Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (35 page)

But the names of the sons always bear a trace of the passions of the father. Giuseppe Misso, boss of the Sanità neighborhood clan, has three grandchildren: Ben Hur, Jesus, and Emiliano Zapata. When on trial, Misso always assumed the attitude of political leader, conservative thinker, and rebel; he recently wrote a novel,
I leoni di marmo,
“The Marble Lions.” Several hundred copies were sold in a few weeks in Naples. Told with a mangled syntax but in a furious style, it is the story of Naples in the 1980s and 1990s, the story of the boss’s formation,
his emergence as lone warrior against the Camorra of rackets and drugs, in defense of a chivalrous but vaguely defined code of robbery and theft. He was arrested many times in his long criminal career, and each time he was found with books by Julius Evola and Ezra Pound.

Augusto La Torre, the boss of Mondragone, is a student of psychology, an avid reader of Carl Jung, and an expert on Sigmund Freud. A glance at the titles of the books he requested in prison reveals a lengthy bibliography of scholars of psychoanalysis, and in court, quotations of Lacan are interwoven with his reflections on the Gestalt school of psychology. A knowledge the boss utilized in his rise to power, an unexpected managerial and military weapon.

Even one of Paolo Di Lauro’s most loyal men is a lover of culture: Tommaso Prestieri produces many neo-melodic singers and is a connoisseur of contemporary art. Many bosses are art collectors. Pasquale Galasso’s villa housed a private museum with about three hundred antiques; the jewel of the collection was the throne of the Bourbon king Francis I. And Luigi Vollaro, known as
‘o califfo
or the caliph, owned a painting by his favorite artist, Botticelli.

The police were able to arrest Prestieri because of his love of music. He was caught at the Teatro Bellini in Naples when he went to hear a concert while a fugitive. After his sentencing, Prestieri declared, “In art I am free, I don’t need to be released from prison.” Painting and song offer equilibrium and impossible serenity to an unlucky boss such as Prestieri, who has lost two brothers, both killed in cold blood.

Augusto La Torre, the psychoanalyst boss, was one of Antonio Bardellino’s favorites. He had taken his father’s place when he was young, becoming the sole leader of the Chiuovi clan, as it was called in Mondragone, which ruled in northern Caserta, southern Lazio, and along the Domitian coast. The La Torre clan had sided with Sandokan Schiavone’s enemies, but their management and business savvy, the only elements powerful enough to alter conflictual relationships among Camorra families, eventually reconciled them to the Casalesi, with whom they worked while still maintaining their autonomy. Augusto didn’t come by his name by chance. La Torre family tradition was to name the firstborn after a Roman emperor. But in this case they inverted history; instead of Augustus being followed by Tiberius, Tiberius was father to Augustus.

Scipio Africanus’s villa near Lake Patria, Hannibal’s battles at Capua, and the unassailable might of the Samnites, the first warriors in Europe to attack the Roman legions and then flee to the mountains— these stories are legends in local Camorra families, who consider themselves linked to the distant past. The clans’ historical fantasies clashed with the widespread image of Mondragone as the mozzarella
capital of Italy. My father used to stuff me full of mozzarelle from Mondragone, but it was impossible to decide which area’s mozzarella was the best. The flavors were too diverse: the light, sickly sweetness of Battipaglia, the heavy saltiness of Aversa, or the purity of Mondragone. But the Mondragone mozzarella masters had a way to tell. A good mozzarella leaves an aftertaste, what country folk call
‘o ciato ‘
e
bbufala
or buffalo breath. If there’s no buffalo aftertaste, the mozzarella isn’t any good. I liked to stroll back and forth on the Mondragone wharf, one of my favorite summer destinations before it was demolished. A tongue of reinforced concrete, boat moorings built out over the sea. A useless, unused construction.

Mondragone suddenly became the place for all the kids around Caserta and the Pontine Marshes who wanted to emigrate to the UK. Emigration, the chance of a lifetime, a way to finally get out, but not as a waiter, a scullery boy in a McDonald’s, or a bartender paid in pints of dark beer. They went to Mondragone to try to make contacts with the right people, who could get you a good rent and an in with employers. In Mondragone there were people who could get you a job in insurance or real estate, and who helped the desperate, chronically unemployed find a decent contract and respectable work. Mondragone was the door to Great Britain. Starting in the late 1990s, having a friend in Mondragone all of a sudden meant you’d be valued for what you’re worth, without needing recommendations or connections. A rare thing, impossible in Italy, especially in the south. Around here, you always need a protector, someone who can at least get your foot in the door, if not the rest of you. Presenting yourself without a protector is like showing up without arms and legs. With something missing. But in Mondragone they’d take your résumé and see whom to send it to in the UK. Your skills mattered and, even more, the way you used them. But only in London or Aberdeen. Not in Campania, the most provincial of the provinces of Europe.

My friend Matteo decided to give it a try, to leave once and for all. He’d graduated cum laude and was tired of doing internships, of supporting
himself working construction sites. He’d put aside some money and got the name of a guy in Mondragone who would help him line up some job interviews in Britain. I went with him. We waited for hours at the beach where Matteo’s contact had told him to meet. It was summer. Mondragone’s beaches are invaded by vacationers from all over Campania, the ones who can’t afford the Amalfi coast or a summer rental on the shore, so they commute from the hinterland. Till the mid-1980s mozzarelle were sold on the beach, in wooden pails overflowing with boiling buffalo milk. The bathers ate them with their hands, the milk dripping all over. Kids would lick their hands, salty from the sea, then take a bite. But no one sells them anymore, now it’s grissini and coconut slices. Our contact was two hours late. When he finally showed up, tanned and wearing only a skimpy bathing suit, he explained that he’d eaten breakfast late, so had gone for a swim late and had dried himself off late. That was his excuse—it was the sun’s fault. He took us to a travel agency. That was all. We thought we were going to meet some big middleman, but instead we were merely introduced at an agency, and not a particularly elegant one at that. Not one of those agencies with hundreds of brochures, just an ordinary hole-in-the-wall kind of place. But you needed a local contact to access their services; to anybody just walking in, it seemed like a normal travel agency. A young woman asked Matteo for his résumé and told us the first available flight to Aberdeen. That’s where they were sending him. They handed him a list of businesses where he could go for an interview, and for a small fee they’d even set up appointments with the people doing the hiring. Never had a temp agency been so efficient. Two days later we boarded the plane for Scotland, a quick and affordable trip from Mondragone.

Aberdeen felt like home, though this Scottish city couldn’t have been more different from Mondragone. The third-largest city in Scotland, dark, dirty, and gray, but it rains less than in London. Before the Italian clans arrived, Aberdeen didn’t know how to exploit its resources
for recreation and tourism, and the restaurant, hotel, and entertainment businesses were organized in the sad English manner. The same old thing, people packed into pubs once a week. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, it was Antonio La Torre, Augustos brother, who set up a series of commercial activities in Scotland, which in the space of a few years became the feather in the cap of Scottish entrepreneurship. Most La Torre clan activities in Britain are perfectly legal: acquisition and management of properties and businesses, commerce in foodstuffs with Italy. Enormous turnover, difficult to place a figure on. In Aberdeen, Matteo sought everything he’d been denied in Italy. We walked around feeling pleased; for the first time in our lives being from Campania seemed sufficient to guarantee some measure of success. At 27/29 Union Terrace, I found myself in front of Pavarotti’s, a restaurant registered in Antonio La Torre’s name and listed on tourist websites. Aberdeen had become chic, an elegant address for fine dining and important dealings. At Italissima, the gastronomic fair held in Paris, clan businesses even marketed themselves as the height of Made in Italy. Antonio La Torre advertised his own brand of catering activities there. His success had made him one of the top Scottish businessmen in Europe.

Antonio La Torre was arrested in Aberdeen in March 2005. There was an Italian warrant for his arrest on account of Camorra criminal conspiracy and extortion, but for years his British citizenship and the fact that the authorities did not recognize his alleged crimes shielded him and he had been able to avoid extradition. Scotland didn’t want to lose one of its most brilliant entrepreneurs.

In 2002 the Court of Naples issued preventive-detention orders for thirty people connected to the La Torre clan. It emerged that extortion, contracts, and control of economic activities were bringing in vast sums of money, which the clan then invested overseas, particularly in Britain, where an actual clan colony had formed. The colonists hadn’t invaded or introduced bearish competition in the
workforce; instead they infused the city with economic energy, revitalized the tourist industry, inspired new import-export activities, and injected new vigor in the real estate sector.

The international energy from Mondragone was personified by Rockefeller. That’s what people here call him because of his obvious talent for making deals and his control of vast sums of money. Rockefeller is Raffaele Barbato, sixty-two years old, a native of Mondragone. Maybe even he has forgotten his real name. He has a Dutch wife, and until the late 1980s he did business in Holland, where he owned two casinos that drew international big shots, such as the brother of Bob Cellino, who’d set up casinos in Las Vegas, and Miami-based, Slavic Mafiosi. His partners were a certain Liborio, a Sicilian with Cosa Nostra connections, and Emi, a Dutchman who later moved to Spain, where he opened hotels, residences, and discos. According to Mario Sperlongaro, Stefano Piccirillo, and Girolamo Rozzera—all
pentiti
—it was Rockefeller, together with Augusto La Torre, who hatched the idea of going to Caracas to try to meet Venezuelan narcotraffickers, whose coke prices beat those of the Colombians who supplied the Neapolitans and Casalesi. And it was Rockefeller who found a comfortable place for Augusto to sleep when he went into hiding in Holland: the skeet-shooting club. Even though he was far from the Mondragone countryside, the boss could keep in shape firing at flying clay pigeons. Rockefeller had an enormous network. He was one of the best-known businessmen not only in Europe but also in the USA; through his gambling houses he made contacts with Italian-American Mafiosi who were slowly being squeezed out by the Albanian clans taking over in New York. As a result the Mafiosi were increasingly allied to Campania Camorra families and eager to traffic in drugs and invest in European markets, restaurants, and hotels through Mondragone’s open door. Rockefeller is the owner of Adam and Eve, renamed La Playa, a beautiful holiday village on the Mondragone coast, where, according to the magistrates, many fugitive affiliates vacationed. The more comfortable the hideout, the less the temptation to
turn state’s witness and put an end to life on the run. La Torre was fierce with
pentiti.
Francesco Tiberio, Augusto’s cousin, phoned Domenico Pensa, who had testified against the Stolder clan, and in no uncertain terms invited him to leave town.

“I heard from the Stolders that you collaborated against them. Given as how we don’t want informants in this town, you’d better get out of Mondragone or else someone will come and cut your head off.”

Augusto’s cousin had a knack for making terrorizing telephone calls to whoever dared collaborate with the authorities or leak information. With Vittorio Di Tella, he was more explicit, inviting him to purchase his funeral suit.

“If you have to talk, you’d better buy yourself a black shirt, fucker, because I’m going to kill you.”

Before clan affiliates started turning state’s witness, no one would have imagined the vast scope of Mondragone dealings. One of Rockefeller’s friends was a certain Raffaele Acconcia. Like Rockefeller, he was born in Mondragone but moved to Holland, where he owned a restaurant chain and, according to
pentito
Stefano Piccirillo, was an important international drug trafficker. The La Torre treasure is still hidden somewhere in Holland, perhaps in a bank—millions of euros the magistrates have never been able to locate, taken in through mediation and commerce. In Mondragone this alleged stash in a Dutch bank has become a symbol of absolute wealth, trumping all other references to international riches. People no longer say, “He thought I was the Bank of Italy,” but, “He thought I was the Bank of Holland.”

With backing in South America and Holland, the La Torre clan planned to take over cocaine traffic in Rome. All Caserta families consider the capital city an extension of their province, and Rome has become the number one spot for drugs and real estate investments. The La Torres counted on the supply routes along the Domitian
coast; the villas there were essential for contraband cigarettes and all sorts of merchandise. The actor Nino Manfredi had a villa there. Clan representatives went and asked him to sell it. Manfredi resisted in every way he could, but clan pressure intensified; his house was located on a strategic point for mooring the motorboats. They stopped asking him to sell and forced him to hand it over at a price they set. Manfredi even appealed to a Cosa Nostra boss, disclosing the story to
Radio News 1
in January 1994, but no Sicilian stepped in to mediate against the powerful Mondragonesi. Only by going on TV and attracting national media attention was he able to make known the pressure the Camorra applied for the sake of strategic interests.