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

DON PEPPINO DIANA

Whenever I think about the clan wars in Casal di Principe, San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and all the other territories they control from Parete to Formia, I always think about white sheets. Hanging from every balcony, railing, and window. White, all white. A cascade of pure white cloth was the angry display of mourning at Don Peppino Diana’s funeral in March 1994. I was sixteen. My aunt woke me as always that morning, but more roughly than usual, yanking the sheet I’d wrapped around me as if she were unwrapping a salami. I fell out of bed. My aunt didn’t say a word, but walked about noisily, as if she were venting all her irritation with her heels. She knotted the sheets so tightly to the balcony, not even a tornado would have torn them loose, and then threw open the windows, letting the voices from the street in and the noises of the house out. She even opened all the cupboards. I remember the waves of Boy Scouts; they had shed their usual, easygoing manner of well-behaved kids, and a deep rage seemed to trail from their peculiar blue and green scarves; for Don Peppino was one of them. It was the only time I ever saw Scouts so nervous, mindless of the forms of orderly conduct and composure that usually define their long marches. My memories of that day are spotty, like a Dalmatian’s fur. Don Peppino Diana’s story is strange; once you’ve heard it, it becomes part of you and you have to preserve it inside you somewhere— deep in your throat, tight in your fist, close to your heart, at the back of your eyes. An extraordinary story, unknown to most.

Don Peppino had studied in Rome, and that’s where he should have stayed to make a career for himself. Far from here, far from his hometown and its dirty deals. But, like someone who can’t shake off a memory, a habit, or a smell, he suddenly decided to return to Casal di Principe. Or maybe like someone with a burning itch to do something, and who can find no peace until he does it, or at least gives it a try. Don Peppino was the young priest of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Bari, a modern structure, the aesthetics of which seemed ideally suited to his sense of commitment. Unlike the other priests, who wore their gloomy authority along with their cassocks, he went around dressed in jeans. Don Peppino didn’t eavesdrop on family squabbles, chastise the men for their erotic escapades, or make the rounds comforting cuckolded women. He spontaneously transformed the role of the local priest, deciding to take an interest in the dynamics of power, and not merely its corollary suffering. He didn’t want merely to clean the wound but to understand the mechanisms of the metastasis, to prevent the cancer from spreading, to block the source of whatever was turning his home into a gold mine of capital with an abundance of cadavers. He even smoked a cigar in public every now and then. Anywhere else that might have seemed harmless, but around here priests tended to put on a show of depriving themselves of the superfluous, while indulging their lazy weaknesses behind closed doors. Don Peppino decided just to be himself—a guarantee of transparency in a land where faces must be ready to mime what they represent, aided by nicknames that pump their bodies full of the power they hope to suture onto their skin. Don Peppino was obsessed with action. He set up a welcome center to offer room and board to the first wave of African immigrants. It was important to welcome them to keep the clans from turning them into perfect soldiers— which is what eventually happened. He even contributed some of his own money from teaching to the project. Waiting for institutional backing can be such a slow and complicated ordeal that it becomes the biggest reason for doing nothing. As priest he had watched the succession of bosses, the elimination of Bardellino, the power of Sandokan and Cicciotto di Mezzanotte, the massacres among Bardellino’s men and the Casalesi, and then among the leading businessmen.

A famous episode from that time had involved a parade through the streets of town. It was about six in the evening when ten or so cars formed a sort of carousel under their enemies’ windows: Schiavone’s victorious men challenging the opposition. I was just a kid, but my cousins swear they saw them with their own eyes, driving slowly through the streets of San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and Casal di Principe, windows down, men straddling the doors, one leg in the car and the other dangling out. Faces unmasked, each holding an assault rifle. The cavalcade proceeded slowly, gathering more affiliates as it went; they came out of their apartments carrying rifles and semi-automatics and fell in behind the cars. A full-blown, public, armed demonstration. They stopped in front of the houses of their enemies, who had dared to challenge their supremacy.

“Come out, you shits! Come out … if you have the balls!”

The parade went on for at least an hour, continuing undisturbed as shutters on shops and bars were quickly lowered. For two days there was a complete cease-fire. No one went out, not even to buy bread. Don Peppino realized it was time to devise a plan of resistance. Time to openly delineate a path to follow. No more speaking out solo; it was time to organize a protest and coordinate a new level of local church engagement. He wrote a surprising document that was signed by all the Casal di Principe priests: a religious, Christian text with a tone of despairing human dignity that made his words universal and allowed them to reach beyond the boundaries of religion, causing the bosses to tremble; they feared the priest’s words more than an anti-Mafia division blitz, more than the impounding of their quarries and concrete mixers, more than the wiretaps that can trace a command to kill. It was a lively text with a romantically powerful title: “For love of my people I will not keep silent.” Don Peppino distributed the document on Christmas Day. He did not post it on his church doors; he wasn’t a Martin Luther out to reform the Roman Church. Don Peppino had other things to think about: to try to understand how to create a path that could sever the sinews of power and cripple the Camorra clans’ economic and criminal authority.

Don Peppino dug a path in the surface of the word and eroded their power with syntax; spoken publicly and clearly, words could still do such things. He lacked the intellectual apathy of those who believe that words have exhausted all their resources and merely fill the space between our ears. The word as concreteness, an aggregate of atoms that intervenes in the mechanisms of things, like mortar or a pickax. Don Peppino searched for the right word to dump like a bucket of water on the dirty looks he received. Around here keeping your mouth shut is not the simple, silent omertà of lowered hats and eyes. Here the prevailing attitude is “It’s not my problem.” But that’s not all. The decision to withdraw is the actual vote that’s cast in the election of the state of things. The word becomes a shout. A loud and piercing cry hurled at bulletproof glass in hopes of making it shatter.

We are powerless seeing so many families grieve as their sons miserably end up either victims or perpetrators of Camorra organizations … The Camorra today is a form of terrorism that arouses fear and imposes its own laws in an attempt to become an endemic element of Campania society. Weapons in hand, the Camorristi violently impose unacceptable rules: extortions that have turned our region into subsidized areas with no potential on their own for development; bribes of 20 percent or more on construction projects, which would discourage the most reckless businessman; illicit traffic in narcotics, whose use creates gangs of marginalized youngsters and unskilled workers at the beck and call of criminal organizations; clashes among factions that descend like a ruinous plague on the families of our region; negative examples for the entire teenage population, veritable laboratories of violence and organized crime.

Don Peppino’s aim was to remind people that, in the face of clan power, it was important not to confine their reactions to the silence of the confessional. He evoked the voices of the prophets to argue urgently that taking to the streets, reporting, and reacting were essential to give some sense to their lives.

Our prophetic commitment to speak out must not and cannot falter; God calls us to be prophets.

The Prophet is a watchman: he sees injustice and speaks out against it, recalling God’s original command (Ezekiel 3:16–19);

The Prophet remembers the past and uses it to gather up new things in the present (Isaiah 43);

The Prophet invites us to live, and himself lives in solidarity and suffering (Genesis 8:18–22);

The Prophet gives priority to the life of justice (Jeremiah 22:3; Isaiah 58).

We ask the priests—our shepherds and brethren—to speak clearly during the homilies and in all those occasions that require courageous witness. We ask the Church not to renounce its “prophetic” role so that the means for speaking out and declaring will result in the ability to create a new conscience under the sign of justice, an ethical and social solidarity.

The document did not aim to be amenable to social reality, nor polite toward political power, which it considered not merely supported by the clans but actually shaped by similar goals. Don Peppino didn’t want to believe the clan was an evil choice a person makes, but rather the result of clear conditions, fixed mechanisms, identifiable and gangrenous causes. No church or individual in this region had ever been so determined to clarify things.

The southern Italian’s wariness and distrust of the establishment because of its age-old inability to solve the serious problems that afflict the south, particularly employment, housing, health, and education;

The suspicion, not always baseless, of complicity with the Camorra on the part of politicians who, in exchange for electoral support, or to achieve common goals, guarantee cover and grant favors;

The widespread feeling of personal insecurity and constant risk resulting from insufficient legal protection of persons and possessions, from the slowness of the legal system, the ambiguity of the legislative tools … that not infrequently leads to an appeal for defense organized by the clans or the acceptance of Camorra protection;

The lack of clarity on the job market, so that finding a job is more a matter of Camorra-client operations than the pursuit of a right based on employment legislation;

The absence or inadequacy, even in pastoral activities, of a true social education, as if it were possible to shape a mature Christian without also shaping the man and the mature citizen.

In the late 1980s Don Peppino organized an anti-Camorra march following a mass assault on the carabinieri barracks in San Cipriano d’Aversa. Some carabinieri had dared to break up a fight between two local boys during an evening of entertainment in honor of the patron saint, so dozens of people decided to destroy their headquarters and beat up the officers. The San Cipriano barracks are tucked in a narrow alley, and the marshals and lance corporals had no means of escape. The bosses themselves had to send the neighborhood capos to put down the revolt and save the carabinieri. Antonio Bardellino was still in control at that time, and his brother Ernesto was the mayor.

We, the priests of the churches of Campania, do not intend, however, to limit ourselves to denouncing these situations; rather, within the scope of our abilities and possibilities, we intend to help overcome them even by revising and integrating the matter and method of pastoral activity.

Don Peppino started to question the bosses’ religious beliefs, to deny explicitly that there could be any harmony between the Christian creed and the business, political, and military power of the clans. In the land of the Camorra, the Christian message is not considered contradictory to Camorra activities: if the clan acts for the good of all its affiliates, the organization is seen as respecting and pursuing the Christian good. The killing of enemies and traitors is seen as a necessary, legitimate transgression; by the bosses’ reasoning, the command “Thou shalt not kill” inscribed on Moses’ tablets may be suspended if the homicide occurs for a higher motive, namely the safeguarding of the clan, the interests of its managers, or the good of the group, and therefore of everyone. Killing is a sin that Christ will understand and forgive in the name of necessity.

At San Cipriano d’Aversa, Antonio Bardellino made use of an old ritual that eventually disappeared: pungitura, which the Cosa Nostra also used in initiating new affiliates. The aspirant’s right index finger would be pricked with a pin and the blood made to drip onto an image of the Madonna of Pompeii. This was then burned over a candle and passed, hand to hand, to all the clan managers who stood around a table. If all the affiliates kissed the Madonna, the candidate became officially part of the clan. Religion is a constant point of reference for the Camorra, not merely a propitiatory gesture or cultural relic but a spiritual force that determines the most intimate decisions. Camorra families, especially the most charismatic bosses, often consider their own actions as a Calvary, their own conscience bearing the pain and weight of sin for the well-being of the group and the men they rule.

At Pignataro Maggiore the Lubrano clan paid to have a fresco of the Madonna restored. It is called the Madonna of the Camorra since the town’s most important Cosa Nostra fugitives from Sicily turned to her for protection. It’s not really that difficult to imagine Totò Riina, Michele Greco, Luciano Liggio, and Bernardo Provenzano kneeling in front of the fresco and praying that their actions be enlightened and their getaways protected.

When Vincenzo Lubrano was acquitted, he organized a pilgrimage—several busloads of the faithful—to San Giovanni Rotondo to give thanks to Padre Pio, who, he believed, was responsible for his absolution. Life-size statues of Padre Pio and terra-cotta or bronze copies of the open-armed Christ on Pão de Açúcar in Rio de Janeiro can be found in the villa of many a Camorra boss. In the drug-warehouse laboratories in Scampia, bricks of hashish are often cut thirty-three at a time—like Christ’s age. Then they halt work for thirty-three minutes, make the sign of the cross, and start up again. A way to propitiate Christ and receive earnings and tranquillity. The same happens with packets of cocaine; often before they are distributed to the pushers, the neighborhood capo blesses them with holy water from Lourdes in the hopes that they don’t kill anyone, especially because he would have to answer personally for the poor quality of the stuff.

Camorra power does not involve only the flesh, nor does it merely own everyone’s life. It also lays claim to souls. Don Peppino wanted to bring some clarity to words, meanings, and values.

The Camorra gives the name family to a clan organized for criminal purposes, in which absolute loyalty is the law, any expression of autonomy is denied, and not only defection but the conversion to honesty is considered a betrayal worthy of death; the Camorra uses every means to extend and consolidate this type of family, even exploitation of the sacraments. For the Christian, shaped to the school of the Word of God, family means only a group of people united by shared love, in which love means disinterested and attentive service, in which service exalts him who offers it and him who receives it. The Camorra claims to have its own religiosity, and at times it manages to deceive not only the faithful, but also the inexperienced or ingenuous shepherd of souls.

The document even attempted to broach the subject of the sacraments. To keep at bay any possible confusion of Communion, marriage, and the role of the godfather, with Camorra strategies. To distance clan pacts and alliances from religious symbols. At the mere thought of saying such things the local priests would have run to the bathroom in fright with their hands on their stomachs. Who would chase away from the altar a boss eager to baptize an affiliate’s child? Who would refuse to celebrate a marriage just because it was the result of an alliance between Camorra families? Don Peppino was clear:

In the sacraments that call for a godfather, do not allow that role to be held by anyone not known for Christian maturity and honesty in his public and private life. Do not admit to the sacraments anyone who attempts to assert undue pressure in the absence of the necessary sacramental initiation.

Don Peppino’s challenge to the power of the Camorra came in the moment when Francesco Sandokan Schiavone was hiding in a bunker under his villa in town, the Casalesi families were warring among themselves, and cement and waste were becoming the new frontiers of their empires. Don Peppino did not want to play the consoling priest who accompanies murdered boy soldiers to their grave and whispers, “You must be strong,” to mothers in black. In an interview he stated, “We must divide the people so as to throw them into crisis.” He also took a stand politically, explaining that his priority was to fight political power as an expression of criminal business power: he would give his support to concrete projects, to renovation, and he would not remain impartial. “Political parties have become confused with their representatives; often the candidates favored by the Camorra have neither policy nor party, but merely a role as player or a post to fill.” The goal was not to defeat the Camorra. As Don Peppino himself would say, “Winners and losers are all in the same boat.” Instead it was to understand, transform, bear witness, speak out, take an electrocardiogram of the heart of economic power to understand how to wrest the organ’s muscles from the clan’s control.

I have never for one instant felt pious, yet Don Peppino’s words resounded with something beyond the religious. He created a new method that reestablished religious and political speech. A faith in being able to bite into reality and not let go until you rip it to pieces. A language capable of tracing the scent of money.

We tend to think that money doesn’t smell, but that’s true only when it is in the emperor’s hands. Before it ends up between his fingers, pecunia olet—money does indeed smell. Like a latrine. Don Peppino toiled in a land where money carries a scent, but only for a moment—the instant in which it is extracted, before it becomes something else, before it can become legitimate. Odors we recognize only when our noses brush against what smells. Don Peppino Diana realized that he had to keep his face close to the ground, on people’s backs and eyes, that he couldn’t pull away if he wanted to keep seeing and pointing the finger, if he wanted to understand where and how business wealth accumulates, and how the killings and arrests, the feuds and silences, begin. He had to keep his instrument—the word—the only tool that could alter the reality of his time, on the tip of his tongue. And this word, incapable of keeping silent, was his death sentence. His killers did not pick a date by chance. March 19, 1994, was the feast of San Giuseppe, his name day. Early morning. Don Peppino was in the church meeting room near his study. He had not yet donned his priestly robes, so it was not immediately clear who he was.

“Who is Don Peppino?”

“I am.”

His final answer. Shots echoed in the nave. Two bullets hit him in the face, others pierced his head, neck, and hand, and one hit the bunch of keys on his belt. They had shot from close range, aiming at his head. A shell lodged between his jacket and his sweater. Don Peppino was getting ready to say the first mass of the day. He was thirty-six years old.

Renato Natale, Casal di Principe’s Communist mayor, was one of the first to race to the church, where he found the priest’s body still on the floor. Natale had been elected only four months earlier. It was no coincidence; they wanted to make that body fall during his very, very brief political tenure. He was the first Casal di Principe mayor to make fighting the clans a top priority. He had even resigned from the town council in protest because he felt it had been reduced to merely rubber-stamping decisions that were made elsewhere. The carabinieri once raided the house of Gaetano Corvino, a town councilman, finding all the top clan managers assembled while Corvino was at a council meeting at the town hall. On the one side town business, on the other business via the town. Doing business is the only reason to get out of bed in the morning; it tugs on your pajamas and gets you up and on your feet.

I had always watched Renato Natale from afar, as you do those people who unwillingly become symbols of some idea of commitment, resistance, and courage. Symbols that are almost metaphysical, unreal, archetypal. I felt a teenager’s embarrassment observing his efforts to set up clinics for immigrants and speak out against the Casalese Camorra families’ power and their cement and waste-management operations during the dark years of the feuds. They had approached him, threatened his life, told him that if he didn’t stop, his family would be made to pay for his choices, but he carried on speaking out in every way he could, even putting up posters around town that revealed what the clans had decided and done. The more persistent and courageous he was, the more his metaphysical protection grew. One would have to know the political history of this region to understand the real weight of terms such as commitment and will.

Since the law regarding Mafia infiltration went into effect, sixteen town councils in the province of Caserta have been dissolved, five of them twice: Carinola, Casal di Principe, Casapesenna, Castelvolturno, Cesa, Frignano, Grazzanise, Lusciano, Mondragone, Pignataro Maggiore, Recale, San Cipriano, Santa Maria la Fossa, San Tammaro, Teverola, Villa di Briano. When candidates opposing the clans manage to win in these towns, overcoming the vote-trading and economic strategies that constrain every political alliance, they have to reckon with the limits of the local administrations, extremely tight funds, and total marginality. They have to demolish, brick by brick, to face off multinational companies with small-town budgets, and rein in enormous firing squads with local troops. Such as in 1988 when the Casapesenna town councilor Antonio Cangiano opposed clan infiltration of certain contracts. They threatened him, tailed him, and shot him in the back, right in the piazza, right in front of everyone. If he wasn’t going to let the Casalesi clan get ahead, then the Casalesi wouldn’t let him even walk. They confined Cangiano to a wheelchair. The alleged perpetrators were acquitted in 2006.

Casal di Principe is not a town under Mafia attack in Sicily, where opposing the criminal business class is difficult, but where your actions are flanked by a parade of video cameras, famous and soon-to-be-famous journalists, and swarms of national anti-Mafia officials who somehow manage to amplify their role. Here everything you do remains within narrow perimeters and is shared with only a few. I believe that it is precisely within this solitude that what could be called courage is forged: a sort of armor that you don’t think about, that you wear without noticing. You carry on, do what you have to do—the rest is worthless. Because the threat isn’t always a bullet between the eyes or a ton of buffalo shit dumped on your front doorstep.

They take you slowly, one layer at a time, till you find yourself naked and alone and you start believing you’re fighting something that does not exist, a hallucination of your brain. You start believing the slander that marks you as a malcontent who takes it out on successful people, whom you label Camorristi out of frustration. They play with you the way they do with Pick Up sticks. They pick up all the sticks without ever making you move, so that in the end you’re all alone, and loneliness drags you by the hair. But you can’t allow yourself that feeling here; it’s a risk—if you lower your guard, you won’t be able to understand the mechanisms, symbols, choices. You risk not noticing anything anymore. So you have to draw on all your resources. You have to find something that fuels the stomach of your soul in order to carry on. Christ, Buddha, civil commitment, ethics, Marxism, pride, anarchy, the fight against crime, cleanliness, persistent and everlasting rage, southernness. Something. Not a hook to hang on. More like a root, something underground and unassailable. In the useless battle in which you’re sure to play the role of the loser, there is something you have to preserve and know. You have to be certain it will grow stronger while your wasted energy tastes of folly and obsession. I have learned to recognize that root in the eyes of those who have decided to stare certain powers in the face.

Giuseppe Quadrano and his men, who were allied with Sandokan’s enemies, were immediately suspected of Don Peppino’s murder. There were also two witnesses: a photographer who was there to wish Don Peppino well, and the church sexton. As soon as word got out that police suspicions were directed toward Quadrano, the boss Nunzio De Falco, known as ‘o lupo or the Wolf, called the Caserta police and asked for a meeting to clarify some questions concerning one of his affiliates. As a result of territorial divisions of power among the Casalesi, De Falco was in Granada, Spain. Two Caserta officers went to meet him there. The boss’s wife picked them up at the airport and drove into the beautiful Andalusian countryside. Nunzio De Falco was waiting for them not in his villa in Santa Fe, but in a restaurant where most of the customers were probably insiders ready to react if the police did anything rash. The boss immediately explained that he had called them to offer his version of the story, a sort of interpretation of a historical event rather than a denunciation or accusation. A clear and necessary preamble so as not to besmirch the family’s name and authority. He could not start collaborating with the police. Without beating around the bush the boss declared that it had been the Schiavone family—his rivals—who had killed Don Peppino. They had done it to make suspicion fall on the De Falcos. The Wolf said that he would never have given the order to kill Don Peppino Diana because his own brother Mario was close to him. The priest had even tried to free Mario from the Camorra system and had succeeded in keeping him from becoming a clan manager. It was one of Don Peppino’s major accomplishments, but De Falco used it as an alibi. Two other affiliates, Mario Santoro and Francesco Piacenti, backed up the boss’s theory.

Giuseppe Quadrano was in Spain as well. He was first a guest in the De Falco villa, then settled in a village near Valencia. He wanted to form a group and tried drug shipments as a way to quickly establish yet another Italian criminal business clan in the south of Spain. But he was unsuccessful. At heart Quadrano had always been a supporting actor. He turned himself in to the Spanish police and declared he was ready to collaborate. He contradicted Nunzio De Falco’s version and situated the homicide within the feud that was unfolding between his group and the Schiavones. Quadrano was the Carinaro neighborhood capo, and Sandokan’s Casalese men recently had killed four of his affiliates—two uncles and his sister’s husband. Quadrano said that he and Mario Santoro had decided to kill Aldo Schiavone, Sandokan’s cousin, to avenge the insult. Before taking action they called De Falco in Spain—no hit can take place without the boss’s consent—but De Falco blocked everything: if his cousin was killed, Schiavone would order that all of De Falco’s Campania relatives be killed. The boss announced that he would send Francesco Piacenti to implement his command. Piacenti did the drive from Granada to Casal di Principe in his Mercedes, the car that became a symbol of this area in the 1980s and 1990s. The journalist Enzo Biagi was shocked when he obtained the statistics of Mercedes sales in Italy for an article he wrote in the 1990s. Casal di Principe was among the top in Europe. But he also noticed another record: Casal di Principe was the urban area with the highest murder rate in Europe. The relation of Mercedes to murders would remain a constant of observation in Camorra territories. Piacenti—according to Quadrano’s first revelation—communicated that it was necessary to kill Don Peppino. No one knew why, but they were all sure that “the Wolf knew what he was doing.” According to Quadrano, Piacenti declared that he would do the killing himself on the condition that Santoro or some other clan member went with him. But Mario Santoro hesitated. He called De Falco to say that he was against the killing, but in the end he gave in. He couldn’t ignore such an important order if he didn’t want to lose the position the Wolf had assigned him as middleman in narcotrafficking with Spain. But he couldn’t accept the murder of a priest, especially without a clear motive, as if it were just like any other task. In the Camorra system murder is necessary; it’s like depositing money in the bank, purchasing a franchise, or breaking off a friendship. It’s no different from the rest of your life, part of the daily routine of every Camorra family, boss, and affiliate. But killing a priest, one outside the dynamic of power, pricks your conscience. According to Quadrano, Francesco Piacenti withdrew, claiming that too many people in Casale knew him for him to take part in the murder. But Mario Santoro accepted, accompanied by an affiliate of the Ranucci clan from Sant’ Antimo named Giuseppe Della Medaglia, with whom he had already executed other operations. According to the pentito, they organized for the next morning at six. But that night the whole commando was tormented. They were restless, couldn’t sleep, and quarreled with their wives. That priest scared them more than the rival clans’ guns.

Della Medaglia didn’t show up at the appointed hour, but in the night he had contacted someone else to take his place: Vincenzo Verde. The other members of the commando were not particularly pleased with his choice, as Verde often suffered from epileptic fits. There was the risk that after the shooting he would fall to the floor in convulsions, foaming at the mouth and his teeth cutting his tongue. So they tried to get Nicola Gaglione to take his place, but he refused categorically. Santoro developed an inner-ear infection and couldn’t stick to any set plan, so Quadrano sent his brother Armando to go with him. A simple operation: a car in front of the church waits for the killers, who walk out slowly after doing the job. Like an early-morning prayer. The hit squad was not in a rush to flee after the execution. Quadrano was invited to go to Spain that very evening, but he refused. He felt safe since Don Peppino’s murder was completely unrelated to their usual practices. And just as the motive was a mystery to them, so it would be to the carabinieri. When police investigations began moving in all directions, however, Quadrano left for Spain. He even declared that Francesco Piacenti had told him that Nunzio De Falco, Sebastiano Caterino, and Mario Santoro were supposed to kill him, perhaps because they suspected he wanted to turn state’s evidence, but that the day set for the hit they saw him in his car with his little boy and decided to spare him.

In Casal di Principe, Sandokan kept hearing his name connected to the elimination of the priest. So he let Don Peppino’s family know that if his men got their hands on Quadrano before the police did, they would cut him in three pieces and throw them on the church grounds. This was not revenge but a clear statement to say that Sandokan was not responsible for Don Peppino’s murder. Shortly after, there was a De Falco clan meeting in Spain to decide how to respond to Francesco Schiavone’s claims that he had nothing to do with the murder. Giuseppe Quadrano proposed killing one of Schiavone’s relatives, chopping him in pieces, and leaving him in a bag outside Don Peppino’s church. A way of making the blame fall on Sandokan. Both factions, each ignorant of the other’s plans, had arrived at the same solution. The best way to send an indelible message is to cut up bodies and scatter the pieces about. While Don Peppino’s assassins were talking about cutting up flesh to seal their position, I was still thinking about the priest’s battle and the primacy of the word. About his incredibly new and powerful desire to place the word at the center of a struggle against the mechanisms of power. Words against cement mixers and guns. And not just metaphorically. For real. To speak out, testify, take a stand. The word, with its only armor: to be spoken. A word that is a vigilant witness, that never stops seeking the truth. The only way to eliminate a word like that is to kill it.

In 2001 the court of Santa Maria Capua Vetere handed down a first verdict: life sentences for Vincenzo Verde, Francesco Piacenti, and Giuseppe Della Medaglia. Giuseppe Quadrano had already begun to try to discredit the figure of Don Peppino. During the cross-examination he mused on a series of motives for the homicide, intending to strangle the priest’s commitment in a noose of criminal interpretations. He stated that Nunzio De Falco had given Don Peppino some weapons, which he then turned over to Walter Schiavone without authorization, and had been punished for this grave transgression. There was also talk of a crime of passion, that he had been killed because he had had designs on the cousin of a boss. Just as calling a woman a slut is enough to put a stop to every sort of fantasizing about her, the fastest way of closing the books on a priest is to accuse him of frequenting prostitutes. It was also said that Don Peppino was killed for not doing his job as a priest, for not wanting to celebrate in church the funeral of one of Quadrano’s relatives. Unbelievable, ludicrous motives, an attempt to prevent Don Peppino from becoming a martyr, to keep his words from spreading, to turn him from a Camorra victim to a clan soldier. People unfamiliar with Camorra power dynamics often think that killing an innocent person is a naive gesture on the part of the clans because it only legitimizes and amplifies the victim’s example and words, a confirmation of the truths he spoke. Wrong. That’s never the way it is. As soon as you die in the land of the Camorra, you’re enshrouded in countless suspicions, and innocence is a distant hypothesis, the last one imaginable. You are guilty until proven innocent. In the land of the Camorra, the theory of modern rights is turned on its head.

Media attention is so limited that even the smallest suspicion is enough to keep the papers from printing that an innocent person has been killed. And if there are no further deaths, no one will focus on the case. The destruction of Don Peppino Diana’s image was thus an important tactic to ease pressure on the clans, to alleviate the troublesome problem of awaking national interest.

One local paper turned the campaign to discredit Don Peppino into a sound box. The headlines were so heavy with boldface that your fingers turned black as you flipped the pages: “Don Diana was a Camorrista,” and a few days later, “Don Diana in bed with two women.” The message was clear: no one can go up against the Camorra. Whoever does always has some personal motive, a quarrel, some private affair that wallows in the same filth.

His old friends, his relatives, and his followers defended him, including the journalists Raffaele Sardo, who preserved his memory in articles and books, and Rosaria Capacchione, who monitored the strategies of the clans, their complex, bestial power, and the shrewdness of the pentiti.

A 2003 appeal questioned aspects of Giuseppe Quadrano’s earlier testimony, and Vincenzo Verde and Giuseppe Della Medaglia were exonerated. Quadrano had confessed partial truths; his strategy from the very beginning was to not admit his own responsibility. But he was the killer, as identified by witnesses and confirmed by ballistic reports. Giuseppe Quadrano killed Don Peppino Diana. The hit squad had been composed of Quadrano and Santoro, who acted as the driver. Francesco Piacenti, sent directly from Spain by De Falco to guide the operation, had supplied information about Don Peppino. The appeal also upheld the verdict of life imprisonment for Piacenti and Santoro. Quadrano had even recorded phone conversations with affiliates, during which he repeatedly stated that he had nothing to do with the homicide—recordings that he then turned over to the police. Quadrano understood that the order for the killing had come from De Falco, and he didn’t want it revealed that he was simply the brawn of the operation. It is highly likely that all the figures in Quadrano’s first version had shit in their pants and didn’t want to be involved in the killing in any way. At times submachine guns and pistols are not sufficient for facing an unarmed face and plain speech.

Nunzio De Falco was arrested in Albacete while on the Valencia–Madrid intercity train. He had established a powerful criminal cartel with some ‘Ndrangheta men and a few Cosa Nostra dropouts. According to Spanish police investigations, he had also attempted to organize the Gypsies in the south of Spain into a criminal group. He had built an empire. Vacation villages, gambling houses, shops, and hotels. The infrastructure of Spain’s Costa del Sol improved dramatically when the Casalese and Neapolitan clans decided to turn the area into a pearl of mass tourism.

In January 2003 De Falco received a life sentence as instigator of Don Peppino Diana’s murder. When the verdict was read out in the courtroom, I felt like laughing, but I managed to puff out my cheeks and contain myself. I couldn’t stand the absurdity of what was happening. Nunzio De Falco’s attorney was Gaetano Pecorella, simultaneously the president of the Chamber of Deputies’ Justice Commission and the counsel for the defense for one of the biggest Casalese Camorra cartel bosses. I laughed because the clans were so strong that they had even reversed the axioms of nature and fable. A wolf was being defended by a lamb.* But my delirium may have been the result of exhaustion and nervous collapse.

Nunzio De Falco’s nickname is written on his face. He really does look like a wolf. His identification photo portrays a long face covered with a thin, prickly beard, like a carpet of needles, and pointed ears. Frizzy hair, dark skin, and a triangular mouth. He looks just like one of those werewolves in a horror film. And yet a local paper—the same one that had boasted about relations between Don Peppino and the clan—dedicated the first page to his qualities as a lover, passionately desired by women and girls. The headlines on January 17, 2005, were eloquent: “Nunzio De Falco king of the womanizers.”

CASAL DI PRINCIPE (CE)

They may not be handsome, but they are attractive because they’re bosses; that’s how it is. If one had to rank the playboy bosses of the area, first place would go to two repeat convicts from Casal di Principe, men who are certainly not good-looking, unlike Don Antonio Bardellino, the most fascinating of them all. We are talking about Francesco Piacenti, alias Big Nose, and Nunzio De Falco, alias the Wolf. People say that one had five wives and the other seven. Obviously we’re not talking about actual marriages but longterm relationships that produced children. In fact Nunzio De Falco apparently has more than twelve children by various women. Another interesting detail is that not all the women in question are Italian. One is Spanish, another English, and another Portuguese. Like sailors, these men would make a new family in every place they hid … Not by chance, some of their women were called to testify during their trials, each of them beautiful and elegant. The fair sex is the cause of the decline of many a boss. They are often the ones who lead indirectly to the capture of the most dangerous bosses. Tailing the women, investigators have been led to bosses of the caliber of Francesco Schiavone Cicciariello … In other words, women are a mixed blessing even for bosses.

Don Peppino’s death was the price paid for peace between the clans. Even the verdict makes reference to this hypothesis. An agreement had to be found between the two warring groups, perhaps sealed on Don Peppino’s flesh. Like a scapegoat. Eliminating him meant resolving a problem for all the families while also distracting investigations away from their affairs.

I had heard talk of Cipriano, a childhood friend of Don Peppino’s who had written a harangue to be read at the funeral, an invective inspired by one of the priest’s speeches, but who didn’t even have the strength to move that morning. He had gone away many years before and settled near Rome, having decided never to set foot in Campania again. They told me that his grief over Don Peppino’s death kept him in bed for months. Whenever I asked one of his aunts about him, she would automatically respond in the same mournful voice, “He’s closed up. Cipriano’s closed up!”

It happens every now and then. It isn’t unusual to hear someone say such a thing around here. Every time I hear that expression, I think of Giustino Fortunato, who in the early 1900s walked the entire length of the southern Apennine Mountains. He wanted to know what life was like in the towns along the ridge, and visited every one of them, staying with farmers, listening to angry peasants, getting to know the voice and smell of the southern question. When he later became a senator, he returned to the towns and asked about the people he had met years earlier, the most combative of whom he wanted to involve in his political reform projects. But often the relatives would respond, “He’s closed up!” To close up, become silent, practically mute: a desire to escape within yourself and stop knowing, understanding, doing. To stop resisting, a decision to retreat an instant before you dissolve in the compromises of life. Cipriano had closed up too. In town they told me it started after he went on a job interview for a human resources position in a shipping company in Frosinone. The interviewer was reading his résumé out loud, but stopped at the name of his town.

“Ah, yes, I know where you’re from! The town of that famous boss … Sandokan, right?”

“No, the town of Don Peppino Diana.”

“Who?”

Cipriano got up and walked out. He ran a newsstand in Rome to support himself. I got his address from his mother, who happened to be in front of me in the checkout line at the supermarket one day. She must have alerted him to my arrival because he didn’t answer the doorbell. Maybe he knew what I wanted to talk to him about. But I waited out front for hours and was prepared to sleep on his doorstep. Cipriano finally decided to come out, but he barely said hello. We went to a small park nearby. He had me sit on a bench and opened a notebook, the kind you use in elementary school. There on the lined pages was his harangue, written out in longhand. Who knows if Don Peppino’s handwriting was also there somewhere. I didn’t dare ask. A speech they had both intended to sign, but then came the killers, death, slander, and unfathomable solitude. When Cipriano started to read, it was with the voice and gestures of Fra Dolcino, the medieval preacher who wandered the streets announcing the Apocalypse, and who was burned at the stake for heresy:

We will not allow our lands to become places of the Camorra, one giant Gomorrah to destroy! Men of the Camorra—not beasts, but men like everyone else—we will not allow you to find here an illicit energy in what is legitimate elsewhere, we will not allow you to destroy here what is built elsewhere. You create a desert around your villas, and only your absolute desire stands between what you are and what you want. Remember. And the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire; he destroyed those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew on the ground. But the wife of Lot turned to look back and she became a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:24–26). We must risk becoming salt, we must turn and look at what is happening, what is raining down on Gomorrah, the total destruction where life is added to or subtracted from your economic activities. Don’t you see that this is Gomorrah, don’t you see? Remember. When they see that the whole land is brimstone, and salt, and burning, and there will be no sowing, no sprouting, no grass growing, like after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Seboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and his wrath (Deuteronomy 29:22). Men die for a yes or a no, give their lives for someone’s order or decision; you spend decades in jail to achieve the power of death, you earn mountains of money that you invest in houses where you will never live, in banks you will never enter, in restaurants you do not run, in companies you do not manage; you control a deadly power in order to dominate a life you spend hidden underground, surrounded by bodyguards. You kill and are killed in a chess game, but you are not kings. The kings are those who get rich off you, making you eat one another until no one can call checkmate and only a pawn remains on the board. And it will not be you. What you devour here you will spit out elsewhere, far away, like birds that vomit food into the mouths of their chicks. But those you are feeding are not chicks but vultures, and you are not mother birds but buffalos ready to destroy yourselves in a place where blood and power are the terms of victory. It is time we stopped being a Gomorrah …

Cipriano stopped reading. It seemed as if he had imagined all the faces into which he would have liked to hurl those words. His breath was strangled, like an asthmatic’s. He closed his notebook and left without saying good-bye.

^*Pecorella means “lamb” in Italian.