Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [91]
Each usurer has a distinctive beat, a unique clientele, and locally recognized idioms of threat and violence for extorting the prompt payment of high interest charges. Their deep-rootedness in local society makes them relatively immune from prosecution, both because betrayal is considered a blow against local solidarity and because the reach of their retaliation is immediate, swift, and exemplary. One or two Monti usurers have maintained ramified business interests in the district so that their power was further enhanced by the secretive whispering of cowed neighbors-neighbors who knew of threatening phone calls in the night or saw the daily impunity with which such people violated building codes and other laws. The only power their debtors had over them was the threat of being unable to pay up at all. One barman even claimed that the banks were worse than usurers, because, whereas banks would crack down on defaulters without mercy, the usurers would generally extend deadlines to a certain extent if that ensured that the debts would thereby be settled; they had no legal means of enforcing payment, and thus tended not to use violence unless they thought that it was the only way to get results.
The dislike of banks is certainly pervasive and intense; one official of an artisans' union suggested that usurers occasionally even saved poor artisans from complete ruin when the banks refused to help them. Most regard banks as the true usurers. Even working for a bank as a lowly employee carries social risks, as I learned when one of my friends teasingly called a bank clerk a thief (ladro) in a jesting tone that nevertheless carried more than a hint of opprobrium. Artisans' solitary work habits lead other, more educated colleagues to assume with a knowing air that, in order to survive, such wretches must indeed be getting loans from usurers. A bank that had demanded payment of a considerable amount of interest on a loan to a merchant hastily agreed to halve the amount when it became clear that the merchant knew that the bank had used a dishonest consultant to value the merchant's collateral at double its real worth. The consultant's cousin told me about this incident, remarking that a consultant's capital was purely a matter of credibility (fiducia)-a social rather than a factual attribute, often subsisting in dishonest complicity rather than generic trustworthiness.2 Among friends, the consultant could always claim to have miscalculated in order to allow for the kind of recalculation I have just described, perhaps by hinting that real estate values were unstable. "Even the banks are usurious," sighed the consultant's cousin, although he did not seem to think that another consultant would have acted differently in a similar situation. The system works because the standards of social capital are largely a matter of consensus.
As a result of this wider sense of shared involvement and the fear that debtors generally feel about reporting acts of extortion, usurers get caught only very occasionally. One young woman, a merciless extortionist and the daughter of a local prostitute who had built up a substantial capital from her trade, found herself trapped by her victims when she went to demand her payment at a time when she knew them to be in difficulty; she started screaming at them, and a pair of carabinieri who happened to be strolling past at the time for perhaps had been alerted in advance) demanded to know what the fuss was all about. On learning that she had loaned the shopkeepers io,ooo,ooo lire and was now demanding i 1,ooo,ooo from them, they hauled her off in handcuffs and went on to discover a large stash of gold, watches, and other precious objects that had evidently been