Authors: Roberto Saviano
Except for certain open-air markets, retail drug sales may eventually disappear. Now there are the so-called circles: the doctors’ circle, the pilots’ circle, circles for journalists and government employees. The lower-middle class is the perfect fit for an informal and hyperliberal distribution system. A friendly exchange, more like a Tupperware party, far removed from any criminal structures. Ideal for eliminating excessive moral responsibility. No pusher in a silk acetate tracksuit planted for days on end in the corner of the marketplace, protected by lookouts. Nothing but the products and the money, just enough space for commercial exchange. Italian police records reveal that one in three arrests is of a first-time offender. According to the Superior Health Institute, cocaine consumption has soared to historical highs, rising 80 percent from 1999 to 2002. The number of addicts who turn to SERT, the Italian services for substance abusers, doubles every year. The market expansion is immense. Genetically modified cultivation, which permits four harvests a year, has eliminated supply problems, and the absence of a single dominant organization favors free enterprise. I read in a newspaper that the singer Robbie Williams, who has had his problems with cocaine, was fond of saying, “Cocaine is God’s way of letting you know you have too much money.” These words came back to me when I heard some kids in the Case Celesti neighborhood singing the praises of product and place: “If Case Celesti cocaine exists, it means that God doesn’t place any value on money.”
Case Celesti—the name comes from the pale blue color the houses once had—an area which runs along Via Limitone d’Arzano, is one of Europe’s finest cocaine markets. This wasn’t always the case. According
to investigations, it was Gennaro Marino McKay who made the place so profitable. He’s the clan’s point man in the area. And that’s not all. Paolo Di Lauro likes the way he runs things so he gave him franchising rights on the local market. McKay operates independently; all he has to do is pay a monthly fee to the clan. Gennaro and his brother Gaetano are known as the McKays because their father resembled Zeb Macahan, which Italians pronounce as McKay, in the TV series
How the West Was Won.
And so the whole family became McKay. Gaetano has no hands. He lost them in 1991 in the war against the Pucas, an old Cutolo clan family, when a grenade he was holding went off. Now he has two stiff wooden prostheses that are painted black. Gaetano McKay always has a companion, a sort of majordomo who acts as his hands. But when Gaetano has to sign something, he jams a pen in his prosthesis and fixes it on the paper; contorting his neck and wrists, he somehow manages to produce a signature that is only slightly crooked.
According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, Genny McKay’s operations store as well as peddle drugs. Suppliers’ prices are tightly linked to their ability to stockpile, and the cement jungle and hundred thousand inhabitants of Secondigliano are a valuable asset. The mass of people with homes and daily lives forms a great wall around the drug depots. The Case Celesti marketplace is responsible for a decrease in cocaine prices. Normally they start at 50 to 60 euros a gram and can go as high as 100 or 200 euros. Here prices have dropped to the 25 to 50 range, but the quality remains high. DDA reports identify Genny McKay as one of the most talented Italians in the cocaine business, dominating a market of unparalleled, exponential growth. Open-air drug markets could have been established in Posillipo, Parioli, or Brera—posh neighborhoods of Naples, Rome, and Milan—but instead they were established in Secondigliano. Labor costs in any other place would have been far too high. Here the serious lack of work and the impossibility of finding a way to earn a living—other than emigrating—make for low salaries, very low. It’s no
mystery, really, and there’s no need to appeal to the sociology of poverty or a metaphysics of the ghetto. An area where dozens of clans are operating, with profit levels comparable only to a maneuver in high finance—where a single family can turn over 300 million euros annually—cannot be a ghetto. The work is meticulous and the chain of production is extremely expensive. A kilo of cocaine costs the producer 1,000 euros, but by the time it reaches the wholesaler, it’s already worth 30,000. After the first cut 30 kilos become 150: a market value of approximately 15 million euros. With a larger cut, 30 kilos can be stretched to 200. The cut is essential: caffeine, glucose, mannitol, paracetamol, lidocaine, benzocaine, amphetamines—but in emergencies even talc and calcium for dogs are used. The cut determines the quality, and a bad cut attracts death, police, and arrests. A bad cut clogs the arteries of commerce.
The Secondigliano clans are ahead of everyone else in drug cutting, a precious advantage. Here there are the Visitors: heroin addicts, named after characters in a 1980s TV program who devour mice and have greenish, slimy scales under seemingly normal human skin. The Visitors are used as guinea pigs, human guinea pigs for testing to see if a cut is dangerous, what reactions it causes, how much to dilute the powder. When the lab needs lots of guinea pigs, they lower the prices. From 20 down to as low as 10 euros a hit. Word gets out and the Visitors come from as far away as the Marche and Lucania for a few hits. The heroin market is collapsing. The number of addicts is in decline, and the ones who are left are desperate. They stagger their way onto buses, on and off trains all night, catch rides, walk for miles. But the cheapest heroin on the Continent is worth the effort. The guys who do the cut for the clan assemble the Visitors, give them a free dose, and wait. In a phone call included in a March 2005 preventive detention order released by the Court of Naples, two individuals organize a test of a cut. First they set things up:
“Can you give me five doses … for allergy testing?”
They talk again a bit later:
“Did you try the machine?”
“Yes …”
They clearly mean the testing.
“Yes,
mamma mia, troppo bello,
we’re number one, my friend, the others will be out of business.”
They rejoice, glad the guinea pigs didn’t die; on the contrary, they really enjoyed it. A good cut doubles sales, and if it’s really high quality, it’ll soon be in demand nationally, trouncing the competition.
Only after I read this telephone exchange did I understand a scene I’d witnessed a while earlier. I could not believe my eyes. I was in Miano, not far from Scampia, in a clearing near some storage hangars, where a dozen or so Visitors had been rounded up. I hadn’t ended up there by chance; I believe that the way to truly understand, to get to the bottom of things, is to smell the hot breath of reality, to touch the nitty-gritty. I’m not convinced it’s necessary to be there, to observe in order to know things, but being there is absolutely essential for things to know you. A well-dressed fellow—white suit, navy blue shirt, brand-new running shoes—unfolded a chamois cloth with a few syringes in it on the hood of the car. The Visitors elbowed their way forward; it looked like one of those scenes they show on the news when a truck full of flour arrives in Africa. Identical, always the same, year after year. But then a Visitor started yelling:
“No, I won’t take it, not even if you give it to me … you want to kill us …”
All it took was one suspicious person and the others withdrew immediately. The fellow just waited; he didn’t seem particularly eager to convince anyone. The air was full of dust from the Visitors’ trampling around, and every now and then he’d spit out the grit that settled on his teeth. Two of the Visitors finally went up to him, a couple actually. They were trembling, really on the edge, in withdrawal. The veins in the guy’s arms were shot, so he took off his shoes, but even the soles
of his feet were ruined. The girl picked up a syringe and held it between her teeth as she slowly opened his shirt, as if it had a hundred buttons, then jabbed him in the throat. The syringe contained coke. Once it’s in the bloodstream it becomes clear pretty quickly if the cut is good or if it’s off, too heavy, or poor quality. After a bit he started to sway, frothing lightly at the corners of his mouth. He fell to the ground, jerked around and then stretched out flat, closed his eyes, and went stiff. The man in the white suit started calling on his cell.
“He looks dead to me … Okay, okay, I’ll try giving him a massage …”
He began pounding the Visitor’s chest with his boot: a violent cardiac massage. Next to him the girl was blithering something, the words hanging on her lips: “You’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it wrong. You’re hurting him …” With all the strength of a wet noodle she tried to push him away from her boyfriend’s body. But the man was disgusted, almost frightened by her and the Visitors in general:
“Don’t touch me … you’re disgusting … don’t you dare come near me … don’t touch me or I’ll shoot!”
He went on kicking the guy’s chest, and then, resting his foot on his sternum, he made another call:
“He’s a goner … Oh yeah, the Kleenex … hang on, let me see …”
He took a Kleenex out of his pocket, moistened it, and spread it over the guy’s lips. Even the faintest breath would make a hole, indicating that he was still alive. A precaution to keep from touching the body. He phoned one last time:
“He’s dead. We have to make it lighter.”
The man got back in his car. The driver, meanwhile, had been bouncing up and down the whole time, dancing in his seat to some silent music; I couldn’t hear a sound even though he acted as if it were playing full blast. Within a few minutes everyone moved away and started wandering around in that patch of dust. The guy was still stretched out on the ground, his girlfriend whimpering beside him.
Even her crying stuck to her lips, as if the only form of vocal expression the heroin allowed was a hoarse moan.
I couldn’t understand why, but the girl got up, dropped her pants, squatted right over his face, and pissed. The Kleenex stuck to his mouth and nose. After a bit he regained his senses, and wiped his face with his hands, like when you come up from underwater. This Lazarus of Miano, resurrected by who knows what substances in her urine, slowly got up. I swear that if I hadn’t been so stunned, I would have cried out, “Miracle!” Instead I paced back and forth, which is what I always do when I don’t understand or don’t know what to do. I nervously occupy space. My moving around must have attracted attention, since the Visitors came nearer and started yelling at me. They thought I was connected to the guy with the syringes. They kept shouting, “You … you … you wanted to kill him.”
They hovered around me, but scattered as soon as I quickened my pace. They followed me though, hurling disgusting objects they’d picked up from the ground. I hadn’t done anything, but if you’re not an addict, you must be a pusher. Suddenly a truck appeared. Dozens of them had been pulling out of the warehouses all morning. It stopped near me and a voice called my name. It was Pasquale. He opened the door and had me jump in. Not a guardian angel who saves his favorite charge—more like two rats running in the same sewer, pulling each other by the tail.
Pasquale looked at me with the severity of a father who’d foreseen everything. That sarcastic smile said it all; no need to waste time scolding me. I stared at his hands instead. Even redder, more chapped, knuckles cracked, palms anemic. Fingers accustomed to silk and velvet have trouble adjusting to ten hours at the steering wheel. Pasquale was talking, but I couldn’t get the Visitors out of my head. Monkeys. Less than monkeys. Guinea pigs, testing the cut of a drug that will be distributed all over Europe—the clans can’t take the chance it might kill someone. Human guinea pigs, so that people in Rome, Naples, Abruzzo, Lucania, and Bologna won’t end up dead,
blood dripping from their nose and foaming at the mouth. A dead Visitor in Secondigliano is only one more wretch whose demise will go uninvestigated. It’s already a lot if he’s picked up off the ground, his face wiped clean of vomit and piss, and buried. Elsewhere there’d be an autopsy, an investigation, conjectures about his death. Here there’s just one word: overdose.
Pasquale took the road that links the northern suburbs of Naples. Sheds, warehouses, rubbish dumps, rusting junk strewn around, trash tossed everywhere. No industrial complexes here. There’s the stink of factory smoke but no factories. Houses scattered along streets, piazzas defined by the presence of a bar. A confused and complicated desert. Pasquale realized I wasn’t listening so he braked suddenly. Without coming to a full stop, just a little whiplash—just enough to shake me up. Then he looked at me and said, “Things are going to get rough in Secondigliano … ‘a
vicchiarella
is in Spain with everybody’s money. You’ve got to quit coming around here. I can feel the tension everywhere. Even the asphalt would peel off the ground if it could get out of here.”
I decided to follow what was going to happen in Secondigliano. The more Pasquale insisted it would be dangerous, the more I became convinced that it was impossible not to try to understand the elements of the disaster. And understanding meant being part of it somehow. I had no choice; as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to understand things. Neutrality and objective distance are places I’ve never been able to find. Raffaele Amato—‘a
vicchiarella,
the old woman—a second-tier clan executive in charge of the Spanish drug markets, had fled to Barcelona with the Di Lauro cash box. At least that’s what was being said. In truth he had failed to turn his quota over to the clan, a way of demonstrating that he no longer felt the least obligation to the people who wanted to keep him on a salary. The schism was official. For the moment it involved only Spain,
which had always been controlled by the clans: Andalusia by the Casalesi of Caserta, the islands by the Nuvolettas of Marano, and Barcelona by the “secessionists.” That’s the name the first crime reporters on the story gave to the Di Lauro men who broke away. But everyone in Secondigliano calls them the Spaniards. With their leader in Spain, they took the lead not only in peddling but in narcotraffic as well, Madrid being a crucial junction for cocaine coming from Colombia and Peru. According to investigations, Amato’s men had long employed a brilliant stratagem for moving huge amounts of drugs: garbage trucks. Trash on the top, drugs underneath. An infallible method for escaping controls. No one would stop a garbage truck in the middle of the night.