Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (15 page)

The
pentito
Pietro Esposito, known as Kojak, recounts something that seems more than just legend. He’d gone to a house where Ugo De Lucia was stretched out on the bed in front of the television and commenting on the news:

“We’ve done two more pieces! And they’ve done one piece in Terzo Mondo.”

The television was the best way to follow the war in real time without having to make compromising calls. From this point of view, the media attention the war had brought to Scampia was a strategic advantage for the fighters. But what struck me even more was the word
piece
—the new term for a homicide. Even Pikachu used it; he’d talk about the pieces done by the Di Lauros and the pieces done by the secessionists. The expression
to do a piece
came from contract labor or piecework. Killing a human being became the equivalent of manufacturing something, it didn’t matter what. A piece.

Pikachu and I went for a walk and he told me about the boys, the
real strength of the Di Lauro clan. I asked him where they hung out, and he offered to take me to a pizzeria where they’d go in the evening; he wanted me to see that he knew them all. First we picked up a friend of Pikachu’s, who’d been part of the System for a while. Pikachu worshipped him and described him as a sort of boss; the System kids looked up to him because he’d been given the task of providing food for the fugitives and even doing the shopping for the Di Lauro family, or so he claimed. He was called Tonino Kit Kat because he was known to devour masses of candy bars. Kit Kat assumed the attitude of a little boss, but I let him see I was skeptical. He got fed up answering my questions, so he lifted his sweater. His entire chest was speckled with bruises: violet circles with yellow and greenish clots of crushed capillaries in the centers.

“What have you done?”

“The vest.”

“What vest?”

“The bulletproof vest.”

“The vest doesn’t give you those bruises, does it?”

“No, but these eggplants are the hits I took.”

The bruises—eggplants—were the fruit of the bullets that the jacket had stopped an inch before they penetrated flesh. To train the boys not to be afraid of weapons, they make them put on a vest and then fire at them. Faced with a gun, a vest alone isn’t enough to convince you not to flee. A vest is not a vaccine against fear. The only way to anesthetize every fear is to show how the guns can be neutralized. The boys told me that they were taken out to the countryside beyond Secondigliano. They’d put the vests on under their T-shirts, and then, one by one, half a clip would be unloaded at them. “When you’re hit, you fall on the ground, you can’t breathe, you gasp for air, but you can’t inhale. You just can’t do it. It’s like you’ve been punched in the chest, you feel like you’re dying … but then you get back up. That’s the important thing. After you’ve been hit, you get back up.” Kit Kat
had been trained along with others to take the hit. He’d been trained to die, or rather to almost die.

The clans enlist the boys as soon as they’re capable of being loyal. Twelve to seventeen years old. Lots of them are sons or brothers of clan affiliates, while others come from families without steady incomes. This is the Neapolitan Camorra clans’ new army, recruited via well-structured clan affiliations, drawn from the old city center, from the Sanità, Forcella, Secondigliano, San Gaetano, Quartieri Spagnoli, and Pallonetto neighborhoods. A whole army of them. The advantages for the clan are many: a boy earns half the salary of a low-ranking adult, rarely has to support his parents, doesn’t have the burdens of a family or fixed hours, doesn’t need to be paid punctually, and above all, is willing to be on the streets at all times. There’s a whole range of jobs and responsibilities. They start with pushing light drugs, hashish in particular. The boys position themselves in the most crowded streets, and they’re almost always issued a motor scooter. They work their way up to cocaine, which they peddle at the universities, outside the nightclubs, in front of hotels, inside the subway stations. These baby pushers are fundamental to the flexible drug economy because they attract less attention, do business between a soccer match and a scooter ride, and will often deliver directly to the client’s home. The clan doesn’t usually make them work mornings; in fact, they continue to go to school, in part because if they dropped out, they would be easier to identify. After the first couple of months, the boy affiliates go about armed, a form of self-defense and a way of asserting themselves. The weapons—automatics and semiautomatics the boys learn to use in the garbage dumps outside of town or in the city’s underground caverns—are both a promotion in the field and a promise of possibility, of rising to the upper echelons of the clan.

When they prove themselves reliable and win the area capo’s complete trust, they take on a role that goes well beyond that of pusher: they become lookouts. Lookouts make sure that all the trucks unloading
goods at the supermarkets, stores, and delicatessens on their assigned street are ones imposed by the clan, and they report when a shop is using a distributor other than the “preselected” one. The presence of lookouts is also essential at construction sites. Contractors often subcontract to Camorra companies, but at times the work is assigned to firms that are “not recommended.” To discover if work is being given to “external” firms, the clans monitor the sites constantly, and in a way that is above suspicion. The boys observe, check, and report back to the area capo, who tells them what to do if a site steps out of line. These young affiliates behave like and have the responsibilities of adult Camorristi. They start their careers young and charge up through the ranks; their rise to positions of power is radically altering the genetic structure of the clans. Baby capos and boy bosses make for unpredictable and ruthless interlocutors; they follow a logic that keeps law officers and anti-Mafia investigators from understanding their dynamics. The faces are new and unfamiliar. Following Cosimo’s reorganization, entire divisions of the drug market are run by fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds who give orders to forty-and fifty-year-olds without feeling the least bit embarrassed or inadequate. The car of one of these boys, Antonio Galeota Lanza, was bugged by the carabinieri. The stereo blasting, Antonio talks about his life as a pusher:

“Every Sunday evening I make eight or nine hundred euros, even if being a pusher means you deal with crack, cocaine, and five hundred years of jail.”

The System boys now tend to try to obtain everything they want with “iron,” as they call their pistols, and the desire for a cell phone or a stereo, a car or a scooter, easily transmutes into a killing. It’s not unusual to hear baby soldiers at the checkout counter in a supermarket or shop say things like “I belong to the Secondigliano System” or “I belong to the Quartieri System.” Magic words that allow the boys to walk off with whatever they want and in the face of which no shopkeeper would ever ask them to pay what they owe.

In Secondigliano this new structure of boys was militarized. Pikachu
and Kit Kat took me to see Nello, a pizza chef in the area who was responsible for feeding the System boys when they’d finished their shifts. A group came into Nello’s pizzeria just after I got there. They were awkward and ungainly, their sweaters puffed out from the bulletproof vests underneath. They’d left their
motorini
on the sidewalk and came in without saying hello to anyone. The way they walked, with their padded chests, made them look like football players. Boyish faces, thirteen to sixteen years old, a few with the first hints of a beard. Pikachu and Kit Kat had me sit with them, and no one seemed to mind. They were eating and, above all, drinking. Water, Coca-Cola, Fanta. An incredible thirst that they tried to quench even with the pizza; they asked for olive oil and then poured it on the pizzas, saying they were too dry. Everything dried up in their mouths, from their saliva to their words. I realized immediately that they were coming off a night shift as watch guards. They gave them MDMA pills—ecstasy—to keep them awake, to keep them from stopping to eat twice a day. After all, the German drugmaker Merck patented MDMA during World War I for soldiers in the trenches—those German soldiers referred to as
Menschenmaterial,
human material—to enable them to overcome hunger, cold, and terror. Later it was used by the Americans for espionage operations. And now these little soldiers received their dose of artificial courage and adulterated resistance. They cut slices of pizza and sucked them down; the sounds coming from the table were of old people slurping their soup. The boys kept ordering bottles of water and talking. And then I did something that could have provoked a violent reaction, but I sensed I could get away with it, that these were kids I was looking at. Padded with plates of lead, but kids nevertheless. I put a tape recorder on the table and addressed them all in a loud voice, trying to catch each one’s eye:

“Forza,
go ahead and talk into this, say whatever you feel like.”

This didn’t strike anyone as strange, and no one suspected they were sitting with a narc or a journalist. Someone hurled a few insults
at the recorder, then one boy, encouraged by some of my questions, recounted his career. It seemed as if he couldn’t wait to tell it.

“First I worked in a bar. I made two hundred euros a month, two fifty with tips, but I didn’t like the work. I wanted to work in the garage with my brother, but they didn’t take me. In the System I get three hundred euros a week, but if I sell well, I also get a percentage on every brick of hashish and can make up to three hundred fifty, four hundred euros. I have to bust my ass, but in the end they always give me something more.”

After a volley of belches that two of the kids wanted to record, the boy called Satore, a name halfway between Sasà and Totore, two diminutives for Salvatore, continued:

“Before I was out on the street, it annoyed me that I didn’t have a scooter and had to get around on foot or take the bus. I like the work, everyone respects me, and I can do what I want. Now they gave me iron and I have to stay around here all the time, Terzo Mondo, Case dei Puffi. Always in the same place, back and forth. And I don’t like it.”

Satore smiled at me, then laughed loudly into the recorder:

“Let me out of here! Tell that to the boss!”

They’d been given iron—a pistol—and a limited territory in which to work. Kit Kat began to speak into the recorder, his lips touching the microphone, so that even his breath registered.

“I want to open a remodeling company or else a warehouse or a store. The System will have to give me the money to get set up, but then I’ll worry about the rest, even who to marry. I want to get married, not to somebody from here, though, but a model, black or German.”

Pikachu took a pack of cards from his pocket, and four of them started to play. The others got up and stretched, but no one removed his bulletproof vest. I kept asking Pikachu about the trawlers, but he was starting to get irritated at my insistence. He told me he’d been at a trawler house a few days before, but that they’d dismantled everything
the only thing left was their MP3 player with the music they listened to when they went to do pieces, which was now dangling from his neck. Inventing an excuse, I asked if I could borrow it for a few days. Pikachu laughed as if to say that he wasn’t offended that I’d taken him for an idiot, for someone stupid enough to lend things. So I coughed up 50 euros and he gave me the player. I immediately stuck the headphones in my ears; I wanted to know what trawler background music was. I was expecting rap, acid rock, heavy metal, but instead it was an endless round of Neapolitan neo-melodic music and pop. In America, killers pump themselves up on rap, but in Secondigliano they go off to kill with love songs in their ears.

Pikachu started shuffling and asked me if I wanted in, but I’ve always been hopeless at cards, so I got up from the table. The waiters at the pizzeria were the same age as the System boys, and they looked at them admiringly, lacking even the courage to serve them. The owner took care of them himself. To work as an errand boy, waiter, or on a construction site is considered a disgrace here. In addition to the usual, eternal reasons—no contract, no sick days or vacation, ten-hour shifts—there’s no hope of bettering your situation. The System at least grants the illusion that commitment will be recognized, that it’s possible to make a career. An affiliate will never be seen as an errand boy, and girls will never feel they are being courted by a failure. These padded boys, these ridiculous sentinels who looked like puppets of football players, didn’t dream of being Al Capone but Flavio Briatore, not gunslingers but entrepreneurs with beautiful models on their arms; they wanted to become successful businessmen.

On January 19, 2005, the forty-five-year-old Pasquale Paladini is killed. Eight shots to the chest and head. A few hours later, Antonio
Auletta, age nineteen, is hit in the legs. But January 21 seems to be a turning point. Word spreads quickly, there’s no need for a press office. Cosimo Di Lauro has been arrested. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, Cosimo is the prince of the gang and the leader of the slaughter. According to state witnesses, he’s the clan commander. But he was hiding in a hole forty meters square and sleeping on a dilapidated bed. The heir to a criminal association that takes in 500,000 euros a day from narcotics alone, and who had a villa worth 5 million euros in the heart of one of the poorest regions of Italy, was reduced to hiding in a stinking little hole not far from his alleged palace.

A villa that rose out of nothing in Via Cupa dell’Arco, near the Di Lauro family home. An elegant, eighteenth-century farmhouse, restructured like a Pompeian villa, complete with impluvium, columns, plaster decorations, false ceilings, and grand staircases. No one knew it existed. No one knew the official owners. The carabinieri were investigating, but no one in the neighborhood had any doubts—it was for Cosimo. The carabinieri discovered the place by chance. After breaching the thick walls surrounding it, they came across some workers, who ran off as soon as they saw the uniforms. The war interrupted work on the villa, kept it from being filled with furniture and paintings fit for a prince, from becoming the heart of gold of the decaying body of the Secondigliano building industry.