Authors: Roberto Saviano
I’d got hold of a radio that picked up the police frequencies in order to follow the feud, so I’d arrive on my Vespa more or less at the same time as the police squads. But that night I’d fallen asleep. The cadenced crackle and squawk of police headquarters had become a sort of melodic lullaby. This time it was a phone call in the middle of
the night that alerted me to what had happened. When I arrived at the scene, I found a car completely gutted by fire. They’d doused it with gasoline, gallons of it everywhere. Gas on the front seats, gas on the backseats, on the tires and steering wheel. The flames had already died and the windows exploded when the firemen arrived. I don’t exactly know why I rushed headlong to that carcass of a car. The stench was terrible, like burned plastic. A few people milling about, a policeman with a flashlight peering inside the metal frame. He sees a body, or something that looks like one. The firemen, looking disgusted, open the doors and remove the cadaver. A carabiniere feels sick and leans against the wall and vomits up the pasta and potatoes he’d eaten a few hours earlier. All that’s left is a stiff black trunk, a blackened skull, legs flayed by the flames. They pick it up by the arms, lower it to the ground, and wait for the mortuary van.
The death-catcher van circulates constantly. I see it driving around Scampia and Torre Annunziata. It collects bodies, accumulating cadavers of people who’ve been shot and killed. Campania has the highest murder rate in Italy, among the highest in the world. The mortuary van’s tires are worn smooth; it would be enough to photograph the nibbled rims and the gray sidewalls to capture the symbol of this place. Wearing filthy lattice gloves that have been used a thousand times, the men get out of the van and go to work. They slide the cadaver into a bag, one of those black body bags usually used for dead soldiers. It looks like one of the figures that emerge from the ashes of Vesuvius when the archaeologists pour plaster into the void left by the body. By now throngs of people have gathered around the car, but they’re all silent. As if no one were there. We barely even dare breathe. After the Camorra war started, many people stopped setting limits to what they could stand. And now they’ve come to see what else will happen. Every day they learn what more is possible, what else they have to endure. They learn, go home, and carry on. The carabinieri start taking photographs, and the van leaves with the dead
body. I go to police headquarters. They’ll have to say something about this death. The usual journalists and a few policemen are in the pressroom. After a while the comments start: “They’re killing each other off, so much the better!” “Look how you end up if you become a Camorrista.” “You enjoyed earning all that money, so now enjoy being dead, you piece of shit.” The usual remarks, only more disgusted and exasperated. As if the cadaver were present and everyone had something to fling in his face: this night that had been ruined, this war that never ends, the garrisons that sprout up on every corner of Naples. It takes the doctors a long time to identify the body. Someone supplies the name of a neighborhood capo who’d disappeared a few days before. One of the many, one of the bodies piled up in cold storage in Cardarelli Hospital, awaiting the worst name possible. But they announce it’s not him.
Someone covers his mouth with his hands. The journalists swallow so hard their mouths go dry. The policemen shake their heads and stare at the tips of their shoes. The angry remarks are guiltily cut short. That body belonged to Gelsomina Verde, a twenty-two-year-old woman. She’d been kidnapped, tortured, and killed, a bullet in the back of the neck, fired from so close that it came out the front of her skull. Then they threw her in a car—her car—and set it on fire. Gelsomina had dated Gennaro Notturno, a young guy who had first decided to stay with the Di Lauros but then moved over to the Spaniards. She’d gone out with him for a few months, a while back. But someone had seen them embrace, maybe riding on a Vespa or sitting in a car together. Gennaro had been condemned to death, but he’d given them the slip; who knows where he’d disappeared to, maybe even some garage near where Gelsomina had been killed. He didn’t feel the need to protect her because they weren’t together anymore. But the clans have to strike, and the map of an individual is drawn through his acquaintances, relatives, even his possessions. A map on which messages can be written. The most terrible messages.
Punishment is necessary. If someone goes unpunished, it might legitimize new betrayals or schisms. It’s too big a risk. Strike, in the worst way possible. This is the order. The rest doesn’t mean a thing. And so the Di Lauro loyalists find Gelsomina, use some excuse to meet her. They grab her, beat her bloody, torture her, ask her where Gennaro is. She doesn’t answer. Maybe she doesn’t know, or maybe she prefers to endure herself whatever they would have done to him. So they kill her. Maybe the Camorristi sent to do the job are high on cocaine, or maybe they need to stay straight to catch even the smallest detail. But their methods for eliminating every type of resistance, for negating every last breath of humanity, are well-known. Burning the body seemed to me like a way of erasing the traces of torture. The tormented body of a young woman would have provoked a dark rage throughout the neighborhood, and even though the clan can’t claim to have people’s consent, it doesn’t want hostility either. So burn, burn everything. It’s not her death that is so grievous, no more so than any other death during wartime. But it is unbearable to imagine how she died, how the torture was carried out. I breathe deeply and spit out the mucus in my chest in order to block those images.
Gelsomina Verde, or Mina, as she was called in the neighborhood. That’s how the newspapers call her as well, when they start to fondle her with those guilty, day-after feelings. It would have been easy to not distinguish her flesh from the people who are killing each other. Or, had she still been alive, to keep on thinking of her as the girlfriend of a Camorrista, one of the many who go along for the money or the sense of importance it gives them. Just one more signora who enjoys the riches of her Camorra husband. But
Saracino,
or Saracen, as Gennaro Notturno is called, has just started out. If he makes local capo and oversees the pushers, he could earn 1,000 or 2,000 euros a month. But it’s a long road. Compensation for a murder is probably 2,500 euros. And if you have to strike camp because the carabinieri are about to nab you, the clan will pay for a month in northern Italy or
abroad. Maybe Gennaro even dreamed of becoming boss, of ruling half of Naples and investing all over Europe.
If I stop and take a deep breath, I can easily imagine their meeting, even though I wouldn’t recognize their faces. They probably met in a typical bar, one of those damned bars you find in the outskirts of southern cities, around which the existence of everyone, from kids to ninety-year-olds with cataracts, whirls. Or maybe they met in some discotheque. A stroll in Piazza Plebiscito, a kiss before going home. Then Saturdays together, going for pizza in the countryside, the bedroom door locked on Sundays after lunch when everyone else is nodding off, exhausted from all the eating. And on it goes. Just as it always does, for everyone, for Christ’s sake. Then Gennaro joins the System. He’ll have gone to some Camorra friend of his, gotten himself introduced, and started working for Di Lauro. I imagine Gelsomina probably knew and would have tried to find him something else to do. That’s how it usually goes around here, the girls rushing around for their boyfriends. But maybe in the end she forgot about Gennaro’s profession. After all, it was a job like any other. Driving a car, delivering a few packages, it all starts with the little things. With nothing. But it allows you to live, to work, and at times even makes you feel accomplished, appreciated, satisfied. And then their relationship ends.
Those few months were enough, though. Enough to associate Gelsomina with Gennaro. To mark her as traced by him, one of his affections. Even if their relationship was already over or had never really even begun. It doesn’t matter. These are only conjectures, fantasies. What remains is that a girl was tortured and killed because they saw her while she caressed or kissed someone a few months earlier somewhere in Naples. It’s almost impossible to believe. Gelsomina slaved a lot, like everyone around here. Often the young women and wives have to support their families because so many men suffer years of depression. Even the people who live in Secondigliano—the Third
World—have a psyche. Being out of work for years changes you, and it kills you to be treated like shit by your superiors, with no contract, no respect, and no money. Or you become a beast. And then you’re really on the edge, near the end. So Gelsomina worked, just like everyone else who holds down at least three jobs to hoard up enough money, half of which she gave to her family. She also did volunteer work, assisting the elderly, something the newspapers outdid themselves in praising, as if they were competing to bring her back to life.
In war it’s impossible to maintain amorous ties or relationships, anything that could become an element of weakness. The emotional earthquake that occurs in the lives of the young men who become clan affiliates can be heard in the phone calls the carabinieri intercept, such as that between Francesco Venosa and his girlfriend Anna, transcribed in the holding order issued by the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office in February 2006. The last call before the number is changed, before Francesco flees to Lazio. First he sends an SMS to his brother, warning him not to go out on the street because he’s under fire:
“Hi bro luv u. dont go out for any reason. ok?”
Then Francesco has to tell his girlfriend he has to go away, explain that the life of a System man is complicated:
“I’m eighteen now … these guys don’t kid around … they throw you away … kill you, Anna!”
But Anna is obstinate. She would like to become a carabiniere, to change her life and make Francesco change his. He doesn’t disapprove in the least of Anna’s professional aspirations, but thinks he’s already too old to turn his life around.
Francesco: “I told you, I’m happy for you … But my life’s different … And I’m not about to change my life.”
Anna: “Oh, bravo, that’s great … Fine, stay just the way you are!”
Francesco: “Anna, Anna … don’t be like this …”
Anna: “But you’re eighteen, you can easily change … Why have you given up already? I don’t know …”
Francesco: “I’m not changing my life, not for anything in the world.”
Anna: “Right, because you’re fine the way you are.”
Francesco: “No, Anna, I’m not fine like this, but for the moment we’re down, and we have to regain the respect we lost … Before when we walked around the neighborhood, people didn’t dare to look us in the face … now they all hold their heads high.”
For Francesco, a Spaniard, the most serious insult is that no one is in awe of their power. They’ve suffered so many losses that everyone in the neighborhood sees them as a group of worthless killers, failed Camorristi. This is intolerable. He has to react, even at the price of his life. Anna tries to stop him, to make him feel he’s not already condemned.
Anna: “You don’t have to throw yourself into that mess, you can live just fine …”
Francesco: “No, I don’t want to change my life …”
This young secessionist is terrified that the Di Lauros will go after her, but he reassures her by telling her he’s had lots of girls so no one will associate the two of them. But then the romantic in him makes him confess she’s the only one: “I used to go with thirty women in the neighborhood—but now I’m only with you …”
Anna, girl that she is, seems to forget all fears of retaliation and only thinks about the last words Francesco has said: “I’d like to believe you.”
The war goes on. On November 24, 2004, they shoot Salvatore Abbinante in the face. He’s the nephew of Raffaele Abbinante, a Spaniard, one of the leaders, a Marano man. Nuvoletta territory. To become players on the Secondigliano market, the Maranos transferred
lots of their members with their families to the Monterosa neighborhood, and the alleged leader of this group of Mafiosi planted in the heart of Secondigliano is Raffaele Abbinante. He was one of the most charismatic figures in Spain, where he was in command of the Costa del Sol region. In 1997, 2,500 kilos of hashish, 1,020 ecstasy pills, and 1,500 kilos of cocaine were seized in a huge operation. The authorities proved that the Neapolitan cartels of the Abbinantes and Nuvolettas were managing nearly all the synthetic-drug traffic in Spain and Italy. After Salvatore Abbinante’s murder it was feared that the Nuvolettas would intervene, that Cosa Nostra would have something to say about the Secondigliano feud. But nothing happened, or at least nothing violent. The Nuvolettas opened their borders to the secessionists on the run; this was the criticism that the Cosa Nostra men in Campania leveled at Cosimo’s war. On November 25 the Di Lauros killed Antonio Esposito in his grocery store. When I got to the scene, his body was still lying amid the bottles of water and cartons of milk. Two men lifted him by his jacket and feet and placed him in a metal coffin. After the mortuary van left, a woman appeared in the store. She began picking the cartons up off the floor, cleaning the blood splatters from the glass of the cold-cuts counter. The carabinieri let her be. The ballistic traces, fingerprints, and clues had already been gathered, the information already futilely recorded in the ledger. The woman worked all night long putting the shop back in order, as if fixing up the place could cancel out what had happened, as if returning the milk cartons to the shelf and straightening up the snacks could relegate the weight of death to those few minutes in which the ambush occurred, to those few minutes only.
Meanwhile in Scampia a rumor spreads that Cosimo Di Lauro is offering 150,000 euros in exchange for essential information on the whereabouts of Gennaro Marino McKay. A big bounty, but not that big, not for an economic empire such as the Secondigliano System—
a shrewd desire not to overvalue the enemy. But no one takes the bait. The police get there first. All the secessionist leaders still in the area are gathered on the thirteenth floor of a building on Via Fratelli Cervi. As a precaution they’ve lined the landing in armor plating and installed metal-reinforced doors and a cage that seals off the head of the stairs. The police surround the building. What had been designed to protect the Spaniards against eventual enemy attacks now condemns them to sit there, unable to do anything, as the grinder cuts through the metal grating and the steel doors are knocked down. Waiting to be arrested, they throw a backpack with a submachine gun, some pistols, and hand grenades out the window. As it falls, the machine gun lets off a round. A shot grazes the neck of a policeman, just caressing his nape. He’s so nervous he jumps, breaks out in a sweat, and suffers an anxiety attack. Dying from a bouncing bullet spit from a machine gun hurled from the thirteenth floor is a scenario one doesn’t even consider. Nearly delirious, he begins talking to himself, insulting everyone, muttering names, and waving his hands around as if he were trying to shoo mosquitoes from his face: