by Peter Robb
Engineers were sounding every building days after the earthquake and microsurgery by innumerable squads of workmen over the following months saved the city from collapse. It cost tens of billions of dollars. The city administration drew up a reconstruction plan. At some point however you noticed that the work on many buildings was going well beyond the needs of the structural emergency and into the areas of renovation and redecoration. And went on and on. After a few years the rundown old city was looking strangely smart. Empty apartments however remained empty. The evacuated never came back home. Those with least clout went on living in their container parks for ever. Naples was turning into a speculator’s dream.
The tarting-up of Naples was the visible face of a gigantic rort. Worse was going on in the towns of Irpinia where the earthquake had its epicentre. Irpinia was also the power base of Ciriaco De Mita, the DC party leader and Italian prime minister in the eighties, and where his brother happened to be in the construction business. Rome poured over fifty billion dollars into Naples and Irpinia as earthquake emergency funds. The money was divvied up, insofar as interests could even be said to be distinguishable, by the politicians and administrators and the construction companies owned by organized crime. In 1985 a young reporter for the Naples daily Il Mattino looked into earthquake reconstruction contracts around Gava’s power base on the Sorrento peninsula, which had been closer to the earthquake’s epicentre than Naples itself and harder hit. The reporter was shot outside his home in Naples. It took ten years for the camorra to be brought to book for the murder. The killing had been tacitly ordered by the mayor of one of the towns.
The reforming Naples city council fell, and with it their plan to screen the tendering companies for criminal contamination. The last obstacle to Gava and the camorra was now gone. Three years after the Irpinia disaster the slow earthquake of subsidence stirred again at Pozzuoli, the ancient port city where the sleazier episodes of the Satyricon may or may not have been set, now a part of outer Naples, which had been sinking into the sea since Roman times. Another old centre was evacuated, more billions arrived from Rome, an uninhabitable new centre was built nearby. Other major initiatives followed, as year by year daily life in Naples got harder to bear. Dubious firms took over essential services, the underground railway project, the rapid tramway system project, the cable cars, the parking buildings, the World Cup projects. Reconstruction money and drug profits fed into the same stream. In 1993 the Italian government dissolved the Naples city council for reasons of public security. It was the first time such a measure had ever been taken for any city in Italy.
I went away. I came back. I was in the very Neapolitan situation of having glimpsed felicity only to have everything snatched away. What remained was a lacerating sense of loss. Life dragged on, and when I finally decided to up sticks and leave for good at the end of 1992 it was without regrets and after hard-headed calculation. The next year there were far more parliamentarians being investigated for organized crime in the Naples region of Campania than anywhere else in Italy, including Sicily, far more magistrates under criminal investigation for corruption, far more town councils disbanded for criminal activity. The statistics were a small indicator. Only in the killings did Sicily keep a slight edge. In the decade of the eighties there were 2621 homicides in Campania, nearly three hundred less than Sicily’s total of 2905 in the same period. No other Italian region came anywhere near, not even Calabria, which was third.
After three weeks of negotiations the chief of the central post office agreed to dispatch my books to Sydney. The builder with the glass eye who lived across the alley took them in on his truck. One dank pre-dawn I walked through the borgo for the last time toward the station. The borgo’s black slimy stones cut from volcanic lava were still littered with waste from the day before’s market. I’d done a deal of not very rigorous or systematic thinking about what went wrong, and it wasn’t just personal. It wasn’t personal at all.
* * *
THE HEAD decomposing on the front seat and the body found when the car boot was cautiously opened had both belonged to a Roman lawyer. He’d last been seen lunching at the Hotel Royal on the seafront at Santa Lucia, looking out on the boat harbour with its yachts and contraband fleet and the ancient castel dell’Ovo, and beyond to the bay of Naples, Capri and Vesuvius. The lawyer had been an unsavoury type even in one piece. He must have come to Naples that week in 1982 engaged by Raffaele Cutolo, since it was outside Cutolo’s castle on the periphery of Naples that the car was parked. The professor, as Cutolo was called because he’d finished elementary school, was a prisoner at the time, but his New Organized Camorra was the emergent force in Neapolitan organized crime at the start of the eighties. The professor made highly-publicized courtroom appearances from time to time, expensively dressed and slightly overdoing the gold accessories by Cartier, accepting the obeisance of criminals and public figures, declaiming his poetry and issuing veiled threats to politicians and judges. Unlike the grim and obsessively discreet mafiosi, the camorristi enjoyed a little theatre, a little display, for which they were considered buffoons by the Sicilians. Sometimes the professor’s veiled threats were contained in the poetry, which was also available in slim volumes.
Cutolo’s detention didn’t cramp the New Camorra’s exponential growth. He’d been in jail since the fifties and that was where he did his recruiting. He’d directed a flourishing cocaine traffic from an insane asylum, in telephone contact with Colombia and Peru. Affairs outside were controlled from the castle-fortress by his unmarried sister, Rosetta Ice Eyes Cutolo. The ice eyes lady was said to be a brilliant accountant and devoted to her brother’s interests. When police raided the castle after the failure by a whisker of her plan to blow up the Naples police headquarters, the ice eyes lady got through the police roadblock hidden under a tartan rug on the floor of a car driven by the local priest.
The Naples police headquarters fill a solid structure of six or eight storeys built by the fascists, whose emblem of the axe and rods still adorns its façade, in the city centre. It would have taken some blowing up, but the quantity of explosive was apparently commensurate with the job. That the New Camorra’s plan failed by mere hours concerned me, because I was at the time living directly opposite, on the other side of via Medina. The explosion of a bomb in a camorra-owned bank, a few yards down from the police beside a fourteenth-century church, had in the depth of an earlier night already shaken the vast sixteenth-century palazzo where I lived beneath the chambers of the Liberal Party. Once frequented by the philosopher Benedetto Croce, these were now the power base of a rapidly-rising politician named De Lorenzo, whom I used to pass in the courtyard. De Lorenzo was a university professor mapping out a career that would soon turn the ministry of health into a criminal organization, and skim off for himself four million dollars in bribes. Police headquarters over the road were manned by carabinieri in flak jackets with submachineguns, and convoys of screeching Alfas would arrive with terrorists and camorristi, perpetrators of the crimes on that night’s news. Around the corner was a grille in the wall, where a knot of stocky women in black would be yelling to husbands, sons, brothers and boyfriends in the cells below. Living with this, you felt involved.
Nobody living in Naples in the early eighties could help feeling involved. Cutolo’s New Camorra recruited its forces on the outskirts of Naples, in that network of lawless towns that sprawled amorphously around the city proper. It tapped a huge reserve of youths with neither work prospects nor strong social ties. The organization was new but it functioned in the purest tradition of southern Italian criminal organizations. It looked after its people when the state had abandoned them. The young men who ended in jail for minor crimes had wives and children, since they married young in the south, left without any support. In Poggioreale prison the young men themselves were in dire circumstances. Cutolo protected these kids in jail, looked after their families outside and guaranteed a job on release. In return he got an oath of loyalty to the Nuova Camorra Organizzata
. The induction was modelled on the rituals of the camorra’s eighteenth-century origins. Giacomo, a plumber’s son I’d known in the Spanish quarters, disappeared into the New Camorra. Selling hashish to American sailors of the sixth fleet one night by the waterfront, he’d ended in Poggioreale. Here he had been invited for an audience in the carpeted cell of don Raffaele Cutolo, with whom he took coffee. Cutolo was at that time spending twenty thousand dollars a month on food and related expenses in jail. His fame was almost at its zenith. The professor had been a real gentleman. Giacomo’s narrative ended here and it would have been tactless to enquire further. I never saw him again.
The New Camorra grew fast and threatened the old camorra families of the city centre. The criminal map of old Naples was divided into zones controlled by family organizations that had coexisted for a long time and carved up the income from contraband, prostitution, counterfeiting consumer goods and extortion rackets. When Cutolo’s men started muscling in from the periphery, the old camorra clans formed an alliance they called the New Family to repel the pretenders. I got word of the New Family in 1980 from the horse’s mouth, or rather an angelic fifteen-year-old’s from one of the families in the Spanish quarters. This was before the violence erupted, before anyone knew what was going to happen. What happened was a prolonged street war that in the first years of the eighties was taking nearly three hundred lives a year. This was a killing rate as high or higher than the mafia’s in the Palermo war going on at the same time. In Naples a lot of the victims were in their mid-teens or little older, the new recruits, the foot-soldiers on both sides of a conflict whose ante was being upped week by week. It was a barbaric war of extermination that made Riina’s killings look selective and almost refined. It was a time of horror, and the bodies in the streets were not the only horror that transformed Naples in those years.
The other horror was the heroin, directly linked to the camorra war and largely its cause. Unrefined heroin from Asia arrived in Italy with the eighties, and the camorra was Cosa Nostra’s partner in its selling. Italy proved a peculiarly vulnerable society to the novelty of heroin. It soon had one of the highest estimated addiction rates in the world and was the only country where the primary cause of AIDS was the use of dirty needles by drug takers. In Naples the camorra distributed hashish, a lot of it free at first, to establish the notion of la droga as a cheap and harmless source of pleasure for kids. When heroin arrived it cut a swathe through the city’s youth. In 1980 I went to the funeral of one of the first overdose victims, a student of mine, and his death was front page news. The long roll of deaths that followed soon went unnoticed by the press. Kids just disappeared from circulation. The alleys of the Spanish quarters at night were now full of spectral, staggering figures. It had quite a history, what was destroyed. The privileged autonomy of the scugnizzi in the street life of Naples, the ferocious energy of the city’s teeming plebs. It was inner-directed and self-defeating most of the time, but this youthful proletarian wildness had been formidable whenever it found an object. The fishmonger Masaniello had made the Spanish empire totter at the head of such a crowd. The unarmed starving boys of Naples had driven the German army from their city in 1943. Their heirs, the boys who used to wait up to read the early edition of Il Mattino on Toledo after midnight, checking out the crimes and punishments of their elder brothers, were now gone. I don’t know anyone in Naples now, Oscar Wilde had complained theatrically when he came back to Naples near the end. All my friends are in jail. I was starting to feel, as Naples headed into the eighties, that all of my friends were dead.
The old camorra was threatened by Cutolo at the very time it was tapping into the huge new wealth derived from heroin. Cutolo had forbidden the New Camorra to traffic in heroin, having the intelligence to see it would most damage the very social stratum that had empowered him. Later, when Cutolo’s NCO found itself overextended and in difficulty as a result of its rapid growth, he may have changed his mind. The New Family, for its part, was drawn by the new money in the eighties drug, cocaine, whose importation Cutolo controlled. Far too much money was now being made by the camorra from both drugs for the profits to be merely reinvested in crime. They had, like the mafia’s profits in Sicily, to be ploughed into construction and real estate throughout Italy. Here Gava and the political friends in Rome came in. The camorra wanted to become part of the fabric of national politics and finance, as the mafia had done long before. The stakes were so great that in 1981 Riina’s Cosa Nostra tried to broker a settlement of the war between the New Camorra and New Family. Cosa Nostra’s ties were to the old camorra of the New Family, several of whose leaders were also made men of Cosa Nostra itself, but the war was inhibiting business. The summit was held on a camorra leader’s property on the outskirts of Naples, attended by over a hundred leading mafiosi and camorristi, each of whom arrived in his own car, unnoticed by police, and Riina and his Sicilian delegation were housed in a separate building, on hand to advise and consent. The peacemaking effort failed, and though Cutolo was later defeated, the clans of the New Family won not because of their alliance with Cosa Nostra but through their alliance with the DC.
Cutolo’s great moment came in the spring of that year, and by the end of 1981 he seemed to have won acceptance as a major player on the dangerous confines of crime and politics. The failures of the reforming administration in Naples had become paralysis after the earthquake and given a fresh impulse to terrorism. Five months after the earthquake, the Neapolitan column of the Red Brigades in April 1981 kidnapped a powerful DC politician called Ciro Cirillo, killing his driver and bodyguard and wounding his secretary. Cirillo was head of town planning for Campania, president of the earthquake reconstruction committee and a former president of the region. He was also a close friend and ally of Antonio Gava’s. The BR wanted to play on popular discontents, and use Cirillo to stop the deportation of people from the city centre, close the great container camp of homeless people, end the requisitioning of houses, interrogate Cirillo as they had Moro about the DC’s embarrassing secrets. Three months later, unlike the unfortunate Aldo Moro, Cirillo was released after payment of a big ransom. The political demands were forgotten. Leaders of the DC, Gava’s people, had been taken by the secret services to see Cutolo in jail. They’d got him to be the go-between for a deal to buy off the BR. This moment of national squalor was the apex of Cutolo’s career.
Cutolo’s greatest reward for his mediation was to be big earthquake reconstruction contracts for his firms. Too much became known, however, about the secret prison dealings. There was a public outcry and the DC politicians dragged their feet in repaying Cutolo. To spur them he released a document about a visit he’d had in jail from a DC government minister. It was Scotti, another DC interior minister, another leader of the government’s fight against organized crime. This leak made the leaders of the Neapolitan DC realize how dangerously compromised they were with Cutolo, how open to further blackmail. Gava turned to the New Family for help. Within weeks Cutolo’s financial director was murdered in hospital, where he was recovering from an earlier attack. Nine months later Cutolo’s deputy, military chief and alter ego was blown up in a Rome car bomb explosion. A secret service ID was found in his pocket. The spectacular car bomb killing was intended to underline the finality of Cutolo’s elimination. A pentito explained later that Gava’s new associates wanted to demonstrate to Cutolo that he was finished and that once and for all he had to stop blackmailing the politicians and state organizations that had dealt with him in the Cirillo affair. Immediately, major government reconstruction contracts began flowing to the New Family’s companies.
The head on the car seat in 1982 was a response to Cutolo’s attempt to blackmail the DC. Before his decapitation the lawyer had been forced to write a note claiming to be the author of the document describing the DC minister’s visit to Cutolo in prison. The head was also a portent. A little later that year Antonio Ammaturo, the chief of criminal investigations in the Naples police, was assassinated with his assistant
for probing too deeply into the Cirillo kidnapping. His files and most other documents in the case disappeared. The Cirillo affair was still causing death over ten years later. When the parliamentary antimafia commission announced in 1993 that it intended to look into the matter, Cutolo’s lawyer, who’d been intimately involved in the deal, told Il Mattino that he intended to tell the commission all he knew. Three days later he was assassinated. It happened months before Gava was arrested as a camorrista. The New Camorra’s failure to blow up police headquarters marked the beginning of its decline. Cutolo tried to form an alliance with Cosa Nostra in the US, but was blocked by the New Family’s ties with Cosa Nostra in Sicily. A hundred other New Camorra members were arrested at the time of the swoop on the castle in 1983, among them a prison chaplain and a nun who savaged the arresting officer during a pre-dawn raid on her convent. She tore off his shirt and severed his finger with her teeth. In the police raids of 1983 and 1984 there were fifteen hundred arrests.