virtue of his clothes and paste-diamond scarf-pin; the thief that successfully evades the law is a hero; and the crook who stands in with the police is a politician and a diplomat. The existence of the Camorra in its broad sense turns, not on the vigor of the government or the honesty of the local functionaries, so much as on the conditions of the society in which it is to be found.

Such is a glimpse of the Camorra, past and present, which, with its secret relations to the police, its terrors for the superstitious and timid, its attraction for the weak and evil-minded, its value to the politicians, its appeal to the natural hatred of the southern Italian for law and government, will continue so long as social conditions in Naples remain the same—until reform displaces indifference and incapacity, and education[12] and religion effectively unite to lift the Neapolitans out of the stew of their own grease. This is the sociological key to the Camorra, for camorra means nothing but moral delinquency, and moral delinquency is always the companion of ignorance, superstition, and poverty. These last are the three bad angels of southern Italy.

For the reasons previously stated it is not surprising that the disclosures of 1900 had little or no permanent effect upon the criminal activities of the Camorra. The Ring and the politicians had, it is true, received a severe shock, but the minor criminals had not been affected and their hold on the population remained as strong as ever. Soon the Camorrists became as active at the elections, and the authorities as complacent, as before, and after a spasmodic pretence at virtue the “Public Safety” relapsed into its old relations to the organization.[13]

The leaders of the new “Beautifully Reformed Society” were reported to be Giovanni Rapi, a suave and well-educated gambler, the Cashier of the organization and its chief adviser, surnamed “The Professor” for having once taught modern languages in the public schools, at one and the same time a member of both the high and the low Camorra, and an international blackleg; Enrico Alfano, popularly known as “Erricone,” the reorganizer of the society and its “Supreme Head,” the boss of all the gangs, a fearless manipulator of elections, a Camorrist of the new order—of the revolver instead of the knife, the confidant of his godfather, Don Ciro Vittozzi,—the third of the criminal triumvirate, the most mediæval of all these mediæval figures, and the Machiavelli of Naples.