My Acquaintance with the "Men of Honour"

In 1998 I was on a short business trip to Cologne and stayed at the apartment of an old pal from Hannover days, Romie. I awoke one morning in her spare room, surrounded by pictures of her family, images of Ganesh, the elephant god (Romie is half-Indian), and momentoes of her musical past. Searching for something to read to pass the time before rising, I glanced through the bookshelves over the bed. A book that caught my eye was "Mafia Women", by Clare Longrigg (Chatto and Windus, 1997). I opened the book at a page of photos, and found myself staring at members of a family I used to meet regularly in Naples, without knowing their true affiliations.

I recognized immediately Erminia Giuliano (pictured above with Maradonna). Their family bar was midway between Piazza Garibaldi, where I used to eat, and my apartment near the Botanical gardens, and it was a convenient place to meet Jija and her friends after work. I got to know one of Erminia's sons through a Brazilian woman I met at their bar, and he asked me to take pictures of his new baby. Only later did I learn from the police that the bar was well known to them as a haunt of drug dealers, and another of Erminia's sons was a notorious cocaine-addict.

Her youngest son, who waited at tables at the bar, used to flirt with Jasmine, a young friend of Jija's. He was a lively kid, always laughing, and we used tip him well. Jasmine taught him a few words of English, which he used try out on me. He thought I was American--when I explained that I was Irish, not American, he grinned and said "Irish, American--they're all the same!". He was killed within sight of the bar when his scooter ran into a car at the base of the hill leading down to Porta Capuana. Jasmine was disconsolate at his death (but she didn't have much time to grieve--shortly afterwards she was kidnapped and gang-raped by a bunch of teenagers and is now a mental case).

What I didn't know was that Erminia's father, Pio, whom I had often seen sipping coffee at the bar, was the head of one of the best-known Camorra clans in Naples. Her brother, Luigi (whom I had never met as he was in prison) was known in Neapolitan dialect as "'o re", the King, of the Forcella, the district surrounding the ancient Via Tribunale, which leads on to the Porta Capuana. He had played a major role in the "Mafia wars" of the eighties, during which hundreds of people had been killed, many of them stabbed in prison. In one incident a member of the Giuliano family sent radios into the prison as gifts for his men--inside each set was taped a cut-throat razor.

Luigi's daughter, Marianna, an attractive blue-eyed blond, who was about 15 at the time, used to work on the till at the bar. With colouring like that I could hardly believe she was Neapolitan (Erminia is also a blue-eyed blond). She got married at 16 (her mother was married at 13) shortly after I left Naples--Luigi was absent, still in prison. Her mother, Carmela (at right), was arrested regularly on various charges, from drug-dealing to extortion--she claimed she was being harassed because she was Luigi's wife. In fact, it's tradition in the Camorra that when a man is in prison his wife takes his place, and I was told that the Giuliano women are well-known for being the real strength of that family.

There were several pictures of Maradonna dotted around the bar-- when another of Luigi's daughters, Gemma, married in 1990, Diego Maradonna was guest of honour at the wedding.

Background--the Mafia, Camorra and 'ndrangheta

Throughout the seventies and eighties hundreds of people throughout Southern Italy and Sicily had been murdered by agents of the Mafia. Giancarlo Siani was one. A writer for the Naples daily Il Mattino, he was slain in 1985 in Naples. He was "killed," says the report of an anti-Mafia investigation committee, "because he decided to investigate collusion in the assignation of lands in Torre Annunziata between the then-mayor Domenico Bertone and the Gionta Mafia clan."

Until 1992 the Mafia did not receive this kind of attention. The Christian Democrats, the political party that dominated Italy until recently, used the Mafia to maintain power and were reluctant to direct attention to organized crime. Furthermore, the Mafia is an ancient phenomenon, and Italian public opinion had not caught up to the fact that the Mafia was no longer the local racketeers of the 1950s. During the 1970s, organized crime moved out of its traditional strongholds like western Sicily and conquered the rest of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. The Mafia expanded its extortion racket and enriched itself through the sale of drugs. It infiltrated local administrative offices, going as far as the police precincts and the judicial chambers. It crossed into the new markets of northern Italy. Unfortunately, only local reports told how Salvatore "Toto" Riina (in picture on right) and his men controlled access to governmental power in Palermo, how the men of the Camorra in Naples and of the 'ndrangheta in Calabria conquered the black market as well as the allocation of public lands and how this control was eventually defended by Kalashnikovs or car bombs.

It took time for Italians to recognize the danger that the Mafia posed to democracy. At the end of 1989, Italy's chief of police, Prefect Vincenzo Parisi, delivered a speech at a high school. He defined the Mafia as an enemy of the Italian state, a threat to Italian democracy that practically had the force of a hostile power. Parisi denounced the enormous sway that the Cosa Nostra had seized. But it would take three years and terrible events for Italians, especially Italian journalists, to address the implications of Parisi's charge.

Judge Falcone, brought from Palermo to Rome to direct the division of Penal Affairs for the Ministry of Justice, mapped a new judicial geography with new guidelines for the prosecution of the Mafia. But it took his assassination in May 1992, followed by the killing of his colleague Borsellino in July 1992, to make the project a reality and give Italy an investigative, penal and judicial system that could effectively compete with organized crime (on the left, the aftermath of the explosion of 1 000 Kilos of explosives that killed Falcone, his wife and bodyguard). Shortly afterwards the 11-year-old son of a "pentito", Giuseppe Di Matteo, was kidnapped, held for 18 months, and then strangled and his body thrown into a bath of acid, because his father had collaborated with the legal authorities. The "pentiti" continued to make deals with the police in return for information, but funnily enough, of the 1200 mafiosi who have so far collaborated in this manner, not a single one could specify a bank account that had been used by the Mafia. Is this a charade?

Nevertheless, despite the efforts of the authorities, during the time I was in Naples I had the feeling that the old order was trying to re-establish itself.

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