Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (34 page)

Movies are the source for forms of expression. In Naples, Cosimo Di Lauro is a good example. His clothes are reminiscent of Brandon Lee’s in
The Crow.
Camorristi look to the movies to create for themselves a criminal image they often lack. They model themselves on familiar Hollywood masks, a sort of shortcut to make themselves into figures to fear. Cinematographic inspiration even conditions technical choices such as the way you handle or shoot a gun. A veteran of the Naples Forensic Division once told me how Camorra killers imitate the movies:

“Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot! They don’t keep the barrel straight anymore. Now they hold it crooked, like in the movies, which makes for disaster. They hit the guts, groin, or legs, seriously wounding but not killing. And so they have to finish the victim off with a bullet to the nape of the neck. A pool of pointless blood, a barbarism completely superfluous to the goal of execution.”

Female bosses have bodyguards who dress like Uma Thurman in
Kill Bill:
blond hair and phosphorescent yellow outfits. Vincenza Di Domenico, a woman from the Quartieri Spagnoli who collaborated with the authorities for a short while, had the eloquent nickname of Nikita, the heroine killer in Luc Besson’s film. Movies, especially American movies, are not distant lands where aberrations occur or the impossible happens, but places very close to home.

I left the villa quietly, trying not to get caught in the brambles and weeds that had overgrown the English Garden so dear to the boss. I left the gate open. Just a few years earlier, getting anywhere near here would have meant being spotted by dozens of sentinels. But now I walked out with my hands in my pockets and my head down, as when you leave the movie theater, still dazed by what you’ve seen.

It’s not hard to understand why Giuseppe Tornatore’s film
Il camorrista
left such a powerful mark on the imagination in Naples. All you have to do is listen to people’s banter, the same lines repeated for years:

“Tell the professor I didn’t betray him.”

“I know who he is, but I also know who I am!”

“Malacarne’s a weakling!”

“Who sent you?”

“The one who can save your life, or take it from you.”

The film’s sound track has become a sort of Camorra theme song, whistled when a neighborhood capo walks by, or just to make a shopkeeper nervous.
Il camorrista
even made it to the discos, where people can dance to three different mixes of Raffaele Cutolo’s most famous lines, played in the film by Ben Gazzara.

Two kids from Casal di Principe, Giuseppe M. and Romeo P., knew the
Il camorrista
dialogues by heart and would act out various scenes:

“How much does a
picciotto
*
weigh? As much as a feather in the wind.”

They started hassling groups of kids their age in Casale and San Cipriano d’Aversa even before they were old enough to drive a car.
They were bullies. Braggarts and buffoons, they’d go out to eat and leave a tip twice the amount of the check. Shirts unbuttoned to show off hairless chests, a theatrical swagger, as if claiming every step. Chin high, an ostentatious display of confidence and power, real only in their minds. They were inseparable. Giuseppe played the boss, always one step ahead of his
compare.
Romeo acted as his bodyguard, his right-hand man and loyal friend. Giuseppe often called him Donnie, after Donnie Brasco. Even though Brasco was a police infiltrator, he becomes a real Mafioso in his soul and that saves him from his original sin in the eyes of his admirers. In Aversa, Giuseppe and Romeo would terrorize the kids who had just gotten their licenses. They liked young couples best. They’d run their motor scooter into the couple’s car, and when they got out to ask for insurance papers, Giuseppe or Romeo would spit in the girl’s face, provoking the boyfriend to react. Then they’d beat him to a pulp. They also challenged adults, even adults who really counted, invading their territory and doing whatever they wanted. Giuseppe and Romeo came from Casal di Principe, and in their minds that was enough. They wanted to be feared and respected; anyone who came near them was supposed to stare at the ground, unable to find the courage to look them in the face. But one day they aimed too high. They went out armed with a submachine gun, picked up from who knows which clan armory, and fired on a group of kids. They must have practiced a lot because they were careful not to hit a single one, but they let them smell the gunpowder and hear the gun’s voice. Before they opened fire, one of them recited something. No one understood what he blathered, but one witness said it sounded like the Bible; perhaps Giuseppe and Romeo were preparing for confirmation. But taking apart their words, it was clear that this was no confirmation text. It was the Bible, however. A passage not from the catechism but from Quentin Tarantino. The verses Jules Winnfield delivers in
Pulp Fiction,
right before he kills the guy who had made Marsellus Wallace’s precious suitcase disappear:

Giuseppe and Romeo recited it just as in the film and then opened fire. Giuseppe’s father was a Camorrista, a
pentito
who went back to the Quadrano—De Falco organization after it was defeated by the Schiavones. So a loser. But he’d thought that maybe the film of his life could change if he just played the right role. The two boys knew all the best lines of every crime movie by heart. Most of the time they’d start fights over a glance. In the land of the Camorra a look is a question of territory; it’s an invasion of one’s private space, like breaking down the door and violently entering someone’s home. A look is something more than an insult. To stare someone in the face for too long is already somehow an open challenge:

“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”

They’d repeat those famous lines from
Taxi Driver,
then start fighting, landing punches on the sternum, the kind that make a noise and echo in your chest.

The Casalesi bosses took the problem seriously. The brawls, altercations, and threats were not easily tolerated: too many nervous mothers, too many complaints. So they sent a warning through a neighborhood capo, a sort of call to order. The capo meets them in a bar and tells them the bosses are losing patience with them. But Giuseppe and Romeo keep acting in their imaginary film, beating up whomever they feel like, pissing in gas tanks of the neighborhood kids’ motorcycles. So the bosses have them sent for again. They want to talk to them directly; the clan can’t accept such behavior. The paternalistic
tolerance common to these parts translates into the need to punish; the boys need a beating, a brutal public spanking to make them toe the line. But Giuseppe and Romeo snub the bosses’ summons and continue sprawling about at the bar, playing video poker or glued to the TV, watching their favorite films on DVD, hours spent memorizing lines, imitating body language, expressions, and wardrobe choices. They think they can stand up to anyone. Even the big guys. In fact, they believe that precisely by standing up to the big guys they’ll be feared for real. Like Tony and Manny in
Scarface,
they set no limits. They don’t listen to anyone, but their continual raids and intimidations make them feel they’re the viceroys of Caserta. Giuseppe and Romeo had not chosen to join the clan. They didn’t even try. That path was too slow and regimented, they didn’t want to rise silently through the ranks. Besides, for years the Casalesi had been placing the really good members in the organization’s economic sectors and not in the hit squads. Giuseppe and Romeo were the complete opposite of the new Camorra soldier. They thought they could ride the wave of the area’s bad reputation. They weren’t affiliates, but wanted to enjoy the privileges of Camorristi. They expected the bars to serve them for free, assumed that gas for their scooters was their due, and that their mothers would receive free groceries; when someone dared to rebel, they would descend upon them immediately, smashing windows and beating up greengrocers and salesgirls. So in the spring of 2004 some clan emissaries set up a meeting with them on the outskirts of Castelvolturno, in the Parco Mare area, where sand, sea, and trash all flowed together. If the bosses couldn’t get to them with negative proposals, they’d try with positive ones. Some tempting deal, or maybe even the chance to participate in a killing. The first real hit of their lives. I pictured them racing full throttle on their
motorini,
replaying in their minds all their favorite movie scenes, in which the big guys are forced to yield to the ostentatious new heroes. Young Spartans went to war with the feats of Achilles and Hector in their heads, but around here you go to kill and
be killed thinking of
Scarface, GoodFellas, Donnie Brasco,
and
The Godfather.
Every time I go by Parco Mare, I imagine the scene that the police reconstructed, that was reported in the newspapers. Giuseppe and Romeo arrived way ahead of the set time. Burning with anxiety. They were there waiting when the car pulled up. A group of men got out. The two kids went over to greet them, but they grabbed Romeo right away and started beating up Giuseppe. Then they pointed the barrel of an automatic at his chest and fired. I’m sure that the scene from
GoodFellas
flashed before Romeo’s eyes, the scene where Tommy DeVito is invited to take part in the management of Cosa Nostra in America, but instead of welcoming him in a hall crowded with bosses, they take him to an empty room and shoot him in the head. It’s not true that films are a lie, that you can’t live as in the movies, that as soon as you stick your head out of the theater, you realize things are not the same. Only one moment is different: the moment when Al Pacino gets up from the fountain into which his double, mowed down by machine-gun fire, has fallen, and dries his face, wiping off the color of blood. The moment when Joe Pesci washes his hair and stops the fake bleeding. But you don’t want to know that part, so you don’t understand it. When Romeo sees Giuseppe on the ground, I’m sure—though I can never confirm it— that he understood the exact difference between movies and reality, between a staged scene and the smell in the air, between his own life and a script. Then it was his turn. They shot him in the throat, finishing him off with a bullet to the head. The sum of their ages was barely thirty. That was how the Casalesi clan resolved the problem of this micro-criminal excrescence nourished on movies. They didn’t even make an anonymous call to the police or ambulance. They left the boy cadavers there, their hands to be pecked at by seagulls and their lips and noses nibbled by stray dogs that roam the trash-covered beaches. But that’s something the movies never show. They end just the minute before.

There’s no real difference between movie audiences in the land of the Camorra and elsewhere. Cinematographic references everywhere create mythologies of imitation. If elsewhere you may like
Scarface
and secretly identify with him, here you can
be
Scarface, but you have to be him all the way.

In the land of the Camorra, people are also passionate about art and literature. Sandokan had an enormous library in his villa bunker, with dozens of volumes, all on two topics: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Napoléon Bonaparte. Sandokan was attracted to the Bourbon state’s importance, bragging that his ancestors were officers in southern Italy, the Terra di Lavoro. He was fascinated by the genius of Bonaparte, who rose from a low military rank to conquer half of Europe; he saw similarities to his own life, for he’d started at the bottom and was now generalissimo of one of the most powerful clans in Europe. Sandokan, who had once been a medical student, preferred to pass his time in hiding painting religious icons and portraits of Napoléon and Mussolini. They’re still for sale today, in Caserta shops that are above suspicion: extremely rare holy images, Sandokan’s own face inserted in place of Christ’s. He also liked reading epics. Homer, the Arthurian legends, and Walter Scott were his favorites. It was his love of Scott that inspired him to baptize one of his numerous children with the grandiloquent, proud name of Ivanhoe.