Culture in Communication
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144 MARCO JACQUEMET
Department. Through their collaboration the Justice Department was able to
prosecute, among others, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (“Newly Orga-
nized Camorra,” or NCO, a cartel of different gangs from rural areas around
Naples — for a discussion of this cartel see Jacquemet 1992 and 1996), to
arrest more than a thousand people on a charge of belonging to this organiza-
tion, and to set up the biggest trial ever of a single criminal organization in the
Neapolitan area (it came to be known as the maxi-processo or “maxi-trial”).
Since the prosecution’s case rested mainly on pentiti’s confessions, they
were called government witnesses. Once the trial began, it immediately be-
came apparent that the credibility of these witnesses would depend on their
ability to be perceived as “truthful.” In order to convey credibility in the
courtroom, the pentiti had to perform a true discourse, or a discourse produc-
ing a truth meaning-effect. That is, a discourse contextualized in a way that
“rang true.”
But in constructing their discourse and establishing their credibility, the
pentiti, impaired by their limited command of potential stylistic resources,
relied on the communicative strategies acquired over the years in the streets of
the tighly-knit community of the Neapolitan underclass. This community, as
in many other closed networks, depended greatly on situational context and
implicit, local understanding among speakers to produce an elliptical and
formulaic “street” behavior and set clear boundaries between who was “in”
and who was “out.” In their everyday life the pentiti had utilized these local
communicative patterns, and they brought them into the courtroom. In an
unfamiliar role and under the stress of being scrutinized, they executed these
communicative strategies based on local communal values, such as the code
of honor, the importance of having/giving respect, the dependence upon
patronage ties. In a community where a man of honor was a man of truth, they
claimed that their word — and communicative behavior — was a word of
honor. In this way they intended to have the Justice Department acknowledge
their respectability and thus their credibility.
Consequently, the pentiti clashed with the environment of courtroom
interactions: their presence in the courtroom broke the judicial routine, and
everybody, especially the presiding judge, had to readjust and renegotiate his
role (since all pentiti and all judges were male, I use the masculine form to
refer to them). A curious “pas-de-deux” developed between the judge and the
pentito, in which the latter’s credibility depended on how a particular judge
perceived him, on his ability to negotiate the judge’s expectations of his
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THE MAKING OF A WITNESS
performance, and on the degree of rapport between individual judges and
individual pentiti. These unique interactions between judge and pentito pro-
duced a new kind of legal proceeding, in which different sets of truth “made
sense” only within the framework of this rapport.
The judges involved in the initial stages of the 1983–1985 maxi-trial
(preliminary hearings and first set of trials), under pressure from an Italian
government which feared that Southern Italy was on the verge of social chaos,
placed excessive reliance on the pentiti’s communicative style and allowed
considerable latitude in their testimony, accepting their claims uncritically.
These judges and the pentiti were able to renegotiate a common ground on
which government witnesses could comfortably perform. As a result, pentiti’s
testimonies were relaxed and smooth and pentiti were thus more likely to be
perceived as reliable witnesses. This perception was then translated into
various judgments that construed the pentiti’s testimonies as truthful, even in
the absence of corroborating evidence.
In cases when the standard short form of the questioning routine proved
insufficient to secure a strong case against a particular defendant, they allowed
the pentito to provide more information about the defendant under examina-
tion. This was usually done if the pentito was hesitant in his answers or when
the presiding judge wanted a better case against a particular defendant. In such
a case the pentito was given the floor so that he could provide whatever
information he had about the defendant. This yielding of the floor to the
pentito could already be seen as an instance of voluntary, partial transfer from
the judge to the pentito of control over evidence presentation, which in itself
boosted the pentito’s claim to be reliable and credible.
Most of the time, particularly at the beginning of the trial when the pentito
was eager to establish his credibility vis-a-vis the presiding judge and the
multifaceted audience of the court, he seized the opportunity of being allowed
an unobstructed narration to try to establish himself as a “man of knowledge”
the first step in being recognized as a “man of truth.” This impression manage-
ment had to be constructed in the course of a performance which would
convert the courtroom ritual into a discourse of knowledge. The courtroom,
normally conceived as the locus of a democratic ritual of openness and
publicity, became, during the unobstructed narration of the pentito, a territory
raided by the disruptive communicative mechanisms of organized crime that
had produced the trial in the first place.
To explore in detail how the pentito’s credibility was achieved, let us now
146 MARCO JACQUEMET
turn to one of the most effective courtroom raiders involved in the maxi-trial
against the NCO: Giovanni Pandico.
3. From underwriter to godfather
Giovanni Pandico’s decision to become a pentito came as a big surprise to
law-enforcement agencies. Although he had spent the last 12 years in jail, they
never suspected him of belonging to this particular criminal organization.
Pandico was born on June 24, 1944, in Sassari, Sardinia, where his father was
a lieutenant in the artillery. Leaving Sassari shortly after the war, his mother
brought him to Liveri, another small town on the outskirts of Naples where his
Greek grandfather had first taken up residence.
1
At 15 he was already familiar
with Juvenile Hall, having spent some years inside the Filangieri, the Neapoli-
tan juvenile detention center. At 19, arrested for attempting to bomb the
barracks of the Carabinieri (the Italian military police), he met Raffaele
Cutolo, the undisputed leader of the NCO, in the prison of Poggioreale.
According to his later testimony in the courtroom, he was initiated into the
Camorra by Cutolo on December 8, 1963, by the classical ritual of the blood
baptism: a small cut on the base of the index finger of the right hand. Later, in
a letter to his godfather, Pandico remembered the event as: “our first
camorristic dawn with all its delicate splendor.”
2
Acquitted of the bombing charges, he survived on odd, marginal jobs,
and was occasionally sent back to Poggioreale for minor offenses. During one
of these stays, he was reunited with Giorgio Della Pietra, another native of
Liveri. After spending some time with Della Pietra, Pandico came to the
conclusion that his own father and mother, together with the mayor of Liveri,
Nicola Nappi, and his brother Salvatore, had conspired to have Giorgio Della
Pietra convicted of the murder of another brother of the mayor of Liveri,
Michele Nappi, on April 3, 1956. Pandico decided to take revenge on the
people responsible for having his friend locked up in Poggioreale for 24 years.
Two days after he was released from Poggioreale — on June 18, 1970 — he
went to City Hall in Liveri intending to kill the mayor, Nicola Nappi. In his
rampage through the corridors of City Hall, he first killed Giuseppe Gaetano,
a city supervisor who tried to block him, then he shot and killed Guido
Adrianopoli, a clerk who had appeared in the corridor to see what was going
on, and finally he shot and wounded the mayor and an employee, Pasquale
147
THE MAKING OF A WITNESS
Scola, who had both tried to find some protection under the mayor’s desk.
Arrested the following day, he confessed that he wanted to get even with the
mayor, the mayor’s brother Salvatore, and his own father and mother, who had
testified for the prosecution in the criminal trial against his friend Giorgio
Della Pietra. However, he later changed his mind and declared that Mayor
Nappi had put a contract on Giuseppe Gaetano, who was blackmailing the
mayor, and arranged to be wounded in order to confuse the reconstruction of
the crime and distance himself from the murder. After a psychiatric examina-
tion which cleared Pandico to stand trial — he was defined as a “pure paranoid
individual, able however to understand perfectly well his own situation” (La
Voce in CDR 1985: 88) — the judges of the Corte d’Assise in Naples
convicted him of multiple murder, multiple attempted murder, and lying with
malice. He was sentenced to a 30-year term of imprisonment.
In jail he nurtured his knowledge by voraciously reading up written
documents, particularly legal papers, and little by little he started helping other
inmates in their dealings with the law. In the illiterate world of the jail,
Pandico had a prodigious “career:” transferred to the prison of Porto Azzurro,
he was hired by the prison administration to help other inmates write personal
letters, appeals to judges, and other bureaucratic papers. Later, after a new
transfer, he arrived at Ascoli Piceno, the kingdom of Cutolo, and after a few
months, he became the personal writer of the NCO leader. He was moved to a
cell next to Cutolo, and he followed the boss in his daily routine: he made
coffee for him, he served him, but above all he wrote letters on Cutolo’s
behalf, using a stamp with Cutolo’s signature. This close contact with the boss
boosted Pandico’s respect inside the organization, and he greatly appreciated
this new status of scrivano (“writer”) for the Camorra. Pandico was now a
“man of honor,” but he was increasingly at odds with the younger, more
violent and determined new members of the NCO who did not like his
arrogance and his desire to always be “in the know.” Only Cutolo’s vested
interest prevented any violence against Pandico. However, when, following
the scandal of the Cirillo Affair,
3
the presiding judge of the Republic, Sandro
Pertini, personally intervened to have Cutolo transferred to the high-security
prison on the island of Asinara, Sardinia, Pandico realized that the young
leaders of the NCO would never pay him the respect that he wanted. After
unsuccessfully trying to improve his position by meeting with the leadership
of the NCO, he asked the jail administration to put him in isolation. Two days
later, on March 21, 1983, he summoned the warden and announced his desire
148 MARCO JACQUEMET
to defect from the NCO. A week later a helicopter took him to the Neapolitan
Operative Center of the Carabinieri, where prosecuting judges Di Pietro and
Di Persia were waiting for him. After more than a week of interrogation and
three hundred pages of deposition, Pandico was certified as a “true” pentito.
His deposition was released to the press two months later, at the time of the
crackdown against the NCO, as the most significant evidence behind the arrest
of more than two hundred individuals.
Among the names he had indicated to the police was that of his former
cellmate, Alfredo Guarneri. What follows is Pandico’s recollection of
Guarneri’s role within the NCO.
4. The myth of the rabbits
This story was told by Pandico on April 11, 1985, during his second day on the
witness stand, at a time when he was trying to secure the trust of the judges; he
had already started to gain this trust the day before through his impressive
recollection of minute details. After his first testimony, he had come to be
perceived as the most reliable of the pentiti by both the press and law-
enforcement agencies. The Italian newspapers, comparing his memory to that
of a super-computer, were scrambling to cover and verify the new wealth of
information that he had produced “ex-novo” in the courtroom — all of this
despite Pandico’s two previous convictions for perjury and a recent statement
by the prosecuting magistrate from the Justice Department of Salerno (a town
30 miles from Naples, where Pandico had been called as a witness in a
separate trial) that Pandico’s repentance was “one of his many opportunities to
show off his histrionic personality made up of mystifications, ample but void
gestures, bickering accusations and lies” (La Voce in CDR 1985: 88).
On this second day of Pandico’s testimony, the judges in Naples were
trying to decide if he was really the godfather that he claimed to be, and they
gave him the floor in an attempt to elicit more information about his role
within the NCO. Pandico promptly grabbed the occasion for a performance
that lasted the entire day (and continued for the following four days). During
an unchallenged recollection of events, Pandico reminisced about the actions
of one of his own camorristic “godsons,” Alfredo Guarnieri. Pandico testified
that during the time when he and Guarnieri shared the same cell, the latter
asked to be admitted into the NCO. According to pentiti, prior to an incorpora-
149
THE MAKING OF A WITNESS
tion, the adept has to prove his courage by executing a violent action. Thus, as
part of his “education,” Guarnieri had to pass some qualifying exams, includ-
ing the sgarro (a test of personal violence needed by any new member in order
to become a full camorrista). Pandico agreed to this initiation by providing
Guarnieri with the first test: the murder of Pandico’s own sister-in-law, guilty
of not having respected the family’s honor after the death of her husband.
Pandico wanted the woman killed and beheaded, and the severed head placed
on the grave of his late brother. Moreover, the head had to be cut off in a
precise way, almost surgically, in order to create a cover-up. Guarnieri,
however, did not possess the necessary skill for the operation. Pandico de-
cided to teach him how to decapitate a person by showing him how to behead
rabbits.
(PAN lld85–C)
01 quindi al guantieri lo misi a conoscenza, 01 then I put Guarnieri in the know
02 di tanta particolare, 02 on all the details
03 sino al punto tale che/ (..) 03 up to the point that
04 quando il nello mi parlò/ 04 when Nello talked to me
05 di questa mia cognata, 05 about this sister-in-law of mine
06 parlò con una certa::delicatezza::(…) 06 he spoke with a kind of discretion
07 si tratteneva:: (..) 07 he restrained himself,
08 cercava di essere generico, 08 he tried to be general,
09 di essere:: -marginale 09 to be vague,
10 dissi nello parlami chiaro ma 10 I said to him: “Nello talk straight but
11 di che si tratta bruno/ 11 what is all this about, Bruno?
12
è inutile che facimme sti barzellette, 12 We don’t have to fool ourselves.”
13 disse guarda la tua cognata, 13 He said: “look, your sister-in-law
14 si mantiene a uno 14 is keeping a guy
15 cossì cossì cossì cossì\ (…) 15 like this and this and this”
16 e ADDIRITTURA 16 but EVEN MORE
17 addirittura mi pare che mi ^disse, 17 even more, I think, he told me
18 che era uno della nuova famiglia/(…) 18 that this guy was from the Nuova
Famiglia
19 dissi vabbene chiuso. 19 I said: “all right, that’s it.”
20 (…) ora che accade 20 …now, what happened
21 in questo frattempo, (…) 21 during this time
22 tornando dalla- 22 I was coming back from
23 perché ora passiamo/ 23 because now we are
24 nel mese di -settembre — ottobre 24 in September, October,
25 quando il nello mi dice questo, (…) 25 when Nello told me this,…
26 mi accerto col telegramma che la 26 I make sure by telegram that the
cognata sta sister-in-law is
27 mia cognata stava a via del convento/ 27 my sister-in-law still lived on Convento
Street
150 MARCO JACQUEMET
28 incomincio a chiamare a guarnieri 28 I start calling Guarnieri
29 e gli dico guarda, 29 and I say to him: look,
30 poiché tu ci tieni tanto, 30 seeing that you are eager to do it,
31 poiché tu devi dare le dovute prove 31 seeing that you must pass the right tests,
32 poiché tu hai detto/ 32 seeing that you said
33 sei pronto e dare la vita e tutto, 33 that you are ready to give your life
and all
34 tu/ devi fare questi favori. (…) 34 you must do these favors….
35 la prima cosa/ 35 first thing,
36 devi staccare la testa alla mia cognata, 36 you must cut off my sister-in-law’s
head
37 e la devi mettere/ 37 and you must put it
38 sulla fossa del cimitero dove sta 38 on the grave of the cemetery where
seppellito
39 mio fratello. 39 my brother is buried.”
40 dissi però non devi staccare la testa 40 I said: “but you shouldn’t cut off
così her head like this
41 (..) no, 41 ….right,
42 la devi staccare in ~ modo 42 you must cut it off in such a way
43 che devi creare un depistamento che/ 43 that you create a cover-up so that
44 quando sarà trovata devono 44 when it is found they must
45 non devono capire se è stata fatta/ 45 they must not know whether it was
done
46 da uno che ne capiva in medicina o me- 46 by somebody who knows surgery
47 un fatto del genere. 47 or something like that.”
48 e quello mi dice ma come faccio io, 48 And he says to me: “but how can I
do it?”
49 e dissi vabbene, 49 and I said: “all right,”
50 e comprai in quel periodo, 50 and I then bought
51 che si può anche constatare, 51 this is certifiable
52 perché un pò 52 because a little
53 un giorno/ 53 one day
54 il maresciallo mi canzonò un pò/ 54 the warrant-officer teased me a little
55 su questi conigli, 55 about these rabbits
56 comprai eeu:: 56 I bought, uh,
57 si può dire un quindici venti conigli, 57 we can say fifteen, twenty rabbits,
58 e ogni qualvolta gli facevo vedere, 58 and every so often I showed him
59 con la lametta/ 59 with a blade,
60 con un temperino/ 60 with a pocket-knife
61 vedi che la testa va tagliata così/ 61 “See, the head must be cut off like this
62 vabbene (…) 62 all right…
63 lu- fammi vedere, 63 no, show me.”
64 comprai un altro pò di- 64 I bought some more rabbits:
65 no/ vai male, 65 “No, you’re doing it wrong.
66 a questo punto devi fare così/ 66 Here, you must do like this
151
THE MAKING OF A WITNESS
67 non devi stracciare devi- 67 you must not tear it apart, you must-”
68 (..) dopo che il guarnieri fu all’altezza, 68 …when Guarnieri was ready
69 di capire che le teste dei conigli eué/ 69 to understand that the heads of the
rabbits
70 dissi allora lo puoi fare. 70 I said to him: “Now you can do it.”
This story of beheaded rabbits is an Ionesco-like piece reminiscent of the
Theater of the Absurd, a moral tale of honor and shame, a narrative recollec-
tion of a rite of passage. The story has three levels of organization and will be
analyzed accordingly. I will first reconstruct the semio-narrative structure of
the story, then discuss the semantic level, built around the anthropologically
relevant meanings of the different figures employed by Pandico in the narra-
tion, and finally examine the syntactic, surface level of the discourse.
4.1 Story
On the semio-narrative level we are in the presence of a folktale, the textual
movement of which matches the formal structure of one of the many folktales
analyzed by Propp (1968). As in all tales, there is here a sender (Pandico) —
both at the existential level (providing tasks) as well as at the cognitive level
(providing skills) — assisted by an informer charged with setting the story in
motion (Nello). There is the young and inexperienced novice — or hero —
who has to undergo his rite of passage and his trial (Guarnieri). The Anti-hero
that he has to fight in this initiation is pictured as an opponent of the sender
(the sister-in-law). Her death, which is both a punishment and a sacrifice,
allows the hero to obtain an object of use (the severed head) which will in turn
allow him to be conjoined with his final object of value (membership in the
NCO). Finally, the hero has to go through different trials in order to accom-
plish his task: in this case he must acquire the (surgical) competence necessary
for the beheading. Structurally the story can be divided into three parts: a
preface (the acquisition of the knowledge about the sister-in-law’s behavior),
the main narrative program (the decision to invest the hero with the mission to
kill), and the secondary narrative program (the acquisition of competence).
As in all tales, the time of the preface is uncertain, some time ago in the
penitentiary of Pianosa. Pandico’s narrative role too is uncertain, but can be
loosely glossed into a “godfather” role in charge of the incorporation of his
young “godson” into the NCO. He must therefore provide the latter with a
necessary understanding of the NCO’s dealings (lines 1–2: “then I put Guarnieri
152 MARCO JACQUEMET
in the know on all the details”) in order to fit him into its structure. By a surprising
series of chance events, Pandico had found out through Bruno Nello — a
member of the NCO already found guilty of belonging to this organization —
that his sister-in-law was not respecting the honor of her late husband, Pandico’s
brother. Gathering this intelligence had not been easy. As we learn at the
beginning of the text, Nello had been a recalcitrant source. He had tried to be
vague, to be diplomatic, but when Pandico resorted to appealing to their
common membership, he finally broke down and shared his news with him. The
sister-in-law, far from mourning her loss and maintaining her honor and that of
her husband’s family (thus Pandico’s), had taken a new lover. Moreover, she not
only supported him (line 14: “(she) is keeping a guy like this and this and this”),
but she had found him in the enemy camp (line 18: “this guy was from the Nuova
Famiglia”). Pandico decided to redeem his family’s honor.
The main narrative program is then put in motion. First, he had to double
check the location of the woman. He obtained this information by sending a
telegram to her last address (line 26–27: “I make sure by telegram that the
sister-in-law is/ my sister-in-law still lived on Convent Street”). A somewhat
rational explanation for this action was that if she had moved to a new
residence the telegram would have been immediately returned to the “sender”
(this constitutes a new narrative position within the colony of Pandico’s
selves, the cognitive sender of mythical proportions becoming here a practical
sender for mailing purposes). Thus Pandico would have been notified in the
fastest possible way of any change. But Pandico could easily have asked the
well-informed Nello for his sister-in-law’s address. Pandico in fact did not talk
of sending a determinate telegram, i.e. a wire message, but he talked of the
telegram in general, i.e. the means of communication (line 26: “I make sure by
telegram that the sister-in-law is”). By calling upon the semantic implications
of this means of communication instead of a specific message, Pandico
wanted to convey an impression of reliability (telegrams usually arrive at their
destination), urgency (they arrive quickly) accountability (somewhere there is
a written record of this message), and luxury (telegrams are expensive). These
traits of modernity associated with telegrams are signs of a 19th-century world
of wire services, pneumatic mail, and railway transportation that is still very
much part of the contemporary landscape of Italian prisoners. Denied access
to the telephone, or a fax machine, the telegram was and still is the fastest
means of communication at their everyday disposal and the most expensive.
By foregrounding his use of it, Pandico was showing off both his wealth as a
153
THE MAKING OF A WITNESS
camorra boss and his dedication to solving questions of honor.
After sending the telegram, Pandico was finally ready to turn his attention
to Guarnieri. He summoned him and asked Guarnieri to perform some actions
on behalf of the NCO through a reported dialogue performed as an incanta-
tion:
“seeing that you are eager to do it, seeing that you must pass the right tests,
seeing that you said that you are ready to give your life and all, you must do
these favors.” (lines 30–34)
The orders were delivered in a three-part sequence which clearly signaled the
sacred character of this investiture. This reconstructed ceremony had two
modalities: the will of the hero to become a member and his duty as a NCO
member to promptly execute orders from his superiors. The first sentence
focuses on the hero’s will: Guarnieri wanted to become a member above all
else. The second stressed the duty that this incorporation entails: Guarnieri
had to pass the necessary tests. Finally, the third sentence returned to the
hero’s committment, reminding the new adept that he had given his word, up
to the point of dying and giving everything for the organization.
The reference to the possible death of the initiate prompted the order to
kill the sister-in-law. Pandico never mentioned the murder of his sister-in-law.
From the very beginning it was something else: a ritual of purification, a
detailed ceremony of bodily separation, a head-hunting quest for a trophy (line
36: “you must cut off my sister-in-law’s head”). Pandico, taking the murder
for granted — an unfaithful woman must be killed, ça va de soi — specifically
asked for the beheading of his sister-in-law. However, the decapitation alone
would not satisfy Pandico’s thirst for revenge: the decapitated head had to be
placed on the tombstone of Pandico’s brother, thus transforming it into
a funerary urn (lines 37–39).
4
The decapitation had an additional twist:
Guarnieri was to create a diversion (line 43: “create a cover-up”) by severing
the head as if it were a skillful exercise in anatomy. In this way, when the head
was eventually discovered on the grave, “they” would be dumbfound and
misled into thinking that a surgeon was responsible for the murder (lines 43–
47). Pandico left the reference about these “they” rather ambiguous. Obvi-
ously it is not the local community familiar with the immoral behavior of the
sister-in-law. It is not the people from the Nuova Famiglia, friends of the
lovers, because they too would know — and likely approve — his handling of
the matter. “They” must be, in a tradition dating back to the unification of
Italy, the Italian state and its law-enforcement agencies. By making this