Roberto Saviano - Gomorrah - A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System

In a magazine for the families of military personnel overseas, I once read a short article for people about to be stationed at Gricignano d’Aversa. I translated the piece and wrote it down in my diary so I wouldn’t forget it:

To understand where you will soon be stationed, imagine yourself in a Sergio Leone film. It’s like the Wild West. Somebody gives orders, there are shoot-outs and unwritten yet unassailable laws. Don’t be alarmed, however, for maximum respect and hospitality are extended to the townspeople and the American military. Nevertheless, leave the military compound only when necessary.

That Yankee writer taught me something about the place where I lived.

That morning at the bar, Mariano was strangely euphoric. He was really wound up, downing martinis first thing in the morning.

“What’s going on?”

Everyone was asking the same thing. Even the bartender refused him a fourth round. But Mariano didn’t answer, as if it were perfectly clear to everyone.

“I want to go meet him. They tell me he’s still alive, but is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“How’d he do it? I’m going to use my vacation time and go meet him.”

“Who? What?”

“You realize how light it is? And precise. Before you even know it, you’ve let off twenty, thirty shots … it’s brilliant!” Mariano was in ecstasy. The bartender was looking at him the way he’d look at a boy who had just slept with a woman for the first time, that unmistakable expression on his face, the same that Adam must have worn. Then I realized the cause of his euphoria. Mariano had fired an AK-47 for the first time and was so impressed with the contraption that he wanted to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who invented it. Mariano had never shot at anyone; he’d been brought into the clan to handle the distribution of certain brands of coffee in the area bars. A young man with a degree in economics, he was responsible for millions of euros, given the number of bars and coffee distributors that wanted to get in on the clan’s commercial network. The neighborhood capo wanted to be sure that all his men, even those with college degrees—the businessmen as well as the foot soldiers—knew how to shoot. So they’d handed Mariano an AK-47. During the night he had unloaded it into some bar windows, selecting them at random. It wasn’t a warning, but even if he didn’t know why he was shooting at those particular windows, the owners had come up with a valid explanation for sure. There’s always some reason to feel you’re in the wrong. Mariano spoke about the weapon in menacing and professional tones. AK-47: a rather simple name, where AK is short for the Russian avtomat Kalashnikova, “Kalashnikov’s automatic,” and 47 refers to the year in which it was selected as the official weapon of the Soviet Union. Weapons often have encoded names, letters and ciphers intended to conceal their lethal power, symbols of ruthlessness. In truth they are banal labels assigned by some NCO who catalogs new weapons just as he does nuts and bolts. AK-47s are light and easy to use and require only simple maintenance. Their strength is in their size: neither so small as to lack sufficient firepower, like revolvers, nor so big as to become unwieldy or have too much recoil. They are so simple to clean and assemble that in the former Soviet Union schoolboys were taught to do it in an average of two minutes.

The last time I had heard machine-gun fire was several years ago. Near the university in Santa Maria Capua Vetere. I don’t remember where exactly, but I am certain it was at a crossroads. Four cars blocked Sebastiano Caterino’s vehicle, and killed him with a symphony of AK-47s. Caterino had always been close to Antonio Bardellino, the capo of capos of the Caserta Camorra in the 1980s and 1990s. When Bardellino was killed and the leadership changed, Caterino had managed to flee, escaping the massacre. For thirteen years he had holed up in his house; he only stuck his nose out at night, used bulletproof vehicles when he ventured beyond his front gate, and stayed away from San Cipriano d’Aversa, his hometown. After many years of silence he thought he had again acquired authority, that the rival clan had forgotten about the past and would not attack an old leader such as himself. So he started to raise a new clan in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, the old Roman city that had become his fiefdom. When the marshal from Caterino’s town arrived on the murder scene, he had just one thing to say: “They got him really bad!” Around here the treatment you receive is evaluated in terms of how many bullets they put in you. If they kill you delicately, a single shot to the head or stomach, it is interpreted as a necessary operation, a surgical strike, no malice. Unloading more than two hundred shots into your car and more than forty into your body, on the other hand, is an absolute method of erasing you from the face of the planet. The Camorra has a very long memory and is capable of infinite patience. Thirteen years, 156 months, four AK-47s, 200 shots—a bullet for each month of waiting. In certain places, even the weapons remember, preserving a hatred and condemnation that they spit out when the moment comes.

On the morning when I ran my fingers over the gun’s decorations, I was wearing a backpack. I was leaving, going to my cousin’s house in Milan. It’s strange how no matter whom you’re talking to, no matter about what, as soon as you say you’re going away, you receive all sorts of good wishes, congratulations, and enthusiastic responses: “Good for you, you’re doing the right thing, I’d leave too.” You don’t need to supply any details or explain what you’re going to do. Whatever the reason, it will be better than the reasons you have for sticking around here. When people ask me where I’m from, I never answer. I’d like to say “the south,” but that sounds too rhetorical. If someone asks on the train, I stare at my feet and pretend not to have heard because I’m always reminded of Vittorini’s novel Conversations in Sicily and I’m afraid if I open my mouth, I will sound like the protagonist, Silvestro Ferrato. But it’s not worth it. Times change, yet the voices remain the same. But that day I happened to meet a large woman who could barely jam herself into her seat. She had boarded the Eurostar in Bologna with an incredible desire to talk, as if she intended to fill the time the way she had her body. She insisted on knowing where I was from, what I did, where I was going. I was tempted to reply simply by showing her the cut on my finger. But I didn’t. Instead I told her, “I’m from Naples.” A city that lets loose so many words that merely uttering its name frees you from saying anything more. A place where bad becomes evil, and good becomes total purity. I fell asleep.

Mariano called me early the next morning. He was anxious. Accountants and organizers were needed for a delicate operation some neighborhood businessmen were carrying out in Rome. Pope John Paul II was ill, perhaps already dead, even though the official announcement hadn’t been made. Mariano asked me to join him, so I boarded a train again and headed south. Within the space of a few days, stores, hotels, restaurants, and supermarkets would need extraordinary quantities of supplies of every sort. There was a ton of money to be made. Soon millions of people would be pouring into the capital, living on the streets, and spending long hours on the sidewalks, all of them needing to drink and eat—in a word, to buy. You could triple prices, sell all day and night, squeeze the profit out of every minute. Mariano was called in. He proposed that I keep him company and offered a bit of money in return for my kindness. Nothing’s free. Mariano was promised a month of vacation so he could fulfill his dream of going to Russia to meet Mikhail Kalashnikov; he’d even received guarantees from a man from one of the Russian families who swore he knew him. Mariano would be able to look Kalashnikov in the eye and touch the hands that had invented such a powerful weapon.