Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

The Di Lauro monopoly on the drug market has been broken. There’s no going back. The territory must be divided up fairly. The province to the secessionists, Naples to the Di Lauros.

  The secessionists can make use of their own channels to import drugs; they are no longer required to depend on Di Lauro middlemen.

  Private vendettas are separate from business; in other words, business is more important than personal matters. If in the future there is a vendetta connected to the feud, it will not reignite hostilities but will remain a private matter.

  The boss of bosses of Secondigliano must have returned. He’d been sighted everywhere, from Puglia to Canada. The secret service has been working for months to nab him. Paolo Di Lauro leaves the most elusive of traces—invisible, like his power before the feud. It seems that he was operated on in a clinic in Marseille, the same one that treated the Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano. He has returned to sign the peace pact or to limit damages. He’s here, you can feel his presence; the wind has shifted. The boss who has been missing for ten years, the one who “had to come back, even if he has to run the risk of prison,” as one affiliate stated over the phone. The phantom boss, whose face is a mystery even to his affiliates. One of them pleaded with the boss Maurizio Prestieri, “I beg you, let me see him, just for a second, just one second, one look and then I’ll go.”

  Paolo Di Lauro is nabbed on Via Canonico Stornaiuolo on September 16, 2005. Hidden in the modest home of Fortunata Liguori, the woman of a low-ranking affiliate. An anonymous house, similar to the one where his son Cosimo had hid. It’s easier to camouflage yourself in the cement forest; in a nondescript home you’re not noticed, not talked about. The urban environment offers total absence, and the city provides greater anonymity than a trapdoor or an underground hideout. Paolo Di Lauro was nearly arrested on his birthday. It was a challenge to return home to eat with his family when half of Europe’s police were on his trail. But someone warned him in time. When the carabinieri entered the family villa, they found the table set and his place empty. But this time the ROS, the special operations unit of the carabinieri, are sure. The officers are agitated when they enter the house at 4 a.m. after a whole night of surveillance. The boss, on the other hand, doesn’t react; in fact he soothes them.

  “Come in … I am calm … There’s no problem.”

  Twenty vehicles escort the car carrying Paolo Di Lauro, and four motorcycles ride ahead, making sure everything is under control. The motorcade speeds along, with the boss in the bulletproof car. There are three possible routes to the barracks: to cross Via Capodimonte and then dart along Via Pessina and Piazza Dante; to block all access to Corso Secondigliano and get onto the beltway toward Vomero; or, if the situation looks extremely dangerous, to land a helicopter and take him by air. The motorcycles indicate a suspicious automobile along the route. Everyone is expecting an ambush, but it turns out to be a false alarm. The motorcade delivers Di Lauro to the barracks on Via Pastrengo, in the heart of Naples. The helicopter swoops down, kicking up dust and dirt from the flowerbed in the piazza, which whirls about along with plastic bags, Kleenex, and newspapers. A whirlwind of rubbish.

  There’s absolutely no danger. But it’s necessary to trumpet his arrest, to show that they’ve managed to catch the uncatchable one, to capture the boss. When the carousel of bulletproof vehicles arrives at the barracks and the carabinieri see that the reporters are already gathered at the entrance, they straddle the car doors as if sitting on saddles; they make a show of brandishing their pistols, wearing ski masks and carabinieri vests. After Giovanni Brusca’s arrest, every policeman and carabiniere wants to be photographed in this pose: the reward for the long nights of waiting in position, the satisfaction of having captured one’s prey, the PR astuteness of knowing it will make the front page of the newspaper. Paolo Di Lauro displays none of his son Cosimo’s arrogance; leaving the barracks, he bends over, face to the ground, offering only his balding head to the cameras. Perhaps it’s merely a form of self-protection. Being photographed from every angle by hundreds of lenses and filmed by dozens of video cameras would have showed his face to all of Italy, perhaps causing unsuspecting neighbors to report having seen him, having lived near him. Better not abet the investigations, better not reveal his secret ways. But some interpret his lowered head as a simple irritation at the flash of the cameras, the annoyance at being reduced to a beast on display.

  After a few days Paolo Di Lauro is brought to court, room 215. He takes his place amid a public made up of relatives. The only word the boss pronounces is “Present”; all the rest he articulates without speaking. Gestures, winks, and smiles are the mute syntax he uses to communicate with from his cage. Greetings, responses, reassurances. Paolo Di Lauro seems to be staring at me, but he is really catching the eye of the gray-haired man behind me. They look at each other for a few seconds, then the boss winks at him.

  After learning of his arrest, many people apparently came to greet the boss whom they had been unable to meet for years because he was in hiding. Paolo Di Lauro is wearing jeans, a dark sweater, and Paciotti shoes, the brand worn by all the local clan managers. His jailers had removed his handcuffs, and he has a cage all to himself. The elite of all the northern Naples clans are brought in: Raffaele Abbinante, Enrico D’Avanzo, Giuseppe Criscuolo, Arcangelo Valentino, Maria Prestieri, Maurizio Prestieri, Salvatore Britti, and Vincenzo Di Lauro. The boss’s men and ex-men are now divided between two cages, one for the Di Lauro faithful and one for the Spaniards. Prestieri is the most elegant, in a blue jacket and dark blue oxford shirt. He is the first to go up to the protective glass that separates them from the boss. They greet each other. Enrico D’Avanzo comes over as well, and they even manage to whisper something between the cracks in the bulletproof glass. Many of the managers hadn’t seen him for years. His son Vincenzo hasn’t seen him since 2002, when Vincenzo went into hiding in Chivasso in Piedmont, where he was arrested in 2004.

  I never take my eyes off the boss. Every gesture, every expression is material to fill pages of interpretation, to establish new grammars of body language. A strange, silent dialogue unfolds between father and son. With his right index finger Vincenzo indicates the ring finger of his left hand, as if to ask his father, “Your wedding ring?” The boss passes his hands over the sides of his head, then mimes holding a steering wheel, as if he were driving. I can’t decipher their gestures. The interpretation the newspapers give is that Vincenzo had asked his father why he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring, and his father explained that the carabinieri had taken away all his gold. After all the gestures, facial expressions, fast-moving lips, winks, and hands on the bulletproof glass, Paolo Di Lauro just stares at his son and smiles. They kiss each other through the glass. At the end of the hearing the boss’s lawyer asks that the two be permitted to embrace. The request is granted. Seven policemen guard them.

  “You’re pale,” Vincenzo says, and his father looks him in the eye as he responds, “This face hasn’t seen the sun for years and years.”

  When they are caught, fugitives are often at the end of their rope. Their constant flight demonstrates the impossibility of enjoying one’s wealth, which brings the bosses even closer to their chiefs of staff, and this becomes the only true measure of their economic and social success. With the elaborate protection systems, the morbid and obsessive need to plan every step, spending most of their time holed up in a room regulating and coordinating their interests, fugitive bosses become prisoners of their own business. A woman in the courtroom recounts an episode from when Di Lauro was in hiding. She looks a bit like a professor, her hair more yellow than blond, with dark roots. Her voice is hoarse and heavy, and she seems almost sorry for his difficulties. She tells me about when Paolo Di Lauro still moved about Secondigliano, albeit with meticulous planning. He had five cars, all the same color, model, and license plate. When he had to go somewhere, he would send all five of them out, even though obviously he was in only one of them. All five cars were escorted, and none of his men knew f
or sure which one he was in. As each car left the villa, the men would line up behind to follow it. A sure way to avoid betrayal, even the simple betrayal of signaling that the boss was about to move. The woman recounts all this in a tone of profound commiseration for the suffering and solitude of a man who must always think he is about to be killed. After the tarantellas of gestures and embraces, after the greetings and winks of people who make up the most ferocious power structure of Naples, the bulletproof glass separating the boss from the other men is full of different sorts of signs: handprints, greasy smears, the shadow of lips.

  Less than twenty-four hours after the boss’s arrest, a Polish kid is found at the Arzano roundabout, trembling like a leaf as he struggles to throw an enormous bundle in the trash. He is smeared with blood and crippled with fear. The bundle is a body. A mangled, tortured, badly disfigured body; it seems impossible that a person could be treated that way. If he had been made to swallow a mine that then exploded in his stomach, it would have wreaked less destruction. The body belonged to Edoardo La Monica, though his features were no longer recognizable. Only his lips were still intact; the rest of his face was completely crushed. His body was riddled with holes and encrusted with blood. They had tied him up and tortured him with a spiked bat—slowly, for hours. Every blow cut new holes, piercing his flesh and breaking his bones as the nails sunk in and were then yanked out. They had cut off his ears, cropped his tongue, shattered his wrists, gouged out his eyes with a screwdriver—all while he was still alive, awake, conscious. Then to finish him off they smashed his face with a hammer and carved a cross on his lips with a knife. His body was supposed to end up in the trash so that it would be found rotting in a dump. The message inscribed on his flesh was perfectly clear to everyone. We cut off the ears with which you heard where the boss was hiding, shattered the wrists you extended to take the blood money, gouged out the eyes you saw with, cut out the tongue you talked with. We crushed the face you lost in the eyes of the System by doing what you did. Your lips are sealed with a cross, closed forever to the faith you betrayed. Edoardo La Monica had a clean record. But he had a loaded last name, belonging to one of the families that had turned Secondigliano into Camorra territory and a mine for business. The family with whom Paolo Di Lauro had taken his first steps. Edoardo La Monica’s murder resembles that of Giulio Ruggiero. Both of them torn to pieces, meticulously tortured just hours after the arrest of a boss. Flayed, beaten, quartered, skinned. Homicides with such deliberate and bloody symbolism hadn’t been seen for years, since the end of Cutolo’s reign. Cutolo’s favorite killer, Pasquale Barra ‘o nimale—the animal—became famous for murdering Francis Turatello in prison by ripping his heart out with his bare hands and then biting into it. These rituals had died out, but the Secondigliano feud revived them, transforming every gesture, every inch of flesh, and every word into a means of communication in the war.

  In a press conference the special operations carabinieri officers declared that Di Lauro’s arrest came about after the clan member who purchased Di Lauro’s favorite fish, the pezzogna, or blue-spotted bream was identified. The story seemed calculated to shatter Di Lauro’s image: the supremely powerful boss who controls hundreds of sentinels, but who lets himself get nabbed because of his sin of gluttony. No one in Secondigliano buys the story of the pezzogna trail, not for a minute. Many figured that SISDE, Italy’s domestic intelligence agency, had to be solely responsible. The forces of law and order confirmed that SISDE had indeed intervened, but its presence in Secondigliano was extremely difficult to perceive. In snippets of barroom chat I had picked up the hint of something that sounded awfully close to numerous reporters’ hypotheses, namely that SISDE had put several people in the area on the payroll in exchange for information or lack of interference. Men drinking their espresso or cappuccino with a croissant would say things like:

  “Since you take money from James Bond …”

  Twice in those days I heard furtive or allusive mention of 007. The references were too insignificant or too ridiculous to allow me to draw any conclusions, but at the same time they were too anomalous to ignore.

  The secret service’s strategy may have been to identify and recruit those who were technically responsible for lookouts, getting them to station all the sentinels in other zones so that they would be unable to sound the alarm and allow the boss to flee. The family of Edoardo La Monica denies any possible involvement on his part, maintains that he had never been part of the System and was afraid of the clans and their business affairs. Maybe he paid for someone else in his family, but the surgical torture seems to have been intended specifically for him rather than to be delivered to someone else via his body.

  One day I noticed a small group of people not far from where Edoardo La Monica’s body had been found. One of the boys pointed to his ring finger, touched his head, and moved his lips without making a sound. Vincenzo Di Lauro’s courtroom gestures came back to me in a flash: that strange sign, that asking his father about his wedding ring, his first question after not seeing him for years. The ring—anello—which in Neapolitan becomes aniello. A message referring to Aniello La Monica, the family patriarch, and the ring finger, which symbolizes faith or loyalty. Thus loyalty betrayed, as if he were signaling the root of the family that had betrayed him. The family responsible for his arrest. The person who had talked.

  For years the La Monicas had been called the anielli in the neighborhood, just as the Gionta di Torre Annunziata family members were called valentini after the boss Valentino Gionta. According to the declarations of the pentito Antonio Ruocco and of Luigi Giuliano, Aniello La Monica had been eliminated by none other than his godson, Paolo Di Lauro. It is true that the La Monica men are all in the ranks of the Di Lauro clan. But this atrocious killing could be the punishment, a more violent message than a simple burst of gunfire, the revenge for that death twenty years earlier—revenge is a dish best served cold. A long memory, very long. A memory shared by the Secondigliano clans that later rose to power and by the very territory they rule. But which rests on rumors, hypotheses, and suspicions, producing sensational arrests or tortured bodies, without, however, ever taking the shape of truth. A truth that must always be obstinately interpreted, like a hieroglyphic. One that is better left undeciphered.

  Secondigliano returned to its regular economic rhythms. All the Spaniard and the Di Lauro managers were in prison. New neighborhood capos were emerging, new boy managers were taking their first steps up the chain of command. Over a few months the word feud fell out of use and was replaced by Vietnam.

  “That one there … he was in Vietnam … so now he has to lay low.”

  “After Vietnam everyone’s afraid around here …”

  “Is Vietnam over or not?”

  Fragments of sentences that the new clan conscripts speak into their cell phones. Intercepted conversations that on February 8, 2006, led to the arrest of Salvatore Di Lauro, the eighteen-year-old son of the boss, who had a small army of baby drug dealers. The Spaniards had lost the battle, but it seems they managed to achieve their goal of becoming autonomous, with their own cartel run by young kids. The carabinieri intercepted an SMS that a girl sent to a young drug-market capo who had been arrested during the feud and who took up dealing as soon as he was released: “Good luck with your work and your return to the neighborhood, I’m excited for your victory, congratulations!”

  The victory was a military one, the congratulations for having fought on the right side. The Di Lauros are in jail, but they saved the skin and family business.

  Things suddenly calmed down after the clan negotiations and arrests. I wandered about a Secondigliano that was exhausted, trampled, photographed, filmed, abused by too many people, a Secondigliano weary of it all. I stopped in front of the murals by Felice Pignataro with their sun faces and skulls combined with clowns. Murals that gave the cement some light and unexpected beauty. All of a sudden the sky exploded with fireworks and the air echoed with the obsessive trictrac of explosions. The new
s crews who were dismantling their posts after the boss’s arrest came running to see what was going on. Precious material for their final broadcast: festivities involving two entire apartment buildings. They turned on their microphones and spotlights and called in to their editors to announce a special report on the Spaniards’ celebrating Paolo Di Lauro’s arrest. I went over to see what was happening, and a boy, pleased that I asked, told me, “It’s for Peppino, he’s come out of coma.” Last year Peppino was on his way to work when his Ape, the three-wheeled vehicle he drove to the market, started to veer and then overturned. Neapolitan roads are water soluble; after two hours of rain the volcanic paving stones start to float and the tar dissolves as if it were mixed with salt. They brought a tractor from the countryside to recover the Ape from the escarpment where it had ended up. Peppino suffered severe cranial trauma. After a year in a coma he had revived, and a few months later he was released. The neighborhood was celebrating his homecoming. They set off the first fireworks right as he was getting out of the car and settling into his wheelchair. Children had their picture taken caressing his shaven head. Peppino’s mother protected him from hugs and kisses that were too much for his condition. The correspondents called their offices again and canceled the report; the .38-caliber serenade they hoped to film had faded into a party for a kid who had come out of a coma. They headed back to their hotels, but I continued on to Peppino’s house, feeling like a merry draft dodger at a party that was too festive to miss. I toasted Peppino’s health all night long with his neighbors, the party spilling onto the stairs and landings, apartment doors wide-open and tables laden with food, no worries as to whose homes they were. Completely drunk, I played courier on my Vespa, ferrying bottles of red wine and Coca-Cola from a late-night bar to Peppino’s. That night Secondigliano was silent and exhausted, emptied of reporters and helicopters, without lookouts and sentinels. A silence that made you want to sleep, the way you do at the beach in the afternoon, stretched out on the sand with your arms under your head, not thinking of anything.