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

HOLLYWOOD

In Casal di Principe there is now a Foster Children’s Center in Don Peppino Diana’s memory. It is housed in a sumptuous, spacious villa seized from Casalesi clan affiliate Egidio Coppola. AGRORINASCE, the agency for the renewal, development, and safety of Casapessena, Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, and Villa Literno, has transformed confiscated Camorra assets into community facilities. Unless they’re put to some other use the villas continue to bear the mark of the bosses who built and lived in them. Even abandoned, they remain symbols of sovereignty. A trip across the Aversa Marshes offers a catalog of the last thirty years of architectural styles. The most imposing villas, belonging to contractors and landowners, provide the inspiration for office workers’ and shopkeepers’ houses. If the former is enthroned with four Doric columns in reinforced concrete, the latter will be adorned with two columns half their size. This imitation game has filled the area with villas competing to be the most impressive, complicated, and impregnable, mansions striving for eccentricity and uniqueness; one has a gate with the geometry of a Mondrian painting.

Camorra villas are pearls of cement tucked away on rural streets, protected by walls and video cameras. There are dozens and dozens of them. Marble and parquet, colonnades and staircases, granite fireplaces with the boss’s initials. One, the most sumptuous, is particularly famous, or perhaps it has merely generated the most legends. Everyone calls it Hollywood. Just saying the word makes you understand why. Hollywood was the home of Walter Schiavone, Sandokan’s brother, who ran the clan’s cement business for years. It’s not difficult to guess the reason for the name, easy to imagine the spaces and splendor. But that’s not the whole of it. Walter Schiavone’s villa really does have a link to Hollywood. People in Casal di Principe say the boss told his architect he wanted a villa just like Tony Montana’s, the Miami Cuban gangster in Scarface. He’d seen the film countless times and it had made a deep impression on him, to the point that he came to identify with the character played by Al Pacino. With a bit of imagination, Schiavone’s hollowed face could actually be superimposed on the actor’s. The story has all the makings of a legend. People say Schiavone even gave his architect a copy of the film; he wanted the Scarface villa, exactly as it was in the movie. It seemed like one of those stories that embellish every boss’s rise to power, of aura blending with legend, an authentic urban myth. Anytime anyone mentioned Hollywood, someone would say he’d seen it being built when he was young, a bunch of kids on bikes contemplating Tony Montana’s villa as it rose right off the screen into the middle of the neighborhood. Which is rather odd, because in Casale, villa construction starts only after high walls are built to close off the site. I never did believe in the Hollywood version. From the outside, Schiavone’s villa looks like a bunker surrounded by thick walls topped with threatening bars. Armored gates protect every access. There’s no way to tell what’s behind the walls, but they make you think it must be something extravagant.

There’s only one external sign, silently celebrated at the main entrance. The red gate, which otherwise looks like that of a country farm, is framed by Doric columns and a tympanum that clash with the disciplined sobriety of the thick walls and gate. The neo-pagan tympanum is actually the family emblem; it sends a message to anyone who already knows the place. The mere sight of it was enough to convince me that the legendary villa was actually for real. I had thought about going to see it for myself dozens of times, but it seemed impossible. Even after Hollywood was seized by the authorities, clan sentinels still guarded it. One morning, almost before I realized what I was doing, I got my courage up and went inside. I used a side entrance, safe from prying eyes that would not have appreciated my intrusion. The villa was stately and luminous, and the monumental facade awe-inspiring. Columns supported a double pediment with a cropped semicircle in the center. The front hall was an architectural delirium: two enormous staircases, like marble wings, soaring up to the second-floor balcony, which looked onto the large hall below. Just like Tony Montana’s. There was even a study off the balcony, just as in the final scene of Scarface, which ends in a torrent of bullets. The villa is a triumph of Doric columns, the interior ones in pink plaster and the external ones in aquamarine. On the sides are double colonnades with expensive wrought-iron trim. The entire property covers nearly an acre, and the three-storied villa is almost nine thousand square feet. At the end of the 1990s it was worth about $3.5 million, but now the same building would go for about $5 million. The rooms on the ground floor are huge, each with at least one bath, some large and luxurious, others small and cozy. In the children’s room, posters of singers and soccer players still hang on the walls, along with a small, blackened painting of two little angels, which probably hung at the head of the bed. A newspaper cutting: “Albanova sharpens its weapons.” Albanova was the local soccer team—a toy team for the bosses, backed by clan money—and disbanded by the Anti-Mafia Commission in 1997. Those scorched clippings clinging to the rotting plaster were all that remained of Walter’s son, who died in a car accident as a teenager. From the balcony you can see the front yard— palm trees and even an artificial lake with a wooden bridge leading to a tiny, verdant island encircled by a stone wall. When the Schiavones lived here, their dogs ran about in the yard: mastiffs, yet another display of power. In the backyard, palm trees shaded an elegant, obliquely elliptical swimming pool from the summer sun. The garden was copied from the bath of Venus, the jewel of the English Garden at the royal palace at Caserta. The statue of the goddess floats on the surface of the water with the same grace as the one designed by Luigi Vanvitelli. The villa was abandoned after the boss’s arrest, which occurred in 1996, right in these rooms. Walter did not do what his brother did; when Sandokan went into hiding, he built a large and princely hideout under his enormous Casal di Principe villa: a blockhouse devoid of doors and windows, with underground passages and natural grottoes for emergency escape routes. But there was also a thousand-square-foot, fully furnished apartment.

A surreal apartment, with neon lights and white majolica-tiled floors. A video intercom system and two entrances completely invisible from the outside. There seemed to be no way in: the doors were walls of cement that slid open along tracks. When there was the risk of a search, the boss could go through a trapdoor in the dining room to a network of interconnected tunnels—eleven all together—that formed a sort of underground redoubt or final refuge, where Sandokan had set up camp tents. A bunker within a bunker. To catch him, in 1998 the DIA staked out the place for a year and seven months, finally using an electric saw to cut through the wall into his hiding place. Only after Francesco Schiavone had given himself up were they able to identify the principal access amid the empty plastic crates and garden tools in the storage room of a villa in Via Salerno. The hideout lacked for nothing: two refrigerators were stocked with food to feed at least six people for a fortnight. A sophisticated home entertainment center—stereo, VCRs, and projectors—took up one whole wall. It took the Forensic Division of the Naples Police Department ten hours to check the alarm and lock systems controlling the two accesses. There was even a whirlpool tub in the bathroom. Schiavone lived underground, in a rabbit warren, amid trapdoors and secret passageways.

Walter, on the other hand, did not squirrel himself away. As a fugitive, he’d still show up in town for the most important meetings, returning home in the light of day, accompanied by his bodyguards, secure in the inaccessibility of his villa. The police arrested him almost by chance. They were performing the usual controls. Police and carabinieri usually go to a fugitive’s home eight, ten, twelve times a day; they check up on the family members, pay visits, search, and above all attempt to wear down their nerves and undermine their support for their relative’s decision to go into hiding. Signora Schiavone always greeted the police with courtesy and defiance, always serene as she offered them tea and cookies, which they systematically refused. One afternoon, however, Walter’s wife was already tense when they rang the bell, and by the slowness with which she opened the gate, they suspected immediately that something was up. Mrs. Schiavone kept right on their heels as they moved about the villa, rather than shouting to them from the bottom of the stairs as she usually did, her words echoing throughout the house. They found freshly ironed men’s shirts too big for her son folded on the bed. Walter was there. He’d come home. The police fanned out to search for him, catching him as he tried to scale the wall. The same wall he had had built to make his villa impregnable now prevented his quick escape. Nabbed like a petty thief flailing about in search of a hold on a smooth wall. The villa was confiscated immediately, but no one really took possession of it for six years. Walter ordered everything possible removed. If he couldn’t use it, it shouldn’t exist. Either his or no one’s. He had the doors taken off their hinges, the windows removed, the parquet taken up, the marble pulled off the stairs, the expensive fireplace mantels disassembled. Ceramic bathroom fixtures, wood railings, light fixtures, and kitchen appliances were removed, and antique furniture, china closets, and paintings carried off. He gave orders to strew the house with tires and set them on fire, ruining the plaster and damaging the columns. Even so, he managed to leave a message. The only thing left untouched was a bathtub, sitting on three wide steps in the living room. A princely version, with a lion’s face that roared water. The boss’s great indulgence. The tub sat right in front of a Palladian window that looked directly onto the garden. A sign of his power as builder and Camorrista, like an artist who cancels out his painting but leaves his signature on the canvas.

As I wandered through those blackened rooms, I felt my chest swell, as if my insides had become one giant heart. It beat harder and harder, pumping through my entire body. My mouth had gone dry from the deep breaths I took to calm my anxiety. If some clan sentinel had jumped me and beaten me to a pulp, I could have squealed like a butchered pig but no one would have heard me. Evidently no one saw me enter, or maybe no one was guarding the villa anymore. A pulsating rage rose up inside me. Flashing in my mind, like a giant swirl of fragmented visions, were the images of friends who had emigrated, joined the clan or the military, the lazy afternoons in these desert lands, the lack of everything except deals, politicians mopped up by corruption, and empires built in the north of Italy and half of Europe, leaving behind nothing but trash and toxins. I needed to vent, to take it out on someone. I couldn’t resist. I stood on the edge of the tub and took a piss. An idiotic gesture, but as my bladder emptied, I felt better. That villa was the confirmation of a cliché, the concrete realization of a rumor. I had the absurd sensation that Tony Montana was about to come out of one of the rooms and greet me with a stiff, arrogant gesture: “All I have in this world is my balls and my word, and I don’t break them for no one, you understand?” Who knows if Walter dreamed of dying like Montana too, riddled with bullets and tumbling into his front hall rather than ending his days in a prison cell, consumed by Graves’ disease, his eyes rotting and his blood pressure exploding.

It’s not the movie world that scans the criminal world for the most interesting behavior. The exact opposite is true. New generations of bosses don’t follow an exclusively criminal path; they don’t spend their days on the streets with the local thugs, carry a knife, or have scars on their faces. They watch TV, study, go to college, graduate, travel abroad, and are above all employed in the office of the mechanisms of power. The film Il Padrino, The Godfather, is an eloquent example. Before the film came out, no one in the Sicilian or Campania criminal organizations had ever used the term padrino, derived from a philologically incorrect translation of the English word godfather. The term for the head of the family or an affiliate had always been compare. After the film, however, ethnic Italian Mafia families in the United States started using godfather instead of compare and its diminutive, compariello, which fell out of use. Many young Italian-Americans with Mafia ties adopted dark glasses, pin-striped suits, and solemn speech. John Gotti himself wanted to become a flesh-and-blood version of Don Vito Corleone. And even Cosa Nostra boss Luciano Liggio jutted his chin like Marlon Brando in The Godfather when posing for photographs.

Mario Puzo’s inspiration was not a Sicilian but Alfonso Tieri, boss of Pignasecca in downtown Naples, who became the head of the leading Italian Mafia families in the United States after the death of Charles Gambino. In an interview for an American newspaper, Antonio Spavone ‘o malommo, or “bad man,” the Neapolitan boss linked to Tieri, stated, “If the Sicilians showed how to keep their mouths shut, the Neapolitans showed the world how to behave when you’re in command. To convey with a gesture that commanding is better than fucking.” Most of the criminal archetypes, the acme of Mafia charisma, were from a few square miles of Campania. Even Al Capone was originally from here; his family came from Castellammare di Stabia. Capone was the first boss to measure himself against the movies. His nickname, Scarface, from a scar on his cheek, was used by Brian De Palma for his 1983 film about Tony Montana, but Howard Hawks had used it previously for his 1932 movie about Capone. Capone and his escort would show up on the set every time there was an action scene or location shot he could watch. The boss wanted to make sure that Tony Camonte, the Scarface character he inspired, did not become trite. But he also wanted to make sure he was as much like Tony Camonte as possible; he knew that after the film’s release, Camonte would become the emblem of Capone, rather than the other way around.

Movies are the source for forms of expression. In Naples, Cosimo Di Lauro is a good example. His clothes are reminiscent of Brandon Lee’s in The Crow. Camorristi look to the movies to create for themselves a criminal image they often lack. They model themselves on familiar Hollywood masks, a sort of shortcut to make themselves into figures to fear. Cinematographic inspiration even conditions technical choices such as the way you handle or shoot a gun. A veteran of the Naples Forensic Division once told me how Camorra killers imitate the movies:

“Ever since Tarantino, these guys don’t know the right way to shoot! They don’t keep the barrel straight anymore. Now they hold it crooked, like in the movies, which makes for disaster. They hit the guts, groin, or legs, seriously wounding but not killing. And so they have to finish the victim off with a bullet to the nape of the neck. A pool of pointless blood, a barbarism completely superfluous to the goal of execution.”

Female bosses have bodyguards who dress like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill: blond hair and phosphorescent yellow outfits. Vincenza Di Domenico, a woman from the Quartieri Spagnoli who collaborated with the authorities for a short while, had the eloquent nickname of Nikita, the heroine killer in Luc Besson’s film. Movies, especially American movies, are not distant lands where aberrations occur or the impossible happens, but places very close to home.

I left the villa quietly, trying not to get caught in the brambles and weeds that had overgrown the English Garden so dear to the boss. I left the gate open. Just a few years earlier, getting anywhere near here would have meant being spotted by dozens of sentinels. But now I walked out with my hands in my pockets and my head down, as when you leave the movie theater, still dazed by what you’ve seen.

It’s not hard to understand why Giuseppe Tornatore’s film Il camorrista left such a powerful mark on the imagination in Naples. All you have to do is listen to people’s banter, the same lines repeated for years:

“Tell the professor I didn’t betray him.”

“I know who he is, but I also know who I am!”

“Malacarne’s a weakling!”

“Who sent you?”

“The one who can save your life, or take it from you.”

The film’s sound track has become a sort of Camorra theme song, whistled when a neighborhood capo walks by, or just to make a shopkeeper nervous. Il camorrista even made it to the discos, where people can dance to three different mixes of Raffaele Cutolo’s most famous lines, played in the film by Ben Gazzara.

Two kids from Casal di Principe, Giuseppe M. and Romeo P., knew the Il camorrista dialogues by heart and would act out various scenes:

“How much does a picciotto* weigh? As much as a feather in the wind.”

They started hassling groups of kids their age in Casale and San Cipriano d’Aversa even before they were old enough to drive a car. They were bullies. Braggarts and buffoons, they’d go out to eat and leave a tip twice the amount of the check. Shirts unbuttoned to show off hairless chests, a theatrical swagger, as if claiming every step. Chin high, an ostentatious display of confidence and power, real only in their minds. They were inseparable. Giuseppe played the boss, always one step ahead of his compare. Romeo acted as his bodyguard, his right-hand man and loyal friend. Giuseppe often called him Donnie, after Donnie Brasco. Even though Brasco was a police infiltrator, he becomes a real Mafioso in his soul and that saves him from his original sin in the eyes of his admirers. In Aversa, Giuseppe and Romeo would terrorize the kids who had just gotten their licenses. They liked young couples best. They’d run their motor scooter into the couple’s car, and when they got out to ask for insurance papers, Giuseppe or Romeo would spit in the girl’s face, provoking the boyfriend to react. Then they’d beat him to a pulp. They also challenged adults, even adults who really counted, invading their territory and doing whatever they wanted. Giuseppe and Romeo came from Casal di Principe, and in their minds that was enough. They wanted to be feared and respected; anyone who came near them was supposed to stare at the ground, unable to find the courage to look them in the face. But one day they aimed too high. They went out armed with a submachine gun, picked up from who knows which clan armory, and fired on a group of kids. They must have practiced a lot because they were careful not to hit a single one, but they let them smell the gunpowder and hear the gun’s voice. Before they opened fire, one of them recited something. No one understood what he blathered, but one witness said it sounded like the Bible; perhaps Giuseppe and Romeo were preparing for confirmation. But taking apart their words, it was clear that this was no confirmation text. It was the Bible, however. A passage not from the catechism but from Quentin Tarantino. The verses Jules Winnfield delivers in Pulp Fiction, right before he kills the guy who had made Marsellus Wallace’s precious suitcase disappear:

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and goodwill, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

Giuseppe and Romeo recited it just as in the film and then opened fire. Giuseppe’s father was a Camorrista, a pentito who went back to the Quadrano—De Falco organization after it was defeated by the Schiavones. So a loser. But he’d thought that maybe the film of his life could change if he just played the right role. The two boys knew all the best lines of every crime movie by heart. Most of the time they’d start fights over a glance. In the land of the Camorra a look is a question of territory; it’s an invasion of one’s private space, like breaking down the door and violently entering someone’s home. A look is something more than an insult. To stare someone in the face for too long is already somehow an open challenge:

“You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?”

They’d repeat those famous lines from Taxi Driver, then start fighting, landing punches on the sternum, the kind that make a noise and echo in your chest.

The Casalesi bosses took the problem seriously. The brawls, altercations, and threats were not easily tolerated: too many nervous mothers, too many complaints. So they sent a warning through a neighborhood capo, a sort of call to order. The capo meets them in a bar and tells them the bosses are losing patience with them. But Giuseppe and Romeo keep acting in their imaginary film, beating up whomever they feel like, pissing in gas tanks of the neighborhood kids’ motorcycles. So the bosses have them sent for again. They want to talk to them directly; the clan can’t accept such behavior. The paternalistic tolerance common to these parts translates into the need to punish; the boys need a beating, a brutal public spanking to make them toe the line. But Giuseppe and Romeo snub the bosses’ summons and continue sprawling about at the bar, playing video poker or glued to the TV, watching their favorite films on DVD, hours spent memorizing lines, imitating body language, expressions, and wardrobe choices. They think they can stand up to anyone. Even the big guys. In fact, they believe that precisely by standing up to the big guys they’ll be feared for real. Like Tony and Manny in Scarface, they set no limits. They don’t listen to anyone, but their continual raids and intimidations make them feel they’re the viceroys of Caserta. Giuseppe and Romeo had not chosen to join the clan. They didn’t even try. That path was too slow and regimented, they didn’t want to rise silently through the ranks. Besides, for years the Casalesi had been placing the really good members in the organization’s economic sectors and not in the hit squads. Giuseppe and Romeo were the complete opposite of the new Camorra soldier. They thought they could ride the wave of the area’s bad reputation. They weren’t affiliates, but wanted to enjoy the privileges of Camorristi. They expected the bars to serve them for free, assumed that gas for their scooters was their due, and that their mothers would receive free groceries; when someone dared to rebel, they would descend upon them immediately, smashing windows and beating up greengrocers and salesgirls. So in the spring of 2004 some clan emissaries set up a meeting with them on the outskirts of Castelvolturno, in the Parco Mare area, where sand, sea, and trash all flowed together. If the bosses couldn’t get to them with negative proposals, they’d try with positive ones. Some tempting deal, or maybe even the chance to participate in a killing. The first real hit of their lives. I pictured them racing full throttle on their motorini, replaying in their minds all their favorite movie scenes, in which the big guys are forced to yield to the ostentatious new heroes. Young Spartans went to war with the feats of Achilles and Hector in their heads, but around here you go to kill and be killed thinking of Scarface, GoodFellas, Donnie Brasco, and The Godfather. Every time I go by Parco Mare, I imagine the scene that the police reconstructed, that was reported in the newspapers. Giuseppe and Romeo arrived way ahead of the set time. Burning with anxiety. They were there waiting when the car pulled up. A group of men got out. The two kids went over to greet them, but they grabbed Romeo right away and started beating up Giuseppe. Then they pointed the barrel of an automatic at his chest and fired. I’m sure that the scene from GoodFellas flashed before Romeo’s eyes, the scene where Tommy DeVito is invited to take part in the management of Cosa Nostra in America, but instead of welcoming him in a hall crowded with bosses, they take him to an empty room and shoot him in the head. It’s not true that films are a lie, that you can’t live as in the movies, that as soon as you stick your head out of the theater, you realize things are not the same. Only one moment is different: the moment when Al Pacino gets up from the fountain into which his double, mowed down by machine-gun fire, has fallen, and dries his face, wiping off the color of blood. The moment when Joe Pesci washes his hair and stops the fake bleeding. But you don’t want to know that part, so you don’t understand it. When Romeo sees Giuseppe on the ground, I’m sure—though I can never confirm it— that he understood the exact difference between movies and reality, between a staged scene and the smell in the air, between his own life and a script. Then it was his turn. They shot him in the throat, finishing him off with a bullet to the head. The sum of their ages was barely thirty. That was how the Casalesi clan resolved the problem of this micro-criminal excrescence nourished on movies. They didn’t even make an anonymous call to the police or ambulance. They left the boy cadavers there, their hands to be pecked at by seagulls and their lips and noses nibbled by stray dogs that roam the trash-covered beaches. But that’s something the movies never show. They end just the minute before.

There’s no real difference between movie audiences in the land of the Camorra and elsewhere. Cinematographic references everywhere create mythologies of imitation. If elsewhere you may like Scarface and secretly identify with him, here you can be Scarface, but you have to be him all the way.

In the land of the Camorra, people are also passionate about art and literature. Sandokan had an enormous library in his villa bunker, with dozens of volumes, all on two topics: the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and Napoléon Bonaparte. Sandokan was attracted to the Bourbon state’s importance, bragging that his ancestors were officers in southern Italy, the Terra di Lavoro. He was fascinated by the genius of Bonaparte, who rose from a low military rank to conquer half of Europe; he saw similarities to his own life, for he’d started at the bottom and was now generalissimo of one of the most powerful clans in Europe. Sandokan, who had once been a medical student, preferred to pass his time in hiding painting religious icons and portraits of Napoléon and Mussolini. They’re still for sale today, in Caserta shops that are above suspicion: extremely rare holy images, Sandokan’s own face inserted in place of Christ’s. He also liked reading epics. Homer, the Arthurian legends, and Walter Scott were his favorites. It was his love of Scott that inspired him to baptize one of his numerous children with the grandiloquent, proud name of Ivanhoe.

But the names of the sons always bear a trace of the passions of the father. Giuseppe Misso, boss of the Sanità neighborhood clan, has three grandchildren: Ben Hur, Jesus, and Emiliano Zapata. When on trial, Misso always assumed the attitude of political leader, conservative thinker, and rebel; he recently wrote a novel, I leoni di marmo, “The Marble Lions.” Several hundred copies were sold in a few weeks in Naples. Told with a mangled syntax but in a furious style, it is the story of Naples in the 1980s and 1990s, the story of the boss’s formation, his emergence as lone warrior against the Camorra of rackets and drugs, in defense of a chivalrous but vaguely defined code of robbery and theft. He was arrested many times in his long criminal career, and each time he was found with books by Julius Evola and Ezra Pound.

Augusto La Torre, the boss of Mondragone, is a student of psychology, an avid reader of Carl Jung, and an expert on Sigmund Freud. A glance at the titles of the books he requested in prison reveals a lengthy bibliography of scholars of psychoanalysis, and in court, quotations of Lacan are interwoven with his reflections on the Gestalt school of psychology. A knowledge the boss utilized in his rise to power, an unexpected managerial and military weapon.

Even one of Paolo Di Lauro’s most loyal men is a lover of culture: Tommaso Prestieri produces many neo-melodic singers and is a connoisseur of contemporary art. Many bosses are art collectors. Pasquale Galasso’s villa housed a private museum with about three hundred antiques; the jewel of the collection was the throne of the Bourbon king Francis I. And Luigi Vollaro, known as ‘o califfo or the caliph, owned a painting by his favorite artist, Botticelli.

The police were able to arrest Prestieri because of his love of music. He was caught at the Teatro Bellini in Naples when he went to hear a concert while a fugitive. After his sentencing, Prestieri declared, “In art I am free, I don’t need to be released from prison.” Painting and song offer equilibrium and impossible serenity to an unlucky boss such as Prestieri, who has lost two brothers, both killed in cold blood.

^*The lowest-ranking Mafioso.—Trans.