Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [108]
The old associations usually charged an interest rate that varied between io and 12 percent-higher than that of the banks, but not as crushing as the interest usually exacted by usurers; loans had to be paid back, with the interest, over twenty weeks, but any interest left unused and all profits from its investment would in theory be shared out among all the members at the end of a two-year cycle. Those needing a loan would have to give twenty days' notice of their requests.
Recruitment to these associations was largely, but not exclusively, through kinship and neighborhood ties; a few were based on the old artisans' guilds. An unknown applicant would not ordinarily be able to gain admission; in the more competitive trades these would be very small, informal groupings of friends, willing to help each other with non-professional problems such as an expensive girlfriend) but always on the alert for competitive moves from the other members. Even today these associations are useful in facing unexpected problems; one of them served to stave off disaster for the local butchers when the mad cow disease scare struck and local customers turned suddenly-if briefly-vegetarian. Their defenders defend these associations against charges of being a thinly disguised form of usury by arguing that, to the contrary, they provided a way of not being "suffocated" by real usurers.
For many Monticiani, however, the problem with the precedent these bodies represented was, as we have seen, that they also had a long history of malpractice. Quarrels would break out when someone was held responsible for having introduced as members kin who subsequently proved unreliable or dishonest; embezzlement was far from rare. One association, which had existed for at least two generations but broke up around 1992, had about 100,000,000 lire in play at the time. One of the most powerful of its 72 members lost some 12,000,000 when this happened; another, who was heavily in debt as a result of his construction of a huge new restaurant, owed io,ooo,ooo at the time of the collapse-and was not expected to pay back any of that money even if his business thrived which it did). Part of his escape from indebtedness thus remains etched in local memory, but people apparently forgave him for this because, like so many others, he was not the sole architect of the collapse or even necessarily in any degree responsible for it. When the collapse began, he, along with nearly half the other members, was able to extricate himself hastily but without financial damage to himself; these survivors could hardly, in this sinful world, be expected to restore sums that no one had any legal means of extracting from them-indeed, had they done so, they would have been regarded as fools. They would also have risked bringing their own involvement to the attention of the authorities, with potentially unpleasant consequences. But they did leave the current head of the association, a man who had inherited his slot from his father, exposed to the wrath of the authorities and charges of tax evasion and usury; and this, not to speak of the 20,000,000 lire that he and his wife lost or of his legal expenses, was something he could not easily forgive.
Such embarrassing misadventures perhaps explain why it is actually very difficult to obtain relevant information from those who ran the associations in years past. Some scoffed at the very idea that there was any sort of formal organization at all, while at the same time reluctantly acknowledging the need for trustworthy "friends" at moments of economic difficulty. These arrangements were nevertheless clearly more structured than participants wanted to admit. One highly respectable and conservative individual I asked about a rumor that he had run one of these groups turned suddenly silent, clearly upset at the idea that his name might be associated with such activity, and dismissively blamed it on "chatty gossip" ale chiacchiere); but more than