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

CEMENT

I had been away from Casal di Principe a long time. If Japan is the capital of martial arts, Australia of surfing, and Sierra Leone of diamonds, Casal di Principe is the capital of the Camorra’s entrepreneurial power. Being from Casale is a sort of guarantee of immunity around Naples and Caserta. It means that you’re larger-than-life, as if you emanated directly from the ferocity of Caserta’s criminal organizations. You enjoy a guaranteed respect, a sort of natural fear. Even Benito Mussolini wanted to eliminate this birthmark, this criminal aura; he rebaptized San Cipriano d’Aversa and Casal di Principe with the name Albanova—new dawn. And to inaugurate a new dawn of justice, he sent in dozens of carabinieri, who were supposed to resolve the problem “with iron and fire.” Today the only thing that remains of the name Albanova is the rusty train station in Casale.

Some guys spend hours hitting a punching bag, doing bench presses to sculpt their pecs, or take muscle enhancers, but for others a particular accent or a gesture is enough to bring back to life all the bodies on the ground covered with sheets. An old saying perfectly captures the lethal charge of the place’s violent mythology: “You can become a Camorrista, but you’re born a Casalese.” Or when you get into an argument with someone. You challenge your opponent with your eyes, and a second before the punching or stabbing starts, you declare your philosophy: “Life or death, it’s all the same to me!” At times your roots, your hometown, comes in handy: being associated with the violence can lend you a certain fascination. You can use it as veiled intimidation to get a discount at the movies or credit from a timid checkout girl. But it’s also true that your hometown saddles you with powerful prejudices, and you don’t really want to have to stand there and explain that not everyone is a clan affiliate, not everyone is a criminal; that the Camorristi are a minority. So you take a shortcut and come up with a more anonymous nearby town that will cancel any connection between yourself and the criminals: Secondigliano becomes a generic Naples, and Casal di Principe becomes Aversa or Caserta. You’re either ashamed or proud, depending on the moment and the situation. Like a suit of clothing, except it’s the suit that decides when to wear you.

Compared to Casal di Principe, Corleone is Disneyland. Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, Casapesenna. Fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants, but twelve hundred of them have been sentenced for having ties to the Mafia, and a whole lot more have been accused or convicted of aiding or abetting Mafia activities. Since time immemorial this area has borne the weight of the Camorra, a violent and ferocious middle class led by its bloody and powerful clan. The Casalesi clan, which takes its name from Casal di Principe, is a confederation of all the Camorra families in the Caserta area: Castelvolturno, Villa Literno, Gricignano, San Tammaro, Cesa, Villa di Briano, Mondragone, Carinola, Marcianise, San Nicola La Strada, Calvi Risorta, Lusciano, and dozens of other towns. Each with its own area capo, each a part of the Casalesi network. Antonio Bardellino, the Casalesi clan founder, was the first in Italy to understand that cocaine would far surpass heroin in the long run. Yet heroin continued to be the mainstay of Cosa Nostra and many Camorra families. In the 1980s heroin addicts were considered to be literal gold mines, whereas coke was thought to be an elite drug. But Antonio Bardellino understood that big money was to be had by marketing a drug that didn’t kill quickly, that was more like a bourgeois cocktail than a poison for outcasts. So he created an import-export company that shipped fish flour from South America to Aversa. Fish flour that concealed tons of cocaine. Bardellino peddled heroin as well; the shipments to John Gotti in America were packed in espresso filters. An American narcotics squad once intercepted sixty-seven kilos of heroin, but it wasn’t a disastrous loss for the San Cipriano d’Aversa boss. A few days later he had a call put through to Gotti: “Now we’re sending twice as much another way.” From the marshes of Aversa was born a cartel that knew how to stand up to Cutolo, and the ferocity of that war is still imprinted in the genetic code of the Caserta clans. The Cutolo families were eliminated in the 1980s, in a few extremely violent operations. The De Matteos—four men and four women— were slaughtered in a few days. The only one the Casalesi spared was an eight-year-old boy. All seven members of the Simeone family were killed almost simultaneously. In the morning the powerful family was alive and well, but by that evening it was extinct. Butchered. In March 1982, the Casalesi positioned a field machine gun, the kind used in trenches, on a hill in Ponte Annicchino and picked off four Cutolo members.

Antonio Bardellino was affiliated with Cosa Nostra, was tied to Tano Badalamenti, and was a friend and companion of Tommaso Buscetta, with whom he had shared a villa in South America. When the Corleones swept away the Badalamenti-Buscetta power, they also tried to eliminate Bardellino, but in vain. During the rise of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the Sicilians also tried to eliminate Raffaele Cutolo. They sent a hit man, Mimmo Bruno, over on the ferry from Palermo, but he was killed as soon as he set foot outside the port. Cosa Nostra had always had a sort of respect and awe of the Casalesi, but when in 2002 they killed Raffaele Lubrano—the boss of Pignataro Maggiore, a man with close ties to Cosa Nostra, having been handpicked by Totò Riina—many feared a feud would explode. I remember being at a newsstand the day after the ambush and hearing the vendor murmuring to a customer:

“If the Sicilians come here to fight now too, we won’t have peace for three years.”

“Which Sicilians? The Mafiosi?”

“Yes, the Mafiosi.”

“The Mafia should get down on their knees in front of the Casalesi and suck. That’s it, just slurp it all up.”

One of the declarations about the Sicilian Mafiosi that shocked me most was made by the Casalesi pentito Carmine Schiavone in a 2005 interview. He talked about Cosa Nostra as if it were an organization enslaved to politicians and, unlike the Caserta Camorristi, incapable of thinking in business terms. According to Schiavone, the Mafia wanted to become a sort of antistate, but this was not a business issue. The state-antistate paradigm doesn’t exist. All there is, is a territory where you do business—with, through, or without the state:

We lived with the state. For us the state had to exist and it had to be that state, except that our philosophy was different from the Sicilians. Whereas Riina came from island isolation, an old shepherd from out of the mountains, really, we had surpassed those limits and we wanted to live with the state. If a state figure stonewalled us, we would find someone else who was willing to help us. If it was a politician, we wouldn’t vote for him, and if it was an institutional figure, we would find a way to swindle him.

Carmine Schiavone, Sandokan’s cousin, was the first to take the lid off the Casalesi clan’s business affairs. When he decided to cooperate with the law, his daughter Giuseppina’s condemnation of him was fierce, more lethal than a death sentence. Her fiery words were printed in the newspaper:

“He’s a big fraud, a liar, a bad man, and a hypocrite who has sold his failures. A beast. He never was my father. I don’t even know what the Camorra is.”

Businessmen. That’s how the Caserta Camorristi define themselves, nothing more than businessmen. A clan made up of violent company men and killer managers, of builders and landowners. Each with his own armed band and linked by common economic interests. The Casalesi cartel’s strength has always been its ability to handle large drug lots without needing to feed an internal market. They are present on Rome’s vast drug market, but more significant is their role in the sale of huge consignments. The 2006 acts of the Anti-Mafia Commission indicate that the Casalesi were supplying the Palermo families with drugs. Alliances with Nigerian and Albanian clans meant they no longer had to be involved in direct peddling and narcotrafficking operations. Pacts with clans in Lagos and Benin City, alliances with Mafia families in Priŝtina and Tirana, and agreements with Ukrainian Mafiosi in Lviv and Kiev liberated the Casalesi from bottom-rung criminal activities. At the same time the Casalesi received privileged treatment in investments in Eastern Europe and in the purchase of cocaine from Nigeria-based international traffickers. New leaders and new wars. It all happened after the explosion of the Bardellino clan, the origin of the Camorra’s entrepreneurial power in this area. Antonio Bardellino, having achieved total dominion in every legal and illegal economic sector, from narcotraffic to construction, settled in Santo Domingo with a new family. He gave his Caribbean chil-dren the same names as those in San Cipriano—a simple, easy way of avoiding confusion. His most loyal men held the reins of power back home. Having emerged unscathed from the war with Cutolo, they developed companies and established their authority, expanding everywhere in northern Italy and abroad. Mario Iovine, Vincenzo De Falco, Francesco Sandokan Schiavone, Francesco Cicciotto di Mezzanotte Bidognetti, and Vincenzo Zagaria were the capos of the Ca-salese confederation. In the early 1980s Cicciotto di Mezzanotte and Sandokan headed up the clan’s military operations, but they were also businessmen with widespread interests, eager to control the enormous, many-headed beast of the confederation. They realized that Mario Iovine was too close to Bardellino, however; he did not approve of their desire for autonomy. So they devised a mysterious but politically effective strategy. They used the cantankerous nature of Camorra diplomacy in the only way that would let them achieve their goals: they sparked an internal war.

As the pentito Carmine Schiavone tells it, the two bosses urged Antonio Bardellino to return to Italy and eliminate Mario Iovine’s brother Mimì. Mimì owned a furniture factory and was formally unconnected to the Camorra, but, the two bosses claimed, he had often acted as a police informer. To convince Bardellino, they told him that even Mario was prepared to sacrifice his brother to keep the clan’s power on solid footing. Bardellino let himself be convinced and had Mimì killed on his way to his furniture factory. Right after the ambush Cicciotto di Mezzanotte and Sandokan pressured Mario Iovine to eliminate Bardellino, saying that he had dared to kill his brother on a pretext, based only on rumor. A double cross calculated to pit one against the other. They started to organize. Bardellino’s heirs all agreed to eliminate the capo of capos, the man who, more than anyone else in Campania, had created a criminal-business power system. Bardellino was convinced to move from Santo Domingo to the Brazilian villa; they told him that Interpol was on his tail. Mario Iovine went to see him in Brazil in 1988 on the pretext of needing to put their fish flour and cocaine business in order. One afternoon Iovine— not finding his pistol in his trousers—took a mallet and bashed in Bardellino’s skull. He buried the body in a hole dug on the beach, but as it was never found, the legend was born that Antonio Bardellino was really still alive and enjoying his wealth on some South American island. Mission accomplished, Iovine immediately phoned Vincenzo De Falco to give him the news and to kick off the massacre of all the Bardellino men. Paride Salzillo, Bardellino’s nephew and his true heir in the area, was invited to a summit of all the Casalese cartel managers. Carmine Schiavone recounts that they had Salzillo sit at the head of the table, in honor of his uncle. All of a sudden, Sandokan started to strangle him while his cousin, also named Francesco Schiavone but known as Cicciariello, together with his cohorts Raffaele Diana and Giuseppe Caterino, held him by the legs and arms. Sandokan could have killed him with a gun or a knife to the stomach, the way the old bosses used to. But no. He had to do it with his hands: that’s the way the new sovereign kills the old one when he usurps the throne. Ever since 1345 when Andrew of Hungary was strangled in Aversa, the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by his wife, Queen Joan I, and the Neapolitan nobles loyal to Charles, Duke of Durazzo, who aspired to the throne, strangulation around here has been a symbol of succession, of the violent turnover of sovereignty. Sandokan had to show all the bosses that he was the heir, that, by right of viciousness, he was the new Casalesi leader.

Antonio Bardellino had created a complex system of power, and the business cells bred in his bosom would not long remain neatly within the structures he had devised. They had matured and now needed to express their power without further hierarchical limitations. This is how Sandokan Schiavone became the leader. He developed a highly efficient, family-run system. His brother Walter coordinated the firing squads, his cousin Carmine managed economic and financial affairs, his cousin Francesco was elected mayor of Casal di Principe, and another cousin, Nicola, treasurer. Important moves for local self-assertion, which is crucial in the early phases. In the first years of his rule Sandokan’s power was also solidified through strict political ties. Because of a conflict with the old Christian Democratic Party, in 1992 the clan in Casal di Principe supported the Italian Liberal Party, which experienced the biggest upswing in its history, jumping from a measly 1 to 30 percent. But all the other top-level clan members were hostile to Sandokan’s absolute leadership. In particular the De Falcos, who in addition to their business and political alliances had the police and carabinieri on their side. In 1990 there were several meetings of the Casalesi leaders. Vincenzo De Falco, nicknamed the Fugitive, was invited to one of the meetings. The bosses would have liked to eliminate him. But he didn’t show. The carabinieri arrived instead and arrested the guests. Vincenzo De Falco was killed in 1991, riddled with bullets in his car. The police found him hunched over with the stereo blasting, a tape of the singer Domenico Modugno still playing. After his death there was a rift in the Casalesi confederation. On one side the families close to Sandokan and Iovine: Zagaria, Reccia, Bidognetti, and Caterino; on the other the families close to the De Falcos: Quadrano, La Torre, Luise, Salzillo. The De Falcos responded to the murder of the Fugitive by killing Mario Iovine in Cascais, Portugal, in 1991. They showered him with bullets in a phone booth. Iovine’s death meant a green light for Sandokan Schiavone. There followed four years of wars and massacres, four years of continuous killings between the families close to Schiavone and those close to the De Falcos. Years of upheavals, of alliances, and shifting sides; there was no real solution but rather a division of territories and powers. Sandokan became the emblem of his cartel’s victory over the other families. Afterward, all his enemies reconverted into allies. Cement, drugs, rackets, transportation, waste management, commercial monopolies, and specified suppliers: under Sandokan all this was Casalesi company territory.

Cement makers, upon which every construction company depends, became a crucial weapon for the Casalesi clans. This supply system is key for putting the clans in touch with all the contractors in the area and for linking them to every possible deal. As Carmine Schiavone frequently claimed, the clans’ cement makers offered favorable prices because their ships carried not only cement but also distributed arms to Middle Eastern countries under embargo. This second level of commerce allowed them to beat out the legal prices. The Casalesi clans made money at every step of the way; they supplied cement and subcontractors, receiving bribes on big deals. These bribes were really just the beginning, since their efficient and economical companies would not work without them, and no other company could do the work for a good price and without being punished. The Schiavone family manages a turnover of 5 billion euros a year. The entire economic potential of the Casalesi cartel—consisting of real estate holdings, farms, stock, liquid assets, construction companies, sugar refineries, cement plants, usury, and drug and arms traffic—is around 30 billion euros. The Casalese Camorra has become a multipurpose company, the most dependable in Campania, players in a whole range of business activities. The amount of illegally accumulated capital often leads to subsidized credit, which allows their companies to trounce the competition through low prices or intimidation. The new Casalese Camorrista middle class has transformed extortion into a sort of additional service, the racket into participation in Camorra business. Your monthly payments fund clan operations, but they also earn you economic protection with the banks, punctual deliveries, and respect for your sales representatives. Extortion as an imposed acquisition of services. This new racket concept came to light in a 2004 investigation by the Caserta police, which ended in the arrest of eighteen people. Francesco Sandokan Schiavone, Michele Zagaria, and the Moccia clan were, at that time, the most important Campania stockholders in Cirio and Parmalat. The milk distributed first by Cirio and then by Parmalat had conquered 90 percent of the market in the Caserta region, a good part of the Naples region, all of southern Lazio, parts of the Marche, Abruzzo, and Lucania. The companies achieved this result through their close alliance with the Casalese Camorra and bribes to the clans to maintain their preeminent position. Various brands were involved, all connected to Eurolat, which in 1999 passed from Cirio, under Cragnotti’s direction, to Parmalat, then run by Calisto Tanzi.

The judges ordered the seizure of three concessionaries and numerous companies connected to the distribution and sale of milk, all accused of being controlled by the Casalesi. The milk companies were registered under false names on their behalf. Cirio and Parmalat dealt directly with the brother-in-law of Michele Zagaria, the Casalesi clan regent in hiding for a decade, in order to obtain special client status, which they won above all through commercial deals. Cirio and Parmalat brands gave their distributors special discounts—from 4 to 6.5 percent, rather than the usual 3 percent—as well as various production awards, so supermarkets and retailers also received price reductions. In this way the Casalesi achieved widespread acquiescence for their commercial predominance. And where pacific persuasion and common interest didn’t work, violence did: threats, extortion, destruction of transport vehicles. They beat up their competitors’ drivers, plundered their trucks, and burned their depots. The fear was so widespread that in the areas controlled by the clans it was impossible not only to distribute but even to find someone willing to sell brands other than those imposed by the Casalesi. In the end, consumers paid the price: with a monopoly and a frozen market, there was no real competition, and retail prices were uncontrollable.

The big deal between the national milk companies and the Camorra came to light in the fall of 2000, when Cuono Lettiero, a Casalesi affiliate, began collaborating with the law and discussing the clans’ commercial ties. The guarantee of a constant rate of sale was the most direct and automatic way of obtaining bank guarantees—the dream of every big business. In this scenario, Cirio and Parmalat were officially the “offended parties”—the victims of extortion—but investigators became convinced that the mood was relatively relaxed and that the behavior of both the national companies and the local Camorristi was mutually beneficial.

Cirio and Parmalat—at least their management at the time—never reported suffering from clan interference in Campania. Not even in 1998, when a Cirio official was attacked in his home near Caserta; he was brutally beaten with a stick in front of his wife and nine-year-old daughter because he hadn’t obeyed clan orders. No rebellion, no charges filed. The certainty of the monopoly was better than the uncertainty of the market. The money to maintain the monopoly and take possession of the Campania market had to be justified on the company balance sheet. But in the country of creative financing and the decriminalization of false accounting, this was not a problem. False invoicing, false sponsorships, and false year-end awards for milk sales resolved any bookkeeping problems. To this end, nonexistent events have been paid for since 1997: the Mozzarella Festival, Music in the Piazza, even the Feast of San Tammaro, patron saint of Villa Literno. As a token of esteem for its employees, Cirio even financed the Polisportiva Afragolese, a sports club run by the Moccia clan, as well as an extensive network of music, sports, and recreation centers, demonstrating the “public spiritedness” of the Casalesi. Cirio stated that it had been forced to do so as part of a protection racket and insisted that it was the victim. (Subsequent to these investigations and the financial scandals that ensued, both Cirio and Parmalat filed for bankruptcy. Both companies have been reconstituted and continue to trade under completely new management teams.)

The power of the clan has grown extensively in recent years, extending to eastern Europe: Poland, Romania, and Hungary. Poland was where Francesco Cicciariello Schiavone, Sandokan’s cousin, the squat, mustachioed boss and a principal Camorra figure, was arrested in 2004. He was wanted for ten homicides, three kidnappings, nine attempted homicides, numerous violations of arms laws, and extortion. They nabbed him as he was grocery shopping with his twenty-five-year-old Romanian companion Luiza Boetz. Cicciariello was going by the name of Antonio and seemed like an ordinary fifty-one-year-old Italian businessman. But his companion must have sensed that something was amiss when, in an attempt to throw off the police bloodhounds, she had to make a long and tortuous train journey to join him in Krosno, near Kraków. They tailed her across three borders, followed her by car to the outskirts of the Polish city, and finally stopped Cicciariello at the supermarket checkout; he had shaved his mustache, straightened his curly hair, and lost weight. Cicciariello had moved to Hungary, but con-tinued to meet his companion in Poland, where he had big business interests: animal farms, land purchases, deals with local businessmen. The Italian representative of SECI, the Southeast European Cooperative Initiative for Combating Trans-Border Crime, had reported that Schiavone and his men frequently went to Romania and had started important dealings in Barlad in the east, in Sinaia in the center, and in Cluj in the west, as well as along the Black Sea. Cicciariello Schiavone had two lovers: Luiza Boetz and Cristina Coremanciau, also Romanian. In Casale, word of his arrest “because of a woman” was like a slap in his face. The headline of one local paper seemed to sneer at him: “Cicciariello arrested with his lover.” In truth both of his lovers were crucial to his business as they were in fact managers who handled his investments in Poland and Romania. Cicciariello was one of the last Schiavone family bosses to be arrested. In twenty years of power and feuds, many Casalesi clan leaders and supporters had been locked away. All the investigations against the cartel and its branches were grouped together in the Spartacus maxi-trial, named after the rebel gladiator who had attempted the greatest insurrection Rome had ever known on this very same land.

I went to the courthouse in Santa Maria Capua Venere on the day of the sentencing. I was expecting video crews and photographers, but there were only a few, and only from local newspapers and TV stations. But police and carabinieri were everywhere. About two hundred of them. Two helicopters were hovering low over the courthouse, the noise of the propellers pounding in everyone’s ears. Bomb detection dogs, police vehicles. The mood was extremely tense. And yet the national press and TV crews were absent. The media was totally ignoring the biggest trial—in terms of the number of accused and convictions requested—of a criminal cartel. Experts refer to the Spartacus trial by a number: 3615, the number assigned to the investigation in the general register, with around thirteen hundred DDA inquiries beginning in 1993, all stemming from Carmine Schiavone’s testimony.

The trial lasted seven years and twenty-one days, for a total of 626 hearings. The most complex Mafia trial in Italy in the last fifteen years. Five hundred witnesses took the stand, in addition to twenty-four government witnesses, six of whom were defendants. Ninety files were deposited: acts, sentences from other trials, documents, and wiretaps. Almost a year after the 1995 blitz, the offspring investigations of Spartacus also started up: Spartacus 2 and Regi Lagni, related to the renovation of the Bourbon canals, which hadn’t been properly restored since the eighteenth century. According to the accusations, the clans had piloted the renovation project for years, generating contracts worth millions. Rather than putting the money toward the canals, they channeled it into their construction businesses, which subsequently became extremely successful throughout Italy. There was also the Aima trial, related to the swindling in the famous produce collection centers, where the European community destroyed surplus production, providing subsidies to the farmers. The clans dumped trash, iron, and construction waste into the huge craters intended for the produce. But first they had it all weighed as if it were produce. And obviously they collected the subsidies while the fruit of their lands continued to be sold. One hundred and thirty-one orders of seizure were issued regarding companies, lands, and agricultural businesses, amounting to hundreds of millions of euros. Two soccer clubs were also seized: Albanova, which competed in the C2 league, and Casal di Principe.

Investigations also probed the clan’s stronghold on public works contracts, which went to firms connected to their concrete and earth-moving operations; scams regarding illegally obtained agricultural subsidies, which were injurious to the European Economic Community; and hundreds of homicides and business relationships. As I awaited the sentence along with everyone else, it occurred to me that this was not just another trial, not a simple, ordinary prosecution of Camorra families in southern Italy. It seemed more like a trial of history, the Nuremberg for a whole generation of the Camorra. But unlike the high officers of the Reich, many of the Camorristi present were still in command, still the heads of their empires. A Nuremberg without victors. The accused in cages, in silence. Sandokan was on videoconference from the Viterbo prison; it would have been too risky to move him. The only sound in the courtroom was the lawyers’ voices: over twenty law firms were involved and more than fifty lawyers and paralegals had studied, followed, observed, and defended. The relatives of the accused were huddled together in a small room next to the bunker wing, their eyes glued to the monitors. When the Court president, Catello Marano, picked up the thirty-page verdict, there was silence. A nervous silence, accompanied by an orchestra of anxious sounds: heavy breathing, hundreds of throats swallowing, watches ticking, dozens of muted cell phones silently vibrating. The president read the list of the guilty first. Twenty-one life sentences, more than 750 years of prison. Twenty-one times he pronounced the sentence of life imprisonment, often repeating the names of the condemned. And then seventy times he read out the years that other men, associates and managers, would spend in prison for their alliance with the terrible Casalese power. By one thirty it was almost all over. Sandokan asked to speak. He was agitated and wanted to respond to the sentence, repeat the claim of the counsel for the defense: he was a successful businessman, but a plot of envious, Marxist judges had deemed the local bourgeoisie a criminal power rather than the product of entrepreneurial and economic talent. He wanted to shout that the sentence was unjust. According to his logic, all the dead resulted from local feuds that were part of the rural culture, and not from Camorra wars. But this time Sandokan was not allowed to speak. Silenced like an unruly schoolboy, he started to yell, so the judges had the audio disconnected. A big, bearded man continued to squirm on the screen until the video was cut as well. The courtroom emptied immediately, the police and carabinieri slowly dispersing as the helicopter hovered over the courtroom bunker. It’s strange, but I didn’t have the feeling that the Casalesi clan had been defeated. Many were thrown in jail for a few years, some bosses would never come out alive, and perhaps a few would eventually decide to cooperate and thus regain a piece of their existence beyond bars. Sandokan’s rage must have been the suffocating anger of a powerful man who holds the entire map of his empire in his head but cannot control it directly.

The bosses who decide not to cooperate with the authorities live off a metaphysical, almost imaginary power, and they do everything possible to forget about the businessmen whom they supported and launched, those who, not being clan members, get off scot-free. If they wanted to, the bosses could make sure they ended up in jail as well, but they would have to talk first, and this would immediately put an end to their supreme authority and place all their family members at risk. But even then—something far more tragic for a boss—they would not be able to map the routes of their money and legal investments. Even confessing and revealing their power, they would never know exactly where all their money ended up. The bosses always pay—they can’t do otherwise. They kill, they direct firing squads, they’re the first link in the chain of the extraction of illegal capital; this means that their crimes are always traceable, unlike the diaphanous economic crimes of their white-collar men. Besides, bosses are not eternal. Cutolo gives way to Bardellino, Bardellino to Sandokan, Sandokan to Zagaria, Zagaria to La Monica, La Monica to Di Lauro, Di Lauro to the Spaniards, and the Spaniards to God knows whom. The economic power of the Camorra System lies exactly in its continual turnover of leaders and criminal choices. One man’s dictatorship is always brief; if the power of a boss were long-lasting, he would raise prices, create a monopoly, making rigid markets, and keep investing in the same sectors rather than exploring new ones. Instead of adding value in the criminal economy, he would become an obstacle to business. And so, as soon as a boss takes over, others ready to take his place start to emerge, figures eager to expand, to stand on the shoulders of the giants they helped create. Something that the journalist Riccardo Orioles, one of the most astute observers of power dynamics, always remembered: “Criminality is not power pure and simple, but one kind of power.” There will never be a boss who wants a seat in government. If the Camorra had all the power, its business, which is essential to the workings of the legal and illegal scale, would not exist. In this sense every arrest and maxi-trial seems more like a way of replacing capos and breaking business cycles than something capable of destroying a system.

The faces that were printed the next day in the newspapers, all lined up one next to another—bosses, supporters, young affiliates, and seasoned old guard—did not represent an infernal circle of criminals but pieces of a mosaic of power that no one had been able to ignore or defy for twenty years. After the Spartacus trial, the imprisoned bosses started implicitly and explicitly threatening judges, magistrates, and journalists—everyone they considered responsible for turning a group of cement and mozzarella managers into killers in the eyes of the law.

Senator Lorenzo Diana was their favorite target. They sent letters to the local papers, made explicit threats during trials. Immediately following the Spartacus sentencing, some people went to the senator’s brother’s trout farm and scattered the fish around, leaving them wiggling on the ground to die slowly, suffocating in the air. Some pentiti even reported attempts on the senator’s life on the part of the organization’s “hawks.” Operations that were halted through the intervention of more diplomatic elements of the clan. Diana’s police escort also helped dissuade them. Armed escorts are never an obstacle for the clans; they’re not afraid of bulletproof cars and policemen. But it is a sign that the man they want to eliminate is not alone, that they can’t so easily rid themselves of him as they could an individual whose death would concern only his family circle. Lorenzo Diana is one of those politicians who decided to reveal the complexity of the Casalese power rather than generically denounce criminals. He was born in San Cipriano d’Aversa and experienced firsthand the emergence of Bardellino and Sandokan, the feuds, massacres, and business operations. He can speak about that power better than anyone else, and the clans fear his knowledge and his memory. They fear that from one moment to the next he can reawaken the national media’s interest. They fear that the senator will report to the Anti-Mafia Commission what the press, attributing everything to local crime, is ignorant of. Lorenzo Diana is one of those rare men who knows that fighting the power of the Camorra calls for infinite patience, the sort of patience that starts over from the beginning, again and again, that pulls the threads of the economic knot one by one to arrive at the criminal head. Slowly, but with perseverance and anger, even when your attention wanes, even when it all seems futile, when you’re lost in a metamorphosis of criminal powers that change but are never defeated.

With the trial over, there was the risk of an open clash between the Bidognetti and the Schiavone families. They had been facing off through confederate clans for years, but their common business interests always prevailed. Bidognetti territory covers the northern part of the Caserta region, extending to the coast. The Mezzanotte clan has powerful and incredibly ferocious hit squads. They burned alive Francesco Salvo, who owned and worked at a bar called The Tropicana: punishment for having dared to replace Bidognetti video poker machines with those of a rival clan. They went so far as to launch a phosphorus bomb at Gabriele Spenuso’s car on the Nola–Villa Literno road. In 2001, Domenico Bidognetti ordered Antonio Magliulo eliminated because though he was married he had dared to make advances on a cousin of a boss’s. They took him to the beach, tied him to a chair facing the sea, and began to stuff his mouth and nose with sand. Magliulo tried to breathe, swallowing and spitting sand, blowing it out his nose, vomiting, chewing, and twisting his neck. His saliva, mixing with the sand, formed a kind of primitive cement, a gluey substance that slowly suffocated him. Mezzanotte ferocity was directly proportional to its business power. According to various investigations by the Naples DDA in 1993 and 2006, the Bidognettis, who were in the waste-management business, forged alliances with businessmen of the deviant P2 Masonic Lodge, for whom they illegally— and at special prices—disposed of toxic wastes. Cicciotto di Mezzanotte’s nephew Gaetano Cerci, arrested in the “Adelphi” operation against the ecomafia or illegal-waste traffickers, was the contact between the Casalese Camorra and the Masons, and he frequently met directly with Licio Gelli, for business purposes.* Investigators discovered the deals through the earnings—more than 35 million euros—of a single company. The bosses Bidognetti and Schiavone, both in prison serving life sentences, could take advantage of each other’s conviction to unleash his own men in an attempt to eliminate the rival clan. There was a moment when everything seemed about to explode, setting off one of those wars that results in clusters of deaths every day.

In the spring of 2005 Sandokan’s youngest son went to a party in Parete, in Bidognetti territory, and—according to the investigations— started flirting with a girl even though she was with someone. The Schiavone scion was without an escort, believing that the mere fact of being Sandokan’s son would make him immune to any form of aggression. But that’s not how it went. A small group dragged him outside and beat him up—slapping, punching, and kicking him in the ass. He had to go to the hospital to get his scalp sewed up. The next day fifteen or so guys on motorcycles and in cars showed up at Penelope’s, the bar where the kids who had attacked Sandokan’s son usually hung out. Armed with baseball bats, they wrecked the place, beating to a pulp everyone there, but they couldn’t identify those responsible for insulting Sandokan. It seems they escaped through another exit; the commandos chased them and fired at them in the piazza, hitting a passerby in the stomach. In response, the next day three motorcycles pulled up at the Caffè Matteotti in Casal di Principe, where the younger Schiavone clan affiliates usually hung out. The riders got off their bikes slowly, giving passersby time to flee, then started smashing everything. Brawls and more than sixteen knifings were reported. The air was heavy: a new war was brewing.

Luigi Diana’s unexpected confession increased the tension. According to a local paper, the pentito declared that Bidognetti was responsible for Schiavone’s first arrest, that he was the one who had collaborated with the carabinieri, revealing the boss’s hiding place in France. The hit squads were gearing up and the carabinieri were ready to collect the dead bodies. But Sandokan himself called a halt to the massacre with a public gesture. Despite strict prison rules, he managed to send an open letter to a local paper, which was printed on the front page on September 21, 2005. The boss, like a successful manager, resolved the conflict by contradicting the pentito, a relative of whose was killed just hours after his declaration.

“It has been proven that the tip-off, from the person who squealed, thus permitting my arrest in France, was given by Carmine Schiavone, and not by Cicciotto Bidognetti. The truth is that the individual who goes by the name of the pentito Luigi Diana speaks lies and wants to sow discord for his own personal gain.”

Sandokan also “advises” the newspaper editor to report the news properly:

“I beg you to not let yourself be exploited by this mercenary and very compromised traitor, and not to fall into the error of turning your newspaper into a scandal-mongering rag that would inevitably lose credibility, as your competitor has done. I have not renewed my subscription to that paper, and many other people will follow suit. They, like me, would not buy such a manipulated newspaper.”

Sandokan thus discredits the rival publication and officially elects the one to whom he sent his letter as his new interlocutor.

“I won’t even bother to comment on the fact that your competitor is accustomed to writing falsehoods. The undersigned is like water from a spring: completely transparent!”

Sandokan urged his men to switch papers. Requests for subscriptions to the boss’s new choice and cancellations for the old one arrived from dozens of prisons throughout Italy. The boss closed his letter of peace with Bidognetti as follows:

“Life always asks you what you are able to face. And it has asked these so-called pentiti to face the mud. Like pigs!”

The Casalesi cartel was not defeated. On the contrary, it even seemed reinvigorated. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, the cartel is now run by a dyarchy: Antonio Iovine, known as ‘o ninno or “nursing baby” because he became a clan leader when he was still a kid, and Michele Zagaria, the manager boss of Casapesenna, called capastorta—crooked head—due to the irregularity of his face, even though it seems he now calls himself Manera. Both bosses have been in hiding for years and are on the minister of the interior’s list of most dangerous Italian fugitives. Untraceable, yet they are undoubtedly in their hometowns. No boss can leave his roots for too long, because all his power is based on them, and it’s there that it can all collapse.

A mere handful of miles, minuscule towns, knots of little lanes, farms lost in the countryside—and yet it’s impossible to catch them. But they’re here. They move along international routes, but they always go home and are here most of the year. Everyone knows it. And yet they can’t nab them. Their system of cover is so efficient that it prevents their arrest. Their families and relatives continue to live in their villas. Antonio Iovine’s villa in San Cipriano is in art nouveau style, whereas Michele Zagaria’s vast complex, between San Cipriano and Casapesenna, has a glass cupola to allow the sunlight to reach an enormous tree that dominates the living room. The Zagaria family owns dozens of satellite companies throughout Italy and—according to the Naples DDA judges—the largest Italian earthmoving business. The most powerful of all. An economic supremacy that is born not of direct criminal activity but of the ability to balance licit and illicit capital.

These firms manage to be extremely competitive. They have full-scale criminal colonies in Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Veneto, where anti-Mafia controls and certification are less strict and thus allow for the transfer of whole branches of a company. At first the Casalesi demanded protection money from Campania businessmen working in the north, but they now manage the market directly. They control most of the construction business around Modena and Arezzo, importing a workforce that is predominantly from Caserta.

Current investigations reveal that construction companies connected to the Casalesi clan have infiltrated the TAV or high-speed-train works in the north, just as they have done in the south. A July 1995 investigation coordinated by Judge Franco Imposimato revealed that the large companies that had won bids for the Naples-Rome leg of the TAV then subcontracted the work to Edilsud, a company connected to none other than Michele Zagaria, as well as to dozens of other companies linked with the Casalese cartel. A deal that yielded about 5 billion euros.

Investigations show that the Zagaria clan had already reached an agreement with the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta about their firms’ participation in the bidding in the event that the TAV were to get as far south as Reggio Calabria. The Casalesi were ready, as they are now. According to recent Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s investigations, the Casapesenna rib of the organization has infiltrated a series of public works projects in Umbria connected to reconstruction activities after the 1997 earthquake. The Camorra companies in the Aversa area can dominate every step of every large contract and every construction site. Rental equipment, earth removal, transportation, materials, and manpower.

The Aversa-area firms are ready to intervene: they are organized, economical, fast, and efficient. Officially there are 517 construction companies in Casal di Principe. A great many of them are direct emanations of the clans, and there are hundreds more in the area, an army ready to cement over anything. The clans have not blocked development in the area, but rather rerouted the benefits into their pockets. In the past five years, veritable commercial thrones of cement have been built in just a few square miles: one of the largest movie theater complexes in Italy in Marcianise; the largest shopping center in southern Italy in Teverola; and the largest shopping center in Europe in Marcianise—all within a region with extremely high unemployment that is continually hemorrhaging emigrants. Enormous commercial complexes. Rather than nonplaces, as the ethnologist Marc Augé would have defined them, they seem to be starting places. Supermarkets where the paper money from everything bought and consumed baptizes capital that would otherwise not find a specific, legitimate origin. Places that provide the legal origin of money. The more shopping centers that go up, the more new construction sites, the more merchandise that arrives, the more suppliers who work, the more shipments that arrive, the faster the money will be able to cross from the jagged confines of illegal territories into legal ones.

The clans benefited from the structural development of the area, and they’re also ready to collect the material rewards. They anxiously await the inauguration of major projects: the subway in Aversa and the airport in Grazzanise, one of the biggest in Europe, to be built near the farms that once belonged to Cicciariello and Sandokan.

The Casalesi have distributed their goods throughout the region. Just the real estate assets seized by the Naples DDA in the last few years amount to 750 million euros. The lists are frightening. In the Spartacus trial alone, 199 buildings, 52 pieces of property, 14 companies, 12 automobiles, and 3 boats were confiscated. Over the years, according to a 1996 trial, Schiavone and his trusted men have seen the seizure of assets worth 230 million euros: companies, villas, lands, buildings, and powerful automobiles, including the Jaguar in which Sandokan was found at the time of his first arrest. Confiscations that would have destroyed any company, losses that would have ruined any businessman, economic blows that would have capsized any firm. Anyone but the Casalesi cartel. Every time I read about the seizure of property, every time I see the lists of assets the DDA has confiscated from the bosses, I feel depressed and exhausted; everywhere I turn, everything seems to be theirs. Everything. Land, buffalos, farms, quarries, garages, dairies, hotels, and restaurants. A sort of Camorra omnipotence. I can’t see anything that doesn’t belong to them.

One businessman more than every other possessed this absolute power of owning everything: Dante Passarelli from Casal di Principe. He was arrested years ago for Camorra ties, accused of being the Casalesi clan treasurer. The prosecution asked for a sentence of eight years. Passarelli was not simply one of the countless businessmen who did deals with and through the clans. Passarelli was The Businessman, the number one, the closest, the most trustworthy. He had run a highly successful delicatessen, and according to the charges, his commercial talents were what led to his being chosen to handle part of the clan’s investments. He became a wholesaler and then an industrialist, a pasta manufacturer and a contractor, had his hand in sugar and catering, even in the soccer business. According to an estimate by the DIA, the anti-Mafia directorate, Dante Passarelli’s assets were worth between 300 and 400 million euros. A good part of that wealth was the fruit of holdings and significant shares in the agricultural-alimentary sector. He owned Ipam, one of the most important Italian sugar refineries. His company Passarelli Dante and Sons, which was awarded the contract for the cafeteria hospitals in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Capua, and Sessa Aurunca, was the leader in meal distribution. He owned hundreds of apartments, and commercial and industrial buildings. At the time of his arrest on December 5, 1995, assets subject to seizure included: nine buildings in Villa Literno; an apartment in Santa Maria Capua Vetere; another in Pinetamare; a building in Casal di Principe; lands in Castelvolturno, Casal di Principe, Villa Literno, and Cancello Arnone; and La Balzana, an agricultural complex in Santa Maria La Fossa composed of 209 hectares of land and 40 rural buildings. As well as the feather in his cap: Anfra III, a luxury yacht with several cabins, parquet floors, and a whirlpool tub, docked in Gallipoli. Sandokan and his consort had taken a cruise of the Greek isles aboard Anfra III. Investigations were leading to the progressive confiscation of Dante Passarelli’s assets when in November 2004 he was found dead, having fallen from the balcony of one of his houses. His wife found the body—head split open, spine shattered. The case is still open. It remains unclear whether it was an accident or a very familiar, anonymous hand that caused him to fall from an unfinished balcony. With his death, all the assets that were to go to the state reverted to the family. Passarelli’s destiny was that of a talented businessman who, thanks to the clan, handled sums he never would have seen otherwise, and he caused them to multiply exponentially. Then there was a snag—a judicial investigation—and that wealth was confiscated. Just as his skill as a company man brought him an empire, so the seizures brought him death. The clans do not allow for mistakes. When during a trial it was made known to Sandokan that Dante Passarelli was dead, the boss serenely replied, “May his soul rest in peace.”

The clans’ power remained the power of cement. It was at the construction sites that I could feel—physically, in my gut—all their might. I had worked on construction sites for several summers; to get a job mixing cement, all I had to do was let the contractor know where I was from. Campania provided the best builders in all of Italy—the most skilled, the fastest, cheapest, the least pains in the ass. It’s killer work, and I have never learned to do it particularly well. A trade that might yield a considerable sum only if you are prepared to gamble all your strength, all your muscles, and all your energy. To work in all kinds of weather, wearing sometimes a ski mask, sometimes just your underwear. Getting my hands and nose near cement was the only way I knew to understand what power—real power— was built on.

It was when Francesco Iacomino died that I truly understood the workings of the building trade. He was thirty-three when they found him, in his overalls, on the ground at the intersection of Via Quattro Orologi and Via Gabriele D’Annunzio in Ercolano. He had fallen from a scaffolding. After the accident everyone fled, even the draftsman. No one called an ambulance for fear that it would arrive before they got away. So they left him lying in the street, still alive, spitting blood from his lungs. The news of yet another death, one of the three hundred construction workers who die every year on Italy’s building sites, pierced my insides. Iacomino’s death sparked in me a rage that was more like an asthma attack than nervous excitement. I wanted to be like the protagonist in Luciano Bianciardi’s 1962 novel, La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life), who goes to Milan to blow up the Pirelli building, his way of avenging the forty-eight miners from Ribolla who were killed in May 1954 in an explosion in the “Camorra well,” so called because of the dreadful working conditions. Maybe I too had to choose a building—the building—to blow up. But before I could slip into the schizophrenia of the terrorist, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “I Know” started echoing in my ears.* Over and over, tormenting me like a jingle. And so instead of searching for buildings to blow sky-high, I went to Casarsa, to Pasolini’s tomb. I went alone, even if this is one of those things you should do with others—with a group of devoted readers, or a girlfriend to make it less pathetic. But I stubbornly went alone.

Casarsa is a nice place, one of those places where it’s easy to think of someone wanting to get by as a writer, and where, on the other hand, it’s hard to think of someone leaving in order to descend into hell. I didn’t go to Pasolini’s tomb to pay him tribute or even to celebrate. Pier Paolo Pasolini. That name—three in one, as the poet Giorgio Caproni used to say—is neither my secular saint nor a literary Christ. I felt like finding a place where it was still possible to reflect without shame on the possibility of the word. The possibility of writing about the mechanisms of power, beyond the stories and details. To reflect on whether it is still possible to name names, one by one, to point out the faces, strip the bodies of their crimes, and reveal them as elements of the architecture of authority. To reflect on whether it is still possible to sniff out, like truffle pigs, the dynamics of the real, the affirmation of power, without metaphors, without mediation, with nothing but the cutting edge of the word.

I took the train from Naples to Pordenone, an incredibly slow train with a remarkably eloquent name—Marco Polo—for the distance it had to travel. An enormous distance seems to separate Friuli from Campania. I left Naples at ten to eight and arrived in Friuli at twenty past seven the next day, having endured a night of relentless cold that kept me from sleeping. From Pordenone I took a bus to Casarsa. When I got off, I started walking with my head down, like someone who knows where he’s going and can recognize the way by looking at the tips of his shoes. Obviously I got lost. But after wandering about aimlessly I found the cemetery on Via Valvasone where Pasolini is buried with all his family. On the left, just past the entrance, was an empty flowerbed. I went over to that square of earth, in the middle of which were two small, white marble slabs, and saw his tomb. “Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975).” Next to it, a bit farther on, was that of his mother. I felt less alone. I began to mumble my rage, fists clenched so tight that my fingernails pierced my palms. I began to articulate my own “I Know,” the “I Know” of my day.

I know and I can prove it. I know how economies originate and where their smell comes from. The smell of success and victory. I know what sweats of profit. I know. And the truth of the word takes no prisoners because it devours everything and turns everything into evidence. It doesn’t need to drag in cross-checks or launch investigations. It observes, considers, looks, listens. It knows. It does not condemn to prison and the witnesses do not retract their statements. No one repents. I know and I can prove it. I know where the pages of the economy manuals vanish, their fractals mutating into materials, things, iron, time, and contracts. I know. The proofs are not concealed in some flash drive buried underground. I don’t have compromising videos hidden in a garage in some inaccessible mountain village. Nor do I possess copies of secret service documents. The proofs are irrefutable because they are partial, recorded with my eyes, recounted with words, and tempered with emotions that have echoed off iron and wood. I see, hear, look, talk, and in this way I testify, an ugly word that can still be useful when it whispers, “It’s not true,” in the ear of those who listen to the rhyming lullabies of power. The truth is partial; after all, if it could be reduced to an objective formula, it would be chemistry. I know and I can prove it. And so I tell. About these truths.

I always try to quiet the anxiety that overcomes me every time I walk, every time I climb the stairs, take the elevator, or wipe my feet on a doormat and cross a threshold. I cannot stop myself from constantly brooding over how these buildings and houses are built. And when someone is willing to listen, it’s difficult for me not to recount how floor after floor gets slapped together. It’s not a sense of universal guilt that comes over me, nor a moral redemption for those who have been canceled from historical memory. Instead I try to cast off the Brechtian mechanism that comes naturally to me, of thinking about the hands and feet of history. In other words, to think more about the constantly empty plates that led to the storming of the Bastille than about the proclamations of Girondists and Jacobins. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a bad habit. Like someone in front of a Vermeer painting who, instead of contemplating the portrait, thinks about who mixed the colors, stretched the canvas, and made the pearl earrings. A real perversion. When I see a flight of stairs, I simply cannot forget how the cement cycle works, and a wall of windows can’t keep me from thinking about how the scaffolding was put up. I can’t pretend not to think about it. I can’t see the wall without thinking about the trowel and mortar. Maybe it’s just that people born at certain meridians have a particular, unique relationship with certain substances. Materials are not perceived in the same way everywhere. I believe that in Qatar the smell of petroleum and gas evokes sensations of mansions, sunglasses, and limousines. The same acid smell of fossil fuel in Minsk evokes darkened faces, gas leaks, and smoking cities, whereas in Belgium it calls up the garlic Italians use and the onions of the North Africans. The same thing happens with cement in the south of Italy. Cement. Southern Italy’s crude oil. Cement gives birth to everything. Every economic empire that arises in the south passes through the construction business: bids, contracts, quarries, cement, components, bricks, scaffolding, workers. These are the Italian businessman’s armaments. If his empire’s feet are not set in cement he hasn’t got a chance. Cement’s the simplest way to make money as fast as possible, to earn trust, hire people in time for an election, pay out salaries, accumulate investment capital, and stamp your face on the facades of the buildings you put up. The builder’s skills are those of the mediator and the predator. He possesses the infinite patience of a bureaucrat in compiling documents, enduring interminable delays, waiting for authorizations that come slowly, like the dripping of a stalactite. He’s like a bird of prey who flies over land no one else notices, snapping it up for a few pennies, then holds on to it until every inch, every hole, can be resold for astronomical amounts. The predatory businessman knows how to use his beak and claws. And Italian banks seem made for the builders; they know to grant the builder maximum credit. And if he really has no credit and the houses he will build are not enough of a guarantee, some good friend will always back him. The concreteness of cement and brick is the only real materiality that Italian banks recognize. Bank directors think that research, laboratories, agriculture, and crafts are vaporous terrain, ethereal, and devoid of gravity. Rooms, floors, tiles, phone jacks and electrical outlets—these are the only forms of concreteness they recognize. I know and I can prove it. I know how half of Italy has been built. More than half. I am familiar with the hands, the fingers, the projects. And the sand. The sand that has constructed skyscrapers, neighborhoods, parks, and villas. No one in Castelvolturno can forget the endless rows of trucks that pillaged the Volturno River of its sand. Lines of trucks flanked by farmers who had never seen such mammoths of metal and rubber before. Farmers who had managed to stay on here, to survive instead of emigrating, watched as they carted it all away, right before their very eyes. Now that sand is in the walls of apartments in Abruzzo, in buildings in Varese, Asiago, and Genoa. Now it is no longer the river that flows to the sea, but the sea that flows into the river. Now they fish for sea bass in the Volturno, and there are no more farmers. Deprived of their lands, first they turned to raising buffalo, and then set up small construction companies, hiring the young Nigerians and South Africans who used to find seasonal employment on the farms. If they didn’t join up with the clans, they met an early death. I know and I can prove it. Extraction firms are authorized to remove small amounts, but they actually devour entire mountains and crumble hills. Kneaded into cement, the mountains and hills are all over the place now, from Tenerife to Sassuolo. The deportation of things has followed that of people. I met Don Salvatore in a trattoria in San Felice a Cancello. Once a master builder, now he was a walking corpse. He wasn’t more than fifty years old, but he looked eighty. He told me that he worked for ten years adding exhaust-fume dust to cement mixers. Companies connected to the clans use cement to hide waste, which is what allows them to come in with bids as low as if they were using Chinese labor. Now garages, walls, and stair landings are permeated by poison. Nothing will happen until a worker, some North African probably, inhales the dust and dies a few years later, blaming his ill luck for his cancer.

I know and I can prove it. Successful Italian businessmen come from cement. They’re actually a part of the cement cycle. I know that before transforming themselves into fashion-models, managers, financial sharks, and owners of newspapers and yachts, before all this and under all this lies cement, subcontractors, sand, crushed stone, vans crammed with men who work all night and disappear in the morning, rotten scaffolding, and bogus insurance. The driving force of the Italian economy rests on the thickness of the walls. The constitution should be amended to say that it is founded on cement. Builders are the founding fathers of Italy, not Ferruccio Parri, Luigi Einaudi, Pietro Nenni, or Junio Valerio Borghese. It was the real estate speculators who with their cement works, contracts, buildings, and newspapers pulled Italy out of the mud of financial scandals.

The building trade is a turning point for affiliates. After working as a killer, extortionist, or lookout, you end up in construction or trash collecting. Rather than showing films and giving lectures at school, it would be interesting to take new affiliates for a tour of construction sites to show them the future that awaits them. If prison and death spare them, that’s where they’ll end up, spitting blood and lime. While the white-collar elite the bosses believe they control are living the good life, others are dying of work. All the time. The speed of construction, the need to save on every form of safety and every sort of schedule. Inhuman shifts, nine, twelve hours a day, Saturdays and Sundays included. A hundred euros a week, plus 50 more for every ten hours of Sunday or evening overtime. The younger ones even do fifteen hours, maybe by snorting cocaine. When someone dies on a building site, a tried-and-true mechanism goes into effect. The dead body is taken away and a car accident is faked. They put the body in a car and push it off a cliff or a precipice, setting it on fire first. The insurance money is given to the family as severance. It is not unusual for the people staging the accident to also be hurt, at times seriously, especially when they have to crash a car into a wall before setting it on fire. When the boss is present, everything works smoothly. But when he’s not, the workers often panic. And so they take the wounded guy, the near cadaver, and leave him on the side of a road leading to the hospital. They drive him there, place him carefully on the pavement, and flee. When they are feeling really scrupulous, they call an ambulance. Whoever takes part in the disappearance or abandonment of a near cadaver knows that his coworkers would do the same to him if it were his body that had been smashed up or run through. You know for sure that, in a dangerous situation, the person at your side will first help you, but then finish you off to rid himself of you. And so there’s a sort of wariness on the site. The person next to you could be your executioner, or you his. He won’t make you suffer, but he’ll leave you to die alone on the sidewalk or burn you in a car. Every builder knows that’s how it works. And the companies in the south provide better guarantees. They get the job done and then disappear; they fix every mess without causing an uproar. I know and I can prove it. And the proofs have a name. In seven months fifteen construction workers died in building sites north of Naples. They fell or ended up under a power shovel or were crushed by a crane run by workers worn out from long shifts. Work has to be quick, even if it goes on for years; subcontractors have to make way for the next lot. Make your money, call in your debts, and move on. More than 40 percent of the firms operating in Italy are from the south. From Aversa, Naples, and Salerno. Empires can still be born in the south, the links of the economy can be strengthened, and the balance of the original accumulation is still incomplete. They should hang WELCOME signs all over the south, from Puglia to Calabria, for the businessmen who want to throw themselves into the cement arena and be invited into the inner circles in Milan and Rome a few years hence. A WELCOME sign of good luck, since many come yet only a few escape the quicksand. I know. And I can prove it. And the new builders, bank and yacht owners, princes of gossip, and kings of whores hide their profits. Perhaps they still have a soul. They’re ashamed to declare where their earnings come from. In their model country, the USA, when a businessman becomes a top name in the financial world, when he has fame and success, he summons analysts and young economists to show off his skills and reveals the path he took to victory. Here, silence. Money is only money. And when asked about their success, the big businessmen from a land sickened with the Camorra respond shamelessly, “I bought at ten and sold at three hundred.” Someone said that living in the south is like living in paradise. All you have to do is stare at the sky and never look down. Ever. But it’s impossible. The expropriation of every perspective has even removed the lines of sight. Every perspective hits up against balconies, attics, mansards, apartments, intertwined buildings, knots of neighborhoods. Around here no one thinks something could fall from the sky. Around here you have to look down. Sink into the abyss. Because there is always another abyss in the abyss. And so when I tread up stairs and across rooms, or when I take the elevator, I can’t help but notice. Because I know. And it’s a perversion. And so when I find myself among the best, the really successful businessmen, I feel ill. Even though these men are elegant, speak quietly, and vote for leftist politicians. I smell the odor of lime and cement emanating from their socks, their Bulgari cuff links, and their bookshelves. I know. I know who built my town and who is building it still. I know that tonight a train will leave Reggio Calabria and at a quarter past midnight it will stop in Naples on its way to Milan. The train will be packed. And at the station the vans and dusty Punto automobiles will pick up the kids for the new construction sites. An emigration without a fixed point that no one will study or evaluate since it survives only in the footprints of ce-ment dust, nowhere else. I know what the real constitution of my day is, and the wealth of companies. I know how much of the blood of others is in every pillar. I know and I can prove it. I take no prisoners.

^*Gelli was master of the Propaganda Due or P2 Masonic Lodge, which was implicated in criminal activities. The lodge was closed by Masonic authorities in 1976, and Licio Gelli was expelled from Freemasonry.—Trans.

^*Pasolini’s famous denunciation of the Christian Democrats, printed on the front page of the Corriere della sera on November 14, 1974.—Trans.