“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”
They’d repeat those famous lines from Taxi Driver, then start fighting, landing punches on the sternum, the kind that make a noise and echo in your chest.
The Casalesi bosses took the problem seriously. The brawls, altercations, and threats were not easily tolerated: too many nervous mothers, too many complaints. So they sent a warning through a neighborhood capo, a sort of call to order. The capo meets them in a bar and tells them the bosses are losing patience with them. But Giuseppe and Romeo keep acting in their imaginary film, beating up whomever they feel like, pissing in gas tanks of the neighborhood kids’ motorcycles. So the bosses have them sent for again. They want to talk to them directly; the clan can’t accept such behavior. The paternalistic tolerance common to these parts translates into the need to punish; the boys need a beating, a brutal public spanking to make them toe the line. But Giuseppe and Romeo snub the bosses’ summons and continue sprawling about at the bar, playing video poker or glued to the TV, watching their favorite films on DVD, hours spent memorizing lines, imitating body language, expressions, and wardrobe choices. They think they can stand up to anyone. Even the big guys. In fact, they believe that precisely by standing up to the big guys they’ll be feared for real. Like Tony and Manny in Scarface, they set no limits. They don’t listen to anyone, but their continual raids and intimidations make them feel they’re the viceroys of Caserta. Giuseppe and Romeo had not chosen to join the clan. They didn’t even try. That path was too slow and regimented, they didn’t want to rise silently through the ranks. Besides, for years the Casalesi had been placing the really good members in the organization’s economic sectors and not in the hit squads. Giuseppe and Romeo were the complete opposite of the new Camorra soldier. They thought they could ride the wave of the area’s bad reputation. They weren’t affiliates, but wanted to enjoy the privileges of Camorristi. They expected the bars to serve them for free, assumed that gas for their scooters was their due, and that their mothers would receive free groceries; when someone dared to rebel, they would descend upon them immediately, smashing windows and beating up greengrocers and salesgirls. So in the spring of 2004 some clan emissaries set up a meeting with them on the outskirts of Castelvolturno, in the Parco Mare area, where sand, sea, and trash all flowed together. If the bosses couldn’t get to them with negative proposals, they’d try with positive ones. Some tempting deal, or maybe even the chance to participate in a killing. The first real hit of their lives. I pictured them racing full throttle on their motorini, replaying in their minds all their favorite movie scenes, in which the big guys are forced to yield to the ostentatious new heroes. Young Spartans went to war with the feats of Achilles and Hector in their heads, but around here you go to kill and be killed thinking of Scarface, GoodFellas, Donnie Brasco, and The Godfather. Every time I go by Parco Mare, I imagine the scene that the police reconstructed, that was reported in the newspapers. Giuseppe and Romeo arrived way ahead of the set time. Burning with anxiety. They were there waiting when the car pulled up. A group of men got out. The two kids went over to greet them, but they grabbed Romeo right away and started beating up Giuseppe. Then they pointed the barrel of an automatic at his chest and fired. I’m sure that the scene from GoodFellas flashed before Romeo’s eyes, the scene where Tommy DeVito is invited to take part in the management of Cosa Nostra in America, but instead of welcoming him in a hall crowded with bosses, they take him to an empty room and shoot him in the head. It’s not true that films are a lie, that you can’t live as in the movies, that as soon as you stick your head out of the theater, you realize things are not the same. Only one moment is different: the moment when Al Pacino gets up from the fountain into which his double, mowed down by machine-gun fire, has fallen, and dries his face, wiping off the color of blood. The moment when Joe Pesci washes his hair and stops the fake bleeding. But you don’t want to know that part, so you don’t understand it. When Romeo sees Giuseppe on the ground, I’m sure—though I can never confirm it— that he understood the exact difference between movies and reality, between a staged scene and the smell in the air, between his own life and a script. Then it was his turn. They shot him in the throat, finishing him off with a bullet to the head. The sum of their ages was barely thirty. That was how the Casalesi clan resolved the problem of this micro-criminal excrescence nourished on movies. They didn’t even make an anonymous call to the police or ambulance. They left the boy cadavers there, their hands to be pecked at by seagulls and their lips and noses nibbled by stray dogs that roam the trash-covered beaches. But that’s something the movies never show. They end just the minute before.
There’s no real difference between movie audiences in the land of the Camorra and elsewhere. Cinematographic references everywhere create mythologies of imitation. If elsewhere you may like Scarface and secretly identify with him, here you can be Scarface, but you have to be him all the way.
In the land of the Camorra, people are also passionate about art and literature. Sandokan had an enormous library in his villa bunker, with dozens of volumes, all on two topics: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Napoléon Bonaparte. Sandokan was attracted to the Bourbon state’s importance, bragging that his ancestors were officers in southern Italy, the Terra di Lavoro. He was fascinated by the genius of Bonaparte, who rose from a low military rank to conquer half of Europe; he saw similarities to his own life, for he’d started at the bottom and was now generalissimo of one of the most powerful clans in Europe. Sandokan, who had once been a medical student, preferred to pass his time in hiding painting religious icons and portraits of Napoléon and Mussolini. They’re still for sale today, in Caserta shops that are above suspicion: extremely rare holy images, Sandokan’s own face inserted in place of Christ’s. He also liked reading epics. Homer, the Arthurian legends, and Walter Scott were his favorites. It was his love of Scott that inspired him to baptize one of his numerous children with the grandiloquent, proud name of Ivanhoe.
But the names of the sons always bear a trace of the passions of the father. Giuseppe Misso, boss of the Sanità neighborhood clan, has three grandchildren: Ben Hur, Jesus, and Emiliano Zapata. When on trial, Misso always assumed the attitude of political leader, conservative thinker, and rebel; he recently wrote a novel, I leoni di marmo, “The Marble Lions.” Several hundred copies were sold in a few weeks in Naples. Told with a mangled syntax but in a furious style, it is the story of Naples in the 1980s and 1990s, the story of the boss’s formation, his emergence as lone warrior against the Camorra of rackets and drugs, in defense of a chivalrous but vaguely defined code of robbery and theft. He was arrested many times in his long criminal career, and each time he was found with books by Julius Evola and Ezra Pound.
Augusto La Torre, the boss of Mondragone, is a student of psychology, an avid reader of Carl Jung, and an expert on Sigmund Freud. A glance at the titles of the books he requested in prison reveals a lengthy bibliography of scholars of psychoanalysis, and in court, quotations of Lacan are interwoven with his reflections on the Gestalt school of psychology. A knowledge the boss utilized in his rise to power, an unexpected managerial and military weapon.
Even one of Paolo Di Lauro’s most loyal men is a lover of culture: Tommaso Prestieri produces many neo-melodic singers and is a connoisseur of contemporary art. Many bosses are art collectors. Pasquale Galasso’s villa housed a private museum with about three hundred antiques; the jewel of the collection was the throne of the Bourbon king Francis I. And Luigi Vollaro, known as ‘o califfo or the caliph, owned a painting by his favorite artist, Botticelli.
The police were able to arrest Prestieri because of his love of music. He was caught at the Teatro Bellini in Naples when he went to hear a concert while a fugitive. After his sentencing, Prestieri declared, “In art I am free, I don’t need to be released from prison.” Painting and song offer equilibrium and impossible serenity to an unlucky boss such as Prestieri, who has lost two brothers, both killed in cold blo
od.
*The lowest-ranking Mafioso.—Trans.
ABERDEEN, MONDRAGONE
Augusto La Torre, the psychoanalyst boss, was one of Antonio Bardellino’s favorites. He had taken his father’s place when he was young, becoming the sole leader of the Chiuovi clan, as it was called in Mondragone, which ruled in northern Caserta, southern Lazio, and along the Domitian coast. The La Torre clan had sided with Sandokan Schiavone’s enemies, but their management and business savvy, the only elements powerful enough to alter conflictual relationships among Camorra families, eventually reconciled them to the Casalesi, with whom they worked while still maintaining their autonomy. Augusto didn’t come by his name by chance. La Torre family tradition was to name the firstborn after a Roman emperor. But in this case they inverted history; instead of Augustus being followed by Tiberius, Tiberius was father to Augustus.
Scipio Africanus’s villa near Lake Patria, Hannibal’s battles at Capua, and the unassailable might of the Samnites, the first warriors in Europe to attack the Roman legions and then flee to the mountains— these stories are legends in local Camorra families, who consider themselves linked to the distant past. The clans’ historical fantasies clashed with the widespread image of Mondragone as the mozzarella capital of Italy. My father used to stuff me full of mozzarelle from Mondragone, but it was impossible to decide which area’s mozzarella was the best. The flavors were too diverse: the light, sickly sweetness of Battipaglia, the heavy saltiness of Aversa, or the purity of Mondragone. But the Mondragone mozzarella masters had a way to tell. A good mozzarella leaves an aftertaste, what country folk call ‘o ciato ‘e bbufala or buffalo breath. If there’s no buffalo aftertaste, the mozzarella isn’t any good. I liked to stroll back and forth on the Mondragone wharf, one of my favorite summer destinations before it was demolished. A tongue of reinforced concrete, boat moorings built out over the sea. A useless, unused construction.
Mondragone suddenly became the place for all the kids around Caserta and the Pontine Marshes who wanted to emigrate to the UK. Emigration, the chance of a lifetime, a way to finally get out, but not as a waiter, a scullery boy in a McDonald’s, or a bartender paid in pints of dark beer. They went to Mondragone to try to make contacts with the right people, who could get you a good rent and an in with employers. In Mondragone there were people who could get you a job in insurance or real estate, and who helped the desperate, chronically unemployed find a decent contract and respectable work. Mondragone was the door to Great Britain. Starting in the late 1990s, having a friend in Mondragone all of a sudden meant you’d be valued for what you’re worth, without needing recommendations or connections. A rare thing, impossible in Italy, especially in the south. Around here, you always need a protector, someone who can at least get your foot in the door, if not the rest of you. Presenting yourself without a protector is like showing up without arms and legs. With something missing. But in Mondragone they’d take your résumé and see whom to send it to in the UK. Your skills mattered and, even more, the way you used them. But only in London or Aberdeen. Not in Campania, the most provincial of the provinces of Europe.
My friend Matteo decided to give it a try, to leave once and for all. He’d graduated cum laude and was tired of doing internships, of supporting himself working construction sites. He’d put aside some money and got the name of a guy in Mondragone who would help him line up some job interviews in Britain. I went with him. We waited for hours at the beach where Matteo’s contact had told him to meet. It was summer. Mondragone’s beaches are invaded by vacationers from all over Campania, the ones who can’t afford the Amalfi coast or a summer rental on the shore, so they commute from the hinterland. Till the mid-1980s mozzarelle were sold on the beach, in wooden pails overflowing with boiling buffalo milk. The bathers ate them with their hands, the milk dripping all over. Kids would lick their hands, salty from the sea, then take a bite. But no one sells them anymore, now it’s grissini and coconut slices. Our contact was two hours late. When he finally showed up, tanned and wearing only a skimpy bathing suit, he explained that he’d eaten breakfast late, so had gone for a swim late and had dried himself off late. That was his excuse—it was the sun’s fault. He took us to a travel agency. That was all. We thought we were going to meet some big middleman, but instead we were merely introduced at an agency, and not a particularly elegant one at that. Not one of those agencies with hundreds of brochures, just an ordinary hole-in-the-wall kind of place. But you needed a local contact to access their services; to anybody just walking in, it seemed like a normal travel agency. A young woman asked Matteo for his résumé and told us the first available flight to Aberdeen. That’s where they were sending him. They handed him a list of businesses where he could go for an interview, and for a small fee they’d even set up appointments with the people doing the hiring. Never had a temp agency been so efficient. Two days later we boarded the plane for Scotland, a quick and affordable trip from Mondragone.
Aberdeen felt like home, though this Scottish city couldn’t have been more different from Mondragone. The third-largest city in Scotland, dark, dirty, and gray, but it rains less than in London. Before the Italian clans arrived, Aberdeen didn’t know how to exploit its resources for recreation and tourism, and the restaurant, hotel, and entertainment businesses were organized in the sad English manner. The same old thing, people packed into pubs once a week. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, it was Antonio La Torre, Augustos brother, who set up a series of commercial activities in Scotland, which in the space of a few years became the feather in the cap of Scottish entrepreneurship. Most La Torre clan activities in Britain are perfectly legal: acquisition and management of properties and businesses, commerce in foodstuffs with Italy. Enormous turnover, difficult to place a figure on. In Aberdeen, Matteo sought everything he’d been denied in Italy. We walked around feeling pleased; for the first time in our lives being from Campania seemed sufficient to guarantee some measure of success. At 27/29 Union Terrace, I found myself in front of Pavarotti’s, a restaurant registered in Antonio La Torre’s name and listed on tourist websites. Aberdeen had become chic, an elegant address for fine dining and important dealings. At Italissima, the gastronomic fair held in Paris, clan businesses even marketed themselves as the height of Made in Italy. Antonio La Torre advertised his own brand of catering activities there. His success had made him one of the top Scottish businessmen in Europe.
Antonio La Torre was arrested in Aberdeen in March 2005. There was an Italian warrant for his arrest on account of Camorra criminal conspiracy and extortion, but for years his British citizenship and the fact that the authorities did not recognize his alleged crimes shielded him and he had been able to avoid extradition. Scotland didn’t want to lose one of its most brilliant entrepreneurs.
In 2002 the Court of Naples issued preventive-detention orders for thirty people connected to the La Torre clan. It emerged that extortion, contracts, and control of economic activities were bringing in vast sums of money, which the clan then invested overseas, particularly in Britain, where an actual clan colony had formed. The colonists hadn’t invaded or introduced bearish competition in the workforce; instead they infused the city with economic energy, revitalized the tourist industry, inspired new import-export activities, and injected new vigor in the real estate sector.
The international energy from Mondragone was personified by Rockefeller. That’s what people here call him because of his obvious talent for making deals and his control of vast sums of money. Rockefeller is Raffaele Barbato, sixty-two years old, a native of Mondragone. Maybe even he has forgotten his real name. He has a Dutch wife, and until the late 1980s he did business in Holland, where he owned two casinos that drew international big shots, such as the brother of Bob Cellino, who’d set up casinos in Las Vegas, and Miami-based, Slavic Mafiosi. His partners were a certain Liborio, a Sicilian with Cosa Nostra connections, and Emi, a Dutchman who later moved to Spain, where he opened hotels, residences, and discos. According to Mario Sperlongaro,
Stefano Piccirillo, and Girolamo Rozzera—all pentiti—it was Rockefeller, together with Augusto La Torre, who hatched the idea of going to Caracas to try to meet Venezuelan narcotraffickers, whose coke prices beat those of the Colombians who supplied the Neapolitans and Casalesi. And it was Rockefeller who found a comfortable place for Augusto to sleep when he went into hiding in Holland: the skeet-shooting club. Even though he was far from the Mondragone countryside, the boss could keep in shape firing at flying clay pigeons. Rockefeller had an enormous network. He was one of the best-known businessmen not only in Europe but also in the USA; through his gambling houses he made contacts with Italian-American Mafiosi who were slowly being squeezed out by the Albanian clans taking over in New York. As a result the Mafiosi were increasingly allied to Campania Camorra families and eager to traffic in drugs and invest in European markets, restaurants, and hotels through Mondragone’s open door. Rockefeller is the owner of Adam and Eve, renamed La Playa, a beautiful holiday village on the Mondragone coast, where, according to the magistrates, many fugitive affiliates vacationed. The more comfortable the hideout, the less the temptation to turn state’s witness and put an end to life on the run. La Torre was fierce with pentiti. Francesco Tiberio, Augusto’s cousin, phoned Domenico Pensa, who had testified against the Stolder clan, and in no uncertain terms invited him to leave town.
“I heard from the Stolders that you collaborated against them. Given as how we don’t want informants in this town, you’d better get out of Mondragone or else someone will come and cut your head off.”
Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System Page 27