Authors: Roberto Saviano
“They squealed. They weren’t able to get in there, so they squealed and sent us in instead … We’re being double-crossed, we’re saving these guys’ lives. Let’s leave them here, let them slit each other’s throats, let them cut everybody’s throats, what the fuck do we care?”
His colleagues signal for me to get out of there. That night in the house on Via Fratelli Cervi they arrest Arcangelo Abete and his sister Anna, Massimiliano Cafasso, Ciro Mauriello, Mina Verde’s ex-boyfriend Gennaro Notturno, and Raffaele Notturno. But the real prize is Gennaro Marino McKay, the secessionist leader. The Marinos were the feud’s primary targets. They’d set fire to Gennaro’s properties—a restaurant, Orchidea, on Via Diacono in Secondigliano, a bakery on Corso Secondigliano, and a pizzeria on Via Pietro Nenni in Arzano—and his house, a Russian dacha on Via Limitone d’Arzano. In his territory of reinforced concrete, crumbling streets, obstructed manholes, and sporadic street lighting, the boss of Case Celesti had
torn a corner off and turned it into a mountain retreat. He’d built a villa out of precious woods and planted Libyan palms—the most expensive kind—on the grounds. Someone said that he’d gone to Russia for business and had fallen in love with the dacha where he’d been a guest. At that time nothing and no one could prevent Gennaro Marino from building a dacha in the heart of Secondigliano: a symbol of the power of his business, and a promise of success for his boys, who, if they knew how to act, might one day live in such luxury, even in the outskirts of Naples, even on the darkest shore of the Mediterranean. Now all that remains of the dacha is a cement skeleton and carbonized wood beams. The carabinieri flushed Gennaro’s brother Gaetano out of a room at La Certosa, a luxury hotel in Massa Lubrense. So as not to risk his skin, he’d holed himself up in a room by the sea, an unusual way of removing himself from the conflict. When the carabinieri arrived, the majordomo, the man who acted as Gaetano’s hands, looked them in the eye and said, “You’ve ruined my vacation.”
But the Spaniards’ arrest doesn’t stem the hemorrhage. Giuseppe Bencivenga is killed on November 27. On November 28 they shoot Massimo de Felice, and on December 5 it’s Enrico Mazzarella’s turn.
The tension creates a kind of screen between people. In war you can’t let your gaze be distracted. Every face, every single face, has to tell you something. You need to decipher it, fix it with your eyes. Silently. You have to know which shop to enter, be certain of every word you utter. Before you decide to go for a walk with someone, you need to know who he is. You have to be more than certain, eliminate every possibility he’s a pawn on the chessboard of the conflict. To stroll next to him and speak to him means to share the field. In war the attention threshold of all the senses is multiplied; it’s as if you perceive things more acutely, see into things more deeply, smell things more intensely. Even though all such cunning is for naught when the decision
is made to kill. When they strike, they don’t worry about whom to save and whom to condemn. In a wiretapped call, Rosario Fusco, allegedly a Di Lauro territory capo, is notably tense even though he’s trying to sound convincing to his son:
“You can’t go with anyone, that much is clear, just like I wrote you: listen to your daddy, you want to go out, you want to go take a walk with a girl, fine, but you just can’t hang around any boys, because we don’t know who they’re with or who they belong to. And if they have to do something to him and you’re next to him, they’ll hit you too. You understand what the problem is now, your daddy’s telling you …”
The problem is that no one can afford to think he’s not involved. It’s not enough to assume that the way you live your life will protect you from every danger. It’s no longer enough to say, “They’re killing each other.” During a Camorra conflict even the most solid construction is at risk, like a sand fence washed away by the undertow. People try to go unnoticed, to reduce to a minimum their presence in the world. Anonymous colors, little makeup, but that’s not all. The asthma sufferer locks himself up in his house because he can’t run, but then he finds an excuse to go out, invents a reason, because holing yourself up in your house could seem like an admission of guilt, of who knows what—and is certainly a confession of fear. Women stop wearing high heels—too hard to run in them. In a war that is not officially declared, not recognized by governments, and not recorded by reporters, the fear also goes unspoken. It hides under your skin, making you feel bloated, as after a huge meal or a night of cheap wine. A fear that doesn’t explode in newspapers or on billboards. There are no invasions, no skies darkened with planes. It’s a war you feel inside. Almost like a phobia. You don’t know if you should show your fear or hide it. You can’t decide if you’re exaggerating or underestimating. There are no sirens to warn you, but the most discordant information gets through. They say the Camorra war is fought among gangs, that they kill off each other. But no one knows where the border is between who’s them and who’s not. The carabinieri
jeeps, the police roadblocks, and the helicopters flying overhead at all hours don’t comfort you, but seem almost to shrink the battlefield. They are not reassuring. They subtract space, surround you, restrict the area of the struggle even further. You feel trapped, shoulder to shoulder, and the heat of the person next to you becomes unbearable.
I would ride my Vespa through this pall of tension. In Secondigliano, I’d be frisked at least ten times a day. If I’d had so much as a Swiss Army knife on me, they would have made me swallow it. First the police would stop me, then the carabinieri, sometimes the financial police as well, and then the Di Lauro and Spanish sentinels. All with the same simple authority, the same mechanical gestures and identical phrases. The law enforcement officers would look at my driver’s license, then search me, while the sentinels would search me first and then ask lots of questions, listening for the slightest accent, scanning for lies. During the heat of the conflict the sentinels searched everyone, poked their heads into every car, cataloging your face, checking if you were armed. The motor scooters would arrive first, piercing your very soul, then the motorcycles, and finally the cars on your tail.
Medics filed complaints: before they could assist someone—anyone, not just those with gunshot wounds, but even the little old lady with a fractured femur or a heart attack victim—they had to get out of the ambulance, submit to a search, and let a sentinel check if it really was an ambulance or a way to hide weapons, killers, or escapees. The Red Cross is not recognized during Camorra wars, and no clan has signed the Geneva conventions. Even the unmarked cars the carabinieri use are vulnerable. When some plainclothes officers were mistaken for rivals, shots ripped into their car, wounding a few of the men. A couple of days later a boy showed up at the barracks, carrying a small suitcase with his underwear in it; he knew exactly what to do during an arrest. He confessed everything immediately,
perhaps because the punishment he would have received for shooting at the carabinieri would have been far worse than jail. Or more likely, the clan, promising to give him his due and pay his legal expenses, made him turn himself in so as to avoid triggering any private feuds between men in uniform and Camorristi. Once inside the barracks the boy unhesitatingly declared, “I thought they were Spaniards so I fired.”
On December 7, I am awakened again by a phone call in the middle of the night. A photographer friend was calling to inform me of the blitz. Not any blitz, but
the
blitz, the one that local and national politicians had been demanding in response to the feud.
Secondigliano is surrounded by a thousand officers. A large area whose nickname, Terzo Mondo, says it all, as does the graffiti near the entrance to the main street: “Third World, do not enter.” It’s a huge media operation, and Scampia, Miano, Piscinola, San Pietro a Patierno, and Secondigliano will soon be invaded by journalists and television crews. After twenty years of silence the Camorra suddenly lives again. But the lack of steady attention means that the tools of analysis are old, ancient, as if a brain that had gone into hibernation twenty years ago was just now waking up. As if it were still dealing with the Camorra of Raffaele Cutolo and the logic of the Mafia that blew up highways to kill judges. Today everything has changed except for the eyes of the observers, no matter how experienced. Among those arrested is Ciro Di Lauro, one of the boss’s sons. Some say he’s the clan’s accountant. The carabinieri break down the door, search everyone, and aim their rifles at kids’ faces. All I manage to see is an officer shouting at a boy who is pointing a knife at him.
“Drop it! Drop it! Now! Now! Drop it!”
The boy drops the knife. The officer kicks it away, and as it bounces off the baseboard, the blade folds into the handle. It’s plastic, a Ninja Turtle knife. Meanwhile the other officers are frisking,
photographing, searching everywhere. Dozens of blockhouses are knocked down. Reinforced concrete walls are gutted, revealing drug stashes under stairwells. Gates closing off entire portions of streets are toppled, exposing drug warehouses.
Hundreds of women pour onto the streets, setting trash bins on fire and throwing things at the police cars. Their sons, nephews, neighbors are being arrested. Their employers. Yet it’s not just a criminal solidarity that I sense on their faces, or in their angry words or hips, swathed in sweatpants so tight that they seem about to explode. For most Secondigliano residents, the drug market provides a means of support, albeit minimal. The only ones who get rich, who reap exponential advantages, are the clan businessmen. All the rest, those who work selling, storing, hiding, or protecting get nothing but ordinary salaries, though they risk arrest and months or years in prison. The women’s faces wear masks of rage. A rage that tastes of gastric acid. A rage that is both a defense of their territory and an accusation against those who have always considered it nonexistent, lost, a place to forget.
This gigantic deployment of law and order seems staged, arriving all of a sudden, and only after countless deaths, only after a local girl has been tortured and burned. To the women here it reeks of mockery. The police and bulldozers haven’t come to change things, but merely to help out whoever now needs to make arrests or knock down walls. As if all of a sudden someone changed the categories of interpretation and were now declaring that their lives are all wrong. The women know perfectly well everything is wrong here; they didn’t need helicopters and armored vehicles to remind them, but up till then this error was their principal form of life, their mode of survival. What’s more, after this eruption that will only complicate their lives, no one will really make any effort to improve things. And so those women jealously guard the oblivion of their isolation and their mistaken lives, chasing away those who have suddenly become aware of the dark.
The journalists lie in wait in their cars. They’re careful not to get under the carabinieri’s boots, and only start covering the blitz after it’s all over. At the end of the operation fifty-three people are in handcuffs. The youngest is nineteen. They’ve all grown up in the Naples Renaissance, in the new political dimension of the late 1990s, which was supposed to alter people’s destiny. They all know what to do as the carabinieri cuff them and load them into the prison vans: call this or that lawyer and wait till the clan stipend, along with the boxes of pasta, is delivered to their wives or mothers on the twenty-eighth of the month. The men with adolescent sons at home are the most worried, wondering what role their boys will be assigned now. But they have no say in the matter.
After the blitz the war knows no truce. On December 18 Pasquale Galasso, namesake of one of the most powerful bosses of the 1990s, is bumped off behind the counter of a bar. On December 20 Vincenzo Iorio is killed in a pizzeria. On the twenty-fourth they kill Giuseppe Pezzella, thirty-four years old. He tries to take cover in a bar, but they empty a whole clip into him. Then a pause for Christmas. The guns of war fall silent. They reorganize, try to establish some rules, devise strategies in this most disorderly of conflicts. On December 27 Emanuele Leone is killed with a bullet to the head. He was twenty-one years old. On December 30 the Spaniards murder Antonio Scafuro, twenty-six, and hit his son in the leg. He was related to the Di Lauro area capo in Casavatore.
The most complicated thing was to understand. Understand how it was possible for the Di Lauros to wage a war and win. To strike and disappear. To shield themselves among the people, get lost in the neighborhoods. Lotto T, Vele, Parco Postale, Case Celesti, Case dei Puffi, and Terzo Mondo are a jungle, a rain forest of reinforced concrete where it’s easy to disappear, blend in with the crowd, turn into phantoms. The Di Lauros had lost all their top management and area
capos, but they’d still managed to trigger a ruthless war without suffering serious losses. It was as if a government, toppled by a coup and without a president, decided that the way to preserve its power and protect its interests was to arm schoolboys and draft mailmen, civil servants, and office clerks, to grant them access to the new power center instead of relegating them to the rank and file.
A bug planted in the car of Ugo De Lucia, the Di Lauro loyalist and alleged murderer of Gelsomina Verde, picks up a conversation that is filed in a December 2004 injunction:
“I’m not making a move without orders, that’s the way I am!”
The perfect soldier displays his total obedience to Cosimo. Then he comments about an episode in which someone was wounded.
“I would’ve killed him, I wouldn’t have just shot him in the leg, if I’d been there, his brain would be pulp, you know! … Let’s use my neighborhood, it’s tranquil there, we’ll be able to work …”
Ugariello, as he is known in his neighborhood, would never have merely wounded. He would have killed.
“I say now it’s up to us, let’s all get together … all of us in one place … five in one house … five in another … and five in another and you send for us only when you need us to go blow someone’s brains out!”