The Honored Society

by Petra Reski

  Carmine represented the best singers in Naples. In his agency, one wall was papered with his stars’ posters. They were men whose tattoos crept from their shirt collars, men with pinsharp sideburns who called themselves Alessio or Nello Amato or Maurizio, men at the sight of whom girls in Naples started weeping as hysterically as if the blood of San Gennaro had just liquefied in front of their eyes.

  “E carcerate” was the name of one of the hits from Sarno’s workshop: “The Prisoners,” a martyrs’ hymn about men who aren’t allowed to see their children growing up. Carmine Sarno is a man with a soft heart. And armored glass in his window panes. The armored glass was necessary because sinister characters made the area unsafe from time to time, he said. Which was an elegant circumlocution for the Camorra war between the Sarno and Panico clans—manifest now in a car bomb, now in a bullet to the head. The war between the clans had also killed Sarno’s nephew, whose face, engraved in gold, rested on his chest. The boy had been blown sky-high by a car bomb meant for his father: only his hands were left, Carmine Sarno said.

  Later, he invited me to lunch. We ate with one of his friends, an impresario who looked as if he’d been dressed by a costume designer: with a lot of hair gel and an awful lot of artificial tan, a light-gray suit, a white shirt open to the chest, and the usual medallion with the picture of a dead person around his neck. The impresario was telling Carmine Sarno that he had been checked by the DIA, the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia, the national anti-Mafia office. Turning to me, he added apologetically that it must have been a case of mistaken identity: “We’re always talking about various artists on the phone,” he said. The police, he explained, had confused that with some sort of secret code.

  Carmine Sarno saw my interest in him as a piece of jewelry that you pin on yourself. After all, there had been bosses in Naples who had dictated legends from their lives straight into the notebooks of selected journalists. Unlike the Sicilian or Calabrian bosses, the bosses of the Camorra are not embarrassed about putting their wealth on display. Camorristi are known for building themselves Hollywood-style villas and speeding down the alleyways of the Spanish Quarter in their Ferrari Testarossas. When I accompanied a Neapolitan wedding photographer to the baptism of a Camorrista’s child in the Spanish Quarter, I witnessed the mother giving the godfather a diamond-encrusted platinum bracelet. And the godfather responding with a diamond-encrusted platinum cross for the child. The clan of the Giulianos, the legendary Camorra family that ruled Naples until the 1990s, loved making a show for the cameras: the photograph of Diego Armando Maradona, lying in the Giulianos’ scallop-shaped pool drinking champagne, became a Camorra icon.

  The smart restaurant where I ate with Carmine Sarno and the impresario rose like a chimera from the wasteland of Ponticelli, with a marble terrace and brightly colored awnings; the waiters served frittered fruits de mer and we drank wine adorned with slices of fresh peach and delicate mint leaves.

  “Without parsley for you, as always, Carmine,” said the waiter as he served the pasta, and Carmine Sarno’s eye drifted carelessly over the businessmen who greeted him. “Carmine, you’re the greatest!” a man called from the next table, but Sarno didn’t respond.

  Unusually, he drank wine, in my honor, although he had just had a serious stomach operation. “To your health, Petra,” he said, and straightened the red ruby ring on his right hand—a present from someone thanking him for a favor he had performed. Then Carmine spoke quietly about the benefit concerts that he organizes every year: one for children at Epiphany, and one for the physically handicapped in September.

  Why did he do that?

  “Because I have been lame since childhood,” he said.

  Carmine Sarno lived in one of those industrialized blocks on stilts of which the whole eastern edge of Naples seemed to consist, all the way inland. Ponticelli was the Sarnos’ fortress. With solariums called fuego, fire, and the Coppola bar, in which young, nervous men drank tumblers full of whisky sour even in the morning. Before going on to sing a verse from a love song. When they saw Carmine Sarno, they smiled so broadly that I could see their cocaine-eroded gums.

  Nothing stirred here without the consent of the Sarnos. Bodyguards reported every suspicious movement—a hidden investigator, a turncoat clan member, a motorbike driver in a helmet. In Naples only hit men wear helmets. Unlike the old town of Naples, Ponticelli couldn’t hide behind the enchantment of Renaissance marble cornucopias, baroque churches decorated with death’s-heads, and rococo palazzi. There were no frescoes here, no marble columns scattering poetry like jewels over everyday life among the Camorra; there was nothing here but trash bags that flourished like carbuncles along the roadside ditches, and that at night, once they had been lit, blazed like beacons of perdition.

  Unlike the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra is organized horizontally: there is no hierarchy and there are hardly any rules; everyone wants to be the boss, and that doesn’t happen without a murder. Every third day someone is killed in Naples. A few months before I met Carmine Sarno, the police in Ponticelli had arrested seventy-one clan members: for nine murders, two attempted murders, three instances of grievous bodily harm, and one thwarted assassination attempt; for robbery, profiteering, drug and arms dealing. Kalashnikovs, rapid-fire rifles, pistols, and explosives had been smuggled into Naples in the buses bringing Polish home helps into town. Thanks to the arrests, an attack by the Panico family on the Sarno clan had been thwarted; the prepared explosives had been impounded, along with twenty businesses, properties worth millions, cars, and yachts. And in Ponticelli you saw nothing but burned-out car wrecks, homemade house altars, and the graffito My breath belongs to you.

  Carmine’s brother Ciro was called o’ sindaco, the mayor, because he had appointed himself master of the Terremotati, the people displaced by the 1980 earthquake, who occupied Ponticelli’s ruined buildings, shells left behind by Neapolitan speculators after they had cashed in their grants. Ciro o’ sindaco had allocated the apartments. And taken care of electricity, water, and gas connections. And thus won himself the unconditional devotion of people who had nothing more to lose. When Ciro Sarno was arrested in 1990 for illegal arms possession, there was a revolt: frying pans, flowerpots, and crockery rained down on the police. One clan member relieved Ciro Sarno by assuming responsibility for the illegal arms possession. Ciro was released again. Temporarily.

  Carmine Sarno didn’t like to talk about such sad things. He preferred to talk about his songs, which were, he said, always inspired by true stories from Ponticelli. The song “Frate mio,” “My Brother,” is about a pair of lovers who discover they are brother and sister. Social workers make the couple part. “Sora mia,” “My Sister,” is about the death of a woman who dies of an incurable illness at the age of only thirty, leaving behind a little daughter.

  Later, when we were sitting in his agency again, Carmine Sarno tried to make it clear to me he didn’t use the sources of his inspiration without their permission: of course, he always asked the families beforehand whether they minded him writing a song about them, he said. Like the parents of little Francesco Paolillo, for whom he had written the song “Insieme con Gesù,” “Together with Jesus.” Francesco died while playing in an unsafe derelict building. In memory of him, Sarno had produced a video clip and had a little altar built near the spot where he had fallen to his death.

  At that thought Carmine felt silent, leaving nothing but a feeling of piety and a gentle summer wind that passed through the agency. The breeze drifted over a withered yucca tree, a Padre Pio watching over a keyboard, and a cabaret artist sitting mutely in a corner. He humbly unrolled a poster and tried to excite Carmine about his program, which was guaranteed family fare, simple lyrics, no swearing. He performed with his daughter, who was nine and a half and a natural talent; the act was capable of further development and equally suited to first communions and weddings, to baptisms and confirmations. Then he told a joke from his act. And laughed. Carmine Sarno didn’t laugh. He just looked out of the wi
ndow into the street. And casually returned the greeting of a passing youth. And the cabaret artist rolled his poster back up again.

  A Sarno doesn’t fritter himself away, either in words or in gestures.

  Carmine Sarno didn’t lose his composure even when he received an unexpected visit in my presence: two men in sunglasses. One of them had white hair and looked like Richard Gere, the other had black hair and looked like Al Pacino. Richard Gere wore a pinstripe suit and a thin D’Artagnan beard; Al Pacino was dressed entirely in black.

  “Financial police,” said Richard Gere, taking out his ID.

  Because I wanted to be polite, I made as if to leave the agency, so that I wouldn’t be witness to what might turn out to be an unpleasant conversation for Sarno. “No,” he said. “Sit right where you are, Petra, it’s not a problem.”

  “It’s about the income from Alessio’s concerts,” said Al Pacino. “We want to know how many tickets were sold, things like that.”

  Sarno fell silent.

  “Can’t you help us in any way?” asked Richard Gere.

  “No,” said Sarno. “I don’t deal with that kind of thing.”

  Then he went to a shelf and took out a folder. He opened it awkwardly. There were documents in it, yellowed licenses, which Carmine Sarno looked at as if seeing them for the first time.

  “Perhaps your tax adviser might be able to help us. What’s his name?” asked Al Pacino.

  “My what?” asked Carmine Sarno.

  “Your tax adviser. You must have a tax adviser,” said Richard Gere.

  “I don’t know the name of my tax adviser. My wife deals with things like that.” And then he called to the joiner across the street: “Do you know the name of my tax adviser?”

  The joiner yelled back: “No idea.”

  “Perhaps we could have a word with your wife,” said Al Pacino. “She might be able to drop by later,” said Richard Gere.

  And Carmine Sarno answered: “No, that’s not possible. My wife is in Lourdes right now. On a pilgrimage.”

  “Things like that only happen in Naples,” says Shobha. And please note that the only real question in Italy is what kind of Mafia you can live with most easily—the Sicilian, the Calabrian, or the Neapolitan?

  I tap the remote control again, turn over, and see the domes of Noto cathedral. On a local channel there’s a program about Sicily’s baroque town. The presenter is currently raving about how the Sicilian baroque celebrates the moment, movement, the effimero; Shobha and I are only thinking that there’s resignation in the air today. And not only in Sicily. In Calabria and Campania, too.

  While Shobha makes caponata in the kitchen, bracelets jangling, I lay the table on the terrace. Here, above the rooftops of Palermo, you can sometimes forget reality. Only recently we spent an evening on the terrace of Marzia Sabella, the Sicilian public prosecutor who led the investigating unit that arrested Bernardo Provenzano. You could have aimed at the terrace from various windows and balconies, but the prosecutor didn’t care. From here you can see the sea: that was more important to her. Marzia Sabella had decided not to be frightened.

  But when Shobha and I told her about Calabria and Duisburg she shuddered. Calabria makes even Mafia-tested Sicilian prosecutors uneasy. Just as Sicilians sneer at the Neapolitan Camorra. Even the public prosecutors have a certain local patriotism; I often had the feeling that they felt a certain ironic bond with the criminal organization that they fought against every day. The Sicilian public prosecutor thought the Sicilian Cosa Nostra was criminally superior to all other Mafia organizations, at least where its political influence was concerned. The Calabrian public prosecutor thought the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta was nimbler and therefore better equipped for the future in the long term. And the Neapolitan public prosecutor was amused that the Neapolitan Camorristi had always managed to swindle Cosa Nostra whenever they smuggled cigarettes together, regularly failing to share a cargo with them.

  In Naples, everyone knows that the Camorra isn’t a foreign body but has been part of the city for two hundred years. Today the reality is that a hundred Camorra clans rule the city, and that in 2006 alone one ton of cocaine and six tons of hashish were impounded in Naples—no more than 10 percent of the drugs traded in Italy, however—while politicians justify the existence of the Camorra as a kind of social shock absorber that keeps public order because it guarantees the survival of whole social classes.

  The morality of lawlessness denounced by the judiciary has produced a network of Camorra, contractors, and politicians from which all three participants derive great benefits. In economic theory this is known as a win-win situation. The politicians support the Camorra to guarantee themselves votes. And they ally themselves with the contractors in order to enjoy bribes in return for public contracts. The Camorra in turn receives bribes from the businessmen for public contracts, as well as contracts for subcontractors, which enables the Camorra to create jobs and thus assure itself of social legitimacy. And the politicians guarantee the Camorra protection from prosecution by the police and the judiciary.

  The benefit to the contractors in this business lies in the fact that by eliminating their competitors they always obtain public contracts, that the safety of building sites is guaranteed; no kind of pressure can be exerted by the trade unions; and the conditions for tax avoidance, slush funds, and investments in tax idylls are all in place.

  And thanks to its inexhaustible sources of money, the Camorra no longer needs to resort to violence. It operates quite legally by buying up the market: every espresso drunk in a cafe is controlled by the Camorra. It dominates the markets of everyday consumption—meat, mineral water, coffee, dairy products, cattle feed—without any kind of hygiene control. Not to mention the waste business.

  As I’m straightening the chairs on Shobha’s terrace, my foot bumps against something that looks like a stone in the darkness, but reveals itself to be a tortoise: the terrace is home to two tortoises that have belonged to the family for over forty years. Shobha likes to talk with them as if she still hasn’t given up hope, even after forty years, that they might one day reply.

  The two tortoises stick out their little pink tongues and creep toward the food bowl. Mafia wars, murders, bloodbaths, and trials drifted across Palermo. The Corleonesi slaughtered their enemies; they murdered everyone who got in their way—“illustrious corpses,” as they say in Palermo when a politician or a civil servant is killed. The Palermo Spring came and faded; bed-sheets bearing the words Down with the Mafia! were hung out and brought back in again. Giulio Andreotti—“Uncle Giulio,” as the mafiosi called him—was accused, acquitted, and finally sentenced for supporting the Mafia, a crime that had already lapsed when the sentence was passed. Cosa Nostra sealed a pact with Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Onward Italy). Minister-presidents, senators, and mayors were accused of supporting the Mafia and acquitted. And the two tortoises did nothing but eat bits of chopped apricot, banana, and tomatoes. Organically grown tomatoes—Shobha sets great store by that.

  In the distance you can see the harbor, with the ferries that are lit up at night and lie there like whales with their mouths wide open. When I was in Naples, I took a drive through the mountains of containers at the harbor, with two “falcons,” the name given to the plainclothes policemen who patrol on motorbikes. Since Roberto Saviano’s book Gomorra, the world knows that the Neapolitan port has no competitors when it comes to the smuggling of forged goods, which are sold in Germany and elsewhere—by Camorristi like the ones in the Licciardi clan, who not only dealt in forged trademarked products, from clothes to drills to cameras, but also in drugs, and who, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, extended their area of activity from Germany to Hungary and Poland. When I talked about that with the Neapolitan public prosecutor Franco Roberti, Duisburg came up once again. Duisburg hadn’t been a coincidence, the prosecutor said; Germany was just as solid a base for the Camorra’s businesses as it was for those of the ’Ndrangheta, with restaurants and clothes shops used for money l
aundering.

  “In Germany, if you see a Neapolitan or a Calabrian opening a shop, you should take a closer look at where the money comes from,” Public Prosecutor Roberti said.

  The traffic snarls up from below, police sirens wail, and even up here on Shobha’s balcony Palermo’s breath smells of sulfur, dark soil, and corruption. And basil, oregano, and thyme, all the herbs of the Mediterranean. Shobha has transformed her terrace into a thicket, a thicket of jasmine and bougainvillea, of palms and olive trees, geraniums and little lemon trees. She loves picking off dry leaves, watering, and fertilizing. In another life, I’m sure she would have been a gardener.

  “And have you seen this Carmine again since?” asks Shobha. The episode with the two financial policemen cheers her up. Is life in Naples tragicomic? Or is it more that it’s tragic, and you can only endure it by looking for comedy?

  The founder of the Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples once said to me: “The lowlifes are still in power, even today. The Camorra are the bourgeoisie of Naples! They’re the people that power talks to. The state has no monopoly on force here! The evils of Naples are the evils of Italy! Europe has to get moving! It can’t afford to lose Italy!”

  Just as the Bourbon King Ferdinand IV of Naples always tried to stay close to the notorious lazzaroni, the lowlifes whom he showered with gifts as a way of securing his power, even now Italian politicians are wheeling and dealing with the Camorra in just the same way.

  After the financial police had left Carmine’s agency with unfinished business, Carmine Sarno had suggested showing me the video that he had had made for the boy who died in the accident. For Francesco Paolillo. Sarno closed up the agency and walked to his car, a silver S-series Mercedes. As we drove past he showed me the chapel of the Madonna dell’Arco, which he had had built between the rows of houses and that looked like a little mosque. A bit further along, at the edge of the road hung the house altar that Carmine Sarno had had built for the dead boy: For that little blossom that was stolen from the earth to flower in the hands of the Lord. That was what the inscription said. Signed by the Sarno family.