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

by Roberto Saviano

  I know and I can prove it. Successful Italian businessmen come from cement. They’re actually a part of the cement cycle. I know that before transforming themselves into fashion-models, managers, financial sharks, and owners of newspapers and yachts, before all this and under all this lies cement, subcontractors, sand, crushed stone, vans crammed with men who work all night and disappear in the morning, rotten scaffolding, and bogus insurance. The driving force of the Italian economy rests on the thickness of the walls. The constitution should be amended to say that it is founded on cement. Builders are the founding fathers of Italy, not Ferruccio Parri, Luigi Einaudi, Pietro Nenni, or Junio Valerio Borghese. It was the real estate speculators who with their cement works, contracts, buildings, and newspapers pulled Italy out of the mud of financial scandals.

  The building trade is a turning point for affiliates. After working as a killer, extortionist, or lookout, you end up in construction or trash collecting. Rather than showing films and giving lectures at school, it would be interesting to take new affiliates for a tour of construction sites to show them the future that awaits them. If prison and death spare them, that’s where they’ll end up, spitting blood and lime. While the white-collar elite the bosses believe they control are living the good life, others are dying of work. All the time. The speed of construction, the need to save on every form of safety and every sort of schedule. Inhuman shifts, nine, twelve hours a day, Saturdays and Sundays included. A hundred euros a week, plus 50 more for every ten hours of Sunday or evening overtime. The younger ones even do fifteen hours, maybe by snorting cocaine. When someone dies on a building site, a tried-and-true mechanism goes into effect. The dead body is taken away and a car accident is faked. They put the body in a car and push it off a cliff or a precipice, setting it on fire first. The insurance money is given to the family as severance. It is not unusual for the people staging the accident to also be hurt, at times seriously, especially when they have to crash a car into a wall before setting it on fire. When the boss is present, everything works smoothly. But when he’s not, the workers often panic. And so they take the wounded guy, the near cadaver, and leave him on the side of a road leading to the hospital. They drive him there, place him carefully on the pavement, and flee. When they are feeling really scrupulous, they call an ambulance. Whoever takes part in the disappearance or abandonment of a near cadaver knows that his coworkers would do the same to him if it were his body that had been smashed up or run through. You know for sure that, in a dangerous situation, the person at your side will first help you, but then finish you off to rid himself of you. And so there’s a sort of wariness on the site. The person next to you could be your executioner, or you his. He won’t make you suffer, but he’ll leave you to die alone on the sidewalk or burn you in a car. Every builder knows that’s how it works. And the companies in the south provide better guarantees. They get the job done and then disappear; they fix every mess without causing an uproar. I know and I can prove it. And the proofs have a name. In seven months fifteen construction workers died in building sites north of Naples. They fell or ended up under a power shovel or were crushed by a crane run by workers worn out from long shifts. Work has to be quick, even if it goes on for years; subcontractors have to make way for the next lot. Make your money, call in your debts, and move on. More than 40 percent of the firms operating in Italy are from the south. From Aversa, Naples, and Salerno. Empires can still be born in the south, the links of the economy can be strengthened, and the balance of the original accumulation is still incomplete. They should hang WELCOME signs all over the south, from Puglia to Calabria, for the businessmen who want to throw themselves into the cement arena and be invited into the inner circles in Milan and Rome a few years hence. A WELCOME sign of good luck, since many come yet only a few escape the quicksand. I know. And I can prove it. And the new builders, bank and yacht owners, princes of gossip, and kings of whores hide their profits. Perhaps they still have a soul. They’re ashamed to declare where their earnings come from. In their model country, the USA, when a businessman becomes a top name in the financial world, when he has fame and success, he summons analysts and young economists to show off his skills and reveals the path he took to victory. Here, silence. Money is only money. And when asked about their success, the big businessmen from a land sickened with the Camorra respond shamelessly, “I bought at ten and sold at three hundred.” Someone said that living in the south is like living in paradise. All you have to do is stare at the sky and never look down. Ever. But it’s impossible. The expropriation of every perspective has even removed the lines of sight. Every perspective hits up against balconies, attics, mansards, apartments, intertwined buildings, knots of neighborhoods. Around here no one thinks something could fall from the sky. Around here you have to look down. Sink into the abyss. Because there is always another abyss in the abyss. And so when I tread up stairs and across rooms, or when I take the elevator, I can’t help but notice. Because I know. And it’s a perversion. And so when I find myself among the best, the really successful businessmen, I feel ill. Even though these men are elegant, speak quietly, and vote for leftist politicians. I smell the odor of lime and cement emanating from their socks, their Bulgari cuff links, and their bookshelves. I know. I know who built my town and who is building it still. I know that tonight a train will leave Reggio Calabria and at a quarter past midnight it will stop in Naples on its way to Milan. The train will be packed. And at the station the vans and dusty Punto automobiles will pick up the kids for the new construction sites. An emigration without a fixed point that no one will study or evaluate since it survives only in the footprints of ce-ment dust, nowhere else. I know what the real constitution of my day is, and the wealth of companies. I know how much of the blood of others is in every pillar. I know and I can prove it. I take no prisoners.

  *Gelli was master of the Propaganda Due or P2 Masonic Lodge, which was implicated in criminal activities. The lodge was closed by Masonic authorities in 1976, and Licio Gelli was expelled from Freemasonry.—Trans.

  *Pasolini’s famous denunciation of the Christian Democrats, printed on the front page of the Corriere della sera on November 14, 1974.—Trans.

  DON PEPPINO DIANA

  Whenever I think about the clan wars in Casal di Principe, San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and all the other territories they control from Parete to Formia, I always think about white sheets. Hanging from every balcony, railing, and window. White, all white. A cascade of pure white cloth was the angry display of mourning at Don Peppino Diana’s funeral in March 1994. I was sixteen. My aunt woke me as always that morning, but more roughly than usual, yanking the sheet I’d wrapped around me as if she were unwrapping a salami. I fell out of bed. My aunt didn’t say a word, but walked about noisily, as if she were venting all her irritation with her heels. She knotted the sheets so tightly to the balcony, not even a tornado would have torn them loose, and then threw open the windows, letting the voices from the street in and the noises of the house out. She even opened all the cupboards. I remember the waves of Boy Scouts; they had shed their usual, easygoing manner of well-behaved kids, and a deep rage seemed to trail from their peculiar blue and green scarves; for Don Peppino was one of them. It was the only time I ever saw Scouts so nervous, mindless of the forms of orderly conduct and composure that usually define their long marches. My memories of that day are spotty, like a Dalmatian’s fur. Don Peppino Diana’s story is strange; once you’ve heard it, it becomes part of you and you have to preserve it inside you somewhere— deep in your throat, tight in your fist, close to your heart, at the back of your eyes. An extraordinary story, unknown to most.

  Don Peppino had studied in Rome, and that’s where he should have stayed to make a career for himself. Far from here, far from his hometown and its dirty deals. But, like someone who can’t shake off a memory, a habit, or a smell, he suddenly decided to return to Casal di Principe. Or maybe like someone with a burning itch to do something, and who can find no peace until he does it, or
at least gives it a try. Don Peppino was the young priest of the Church of Saint Nicholas of Bari, a modern structure, the aesthetics of which seemed ideally suited to his sense of commitment. Unlike the other priests, who wore their gloomy authority along with their cassocks, he went around dressed in jeans. Don Peppino didn’t eavesdrop on family squabbles, chastise the men for their erotic escapades, or make the rounds comforting cuckolded women. He spontaneously transformed the role of the local priest, deciding to take an interest in the dynamics of power, and not merely its corollary suffering. He didn’t want merely to clean the wound but to understand the mechanisms of the metastasis, to prevent the cancer from spreading, to block the source of whatever was turning his home into a gold mine of capital with an abundance of cadavers. He even smoked a cigar in public every now and then. Anywhere else that might have seemed harmless, but around here priests tended to put on a show of depriving themselves of the superfluous, while indulging their lazy weaknesses behind closed doors. Don Peppino decided just to be himself—a guarantee of transparency in a land where faces must be ready to mime what they represent, aided by nicknames that pump their bodies full of the power they hope to suture onto their skin. Don Peppino was obsessed with action. He set up a welcome center to offer room and board to the first wave of African immigrants. It was important to welcome them to keep the clans from turning them into perfect soldiers— which is what eventually happened. He even contributed some of his own money from teaching to the project. Waiting for institutional backing can be such a slow and complicated ordeal that it becomes the biggest reason for doing nothing. As priest he had watched the succession of bosses, the elimination of Bardellino, the power of Sandokan and Cicciotto di Mezzanotte, the massacres among Bardellino’s men and the Casalesi, and then among the leading businessmen.

  A famous episode from that time had involved a parade through the streets of town. It was about six in the evening when ten or so cars formed a sort of carousel under their enemies’ windows: Schiavone’s victorious men challenging the opposition. I was just a kid, but my cousins swear they saw them with their own eyes, driving slowly through the streets of San Cipriano, Casapesenna, and Casal di Principe, windows down, men straddling the doors, one leg in the car and the other dangling out. Faces unmasked, each holding an assault rifle. The cavalcade proceeded slowly, gathering more affiliates as it went; they came out of their apartments carrying rifles and semi-automatics and fell in behind the cars. A full-blown, public, armed demonstration. They stopped in front of the houses of their enemies, who had dared to challenge their supremacy.

  “Come out, you shits! Come out … if you have the balls!”

  The parade went on for at least an hour, continuing undisturbed as shutters on shops and bars were quickly lowered. For two days there was a complete cease-fire. No one went out, not even to buy bread. Don Peppino realized it was time to devise a plan of resistance. Time to openly delineate a path to follow. No more speaking out solo; it was time to organize a protest and coordinate a new level of local church engagement. He wrote a surprising document that was signed by all the Casal di Principe priests: a religious, Christian text with a tone of despairing human dignity that made his words universal and allowed them to reach beyond the boundaries of religion, causing the bosses to tremble; they feared the priest’s words more than an anti-Mafia division blitz, more than the impounding of their quarries and concrete mixers, more than the wiretaps that can trace a command to kill. It was a lively text with a romantically powerful title: “For love of my people I will not keep silent.” Don Peppino distributed the document on Christmas Day. He did not post it on his church doors; he wasn’t a Martin Luther out to reform the Roman Church. Don Peppino had other things to think about: to try to understand how to create a path that could sever the sinews of power and cripple the Camorra clans’ economic and criminal authority.

  Don Peppino dug a path in the surface of the word and eroded their power with syntax; spoken publicly and clearly, words could still do such things. He lacked the intellectual apathy of those who believe that words have exhausted all their resources and merely fill the space between our ears. The word as concreteness, an aggregate of atoms that intervenes in the mechanisms of things, like mortar or a pickax. Don Peppino searched for the right word to dump like a bucket of water on the dirty looks he received. Around here keeping your mouth shut is not the simple, silent omertà of lowered hats and eyes. Here the prevailing attitude is “It’s not my problem.” But that’s not all. The decision to withdraw is the actual vote that’s cast in the election of the state of things. The word becomes a shout. A loud and piercing cry hurled at bulletproof glass in hopes of making it shatter.

  We are powerless seeing so many families grieve as their sons miserably end up either victims or perpetrators of Camorra organizations … The Camorra today is a form of terrorism that arouses fear and imposes its own laws in an attempt to become an endemic element of Campania society. Weapons in hand, the Camorristi violently impose unacceptable rules: extortions that have turned our region into subsidized areas with no potential on their own for development; bribes of 20 percent or more on construction projects, which would discourage the most reckless businessman; illicit traffic in narcotics, whose use creates gangs of marginalized youngsters and unskilled workers at the beck and call of criminal organizations; clashes among factions that descend like a ruinous plague on the families of our region; negative examples for the entire teenage population, veritable laboratories of violence and organized crime.

  Don Peppino’s aim was to remind people that, in the face of clan power, it was important not to confine their reactions to the silence of the confessional. He evoked the voices of the prophets to argue urgently that taking to the streets, reporting, and reacting were essential to give some sense to their lives.

  Our prophetic commitment to speak out must not and cannot falter; God calls us to be prophets.

  The Prophet is a watchman: he sees injustice and speaks out against it, recalling God’s original command (Ezekiel 3:16–19);

  The Prophet remembers the past and uses it to gather up new things in the present (Isaiah 43);

  The Prophet invites us to live, and himself lives in solidarity and suffering (Genesis 8:18–22);

  The Prophet gives priority to the life of justice (Jeremiah 22:3; Isaiah 58).

  We ask the priests—our shepherds and brethren—to speak clearly during the homilies and in all those occasions that require courageous witness. We ask the Church not to renounce its “prophetic” role so that the means for speaking out and declaring will result in the ability to create a new conscience under the sign of justice, an ethical and social solidarity.