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

WOMEN

It was as if I had an indefinable odor on me. Like the smell that permeates your clothing when you go to one of those fried-food places. When you leave, the smell gradually becomes less noticeable, blending with the poison of car exhaust, but it’s still there. You can take countless showers, soak for hours in heavily perfumed bath salts and oils, but you can’t get rid of it. And not because—like the sweat of a rapist—it has penetrated your flesh, but because you realize it was already inside you. As if it were emanating from a dormant gland that all of a sudden started secreting, activated more by a sensation of truth than of fear. As if something in your body were able to tell when you are staring at the truth, perceiving it with all your senses, with no mediation. Not a recounted or reported or photographed truth, but existential truth that gives itself to you: the realization of how things work, the path the present is taking. No way of thinking can attest to the truth of what you have seen. After you’ve stared a Camorra war in the face, your memory swells with too many images to recall individually, and they come flooding back all at once, confused and blending together. You can’t trust your eyes. After a Camorra war there are no ruins of buildings, and the sawdust soon soaks up the blood. It’s as if you were the only one to see or suffer, as if someone were ready to point a finger at you and say, “It’s not true.”

The aberration of a clan war—of assets that face off, cutthroat investments, financial ventures that devour each other—will always find a reason for consolation, a significance that distances the danger, making the conflict seem far away when in reality it’s taking place on your doorstep. And so you can file it all away in those pigeonholes of reason that you gradually construct for yourself. But not the odors. They can’t be regimented. They linger, like the last trace of a patrimony of lost experience. The odors stuck in my nose—blood and sawdust, the aftershave the boy soldiers slap on their beardless cheeks, but above all the womanly smells of deodorant, hairspray, and sweet perfume.

Women are always a part of clan power dynamics. It is no accident that the Secondigliano feud eliminated two women with a savagery usually reserved for bosses. And that hundreds of women poured into the streets to prevent pushers and sentinels from being arrested, setting trash bins on fire and yanking on the carabinieri’s elbows. I saw the girls go running every time a video camera materialized; all smiles, they would throw themselves in front of the lenses, singing little ditties and asking to be interviewed, hovering around to see the logo on the camera so they could figure out which channel was filming them. You never know. Someone might see them and invite them to be on a show. Around here, opportunities don’t happen; you have to rip them out with your teeth, buy them, or dig for them. They have to be here, somewhere, somehow. Nothing is left to chance. Not even finding a boyfriend is left to the casualness of an encounter or the fate of falling in love. Every conquest is a strategy. And the girls who don’t develop a strategy risk committing dangerous frivolities, hands touching them all over and insistent tongues drilling through their clenched teeth. Tight jeans, clingy T-shirts: beauty as bait. In some places beauty is a trap, the most pleasing kind. But if you give in, pursue the pleasure of the moment, you don’t know what you may find. The girl will be that much better if she can get herself courted by the best, and, once she has snared him, hold on to him, put up with him, hold her nose and swallow him. But keep him—all of him—for herself. Passing in front of a school once, I saw a girl getting off the back of a motorcycle. She moved slowly, giving everyone time to notice the bike, her helmet, motorcycle gloves, and pointy boots, which barely touched the ground. A janitor who had worked there for ages and had watched over generations of kids, went up to her and said, “France’, ma già fai ammore? And with Angelo? You know he’ll end up in Poggioreale, don’t you?”

Around here fa ammore does not mean “to make love,” but to go steady or be engaged. Angelo had recently entered the System, and it didn’t look as if he was just doing little jobs, so the janitor concluded he’d soon end up at the Poggioreale jail. Francesca, instead of defending her boyfriend, had her answer ready: “And what’s the problem as long as he gives me the monthly allowance? He really loves me.”

The monthly allowance. This is her first success. If her boyfriend ends up in jail, she’ll have earned herself a salary: the money the clans give to affiliates’ families. If an affiliate has a serious girlfriend, the money goes to her, even though it’s best to be pregnant, just to be sure. Not married necessarily—a baby is enough, even one that’s on the way. If you’re only engaged, there’s a risk that some other girl he’s been keeping on the side, someone you didn’t know about, will come forward. In this case the neighborhood capo may decide to split the money between the two—a risky proposition because it generates a lot of tension between the girls’ families—or he may make the affiliate decide which one to give it to. Most of the time it’s decided to give it to his family instead, neatly resolving the dilemma. Matrimony and childbirth provide solid guarantees. To avoid leaving clues on people’s bank records, the money is almost always hand-delivered by a “submarine”—so called because he slithers along the bottom of the streets without ever letting himself be seen. He always takes a different route to get to the same house, surfacing suddenly so that he won’t be trailed—precautions against being blackmailed, robbed, or compromised. The submarine handles the stipends of the low-level members, whereas the managers deal directly with the treasurer, asking for the amount they need when they need it. Submarines are not part of the System and do not become affiliates, so there’s no chance of using their position to rise in the ranks. They are almost always retirees, bookkeepers or shop accountants who work for the clans to round out their pensions and to have a reason to get out of the house and not rot in front of the television. The submarine knocks on the twenty-eighth of every month, sets his plastic bags on the table, then extracts the envelope bearing the imprisoned or dead affiliate’s name from the stack of them stuffed inside his jacket. He hands it to the affiliate’s wife or, if she’s not there, the oldest child. He almost always brings some food as well: prosciutto, fruit, pasta, eggs, bread. The sounds of grocery bags rubbing against the wall and heavy step on the stairs announce his arrival. He always goes to the same shops, buying everything at once, then makes his rounds, weighed down like a mule. You can get an idea of how many prisoners’ wives and Camorrista widows live on a particular street by how loaded down the submarine is.

Don Ciro was the only submarine I got to know. He lived in the old city center and delivered stipends for clans that had been drifting but were now on the upswing, given the prosperous climate. He worked for clans in the Quartieri Spagnoli and Forcella for a few years, then off and on for those in the Sanità neighborhood. Don Ciro was so good at finding houses, basement apartments, buildings with no street number, and homes carved out of corners of landings that at times the mailmen, who kept getting lost in the labyrinth of streets, would give him letters to deliver to his clients. Don Ciro’s battered shoes—there was a bump from his big toe and the soles were worn through at the heels—were the emblem of the submarine, the symbol of the miles he’d covered on Naples’s backstreets and hills, his journeys made longer by the paranoia of being followed or robbed. Don Ciro’s pants were clean but not pressed; he had lost his wife, and his new Moldavian companion was really too young to concern herself with such things. A timorous type, he always kept his eyes on the ground, even when talking with me. His mustache was stained yellow from nicotine, as were the index and middle fingers of his right hand. A submarine also delivers monthly allowances to men whose women have landed in jail. It’s humiliating for them to receive their wife’s money, so the submarine usually goes to her mother’s house and has her distribute the money to the prisoner’s family. In this way the submarine avoids the false reprimands, shouts on the stairway, and theatrics of the man who kicks him out of the house, never failing, however, to first collect the envelope. The submarine hears all sorts of complaints from affiliates’ wives—the rent increase, the high utilities bill, kids who are failing school or want to go to college. He listens to every request, every bit of gossip about the other wives who have more money because their husbands were more clever in climbing the ranks of the clan. As the women complain, the submarine just keeps repeating, “I know, I know.” He lets them vent, and in the end he offers two types of response: “It’s not up to me” or “I just bring the money, I’m not the one who decides.” The wives know perfectly well that the submarine doesn’t make any decisions, but they hope that if they keep pouring out their complaints to him, sooner or later something will come out of his mouth in front of some neighborhood capo, who might decide to increase her allowance or grant bigger favors. Don Ciro was so used to saying “I know, I know” that he would chant it whenever I spoke with him, no matter what the topic of conversation. He had delivered money to hundreds of Camorra families and could have charted generations of wives and girlfriends as well as men whose women were in jail. A historiography of criticism of bosses and politicians. But Don Ciro was a taciturn and melancholy submarine who had emptied his head of every word he’d heard, letting them echo without a trace. As we talked, he dragged me from one end of Naples to the other, and when we said goodbye, he took a bus back to the place we’d started from. It was all part of his strategy to throw me off his trail, to keep me from forming even the slightest idea of where he lived.

For many women, marrying a Camorrista is like receiving a loan or acquiring capital. If talent and destiny are in their favor, that capital will bear fruit and the women will become entrepreneurs, managers, or generals’ wives, wielding unlimited power. If things go badly, the only thing left to them will be hours in prison waiting rooms. If the clan collapses and can’t pay the monthly allowance, they’ll have to beg for work as a maid—competing with the immigrants—so they can pay the lawyers and put food on the table. Alliances are founded on the bodies of Camorra women, whose faces register the family power. They are recognized by their black veils at funerals, their screams during arrests, the kisses they throw their men in court.

The typical image of the Camorra woman is of a female who does nothing but echo the pain and will of her men—her brothers, husband, and sons. But it’s not like that. The transformation of the Camorra in recent years has also meant a metamorphosis of the woman’s role, which has gone from that of a maternal figure and helper in times of misfortune to a serious manager who concerns herself almost exclusively with the business and financial end of things, delegating the fighting and illegal trafficking to others.

One such historic figure is Anna Mazza. Widow of the godfather of Afragola, she headed one of the most powerful criminal and business organizations and was one of the first women in Italy to be found guilty of Mafia-related crimes. At first Anna Mazza capitalized on the aura of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 1970s. The “black widow of the Camorra,” as she came to be known, was the brain behind the Moccia clan for more than twenty years. She had a talent for extending her power everywhere; when the court required her to relocate to the north, near Treviso, in the 1990s, she attempted to consolidate her network of power even in total isolation and—according to investigations—made contact with the Brenta Mafia. She was accused of arming her twelve-year-old son immediately after her husband’s murder to kill the person who ordered his death, but was let go for lack of proof. Anna Mazza had an oligarchic managerial style and was strongly opposed to armed uprisings. She held sway over her entire territory, as the dissolution of the Afragola city council in 1999 for Camorra infiltration shows. Politicians followed her lead and sought her support. Anna Mazza was a pioneer. Before her there was only Pupetta Maresca, the beautiful, vengeful killer who became famous in Italy in the 1950s when, six months pregnant, she decided to avenge the death of her husband, Pascalone ‘e Nola.

Anna Mazza was not merely vengeful. She realized that the time warp of the Camorra would allow her to enjoy a sort of impunity reserved for women. A backwardness that made her immune to ambushes, envies, and conflicts. Her patience and fierce determination in the 1980s and 1990s made the Moccia family into one of the most important clans in the construction business; they handled contracts, controlled quarries, and negotiated the purchase of land zoned for building. The entire area of Frattamaggiore, Crispano, Sant’Antimo, Frattaminore, and Caivano was controlled by local capos tied to the Moccias. In the 1990s the Moccia clan became one of the pillars of the Nuova Famiglia, the broad cartel opposed to Raffaele Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and whose political and business power surpassed that of the Cosa Nostra cartels. When the political parties that had benefited from their association with clan businesses collapsed, only the Nuova Famiglia bosses were arrested and given life sentences. Not wanting to pay in place of the politicians they had helped, or to be considered the cancer of a system they’d supported and in which they’d played an active and productive, albeit criminal, role, they decided to turn state’s witness. Pasquale Galasso, boss of Poggiomarino, was the first high-ranking military and business figure to collaborate with the law in the 1990s. Names, strategies, funds— he revealed everything, a decision that the government repaid by protecting the family’s assets and to a certain extent his own. Galasso told everything he knew. Of all the families in the confederation, it was the Moccias who took it upon themselves to make him shut up for good. With a few choice revelations, Galasso could have destroyed the widow’s clan in no time. They tried to corrupt his bodyguards to poison him and planned to eliminate him with a bazooka. After these attempts, organized by the men, failed, Anna Mazza intervened. She sensed that the moment had arrived for a new strategy: dissociation. A concept she appropriated from the terrorism of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, when militants dissociated themselves from their armed organizations but without repenting or revealing names, without accusing instigators or perpetrators. It was an attempt to delegitimize a political stance, the official repudiation of which was enough to obtain a reduction in one’s sentence; Mazza believed this would be the best way to eliminate the threat of pentiti while also making it seem as if the clans were unconnected to the government. If the clans could establish an ideological distance from the Camorra, they could take advantage of prison sentence reductions and improvements in conditions, but without revealing methods, names, bank accounts, or alliances. What for some observers might be considered an ideology the Camorra ideology—for the clans was nothing more than the economic and military operations of a business group. The clans were changing: the criminal rhetoric and the Cutolo mania for the ideologization of Camorra behavior had spent itself. Dissociation could eliminate the lethal power of the pentiti, which, despite the inherent contradictions, is the true fulcrum of the attack on the Camorra. The widow understood the full potential of this trick. Her sons wrote to a priest, making a show of their desire to redeem themselves; as a symbolic gesture, a car filled with weapons was supposed to be left in front of a church in Acerra. Deposition of arms, just as the IRA did with the British. But the Camorra is not an independentist organization or an armed nucleus, and weapons are not its real power. That car was never left, and the strategy of dissociation conceived in the mind of a woman boss slowly lost its appeal. It was not heard in parliament or the Court and lost support among the clans as well. The pentiti were becoming more numerous and less useful, and Galasso’s grand revelations, while disavowing the clans’ military apparatuses, left nearly intact their business and political plans. Anna Mazza continued constructing a sort of Camorra matriarchy: the women as the real power center and the men as soldiers, mediators, and managers who obeyed the women’s orders. The important decisions, both military and economic, were up to the black widow.

The women became clan managers, entrepreneurs, and bodyguards. They were better at business, less obsessed with ostentatious shows of power, and less eager for conflict. Immacolata Capone, one of the clan’s “ladies in waiting” and the godmother of Anna Mazza’s daughter Teresa, made a career for herself over the years. Immacolata didn’t have the matronly look—the coiffed hair and full cheeks—of Anna Mazza; minute, and possessed of a sober elegance, her blond bob always perfectly combed, there was nothing of the shady Camorrista about her. Instead of looking for men who could confer greater authority upon her, she was sought out by men who wanted her protection. She married Giorgio Salierno, a Camorrista implicated in the attempts to thwart the pentito Galasso, and later became involved with a member of the Puca clan of Sant’Antimo, a family with a powerful history close to Cutolo, and made famous by Immacolata’s companion’s brother Antonio Puca. An address book found in her pocket contained the name of Enzo Tortora, the TV personality unjustly accused of being a Camorrista. The clan was undergoing a managerial and business crisis by the time Immacolata came of age. Prison and pentiti had jeopardized Lady Anna’s painstaking labor. But Immacolata bet everything on cement. She also managed a brick factory in the center of Afragola. As a businesswoman she did all she could to associate with the Casalesi, the most powerful clan in the building and construction business nationally and internationally. According to the Naples DDA investigations, Immacolata Capone led the Moccia family companies back to the top of the building trade. In this she had the cooperation of MOTRER, one of the most important names in earthmoving in southern Italy. The mechanism she set up was impeccable. According to investigations, she collaborated with a local politician, who awarded contracts to a businessman who then subcontracted to Lady Immacolata. I only saw her once, I think, right as she was going into a supermarket in Afragola. Her bodyguards were young women. They followed her in a Smart, the little two-seater car all the Camorra women own, but judging by the thickness of the doors, hers was armor-plated. In our fantasies female bodyguards look like bodybuilders, every muscle bulging like a man’s, bunching thighs, pectorals swallowing breasts, overgrown biceps, necks like tree trunks. But there was nothing of the Amazon in the bodyguards I saw. One was short, with a big, flabby ass and hair dyed too black; the other was thin, frail, and bony-looking. I was struck by the fact that both were wearing fluorescent yellow, the same color as the Smart. The driver had on yellow sunglasses and the other a bright yellow T-shirt. A yellow that could not have been chosen by chance, a combination that could not have been a mere coincidence. A professional touch. The same yellow as Uma Thurman’s motorcycle outfit in Kill Bill, the Quentin Tarantino film in which for the first time women are first-rate criminal stars. The same yellow that Uma Thurman wears in the ad for the film, with her bloody samurai sword—a yellow imprinted on your retina and maybe even on your taste buds. A yellow so unreal it becomes a symbol. A winning business must have a winning image. Nothing is left to chance, not even the color of the car or the uniform of the bodyguards. Immacolata Capone set the example, and now Camorra women of all ranks want female bodyguards, carefully cultivating their image.

But something wasn’t right. Maybe she had invaded someone else’s territory, or maybe she was blackmailing someone. Immacolata Capone was killed in March 2004 in Sant’Antimo, her companion’s town. She was without her bodyguards; maybe she didn’t think she was in any danger. The execution took place in the center of town, and the killers operated on foot. As soon as she sensed she was being followed, she started to run; people thought she’d had her bag snatched and was chasing the thieves, but her purse was still across her shoulder. Immacolata Capone hugged it to her chest as she ran, an instinctual reaction that prevented her from dropping the thing that made running for her life more difficult. She went into a poultry shop, but the killers got to her before she could take cover behind the counter. Two shots in the nape of her neck: that was how the old-fashioned taboo of not touching women was breached. A skull shattered by bullets, facedown in a puddle of blood—this was the new direction of the Camorra. No difference between men and women. No supposed code of honor. But the Moccia matriarch had always moved slowly, was always ready to do big business, controlling her territory through shrewd investments and first-class financial negotiations, monopolizing land deals, and avoiding feuds and alliances that could have interfered with the family business.

Doubtless unknown to IKEA, the largest IKEA complex in Italy now sits on land controlled by Moccia companies, as will the biggest high-speed train construction site in southern Italy. In October 2005—for the umpteenth time—the municipal government of Afragola was dissolved for Camorra infiltration. The accusations are heavy: a group of Afragola city council members requested the president of a commercial entity to hire more than 250 people with close family ties to the Moccia clan.

Illegal building permits also contributed to the decision to dissolve the municipality. There are megastructures on boss-owned properties and talk of a hospital being constructed on land the clan acquired just as the city council was debating the issue. Land bought for very little and then, once the location for the new hospital was announced, sold for an astronomical amount. For 600 percent more than the original price. A profit only the Moccia women were able to achieve.

Women such as Anna Vollaro worked in the trenches to defend clan assets and properties. Niece of the Portici clan boss Luigi Vollaro, Anna was twenty-nine when the police showed up to seize yet another family business, this time a pizzeria. She doused herself with gasoline and lit a match, and to make sure no one could put out the flames, she ran around wildly, finally hitting a wall. The plaster turned black, as when an outlet short-circuits. Anna Vollaro burned herself alive to protest the seizure of an illicitly acquired asset that she considered the product of the normal course of business.

One tends to think that in the criminal world military success leads to a position in business. But that’s not always the case. Take the feud in Quindici, a town in the province of Avellino, which has endured the constant, suffocating presence of the Cava and Graziano clans for years. In the 1970s the Cavas were a subset of the Grazianos. But the two families have been at war forever. When the 1980 earthquake destroyed the Lauro Valley, the 100 billion lire of reconstruction funds that poured in gave rise to a middle class of Camorra businessmen. The money allowed both families to establish small construction empires, both run by the women. The battle was sparked by disagreements over contracts and kickbacks from the earthquake reconstruction funds. What unfolded in Quindici was different from in the rest of Campania, however: not simply a factional conflict, but a family feud resulting in around forty savage murders that sowed mourning among the rival groups and created an undying hatred that has contaminated generations of family leaders like the plague. The town watches helplessly as the two factions continue to slaughter each other. One day when the mayor, who had been elected through Graziano backing, was in his office, a group of Cava commandos knocked at his door. They didn’t open fire right away, giving him time to climb out the window onto the roof, and escape along the tops of the houses.

The Graziano clan has produced five mayors, two of whom were murdered; the other three were removed by the Italian president for having ties to the Camorra. But there was a moment when it seemed things could change. When a young pharmacist, Olga Santaniello, was elected mayor. Only a tough woman could take on the Cava and Graziano women. She did everything she could to wash away the filth of clan power, but she didn’t succeed. On May 5, 1998, a devastating flood inundated the entire Lauro Valley, turning houses into sponges that soaked up water and mud, the earth into slimy pools, and the streets into useless canals. Olga Santaniello drowned. The mud that suffocated her was doubly rewarding for the clans: the flood meant more aid money, and the power of the clans increased. Antonio Siniscalchi was elected mayor and reelected unanimously four years later. After his first electoral victory, Siniscalchi, his advisers, and his most vocal supporters marched from the polling station to the Brosagro neighborhood, passing in front of the home of Arturo Graziano, who was called guaglione or boy. The salutations were not directed at him, however, but at the Graziano women. Lined up in order of age, they stood on the balcony as the new mayor paid them homage now that death had definitively eliminated Olga Santaniello. In June 2002, Antonio Siniscalchi was arrested in a blitz carried out by the Naples DDA. According to the Neapolitan anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, he used the first round of reconstruction funds to redo the street and fencing surrounding the Graziano family’s bunker-villa.

The villas scattered around Quindici, the secret hideaways, paved roads, and streetlamps were paid for by the town, public works that helped the Grazianos and made them immune to attacks and ambushes. The representatives of the two families lived barricaded behind insurmountable fences and under twenty-four-hour closed-circuit surveillance.

Clan boss Biagio Cava was arrested at the Nice airport as he was getting on a plane to New York. With Biagio behind bars, all the power passed to his daughter and wife. Only the women showed their faces in the town; not only were they the behind-the-scenes administrators and brains of the operation, but they also became the official symbol of the families, the faces and eyes of power. When the rival families met on the street, they would exchange ferocious looks and intense stares—an absurd game, a test of who would drop their gaze first. Tension in the town was high. The Cava women realized that the time had come to take up arms, to go from being businesswomen to killers. They trained in apartment entranceways, the music turned up loud to cover the sound of pistols being unloaded into bags of walnuts that had been gathered on their country estates. During the 2002 local elections, Maria Scibelli, Michelina Cava, and her daughters, sixteen-year-old Clarissa and nineteen-year-old Felicetta, started going around armed. On Via Cassese the Cava women’s car—an Audi 80—encountered the Graziano women’s car, with twenty-and twenty-one-year-old Stefania and Chiara Graziano aboard. The Cavas started to shoot, but the Grazianos braked hard, as if they’d been expecting them. They swerved, accelerated, reversed, and escaped. Bullets shattered windows and pierced the body of the car, but didn’t hit flesh. The two girls returned to their villa in hysterics. Their mother, Anna Scibelli, and clan boss Luigi Salvatore Graziano, the seventy-year-old family patriarch, decided to avenge the attack. They took off together in his Alfa, followed by a bulletproof car carrying four people with submachine guns and rifles. They intercepted the Cava Audi, slamming into it repeatedly as the backup car blocked first the side and then the front exit, preventing any chance of getaway. The Cava women, fearful of being stopped by the carabinieri after their unsuccessful shoot-out, had relieved themselves of their weapons, so when they found a car blocking their path, they swerved, flung open the doors, and tried to escape on foot. The Grazianos got out and opened fire, showering the Cavas’ legs, heads, shoulders, chests, cheeks, and eyes with lead. In a matter of seconds they were down, shoes flying and feet in the air. It seems that the Grazianos treated their bodies mercilessly, without realizing that one of them was still alive. In fact, Felicetta Cava survived. A small bottle of acid was found in one of the Cava women’s purses. Perhaps in addition to shooting, they intended to disfigure their enemies by throwing acid on their faces.

Women are better able to confront crime as if it were only momentary, or someone’s opinion, or a step one takes before quickly moving on. Clan women demonstrate this very clearly. They feel offended and vilified when they are called Camorristi or criminals, as if “criminal” were merely a judgment of an action, not an objective way of behaving. In fact, contrary to the men, so far not one female Camorra boss has ever repented. Not one.

Erminia Giuliano, known as Celeste for the color of her eyes, always did her utmost to defend the family’s assets. According to investigations, the beautiful and ostentatious sister of Forcella bosses Carmine and Luigi called the shots for their real estate and financial investments. Celeste looks like the typical Neapolitan female, the downtown Camorra woman—platinum blond hair, cold, pale eyes drowning in yolks of black eyeliner. She managed the economic and legal aspects of the clan, whose business assets were confiscated in 2004: 28 million euros, their economic lung. They owned a chain of stores in Naples and the surrounding area and a popular brand that owed its success to the clan’s savvy as well as to its military and economic protection. A brand with a franchising network of fifty-six sales points in Italy, Tokyo, Bucharest, Lisbon, and Tunis.

The Giuliano clan was born in Forcella, the soft underbelly of Naples, a neighborhood shrouded in casbah mythology, the legendary rotten navel of the old city center. The Giulianos were the dominant power in the 1980s and 1990s. They’d emerged slowly from poverty, going from smuggling to prostitution, from door-to-door extortion to holdups, creating a vast dynasty of cousins, nephews, uncles, relatives. Though they reached the pinnacle of their power in the late 1980s, their charisma has not yet faded. Even today whoever wants to operate in the city center has to square it with the Giulianos. A clan that still feels poverty breathing at the back of its neck and lives in terror of going back there. One of the utterances that best conveys Forcella king Luigi Giuliano’s aversion to being poor was recorded by the reporter Enzo Perez: “I like nativity scenes, I just can’t stand the poverty of the shepherds!”

The face of supreme Camorra strength is increasingly female, but so are those crushed by the tanks of power. Annalisa Durante, fourteen years old, was caught in the cross fire in Forcella on March 27, 2004. Fourteen years old. Fourteen years old. Repeating it is like running a sponge soaked in ice water down your spine. I was at Annalisa Durante’s funeral. I got to the church early. The flowers hadn’t been delivered yet, but messages of condolence, tears, and heartrending memories from classmates were hung all over the place. Annalisa had been killed. One hot evening, probably the first really hot evening in a season of endless rain, Annalisa had decided to go to a friend’s who lived downstairs in her building. Already tan, she was wearing a pretty, eye-catching dress that clung to her toned and tense figure. Evenings like this seem created for meeting boys, and fourteen is when a girl from Forcella starts selecting a boyfriend to ferry all the way to the altar. At fourteen the girls from Neapolitan working-class neighborhoods already seem like experienced women: their faces heavily made up, their breasts mutated into swollen little melons by push-up bras, and their pointy, high-heeled boots. They must be talented tightrope walkers to navigate the Neapolitan streets paved with basalt or lava stones, enemy to all feminine footwear. Annalisa was pretty. Very pretty. She was listening to music with her friend and a cousin, all three of them eyeing the boys doing wheelies on their motorcycles, burning rubber, weaving dangerous obstacle courses amid cars and people. A courting game, atavistic and always the same. Forcella girls love to listen to neo-melodic music, a style that sells big in the working-class neighborhoods of Naples, as well as Palermo and Bari. Gigi D’Alessio is unquestionably the best. The one who managed to break out of the small time, who made it everywhere in Italy, while the others, hundreds of them, are still just little local idols in some neighborhood, building, or street. Everyone has his singer. But all of a sudden, just as the stereo is croaking out a high note, two motorini go by at full throttle, hot on someone’s trail. He escapes, his feet devouring the pavement. Annalisa, her cousin, and friend don’t understand, they think the boys are just joking around, maybe it’s a dare. Then the shots. Bullets ricochet everywhere. Annalisa is on the ground, felled by two bullets. Everyone scatters, and heads start appearing on balconies, the doors of which are always left open so as to keep an ear on what is happening in the street. The cries, the ambulance, the race to the hospital, the whole neighborhood filling the streets with curiosity and anxiety.

Salvatore Giuliano is an important name, a name that already seems to mark you as a commander. But here in Forcella it’s not the memory of the Sicilian bandit that gives the boy authority. Giuliano merely happens to be his last name. The situation was made worse when Lovigino Giuliano decided to talk; he repented, betraying his clan to avoid life imprisonment. But as often happens in dictatorships, even if the head is removed, he can only be replaced by one of his men. So despite the infamy of betrayal, only the Giulianos were able to maintain relations with the big narcotraffic couriers and impose a protection racket. But over time Forcella got tired. It didn’t want to be ruled by an infamous family anymore, didn’t want more arrests and police. Whoever desires to take the Giulianos’ place has to assert himself officially as sovereign; he has to eradicate them by crushing their new heir, Salvatore Giuliano, Lovigino’s nephew. That evening had been chosen as the moment to make the new hegemony official, to do away with the scion who had begun to raise his head and show Forcella the dawning of a new dominion. They wait for him. When he’s spotted, Salvatore is walking calmly, but suddenly realizes he’s in their crosshairs. He bolts, the killers at his heels, looks for some alley to dart into. The shots start flying. In all probability Giuliano runs past the three girls, using them as shields, and in the turmoil pulls out his pistol and starts shooting. After a few seconds he takes off again. The killers can’t catch him. Four legs run into the doorway looking for shelter. The girls turn around. Annalisa’s not there. They go out again. There she is on the street, blood everywhere, a bullet in her head.

At the funeral I manage to get close to the foot of the altar, where Annalisa’s coffin rests. Policemen in dress uniform stand at each of the four corners, Campania’s official tribute to the girl’s family. The coffin is covered with white flowers. A cell phone—her cell phone—has been placed near the base. Annalisa’s father moans and frets, mumbles something, hops around, his fists fidgeting in his pockets. He comes over, even though he’s not really addressing me: “And now what? Now what?” When the head of the family bursts into tears, all the women in the family start to shout, beat their chests, and rock back and forth making high-pitched shrieks. And when he stops crying, all the women once again fall silent. The benches of girls—friends, cousins, and neighbors—imitate their mothers’ gestures, the way they shake their heads, the way they moan over and over, “It can’t be! It’s impossible!” They feel they have been given an important role, that of comforting. And yet they ooze pride. A Camorra victim’s funeral is an initiation, on a par with beginning to menstruate or your first sexual encounter. As with their mothers, this event lets them take active part in the life of the neighborhood. The news cameras trained on them, the photographers—everything seems to exist just for them. Many of these girls will soon marry Camorristi. Drug dealers or businessmen. Killers or consultants. Many of them will bear children who will be killed, or they will wait in line at the Poggioreale jail to bring news and money to their husbands. But for now they are just little girls in black. It is a funeral, but they are all carefully dressed: low waist and thong underwear showing. Perfect. They weep for a friend, knowing that this death will make them women. And, despite the pain, they had looked forward to this moment. I think about the eternal return of the laws of this earth. I think about the Giulianos, who reached the peak of their power before Annalisa had even been born, when her mother was still a young girl who played with other young girls who then became the wives of Giulianos and their affiliates, who grew up and listened to D’Alessio and cheered for Maradona, the soccer player who always enjoyed Giulianos’ cocaine and parties—the photo of Diego Armando Maradona in Lovigino’s shell-shaped tub is unforgettable. Twenty years later, Annalisa dies as a Giuliano is chased, shot at while a Giuliano returns fire, using her as a shield, or perhaps merely running by. An identical historical trajectory, eternally the same. Perennial, tragic, ongoing.

The church is packed by now. The police and carabinieri are still nervous, though. I don’t understand. They’re agitated and restless and lose patience over nothing. I walk away from the church and then I understand. A carabinieri car is separating the funeral crowd from a group of well-heeled individuals astride expensive motorcycles, in convertibles, or on powerful scooters. They are the last members of the Giuliano clan, the Salvatore loyalists. The carabinieri fear a confrontation—all hell would break lose. Luckily nothing happens, but their presence is deeply symbolic. A declaration that no one can dominate the center of Naples without their approval or at least without their mediation. They show everyone that they’re there and that, in spite of everything, they’re still the capos.

The white casket emerges from the church, the crowd presses in to touch it, people faint, bestial cries shatter my eardrums. When the coffin passes below Annalisa’s house, her mother, who couldn’t bring herself to attend the church service, tries to hurl herself off the balcony. She flounders and shouts, her face red and swollen. A group of women hold her back. The usual tragic scene unfolds. Let me be quite clear—the ritual weeping and shows of sorrow are not fictions or falsehoods. Quite the opposite. Yet they reveal the confines in which most Neapolitan women still live, in which they are forced to appeal to strong symbolic behavior to express their grief and make it recognizable to the entire community. This frenetic suffering, although terribly real, maintains the characteristics of a Neapolitan melodrama.

The journalists keep their distance. Antonio Bassolino and Rosa Russo Iervolino—the president of the region of Campania and the mayor of Naples—are terrified; they fear the neighborhood could rise up against them. But it doesn’t: the people of Forcella have learned how to take advantage of politics and don’t want to make any enemies. Some people applaud the forces of law and order, causing a few journalists to get excited: carabinieri cheered in the neighborhood of the Camorra. What naïveté. That applause was a provocation. Better the carabinieri than the Giulianos is what it said. Some camera crews try to collect eyewitness accounts; they approach a fragile-looking elderly woman who grabs the microphone right away and shouts, “It’s their fault … my son will do fifty years behind bars! Assassins!” The hatred toward the pentiti is well known. The crowd presses in, tension runs high. Realizing that a girl is dead because she decided to listen to music with her girlfriends at the entranceway to her apartment building one spring evening makes your stomach turn. I feel nauseous. I have to keep calm. I have to understand—if that is even possible. Annalisa was born into and lived in this world. Her girlfriends had told her about motorcycle rides with clan boys, and maybe she would have fallen in love with some handsome, rich prince who would have made a career in the System, or maybe with some good old boy who would have broken his back all day long for peanuts. Maybe her destiny was to work in an underground purse factory, ten hours a day for 500 euros a month. Annalisa was moved by the stained skin of the leather workers and had written in her diary, “The girls who make purses always have black hands, and are shut up in the factory all day long. My sister Manu’s there as well, but at least her boss doesn’t make her work when she doesn’t feel well.” Annalisa has become a tragic symbol because the tragedy ended in its most terrible and essential aspect: murder. But here there is not a minute in which the business of living does not seem like a life sentence, a penalty that must be paid for by a wild, fast, and fierce existence. Annalisa is guilty of having been born in Naples. Nothing more, nothing less. As her body is being carried away in its white coffin, a classmate calls her cell phone. The ringing on the coffin is the new requiem. Musical tones, a sweet melody. No one answers.