The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  It had all happened so quickly in that country, Montenegro, where father and son had decided to take their business. And so they went there together. There was an old iron waterwheel, badly rusted, all that remained of a tumbledown mill. The stream kept it turning, and the Archangel saw the man clearly, saw his face, saw his eyes, saw his hands as they shoved Gabriele against the blades of the waterwheel that the flowing waters of the stream had chipped until they were jagged and sharp. Don Vittorio saw it happen from the window of their villa, which wasn’t far away, and he ran down in desperate haste. He tried to stop the waterwheel with his own hands, but he was unsuccessful. He saw his son’s body smash into the water again and again until he was helped by the domestic staff. It took them a long time to untangle Gabriele’s corpse from those blades. And yet, throughout the entire trial, Don Vittorio defended Micione’s hired killer. He refused to bring evidence, he refused to provide any information. Gabriele Grimaldi’s killer was Tigrotto, the right-hand man of Diego Faella, Micione. That’s how Micione wanted to conquer Montenegro and, more important, take over San Giovanni a Teduccio and from there enjoy unhindered access to Naples. He was present in the courtroom during the trial, and the prosecuting magistrate asked whether he recognized him. Don Vittorio said no. The prosecuting magistrate insisted, hoping to bring the trial to a conclusion: “Are you certain?” He addressed Don Vittorio as voi, avoiding the more formal lei, in an attempt to bring both sides together. And Don Vittorio said no. “Do you recognize Francesco Onorato, ’o Tigrott’?”

  “Never seen him, don’t even know who he is.” Don Vittorio knew that those hands were stained with the blood of his son and many of his fellow clan members. Nothing. Diego Faella’s thanks weren’t exceptional. In the heart of the state’s power, we’re all men of honor. The silence of Don Vittorio Grimaldi was viewed as the normal behavior of a man of honor. The concession that Micione offered was life, or rather, survival. He put a halt to the gang war against the Grimaldis, he allowed him to go on dealing, confining him to a reservation in Ponticelli. A handful of streets, the only place where he’d be allowed to sell and exist. The boundless resources that the Grimaldis had once had—heroin, cocaine, cement, garbage, shops, and supermarkets—had now dwindled to a few square kilometers, and scanty profits. Tigrotto was acquitted and Don Vittorio was returned to house arrest.

  It was an enormous success, the lawyers exchanged hugs, a few people in the front row applauded. Nicolas, Pesce Moscio, Drago’, Briato’, Tucano, and Agostino watched that trial from start to finish, and you could almost say they grew up together at it. When they’d started going to watch, they only had a few stray hairs on their faces, and now some of them had beards worthy of an ISIS militiaman. They continued to enter the courtroom by showing the same fake IDs they’d first displayed two years earlier, during the very first hearings. Because you could enter the courtroom to watch the trial, no question, but only if you were an adult. Getting hold of those fake IDs had been child’s play. The city specialized in the production of fake IDs for jihadists, so there surely would have been no obstacles for local youngsters, guaglioncelli, who wanted to get into a courtroom. Briato’ had taken care of it. He’d taken the photographs and identified the right counterfeiter. A hundred euros apiece, and there they were, three or four years older. Stavodicendo and Biscottino objected to having been left out, but in the end they were forced to give in: they couldn’t have fooled anyone with those baby faces of theirs.

  The first time they assembled outside the court complex, looking up at those three glass-and-steel towers, they were surprised to feel a sort of sneaking attraction. They all felt as if they’d wandered into an American TV series; instead they were in front of the criminal court buildings, the same structures that the bosses they were going in now to see in the flesh had arranged to burn, systematically, while they were still under construction. The allure of glass and steel and height and power had deflated the minute they’d walked in the front entrance. Here everything was plastic, wall-to-wall carpeting, and echoing voices. They’d climbed the stairs, daring one another to see who could reach the top first, yanking on one another’s T-shirts and making noise; then once they were inside the courtroom, they’d been greeted by that slogan—The Law Is Equal for All—at the sight of which Nicolas had had to stifle a laugh. As if no one knew the truth (mannaggia il patriarca, he swore to himself), that the world was divided into just two categories, the fucked and the fuckers. That’s the only law that counts. And every time they went to watch that trial, unfailingly, as they went in, a crooked smile showed on their faces.

  Inside the courtroom, they’d spent hours sitting quietly, something they’d never done before in their short lives. At school, at home, even in clubs, there was always too much to see and try out for them to waste time sitting still. Their legs danced in impatience, always forcing their bodies to go somewhere else, and from there to yet some other place. But the trial was all of life itself, laying itself out before their eyes and revealing its secrets to them. There was so much to learn. Every single gesture, every word, every glance offered a lesson, a teaching. Impossible to look away, impossible to lose your focus. They looked like a group of well-behaved children attending Mass on Sunday, their fingers intertwined, hands resting on their legs, eyes wide open, attentive, heads ready to swivel quickly in the direction of the important words, no nodding, no nervous movements, even cigarettes could wait.

  The courtroom was divvied up in two perfect halves. In the front were the actors, farther back was the audience. And between them, six-foot-high steel bars. The voices came across slightly distorted by the echoing acoustics, but the meaning of the phrases was never lost. The kids had carved out a single space for all of them, in the next-to-last row, over beside the wall. It wasn’t the best location; at the theater these would have been the cheap seats, but they could still see everything: the untroubled gaze of Don Vittorio beneath a silvery head of hair that in this light looked like a mirror, the defendant’s back—he was broader across than he was tall, but with a pair of yellow feline eyes that put the fear in you—the backs of the lawyers, the backs of the people who had managed to snag a front-row seat. They were Chinese shadow puppets, at first only shapeless blurs, but then the light shifts in intensity and the eyes of the audience adjust, sharpen, and then everything makes sense, right down to the finest details. And not far away, perhaps just a couple of rows up, the members of several paranzas, whom you could recognize by a snippet of some tattooed phrase sticking out of the collar of their shirt or a scar that their shaven skull brazenly displayed.

  In the front row, just a few short steps from the bars, sat the paranza of the Capelloni. They’d never made an issue of age and often showed up en masse. Unlike Nicolas and the others, the Capelloni didn’t seem to thirst for every word, every silence, and you’d often see them stroll along the rows of chairs, stop for a moment to place their hands on the bars, indifferent to the objections of those who were behind them, and then go back to their seats. White was the only one who never stood up, perhaps because he worried that his drunken-cowboy gait might attract the attention of the carabinieri. At other times, you might chance to see the Barbudos from Sanità. They sat down wherever they could find a spot. They’d sit there, deep in conversation, stroking their Bin Laden beards, and every so often go out for a cigarette. But there was no tension, no wary studying of one another. All eyes were on the stage.

  “Ua’,” said Maraja in a very low voice. He’d leaned his head back only as far as needed, speaking out of the corner of his mouth because he couldn’t bring himself to turn his gaze away. “If we had half the balls of Don Vittorio, not even fucking God could stop us.”

  “That guy is protecting the guy who shed his own son’s blood…” whispered Dentino.

  “All the more reason,” Maraja reiterated, “adda murì mammà if he hasn’t got a pair of balls on him. As long as he can stay true, he’d be willing to keep the one who crushed his son’s body from going b
ehind bars.”

  “I don’t think I could maintain all this loyalty. That is, either I kill you or if I’m in prison I rat you out and make sure you get life without parole, omm’ ’e mmerda,” said Pesce Moscio. Piece of shit.

  “E questo è da infami,” Maraja replied, and then repeating the same words, “This is infamous, a turncoat’s play. It’s easy to preserve your honor when you have to defend your own money, your own shit, your own blood. It’s precisely when it would be easy to mouth off and sing like a canary to everyone who’ll listen that, instead, if you keep your mouth shut, then that means you’re number one, that you’re the best. That you’ve busted everyone else’s ass. That they can all just suck your dick because you’re head and shoulders above, because you know how to defend the System. Even when they’ve murdered your son. Hai capì, Pescioli’?” Understand, Little Fish?

  “He’s preserving it in front of someone who murdered his son, and he doesn’t say a thing,” Pesce Moscio went on.

  “Pesce Mo’,” Dentino commented, “you’d already be singing if you were there … you’ve got a career as an informant.”

  “No, strunzo, I’d have already sliced him open.”

  “So listen to Jack the Ripper,” Tucano concluded.

  They were talking like a couple of Texas hold ’em players, never looking each other in the eye. They tossed out phrases onto the green felt, showing what they had in their minds, and after a while someone, like Tucano had done, would sweep the table and deal out another hand.

  No one could imagine, though, just what it was that Nicolas was hoping for deep within. Maraja liked Don Vittorio, but it was Micione who, having married Viola, the daughter of Don Feliciano, had the blood in their quarter. Rotten blood, but still, the blood of kings. The blood of their quarter was hereditary, as the rules of ownership require. Don Feliciano had always told his men: “The quarter has to remain in the hands of those who were born there and live there.” And Copacabana, who had been a faithful envoy of the Strianos, had grabbed for Forcella with both hands, immediately after the arrest of the head of the family. It had in fact been the arrest of the boss, almost three years earlier, that had led to the trial.

  The entire quarter had been surrounded. They’d been on his trail for days on end, and the catturandi squad, the equivalent of the U.S. Marshals, couldn’t believe it: Don Feliciano had come back to Naples and was out on the street, dressed in a tracksuit, in contrast with the sartorial distinction he usually flaunted in public. He hadn’t tried to hide, he was spending his time on the run from the law right in his own home quarter, just like everyone, but without lurking behind fake walls, under double floors, down wells, in hidey-holes. They had burst out of the alley, the vicolo, and they’d called his name: “Feliciano Striano, sir, please put your hands up.” He’d stopped, and that “Sir, please put your hands up” seemed to have calmed him down. It was an arrest, not an ambush. He’d shot a chilling glance at his lazy bodyguard, who seemed determined to heat things up by firing his gun; the bodyguard changed his mind and immediately turned to run, eager to escape handcuffs himself. Don Feliciano allowed himself to be cuffed. “Go on, go ahead,” he’d told them. And while they were wrapping his wrists in case-hardened steel, the carabinieri, without even noticing it, suddenly found themselves surrounded by crowds of kids and ladies. Feliciano smiled. “Don’t worry, all of you, stop worrying,” he said, calming the nerves of the people who were leaning out the windows and doors and starting to shout: “Ue’, maronna mia!” The children were wrapping their arms around the carabinieri’s legs and biting their thighs. The mothers were keening: “Let him be, leave him be…” A crowd poured forth into the streets, the apartment buildings seemed like so many bottles overturned, gushing people and more people and still more people out into the vicoli.

  Don Feliciano was laughing: the Casalesi bosses, the bosses of Secondigliano, Palermo, and Reggio Calabria, would surely have been caught deep underground in caves, behind fake wall partitions, in subterranean labyrinths. He, the true king of Naples, was being arrested out on the street, in view of one and all. The one thing that Don Feliciano regretted was that he wasn’t well dressed; it’s clear that the carabinieri who usually gave him confidential tips had sold him out, or else they’d been unable to get word to him of the impending arrest. All he would have needed was half an hour: not to make his escape, but to select the right Eddy Monetti suit, shirt, and Marinella tie. All the times he’d been arrested, he’d always been caught impeccably dressed. And he dressed impeccably because, as he always liked to say, it can always happen, someone might shoot you or arrest you without advance warning, and you can’t let them catch you looking shabby. Everyone would be disappointed, everyone would say: “So Don Feliciano Striano, is that all he was?” And now they were going to see him, and maybe they’d say: “Is this all he was, after all?” This was his one misgiving, he knew all the rest and what little he didn’t know he could imagine. The crowd pressed in, jeering, around the carabinieri squad cars. The sirens didn’t intimidate anyone. Nor did the regulation sidearms. Even if they’d wanted to, under absolutely no circumstances could they have opened fire. “In those apartment buildings, there are more weapons than forks and knives” was the only thing that their commanding officer had told them, urging them to keep cool. The force at play was disproportionate and the advantage was distinctly on the side of the people in the apartment buildings. Camera crews showed up from the national news broadcasts. A couple of helicopters were buzzing overhead. The people in the streets of the quarter were waiting for a sign, any sign at all, to distract the carabinieri, who were anything but ready to face up to a mass insurrection. The arrest had been authorized in a moment of calm and quiet, the streets were deserted, it was the middle of the night. Where had those children come from? Had those people simply been catapulted directly from their beds out into the streets? Among all the faces that looked on with worried veneration, the way you look at a father as he’s being carried off for no good reason, Copacabana stepped forward. Feliciano Striano smiled at him and Copacabana gave him a kiss on the lips, the utmost symbol of loyalty. Mouth shut. No one speaks. Seal of silence.

  “Basta ammuina” was Don Feliciano’s phrase. “Enough uproar.” Copacabana passed it along, and it spread like a domino that eventually knocked down all the others. In the blink of an eye, they were all gone, everyone stopped their yelling. They hurried away to keep company with Don Feliciano’s wife and daughter, as if in a sort of wake, conveying their condolences. That had been Don Feliciano Nobile’s decision. It was the last act of strength of a clan decimated by the war against the Sanità quarter, against the Mocerino clan, with whom the Strianos had at first tried to ally themselves, until they were both forced to kill each other off in reciprocal slaughter. Don Feliciano Nobile’s final winning strategy had been to show himself, prove to his men and his quarter that he hadn’t been forced into hiding—which would naturally mean turning himself into an easy target, and therefore dying. That it would come to an end seemed inevitable after his lengthy reign, inherited from his father, Luigi Striano o’ Sovrano, and he knew that well. In the days still available to him, though, appearing publicly like this meant giving the Striano clan the image of still being fearless, free, and at home in their quarter. Which mattered.

  * * *

  Then that last kiss, given to Copacabana, was betrayed by none other than Don Feliciano. Over the course of the following few months the Apocalypse befell them, unexpected, violent, and unimaginable. Don Feliciano had made up his mind to talk, and his betrayal—his pentimento, or repentance—brought down far more structures than any earthquake. It’s not a metaphor, it’s exactly what happened. He redesigned the entire map of the System. Whole buildings emptied out because of waves of arrests or else witness-protection programs that transported Don Feliciano’s family members to safe zones. It was far more ghastly than any feud. It heaped shame on every man and woman in the clan, the same shame that comes over you when you real
ize that everyone knows about your husband’s or your wife’s betrayal. And you feel watched, mocked. They’d felt Don Feliciano’s blue eyes, his level gaze on them every minute for years now. Those eyes were both a threat and a protection. No one could come into Forcella to do as they pleased, no one could disobey any of the System’s rules. And the System’s rules had been dictated and were enforced by the Strianos. Those eyes were safety and fear. And Don Feliciano had decided to close those eyes.

  As was the case with his arrest, it was night when the quarter learned he had turned state’s witness. There was a blitz of helicopters and even an armor-plated bus filled with hundreds of arrestees. Don Feliciano informed, reporting the paid killers, the gang members, the extortionists, the dope-peddling bases. He informed on his own family, and the whole family spilled the beans in a daisy chain. They all started betraying one another, providing information, talking about bribes, public works contracts, checking accounts. Commissioners, deputy ministers, bank directors, and businessmen: they all started singing like canaries on one another. Don Feliciano talked, and talked, and talked some more, while the whole quarter rose up with a single question: “Why?”

  For months to follow, this interrogative adverb could mean only one thing: “Why did Don Feliciano turn state’s witness?” There was no need to complete the sentence, all you had to say was “Why?” and everyone understood. In cafés and bars, at the dinner table on Sundays, at the soccer stadium. “Why?” just meant: “Why did Don Feliciano do it?” There were weighty catalogs of answers, but the truth was simple, even obvious: Don Feliciano had turned state’s witness because he would rather kill Forcella than turn over ownership of it to anyone else. Because he hadn’t had the fortitude to put a noose around his own neck, he chose to put the noose around everybody else’s. He tried to make people think he’d found his conscience, but how do you wipe your conscience clean of guilt for hundreds of deaths? Bullshit. There’d been no repentance, he didn’t regret a single thing. He was talking just as a way to go on killing. Before he’d done it with guns, now he was doing it with his words.