Gomorrah

by Roberto Saviano

  “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 ta
ke 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.