Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System

by Roberto Saviano

  The church is packed by now. The police and carabinieri are still nervous, though. I don’t understand. They’re agitated and restless and lose patience over nothing. I walk away from the church and then I understand. A carabinieri car is separating the funeral crowd from a group of well-heeled individuals astride expensive motorcycles, in convertibles, or on powerful scooters. They are the last members of the Giuliano clan, the Salvatore loyalists. The carabinieri fear a confrontation—all hell would break lose. Luckily nothing happens, but their presence is deeply symbolic. A declaration that no one can dominate the center of Naples without their approval or at least without their mediation. They show everyone that they’re there and that, in spite of everything, they’re still the capos.

  The white casket emerges from the church, the crowd presses in to touch it, people faint, bestial cries shatter my eardrums. When the coffin passes below Annalisa’s house, her mother, who couldn’t bring herself to attend the church service, tries to hurl herself off the balcony. She flounders and shouts, her face red and swollen. A group of women hold her back. The usual tragic scene unfolds. Let me be quite clear—the ritual weeping and shows of sorrow are not fictions or falsehoods. Quite the opposite. Yet they reveal the confines in which most Neapolitan women still live, in which they are forced to appeal to strong symbolic behavior to express their grief and make it recognizable to the entire community. This frenetic suffering, although terribly real, maintains the characteristics of a Neapolitan melodrama.

  The journalists keep their distance. Antonio Bassolino and Rosa Russo Iervolino—the president of the region of Campania and the mayor of Naples—are terrified; they fear the neighborhood could rise up against them. But it doesn’t: the people of Forcella have learned how to take advantage of politics and don’t want to make any enemies. Some people applaud the forces of law and order, causing a few journalists to get excited: carabinieri cheered in the neighborhood of the Camorra. What naïveté. That applause was a provocation. Better the carabinieri than the Giulianos is what it said. Some camera crews try to collect eyewitness accounts; they approach a fragile-looking elderly woman who grabs the microphone right away and shouts, “It’s their fault … my son will do fifty years behind bars! Assassins!” The hatred toward the pentiti is well known. The crowd presses in, tension runs high. Realizing that a girl is dead because she decided to listen to music with her girlfriends at the entranceway to her apartment building one spring evening makes your stomach turn. I feel nauseous. I have to keep calm. I have to understand—if that is even possible. Annalisa was born into and lived in this world. Her girlfriends had told her about motorcycle rides with clan boys, and maybe she would have fallen in love with some handsome, rich prince who would have made a career in the System, or maybe with some good old boy who would have broken his back all day long for peanuts. Maybe her destiny was to work in an underground purse factory, ten hours a day for 500 euros a month. Annalisa was moved by the stained skin of the leather workers and had written in her diary, “The girls who make purses always have black hands, and are shut up in the factory all day long. My sister Manu’s there as well, but at least her boss doesn’t make her work when she doesn’t feel well.” Annalisa has become a tragic symbol because the tragedy ended in its most terrible and essential aspect: murder. But here there is not a minute in which the business of living does not seem like a life sentence, a penalty that must be paid for by a wild, fast, and fierce existence. Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less. As her body is being carried away in its white coffin, a classmate calls her cell phone. The ringing on the coffin is the new requiem. Musical tones, a sweet melody. No one answers.

  PART TWO

  KALASHNIKOV

  I ran my finger over it. I even closed my eyes as I traced the entire length from top to bottom, my fingernail catching on the holes, some of which were big enough for my whole fingertip to fit in. I touched all the windows this way. First slowly, then quickly, frantically running my hand every which way over the surface, as if my finger were a crazed worm roaming across the glass, climbing in and out of furrows and burrowing into the holes. Until I got cut. A sudden, sharp pain. I opened my eyes. My finger left a watery reddish purple trail across the glass, and the hole was filled with blood. I stopped acting like an idiot and began sucking my wound.

  The holes that AK-47s make in bullet-resistant glass are perfect. They dig fiercely like woodworms gnawing tunnels. Seen from a distance, the shots create a strange effect, as if tiny bubbles had formed between the layers of polyurethane, in the heart of the glass. Hardly any shopkeeper replaces his windows once they have been sprayed with bullets. Some inject silicone into the cracks or cover them with black tape, but most just leave them the way they are. A bullet-resistant shop window can cost up to 5,000 euros, so it’s better to stick with the violent decorations. Besides, there’s a chance they’ll lure curious customers who stop and ask what happened, chat with the owner, and maybe even buy a little something extra in the end. Rather than replace the damaged windows, they wait until they implode from the next burst of gunfire. At that point insurance will cover the cost, because if the owner gets there first thing in the morning and makes all the merchandise disappear, the spray from an assault rifle is labeled a robbery.

  A shop window shooting is not always an intimidation, a message written in bullets, so much as a necessity. When a new shipment of AK-47s arrive, they have to be tested, to make sure they don’t jam. The Camorra could try them out in peace in the countryside, shoot at old cars, or buy some sheet metal to blow to pieces. But no. They fire at stores—windows, doors, metal shutters—a reminder that there is nothing that does not potentially belong to them, and that everything is really granted by them, part of the economy they alone control. A momentary concession, nothing more, something that can be withdrawn at any time. There’s also a side benefit: the local glass companies with the best prices on replacement windows are all related to the clan; the more broken glass, the more money they make.

  Thirty or so AK-47s had arrived the night before from Eastern Europe. From Macedonia. Skopje to Gricignano d’Aversa, a quick, easy trip that filled the Camorra garages with firepower. As soon as the Iron Curtain fell, Camorra members met with leaders of the crumbling Communist parties. They sat at the bargaining table representing the powerful, capable, and silent West. Aware of the crisis, the clans informally acquired entire arms depots from Eastern European countries—Romania, Poland, the former Yugoslavia—paying for years the salaries of the custodians, guards, and officials in charge of maintaining their military resources. In short, the clan financed a part of those countries’ defense. It turns out that the best way to hide weapons is to keep them in barracks. With Eastern Europe’s arms depots at their disposal, bosses didn’t have to depend on the black market, even when there were leadership turnovers, internal feuds, and crises. This time the weapons had been loaded onto military trucks stolen from American garages. Thanks to the writing on the side, the trucks moved about freely in Italy. The U.S. Navy base in Gricignano d’Aversa is a small and inaccessible colossus, a column of reinforced concrete dropped into the middle of a plain. Built by the Coppolas, like everything else around here. You almost never see the Americans. Checkpoints are rare. Military trucks have complete liberty, so when they pulled into town, the drivers even stopped in the piazza for breakfast, asking around at the bar where they could find “a couple of immigrants to do some quick unloading” as they dunked croissants in their cappuccino. And everyone knows what “quick” means. Crates of guns are only a little heavier than crates of tomatoes, and the African kids who want to do a little overtime after their shifts in the fields get paid 2 euros a crate, four times what they make moving tomatoes or apples.

  In a magazine for the families of military personnel overseas, I once read a short article for people about to be stationed at Gricignano d’Aversa. I translated the piece and wrote it down in my diary so I wouldn’t forget it:

&n
bsp; To understand where you will soon be stationed, imagine yourself in a Sergio Leone film. It’s like the Wild West. Somebody gives orders, there are shoot-outs and unwritten yet unassailable laws. Don’t be alarmed, however, for maximum respect and hospitality are extended to the townspeople and the American military. Nevertheless, leave the military compound only when necessary.

  That Yankee writer taught me something about the place where I lived.

  That morning at the bar, Mariano was strangely euphoric. He was really wound up, downing martinis first thing in the morning.

  “What’s going on?”

  Everyone was asking the same thing. Even the bartender refused him a fourth round. But Mariano didn’t answer, as if it were perfectly clear to everyone.

  “I want to go meet him. They tell me he’s still alive, but is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “How’d he do it? I’m going to use my vacation time and go meet him.”

  “Who? What?”

  “You realize how light it is? And precise. Before you even know it, you’ve let off twenty, thirty shots … it’s brilliant!” Mariano was in ecstasy. The bartender was looking at him the way he’d look at a boy who had just slept with a woman for the first time, that unmistakable expression on his face, the same that Adam must have worn. Then I realized the cause of his euphoria. Mariano had fired an AK-47 for the first time and was so impressed with the contraption that he wanted to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who invented it. Mariano had never shot at anyone; he’d been brought into the clan to handle the distribution of certain brands of coffee in the area bars. A young man with a degree in economics, he was responsible for millions of euros, given the number of bars and coffee distributors that wanted to get in on the clan’s commercial network. The neighborhood capo wanted to be sure that all his men, even those with college degrees—the businessmen as well as the foot soldiers—knew how to shoot. So they’d handed Mariano an AK-47. During the night he had unloaded it into some bar windows, selecting them at random. It wasn’t a warning, but even if he didn’t know why he was shooting at those particular windows, the owners had come up with a valid explanation for sure. There’s always some reason to feel you’re in the wrong. Mariano spoke about the weapon in menacing and professional tones. AK-47: a rather simple name, where AK is short for the Russian avtomat Kalashnikova, “Kalashnikov’s automatic,” and 47 refers to the year in which it was selected as the official weapon of the Soviet Union. Weapons often have encoded names, letters and ciphers intended to conceal their lethal power, symbols of ruthlessness. In truth they are banal labels assigned by some NCO who catalogs new weapons just as he does nuts and bolts. AK-47s are light and easy to use and require only simple maintenance. Their strength is in their size: neither so small as to lack sufficient firepower, like revolvers, nor so big as to become unwieldy or have too much recoil. They are so simple to clean and assemble that in the former Soviet Union schoolboys were taught to do it in an average of two minutes.

  The last time I had heard machine-gun fire was several years ago. Near the university in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. I don’t remember where exactly, but I am certain it was at a crossroads. Four cars blocked Sebastiano Caterino’s vehicle, and killed him with a symphony of AK-47s. Caterino had always been close to Antonio Bardellino, the capo of capos of the Caserta Camorra in the 1980s and 1990s. When Bardellino was killed and the leadership changed, Caterino had managed to flee, escaping the massacre. For thirteen years he had holed up in his house; he only stuck his nose out at night, used bulletproof vehicles when he ventured beyond his front gate, and stayed away from San Cipriano d’Aversa, his hometown. After many years of silence he thought he had again acquired authority, that the rival clan had forgotten about the past and would not attack an old leader such as himself. So he started to raise a new clan in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, the old Roman city that had become his fiefdom. When the marshal from Caterino’s town arrived on the murder scene, he had just one thing to say: “They got him really bad!” Around here the treatment you receive is evaluated in terms of how many bullets they put in you. If they kill you delicately, a single shot to the head or stomach, it is interpreted as a necessary operation, a surgical strike, no malice. Unloading more than two hundred shots into your car and more than forty into your body, on the other hand, is an absolute method of erasing you from the face of the planet. The Camorra has a very long memory and is capable of infinite patience. Thirteen years, 156 months, four AK-47s, 200 shots—a bullet for each month of waiting. In certain places, even the weapons remember, preserving a hatred and condemnation that they spit out when the moment comes.

  On the morning when I ran my fingers over the gun’s decorations, I was wearing a backpack. I was leaving, going to my cousin’s house in Milan. It’s strange how no matter whom you’re talking to, no matter about what, as soon as you say you’re going away, you receive all sorts of good wishes, congratulations, and enthusiastic responses: “Good for you, you’re doing the right thing, I’d leave too.” You don’t need to supply any details or explain what you’re going to do. Whatever the reason, it will be better than the reasons you have for sticking around here. When people ask me where I’m from, I never answer. I’d like to say “the south,” but that sounds too rhetorical. If someone asks on the train, I stare at my feet and pretend not to have heard because I’m always reminded of Vittorini’s novel Conversations in Sicily and I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I will sound like the protagonist, Silvestro Ferrato. But it’s not worth it. Times change, yet the voices remain the same. But that day I happened to meet a large woman who could barely jam herself into her seat. She had boarded the Eurostar in Bologna with an incredible desire to talk, as if she intended to fill the time the way she had her body. She insisted on knowing where I was from, what I did, where I was going. I was tempted to reply simply by showing her the cut on my finger. But I didn’t. Instead I told her, “I’m from Naples.” A city that lets loose so many words that merely uttering its name frees you from saying anything more. A place where bad becomes evil, and good becomes total purity. I fell asleep.

  Mariano called me early the next morning. He was anxious. Accountants and organizers were needed for a delicate operation some neighborhood businessmen were carrying out in Rome. Pope John Paul II was ill, perhaps already dead, even though the official announcement hadn’t been made. Mariano asked me to join him, so I boarded a train again and headed south. Within the space of a few days, stores, hotels, restaurants, and supermarkets would need extraordinary quantities of supplies of every sort. There was a ton of money to be made. Soon millions of people would be pouring into the capital, living on the streets, and spending long hours on the sidewalks, all of them needing to drink and eat—in a word, to buy. You could triple prices, sell all day and night, squeeze the profit out of every minute. Mariano was called in. He proposed that I keep him company and offered a bit of money in return for my kindness. Nothing’s free. Mariano was promised a month of vacation so he could fulfill his dream of going to Russia to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov; he’d even received guarantees from a man from one of the Russian families who swore he knew him. Mariano would be able to look Kalashnikov in the eye and touch the hands that had invented such a powerful weapon.

  The day of the pope’s funeral, Rome was jam-packed. It was impossible to make out what street you were on or where the sidewalk was. One gigantic sea of flesh had covered asphalt, doorways, and windows, a lava flow that oozed into every possible space and seemed to increase in volume, exploding the channels through which it ran. Human beings everywhere. Everywhere. A dog was trembling under a bus, terrorized at having all of his usual space invaded by legs and feet. Mariano and I had stopped on the steps of a building, the only shelter from a group that had decided to show their devotion by singing a little song to Saint Francis for six hours straight. We sat and ate a sandwich. I was exhausted. Mariano, on the other hand, never got tired; being compensated for every drop of energy he spent made h
im feel constantly charged.

  All of a sudden I heard someone call my name. I knew who it was even before I turned around. My father. We hadn’t seen each other in two years, and even though we lived in the same city, we never met. It was unbelievable that we ran into each other in this Roman labyrinth of flesh. My father was highly embarrassed. He didn’t know what to say or even if he could greet me as he’d like. But he was euphoric, the way you get on trips that promise intense emotions within the space of a few hours, beautiful experiences you know you won’t have again for a long time, so you try to drink it all in quickly, fearful that you’ll miss out on other joys in the brief time you have. Taking advantage of a Romanian airline’s reduced fares on flights to Italy for the pope’s funeral, he had bought tickets for his lady friend and her whole family. The women were all wearing scarves, and rosaries wound around their wrists. It was impossible to figure out what street we were on; all I remember is a huge sheet hanging between two buildings: “Eleventh Commandment: Do not push and you will not be pushed.” Written in twelve languages. My father’s new relations were happy indeed to be taking part in something as important as the death of the pope. They were all dreaming of an amnesty for immigrants. For these Romanians, the best way to become Italian citizens, sentimentally if not legally, was to participate in such an immense and universal event, to suffer together for the same reason. My father adored John Paul II. He was fascinated by the man who let everyone kiss his hand, and intrigued by how he had been able to obtain such vast power and popularity without open threats or obvious stratagems. All the powerful people had knelt in front of him. For my father, this was enough to earn his admiration. He and his companion’s mother knelt down, spontaneously reciting the rosary right there on the street. I saw a child emerge from the mass of Romanian relatives. I realized right away it was my father and Micaela’s child. I knew that he had been born in Italy so as to receive Italian citizenship, but that he had always lived in Romania because his mother needed to be there. He was anchored to her skirt. I had never seen him before, but I knew his name. Stefano Nicolae. Stefano after my father’s father, Nicolae after Micaela’s father. My father called him Stefano, and his mother and Romanian relatives called him Nico. The name Nico would eventually win out, but my father hadn’t given up yet. Of course the first gift Nico had received from his father when he got off the plane was a ball. This was only the second time my father had seen his little son, but he acted as if they had always been together. He scooped him up in his arms and came over to me.