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

by Roberto Saviano

  Luigi Diana’s unexpected confession increased the tension. According to a local paper, the pentito declared that Bidognetti was responsible for Schiavone’s first arrest, that he was the one who had collaborated with the carabinieri, revealing the boss’s hiding place in France. The hit squads were gearing up and the carabinieri were ready to collect the dead bodies. But Sandokan himself called a halt to the massacre with a public gesture. Despite strict prison rules, he managed to send an open letter to a local paper, which was printed on the front page on September 21, 2005. The boss, like a successful manager, resolved the conflict by contradicting the pentito, a relative of whose was killed just hours after his declaration.

  “It has been proven that the tip-off, from the person who squealed, thus permitting my arrest in France, was given by Carmine Schiavone, and not by Cicciotto Bidognetti. The truth is that the individual who goes by the name of the pentito Luigi Diana speaks lies and wants to sow discord for his own personal gain.”

  Sandokan also “advises” the newspaper editor to report the news properly:

  “I beg you to not let yourself be exploited by this mercenary and very compromised traitor, and not to fall into the error of turning your newspaper into a scandal-mongering rag that would inevitably lose credibility, as your competitor has done. I have not renewed my subscription to that paper, and many other people will follow suit. They, like me, would not buy such a manipulated newspaper.”

  Sandokan thus discredits the rival publication and officially elects the one to whom he sent his letter as his new interlocutor.

  “I won’t even bother to comment on the fact that your competitor is accustomed to writing falsehoods. The undersigned is like water from a spring: completely transparent!”

  Sandokan urged his men to switch papers. Requests for subscriptions to the boss’s new choice and cancellations for the old one arrived from dozens of prisons throughout Italy. The boss closed his letter of peace with Bidognetti as follows:

  “Life always asks you what you are able to face. And it has asked these so-called pentiti to face the mud. Like pigs!”

  The Casalesi cartel was not defeated. On the contrary, it even seemed reinvigorated. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, the cartel is now run by a dyarchy: Antonio Iovine, known as ‘o ninno or “nursing baby” because he became a clan leader when he was still a kid, and Michele Zagaria, the manager boss of Casapesenna, called capastorta—crooked head—due to the irregularity of his face, even though it seems he now calls himself Manera. Both bosses have been in hiding for years and are on the minister of the interior’s list of most dangerous Italian fugitives. Untraceable, yet they are undoubtedly in their hometowns. No boss can leave his roots for too long, because all his power is based on them, and it’s there that it can all collapse.

  A mere handful of miles, minuscule towns, knots of little lanes, farms lost in the countryside—and yet it’s impossible to catch them. But they’re here. They move along international routes, but they always go home and are here most of the year. Everyone knows it. And yet they can’t nab them. Their system of cover is so efficient that it prevents their arrest. Their families and relatives continue to live in their villas. Antonio Iovine’s villa in San Cipriano is in art nouveau style, whereas Michele Zagaria’s vast complex, between San Cipriano and Casapesenna, has a glass cupola to allow the sunlight to reach an enormous tree that dominates the living room. The Zagaria family owns dozens of satellite companies throughout Italy and—according to the Naples DDA judges—the largest Italian earthmoving business. The most powerful of all. An economic supremacy that is born not of direct criminal activity but of the ability to balance licit and illicit capital.

  These firms manage to be extremely competitive. They have full-scale criminal colonies in Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Veneto, where anti-Mafia controls and certification are less strict and thus allow for the transfer of whole branches of a company. At first the Casalesi demanded protection money from Campania businessmen working in the north, but they now manage the market directly. They control most of the construction business around Modena and Arezzo, importing a workforce that is predominantly from Caserta.

  Current investigations reveal that construction companies connected to the Casalesi clan have infiltrated the TAV or high-speed-train works in the north, just as they have done in the south. A July 1995 investigation coordinated by Judge Franco Imposimato revealed that the large companies that had won bids for the Naples-Rome leg of the TAV then subcontracted the work to Edilsud, a company connected to none other than Michele Zagaria, as well as to dozens of other companies linked with the Casalese cartel. A deal that yielded about 5 billion euros.

  Investigations show that the Zagaria clan had already reached an agreement with the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta about their firms’ participation in the bidding in the event that the TAV were to get as far south as Reggio Calabria. The Casalesi were ready, as they are now. According to recent Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s investigations, the Casapesenna rib of the organization has infiltrated a series of public works projects in Umbria connected to reconstruction activities after the 1997 earthquake. The Camorra companies in the Aversa area can dominate every step of every large contract and every construction site. Rental equipment, earth removal, transportation, materials, and manpower.

  The Aversa-area firms are ready to intervene: they are organized, economical, fast, and efficient. Officially there are 517 construction companies in Casal di Principe. A great many of them are direct emanations of the clans, and there are hundreds more in the area, an army ready to cement over anything. The clans have not blocked development in the area, but rather rerouted the benefits into their pockets. In the past five years, veritable commercial thrones of cement have been built in just a few square miles: one of the largest movie theater complexes in Italy in Marcianise; the largest shopping center in southern Italy in Teverola; and the largest shopping center in Europe in Marcianise—all within a region with extremely high unemployment that is continually hemorrhaging emigrants. Enormous commercial complexes. Rather than nonplaces, as the ethnologist Marc Augé would have defined them, they seem to be starting places. Supermarkets where the paper money from everything bought and consumed baptizes capital that would otherwise not find a specific, legitimate origin. Places that provide the legal origin of money. The more shopping centers that go up, the more new construction sites, the more merchandise that arrives, the more suppliers who work, the more shipments that arrive, the faster the money will be able to cross from the jagged confines of illegal territories into legal ones.

  The clans benefited from the structural development of the area, and they’re also ready to collect the material rewards. They anxiously await the inauguration of major projects: the subway in Aversa and the airport in Grazzanise, one of the biggest in Europe, to be built near the farms that once belonged to Cicciariello and Sandokan.

  The Casalesi have distributed their goods throughout the region. Just the real estate assets seized by the Naples DDA in the last few years amount to 750 million euros. The lists are frightening. In the Spartacus trial alone, 199 buildings, 52 pieces of property, 14 companies, 12 automobiles, and 3 boats were confiscated. Over the years, according to a 1996 trial, Schiavone and his trusted men have seen the seizure of assets worth 230 million euros: companies, villas, lands, buildings, and powerful automobiles, including the Jaguar in which Sandokan was found at the time of his first arrest. Confiscations that would have destroyed any company, losses that would have ruined any businessman, economic blows that would have capsized any firm. Anyone but the Casalesi cartel. Every time I read about the seizure of property, every time I see the lists of assets the DDA has confiscated from the bosses, I feel depressed and exhausted; everywhere I turn, everything seems to be theirs. Everything. Land, buffalos, farms, quarries, garages, dairies, hotels, and restaurants. A sort of Camorra omnipotence. I can’t see anything that doesn’t belong to them.

  One businessman more
than every other possessed this absolute power of owning everything: Dante Passarelli from Casal di Principe. He was arrested years ago for Camorra ties, accused of being the Casalesi clan treasurer. The prosecution asked for a sentence of eight years. Passarelli was not simply one of the countless businessmen who did deals with and through the clans. Passarelli was The Businessman, the number one, the closest, the most trustworthy. He had run a highly successful delicatessen, and according to the charges, his commercial talents were what led to his being chosen to handle part of the clan’s investments. He became a wholesaler and then an industrialist, a pasta manufacturer and a contractor, had his hand in sugar and catering, even in the soccer business. According to an estimate by the DIA, the anti-Mafia directorate, Dante Passarelli’s assets were worth between 300 and 400 million euros. A good part of that wealth was the fruit of holdings and significant shares in the agricultural-alimentary sector. He owned Ipam, one of the most important Italian sugar refineries. His company Passarelli Dante and Sons, which was awarded the contract for the cafeteria hospitals in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, Capua, and Sessa Aurunca, was the leader in meal distribution. He owned hundreds of apartments, and commercial and industrial buildings. At the time of his arrest on December 5, 1995, assets subject to seizure included: nine buildings in Villa Literno; an apartment in Santa Maria Capua Vetere; another in Pinetamare; a building in Casal di Principe; lands in Castelvolturno, Casal di Principe, Villa Literno, and Cancello Arnone; and La Balzana, an agricultural complex in Santa Maria La Fossa composed of 209 hectares of land and 40 rural buildings. As well as the feather in his cap: Anfra III, a luxury yacht with several cabins, parquet floors, and a whirlpool tub, docked in Gallipoli. Sandokan and his consort had taken a cruise of the Greek isles aboard Anfra III. Investigations were leading to the progressive confiscation of Dante Passarelli’s assets when in November 2004 he was found dead, having fallen from the balcony of one of his houses. His wife found the body—head split open, spine shattered. The case is still open. It remains unclear whether it was an accident or a very familiar, anonymous hand that caused him to fall from an unfinished balcony. With his death, all the assets that were to go to the state reverted to the family. Passarelli’s destiny was that of a talented businessman who, thanks to the clan, handled sums he never would have seen otherwise, and he caused them to multiply exponentially. Then there was a snag—a judicial investigation—and that wealth was confiscated. Just as his skill as a company man brought him an empire, so the seizures brought him death. The clans do not allow for mistakes. When during a trial it was made known to Sandokan that Dante Passarelli was dead, the boss serenely replied, “May his soul rest in peace.”

  The clans’ power remained the power of cement. It was at the construction sites that I could feel—physically, in my gut—all their might. I had worked on construction sites for several summers; to get a job mixing cement, all I had to do was let the contractor know where I was from. Campania provided the best builders in all of Italy—the most skilled, the fastest, cheapest, the least pains in the ass. It’s killer work, and I have never learned to do it particularly well. A trade that might yield a considerable sum only if you are prepared to gamble all your strength, all your muscles, and all your energy. To work in all kinds of weather, wearing sometimes a ski mask, sometimes just your underwear. Getting my hands and nose near cement was the only way I knew to understand what power—real power— was built on.

  It was when Francesco Iacomino died that I truly understood the workings of the building trade. He was thirty-three when they found him, in his overalls, on the ground at the intersection of Via Quattro Orologi and Via Gabriele D’Annunzio in Ercolano. He had fallen from a scaffolding. After the accident everyone fled, even the draftsman. No one called an ambulance for fear that it would arrive before they got away. So they left him lying in the street, still alive, spitting blood from his lungs. The news of yet another death, one of the three hundred construction workers who die every year on Italy’s building sites, pierced my insides. Iacomino’s death sparked in me a rage that was more like an asthma attack than nervous excitement. I wanted to be like the protagonist in Luciano Bianciardi’s 1962 novel, La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life), who goes to Milan to blow up the Pirelli building, his way of avenging the forty-eight miners from Ribolla who were killed in May 1954 in an explosion in the “Camorra well,” so called because of the dreadful working conditions. Maybe I too had to choose a building—the building—to blow up. But before I could slip into the schizophrenia of the terrorist, Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “I Know” started echoing in my ears.* Over and over, tormenting me like a jingle. And so instead of searching for buildings to blow sky-high, I went to Casarsa, to Pasolini’s tomb. I went alone, even if this is one of those things you should do with others—with a group of devoted readers, or a girlfriend to make it less pathetic. But I stubbornly went alone.

  Casarsa is a nice place, one of those places where it’s easy to think of someone wanting to get by as a writer, and where, on the other hand, it’s hard to think of someone leaving in order to descend into hell. I didn’t go to Pasolini’s tomb to pay him tribute or even to celebrate. Pier Paolo Pasolini. That name—three in one, as the poet Giorgio Caproni used to say—is neither my secular saint nor a literary Christ. I felt like finding a place where it was still possible to reflect without shame on the possibility of the word. The possibility of writing about the mechanisms of power, beyond the stories and details. To reflect on whether it is still possible to name names, one by one, to point out the faces, strip the bodies of their crimes, and reveal them as elements of the architecture of authority. To reflect on whether it is still possible to sniff out, like truffle pigs, the dynamics of the real, the affirmation of power, without metaphors, without mediation, with nothing but the cutting edge of the word.

  I took the train from Naples to Pordenone, an incredibly slow train with a remarkably eloquent name—Marco Polo—for the distance it had to travel. An enormous distance seems to separate Friuli from Campania. I left Naples at ten to eight and arrived in Friuli at twenty past seven the next day, having endured a night of relentless cold that kept me from sleeping. From Pordenone I took a bus to Casarsa. When I got off, I started walking with my head down, like someone who knows where he’s going and can recognize the way by looking at the tips of his shoes. Obviously I got lost. But after wandering about aimlessly I found the cemetery on Via Valvasone where Pasolini is buried with all his family. On the left, just past the entrance, was an empty flowerbed. I went over to that square of earth, in the middle of which were two small, white marble slabs, and saw his tomb. “Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975).” Next to it, a bit farther on, was that of his mother. I felt less alone. I began to mumble my rage, fists clenched so tight that my fingernails pierced my palms. I began to articulate my own “I Know,” the “I Know” of my day.

  I know and I can prove it. I know how economies originate and where their smell comes from. The smell of success and victory. I know what sweats of profit. I know. And the truth of the word takes no prisoners because it devours everything and turns everything into evidence. It doesn’t need to drag in cross-checks or launch investigations. It observes, considers, looks, listens. It knows. It does not condemn to prison and the witnesses do not retract their statements. No one repents. I know and I can prove it. I know where the pages of the economy manuals vanish, their fractals mutating into materials, things, iron, time, and contracts. I know. The proofs are not concealed in some flash drive buried underground. I don’t have compromising videos hidden in a garage in some inaccessible mountain village. Nor do I possess copies of secret service documents. The proofs are irrefutable because they are partial, recorded with my eyes, recounted with words, and tempered with emotions that have echoed off iron and wood. I see, hear, look, talk, and in this way I testify, an ugly word that can still be useful when it whispers, “It’s not true,” in the ear of those who listen to the rhyming lullabies of power. The truth is partial; after
all, if it could be reduced to an objective formula, it would be chemistry. I know and I can prove it. And so I tell. About these truths.

  I always try to quiet the anxiety that overcomes me every time I walk, every time I climb the stairs, take the elevator, or wipe my feet on a doormat and cross a threshold. I cannot stop myself from constantly brooding over how these buildings and houses are built. And when someone is willing to listen, it’s difficult for me not to recount how floor after floor gets slapped together. It’s not a sense of universal guilt that comes over me, nor a moral redemption for those who have been canceled from historical memory. Instead I try to cast off the Brechtian mechanism that comes naturally to me, of thinking about the hands and feet of history. In other words, to think more about the constantly empty plates that led to the storming of the Bastille than about the proclamations of Girondists and Jacobins. I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s a bad habit. Like someone in front of a Vermeer painting who, instead of contemplating the portrait, thinks about who mixed the colors, stretched the canvas, and made the pearl earrings. A real perversion. When I see a flight of stairs, I simply cannot forget how the cement cycle works, and a wall of windows can’t keep me from thinking about how the scaffolding was put up. I can’t pretend not to think about it. I can’t see the wall without thinking about the trowel and mortar. Maybe it’s just that people born at certain meridians have a particular, unique relationship with certain substances. Materials are not perceived in the same way everywhere. I believe that in Qatar the smell of petroleum and gas evokes sensations of mansions, sunglasses, and limousines. The same acid smell of fossil fuel in Minsk evokes darkened faces, gas leaks, and smoking cities, whereas in Belgium it calls up the garlic Italians use and the onions of the North Africans. The same thing happens with cement in the south of Italy. Cement. Southern Italy’s crude oil. Cement gives birth to everything. Every economic empire that arises in the south passes through the construction business: bids, contracts, quarries, cement, components, bricks, scaffolding, workers. These are the Italian businessman’s armaments. If his empire’s feet are not set in cement he hasn’t got a chance. Cement’s the simplest way to make money as fast as possible, to earn trust, hire people in time for an election, pay out salaries, accumulate investment capital, and stamp your face on the facades of the buildings you put up. The builder’s skills are those of the mediator and the predator. He possesses the infinite patience of a bureaucrat in compiling documents, enduring interminable delays, waiting for authorizations that come slowly, like the dripping of a stalactite. He’s like a bird of prey who flies over land no one else notices, snapping it up for a few pennies, then holds on to it until every inch, every hole, can be resold for astronomical amounts. The predatory businessman knows how to use his beak and claws. And Italian banks seem made for the builders; they know to grant the builder maximum credit. And if he really has no credit and the houses he will build are not enough of a guarantee, some good friend will always back him. The concreteness of cement and brick is the only real materiality that Italian banks recognize. Bank directors think that research, laboratories, agriculture, and crafts are vaporous terrain, ethereal, and devoid of gravity. Rooms, floors, tiles, phone jacks and electrical outlets—these are the only forms of concreteness they recognize. I know and I can prove it. I know how half of Italy has been built. More than half. I am familiar with the hands, the fingers, the projects. And the sand. The sand that has constructed skyscrapers, neighborhoods, parks, and villas. No one in Castelvolturno can forget the endless rows of trucks that pillaged the Volturno River of its sand. Lines of trucks flanked by farmers who had never seen such mammoths of metal and rubber before. Farmers who had managed to stay on here, to survive instead of emigrating, watched as they carted it all away, right before their very eyes. Now that sand is in the walls of apartments in Abruzzo, in buildings in Varese, Asiago, and Genoa. Now it is no longer the river that flows to the sea, but the sea that flows into the river. Now they fish for sea bass in the Volturno, and there are no more farmers. Deprived of their lands, first they turned to raising buffalo, and then set up small construction companies, hiring the young Nigerians and South Africans who used to find seasonal employment on the farms. If they didn’t join up with the clans, they met an early death. I know and I can prove it. Extraction firms are authorized to remove small amounts, but they actually devour entire mountains and crumble hills. Kneaded into cement, the mountains and hills are all over the place now, from Tenerife to Sassuolo. The deportation of things has followed that of people. I met Don Salvatore in a trattoria in San Felice a Cancello. Once a master builder, now he was a walking corpse. He wasn’t more than fifty years old, but he looked eighty. He told me that he worked for ten years adding exhaust-fume dust to cement mixers. Companies connected to the clans use cement to hide waste, which is what allows them to come in with bids as low as if they were using Chinese labor. Now garages, walls, and stair landings are permeated by poison. Nothing will happen until a worker, some North African probably, inhales the dust and dies a few years later, blaming his ill luck for his cancer.