The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  Drago’s father, Nunzio Striano Viceré, had taken the convictions and the sentences: Feliciano had informed on him for every sort of traffic, every misdeed, every crime that he’d committed, but Viceré had refused to talk. All the other brothers had turned state’s witness, but Viceré would not. He continued to do his time behind bars, and with his silence he protected a few apartments and his son. He didn’t want Luigi to wind up like Don Feliciano’s daughter, who until she married Micione had been reviled and ostracized by everyone. “Pentita,” they called her.

  * * *

  No one was so naïve as to be unable to glimpse, hovering behind Tigrotto in the defendant’s box, the looming shade of Micione, as if he were actually present in the courtroom in flesh and blood. In the meantime, Don Vittorio persisted in remaining silent in the face of the prosecuting magistrate’s onslaught: “Your son, as we’ve been able to demonstrate, has been identified, by various informants working with law enforcement, as an enemy of the Faellas, with whom you not only share your quarter but also a history as allies. In that case, do you have any knowledge that the Faellas might have wished the death of your son?”

  “My son, as good and kind as he was with everyone, could hardly have stirred in anyone the desire to kill him, at least that’s my belief. Impossible to imagine. Especially in someone from our own quarter and who would therefore have known his deep and abiding love for Ponticelli, its children, and all the people he’d always loved, and who turned out in throngs for his funeral.”

  It was a back-and-forth in a technically proper Italian, doing its best to keep at bay the words in dialect that were seething up from under, but which then and there would have compromised that sunny calm.

  In the meantime, Tigrotto’s arrogance didn’t seem to unsettle Don Vittorio at all; he was even quite willing to lock eyes with him. Tigrotto tried to dismiss it all with a sort of grimace of disgust.

  “I knew Gabriele Grimaldi, but only to say hello. I knew he was never around in Ponticelli, and anyway, I never spent time at Conocal. I’ve never spent time out on the streets.” Tigrotto used those words to report Micione’s words. He wanted to emphasize the difference in their origins, different blood, different interests, born in a villa, not out on the streets. In the silent interplay of references, those words meant: Micione isn’t a narco, he doesn’t live on drug dealing alone, he lives on cement and politics and business, and far from the street. Don Vittorio could do nothing but let him go on saying these things. Could only show himself to be submissive.

  Nicolas understood the dynamic of the game, in all its nuances. He understood that behind it all there was always this thing with blood, affiliation, what’s clean and what’s dirty. There was no theory to hold together these concepts as old as mankind itself. Dirty and clean. Who decides what’s dirty? Who decides what’s clean? It’s blood, it’s always blood. It’s clean and it can never enter into contact with dirty blood, the blood of other people. Nicolas had grown up with these things, all his friends had grown up with them, but he wanted to have the courage to declare that that system was old. And it needed to be abolished. The enemy of your enemy is your friend, aside from any issues of blood and relationships. If in order to become what he wanted to become he was going to have to learn to love what they had taught him to hate, well, he was certainly willing to do that. And to hell with blood. Camorra 2.0.

  HUMAN SHIELD

  The guaglioni of Don Vittorio Grimaldi were obliged to read the names of the streets of the Conocal district every day, because they couldn’t leave that place, that section of Ponticelli. Leaving meant running the risk of being shot by Micione’s men; all the Faellas had them in their crosshairs. And so they stayed inside, within the perimeter of those streets that form a rectangle missing a corner, up top, on the right. When they read articles in the papers that other people wrote about them, they grew furious, because of the pontificating about urban decline, about the apartment buildings that were all alike, about the lack of a future. No matter what they might say, though, those rabbit-warren apartments were there, and, arranged in a hypocritical geometry, were meant to define a living space that was actually a confinement. Like a prison cell. But those guaglioni had no interest in winding up like Scampia and becoming a symbol. They weren’t blind, they had eyes to see that there, where they lived, everything looked like it was third-hand, even fourth-hand. Tattered curtains, baked by the sun, charred garbage, walls spitting threats. Still, this was their quarter and their whole world, and so probably best to accept it and like it, even if that meant denying the facts that were right in front of them. It was a matter of identity, of belonging. Identity is a landing on a staircase. Identity is a street and the streets become the only space where you can possibly live. A single café, just two mini-markets, the rooms of old dry-goods stores that are starting to sell all their inventory. Pawnshops and junkyards transformed into warehouses full of toilet paper and laundry soap because there is no supermarket in the quarter, or it’s too far to be accessible to the elderly, or those on motor scooters, or those who just can’t leave their quarter. That’s what was happening to the Grimaldis. There, though, they could continue to sell drugs. The customers who made it to Conocal were hoping to buy hash, cocaine, and balls of crack at a deep, deep discount. But Don Vittorio had insisted they not drop the price too sharply. It would have been a negative sign, a mark of death. Which meant their customers would stop going there, and they couldn’t venture out looking for customers.

  Not everyone, however, played by the rules. Aucelluzzo was skilled at racing along on his scooter, actually rocketing along, faster than the bullets that might easily take him down, quicker than the eyes that might identify him and pin him down, secretive and furtive in his peddling. Visible to the buyer, invisible to the lookouts. Aucelluzzo therefore had no fear of setting foot outside Conocal. All the same, in spite of the fact that he took courage and eliminated his fears by sucking confidence from the X-Men that occupied so much of his body in the form of tattoos, he was destined to die young. Copacabana, in his cell, allowed no one from outside, and especially no one connected to the Grimaldis, to deal in his territory. He’d have overlooked any other family, in exchange for a percentage, but not them. They had set themselves against Forcella, they’d waged war: they smuggled heroin, cocaine, and grass from the West, while the Grimaldis imported the same products from the East.

  Copacabana wanted to take the East away from the Grimaldis, and he was succeeding. And so three streets in Naples were a fair trade for the capital of Montenegro, a patch of the Balkans, an entire Albanian plantation. Aucelluzzo sensed this, but he didn’t really know it. And he went on racing around on his scooter, with those long, skinny legs that were concealed behind the cowling, so that when you saw him coming, it looked as if the torso and all the rest of him just sprouted directly from the saddle. He always posed aerodynamically, even when there was no need, even when he was riding an ancient Vespa assembled out of spare parts from his father’s Vespa: he leaned so far forward that his face touched the odometer and he splayed his elbows wide, so wide that more than once they’d hit side mirrors. His nose was birdlike as well, pointed and downward curving, like a sparrow hawk’s.

  White’s men—Carlito’s Way, Chicchirichì, and Selvaggio—took off after him the minute they glimpsed from a distance those two outsplayed elbows. Aucelluzzo spotted them out of the corner of his eye, revved his engine, and zipped on his Vespa into the infinite wall of slow-moving traffic. “Next time, we’ll leave your name on the asphalt,” they shouted after him, but Aucelluzzo had vanished, and even if he had heard them it wouldn’t have made a bit of difference to him and he would have come back all the same. Up in Forcella he actually engaged in open defiance, and would freely pass by the back room.

  “The hungrier a bird is,” said Copacabana when they reported these facts to him in prison, “the less afraid it is when you stamp your feet or clap your hands.” He used the dialect term aucielli, a clear reference to Auc
elluzzo. “You know what I mean, ’o White, how when you clap your hands and these flying rats won’t even budge? And why won’t they? Because they’re hungry. And they don’t give a damn about escaping, even if you’ve made up your mind to kill them, because they’re bound to die anyway and they know it. Either of hunger or because you shoot them. We don’t shoot them, and the pigeons cover us with shit. That’s how things go with the Grimaldis.”

  Aucelluzzo brought hordes of kids with him. He’d stake them out for an hour or two. Every so often he’d even bring old guys who could no longer justify a salary. Like Alfredo Scala 40, who’d strewn the pavement with dead bodies, and who’d even been district underboss for a certain period. He’d earned a hundred million lire a week, back when they still had the lira: about a hundred thousand euros. What with lawyers’ fees and general squandering, now he hung out near the markets to rob customers, downgraded to a common dealer, or even a lookout. You started young, in the System. And if you didn’t die right away, your career collapsed eventually anyway.

  It was too much. The cancer that was Aucelluzzo was already starting to metastasize, so the Capelloni set off on a mission to rub him out: White decided to see to it in person. Aucelluzzo was on his Vespa as usual, he’d dared to set up shop on Piazza Calenda, his back against a scaffolding. Before the gunshots, he heard the metallic sound of White’s bullets hitting the tubing of the modular scaffolding. White was holding his pistol the way he’d seen guys do in gangsta rap movies—horizontally. Bang. Bang. Bang. Three times, at random, because lately he’d been doing lots of morphine, the same kind that he’d been selling so successfully via the pushers who reported to him, and therefore to Copacabana. With the money he’d purchased an apartment for La Koala, his sister. But morphine and precision never go hand in hand, and so once again Aucelluzzo was saving his pinfeathers from death.

  If Nicolas, that day, hadn’t been passing by—he and Dentino had plunged into a sudden crisis of ravenous hunger and they were riding down Via Annunziata trying to decide where to go—if he hadn’t recognized those metallic bangs, if he hadn’t made a sharp turn, fishtailing and slamming a foot down onto the pavement to keep from sprawling across the asphalt, to correct the trajectory that threatened to take him out into Piazzetta Forcella, that is, in the opposite direction, well, if he hadn’t done all these things, then he wouldn’t have witnessed the scene and perhaps he’d never have had his idea, which he immediately put into practice, while on Dentino’s face the sign of the cross appeared.

  A human shield. Nicolas threw himself between Aucelluzzo and White, who had now leveled his pistol and had shut one eye to take his aim. He got in the middle. White stopped. Aucelluzzo froze in place. Dentino grabbed his T-shirt and shouted: “Maraja, what the fuck are you doing?!” Nicolas spoke to White, who was still standing there, aiming his gun, one eye closed, as if he were waiting for Nicolas to get out of the way so he could start shooting again.

  “’O White,” said Nicolas, revving closer to him on his motor scooter while Aucelluzzo finally screeched off, “we’re just killing more people and doing nothing to get rid of the cops and the checkpoints. You’re out of your mind. Next thing you know, you’ll kill an old man, a lady, a child. Aucelluzzo got away, we’ll pick him up. Leave it to me.” He said it all in a single breath. White lowered his gun, but said nothing. There were two possibilities, Nicolas considered. Either he raises the pistol again and it all ends here. Or else … White half closed his mouth and flashed a smile of chipped, nicotine-yellowed teeth, then he jammed the pistol down his pants and roared off. Nicolas heaved a sigh of relief, and even Dentino felt it, from where he was sitting, pressed against his back.

  * * *

  Aucelluzzo vanished, but they knew he wouldn’t be able to stay out of sight forever.

  “But why did you do it?” Briato’ asked him. “Aucelluzzo is against Micione, he’s against Copacabana, and that means he’s against us.”

  They were in the back room, and it was just them. The Capelloni, Nicolas decided, must be in prison reporting to Copacabana. So much the better.

  “Don’t worry, we aren’t on ’o Micione’s side, we aren’t with Copacabana. We’re with us,” Nicolas replied.

  “I still don’t understand exactly what this ‘us’ is,” Dentino said. “So far, I belong to whoever gives me money.”

  “Okay,” said Maraja, “but if the money you gave to this one, to another, and to a third guy—what if we put it all together? And then, if the money makes us a group, don’t you like that outcome?”

  “But we’re already a group!”

  “Sure, a group of fools.”

  “You’re obsessed. He wants to start a paranza whatever the cost,” said Dentino.

  Nicolas was visibly scratching his balls, as if to say that dreams should never be spoken aloud. And that word, paranza, was a word he tried to pronounce as seldom as possible.

  “I want to take Aucelluzzo down myself,” said Maraja, “so if you see him, no one else gets to do it.”

  They’d been discussing what Nicolas had done for a good solid hour. They were telling him he’d been a lunatic, a true madman. What if White had unleashed a firefight? And what if, as Nicolas himself was saying, old men and little children got caught in the crossfire? Plain crazy. Maraja listened. Because what he was receiving from the others was a genuine investiture. What Briato’ and the rest of the group were calling madness, Maraja considered to be instinct, and Maraja commanded by instinct, it was a natural gift of sorts, more or less like skillfully handling a soccer ball without ever having set foot on a pitch, or else knowing how to add and subtract when you’re just a kid who’s never received lessons from a teacher. He felt infused with a sort of spirit of command, and he liked it when the others acknowledged the fact.

  Aucelluzzo was an insignificant little kid, but he was the front door to Conocal, and, once they got in there, they could get to Don Vittorio, and from there … Nicolas grabbed his balls again, a classic gesture to ward off bad luck, invoke good.

  “But now that you saved his life,” Briato’ said, “he’s not enough of a fool that he’ll just wait around to be found.”

  “Of course he will,” said Maraja, “when he runs out of feed, he’s going to have to come looking for more.”

  “But they’ll shoot him here,” said Briato’.

  “Sure, but it won’t be easy. Here he’ll have to come via Sanità, Forcella, the station, ’o Rettifilo, San Domenico. He’ll take a look around, and the minute things look dicey, he’ll take off.”

  “Do you think he’s packing?” asked Dentino.

  “For real? I don’t think so. And if he is, all he’s carrying is the same as what we’ve got, a beat-up old gat and some knives.”

  In the days that followed, Nicolas mapped out the territory, shuttling back and forth, back and forth. By now it was an obsession with him. Letizia, too, had noticed that he constantly had something else on his mind, but then, Nicolas always had something churning in his head, and so she didn’t get too worried. In the end, Aucelluzzo reappeared. He started from a considerable distance, not directly with the areas controlled by Copacabana’s men. By now he was selling to blacks and little kids, and at prices that were so low that maybe his own men would soon kill him. He worked the Ponte della Maddalena, he worked the train station a little, too. And that, in fact, was where Nicolas caught up with him, on Piazza Garibaldi, in a torrential downpour, the kind that blurs your vision, but he had no doubts, it was really him. That black sweatshirt with the picture of Tupac Shakur on it? Aucelluzzo never took it off, not even when it was ninety degrees out. He had his hood pulled over his head and he was deep in conversation with some other guy Nicolas had never seen before. Maraja killed the engine on his motor scooter and tiptoed closer, pushing off the balls of his feet. He had no clearly worked-out strategy, he just hoped to catch him off guard and then improvise then and there, but a deafening clap of thunder made everyone look up, even Aucelluzzo, and then he saw Nicola
s, drenched, his jeans clinging to his thighs.

  Aucelluzzo grabbed the Vespa that he’d leaned against the balustrade and he was already gone, swallowed by the rain. He raced off, taking the curve a recchia ’n terra, as the saying went, “one ear to the ground,” whizzing off as if there were no traffic, as if that traffic weren’t being made even crazier by the cloudburst. He took Corso Umberto. The cars were a compact, unbudging mass, horns quarreling with other horns, windshield wipers fanning on the highest speed, sloshing water left and right. This is a tropical rainstorm, thought Nicolas, this is the rain out of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, and he felt like an Uruk-hai, his jacket pulled tight around him like some impenetrable suit of armor. The people on the sidewalks were glued to the walls in the hope that the balconies above might protect them from the downpour. Aucelluzzo kicked up waves in each and every puddle, and when he spotted an opening between two cars he’d slide through it, running a hand over his face like a towel, and then revving faster and faster, ever faster. Nicolas was having trouble keeping up with him, and he shouted: “I don’t want to hurt you, I just want to talk,” but Aucelluzzo kept hitting the gas, his elbows thrown wider and wider, until they grazed the rearview mirrors, and anyway, with all that noise, so loud it sounded as if they were in the midst of a war, there was no way he could hear Nicolas. It went on like that for a good long while. Aucelluzzo veered suddenly, went the wrong way up one-way streets, arcing through perfect curves without ever touching his brakes. He drove the Vespa as if he were swerving through a minefield, but instead of sidestepping the mines he was driving right over them, on purpose.