Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System (9 page)

McKay and Angioletto had made up their minds. They’d decided to form their own group and wanted to make it official. All the old guard had agreed, and they’d made it clear they weren’t trying to start a conflict. They wanted to become competitors, fair competitors, on the open market. Side by side, but independent. And so—according to the
pentito
Pietro Esposito—they sent a message to Cosimo Di Lauro, the cartel’s regent. They wanted to meet with his father, Paolo, the top man, the boss, the association’s number one. To talk to him in person, tell him they didn’t agree with his reorganization decisions, remind him that they had children of their own now. They wanted to look him in the eye. Enough of this passing word from mouth to mouth, of messages sticky from the saliva of too many tongues—cell phones were out of the question because they could reveal his hiding place. Genny McKay wanted to meet with Paolo Di Lauro, the boss who was responsible for his rise in the business.

Cosimo formally accepts the request for a meeting, which means assembling all the top brass of the organization: bosses, underbosses, and area capos. It’s impossible to say no. But Cosimo’s already got it all figured out, or so it seems. He’s clear on where he’s taking things
and knows how to organize his defense. And so—according to investigations and state witnesses—Cosimo doesn’t send his underlings. He doesn’t send Giovanni
cavallaro
Cortese, the horse dealer, the official spokesman, the one who’d always handled the Di Lauro family’s relations with the outside world. Cosimo sends his brothers. Marco and Ciro case the meeting place, check it out, see which way the wind is blowing, but without letting anyone know they’re there. No bodyguards, just a quick drive by. But not too quick. They note the prepared exit routes and the sentries in position, all without attracting attention. Then they report back to Cosimo, give him the details. He takes it all in. The meeting is a setup, a trap, a way to kill Paolo and whoever comes with him and to ratify a new era in the running of the cartel. Then again, you don’t divide up an empire with a handshake. You have to cut it with a knife. That’s what they say, what all the investigations and informants say.

Cosimo, the son Paolo put in charge of the narcotics trade, the one to whom he’d given the greatest responsibility, has to decide. It will be war. But he doesn’t declare it openly. He keeps it all in his head—he doesn’t want to alarm his rivals. He watches and waits to see what they’ll do. He knows they’ll attack him soon, knows he needs to be prepared for their claws in his flesh, but he also needs to play for time, to come up with a precise, infallible, winning strategy. To figure out whom he can count on, what forces he can control. Who is with him and who’s against him. Secondigliano isn’t big enough for both of them.

The Di Lauros make excuses for their father’s absence: he’s on the run, a wanted man for over ten years, and the police investigations make it difficult for him to move about. A missed appointment is nothing serious if you’re one of the thirty most dangerous fugitives in Italy. After decades of smooth operations, the biggest narcotraffic holding company nationally and internationally is about to face a lethal crisis.

The Di Lauro clan has always been a well-organized business,
structured along the lines of a multilevel company. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor’s office, the first tier is made up of clan leaders Rosario Pariante, Raffaele Abbinante, Enrico D’Avanzo, and Arcangelo Valentino; they act as promoters and financiers, controlling the peddling and drug-trafficking activities through their direct affiliates. The second tier, which includes Gennaro Marino, Lucio De Lucia, and Pasquale Gargiulo, actually handle the drugs, do the purchasing and packaging, and manage relations with the pushers, who are guaranteed legal defense in case of arrest. The third level is composed of open-air drug-market capos; they have direct contact with the pushers, coordinate lookouts and escape routes, and secure the storehouses and places where the drugs are cut. The fourth level, the pushers, is the most exposed. Every level has its own sublevels that report exclusively to their leader rather than to the entire structure. This setup brings in profits of 500 percent on initial investments.

The Di Lauro business model has always reminded me of the mathematical concept of fractals, which textbooks explain using a bunch of bananas: each individual banana is actually a bunch of bananas, and in turn each of those bananas is a bunch of bananas, and so on to infinity. The Di Lauro clan turns over 500,000 euros a day through narcotraffic alone. Pushers, storehouse operators, and couriers often aren’t part of the organization but simply salaried workers. Drug peddling is an enormous activity employing thousands of individuals, but they don’t know who their boss is. They have a general idea of which Camorra family they work for, but that’s all. If someone gets arrested and decides to talk, his knowledge of the organization is limited to a small, well-defined area; he’d be incapable of revealing the entire flowchart, the vast circumnavigation of the organization’s economic and military power.

The whole economic and financial structure is backed by a military set up: a team of ferocious hit men with a vast network of flank support. A legion of killers—including Emanuele D’ Ambra, Ugo
ugariello
De Lucia, Nando
‘o schizzato
Emolo, Antonio
‘o tavano
Ferrara,
Salvatore Tamburino, Salvatore Petriccione, Umberto La Monica, and Antonio Mennetta—are flanked by neighborhood capos Gennaro Aruta, Ciro Saggese, Fulvio Montanino, Antonio Galeota, Constantino Sorrentino, and Giuseppe Prezioso, Cosimo’s personal bodyguard. An outfit at least three hundred strong, all on monthly salary. A complex structure, meticulously planned and organized. A large fleet of cars and motorcycles always ready for emergencies. A secret armory and a group of factories ready to destroy weapons immediately after they’re used. A supply of inconspicuous tracksuits and motorcycle helmets, also to be destroyed afterward. Even a logistical network that immediately after the hit gets the killers to a shooting range that records their entrance time; that’s how they construct an alibi and confound the findings in the event of a stub, a test that detects gunpowder residue. The stub is every killer’s worst fear: gunpowder traces can’t be removed and are the most damning evidence. The idea isn’t so much to conceal an action, a murder, or an investment, but simply to render it unprovable in court. A flawless company, everything in perfect working order, or almost.

I’d been going to Secondigliano for a while. Ever since Pasquale quit working as a tailor, he’d been keeping me up-to-date on how the wind was blowing there. It was shifting fast, as fast as the flow of money.

I’d cruise around on my Vespa. The thing I like most about Secondigliano and Scampia is the light. The big, wide streets are airier than the tangle of the old city center, and I could imagine the countryside still alive under the asphalt and massive buildings. After all, space is preserved in Scampia’s very name, which in a defunct Neapolitan dialect means “open land.” A place where weeds grow. Where the infamous
Vele,
or Sails, a monstrous public housing project, sprouted in the 1960s. The rotten symbol of architectural delirium, or perhaps merely a cement utopia powerless to oppose the narcotraffic machine that feeds on this part of the world. Chronic unemployment
and a total absence of social development planning have transformed the area into a narcotics warehouse, a laboratory for turning drug money into a vibrant, legal economy. Scampia and Secondigliano pump oxygen from illegal markets into legitimate businesses. In 1989 the Camorra Observatory, a Camorra-watch organization, noted in one of its publications that the northern outskirts of Naples had one of the highest ratios of drug pushers to inhabitants in all of Italy. This ratio is now the highest in Europe and one of the top five in the world.

Over time my face got to be known in the area. For the clan sentries or lookouts, familiarity is a neutral value. In a territory that’s constantly under visual surveillance, there are negative values—the police, carabinieri, infiltrators from rival families—and positive ones: buyers. Anything else is considered neutral, useless. If you’re put in this category, it means you don’t exist. Open-air drug markets have always fascinated me; their impeccable organization contradicts any idea of absolute degradation. They run like clockwork, the people like gears, each move setting off another. It’s bewitching to watch. Salaries are paid out weekly, 100 euros for the lookouts, 500 for the market coordinator and cashier, 800 for the pushers, and 1,000 for the people who run the storehouses and hide drugs in their homes. Shifts run from 3 p.m. to midnight and from midnight to 4 a.m.; it’s too hard to deal in the morning, too many police around. Everyone gets a day off, and if you show up late, your pay is docked, 50 euros for every hour you miss.

Via Baku is always hopping. Clients arrive, pay, collect the goods, and leave. At times a line of cars actually forms behind the pusher. Especially on Saturday evenings, when pushers are pulled in from other areas. Via Baku brings in half a million euros a month; the narcotics squad reports that on average four hundred doses each of marijuana and cocaine are sold here every day. When the police show up, the pushers know exactly which houses to go to and where to stash the goods. A car or scooter usually pulls in front of the police car to
slow it down, thus giving the lookouts time to pick up the pushers and whisk them away on their motorcycles. The lookouts are unarmed and usually have a clean record, so even if they’re pulled over, there’s little risk of indictment. If the pushers are arrested, reserves are called in, usually addicts or regular users willing to help out in emergencies. For every pusher who’s arrested, another takes his place. Business is business, even in times of trouble.

Via Dante also brings in astronomical sums. It’s a thriving market, one of the newest Di Lauro setups, and the pushers are all young kids. Then there’s Viale della Resistenza, an old heroin market that also deals in kobret and cocaine. Here the marketplace coordinators actually have a headquarters furnished with maps and speakerphones where they organize the defense of their territory. Lookouts on cell phones keep them informed as to what is happening, permitting them to follow the movements of police and clients in real time.

One of the Di Lauro innovations is customer protection. Before the clan took over, only the pushers were protected from arrest and identification, whereas buyers could be stopped, identified, and taken down to headquarters. But Di Lauro provided lookouts for their customers as well—safe access for everyone. Nothing but the best for the casual consumer, a mainstay of the Secondigliano drug trade. In the Berlingieri neighborhood you can call ahead and they’ll have your order ready for you. The same holds for Via Ghisleri, Parco Ises, the whole Don Guanella neighborhood, the H section of Via Labriola, and the Sette Palazzi quarter. In areas that have been transformed into profitable markets, the streets are guarded and the residents develop a survival instinct of selective vision, of deciding in advance what to see and what to block out as too horrendous. They live in an enormous supermarket, where every imaginable kind of drug is available. No substance gets introduced on the European market without first passing through Secondigliano. If the drugs were only for the inhabitants of Naples and Campania, the statistics would be unbelievably absurd. At least two coke addicts and one heroin addict to every
family. And that’s not even considering hashish, marijuana, kobret, and light drugs. Pills—what some people still call ecstasy, but there are actually 179 varieties—are huge sellers in Secondigliano, where they’re called X files or tokens or candies. There’s enormous profit in pills. They cost 1 euro to produce, are sold in bulk at 3 to 5 euros, and then resold in Milan, Rome, or other parts of Naples for 50 to 60 euros apiece. In Scampia they go for 15.

Secondigliano moved beyond the confines of the traditional drug market and identified cocaine as the new frontier. Thanks to the clans’ new economic policies, what was once an elite substance is now well within everyone’s reach, with various grades of quality to satisfy every need. According to the analyst group Abele, 90 percent of cocaine users are workers or students. No longer just for getting high, coke is now consumed at all times of the day: to relax after working overtime, to find the energy to do something that resembles a human activity and not simply to combat exhaustion; to drive a truck at night; to keep at it for hours in front of the computer; to carry on without stopping, to work for weeks without any sort of break. A solvent for fatigue, an anesthetic for pain, a prosthesis for happiness. No longer merely for stupefaction, drugs are a resource now. To satisfy this new desire, dealing had to become flexible and free of criminal rigidities. The supply and sale of drugs had to be liberalized. The Di Lauro clan was the first to make the leap in Naples. Italian criminal cartels traditionally prefer to sell large lots. But Di Lauro decided to sell medium lots to promote small drug-dealing businesses that would attract new clients. Autonomous businesses, free to do what they want with the goods, set their own prices, advertise how and where they choose. Anyone can access the market, for any amount, without needing to go through clan mediators. Cosa Nostra and ‘Ndrangheta have extensive drug businesses, but you have to know the chain of command, and to deal through them you have to be introduced by clan members or affiliates. They insist on knowing where you’ll be peddling, what the distribution will be. But not the Secondigliano System. Here the rule
is laissez-faire, laissez-passer. Total and absolute liberalism. Let the market regulate itself. And so in no time Secondigliano attracted everyone eager to set up a small drug business among friends, anyone wanting to buy at 15 and sell at 100 to pay for a vacation, a master’s degree, or a mortgage. The total liberalization of the market caused prices to drop.