Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (14 page)

Ugariello proposes they form hit squads, or trawlers, as Camorristi call them, men who hole up in safe houses and never leave their hiding places except to strike. But Petrone, his interlocutor, isn’t as relaxed:

“Yeah, but if one of these bastards ends up finding some hidden trawler somewhere, if they spot us and trail us, they’ll break our heads … let’s at least do in a few of them before we die, you know what I mean? At least let me eliminate four or five of them!”

Petrone’s idea is to murder the ones who don’t know they’ve been found out:

“It’s easiest when they’re comrades, you get them in your car and then you take them out.”

The Di Lauros win because they are less predictable when they strike, and because they already foresee their destiny. But before the end they have to inflict as many losses as possible on the enemy. A kamikaze logic, no explosions. The only strategy that offers any chance of winning when you’re in the minority. They start hitting right away, even before the trawlers are formed.

On January 2 they kill Crescenzo Marino, the McKays’ father. He hangs facedown in his Smart, the most expensive model, an unusual automotive choice for a sixty-year-old man. Maybe he thought it would fool the lookouts. A single shot right in the center of his forehead. The merest trickle of blood runs down his face. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t be dangerous to go out just for a few minutes, just for a second. But it was. On the same day the Spaniards bump off Salvatore Barra in a bar in Casavatore. It’s the day that Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the president of the Italian Republic, arrives in Naples to ask the city to react, to offer institutional words of courage and express the support of the state. Three ambushes occur during the hours of his visit.

On January 5 they shoot Carmela Attrice in the face. She is the mother of the secessionist Francesco Barone
‘o russo
—the Russian—whom investigations identified as being close to the McKays. She no longer leaves her house, so they use a kid as bait. He rings the bell. She knows him, knows who he is, so she doesn’t think there’s any danger. Still in her pajamas, she goes downstairs, opens the door, and someone sticks the barrel of a gun in her face. Blood and brains pour out of her head as from a broken egg.

When I arrived at the scene in Case Celesti, the body hadn’t yet been covered with a sheet. People were walking in her blood, leaving footprints everywhere. I swallowed hard, trying to calm my stomach. Carmela Attrice hadn’t run away even though they’d warned her. She knew her son was a Spaniard, but the Camorra war is full of uncertainty.
Nothing is defined, nothing is clear. Things become real only when they happen. In the dynamics of power, of absolute power, nothing exists other than what is concrete. And so fleeing, staying, escaping, and informing are choices that seem too suspended, too uncertain, and every piece of advice always finds its opposite twin. Only a concrete occurrence can make you decide. But when it happens, all you can do is accept the decision.

When you die on the street, you’re surrounded by a tremendous racket. It’s not true that you die alone. Unfamiliar faces right in front of your nose, people touching your legs and arms to see if you’re already dead or if it’s worth calling an ambulance. The faces of all the mortally wounded, all the expressions of the dying, seem to share the same fear. And the same shame. It may seem strange, but right before the end there’s a sense of shame.
Lo scuorno
is what they call it here. A bit like being naked in public—that’s how it feels when you’re mortally wounded in the street. I’ve never gotten used to seeing murder victims. The nurses and policemen are calm, impassive, going through the motions they’ve learned by heart, no matter whom they’re dealing with. “We’ve got calluses on our hearts and leather lining our stomachs,” a young mortuary van driver once said to me. When you get there before the ambulance does, it’s hard to take your eyes off the victim, even if you wish you’d never seen him. I’ve never understood that this is how you die. The first time I saw someone who’d been killed, I must have been about thirteen. It is still vivid in my mind. I woke up feeling embarrassed: poking out from my pajamas was the clear sign of an unwanted erection. That classic morning erection, impossible to disguise. I remember it because on my way to school I ran smack into a dead body in the same situation. Five of us, our backpacks filled with books, were walking to school when we came across an Alfetta riddled with bullets. My friends were terribly curious and rushed over to see. Feet sticking up on the seat. The most daring kid asked a carabiniere why the feet were where the head
should have been. The officer didn’t hesitate to respond, as if he hadn’t realized how old his interlocutor was.

“The spray turned him upside down.”

I was only a boy, but I knew that “spray” meant machine-gun fire. The Camorrista had taken so many blows that his body had flipped. Head down and feet in the air. When the carabinieri opened the door, the corpse fell to the ground like a melting icicle. We watched undisturbed, without anyone telling us this was no sight for children. Without any moral hand covering our eyes. The dead man had an erection, clearly visible under his tight-fitting jeans. It shocked me. I stared at it for a long time. For days I wondered how it could have happened, what he’d been thinking about, what he’d been doing before dying. My afternoons were spent trying to imagine what was in his head before he was killed. It tormented me until I finally got up the courage to ask for an explanation. I was told that an erection is a common reaction in male murder victims. As soon as Linda, one of the girls in our group, saw the dead body slide out from behind the steering wheel, she started to cry and hid behind two of the boys. A strangled cry. A young plainclothes officer grabbed the cadaver by the hair and spit in his face. Then he turned to us and said:

“No, what are you crying for? This guy was a real shit. Nothing happened, everything’s okay. Nothing happened. Don’t cry.”

Ever since then, I’ve had trouble believing those scenarios of forensic police who wear gloves and tread softly, careful not to displace any powder or shells. When I get to a body before the ambulance does and gaze on the final moments of life of someone who realizes he’s dying, I always think of the scene in
Heart of Darkness,
when the woman who loved Kurtz asks Marlow what his last words were. And Marlow lies. He says Kurtz asked about her, when in reality he didn’t utter any sweet words or precious thoughts, but simply repeated, “The horror.” We like to think that a person’s last words convey his ultimate, most important, most essential thoughts. That he
dies articulating the reason life was worth living for. But it’s not like that. When you die, nothing comes out except fear. Everyone, or almost everyone, repeats the same thing, a simple, banal, urgent sentence: “I don’t want to die.” Their faces are superimposed on Kurtz’s and express the torment, disgust, and refusal to end so horrendously, in the worst of all possible worlds. The horror.

After seeing dozens of murder victims, soiled with their own blood as it mixes with filth, as they exhale nauseating odors, as they are looked at with curiosity or professional indifference, shunned like hazardous waste or discussed with agitated cries, I have arrived at just one certainty, a thought so elementary that it approaches idiocy: death is revolting.

In Secondigliano everyone, down to the little kids, has a perfectly clear idea of how you die and the best way to go. I was about to leave the scene of Carmela Attrice’s murder when I overheard two boys talking. Their tone was extremely serious.

“I want to die like the signora. In the head, bang bang and it’s all over.”

“But in your face? They hit her in the face, that’s the worst!”

“No, it’s not, and besides, it’s only an instant. Front or back, but in the head for sure!”

Curious, I butted into their conversation, asking questions and trying to have my say:

“Isn’t it better to be hit in the chest? One shot in the heart and it’s all over.”

But the boy understood the dynamics of pain far better than I did. He explained in great detail and with professional expertise the impact of bullets.

“No, in the chest it hurts a whole lot and it takes you ten minutes to die. Your lungs have to fill with blood, and the bullet is like a fiery needle that pierces and twists inside you. It hurts to get hit in the arm or leg too. But in the chest it’s like a wicked snakebite that won’t go
away. The head’s better, because you won’t piss yourself or shit in your pants. No flailing around on the ground for half an hour.”

He had seen. And much more than just one dead body. Getting hit in the head saves you from trembling in fear, pissing your pants, or having the stench of your guts ooze out of the holes in your stomach. I asked him more about the details of death and killing. Every conceivable question except the only one I should have asked: why was a fourteen-year-old thinking so much about death? But it didn’t occur to me, not even for a second. The boy introduced himself by his nickname: Pikachu, one of the Pokémon figures. His blond hair and stocky figure had earned him the name. Pikachu pointed out some individuals in the crowd that had formed around the body of the dead woman. He lowered his voice:

“See those guys, they’re the ones that killed Pupetta.”

Carmela Attrice had been known as Pupetta. I tried to look them straight in the face. They seemed worked up, palpitating, moving their heads and shoulders to get a better look as the police covered the body. They’d killed her with their faces unmasked and had gone to sit nearby, under the statue of Padre Pio; as soon as a crowd started to form around the body, they’d come back to see. They were caught a few days later. Drug dealers made over into soldiers, trained to ambush a harmless woman, killed in her pajamas and slippers. This was their baptism of fire. The youngest was sixteen, the oldest twenty-eight, the alleged assassin twenty-two. When they were arrested, one of them, catching sight of the flashbulbs and video cameras, started to laugh and wink at the journalists. They also arrested the alleged bait, the sixteen-year-old who had rung the bell so that the woman would come downstairs. Sixteen, the same age as Carmela Attrice’s daughter, who realized what had happened as soon as she heard the shots and went out onto the balcony and started to cry. The investigators
also claimed that the executioners had returned to the scene of the crime. They were too curious; it was like starring in your own movie. First as actor and then as spectator, but in the same film. It must be true that you don’t have a precise memory of your actions when you shoot because those boys went back, eager to see what they’d done and what sort of face the victim had. I asked Pikachu if the guys were a Di Lauro trawler, or if they at least wanted to form one. He laughed.

“A trawler! Don’t they wish! They’re just little pissers, but I saw a real trawler.”

I didn’t know if Pikachu was bullshitting me or if he’d merely pieced together what was being said around Scampia, but his story was credible. He was pedantic, precise to the point of eliminating any doubt. He was pleased to see my stunned expression as he talked. Pikachu told me he used to have a dog named Careca, like the Brazilian forward who played for Napoli, the Italian champions. This dog liked to go out onto the apartment landing. One day he smelled someone in the apartment opposite, which is usually empty, so he started scratching at the door. A few seconds later a burst of gunfire exploded from behind the door and hit him full on. Pikachu told the story complete with sound effects:

“Rat-tat-tat-tat … Careca dies instantly—and the door—bang—slams open real quick.”

Pikachu sat on the ground, planted his feet against a low wall, and made as if he were cradling a machine gun, imitating the sentinel that had killed his dog. The sentinel who’s always sitting behind the door, a pillow behind his back and his feet braced on either side. An uncomfortable position, to keep you from falling asleep, but above all because shooting from below is a sure way to eliminate whoever is on the other side of the door without getting hit yourself. Pikachu told me that as a way of apology for killing his dog, they gave his family some money and invited him into the apartment. An apartment in
which an entire trawler was hiding. He remembered everything, the rooms bare except for beds, a table, and a television.

Pikachu spoke quickly, gesticulating wildly to describe the men’s positions and movements. They were nervous, tense, one of them with “pineapples” around his neck. Pineapples are the hand grenades the killers wear. Pikachu said a basket full of them was near a window. The Camorra has always had a certain fondness for grenades. Clan arsenals everywhere are filled with hand grenades and antitank bombs from Eastern Europe. Pikachu said that the men spent hours playing PlayStation, so he’d challenged and beat them all. Because he always won, they promised him that “one of these days they’d take me with them to shoot for real.”

One of the neighborhood legends has it that Ugo De Lucia was obsessed with
Winning Eleven,
a popular soccer video game. According to informants, in four days he not only committed three murders, but also played an entire soccer championship.