*The NAR, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari or Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, was a neofascist terrorist organization active in Italy in the late 1970s.—Trans.
WOMEN
It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it’s still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can’t get rid of it. And not because—like the sweat of a rapist—it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realize it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something in your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation. Not a recounted or reported or photographed truth, but existential truth that gives itself to you: the realization of how things work, the path the present is taking. No way of thinking can attest to the truth of what you have seen. After you’ve stared a Camorra war in the face, your memory swells with too many images to recall individually, and they come flooding back all at once, confused and blending together. You can’t trust your eyes. After a Camorra war there are no ruins of buildings, and the sawdust soon soaks up the blood. It’s as if you were the only one to see or suffer, as if someone were ready to point a finger at you and say, “It’s not true.”
The aberration of a clan war—of assets that face off, cutthroat investments, financial ventures that devour each other—will always find a reason for consolation, a significance that distances the danger, making the conflict seem far away when in reality it’s taking place on your doorstep. And so you can file it all away in those pigeonholes of reason that you gradually construct for yourself. But not the odors. They can’t be regimented. They linger, like the last trace of a patrimony of lost experience. The odors stuck in my nose—blood and sawdust, the aftershave the boy soldiers slap on their beardless cheeks, but above all the womanly smells of deodorant, hairspray, and sweet perfume.
Women are always a part of clan power dynamics. It is no accident that the Secondigliano feud eliminated two women with a savagery usually reserved for bosses. And that hundreds of women poured into the streets to prevent pushers and sentinels from being arrested, setting trash bins on fire and yanking on the carabinieri’s elbows. I saw the girls go running every time a video camera materialized; all smiles, they would throw themselves in front of the lenses, singing little ditties and asking to be interviewed, hovering around to see the logo on the camera so they could figure out which channel was filming them. You never know. Someone might see them and invite them to be on a show. Around here, opportunities don’t happen; you have to rip them out with your teeth, buy them, or dig for them. They have to be here, somewhere, somehow. Nothing is left to chance. Not even finding a boyfriend is left to the casualness of an encounter or the fate of falling in love. Every conquest is a strategy. And the girls who don’t develop a strategy risk committing dangerous frivolities, hands touching them all over and insistent tongues drilling through their clenched teeth. Tight jeans, clingy T-shirts: beauty as bait. In some places beauty is a trap, the most pleasing kind. But if you give in, pursue the pleasure of the moment, you don’t know what you may find. The girl will be that much better if she can get herself courted by the best, and, once she has snared him, hold on to him, put up with him, hold her nose and swallow him. But keep him—all of him—for herself. Passing in front of a school once, I saw a girl getting off the back of a motorcycle. She moved slowly, giving everyone time to notice the bike, her helmet, motorcycle gloves, and pointy boots, which barely touched the ground. A janitor who had worked there for ages and had watched over generations of kids, went up to her and said, “France’, ma già fai ammore? And with Angelo? You know he’ll end up in Poggioreale, don’t you?”
Around here fa ammore does not mean “to make love,” but to go steady or be engaged. Angelo had recently entered the System, and it didn’t look as if he was just doing little jobs, so the janitor concluded he’d soon end up at the Poggioreale jail. Francesca, instead of defending her boyfriend, had her answer ready: “And what’s the problem as long as he gives me the monthly allowance? He really loves me.”
The monthly allowance. This is her first success. If her boyfriend ends up in jail, she’ll have earned herself a salary: the money the clans give to affiliates’ families. If an affiliate has a serious girlfriend, the money goes to her, even though it’s best to be pregnant, just to be sure. Not married necessarily—a baby is enough, even one that’s on the way. If you’re only engaged, there’s a risk that some other girl he’s been keeping on the side, someone you didn’t know about, will come forward. In this case the neighborhood capo may decide to split the money between the two—a risky proposition because it generates a lot of tension between the girls’ families—or he may make the affiliate decide which one to give it to. Most of the time it’s decided to give it to his family instead, neatly resolving the dilemma. Matrimony and childbirth provide solid guarantees. To avoid leaving clues on people’s bank records, the money is almost always hand-delivered by a “submarine”—so called because he slithers along the bottom of the streets without ever letting himself be seen. He always takes a different route to get to the same house, surfacing suddenly so that he won’t be trailed—precautions against being blackmailed, robbed, or compromised. The submarine handles the stipends of the low-level members, whereas the managers deal directly with the treasurer, asking for the amount they need when they need it. Submarines are not part of the System and do not become affiliates, so there’s no chance of using their position to rise in the ranks. They are almost always retirees, bookkeepers or shop accountants who work for the clans to round out their pensions and to have a reason to get out of the house and not rot in front of the television. The submarine knocks on the twenty-eighth of every month, sets his plastic bags on the table, then extracts the envelope bearing the imprisoned or dead affiliate’s name from the stack of them stuffed inside his jacket. He hands it to the affiliate’s wife or, if she’s not there, the oldest child. He almost always brings some food as well: prosciutto, fruit, pasta, eggs, bread. The sounds of grocery bags rubbing against the wall and heavy step on the stairs announce his arrival. He always goes to the same shops, buying everything at once, then makes his rounds, weighed down like a mule. You can get an idea of how many prisoners’ wives and Camorrista widows live on a particular street by how loaded down the submarine is.
Don Ciro was the only submarine I got to know. He lived in the old city center and delivered stipends for clans that had been drifting but were now on the upswing, given the prosperous climate. He worked for clans in the Quartieri Spagnoli and Forcella for a few years, then off and on for those in the Sanità neighborhood. Don Ciro was so good at finding houses, basement apartments, buildings with no street number, and homes carved out of corners of landings that at times the mailmen, who kept getting lost in the labyrinth of streets, would give him letters to deliver to his clients. Don Ciro’s battered shoes—there was a bump from his big toe and the soles were worn through at the heels—were the emblem of the submarine, the symbol of the miles he’d covered on Naples’s backstreets and hills, his journeys made longer by the paranoia of being followed or robbed. Don Ciro’s pants were clean but not pressed; he had lost his wife, and his new Moldavian companion was really too young to concern herself with such things. A timorous type, he always kept his eyes on the ground, even when talking with me. His mustache was stained yellow from nicotine, as were the index and middle fingers of his right hand. A submarine also delivers monthly allowances to men whose women have landed in jail. It’s humiliating for them to receive their wife’s money, so the submarine usually goes to her mother’s house and has her distribute the money to the prisoner’s family. In this way the submarine avoids the false re
primands, shouts on the stairway, and theatrics of the man who kicks him out of the house, never failing, however, to first collect the envelope. The submarine hears all sorts of complaints from affiliates’ wives—the rent increase, the high utilities bill, kids who are failing school or want to go to college. He listens to every request, every bit of gossip about the other wives who have more money because their husbands were more clever in climbing the ranks of the clan. As the women complain, the submarine just keeps repeating, “I know, I know.” He lets them vent, and in the end he offers two types of response: “It’s not up to me” or “I just bring the money, I’m not the one who decides.” The wives know perfectly well that the submarine doesn’t make any decisions, but they hope that if they keep pouring out their complaints to him, sooner or later something will come out of his mouth in front of some neighborhood capo, who might decide to increase her allowance or grant bigger favors. Don Ciro was so used to saying “I know, I know” that he would chant it whenever I spoke with him, no matter what the topic of conversation. He had delivered money to hundreds of Camorra families and could have charted generations of wives and girlfriends as well as men whose women were in jail. A historiography of criticism of bosses and politicians. But Don Ciro was a taciturn and melancholy submarine who had emptied his head of every word he’d heard, letting them echo without a trace. As we talked, he dragged me from one end of Naples to the other, and when we said goodbye, he took a bus back to the place we’d started from. It was all part of his strategy to throw me off his trail, to keep me from forming even the slightest idea of where he lived.
For many women, marrying a Camorrista is like receiving a loan or acquiring capital. If talent and destiny are in their favor, that capital will bear fruit and the women will become entrepreneurs, managers, or generals’ wives, wielding unlimited power. If things go badly, the only thing left to them will be hours in prison waiting rooms. If the clan collapses and can’t pay the monthly allowance, they’ll have to beg for work as a maid—competing with the immigrants—so they can pay the lawyers and put food on the table. Alliances are founded on the bodies of Camorra women, whose faces register the family power. They are recognized by their black veils at funerals, their screams during arrests, the kisses they throw their men in court.
The typical image of the Camorra woman is of a female who does nothing but echo the pain and will of her men—her brothers, husband, and sons. But it’s not like that. The transformation of the Camorra in recent years has also meant a metamorphosis of the woman’s role, which has gone from that of a maternal figure and helper in times of misfortune to a serious manager who concerns herself almost exclusively with the business and financial end of things, delegating the fighting and illegal trafficking to others.
One such historic figure is Anna Mazza. Widow of the godfather of Afragola, she headed one of the most powerful criminal and business organizations and was one of the first women in Italy to be found guilty of Mafia-related crimes. At first Anna Mazza capitalized on the aura of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 1970s. The “black widow of the Camorra,” as she came to be known, was the brain behind the Moccia clan for more than twenty years. She had a talent for extending her power everywhere; when the court required her to relocate to the north, near Treviso, in the 1990s, she attempted to consolidate her network of power even in total isolation and—according to investigations—made contact with the Brenta Mafia. She was accused of arming her twelve-year-old son immediately after her husband’s murder to kill the person who ordered his death, but was let go for lack of proof. Anna Mazza had an oligarchic managerial style and was strongly opposed to armed uprisings. She held sway over her entire territory, as the dissolution of the Afragola city council in 1999 for Camorra infiltration shows. Politicians followed her lead and sought her support. Anna Mazza was a pioneer. Before her there was only Pupetta Maresca, the beautiful, vengeful killer who became famous in Italy in the 1950s when, six months pregnant, she decided to avenge the death of her husband, Pascalone ‘e Nola.
Anna Mazza was not merely vengeful. She realized that the time warp of the Camorra would allow her to enjoy a sort of impunity reserved for women. A backwardness that made her immune to ambushes, envies, and conflicts. Her patience and fierce determination in the 1980s and 1990s made the Moccia family into one of the most important clans in the construction business; they handled contracts, controlled quarries, and negotiated the purchase of land zoned for building. The entire area of Frattamaggiore, Crispano, Sant’Antimo, Frattaminore, and Caivano was controlled by local capos tied to the Moccias. In the 1990s the Moccia clan became one of the pillars of the Nuova Famiglia, the broad cartel opposed to Raffaele Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and whose political and business power surpassed that of the Cosa Nostra cartels. When the political parties that had benefited from their association with clan businesses collapsed, only the Nuova Famiglia bosses were arrested and given life sentences. Not wanting to pay in place of the politicians they had helped, or to be considered the cancer of a system they’d supported and in which they’d played an active and productive, albeit criminal, role, they decided to turn state’s witness. Pasquale Galasso, boss of Poggiomarino, was the first high-ranking military and business figure to collaborate with the law in the 1990s. Names, strategies, funds— he revealed everything, a decision that the government repaid by protecting the family’s assets and to a certain extent his own. Galasso told everything he knew. Of all the families in the confederation, it was the Moccias who took it upon themselves to make him shut up for good. With a few choice revelations, Galasso could have destroyed the widow’s clan in no time. They tried to corrupt his bodyguards to poison him and planned to eliminate him with a bazooka. After these attempts, organized by the men, failed, Anna Mazza intervened. She sensed that the moment had arrived for a new strategy: dissociation. A concept she appropriated from the terrorism of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, when militants dissociated themselves from their armed organizations but without repenting or revealing names, without accusing instigators or perpetrators. It was an attempt to delegitimize a political stance, the official repudiation of which was enough to obtain a reduction in one’s sentence; Mazza believed this would be the best way to eliminate the threat of pentiti while also making it seem as if the clans were unconnected to the government. If the clans could establish an ideological distance from the Camorra, they could take advantage of prison sentence reductions and improvements in conditions, but without revealing methods, names, bank accounts, or alliances. What for some observers might be considered an ideology the Camorra ideology—for the clans was nothing more than the economic and military operations of a business group. The clans were changing: the criminal rhetoric and the Cutolo mania for the ideologization of Camorra behavior had spent itself. Dissociation could eliminate the lethal power of the pentiti, which, despite the inherent contradictions, is the true fulcrum of the attack on the Camorra. The widow understood the full potential of this trick. Her sons wrote to a priest, making a show of their desire to redeem themselves; as a symbolic gesture, a car filled with weapons was supposed to be left in front of a church in Acerra. Deposition of arms, just as the IRA did with the British. But the Camorra is not an independentist organization or an armed nucleus, and weapons are not its real power. That car was never left, and the strategy of dissociation conceived in the mind of a woman boss slowly lost its appeal. It was not heard in parliament or the Court and lost support among the clans as well. The pentiti were becoming more numerous and less useful, and Galasso’s grand revelations, while disavowing the clans’ military apparatuses, left nearly intact their business and political plans. Anna Mazza continued constructing a sort of Camorra matriarchy: the women as the real power center and the men as soldiers, mediators, and managers who obeyed the women’s orders. The important decisions, both military and economic, were up to the black widow.
The women became clan managers, entrepreneurs, and bodyguards. They were better a
t business, less obsessed with ostentatious shows of power, and less eager for conflict. Immacolata Capone, one of the clan’s “ladies in waiting” and the godmother of Anna Mazza’s daughter Teresa, made a career for herself over the years. Immacolata didn’t have the matronly look—the coiffed hair and full cheeks—of Anna Mazza; minute, and possessed of a sober elegance, her blond bob always perfectly combed, there was nothing of the shady Camorrista about her. Instead of looking for men who could confer greater authority upon her, she was sought out by men who wanted her protection. She married Giorgio Salierno, a Camorrista implicated in the attempts to thwart the pentito Galasso, and later became involved with a member of the Puca clan of Sant’Antimo, a family with a powerful history close to Cutolo, and made famous by Immacolata’s companion’s brother Antonio Puca. An address book found in her pocket contained the name of Enzo Tortora, the TV personality unjustly accused of being a Camorrista. The clan was undergoing a managerial and business crisis by the time Immacolata came of age. Prison and pentiti had jeopardized Lady Anna’s painstaking labor. But Immacolata bet everything on cement. She also managed a brick factory in the center of Afragola. As a businesswoman she did all she could to associate with the Casalesi, the most powerful clan in the building and construction business nationally and internationally. According to the Naples DDA investigations, Immacolata Capone led the Moccia family companies back to the top of the building trade. In this she had the cooperation of MOTRER, one of the most important names in earthmoving in southern Italy. The mechanism she set up was impeccable. According to investigations, she collaborated with a local politician, who awarded contracts to a businessman who then subcontracted to Lady Immacolata. I only saw her once, I think, right as she was going into a supermarket in Afragola. Her bodyguards were young women. They followed her in a Smart, the little two-seater car all the Camorra women own, but judging by the thickness of the doors, hers was armor-plated. In our fantasies female bodyguards look like bodybuilders, every muscle bulging like a man’s, bunching thighs, pectorals swallowing breasts, overgrown biceps, necks like tree trunks. But there was nothing of the Amazon in the bodyguards I saw. One was short, with a big, flabby ass and hair dyed too black; the other was thin, frail, and bony-looking. I was struck by the fact that both were wearing fluorescent yellow, the same color as the Smart. The driver had on yellow sunglasses and the other a bright yellow T-shirt. A yellow that could not have been chosen by chance, a combination that could not have been a mere coincidence. A professional touch. The same yellow as Uma Thurman’s motorcycle outfit in Kill Bill, the Quentin Tarantino film in which for the first time women are first-rate criminal stars. The same yellow that Uma Thurman wears in the ad for the film, with her bloody samurai sword—a yellow imprinted on your retina and maybe even on your taste buds. A yellow so unreal it becomes a symbol. A winning business must have a winning image. Nothing is left to chance, not even the color of the car or the uniform of the bodyguards. Immacolata Capone set the example, and now Camorra women of all ranks want female bodyguards, carefully cultivating their image.
Gomorrah Page 15