The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “No, I’m saying that if you stole without authorization … you’ve done it other times…”

  “Mojo isn’t authorized, Mojo steals, and if the families of the System want something, they come here and they take it.”

  Mojo was respectful, even now that they had realized he was working in other areas. Those vans were packed full of stuff he’d sell at street markets on the outskirts of town. Those Gypsies weren’t even burgling apartments. The bulk of their livelihood came from armed robberies and especially arson: they ran a whole illegal ring in rags, rubber, copper. Keeping up with their normal line of work was already a challenge, they didn’t have time to pick clean a club like the New Maharaja.

  “All right, I’ll tell my father you didn’t do it. And you certainly aren’t going to go telling my father stories, are you?”

  “No, no, Mojo doesn’t lie,” said Mojo. He nodded his head toward one of his men, who came over with Nicolas’s Francotte. Mojo tossed it to him, and it landed in the mud in front of the Beverly’s front wheel.

  “Now go.”

  * * *

  “But why are you fixated on this idea of catching whoever it was who cleaned out the New Maharaja?” asked Drago’. They’d stopped at a kebabbaro, a kebab shop, because everything they’d been doing had whetted their appetite, and then Nicolas had asked for a chunk of ice to put on his lip. He hoped Letizia wouldn’t notice.

  “It’s the only way to get a private dining room for good,” he said. He was chewing on one side, the side that hadn’t been beaten up as bad, and even if it hurt him, he’d refused to do without his kebab.

  “Earlier, I was just telling you that my dad says maybe they did it themselves, to defraud the insurance company…” said Stavodicendo.

  “If that’s the way it is, then there’s nothing we can do about it,” said Drago’. He’d ordered a super-greasy hot dog, dripping with oil. He was sick and tired of Arab food; his mother told him that they put rotten meat in those things. “Still,” Drago’ continued, “I couldn’t care less about who pulled off that caper, all we get is a private dining room, and nothing more? Why the fuck are we doing this?”

  “Like fuck, that’s all we get,” Nicolas replied. “What we get is a private dining room forever, not just for one night. Spend time in the club and get to know everyone. We show our faces.”

  “And for that we’re supposed to do this favor for Oscar, we got to get all his stuff back? It must be a million euros’ worth of stuff, and we’re handing it to him on a silver platter? They stole all kinds of things, did you read about it in the paper? The doors and the handles, even the window frames…”

  “You’re out of your mind, Drago’. If we have the private dining room, then no one can tell us whether or not we can go in, we don’t have to come up with excuses anymore or try to find someone who can get us in the door. We just walk in, simple as can be, forget about working as waiters. All of Naples will see that we’re in there, everyone. City commissioners, soccer players, singers, and all the bosses of the System. It sets us up to join them, can’t you get that through your head?”

  “Ma, nun me ne fotte proprio di stà llà tutt’ ’e ssere…” he said. I don’t give a fuck about spending all my evenings there.

  “Not all our evenings, just when we want to.”

  “Sure, okay, but it’s still not worth it…”

  “Spending our time in the palace next to the ones who are in charge is always worth it, I want to walk with kings, I’m sick of hanging out with people who don’t count for a fucking thing.”

  * * *

  The days that followed were empty ones. No one had said anything more about the story of the Gypsy, but everyone was just waiting for a disturbance to reexhume it. And it was none other than Viceré who rekindled the fire.

  Drago’s mother had called her son in because he needed to go visit his father, at the prison in L’Aquila. For the past year he’d been talking to him through bulletproof glass and an intercom. Nunzio, Viceré, was serving time under the 41 bis regime.

  The 41 bis regime is a sarcophagus. Everything is controlled, observed, monitored. A security camera is trained on you always, morning, noon, and night. You can’t choose to watch a program on TV nor can you ask for a newspaper or a book. Everything goes through censorship. Everything is filtered. Or at least it should be. Family members can visit only once a month, and the visits take place through a slab of bulletproof glass. Under that transparent partition, reinforced concrete. Over that transparent partition, reinforced concrete. An intercom you can talk through. Nothing else.

  Drago’ took a long, silent journey, interrupted only by the steady stream of texts he was receiving. They were from Nicolas, who wanted to know if he’d arrived, if he’d talked to his father, if all of this had anything to do with their situation. He sensed that they were at a tipping point, he just didn’t know what kind.

  Drago’ found his father with a grim expression on his face, and he understood.

  “All right, then, Gigino, how are you?” In spite of his anger, his voice betrayed affection, and the man laid a hand on the bulletproof glass that separated them.

  Drago’ laid his hand against his father’s. From the other side of the glass, no warmth reached him. “I’m good, Pa’,” he said.

  “So what’s this I hear about you going to Romania, you don’t say a thing to your mother and your father, you just decide on your own?”

  “No, Pa’, it’s not that I particularly want to go to Romania myself.”

  Even though he’d had no instructor in the art, he knew how to speak in code, and when he didn’t understand, he was capable of finding a way of requesting information. He went on, getting closer to the intercom, to make sure that his words were as clearly understandable as possible: “It’s not that I particularly want to go to Romania myself, it’s that Nicolas wants to go at all costs, he says it’s a new experience.”

  “But if you do this, if you start going to Romania, you’re leaving your mother all alone, and you’re making me worry,” and with his eyes he would have liked to break that glass and slap his son silly.

  “Well, this thing about going to Romania together, he told me while we were in Posillipo, we were in a club that was empty, everyone had left, and Nicolas said that everyone’s going to Romania because it’s more fun and that’s why the restaurants and clubs here are empty. So he told me I should go, too, because in Romania, all alone, it can be scary. He says they’ll kidnap you,” and he paused on that point.

  His father began speaking immediately: “The fact that the club is empty has nothing to do with Romania, nothing at all. And after all, what the fuck do you care if the clubs are empty? What the fuck do you care if Nicolas goes to Romania? Eh? What the fuck do you care?”

  Drago’ would have liked to reply that he really didn’t give much of a fuck about it at all, that it was really something Nicolas was into, that he’d kept him close, indifferent to the fact that he was blood of the blood of a pentito, someone who had turned state’s witness. He understood his motivations, certainly, and he understood just as well that for an aspiring boss, approval was a fundamental factor. But Drago’ thought of himself as a soldier, sure, a soldier of noble blood, and the way Nicolas struggled to get permanent access to the private dining room struck him as pretty much a waste of time. He was looking through the dictionary for words in code to convey that thought process to his father when Viceré decided to put an end to the conversation.

  “Tell your friend that he doesn’t understand a thing about tourism or customers, that it isn’t true that they’ve stopped going out to the restaurants because they want to go party in Romania, they’ve stopped coming to the restaurants and clubs because they just don’t want to go there anymore. It’s gotten too expensive.”

  “They don’t want to go there anymore? It’s gotten too expensive?” asked Drago’. But Viceré, instead of answering the question, rapped his knuckles on the glass, as if slapping him in the face.
And Drago’ would have been glad to take that slap in the face. Instead, though, he didn’t even have time to say goodbye before his father had turned his back on him.

  * * *

  “So ’o Viceré is basically buried in a tomb?” asked Stavodicendo as soon as Drago’ returned from the prison in L’Aquila.

  “That’s right.”

  “And he can’t see anyone at all?”

  “Only his family, once a month.”

  “And, I was just saying, what about the exercise hour?”

  “Eh, one hour a day. He does it with one person, or with another. Three or four people at the very most.”

  “And do they talk?”

  “They talk, sure, but they’re all shitting their pants because they’re convinced the guards are planting micro recording devices on them. So Papà has become a talking crossword puzzle. You can never figure out what he’s trying to tell you,” and he repeated his father’s words.

  “They don’t want to go there anymore? It’s gotten too expensive?” Nicolas repeated.

  And right behind him, Stavodicendo followed suit: “They don’t want to go there anymore? It’s gotten too expensive?”

  Stavodicendo felt guilty. It had been his father who’d given him bad advice and now it was up to the son to untangle the mess. He offered to give his father a ride on his motor scooter to Borgo Marinari, and as they were zipping along Via Caracciolo, he said: “Ué, Pa’, you sure made me look like shit.”

  “How so?” shouted his father to make himself heard above the noise.

  “It wasn’t the Gypsies, even ’o Viceré says so.”

  “Fuck, so for real you dragged ’o Viceré into this. What does he know about it? He’s in prison.”

  “He told Drago’ that the Roma have nothing to do with it, and then he added some phrase like ‘the tourism isn’t involved, either.’”

  “Tourism?”

  “I was just saying…’O Viceré said that it has nothing to do with it, that there are no tourists in the restaurants, but not because everyone’s going to Romania, but because they don’t want to go there anymore, because it’s gotten too expensive. And Drago’ just didn’t understand it at all … The New Maharaja has never paid for protection.”

  The father burst out laughing and almost knocked his son off the bike.

  “Papà, I was just saying, what’s it got to do with anyting?”

  “It has everything to do with it, actually … Don’t you know that the real shakedown is the protection from private security?”

  “Private security?”

  “Clearly, they asked for more money and the club wouldn’t give it to them, so that’s the private security that doesn’t work any longer.”

  Stavodicendo accelerated, passing cars two at a time, then he cut off a delivery van, which had to slam on its brakes, and swerved off down a narrow alley. He dropped his father off outside his restaurant and revved away. Seconds later, he screeched swerving to a halt, kicking up a cloud of smoke and fumigating with the stench of burnt rubber a couple of tourists sitting at outside tables. He turned back to look at his father: “Thanks,” he said, “I’ve got to go now,” and he screeched out of there once again.

  Stavodicendo texted his father’s interpretation to Nicolas, and they immediately talked it over with Drago’. No doubt about it, now Viceré’s message was clear. They needed to talk about it with Oscar, but he kept ignoring their calls and messages, so Nicolas went and stood outside his house. It was almost midnight. Oscar lived in an apartment house just a short walk from the New Maharaja because, as he put it, his whole life was right there. From the third floor, which was where Oscar had his apartment, light filtered out through the half-closed shutters. Nicolas leaned on the buzzer, determined not to let up until the front door clicked open. Nothing. No answer. Not even a “Fuck you, get out of here.” So he put both hands together over his mouth and started shouting through that jury-rigged megaphone. “It wasn’t Copacabana, it wasn’t the Gypsies, it was the Puma Agency, the private security outfit, the Puma Agency…” Suddenly the shutters flew open and a woman in a nightgown appeared briefly, shouting down to him to shut up, and then vanished back into the light. Nicolas decided to give her ten seconds’ time—one, two, three … —and then he’d start leaning on the buzzer again. He’d reached nine when the front door emitted a metallic click.

  Oscar, in pajamas, was sitting in his armchair, in a daze. A spumante bottle that he’d probably brought home from the club lay on its side, unnoticed, on the carpet in front of him. Nicolas tried to get him to think, but he was fixated, he kept mumbling that it was probably Copacabana who’d had the club ransacked and emptied out because he’d said no about the wedding.

  “It wasn’t him, he really couldn’t give a damn,” Nicolas told him, speaking slowly, calmly, the way you’d talk to a child. “He wants all the friends he can get, if he’d wanted to he would have burned your club to the ground, he wouldn’t just have stolen your things.”

  Nicolas looked over at the TV cabinet and noticed a bottle standing on top of it, identical to the one that the master of the house had guzzled. It wasn’t chilled, who knows how long it had been standing there, but Nicolas grabbed it anyway, popped the cork, and filled the glass that Oscar still held in one hand. And he said what he’d wanted to say ever since his first phone call to Oscar: “If I can track down everything, you have to give me three things: the private dining room at my disposal, whenever the fuck I want it; fifty percent discount on anything I eat or drink in the club, for me and for all my friends; third, tell the Puma Agency to get fucked and I’ll protect you instead.”

  “You?” For a second, Oscar seemed to regain a modicum of control and awareness, tossed back the spumante, and started to get up, but then fell back awkwardly into the armchair. He threw the glass at Nicolas but aimed the throw badly, missing him and hitting the 40-inch TV mounted on the wall. “I don’t want anything to do with the Camorra, I’ve never paid for protection, and the last people I’d pay are you snotnose kids, muccusielli is what you are. Now do me a favor and clear out!”

  His wife had reappeared in the meantime, fully dressed and hair neatly brushed as if she were expecting guests, and she, too, started shouting that this was the home of respectable people and that she would call the carabinieri. Bullshit, you will, Nicolas thought to himself, but this wasn’t the moment to force the situation and he wasn’t going to get anything else out of Oscar. The man had finally managed to get up out of his chair and now he was sniveling as he stared at the crack in the TV screen.

  It didn’t take Nicolas long to figure out exactly what this Puma Agency really was, everyone seemed to know about it: it was an old private security agency founded sometime in the 1990s, with money from the Nuova Famiglia, the New Family. Then the original founder had died. The man was a friend of Lorenzo Nuvoletta, one of the most powerful Camorra bosses in the nineties, and now the place was being run by his son, who happened to enjoy the protection of none other than our old friend Copacabana.

  * * *

  “’O White, did you see all the shit that went down at the New Maharaja?” Nicolas asked the chief of the Capelloni.

  White was resting up after a game of pool. He was swirling a demitasse cup full of opium, just to uphold his reputation for consuming drugs that most people couldn’t afford. He found it repulsive to get high on the kinds of drugs others used.

  “Oh, yeah, fucked-up situation over there.”

  “Do you know who people say did it?”

  “Who?”

  “Copacabana.”

  “Bullshit,” said White with a grimace. A shudder ran through him that came close to making him overturn his cup. Then he lifted the opium to his lips and the trembling stopped immediately. “If Copacabana wanted something, he’d just plant a bomb in the place, you think we give a shit about Posillipo? In fact, we actually like the place … And after all, what do you care about it? If someone hired you to learn more, though, I need to know
so I can tell ’o Micione.”

  “Nobody subcontracted me to do anything. It chaps my ass, though, to hear people put the blame on us when we had nothing to do with it…” Nicolas tossed out. He’d developed a taste for bluffing, for pushing other people into a corner.

  “So you’re a vigilante,” said Chicchirichì. He’d taken White’s place in the pool game, and he was speaking to Nicolas with his back turned, as he lined up a cushion shot. “We? Who’s we? I’m not in business with you and you’re sure not in business with me.”

  “None of us from Forcella had anything to do with it.”

  “Of course not, this has got to be those Gypsies…” White did his best to minimize it. Now he was bluffing, too, because for a theft this big, people could even come looking for the Capelloni.

  “It had nothing to do with the Gypsies, trust me,” said Nicolas.

  White looked him over from head to foot and took a couple of sips from his cup of opium. He pulled out an iPhone and for a minute typed in something that Nicolas could only guess at from behind the phone case, which sported a Jolly Roger. Maybe this time he’d gone too far, maybe now White was calling some of his men. Or maybe he was just chatting with his girlfriend and enjoyed keeping Nicolas standing there, twisting in the wind. When he was done tapping on his phone screen, White looked up and started staring at Nicolas again, this time right in the eyes, and lowered his gaze only when his iPhone emitted a beep that meant someone had answered. One of his men? No, impossible, why reach out to others when, right behind Nicolas, Chicchirichì and the rest stood ready to pounce at a twitch of their master’s finger? His girlfriend? But did he even have a girlfriend, anyway? White read rapidly, set down the cup, and said: “So let’s do this. You want to get yourself a place at the New Maharaja. That’s fine.”

  “No wait…”

  “Shut your mouth. If you get what I think you will, then I’m going to have to arrange for protection at the New Maharaja. At the very most, you can earn a salary, based on a percentage.”

  Nicolas knew that he had no option other than to say: “I don’t want to take a salary from anyone.” Behind Nicolas’s back, the pool game had come to a halt. Not a good sign. White had leaped to his feet and grabbed the pool cue that Chicchirichì was extending in his direction. This wasn’t the moment to look weak.