Blood Brotherhoods by John Dickie Read Free Book Online Page B

the Duke on his first day in the Castello del Carmine was Sicilian.) Not long before, Neapolitans had dressed in the same way. But for some time now they had preferred to signal their status with clothes that could come in any colour, as long as it was ofgood quality and accessorised in gold: gold watch and chain; gold earrings; chunky gold finger rings; all topped off with a fez decorated with lots of braid, embroidery and a golden tassel.
    There were strong loyalties and rivalries between camorristi from different regions. In Duke Castromediano’s experience, the Neapolitans nurtured an ‘inveterate antipathy’ towards the Calabrians. When this antipathy exploded into open hostilities, camorristi from elsewhere tended to take sides in a familiar formation: with the Neapolitans would stand the men from the countryside near Naples and from Puglia; everyone else would side with the Calabrians. The Sicilians ‘loved to keep themselves to themselves’, said Castromediano. ‘But if they came down in favour of one side or the other, oh! the savage vendettas!’ In the worst cases, ‘tens of dead bodies took their places in the prison cemetery’.
    For all their vicious rivalries and their many distinctive qualities, Sicilian mafiosi , like Neapolitan camorristi and Calabrian ’ndranghetisti , have all referred to themselves as members of the ‘Honoured Society’. Their shared vocabulary is a sign of shared origins in the prison system of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In fact, everything Castromediano discovered in prison about the camorra not only still holds good—it still holds good for the Sicilian mafia and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta too. Italy’s criminal organisations both engage in illegal commerce and act as a shadow state that combines extortion ‘taxes’ and alternative judicial and political systems. If they had their way, Italy’s Honoured Societies would turn the whole world into a giant prison, run by their simple but brutally effective rules.

    Seven and a half years after Sigismondo Castromediano was admitted to the Castello del Carmine, the diplomatic pressure on the Bourbon government finally paid off for the patriotic prisoners; like others, the Duke had his sentence commuted to permanent exile. By then his hair had turned completely white. One of the last things he did before being freed was to bribe a jailor to let him keep two mournful souvenirs: his shackles and his red tunic. The humiliations of his prison years would remain with him for the rest of his life.
    The Duke spent just over a year in exile. Then came Garibaldi: the Bourbon state collapsed and its territory became part of Italy. In Turin, on 17 March 1861, Castromediano was in parliament to see Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, pronounced hereditary monarch of the new Kingdom. The ideal for which he had suffered so long was now an official reality.
    But Castromediano soon lost the parliamentary position his prison martyrdom had earned. He returned to his ancestral seat in Puglia, the region that forms the heel of the Italian boot. While he was in jail his castle near the city of Lecce had fallen into serious disrepair. But he had been leeched to near penury by the camorra and would never have the money to renovate. The Duke’s occasional visitors over the years found the castle a fitting setting for a man who had endured so much in the national cause: it became a semi-ruin like those in the romantic novels that had so fired the Duke’s patriotism when he was young. In one corner of the castle chapel, on permanent display, were what he called his ‘decorations’: the prison chain and tunic. The camorra had seeped into the Duke’s soul, infecting him with a recurring melancholy: ‘the spawn of hell’, he called it. ‘One of the most immoral and disastrous sects that human infamy has ever invented.’
    The Duke began writing a memoir of his captivity only days after he was released; yet it remained unfinished