When I arrived at the scene in Case Celesti, the body hadn’t yet been covered with a sheet. People were walking in her blood, leaving footprints everywhere. I swallowed hard, trying to calm my stomach. Carmela Attrice hadn’t run away even though they’d warned her. She knew her son was a Spaniard, but the Camorra war is full of uncertainty. Nothing is defined, nothing is clear. Things become real only when they happen. In the dynamics of power, of absolute power, nothing exists other than what is concrete. And so fleeing, staying, escaping, and informing are choices that seem too suspended, too uncertain, and every piece of advice always finds its opposite twin. Only a concrete occurrence can make you decide. But when it happens, all you can do is accept the decision.
When you die on the street, you’re surrounded by a tremendous racket. It’s not true that you die alone. Unfamiliar faces right in front of your nose, people touching your legs and arms to see if you’re already dead or if it’s worth calling an ambulance. The faces of all the mortally wounded, all the expressions of the dying, seem to share the same fear. And the same shame. It may seem strange, but right before the end there’s a sense of shame. Lo scuorno is what they call it here. A bit like being naked in public—that’s how it feels when you’re mortally wounded in the street. I’ve never gotten used to seeing murder victims. The nurses and policemen are calm, impassive, going through the motions they’ve learned by heart, no matter whom they’re dealing with. “We’ve got calluses on our hearts and leather lining our stomachs,” a young mortuary van driver once said to me. When you get there before the ambulance does, it’s hard to take your eyes off the victim, even if you wish you’d never seen him. I’ve never understood that this is how you die. The first time I saw someone who’d been killed, I must have been about thirteen. It is still vivid in my mind. I woke up feeling embarrassed: poking out from my pajamas was the clear sign of an unwanted erection. That classic morning erection, impossible to disguise. I remember it because on my way to school I ran smack into a dead body in the same situation. Five of us, our backpacks filled with books, were walking to school when we came across an Alfetta riddled with bullets. My friends were terribly curious and rushed over to see. Feet sticking up on the seat. The most daring kid asked a carabiniere why the feet were where the head should have been. The officer didn’t hesitate to respond, as if he hadn’t realized how old his interlocutor was.
“The spray turned him upside down.”
I was only a boy, but I knew that “spray” meant machine-gun fire. The Camorrista had taken so many blows that his body had flipped. Head down and feet in the air. When the carabinieri opened the door, the corpse fell to the ground like a melting icicle. We watched undisturbed, without anyone telling us this was no sight for children. Without any moral hand covering our eyes. The dead man had an erection, clearly visible under his tight-fitting jeans. It shocked me. I stared at it for a long time. For days I wondered how it could have happened, what he’d been thinking about, what he’d been doing before dying. My afternoons were spent trying to imagine what was in his head before he was killed. It tormented me until I finally got up the courage to ask for an explanation. I was told that an erection is a common reaction in male murder victims. As soon as Linda, one of the girls in our group, saw the dead body slide out from behind the steering wheel, she started to cry and hid behind two of the boys. A strangled cry. A young plainclothes officer grabbed the cadaver by the hair and spit in his face. Then he turned to us and said:
“No, what are you crying for? This guy was a real shit. Nothing happened, everything’s okay. Nothing happened. Don’t cry.”
Ever since then, I’ve had trouble believing those scenarios of forensic police who wear gloves and tread softly, careful not to displace any powder or shells. When I get to a body before the ambulance does and gaze on the final moments of life of someone who realizes he’s dying, I always think of the scene in Heart of Darkness, when the woman who loved Kurtz asks Marlow what his last words were. And Marlow lies. He says Kurtz asked about her, when in reality he didn’t utter any sweet words or precious thoughts, but simply repeated, “The horror.” We like to think that a person’s last words convey his ultimate, most important, most essential thoughts. That he dies articulating the reason life was worth living for. But it’s not like that. When you die, nothing comes out except fear. Everyone, or almost everyone, repeats the same thing, a simple, banal, urgent sentence: “I don’t want to die.” Their faces are superimposed on Kurtz’s and express the torment, disgust, and refusal to end so horrendously, in the worst of all possible worlds. The horror.
After seeing dozens of murder victims, soiled with their own blood as it mixes with filth, as they exhale nauseating odors, as they are looked at with curiosity or professional indifference, shunned like hazardous waste or discussed with agitated cries, I have arrived at just one certainty, a thought so elementary that it approaches idiocy: death is revolting.
In Secondigliano everyone, down to the little kids, has a perfectly clear idea of how you die and the best way to go. I was about to leave the scene of Carmela Attrice’s murder when I overheard two boys talking. Their tone was extremely serious.
“I want to die like the signora. In the head, bang bang and it’s all over.”
“But in your face? They hit her in the face, that’s the worst!”
“No, it’s not, and besides, it’s only an instant. Front or back, but in the head for sure!”
Curious, I butted into their conversation, asking questions and trying to have my say:
“Isn’t it better to be hit in the chest? One shot in the heart and it’s all over.”
But the boy understood the dynamics of pain far better than I did. He explained in great detail and with professional expertise the impact of bullets.
“No, in the chest it hurts a whole lot and it takes you ten minutes to die. Your lungs have to fill with blood, and the bullet is like a fiery needle that pierces and twists inside you. It hurts to get hit in the arm or leg too. But in the chest it’s like a wicked snakebite that won’t go away. The head’s better, because you won’t piss yourself or shit in your pants. No flailing around on the ground for half an hour.”
He had seen. And much more than just one dead body. Getting hit in the head saves you from trembling in fear, pissing your pants, or having the stench of your guts ooze out of the holes in your stomach. I asked him more about the details of death and killing. Every conceivable question except the only one I should have asked: why was a fourteen-year-old thinking so much about death? But it didn’t occur to me, not even for a second. The boy introduced himself by his nickname: Pikachu, one of the Pokémon figures. His blond hair and stocky figure had earned him the name. Pikachu pointed out some individuals in the crowd that had formed around the body of the dead woman. He lowered his voice:
“See those guys, they’re the ones that killed Pupetta.”
Carmela Attrice had been known as Pupetta. I tried to look them straight in the face. They seemed worked up, palpitating, moving their heads and shoulders to get a better look as the police covered the body. They’d killed her with their faces unmasked and had gone to sit nearby, under the statue of Padre Pio; as soon as a crowd started to form around the body, they’d come back to see. They were caught a few days later. Drug dealers made over into soldiers, trained to ambush a harmless woman, killed in her pajamas and slippers. This was their baptism of fire. The youngest was sixteen, the oldest twenty-eight, the alleged assassin twenty-two. When they were arrested, one of them, catching sight of the flashbulbs and video cameras, started to laugh and wink at the journalists. They also arrested the alleged bait, the sixteen-year-old who had rung the bell so that the woman would come downstairs. Sixteen, the same age as Carmela Attrice’s daughter, who realized what had happened as soon as she heard the shots and went out onto the balcony and started to cry. The investigators also claimed that the executioners had returned to the scene of the crime. They were too curious; it was like starring in your own
movie. First as actor and then as spectator, but in the same film. It must be true that you don’t have a precise memory of your actions when you shoot because those boys went back, eager to see what they’d done and what sort of face the victim had. I asked Pikachu if the guys were a Di Lauro trawler, or if they at least wanted to form one. He laughed.
“A trawler! Don’t they wish! They’re just little pissers, but I saw a real trawler.”
I didn’t know if Pikachu was bullshitting me or if he’d merely pieced together what was being said around Scampia, but his story was credible. He was pedantic, precise to the point of eliminating any doubt. He was pleased to see my stunned expression as he talked. Pikachu told me he used to have a dog named Careca, like the Brazilian forward who played for Napoli, the Italian champions. This dog liked to go out onto the apartment landing. One day he smelled someone in the apartment opposite, which is usually empty, so he started scratching at the door. A few seconds later a burst of gunfire exploded from behind the door and hit him full on. Pikachu told the story complete with sound effects:
“Rat-tat-tat-tat … Careca dies instantly—and the door—bang—slams open real quick.”
Pikachu sat on the ground, planted his feet against a low wall, and made as if he were cradling a machine gun, imitating the sentinel that had killed his dog. The sentinel who’s always sitting behind the door, a pillow behind his back and his feet braced on either side. An uncomfortable position, to keep you from falling asleep, but above all because shooting from below is a sure way to eliminate whoever is on the other side of the door without getting hit yourself. Pikachu told me that as a way of apology for killing his dog, they gave his family some money and invited him into the apartment. An apartment in which an entire trawler was hiding. He remembered everything, the rooms bare except for beds, a table, and a television.
Pikachu spoke quickly, gesticulating wildly to describe the men’s positions and movements. They were nervous, tense, one of them with “pineapples” around his neck. Pineapples are the hand grenades the killers wear. Pikachu said a basket full of them was near a window. The Camorra has always had a certain fondness for grenades. Clan arsenals everywhere are filled with hand grenades and antitank bombs from Eastern Europe. Pikachu said that the men spent hours playing PlayStation, so he’d challenged and beat them all. Because he always won, they promised him that “one of these days they’d take me with them to shoot for real.”
One of the neighborhood legends has it that Ugo De Lucia was obsessed with Winning Eleven, a popular soccer video game. According to informants, in four days he not only committed three murders, but also played an entire soccer championship.
The pentito Pietro Esposito, known as Kojak, recounts something that seems more than just legend. He’d gone to a house where Ugo De Lucia was stretched out on the bed in front of the television and commenting on the news:
“We’ve done two more pieces! And they’ve done one piece in Terzo Mondo.”
The television was the best way to follow the war in real time without having to make compromising calls. From this point of view, the media attention the war had brought to Scampia was a strategic advantage for the fighters. But what struck me even more was the word piece—the new term for a homicide. Even Pikachu used it; he’d talk about the pieces done by the Di Lauros and the pieces done by the secessionists. The expression to do a piece came from contract labor or piecework. Killing a human being became the equivalent of manufacturing something, it didn’t matter what. A piece.
Pikachu and I went for a walk and he told me about the boys, the real strength of the Di Lauro clan. I asked him where they hung out, and he offered to take me to a pizzeria where they’d go in the evening; he wanted me to see that he knew them all. First we picked up a friend of Pikachu’s, who’d been part of the System for a while. Pikachu worshipped him and described him as a sort of boss; the System kids looked up to him because he’d been given the task of providing food for the fugitives and even doing the shopping for the Di Lauro family, or so he claimed. He was called Tonino Kit Kat because he was known to devour masses of candy bars. Kit Kat assumed the attitude of a little boss, but I let him see I was skeptical. He got fed up answering my questions, so he lifted his sweater. His entire chest was speckled with bruises: violet circles with yellow and greenish clots of crushed capillaries in the centers.
“What have you done?”
“The vest.”
“What vest?”
“The bulletproof vest.”
“The vest doesn’t give you those bruises, does it?”
“No, but these eggplants are the hits I took.”
The bruises—eggplants—were the fruit of the bullets that the jacket had stopped an inch before they penetrated flesh. To train the boys not to be afraid of weapons, they make them put on a vest and then fire at them. Faced with a gun, a vest alone isn’t enough to convince you not to flee. A vest is not a vaccine against fear. The only way to anesthetize every fear is to show how the guns can be neutralized. The boys told me that they were taken out to the countryside beyond Secondigliano. They’d put the vests on under their T-shirts, and then, one by one, half a clip would be unloaded at them. “When you’re hit, you fall on the ground, you can’t breathe, you gasp for air, but you can’t inhale. You just can’t do it. It’s like you’ve been punched in the chest, you feel like you’re dying … but then you get back up. That’s the important thing. After you’ve been hit, you get back up.” Kit Kat had been trained along with others to take the hit. He’d been trained to die, or rather to almost die.
The clans enlist the boys as soon as they’re capable of being loyal. Twelve to seventeen years old. Lots of them are sons or brothers of clan affiliates, while others come from families without steady incomes. This is the Neapolitan Camorra clans’ new army, recruited via well-structured clan affiliations, drawn from the old city center, from the Sanità, Forcella, Secondigliano, San Gaetano, Quartieri Spagnoli, and Pallonetto neighborhoods. A whole army of them. The advantages for the clan are many: a boy earns half the salary of a low-ranking adult, rarely has to support his parents, doesn’t have the burdens of a family or fixed hours, doesn’t need to be paid punctually, and above all, is willing to be on the streets at all times. There’s a whole range of jobs and responsibilities. They start with pushing light drugs, hashish in particular. The boys position themselves in the most crowded streets, and they’re almost always issued a motor scooter. They work their way up to cocaine, which they peddle at the universities, outside the nightclubs, in front of hotels, inside the subway stations. These baby pushers are fundamental to the flexible drug economy because they attract less attention, do business between a soccer match and a scooter ride, and will often deliver directly to the client’s home. The clan doesn’t usually make them work mornings; in fact, they continue to go to school, in part because if they dropped out, they would be easier to identify. After the first couple of months, the boy affiliates go about armed, a form of self-defense and a way of asserting themselves. The weapons—automatics and semiautomatics the boys learn to use in the garbage dumps outside of town or in the city’s underground caverns—are both a promotion in the field and a promise of possibility, of rising to the upper echelons of the clan.
When they prove themselves reliable and win the area capo’s complete trust, they take on a role that goes well beyond that of pusher: they become lookouts. Lookouts make sure that all the trucks unloading goods at the supermarkets, stores, and delicatessens on their assigned street are ones imposed by the clan, and they report when a shop is using a distributor other than the “preselected” one. The presence of lookouts is also essential at construction sites. Contractors often subcontract to Camorra companies, but at times the work is assigned to firms that are “not recommended.” To discover if work is being given to “external” firms, the clans monitor the sites constantly, and in a way that is above suspicion. The boys observe, check, and report back to the area capo, who tells them what to do if
a site steps out of line. These young affiliates behave like and have the responsibilities of adult Camorristi. They start their careers young and charge up through the ranks; their rise to positions of power is radically altering the genetic structure of the clans. Baby capos and boy bosses make for unpredictable and ruthless interlocutors; they follow a logic that keeps law officers and anti-Mafia investigators from understanding their dynamics. The faces are new and unfamiliar. Following Cosimo’s reorganization, entire divisions of the drug market are run by fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds who give orders to forty-and fifty-year-olds without feeling the least bit embarrassed or inadequate. The car of one of these boys, Antonio Galeota Lanza, was bugged by the carabinieri. The stereo blasting, Antonio talks about his life as a pusher:
“Every Sunday evening I make eight or nine hundred euros, even if being a pusher means you deal with crack, cocaine, and five hundred years of jail.”
The System boys now tend to try to obtain everything they want with “iron,” as they call their pistols, and the desire for a cell phone or a stereo, a car or a scooter, easily transmutes into a killing. It’s not unusual to hear baby soldiers at the checkout counter in a supermarket or shop say things like “I belong to the Secondigliano System” or “I belong to the Quartieri System.” Magic words that allow the boys to walk off with whatever they want and in the face of which no shopkeeper would ever ask them to pay what they owe.
In Secondigliano this new structure of boys was militarized. Pikachu and Kit Kat took me to see Nello, a pizza chef in the area who was responsible for feeding the System boys when they’d finished their shifts. A group came into Nello’s pizzeria just after I got there. They were awkward and ungainly, their sweaters puffed out from the bulletproof vests underneath. They’d left their motorini on the sidewalk and came in without saying hello to anyone. The way they walked, with their padded chests, made them look like football players. Boyish faces, thirteen to sixteen years old, a few with the first hints of a beard. Pikachu and Kit Kat had me sit with them, and no one seemed to mind. They were eating and, above all, drinking. Water, Coca-Cola, Fanta. An incredible thirst that they tried to quench even with the pizza; they asked for olive oil and then poured it on the pizzas, saying they were too dry. Everything dried up in their mouths, from their saliva to their words. I realized immediately that they were coming off a night shift as watch guards. They gave them MDMA pills—ecstasy—to keep them awake, to keep them from stopping to eat twice a day. After all, the German drugmaker Merck patented MDMA during World War I for soldiers in the trenches—those German soldiers referred to as Menschenmaterial, human material—to enable them to overcome hunger, cold, and terror. Later it was used by the Americans for espionage operations. And now these little soldiers received their dose of artificial courage and adulterated resistance. They cut slices of pizza and sucked them down; the sounds coming from the table were of old people slurping their soup. The boys kept ordering bottles of water and talking. And then I did something that could have provoked a violent reaction, but I sensed I could get away with it, that these were kids I was looking at. Padded with plates of lead, but kids nevertheless. I put a tape recorder on the table and addressed them all in a loud voice, trying to catch each one’s eye:
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