I know that in Naples the surest number to bet is 62, ’o muort’ acciso, death by murder. I know that Naples treats those murder victims almost as if they were the number 48—the dead man talking—which is what I feel I have become to her. Naples cuts them out, expels them. They’re people on the outside, people from Scampia, Secondigliano, or other towns to the north of Naples that have been hit by the feud that exploded after years of steady homicides. Like Andrea Nollino, killed instantly by the burst of gunfire from a motorcycle as he was opening his café in Casoria. June 26, 2012, 7:30 A.M. Or Lino Romano, who on October 15, 2012, goes to the station to pick up his girlfriend, Rosanna, who’s on her way back from the wedding of a cousin in Modena, from the same kind of celebration that he hoped to be able to offer her soon. He takes her home and goes in to say hi to Rosanna’s parents. Right after he leaves they hear the roar of gunfire, very close, out front in the street. Lino dies while starting up his car, on his way to play soccer with his friends. 9:30 P.M.: It’s dark, it’s raining, his black Clio looks like all the other black Clios around. Maybe you drive one too, but you didn’t get engaged to a girl from Marianella, that clump of apartment complexes in the line of fire between Secondigliano and Scampia.
It seems like a film you’ve already seen, a story you’ve already heard. You’ve read the story of a young man with almost the same name, Attilio Romanò, killed in the cell phone store where he worked. You’ve seen how they deal coke inside the “Vele” apartment complex in Scampia, how they kill without the least drama, how they betray one another. The scene from Gomorrah in which the kids are trained to be shot at really upset you. Those kids are no longer ten, twelve years old, though. Now they’re the ones doing the shooting, and the dying.
But you’re done with it, you can live with yourself. And I’m done with it too. I wrote a book; they made a film from it. It’s my fault if I keep screaming now, if it feels to me as if no one is willing to listen anymore. My fault if the articles I keep writing about the blood spilled in the cocaine markets fall on deaf ears. People can’t keep their attention trained on the same scene for so many years; there are other things that are more important, or simply new. My fault if permission is denied to film the fictional TV show based on my first book, Gomorrah, on site, with a big protest banner that plays on the name of the town: “SCAMPIAmoci da Saviano,” “Let’s flee from Saviano.” And posters all over the place that shout: “He who takes advantage of Naples is guilty of everything!” I bathed the ears of the world in Naples’s blood, but in Scampia nothing has changed. So I’m guilty. Guilty of the new killers whose bodies, brimming with the savagery of youth bolstered by cocaine, go out and murder the umpteenth relative of some affiliate from a rival group. Guilty of the millions in profit for which all those lives continue to be erased. Guilty even of victims like Lino and Andrea.
The entire neighborhood, and even a wider swath of the city, gathered around them. Thousands screamed their innocence; they didn’t abandon them—they accompanied them in their final voyage, which followed the final injustice. It’s not true that mafia wars only generate fear, cynicism, omertà, and indifference. They also generate a special, primitive empathy, because you’re forced to see yourself in Lino, in Andrea, in Rosanna, in their parents, siblings, friends, and colleagues. Maybe you too have a cousin who is a cousin of one of the “scissionisti,” or secessionists, or to one of Girati, as one of the groups that broke away from the winning cartel in the feud against the Di Lauro clan is called. Your turn could be next. It could have been your son or daughter that December 5, 2012, when Luigi Lucenti, known as ’o Cinese, the Chinese, tried to escape an ambush by holing up in the courtyard of the Eugenio Montale nursery school in Scampia, while the children were rehearsing a Christmas play. He was supposed to reopen the Cianfa di Cavallo open-air drug market on via Ghisleri, and they killed him. If it had happened just a little later, when the children who don’t stay for lunch are picked up by their mothers or grandmothers, a few nursery schoolchildren very likely would have been killed. You could have lost a child, a wife, a mother. It went okay for you that time; now you just have to worry about your child’s nightmares, or maybe his wetting the bed just when you’d managed to potty train him. Thank heavens, you keep telling yourself, nothing happened. But it’s not enough. So when the occasion arises you find the energy to react, to join forces, to shout along with the others that the blood that flowed was of someone who deserved to live, not to die.
Those screams are about Naples, for Naples. The body of Naples that closes over the wound. Despite everything I’m relieved to know that this happens too, a flow of vital energy that pours from the flood of rage and fear and not just from the spastic contraction with which the intrusive element that went down the wrong way is spit out. Yet the logic by which I am guilty is not all that different from the logic that drives the people in the street to rebel. It’s the logic of who’s in and who’s out. In and out is not determined merely by a certificate of residency. It is determined by the experience of the feud. Only those who live through it can understand; only those who go through it are included, are in.
I tried to find a way to live with the knowledge that, on the one hand, what I have to say about Naples echoes less and less no matter how loudly I scream, and the more painful knowledge that my words are rejected as illegitimate by Naples itself. And so I have spent years studying and chasing the trail that leads out from Scampia and Casal di Principe, to broaden my horizons, to let my investigation take in the whole world. This seems the only escape route available to me, the only way forward.
What are those Scampia area murders compared to those in Ciudad Juárez? How much is the only open-air drug supermarket in Europe worth in comparison with the trafficking managed by the Calabrian families? An ’ndranghetista might not even bother to respond. Wiretappings reveal that the Calabrians despise the Neapolitans. They butcher each other too often and for too little. I hear a laugh coming from Aspromonte. Carried on the wind toward the Tyrrhenian, it reaches Mount Vesuvius and it descends from there.
The Neapolitans despise me more than the Calabrians despise them. But I’ve never really left Naples. I am always there. To speak about Naples is to betray it a little, but it is in this betrayal that I find my home. The only home, at least for now, that is allowed me.
For me, the pain of the blood that fills the piazzas, the pain of the names that make the lists of the dead grow longer is a sting that doesn’t go away, even if I blow on it as hard as I can. A pain that doesn’t heal even if I put iodine tincture on it, even if I have it stitched up. This pain has to do with me, for all things that cause us the deepest pain have to do with ourselves, like our flesh, our children, the most untouchable parts of ourselves. All I can do, until someone or something kills me, is to keep betting on my number.
16.
DOGS
A Neapolitan doctor I know finally gave in to his son’s pleading and gave the boy a dog. A small dog, relentlessly friendly, with a sweet face. One day he asked his son to go out onto the balcony with him, he had a surprise for him, and in the meantime he went over the little speech he’d prepared in his head. A dog is a delicate creature, you have to respect him, train him, you have to be patient but severe, and above all you have to make him understand that you are the leader of the pack. Liberty, sure, but with hard and fast rules. Necessary preconditions, especially as we’re talking about a Jack Russell terrier, a breed that hunters use even today to flush out foxes. Dealing with the dog’s daring and explosive temperament would prove to be an important undertaking for his son; it would force him to face one of the basic challenges for a human puppy: to go beyond appearances. Behind those puppy eyes and silly demands to be pet and played with is an unpredictable character that needs to be disciplined.
“Do you understand?”
“Sure, Papà.”
Things worked out well. The boy cleaned up after the dog, walked him, played with him, taught him
some basic commands: “Stay!” “Sit!” “Heel!” His father swelled with pride, even though his son was sneezing too much and his eyes were always red. He’s a doctor, he knows what those symptoms mean: allergy to dog fur. They had no choice. The dog, who had already become a full member of the family, had to go. But for the son the separation would be excruciatingly painful, and it risked undoing everything that they had achieved together: the education of a young boy through the education of a young animal. From now on the child could either fill the emptiness by clinging to his grief and the memory of shattered happiness, or he could overcome the wrenching loss, thus undergoing the most difficult test a human puppy must face: getting used to loss.
Today that dog serves in the canine unit of the Naples police: that is where the family friend to whom he was entrusted works. Pocho, like the soccer player Lavezzi, is the terror of the Scampia and Secondigliano pushers, the “top dog” in the canine unit charged with fighting the Camorra. In contrast to his colleagues, little Pocho can worm his way into the narrowest passageways and slip through the tiniest openings. Innate talent and body type have made him a precious resource, but first he had to go through rigorous training. Play, lots of playing. Because for drug-sniffing dogs, finding a packet of cocaine jammed in a crack in a wall is a game. Great fun. They start with a tennis ball or a rolled-up towel. They play tug-of-war. This is the “attachment stage,” in which the dog bonds with objects and its handler. The phase in which an inseparable human-dog couple is formed. During the second phase small quantities of a drug, or a laboratory-created substance that reproduces the odor of a drug, are added to the toy object. This is where an association between toy and drug, between prize and reward, is created. At that point it’s time to turn the game into work. Essential work, thus full of gratification. But also full of danger.
Without Mike, that spent eight years with the canine unit of the Volpiano Carabinieri in Turin province, the more than a kilo of cocaine buried under a lamppost would never have been discovered. Without Labin, the Florence Finance Guard’s splendid female German shepherd which while sniffing car seats did not let herself be fooled by a false bottom spread with tar, another 12 kilos would have gone undetected. Ragal—same breed, same profession, Labin’s colleague at the port of Civitavecchia—started barking furiously at a car that had just come off a ferry from Barcelona, shattering the Neapolitan driver’s presumption that sniffer dogs would not be able to detect his 11 kilos of pure cocaine under the smells of mustard, coffee, and diesel oil. Ciro pointed right at a trailer truck from the Costa del Sol, drawing the curses and clenched teeth of the driver from Castel Volturno. Ufa, who patrols Fiumicino airport, jumped onto a garment bag on the baggage carousel in which were found 2.5 kilos of cocaine. Nearly eight hundred people arrested had failed to reckon with Eola, a veteran awarded for her twelve years of service and more than 100 kilos of cocaine seized.
Agata’s existence was much more trying. She was young when she started working at the Leticia cargo airport in the Amazon jungle in Colombia, an important junction for cocaine from Brazil and Peru on its way to the United States. The narcos, tired of seeing cargo planes stopped by that docile-looking Labrador with golden fur, put a price on her head: ten thousand dollars. From that moment until she retired Agata was under twenty-four-hour protection and could no longer accept tasty morsels from strangers. Boss, a chocolate Lab in Rio de Janeiro, has met the same fate. Nine police officers take turns watching over him ever since the order to eliminate him was intercepted, that “little chocolate” who can’t be tricked by fake walls or the sewer stench of the favelas. When detection dogs dig excitedly, bark, scratch, or paw at an object, it’s their way of saying that the drug is right here. It’s the signal that they’ve won the game and are ready to start playing all over again. But for others, there is no game. There’s only the humiliation of being flesh and blood. Like Pay de Limón—Lemon Cake—who, along with dozens of other dogs like him, was mutilated and dismembered by Mexican narcos. It’s useful to practice on one of them before cutting off the finger of an extortion victim.
Labs, German shepherds, Belgian shepherds, but often even abandoned mutts like Kristal, who risked meeting the unhappy end of a stray but is now one of the most formidable sniffer sleuths in Grosseto. The history of sharp-nosed dogs goes back much further than their specialization in detecting white powder, though. Almost a century of successes in Italy, including that of August 16, 1924, when a stench drew Carabinieri sergeant Ovidio Caratelli’s dog into the Macchia della Quartarella woods: There was the body of Giacomo Matteotti, an Italian socialist antifascist politician kidnapped two months earlier by Mussolini’s black shirts.
Yet their noses and animal instincts also come in handy for those who, like the Camorra, are on the other side. The Scampia clans kept three German shepherds and a Rottweiler in a condominium courtyard in the Case Celesti neighborhood. Accustomed to the brutality of rusty cages, raised amid broken glass and food scraps, their job was to alert their drug-pusher owners when the cops were coming. Animals in the service of criminal organizations aren’t merely faithful watchdogs, though. They are also used as mules, unsuspected couriers, transporting huge amounts of drugs from one continent to the other. Females are ideal: It’s hard to say whether that bulge is due to a pregnancy or pellets. Frispa, a black Lab, and Rex, a yellow Lab, were unloaded in Amsterdam from a cargo plane coming from Colombia in 2003. One of the dogs was very agitated and aggressive, the other weak and apathetic. The authorities grew suspicious and had them checked out. They found scars on the dogs’ bellies, and X-rays confirmed their suspicions. Eleven packets of cocaine as long as sausages in Rex’s stomach, ten in Frispa’s. Frispa, the black Lab, had to be put down, because some of the linings had broken, whereas Rex, after another operation and a long convalescence, was saved. One for the many—far too many—sacrifices of man’s best friend.
In the summer of 2012 a man went for a walk in a pretty countryside near Livorno. He suddenly noticed a strong stench that led him to make a macabre discovery: a dismembered, disemboweled Labrador lying in the middle of the field. The man, who thought it must have been the work of a sadist or a group of satanists, called the police. But not even a week went by before the stench of fresh death returned: This time the dog, a cross between a Dogue de Bordeaux and a pit bull, had his snout taped shut and a plastic bag sticking out of his cut-open stomach. It’s not a coincidence, it’s not black magic, merely the tragic end that the white powder commonly deals its involuntary four-legged couriers. It’s too hard to make them expel the packets naturally; much easier just to gut them and recover the stuff. Dogs are both victims and soldiers in a global ordeal that for them is still what it has always been: a test of loyalty passed off as a game.
17.
DYING TO TELL
What does one risk by reading? A lot. It’s a dangerous thing to open a book and leaf through the pages. Once you’ve opened a work by Émile Zola or Varlam Šalamov, there’s no turning back. I truly believe this. But often the reader is unaware of the risk involved in coming to know these stories; he doesn’t realize the impact they’ll have. If I could truly quantify the damage that knowing eyes, the damage that people who want to understand, can inflict on the powerful, I’d try to diagram it. For the mafiosi the risk of being arrested, put on trial, and sent to prison is nothing compared to the danger that comes from people knowing the truth, understanding how things actually work—the facts.
If you choose to talk about criminal power, if you choose to stare its secrets in the face, to keep your eyes on the road and on the money, well then, there are two ways to go about it: a right way and a wrong way. Christian Poveda knew them both. He knew the differences—and above all the consequences—of each way. He knew that if you decide to be the extension of your work—a pen, a computer, a lens—then you don’t run any risks: You will finish your assignment and come home with the loot. But Christian knew something else as well: If you decide that the
extension of your work—a pen, a computer, a lens—is a means rather than the end, then everything changes. Suddenly what you’re looking for—and what you find—is no longer a dark dead end but a door that opens onto other rooms, that leads to more doors.
“He went looking for it.” “What was he expecting?” “Like he didn’t know beforehand?” Callous, cruel questions, yet also legitimate. Cynical maybe, but all things considered, correct. Unfortunately there’s no answer. There’s only guilt, because you knew the consequences would be terrible, for you and your family. You knew, but you did it anyway. Why? There’s no answer to that question either. You see something and behind it you see a hundred other things. You can’t simply stop dead in your tracks; you have to keep going, to dig deeper. Maybe you know what awaits you, maybe you know perfectly well, but you’re neither reckless nor crazy. You smile at your friends, at your colleagues too, and maybe you share your worries with them, but your outer image doesn’t correspond in the least with your inner torment. It’s as if two opposing forces were pulling you in different directions. A struggle over where to stand, and the battlefield is your own stomach, because that’s where you feel the push and pull, an endless tug-of-war that ties your innards in knots.