Book review: Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias

THE Sicilian mafia and its Neapolitan equivalent, the Camorra, owe their existence to lemons and mozzarella cheese.

Yes, other factors were involved. But as John Dickie's magesterial account of the formation and early years of the southern Italian criminal fraternities makes clear, without those simple comestibles their life would have been so much harder.

Dickie has followed his bestseller Cosa Nostra by looking beyond the shores of Sicily at the mezzogiorno's two other secret societies: the Camorrista of Naples and the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria. In Blood Brotherhoods he shows how, with the Mafia on the other side of the Straits of Messina, this triangulation has formed an alternative state within and without Italy since the nation was born.

Italy is an old civilisation but a young nation state. Its kingdoms, provinces and autonomous cities were not united until the 1860s. The violence and upheaval involved in creating one polity from wealthy Turin and Venice to dirt-scrabble Palermo and Bari left several uncomfortable legacies. One of them was the legitimisation of mobsters and peasant bullies from the far south who put their weight behind the cause of unification.

Those peasant bullies had been around for a while, but on a localised and relatively modest scale. In Sicily the early mafiosi made their money from extortion and protection rackets in the Golden Bowl, the rich citrus fruit groves outside Palermo which provided pre-industrial Italy's most valuable exports.

In Naples, street gangs ran prostitution and other city strategies. And far away in the Greek-speaking, mountainous, forgotten toe of Calabria, a bandit clan of "lads with attitude" filled the vacuum left by a careless state.

Those three distinct operations coalesced into the Mafia, the Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta. The fact that they thrived after unification was not necessarily due to unification - although in Naples especially, the Camorra successfully identified themselves with Garibaldi's freedom fighters.

John Dickie is very good on the persistent ambivalence, inside and outside Italy, towards its mafias. The fact that many of them had fought - or rioted - for unification certainly masked their true identity and purpose for a number of years.

Even when it became clear that their founding ideology was purely criminal, a haze still hung around the Mafia and Camorra. Northern Italians in particular found it difficult to credit southerners with the wit to develop regimented and superbly organised outlaw institutions. Some preferred to think of them as simple and honourable folk policemen, established in defiance of Spanish colonial rule.

Italy's actual policemen, the honest ones, knew the truth - that they faced large, ruthless and united criminal syndicates that were stealthily corrupting every corner of the public and private life of their nation. Italians were disenfranchised, even by 19th century European standards. Before 1882, only 2 per cent of the population could vote, and even after the reforms of that year just 7 per cent were enfranchised. (In neighbouring France and Switzerland, all men had been able to vote since 1848.) But disenfranchisement did not turn people to brutal crime. Greed did that, and most of the rest of the disenfranchised suffered for it.

Despite their murderous codes of silence, the blood brotherhoods were never immune to the campaigns of decent policemen, politicians and officials. Much of Dickie's absorbing narrative is driven by portraits of determined officers of the law and accounts of the sensational trials they brought about.

One of those mass trials, of Camorristi in 1912, almost succeeded in destroying that organisation. Mussolini's anti-Mafia campaign in the 1920s certainly drew blood in Sicily. But the southern Italian brotherhoods habitually rise again, like the undead from their vaults.

The remnants of the Camorra revived by moving out of the city and putting a stranglehold on the mozzarella-producing buffalo swamps in the surrounding countryside. The Mafia laid low, agreed with Mussolini's vain boast that he had eliminated them, and waited for the dictator to go. In the harsh Aspromonte mountains of Calabria, the lads with attitude never went away. Their 'Ndrangheta has grown, silently, almost unobserved and undisturbed, to become in Dickie's words "the most powerful mob of all". Could that be, perhaps, because Francis Ford Coppola made no films about them?