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

by Roberto Saviano

  Augusto’s legionnaires would do anything for him. They even followed him when he turned state’s witness. In January 2003, after his wife’s arrest, the boss decided to take the big step. He accused himself and his men of forty or so homicides, gave the locations of the wells where they’d exploded people, and charged himself with dozens and dozens of extortions. A confession that focused more on military than economic activity. His most loyal men—Mario Sperlongano, Giuseppe Valente, Girolamo Rozzera, Pietro Scuttini, Salvatore Orabona, Ernesto Cornacchia, Angelo Gagliardi—soon followed him. Once in jail, silence becomes the bosses’ best weapon for holding on to authority, for formally maintaining power, even if the harsh prison routine removes them from hands-on management. But Augusto La Torre is a special case: by confessing and having all his men follow suit, there was no fear that someone would kill his family as a result of his defection. Nor did collaborating with the authorities seem to undermine the Mondragone cartel’s economic empire. His confession only helped reveal the logic of the killings and the history of power along the Caserta and Lazio coast. Like many Camorra bosses, Augusto La Torre spoke of the past. Without pentiti, the history of power could not be written. Without pentiti the truth—facts, details, and mechanisms—is only discovered ten, twenty years later, as if a man were to understand how his vital organs worked only after he is dead.

  Collaboration on the part of Augusto La Torre and his chiefs of staff presents a certain risk; they could receive substantial sentence reductions in exchange for confessing and be released a few years later. They could delegate military power to others, above all the Albanian crime families, and still maintain their legal economic power. It’s as if they decided to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to use their knowledge as a way of living on their legal activities only and to avoid life sentences and internal feuds in the process. Augusto had never been able to stand being locked up; unlike the great bosses who’d trained him, he was incapable of surviving decades of incarceration. He expected the prison cafeteria to serve vegetarian food. And as he loved movies but wasn’t allowed a VCR in his cell, when he felt like seeing The Godfather, he’d ask a local broadcaster to air it in the evening, before he went to bed.

  For the magistrates, La Torre’s collaboration is laden with ambiguity, for he never renounced his role as boss. His revelations were an extension of his power, as a letter to his uncle shows: he reassures him that he “saved” him from any possible involvement in clan affairs, but, good storyteller that he is, he also does not fail to threaten him and two other relatives, thus averting the possibility of an alliance against him developing in Mondragone:

  “Your son-in-law and his father feel protected by the walking dead.”

  The boss, even as a pentito, still asked for money from his jail cell in the Aquila prison. He got around the System by delivering commands and requests for cash in letters he gave to his mother or driver, Pietro Scuttini. According to the magistrates, those requests were actually extortions. A polite, courteous letter to the owner of one of the largest cheese makers on the Domitian coast proves that Augusto still considered him under his control.

  “Dear Peppe, I need to ask you a huge favor, because I’ve been ruined. If you would like to help me—but I only ask in the name of our old friendship and not for any other reason, and even if you say no, don’t worry, I’ll always look out for you! I am in urgent need of ten thousand euros. You also have to tell me if you can give me a thousand euros a month, which I need to live with my children.”

  The standard of living the La Torre family was used to was way above the economic assistance level the state provides to collaborators. I only managed to understand the family dealings after reading the documents of the mega-confiscation carried out under the Santa Maria Capua Vetere Court orders in 1992. They seized properties worth about 230 million euros, nineteen companies worth 323 million euros, as well as manufacturing equipment and machinery worth 133 million euros. Numerous factories located along the coast between Naples and Gaeta, including a dairy, a sugar refinery, four supermarkets, nine seaside villas, buildings, land, as well as big cars and motorcycles. Every company had about sixty employees. The judges also ordered confiscated the company that had won the trash-collection contract in Mondragone. A huge operation that annulled a vast economic power, but microscopic compared to actual clan operations. A grandiose villa near Ariana di Gaeta, whose fame had reached all the way to Aberdeen, was also seized. Four stories, right on the cliffs, a swimming pool complete with underwater labyrinth, designed after the villa of Tiberius—not the founder of the Mondragone clan, but the Roman emperor who had retired to the island of Capri. I never did get inside; legends and court documents were the lens through which I learned of the existence of this imperial mausoleum, sentinel of the clan’s Italian properties. The coastal zone could have been a sort of infinite space, inspiring every architectural fantasy imaginable. Instead over time it became a hodgepodge of houses and small villas, thrown up quickly to attract tourists to southern Lazio and Naples. No zoning regulations, no permits. As a result, groups of African immigrants were crammed into cottages from Castelvolturno to Mondragone, and the parks that were planned, the grounds that were for new vacation homes, became unregulated dumps. None of the coastal towns had a purification plant. Now a brownish sea bathes beaches covered in trash. In a few years, even the most remote remembrance of beauty had been canceled out. In the summertime some nightclubs turned into regular brothels. Friends, preparing for the evening’s activities, would show me their empty wallets. Empty not of cash, but of thin foil packets with a circular soul—condoms. They were letting it be known that it was safe to go to Mondragone to fuck without protection: “Tonight we go without!”

  Augusto La Torre was Mondragone’s condom. The boss decided to keep watch over the health of his subjects. Mondragone became a sort of temple, clean of the most dreaded of sexually transmitted diseases. While the rest of the world was plagued with HIV, northern Caserta was fully under control. The clan was meticulous, tracking everyone’s test results. To the extent possible, the clan kept complete lists; they did not want their territory infected. And so when a man close to Augusto tested positive for HIV, they found out immediately. Fernando Brodella frequented the local girls; he could be dangerous. Unlike the Bidognetti clan, who sent their affiliates to the best doctors and paid for surgery in the top hospitals in Europe, the La Torres didn’t even consider sending Brodella to a good doctor or paying for his treatment. They killed him in cold blood. Clan orders: eliminate the sick to stop the epidemic. An infectious disease, especially one transmitted sexually, through the least controllable act, could only be stopped by removing those who were infected once and for all. The only way to be sure they would not infect anyone was to end their lives.

  Capital investments in Campania also had to be safe. They even bought a villa in Anacapri that housed the local carabinieri headquarters. With carabinieri as tenants, they were guaranteed not to run into any difficulties. When the La Torres realized the villa would bring in more money with tourists, they evicted the carabinieri and divided it into six apartments with a yard and parking spaces—before the anti-Mafia division arrived and seized the whole place. Clean, safe investments, with no speculative risks.

  After Augusto turned state’s witness, the new boss, Luigi Fragnoli, a La Torre loyalist, started having problems with some affiliates such as Giuseppe Mancone, also known as Rambo. Rambo bore a vague resemblance to Stallone, his body pumped up from weight lifting. The drug market he’d established was gaining in importance; soon he would be able to kick out the old bosses, whose reputation had been shattered by the pentiti. According to the anti-Mafia prosecutor, the Mondragone clans asked the Birra family from Ercolano to hire the killers. Two hit men arrived in Mondragone to take out Rambo in August 2003. They showed up on one of those big motor scooters—not terribly maneuverable, but so menacing they couldn’t resist using it for the ambush. They’d never set foot in Mondragon
e, but didn’t have any problems spotting their victim; he was at the Roxy Bar, as always. The motorbike came to a halt. One of them got off, walked decisively up to Rambo, emptied an entire clip into him, then returned to the bike.

  “Everything all set? You did it?”

  “Yeah, I did it, go go go.”

  There was a group of kids near the bar, deciding what to do for the August 15 ferragosto holiday. As soon as they saw the guys from Ercolano, they realized what was going on; there was no mistaking the sound of an automatic for fireworks. They all lay down, face to the ground, fearing to be targeted as potential witnesses. Only one person didn’t look away. One person stared at the killer without lowering her eyes, without pressing her chest to the tarmac or covering her face with her hands. A thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher. The woman testified, made identifications, reported the killing. Among the many reasons for keeping quiet, for pretending nothing happened, for going home and living as before, are the fear of intimidation and, even more, futility—one killer arrested was just one out of many. And yet among the slag heap of reasons to keep quiet, the Mondragone schoolteacher found one motivation to speak: the truth. A truth that seems natural, like an everyday, habitual gesture, an obvious and necessary act, like breathing. She testified without asking anything in return. She didn’t expect a stipend or police protection, didn’t set a price on her word. She told what she’d seen, described the killer’s face, his angular features and thick eyebrows. After the shooting, the motor scooter sped off, but it made several wrong turns, heading down dead-end streets and having to turn around. They seemed more like schizophrenic tourists than killers. In the trial that resulted from the schoolteacher’s testimony, Salvatore Cefariello, the twenty-four-year-old killer considered to be in the pay of the Ercolano clans, was condemned for life. The judge who took the teacher’s testimony called her “a rose in the desert,” blooming in a land where truth is always the powerful people’s version of things, where it is almost never stated, a rare commodity to be bartered for a profit.

  And yet her confession made her life difficult. It was as if she had snagged a thread, and her entire existence unraveled along with her courageous testimony. She had been engaged, but her fiancé left her. She lost her job and was transferred to a protected location where she received a small state stipend, just enough to survive. Some family members took their distance, and a profound loneliness descended upon her. A loneliness that explodes violently in her daily life when she wants to dance and has no partner, when cell phones are never answered, when friends stop calling and eventually disappear. It wasn’t testifying in itself that generated such fear, or her identifying a killer that caused such a scandal. The logic of omertà isn’t so simple. What made the young teacher’s gesture scandalous is that she considered being able to testify something natural, instinctive, and vital. In a land where truth is considered to be what gets you something and lying what makes you lose, living as if you actually believe truth can exist is incomprehensible. So the people around you feel uncomfortable, undressed by the gaze of one who has renounced the rules of life itself, which they have fully accepted. And accepted without feeling ashamed, because in the end that’s just how things are and have always been; you can’t change it all on your own, and so it’s better to save your energy, stay on track, and live the way you’re supposed to live.

  In Aberdeen my eyes were confronted with the material success of Italian entrepreneurship. It’s odd to see the distant branches if you know the roots. I don’t know how to describe it, but seeing the restaurants, offices, insurance firms, and buildings was like being grabbed by the ankles, turned upside down, and flung about until everything—house keys and small change—fell out of my pockets and mouth, even my soul, if that can be commercialized. The cash flows radiate in all directions, sucking energy from the center. Knowing this is not the same as seeing it. I went with Matteo to a job interview. They hired him, obviously. He wanted me to stay in Aberdeen as well.

  “Here all you have to do is be yourself, Robbe’.”

  Matteo had to be from Campania to have that aura, to have his résumé, degree, and desire to work be appreciated. The very origins that in Scotland allowed him to become a full-fledged citizen classified him in Italy as little more than a waste of a man, devoid of protection and importance, defeated right from the start because he hadn’t set his life on the proper track. Matteo suddenly burst into a happiness never seen before. The more his spirits soared, the more I was weighed down by a bitter melancholy. I’ve never been able to take enough distance from the place I was born and the behavior of people I hated; I’ve never felt myself truly different from the fierce dynamics that crush lives and longing. Being born in certain places means you’re like a hunting dog, born with the smell of the hare already in your nose. You chase after the hare even against your own will, even if, once you catch it, you snap your jaws and let it go. I was able to follow the routes, streets, and paths with unconscious obsession, with a cursed ability to understand completely the conquered territories.

  I wanted to get out of Scotland, go away and never set foot in that country again. I left as soon as I could. I had trouble sleeping on the plane; the lack of air and the darkness outside my window grabbed my throat, as if I were wearing a tie that was too tight, pressing against my Adam’s apple. Perhaps my claustrophobia wasn’t caused by a tiny seat on a minuscule plane, or by the darkness outside, but by the sensation of being crushed in a reality like a chicken coop crammed full of starving birds, ready to eat and be eaten. As if everything were just one territory with one dimension and one syntax, understood everywhere. A feeling of no exit, of being constrained to join the big battle or not exist. I returned to Italy thinking about the tracks on which high-speed trains travel; the capital flowing into the great European economy rushes in one direction, while in the other— southbound—comes everything that would be infectious elsewhere, entering and exiting through the forced nets of the open and flexible economy, creating—in the continuous cycle of transformation— wealth elsewhere, but without ever triggering any form of development in the lands where the metamorphosis began.

  Rubbish has swollen the belly of southern Italy, stretching it as if it were pregnant, but the fetus never grows; it aborts money, then immediately becomes pregnant again, only to abort and conceive again, to the point where the body is ruined, the arteries are clogged, the lungs filled, the synapses destroyed. Over and over and over again.

  LAND OF FIRES

  It’s not hard to imagine something, not hard to picture in your mind a person or gesture, or something that doesn’t exist. It’s not even complicated to imagine your own death. It’s far more difficult to imagine the economy in all its aspects: the finances, profit percentages, negotiations, debts, and investments. There are no faces to visualize, nothing precise to fix in your mind. You may be able to picture the impact of the economy, but not its cash flows, bank accounts, individual transactions. If you try to imagine it all, you risk shutting your eyes to concentrate and racking your brains till you start seeing those psychedelic distortions painted on the backs of your eyelids.

  I kept trying to construct in my mind an image of the economy, something that could convey the idea of its process and production, its buying and selling. But it was impossible to come up with a flow chart, something of precise iconic compactness. Perhaps the only way to represent the workings of the economy is to understand what it leaves behind, to follow the trail of parts that fall away, like flaking of dead skin, as it marches onward.

  The most concrete emblem of every economic cycle is the dump. Accumulating everything that ever was, dumps are the true aftermath of consumption, something more than the mark every product leaves on the surface of the earth. The south of Italy is the end of the line for the dregs of production, useless leftovers, and toxic waste. If all the trash that, according to the Italian environmental group Legambiente, escapes official inspection were collected in one place, it would form a mountain weigh
ing 14 million tons and rising 47,900 feet from a base of three hectares. Mont Blanc rises 15,780 feet, Everest 29,015. So this heap of unregulated and unreported waste would be the highest mountain on earth. This is how I came to imagine the DNA of the economy, its commercial transactions and profit dividends, the additions and subtractions of accountants. It is as if this mountain had exploded and scattered over the south of Italy, in particular in Campania, Sicily, Calabria, and Puglia, the regions with the greatest number of environmental crimes. These same regions head the list for the largest criminal associations, the highest unemployment rate, and the greatest number of volunteers for the military and police forces. Always the same list, eternal and immutable. In the last thirty years, the area around Caserta, between the Garigliano River and Lake Patria—the land of the Mazzoni clan—has absorbed tons of ordinary and toxic waste.