Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (16 page)

When Cosimo hears the pounding of boots and the clatter of rifles, he doesn’t try to escape. He doesn’t even arm himself. Instead he goes to the mirror, wets his comb, pulls his hair off his forehead, and ties it in a ponytail at his nape, letting the curly mane fall onto his neck. He is wearing a dark polo-neck sweater and a black raincoat. Dressed as a clown of crime, a warrior of the night, Cosimo Di Lauro descends the stairs, chest out. A few years earlier he took a disastrous spill on his motorcycle, and the legacy was a lame leg. But he’s even thought about his limp; as he walks down the stairs he leans on the forearms of the carabinieri who escort him, so as not to reveal his
handicap, and proceeds with a normal gait. The new military sovereigns of the Neapolitan criminal associations don’t present themselves as neighborhood tough guys, don’t have the crazy, wide-eyed look of Raffaele Cutolo, don’t feel the need to pose as the Cosa Nostra boss Luciano Liggio or caricatures of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone.
The Matrix, The Crow,
and
Pulp Fiction
give a better idea of what they want and who they are. They are models everyone recognizes and that don’t need too much mediation. Spectacle is superior to enigmatic codes of winking or the well-defined mythology of infamous crime neighborhoods. Cosimo looks straight at the cameras, lowers his chin, and sticks out his forehead. He didn’t let himself be found out the way Giovanni Brusca did, wearing a pair of threadbare jeans and a shirt with spaghetti sauce stains; he’s not frightened like Totò Riina, who was quickly loaded into a helicopter, or surprised with a sleepy look on his face like Giuseppe Misso, the Sanità neighborhood boss. Cosimo has been brought up in the world of show business, and he knows how to go onstage. He appears like a warrior who has stumbled for the first time. The expression on his face says this is the price he must pay for having so much courage and zeal. He acts as if he weren’t being arrested, but simply moving headquarters. He knew the risk when he triggered the war, but he had no choice. It was war or death. He wants his arrest to seem like the proof of his victory, the symbol of his courage that disdains any form of self-defense as long as it preserves the family system.

The people in the neighborhood feel their stomachs churn. They set off a revolt, overturning cars and launching Molotov cocktails. This hysterical attack is not, as it may seem, to prevent the arrest, but rather to exorcise any act of revenge. To erase every trace of suspicion. To let Cosimo know that no one betrayed him, no one blabbed, that the hieroglyphics of his hiding place had not been deciphered with their help. The revolt is an elaborate rite of apology, a metaphysical chapel of atonement that the neighborhood people build from burned-out carabinieri cars, dumpsters used as barricades, and black
smoke from fuming tires. If Cosimo suspects them, they won’t even have time to pack their bags before the ax falls in yet another ruthless condemnation.

Just days after his arrest, Cosimo’s haughty gaze stares out of the screen savers of the cell phones of dozens of kids in Torre Annunziata, Quarto, and Marano. Mere provocations, banal gestures of adolescent foolishness. Of course. But Cosimo knew. You have to act this way to be recognized as a capo, to touch people’s hearts. You have to know how to work the TV screen and the newspaper, how to tie your ponytail. Cosimo clearly represents the new model of System entrepreneur, the image of the new bourgeoisie, liberated of every constraint, motivated by the absolute desire to dominate every corner of the market and to have a hand in everything. To let go of nothing. Choosing doesn’t mean limiting your field of action, depriving yourself of all other options. Not for someone who thinks of life as a place where you risk losing everything so as to win it all. It means taking into account that you can be arrested, end badly, die. But it doesn’t mean giving up. To want everything now, to have it as soon as possible. This is Cosimo Di Lauro’s appeal, the power he symbolizes.

Everyone, even those who take special care of themselves, gets caught in the trap of retirement, finds out sooner or later he’s been cuckolded, or ends up having a Polish nurse. Why should you die of depression looking for a job that will kill you, or end up working part-time answering phones? Become an entrepreneur. For real. One who deals in anything and does business even with nothing. Ernst Jünger would say that greatness consists in being exposed to the storm. The Camorra bosses would say the same thing. To be the center of every action, the center of power. To use everything as a means and themselves as the ends. Whoever says that it’s amoral, that life can’t exist without ethics, that the economy has limits and must obey certain rules, is merely someone who has never been in command, who’s been defeated by the market. Ethics are the limit of the loser, the protection of the defeated, the moral justification for those who haven’t
managed to gamble everything and win it all. The law has fixed codes, but justice doesn’t. Justice is something else, an abstract principle that involves everyone, that is tolerable depending on how it is interpreted to absolve or condemn every human being: guilty are the ministers and popes, the saints and heretics, the revolutionaries and reactionaries. Guilty, every one of them, of betrayal, murder, error. Guilty of growing old and dying. Guilty of becoming obsolete and defeated. Guilty, every one of them, in the eyes of the universal court of historical morals and absolved by the court of necessity. Justice and injustice, in reality, have only one significance. Victory or defeat, something done or endured. If someone offends you, treats you wrong, he is committing an injustice; if instead he treats you with goodwill, he does you justice. These are the terms of evaluation to use when observing the clans. These are the standards of judgment. They are enough. They have to be. This is the only real way to evaluate justice. The rest is just religion and confessional booths. This is the logic that shapes the economic imperative. It’s not the Camorristi who pursue deals, but deals that pursue the Camorristi. The logic of criminal business, of the bosses, coincides with the most aggressive neoliberalism. The rules, dictated or imposed, are those of business, profit, and victory over all the competition. Anything else is worthless. Anything else doesn’t exist. You pay with prison or your skin for the power to decide people’s lives or deaths, promote a product, monopolize a slice of the economy, and invest in cutting-edge markets. To have power for ten years, a year, an hour—it doesn’t matter for how long. What counts is to live, to truly command. To win in the market arena, to stare at the sun, as the Forcella boss Raffaele Giuliano did, challenging it from his prison cell, showing that he was not blinded even by that supreme light. Raffaele Giuliano, who ruthlessly spread hot pepper on a knife before stabbing the relative of an enemy, so as to make him feel excruciating, burning pain as the blade pierced his flesh, inch by inch. In prison he was feared not for his bloodthirsty punctiliousness, but for the challenge of his gaze, which looked directly into
the sun. To know you are a businessman destined to end up dead or in jail and still feel the ruthless desire to dominate powerful and unlimited economic empires. The boss is arrested or killed, but the economic system he generated lives on, and it continues to mutate, evolve, improve, and produce profits. The mentality of these samurai liberalists who know that you have to pay to have power—absolute power—was summed up in a letter a boy in juvenile detention wrote and gave to a priest. It was read during a conference. I still remember it by heart:

This is the new rhythm of criminal entrepreneurs, the new thrust of the economy: to dominate it at any cost. Power before all else. Economic victory is more precious than life itself. Than anyone’s life, including your own.

They even started calling the System kids “the talking dead.” In a wiretapped conversation included in the holding order issued by the anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office in February 2006, a boy explains who the neighborhood capos in Secondigliano are:

“They’re young kids, the talking dead, the living dead, the walking dead … they kill you without even thinking twice about it, but you’re already as good as dead.”

Boy capos, clan kamikazes who go to their death not for any religion but for money and power, at all costs, in defense of the only way of life worth living.

The body of Giulio Ruggiero is found on the evening of January 21, the same night in which Cosimo Di Lauro is arrested. A burned-out car, a cadaver in the driver’s seat. Decapitated. The head is on the backseat. It hadn’t been cut off with a hatchet, a clean blow, but with a metal grinder: the kind of circular saw welders use to polish soldering. The worst possible tool, and thus the most obvious choice. First cut the flesh, then chip away at the bones. They must have done the job right there because the ground was littered with flakes of flesh that looked like tripe. The investigations hadn’t even begun, but everyone in the area seemed convinced it was a message. A symbol. Cosimo Di Lauro could not have been arrested without a tip-off. In everyone’s mind, that headless body was a traitor. Only someone who has sold a capo can be ripped apart like that. The sentence is passed before the investigations even begin. It doesn’t really matter if the sentence is correct or if it’s chasing an illusion. I looked at that abandoned car and head in Via Hugo Pratt without getting off my Vespa. I could hear the talk of how they had burned the body and the severed head, filling the mouth with gasoline, placing a wick between its teeth, and setting it on fire so that the whole face would explode. I started my Vespa and drove off.

When I arrived on the scene on January 24, 2005, Attilio Romanò was lying dead on the floor. A horde of carabinieri were nervously pacing in front of the store where the ambush had taken place. Yet another one. An agitated youth comments as he passes, “A death a day, that’s the refrain of Naples.” He stops, doffs his hat to the dead he doesn’t even see, and walks on. The killers had entered the shop with their pistols ready. It was clear that they weren’t there to steal but to kill, to punish. Attilio had tried to hide behind the counter. He knew it wouldn’t make a difference, but maybe he hoped to show he was unarmed,
that he wasn’t involved, that he hadn’t done anything. Maybe he knew they were soldiers in the Camorra war the Di Lauros were waging. They shot him, emptying their clips into him, and after the “service” they left the store—calmly, people say—as if they had just bought a cell phone instead of killing a human being. Attilio Romanò is on the floor. Blood everywhere. It seems as if his soul had drained out of the holes that riddled his body. When you see that much blood on the ground, you start touching yourself, checking if you’ve been wounded, if it’s your own blood you’re looking at. You develop a psychotic anxiety and try to make sure that you haven’t been wounded somehow without realizing it. And still you can’t believe that there could be so much blood in just one man. You’re sure there’s far less inside you. And when you’ve ascertained that it wasn’t you who lost all that blood, you still feel empty. You become a hemorrhage yourself, you feel your legs go weak, fur on your tongue, your hands dissolve in that thick lake. You wish someone would look at the whites of your eyes to check if you’re anemic. You want to ask for a blood transfusion, or eat a steak, if you could just get it down without vomiting. You have to shut your eyes and try not to breathe. The smell of congealed blood, like rusty iron, has already penetrated the plaster on the walls. You have to leave, go outside, get some air before they start throwing sawdust on the blood because the combination smells so terrible it will make you vomit for sure.

I couldn’t truly understand why I had decided to show up yet again at a murder scene. But I was sure of one thing: it’s not important to map out what has happened, to reconstruct the terrible drama that has unfolded. It’s pointless to study the traces of the bullets, the chalk circles drawn around them, like a children’s game of marbles. The thing to do instead is to try to understand if something remains. Maybe this is what I want to track down. I try to understand if anything human is left, if there is a path, a tunnel dug by the worm of existence that can lead to a solution, an answer that could give some sense of what is happening.

Attilio’s body is still on the floor when his family arrives. Two women, maybe his mother and his wife, I don’t know. They walk shoulder to shoulder, cling to each other as they approach. They’re the only ones who are still hoping it is not as they know it to be. They understand perfectly well. But they wrap their arms around each other, support one another in the instant before they face the tragedy. And in those very seconds, in the steps that wives and mothers take toward crumpled cadavers, one senses the irrational, mad, and pointless faith in human longing. They hope, hope, hope, and hope some more that there has been a mistake, that the rumors are wrong, a misunderstanding on the part of the officer who had told them of the ambush and the killing. As if clinging stubbornly to their belief can actually alter the course of events. In that moment the blood pressure of hope is at its peak. But there’s nothing to be done. The cries and weeping reveal reality’s force of gravity. Attilio is on the floor. He worked in a phone store and, to make a little extra money, at a call center. He and his wife, Natalia, hadn’t had children yet. They hadn’t had time; maybe they didn’t have the means; maybe they were waiting for the chance to raise them somewhere else. Their days were consumed by work, and when they were finally able to put a little something aside, Attilio had thought it a good idea to buy into the business where he met his death. But the other owner is a distant relative of Pariante, the boss of Bacoli, a Di Lauro colonel who turned against him. Attilio doesn’t know or maybe he underestimates the danger; he trusts his partner, it’s enough that he’s someone who supports himself, someone who works hard, too hard. After all, around here you don’t choose your lot, and a job seems like a privilege, something you hold on to once you’ve gotten it. You feel fortunate, as if a lucky star had shone on you, even if it means you’re away from home thirteen hours a day, you get only half of Sunday off, and your 1,000 euros a month are hardly enough to cover your mortgage. No matter how you got the job, you have to be thankful and not ask too many questions—of yourself or of fate.