Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

  “Forza, go ahead and talk into this, say whatever you feel like.”

  This didn’t strike anyone as strange, and no one suspected they were sitting with a narc or a journalist. Someone hurled a few insults at the recorder, then one boy, encouraged by some of my questions, recounted his career. It seemed as if he couldn’t wait to tell it.

  “First I worked in a bar. I made two hundred euros a month, two fifty with tips, but I didn’t like the work. I wanted to work in the garage with my brother, but they didn’t take me. In the System I get three hundred euros a week, but if I sell well, I also get a percentage on every brick of hashish and can make up to three hundred fifty, four hundred euros. I have to bust my ass, but in the end they always give me something more.”

  After a volley of belches that two of the kids wanted to record, the boy called Satore, a name halfway between Sasà and Totore, two diminutives for Salvatore, continued:

  “Before I was out on the street, it annoyed me that I didn’t have a scooter and had to get around on foot or take the bus. I like the work, everyone respects me, and I can do what I want. Now they gave me iron and I have to stay around here all the time, Terzo Mondo, Case dei Puffi. Always in the same place, back and forth. And I don’t like it.”

  Satore smiled at me, then laughed loudly into the recorder:

  “Let me out of here! Tell that to the boss!”

  They’d been given iron—a pistol—and a limited territory in which to work. Kit Kat began to speak into the recorder, his lips touching the microphone, so that even his breath registered.

  “I want to open a remodeling company or else a warehouse or a store. The System will have to give me the money to get set up, but then I’ll worry about the rest, even who to marry. I want to get married, not to somebody from here, though, but a model, black or German.”

  Pikachu took a pack of cards from his pocket, and four of them started to play. The others got up and stretched, but no one removed his bulletproof vest. I kept asking Pikachu about the trawlers, but he was starting to get irritated at my insistence. He told me he’d been at a trawler house a few days before, but that they’d dismantled everything the only thing left was their MP3 player with the music they listened to when they went to do pieces, which was now dangling from his neck. Inventing an excuse, I asked if I could borrow it for a few days. Pikachu laughed as if to say that he wasn’t offended that I’d taken him for an idiot, for someone stupid enough to lend things. So I coughed up 50 euros and he gave me the player. I immediately stuck the headphones in my ears; I wanted to know what trawler background music was. I was expecting rap, acid rock, heavy metal, but instead it was an endless round of Neapolitan neo-melodic music and pop. In America, killers pump themselves up on rap, but in Secondigliano they go off to kill with love songs in their ears.

  Pikachu started shuffling and asked me if I wanted in, but I’ve always been hopeless at cards, so I got up from the table. The waiters at the pizzeria were the same age as the System boys, and they looked at them admiringly, lacking even the courage to serve them. The owner took care of them himself. To work as an errand boy, waiter, or on a construction site is considered a disgrace here. In addition to the usual, eternal reasons—no contract, no sick days or vacation, ten-hour shifts—there’s no hope of bettering your situation. The System at least grants the illusion that commitment will be recognized, that it’s possible to make a career. An affiliate will never be seen as an errand boy, and girls will never feel they are being courted by a failure. These padded boys, these ridiculous sentinels who looked like puppets of football players, didn’t dream of being Al Capone but Flavio Briatore, not gunslingers but entrepreneurs with beautiful models on their arms; they wanted to become successful businessmen.

  On January 19, 2005, the forty-five-year-old Pasquale Paladini is killed. Eight shots to the chest and head. A few hours later, Antonio Auletta, age nineteen, is hit in the legs. But January 21 seems to be a turning point. Word spreads quickly, there’s no need for a press office. Cosimo Di Lauro has been arrested. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, Cosimo is the prince of the gang and the leader of the slaughter. According to state witnesses, he’s the clan commander. But he was hiding in a hole forty meters square and sleeping on a dilapidated bed. The heir to a criminal association that takes in 500,000 euros a day from narcotics alone, and who had a villa worth 5 million euros in the heart of one of the poorest regions of Italy, was reduced to hiding in a stinking little hole not far from his alleged palace.

  A villa that rose out of nothing in Via Cupa dell’Arco, near the Di Lauro family home. An elegant, eighteenth-century farmhouse, restructured like a Pompeian villa, complete with impluvium, columns, plaster decorations, false ceilings, and grand staircases. No one knew it existed. No one knew the official owners. The carabinieri were investigating, but no one in the neighborhood had any doubts—it was for Cosimo. The carabinieri discovered the place by chance. After breaching the thick walls surrounding it, they came across some workers, who ran off as soon as they saw the uniforms. The war interrupted work on the villa, kept it from being filled with furniture and paintings fit for a prince, from becoming the heart of gold of the decaying body of the Secondigliano building industry.

  When Cosimo hears the pounding of boots and the clatter of rifles, he doesn’t try to escape. He doesn’t even arm himself. Instead he goes to the mirror, wets his comb, pulls his hair off his forehead, and ties it in a ponytail at his nape, letting the curly mane fall onto his neck. He is wearing a dark polo-neck sweater and a black raincoat. Dressed as a clown of crime, a warrior of the night, Cosimo Di Lauro descends the stairs, chest out. A few years earlier he took a disastrous spill on his motorcycle, and the legacy was a lame leg. But he’s even thought about his limp; as he walks down the stairs he leans on the forearms of the carabinieri who escort him, so as not to reveal his handicap, and proceeds with a normal gait. The new military sovereigns of the Neapolitan criminal associations don’t present themselves as neighborhood tough guys, don’t have the crazy, wide-eyed look of Raffaele Cutolo, don’t feel the need to pose as the Cosa Nostra boss Luciano Liggio or caricatures of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone. The Matrix, The Crow, and Pulp Fiction give a better idea of what they want and who they are. They are models everyone recognizes and that don’t need too much mediation. Spectacle is superior to enigmatic codes of winking or the well-defined mythology of infamous crime neighborhoods. Cosimo looks straight at the cameras, lowers his chin, and sticks out his forehead. He didn’t let himself be found out the way Giovanni Brusca did, wearing a pair of threadbare jeans and a shirt with spaghetti sauce stains; he’s not frightened like Totò Riina, who was quickly loaded into a helicopter, or surprised with a sleepy look on his face like Giuseppe Misso, the Sanità neighborhood boss. Cosimo has been brought up in the world of show business, and he knows how to go onstage. He appears like a warrior who has stumbled for the first time. The expression on his face says this is the price he must pay for having so much courage and zeal. He acts as if he weren’t being arrested, but simply moving headquarters. He knew the risk when he triggered the war, but he had no choice. It was war or death. He wants his arrest to seem like the proof of his victory, the symbol of his courage that disdains any form of self-defense as long as it preserves the family system.

  The people in the neighborhood feel their stomachs churn. They set off a revolt, overturning cars and launching Molotov cocktails. This hysterical attack is not, as it may seem, to prevent the arrest, but rather to exorcise any act of revenge. To erase every trace of suspicion. To let Cosimo know that no one betrayed him, no one blabbed, that the hieroglyphics of his hiding place had not been deciphered with their help. The revolt is an elaborate rite of apology, a metaphysical chapel of atonement that the neighborhood people build from burned-out carabinieri cars, dumpsters used as barricades, and black smoke from fuming tires. If Cosimo suspects them, they won’t even have time to pack their bags before the ax falls in yet another ruthle
ss condemnation.

  Just days after his arrest, Cosimo’s haughty gaze stares out of the screen savers of the cell phones of dozens of kids in Torre Annunziata, Quarto, and Marano. Mere provocations, banal gestures of adolescent foolishness. Of course. But Cosimo knew. You have to act this way to be recognized as a capo, to touch people’s hearts. You have to know how to work the TV screen and the newspaper, how to tie your ponytail. Cosimo clearly represents the new model of System entrepreneur, the image of the new bourgeoisie, liberated of every constraint, motivated by the absolute desire to dominate every corner of the market and to have a hand in everything. To let go of nothing. Choosing doesn’t mean limiting your field of action, depriving yourself of all other options. Not for someone who thinks of life as a place where you risk losing everything so as to win it all. It means taking into account that you can be arrested, end badly, die. But it doesn’t mean giving up. To want everything now, to have it as soon as possible. This is Cosimo Di Lauro’s appeal, the power he symbolizes.

  Everyone, even those who take special care of themselves, gets caught in the trap of retirement, finds out sooner or later he’s been cuckolded, or ends up having a Polish nurse. Why should you die of depression looking for a job that will kill you, or end up working part-time answering phones? Become an entrepreneur. For real. One who deals in anything and does business even with nothing. Ernst Jünger would say that greatness consists in being exposed to the storm. The Camorra bosses would say the same thing. To be the center of every action, the center of power. To use everything as a means and themselves as the ends. Whoever says that it’s amoral, that life can’t exist without ethics, that the economy has limits and must obey certain rules, is merely someone who has never been in command, who’s been defeated by the market. Ethics are the limit of the loser, the protection of the defeated, the moral justification for those who haven’t managed to gamble everything and win it all. The law has fixed codes, but justice doesn’t. Justice is something else, an abstract principle that involves everyone, that is tolerable depending on how it is interpreted to absolve or condemn every human being: guilty are the ministers and popes, the saints and heretics, the revolutionaries and reactionaries. Guilty, every one of them, of betrayal, murder, error. Guilty of growing old and dying. Guilty of becoming obsolete and defeated. Guilty, every one of them, in the eyes of the universal court of historical morals and absolved by the court of necessity. Justice and injustice, in reality, have only one significance. Victory or defeat, something done or endured. If someone offends you, treats you wrong, he is committing an injustice; if instead he treats you with goodwill, he does you justice. These are the terms of evaluation to use when observing the clans. These are the standards of judgment. They are enough. They have to be. This is the only real way to evaluate justice. The rest is just religion and confessional booths. This is the logic that shapes the economic imperative. It’s not the Camorristi who pursue deals, but deals that pursue the Camorristi. The logic of criminal business, of the bosses, coincides with the most aggressive neoliberalism. The rules, dictated or imposed, are those of business, profit, and victory over all the competition. Anything else is worthless. Anything else doesn’t exist. You pay with prison or your skin for the power to decide people’s lives or deaths, promote a product, monopolize a slice of the economy, and invest in cutting-edge markets. To have power for ten years, a year, an hour—it doesn’t matter for how long. What counts is to live, to truly command. To win in the market arena, to stare at the sun, as the Forcella boss Raffaele Giuliano did, challenging it from his prison cell, showing that he was not blinded even by that supreme light. Raffaele Giuliano, who ruthlessly spread hot pepper on a knife before stabbing the relative of an enemy, so as to make him feel excruciating, burning pain as the blade pierced his flesh, inch by inch. In prison he was feared not for his bloodthirsty punctiliousness, but for the challenge of his gaze, which looked directly into the sun. To know you are a businessman destined to end up dead or in jail and still feel the ruthless desire to dominate powerful and unlimited economic empires. The boss is arrested or killed, but the economic system he generated lives on, and it continues to mutate, evolve, improve, and produce profits. The mentality of these samurai liberalists who know that you have to pay to have power—absolute power—was summed up in a letter a boy in juvenile detention wrote and gave to a priest. It was read during a conference. I still remember it by heart:

  Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed.

  This is the new rhythm of criminal entrepreneurs, the new thrust of the economy: to dominate it at any cost. Power before all else. Economic victory is more precious than life itself. Than anyone’s life, including your own.

  They even started calling the System kids “the talking dead.” In a wiretapped conversation included in the holding order issued by the anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office in February 2006, a boy explains who the neighborhood capos in Secondigliano are:

  “They’re young kids, the talking dead, the living dead, the walking dead … they kill you without even thinking twice about it, but you’re already as good as dead.”

  Boy capos, clan kamikazes who go to their death not for any religion but for money and power, at all costs, in defense of the only way of life worth living.

  The body of Giulio Ruggiero is found on the evening of January 21, the same night in which Cosimo Di Lauro is arrested. A burned-out car, a cadaver in the driver’s seat. Decapitated. The head is on the backseat. It hadn’t been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice. First cut the flesh, then chip away at the bones. They must have done the job right there because the ground was littered with flakes of flesh that looked like tripe. The investigations hadn’t even begun, but everyone in the area seemed convinced it was a message. A symbol. Cosimo Di Lauro could not have been arrested without a tip-off. In everyone’s mind, that headless body was a traitor. Only someone who has sold a capo can be ripped apart like that. The sentence is passed before the investigations even begin. It doesn’t really matter if the sentence is correct or if it’s chasing an illusion. I looked at that abandoned car and head in Via Hugo Pratt without getting off my Vespa. I could hear the talk of how they had burned the body and the severed head, filling the mouth with gasoline, placing a wick between its teeth, and setting it on fire so that the whole face would explode. I started my Vespa and drove off.

  When I arrived on the scene on January 24, 2005, Attilio Romanò was lying dead on the floor. A horde of carabinieri were nervously pacing in front of the store where the ambush had taken place. Yet another one. An agitated youth comments as he passes, “A death a day, that’s the refrain of Naples.” He stops, doffs his hat to the dead he doesn’t even see, and walks on. The killers had entered the shop with their pistols ready. It was clear that they weren’t there to steal but to kill, to punish. Attilio had tried to hide behind the counter. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference, but maybe he hoped to show he was unarmed, that he wasn’t involved, that he hadn’t done anything. Maybe he knew they were soldiers in the Camorra war the Di Lauros were waging. They shot him, emptying their clips into him, and after the “service” they left the store—calmly, people say—as if they had just bought a cell phone instead of killing a human being. Attilio Romanò is on the floor. Blood everywhere. It seems as if his soul had drained out of the holes that riddled his body. When you see that much blood on the ground, you start touching yourself, checking if you’ve been wounded, if it’s your own blood you’re looking at. You develop a psychotic anxiety and try to make sure that you haven’t been wounded somehow without realizing it. And still you can’t beli
eve that there could be so much blood in just one man. You’re sure there’s far less inside you. And when you’ve ascertained that it wasn’t you who lost all that blood, you still feel empty. You become a hemorrhage yourself, you feel your legs go weak, fur on your tongue, your hands dissolve in that thick lake. You wish someone would look at the whites of your eyes to check if you’re anemic. You want to ask for a blood transfusion, or eat a steak, if you could just get it down without vomiting. You have to shut your eyes and try not to breathe. The smell of congealed blood, like rusty iron, has already penetrated the plaster on the walls. You have to leave, go outside, get some air before they start throwing sawdust on the blood because the combination smells so terrible it will make you vomit for sure.