CEMENT
I had been away from Casal di Principe a long time. If Japan is the capital of martial arts, Australia of surfing, and Sierra Leone of diamonds, Casal di Principe is the capital of the Camorra’s entrepreneurial power. Being from Casale is a sort of guarantee of immunity around Naples and Caserta. It means that you’re larger-than-life, as if you emanated directly from the ferocity of Caserta’s criminal organizations. You enjoy a guaranteed respect, a sort of natural fear. Even Benito Mussolini wanted to eliminate this birthmark, this criminal aura; he rebaptized San Cipriano d’Aversa and Casal di Principe with the name Albanova—new dawn. And to inaugurate a new dawn of justice, he sent in dozens of carabinieri, who were supposed to resolve the problem “with iron and fire.” Today the only thing that remains of the name Albanova is the rusty train station in Casale.
Some guys spend hours hitting a punching bag, doing bench presses to sculpt their pecs, or take muscle enhancers, but for others a particular accent or a gesture is enough to bring back to life all the bodies on the ground covered with sheets. An old saying perfectly captures the lethal charge of the place’s violent mythology: “You can become a Camorrista, but you’re born a Casalese.” Or when you get into an argument with someone. You challenge your opponent with your eyes, and a second before the punching or stabbing starts, you declare your philosophy: “Life or death, it’s all the same to me!” At times your roots, your hometown, comes in handy: being associated with the violence can lend you a certain fascination. You can use it as veiled intimidation to get a discount at the movies or credit from a timid checkout girl. But it’s also true that your hometown saddles you with powerful prejudices, and you don’t really want to have to stand there and explain that not everyone is a clan affiliate, not everyone is a criminal; that the Camorristi are a minority. So you take a shortcut and come up with a more anonymous nearby town that will cancel any connection between yourself and the criminals: Secondigliano becomes a generic Naples, and Casal di Principe becomes Aversa or Caserta. You’re either ashamed or proud, depending on the moment and the situation. Like a suit of clothing, except it’s the suit that decides when to wear you.
Compared to Casal di Principe, Corleone is Disneyland. Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, Casapesenna. Fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants, but twelve hundred of them have been sentenced for having ties to the Mafia, and a whole lot more have been accused or convicted of aiding or abetting Mafia activities. Since time immemorial this area has borne the weight of the Camorra, a violent and ferocious middle class led by its bloody and powerful clan. The Casalesi clan, which takes its name from Casal di Principe, is a confederation of all the Camorra families in the Caserta area: Castelvolturno, Villa Literno, Gricignano, San Tammaro, Cesa, Villa di Briano, Mondragone, Carinola, Marcianise, San Nicola La Strada, Calvi Risorta, Lusciano, and dozens of other towns. Each with its own area capo, each a part of the Casalesi network. Antonio Bardellino, the Casalesi clan founder, was the first in Italy to understand that cocaine would far surpass heroin in the long run. Yet heroin continued to be the mainstay of Cosa Nostra and many Camorra families. In the 1980s heroin addicts were considered to be literal gold mines, whereas coke was thought to be an elite drug. But Antonio Bardellino understood that big money was to be had by marketing a drug that didn’t kill quickly, that was more like a bourgeois cocktail than a poison for outcasts. So he created an import-export company that shipped fish flour from South America to Aversa. Fish flour that concealed tons of cocaine. Bardellino peddled heroin as well; the shipments to John Gotti in America were packed in espresso filters. An American narcotics squad once intercepted sixty-seven kilos of heroin, but it wasn’t a disastrous loss for the San Cipriano d’Aversa boss. A few days later he had a call put through to Gotti: “Now we’re sending twice as much another way.” From the marshes of Aversa was born a cartel that knew how to stand up to Cutolo, and the ferocity of that war is still imprinted in the genetic code of the Caserta clans. The Cutolo families were eliminated in the 1980s, in a few extremely violent operations. The De Matteos—four men and four women— were slaughtered in a few days. The only one the Casalesi spared was an eight-year-old boy. All seven members of the Simeone family were killed almost simultaneously. In the morning the powerful family was alive and well, but by that evening it was extinct. Butchered. In March 1982, the Casalesi positioned a field machine gun, the kind used in trenches, on a hill in Ponte Annicchino and picked off four Cutolo members.
Antonio Bardellino was affiliated with Cosa Nostra, was tied to Tano Badalamenti, and was a friend and companion of Tommaso Buscetta, with whom he had shared a villa in South America. When the Corleones swept away the Badalamenti-Buscetta power, they also tried to eliminate Bardellino, but in vain. During the rise of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the Sicilians also tried to eliminate Raffaele Cutolo. They sent a hit man, Mimmo Bruno, over on the ferry from Palermo, but he was killed as soon as he set foot outside the port. Cosa Nostra had always had a sort of respect and awe of the Casalesi, but when in 2002 they killed Raffaele Lubrano—the boss of Pignataro Maggiore, a man with close ties to Cosa Nostra, having been handpicked by Totò Riina—many feared a feud would explode. I remember being at a newsstand the day after the ambush and hearing the vendor murmuring to a customer:
“If the Sicilians come here to fight now too, we won’t have peace for three years.”
“Which Sicilians? The Mafiosi?”
“Yes, the Mafiosi.”
“The Mafia should get down on their knees in front of the Casalesi and suck. That’s it, just slurp it all up.”
One of the declarations about the Sicilian Mafiosi that shocked me most was made by the Casalesi pentito Carmine Schiavone in a 2005 interview. He talked about Cosa Nostra as if it were an organization enslaved to politicians and, unlike the Caserta Camorristi, incapable of thinking in business terms. According to Schiavone, the Mafia wanted to become a sort of antistate, but this was not a business issue. The state-antistate paradigm doesn’t exist. All there is, is a territory where you do business—with, through, or without the state:
We lived with the state. For us the state had to exist and it had to be that state, except that our philosophy was different from the Sicilians. Whereas Riina came from island isolation, an old shepherd from out of the mountains, really, we had surpassed those limits and we wanted to live with the state. If a state figure stonewalled us, we would find someone else who was willing to help us. If it was a politician, we wouldn’t vote for him, and if it was an institutional figure, we would find a way to swindle him.
Carmine Schiavone, Sandokan’s cousin, was the first to take the lid off the Casalesi clan’s business affairs. When he decided to cooperate with the law, his daughter Giuseppina’s condemnation of him was fierce, more lethal than a death sentence. Her fiery words were printed in the newspaper:
“He’s a big fraud, a liar, a bad man, and a hypocrite who has sold his failures. A beast. He never was my father. I don’t even know what the Camorra is.”
Businessmen. That’s how the Caserta Camorristi define themselves, nothing more than businessmen. A clan made up of violent company men and killer managers, of builders and landowners. Each with his own armed band and linked by common economic interests. The Casalesi cartel’s strength has always been its ability to handle large drug lots without needing to feed an internal market. They are present on Rome’s vast drug market, but more significant is their role in the sale of huge consignments. The 2006 acts of the Anti-Mafia Commission indicate that the Casalesi were supplying the Palermo families with drugs. Alliances with Nigerian and Albanian clans meant they no longer had to be involved in direct peddling and narcotrafficking operations. Pacts with clans in Lagos and Benin City, alliances with Mafia families in Priŝtina and Tirana, and agreements with Ukrainian Mafiosi in Lviv and Kiev liberated the Casalesi from bottom-rung criminal activities. At the same time the Casalesi received privileged treatment in investments in Eastern Europe and in the purc
hase of cocaine from Nigeria-based international traffickers. New leaders and new wars. It all happened after the explosion of the Bardellino clan, the origin of the Camorra’s entrepreneurial power in this area. Antonio Bardellino, having achieved total dominion in every legal and illegal economic sector, from narcotraffic to construction, settled in Santo Domingo with a new family. He gave his Caribbean chil-dren the same names as those in San Cipriano—a simple, easy way of avoiding confusion. His most loyal men held the reins of power back home. Having emerged unscathed from the war with Cutolo, they developed companies and established their authority, expanding everywhere in northern Italy and abroad. Mario Iovine, Vincenzo De Falco, Francesco Sandokan Schiavone, Francesco Cicciotto di Mezzanotte Bidognetti, and Vincenzo Zagaria were the capos of the Ca-salese confederation. In the early 1980s Cicciotto di Mezzanotte and Sandokan headed up the clan’s military operations, but they were also businessmen with widespread interests, eager to control the enormous, many-headed beast of the confederation. They realized that Mario Iovine was too close to Bardellino, however; he did not approve of their desire for autonomy. So they devised a mysterious but politically effective strategy. They used the cantankerous nature of Camorra diplomacy in the only way that would let them achieve their goals: they sparked an internal war.
As the pentito Carmine Schiavone tells it, the two bosses urged Antonio Bardellino to return to Italy and eliminate Mario Iovine’s brother Mimì. Mimì owned a furniture factory and was formally unconnected to the Camorra, but, the two bosses claimed, he had often acted as a police informer. To convince Bardellino, they told him that even Mario was prepared to sacrifice his brother to keep the clan’s power on solid footing. Bardellino let himself be convinced and had Mimì killed on his way to his furniture factory. Right after the ambush Cicciotto di Mezzanotte and Sandokan pressured Mario Iovine to eliminate Bardellino, saying that he had dared to kill his brother on a pretext, based only on rumor. A double cross calculated to pit one against the other. They started to organize. Bardellino’s heirs all agreed to eliminate the capo of capos, the man who, more than anyone else in Campania, had created a criminal-business power system. Bardellino was convinced to move from Santo Domingo to the Brazilian villa; they told him that Interpol was on his tail. Mario Iovine went to see him in Brazil in 1988 on the pretext of needing to put their fish flour and cocaine business in order. One afternoon Iovine— not finding his pistol in his trousers—took a mallet and bashed in Bardellino’s skull. He buried the body in a hole dug on the beach, but as it was never found, the legend was born that Antonio Bardellino was really still alive and enjoying his wealth on some South American island. Mission accomplished, Iovine immediately phoned Vincenzo De Falco to give him the news and to kick off the massacre of all the Bardellino men. Paride Salzillo, Bardellino’s nephew and his true heir in the area, was invited to a summit of all the Casalese cartel managers. Carmine Schiavone recounts that they had Salzillo sit at the head of the table, in honor of his uncle. All of a sudden, Sandokan started to strangle him while his cousin, also named Francesco Schiavone but known as Cicciariello, together with his cohorts Raffaele Diana and Giuseppe Caterino, held him by the legs and arms. Sandokan could have killed him with a gun or a knife to the stomach, the way the old bosses used to. But no. He had to do it with his hands: that’s the way the new sovereign kills the old one when he usurps the throne. Ever since 1345 when Andrew of Hungary was strangled in Aversa, the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his wife, Queen Joan I, and the Neapolitan nobles loyal to Charles, Duke of Durazzo, who aspired to the throne, strangulation around here has been a symbol of succession, of the violent turnover of sovereignty. Sandokan had to show all the bosses that he was the heir, that, by right of viciousness, he was the new Casalesi leader.
Antonio Bardellino had created a complex system of power, and the business cells bred in his bosom would not long remain neatly within the structures he had devised. They had matured and now needed to express their power without further hierarchical limitations. This is how Sandokan Schiavone became the leader. He developed a highly efficient, family-run system. His brother Walter coordinated the firing squads, his cousin Carmine managed economic and financial affairs, his cousin Francesco was elected mayor of Casal di Principe, and another cousin, Nicola, treasurer. Important moves for local self-assertion, which is crucial in the early phases. In the first years of his rule Sandokan’s power was also solidified through strict political ties. Because of a conflict with the old Christian Democratic Party, in 1992 the clan in Casal di Principe supported the Italian Liberal Party, which experienced the biggest upswing in its history, jumping from a measly 1 to 30 percent. But all the other top-level clan members were hostile to Sandokan’s absolute leadership. In particular the De Falcos, who in addition to their business and political alliances had the police and carabinieri on their side. In 1990 there were several meetings of the Casalesi leaders. Vincenzo De Falco, nicknamed the Fugitive, was invited to one of the meetings. The bosses would have liked to eliminate him. But he didn’t show. The carabinieri arrived instead and arrested the guests. Vincenzo De Falco was killed in 1991, riddled with bullets in his car. The police found him hunched over with the stereo blasting, a tape of the singer Domenico Modugno still playing. After his death there was a rift in the Casalesi confederation. On one side the families close to Sandokan and Iovine: Zagaria, Reccia, Bidognetti, and Caterino; on the other the families close to the De Falcos: Quadrano, La Torre, Luise, Salzillo. The De Falcos responded to the murder of the Fugitive by killing Mario Iovine in Cascais, Portugal, in 1991. They showered him with bullets in a phone booth. Iovine’s death meant a green light for Sandokan Schiavone. There followed four years of wars and massacres, four years of continuous killings between the families close to Schiavone and those close to the De Falcos. Years of upheavals, of alliances, and shifting sides; there was no real solution but rather a division of territories and powers. Sandokan became the emblem of his cartel’s victory over the other families. Afterward, all his enemies reconverted into allies. Cement, drugs, rackets, transportation, waste management, commercial monopolies, and specified suppliers: under Sandokan all this was Casalesi company territory.
Cement makers, upon which every construction company depends, became a crucial weapon for the Casalesi clans. This supply system is key for putting the clans in touch with all the contractors in the area and for linking them to every possible deal. As Carmine Schiavone frequently claimed, the clans’ cement makers offered favorable prices because their ships carried not only cement but also distributed arms to Middle Eastern countries under embargo. This second level of commerce allowed them to beat out the legal prices. The Casalesi clans made money at every step of the way; they supplied cement and subcontractors, receiving bribes on big deals. These bribes were really just the beginning, since their efficient and economical companies would not work without them, and no other company could do the work for a good price and without being punished. The Schiavone family manages a turnover of 5 billion euros a year. The entire economic potential of the Casalesi cartel—consisting of real estate holdings, farms, stock, liquid assets, construction companies, sugar refineries, cement plants, usury, and drug and arms traffic—is around 30 billion euros. The Casalese Camorra has become a multipurpose company, the most dependable in Campania, players in a whole range of business activities. The amount of illegally accumulated capital often leads to subsidized credit, which allows their companies to trounce the competition through low prices or intimidation. The new Casalese Camorrista middle class has transformed extortion into a sort of additional service, the racket into participation in Camorra business. Your monthly payments fund clan operations, but they also earn you economic protection with the banks, punctual deliveries, and respect for your sales representatives. Extortion as an imposed acquisition of services. This new racket concept came to light in a 2004 investigation by the Caserta police, which ended in the arrest of eighteen people. Francesco Sandokan Schiavone, Michele
Zagaria, and the Moccia clan were, at that time, the most important Campania stockholders in Cirio and Parmalat. The milk distributed first by Cirio and then by Parmalat had conquered 90 percent of the market in the Caserta region, a good part of the Naples region, all of southern Lazio, parts of the Marche, Abruzzo, and Lucania. The companies achieved this result through their close alliance with the Casalese Camorra and bribes to the clans to maintain their preeminent position. Various brands were involved, all connected to Eurolat, which in 1999 passed from Cirio, under Cragnotti’s direction, to Parmalat, then run by Calisto Tanzi.
The judges ordered the seizure of three concessionaries and numerous companies connected to the distribution and sale of milk, all accused of being controlled by the Casalesi. The milk companies were registered under false names on their behalf. Cirio and Parmalat dealt directly with the brother-in-law of Michele Zagaria, the Casalesi clan regent in hiding for a decade, in order to obtain special client status, which they won above all through commercial deals. Cirio and Parmalat brands gave their distributors special discounts—from 4 to 6.5 percent, rather than the usual 3 percent—as well as various production awards, so supermarkets and retailers also received price reductions. In this way the Casalesi achieved widespread acquiescence for their commercial predominance. And where pacific persuasion and common interest didn’t work, violence did: threats, extortion, destruction of transport vehicles. They beat up their competitors’ drivers, plundered their trucks, and burned their depots. The fear was so widespread that in the areas controlled by the clans it was impossible not only to distribute but even to find someone willing to sell brands other than those imposed by the Casalesi. In the end, consumers paid the price: with a monopoly and a frozen market, there was no real competition, and retail prices were uncontrollable.
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