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

With the trial over, there was the risk of an open clash between the Bidognetti and the Schiavone families. They had been facing off through confederate clans for years, but their common business interests always prevailed. Bidognetti territory covers the northern part of the Caserta region, extending to the coast. The Mezzanotte clan has powerful and incredibly ferocious hit squads. They burned alive Francesco Salvo, who owned and worked at a bar called The Tropicana: punishment for having dared to replace Bidognetti video poker machines with those of a rival clan. They went so far as to launch a phosphorus bomb at Gabriele Spenuso’s car on the Nola–Villa Literno road. In 2001, Domenico Bidognetti ordered Antonio Magliulo eliminated because though he was married he had dared to make advances on a cousin of a boss’s. They took him to the beach, tied him to a chair facing the sea, and began to stuff his mouth and nose with sand. Magliulo tried to breathe, swallowing and spitting sand, blowing it out his nose, vomiting, chewing, and twisting his neck. His saliva, mixing with the sand, formed a kind of primitive cement, a gluey substance that slowly suffocated him. Mezzanotte ferocity was directly proportional to its business power. According to various investigations by the Naples DDA in 1993 and 2006, the Bidognettis, who were in the waste-management business, forged alliances with businessmen of the deviant P2 Masonic Lodge, for whom they illegally— and at special prices—disposed of toxic wastes. Cicciotto di Mezzanotte’s nephew Gaetano Cerci, arrested in the “Adelphi” operation against the ecomafia or illegal-waste traffickers, was the contact between the Casalese Camorra and the Masons, and he frequently met directly with Licio Gelli, for business purposes.* Investigators discovered the deals through the earnings—more than 35 million euros—of a single company. The bosses Bidognetti and Schiavone, both in prison serving life sentences, could take advantage of each other’s conviction to unleash his own men in an attempt to eliminate the rival clan. There was a moment when everything seemed about to explode, setting off one of those wars that results in clusters of deaths every day.

In the spring of 2005 Sandokan’s youngest son went to a party in Parete, in Bidognetti territory, and—according to the investigations— started flirting with a girl even though she was with someone. The Schiavone scion was without an escort, believing that the mere fact of being Sandokan’s son would make him immune to any form of aggression. But that’s not how it went. A small group dragged him outside and beat him up—slapping, punching, and kicking him in the ass. He had to go to the hospital to get his scalp sewed up. The next day fifteen or so guys on motorcycles and in cars showed up at Penelope’s, the bar where the kids who had attacked Sandokan’s son usually hung out. Armed with baseball bats, they wrecked the place, beating to a pulp everyone there, but they couldn’t identify those responsible for insulting Sandokan. It seems they escaped through another exit; the commandos chased them and fired at them in the piazza, hitting a passerby in the stomach. In response, the next day three motorcycles pulled up at the Caffè Matteotti in Casal di Principe, where the younger Schiavone clan affiliates usually hung out. The riders got off their bikes slowly, giving passersby time to flee, then started smashing everything. Brawls and more than sixteen knifings were reported. The air was heavy: a new war was brewing.

Luigi Diana’s unexpected confession increased the tension. According to a local paper, the pentito declared that Bidognetti was responsible for Schiavone’s first arrest, that he was the one who had collaborated with the carabinieri, revealing the boss’s hiding place in France. The hit squads were gearing up and the carabinieri were ready to collect the dead bodies. But Sandokan himself called a halt to the massacre with a public gesture. Despite strict prison rules, he managed to send an open letter to a local paper, which was printed on the front page on September 21, 2005. The boss, like a successful manager, resolved the conflict by contradicting the pentito, a relative of whose was killed just hours after his declaration.

“It has been proven that the tip-off, from the person who squealed, thus permitting my arrest in France, was given by Carmine Schiavone, and not by Cicciotto Bidognetti. The truth is that the individual who goes by the name of the pentito Luigi Diana speaks lies and wants to sow discord for his own personal gain.”

Sandokan also “advises” the newspaper editor to report the news properly:

“I beg you to not let yourself be exploited by this mercenary and very compromised traitor, and not to fall into the error of turning your newspaper into a scandal-mongering rag that would inevitably lose credibility, as your competitor has done. I have not renewed my subscription to that paper, and many other people will follow suit. They, like me, would not buy such a manipulated newspaper.”

Sandokan thus discredits the rival publication and officially elects the one to whom he sent his letter as his new interlocutor.

“I won’t even bother to comment on the fact that your competitor is accustomed to writing falsehoods. The undersigned is like water from a spring: completely transparent!”

Sandokan urged his men to switch papers. Requests for subscriptions to the boss’s new choice and cancellations for the old one arrived from dozens of prisons throughout Italy. The boss closed his letter of peace with Bidognetti as follows:

“Life always asks you what you are able to face. And it has asked these so-called pentiti to face the mud. Like pigs!”

The Casalesi cartel was not defeated. On the contrary, it even seemed reinvigorated. According to the Naples anti-Mafia prosecutor, the cartel is now run by a dyarchy: Antonio Iovine, known as ‘o ninno or “nursing baby” because he became a clan leader when he was still a kid, and Michele Zagaria, the manager boss of Casapesenna, called capastorta —crooked head—due to the irregularity of his face, even though it seems he now calls himself Manera. Both bosses have been in hiding for years and are on the minister of the interior’s list of most dangerous Italian fugitives. Untraceable, yet they are undoubtedly in their hometowns. No boss can leave his roots for too long, because all his power is based on them, and it’s there that it can all collapse.

A mere handful of miles, minuscule towns, knots of little lanes, farms lost in the countryside—and yet it’s impossible to catch them. But they’re here. They move along international routes, but they always go home and are here most of the year. Everyone knows it. And yet they can’t nab them. Their system of cover is so efficient that it prevents their arrest. Their families and relatives continue to live in their villas. Antonio Iovine’s villa in San Cipriano is in art nouveau style, whereas Michele Zagaria’s vast complex, between San Cipriano and Casapesenna, has a glass cupola to allow the sunlight to reach an enormous tree that dominates the living room. The Zagaria family owns dozens of satellite companies throughout Italy and—according to the Naples DDA judges—the largest Italian earthmoving business. The most powerful of all. An economic supremacy that is born not of direct criminal activity but of the ability to balance licit and illicit capital.

These firms manage to be extremely competitive. They have full-scale criminal colonies in Emilia, Tuscany, Umbria, and the Veneto, where anti-Mafia controls and certification are less strict and thus allow for the transfer of whole branches of a company. At first the Casalesi demanded protection money from Campania businessmen working in the north, but they now manage the market directly. They control most of the construction business around Modena and Arezzo, importing a workforce that is predominantly from Caserta.