Italy: Where They Still Walk A Mile for a Camel

In thousands of offices and factories all over Italy, the visit of a friendly little salesman with a plain brown briefcase is as much a part of the workaday routine as the coffee wagon is in the U.S. He is the neighborhood cigarette peddler, and every week he makes his rounds with a fresh supply of Camels, Kents and Marlboros at prices ranging from 40¢ to 48¢ a pack. The same brands sell at 77¢ to 79¢ at the state-owned tobacconist’s, for the state tobacco monopoly imposes a 35¢ duty on every legally imported pack of cigarettes, while the friendly little man’s cigarettes are smuggled, mostly from Switzerland.

The Swiss could not care less, so long as the smugglers register their purchases for export. The contrabbandieri respond gratefully by registering—most of the time. As a result, official Swiss statistics show that cigarette exports to Italy (usually of U.S. brands made under license in Switzerland) flared from 50 million packs in 1960 to 210 million packs last year, while Italian statistics show that only 3,000,000 packs of cigarettes were imported legally in 1964. Italian border police nabbed another 70 million packs of smokes being toted over the border on everything from helicopters and freight cars to trained St. Bernards. One particularly imaginative operator pumped his contraband across a wide Alpine lake in a crude, homemade submarine. The most reliable technique for safe smuggling is still the local spallone (from the Italian spalla, or shoulder). He is a sure-footed mountain man who trudges through the rocky gorge and Alpine forest of the border country with his fags in a shoulder knapsack, then sells them to a distributor who supplies the big cities.

Public opinion is on the side of the smugglers, especially in the mountain country, where nearly everyone has a friend or relative in the business. When border police accidentally shot a girl spallona in the neck last winter, citizens picketed the guard post with placards declaring: YOU SHOULDN’T SHOOT A GIRL FOR SMUGGLING! Actually, the police are not as strict as they might be, since the mountain folk, if foiled in cigarette smuggling, might take to something serious like narcotics. Explains Border Police Chief Salvatore Gallo: “The state prefers in a certain sense to tolerate smuggling rather than to see an increase in common delinquency.”