Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

  But something wasn’t right. Maybe she had invaded someone else’s territory, or maybe she was blackmailing someone. Immacolata Capone was killed in March 2004 in Sant’Antimo, her companion’s town. She was without her bodyguards; maybe she didn’t think she was in any danger. The execution took place in the center of town, and the killers operated on foot. As soon as she sensed she was being followed, she started to run; people thought she’d had her bag snatched and was chasing the thieves, but her purse was still across her shoulder. Immacolata Capone hugged it to her chest as she ran, an instinctual reaction that prevented her from dropping the thing that made running for her life more difficult. She went into a poultry shop, but the killers got to her before she could take cover behind the counter. Two shots in the nape of her neck: that was how the old-fashioned taboo of not touching women was breached. A skull shattered by bullets, facedown in a puddle of blood—this was the new direction of the Camorra. No difference between men and women. No supposed code of honor. But the Moccia matriarch had always moved slowly, was always ready to do big business, controlling her territory through shrewd investments and first-class financial negotiations, monopolizing land deals, and avoiding feuds and alliances that could have interfered with the family business.

  Doubtless unknown to IKEA, the largest IKEA complex in Italy now sits on land controlled by Moccia companies, as will the biggest high-speed train construction site in southern Italy. In October 2005—for the umpteenth time—the municipal government of Afragola was dissolved for Camorra infiltration. The accusations are heavy: a group of Afragola city council members requested the president of a commercial entity to hire more than 250 people with close family ties to the Moccia clan.

  Illegal building permits also contributed to the decision to dissolve the municipality. There are megastructures on boss-owned properties and talk of a hospital being constructed on land the clan acquired just as the city council was debating the issue. Land bought for very little and then, once the location for the new hospital was announced, sold for an astronomical amount. For 600 percent more than the original price. A profit only the Moccia women were able to achieve.

  Women such as Anna Vollaro worked in the trenches to defend clan assets and properties. Niece of the Portici clan boss Luigi Vollaro, Anna was twenty-nine when the police showed up to seize yet another family business, this time a pizzeria. She doused herself with gasoline and lit a match, and to make sure no one could put out the flames, she ran around wildly, finally hitting a wall. The plaster turned black, as when an outlet short-circuits. Anna Vollaro burned herself alive to protest the seizure of an illicitly acquired asset that she considered the product of the normal course of business.

  One tends to think that in the criminal world military success leads to a position in business. But that’s not always the case. Take the feud in Quindici, a town in the province of Avellino, which has endured the constant, suffocating presence of the Cava and Graziano clans for years. In the 1970s the Cavas were a subset of the Grazianos. But the two families have been at war forever. When the 1980 earthquake destroyed the Lauro Valley, the 100 billion lire of reconstruction funds that poured in gave rise to a middle class of Camorra businessmen. The money allowed both families to establish small construction empires, both run by the women. The battle was sparked by disagreements over contracts and kickbacks from the earthquake reconstruction funds. What unfolded in Quindici was different from in the rest of Campania, however: not simply a factional conflict, but a family feud resulting in around forty savage murders that sowed mourning among the rival groups and created an undying hatred that has contaminated generations of family leaders like the plague. The town watches helplessly as the two factions continue to slaughter each other. One day when the mayor, who had been elected through Graziano backing, was in his office, a group of Cava commandos knocked at his door. They didn’t open fire right away, giving him time to climb out the window onto the roof, and escape along the tops of the houses.

  The Graziano clan has produced five mayors, two of whom were murdered; the other three were removed by the Italian president for having ties to the Camorra. But there was a moment when it seemed things could change. When a young pharmacist, Olga Santaniello, was elected mayor. Only a tough woman could take on the Cava and Graziano women. She did everything she could to wash away the filth of clan power, but she didn’t succeed. On May 5, 1998, a devastating flood inundated the entire Lauro Valley, turning houses into sponges that soaked up water and mud, the earth into slimy pools, and the streets into useless canals. Olga Santaniello drowned. The mud that suffocated her was doubly rewarding for the clans: the flood meant more aid money, and the power of the clans increased. Antonio Siniscalchi was elected mayor and reelected unanimously four years later. After his first electoral victory, Siniscalchi, his advisers, and his most vocal supporters marched from the polling station to the Brosagro neighborhood, passing in front of the home of Arturo Graziano, who was called guaglione or boy. The salutations were not directed at him, however, but at the Graziano women. Lined up in order of age, they stood on the balcony as the new mayor paid them homage now that death had definitively eliminated Olga Santaniello. In June 2002, Antonio Siniscalchi was arrested in a blitz carried out by the Naples DDA. According to the Neapolitan anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, he used the first round of reconstruction funds to redo the street and fencing surrounding the Graziano family’s bunker-villa.

  The villas scattered around Quindici, the secret hideaways, paved roads, and streetlamps were paid for by the town, public works that helped the Grazianos and made them immune to attacks and ambushes. The representatives of the two families lived barricaded behind insurmountable fences and under twenty-four-hour closed-circuit surveillance.

  Clan boss Biagio Cava was arrested at the Nice airport as he was getting on a plane to New York. With Biagio behind bars, all the power passed to his daughter and wife. Only the women showed their faces in the town; not only were they the behind-the-scenes administrators and brains of the operation, but they also became the official symbol of the families, the faces and eyes of power. When the rival families met on the street, they would exchange ferocious looks and intense stares—an absurd game, a test of who would drop their gaze first. Tension in the town was high. The Cava women realized that the time had come to take up arms, to go from being businesswomen to killers. They trained in apartment entranceways, the music turned up loud to cover the sound of pistols being unloaded into bags of walnuts that had been gathered on their country estates. During the 2002 local elections, Maria Scibelli, Michelina Cava, and her daughters, sixteen-year-old Clarissa and nineteen-year-old Felicetta, started going around armed. On Via Cassese the Cava women’s car—an Audi 80—encountered the Graziano women’s car, with twenty-and twenty-one-year-old Stefania and Chiara Graziano aboard. The Cavas started to shoot, but the Grazianos braked hard, as if they’d been expecting them. They swerved, accelerated, reversed, and escaped. Bullets shattered windows and pierced the body of the car, but didn’t hit flesh. The two girls returned to their villa in hysterics. Their mother, Anna Scibelli, and clan boss Luigi Salvatore Graziano, the seventy-year-old family patriarch, decided to avenge the attack. They took off together in his Alfa, followed by a bulletproof car carrying four people with submachine guns and rifles. They intercepted the Cava Audi, slamming into it repeatedly as the backup car blocked first the side and then the front exit, preventing any chance of getaway. The Cava women, fearful of being stopped by the carabinieri after their unsuccessful shoot-out, had relieved themselves of their weapons, so when they found a car blocking their path, they swerved, flung open the doors, and tried to escape on foot. The Grazianos got out and opened fire, showering the Cavas’ legs, heads, shoulders, chests, cheeks, and eyes with lead. In a matter of seconds they were down, shoes flying and feet in the air. It seems that the Grazianos treated their bodies mercilessly, without realizing that one of them was still alive. In fact, Felicetta Cava survived. A small bottle
of acid was found in one of the Cava women’s purses. Perhaps in addition to shooting, they intended to disfigure their enemies by throwing acid on their faces.

  Women are better able to confront crime as if it were only momentary, or someone’s opinion, or a step one takes before quickly moving on. Clan women demonstrate this very clearly. They feel offended and vilified when they are called Camorristi or criminals, as if “criminal” were merely a judgment of an action, not an objective way of behaving. In fact, contrary to the men, so far not one female Camorra boss has ever repented. Not one.

  Erminia Giuliano, known as Celeste for the color of her eyes, always did her utmost to defend the family’s assets. According to investigations, the beautiful and ostentatious sister of Forcella bosses Carmine and Luigi called the shots for their real estate and financial investments. Celeste looks like the typical Neapolitan female, the downtown Camorra woman—platinum blond hair, cold, pale eyes drowning in yolks of black eyeliner. She managed the economic and legal aspects of the clan, whose business assets were confiscated in 2004: 28 million euros, their economic lung. They owned a chain of stores in Naples and the surrounding area and a popular brand that owed its success to the clan’s savvy as well as to its military and economic protection. A brand with a franchising network of fifty-six sales points in Italy, Tokyo, Bucharest, Lisbon, and Tunis.

  The Giuliano clan was born in Forcella, the soft underbelly of Naples, a neighborhood shrouded in casbah mythology, the legendary rotten navel of the old city center. The Giulianos were the dominant power in the 1980s and 1990s. They’d emerged slowly from poverty, going from smuggling to prostitution, from door-to-door extortion to holdups, creating a vast dynasty of cousins, nephews, uncles, relatives. Though they reached the pinnacle of their power in the late 1980s, their charisma has not yet faded. Even today whoever wants to operate in the city center has to square it with the Giulianos. A clan that still feels poverty breathing at the back of its neck and lives in terror of going back there. One of the utterances that best conveys Forcella king Luigi Giuliano’s aversion to being poor was recorded by the reporter Enzo Perez: “I like nativity scenes, I just can’t stand the poverty of the shepherds!”

  The face of supreme Camorra strength is increasingly female, but so are those crushed by the tanks of power. Annalisa Durante, fourteen years old, was caught in the cross fire in Forcella on March 27, 2004. Fourteen years old. Fourteen years old. Repeating it is like running a sponge soaked in ice water down your spine. I was at Annalisa Durante’s funeral. I got to the church early. The flowers hadn’t been delivered yet, but messages of condolence, tears, and heartrending memories from classmates were hung all over the place. Annalisa had been killed. One hot evening, probably the first really hot evening in a season of endless rain, Annalisa had decided to go to a friend’s who lived downstairs in her building. Already tan, she was wearing a pretty, eye-catching dress that clung to her toned and tense figure. Evenings like this seem created for meeting boys, and fourteen is when a girl from Forcella starts selecting a boyfriend to ferry all the way to the altar. At fourteen the girls from Neapolitan working-class neighborhoods already seem like experienced women: their faces heavily made up, their breasts mutated into swollen little melons by push-up bras, and their pointy, high-heeled boots. They must be talented tightrope walkers to navigate the Neapolitan streets paved with basalt or lava stones, enemy to all feminine footwear. Annalisa was pretty. Very pretty. She was listening to music with her friend and a cousin, all three of them eyeing the boys doing wheelies on their motorcycles, burning rubber, weaving dangerous obstacle courses amid cars and people. A courting game, atavistic and always the same. Forcella girls love to listen to neo-melodic music, a style that sells big in the working-class neighborhoods of Naples, as well as Palermo and Bari. Gigi D’Alessio is unquestionably the best. The one who managed to break out of the small time, who made it everywhere in Italy, while the others, hundreds of them, are still just little local idols in some neighborhood, building, or street. Everyone has his singer. But all of a sudden, just as the stereo is croaking out a high note, two motorini go by at full throttle, hot on someone’s trail. He escapes, his feet devouring the pavement. Annalisa, her cousin, and friend don’t understand, they think the boys are just joking around, maybe it’s a dare. Then the shots. Bullets ricochet everywhere. Annalisa is on the ground, felled by two bullets. Everyone scatters, and heads start appearing on balconies, the doors of which are always left open so as to keep an ear on what is happening in the street. The cries, the ambulance, the race to the hospital, the whole neighborhood filling the streets with curiosity and anxiety.

  Salvatore Giuliano is an important name, a name that already seems to mark you as a commander. But here in Forcella it’s not the memory of the Sicilian bandit that gives the boy authority. Giuliano merely happens to be his last name. The situation was made worse when Lovigino Giuliano decided to talk; he repented, betraying his clan to avoid life imprisonment. But as often happens in dictatorships, even if the head is removed, he can only be replaced by one of his men. So despite the infamy of betrayal, only the Giulianos were able to maintain relations with the big narcotraffic couriers and impose a protection racket. But over time Forcella got tired. It didn’t want to be ruled by an infamous family anymore, didn’t want more arrests and police. Whoever desires to take the Giulianos’ place has to assert himself officially as sovereign; he has to eradicate them by crushing their new heir, Salvatore Giuliano, Lovigino’s nephew. That evening had been chosen as the moment to make the new hegemony official, to do away with the scion who had begun to raise his head and show Forcella the dawning of a new dominion. They wait for him. When he’s spotted, Salvatore is walking calmly, but suddenly realizes he’s in their crosshairs. He bolts, the killers at his heels, looks for some alley to dart into. The shots start flying. In all probability Giuliano runs past the three girls, using them as shields, and in the turmoil pulls out his pistol and starts shooting. After a few seconds he takes off again. The killers can’t catch him. Four legs run into the doorway looking for shelter. The girls turn around. Annalisa’s not there. They go out again. There she is on the street, blood everywhere, a bullet in her head.

  At the funeral I manage to get close to the foot of the altar, where Annalisa’s coffin rests. Policemen in dress uniform stand at each of the four corners, Campania’s official tribute to the girl’s family. The coffin is covered with white flowers. A cell phone—her cell phone—has been placed near the base. Annalisa’s father moans and frets, mumbles something, hops around, his fists fidgeting in his pockets. He comes over, even though he’s not really addressing me: “And now what? Now what?” When the head of the family bursts into tears, all the women in the family start to shout, beat their chests, and rock back and forth making high-pitched shrieks. And when he stops crying, all the women once again fall silent. The benches of girls—friends, cousins, and neighbors—imitate their mothers’ gestures, the way they shake their heads, the way they moan over and over, “It can’t be! It’s impossible!” They feel they have been given an important role, that of comforting. And yet they ooze pride. A Camorra victim’s funeral is an initiation, on a par with beginning to menstruate or your first sexual encounter. As with their mothers, this event lets them take active part in the life of the neighborhood. The news cameras trained on them, the photographers—everything seems to exist just for them. Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi. Drug dealers or businessmen. Killers or consultants. Many of them will bear children who will be killed, or they will wait in line at the Poggioreale jail to bring news and money to their husbands. But for now they are just little girls in black. It is a funeral, but they are all carefully dressed: low waist and thong underwear showing. Perfect. They weep for a friend, knowing that this death will make them women. And, despite the pain, they had looked forward to this moment. I think about the eternal return of the laws of this earth. I think about the Giulianos, who reached the peak of their power before Annalisa
had even been born, when her mother was still a young girl who played with other young girls who then became the wives of Giulianos and their affiliates, who grew up and listened to D’Alessio and cheered for Maradona, the soccer player who always enjoyed Giulianos’ cocaine and parties—the photo of Diego Armando Maradona in Lovigino’s shell-shaped tub is unforgettable. Twenty years later, Annalisa dies as a Giuliano is chased, shot at while a Giuliano returns fire, using her as a shield, or perhaps merely running by. An identical historical trajectory, eternally the same. Perennial, tragic, ongoing.