Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

  Della Medaglia didn’t show up at the appointed hour, but in the night he had contacted someone else to take his place: Vincenzo Verde. The other members of the commando were not particularly pleased with his choice, as Verde often suffered from epileptic fits. There was the risk that after the shooting he would fall to the floor in convulsions, foaming at the mouth and his teeth cutting his tongue. So they tried to get Nicola Gaglione to take his place, but he refused categorically. Santoro developed an inner-ear infection and couldn’t stick to any set plan, so Quadrano sent his brother Armando to go with him. A simple operation: a car in front of the church waits for the killers, who walk out slowly after doing the job. Like an early-morning prayer. The hit squad was not in a rush to flee after the execution. Quadrano was invited to go to Spain that very evening, but he refused. He felt safe since Don Peppino’s murder was completely unrelated to their usual practices. And just as the motive was a mystery to them, so it would be to the carabinieri. When police investigations began moving in all directions, however, Quadrano left for Spain. He even declared that Francesco Piacenti had told him that Nunzio De Falco, Sebastiano Caterino, and Mario Santoro were supposed to kill him, perhaps because they suspected he wanted to turn state’s evidence, but that the day set for the hit they saw him in his car with his little boy and decided to spare him.

  In Casal di Principe, Sandokan kept hearing his name connected to the elimination of the priest. So he let Don Peppino’s family know that if his men got their hands on Quadrano before the police did, they would cut him in three pieces and throw them on the church grounds. This was not revenge but a clear statement to say that Sandokan was not responsible for Don Peppino’s murder. Shortly after, there was a De Falco clan meeting in Spain to decide how to respond to Francesco Schiavone’s claims that he had nothing to do with the murder. Giuseppe Quadrano proposed killing one of Schiavone’s relatives, chopping him in pieces, and leaving him in a bag outside Don Peppino’s church. A way of making the blame fall on Sandokan. Both factions, each ignorant of the other’s plans, had arrived at the same solution. The best way to send an indelible message is to cut up bodies and scatter the pieces about. While Don Peppino’s assassins were talking about cutting up flesh to seal their position, I was still thinking about the priest’s battle and the primacy of the word. About his incredibly new and powerful desire to place the word at the center of a struggle against the mechanisms of power. Words against cement mixers and guns. And not just metaphorically. For real. To speak out, testify, take a stand. The word, with its only armor: to be spoken. A word that is a vigilant witness, that never stops seeking the truth. The only way to eliminate a word like that is to kill it.

  In 2001 the court of Santa Maria Capua Vetere handed down a first verdict: life sentences for Vincenzo Verde, Francesco Piacenti, and Giuseppe Della Medaglia. Giuseppe Quadrano had already begun to try to discredit the figure of Don Peppino. During the cross-examination he mused on a series of motives for the homicide, intending to strangle the priest’s commitment in a noose of criminal interpretations. He stated that Nunzio De Falco had given Don Peppino some weapons, which he then turned over to Walter Schiavone without authorization, and had been punished for this grave transgression. There was also talk of a crime of passion, that he had been killed because he had had designs on the cousin of a boss. Just as calling a woman a slut is enough to put a stop to every sort of fantasizing about her, the fastest way of closing the books on a priest is to accuse him of frequenting prostitutes. It was also said that Don Peppino was killed for not doing his job as a priest, for not wanting to celebrate in church the funeral of one of Quadrano’s relatives. Unbelievable, ludicrous motives, an attempt to prevent Don Peppino from becoming a martyr, to keep his words from spreading, to turn him from a Camorra victim to a clan soldier. People unfamiliar with Camorra power dynamics often think that killing an innocent person is a naive gesture on the part of the clans because it only legitimizes and amplifies the victim’s example and words, a confirmation of the truths he spoke. Wrong. That’s never the way it is. As soon as you die in the land of the Camorra, you’re enshrouded in countless suspicions, and innocence is a distant hypothesis, the last one imaginable. You are guilty until proven innocent. In the land of the Camorra, the theory of modern rights is turned on its head.

  Media attention is so limited that even the smallest suspicion is enough to keep the papers from printing that an innocent person has been killed. And if there are no further deaths, no one will focus on the case. The destruction of Don Peppino Diana’s image was thus an important tactic to ease pressure on the clans, to alleviate the troublesome problem of awaking national interest.

  One local paper turned the campaign to discredit Don Peppino into a sound box. The headlines were so heavy with boldface that your fingers turned black as you flipped the pages: “Don Diana was a Camorrista,” and a few days later, “Don Diana in bed with two women.” The message was clear: no one can go up against the Camorra. Whoever does always has some personal motive, a quarrel, some private affair that wallows in the same filth.

  His old friends, his relatives, and his followers defended him, including the journalists Raffaele Sardo, who preserved his memory in articles and books, and Rosaria Capacchione, who monitored the strategies of the clans, their complex, bestial power, and the shrewdness of the pentiti.

  A 2003 appeal questioned aspects of Giuseppe Quadrano’s earlier testimony, and Vincenzo Verde and Giuseppe Della Medaglia were exonerated. Quadrano had confessed partial truths; his strategy from the very beginning was to not admit his own responsibility. But he was the killer, as identified by witnesses and confirmed by ballistic reports. Giuseppe Quadrano killed Don Peppino Diana. The hit squad had been composed of Quadrano and Santoro, who acted as the driver. Francesco Piacenti, sent directly from Spain by De Falco to guide the operation, had supplied information about Don Peppino. The appeal also upheld the verdict of life imprisonment for Piacenti and Santoro. Quadrano had even recorded phone conversations with affiliates, during which he repeatedly stated that he had nothing to do with the homicide—recordings that he then turned over to the police. Quadrano understood that the order for the killing had come from De Falco, and he didn’t want it revealed that he was simply the brawn of the operation. It is highly likely that all the figures in Quadrano’s first version had shit in their pants and didn’t want to be involved in the killing in any way. At times submachine guns and pistols are not sufficient for facing an unarmed face and plain speech.

  Nunzio De Falco was arrested in Albacete while on the Valencia–Madrid intercity train. He had established a powerful criminal cartel with some ‘Ndrangheta men and a few Cosa Nostra dropouts. According to Spanish police investigations, he had also attempted to organize the Gypsies in the south of Spain into a criminal group. He had built an empire. Vacation villages, gambling houses, shops, and hotels. The infrastructure of Spain’s Costa del Sol improved dramatically when the Casalese and Neapolitan clans decided to turn the area into a pearl of mass tourism.

  In January 2003 De Falco received a life sentence as instigator of Don Peppino Diana’s murder. When the verdict was read out in the courtroom, I felt like laughing, but I managed to puff out my cheeks and contain myself. I couldn’t stand the absurdity of what was happening. Nunzio De Falco’s attorney was Gaetano Pecorella, simultaneously the president of the Chamber of Deputies’ Justice Commission and the counsel for the defense for one of the biggest Casalese Camorra cartel bosses. I laughed because the clans were so strong that they had even reversed the axioms of nature and fable. A wolf was being defended by a lamb.* But my delirium may have been the result of exhaustion and nervous collapse.

  Nunzio De Falco’s nickname is written on his face. He really does look like a wolf. His identification photo portrays a long face covered with a thin, prickly beard, like a carpet of needles, and pointed ears. Frizzy hair, dark skin, and a triangular mouth. He looks just like one of those werewolves in a horror film. And yet a local p
aper—the same one that had boasted about relations between Don Peppino and the clan—dedicated the first page to his qualities as a lover, passionately desired by women and girls. The headlines on January 17, 2005, were eloquent: “Nunzio De Falco king of the womanizers.”

  CASAL DI PRINCIPE (CE)

  They may not be handsome, but they are attractive because they’re bosses; that’s how it is. If one had to rank the playboy bosses of the area, first place would go to two repeat convicts from Casal di Principe, men who are certainly not good-looking, unlike Don Antonio Bardellino, the most fascinating of them all. We are talking about Francesco Piacenti, alias Big Nose, and Nunzio De Falco, alias the Wolf. People say that one had five wives and the other seven. Obviously we’re not talking about actual marriages but longterm relationships that produced children. In fact Nunzio De Falco apparently has more than twelve children by various women. Another interesting detail is that not all the women in question are Italian. One is Spanish, another English, and another Portuguese. Like sailors, these men would make a new family in every place they hid … Not by chance, some of their women were called to testify during their trials, each of them beautiful and elegant. The fair sex is the cause of the decline of many a boss. They are often the ones who lead indirectly to the capture of the most dangerous bosses. Tailing the women, investigators have been led to bosses of the caliber of Francesco Schiavone Cicciariello … In other words, women are a mixed blessing even for bosses.

  Don Peppino’s death was the price paid for peace between the clans. Even the verdict makes reference to this hypothesis. An agreement had to be found between the two warring groups, perhaps sealed on Don Peppino’s flesh. Like a scapegoat. Eliminating him meant resolving a problem for all the families while also distracting investigations away from their affairs.

  I had heard talk of Cipriano, a childhood friend of Don Peppino’s who had written a harangue to be read at the funeral, an invective inspired by one of the priest’s speeches, but who didn’t even have the strength to move that morning. He had gone away many years before and settled near Rome, having decided never to set foot in Campania again. They told me that his grief over Don Peppino’s death kept him in bed for months. Whenever I asked one of his aunts about him, she would automatically respond in the same mournful voice, “He’s closed up. Cipriano’s closed up!”

  It happens every now and then. It isn’t unusual to hear someone say such a thing around here. Every time I hear that expression, I think of Giustino Fortunato, who in the early 1900s walked the entire length of the southern Apennine Mountains. He wanted to know what life was like in the towns along the ridge, and visited every one of them, staying with farmers, listening to angry peasants, getting to know the voice and smell of the southern question. When he later became a senator, he returned to the towns and asked about the people he had met years earlier, the most combative of whom he wanted to involve in his political reform projects. But often the relatives would respond, “He’s closed up!” To close up, become silent, practically mute: a desire to escape within yourself and stop knowing, understanding, doing. To stop resisting, a decision to retreat an instant before you dissolve in the compromises of life. Cipriano had closed up too. In town they told me it started after he went on a job interview for a human resources position in a shipping company in Frosinone. The interviewer was reading his résumé out loud, but stopped at the name of his town.

  “Ah, yes, I know where you’re from! The town of that famous boss … Sandokan, right?”

  “No, the town of Don Peppino Diana.”

  “Who?”

  Cipriano got up and walked out. He ran a newsstand in Rome to support himself. I got his address from his mother, who happened to be in front of me in the checkout line at the supermarket one day. She must have alerted him to my arrival because he didn’t answer the doorbell. Maybe he knew what I wanted to talk to him about. But I waited out front for hours and was prepared to sleep on his doorstep. Cipriano finally decided to come out, but he barely said hello. We went to a small park nearby. He had me sit on a bench and opened a notebook, the kind you use in elementary school. There on the lined pages was his harangue, written out in longhand. Who knows if Don Peppino’s handwriting was also there somewhere. I didn’t dare ask. A speech they had both intended to sign, but then came the killers, death, slander, and unfathomable solitude. When Cipriano started to read, it was with the voice and gestures of Fra Dolcino, the medieval preacher who wandered the streets announcing the Apocalypse, and who was burned at the stake for heresy:

  We will not allow our lands to become places of the Camorra, one giant Gomorrah to destroy! Men of the Camorra—not beasts, but men like everyone else—we will not allow you to find here an illicit energy in what is legitimate elsewhere, we will not allow you to destroy here what is built elsewhere. You create a desert around your villas, and only your absolute desire stands between what you are and what you want. Remember. And the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire; he destroyed those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew on the ground. But the wife of Lot turned to look back and she became a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:24–26). We must risk becoming salt, we must turn and look at what is happening, what is raining down on Gomorrah, the total destruction where life is added to or subtracted from your economic activities. Don’t you see that this is Gomorrah, don’t you see? Remember. When they see that the whole land is brimstone, and salt, and burning, and there will be no sowing, no sprouting, no grass growing, like after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Seboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and his wrath (Deuteronomy 29:22). Men die for a yes or a no, give their lives for someone’s order or decision; you spend decades in jail to achieve the power of death, you earn mountains of money that you invest in houses where you will never live, in banks you will never enter, in restaurants you do not run, in companies you do not manage; you control a deadly power in order to dominate a life you spend hidden underground, surrounded by bodyguards. You kill and are killed in a chess game, but you are not kings. The kings are those who get rich off you, making you eat one another until no one can call checkmate and only a pawn remains on the board. And it will not be you. What you devour here you will spit out elsewhere, far away, like birds that vomit food into the mouths of their chicks. But those you are feeding are not chicks but vultures, and you are not mother birds but buffalos ready to destroy yourselves in a place where blood and power are the terms of victory. It is time we stopped being a Gomorrah …

  Cipriano stopped reading. It seemed as if he had imagined all the faces into which he would have liked to hurl those words. His breath was strangled, like an asthmatic’s. He closed his notebook and left without saying good-bye.

  *Pecorella means “lamb” in Italian.

  HOLLYWOOD

  In Casal di Principe there is now a Foster Children’s Center in Don Peppino Diana’s memory. It is housed in a sumptuous, spacious villa seized from Casalesi clan affiliate Egidio Coppola. AGRORINASCE, the agency for the renewal, development, and safety of Casapessena, Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, and Villa Literno, has transformed confiscated Camorra assets into community facilities. Unless they’re put to some other use the villas continue to bear the mark of the bosses who built and lived in them. Even abandoned, they remain symbols of sovereignty. A trip across the Aversa Marshes offers a catalog of the last thirty years of architectural styles. The most imposing villas, belonging to contractors and landowners, provide the inspiration for office workers’ and shopkeepers’ houses. If the former is enthroned with four Doric columns in reinforced concrete, the latter will be adorned with two columns half their size. This imitation game has filled the area with villas competing to be the most impressive, complicated, and impregnable, mansions striving for eccentricity and uniqueness; one has a gate with the geometry of a Mondrian painting.

  Camorra villas are pearls of cement tucked away on rural streets, protec
ted by walls and video cameras. There are dozens and dozens of them. Marble and parquet, colonnades and staircases, granite fireplaces with the boss’s initials. One, the most sumptuous, is particularly famous, or perhaps it has merely generated the most legends. Everyone calls it Hollywood. Just saying the word makes you understand why. Hollywood was the home of Walter Schiavone, Sandokan’s brother, who ran the clan’s cement business for years. It’s not difficult to guess the reason for the name, easy to imagine the spaces and splendor. But that’s not the whole of it. Walter Schiavone’s villa really does have a link to Hollywood. People in Casal di Principe say the boss told his architect he wanted a villa just like Tony Montana’s, the Miami Cuban gangster in Scarface. He’d seen the film countless times and it had made a deep impression on him, to the point that he came to identify with the character played by Al Pacino. With a bit of imagination, Schiavone’s hollowed face could actually be superimposed on the actor’s. The story has all the makings of a legend. People say Schiavone even gave his architect a copy of the film; he wanted the Scarface villa, exactly as it was in the movie. It seemed like one of those stories that embellish every boss’s rise to power, of aura blending with legend, an authentic urban myth. Anytime anyone mentioned Hollywood, someone would say he’d seen it being built when he was young, a bunch of kids on bikes contemplating Tony Montana’s villa as it rose right off the screen into the middle of the neighborhood. Which is rather odd, because in Casale, villa construction starts only after high walls are built to close off the site. I never did believe in the Hollywood version. From the outside, Schiavone’s villa looks like a bunker surrounded by thick walls topped with threatening bars. Armored gates protect every access. There’s no way to tell what’s behind the walls, but they make you think it must be something extravagant.