Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (37 page)

An Egyptian boy, Hassa Fakhry, paid heavily for being a heroin addict. He raised pigs. Black Caserta pigs, a rare breed. Darker than buffaloes, squat and hairy, accordions of fat that were turned into lean sausages, tasty salami, and flavorful chops. Being a swineherd is a horrendous job. Constantly shoveling manure, slitting the animals’ throats, hanging them upside down, and letting the blood drip into basins. Hassa had been a driver in Egypt, but he came from a family of farmers so he knew how to handle animals. But not pigs. To a Muslim, pigs were doubly disgusting. But better to take care of pigs than spend the whole day shoveling buffalo manure as the Indians do. Pigs don’t shit half as much, and pigsties are tiny compared to bovine stalls. Every Arab knows this, so they go for pigs rather than ending up faint with exhaustion from the buffalo. Hassa started doing heroin. He’d take the train to Rome, make his purchase, and return to the pigsty. He became a serious addict and never had enough cash, so his pusher suggested he try peddling in Mondragone, a city with no drug market. Hassa started pushing outside the Bar Domizia. He established a clientele and could earn in ten hours what he’d make in six months as a swineherd. All it took was one phone call on the part
of the bar owner to put an end to his activity. That’s how it works around here. You call a friend who calls his cousin who tells his
compare
who relays the news to whoever needs to know. A chain of which only the beginning and end points are known. After a few days La Torre’s men, the self-proclaimed GAD, went right to Hassa’s hovel and knocked. They pretended to be police officers so he wouldn’t escape amid pigs and buffalo, forcing a chase in the mud and shit. They loaded him into the car and started to drive away, but they didn’t take the road to headquarters. As soon as Hassa realized they were about to kill him, he suffered a strange allergic reaction. His body started to swell up, as if being forced full of air—as if fear had sparked an anaphylactic shock. Augusto La Torre himself, when he told the story to the judges, was aghast at the metamorphosis: the Egyptian’s eyes became tiny, as if being sucked into his head, his pores exuded a thick, honey sweat, and his mouth foamed ricotta. There were eight killers, but only seven fired. The
pentito
Mario Sperlongano stated, “It seemed completely pointless to shoot at a dead body.” But that’s how it always was. Augusto seemed intoxicated by his own imperial name. Every one of his legionnaires had to stand behind him and all his actions. Murders that could be taken care of by one or two men were instead carried out by all his most trusted legionnaires, who were usually expected to fire at least one shot, even if the person was already dead. One for all and all for one. Augusto required full participation, even when it was superfluous. The constant fear that someone could pull back made him always act in a group. Clan dealings in Amsterdam, Aberdeen, London, and Caracas might make some affiliate lose his head and think he could go out on his own. Here savageness is the true value of commerce: to renounce it is to lose everything. After they killed Hassa Fakhry, they stuck hundreds of insulin syringes, the kind heroin addicts use, in his body. A message on his flesh, which everyone in Mondragone and Formia would immediately understand. The boss wasn’t concerned about other people. When Paolo Montano,
known as Zumpariello, one of the most reliable men in his hit squad, started doing drugs and couldn’t break his cocaine habit, Augusto had one of his faithful friends summon him to a meeting on a farm. When they arrived, Ernesto Cornacchia was supposed to empty his entire clip into Zumpariello, but the boss was standing too close and Cornacchia was afraid he would also hit him. Seeing Ernesto hesitate, Augusto took out his pistol and killed Montano himself. The shots pierced his body, hitting Cornacchia as well, but he preferred to take a bullet rather than risk wounding the boss. Zumpa-riello was thrown in a well and blown up, Mondragone-style.

Augusto’s legionnaires would do anything for him. They even followed him when he turned state’s witness. In January 2003, after his wife’s arrest, the boss decided to take the big step. He accused himself and his men of forty or so homicides, gave the locations of the wells where they’d exploded people, and charged himself with dozens and dozens of extortions. A confession that focused more on military than economic activity. His most loyal men—Mario Sperlongano, Giuseppe Valente, Girolamo Rozzera, Pietro Scuttini, Salvatore Orabona, Ernesto Cornacchia, Angelo Gagliardi—soon followed him. Once in jail, silence becomes the bosses’ best weapon for holding on to authority, for formally maintaining power, even if the harsh prison routine removes them from hands-on management. But Augusto La Torre is a special case: by confessing and having all his men follow suit, there was no fear that someone would kill his family as a result of his defection. Nor did collaborating with the authorities seem to undermine the Mondragone cartel’s economic empire. His confession only helped reveal the logic of the killings and the history of power along the Caserta and Lazio coast. Like many Camorra bosses, Augusto La Torre spoke of the past. Without
pentiti,
the history of power could not be written. Without
pentiti
the truth—facts, details, and mechanisms—is only discovered ten, twenty years later, as if a man were to understand how his vital organs worked only after he is dead.

Collaboration on the part of Augusto La Torre and his chiefs of staff presents a certain risk; they could receive substantial sentence reductions in exchange for confessing and be released a few years later. They could delegate military power to others, above all the Albanian crime families, and still maintain their legal economic power. It’s as if they decided to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to use their knowledge as a way of living on their legal activities only and to avoid life sentences and internal feuds in the process. Augusto had never been able to stand being locked up; unlike the great bosses who’d trained him, he was incapable of surviving decades of incarceration. He expected the prison cafeteria to serve vegetarian food. And as he loved movies but wasn’t allowed a VCR in his cell, when he felt like seeing
The Godfather,
he’d ask a local broadcaster to air it in the evening, before he went to bed.

For the magistrates, La Torre’s collaboration is laden with ambiguity, for he never renounced his role as boss. His revelations were an extension of his power, as a letter to his uncle shows: he reassures him that he “saved” him from any possible involvement in clan affairs, but, good storyteller that he is, he also does not fail to threaten him and two other relatives, thus averting the possibility of an alliance against him developing in Mondragone:

“Your son-in-law and his father feel protected by the walking dead.”

The boss, even as a
pentito,
still asked for money from his jail cell in the Aquila prison. He got around the System by delivering commands and requests for cash in letters he gave to his mother or driver, Pietro Scuttini. According to the magistrates, those requests were actually extortions. A polite, courteous letter to the owner of one of the largest cheese makers on the Domitian coast proves that Augusto still considered him under his control.

“Dear Peppe, I need to ask you a huge favor, because I’ve been ruined.
If you would like to help me—but I only ask in the name of our old friendship and not for any other reason, and even if you say no, don’t worry, I’ll always look out for you! I am in urgent need of ten thousand euros. You also have to tell me if you can give me a thousand euros a month, which I need to live with my children.”

The standard of living the La Torre family was used to was way above the economic assistance level the state provides to collaborators. I only managed to understand the family dealings after reading the documents of the mega-confiscation carried out under the Santa Maria Capua Vetere Court orders in 1992. They seized properties worth about 230 million euros, nineteen companies worth 323 million euros, as well as manufacturing equipment and machinery worth 133 million euros. Numerous factories located along the coast between Naples and Gaeta, including a dairy, a sugar refinery, four supermarkets, nine seaside villas, buildings, land, as well as big cars and motorcycles. Every company had about sixty employees. The judges also ordered confiscated the company that had won the trash-collection contract in Mondragone. A huge operation that annulled a vast economic power, but microscopic compared to actual clan operations. A grandiose villa near Ariana di Gaeta, whose fame had reached all the way to Aberdeen, was also seized. Four stories, right on the cliffs, a swimming pool complete with underwater labyrinth, designed after the villa of Tiberius—not the founder of the Mondragone clan, but the Roman emperor who had retired to the island of Capri. I never did get inside; legends and court documents were the lens through which I learned of the existence of this imperial mausoleum, sentinel of the clan’s Italian properties. The coastal zone could have been a sort of infinite space, inspiring every architectural fantasy imaginable. Instead over time it became a hodgepodge of houses and small villas, thrown up quickly to attract tourists to southern Lazio and Naples. No zoning regulations, no permits. As a result, groups of African immigrants were crammed into cottages from Castelvolturno
to Mondragone, and the parks that were planned, the grounds that were for new vacation homes, became unregulated dumps. None of the coastal towns had a purification plant. Now a brownish sea bathes beaches covered in trash. In a few years, even the most remote remembrance of beauty had been canceled out. In the summertime some nightclubs turned into regular brothels. Friends, preparing for the evening’s activities, would show me their empty wallets. Empty not of cash, but of thin foil packets with a circular soul—condoms. They were letting it be known that it was safe to go to Mondragone to fuck without protection: “Tonight we go without!”

Augusto La Torre was Mondragone’s condom. The boss decided to keep watch over the health of his subjects. Mondragone became a sort of temple, clean of the most dreaded of sexually transmitted diseases. While the rest of the world was plagued with HIV, northern Caserta was fully under control. The clan was meticulous, tracking everyone’s test results. To the extent possible, the clan kept complete lists; they did not want their territory infected. And so when a man close to Augusto tested positive for HIV, they found out immediately. Fernando Brodella frequented the local girls; he could be dangerous. Unlike the Bidognetti clan, who sent their affiliates to the best doctors and paid for surgery in the top hospitals in Europe, the La Torres didn’t even consider sending Brodella to a good doctor or paying for his treatment. They killed him in cold blood. Clan orders: eliminate the sick to stop the epidemic. An infectious disease, especially one transmitted sexually, through the least controllable act, could only be stopped by removing those who were infected once and for all. The only way to be sure they would not infect anyone was to end their lives.

Capital investments in Campania also had to be safe. They even bought a villa in Anacapri that housed the local carabinieri headquarters. With carabinieri as tenants, they were guaranteed not to run into any difficulties. When the La Torres realized the villa would bring in
more money with tourists, they evicted the carabinieri and divided it into six apartments with a yard and parking spaces—before the anti-Mafia division arrived and seized the whole place. Clean, safe investments, with no speculative risks.

After Augusto turned state’s witness, the new boss, Luigi Fragnoli, a La Torre loyalist, started having problems with some affiliates such as Giuseppe Mancone, also known as Rambo. Rambo bore a vague resemblance to Stallone, his body pumped up from weight lifting. The drug market he’d established was gaining in importance; soon he would be able to kick out the old bosses, whose reputation had been shattered by the
pentiti.
According to the anti-Mafia prosecutor, the Mondragone clans asked the Birra family from Ercolano to hire the killers. Two hit men arrived in Mondragone to take out Rambo in August 2003. They showed up on one of those big motor scooters—not terribly maneuverable, but so menacing they couldn’t resist using it for the ambush. They’d never set foot in Mondragone, but didn’t have any problems spotting their victim; he was at the Roxy Bar, as always. The motorbike came to a halt. One of them got off, walked decisively up to Rambo, emptied an entire clip into him, then returned to the bike.

“Everything all set? You did it?”

“Yeah, I did it, go go go.”

There was a group of kids near the bar, deciding what to do for the August 15
ferragosto
holiday. As soon as they saw the guys from Ercolano, they realized what was going on; there was no mistaking the sound of an automatic for fireworks. They all lay down, face to the ground, fearing to be targeted as potential witnesses. Only one person didn’t look away. One person stared at the killer without lowering her eyes, without pressing her chest to the tarmac or covering her face with her hands. A thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher. The woman testified, made identifications, reported the killing. Among the many reasons
for keeping quiet, for pretending nothing happened, for going home and living as before, are the fear of intimidation and, even more, futility—one killer arrested was just one out of many. And yet among the slag heap of reasons to keep quiet, the Mondragone schoolteacher found one motivation to speak: the truth. A truth that seems natural, like an everyday, habitual gesture, an obvious and necessary act, like breathing. She testified without asking anything in return. She didn’t expect a stipend or police protection, didn’t set a price on her word. She told what she’d seen, described the killer’s face, his angular features and thick eyebrows. After the shooting, the motor scooter sped off, but it made several wrong turns, heading down dead-end streets and having to turn around. They seemed more like schizophrenic tourists than killers. In the trial that resulted from the schoolteacher’s testimony, Salvatore Cefariello, the twenty-four-year-old killer considered to be in the pay of the Ercolano clans, was condemned for life. The judge who took the teacher’s testimony called her “a rose in the desert,” blooming in a land where truth is always the powerful people’s version of things, where it is almost never stated, a rare commodity to be bartered for a profit.