the same year Spaventa himself became deputy to the Interior Minister in Turin, and began once more to gather information on the Honoured Society. While the publication of Marc Monnier’s The Camorra kept the issue in the public mind, Spaventa made sure that the camorra was included within the terms of reference of a new Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the so-called ‘Great Brigandage’, a wave of peasant unrest and banditry that had engulfed much of the southern Italian countryside. The outcome of the Commission’s work was a notoriously draconian law passed in August 1863—a law that heralds the most enduring historical irony of Silvio Spaventa’s personal crusade against organised crime, and of the Right’s time in power. The name for that irony is ‘enforced residence’.
The new law of August 1863 gave small panels of government functionaries and magistrates the power to punish certain categories of suspects without a trial. The punishment they could hand down was enforced residence—meaning internal exile to a penal colony on some rocky island off the Italian coast. Thanks to Spaventa, camorristi were included in the list of people who could be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in this way.
Enforced residence was designed to deal with camorristi because they were difficult to prosecute by normal means, not least because they were so good at intimidating witnesses and could call on protectors among the elite of Neapolitan society. But once on their penal islands, camorristi had every opportunity to go about their usual business and also to turn younger inmates into hardened delinquents. In 1876 an army doctor spent three months working in a typical penal colony in the Adriatic Sea.
Among the enforced residents there are men who demand respect and unlimited veneration from the rest. Every day they buy, sell and meddle without provoking hatred or rivalry. Their word is usually law, and their every gesture a command. They are called camorristi . They have their statutes, their rites, their bosses. They win promotion according to the wickedness of their deeds. Each of them has a primary duty to keep silent about any crime, and to respond to orders from above with blind obedience.
Enforced residence became the police’s main weapon against suspected gangsters. But far from being a solution to Italy’s organised crime emergency as Silvio Spaventa hoped, it would turn out to be a way of perpetuating it.
In 1865, before these ironies had time to unfold, rumours of another criminal sect began to reach the Right’s administrators—‘the so-called Maffia’ of Sicily. The mafia would soon penetrate Italy’s new governing institutions far more thoroughly than did the camorra in Naples. So thoroughly as to make it impossible to tell where the sect ended and the state began.
6
R EBELS IN CORDUROY
L IKE THE CAMORRA , THE S ICILIAN MAFIA PRECIPITATED OUT FROM THE DIRTY POLITICS of Italian unification.
Before Garibaldi conquered Sicily in 1860 and handed it over to the new Kingdom of Italy, the island was ruled from Naples as part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In Sicily, as in Naples, the prisons of the early nineteenth century were filthy, overcrowded, badly managed, and run from within by camorristi . Educated revolutionaries joined secret Masonic sects like the Charcoal Burners. When the sect members were jailed they built relationships with the prison gangsters and recruited them as insurrectionary muscle. Soon those gangsters learned the benefits of organising along Masonic lines and, sure enough, the Bourbon authorities found it hard to govern without coming to terms with the thugs. In Sicily, just as in Naples, Italian patriots would overthrow the old regime only to find themselves repeating some of its nefarious dealings with organised crime.
But the Sicilian mafia was, from the outset, far more powerful than the Neapolitan camorra, far more profoundly enmeshed with political
The new law of August 1863 gave small panels of government functionaries and magistrates the power to punish certain categories of suspects without a trial. The punishment they could hand down was enforced residence—meaning internal exile to a penal colony on some rocky island off the Italian coast. Thanks to Spaventa, camorristi were included in the list of people who could be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in this way.
Enforced residence was designed to deal with camorristi because they were difficult to prosecute by normal means, not least because they were so good at intimidating witnesses and could call on protectors among the elite of Neapolitan society. But once on their penal islands, camorristi had every opportunity to go about their usual business and also to turn younger inmates into hardened delinquents. In 1876 an army doctor spent three months working in a typical penal colony in the Adriatic Sea.
Among the enforced residents there are men who demand respect and unlimited veneration from the rest. Every day they buy, sell and meddle without provoking hatred or rivalry. Their word is usually law, and their every gesture a command. They are called camorristi . They have their statutes, their rites, their bosses. They win promotion according to the wickedness of their deeds. Each of them has a primary duty to keep silent about any crime, and to respond to orders from above with blind obedience.
Enforced residence became the police’s main weapon against suspected gangsters. But far from being a solution to Italy’s organised crime emergency as Silvio Spaventa hoped, it would turn out to be a way of perpetuating it.
In 1865, before these ironies had time to unfold, rumours of another criminal sect began to reach the Right’s administrators—‘the so-called Maffia’ of Sicily. The mafia would soon penetrate Italy’s new governing institutions far more thoroughly than did the camorra in Naples. So thoroughly as to make it impossible to tell where the sect ended and the state began.
6
R EBELS IN CORDUROY
L IKE THE CAMORRA , THE S ICILIAN MAFIA PRECIPITATED OUT FROM THE DIRTY POLITICS of Italian unification.
Before Garibaldi conquered Sicily in 1860 and handed it over to the new Kingdom of Italy, the island was ruled from Naples as part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In Sicily, as in Naples, the prisons of the early nineteenth century were filthy, overcrowded, badly managed, and run from within by camorristi . Educated revolutionaries joined secret Masonic sects like the Charcoal Burners. When the sect members were jailed they built relationships with the prison gangsters and recruited them as insurrectionary muscle. Soon those gangsters learned the benefits of organising along Masonic lines and, sure enough, the Bourbon authorities found it hard to govern without coming to terms with the thugs. In Sicily, just as in Naples, Italian patriots would overthrow the old regime only to find themselves repeating some of its nefarious dealings with organised crime.
But the Sicilian mafia was, from the outset, far more powerful than the Neapolitan camorra, far more profoundly enmeshed with political
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