Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (2 page)

The first time I saw a Chinese vessel dock, I felt as if I were looking at the production of the whole world. I was unable to count the containers, to keep track of them all. It might seem absurd not to be able to put a number on things, but I kept losing count, the figures were too big and got mixed up in my head.

These days the merchandise unloaded in Naples is almost exclusively Chinese—1.6 million tons annually. Registered merchandise, that is. At least another million tons pass through without leaving a trace. According to the Italian Customs Agency, 60 percent of the goods arriving in Naples escape official customs inspection, 20 percent of the bills of entry go unchecked, and fifty thousand shipments are contraband, 99 percent of them from China—all for an estimated 200 million euros in evaded taxes each semester. The containers that need to disappear before being inspected are in the first row. Every container is duly numbered, but on many the numbers are identical. So one inspected container baptizes all the illegal ones with the same number. What gets unloaded on Monday can be for sale in Modena or Genoa or in the shop windows of Bonn or Munich by Thursday. Lots of merchandise on the Italian market is supposedly only in transit, but the magic of customs makes transit stationary. The grammar of merchandise has one syntax for documents and another for commerce.
In April 2005, the Antifraud unit of Italian Customs, which had by chance launched four separate operations nearly simultaneously, confiscated 24,000 pairs of jeans intended for the French market; 51,000 items from Bangladesh labeled “Made in Italy”; 450,000 figurines, puppets, Barbies, and Spider-men; and another 46,000 plastic toys—for a total value of approximately 36 million euros. Just a small serving of the economy that was making its way through the port of Naples in a few hours. And from the port to the world. On it goes, all day, every day. These slices of the economy are getting bigger and bigger, becoming enormous slabs of the commercial cash cow.

The port is detached from the city. An infected appendix, never quite degenerating into peritonitis, always there in the abdomen of the coastline. A desert hemmed in by water and earth, but which seems to belong to neither land nor sea. A grounded amphibian, a marine metamorphosis. A new formation created from the dirt, garbage, and odds and ends that the tide has carried ashore over the years. Ships empty their latrines and clean their holds, dripping yellow foam into the water; motorboats and yachts, their engines belching, tidy up by tossing everything into the garbage can that is the sea. The soggy mass forms a hard crust all along the coastline. The sun kindles the mirage of water, but the surface of the sea gleams like trash bags. Black ones. The gulf looks percolated, a giant tub of sludge. The wharf with its thousands of multicolored containers seems an un-crossable border: Naples is encircled by walls of merchandise. But the walls don’t defend the city; on the contrary, it’s the city that defends the walls. Yet there are no armies of longshoremen, no romantic riffraff at the port. One imagines it full of commotion, men coming and going, scars and incomprehensible languages, a frenzy of people. Instead, the silence of a mechanized factory reigns. There doesn’t seem to be anyone around anymore, and the containers, ships, and trucks seem animated by perpetual motion. A silent swiftness.

I used to go to the port to eat fish. Not that nearness to the sea means anything in terms of the quality of the restaurant. I’d find pumice stones, sand, even boiled seaweed in my food. The clams were fished up and tossed right into the pan. A guarantee of freshness, a Russian roulette of infection. But these days, with everyone resigned to the taste of farm-raised seafood, so squid tastes like chicken, you have to take risks if you want that indefinable sea flavor. And I was willing to take the risk. In a restaurant at the port, I asked about finding a place to rent.

“I don’t know of anything, the houses around here are disappearing. The Chinese are taking them …”

A big guy, but not as big as his voice, was holding court in the center of the room. He took a look at me and shouted, “There still might be something left!”

That was all he said. After we’d both finished our lunch, we made our way down the street that runs along the port. He didn’t need to tell me to follow him. We came to the atrium of a ghostly apartment house and went up to the fourth floor, to the last remaining student apartment. They were kicking everyone out to make room for emptiness. Nothing was supposed to be left in the apartments. No cabinets, beds, paintings, bedside tables—not even walls. Only space. Space for cartons, space for enormous cardboard wardrobes, space for merchandise.

I was assigned a room of sorts. More of a cubbyhole, just big enough for a bed and a wardrobe. There was no talk of monthly rent, utility bills, or a phone hookup. He introduced me to four guys, my housemates, and that was that. They explained that this was the only apartment in the building that was still occupied and that it served as lodging for Xian, the Chinese man in charge of “the palazzi,” the buildings. There was no rent to pay, but I was expected to work in the apartment-warehouses on the weekends. I’d gone looking for a room
and ended up with a job. In the morning we’d knock down walls, and in the evening we’d clean up the wreckage—chunks of cement and brick—collecting the rubble in ordinary trash bags. Knocking down a wall makes unexpected sounds, not of stones being struck but of crystal being swept off a table onto the floor. Every apartment became a storehouse devoid of walls. I still can’t figure out how the building where I worked remained standing. More than once we knowingly took out main walls. But the space was needed for the merchandise, and there’s no contest between saving walls and storing products.

The idea of cramming apartments full of boxes dawned on some Chinese merchants after the Naples Port Authority presented its security plan to a delegation of U.S. congressmen. The plan calls for the port to be divided into four areas: cruise ships, pleasure craft, commercial vessels, and containers, with an evaluation of the risks in each area. After the plan was made public, many Chinese businessmen decided that the way to keep the police from feeling they had to intervene, the newspapers from writing about it constantly, or TV crews from sneaking around in search of a juicy story was to engulf everything in total silence. A rise in costs was another reason for making the merchandise more inconspicuous. Having it disappear into rented warehouses in remote parts of the countryside, amid landfill and tobacco fields, would have meant a lot of additional tractor-trailer traffic. This way, no more than ten vans, stuffed to the gills with boxes, go in and out of the port daily. Just a short trip and they’re in the garages of the apartment houses facing the port. In and out, that’s all it takes.

Nonexistent, imperceptible movements lost in the everyday traffic. Apartments rented. Gutted. Garage walls removed to make one continuous space. Cellars packed floor to ceiling with merchandise. Not one owner dared complain. Xian had paid them all: rent and compensation for unauthorized demolition. Thousands of boxes brought up in the elevator, which was rebuilt to move freight. A steel cage with tracks and a continuously moving platform. The work was concentrated
in a few hours, and the choice of merchandise was not accidental. I happened to be unloading during the first days of July. The pay is good, but it’s hard work if you aren’t used to it. It was hot and humid, but no one dared ask about air-conditioning. No one. And not out of fear of punishment or because of cultural norms of obedience and submission. The people unloading came from every corner of the globe: Ghana, Ivory Coast, China, and Albania, as well as Naples, Calabria, and Lucania. No one asked because everyone understood that since merchandise doesn’t suffer from the heat, there was no reason to waste money on air-conditioning.

We stacked boxes of jackets, raincoats, Windbreakers, cotton sweaters, and umbrellas. It seemed a strange choice in the height of summer to be stocking up on fall clothing instead of bathing suits, sundresses, and flip-flops. Unlike the warehouses for stockpiling merchandise, these storage apartments were for items that would be put on the market right away. And the Chinese businessmen had forecast a cloudy August. I’ve never forgotten John Maynard Keynes’s lesson on the concept of marginal value: how, for example, the price of a bottle of water varies depending on whether it is in the desert or near a waterfall. That summer Italian enterprises were offering bottles by the falls while Chinese entrepreneurs were building fountains in the desert.

A few days after I’d started working, Xian spent the night at the apartment. He spoke perfect Italian, with a soft
r
that sounded more like a v. Like the impoverished aristocrats Totò imitates in his films. Xian Zhu had been rebaptized Nino. In Naples, nearly all the Chinese who have dealings with locals take Neapolitan names. It’s now such common practice that it’s no longer surprising to hear a Chinese introduce himself as Tonino, Nino, Pino, or Pasquale. Nino Xian didn’t sleep; instead, he spent the night sitting at the kitchen table making phone calls, one eye on the TV. I’d lain down on my bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. Xian’s voice never let up, his tongue like a machine gun, firing through his teeth. He spoke without inhaling, an asphyxiation
of words. His bodyguards’ flatulence saturated the house with a sickly sweet smell and permeated my room as well. It wasn’t just the stench that disgusted me, but the images it evoked. Spring rolls putrefying in their stomachs and Cantonese rice steeped in gastric juices. The other tenants were used to it. Once their doors were closed the only thing that existed for them was sleep. But for me nothing existed except what was going on outside my door. So I went and sat in the kitchen. Communal space. And therefore also partly mine; at least in theory. Xian stopped talking and started cooking. Fried chicken. All sorts of questions came to mind, clichés I wanted to peel away. I started talking about the Triad, the Chinese Mafia. Xian kept on frying. I wanted to ask him for details, even if only symbolic ones—I certainly didn’t expect a confession about his affiliation. Presuming that the criminal investigations were an accurate reflection of the reality, I revealed my familiarity with the Chinese underworld. Xian put his fried chicken on the table, sat down, and said nothing. I don’t know if he thought what I was saying was interesting. I never did find out if he belonged to the Triad. He took a few sips of beer, then lifted one buttock off his chair, took his wallet out of his pants pocket, flipped through it, and pulled out three bills. He spread them out on the table and placed a glass on top of them.

“Euro, dollar, yuan. Here’s my triad.”

Xian seemed sincere. No other ideology, no symbols or hierarchical passion. Profit, business, capital. Nothing else. One tends to think that the power determining certain dynamics is obscure, and so must issue from an obscure entity: the Chinese Mafia. A synthesis that cancels out all intermediate stages, financial transfers, and investments—everything that makes a criminal economic outfit powerful. For the last several years every Anti-Mafia Commission report has highlighted “the growing danger of the Chinese Mafia,” yet in ten years of investigations the police have confiscated only 600,000 euros in Campi Bisenzio near Florence. A few motorcycles and part of a factory. Nothing compared to the economic force capable of moving
the hundreds of millions of euros in capital that American analysts kept writing about. Xian the businessman was smiling at me.

“The economy has a top and a bottom. We got in at the bottom and we’re coming out on top.”

Before he went to bed Nino Xian made me a proposal for the following day.

“You get up early?”

“It depends …”

“If you can be on your feet at five a.m. tomorrow, come with us to the port. You can give us a hand.”

“Doing what?”

“If you have a hooded sweatshirt, it’d be a good idea to wear it.” Nothing more was said. Nor did I insist, eager as I was to take part. Asking too many questions could have compromised Xian’s invitation. There were only a few hours left to rest, but I was too anxious to sleep.

I was ready and waiting downstairs at five on the dot, along with the others: one of my housemates and two North Africans with graying hair. We crammed into the van and headed to the port. I don’t know how far we went once inside the port, or what back alleys we took; I fell asleep, my head against the window. We got out near some rocks, a small jetty jutting out into the gorge, where a boat with a huge motor—it seemed too heavy a tail for such a long, narrow craft—was moored. With our hoods up we looked like members of some ridiculous rap group. The hood I’d thought was to hide my identity turned out instead to be protection against icy sprays, an attempt to ward off the migraine that nails you in the temples first thing in the morning on the open sea. A young Neapolitan started the motor and another steered. They could have been brothers they looked so much alike. Xian didn’t come with us. After about half an hour we drew up to a ship. I thought we were going to slam right into it. Enormous. I could barely tilt my head back far enough to see the top of the bulwarks. Ships in open water let out iron cries, like felled trees, and
hollow sounds that make you swallow constantly, your mucus tasting of salt.