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

THE SECONDIGLIANO WAR

McKay and Angioletto had made up their minds. They’d decided to form their own group and wanted to make it official. All the old guard had agreed, and they’d made it clear they weren’t trying to start a conflict. They wanted to become competitors, fair competitors, on the open market. Side by side, but independent. And so—according to the pentito Pietro Esposito—they sent a message to Cosimo Di Lauro, the cartel’s regent. They wanted to meet with his father, Paolo, the top man, the boss, the association’s number one. To talk to him in person, tell him they didn’t agree with his reorganization decisions, remind him that they had children of their own now. They wanted to look him in the eye. Enough of this passing word from mouth to mouth, of messages sticky from the saliva of too many tongues—cell phones were out of the question because they could reveal his hiding place. Genny McKay wanted to meet with Paolo Di Lauro, the boss who was responsible for his rise in the business.

Cosimo formally accepts the request for a meeting, which means assembling all the top brass of the organization: bosses, underbosses, and area capos. It’s impossible to say no. But Cosimo’s already got it all figured out, or so it seems. He’s clear on where he’s taking things and knows how to organize his defense. And so—according to investigations and state witnesses—Cosimo doesn’t send his underlings. He doesn’t send Giovanni cavallaro Cortese, the horse dealer, the official spokesman, the one who’d always handled the Di Lauro family’s relations with the outside world. Cosimo sends his brothers. Marco and Ciro case the meeting place, check it out, see which way the wind is blowing, but without letting anyone know they’re there. No bodyguards, just a quick drive by. But not too quick. They note the prepared exit routes and the sentries in position, all without attracting attention. Then they report back to Cosimo, give him the details. He takes it all in. The meeting is a setup, a trap, a way to kill Paolo and whoever comes with him and to ratify a new era in the running of the cartel. Then again, you don’t divide up an empire with a handshake. You have to cut it with a knife. That’s what they say, what all the investigations and informants say.

Cosimo, the son Paolo put in charge of the narcotics trade, the one to whom he’d given the greatest responsibility, has to decide. It will be war. But he doesn’t declare it openly. He keeps it all in his head—he doesn’t want to alarm his rivals. He watches and waits to see what they’ll do. He knows they’ll attack him soon, knows he needs to be prepared for their claws in his flesh, but he also needs to play for time, to come up with a precise, infallible, winning strategy. To figure out whom he can count on, what forces he can control. Who is with him and who’s against him. Secondigliano isn’t big enough for both of them.

The Di Lauros make excuses for their father’s absence: he’s on the run, a wanted man for over ten years, and the police investigations make it difficult for him to move about. A missed appointment is nothing serious if you’re one of the thirty most dangerous fugitives in Italy. After decades of smooth operations, the biggest narcotraffic holding company nationally and internationally is about to face a lethal crisis.

The Di Lauro clan has always been a well-organized business, structured along the lines of a multilevel company. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, the first tier is made up of clan leaders Rosario Pariante, Raffaele Abbinante, Enrico D’Avanzo, and Arcangelo Valentino; they act as promoters and financiers, controlling the peddling and drug-trafficking activities through their direct affiliates. The second tier, which includes Gennaro Marino, Lucio De Lucia, and Pasquale Gargiulo, actually handle the drugs, do the purchasing and packaging, and manage relations with the pushers, who are guaranteed legal defense in case of arrest. The third level is composed of open-air drug-market capos; they have direct contact with the pushers, coordinate lookouts and escape routes, and secure the storehouses and places where the drugs are cut. The fourth level, the pushers, is the most exposed. Every level has its own sublevels that report exclusively to their leader rather than to the entire structure. This setup brings in profits of 500 percent on initial investments.

The Di Lauro business model has always reminded me of the mathematical concept of fractals, which textbooks explain using a bunch of bananas: each individual banana is actually a bunch of bananas, and in turn each of those bananas is a bunch of bananas, and so on to infinity. The Di Lauro clan turns over 500,000 euros a day through narcotraffic alone. Pushers, storehouse operators, and couriers often aren’t part of the organization but simply salaried workers. Drug peddling is an enormous activity employing thousands of individuals, but they don’t know who their boss is. They have a general idea of which Camorra family they work for, but that’s all. If someone gets arrested and decides to talk, his knowledge of the organization is limited to a small, well-defined area; he’d be incapable of revealing the entire flowchart, the vast circumnavigation of the organization’s economic and military power.

The whole economic and financial structure is backed by a military set up: a team of ferocious hit men with a vast network of flank support. A legion of killers—including Emanuele D’ Ambra, Ugo ugariello De Lucia, Nando ‘o schizzato Emolo, Antonio ‘o tavano Ferrara, Salvatore Tamburino, Salvatore Petriccione, Umberto La Monica, and Antonio Mennetta—are flanked by neighborhood capos Gennaro Aruta, Ciro Saggese, Fulvio Montanino, Antonio Galeota, Constantino Sorrentino, and Giuseppe Prezioso, Cosimo’s personal bodyguard. An outfit at least three hundred strong, all on monthly salary. A complex structure, meticulously planned and organized. A large fleet of cars and motorcycles always ready for emergencies. A secret armory and a group of factories ready to destroy weapons immediately after they’re used. A supply of inconspicuous tracksuits and motorcycle helmets, also to be destroyed afterward. Even a logistical network that immediately after the hit gets the killers to a shooting range that records their entrance time; that’s how they construct an alibi and confound the findings in the event of a stub, a test that detects gunpowder residue. The stub is every killer’s worst fear: gunpowder traces can’t be removed and are the most damning evidence. The idea isn’t so much to conceal an action, a murder, or an investment, but simply to render it unprovable in court. A flawless company, everything in perfect working order, or almost.

I’d been going to Secondigliano for a while. Ever since Pasquale quit working as a tailor, he’d been keeping me up-to-date on how the wind was blowing there. It was shifting fast, as fast as the flow of money.

I’d cruise around on my Vespa. The thing I like most about Secondigliano and Scampia is the light. The big, wide streets are airier than the tangle of the old city center, and I could imagine the countryside still alive under the asphalt and massive buildings. After all, space is preserved in Scampia’s very name, which in a defunct Neapolitan dialect means “open land.” A place where weeds grow. Where the infamous Vele, or Sails, a monstrous public housing project, sprouted in the 1960s. The rotten symbol of architectural delirium, or perhaps merely a cement utopia powerless to oppose the narcotraffic machine that feeds on this part of the world. Chronic unemployment and a total absence of social development planning have transformed the area into a narcotics warehouse, a laboratory for turning drug money into a vibrant, legal economy. Scampia and Secondigliano pump oxygen from illegal markets into legitimate businesses. In 1989 the Camorra Observatory, a Camorra-watch organization, noted in one of its publications that the northern outskirts of Naples had one of the highest ratios of drug pushers to inhabitants in all of Italy. This ratio is now the highest in Europe and one of the top five in the world.

Over time my face got to be known in the area. For the clan sentries or lookouts, familiarity is a neutral value. In a territory that’s constantly under visual surveillance, there are negative values—the police, carabinieri, infiltrators from rival families—and positive ones: buyers. Anything else is considered neutral, useless. If you’re put in this category, it means you don’t exist. Open-air drug markets have always fascinated me; their impeccable organization contradicts any idea of absolute degradation. They run like clockwork, the people like gears, each move setting off another. It’s bewitching to watch. Salaries are paid out weekly, 100 euros for the lookouts, 500 for the market coordinator and cashier, 800 for the pushers, and 1,000 for the people who run the storehouses and hide drugs in their homes. Shifts run from 3 p.m. to midnight and from midnight to 4 a.m.; it’s too hard to deal in the morning, too many police around. Everyone gets a day off, and if you show up late, your pay is docked, 50 euros for every hour you miss.

Via Baku is always hopping. Clients arrive, pay, collect the goods, and leave. At times a line of cars actually forms behind the pusher. Especially on Saturday evenings, when pushers are pulled in from other areas. Via Baku brings in half a million euros a month; the narcotics squad reports that on average four hundred doses each of marijuana and cocaine are sold here every day. When the police show up, the pushers know exactly which houses to go to and where to stash the goods. A car or scooter usually pulls in front of the police car to slow it down, thus giving the lookouts time to pick up the pushers and whisk them away on their motorcycles. The lookouts are unarmed and usually have a clean record, so even if they’re pulled over, there’s little risk of indictment. If the pushers are arrested, reserves are called in, usually addicts or regular users willing to help out in emergencies. For every pusher who’s arrested, another takes his place. Business is business, even in times of trouble.

Via Dante also brings in astronomical sums. It’s a thriving market, one of the newest Di Lauro setups, and the pushers are all young kids. Then there’s Viale della Resistenza, an old heroin market that also deals in kobret and cocaine. Here the marketplace coordinators actually have a headquarters furnished with maps and speakerphones where they organize the defense of their territory. Lookouts on cell phones keep them informed as to what is happening, permitting them to follow the movements of police and clients in real time.

One of the Di Lauro innovations is customer protection. Before the clan took over, only the pushers were protected from arrest and identification, whereas buyers could be stopped, identified, and taken down to headquarters. But Di Lauro provided lookouts for their customers as well—safe access for everyone. Nothing but the best for the casual consumer, a mainstay of the Secondigliano drug trade. In the Berlingieri neighborhood you can call ahead and they’ll have your order ready for you. The same holds for Via Ghisleri, Parco Ises, the whole Don Guanella neighborhood, the H section of Via Labriola, and the Sette Palazzi quarter. In areas that have been transformed into profitable markets, the streets are guarded and the residents develop a survival instinct of selective vision, of deciding in advance what to see and what to block out as too horrendous. They live in an enormous supermarket, where every imaginable kind of drug is available. No substance gets introduced on the European market without first passing through Secondigliano. If the drugs were only for the inhabitants of Naples and Campania, the statistics would be unbelievably absurd. At least two coke addicts and one heroin addict to every family. And that’s not even considering hashish, marijuana, kobret, and light drugs. Pills—what some people still call ecstasy, but there are actually 179 varieties—are huge sellers in Secondigliano, where they’re called X files or tokens or candies. There’s enormous profit in pills. They cost 1 euro to produce, are sold in bulk at 3 to 5 euros, and then resold in Milan, Rome, or other parts of Naples for 50 to 60 euros apiece. In Scampia they go for 15.

Secondigliano moved beyond the confines of the traditional drug market and identified cocaine as the new frontier. Thanks to the clans’ new economic policies, what was once an elite substance is now well within everyone’s reach, with various grades of quality to satisfy every need. According to the analyst group Abele, 90 percent of cocaine users are workers or students. No longer just for getting high, coke is now consumed at all times of the day: to relax after working overtime, to find the energy to do something that resembles a human activity and not simply to combat exhaustion; to drive a truck at night; to keep at it for hours in front of the computer; to carry on without stopping, to work for weeks without any sort of break. A solvent for fatigue, an anesthetic for pain, a prosthesis for happiness. No longer merely for stupefaction, drugs are a resource now. To satisfy this new desire, dealing had to become flexible and free of criminal rigidities. The supply and sale of drugs had to be liberalized. The Di Lauro clan was the first to make the leap in Naples. Italian criminal cartels traditionally prefer to sell large lots. But Di Lauro decided to sell medium lots to promote small drug-dealing businesses that would attract new clients. Autonomous businesses, free to do what they want with the goods, set their own prices, advertise how and where they choose. Anyone can access the market, for any amount, without needing to go through clan mediators. Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta have extensive drug businesses, but you have to know the chain of command, and to deal through them you have to be introduced by clan members or affiliates. They insist on knowing where you’ll be peddling, what the distribution will be. But not the Secondigliano System. Here the rule is laissez-faire, laissez-passer. Total and absolute liberalism. Let the market regulate itself. And so in no time Secondigliano attracted everyone eager to set up a small drug business among friends, anyone wanting to buy at 15 and sell at 100 to pay for a vacation, a master’s degree, or a mortgage. The total liberalization of the market caused prices to drop.

Except for certain open-air markets, retail drug sales may eventually disappear. Now there are the so-called circles: the doctors’ circle, the pilots’ circle, circles for journalists and government employees. The lower-middle class is the perfect fit for an informal and hyperliberal distribution system. A friendly exchange, more like a Tupperware party, far removed from any criminal structures. Ideal for eliminating excessive moral responsibility. No pusher in a silk acetate tracksuit planted for days on end in the corner of the marketplace, protected by lookouts. Nothing but the products and the money, just enough space for commercial exchange. Italian police records reveal that one in three arrests is of a first-time offender. According to the Superior Health Institute, cocaine consumption has soared to historical highs, rising 80 percent from 1999 to 2002. The number of addicts who turn to SERT, the Italian services for substance abusers, doubles every year. The market expansion is immense. Genetically modified cultivation, which permits four harvests a year, has eliminated supply problems, and the absence of a single dominant organization favors free enterprise. I read in a newspaper that the singer Robbie Williams, who has had his problems with cocaine, was fond of saying, “Cocaine is God’s way of letting you know you have too much money.” These words came back to me when I heard some kids in the Case Celesti neighborhood singing the praises of product and place: “If Case Celesti cocaine exists, it means that God doesn’t place any value on money.”

Case Celesti—the name comes from the pale blue color the houses once had—an area which runs along Via Limitone d’Arzano, is one of Europe’s finest cocaine markets. This wasn’t always the case. According to investigations, it was Gennaro Marino McKay who made the place so profitable. He’s the clan’s point man in the area. And that’s not all. Paolo Di Lauro likes the way he runs things so he gave him franchising rights on the local market. McKay operates independently; all he has to do is pay a monthly fee to the clan. Gennaro and his brother Gaetano are known as the McKays because their father resembled Zeb Macahan, which Italians pronounce as McKay, in the TV series How the West Was Won. And so the whole family became McKay. Gaetano has no hands. He lost them in 1991 in the war against the Pucas, an old Cutolo clan family, when a grenade he was holding went off. Now he has two stiff wooden prostheses that are painted black. Gaetano McKay always has a companion, a sort of majordomo who acts as his hands. But when Gaetano has to sign something, he jams a pen in his prosthesis and fixes it on the paper; contorting his neck and wrists, he somehow manages to produce a signature that is only slightly crooked.

According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, Genny McKay’s operations store as well as peddle drugs. Suppliers’ prices are tightly linked to their ability to stockpile, and the cement jungle and hundred thousand inhabitants of Secondigliano are a valuable asset. The mass of people with homes and daily lives forms a great wall around the drug depots. The Case Celesti marketplace is responsible for a decrease in cocaine prices. Normally they start at 50 to 60 euros a gram and can go as high as 100 or 200 euros. Here prices have dropped to the 25 to 50 range, but the quality remains high. DDA reports identify Genny McKay as one of the most talented Italians in the cocaine business, dominating a market of unparalleled, exponential growth. Open-air drug markets could have been established in Posillipo, Parioli, or Brera—posh neighborhoods of Naples, Rome, and Milan—but instead they were established in Secondigliano. Labor costs in any other place would have been far too high. Here the serious lack of work and the impossibility of finding a way to earn a living—other than emigrating—make for low salaries, very low. It’s no mystery, really, and there’s no need to appeal to the sociology of poverty or a metaphysics of the ghetto. An area where dozens of clans are operating, with profit levels comparable only to a maneuver in high finance—where a single family can turn over 300 million euros annually—cannot be a ghetto. The work is meticulous and the chain of production is extremely expensive. A kilo of cocaine costs the producer 1,000 euros, but by the time it reaches the wholesaler, it’s already worth 30,000. After the first cut 30 kilos become 150: a market value of approximately 15 million euros. With a larger cut, 30 kilos can be stretched to 200. The cut is essential: caffeine, glucose, mannitol, paracetamol, lidocaine, benzocaine, amphetamines—but in emergencies even talc and calcium for dogs are used. The cut determines the quality, and a bad cut attracts death, police, and arrests. A bad cut clogs the arteries of commerce.

The Secondigliano clans are ahead of everyone else in drug cutting, a precious advantage. Here there are the Visitors: heroin addicts, named after characters in a 1980s TV program who devour mice and have greenish, slimy scales under seemingly normal human skin. The Visitors are used as guinea pigs, human guinea pigs for testing to see if a cut is dangerous, what reactions it causes, how much to dilute the powder. When the lab needs lots of guinea pigs, they lower the prices. From 20 down to as low as 10 euros a hit. Word gets out and the Visitors come from as far away as the Marche and Lucania for a few hits. The heroin market is collapsing. The number of addicts is in decline, and the ones who are left are desperate. They stagger their way onto buses, on and off trains all night, catch rides, walk for miles. But the cheapest heroin on the Continent is worth the effort. The guys who do the cut for the clan assemble the Visitors, give them a free dose, and wait. In a phone call included in a March 2005 preventive detention order released by the Court of Naples, two individuals organize a test of a cut. First they set things up:

“Can you give me five doses … for allergy testing?”

They talk again a bit later:

“Did you try the machine?”

“Yes …”

They clearly mean the testing.

“Yes, mamma mia, troppo bello, we’re number one, my friend, the others will be out of business.”

They rejoice, glad the guinea pigs didn’t die; on the contrary, they really enjoyed it. A good cut doubles sales, and if it’s really high quality, it’ll soon be in demand nationally, trouncing the competition.

Only after I read this telephone exchange did I understand a scene I’d witnessed a while earlier. I could not believe my eyes. I was in Miano, not far from Scampia, in a clearing near some storage hangars, where a dozen or so Visitors had been rounded up. I hadn’t ended up there by chance; I believe that the way to truly understand, to get to the bottom of things, is to smell the hot breath of reality, to touch the nitty-gritty. I’m not convinced it’s necessary to be there, to observe in order to know things, but being there is absolutely essential for things to know you. A well-dressed fellow—white suit, navy blue shirt, brand-new running shoes—unfolded a chamois cloth with a few syringes in it on the hood of the car. The Visitors elbowed their way forward; it looked like one of those scenes they show on the news when a truck full of flour arrives in Africa. Identical, always the same, year after year. But then a Visitor started yelling:

“No, I won’t take it, not even if you give it to me … you want to kill us …”

All it took was one suspicious person and the others withdrew immediately. The fellow just waited; he didn’t seem particularly eager to convince anyone. The air was full of dust from the Visitors’ trampling around, and every now and then he’d spit out the grit that settled on his teeth. Two of the Visitors finally went up to him, a couple actually. They were trembling, really on the edge, in withdrawal. The veins in the guy’s arms were shot, so he took off his shoes, but even the soles of his feet were ruined. The girl picked up a syringe and held it between her teeth as she slowly opened his shirt, as if it had a hundred buttons, then jabbed him in the throat. The syringe contained coke. Once it’s in the bloodstream it becomes clear pretty quickly if the cut is good or if it’s off, too heavy, or poor quality. After a bit he started to sway, frothing lightly at the corners of his mouth. He fell to the ground, jerked around and then stretched out flat, closed his eyes, and went stiff. The man in the white suit started calling on his cell.

“He looks dead to me … Okay, okay, I’ll try giving him a massage …”

He began pounding the Visitor’s chest with his boot: a violent cardiac massage. Next to him the girl was blithering something, the words hanging on her lips: “You’re doing it wrong, you’re doing it wrong. You’re hurting him …” With all the strength of a wet noodle she tried to push him away from her boyfriend’s body. But the man was disgusted, almost frightened by her and the Visitors in general:

“Don’t touch me … you’re disgusting … don’t you dare come near me … don’t touch me or I’ll shoot!”

He went on kicking the guy’s chest, and then, resting his foot on his sternum, he made another call:

“He’s a goner … Oh yeah, the Kleenex … hang on, let me see …”

He took a Kleenex out of his pocket, moistened it, and spread it over the guy’s lips. Even the faintest breath would make a hole, indicating that he was still alive. A precaution to keep from touching the body. He phoned one last time:

“He’s dead. We have to make it lighter.”

The man got back in his car. The driver, meanwhile, had been bouncing up and down the whole time, dancing in his seat to some silent music; I couldn’t hear a sound even though he acted as if it were playing full blast. Within a few minutes everyone moved away and started wandering around in that patch of dust. The guy was still stretched out on the ground, his girlfriend whimpering beside him. Even her crying stuck to her lips, as if the only form of vocal expression the heroin allowed was a hoarse moan.

I couldn’t understand why, but the girl got up, dropped her pants, squatted right over his face, and pissed. The Kleenex stuck to his mouth and nose. After a bit he regained his senses, and wiped his face with his hands, like when you come up from underwater. This Lazarus of Miano, resurrected by who knows what substances in her urine, slowly got up. I swear that if I hadn’t been so stunned, I would have cried out, “Miracle!” Instead I paced back and forth, which is what I always do when I don’t understand or don’t know what to do. I nervously occupy space. My moving around must have attracted attention, since the Visitors came nearer and started yelling at me. They thought I was connected to the guy with the syringes. They kept shouting, “You … you … you wanted to kill him.”

They hovered around me, but scattered as soon as I quickened my pace. They followed me though, hurling disgusting objects they’d picked up from the ground. I hadn’t done anything, but if you’re not an addict, you must be a pusher. Suddenly a truck appeared. Dozens of them had been pulling out of the warehouses all morning. It stopped near me and a voice called my name. It was Pasquale. He opened the door and had me jump in. Not a guardian angel who saves his favorite charge—more like two rats running in the same sewer, pulling each other by the tail.

Pasquale looked at me with the severity of a father who’d foreseen everything. That sarcastic smile said it all; no need to waste time scolding me. I stared at his hands instead. Even redder, more chapped, knuckles cracked, palms anemic. Fingers accustomed to silk and velvet have trouble adjusting to ten hours at the steering wheel. Pasquale was talking, but I couldn’t get the Visitors out of my head. Monkeys. Less than monkeys. Guinea pigs, testing the cut of a drug that will be distributed all over Europe—the clans can’t take the chance it might kill someone. Human guinea pigs, so that people in Rome, Naples, Abruzzo, Lucania, and Bologna won’t end up dead, blood dripping from their nose and foaming at the mouth. A dead Visitor in Secondigliano is only one more wretch whose demise will go uninvestigated. It’s already a lot if he’s picked up off the ground, his face wiped clean of vomit and piss, and buried. Elsewhere there’d be an autopsy, an investigation, conjectures about his death. Here there’s just one word: overdose.

Pasquale took the road that links the northern suburbs of Naples. Sheds, warehouses, rubbish dumps, rusting junk strewn around, trash tossed everywhere. No industrial complexes here. There’s the stink of factory smoke but no factories. Houses scattered along streets, piazzas defined by the presence of a bar. A confused and complicated desert. Pasquale realized I wasn’t listening so he braked suddenly. Without coming to a full stop, just a little whiplash—just enough to shake me up. Then he looked at me and said, “Things are going to get rough in Secondigliano … ‘a vicchiarella is in Spain with everybody’s money. You’ve got to quit coming around here. I can feel the tension everywhere. Even the asphalt would peel off the ground if it could get out of here.”

I decided to follow what was going to happen in Secondigliano. The more Pasquale insisted it would be dangerous, the more I became convinced that it was impossible not to try to understand the elements of the disaster. And understanding meant being part of it somehow. I had no choice; as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to understand things. Neutrality and objective distance are places I’ve never been able to find. Raffaele Amato—‘a vicchiarella, the old woman—a second-tier clan executive in charge of the Spanish drug markets, had fled to Barcelona with the Di Lauro cash box. At least that’s what was being said. In truth he had failed to turn his quota over to the clan, a way of demonstrating that he no longer felt the least obligation to the people who wanted to keep him on a salary. The schism was official. For the moment it involved only Spain, which had always been controlled by the clans: Andalusia by the Casalesi of Caserta, the islands by the Nuvolettas of Marano, and Barcelona by the “secessionists.” That’s the name the first crime reporters on the story gave to the Di Lauro men who broke away. But everyone in Secondigliano calls them the Spaniards. With their leader in Spain, they took the lead not only in peddling but in narcotraffic as well, Madrid being a crucial junction for cocaine coming from Colombia and Peru. According to investigations, Amato’s men had long employed a brilliant stratagem for moving huge amounts of drugs: garbage trucks. Trash on the top, drugs underneath. An infallible method for escaping controls. No one would stop a garbage truck in the middle of the night.

According to the inquiries, Cosimo Di Lauro sensed that his managers were turning less and less capital over to the clan. Profit was supposed to be reinvested in wagers, the investments that managers make when purchasing drug lots with Di Lauro capital. Wager: the term comes from the irregular, hyperliberal cocaine and pill trade, in which there is no measure or certainty. So one bets, like in Russian roulette. If you wager 100,000 euros and things go well, two weeks later you’ve got 300,000. Whenever I come across such exponential figures, I remember what Giovanni Falcone told a group of students: “In order to understand how prosperous the drug trade is, consider that a thousand lire invested in drugs on the first of September become a hundred million by the first of August of the following year.” His example was recorded in hundreds of school notebooks.

The sums Di Lauro’s managers turned over were still astronomical, but getting progressively smaller. Over the long term this sort of practice would strengthen some and weaken others, and eventually—as soon as a group gathered enough organizational and military force—they’d give Paolo Di Lauro the shove. Not just some stiff competition, but the big shove, the one you don’t get up from, a shove with lead in it. So Cosimo ordered everyone be put on salary. He wanted them all to depend on him. The decision ran counter to his father’s ways, but it was necessary to protect his business, his authority, his family. No more loose ties, with everyone free to decide how much to invest, what type and quality of drugs to put on the market. No more liberty and autonomy within a multilevel corporation. Salaried employees. Some were saying 50,000 euros a month. An extraordinary amount, but a salary nevertheless. A subordinate role. The end of the entrepreneurial dream, replaced by a manager’s job. And the administrative revolution didn’t end there. Informants testify that Cosimo also imposed a generational turnover. Immediate rejuvenation of the top management, so no executives over thirty. The market doesn’t make concessions for the appreciation of human assets. It doesn’t make concessions for anything. You have to hustle to win. Every bond, be it affection, law, rights, love, emotion, or religion, is a concession to the competition, a stumbling block to success. There’s room for all that, but economic victory and control come first. Old bosses used to be listened to out of respect, even when they proposed outdated ideas or gave ineffective orders; their decisions counted precisely because of their age. And age was what posed the biggest threat to the leadership of Paolo Di Lauro’s offspring.

So now they were all on the same level; no appealing to a mythical past, previous experience, or respect owed. Everyone had to get by on the strength of his proposals, management abilities, or charisma. The Secondigliano commandos began unleashing their force before the secession occurred. But it was already brewing. One of their first objectives was Ferdinando Bizzarro, also known as bacchetella or Uncle Fester, after the bald, slippery little character on The Addams Family. Bizzarro was the ras of Melito. Ras is a term for someone of authority but who is still subject to the higher power of the boss. Bizzarro was no longer performing diligently as a Di Lauro area capo. He wanted to manage his own money, to make pivotal, and not merely administrative, decisions. This wasn’t a classic revolt; he merely wanted to be promoted, to become an autonomous partner. But he promoted himself. The Melito clans are ferocious; they run underground factories that make high-quality shoes for half the world and generate cash for loan-sharking. Underground factory owners almost always support the politician who will guarantee the least amount of business regulation, or the regional capo who gets him elected. The Secondigliano clans have never been slaves to politicians and have never wanted to establish programmatic pacts, but in this region it’s essential to have friends.

The very person who had been Bizzarro’s political point man became his angel of death. The clan asked Alfredo Cicala, a former mayor of Melito and local leader of the center-left political party La Margherita, for help with Bizzarro. According to the Naples DDA investigations, Cicala provided precise information about Bizzarro’s whereabouts. If one reads the wiretaps, it doesn’t seem as if they were plotting a murder, but simply rotating leaders. In the end, it’s really the same thing. Business has to go on, and Bizzarro’s decision to be autonomous threatened to cause problems. It had to be done, by whatever means. When Bizzarro’s mother died, Di Lauro’s affiliates considered going to the funeral and shooting at everyone and everything. Taking out Bizzarro, his son, his cousins. Everyone. They were ready. But Bizzarro and his son didn’t show. Detailed plans for an ambush continued, however. The clan even faxed information and orders to its affiliates:

“There’s no one left from Secondigliano, he’s sent them all away … he only goes out on Tuesday and Saturday, with four cars … you’re not to move for any reason. Uncle Fester sent a message saying that for Easter he wants 250 euros a store and isn’t afraid of anyone. They’re going to torture Siviero this week.”

A strategy orchestrated by fax. An appointment to torture marked on the calendar, just like an invoice, an order, or an airplane reservation. As are the reports on the traitor’s activities: Bizzarro has four escort cars and is extorting 250 euros a month. Siviero, Bizzarro’s faithful driver, is to be tortured, perhaps so he’ll spill the routes his boss is planning to take in the future. But the catalog of plots against Bizzarro doesn’t end here. They consider going to his son’s house, where they “won’t spare anyone.” And then a phone call: a killer heard that Bizzarro had stuck his nose out, had appeared in public to demonstrate his power and safety. The killer moans about losing such a perfect opportunity:

“Damn it, Madonna, we’re missing out here, he’s been in the piazza all morning.”

Nothing is hidden. Everything seems clear, obvious, woven into the fabric of the everyday. But the former mayor of Melito divulges the name of the hotel where Bizzarro holes up with his lover, where he goes to release tension and sperm. You can get used to everything: to living with the lights off so no one knows you’re home, to being escorted by four cars, to not making or receiving phone calls, to skipping your own mother’s funeral. But not to be able to see your lover—no. That would feel like a mockery, the end of all your power.

On April 26, 2004, Bizzarro is at the Hotel Villa Giulia, on the fourth floor. In bed with his lover. The commandos arrive wearing police bibs. The concierge doesn’t even ask the supposed officers to show their badges before giving them the magnetic key. They pound on the door. Bizzarro is still in his underwear. They hear him approach and start shooting. Two bursts of fire penetrate the door and his body. Lead and splinters hammer into his flesh. More shots demolish the door, and they finish him off with a bullet to the head. It’s clear now how the slaughter will unfold. Bizzarro was the first. Or one of the first. Or at least the first test of the Di Lauro clan’s strength, of their ability to attack whoever dares break the alliance or violate the business agreement. The secessionists’ strategy hasn’t completely taken shape yet, it’s not immediately comprehensible. You can breathe the tension in the air, but it’s as if they’re still waiting for something. Clarity—a declaration of war—comes on October 20, 2004, a few months after Bizzarro’s murder: Fulvio Montanino and Claudio Salerno are killed, shot fourteen times. According to investigations, they operated open-air drug markets and were extremely loyal to Cosimo. Since the idea of ensnaring and eliminating Cosimo and his father came to nothing, their killing marks the beginning of hostilities. The conflict is unleashed. Faced with dead bodies, there’s nothing else to do but fight. All the leaders decide to rebel against Di Lauro’s sons: Rosario Pariante, Raffaele Abbinante, as well as the new managers Raffaele Amato, Gennaro Marino McKay, Arcangelo Abate, and Giacomo Migliaccio. The De Lucias, Giovanni Cortese, Enrico D’Avanzo, and a large—very large—group of supporters remain loyal to Di Lauro. Young men who are promised promotions, booty, and economic and social advancement within the clan. Paolo Di Lauro’s sons Cosimo, Marco, and Ciro assume the leadership. It’s highly likely that Cosimo realized he was risking imprisonment or his life. Arrests and economic crises. But you have to choose: either wait to be slowly defeated by the rival clan growing in your own bosom, or try to save your business—or at least your hide. Economic defeat means immediate physical defeat as well.

This is war. No one knows how it will be fought, but everyone knows for sure it will be long and terrible. The most ruthless war that southern Italy has seen in the last ten years. The Di Lauros have fewer men, are much weaker, and far less organized. They had always reacted forcefully to the internal schisms arising from their liberalist management style, which some people misunderstood as autonomy, as permission to set up their own business. But in the Di Lauro clan, freedom is given; you cannot presume to own it. In 1992 the old rulers resolved the schism sparked by Antonio Rocco, head of Mugnano, by entering the Fulmine bar armed with submachine guns and hand grenades. They killed five people. Rocco turned government witness to save his skin, and based on the information he provided, the state placed nearly two hundred of Di Lauro’s targets under protection. But it didn’t make any difference; the association’s management was untarnished by Rocco’s testimony.

But this time Cosimo Di Lauro’s men start getting worried, as the December 7, 2004, provisional confinement order issued by the Court of Naples reveals. Two affiliates, Luigi Petrone and Salvatore Tamburino, talk on the phone about the declaration of war that came in the form of Montanino’s and Salerno’s murders.

Petrone: “They killed Fulvio.”

Tamburino: “Ah …”

Petrone: “You understand?”

The battle strategy, which Tamburino claims is dictated by Cosimo Di Lauro, begins to take shape. Take them out one by one, kill them, even if you have to use bombs.

Tamburino: “Even bombs, you hear? Cosimino said so, he said, ‘Now I’m going to take them out one by one … I’m going to kill them … real nasty, he said … all of them …”

Petrone: “The important thing is that the people are behind it, that they ‘work’ …”

Tamburino: “Gino, there’s millions of ‘em here. They’re kids, all of them … kids … now I’ll show you what he’s up to, that one …”

It’s a new strategy. Bring in the kids, promote them to the rank of soldier, transform the well-oiled operation of drug dealing, investments, and territorial control into a fighting machine. Boys who work in delicatessens and butcher’s shops, mechanics, waiters, and unemployed youth are to become the clan’s new and unforeseen power. Montanino’s death sets off a long and bloody attack and counterattack, deaths on top of deaths, one, two ambushes a day, clan supporters first, then relatives, houses burned, people beaten, suspicions flying.

Tamburino: “Cosimino’s very cool, ‘Eat, drink, and fuck’ is what he said. What can we do … it happened, we have to move on.”

Petrone: “But I don’t feel like eating any more. I eat just to put something in my stomach …”

The order to fight mustn’t seem desperate, though. It’s essential to look like winners, for a business just as for an army. Whoever lets it be seen that he’s in trouble, whoever escapes, disappears, or retreats, has already lost. Eat, drink, fuck. As if nothing had happened, as if nothing were happening. But Petrone and Tamburino are really scared; they don’t know how many affiliates have gone over to the Spaniards and how many have remained on their side.

Tamburino: “And how do we know how many of them have thrown in their lot with the others … we don’t know!”

Petrone: “Ah! How many of them have gone over? A whole bunch of them have stayed, Totore! I don’t understand … these ones here … don’t they like the Di Lauros?”

Tamburino: “If I were Cosimino, you know what I’d do? I’d start killing them all. If I had any doubts … all of them. I’d start taking them out … you understand!”

Kill them all. Every one of them. Even if you have doubts. Even if you don’t know which side they’re on, or if they’re even involved. Shoot! They’re slime, nothing but slime. In the face of war, danger, and defeat, allies and enemies are interchangeable. They’re no longer individuals, but elements for testing and expressing your strength. Groups, alliances, and enemies will take shape afterward. But first the shooting has to start.

On October 30, 2004, Di Lauro’s men show up at the home of Salvatore de Magistris: a man in his sixties married to the mother of Biagio Esposito, one of the secessionists. They want to know where Esposito’s hiding. The Di Lauros have to get them all, before they organize, before they realize they’re in the majority. They break de Magistris’s arms and legs with a club and crush his nose. With each blow they ask for information on his wife’s son. He doesn’t answer, and every refusal provokes another blow. They kick him relentlessly. He has to confess. But he doesn’t. Or maybe he really doesn’t know where Esposito is hiding. He dies after a month of agony.

On November 2, Massimo Galdiero is killed in a parking lot. They were supposed to hit his brother Gennaro, allegedly a friend of Raffaele Amato’s. On November 6, Antonio Landieri is killed on Via Labriola; to get him they fire on the whole group he’s with, seriously wounding five others who were dealing in cocaine, apparently for Gennaro McKay. The Spaniards answer back. On November 9 they evade a series of roadblocks and leave a white Fiat Punto in Via Cupa Perrillo. It’s the middle of the afternoon when the police find three bodies. Stefano Maisto, Mario Maisto, and Stefano Mauriello. One in the front, one in the back, one in the trunk: wherever they look they find a body. On November 20, Di Lauro’s men slay Biagio Migliaccio. They go to the car dealership where he works. “This is a holdup,” they say, then fire at his chest. His uncle Giacomo was the target. The Spaniards respond on the same day, killing Gennaro Emolo, father of one of Di Lauro’s most loyal men, accused of being part of the military arm of the organization. Domenico Riccio and Salvatore Gagliardi, both close to Raffaele Abbinante, are in a tobacco shop on November 21 when the Di Lauros take them out. An hour later Francesco Tortora is slain. The killers travel by car instead of motorcycle. They drive up, shoot, pick up his body like a sack, and take it to the outskirts of Casavatore, where they set car and body on fire, solving two problems at once. At midnight on the twenty-second the carabinieri find a burned-out car. Another one.

I’d got hold of a radio that picked up the police frequencies in order to follow the feud, so I’d arrive on my Vespa more or less at the same time as the police squads. But that night I’d fallen asleep. The cadenced crackle and squawk of police headquarters had become a sort of melodic lullaby. This time it was a phone call in the middle of the night that alerted me to what had happened. When I arrived at the scene, I found a car completely gutted by fire. They’d doused it with gasoline, gallons of it everywhere. Gas on the front seats, gas on the backseats, on the tires and steering wheel. The flames had already died and the windows exploded when the firemen arrived. I don’t exactly know why I rushed headlong to that carcass of a car. The stench was terrible, like burned plastic. A few people milling about, a policeman with a flashlight peering inside the metal frame. He sees a body, or something that looks like one. The firemen, looking disgusted, open the doors and remove the cadaver. A carabiniere feels sick and leans against the wall and vomits up the pasta and potatoes he’d eaten a few hours earlier. All that’s left is a stiff black trunk, a blackened skull, legs flayed by the flames. They pick it up by the arms, lower it to the ground, and wait for the mortuary van.

The death-catcher van circulates constantly. I see it driving around Scampia and Torre Annunziata. It collects bodies, accumulating cadavers of people who’ve been shot and killed. Campania has the highest murder rate in Italy, among the highest in the world. The mortuary van’s tires are worn smooth; it would be enough to photograph the nibbled rims and the gray sidewalls to capture the symbol of this place. Wearing filthy lattice gloves that have been used a thousand times, the men get out of the van and go to work. They slide the cadaver into a bag, one of those black body bags usually used for dead soldiers. It looks like one of the figures that emerge from the ashes of Vesuvius when the archaeologists pour plaster into the void left by the body. By now throngs of people have gathered around the car, but they’re all silent. As if no one were there. We barely even dare breathe. After the Camorra war started, many people stopped setting limits to what they could stand. And now they’ve come to see what else will happen. Every day they learn what more is possible, what else they have to endure. They learn, go home, and carry on. The carabinieri start taking photographs, and the van leaves with the dead body. I go to police headquarters. They’ll have to say something about this death. The usual journalists and a few policemen are in the pressroom. After a while the comments start: “They’re killing each other off, so much the better!” “Look how you end up if you become a Camorrista.” “You enjoyed earning all that money, so now enjoy being dead, you piece of shit.” The usual remarks, only more disgusted and exasperated. As if the cadaver were present and everyone had something to fling in his face: this night that had been ruined, this war that never ends, the garrisons that sprout up on every corner of Naples. It takes the doctors a long time to identify the body. Someone supplies the name of a neighborhood capo who’d disappeared a few days before. One of the many, one of the bodies piled up in cold storage in Cardarelli Hospital, awaiting the worst name possible. But they announce it’s not him.

Someone covers his mouth with his hands. The journalists swallow so hard their mouths go dry. The policemen shake their heads and stare at the tips of their shoes. The angry remarks are guiltily cut short. That body belonged to Gelsomina Verde, a twenty-two-year-old woman. She’d been kidnapped, tortured, and killed, a bullet in the back of the neck, fired from so close that it came out the front of her skull. Then they threw her in a car—her car—and set it on fire. Gelsomina had dated Gennaro Notturno, a young guy who had first decided to stay with the Di Lauros but then moved over to the Spaniards. She’d gone out with him for a few months, a while back. But someone had seen them embrace, maybe riding on a Vespa or sitting in a car together. Gennaro had been condemned to death, but he’d given them the slip; who knows where he’d disappeared to, maybe even some garage near where Gelsomina had been killed. He didn’t feel the need to protect her because they weren’t together anymore. But the clans have to strike, and the map of an individual is drawn through his acquaintances, relatives, even his possessions. A map on which messages can be written. The most terrible messages. Punishment is necessary. If someone goes unpunished, it might legitimize new betrayals or schisms. It’s too big a risk. Strike, in the worst way possible. This is the order. The rest doesn’t mean a thing. And so the Di Lauro loyalists find Gelsomina, use some excuse to meet her. They grab her, beat her bloody, torture her, ask her where Gennaro is. She doesn’t answer. Maybe she doesn’t know, or maybe she prefers to endure herself whatever they would have done to him. So they kill her. Maybe the Camorristi sent to do the job are high on cocaine, or maybe they need to stay straight to catch even the smallest detail. But their methods for eliminating every type of resistance, for negating every last breath of humanity, are well-known. Burning the body seemed to me like a way of erasing the traces of torture. The tormented body of a young woman would have provoked a dark rage throughout the neighborhood, and even though the clan can’t claim to have people’s consent, it doesn’t want hostility either. So burn, burn everything. It’s not her death that is so grievous, no more so than any other death during wartime. But it is unbearable to imagine how she died, how the torture was carried out. I breathe deeply and spit out the mucus in my chest in order to block those images.

Gelsomina Verde, or Mina, as she was called in the neighborhood. That’s how the newspapers call her as well, when they start to fondle her with those guilty, day-after feelings. It would have been easy to not distinguish her flesh from the people who are killing each other. Or, had she still been alive, to keep on thinking of her as the girlfriend of a Camorrista, one of the many who go along for the money or the sense of importance it gives them. Just one more signora who enjoys the riches of her Camorra husband. But Saracino, or Saracen, as Gennaro Notturno is called, has just started out. If he makes local capo and oversees the pushers, he could earn 1,000 or 2,000 euros a month. But it’s a long road. Compensation for a murder is probably 2,500 euros. And if you have to strike camp because the carabinieri are about to nab you, the clan will pay for a month in northern Italy or abroad. Maybe Gennaro even dreamed of becoming boss, of ruling half of Naples and investing all over Europe.

If I stop and take a deep breath, I can easily imagine their meeting, even though I wouldn’t recognize their faces. They probably met in a typical bar, one of those damned bars you find in the outskirts of southern cities, around which the existence of everyone, from kids to ninety-year-olds with cataracts, whirls. Or maybe they met in some discotheque. A stroll in Piazza Plebiscito, a kiss before going home. Then Saturdays together, going for pizza in the countryside, the bedroom door locked on Sundays after lunch when everyone else is nodding off, exhausted from all the eating. And on it goes. Just as it always does, for everyone, for Christ’s sake. Then Gennaro joins the System. He’ll have gone to some Camorra friend of his, gotten himself introduced, and started working for Di Lauro. I imagine Gelsomina probably knew and would have tried to find him something else to do. That’s how it usually goes around here, the girls rushing around for their boyfriends. But maybe in the end she forgot about Gennaro’s profession. After all, it was a job like any other. Driving a car, delivering a few packages, it all starts with the little things. With nothing. But it allows you to live, to work, and at times even makes you feel accomplished, appreciated, satisfied. And then their relationship ends.

Those few months were enough, though. Enough to associate Gelsomina with Gennaro. To mark her as traced by him, one of his affections. Even if their relationship was already over or had never really even begun. It doesn’t matter. These are only conjectures, fantasies. What remains is that a girl was tortured and killed because they saw her while she caressed or kissed someone a few months earlier somewhere in Naples. It’s almost impossible to believe. Gelsomina slaved a lot, like everyone around here. Often the young women and wives have to support their families because so many men suffer years of depression. Even the people who live in Secondigliano—the Third World—have a psyche. Being out of work for years changes you, and it kills you to be treated like shit by your superiors, with no contract, no respect, and no money. Or you become a beast. And then you’re really on the edge, near the end. So Gelsomina worked, just like everyone else who holds down at least three jobs to hoard up enough money, half of which she gave to her family. She also did volunteer work, assisting the elderly, something the newspapers outdid themselves in praising, as if they were competing to bring her back to life.

In war it’s impossible to maintain amorous ties or relationships, anything that could become an element of weakness. The emotional earthquake that occurs in the lives of the young men who become clan affiliates can be heard in the phone calls the carabinieri intercept, such as that between Francesco Venosa and his girlfriend Anna, transcribed in the holding order issued by the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office in February 2006. The last call before the number is changed, before Francesco flees to Lazio. First he sends an SMS to his brother, warning him not to go out on the street because he’s under fire:

“Hi bro luv u. dont go out for any reason. ok?”

Then Francesco has to tell his girlfriend he has to go away, explain that the life of a System man is complicated:

“I’m eighteen now … these guys don’t kid around … they throw you away … kill you, Anna!”

But Anna is obstinate. She would like to become a carabiniere, to change her life and make Francesco change his. He doesn’t disapprove in the least of Anna’s professional aspirations, but thinks he’s already too old to turn his life around.

Francesco: “I told you, I’m happy for you … But my life’s different … And I’m not about to change my life.”

Anna: “Oh, bravo, that’s great … Fine, stay just the way you are!”

Francesco: “Anna, Anna … don’t be like this …”

Anna: “But you’re eighteen, you can easily change … Why have you given up already? I don’t know …”

Francesco: “I’m not changing my life, not for anything in the world.”

Anna: “Right, because you’re fine the way you are.”

Francesco: “No, Anna, I’m not fine like this, but for the moment we’re down, and we have to regain the respect we lost … Before when we walked around the neighborhood, people didn’t dare to look us in the face … now they all hold their heads high.”

For Francesco, a Spaniard, the most serious insult is that no one is in awe of their power. They’ve suffered so many losses that everyone in the neighborhood sees them as a group of worthless killers, failed Camorristi. This is intolerable. He has to react, even at the price of his life. Anna tries to stop him, to make him feel he’s not already condemned.

Anna: “You don’t have to throw yourself into that mess, you can live just fine …”

Francesco: “No, I don’t want to change my life …”

This young secessionist is terrified that the Di Lauros will go after her, but he reassures her by telling her he’s had lots of girls so no one will associate the two of them. But then the romantic in him makes him confess she’s the only one: “I used to go with thirty women in the neighborhood—but now I’m only with you …”

Anna, girl that she is, seems to forget all fears of retaliation and only thinks about the last words Francesco has said: “I’d like to believe you.”

The war goes on. On November 24, 2004, they shoot Salvatore Abbinante in the face. He’s the nephew of Raffaele Abbinante, a Spaniard, one of the leaders, a Marano man. Nuvoletta territory. To become players on the Secondigliano market, the Maranos transferred lots of their members with their families to the Monterosa neighborhood, and the alleged leader of this group of Mafiosi planted in the heart of Secondigliano is Raffaele Abbinante. He was one of the most charismatic figures in Spain, where he was in command of the Costa del Sol region. In 1997, 2,500 kilos of hashish, 1,020 ecstasy pills, and 1,500 kilos of cocaine were seized in a huge operation. The authorities proved that the Neapolitan cartels of the Abbinantes and Nuvolettas were managing nearly all the synthetic-drug traffic in Spain and Italy. After Salvatore Abbinante’s murder it was feared that the Nuvolettas would intervene, that Cosa Nostra would have something to say about the Secondigliano feud. But nothing happened, or at least nothing violent. The Nuvolettas opened their borders to the secessionists on the run; this was the criticism that the Cosa Nostra men in Campania leveled at Cosimo’s war. On November 25 the Di Lauros killed Antonio Esposito in his grocery store. When I got to the scene, his body was still lying amid the bottles of water and cartons of milk. Two men lifted him by his jacket and feet and placed him in a metal coffin. After the mortuary van left, a woman appeared in the store. She began picking the cartons up off the floor, cleaning the blood splatters from the glass of the cold-cuts counter. The carabinieri let her be. The ballistic traces, fingerprints, and clues had already been gathered, the information already futilely recorded in the ledger. The woman worked all night long putting the shop back in order, as if fixing up the place could cancel out what had happened, as if returning the milk cartons to the shelf and straightening up the snacks could relegate the weight of death to those few minutes in which the ambush occurred, to those few minutes only.

Meanwhile in Scampia a rumor spreads that Cosimo Di Lauro is offering 150,000 euros in exchange for essential information on the whereabouts of Gennaro Marino McKay. A big bounty, but not that big, not for an economic empire such as the Secondigliano System— a shrewd desire not to overvalue the enemy. But no one takes the bait. The police get there first. All the secessionist leaders still in the area are gathered on the thirteenth floor of a building on Via Fratelli Cervi. As a precaution they’ve lined the landing in armor plating and installed metal-reinforced doors and a cage that seals off the head of the stairs. The police surround the building. What had been designed to protect the Spaniards against eventual enemy attacks now condemns them to sit there, unable to do anything, as the grinder cuts through the metal grating and the steel doors are knocked down. Waiting to be arrested, they throw a backpack with a submachine gun, some pistols, and hand grenades out the window. As it falls, the machine gun lets off a round. A shot grazes the neck of a policeman, just caressing his nape. He’s so nervous he jumps, breaks out in a sweat, and suffers an anxiety attack. Dying from a bouncing bullet spit from a machine gun hurled from the thirteenth floor is a scenario one doesn’t even consider. Nearly delirious, he begins talking to himself, insulting everyone, muttering names, and waving his hands around as if he were trying to shoo mosquitoes from his face:

“They squealed. They weren’t able to get in there, so they squealed and sent us in instead … We’re being double-crossed, we’re saving these guys’ lives. Let’s leave them here, let them slit each other’s throats, let them cut everybody’s throats, what the fuck do we care?”

His colleagues signal for me to get out of there. That night in the house on Via Fratelli Cervi they arrest Arcangelo Abete and his sister Anna, Massimiliano Cafasso, Ciro Mauriello, Mina Verde’s ex-boyfriend Gennaro Notturno, and Raffaele Notturno. But the real prize is Gennaro Marino McKay, the secessionist leader. The Marinos were the feud’s primary targets. They’d set fire to Gennaro’s properties—a restaurant, Orchidea, on Via Diacono in Secondigliano, a bakery on Corso Secondigliano, and a pizzeria on Via Pietro Nenni in Arzano—and his house, a Russian dacha on Via Limitone d’Arzano. In his territory of reinforced concrete, crumbling streets, obstructed manholes, and sporadic street lighting, the boss of Case Celesti had torn a corner off and turned it into a mountain retreat. He’d built a villa out of precious woods and planted Libyan palms—the most expensive kind—on the grounds. Someone said that he’d gone to Russia for business and had fallen in love with the dacha where he’d been a guest. At that time nothing and no one could prevent Gennaro Marino from building a dacha in the heart of Secondigliano: a symbol of the power of his business, and a promise of success for his boys, who, if they knew how to act, might one day live in such luxury, even in the outskirts of Naples, even on the darkest shore of the Mediterranean. Now all that remains of the dacha is a cement skeleton and carbonized wood beams. The carabinieri flushed Gennaro’s brother Gaetano out of a room at La Certosa, a luxury hotel in Massa Lubrense. So as not to risk his skin, he’d holed himself up in a room by the sea, an unusual way of removing himself from the conflict. When the carabinieri arrived, the majordomo, the man who acted as Gaetano’s hands, looked them in the eye and said, “You’ve ruined my vacation.”

But the Spaniards’ arrest doesn’t stem the hemorrhage. Giuseppe Bencivenga is killed on November 27. On November 28 they shoot Massimo de Felice, and on December 5 it’s Enrico Mazzarella’s turn.

The tension creates a kind of screen between people. In war you can’t let your gaze be distracted. Every face, every single face, has to tell you something. You need to decipher it, fix it with your eyes. Silently. You have to know which shop to enter, be certain of every word you utter. Before you decide to go for a walk with someone, you need to know who he is. You have to be more than certain, eliminate every possibility he’s a pawn on the chessboard of the conflict. To stroll next to him and speak to him means to share the field. In war the attention threshold of all the senses is multiplied; it’s as if you perceive things more acutely, see into things more deeply, smell things more intensely. Even though all such cunning is for naught when the decision is made to kill. When they strike, they don’t worry about whom to save and whom to condemn. In a wiretapped call, Rosario Fusco, allegedly a Di Lauro territory capo, is notably tense even though he’s trying to sound convincing to his son:

“You can’t go with anyone, that much is clear, just like I wrote you: listen to your daddy, you want to go out, you want to go take a walk with a girl, fine, but you just can’t hang around any boys, because we don’t know who they’re with or who they belong to. And if they have to do something to him and you’re next to him, they’ll hit you too. You understand what the problem is now, your daddy’s telling you …”

The problem is that no one can afford to think he’s not involved. It’s not enough to assume that the way you live your life will protect you from every danger. It’s no longer enough to say, “They’re killing each other.” During a Camorra conflict even the most solid construction is at risk, like a sand fence washed away by the undertow. People try to go unnoticed, to reduce to a minimum their presence in the world. Anonymous colors, little makeup, but that’s not all. The asthma sufferer locks himself up in his house because he can’t run, but then he finds an excuse to go out, invents a reason, because holing yourself up in your house could seem like an admission of guilt, of who knows what—and is certainly a confession of fear. Women stop wearing high heels—too hard to run in them. In a war that is not officially declared, not recognized by governments, and not recorded by reporters, the fear also goes unspoken. It hides under your skin, making you feel bloated, as after a huge meal or a night of cheap wine. A fear that doesn’t explode in newspapers or on billboards. There are no invasions, no skies darkened with planes. It’s a war you feel inside. Almost like a phobia. You don’t know if you should show your fear or hide it. You can’t decide if you’re exaggerating or underestimating. There are no sirens to warn you, but the most discordant information gets through. They say the Camorra war is fought among gangs, that they kill off each other. But no one knows where the border is between who’s them and who’s not. The carabinieri jeeps, the police roadblocks, and the helicopters flying overhead at all hours don’t comfort you, but seem almost to shrink the battlefield. They are not reassuring. They subtract space, surround you, restrict the area of the struggle even further. You feel trapped, shoulder to shoulder, and the heat of the person next to you becomes unbearable.

I would ride my Vespa through this pall of tension. In Secondigliano, I’d be frisked at least ten times a day. If I’d had so much as a Swiss Army knife on me, they would have made me swallow it. First the police would stop me, then the carabinieri, sometimes the financial police as well, and then the Di Lauro and Spanish sentinels. All with the same simple authority, the same mechanical gestures and identical phrases. The law enforcement officers would look at my driver’s license, then search me, while the sentinels would search me first and then ask lots of questions, listening for the slightest accent, scanning for lies. During the heat of the conflict the sentinels searched everyone, poked their heads into every car, cataloging your face, checking if you were armed. The motor scooters would arrive first, piercing your very soul, then the motorcycles, and finally the cars on your tail.

Medics filed complaints: before they could assist someone—anyone, not just those with gunshot wounds, but even the little old lady with a fractured femur or a heart attack victim—they had to get out of the ambulance, submit to a search, and let a sentinel check if it really was an ambulance or a way to hide weapons, killers, or escapees. The Red Cross is not recognized during Camorra wars, and no clan has signed the Geneva conventions. Even the unmarked cars the carabinieri use are vulnerable. When some plainclothes officers were mistaken for rivals, shots ripped into their car, wounding a few of the men. A couple of days later a boy showed up at the barracks, carrying a small suitcase with his underwear in it; he knew exactly what to do during an arrest. He confessed everything immediately, perhaps because the punishment he would have received for shooting at the carabinieri would have been far worse than jail. Or more likely, the clan, promising to give him his due and pay his legal expenses, made him turn himself in so as to avoid triggering any private feuds between men in uniform and Camorristi. Once inside the barracks the boy unhesitatingly declared, “I thought they were Spaniards so I fired.”

On December 7, I am awakened again by a phone call in the middle of the night. A photographer friend was calling to inform me of the blitz. Not any blitz, but the blitz, the one that local and national politicians had been demanding in response to the feud.

Secondigliano is surrounded by a thousand officers. A large area whose nickname, Terzo Mondo, says it all, as does the graffiti near the entrance to the main street: “Third World, do not enter.” It’s a huge media operation, and Scampia, Miano, Piscinola, San Pietro a Patierno, and Secondigliano will soon be invaded by journalists and television crews. After twenty years of silence the Camorra suddenly lives again. But the lack of steady attention means that the tools of analysis are old, ancient, as if a brain that had gone into hibernation twenty years ago was just now waking up. As if it were still dealing with the Camorra of Raffaele Cutolo and the logic of the Mafia that blew up highways to kill judges. Today everything has changed except for the eyes of the observers, no matter how experienced. Among those arrested is Ciro Di Lauro, one of the boss’s sons. Some say he’s the clan’s accountant. The carabinieri break down the door, search everyone, and aim their rifles at kids’ faces. All I manage to see is an officer shouting at a boy who is pointing a knife at him.

“Drop it! Drop it! Now! Now! Drop it!”

The boy drops the knife. The officer kicks it away, and as it bounces off the baseboard, the blade folds into the handle. It’s plastic, a Ninja Turtle knife. Meanwhile the other officers are frisking, photographing, searching everywhere. Dozens of blockhouses are knocked down. Reinforced concrete walls are gutted, revealing drug stashes under stairwells. Gates closing off entire portions of streets are toppled, exposing drug warehouses.

Hundreds of women pour onto the streets, setting trash bins on fire and throwing things at the police cars. Their sons, nephews, neighbors are being arrested. Their employers. Yet it’s not just a criminal solidarity that I sense on their faces, or in their angry words or hips, swathed in sweatpants so tight that they seem about to explode. For most Secondigliano residents, the drug market provides a means of support, albeit minimal. The only ones who get rich, who reap exponential advantages, are the clan businessmen. All the rest, those who work selling, storing, hiding, or protecting get nothing but ordinary salaries, though they risk arrest and months or years in prison. The women’s faces wear masks of rage. A rage that tastes of gastric acid. A rage that is both a defense of their territory and an accusation against those who have always considered it nonexistent, lost, a place to forget.

This gigantic deployment of law and order seems staged, arriving all of a sudden, and only after countless deaths, only after a local girl has been tortured and burned. To the women here it reeks of mockery. The police and bulldozers haven’t come to change things, but merely to help out whoever now needs to make arrests or knock down walls. As if all of a sudden someone changed the categories of interpretation and were now declaring that their lives are all wrong. The women know perfectly well everything is wrong here; they didn’t need helicopters and armored vehicles to remind them, but up till then this error was their principal form of life, their mode of survival. What’s more, after this eruption that will only complicate their lives, no one will really make any effort to improve things. And so those women jealously guard the oblivion of their isolation and their mistaken lives, chasing away those who have suddenly become aware of the dark.

The journalists lie in wait in their cars. They’re careful not to get under the carabinieri’s boots, and only start covering the blitz after it’s all over. At the end of the operation fifty-three people are in handcuffs. The youngest is nineteen. They’ve all grown up in the Naples Renaissance, in the new political dimension of the late 1990s, which was supposed to alter people’s destiny. They all know what to do as the carabinieri cuff them and load them into the prison vans: call this or that lawyer and wait till the clan stipend, along with the boxes of pasta, is delivered to their wives or mothers on the twenty-eighth of the month. The men with adolescent sons at home are the most worried, wondering what role their boys will be assigned now. But they have no say in the matter.

After the blitz the war knows no truce. On December 18 Pasquale Galasso, namesake of one of the most powerful bosses of the 1990s, is bumped off behind the counter of a bar. On December 20 Vincenzo Iorio is killed in a pizzeria. On the twenty-fourth they kill Giuseppe Pezzella, thirty-four years old. He tries to take cover in a bar, but they empty a whole clip into him. Then a pause for Christmas. The guns of war fall silent. They reorganize, try to establish some rules, devise strategies in this most disorderly of conflicts. On December 27 Emanuele Leone is killed with a bullet to the head. He was twenty-one years old. On December 30 the Spaniards murder Antonio Scafuro, twenty-six, and hit his son in the leg. He was related to the Di Lauro area capo in Casavatore.

The most complicated thing was to understand. Understand how it was possible for the Di Lauros to wage a war and win. To strike and disappear. To shield themselves among the people, get lost in the neighborhoods. Lotto T, Vele, Parco Postale, Case Celesti, Case dei Puffi, and Terzo Mondo are a jungle, a rain forest of reinforced concrete where it’s easy to disappear, blend in with the crowd, turn into phantoms. The Di Lauros had lost all their top management and area capos, but they’d still managed to trigger a ruthless war without suffering serious losses. It was as if a government, toppled by a coup and without a president, decided that the way to preserve its power and protect its interests was to arm schoolboys and draft mailmen, civil servants, and office clerks, to grant them access to the new power center instead of relegating them to the rank and file.

A bug planted in the car of Ugo De Lucia, the Di Lauro loyalist and alleged murderer of Gelsomina Verde, picks up a conversation that is filed in a December 2004 injunction:

“I’m not making a move without orders, that’s the way I am!”

The perfect soldier displays his total obedience to Cosimo. Then he comments about an episode in which someone was wounded.

“I would’ve killed him, I wouldn’t have just shot him in the leg, if I’d been there, his brain would be pulp, you know! … Let’s use my neighborhood, it’s tranquil there, we’ll be able to work …”

Ugariello, as he is known in his neighborhood, would never have merely wounded. He would have killed.

“I say now it’s up to us, let’s all get together … all of us in one place … five in one house … five in another … and five in another and you send for us only when you need us to go blow someone’s brains out!”

Ugariello proposes they form hit squads, or trawlers, as Camorristi call them, men who hole up in safe houses and never leave their hiding places except to strike. But Petrone, his interlocutor, isn’t as relaxed:

“Yeah, but if one of these bastards ends up finding some hidden trawler somewhere, if they spot us and trail us, they’ll break our heads … let’s at least do in a few of them before we die, you know what I mean? At least let me eliminate four or five of them!”

Petrone’s idea is to murder the ones who don’t know they’ve been found out:

“It’s easiest when they’re comrades, you get them in your car and then you take them out.”

The Di Lauros win because they are less predictable when they strike, and because they already foresee their destiny. But before the end they have to inflict as many losses as possible on the enemy. A kamikaze logic, no explosions. The only strategy that offers any chance of winning when you’re in the minority. They start hitting right away, even before the trawlers are formed.

On January 2 they kill Crescenzo Marino, the McKays’ father. He hangs facedown in his Smart, the most expensive model, an unusual automotive choice for a sixty-year-old man. Maybe he thought it would fool the lookouts. A single shot right in the center of his forehead. The merest trickle of blood runs down his face. Maybe he thought it wouldn’t be dangerous to go out just for a few minutes, just for a second. But it was. On the same day the Spaniards bump off Salvatore Barra in a bar in Casavatore. It’s the day that Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, the president of the Italian Republic, arrives in Naples to ask the city to react, to offer institutional words of courage and express the support of the state. Three ambushes occur during the hours of his visit.

On January 5 they shoot Carmela Attrice in the face. She is the mother of the secessionist Francesco Barone ‘o russo—the Russian—whom investigations identified as being close to the McKays. She no longer leaves her house, so they use a kid as bait. He rings the bell. She knows him, knows who he is, so she doesn’t think there’s any danger. Still in her pajamas, she goes downstairs, opens the door, and someone sticks the barrel of a gun in her face. Blood and brains pour out of her head as from a broken egg.

When I arrived at the scene in Case Celesti, the body hadn’t yet been covered with a sheet. People were walking in her blood, leaving footprints everywhere. I swallowed hard, trying to calm my stomach. Carmela Attrice hadn’t run away even though they’d warned her. She knew her son was a Spaniard, but the Camorra war is full of uncertainty. Nothing is defined, nothing is clear. Things become real only when they happen. In the dynamics of power, of absolute power, nothing exists other than what is concrete. And so fleeing, staying, escaping, and informing are choices that seem too suspended, too uncertain, and every piece of advice always finds its opposite twin. Only a concrete occurrence can make you decide. But when it happens, all you can do is accept the decision.

When you die on the street, you’re surrounded by a tremendous racket. It’s not true that you die alone. Unfamiliar faces right in front of your nose, people touching your legs and arms to see if you’re already dead or if it’s worth calling an ambulance. The faces of all the mortally wounded, all the expressions of the dying, seem to share the same fear. And the same shame. It may seem strange, but right before the end there’s a sense of shame. Lo scuorno is what they call it here. A bit like being naked in public—that’s how it feels when you’re mortally wounded in the street. I’ve never gotten used to seeing murder victims. The nurses and policemen are calm, impassive, going through the motions they’ve learned by heart, no matter whom they’re dealing with. “We’ve got calluses on our hearts and leather lining our stomachs,” a young mortuary van driver once said to me. When you get there before the ambulance does, it’s hard to take your eyes off the victim, even if you wish you’d never seen him. I’ve never understood that this is how you die. The first time I saw someone who’d been killed, I must have been about thirteen. It is still vivid in my mind. I woke up feeling embarrassed: poking out from my pajamas was the clear sign of an unwanted erection. That classic morning erection, impossible to disguise. I remember it because on my way to school I ran smack into a dead body in the same situation. Five of us, our backpacks filled with books, were walking to school when we came across an Alfetta riddled with bullets. My friends were terribly curious and rushed over to see. Feet sticking up on the seat. The most daring kid asked a carabiniere why the feet were where the head should have been. The officer didn’t hesitate to respond, as if he hadn’t realized how old his interlocutor was.

“The spray turned him upside down.”

I was only a boy, but I knew that “spray” meant machine-gun fire. The Camorrista had taken so many blows that his body had flipped. Head down and feet in the air. When the carabinieri opened the door, the corpse fell to the ground like a melting icicle. We watched undisturbed, without anyone telling us this was no sight for children. Without any moral hand covering our eyes. The dead man had an erection, clearly visible under his tight-fitting jeans. It shocked me. I stared at it for a long time. For days I wondered how it could have happened, what he’d been thinking about, what he’d been doing before dying. My afternoons were spent trying to imagine what was in his head before he was killed. It tormented me until I finally got up the courage to ask for an explanation. I was told that an erection is a common reaction in male murder victims. As soon as Linda, one of the girls in our group, saw the dead body slide out from behind the steering wheel, she started to cry and hid behind two of the boys. A strangled cry. A young plainclothes officer grabbed the cadaver by the hair and spit in his face. Then he turned to us and said:

“No, what are you crying for? This guy was a real shit. Nothing happened, everything’s okay. Nothing happened. Don’t cry.”

Ever since then, I’ve had trouble believing those scenarios of forensic police who wear gloves and tread softly, careful not to displace any powder or shells. When I get to a body before the ambulance does and gaze on the final moments of life of someone who realizes he’s dying, I always think of the scene in Heart of Darkness, when the woman who loved Kurtz asks Marlow what his last words were. And Marlow lies. He says Kurtz asked about her, when in reality he didn’t utter any sweet words or precious thoughts, but simply repeated, “The horror.” We like to think that a person’s last words convey his ultimate, most important, most essential thoughts. That he dies articulating the reason life was worth living for. But it’s not like that. When you die, nothing comes out except fear. Everyone, or almost everyone, repeats the same thing, a simple, banal, urgent sentence: “I don’t want to die.” Their faces are superimposed on Kurtz’s and express the torment, disgust, and refusal to end so horrendously, in the worst of all possible worlds. The horror.

After seeing dozens of murder victims, soiled with their own blood as it mixes with filth, as they exhale nauseating odors, as they are looked at with curiosity or professional indifference, shunned like hazardous waste or discussed with agitated cries, I have arrived at just one certainty, a thought so elementary that it approaches idiocy: death is revolting.

In Secondigliano everyone, down to the little kids, has a perfectly clear idea of how you die and the best way to go. I was about to leave the scene of Carmela Attrice’s murder when I overheard two boys talking. Their tone was extremely serious.

“I want to die like the signora. In the head, bang bang and it’s all over.”

“But in your face? They hit her in the face, that’s the worst!”

“No, it’s not, and besides, it’s only an instant. Front or back, but in the head for sure!”

Curious, I butted into their conversation, asking questions and trying to have my say:

“Isn’t it better to be hit in the chest? One shot in the heart and it’s all over.”

But the boy understood the dynamics of pain far better than I did. He explained in great detail and with professional expertise the impact of bullets.

“No, in the chest it hurts a whole lot and it takes you ten minutes to die. Your lungs have to fill with blood, and the bullet is like a fiery needle that pierces and twists inside you. It hurts to get hit in the arm or leg too. But in the chest it’s like a wicked snakebite that won’t go away. The head’s better, because you won’t piss yourself or shit in your pants. No flailing around on the ground for half an hour.”

He had seen. And much more than just one dead body. Getting hit in the head saves you from trembling in fear, pissing your pants, or having the stench of your guts ooze out of the holes in your stomach. I asked him more about the details of death and killing. Every conceivable question except the only one I should have asked: why was a fourteen-year-old thinking so much about death? But it didn’t occur to me, not even for a second. The boy introduced himself by his nickname: Pikachu, one of the Pokémon figures. His blond hair and stocky figure had earned him the name. Pikachu pointed out some individuals in the crowd that had formed around the body of the dead woman. He lowered his voice:

“See those guys, they’re the ones that killed Pupetta.”

Carmela Attrice had been known as Pupetta. I tried to look them straight in the face. They seemed worked up, palpitating, moving their heads and shoulders to get a better look as the police covered the body. They’d killed her with their faces unmasked and had gone to sit nearby, under the statue of Padre Pio; as soon as a crowd started to form around the body, they’d come back to see. They were caught a few days later. Drug dealers made over into soldiers, trained to ambush a harmless woman, killed in her pajamas and slippers. This was their baptism of fire. The youngest was sixteen, the oldest twenty-eight, the alleged assassin twenty-two. When they were arrested, one of them, catching sight of the flashbulbs and video cameras, started to laugh and wink at the journalists. They also arrested the alleged bait, the sixteen-year-old who had rung the bell so that the woman would come downstairs. Sixteen, the same age as Carmela Attrice’s daughter, who realized what had happened as soon as she heard the shots and went out onto the balcony and started to cry. The investigators also claimed that the executioners had returned to the scene of the crime. They were too curious; it was like starring in your own movie. First as actor and then as spectator, but in the same film. It must be true that you don’t have a precise memory of your actions when you shoot because those boys went back, eager to see what they’d done and what sort of face the victim had. I asked Pikachu if the guys were a Di Lauro trawler, or if they at least wanted to form one. He laughed.

“A trawler! Don’t they wish! They’re just little pissers, but I saw a real trawler.”

I didn’t know if Pikachu was bullshitting me or if he’d merely pieced together what was being said around Scampia, but his story was credible. He was pedantic, precise to the point of eliminating any doubt. He was pleased to see my stunned expression as he talked. Pikachu told me he used to have a dog named Careca, like the Brazilian forward who played for Napoli, the Italian champions. This dog liked to go out onto the apartment landing. One day he smelled someone in the apartment opposite, which is usually empty, so he started scratching at the door. A few seconds later a burst of gunfire exploded from behind the door and hit him full on. Pikachu told the story complete with sound effects:

“Rat-tat-tat-tat … Careca dies instantly—and the door—bang—slams open real quick.”

Pikachu sat on the ground, planted his feet against a low wall, and made as if he were cradling a machine gun, imitating the sentinel that had killed his dog. The sentinel who’s always sitting behind the door, a pillow behind his back and his feet braced on either side. An uncomfortable position, to keep you from falling asleep, but above all because shooting from below is a sure way to eliminate whoever is on the other side of the door without getting hit yourself. Pikachu told me that as a way of apology for killing his dog, they gave his family some money and invited him into the apartment. An apartment in which an entire trawler was hiding. He remembered everything, the rooms bare except for beds, a table, and a television.

Pikachu spoke quickly, gesticulating wildly to describe the men’s positions and movements. They were nervous, tense, one of them with “pineapples” around his neck. Pineapples are the hand grenades the killers wear. Pikachu said a basket full of them was near a window. The Camorra has always had a certain fondness for grenades. Clan arsenals everywhere are filled with hand grenades and antitank bombs from Eastern Europe. Pikachu said that the men spent hours playing PlayStation, so he’d challenged and beat them all. Because he always won, they promised him that “one of these days they’d take me with them to shoot for real.”

One of the neighborhood legends has it that Ugo De Lucia was obsessed with Winning Eleven, a popular soccer video game. According to informants, in four days he not only committed three murders, but also played an entire soccer championship.

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.

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:

Everyone I know is either dead or in jail. I want to become a boss. I want to have supermarkets, stores, factories, I want to have women. I want three cars, I want respect when I go into a store, I want to have warehouses all over the world. And then I want to die. I want to die like a man, like someone who truly commands. I want to be killed.

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.

But someone has his doubts. And so the body of Attilio Romanò gets added to those of the Camorra soldiers killed in recent months. The bodies are the same, fallen in the same war, but the reasons for their deaths are different. The clans are the ones to decide who you are and what part you play in the game of risk. They decide independently of individuals’ wills. When the armies take to the streets, it is impossible to move according to any other dynamic than their strategy; it is they who decide meaning, motives, causes. In that moment, the shop where Attilio worked represented an economy linked to the Spaniards, one that had to be destroyed.

Natalia, or Nata as Attilio called her, is stunned by the tragedy. They’d only been married for four months, but she is not consoled, the president of the Republic doesn’t attend the funeral, there’s no minister or mayor to hold her hand. Perhaps it’s just as well: she is spared the institutional theater. But an unjust suspicion hovers over Attilio’s death, a suspicion that is the silent approval of the rule of the Camorra. Yet another assent to the clans’ activities. But the people who worked with Attila—the nickname they gave him because of his fierce desire to live—at the call center organize candlelight vigils and insist on marching even if other murders occur during the protests and blood still stains the streets. They demonstrate, light candles, clarify, remove all shame, cancel out all suspicion. Attila died on the job and had no ties to the Camorra.

In truth, after an ambush suspicion falls on everyone. The clan machine is too perfect. There are no mistakes, only punishments. And so it is the clan who is believed, not the relatives who don’t understand, the colleagues who know him, or the life story of the individual. In this war, innocent individuals are crushed and cataloged as side effects or listed among the probably guilty.

On December 26, 2004, Dario Scherillo, a twenty-six-year-old, is riding his motorcycle when he’s shot in the face and chest and left to die in a puddle of his blood, which soaks his shirt completely. An innocent man. But he was from Casavatore, a town that has been chewed up by the conflict. For him there is still silence and incomprehension. No epigraph, no plaque, no remembrance. “When someone is killed by the Camorra, you never know,” an old man tells me as he crosses himself at the spot where Dario was killed. Not all blood is the same color. Dario’s is reddish purple and seems to still be flowing. The piles of sawdust have a hard time absorbing it all. After a bit a car takes advantage of the space and parks on top of the stain. Everything comes to an end. Everything gets covered over. Dario was killed to send a message to the town, a message of flesh sealed in an envelope of blood. As in Bosnia, Algeria, Somalia, as in any confused internal war, when it’s hard to understand which side you’re on, it’s enough to kill your neighbor, a dog, your friend, or your relative. The hint of kinship or physical resemblance is all it takes to become a target. It’s enough to walk down a certain street to immediately acquire an identity cast in lead. What matters is to concentrate as much pain, tragedy, and terror as possible, and the only objective is to show absolute strength, uncontested control, and the impossibility of opposing the real and ruling power. To the point that you get used to thinking the way they do, like those who might take offense at a gesture or a phrase. To save your life, to avoid touching the high-voltage line of revenge, you have to be careful, wary, silent. As I was leaving, as they were taking away Attilio Romanò, I started to understand. To understand why there is not a moment in which my mother does not look at me with anxiety, unable to fathom why I don’t leave, run away, why I keep living in this hell. I tried to recall how many have fallen, how many have been killed since the day I was born.

You don’t need to count the dead to understand the business of the Camorra. The dead are the least revealing element of the Camorra’s real power, but they are the most visible trace, what sparks a gut reaction. I start counting: 100 deaths in 1979, 140 in 1980, 110 in 1981, 264 in 1982, 204 in 1983, 155 in 1984, 107 in 1986, 127 in 1987, 168 in 1988, 228 in 1989, 222 in 1990, 223 in 1991, 160 in 1992, 120 in 1993, 115 in 1994, 148 in 1995, 147 in 1996, 130 in 1997, 132 in 1998, 91 in 1999, 118 in 2000, 80 in 2001, 63 in 2002, 83 in 2003, 142 in 2004, 90 in 2005.

Since I was born, 3,600 deaths. The Camorra has killed more than the Sicilian Mafia, more than the ‘Ndrangheta, more than the Russian Mafia, more than the Albanian families, more than the total number of deaths by the ETA in Spain and the IRA in Ireland, more than the Red Brigades, the NAR,* and all the massacres committed by the government in Italy. The Camorra has killed the most. Imagine a map of the world, the sort you see in newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique, which marks places of conflict around the globe with a little flame. Kurdistan, Sudan, Kosovo, East Timor. Your eye is drawn to the south of Italy, to the flesh that piles up with every war connected to the Camorra, the Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, and the Basilischi in Lucania. But there’s no little flame, no sign of a conflict. This is the heart of Europe. This is where the majority of the country’s economy takes shape. It doesn’t much matter what the strategies for extraction are. What matters is that the cannon fodder remain mired in the outskirts, trapped in tangles of cement and trash, in the black-market factories and cocaine warehouses. And that no one notice them, that it all seem like a war among gangs, a beggars’ war. Then you understand the way your friends who have emigrated, who have gone off to Milan or Padua, smile sarcastically at you, wondering whom you have become. They look at you from head to toe, try to size you up, figure out if you are a chiachiello or a bbuono. A failure or a Camorrista. You know which direction you chose at the fork in the road, which path you’re on, and you don’t see anything good at the end.

I went home, but I couldn’t sit still. I went out again and started to run, faster and faster, my knees gyrating, my heels drumming my buttocks, my arms flailing like a puppet’s. My heart was pounding, my tongue and teeth were drowning in saliva. I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my neck, flooding my chest, I was out of breath, inhaling all the air I could and then exhaling hard, like a bull. I started running again, my hands frozen, my face on fire, my eyes closed. I felt I had absorbed all the blood I had seen on the ground, that all the blood that had gushed out, as if from a broken faucet, was now pumping through my body.

I ran to the shore and climbed on the rocks. Haze mixed with the darkness so I couldn’t even make out the lights of the ships crossing the gulf. The water rippled, the waves were beginning to pick up. It seemed as if they were reluctant to touch the mire of the battleground, but they didn’t return to the distant maelstrom of the open sea. They were immobile, stubbornly resisting, impossibly still, clinging to their foamy crests, as if no longer sure where the sea ends.

Reporters start arriving a few weeks later. All of a sudden, the Camorra has come back to life in the region they believed hosted nothing but gangs and purse-snatchers. Within a few hours Secondigliano becomes the center of attention. Special correspondents, press photographers from the most important news agencies, even a permanent BBC garrison. Some kids have their picture taken next to a cameraman who’s carrying a video camera with the CNN logo. “Just like the ones for Saddam,” the kids in Scampia say with a giggle. The cameras make them feel they’ve been transported to the earth’s center of gravity, and the media attention seems to grant these places a real existence for the first time. After twenty years of neglect, the Secondigliano massacre focuses attention on the Camorra. The war kills quickly, out of respect for the reporters. Dozens and dozens of victims are accumulated in less than a month; it seems done on purpose so that every correspondent has his own death. Success all around. Herds of interns are sent to get experience. Microphones and cameras sprout all over the place to interview drug dealers and capture the forbidding, angular profile of the Vele projects. A few interns even manage to interview some alleged pushers, shooting them from behind. Almost everyone gives some change to the heroin addicts who mumble their stories. Two young female reporters have their camera operator photograph them in front of a burned-out car. A souvenir from their first little war as reporters. A French journalist calls me to ask if he should wear a bulletproof vest to go photograph Cosimo Di Lauro’s villa. Media crews drive around shooting, as if they were exploring a forest where everything has been transformed into a stage set. Other journalists travel with bodyguards. The worst way of reporting on Secondigliano is to be escorted by the police. These are not inaccessible areas; the strength of the local drug markets is that they guarantee complete accessibility to everyone. The journalists who go around with bodyguards will only be able to record what they can already find printed by any news agency. Like sitting in front of their office computers, except that they’re moving.

More than a hundred reporters in less than two weeks. All of a sudden Europe’s drug market exists. Even the police are swamped with requests; everyone wants to take part in an operation, see at least one pusher arrested, one house searched. Everyone wants to insert a few images of confiscated handcuffs and machine guns into their fifteen-minute broadcast. A lot of officers start liberating themselves of the hordes of reporters and budding investigative journalists by having them photograph plainclothes policemen who pose as pushers. A way to give them what they want without losing too much time. The worst possible story in the shortest possible time. The worst of the worst, the horror of horrors. Broadcast the tragedy, the blood and guts, the submachine-gun shots, the crushed skulls and burned flesh. The worst they tell is merely the waste of the worst. Many reporters think they have found the ghetto of Europe in Secondigliano, a place of total misery. But if they didn’t run away, they would realize that they are looking at the pillars of the economy, the hidden mine, the darkness where the beating heart of the market gets its energy.

The television reporters made the most incredible proposals. Some asked me to wear a tiny video camera on my ear as I go about certain streets—”you know which ones”—following “you know who.” They dreamed of making Scampia into a reality show, with footage of a homicide or drug deal. One scriptwriter handed me a story of blood and death, where the devil of the new century is conceived in Terzo Mondo. I got a free dinner every evening for a month from the television crews who presented me with absurd proposals, trying to gather information. During the feud a veritable industry of guides, official interpreters, informers, and Indian scouts grew up among the Camorra reserves in Secondigliano and Scampia. Many kids developed a special technique. They wandered over to the area where the reporters were gathered, pretending to be pushers or lookouts, and as soon as someone got up the courage to approach them, they announced their availability to talk, explain, be photographed. They stated their fees right away. Fifty euros for their story, 100 euros for a tour of an open-air drug market, 200 to get inside the house of one of the dealers who lives in the Vele projects.

To understand the cycle of gold you can’t just look at the nugget or the mine. You have to start in Secondigliano and follow the tracks of the clans’ empires. The Camorra wars put the towns ruled by the clans on the map: the Campania hinterland, the land of poverty, territories that some call the Italian Far West, where, according to one grim legend, there are more submachine guns than forks. But beyond the violence that erupts in certain moments, these areas produce an exponential wealth, of which they only see the distant shimmer. But none of this gets reported. Media coverage is only concerned with the aesthetics of the Neapolitan slums.

On January 29, Vincenzo De Gennaro is killed. On January 31, they kill Vittorio Bevilacqua in a delicatessen. On February 1, Giovanni Orabona, Giuseppe Pizzone, and Antonio Patrizio are slain. They use an ancient yet effective strategy: the killers pose as policemen. Giovanni Orabona was the twenty-three-year-old forward on the Real Casavatore soccer team. They were taking a walk when a car with a siren stopped them. Two men with police badges got out. The men didn’t try to flee or put up resistance. They knew how to behave, so they let themselves be handcuffed and loaded into the car. But the car stopped suddenly and they were made to get out. They might not have understood right away, but everything became clear at the sight of the guns. It was an ambush. These were Spaniards, not policemen. Members of the rebel group. Two of them were shot in the head as they knelt, dying instantly. The third, judging from the evidence at the scene, tried to escape, but, hands tied behind his back and only his head to help him balance, he fell, got up, and fell again. The killers caught him and stuck an automatic in his mouth. When his body was found, his teeth were broken. Instinctively he’d tried to bite the barrel, to break it off.

On February 27 word arrives from Barcelona that Raffaele Amato has been arrested. He’d been playing blackjack in a casino, trying to divest himself of some cash. The Di Lauros had only managed to hit his cousin Rosario, burning down his house. According to the accusations of the Neapolitan magistracy, Amato was the charismatic leader of the Spaniards. He’d grown up right on Via Cupa dell’Arco, the same street as Paolo Di Lauro and his family. Amato became an important manager when he started mediating narcotraffic and handling wager investments. According to pentiti and anti-Mafia investigations, he enjoyed unlimited credit with the international traffickers and imported tons of cocaine. When police in ski masks threw him facedown on the floor, it was not the first hiatus in his career. Raffaele Amato had been arrested in a hotel in Casandrino together with another lieutenant and a big Albanian trafficker who was aided by an interpreter par excellence, the nephew of a government minister.

On February 5, it’s Angelo Romano’s turn. On March 3, Davide Chiarolanza is killed in Melito. He knew his killers and might even have had an appointment with them. He was done in as he tried to flee to his car. But it is not the courts or the carabinieri and police who can put an end to the feud. The forces of law and order can slow things down by taking out Camorristi, but they are unable to stop the violence. While the press chases after the crime reports, tripping over interpretations and evaluations, a Neapolitan newspaper comes out with news of a pact between the Spaniards and the Di Lauros, a temporary peace mediated by the Licciardi clan. The other Secondigliano clans, as well as the other Camorra cartels, are eager for an agreement; they fear that the conflict will break the silence concerning their power. It is crucial that the legal universe return to ignoring the world of criminal accumulation. The pact is not written overnight by some charismatic boss in a jail cell, not circulated secretly, but published in an article by Simone Di Meo in the Cronache di Napoli on June 27, 2005. On the newsstands for all to read and understand. Here are the points of the published agreement:

The secessionists demand the restitution of the lodgings that were vacated between November and January in Scampia and Secondigliano. Circa eight hundred people were forced by the Di Lauro hit squad to leave their homes.

The Di Lauro monopoly on the drug market has been broken. There’s no going back. The territory must be divided up fairly. The province to the secessionists, Naples to the Di Lauros.

The secessionists can make use of their own channels to import drugs; they are no longer required to depend on Di Lauro middlemen.

Private vendettas are separate from business; in other words, business is more important than personal matters. If in the future there is a vendetta connected to the feud, it will not reignite hostilities but will remain a private matter.

The boss of bosses of Secondigliano must have returned. He’d been sighted everywhere, from Puglia to Canada. The secret service has been working for months to nab him. Paolo Di Lauro leaves the most elusive of traces—invisible, like his power before the feud. It seems that he was operated on in a clinic in Marseille, the same one that treated the Cosa Nostra boss Bernardo Provenzano. He has returned to sign the peace pact or to limit damages. He’s here, you can feel his presence; the wind has shifted. The boss who has been missing for ten years, the one who “had to come back, even if he has to run the risk of prison,” as one affiliate stated over the phone. The phantom boss, whose face is a mystery even to his affiliates. One of them pleaded with the boss Maurizio Prestieri, “I beg you, let me see him, just for a second, just one second, one look and then I’ll go.”

Paolo Di Lauro is nabbed on Via Canonico Stornaiuolo on September 16, 2005. Hidden in the modest home of Fortunata Liguori, the woman of a low-ranking affiliate. An anonymous house, similar to the one where his son Cosimo had hid. It’s easier to camouflage yourself in the cement forest; in a nondescript home you’re not noticed, not talked about. The urban environment offers total absence, and the city provides greater anonymity than a trapdoor or an underground hideout. Paolo Di Lauro was nearly arrested on his birthday. It was a challenge to return home to eat with his family when half of Europe’s police were on his trail. But someone warned him in time. When the carabinieri entered the family villa, they found the table set and his place empty. But this time the ROS, the special operations unit of the carabinieri, are sure. The officers are agitated when they enter the house at 4 a.m. after a whole night of surveillance. The boss, on the other hand, doesn’t react; in fact he soothes them.

“Come in … I am calm … There’s no problem.”

Twenty vehicles escort the car carrying Paolo Di Lauro, and four motorcycles ride ahead, making sure everything is under control. The motorcade speeds along, with the boss in the bulletproof car. There are three possible routes to the barracks: to cross Via Capodimonte and then dart along Via Pessina and Piazza Dante; to block all access to Corso Secondigliano and get onto the beltway toward Vomero; or, if the situation looks extremely dangerous, to land a helicopter and take him by air. The motorcycles indicate a suspicious automobile along the route. Everyone is expecting an ambush, but it turns out to be a false alarm. The motorcade delivers Di Lauro to the barracks on Via Pastrengo, in the heart of Naples. The helicopter swoops down, kicking up dust and dirt from the flowerbed in the piazza, which whirls about along with plastic bags, Kleenex, and newspapers. A whirlwind of rubbish.

There’s absolutely no danger. But it’s necessary to trumpet his arrest, to show that they’ve managed to catch the uncatchable one, to capture the boss. When the carousel of bulletproof vehicles arrives at the barracks and the carabinieri see that the reporters are already gathered at the entrance, they straddle the car doors as if sitting on saddles; they make a show of brandishing their pistols, wearing ski masks and carabinieri vests. After Giovanni Brusca’s arrest, every policeman and carabiniere wants to be photographed in this pose: the reward for the long nights of waiting in position, the satisfaction of having captured one’s prey, the PR astuteness of knowing it will make the front page of the newspaper. Paolo Di Lauro displays none of his son Cosimo’s arrogance; leaving the barracks, he bends over, face to the ground, offering only his balding head to the cameras. Perhaps it’s merely a form of self-protection. Being photographed from every angle by hundreds of lenses and filmed by dozens of video cameras would have showed his face to all of Italy, perhaps causing unsuspecting neighbors to report having seen him, having lived near him. Better not abet the investigations, better not reveal his secret ways. But some interpret his lowered head as a simple irritation at the flash of the cameras, the annoyance at being reduced to a beast on display.

After a few days Paolo Di Lauro is brought to court, room 215. He takes his place amid a public made up of relatives. The only word the boss pronounces is “Present”; all the rest he articulates without speaking. Gestures, winks, and smiles are the mute syntax he uses to communicate with from his cage. Greetings, responses, reassurances. Paolo Di Lauro seems to be staring at me, but he is really catching the eye of the gray-haired man behind me. They look at each other for a few seconds, then the boss winks at him.

After learning of his arrest, many people apparently came to greet the boss whom they had been unable to meet for years because he was in hiding. Paolo Di Lauro is wearing jeans, a dark sweater, and Paciotti shoes, the brand worn by all the local clan managers. His jailers had removed his handcuffs, and he has a cage all to himself. The elite of all the northern Naples clans are brought in: Raffaele Abbinante, Enrico D’Avanzo, Giuseppe Criscuolo, Arcangelo Valentino, Maria Prestieri, Maurizio Prestieri, Salvatore Britti, and Vincenzo Di Lauro. The boss’s men and ex-men are now divided between two cages, one for the Di Lauro faithful and one for the Spaniards. Prestieri is the most elegant, in a blue jacket and dark blue oxford shirt. He is the first to go up to the protective glass that separates them from the boss. They greet each other. Enrico D’Avanzo comes over as well, and they even manage to whisper something between the cracks in the bulletproof glass. Many of the managers hadn’t seen him for years. His son Vincenzo hasn’t seen him since 2002, when Vincenzo went into hiding in Chivasso in Piedmont, where he was arrested in 2004.

I never take my eyes off the boss. Every gesture, every expression is material to fill pages of interpretation, to establish new grammars of body language. A strange, silent dialogue unfolds between father and son. With his right index finger Vincenzo indicates the ring finger of his left hand, as if to ask his father, “Your wedding ring?” The boss passes his hands over the sides of his head, then mimes holding a steering wheel, as if he were driving. I can’t decipher their gestures. The interpretation the newspapers give is that Vincenzo had asked his father why he wasn’t wearing his wedding ring, and his father explained that the carabinieri had taken away all his gold. After all the gestures, facial expressions, fast-moving lips, winks, and hands on the bulletproof glass, Paolo Di Lauro just stares at his son and smiles. They kiss each other through the glass. At the end of the hearing the boss’s lawyer asks that the two be permitted to embrace. The request is granted. Seven policemen guard them.

“You’re pale,” Vincenzo says, and his father looks him in the eye as he responds, “This face hasn’t seen the sun for years and years.”

When they are caught, fugitives are often at the end of their rope. Their constant flight demonstrates the impossibility of enjoying one’s wealth, which brings the bosses even closer to their chiefs of staff, and this becomes the only true measure of their economic and social success. With the elaborate protection systems, the morbid and obsessive need to plan every step, spending most of their time holed up in a room regulating and coordinating their interests, fugitive bosses become prisoners of their own business. A woman in the courtroom recounts an episode from when Di Lauro was in hiding. She looks a bit like a professor, her hair more yellow than blond, with dark roots. Her voice is hoarse and heavy, and she seems almost sorry for his difficulties. She tells me about when Paolo Di Lauro still moved about Secondigliano, albeit with meticulous planning. He had five cars, all the same color, model, and license plate. When he had to go somewhere, he would send all five of them out, even though obviously he was in only one of them. All five cars were escorted, and none of his men knew for sure which one he was in. As each car left the villa, the men would line up behind to follow it. A sure way to avoid betrayal, even the simple betrayal of signaling that the boss was about to move. The woman recounts all this in a tone of profound commiseration for the suffering and solitude of a man who must always think he is about to be killed. After the tarantellas of gestures and embraces, after the greetings and winks of people who make up the most ferocious power structure of Naples, the bulletproof glass separating the boss from the other men is full of different sorts of signs: handprints, greasy smears, the shadow of lips.

Less than twenty-four hours after the boss’s arrest, a Polish kid is found at the Arzano roundabout, trembling like a leaf as he struggles to throw an enormous bundle in the trash. He is smeared with blood and crippled with fear. The bundle is a body. A mangled, tortured, badly disfigured body; it seems impossible that a person could be treated that way. If he had been made to swallow a mine that then exploded in his stomach, it would have wreaked less destruction. The body belonged to Edoardo La Monica, though his features were no longer recognizable. Only his lips were still intact; the rest of his face was completely crushed. His body was riddled with holes and encrusted with blood. They had tied him up and tortured him with a spiked bat—slowly, for hours. Every blow cut new holes, piercing his flesh and breaking his bones as the nails sunk in and were then yanked out. They had cut off his ears, cropped his tongue, shattered his wrists, gouged out his eyes with a screwdriver—all while he was still alive, awake, conscious. Then to finish him off they smashed his face with a hammer and carved a cross on his lips with a knife. His body was supposed to end up in the trash so that it would be found rotting in a dump. The message inscribed on his flesh was perfectly clear to everyone. We cut off the ears with which you heard where the boss was hiding, shattered the wrists you extended to take the blood money, gouged out the eyes you saw with, cut out the tongue you talked with. We crushed the face you lost in the eyes of the System by doing what you did. Your lips are sealed with a cross, closed forever to the faith you betrayed. Edoardo La Monica had a clean record. But he had a loaded last name, belonging to one of the families that had turned Secondigliano into Camorra territory and a mine for business. The family with whom Paolo Di Lauro had taken his first steps. Edoardo La Monica’s murder resembles that of Giulio Ruggiero. Both of them torn to pieces, meticulously tortured just hours after the arrest of a boss. Flayed, beaten, quartered, skinned. Homicides with such deliberate and bloody symbolism hadn’t been seen for years, since the end of Cutolo’s reign. Cutolo’s favorite killer, Pasquale Barra ‘o nimale—the animal—became famous for murdering Francis Turatello in prison by ripping his heart out with his bare hands and then biting into it. These rituals had died out, but the Secondigliano feud revived them, transforming every gesture, every inch of flesh, and every word into a means of communication in the war.

In a press conference the special operations carabinieri officers declared that Di Lauro’s arrest came about after the clan member who purchased Di Lauro’s favorite fish, the pezzogna, or blue-spotted bream was identified. The story seemed calculated to shatter Di Lauro’s image: the supremely powerful boss who controls hundreds of sentinels, but who lets himself get nabbed because of his sin of gluttony. No one in Secondigliano buys the story of the pezzogna trail, not for a minute. Many figured that SISDE, Italy’s domestic intelligence agency, had to be solely responsible. The forces of law and order confirmed that SISDE had indeed intervened, but its presence in Secondigliano was extremely difficult to perceive. In snippets of barroom chat I had picked up the hint of something that sounded awfully close to numerous reporters’ hypotheses, namely that SISDE had put several people in the area on the payroll in exchange for information or lack of interference. Men drinking their espresso or cappuccino with a croissant would say things like:

“Since you take money from James Bond …”

Twice in those days I heard furtive or allusive mention of 007. The references were too insignificant or too ridiculous to allow me to draw any conclusions, but at the same time they were too anomalous to ignore.

The secret service’s strategy may have been to identify and recruit those who were technically responsible for lookouts, getting them to station all the sentinels in other zones so that they would be unable to sound the alarm and allow the boss to flee. The family of Edoardo La Monica denies any possible involvement on his part, maintains that he had never been part of the System and was afraid of the clans and their business affairs. Maybe he paid for someone else in his family, but the surgical torture seems to have been intended specifically for him rather than to be delivered to someone else via his body.

One day I noticed a small group of people not far from where Edoardo La Monica’s body had been found. One of the boys pointed to his ring finger, touched his head, and moved his lips without making a sound. Vincenzo Di Lauro’s courtroom gestures came back to me in a flash: that strange sign, that asking his father about his wedding ring, his first question after not seeing him for years. The ring—anello—which in Neapolitan becomes aniello. A message referring to Aniello La Monica, the family patriarch, and the ring finger, which symbolizes faith or loyalty. Thus loyalty betrayed, as if he were signaling the root of the family that had betrayed him. The family responsible for his arrest. The person who had talked.

For years the La Monicas had been called the anielli in the neighborhood, just as the Gionta di Torre Annunziata family members were called valentini after the boss Valentino Gionta. According to the declarations of the pentito Antonio Ruocco and of Luigi Giuliano, Aniello La Monica had been eliminated by none other than his godson, Paolo Di Lauro. It is true that the La Monica men are all in the ranks of the Di Lauro clan. But this atrocious killing could be the punishment, a more violent message than a simple burst of gunfire, the revenge for that death twenty years earlier—revenge is a dish best served cold. A long memory, very long. A memory shared by the Secondigliano clans that later rose to power and by the very territory they rule. But which rests on rumors, hypotheses, and suspicions, producing sensational arrests or tortured bodies, without, however, ever taking the shape of truth. A truth that must always be obstinately interpreted, like a hieroglyphic. One that is better left undeciphered.

Secondigliano returned to its regular economic rhythms. All the Spaniard and the Di Lauro managers were in prison. New neighborhood capos were emerging, new boy managers were taking their first steps up the chain of command. Over a few months the word feud fell out of use and was replaced by Vietnam.

“That one there … he was in Vietnam … so now he has to lay low.”

“After Vietnam everyone’s afraid around here …”

“Is Vietnam over or not?”

Fragments of sentences that the new clan conscripts speak into their cell phones. Intercepted conversations that on February 8, 2006, led to the arrest of Salvatore Di Lauro, the eighteen-year-old son of the boss, who had a small army of baby drug dealers. The Spaniards had lost the battle, but it seems they managed to achieve their goal of becoming autonomous, with their own cartel run by young kids. The carabinieri intercepted an SMS that a girl sent to a young drug-market capo who had been arrested during the feud and who took up dealing as soon as he was released: “Good luck with your work and your return to the neighborhood, I’m excited for your victory, congratulations!”

The victory was a military one, the congratulations for having fought on the right side. The Di Lauros are in jail, but they saved the skin and family business.

Things suddenly calmed down after the clan negotiations and arrests. I wandered about a Secondigliano that was exhausted, trampled, photographed, filmed, abused by too many people, a Secondigliano weary of it all. I stopped in front of the murals by Felice Pignataro with their sun faces and skulls combined with clowns. Murals that gave the cement some light and unexpected beauty. All of a sudden the sky exploded with fireworks and the air echoed with the obsessive trictrac of explosions. The news crews who were dismantling their posts after the boss’s arrest came running to see what was going on. Precious material for their final broadcast: festivities involving two entire apartment buildings. They turned on their microphones and spotlights and called in to their editors to announce a special report on the Spaniards’ celebrating Paolo Di Lauro’s arrest. I went over to see what was happening, and a boy, pleased that I asked, told me, “It’s for Peppino, he’s come out of coma.” Last year Peppino was on his way to work when his Ape, the three-wheeled vehicle he drove to the market, started to veer and then overturned. Neapolitan roads are water soluble; after two hours of rain the volcanic paving stones start to float and the tar dissolves as if it were mixed with salt. They brought a tractor from the countryside to recover the Ape from the escarpment where it had ended up. Peppino suffered severe cranial trauma. After a year in a coma he had revived, and a few months later he was released. The neighborhood was celebrating his homecoming. They set off the first fireworks right as he was getting out of the car and settling into his wheelchair. Children had their picture taken caressing his shaven head. Peppino’s mother protected him from hugs and kisses that were too much for his condition. The correspondents called their offices again and canceled the report; the .38-caliber serenade they hoped to film had faded into a party for a kid who had come out of a coma. They headed back to their hotels, but I continued on to Peppino’s house, feeling like a merry draft dodger at a party that was too festive to miss. I toasted Peppino’s health all night long with his neighbors, the party spilling onto the stairs and landings, apartment doors wide-open and tables laden with food, no worries as to whose homes they were. Completely drunk, I played courier on my Vespa, ferrying bottles of red wine and Coca-Cola from a late-night bar to Peppino’s. That night Secondigliano was silent and exhausted, emptied of reporters and helicopters, without lookouts and sentinels. A silence that made you want to sleep, the way you do at the beach in the afternoon, stretched out on the sand with your arms under your head, not thinking of anything.

^*The NAR, the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari or Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, was a neofascist terrorist organization active in Italy in the late 1970s.—Trans.