Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (30 page)

Whenever I think about the clan wars in Casal di Principe, San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and all the other territories they control from Parete to Formia, I always think about white sheets. Hanging from every balcony, railing, and window. White, all white. A cascade of pure white cloth was the angry display of mourning at Don Peppino Diana’s funeral in March 1994. I was sixteen. My aunt woke me as always that morning, but more roughly than usual, yanking the sheet I’d wrapped around me as if she were unwrapping a salami. I fell out of bed. My aunt didn’t say a word, but walked about noisily, as if she were venting all her irritation with her heels. She knotted the sheets so tightly to the balcony, not even a tornado would have torn them loose, and then threw open the windows, letting the voices from the street in and the noises of the house out. She even opened all the cupboards. I remember the waves of Boy Scouts; they had shed their usual, easygoing manner of well-behaved kids, and a deep rage seemed to trail from their peculiar blue and green scarves; for Don Peppino was one of them. It was the only time I ever saw Scouts so nervous, mindless of the forms of orderly conduct and composure that usually define their long marches. My memories of that day are spotty, like a Dalmatian’s
fur. Don Peppino Diana’s story is strange; once you’ve heard it, it becomes part of you and you have to preserve it inside you somewhere— deep in your throat, tight in your fist, close to your heart, at the back of your eyes. An extraordinary story, unknown to most.

Don Peppino had studied in Rome, and that’s where he should have stayed to make a career for himself. Far from here, far from his hometown and its dirty deals. But, like someone who can’t shake off a memory, a habit, or a smell, he suddenly decided to return to Casal di Principe. Or maybe like someone with a burning itch to do something, and who can find no peace until he does it, or at least gives it a try. Don Peppino was the young priest of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Bari, a modern structure, the aesthetics of which seemed ideally suited to his sense of commitment. Unlike the other priests, who wore their gloomy authority along with their cassocks, he went around dressed in jeans. Don Peppino didn’t eavesdrop on family squabbles, chastise the men for their erotic escapades, or make the rounds comforting cuckolded women. He spontaneously transformed the role of the local priest, deciding to take an interest in the dynamics of power, and not merely its corollary suffering. He didn’t want merely to clean the wound but to understand the mechanisms of the metastasis, to prevent the cancer from spreading, to block the source of whatever was turning his home into a gold mine of capital with an abundance of cadavers. He even smoked a cigar in public every now and then. Anywhere else that might have seemed harmless, but around here priests tended to put on a show of depriving themselves of the superfluous, while indulging their lazy weaknesses behind closed doors. Don Peppino decided just to be himself—a guarantee of transparency in a land where faces must be ready to mime what they represent, aided by nicknames that pump their bodies full of the power they hope to suture onto their skin. Don Peppino was obsessed with action. He set up a welcome center to offer room and board to the first wave of African immigrants. It was important to welcome them to keep the clans from turning them into perfect soldiers—
which is what eventually happened. He even contributed some of his own money from teaching to the project. Waiting for institutional backing can be such a slow and complicated ordeal that it becomes the biggest reason for doing nothing. As priest he had watched the succession of bosses, the elimination of Bardellino, the power of Sandokan and Cicciotto di Mezzanotte, the massacres among Bardellino’s men and the Casalesi, and then among the leading businessmen.

A famous episode from that time had involved a parade through the streets of town. It was about six in the evening when ten or so cars formed a sort of carousel under their enemies’ windows: Schiavone’s victorious men challenging the opposition. I was just a kid, but my cousins swear they saw them with their own eyes, driving slowly through the streets of San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and Casal di Principe, windows down, men straddling the doors, one leg in the car and the other dangling out. Faces unmasked, each holding an assault rifle. The cavalcade proceeded slowly, gathering more affiliates as it went; they came out of their apartments carrying rifles and semi-automatics and fell in behind the cars. A full-blown, public, armed demonstration. They stopped in front of the houses of their enemies, who had dared to challenge their supremacy.

“Come out, you shits! Come out … if you have the balls!”

The parade went on for at least an hour, continuing undisturbed as shutters on shops and bars were quickly lowered. For two days there was a complete cease-fire. No one went out, not even to buy bread. Don Peppino realized it was time to devise a plan of resistance. Time to openly delineate a path to follow. No more speaking out solo; it was time to organize a protest and coordinate a new level of local church engagement. He wrote a surprising document that was signed by all the Casal di Principe priests: a religious, Christian text with a tone of despairing human dignity that made his words universal and allowed them to reach beyond the boundaries of religion, causing the bosses to tremble; they feared the priest’s words more than an anti-Mafia division blitz, more than the impounding of their quarries and concrete
mixers, more than the wiretaps that can trace a command to kill. It was a lively text with a romantically powerful title: “For love of my people I will not keep silent.” Don Peppino distributed the document on Christmas Day. He did not post it on his church doors; he wasn’t a Martin Luther out to reform the Roman Church. Don Peppino had other things to think about: to try to understand how to create a path that could sever the sinews of power and cripple the Camorra clans’ economic and criminal authority.

Don Peppino dug a path in the surface of the word and eroded their power with syntax; spoken publicly and clearly, words could still do such things. He lacked the intellectual apathy of those who believe that words have exhausted all their resources and merely fill the space between our ears. The word as concreteness, an aggregate of atoms that intervenes in the mechanisms of things, like mortar or a pickax. Don Peppino searched for the right word to dump like a bucket of water on the dirty looks he received. Around here keeping your mouth shut is not the simple, silent
omertà
of lowered hats and eyes. Here the prevailing attitude is “It’s not my problem.” But that’s not all. The decision to withdraw is the actual vote that’s cast in the election of the state of things. The word becomes a shout. A loud and piercing cry hurled at bulletproof glass in hopes of making it shatter.

Don Peppino’s aim was to remind people that, in the face of clan power, it was important not to confine their reactions to the silence of the confessional. He evoked the voices of the prophets to argue urgently that taking to the streets, reporting, and reacting were essential to give some sense to their lives.

The document did not aim to be amenable to social reality, nor polite toward political power, which it considered not merely supported by the clans but actually shaped by similar goals. Don Peppino didn’t want to believe the clan was an evil choice a person makes, but rather
the result of clear conditions, fixed mechanisms, identifiable and gangrenous causes. No church or individual in this region had ever been so determined to clarify things.

In the late 1980s Don Peppino organized an anti-Camorra march following a mass assault on the carabinieri barracks in San Cipriano d’Aversa. Some carabinieri had dared to break up a fight between two local boys during an evening of entertainment in honor of the patron saint, so dozens of people decided to destroy their headquarters and beat up the officers. The San Cipriano barracks are tucked in a narrow alley, and the marshals and lance corporals had no means of escape. The bosses themselves had to send the neighborhood capos
to put down the revolt and save the carabinieri. Antonio Bardellino was still in control at that time, and his brother Ernesto was the mayor.

Don Peppino started to question the bosses’ religious beliefs, to deny explicitly that there could be any harmony between the Christian creed and the business, political, and military power of the clans. In the land of the Camorra, the Christian message is not considered contradictory to Camorra activities: if the clan acts for the good of all its affiliates, the organization is seen as respecting and pursuing the Christian good. The killing of enemies and traitors is seen as a necessary, legitimate transgression; by the bosses’ reasoning, the command “Thou shalt not kill” inscribed on Moses’ tablets may be suspended if the homicide occurs for a higher motive, namely the safeguarding of the clan, the interests of its managers, or the good of the group, and therefore of everyone. Killing is a sin that Christ will understand and forgive in the name of necessity.

At San Cipriano d’Aversa, Antonio Bardellino made use of an old ritual that eventually disappeared:
pungitura,
which the Cosa Nostra also used in initiating new affiliates. The aspirant’s right index finger would be pricked with a pin and the blood made to drip onto an image of the Madonna of Pompeii. This was then burned over a candle and passed, hand to hand, to all the clan managers who stood around a table. If all the affiliates kissed the Madonna, the candidate became officially part of the clan. Religion is a constant point of reference for the Camorra, not merely a propitiatory gesture or cultural relic but a spiritual force that determines the most intimate decisions. Camorra
families, especially the most charismatic bosses, often consider their own actions as a Calvary, their own conscience bearing the pain and weight of sin for the well-being of the group and the men they rule.

At Pignataro Maggiore the Lubrano clan paid to have a fresco of the Madonna restored. It is called the Madonna of the Camorra since the town’s most important Cosa Nostra fugitives from Sicily turned to her for protection. It’s not really that difficult to imagine Totò Riina, Michele Greco, Luciano Liggio, and Bernardo Provenzano kneeling in front of the fresco and praying that their actions be enlightened and their getaways protected.

When Vincenzo Lubrano was acquitted, he organized a pilgrimage—several busloads of the faithful—to San Giovanni Rotondo to give thanks to Padre Pio, who, he believed, was responsible for his absolution. Life-size statues of Padre Pio and terra-cotta or bronze copies of the open-armed Christ on Pão de Açúcar in Rio de Janeiro can be found in the villa of many a Camorra boss. In the drug-warehouse laboratories in Scampia, bricks of hashish are often cut thirty-three at a time—like Christ’s age. Then they halt work for thirty-three minutes, make the sign of the cross, and start up again. A way to propitiate Christ and receive earnings and tranquillity. The same happens with packets of cocaine; often before they are distributed to the pushers, the neighborhood capo blesses them with holy water from Lourdes in the hopes that they don’t kill anyone, especially because he would have to answer personally for the poor quality of the stuff.