The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  Only then had his mother come in like a fury. She’d appeared, taking up the entire doorway, arms thrown wide, hands on the door frame as if she were trying to hold up the building. Her husband had stepped aside to leave the scene to her. And she’d taken it. She’d crept slowly closer to Nicolas, with the gait of a ferocious beast. When she was finally right in front of him, as if she were about to embrace him, she’d whispered in his ear: “What a disgrace, what scuorno.” And she’d continued: “What company have you been keeping, what company?” Her husband had heard without understanding, and Nicolas had lurched violently away from her, so that his father had lunged at him again, crushing him against the wall: “Now just look at him. ’O spacciatore—the drug dealer. How the fuck can this be?!”

  “Drug dealer, my ass,” his mother had said, pulling her husband aside. “Oh, the shame.”

  “So what do you think,” Nicolas had blurted out, “that my closet turned into a Foot Locker display case just by accident? By working at a gas station on Saturdays and Sundays?”

  “Nice asshole you are. And now you’re going to do some jail time,” his mother had said.

  “What jail time?”

  And she’d hauled off and slapped him, with less force than his father, but sharper, more resounding.

  “Shut up, enough’s enough. You’re not going out again, you only go out under strict supervision,” she’d said, and, to her husband: “Drug dealer, no way, you got it? No way, no way on earth. Let’s get this taken care of and go home.”

  “Curse all the saints, to hell with them,” his father had limited himself to muttering. “And I even have to pay the lawyer!”

  Nicolas had gone home, escorted by his parents as if they were a couple of carabinieri. His father stared straight ahead, looking out for those who would be greeting them: Letizia and his younger son, Christian. Let them see the disgraced wretch, let them look him right in the face. The mother, on the other hand, stayed by Nicolas’s side, her eyes downcast.

  The minute he spotted his brother, Christian had switched off the TV set and leaped to his feet, covering the distance between the sofa and the door in three long steps, reaching out to shake hands the way he’d seen in the movies—hand, arm, and then shoulder to shoulder, like duje brò, a couple of brothers. But his father had glared daggers at him, jutting his chin. Nicolas had forced himself to keep from laughing in front of his younger brother, who idolized him, and told himself that later that night, in their bedroom, he’d have plenty to sate his kid brother’s curiosity. They’d talk through the night, and then Nicolas would run his hands through Christian’s hair, the way he always did before telling him good night.

  Letizia, too, would have liked to embrace him, just so she could ask him: “But what was it? Why?” She knew Nicolas was slinging hash, and that necklace he’d given her for her birthday had certainly cost him something, but she didn’t think things had gotten so serious so fast, even if things weren’t really so bad after all.

  She spent the following afternoon applying Nivea cream to his lips and cheeks. “That’ll make the swelling go down,” she told him. These were the kindnesses that had started to weld them together. He yearned to eat her alive, he’d tell her so: “I feel just like the vampire in Twilight!” but her virginity was just too important. He accepted that all the decisions had to be up to her, and so they’d gorge themselves on kisses, oblique petting strategies, hours listening to music with one earbud apiece.

  They sent them all home from police headquarters as persons under investigation, free on their own recognizance, even Agostino, who, caught red-handed in the middle of his shift, was probably in the worst shape legally. For days they spent their time trying to remember what they had written in the chat rooms to one another, because their cell phones had all been confiscated. In the end, the decision was an easy one: Alvaro would take the fall. Copacabana put together an anonymous tip, and the carabinieri found the whole drug supply in his basso. He even took responsibility for having given the hash to the kids. When Copacabana had informed him that he was going back to prison, he replied: “No! Again? What the fuck.” Not another word after that. In exchange, he’d get a regular payment, a pittance, a thousand euros. And before he turned himself in at the front gate of Poggioreale prison, a Romanian girl. But, he’d asked, he wanted to marry her. And Copacabana had replied, very simply: “Let’s see what we can do.”

  In the meantime, they’d gotten their hands on new smartphones for just a few euros, clearly stolen, just to start keeping the group together again. They’d resolved not to write anything about what had happened in the chat they’d just restarted, especially not a thought that had occurred to them all, but that only Stavodicendo had been able to put into words: “Guagliu’, sooner or later, Nisida Reform School is waiting for us. Maybe that’s where we were bound to wind up.”

  At least once, each of them had imagined the trip toward the juvenile detention center aboard the police paddy wagon. Rumbling across the jetty that connects the little island to the mainland. In you went, and a year later, out you came, transformed. Ready now. A man.

  For some, it was something you had to do, to the extent that they were happy to let themselves get caught on some misdemeanor. After all, once you were back out, there’d be plenty of time.

  When all was said and done, though, the kids had held up their end, they’d kept their lips sealed, and apparently nothing had emerged from their chat that could be used as evidence. And so Nicolas and Agostino had finally been invited by Copacabana to come into the New Maharaja. But Nicolas wanted a little something more, he wanted to be introduced to the district underboss. Agostino had worked up the nerve to ask Copacabana in person. “Sure, of course, I want to meet my kids,” he’d replied. So Nicolas and Agostino had entered the New Maharaja accompanied by him in person: Copacabana.

  Nicolas was meeting him for the first time. He’d expected him to be old, instead he was a man just a little over forty. In the car, on the way to the club, Copacabana told them how happy he was with the work they were doing. He treated them like his messenger boys, but still, with a certain courtesy. Nicolas and Agostino weren’t bothered by it, their attention was fully absorbed by the evening in store for them.

  “What’s it like? What’s it like in there?” they asked.

  “It’s a club,” he answered, but they knew exactly what it was like. YouTube had instructed them, displaying events and concerts. By asking “What’s it like?” those two kids were asking what it was like to be in there, have a private, reserved room, what it was like to be in the world of the New Maharaja. What it was like to belong to that world.

  Copacabana ushered them in through a private entrance and led them to his reserved room. They’d spiffed up and dressed to the nines, they’d announced to parents and friends where they were going, as if they’d been summoned to an audience before the most illustrious court. To a certain extent, it was true, even the Naples of rich young jerks, the trendy little snot noses, really did socialize there. The place could have been a symphony of kitsch, a panegyric to the worst possible taste. Instead it wasn’t. It managed to strike an elegant balance between the finest Campanian coastal tradition of pastel-hued majolica and an almost playful reference to the Far East: that name Maharaja, the New Maharaja, came from an enormous canvas at the center of the club, brought all the way from India, where it had been painted by an Englishman who had later come to Naples. The mustache, the curve of the eyes, the beard, the silks, the comfy sofa, a shield upon which appeared an assortment of gemstones and a moon facing north. Nicolas’s life had begun there, in the fascination of the enormous painting of the Maharaja.

  For the rest of the evening, Nicolas and Agostino feasted their eyes on the people in the club, with champagne corks popping, one after the other, as background. Everyone who was anyone was here. This was the place where businessmen, sports stars, notaries, lawyers, and judges all found a table where they could sit down and get to know one another, crystal
glasses to clink in toasts. A place that immediately took you light-years away from the local tavern, the typical Neapolitan restaurant, the place where they’d serve you an impepata di cozze and a family-style pizza, the places your friends know about, the places you’d take your wife. Instead, this was a place where you could meet anyone without owing anyone an explanation, because it was like bumping into them on the piazza. It was the most natural thing in the world to meet new people at the New Maharaja.

  In the meantime, Copacabana talked and talked, and Nicolas kept stretching in his head a clear image, which added to the shapes of the food and the well-dressed guests the music of a word. Lazarat. The name of a village and its exotic allure.

  Albanian grass had become the newest driving force. In point of fact, Copacabana had two lines of business: the legal one in Rio and the illegal one in Tirana. “One of these days, you ought to take me there,” Agostino said to him, as he leaned forward to grab his umpteenth glass of wine. “It’s the biggest plantation there is on earth, guagliu’. Grass everywhere,” Copacabana replied, referring to Lazarat. It had become the platform for the largest possible harvests of marijuana. Copacabana told him how he’d managed to finagle major purchases, but it was never clear exactly how he transported them from Albania to Italy, just like that, without difficulty: the sea lanes and air routes from Albania were by no means secure. The shipments of grass moved through Montenegro, Croatia, and Slovenia, and managed to slip into Friuli. In his telling of it, it was all very confusing. Agostino, stunned by the dazzling world that swirled all around him, heard those stories and yet didn’t hear them, while Nicolas would never have willingly stopped listening.

  Every shipment was stacks and stacks of cash, and when that cash became a river in spate, there was no longer any way of hiding it. A few weeks after their night out at the New Maharaja, the investigation of the Antimafia Squad began, all the newspapers had headlined it: they’d arrested one of Copacabana’s mules and now a warrant had been issued. He had no alternative but to go on the run. He vanished, perhaps to Albania, or else he’d managed to make it to Brazil. No sign of him for months. The Forcella market had run through its supply.

  Agostino had tried to understand but, with Copacabana who knows where, and Alvaro in prison, it proved impossible.

  “But ’o White’s paranza is struggling … Adda murì mammà, if the shit doesn’t come in,” Lollipop had commented. May his mother die, was his phrase in dialect.

  For Nicolas and his guys, where to go to get the dope, and how much of it, what type to sell, what shifts to work had become a problem. The city’s drug markets were split up among the families. It was like a map, redrawn with new names, and each name marked a conquest.

  “So now what are we going to do?” Nicolas had asked. They were in the back room, a no-man’s-land created out of the junction of bar, tobacco shop, mini video arcade, and betting parlor. Everyone was welcome. Those with their noses in the air, cursing as they watched a horse gallop too slowly, those perched on stools with their noses stuck in demitasses of espresso, those who were busy flushing their salaries down the drain on the slot machines. And then there were Nicolas and his friends, as well as the Capelloni. White had just shot up, he was clearly wrecked on cocaine, which he no longer ingested through his nostrils but, with increasing frequency, through his veins. He was playing foosball all by himself, taking on two of his men, Chicchirichì and Selvaggio. He’d leap with agility from one handle to another, twisting the rods like a tarantolato, someone in the proverbial frenzy caused by a tarantula bite. Extremely talkative, but antennae picking up everything, every word that might chance to reach his ears. And he’d picked up on that utterance of Nicolas’s: “So now what are we going to do?”

  “Vulite faticà, criatu’? Eh!” he’d said, rolling a joint the whole time. “So you want to work, kid? Okay! You can work now, but as substitutes. I’ll send you out, and you can work on some other market that needs you…”

  They’d accepted unwillingly, but they really had no other option. After Copacabana was shuffled off the stage, the Forcella market was out of business for good.

  They’d started working for anyone who had a hole to fill. Arrested Moroccan dealers, pushers with a fever, unreliable guaglioni dismissed from the crew. They worked for the Mocerino clan of Sanità, the Pesacane family in Cavone, sometimes they even went as far as Torre Annunziata to lend a hand to the Vitiellos. The locations where they peddled had turned into a nomadic wandering. Sometimes it was Piazza Bellini, other times the main station. People would reach out to them at the last minute, their cell-phone numbers known to all the Camorra scum of the region. Nicolas had gotten tired, little by little he’d stopped pushing the extra hash and was spending more time at home. All the kids who were older than them were making money even if they really weren’t much good at their work, people who’d been caught red-handed, people who shuttled in and out of Poggioreale: White offered third-rate working conditions.

  Still, the weather vane of fortune had started to veer.

  * * *

  That, at least, was the meaning of the text Agostino had sent Nicolas while he, outside Letizia’s apartment house, was doing his best to convince her that Renatino’s humiliation had been nothing more than an act of love.

  “Guagliu’, Copacabana is back in Naples,” said Agostino as soon as Nicolas halted his scooter next to his and Briato’s. They were idling there, motors running, at the last turn in the road before the New Maharaja. The club could just be glimpsed from that location, and when it was closed it looked even more imposing.

  “And he’s an asshole for coming back, because they’ll take him down for sure,” said Briato’.

  “No, no, the reason Copacabana came back is something super-important.”

  “So we can start selling hash and grass!” said Briato’, and he glanced at Agostino with a smile. The first one of the day.

  “Yeah, ri-i-i-ight! Get serious … I swear to you, he’s back to organize ’o Micione’s wedding, he’s going to get married to Viola Striano, guagliu’!”

  “Are you for real?” said Nicolas.

  “Yes,” and he added lest there be any lingering doubt: “Adda murì mammà.”

  “Which means that now the guys from San Giovanni are in charge here, at our house…”

  “So what does that matter?” Agostino replied. “Copacabana is here and he wants to see us.”

  “Where?”

  “Here, I already told you, and right now…” he said, pointing at the club. “The others will be here any minute.”

  The time to change their lives was now. Nicolas knew it, he could sense that the opportunity would arrive. And now here it was. You go, you answer the call. You have to be strong with the strong. He actually had no idea what was going to happen, but he could use his imagination.

  BAD THOUGHTS

  Copacabana was parked in front of the club in a Fiat Fiorino packed full of cleaning supplies. He got out as soon as he was told the kids had arrived. He pinched their cheeks as he said hello, as if greeting toddlers, and they made no objection. This was a man who could step them up big-time, even though he looked skinny and pale, with long hair and patchy whiskers. His eyes were red and bloodshot. Life on the run must have been pretty tough. “Here they are, all my children … all right then, kids, come with me, you’re here to look pretty … I’ll take care of everything else.”

  Copacabana gave Oscar a big hug. Oscar was the guy in charge at the New Maharaja. His father’s father had bought the place fifty years ago. He was a fat man who loved monogrammed, tailor-made shirts, though he always wore them one size too small, which meant you saw the buttons in the buttonholes struggling and squirming to hold things together. Oscar returned the hug shyly, practically holding Copacabana at arm’s length with some discomfort, lest their hug paint him as the wrong sort of person.

  “I’m about to do you a great honor, Oscarino mio…”

  “I’m all ears…”

  �
�Diego Faella and Viola Striano are going to celebrate their wedding here … in your place…” And he spread his arms wide to take in the whole club, as if it belonged to him.

  At the mere sound of those two surnames uttered in the same breath, Oscar’s face went beet red.

  “Copacabana, I love you like a brother, but…”

  “That’s not the answer I was expecting…”

  “I’m a friend to one and all, you know that, but as the majority shareholder in this club … our policies are to steer clear of…”

  “Of?”

  “Of difficult situations.”

  “Still, you’re happy to take money that comes from difficult situations, aren’t you?”

  “We take money from everyone, but this kind of a wedding…” He didn’t bother to finish the phrase, there was no need.

  “But why would you avoid the honor of doing something like this?” asked Copacabana. “Do you have any idea of how many weddings you’d book because of this one?”

  “Then they’ll put micro recording devices on us.”

  “What micro recording devices are you talking about? Leaving aside the fact that the waiters aren’t yours, I have my own guaglioni who’ll be doing it…”

  Agostino, Nicolas, Pesce Moscio, Briato’, Lollipop, Dentino, and the others hardly expected that they’d have to work as waiters, they didn’t know how, they’d never done such a thing. But if that’s what Copacabana had decided, that’s how it would go.

  “Ah, Oscar, I don’t know if it’s clear to you that these people are ready to give you a deposit, tomorrow morning, of two hundred thousand euros … for this wedding, for this lovely party…”