The Cold Summer

by Gianrico Carofiglio

  “What do you think of my lawyer, marshal? Do you think she’s okay? She seems a bit insecure to me. I was keen to appoint her, but I don’t know how she’ll be when we get to court.”

  “She’s a civil lawyer. If we’d called in a criminal lawyer, there was a risk that news of your cooperating might get out too soon. When we get to court, you can decide whether to stick with her or get someone else, maybe someone from outside who has no connections with Bari.”

  Lopez finished his cigarette, extinguished it and walked over to the window. Beyond the bars, the courtyard was deserted.

  “What were you thinking when I talked about how we killed Curly?” he said, still looking out.

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “It disgusted you, didn’t it?”

  Actually, the immediate and correct answer would have been: no, it hadn’t disgusted him. Not because it wasn’t a repulsive act, but because it was more or less what he had expected to hear. It hadn’t disgusted him because that was his job, because he had heard or come across many similar stories. It hadn’t disgusted him because he was used to it, he had been anaesthetized, he’d developed that mechanism common to all detectives by which the horrors of life are reduced to forms and files. The mechanism by which, when you’re told about some poor guy being tortured, beaten to a pulp, killed like a dog and burnt, perhaps still alive, all you’re thinking about is the inquiries you’ll have to conduct, the cases you’ll have to reopen, the corroborating evidence you’ll have to find. But if you don’t have that functioning system of defences, you’ll just go crazy.

  So no, it hadn’t disgusted him, but telling that to Lopez didn’t seem appropriate. It didn’t seem right. So he kept silent. His expression said only: go on, if you want. Lopez lit another cigarette.

  “The day we went to kill him, I felt strong. My life was about to change, I was going to become someone, not the loser I’d always been. You know when I stopped feeling that way?”

  “When?”

  “When I made him get down on his knees. I told you his face was all bloody from being hit with the brass knuckles, but I didn’t give a fuck about that. I’d beaten up lots of people. It was normal. But the moment I made him get down on his knees and he realized we were going to kill him and I realized that Grimaldi was making me do it, I started to feel … what can I call it?”

  “Panic?”

  “Panic, I felt panic. I felt like running away, and almost did. And then it occurred to me that if I ran away, they’d kill me, too. Capocchiani would kill me, because the son of a bitch liked killing people. Have you ever been afraid of death, marshal? Not death in general. Have you ever thought you might be about to die?”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “Then you know what I mean. I felt I was going to shit my pants, I really had to hold it in, and in fact I later threw up. When Grimaldi told me to shoot him, I was shaking all over and didn’t want to show it, so, as I said, I took the gun in both hands and killed him, to have done with it. Then I dreamt about it for a week. I dreamt that he was begging me, telling me not to kill him, I dreamt that he was burning alive. Once I even dreamt that my father – who was already dead by then – was standing there after we’d burnt Curly, asking me what I’d done.”

  Fenoglio wondered why Lopez was telling him all this. Assuming there was a reason.

  “Don’t you ever smoke, marshal?” Lopez asked, holding out the packet of cigarettes.

  “Almost never,” Fenoglio replied, shaking his head.

  “Then, gradually, I stopped dreaming about him,” Lopez resumed, as if he had left an important part hanging.

  “What about the other murders?”

  “You want me to tell you about them now?”

  “No, I just want to know what you felt.”

  Lopez was silent for a while. He didn’t seem surprised by the question, and appeared to be searching for the right words – which are almost always the simplest.

  “You know something, marshal? I didn’t feel anything. A few months later, I committed another murder. It was meant to be just a kneecapping, but it went wrong. By the next day I’d already forgotten it. And the third even less. He was a junkie, Capocchiani and I killed him, and then I went and had a meal.”

  Fenoglio felt the need to drink a sip of beer, but his bottle was empty.

  “The problem, marshal, is that you can get used to anything. Even murder.”

  Yes, that was the problem: you could get used to anything.

  6

  At 15.30 on 19 May, in the presence of the same persons as previously indicated, the interview is resumed.

  QUESTION When we suspended the interview, you were telling us about your promotion within the hierarchy of Grimaldi’s group. Before continuing with this account, can you explain to us the various ranks in the criminal organization to which you belonged, and what the qualifications for affiliation or promotion are?

  ANSWER The ranks – or to be more exact: the gifts – of the organization, according to rules which, with a few differences, are valid throughout Apulia, are as follows: Picciotteria, Camorra, Sgarro, Santa, Vangelo, Trequartino and Diritto di medaglione. Actually, the rank of Picciotteria is never used, in the sense that new members join the organization as a camorrista or even a sgarrista. For example, I was affiliated directly as a sgarrista, which is referred to as the ‘third’, meaning the third gift.

  QUESTION For what reason is the first rank never used, and for what reason were you affiliated directly into the third rank, the rank of sgarrista?

  ANSWER It is necessary to say something first. The organization of which I was part, which is headed by Nicola Grimaldi, comes out of the Apulian prison Camorra established at the beginning of the 1980s, the leaders of which were – and as far as I know, still are – Giosuè Rizzi from Foggia, known as the Pope, for the northern part of Apulia, and Pino Rogoli from Mesagne, known as the Bricklayer, for the southern part. Giosuè Rizzi is the head of the Società Foggiana, while Rogoli is the head of the Sacra Corona Unita. When I speak of prison Camorra, I am referring to the fact that this organization, to which many Apulian prisoners from various places eventually belonged, was born within the prison system. Up until the end of the 1970s – I speak here of things I was told and of which I have no direct knowledge – there were no Mafia-style organizations in Apulia, only criminal cliques devoted to specific activities such as smuggling, gambling, prostitution and, obviously, narcotics. With the exception of the town of Andria, in which a dangerous and highly respected group devoted to kidnapping had been active for some time, Apulia was a region of little significance from a criminal point of view. That was the reason for the particularly harsh prison conditions imposed on Apulian prisoners, who were considered second-class criminals: apart from having to bear the normal rigours of the prison regime, they were forced to endure harassment by prisoners from other regions in the south, especially from members of the Neapolitan Camorra. The situation became intolerable, and some Apulian prisoners decided to react. First of all, as I said, Rogoli and Rizzi, having been affiliated and promoted by major Calabrian Mafia bosses (Di Stefano in the case of Rizzi and Bellocco in the case of Rogoli, I believe), and therefore having acquired some personal prestige in criminal circles, started in their turn to affiliate others in large numbers in order to form self-defence groups within the prisons, with the aim of countering the bullying and violence of the Neapolitans. The idea was that in Apulian prisons, the Apulians should be in charge, and not, to use Grimaldi’s expression, those “scumbags from the Neapolitan Camorra”. It is no coincidence that the Apulian prison Mafia was born out of a narrow relationship with the Calabrians, absorbing the rituals and hierarchy of the ’Ndrangheta almost wholesale. The very need to establish large groups within a short space of time led them to speed up the procedures, affiliating people directly into the second or third rank, as in my case. I’ve never met anyone who had the first rank, the Picciotteria. It exists in the theoretical framework of the or
ganization, but it has never been used, at least not by us.

  QUESTION I repeat the previous question. For what reason were you affiliated directly into the third rank? Where and how did your affiliation take place?

  ANSWER Grimaldi had taken a great liking to me during a brief period of imprisonment together. I was in prison for a robbery for which I had been arrested as a consequence of being identified by the victim from photographs. Immediately after the arrest, I was beaten for a long time, very harshly, to make me inform on my accomplices, but I did not do so. When I entered prison – Grimaldi was already there – I still had visible marks of the beating on me, and word soon spread that I was a young man who respected omertà. One day, during the exercise hour, Grimaldi came up to me and said that he knew how I had conducted myself during my arrest and afterwards, and he said he appreciated that. Then he said that he knew something else about me, something that had made a good impression on him.

  QUESTION To what was he referring?

  ANSWER Sometime earlier, I had gone to dinner with two friends of mine with whom I had done a number of jobs – Vito Colella and Franco De Carne – in a pizzeria in the San Girolamo district. I do not remember the name. After eating and drinking a lot, we got up to go without paying, which is what we did in a lot of places. Usually, nobody said anything because the owners of the restaurants and the pizzerias knew us and preferred to avoid trouble. In that case, though, I think the management of the pizzeria had changed, because a young man – the son of the owner – followed us, caught up with us at the door and said with great determination that we had to pay the bill. Colella, who was the most drunk of all of us, tried to punch him, but the fellow dodged the blow and reacted by hitting him repeatedly in the face. We would later find out that the man was a black belt in karate, even a national champion, I think. De Carne also tried to hit him, but suffered the same fate. While this fellow was beating De Carne, I grabbed a bottle of beer from a table and struck him violently on the head several times with it. He fell to the ground. He may have been knocked unconscious. What is certain is that I had hit him until he bled, in front of the other customers and the waiters. The next day, I discovered – even the newspapers talked about it – that the man I had hit was a martial arts champion. The news spread, and this increased my criminal reputation. As I said, even Grimaldi had heard about it (although he did not know that I had used a bottle and assumed I had got the better of a martial arts expert with my bare hands) and had been impressed.

  When he left prison a few days later – he was acquitted of a charge of loan sharking and extortion – he told me to go and see him once I, too, had got out. I replied that this would not be for some time, given the seriousness of the charge against me. He gave me a strange smile, patted me on the back and said: “Who knows?” At the time, I did not understand what he meant, but it soon became clear to me because the witness to the robbery, when asked to identify me by the examining magistrate, did not do so and I was released. I later found out that some of Grimaldi’s men had been in touch with him and told him not to identify anyone.

  QUESTION They threatened him, obviously?

  ANSWER I do not know the details, but I would say there was no need for overt threats. If the witness knew who these people were and on whose behalf they were speaking – and of course I believe that he did know – a request devoid of any overtly threatening content would have sufficed.

  QUESTION Were you responsible for that robbery?

  ANSWER Of course, and the witness had seen me very clearly.

  QUESTION What did you do when you got out?

  ANSWER What Grimaldi had told me to do. I went to see him, he asked me if I wanted to become one of his men and I said yes. He told me that he had gathered a great deal of information about me and that it was all positive. That was why he had decided to do something out of the ordinary, which was to affiliate me directly into the rank of sgarrista. He told me it was an honour, and I was perfectly well aware of that.

  QUESTION What information had Grimaldi gathered about you?

  ANSWER Grimaldi knew practically everything about me and my criminal career, which had started with petty thefts when I was still a little boy and continued with smuggling and robbery. I do not know who he had talked to, but he had become convinced – as he told me quite openly – that I was a young man who could act, talk and keep quiet when each of these things was necessary. Such a judgement from a figure as important and prestigious in criminal circles as Grimaldi filled me with pride. At that moment I would have done without question anything he had ordered me to do.

  QUESTION Tell us about your affiliation.

  ANSWER I should point out that for the proper conduct of an affiliation or a promotion, a baptized place is necessary. When I say “baptized” I mean it must be a place expressly and stably equipped for affiliations in a ceremony of baptism, or else a different place but one that has first to be subjected to a kind of purification.

  QUESTION Can you describe this?

  ANSWER For this ritual, as for the others (affiliations, promotions), specific formulas are laid down. I have to say that I have long been fascinated by these rituals and have learned them all by heart. Someone like me, who is able to speak every formula without the help of a written text, is said in our jargon to “shine”. The purification of the place is carried out following a ritual dialogue between the head of the group and the other participants in the ceremony. The boss begins thus: “Good evening, wise companions.” The others reply: “Good evening.” The boss: “Are you ready to baptize these premises?” The others: “We are ready.” The boss: “In the name of our ancestors, the three Spanish knights Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, I baptize these premises. If previously I recognized it as a place haunted by policemen and informers, from now on I recognize it as a sacrosanct and inviolable place where this honoured society may form and dissolve.”

  QUESTION Was the place where your affiliation was celebrated a place permanently devoted to these rituals, or was it baptized specially for the occasion?

  ANSWER It was a house between Palese and Santo Spirito. I do not know who the owner was, but it was clearly at the disposal of Grimaldi and his men. It was a place permanently equipped for affiliations, and in fact it was also there that I was raised to the rank of santista.

  QUESTION Who took part in your affiliation ceremony?

  ANSWER Grimaldi, who was the Godfather or Leader in Chief; Capocchiani, who was the Tirade; a man named Lattanzio who later died of natural causes, who was the Bookkeeper; a young fellow from Foggia whose name I cannot remember, who was the Favourable, and someone named Oronzo, from Lecce, who was the Unfavourable.

  QUESTION What do these terms mean?

  ANSWER They are the roles that have to be filled for the ceremony of affiliation or promotion to be valid. The Godfather is the one who grants the gift; the Bookkeeper represents the organization’s responsibilities towards its members, who will always be helped in times of need; the Tirade (an expression that refers both to the formula of affiliation and the person who recites it) is the one who represents the training and traditions of the organization; the Favourable is the one who delivers his opinion on the affiliation or promotion of the initiate; the Unfavourable is the one who has the task of checking that the procedure is being performed correctly.

  QUESTION Describe to us briefly how it went.

  ANSWER After the formulas of affiliation had been recited, a small cut was made on the index finger of my right hand (the trigger finger) and the blood allowed to drip onto a small image that I burnt while holding it in my hand. Then I recited the oath which I had learned by heart and can still remember. If you like, I can even recite it now.

  QUESTION Go on.

  ANSWER I swear on the point of this dagger bathed in blood that I will be loyal to this constituted society and disown mother, father, brothers and sisters to the seventh generation; I swear to share, hundredth part by hundredth part, thousandth part by thousandth par
t, to the last drop of my blood, with one foot in the grave and one on the chain, embracing imprisonment wholeheartedly.

  At the end of the ceremony I was congratulated and then we had dinner to celebrate. My affiliation was passed as news to all the other members, both inside and outside prison.

  QUESTION “Passed as news”?

  ANSWER In our jargon, passed as news means communicated. When there is a new affiliation all the members of the organization, both those at large and those inside, must be informed immediately. Another thing that is done after a new affiliation is what is known as “giving the portions”. That means offering cakes or cigarettes to celebrate the admission of the new member. I should point out that those members at large are offered cakes and those inside are offered cigarettes, red Marlboros to be specific.

  QUESTION So this is the ceremony in which you were affiliated. You said that after the murder of Curly you were granted the rank of santista. Can you explain what it means to receive and hold the rank of santista?

  ANSWER As I said earlier, the Santa is the fourth of the ranks in the hierarchy. It is an important rank, which involves some duties of command, and can be granted only to someone who has committed a murder or at least, but only in exceptional cases, an act of violence in which the victim did not die. I have been told that in the Calabrian families it took, and still takes, many years to reach that rank. With us, for the reasons I have explained (the need to establish a structured organization with the requisite hierarchy within a short period of time), things happen more quickly. In concrete terms, I was affiliated with the rank of sgarrista in February 1987 and received the Santa in November of that same year after the murder of Curly.

  QUESTION Who was present at the ceremony in which you were given the rank of santista?

  ANSWER I should point out that the ceremony for the promotion to the rank of santista involves three celebrants, not five. All three are godfathers and are conventionally known as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini and Alfonso La Marmora.