Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

  A matrix for printing Versace’s signature Medusa’s head was found in a lab on the outskirts of Naples. In Secondigliano word spread that the American market was dominated by Directory clothes, making it easier for young people eager to go to America and become salespeople. They were inspired by the success of Vip Moda, whose jeans filled Texas stores, where they were passed off as Valentino.

  Business spread to the southern hemisphere as well. A boutique in Five Dock, New South Wales, became one of Australia’s hottest addresses for elegant clothing, and there were also shops and warehouses in Sydney. The Secondigliano clans dominated the clothing market in Brazil—in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. They had plans to open a store for American and European tourists in Cuba, and they’d been investing in Saudi Arabia and North Africa for a while. The distribution mechanism the Directory had put in place was based on warehouses—that’s how they’re referred to in the wiretappings—veritable clearing stations for people and merchandise, depots for every kind of clothing. The warehouses were the center of a commercial hub, the place where agents picked up the merchandise to be distributed to the clans’ stores or other retailers. It was an old concept, that of the magliari, the Neapolitan traveling salesmen; after the Second World War they invaded half the planet, eating up the miles lugging their bags stuffed with socks, shirts, and jackets. Applying their age-old mercantile experience on a larger scale, the magliari became full-fledged commercial agents who could sell anywhere and everywhere, from neighborhood markets to malls, from parking lots to gas stations. The best of them made a qualitative leap, selling large lots of clothing directly to retailers. According to investigations, some businessmen organized the distribution of fakes, offering logistical support to the sales reps, the magliari. They paid travel and hotel expenses in advance, provided vans and cars, and guaranteed legal assistance in the case of arrest or confiscation of merchandise. And of course they pocketed the earnings. A business with an annual turnover of about 300 million euros per family.

  The Italian labels started to protest against the Secondigliano cartels’ huge fake market only after the DDA uncovered the entire operation. Before that, they had no plans for a negative publicity campaign, never filed charges, or divulged to the press the harmful workings of the illegal production. It is difficult to comprehend why the brands never took a stand against the clans, but there are probably many reasons. Denouncing them would have meant forgoing once and for all their cheap labor sources in Campania and Puglia. The clans would have closed down access to the clothing factories around Naples and hindered relations with those in Eastern Europe and Asia. And given the vast number of shopping centers operated directly by the clans, denouncing them would have jeopardized thousands of retail sales contacts. In many places the families handle transportation and agents, so fingering them would have meant a sudden rise in distribution costs. Besides, the clans weren’t ruining the brands’ image, but simply taking advantage of their advertising and symbolic charisma. The garments they turned out were not inferior and didn’t disgrace the brands’ quality or design image. Not only did the clans not create any symbolic competition with the designer labels, they actually helped promote products whose market price made them prohibitive to the general public. In short, the clans were promoting the brand. If hardly anyone wears a label’s clothes, if they’re seen only on live mannequins on the runway, the market slowly dies and the prestige of the name declines. What’s more, the Neapolitan factories produced counterfeit garments in sizes that the designer labels, for the sake of their image, do not make. But the clans certainly weren’t going to trouble themselves about image when there was a profit to be made. Through the true fake business and income from drug trafficking, the Secondigliano clans acquired stores and shopping centers where genuine articles were increasingly mixed in with the fakes, thus erasing any distinction. In a way the System sustained the legal fashion empire in a moment of crisis; by taking advantage of sharply rising prices, it continued to promote Italian-made goods throughout the world, earning exponential sums.

  The Secondigliano clans realized that their vast international distribution and sales network was their greatest asset, even stronger than drug trafficking. Narcotics and clothing often moved along the same routes. The System’s entrepreneurial energies were also invested in technology, however. Investigations in 2004 revealed that the clans use their commercial networks to import Chinese high-tech products for European distribution. Europe had the form—the brand, the fame, and the advertising—and China the content—the actual product, cheap labor, and inexpensive materials. The System brought the two together, winning out all around. Aware that the economy was on the brink, the clans targeted Chinese industrial zones already manufacturing for big Western companies; in this they followed the pattern of businesses that first invested in southern Italy’s urban sprawl and then gradually shifted to China. They got the idea of ordering batches of high-tech products to resell on the European market, obviously with a fake brand name that would increase desirability. But they were cautious; as with a batch of cocaine, they first tested the quality of the products the Chinese factories sold them. After confirming their market validity, they launched one of the most prosperous intercontinental dealings in criminal history. Digital cameras, video cameras, and power tools: drills, grinders, pneumatic hammers, planes, and sanders, all marketed as Bosch, Hammer, or Hilti. When the Secondigliano boss Paolo Di Lauro started doing business with China, he was ten years ahead of the initiative of Confindustria, the Italian Manufacturers’ Association, to improve business ties with Asia. The Di Lauro clan sold thousands of Canons and Hitachis on the East European market. Thanks to Camorra imports, items that were once the prerogative of the upper-middle class were now accessible to a broader public. To guarantee a stronger entry into the market, the clans offered practically the identical product, slapping the brand name on at the end.

  The Di Lauro and Contini clans’ investment in China, which was the focus of a 2004 Naples DDA inquiry, demonstrates the entrepreneurial farsightedness of the bosses. The era of big business was finished and the criminal conglomerates had crumbled as a result. The Nuova Camorra Organizzata or New Organized Camorra, established by Raffaele Cutolo in the 1980s, had been a sort of enormous company, a centralized conglomerate. It was followed by La Nuova Famiglia or New Family, which Carmine Alfieri and Antonio Bardellino operated as a federal structure of economically autonomous families united by common interests. But this too proved unwieldy.

  The flexibility of today’s economy has permitted small groups of manager bosses operating in hundreds of enterprises in well-defined sectors to control the social and financial arenas. There is now a horizontal structure—much more flexible than Cosa Nostra, and much more permeable to new alliances than the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta—that draws constantly on new clans, and adopts new strategies in entering cutting-edge markets. Dozens of police operations in recent years have revealed that both the Sicilian Mafia and the ‘Ndrangheta needed to go through the Neapolitan clans to purchase big drug lots. The Naples and Campania cartels were supplying cocaine and heroin at good prices, so buying from them often proved easier and more economical than buying directly from South American and Albanian dealers.

  The restructuring of the clans notwithstanding, the Camorra is the most solid criminal organization in Europe in terms of membership. For every Sicilian Mafioso there are five Camorristi, eight for every ‘Ndranghetista. Three to four times as many members as the other organizations. The constant spotlight on Cosa Nostra and the obsessive attention to Mafia bombs have provided the perfect media distraction for the Camorra, which has remained practically unknown. With the post-Fordist restructuring, the Naples clans have stopped giving handouts to the masses, and the rise in petty crime in the city can be explained by this curtailing of stipends. Camorra groups no longer need to maintain widespread military-style control—or at least not always—because their principal business activities now take place outside Naples. />
  Investigations conducted by the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor reveal that the Camorra’s flexible, federalist structure has completely transformed the fabric of the families: instead of diplomatic alliances and stable pacts, clans now operate more like business committees. The Camorra’s flexibility reflects its need to move capital, set up and liquidate companies, circulate money, and invest quickly in real estate without geographical restrictions or heavy dependence on political mediation. The clans no longer need to organize in large bodies. These days a group of people can decide to band together, rob, smash store windows, and steal without risking being killed or taken over by the clan. The gangs rampaging around Naples are not composed exclusively of individuals who commit crimes to pad their wallets, buy fancy cars, or live in luxury. They know that by joining forces and increasing the degree and amount of violence, they can often improve their economic capacity, becoming interlocutors for the clans. The Camorra is made up of groups that suck like voracious lice, hindering all economic development, and others that operate as instant innovators, pushing their businesses to new heights of development and trade. Caught between these two opposing yet complementary movements, the skin of the city is lacerated and torn. In Naples cruelty is the most complex and affordable strategy for becoming a successful businessman. The air of the city smells like war, you can breathe it through every pore; it has the rancid odor of sweat, and the streets have become open-air gyms for training to ransack, plunder, and steal, for exercising the gymnastics of power, and the spinning of economic growth.

  In the urban outskirts the System has expanded, rising like bread dough. Local and regional governments thought they could oppose the System by not doing business with the clans. But that wasn’t enough. They underrated the power of the families and neglected the phenomenon, considering it an aspect of urban blight. As a result Campania is now the Italian region with the highest number of cities under observation for Camorra infiltration. A total of seventy-one municipal administrations have been dissolved since 1991. An extraordinary number, far surpassing that in the other regions of Italy: forty-four in Sicily, thirty-four in Calabria, seven in Puglia. In the province of Naples alone, town councils have been dissolved in Pozzuoli, Quarto, Marano, Melito, Portici, Ottaviano, San Giuseppe Vesuviano, San Gennaro Vesuviano, Terzigno, Calandrino, Sant’ Antimo, Tufino, Crispano, Casamarciano, Nola, Liveri, Boscoreale, Poggiomarino, Pompei, Ercolano, Pimonte, Casola di Napoli, Sant’ Antonio Abate, Santa Maria la Carità, Torre Annunziata, Torre del Greco, Volla, Brusciano, Acerra, Casoria, Pomigliano d’ Arco, and Frattamaggiore. Only nine of the ninety-two municipalities in the province of Naples have never had external commissioners, inquiries, or monitoring. Clan businesses have determined zoning regulations, infiltrated local sanitation services, purchased land immediately prior to its being zoned for building and then subcontracted the construction of shopping centers, and imposed patron saints’ days festivities that depend on their multiservice companies, from catering to cleaning, from transportation to trash collection.

  Never in the economy of a region has there been such a widespread, crushing criminal presence as in Campania in the last ten years. Unlike the Sicilian Mafia groups, the Camorra clans don’t need politicians; it’s the politicians who need the System. In Campania a deliberate strategy leaves the political structures that are most visible, those under media scrutiny, formally immune to connivances and contiguities. But in the countryside, in the towns where the clans need armed protection and cover for fugitives, and where their economic maneuvers are more exposed, alliances between politicians and Camorra families are tighter. Camorra clans rise to power through their commercial empires. And that allows them to control everything else.

  The business-criminal transformation of the suburbs of Secondigliano and Scampia was crafted by the Licciardi family, whose center of operations at Masseria Cardone is practically impregnable. The boss Gennaro Licciardi, known as ‘a scigna—la scimmia, the monkey—for his striking resemblance to a gorilla or an orangutan, initiated the metamorphosis. In the late 1980s Licciardi was the Secondigliano lieutenant to Liugi Giuliano, the boss of Forcella, an area in the heart of Naples. The outskirts were considered an awful place—a territory without stores or shopping centers, on the margins of every kind of wealth, where not even the leeches could extort enough cuts to feed themselves on. But Licciardi realized the area could become a hub for drug sales, a free port for transportation, and a collection point for cheap labor. A place that would soon be sprouting the scaffolding of new construction as the city expanded. Gennaro Licciardi did not succeed in fully implementing his strategy. He died at thirty-eight, in prison, of an incredibly banal umbilical hernia—a pathetic end for a boss. Especially because he’d once been involved in a brawl with members of the two big Camorra fronts, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia, while awaiting a hearing in the Naples courthouse lockup. He was stabbed sixteen times, all over his body. But he’d come out alive.

  The Licciardi family transformed what was merely a reservoir of cheap labor into a machine for the narcotics trade: an international criminal business. Thousands of people were co-opted, enrolled, or crushed by the System. Clothes and drugs. Business investments before all else. After the death of Gennaro the monkey, his brothers Pietro and Vincenzo took over the militant side of the clan, but it was Maria, known as ‘a piccerella—la piccoletta or the little one—who wielded the economic power.

  After the fall of the Berlin wall, Pietro Licciardi transferred the majority of his own investments, legal and illegal, to Prague and Brno. Criminal activity in the Czech Republic was completely controlled by the Secondigliano clan, which applied the logic of the productive outskirts and set out to corner the German market. Pietro Licciardi had a manager’s profile, and his business associates called him “the Roman emperor” because of his authoritarian attitude and arrogant belief that the entire world was an extension of Secondigliano. He’d opened a clothing store in China—a commercial pied-à-terre in Taiwan—to take advantage of cheap labor and move in on the internal Chinese market. He was arrested in Prague in June 1999. Licciardi was a ruthless fighter, accused of ordering the bomb that was placed on Via Cristallini in the Sanità neighborhood in 1998 during the conflicts between the outlying and center-city clans. A bomb to punish the entire neighborhood, not merely the clan leaders. When the car exploded, metal and glass went flying like bullets, hitting thirteen people. But there wasn’t sufficient proof to convict him and he was acquitted. The Licciardi clan’s primary commercial activities in Italy were in the garment and retail industry, centered around Castelnuovo del Garda in the Veneto. Not far from there, in Portogruaro, Pietro Licciardi’s brother-in-law Vincenzo Pernice was arrested, along with some clan supporters, including Renato Peluso, who lived in Castelnuovo del Garda. As a fugitive Pietro Licciardi was harbored by Veneto retailers and businessmen tied to the clan—not clan members in the full sense of the term, but accomplices intimately involved in the business-criminal organization. In addition to possessing a remarkable talent for business, the Licciardis also had a military squadron. Subsequent to Pietro’s and Maria’s arrests, the clan is run by Vincenzo Licciardi, the fugitive boss who coordinates both military and economic activities.

  The Licciardi clan has always been particularly vindictive. In 1991 they brutally avenged the death of Gennaro Licciardi’s nephew, Vincenzo Esposito. Heir to the ruling family in Secondigliano, Vincenzo was known as il principino, the little prince. He was twenty-one when he was killed in Monterosa, a neighborhood run by the Prestieris, one of the families in the Alliance. He’d gone there on his motorcycle to demand an explanation for the violent treatment some of his friends had received. With his helmet on, he was “mistaken” for a killer and shot. The Licciardis accused the Di Lauros, close allies of the Prestieris, of supplying the killers for the hit. According to the pentito or “penitent” Luigi Giuliano, it was Di Lauro himself who orchestrated the little prince’s murder because he’d been m
eddling too much in certain affairs. Whatever the motive, Licciardi power was so unassailable that the clans involved were required to purge those potentially responsible for Esposito’s death. They instigated a slaughter that in days left fourteen people dead for their direct or indirect involvement in the murder of the young heir.

  The System also transformed classic extortion and usury practices. Aware that shopkeepers needed cash and banks were becoming increasingly rigid, the clans situated themselves between suppliers and retailers. Retailers who must purchase their own merchandise can either pay in cash or with drafts, but if they pay in cash things cost half to two-thirds less, so both retailer and supplier prefer this method. The clans have become hidden financiers, offering cash at 10 percent interest on average. In this way a corporate relationship is automatically established among the buyer, the seller, and the clan. The proceeds are split fifty-fifty, but if a retailer runs into debt, higher and higher percentages flow into the clan’s coffers, and he is eventually reduced to a straw man on a monthly salary. Unlike banks, which seize everything when someone falls into debt, the clans continue to utilize their assets by letting the experienced individuals who’ve lost their property continue to work. According to a pentito in the 2004 DDA investigation, 50 percent of the shops in Naples alone are actually run by the Camorra.