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

by Roberto Saviano

  I couldn’t truly understand why I had decided to show up yet again at a murder scene. But I was sure of one thing: it’s not important to map out what has happened, to reconstruct the terrible drama that has unfolded. It’s pointless to study the traces of the bullets, the chalk circles drawn around them, like a children’s game of marbles. The thing to do instead is to try to understand if something remains. Maybe this is what I want to track down. I try to understand if anything human is left, if there is a path, a tunnel dug by the worm of existence that can lead to a solution, an answer that could give some sense of what is happening.

  Attilio’s body is still on the floor when his family arrives. Two women, maybe his mother and his wife, I don’t know. They walk shoulder to shoulder, cling to each other as they approach. They’re the only ones who are still hoping it is not as they know it to be. They understand perfectly well. But they wrap their arms around each other, support one another in the instant before they face the tragedy. And in those very seconds, in the steps that wives and mothers take toward crumpled cadavers, one senses the irrational, mad, and pointless faith in human longing. They hope, hope, hope, and hope some more that there has been a mistake, that the rumors are wrong, a misunderstanding on the part of the officer who had told them of the ambush and the killing. As if clinging stubbornly to their belief can actually alter the course of events. In that moment the blood pressure of hope is at its peak. But there’s nothing to be done. The cries and weeping reveal reality’s force of gravity. Attilio is on the floor. He worked in a phone store and, to make a little extra money, at a call center. He and his wife, Natalia, hadn’t had children yet. They hadn’t had time; maybe they didn’t have the means; maybe they were waiting for the chance to raise them somewhere else. Their days were consumed by work, and when they were finally able to put a little something aside, Attilio had thought it a good idea to buy into the business where he met his death. But the other owner is a distant relative of Pariante, the boss of Bacoli, a Di Lauro colonel who turned against him. Attilio doesn’t know or maybe he underestimates the danger; he trusts his partner, it’s enough that he’s someone who supports himself, someone who works hard, too hard. After all, around here you don’t choose your lot, and a job seems like a privilege, something you hold on to once you’ve gotten it. You feel fortunate, as if a lucky star had shone on you, even if it means you’re away from home thirteen hours a day, you get only half of Sunday off, and your 1,000 euros a month are hardly enough to cover your mortgage. No matter how you got the job, you have to be thankful and not ask too many questions—of yourself or of fate.

  But someone has his doubts. And so the body of Attilio Romanò gets added to those of the Camorra soldiers killed in recent months. The bodies are the same, fallen in the same war, but the reasons for their deaths are different. The clans are the ones to decide who you are and what part you play in the game of risk. They decide independently of individuals’ wills. When the armies take to the streets, it is impossible to move according to any other dynamic than their strategy; it is they who decide meaning, motives, causes. In that moment, the shop where Attilio worked represented an economy linked to the Spaniards, one that had to be destroyed.

  Natalia, or Nata as Attilio called her, is stunned by the tragedy. They’d only been married for four months, but she is not consoled, the president of the Republic doesn’t attend the funeral, there’s no minister or mayor to hold her hand. Perhaps it’s just as well: she is spared the institutional theater. But an unjust suspicion hovers over Attilio’s death, a suspicion that is the silent approval of the rule of the Camorra. Yet another assent to the clans’ activities. But the people who worked with Attila—the nickname they gave him because of his fierce desire to live—at the call center organize candlelight vigils and insist on marching even if other murders occur during the protests and blood still stains the streets. They demonstrate, light candles, clarify, remove all shame, cancel out all suspicion. Attila died on the job and had no ties to the Camorra.

  In truth, after an ambush suspicion falls on everyone. The clan machine is too perfect. There are no mistakes, only punishments. And so it is the clan who is believed, not the relatives who don’t understand, the colleagues who know him, or the life story of the individual. In this war, innocent individuals are crushed and cataloged as side effects or listed among the probably guilty.

  On December 26, 2004, Dario Scherillo, a twenty-six-year-old, is riding his motorcycle when he’s shot in the face and chest and left to die in a puddle of his blood, which soaks his shirt completely. An innocent man. But he was from Casavatore, a town that has been chewed up by the conflict. For him there is still silence and incomprehension. No epigraph, no plaque, no remembrance. “When someone is killed by the Camorra, you never know,” an old man tells me as he crosses himself at the spot where Dario was killed. Not all blood is the same color. Dario’s is reddish purple and seems to still be flowing. The piles of sawdust have a hard time absorbing it all. After a bit a car takes advantage of the space and parks on top of the stain. Everything comes to an end. Everything gets covered over. Dario was killed to send a message to the town, a message of flesh sealed in an envelope of blood. As in Bosnia, Algeria, Somalia, as in any confused internal war, when it’s hard to understand which side you’re on, it’s enough to kill your neighbor, a dog, your friend, or your relative. The hint of kinship or physical resemblance is all it takes to become a target. It’s enough to walk down a certain street to immediately acquire an identity cast in lead. What matters is to concentrate as much pain, tragedy, and terror as possible, and the only objective is to show absolute strength, uncontested control, and the impossibility of opposing the real and ruling power. To the point that you get used to thinking the way they do, like those who might take offense at a gesture or a phrase. To save your life, to avoid touching the high-voltage line of revenge, you have to be careful, wary, silent. As I was leaving, as they were taking away Attilio Romanò, I started to understand. To understand why there is not a moment in which my mother does not look at me with anxiety, unable to fathom why I don’t leave, run away, why I keep living in this hell. I tried to recall how many have fallen, how many have been killed since the day I was born.

  You don’t need to count the dead to understand the business of the Camorra. The dead are the least revealing element of the Camorra’s real power, but they are the most visible trace, what sparks a gut reaction. I start counting: 100 deaths in 1979, 140 in 1980, 110 in 1981, 264 in 1982, 204 in 1983, 155 in 1984, 107 in 1986, 127 in 1987, 168 in 1988, 228 in 1989, 222 in 1990, 223 in 1991, 160 in 1992, 120 in 1993, 115 in 1994, 148 in 1995, 147 in 1996, 130 in 1997, 132 in 1998, 91 in 1999, 118 in 2000, 80 in 2001, 63 in 2002, 83 in 2003, 142 in 2004, 90 in 2005.

  Since I was born, 3,600 deaths. The Camorra has killed more than the Sicilian Mafia, more than the ‘Ndrangheta, more than the Russian Mafia, more than the Albanian families, more than the total number of deaths by the ETA in Spain and the IRA in Ireland, more than the Red Brigades, the NAR,* and all the massacres committed by the government in Italy. The Camorra has killed the most. Imagine a map of the world, the sort you see in newspapers such as Le Monde Diplomatique, which marks places of conflict around the globe with a little flame. Kurdistan, Sudan, Kosovo, East Timor. Your eye is drawn to the south of Italy, to the flesh that piles up with every war connected to the Camorra, the Mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, and the Basilischi in Lucania. But there’s no little flame, no sign of a conflict. This is the heart of Europe. This is where the majority of the country’s economy takes shape. It doesn’t much matter what the strategies for extraction are. What matters is that the cannon fodder remain mired in the outskirts, trapped in tangles of cement and trash, in the black-market factories and cocaine warehouses. And that no one notice them, that it all seem like a war among gangs, a beggars’ war. Then you understand the way your friends who have emigrated, who have gone off to Milan or Padua, smile sarcastically at you, wo
ndering whom you have become. They look at you from head to toe, try to size you up, figure out if you are a chiachiello or a bbuono. A failure or a Camorrista. You know which direction you chose at the fork in the road, which path you’re on, and you don’t see anything good at the end.

  I went home, but I couldn’t sit still. I went out again and started to run, faster and faster, my knees gyrating, my heels drumming my buttocks, my arms flailing like a puppet’s. My heart was pounding, my tongue and teeth were drowning in saliva. I could feel the blood swelling the veins in my neck, flooding my chest, I was out of breath, inhaling all the air I could and then exhaling hard, like a bull. I started running again, my hands frozen, my face on fire, my eyes closed. I felt I had absorbed all the blood I had seen on the ground, that all the blood that had gushed out, as if from a broken faucet, was now pumping through my body.

  I ran to the shore and climbed on the rocks. Haze mixed with the darkness so I couldn’t even make out the lights of the ships crossing the gulf. The water rippled, the waves were beginning to pick up. It seemed as if they were reluctant to touch the mire of the battleground, but they didn’t return to the distant maelstrom of the open sea. They were immobile, stubbornly resisting, impossibly still, clinging to their foamy crests, as if no longer sure where the sea ends.

  Reporters start arriving a few weeks later. All of a sudden, the Camorra has come back to life in the region they believed hosted nothing but gangs and purse-snatchers. Within a few hours Secondigliano becomes the center of attention. Special correspondents, press photographers from the most important news agencies, even a permanent BBC garrison. Some kids have their picture taken next to a cameraman who’s carrying a video camera with the CNN logo. “Just like the ones for Saddam,” the kids in Scampia say with a giggle. The cameras make them feel they’ve been transported to the earth’s center of gravity, and the media attention seems to grant these places a real existence for the first time. After twenty years of neglect, the Secondigliano massacre focuses attention on the Camorra. The war kills quickly, out of respect for the reporters. Dozens and dozens of victims are accumulated in less than a month; it seems done on purpose so that every correspondent has his own death. Success all around. Herds of interns are sent to get experience. Microphones and cameras sprout all over the place to interview drug dealers and capture the forbidding, angular profile of the Vele projects. A few interns even manage to interview some alleged pushers, shooting them from behind. Almost everyone gives some change to the heroin addicts who mumble their stories. Two young female reporters have their camera operator photograph them in front of a burned-out car. A souvenir from their first little war as reporters. A French journalist calls me to ask if he should wear a bulletproof vest to go photograph Cosimo Di Lauro’s villa. Media crews drive around shooting, as if they were exploring a forest where everything has been transformed into a stage set. Other journalists travel with bodyguards. The worst way of reporting on Secondigliano is to be escorted by the police. These are not inaccessible areas; the strength of the local drug markets is that they guarantee complete accessibility to everyone. The journalists who go around with bodyguards will only be able to record what they can already find printed by any news agency. Like sitting in front of their office computers, except that they’re moving.

  More than a hundred reporters in less than two weeks. All of a sudden Europe’s drug market exists. Even the police are swamped with requests; everyone wants to take part in an operation, see at least one pusher arrested, one house searched. Everyone wants to insert a few images of confiscated handcuffs and machine guns into their fifteen-minute broadcast. A lot of officers start liberating themselves of the hordes of reporters and budding investigative journalists by having them photograph plainclothes policemen who pose as pushers. A way to give them what they want without losing too much time. The worst possible story in the shortest possible time. The worst of the worst, the horror of horrors. Broadcast the tragedy, the blood and guts, the submachine-gun shots, the crushed skulls and burned flesh. The worst they tell is merely the waste of the worst. Many reporters think they have found the ghetto of Europe in Secondigliano, a place of total misery. But if they didn’t run away, they would realize that they are looking at the pillars of the economy, the hidden mine, the darkness where the beating heart of the market gets its energy.

  The television reporters made the most incredible proposals. Some asked me to wear a tiny video camera on my ear as I go about certain streets—”you know which ones”—following “you know who.” They dreamed of making Scampia into a reality show, with footage of a homicide or drug deal. One scriptwriter handed me a story of blood and death, where the devil of the new century is conceived in Terzo Mondo. I got a free dinner every evening for a month from the television crews who presented me with absurd proposals, trying to gather information. During the feud a veritable industry of guides, official interpreters, informers, and Indian scouts grew up among the Camorra reserves in Secondigliano and Scampia. Many kids developed a special technique. They wandered over to the area where the reporters were gathered, pretending to be pushers or lookouts, and as soon as someone got up the courage to approach them, they announced their availability to talk, explain, be photographed. They stated their fees right away. Fifty euros for their story, 100 euros for a tour of an open-air drug market, 200 to get inside the house of one of the dealers who lives in the Vele projects.

  To understand the cycle of gold you can’t just look at the nugget or the mine. You have to start in Secondigliano and follow the tracks of the clans’ empires. The Camorra wars put the towns ruled by the clans on the map: the Campania hinterland, the land of poverty, territories that some call the Italian Far West, where, according to one grim legend, there are more submachine guns than forks. But beyond the violence that erupts in certain moments, these areas produce an exponential wealth, of which they only see the distant shimmer. But none of this gets reported. Media coverage is only concerned with the aesthetics of the Neapolitan slums.

  On January 29, Vincenzo De Gennaro is killed. On January 31, they kill Vittorio Bevilacqua in a delicatessen. On February 1, Giovanni Orabona, Giuseppe Pizzone, and Antonio Patrizio are slain. They use an ancient yet effective strategy: the killers pose as policemen. Giovanni Orabona was the twenty-three-year-old forward on the Real Casavatore soccer team. They were taking a walk when a car with a siren stopped them. Two men with police badges got out. The men didn’t try to flee or put up resistance. They knew how to behave, so they let themselves be handcuffed and loaded into the car. But the car stopped suddenly and they were made to get out. They might not have understood right away, but everything became clear at the sight of the guns. It was an ambush. These were Spaniards, not policemen. Members of the rebel group. Two of them were shot in the head as they knelt, dying instantly. The third, judging from the evidence at the scene, tried to escape, but, hands tied behind his back and only his head to help him balance, he fell, got up, and fell again. The killers caught him and stuck an automatic in his mouth. When his body was found, his teeth were broken. Instinctively he’d tried to bite the barrel, to break it off.

  On February 27 word arrives from Barcelona that Raffaele Amato has been arrested. He’d been playing blackjack in a casino, trying to divest himself of some cash. The Di Lauros had only managed to hit his cousin Rosario, burning down his house. According to the accusations of the Neapolitan magistracy, Amato was the charismatic leader of the Spaniards. He’d grown up right on Via Cupa dell’Arco, the same street as Paolo Di Lauro and his family. Amato became an important manager when he started mediating narcotraffic and handling wager investments. According to pentiti and anti-Mafia investigations, he enjoyed unlimited credit with the international traffickers and imported tons of cocaine. When police in ski masks threw him facedown on the floor, it was not the first hiatus in his career. Raffaele Amato had been arrested in a hotel in Casandrino together with another lieutenant and a big Albanian trafficker who was aided by an interpret
er par excellence, the nephew of a government minister.

  On February 5, it’s Angelo Romano’s turn. On March 3, Davide Chiarolanza is killed in Melito. He knew his killers and might even have had an appointment with them. He was done in as he tried to flee to his car. But it is not the courts or the carabinieri and police who can put an end to the feud. The forces of law and order can slow things down by taking out Camorristi, but they are unable to stop the violence. While the press chases after the crime reports, tripping over interpretations and evaluations, a Neapolitan newspaper comes out with news of a pact between the Spaniards and the Di Lauros, a temporary peace mediated by the Licciardi clan. The other Secondigliano clans, as well as the other Camorra cartels, are eager for an agreement; they fear that the conflict will break the silence concerning their power. It is crucial that the legal universe return to ignoring the world of criminal accumulation. The pact is not written overnight by some charismatic boss in a jail cell, not circulated secretly, but published in an article by Simone Di Meo in the Cronache di Napoli on June 27, 2005. On the newsstands for all to read and understand. Here are the points of the published agreement: