Mikhail Kalashnikov’s responses were automatic, always the same answers no matter what the question was. His English, which he’d learned as an adult, was smooth, and he used it as he would a screwdriver. To calm his jitters, Mariano posed generic and pointless questions about the AK-47. “I did not invent that weapon to make money, but only and exclusively to defend the Motherland in a moment in which she needed it. If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would do exactly the same things and live my life just as I have. I have worked all my life, and my life is my work.” This is how he answers every question about his invention.
Nothing in the world—organic or synthetic, metal or chemical—has produced more deaths than the AK-47. It has killed more than the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than HIV, more than the bubonic plague, more than malaria, more than all the attacks by Islamic fundamentalists, more than the total of all the earthquakes that have shaken the globe. An exponential amount of human flesh, impossible to even imagine. Only one image came anywhere close to a convincing description, an advertisement at a convention: fill a bottle with sugar by pouring the grains from a small hole in the corner of the bag. Each grain of sugar is someone killed by a Kalashnikov.
The AK-47 can fire in the most disparate conditions. It won’t jam, will shoot even when crammed with dirt or soaking wet, is comfortable to hold, and has a feather trigger that even a child can pull. Luck, error, imprecision—all the elements that might spare a life in battle—are eliminated by the certainty of the AK-47. Fate has been prohibited from playing a role. Easy to use and easy to transport, it allows you to kill efficiently, without any type of training. “It can turn even a monkey into a combatant,” as Laurent Kabila, the fearsome Congolese political leader, used to say. AK-47s have been used by armies in conflicts in more than fifty countries over the last thirty years. Massacres perpetrated with AK-47s—verified by the UN— have taken place in Algeria, Angola, Bosnia, Burundi, Cambodia, Chechnya, Colombia, Congo, Haiti, Kashmir, Mozambique, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Uganda. More than fifty regular armies are supplied with AK-47s, and statistics on the irregular, paramilitary, and guerrilla groups that also use them are impossible to formulate.
Anwar el-Sadat was killed by an AK-47 in 1981, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa in 1982, and Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989. Salvador Allende was found in the Palacio de La Moneda with AK-47 bullets in his body. And these excellent cadavers are the weapon’s historic PR headliners. The AK-47 has even found its way onto the flag of Mozambique and the symbols of hundreds of political groups, from Al Fatah in Palestine to the MRTA in Peru. When Osama bin Laden appears in a video, the AK-47 is his one and only menacing symbol. It has been the prop for every role: liberator, oppressor, soldier, terrorist, robber, and the special forces who guard presidents. Kalashnikov’s highly efficient weapon has evolved over the years: eighteen variants and twenty-two new models, all from the original design. It is the true symbol of free enterprise. The absolute icon. It can become the emblem of anything: it doesn’t matter who you are, what you think, where you come from, what your religion is, who you’re for, or what you’re against, as long as you do what you do using our product. Fifty million dollars will buy about two hundred thousand weapons. In other words, with $50 million, you can create a small army. Anything that destroys political bonds and mediation, that allows for enormous consumption and exponential power, is a winner on the market, and with his invention Mikhail Kalashnikov allowed every power and micropower group a military instrument. After the invention of the AK-47, no one can say they were defeated because they didn’t have access to arms. He leveled the battlefield: arms for everyone, massacres for all. War is no longer the exclusive domain of armies. The AK-47 did on an international scale what the Secondigliano clans did locally by fully liberalizing cocaine and allowing anyone to become a drug trafficker, user, or pusher, thus freeing the market from pure criminal and hierarchical mediation. In the same way, the AK-47 allowed everyone to become soldiers, even young boys and skinny little girls, and transformed people who wouldn’t be able to herd a dozen sheep into army generals. Buy submachine guns, shoot, destroy people and things, and go back and buy some more. The rest is just details. In every photo Kalashnikov’s face, with its angular, Slavic forehead and Mongolian eyes that shrink into tiny slits as he ages, is serene. He sleeps the sleep of the righteous. He goes to bed tranquil if not happy, his slippers tucked neatly under his bed. Even when he is serious, his lips are pulled up like those of Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence in Full Metal Jacket. Kalashnikov smiles with his lips, but not with his face.
Whenever I see Mikhail Kalashnikov’s portrait, I am reminded of Alfred Nobel, famous for the prize that bears his name, but also the father of dynamite. The pictures of Nobel taken after his invention—after he realized the use that his mix of nitroglycerin and clay would be put to—show a man devastated by anxiety, his fingers tormenting his beard. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but when I look at Nobel, with his arched eyebrows and lost eyes, he seems to be saying just one thing: “I didn’t mean to. I intended to move mountains, crumble rocks, and create tunnels. I didn’t want everything else that happened.” Kalashnikov, on the other hand, always looks at peace, like an old Russian retiree, his head full of memories. You can imagine him, the trace of vodka on his breath as he tells you about some friend of his from the war, or whispering as you eat that when he was young, he could make love for hours on end. And in my childish imagination, Mikhail Kalashnikov’s picture seems to say, “Everything’s fine, it’s not my problem, all I did was invent an assault rifle. It’s no concern of mine how other people use it.” A responsibility that doesn’t go beyond your own skin, and is circumscribed by your actions. Your conscience applies only to the work of your own hands. I think this is one of the elements that makes the old general an involuntary icon of clans around the world. Mikhail Kalashnikov is not an arms trafficker, carries no weight in arms deals, has no political influence, and lacks a charismatic personality, yet he embodies the daily imperative of the man of the market: he does what he has to do to win, and the rest is none of his concern.
Mariano had on a hooded sweatshirt and a knapsack, with KALASHNIKOV on both. The general had diversified his investments and was becoming a talented businessman. No one’s name was better known, so a German businessman launched the Kalashnikov label. The general had taken a liking to distributing his name, even investing in a company that made fire extinguishers. In the middle of his story Mariano stopped the film and ran out to his car, took a small military suitcase from the trunk, and came back and placed it on the bar. I was afraid he had gone completely crazy with machine-gun mystique and had driven across Europe with an AK-47 in his trunk, which he was about to unveil in front of everyone. Instead he held up a tiny crystal Kalashnikov full of vodka, the cork fitted into the end of the barrel. Very kitsch. And after his trip, every bar Mariano supplied in the Aversa Marshes sold Kalashnikov vodka. I was already imagining the crystal reproduction sitting on a shelf behind every barkeeper from Teverola to Mondragone. The video was almost over, and my eyes hurt from squinting—an attempt to correct my nearsightedness. But the final image was truly not to be missed. Two elderly people in slippers standing on their doorstep, still chewing on the last bite of mozzarella, are waving to their young guest. A group of kids had formed around Mariano and me, and they were staring at him as if he were one of the chosen ones, a sort of hero for having met him. Someone who had met Mikhail Kalashnikov. Mariano gave me a look of false complicity, something that had never existed between us. He removed the rubber band from the pack of photographs and flipped through them. After glancing at dozens, he handed me one.
“This is for you. And don’t say I never think of you.”
On the portrait of the old general was written in black felt-tip pen: “To Roberto Saviano with Best Regards M. Kalashnikov.”
International research institutes in economics are in constant need of data, which t
hey serve like daily bread to newspapers, magazines, and political parties. For example, the celebrated “Big Mac” index estimates the prosperity of a country based on the cost of a McDonald’s hamburger. To calculate the state of human rights, the analysts consider the price of an AK-47. The less it costs, the more human rights violations there are, an indication that civil rights are gangrening and the social structure is falling to pieces. In western Africa, an AK-47 can cost as little as $50. And in Yemen it is possible to find second-or thirdhand weapons for as low as six dollars. The best resource for arms traffickers are the Caserta and Naples clans, who, together with the Calabrian Mafia, with whom they are in constant contact, have their paws on the arms deposits of crumbling, Eastern European socialist countries.
The Camorra, in handling a large slice of the international arms market, could actually set the price of AK-47s, thus becoming the indirect arbiter of the state of human rights in the West. As if the level of human rights were slowly declining, draining drop by drop as with a catheter. In the 1980s, while French and American criminal groups were using the M16, the Marine-issue assault rifle designed by Eugene Stoner—a bulky, heavy weapon that has to be oiled and cleaned to keep from jamming—AK-47s were already making the rounds in Sicily and Campania, from Cinisi to Casal di Principe. In 2003, Raffaele Spinello, a pentito of the Genovese clan, which ruled Avellino and the surrounding area, revealed the connection between the Basque ETA and the Camorra. The Genovese clan is allied with the Cavas in Quindici and the Caserta families. It’s not a top-level clan, yet it supplied weapons to one of the principal European militant organizations. The ETA had explored various options for arms procurement during its thirty-year struggle, but the Campania clans became their privileged interlocutors. According to 2003 investigations by the Naples attorney’s office, José Miguel Arreta and Gracia Morillo Torres, two etarras or ETA militants, spent ten days negotiating in a hotel suite in Milan. Prices, routes, swaps. They reached an agreement: cocaine for arms. The ETA promised to steadily lower the market price of cocaine obtained through its contacts with Colombian guerrilla groups, and cover the cost and responsibility of getting the drug to Italy—anything to keep its connections with the Campania cartels, who were probably the only ones able to supply them with entire arsenals. But the ETA didn’t want just AK-47s. They also requested heavy weapons, powerful explosives, and above all, missile launchers.
Relations between the Camorra and guerrilla fighters have always been prolific. Even in Peru, the adopted country of the Neapolitan narcos. In 1994, after the murder of ten or so Italians in Lima, the Court of Naples requested permission of the Peruvian authorities to carry out investigations. Investigations that aimed at revealing the connections—through the Rodriguez brothers—between Neapolitan clans and MRTA, the guerrilla warriors with red and white bandannas over their faces. Inquiries into the Mazzarella clan’s connections to Somalia moved in various directions, and arms traffic was certainly a primary thread. Even warlords become tame when they need the Campania clans’ weapons.
The firepower uncovered in March 2005 in Sant’Anastasia, a town at the foot of Vesuvius, was stunning. The discovery came about partly by chance, and partly by the lack of discipline of the arms traffickers: customers and drivers started fighting on the street because they couldn’t agree on the price. When the carabinieri arrived, they removed the interior panels of the truck parked near the brawl, discovering one of the largest mobile depots they had ever seen. Uzis with four magazines, seven clips, and 112 380-caliber bullets, Russian and Czech machine guns able to fire 950 shots a minute. (Nine hundred fifty shots a minute was the firing power of American helicopters in Vietnam.) Weapons for ripping apart tanks and entire divisions of men, not for Camorra family fights on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. Almost new, well-oiled, rifle numbers still intact, just in from Kraków. Arms trafficking is the latest way to maneuver the levers of power of the Leviathan that imposes its authority through its potential for violence. Clan armories are filled with bazookas, hand grenades, antitank mines, and machine guns, even though clans almost exclusively use Kalashnikovs, Uzis, and automatic and semiautomatic pistols. The rest is there to construct their military power and show off their strength. With all this fighting potential the clans are not opposing the legitimate violence of the state but rather monopolizing it. Campania clans, unlike the old Cosa Nostra clans, are not obsessed with truces. Weapons are a direct extension of power dynamics between emerging groups and competing families, of the adjustment of capital and territory. It is as if the clans had exclusive rights to the concept, flesh, and tools of violence. Violence becomes Camorra territory, and committing violence trains you for wielding power—System power. The clans have even created new weapons, designed and built by affiliates. In 2004 police agents found a strange gun wrapped in oil-soaked cotton cloth and hidden in a hole covered over with weeds in Sant’Antimo, north of Naples. A sort of do-it-yourself lethal weapon that sells for 250 euros—nothing compared to a semiautomatic that on average goes for 2,500. The model was based on an old toy gun from the 1980s that fired Ping-Pong balls by pulling hard on the butt, thus releasing an internal spring. A toy gun, like those used by thousands of Italian children in the wars in their living rooms. But from that model—from a children’s toy—comes what around here is called simply ‘o tubo—the tube. It consists of two tubes, one about forty centimeters long, with a handle and a large metal screw that acts as the bolt welded inside. The second tube, smaller in diameter, can take a 20-caliber cartridge and has a side handle. Two interlocking tubes that can be transported separately, but once assembled they turn into a deadly sawed-off shot-gun for cartridges or large shots. Incredibly simple and terribly powerful. And it has the advantage of not creating complications after use: no need to rush to destroy it after an ambush; all you have to do is take it apart and it becomes two harmless cylinders, innocuous in the event of a search. Before the gun was seized by the authorities, I had heard a poor shepherd talk about it, one of those emaciated souls who still roam the bits of countryside that encircle the highway overpasses and ugly, barracklike buildings of the suburbs. His skinny Neapolitan sheep, their ribs showing, chewed on dioxin-laced grass that rotted their teeth and turned their wool gray. This shepherd would often find his animals in two pieces, their scrawny bodies split—not cut—in half. The shepherd thought it was a warning or provocation on the part of his wretched competitors with their sickly flocks. He didn’t understand. It was the tube manufacturers doing tests. Sheep were the best targets for a quick control of bullet power and weapon quality, which could be measured by the way the animals flipped in the air and split in two, as in a video game.
The arms question is kept secret in the bowels of the economy, sealed in a pancreas of silence. According to figures gathered by SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Italy spends $27 billion annually on arms. More than Russia, twice as much as Israel. If these figures from the legal economy are coupled with the $3.3 billion of arms trafficking that EURISPES, the Institute of Political, Economic, and Social Research, estimates is handled by the Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia, we are talking about a huge proportion of the arms in circulation worldwide. The Casalesi cartel is the criminal-business group with the best international capacity to supply not only groups but entire armies. During the 1982 Anglo-Argentine war in the Falklands, Argentina experienced its darkest period of economic isolation. So the Camorra opened negotiations with the Argentine defense, becoming the funnel through which poured weapons no one would have sold them officially. The clans outfitted themselves for a long war, but the fighting that broke out in March was over by June. Few shots, few dead, few purchases. A war of more use to politicians than to businessmen, that did more for diplomacy than for the economy. It didn’t make sense for the Caserta clans to sell off their stock just to bring in immediate earnings. On the same day that the end of hostilities was declared, the British secret services intercepted a ph
one call between Argentina and San Cipriano d’Aversa. Just two sentences, but enough to understand the power and diplomatic potential of the Caserta families.
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“The war’s over here, now what are we supposed to do?”
“Don’t worry, there’ll be another one.”
The wisdom of power has a patience the best businessmen often lack. In 1977 the Casalesi clan had negotiated the purchase of some tanks, and the Italian secret service reported that a dismantled Leopard tank was at the train station in Villa Literno, ready to be shipped. The Camorra had long been dealing in Leopards. In February 1986 a wiretapped conversation revealed the Nuvoletta clan’s negotiations for the purchase of Leopards from what was then East Germany. Even with the turnover in leadership, the Casalesi clan remained the international point of reference for groups as well as entire armies. A 1994 report from SISMI, the Italian Military Intelligence and Security Service, and the counterespionage center in Verona indicated that Željko Razžnatović, better known as Arkan, was in communication with Sandokan Schiavone, the head of the Casalesi clan. Arkan, who was killed in 2000 in a hotel in Belgrade, was one of the most ruthless Serbian war criminals, the founder of the Serb Volunteer Guard, the nationalist group that razed Muslim villages in Bosnia to the ground. The two became allies. Arkan asked for arms for his guerrilla fighters, and above all for the possibility to circumvent the embargo imposed on Serbia by bringing in capital and weapons disguised as humanitarian aid: camp hospitals, medicine, and medical supplies. According to SISMI, however, Serbia actually paid for the provisions—worth tens of millions of dollars—out of bank accounts in Austria containing $85 million. The money was then handed over to an entity allied with the Serbia and Campania clans, which purchased from interested companies the merchandise to be given as humanitarian aid, paying with money earned through illegal activities. This is where the Casalesi clans came in. They allowed the money laundering by making available companies, transportation, and goods. According to the reports, Arkan, through his intermediaries, asked the Casalesi clan to silence the Albanian Mafiosi who could have ruined his money war by attacking from the south and blocking the arms traffic. The Casalesi clan pacified its Albanian allies with arms, thus allowing Arkan a peaceful war. In exchange, clan businessmen bought up companies, stores, and farms at favorable prices, and Italian entrepreneurship spread throughout Serbia. Before going into battle, Arkan had contacted the Camorra. From South America to the Balkans, wars are fought with the weaponry of Campania families.