Bloody revenge all in the name of honour

By PETER POPHAM

We don't know her name, and for excellent reasons her photograph has not been released, but from the police description we can picture her well enough: a brunette, petite, angular, 25. Striking enough, no doubt, to have caught the fancy of the powerful man she was about to betray.

Alone she bustled down the platform of Foggia station and caught the train to Bari, capital of the Puglia region in the far south of Italy. Alone she walked to the Tribunale, the court building in the city centre, took the lift to the second floor and presented herself to the Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia, the regional crime squad dedicated to tackling organised crime.

"Officer," she said, "I'm tired of watching murder, attacks and vendettas cooked up around my kitchen table while I'm making dinner." And her long tale of butchery and revenge began to unfold.

As a result of what she said, police in the Gargano region staged overnight raids arresting 90 alleged gangsters implicated in a vendetta that has claimed 35 lives.

The young woman, now resettled in a secret location with a new identity, was the "companion" as she put it, of a gang leader in the town of Sannicandro Garganico, Puglia. And the crimes dreamed up by the family's menfolk while she was chopping basil or throwing pasta in the pot belong to a vendetta between the Ciaravella and the Tarantino clans that has been going on for 30 years. Besides the 35 dead, there have been 50 other attempted murders.

It began in the 1970s with a case of horse-rustling and a bitter dispute between herdsmen over grazing land. Crime begat crime in the traditional southern way, with sons and brothers goaded by wives and mothers to exact revenge and protect the family's omerta, or honour.

The key atrocity came in March 1981: Matteo Ciaravella and his wife and three children aged between 5 and 17, were slaughtered in their home. Their bodies were never found. It is thought they were ground to a paste and fed to the pigs.

The man believed responsible belonged to the Tarantino family, with whom the Ciaravella had been feuding for years. And now it was the turn of the Tarantino to suffer the blows of honour.

The most recent one to die was Antonio Tarantino, 41, killed with three shots outside a bar in Sannicandro Garganico. Of the eight brothers, Antonio was the sixth to die violently, all paying the price for the slaughter of Matteo Ciaravella and his family. Giuseppe Tarantino, Antonio's brother, has been in jail since 1981, serving life for the murders.

But that will be of no consequence to the family's enemies because, as Clare Longrigg writes in her book Mafia Women, "The law of vendetta does not acknowledge any other form of justice". If the feud - faihida in local dialect - continues, and the first, nightmarish rule of vendetta is that it never ends until everyone is dead, Giuseppe Tarantino can also expect to be gunned down one of these days, either inside prison or out.

Sannicandro Garganico is on the edge of the Gargano National Park on the heel of the Italian boot. Until a few decades ago, Gargano was practically unvisited by the outside world. It was a mountainous promontory rising from the plains of Tavoliere, shut away by dense forests of beech and oak.

Seen from the north, southern Italy is lawless, feudalistic, introverted, marching to a different drum; and as southern Italy is to the north, Gargano is to the rest of the south.

Although Direzione Investigativa AntiMafia is handling the Gargano case, this is the first time in the long involvement of the forces of law and order with the clan war that the word "Mafia" has been invoked. These families are not Mafia gangs as the outside world understands Sicilian clans such as the Corleone to be. They are farming families who fell out with each other in a region where the presence of the Italian State remains hazy, where state justice is either absent or too late.

Crimes of horse-rustling and pasture-poaching, the details bleached from collective memory, long ago begat crimes of blood in punishment. And in the lands where "blood calls blood", that was enough to set the vendetta rolling.

Because what was at stake was that ineffable entity known as omerta, it was not enough that the one who had given offence or his kin be merely rubbed out. The crime must be avenged with all the effects of grand drama that the theatrically beautiful towns of southern Italy can provide: the victim emerging after Mass from some immense baroque church, surrounded by hundreds of fellow-worshippers, or if shot at home, struck by so many bullets that no identity remained.

Attempts to short-circuit the vendetta by bringing in the police are singled out for exemplary punishment. Antonio Miucci, a member of one of the clans involved in this faihida, went to the police after his brother was murdered by two hired killers wearing carnival masks.

He gave the police the names he knew, and six men were arrested. All were acquitted for want of evidence. One year later, Miucci was shot dead by another man in a carnival mask.

"Many trials," as the local people say cynically, "many acquittals."

"Many enemies," they also say, in mingled respect and fear, "much honour".

Much blood spilt and few witnesses: Antonio Tarantino was murdered outside a bar in San Nicardo Garganico on November 1 last year, a public holiday, when the streets were teeming with people. No one saw a thing.

It could have happened just like this at any time in the past 500 years or more. But like the rest of Italy, Gargano is changing fast. Much of the beautiful woodland has been cleared and this once-remote corner has been discovered by tourists.

The warring families of Ciavarella and Tarantino have been changing, too. Grazing and horse-stealing was granddad's thing. Now they kill each other over the usual staples of organised crime: drug importing and dealing, protection money, extortion, kickbacks from public works projects.

And perhaps that is part of the explanation of why one housewife decided to call it a day. Thirty years ago these were country families, but three decades of protecting family "honour" has transformed them into brutal and pitiless criminals.

What she did was entirely out of character for women trapped in a blood feud. Like Lady Macbeth, the classic female role is to egg on their menfolk.

"The classic view of Mafia women," says Clare Longrigg, "is of avenging angels in black veils, crying vendetta for the murder of their loved ones."

It is a view endorsed by travel writer Norman Lewis, who married the daughter of a Mafia boss. He describes a blood feud between two families from the suburbs of Palermo, in the late 19th century.

"A man might be approached," he wrote in The Honoured Society, "by some enshrouded, tragic crone he had never seen before - the female head of one of the clans - who would inform him that he was now the surviving head of the [family], and that he must consider himself in a state of ritual vendetta with some cousin he had never seen or heard of."

He described one of the constant features of the ritual: "The kissing, even pretended sucking, of the wounds [of the dead man], by close relations such as mother, wife or brother, followed by the spoken formula: 'In this way may I drink the blood of the man who killed you ... "'

The exception to that rule only serves to drive it home: a Palermo woman in the 1960s, Serafina Battaglia, went to court to denounce the men who had murdered her husband and son - only because no man was left alive to avenge her. As long as her son remained alive she had given him no peace.

"After her husband's murder," wrote Nino Calderone in Gli uomini del disonore, "every morning without fail she would scream at her son: 'Get uuuuup! They have murdered your father! Get uuuuup! You must go out and kill them!"'

Signora Battaglia's faith in vendetta was perhaps vindicated when all the men she denounced were acquitted.

This week 90 men are in jail in Foggia thanks to one woman's revelations; but another 30, including the alleged chiefs of the warring clans, are free - enough, police fear, to get the vendetta back on the rails.

"This is an organisation that has been characterised by extreme omerta," the anti-Mafia prosecutor Pier Luigi Vigna said after the arrests. "I am extremely grateful for [this woman's] action."

As a result of what she has told the police, there is enough evidence, it is said, to declare 18 of the 35 clan murders "solved".

All that remains is for the rest of the men to be found and put on trial; and for enough witnesses to give sufficient evidence for the judge to consider their guilt proved, for justice to be done.

Then the idea that "honour" means killing people in the most ghastly way imaginable must somehow be extirpated from the region; and one brave young woman must be given the opportunity to make herself a new life.

- INDEPENDENT