Blood Brotherhoods by John Dickie Read Free Book Online Page A

could easily be sanctioned by the camorra’s shadow judicial system. Quite whether a vendetta was legitimate or not depended partly on the Society’s rules and legal precedents, which were transmitted orally from one generation of criminals to the next. More importantly, it depended on whether the vendetta was committed by a camorrista fearsome enough to impose his will. In the prison camorra, even more than anywhere else, the rules were the tool of the rich and powerful. Honour was law for those who placed themselves above the law.
    Camorra ‘taxation’. Camorra ‘justice’. Castromediano also talks of the camorra’s ‘jurisdiction’, its ‘badges of office’, and its ‘administration’. His terminology is striking, consistent and apt: it is the vocabulary of state power. What he is describing is a system of criminal authority that apes the workings of a modern state—even within a dungeon’s sepulchral gloom.
    If the camorra of the prisons was a kind of shadow state, it had a very interventionist idea of how the state should behave. Duke Castromediano saw that camorristi fostered gambling and drinking in the full knowledge that these activities could be taxed. (Indeed the practice of taking bribes from gamers was so closely associated with gangsters that it generated a popular theory about how the camorra got its name. Morra was a game, and the capo della morra was the man who watched over the players. It was said that this title was shortened at some stage to ca-morra . The theory is probably apocryphal: in Naples, camorra meant ‘bribe’ or ‘extortion’ long before anyone thought of applying the term to a secret society.)
    Card games and bottles of wine generated other moneymaking opportunities: the camorra provided the only source of credit for unlucky gamblers, and it controlled the prison’s own stinking, rat-infested tavern. Moreover, every object that the camorra confiscated from a prisoner unable to afford his interest payments, his bottle, or his bribe, could be sold on at an eye-watering markup. The dungeons echoed to the cries of pedlars selling greasy rags and bits of stale bread. A whole squalid economy sprouted from exploiting the prisoners at every turn. As an old saying within the camorra would have it, ‘ Facimmo caccia’ l’oro de’ piducchie ’: ‘We extract gold from fleas.’
    The camorra system also reached up into the prisons’ supposed command. Naturally, many guards were on the payroll. This corruption not only gave the camorra the freedom it needed to operate, it also put even more favours into circulation. For a price, prisoners could wear their own clothes, sleep in separate cells, eat better food, and have access to medicine, letters, books and candles. By managing the traffic in goods that came in and out of prison, the camorra both invented and monopolised a whole market in contraband items.
    So the prison camorra had a dual business model designed to extract gold from fleas: extortion ‘taxes’ on the one hand and contraband commerce on the other. The camorra of today works on exactly the same principles. All that has changed is that the ‘fleas’ have become bigger. Bribes once taken on a place to lay a mattress are now cuts taken on huge public works contracts. Candles and food smuggled into prison are now consignments of narcotics smuggled into the country.
    Duke Castromediano’s years as a political prisoner were spent in several jails but everywhere he went he found the camorra in charge. So his story is not just about the origins of what today is called the Neapolitan camorra. Prisoners from different regions mingled in jails across the southern part of the Italian peninsula, on Sicily, and on many small islands. They all referred to themselves as camorristi .
    The Duke did however notice distinctions in the dress code adopted by camorristi from different regions. Sicilians tended to opt for the black plush look. (The camorrista who introduced himself to