Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (20 page)

For many women, marrying a Camorrista is like receiving a loan or acquiring capital. If talent and destiny are in their favor, that capital will bear fruit and the women will become entrepreneurs, managers, or generals’ wives, wielding unlimited power. If things go badly, the only thing left to them will be hours in prison waiting rooms. If the clan collapses and can’t pay the monthly allowance, they’ll have to beg for work as a maid—competing with the immigrants—so they can pay the lawyers and put food on the table. Alliances are founded on the bodies of Camorra women, whose faces register the family power. They are recognized by their black veils at funerals, their screams during arrests, the kisses they throw their men in court.

The typical image of the Camorra woman is of a female who does nothing but echo the pain and will of her men—her brothers, husband, and sons. But it’s not like that. The transformation of the Camorra in recent years has also meant a metamorphosis of the woman’s role, which has gone from that of a maternal figure and helper in times of misfortune to a serious manager who concerns herself almost exclusively with the business and financial end of things, delegating the fighting and illegal trafficking to others.

One such historic figure is Anna Mazza. Widow of the godfather of Afragola, she headed one of the most powerful criminal and business organizations and was one of the first women in Italy to be found guilty of Mafia-related crimes. At first Anna Mazza capitalized on the aura of her husband, Gennaro Moccia, who was killed in the 1970s. The “black widow of the Camorra,” as she came to be known, was the brain behind the Moccia clan for more than twenty years. She had a talent for extending her power everywhere; when the court required her to relocate to the north, near Treviso, in the 1990s, she attempted
to consolidate her network of power even in total isolation and—according to investigations—made contact with the Brenta Mafia. She was accused of arming her twelve-year-old son immediately after her husband’s murder to kill the person who ordered his death, but was let go for lack of proof. Anna Mazza had an oligarchic managerial style and was strongly opposed to armed uprisings. She held sway over her entire territory, as the dissolution of the Afragola city council in 1999 for Camorra infiltration shows. Politicians followed her lead and sought her support. Anna Mazza was a pioneer. Before her there was only Pupetta Maresca, the beautiful, vengeful killer who became famous in Italy in the 1950s when, six months pregnant, she decided to avenge the death of her husband, Pascalone ‘e Nola.

Anna Mazza was not merely vengeful. She realized that the time warp of the Camorra would allow her to enjoy a sort of impunity reserved for women. A backwardness that made her immune to ambushes, envies, and conflicts. Her patience and fierce determination in the 1980s and 1990s made the Moccia family into one of the most important clans in the construction business; they handled contracts, controlled quarries, and negotiated the purchase of land zoned for building. The entire area of Frattamaggiore, Crispano, Sant’Antimo, Frattaminore, and Caivano was controlled by local capos tied to the Moccias. In the 1990s the Moccia clan became one of the pillars of the Nuova Famiglia, the broad cartel opposed to Raffaele Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and whose political and business power surpassed that of the Cosa Nostra cartels. When the political parties that had benefited from their association with clan businesses collapsed, only the Nuova Famiglia bosses were arrested and given life sentences. Not wanting to pay in place of the politicians they had helped, or to be considered the cancer of a system they’d supported and in which they’d played an active and productive, albeit criminal, role, they decided to turn state’s witness. Pasquale Galasso, boss of Poggiomarino, was the first high-ranking military and business figure to collaborate with the law in the 1990s. Names, strategies, funds—
he revealed everything, a decision that the government repaid by protecting the family’s assets and to a certain extent his own. Galasso told everything he knew. Of all the families in the confederation, it was the Moccias who took it upon themselves to make him shut up for good. With a few choice revelations, Galasso could have destroyed the widow’s clan in no time. They tried to corrupt his bodyguards to poison him and planned to eliminate him with a bazooka. After these attempts, organized by the men, failed, Anna Mazza intervened. She sensed that the moment had arrived for a new strategy: dissociation. A concept she appropriated from the terrorism of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, when militants dissociated themselves from their armed organizations but without repenting or revealing names, without accusing instigators or perpetrators. It was an attempt to delegitimize a political stance, the official repudiation of which was enough to obtain a reduction in one’s sentence; Mazza believed this would be the best way to eliminate the threat of
pentiti
while also making it seem as if the clans were unconnected to the government. If the clans could establish an ideological distance from the Camorra, they could take advantage of prison sentence reductions and improvements in conditions, but without revealing methods, names, bank accounts, or alliances. What for some observers might be considered an ideology the Camorra ideology—for the clans was nothing more than the economic and military operations of a business group. The clans were changing: the criminal rhetoric and the Cutolo mania for the ideologization of Camorra behavior had spent itself. Dissociation could eliminate the lethal power of the
pentiti,
which, despite the inherent contradictions, is the true fulcrum of the attack on the Camorra. The widow understood the full potential of this trick. Her sons wrote to a priest, making a show of their desire to redeem themselves; as a symbolic gesture, a car filled with weapons was supposed to be left in front of a church in Acerra. Deposition of arms, just as the IRA did with the British. But the Camorra is not an independentist organization or an armed nucleus, and weapons are not its real power. That
car was never left, and the strategy of dissociation conceived in the mind of a woman boss slowly lost its appeal. It was not heard in parliament or the Court and lost support among the clans as well. The
pentiti
were becoming more numerous and less useful, and Galasso’s grand revelations, while disavowing the clans’ military apparatuses, left nearly intact their business and political plans. Anna Mazza continued constructing a sort of Camorra matriarchy: the women as the real power center and the men as soldiers, mediators, and managers who obeyed the women’s orders. The important decisions, both military and economic, were up to the black widow.

The women became clan managers, entrepreneurs, and bodyguards. They were better at business, less obsessed with ostentatious shows of power, and less eager for conflict. Immacolata Capone, one of the clan’s “ladies in waiting” and the godmother of Anna Mazza’s daughter Teresa, made a career for herself over the years. Immacolata didn’t have the matronly look—the coiffed hair and full cheeks—of Anna Mazza; minute, and possessed of a sober elegance, her blond bob always perfectly combed, there was nothing of the shady Camorrista about her. Instead of looking for men who could confer greater authority upon her, she was sought out by men who wanted her protection. She married Giorgio Salierno, a Camorrista implicated in the attempts to thwart the
pentito
Galasso, and later became involved with a member of the Puca clan of Sant’Antimo, a family with a powerful history close to Cutolo, and made famous by Immacolata’s companion’s brother Antonio Puca. An address book found in her pocket contained the name of Enzo Tortora, the TV personality unjustly accused of being a Camorrista. The clan was undergoing a managerial and business crisis by the time Immacolata came of age. Prison and
pentiti
had jeopardized Lady Anna’s painstaking labor. But Immacolata bet everything on cement. She also managed a brick factory in the center of Afragola. As a businesswoman she did all she could to associate with the Casalesi, the most powerful clan in the building and construction business nationally and internationally. According to
the Naples DDA investigations, Immacolata Capone led the Moccia family companies back to the top of the building trade. In this she had the cooperation of MOTRER, one of the most important names in earthmoving in southern Italy. The mechanism she set up was impeccable. According to investigations, she collaborated with a local politician, who awarded contracts to a businessman who then subcontracted to Lady Immacolata. I only saw her once, I think, right as she was going into a supermarket in Afragola. Her bodyguards were young women. They followed her in a Smart, the little two-seater car all the Camorra women own, but judging by the thickness of the doors, hers was armor-plated. In our fantasies female bodyguards look like bodybuilders, every muscle bulging like a man’s, bunching thighs, pectorals swallowing breasts, overgrown biceps, necks like tree trunks. But there was nothing of the Amazon in the bodyguards I saw. One was short, with a big, flabby ass and hair dyed too black; the other was thin, frail, and bony-looking. I was struck by the fact that both were wearing fluorescent yellow, the same color as the Smart. The driver had on yellow sunglasses and the other a bright yellow T-shirt. A yellow that could not have been chosen by chance, a combination that could not have been a mere coincidence. A professional touch. The same yellow as Uma Thurman’s motorcycle outfit in
Kill Bill,
the Quentin Tarantino film in which for the first time women are first-rate criminal stars. The same yellow that Uma Thurman wears in the ad for the film, with her bloody samurai sword—a yellow imprinted on your retina and maybe even on your taste buds. A yellow so unreal it becomes a symbol. A winning business must have a winning image. Nothing is left to chance, not even the color of the car or the uniform of the bodyguards. Immacolata Capone set the example, and now Camorra women of all ranks want female bodyguards, carefully cultivating their image.

But something wasn’t right. Maybe she had invaded someone else’s territory, or maybe she was blackmailing someone. Immacolata Capone was killed in March 2004 in Sant’Antimo, her companion’s
town. She was without her bodyguards; maybe she didn’t think she was in any danger. The execution took place in the center of town, and the killers operated on foot. As soon as she sensed she was being followed, she started to run; people thought she’d had her bag snatched and was chasing the thieves, but her purse was still across her shoulder. Immacolata Capone hugged it to her chest as she ran, an instinctual reaction that prevented her from dropping the thing that made running for her life more difficult. She went into a poultry shop, but the killers got to her before she could take cover behind the counter. Two shots in the nape of her neck: that was how the old-fashioned taboo of not touching women was breached. A skull shattered by bullets, facedown in a puddle of blood—this was the new direction of the Camorra. No difference between men and women. No supposed code of honor. But the Moccia matriarch had always moved slowly, was always ready to do big business, controlling her territory through shrewd investments and first-class financial negotiations, monopolizing land deals, and avoiding feuds and alliances that could have interfered with the family business.

Doubtless unknown to IKEA, the largest IKEA complex in Italy now sits on land controlled by Moccia companies, as will the biggest high-speed train construction site in southern Italy. In October 2005—for the umpteenth time—the municipal government of Afragola was dissolved for Camorra infiltration. The accusations are heavy: a group of Afragola city council members requested the president of a commercial entity to hire more than 250 people with close family ties to the Moccia clan.

Illegal building permits also contributed to the decision to dissolve the municipality. There are megastructures on boss-owned properties and talk of a hospital being constructed on land the clan acquired just as the city council was debating the issue. Land bought for very little and then, once the location for the new hospital was announced, sold for an astronomical amount. For 600 percent more than the original price. A profit only the Moccia women were able to achieve.

Women such as Anna Vollaro worked in the trenches to defend clan assets and properties. Niece of the Portici clan boss Luigi Vollaro, Anna was twenty-nine when the police showed up to seize yet another family business, this time a pizzeria. She doused herself with gasoline and lit a match, and to make sure no one could put out the flames, she ran around wildly, finally hitting a wall. The plaster turned black, as when an outlet short-circuits. Anna Vollaro burned herself alive to protest the seizure of an illicitly acquired asset that she considered the product of the normal course of business.

One tends to think that in the criminal world military success leads to a position in business. But that’s not always the case. Take the feud in Quindici, a town in the province of Avellino, which has endured the constant, suffocating presence of the Cava and Graziano clans for years. In the 1970s the Cavas were a subset of the Grazianos. But the two families have been at war forever. When the 1980 earthquake destroyed the Lauro Valley, the 100 billion lire of reconstruction funds that poured in gave rise to a middle class of Camorra businessmen. The money allowed both families to establish small construction empires, both run by the women. The battle was sparked by disagreements over contracts and kickbacks from the earthquake reconstruction funds. What unfolded in Quindici was different from in the rest of Campania, however: not simply a factional conflict, but a family feud resulting in around forty savage murders that sowed mourning among the rival groups and created an undying hatred that has contaminated generations of family leaders like the plague. The town watches helplessly as the two factions continue to slaughter each other. One day when the mayor, who had been elected through Graziano backing, was in his office, a group of Cava commandos knocked at his door. They didn’t open fire right away, giving him time to climb out the window onto the roof, and escape along the tops of the houses.