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

ABERDEEN, MONDRAGONE

Augusto La Torre, the psychoanalyst boss, was one of Antonio Bardellino’s favorites. He had taken his father’s place when he was young, becoming the sole leader of the Chiuovi clan, as it was called in Mondragone, which ruled in northern Caserta, southern Lazio, and along the Domitian coast. The La Torre clan had sided with Sandokan Schiavone’s enemies, but their management and business savvy, the only elements powerful enough to alter conflictual relationships among Camorra families, eventually reconciled them to the Casalesi, with whom they worked while still maintaining their autonomy. Augusto didn’t come by his name by chance. La Torre family tradition was to name the firstborn after a Roman emperor. But in this case they inverted history; instead of Augustus being followed by Tiberius, Tiberius was father to Augustus.

Scipio Africanus’s villa near Lake Patria, Hannibal’s battles at Capua, and the unassailable might of the Samnites, the first warriors in Europe to attack the Roman legions and then flee to the mountains— these stories are legends in local Camorra families, who consider themselves linked to the distant past. The clans’ historical fantasies clashed with the widespread image of Mondragone as the mozzarella capital of Italy. My father used to stuff me full of mozzarelle from Mondragone, but it was impossible to decide which area’s mozzarella was the best. The flavors were too diverse: the light, sickly sweetness of Battipaglia, the heavy saltiness of Aversa, or the purity of Mondragone. But the Mondragone mozzarella masters had a way to tell. A good mozzarella leaves an aftertaste, what country folk call ‘o ciato ‘e bbufala or buffalo breath. If there’s no buffalo aftertaste, the mozzarella isn’t any good. I liked to stroll back and forth on the Mondragone wharf, one of my favorite summer destinations before it was demolished. A tongue of reinforced concrete, boat moorings built out over the sea. A useless, unused construction.

Mondragone suddenly became the place for all the kids around Caserta and the Pontine Marshes who wanted to emigrate to the UK. Emigration, the chance of a lifetime, a way to finally get out, but not as a waiter, a scullery boy in a McDonald’s, or a bartender paid in pints of dark beer. They went to Mondragone to try to make contacts with the right people, who could get you a good rent and an in with employers. In Mondragone there were people who could get you a job in insurance or real estate, and who helped the desperate, chronically unemployed find a decent contract and respectable work. Mondragone was the door to Great Britain. Starting in the late 1990s, having a friend in Mondragone all of a sudden meant you’d be valued for what you’re worth, without needing recommendations or connections. A rare thing, impossible in Italy, especially in the south. Around here, you always need a protector, someone who can at least get your foot in the door, if not the rest of you. Presenting yourself without a protector is like showing up without arms and legs. With something missing. But in Mondragone they’d take your résumé and see whom to send it to in the UK. Your skills mattered and, even more, the way you used them. But only in London or Aberdeen. Not in Campania, the most provincial of the provinces of Europe.

My friend Matteo decided to give it a try, to leave once and for all. He’d graduated cum laude and was tired of doing internships, of supporting himself working construction sites. He’d put aside some money and got the name of a guy in Mondragone who would help him line up some job interviews in Britain. I went with him. We waited for hours at the beach where Matteo’s contact had told him to meet. It was summer. Mondragone’s beaches are invaded by vacationers from all over Campania, the ones who can’t afford the Amalfi coast or a summer rental on the shore, so they commute from the hinterland. Till the mid-1980s mozzarelle were sold on the beach, in wooden pails overflowing with boiling buffalo milk. The bathers ate them with their hands, the milk dripping all over. Kids would lick their hands, salty from the sea, then take a bite. But no one sells them anymore, now it’s grissini and coconut slices. Our contact was two hours late. When he finally showed up, tanned and wearing only a skimpy bathing suit, he explained that he’d eaten breakfast late, so had gone for a swim late and had dried himself off late. That was his excuse—it was the sun’s fault. He took us to a travel agency. That was all. We thought we were going to meet some big middleman, but instead we were merely introduced at an agency, and not a particularly elegant one at that. Not one of those agencies with hundreds of brochures, just an ordinary hole-in-the-wall kind of place. But you needed a local contact to access their services; to anybody just walking in, it seemed like a normal travel agency. A young woman asked Matteo for his résumé and told us the first available flight to Aberdeen. That’s where they were sending him. They handed him a list of businesses where he could go for an interview, and for a small fee they’d even set up appointments with the people doing the hiring. Never had a temp agency been so efficient. Two days later we boarded the plane for Scotland, a quick and affordable trip from Mondragone.

Aberdeen felt like home, though this Scottish city couldn’t have been more different from Mondragone. The third-largest city in Scotland, dark, dirty, and gray, but it rains less than in London. Before the Italian clans arrived, Aberdeen didn’t know how to exploit its resources for recreation and tourism, and the restaurant, hotel, and entertainment businesses were organized in the sad English manner. The same old thing, people packed into pubs once a week. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, it was Antonio La Torre, Augustos brother, who set up a series of commercial activities in Scotland, which in the space of a few years became the feather in the cap of Scottish entrepreneurship. Most La Torre clan activities in Britain are perfectly legal: acquisition and management of properties and businesses, commerce in foodstuffs with Italy. Enormous turnover, difficult to place a figure on. In Aberdeen, Matteo sought everything he’d been denied in Italy. We walked around feeling pleased; for the first time in our lives being from Campania seemed sufficient to guarantee some measure of success. At 27/29 Union Terrace, I found myself in front of Pavarotti’s, a restaurant registered in Antonio La Torre’s name and listed on tourist websites. Aberdeen had become chic, an elegant address for fine dining and important dealings. At Italissima, the gastronomic fair held in Paris, clan businesses even marketed themselves as the height of Made in Italy. Antonio La Torre advertised his own brand of catering activities there. His success had made him one of the top Scottish businessmen in Europe.

Antonio La Torre was arrested in Aberdeen in March 2005. There was an Italian warrant for his arrest on account of Camorra criminal conspiracy and extortion, but for years his British citizenship and the fact that the authorities did not recognize his alleged crimes shielded him and he had been able to avoid extradition. Scotland didn’t want to lose one of its most brilliant entrepreneurs.

In 2002 the Court of Naples issued preventive-detention orders for thirty people connected to the La Torre clan. It emerged that extortion, contracts, and control of economic activities were bringing in vast sums of money, which the clan then invested overseas, particularly in Britain, where an actual clan colony had formed. The colonists hadn’t invaded or introduced bearish competition in the workforce; instead they infused the city with economic energy, revitalized the tourist industry, inspired new import-export activities, and injected new vigor in the real estate sector.

The international energy from Mondragone was personified by Rockefeller. That’s what people here call him because of his obvious talent for making deals and his control of vast sums of money. Rockefeller is Raffaele Barbato, sixty-two years old, a native of Mondragone. Maybe even he has forgotten his real name. He has a Dutch wife, and until the late 1980s he did business in Holland, where he owned two casinos that drew international big shots, such as the brother of Bob Cellino, who’d set up casinos in Las Vegas, and Miami-based, Slavic Mafiosi. His partners were a certain Liborio, a Sicilian with Cosa Nostra connections, and Emi, a Dutchman who later moved to Spain, where he opened hotels, residences, and discos. According to Mario Sperlongaro, Stefano Piccirillo, and Girolamo Rozzera—all pentiti—it was Rockefeller, together with Augusto La Torre, who hatched the idea of going to Caracas to try to meet Venezuelan narcotraffickers, whose coke prices beat those of the Colombians who supplied the Neapolitans and Casalesi. And it was Rockefeller who found a comfortable place for Augusto to sleep when he went into hiding in Holland: the skeet-shooting club. Even though he was far from the Mondragone countryside, the boss could keep in shape firing at flying clay pigeons. Rockefeller had an enormous network. He was one of the best-known businessmen not only in Europe but also in the USA; through his gambling houses he made contacts with Italian-American Mafiosi who were slowly being squeezed out by the Albanian clans taking over in New York. As a result the Mafiosi were increasingly allied to Campania Camorra families and eager to traffic in drugs and invest in European markets, restaurants, and hotels through Mondragone’s open door. Rockefeller is the owner of Adam and Eve, renamed La Playa, a beautiful holiday village on the Mondragone coast, where, according to the magistrates, many fugitive affiliates vacationed. The more comfortable the hideout, the less the temptation to turn state’s witness and put an end to life on the run. La Torre was fierce with pentiti. Francesco Tiberio, Augusto’s cousin, phoned Domenico Pensa, who had testified against the Stolder clan, and in no uncertain terms invited him to leave town.

“I heard from the Stolders that you collaborated against them. Given as how we don’t want informants in this town, you’d better get out of Mondragone or else someone will come and cut your head off.”

Augusto’s cousin had a knack for making terrorizing telephone calls to whoever dared collaborate with the authorities or leak information. With Vittorio Di Tella, he was more explicit, inviting him to purchase his funeral suit.

“If you have to talk, you’d better buy yourself a black shirt, fucker, because I’m going to kill you.”

Before clan affiliates started turning state’s witness, no one would have imagined the vast scope of Mondragone dealings. One of Rockefeller’s friends was a certain Raffaele Acconcia. Like Rockefeller, he was born in Mondragone but moved to Holland, where he owned a restaurant chain and, according to pentito Stefano Piccirillo, was an important international drug trafficker. The La Torre treasure is still hidden somewhere in Holland, perhaps in a bank—millions of euros the magistrates have never been able to locate, taken in through mediation and commerce. In Mondragone this alleged stash in a Dutch bank has become a symbol of absolute wealth, trumping all other references to international riches. People no longer say, “He thought I was the Bank of Italy,” but, “He thought I was the Bank of Holland.”

With backing in South America and Holland, the La Torre clan planned to take over cocaine traffic in Rome. All Caserta families consider the capital city an extension of their province, and Rome has become the number one spot for drugs and real estate investments. The La Torres counted on the supply routes along the Domitian coast; the villas there were essential for contraband cigarettes and all sorts of merchandise. The actor Nino Manfredi had a villa there. Clan representatives went and asked him to sell it. Manfredi resisted in every way he could, but clan pressure intensified; his house was located on a strategic point for mooring the motorboats. They stopped asking him to sell and forced him to hand it over at a price they set. Manfredi even appealed to a Cosa Nostra boss, disclosing the story to Radio News 1 in January 1994, but no Sicilian stepped in to mediate against the powerful Mondragonesi. Only by going on TV and attracting national media attention was he able to make known the pressure the Camorra applied for the sake of strategic interests.

Drug traffic followed on the heels of other commercial routes. Enzo Boccolato, a cousin of the La Torres’ and owner of a restaurant in Germany, decided to export clothing. Together with Antonio La Torre and a Lebanese businessman, he purchased clothing in Puglia—the Campania garment industry was already monopolized by the Secondigliano clans—and resold them in Venezuela through a middleman, a certain Alfredo, who investigations indicated was one of the most important diamond traffickers in Germany. Thanks to Campania Camorra clans, diamonds—which have significant price fluctuations but always maintain a nominal value—quickly became the asset of choice for money laundering. Enzo Boccolato was known in the Venezuela and Frankfurt airports, where he had protectors among the merchandise inspectors, who probably not only did not check the clothing shipments, but were also preparing a giant cocaine network. It might seem that the clans, once they’ve accumulated substantial capital, would stop their criminal activities, unravel their genetic code somehow, and convert to legality. Just like the Kennedy family, who had earned enormous amounts selling liquor during Prohibition and later broke all criminal ties. But the strength of Italian criminal business lies precisely in maintaining a double track, in never renouncing its origins. In Aberdeen this system is called scratch. Like the rappers and DJs who put their finger on the record to keep it from spinning normally, Camorra businessmen momentarily stop the movement of the legal market, scratch, then make it spin even faster.

Various inquiries by the Naples Anti-Mafia Public Attorney’s Office revealed that when the La Torre legal track was in crisis, the criminal one was immediately activated. If cash was short, they had counterfeit bills printed; if capital was needed in a hurry, they sold bogus treasury bonds. They annihilated the competition through extortions and imported merchandise tax-free. Scratching the record of the legal economy means that clients get steady prices, bank credits are always honored, money continues to circulate, and products continue to be consumed. Scratching reduces the separation between the law and economic imperative, between what regulations prohibit and what making money demands.

Foreign deals meant that British participation in various levels of La Torre clan activity was indispensable; some Brits even became affiliates. One of these is a British Camorrista, incarcerated in Great Britain. His name cannot be spoken in the Queen’s land because association with the Mafia is not recognized as a crime there, where it is easy for someone who belongs to a Mafia organization to hide behind their libel laws. And since Great Britain doesn’t recognize the crime, it often doesn’t recognize the accusations either. An immaculate criminal record means that words must be mute. And yet this British Camorrista receives a stipend from Mondragone every month, Christmas bonus included. In addition to physical protection, affiliates are normally guaranteed a salary, legal assistance, and clan cover if needed. Yet to receive assurances directly from the boss, this Camorrista had to have played a vital role in clan business, unquestioningly the number one British Camorrista in Italian criminal history.

I’d heard talk of this British Camorrista for years, even though I’d never seen him, not even in a photograph. When I got to Aberdeen, I couldn’t help but ask about him, Augusto La Torre’s trustworthy ally, the man who, knowing only the syntax of business and the grammar of power, effortlessly dissolved any residual relations with ancient Highlands clans in order to join the Mondragonesi. There was always a bunch of local kids hanging out at the La Torre pubs—not the lazy, rebellious, petty-criminal types nursing a pint of beer, waiting for a punch-up or a purse snatching, but quick-witted kids involved at various levels of legal businesses. Transportation, advertising, marketing. When I asked about him, I didn’t get hostile stares or vague answers, as I would have if I’d asked in Campania about an affiliate. It seemed they’d known him forever, but he’d probably become a mythical figure everyone talks about. He was the man who had made it. Not like them, not just someone with a steady salary, an employee in a restaurant, company, store, or real estate agency. The British Camorrista was more than that. He had fulfilled many a young Scot’s dream not to simply work legally, but to become part of the System, a working member of the clan. To become a Camorrista in every respect— despite the disadvantage of a Scottish birth, which means believing that the economy has just one route, belonging to everyone, the banal economy of rules and defeats, of mere competition and prices. I was shocked to discover that in Scotland my English, spoken with a fat Italian accent, did not make me an emigrant in their eyes, the skinny deformation of Jake La Motta—the Raging Bull—or a criminal invader, come to suck money out of their land; they heard instead the grammar of the economy’s absolute power, a power that decides everything about everything, unlimited even by life in prison or death. It seemed impossible, yet they clearly knew Mondragone, Secondigliano, Marano, Casal di Principe; they’d heard about these places, as if in an epic of a faraway land, from the bosses who’d come through here or eaten at the restaurants where they worked. For my Scottish peers, to be born in the land of the Camorra was an advantage; it meant you had something that enabled you to perceive the existence of an arena where entrepreneurship, arms, and even your own life are only and exclusively a means to money and power, the things that make living worthwhile, that put you at the center of your day, without having to worry about anything else. The British Camorrista had done it, even without being born in Italy, even without ever seeing Campania or driving for miles past construction sites, dumps, and buffalo farms. He had become a man of real power. A Camorrista.

This grand organization of international commerce and finance did not earn the clan flexibility at home, however. Augusto La Torre wielded his power harshly in Mondragone. He had to be ruthless to create such a powerful cartel. Weapons, hundreds of them, were ordered from Switzerland. His political tactics varied from aggressive contract management to alliances to sporadic contacts; he allowed his deals to solidify, making sure politics fell in line with his business. Mondragone was the first Italian town whose government was dissolved in the 1990s because of Camorra infiltration. Over the years, politics and the clan never really separated. In 2005 a Neapolitan fugitive found hospitality in the home of a candidate in the outgoing mayor’s party. And for a long time, the daughter of a traffic police officer accused of collecting La Torre bribes represented the majority party on the town council.

Augusto was harsh on politicians as well. All who opposed the family business received cruel exemplary punishments. The method for physically eliminating La Torre enemies was always the same, and in criminal jargon it came to be referred to as Mondragone-style. The technique consists in brutally beating the body, throwing it in a country well, then tossing in a hand grenade, so the body is torn to shreds and the earth covers the remains, which sink into the water. This is what Augusto La Torre did to Antonio Nugnes, the Christian Democrat deputy mayor who disappeared into thin air in 1990. Nugnes represented an obstacle in the clan’s desire to directly manage municipal contracts and have a hand in all political and administrative matters. Augusto La Torre didn’t want allies. He wanted to run everything himself. Military decisions were not heavily pondered then. First you shot and then you reasoned. Augusto was young when he became the boss of Mondragone. He wanted to become a stockholder in a private clinic that was being built, and Nugnes held a significant number of shares. The Incaldana clinic was one of the most prestigious in Lazio and Campania, and a stone’s throw from Rome; it would attract a good number of businessmen from southern Lazio, thus solving the problem of the lack of quality hospitals on the Domitian coast and in the Pontine Marshes. Augusto insisted the clinic’s board of directors accept his dauphin, another clan businessman who had gotten rich running a dump, as the family representative. Nugnes was opposed; he realized that La Torre’s strategy was more than simply about getting in on a huge deal. So Augusto sent an emissary to the deputy mayor to try to soften him up, convince him to accept his terms. For a Christian Democrat to have contact with a boss and reckon with his business and military power wasn’t all that scandalous. Clans were the primary economic force in the area; refusing a relationship with them would be like the deputy mayor of Turin refusing to meet with the top management of Fiat. Augusto La Torre’s idea wasn’t to buy shares at a good price, as a more diplomatic boss would have done. He wanted them for free. In exchange he would guarantee that all his companies that won contracts for service, cleaning, catering, transportation, and guarding would do their job professionally and at favorable fees. He even assured Nugnes his buffaloes would produce better milk. On the pretense of a meeting with the boss, Nugnes was picked up at his agricultural business and taken to a farm in Falciano del Massico. According to Augusto’s testimony, waiting with him for Nugnes were Girolamo Rozzera, known as Jimmy, Massimo Gitto, Angelo Gagliardi, Giuseppe Valente, Mario Sperlongano, and Francesco La Torre. All waiting for the ambush. The deputy mayor got out of the car and went to say hello to the boss. Augusto told the judges that as he put out his hand to greet Nugnes, he mumbled to Jimmy:

“Come, Uncle Antonio’s here.”

A clear, unequivocal message. Jimmy shot Nugnes twice in the head. The boss finished him off himself. They dumped the body in a forty-meter well in the middle of the countryside and threw in two grenades. For years nothing was known about Antonio Nugnes. People would call in saying they’d spotted him in every corner of Italy, but he was actually at the bottom of a well, buried under tons of dirt. Thirteen years later, Augusto and his most trusted men told the carabinieri where to find the deputy mayor who had dared to oppose the growth of La Torre business. When the carabinieri started to collect the remains, they realized they were not just of one man. Four tibiae, two skulls, three hands. For more than ten years, Nugnes’s body lay next to that of Vincenzo Boccolato, a Camorrista connected to Cutolo, but who joined the La Torres after Cutolo’s defeat.

Boccolato was condemned to death because he deeply offended Augusto in a letter he sent to a friend from prison. The boss came across it by chance as he wandered around in an affiliate’s living room. Flipping through some letters and papers, his eye caught his name. Curious, he read the heap of insults and criticisms Boccolato dumped on him. Even before finishing the letter, the boss decided he had to die. He sent Angelo Gagliardi, another former Cutolo affiliate, to kill him, as Boccolato would get in his car without suspecting anything. Friends make the best killers. They do a clean job, no need to chase after a target who runs off screaming. Silently, when you least suspect it, they point the barrel of a gun at your neck and pull the trigger. Augusto La Torre wanted executions to be carried out with a friendly intimacy. He couldn’t bear being ridiculed and didn’t want anyone to laugh when his name was uttered. No one should dare.

Luigi Pellegrino, whom everyone knew as Gigiotto, was one of those people who enjoyed gossiping about the city’s powerful figures. Lots of kids in the land of the Camorra whisper about the sexual preferences of bosses, the orgies of neighborhood capos, and the whoring daughters of clan businessmen. The bosses usually put up with it, though. They’ve got other things to think about, and after all, it’s inevitable that the people at the top give rise to quite a bit of talk. Gigiotto spread rumors about the boss’s wife, saying he’d seen her with one of Augusto’s most trusted men. Seen the boss’s driver take her to meet her lover. The La Torre clan’s number one, the man who controlled everything, had a wife who was cheating on him right under his nose, and he didn’t even realize it. Gigiotto repeated his stories, always with more details, always with slight variations. Lie or no lie, by now everyone was telling the funny story of the boss’s wife’s affair with her husband’s right-hand man. They were careful to mention the source: Gigiotto. One day Gigiotto was walking on the sidewalk in downtown Mondragone when he heard a motorcycle coming a little too close. He started to run as soon as it slowed down. Two shots were fired, but Gigiotto, zigzagging among people and lampposts, fled while the killer, stuck behind the motorcyclist, emptied his entire clip. So he chased Gigiotto on foot, to a bar where he was trying to hide. He pulled out his pistol and shot him in the head in front of dozens of people who vanished quickly and silently a moment later. According to the investigations, it was Giuseppe Fragnoli, clan regent, who had wanted Gigiotto eliminated; without even asking for authorization, he decided to silence the tongue wagger who was sullying the image of the boss.

In Augusto’s mind, Mondragone, the surrounding countryside, coastline, and sea were nothing more than the clan’s workshop, a laboratory for him and his colleagues, an area from which to extract material to be churned into profit by their companies. He categorically prohibited drug dealing in Mondragone and along the Domitian coast, issuing the severest order that Caserta bosses give their subordinates, or anyone. The command was morally motivated: to save his fellow townspeople from heroin and cocaine—but it was more to keep the clan’s unskilled pushers from gaining an economic foothold in his territory, from growing rich within the bosom of power and being able to oppose his leadership. Drugs from Holland, sold in Lazio by the Mondragone cartel, were absolutely forbidden. People from Mondragone had to get in the car and drive all the way to Rome to buy pot, coke, and heroin from Neapolitans, Casalesi, and, the Mondragonesi themselves. The clan formed an antidrug group called GAD, which would call the police switchboard and claim responsibility for its actions. If they caught you with a joint in your mouth, they’d break your nose. If a wife discovered a packet of cocaine, all she had to do was let the GAD know, and after being kicked and punched in the face, after the gas stations refused to fill his tank for the drive to Rome, her husband would change his mind.

An Egyptian boy, Hassa Fakhry, paid heavily for being a heroin addict. He raised pigs. Black Caserta pigs, a rare breed. Darker than buffaloes, squat and hairy, accordions of fat that were turned into lean sausages, tasty salami, and flavorful chops. Being a swineherd is a horrendous job. Constantly shoveling manure, slitting the animals’ throats, hanging them upside down, and letting the blood drip into basins. Hassa had been a driver in Egypt, but he came from a family of farmers so he knew how to handle animals. But not pigs. To a Muslim, pigs were doubly disgusting. But better to take care of pigs than spend the whole day shoveling buffalo manure as the Indians do. Pigs don’t shit half as much, and pigsties are tiny compared to bovine stalls. Every Arab knows this, so they go for pigs rather than ending up faint with exhaustion from the buffalo. Hassa started doing heroin. He’d take the train to Rome, make his purchase, and return to the pigsty. He became a serious addict and never had enough cash, so his pusher suggested he try peddling in Mondragone, a city with no drug market. Hassa started pushing outside the Bar Domizia. He established a clientele and could earn in ten hours what he’d make in six months as a swineherd. All it took was one phone call on the part of the bar owner to put an end to his activity. That’s how it works around here. You call a friend who calls his cousin who tells his compare who relays the news to whoever needs to know. A chain of which only the beginning and end points are known. After a few days La Torre’s men, the self-proclaimed GAD, went right to Hassa’s hovel and knocked. They pretended to be police officers so he wouldn’t escape amid pigs and buffalo, forcing a chase in the mud and shit. They loaded him into the car and started to drive away, but they didn’t take the road to headquarters. As soon as Hassa realized they were about to kill him, he suffered a strange allergic reaction. His body started to swell up, as if being forced full of air—as if fear had sparked an anaphylactic shock. Augusto La Torre himself, when he told the story to the judges, was aghast at the metamorphosis: the Egyptian’s eyes became tiny, as if being sucked into his head, his pores exuded a thick, honey sweat, and his mouth foamed ricotta. There were eight killers, but only seven fired. The pentito Mario Sperlongano stated, “It seemed completely pointless to shoot at a dead body.” But that’s how it always was. Augusto seemed intoxicated by his own imperial name. Every one of his legionnaires had to stand behind him and all his actions. Murders that could be taken care of by one or two men were instead carried out by all his most trusted legionnaires, who were usually expected to fire at least one shot, even if the person was already dead. One for all and all for one. Augusto required full participation, even when it was superfluous. The constant fear that someone could pull back made him always act in a group. Clan dealings in Amsterdam, Aberdeen, London, and Caracas might make some affiliate lose his head and think he could go out on his own. Here savageness is the true value of commerce: to renounce it is to lose everything. After they killed Hassa Fakhry, they stuck hundreds of insulin syringes, the kind heroin addicts use, in his body. A message on his flesh, which everyone in Mondragone and Formia would immediately understand. The boss wasn’t concerned about other people. When Paolo Montano, known as Zumpariello, one of the most reliable men in his hit squad, started doing drugs and couldn’t break his cocaine habit, Augusto had one of his faithful friends summon him to a meeting on a farm. When they arrived, Ernesto Cornacchia was supposed to empty his entire clip into Zumpariello, but the boss was standing too close and Cornacchia was afraid he would also hit him. Seeing Ernesto hesitate, Augusto took out his pistol and killed Montano himself. The shots pierced his body, hitting Cornacchia as well, but he preferred to take a bullet rather than risk wounding the boss. Zumpa-riello was thrown in a well and blown up, Mondragone-style.

Augusto’s legionnaires would do anything for him. They even followed him when he turned state’s witness. In January 2003, after his wife’s arrest, the boss decided to take the big step. He accused himself and his men of forty or so homicides, gave the locations of the wells where they’d exploded people, and charged himself with dozens and dozens of extortions. A confession that focused more on military than economic activity. His most loyal men—Mario Sperlongano, Giuseppe Valente, Girolamo Rozzera, Pietro Scuttini, Salvatore Orabona, Ernesto Cornacchia, Angelo Gagliardi—soon followed him. Once in jail, silence becomes the bosses’ best weapon for holding on to authority, for formally maintaining power, even if the harsh prison routine removes them from hands-on management. But Augusto La Torre is a special case: by confessing and having all his men follow suit, there was no fear that someone would kill his family as a result of his defection. Nor did collaborating with the authorities seem to undermine the Mondragone cartel’s economic empire. His confession only helped reveal the logic of the killings and the history of power along the Caserta and Lazio coast. Like many Camorra bosses, Augusto La Torre spoke of the past. Without pentiti, the history of power could not be written. Without pentiti the truth—facts, details, and mechanisms—is only discovered ten, twenty years later, as if a man were to understand how his vital organs worked only after he is dead.

Collaboration on the part of Augusto La Torre and his chiefs of staff presents a certain risk; they could receive substantial sentence reductions in exchange for confessing and be released a few years later. They could delegate military power to others, above all the Albanian crime families, and still maintain their legal economic power. It’s as if they decided to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to use their knowledge as a way of living on their legal activities only and to avoid life sentences and internal feuds in the process. Augusto had never been able to stand being locked up; unlike the great bosses who’d trained him, he was incapable of surviving decades of incarceration. He expected the prison cafeteria to serve vegetarian food. And as he loved movies but wasn’t allowed a VCR in his cell, when he felt like seeing The Godfather, he’d ask a local broadcaster to air it in the evening, before he went to bed.

For the magistrates, La Torre’s collaboration is laden with ambiguity, for he never renounced his role as boss. His revelations were an extension of his power, as a letter to his uncle shows: he reassures him that he “saved” him from any possible involvement in clan affairs, but, good storyteller that he is, he also does not fail to threaten him and two other relatives, thus averting the possibility of an alliance against him developing in Mondragone:

“Your son-in-law and his father feel protected by the walking dead.”

The boss, even as a pentito, still asked for money from his jail cell in the Aquila prison. He got around the System by delivering commands and requests for cash in letters he gave to his mother or driver, Pietro Scuttini. According to the magistrates, those requests were actually extortions. A polite, courteous letter to the owner of one of the largest cheese makers on the Domitian coast proves that Augusto still considered him under his control.

“Dear Peppe, I need to ask you a huge favor, because I’ve been ruined. If you would like to help me—but I only ask in the name of our old friendship and not for any other reason, and even if you say no, don’t worry, I’ll always look out for you! I am in urgent need of ten thousand euros. You also have to tell me if you can give me a thousand euros a month, which I need to live with my children.”

The standard of living the La Torre family was used to was way above the economic assistance level the state provides to collaborators. I only managed to understand the family dealings after reading the documents of the mega-confiscation carried out under the Santa Maria Capua Vetere Court orders in 1992. They seized properties worth about 230 million euros, nineteen companies worth 323 million euros, as well as manufacturing equipment and machinery worth 133 million euros. Numerous factories located along the coast between Naples and Gaeta, including a dairy, a sugar refinery, four supermarkets, nine seaside villas, buildings, land, as well as big cars and motorcycles. Every company had about sixty employees. The judges also ordered confiscated the company that had won the trash-collection contract in Mondragone. A huge operation that annulled a vast economic power, but microscopic compared to actual clan operations. A grandiose villa near Ariana di Gaeta, whose fame had reached all the way to Aberdeen, was also seized. Four stories, right on the cliffs, a swimming pool complete with underwater labyrinth, designed after the villa of Tiberius—not the founder of the Mondragone clan, but the Roman emperor who had retired to the island of Capri. I never did get inside; legends and court documents were the lens through which I learned of the existence of this imperial mausoleum, sentinel of the clan’s Italian properties. The coastal zone could have been a sort of infinite space, inspiring every architectural fantasy imaginable. Instead over time it became a hodgepodge of houses and small villas, thrown up quickly to attract tourists to southern Lazio and Naples. No zoning regulations, no permits. As a result, groups of African immigrants were crammed into cottages from Castelvolturno to Mondragone, and the parks that were planned, the grounds that were for new vacation homes, became unregulated dumps. None of the coastal towns had a purification plant. Now a brownish sea bathes beaches covered in trash. In a few years, even the most remote remembrance of beauty had been canceled out. In the summertime some nightclubs turned into regular brothels. Friends, preparing for the evening’s activities, would show me their empty wallets. Empty not of cash, but of thin foil packets with a circular soul—condoms. They were letting it be known that it was safe to go to Mondragone to fuck without protection: “Tonight we go without!”

Augusto La Torre was Mondragone’s condom. The boss decided to keep watch over the health of his subjects. Mondragone became a sort of temple, clean of the most dreaded of sexually transmitted diseases. While the rest of the world was plagued with HIV, northern Caserta was fully under control. The clan was meticulous, tracking everyone’s test results. To the extent possible, the clan kept complete lists; they did not want their territory infected. And so when a man close to Augusto tested positive for HIV, they found out immediately. Fernando Brodella frequented the local girls; he could be dangerous. Unlike the Bidognetti clan, who sent their affiliates to the best doctors and paid for surgery in the top hospitals in Europe, the La Torres didn’t even consider sending Brodella to a good doctor or paying for his treatment. They killed him in cold blood. Clan orders: eliminate the sick to stop the epidemic. An infectious disease, especially one transmitted sexually, through the least controllable act, could only be stopped by removing those who were infected once and for all. The only way to be sure they would not infect anyone was to end their lives.

Capital investments in Campania also had to be safe. They even bought a villa in Anacapri that housed the local carabinieri headquarters. With carabinieri as tenants, they were guaranteed not to run into any difficulties. When the La Torres realized the villa would bring in more money with tourists, they evicted the carabinieri and divided it into six apartments with a yard and parking spaces—before the anti-Mafia division arrived and seized the whole place. Clean, safe investments, with no speculative risks.

After Augusto turned state’s witness, the new boss, Luigi Fragnoli, a La Torre loyalist, started having problems with some affiliates such as Giuseppe Mancone, also known as Rambo. Rambo bore a vague resemblance to Stallone, his body pumped up from weight lifting. The drug market he’d established was gaining in importance; soon he would be able to kick out the old bosses, whose reputation had been shattered by the pentiti. According to the anti-Mafia prosecutor, the Mondragone clans asked the Birra family from Ercolano to hire the killers. Two hit men arrived in Mondragone to take out Rambo in August 2003. They showed up on one of those big motor scooters—not terribly maneuverable, but so menacing they couldn’t resist using it for the ambush. They’d never set foot in Mondragone, but didn’t have any problems spotting their victim; he was at the Roxy Bar, as always. The motorbike came to a halt. One of them got off, walked decisively up to Rambo, emptied an entire clip into him, then returned to the bike.

“Everything all set? You did it?”

“Yeah, I did it, go go go.”

There was a group of kids near the bar, deciding what to do for the August 15 ferragosto holiday. As soon as they saw the guys from Ercolano, they realized what was going on; there was no mistaking the sound of an automatic for fireworks. They all lay down, face to the ground, fearing to be targeted as potential witnesses. Only one person didn’t look away. One person stared at the killer without lowering her eyes, without pressing her chest to the tarmac or covering her face with her hands. A thirty-five-year-old schoolteacher. The woman testified, made identifications, reported the killing. Among the many reasons for keeping quiet, for pretending nothing happened, for going home and living as before, are the fear of intimidation and, even more, futility—one killer arrested was just one out of many. And yet among the slag heap of reasons to keep quiet, the Mondragone schoolteacher found one motivation to speak: the truth. A truth that seems natural, like an everyday, habitual gesture, an obvious and necessary act, like breathing. She testified without asking anything in return. She didn’t expect a stipend or police protection, didn’t set a price on her word. She told what she’d seen, described the killer’s face, his angular features and thick eyebrows. After the shooting, the motor scooter sped off, but it made several wrong turns, heading down dead-end streets and having to turn around. They seemed more like schizophrenic tourists than killers. In the trial that resulted from the schoolteacher’s testimony, Salvatore Cefariello, the twenty-four-year-old killer considered to be in the pay of the Ercolano clans, was condemned for life. The judge who took the teacher’s testimony called her “a rose in the desert,” blooming in a land where truth is always the powerful people’s version of things, where it is almost never stated, a rare commodity to be bartered for a profit.

And yet her confession made her life difficult. It was as if she had snagged a thread, and her entire existence unraveled along with her courageous testimony. She had been engaged, but her fiancé left her. She lost her job and was transferred to a protected location where she received a small state stipend, just enough to survive. Some family members took their distance, and a profound loneliness descended upon her. A loneliness that explodes violently in her daily life when she wants to dance and has no partner, when cell phones are never answered, when friends stop calling and eventually disappear. It wasn’t testifying in itself that generated such fear, or her identifying a killer that caused such a scandal. The logic of omertà isn’t so simple. What made the young teacher’s gesture scandalous is that she considered being able to testify something natural, instinctive, and vital. In a land where truth is considered to be what gets you something and lying what makes you lose, living as if you actually believe truth can exist is incomprehensible. So the people around you feel uncomfortable, undressed by the gaze of one who has renounced the rules of life itself, which they have fully accepted. And accepted without feeling ashamed, because in the end that’s just how things are and have always been; you can’t change it all on your own, and so it’s better to save your energy, stay on track, and live the way you’re supposed to live.

In Aberdeen my eyes were confronted with the material success of Italian entrepreneurship. It’s odd to see the distant branches if you know the roots. I don’t know how to describe it, but seeing the restaurants, offices, insurance firms, and buildings was like being grabbed by the ankles, turned upside down, and flung about until everything—house keys and small change—fell out of my pockets and mouth, even my soul, if that can be commercialized. The cash flows radiate in all directions, sucking energy from the center. Knowing this is not the same as seeing it. I went with Matteo to a job interview. They hired him, obviously. He wanted me to stay in Aberdeen as well.

“Here all you have to do is be yourself, Robbe’.”

Matteo had to be from Campania to have that aura, to have his résumé, degree, and desire to work be appreciated. The very origins that in Scotland allowed him to become a full-fledged citizen classified him in Italy as little more than a waste of a man, devoid of protection and importance, defeated right from the start because he hadn’t set his life on the proper track. Matteo suddenly burst into a happiness never seen before. The more his spirits soared, the more I was weighed down by a bitter melancholy. I’ve never been able to take enough distance from the place I was born and the behavior of people I hated; I’ve never felt myself truly different from the fierce dynamics that crush lives and longing. Being born in certain places means you’re like a hunting dog, born with the smell of the hare already in your nose. You chase after the hare even against your own will, even if, once you catch it, you snap your jaws and let it go. I was able to follow the routes, streets, and paths with unconscious obsession, with a cursed ability to understand completely the conquered territories.

I wanted to get out of Scotland, go away and never set foot in that country again. I left as soon as I could. I had trouble sleeping on the plane; the lack of air and the darkness outside my window grabbed my throat, as if I were wearing a tie that was too tight, pressing against my Adam’s apple. Perhaps my claustrophobia wasn’t caused by a tiny seat on a minuscule plane, or by the darkness outside, but by the sensation of being crushed in a reality like a chicken coop crammed full of starving birds, ready to eat and be eaten. As if everything were just one territory with one dimension and one syntax, understood everywhere. A feeling of no exit, of being constrained to join the big battle or not exist. I returned to Italy thinking about the tracks on which high-speed trains travel; the capital flowing into the great European economy rushes in one direction, while in the other— southbound—comes everything that would be infectious elsewhere, entering and exiting through the forced nets of the open and flexible economy, creating—in the continuous cycle of transformation— wealth elsewhere, but without ever triggering any form of development in the lands where the metamorphosis began.

Rubbish has swollen the belly of southern Italy, stretching it as if it were pregnant, but the fetus never grows; it aborts money, then immediately becomes pregnant again, only to abort and conceive again, to the point where the body is ruined, the arteries are clogged, the lungs filled, the synapses destroyed. Over and over and over again.