The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples

by Roberto Saviano

  “Exactly.”

  Exactly.

  That one word had been enough, and then it had driven so many other words, and more and more and more. An avalanche. Looking back, would they ever remember that it had all started with a single word? That it had been that one word—uttered just as the celebrations all around them culminated in a paroxysm—that triggered it all? No, no one would ever be able to reconstruct that, nor would they even be interested in bothering to. Because there was no time to waste. There was no time to grow up.

  * * *

  The people grazing peacefully on Piazza Dante realized something was happening from the swelling noise, even before they heaved into view. They sensed curiosity and danger, and for an instant everyone walking or just sipping an espresso froze on the spot. Piazza Dante is entirely enclosed by the eighteenth-century hemicycle of the Foro Carolino, and since it was transformed into a pedestrian island, the elegant arms of Vanvitelli’s two buildings have attained a new scope and expanse. And so, in that sort of oasis of urban beauty, the sense of the happening was all the more powerful, a happening that might resemble a reprisal, a surprise attack. They were preceded by a buzz and the first gunshots fired into the air, while they were still offstage. The buzzing grew and grew and grew in volume until they burst into the piazza, out of the gate of Port’Alba, as compact as a swarm of wasps, and started firing wildly in all directions. They swept down at top speed, and spat out into the light, like a platoon advancing at the charge. They zigzagged across the piazza, under the monument to Dante, gleefully aiming at it, too, but then focusing their fire on shop windows and the smaller windows of offices and apartments.

  This marked the beginning of the season of the stese, a term in dialect that describes Camorra rampages. Terrorizing the public was the cheapest, fastest way of laying claim to any given territory. The era of power in the hands of those who had taken command of the territory alley by alley, vicolo by vicolo, alliance by alliance, man by man, was over. The approach now was to flatten them all. Men, women, children. Tourists, shopkeepers, longtime residents of the quarter. The stesa is democratic in that it makes anyone in range of the bullets duck for cover. And it’s simple and not especially demanding to organize. All you need, in this case, too, is a single word.

  Nicolas’s paranza had gotten its start in the periferia, the outlying quarters of the city. From Ponticelli, from Gianturco. A message in a chat—“time for an excursion”—and the herd moved out on their Honda SH 300s, on their Piaggio BV 350 Beverlys. Their weapons, tucked under the seats or stuffed down their trousers, all kinds. Beretta parabellums, revolvers, Smith & Wesson 357s. Even Kalashnikovs and Beretta M12 submachine guns, combat weapons with magazines full to the last shot, because the fingertip would lift off the trigger only once the gun was out of ammunition. There was never a specific order. At a certain point they just all started firing, in all directions, completely at random. They never aimed at anything in particular, and while they used one hand to twist the throttle and steer their way around obstacles, the other hand fired. They riddled the triangular “yield” signs with bullets, they shot up the mini-dumpsters that spewed forth a black blood, the filth of garbage, and then another twist of the throttle to rev the engine and veer out into the center of the street, the better to aim at balconies and roofs, raising the aim, though never forgetting shops, canopies, buses, and streetcars. There was never time to look around, only lightning-quick darting eyes under the full-face helmets to make sure there were no police checkpoints or teams of Falchi, cops focusing on street crime. Not even time to look around and see if they’d shot anyone. Every gunshot brought with it only a mental image, which was reiterated with each detonation: a head ducking and then the entire body seeking the ground, where it could flatten and disappear. Behind an automobile, behind the parapet of a balcony, behind a patch of greenery let run to seed, ostensibly there to embellish a traffic circle. The terror that Nicolas and the others glimpsed on the faces of all the people was the terror that ought to allow them to seize command. The stesa lasts only a few seconds, like a raid by special forces, and then, once you’re done with one quarter, you move on to another. The next day they’d read in the local news pages how it had really gone, if there had been any collateral damage, any casualties from the battle.

  And then it was time for the historical city center. “Let’s do Via Toledo,” Lollipop had suggested. No sooner said than done. They needed to spread fear there, too. “We need to turn everybody yellow,” he said. The color of fear, jaundice, and diarrhea. The descent down Via Toledo, on the stretch right after Piazza Dante, built up to a breathtaking acceleration. Only Nicolas, in the demented roar of that cavalcade, managed to keep his wits about him and so he noticed, he couldn’t help but focus on a figure—right past Palazzo Doria d’Angri, among the people who were throwing themselves to the ground—a woman who instead remained upright and steady on her legs, in fact, came walking forward to the threshold of her shop, under the sign that read Blue Sky. His mother recognized him, recognized them, and made no other gesture than her habitual one, running her fingers like a comb through her black hair. They rode past her and her shop and then shot up the plate-glass window of a clothing store on the opposite side of the street, a little way downhill.

  On Piazza della Carità they slalomed through the trees and the parked cars, and they did the same thing in Galleria Umberto I, to hear the echo of their gunfire. Then they turned around and headed all the way back to the Disney Store, where a few of them fired low. A Slav who was playing the accordion released the air from his bellows midway through a melancholy song, then moved off slowly toward the Via Toledo metro station. He collapsed on the pavement just as all the others were starting to get to their feet. In the meantime, the kids had already set off for the Spanish Quarter, losing themselves on the steep uphill streets, toward San Martino, as if the swarm were about to take flight and veer out over the city, to gauge the effect of all that artillery. They measured their results, as always, on the evening news, but that night they glimpsed on the screen their first corpse: they saw the man bent over his accordion, in a pool of blood. He was known on the street for a song he often played, a song that told the story of a young woman who had asked for the yellow quince of Istanbul to keep from dying, but her beloved had only arrived three years later, three years later, and the girl had already been taken elsewhere.

  “No, that’s my hit,” said Pesce Moscio.

  “I’m pretty sure you’re wrong, he’s mine,” said Dentino.

  “He’s mine,” said Nicolas, and the others all let him have it, with a mixture of uneasiness and respect.

  Now that they’d completed the stesa, forcing people throughout the area to dive for cover, the time had come to collect tribute. It was too early to take over the drug-dealing markets, the so-called piazzas, they weren’t big enough to take that step yet. They clearly remembered Copacabana’s lesson. “One or the other, either shakedowns or else you control the piazzas and sell hash and coke.” Well, they were ready to do some shakedowns. The quarter was now a reservation without a master; this was their time and they were ready to seize it.

  Nicolas had identified the first shop, a Yamaha dealership on Via Marina. On his eighteenth birthday the paranza had chipped in to pay the fees on his driver’s license and every brother—every frato—had contributed a hundred and fifty euros out of his own pocket. His father had given him a Kymco 150, two thousand euros’ worth of motor scooter, straight from the factory. He’d taken his son down to the garage and, chest swelling with pride, pulled up the roller shutter. The black Kymco glittered and at the sight of the red bow on the front mudguard, Nicolas had barely been able to stifle a laugh. He’d thanked his father, who’d asked him if he didn’t want to try it out right then, but Nicolas had told him maybe some other time. And he’d left him standing there, wondering what he’d said wrong.

  He’d taken the Kymco the next day. The red bow was gone. He zipped over to the dealership and got
the other guys along the way, explaining where they were heading.

  When the office workers saw the slaloming snake of the paranza winding around the motor scooters on display in the parking area, they immediately assumed this was going to be an armed robbery. It would hardly be the first time. The paranza parked their bikes outside the plate-glass window and Nicolas went into the offices alone. He started shouting that he needed to speak to the manager—’o direttore, ’o direttore—that he had an offer he wouldn’t be able to refuse. The customers inside the dealership made way for him, looking at him with expressions of mingled fear and abhorrence. Who was this kid? But once the kid had singled out the manager, a guy in his early forties with a spectacular part in his hair and a Dalí-style mustache, he started giving him a series of flat-handed blows to the chest—whap, whap, whap—until he’d backed him into his office, a clear glass cubicle. Nicolas took a seat in the director’s chair, propped his legs up on the desk, and then waved a hand to show the man he was free to pick whichever chair he preferred among the ones normally set out for prospective customers. The manager, who was massaging his chest where Nicolas had hit it, tried to reply but was hushed immediately: “Baffetti’,” Nicolas addressed him, nicknaming him Whiskers, “calm down a little. We’ll be providing you with our protection now.”

  “We don’t need anyone’s protection,” the manager tried to say, but he couldn’t stop rumpling his striped shirt. That dull ache just wouldn’t go away.

  “Bullshit. Everyone needs protection. Here, let’s do this,” said Nicolas. He swung his legs down from the desk, walked over to the manager, and reached out to the grab the man’s hand, which in the meantime had fallen still. He crushed it in his own and started giving him punches in the same spot where he’d smacked him earlier.

  “You see my crew out there? They’re going to swing by every Friday.”

  Punch. Punch. Punch.

  “But right now let’s get started by transferring ownership on a few items.”

  Punch. Punch. Punch.

  “My Kymco. It’s brand-new. Not even a scratch on it. Can I trade it in for a T-Max?”

  Punch. Punch. Punch.

  “You can, you can,” said the manager in a gasping, tiny voice. “But what should we do about the documentation?”

  “My name’s Nicolas Fiorillo. ’O Maraja. Is that enough?”

  * * *

  Then it was time to deal with the street vendors: “All of the street vendors working Corso Umberto have to pay us,” Nicolas stated. “We’ll stick a gat in these fucking negroes’ mouths and tell them to give us ten, fifteen euros a day.”

  After that, they moved on to the shops and stores. They’d walk in, tell them that from that day on they were in charge, then set their fee. Pizzerias, slot machine parlors knew that every Thursday they could look forward to a visit from Drone and Lollipop, who were in charge of collecting. “Let’s go in for the weekly therapy sessions,” they’d write in their chats. Soon, though, they decided to subcontract the collections to a few poverty-stricken Moroccans in exchange for the handful of euros needed for room and board. All very simple, all very convenient, all you needed to do was avoid stepping outside your own realm of expertise. And if a delicatessen owner objected too forcefully, you just needed to pull out the gat—for a while, Nicolas used the Francotte, he enjoyed it, it filled his hand, that old pistol—and jam it down the man’s throat until you could hear him retching and gagging. But there were damned few who tried to hold out, and in the end there were even a few who self-reported to the paranza if, when they lowered their metal shutters at closing time on Thursday, they still hadn’t seen anybody.

  Now the money was coming in, and how. With the exception of Drago’, none of them had ever seen so much cash at one time. They thought about the skinny wallets their parents carried, even after laboring all day long, struggling to squeeze out a little more money with extra jobs and odd jobs, breaking their backs, and now they felt that they’d figured out the world much better than their parents ever had. They were wiser, more grown up. They were more like men than their own fathers were.

  They met up at the lair and sat around the table, counting out the lettuce, small bills and big ones. While they were passing a joint and Tucano incessantly pulled the slide on his pistol—by now it was a constant background noise, he hardly even noticed he was doing it—Drone added up the numbers, kept a running account, and jotted it all down on his iPhone, and when he was done, they split up the money. Then they indulged in the regular game of Assassin’s Creed, ordered the usual kebab, and, having devoured the last bite, all free now to do as they please, went out to spend their gains. In a group, or else with their girlfriends, and occasionally all alone. Gold Rolexes, the latest-model smartphones, snakeskin Gucci shoes and Valentino sneakers, they wore designer clothes from head to foot, right down to their underpants, rigorously Dolce & Gabbana, and then dozens and dozens of red roses delivered to their girlfriends’ houses, Pomellato rings, oysters and caviar and rivers of Veuve Clicquot consumed on the sofas of the New Maharaja—though to some extent those slimy, stinky foods sort of grossed them out, and so they’d leave the club and go eat a ’nu cuoppo di paranza fritta, good and proper, standing up or perched on their scooters. The minute the money came in, it went right back out again. The idea of setting some aside didn’t even occur to them: making money right now was all they thought of, tomorrow didn’t even exist. Satisfying their every whim, leaving aside any thoughts of need or necessity.

  The paranza was growing. The revenues were growing and the respect they could glimpse in people’s eyes was growing with them. “People are starting to avoid us, which means they want to be like us,” Maraja liked to say. They were growing, too, even if they didn’t have the time to notice the fact. Stavodicendo had stopped washing his face with quarts of Topexan Complex daily wash; the acne that had tortured his face finally seemed contented with the work it had done, and had given him as souvenirs an assortment of marks that lent him a world-weary look. Drago’ and Pesce Moscio had fallen in love at least three different times, with three different girls, and every time, they swore, this was it, the love of their lives. You could see them bowed over their smartphones, typing in phrases they’d found on the Internet, on specialized sites, or else declarations of undying loyalty: she was the prettiest, the sun that lit up their lives, she was the one who’d go on loving them no matter what happened. Briato’ had surrendered to Nicolas’s continuous mockery; Nicolas accused him of combing his hair back like ’nu milanese, and so he’d shaved his head. For a while he went around wearing a flat cap, and every time he showed up, there were new rounds of mockery. “Fuggedaboutit!” they’d greet him in chorus. In and of itself, it was hardly an insult for someone like him who’d turned Donnie Brasco into a mantra that he recited daily, but he finally got sick and tired of it, and one day he just tossed the flat cap into a dumpster. Dentino and Lollipop went to a gym together and they were both in great shape, even though Dentino had stopped growing, while Lollipop just kept getting taller and taller and seemed as if he was never going to stop. They’d also learned to walk with their chests thrust out and their arms held wide, as if their biceps were so massive that it kept them from holding them close to their bodies. Tucano’s already broad shoulders had become wider, more powerful, and increasingly the wings tattooed on his back looked as if they were about to take flight. And Biscottino had bloomed. From one day to the next he’d sprouted up several inches, and with all his bike riding, his legs had become a pair of palpating levers. Drone had taken off his eyeglasses and replaced them with contact lenses, and he’d also gone on a diet, with no more kebabs or fried pizza. Nicolas, too, had changed, and not because he’d become a regular consumer of cocaine, which didn’t seem to have the same effect on him that it had on the rest of the paranza. His was a controlled euphoria. When Drago’ talked to him, he could detect a continuous rumination behind his eyes: he talked, he kidded around, he issued orders, he acted the fool wit
h the others, but he never lowered his guard, he never broke away from a process of reasoning that was entirely his own, and to which no one else was ever invited. Sometimes those eyes reminded him a little of his father’s, Nunzio Viceré’s, eyes that he, Drago’, had never had. But these thoughts of Drago’s were flashes of lightning that vanished the instant they touched the ground.

  What were they turning into? There wasn’t even time to try to answer that question. They just needed to keep going.

  “The sky is the limit,” Nicolas would say.

  MARKETS

  You can’t break the silence because there’s no such thing as silence. Even on a glacier at an elevation of thirteen thousand feet: something’s always going to be creaking. Even at the bottom of the sea: you’ll always have the ka-thump of your heart to keep you company. Silence actually resembles a color. It has a thousand different shades, and someone who was born in a city like Naples, or Mumbai, or Kinshasa can sense them and detect the differences.

  The paranza was in the lair. It was payday. The monthly salary due to each member—each paranzino—sat in a heap of banknotes that covered the low glass coffee table. First Briato’ and then Tucano had tried to divvy it up into equal shares, but when they were done, the numbers never added up. There was always someone who claimed they were getting less than someone else.

  “Briato’,” said Biscottino, who had found himself with ten twenty-euro bills and was staring at the C-notes that were crumpled in Drone’s hands, “weren’t you studying accounting?”

  “No,” Pesce Moscio cut in, “he fucked one of the lady teachers there, but she flunked him anyway.” An old story, probably a false one, but they never tired of retelling it, and by now Briato’ just ignored them, especially now that he’d proved incapable of divvying up the take correctly.