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

Media attention is so limited that even the smallest suspicion is enough to keep the papers from printing that an innocent person has been killed. And if there are no further deaths, no one will focus on the case. The destruction of Don Peppino Diana’s image was thus an important tactic to ease pressure on the clans, to alleviate the troublesome problem of awaking national interest.

One local paper turned the campaign to discredit Don Peppino into a sound box. The headlines were so heavy with boldface that your fingers turned black as you flipped the pages: “Don Diana was a Camorrista,” and a few days later, “Don Diana in bed with two women.” The message was clear: no one can go up against the Camorra. Whoever does always has some personal motive, a quarrel, some private affair that wallows in the same filth.

His old friends, his relatives, and his followers defended him, including the journalists Raffaele Sardo, who preserved his memory in articles and books, and Rosaria Capacchione, who monitored the strategies of the clans, their complex, bestial power, and the shrewdness of the pentiti.

A 2003 appeal questioned aspects of Giuseppe Quadrano’s earlier testimony, and Vincenzo Verde and Giuseppe Della Medaglia were exonerated. Quadrano had confessed partial truths; his strategy from the very beginning was to not admit his own responsibility. But he was the killer, as identified by witnesses and confirmed by ballistic reports. Giuseppe Quadrano killed Don Peppino Diana. The hit squad had been composed of Quadrano and Santoro, who acted as the driver. Francesco Piacenti, sent directly from Spain by De Falco to guide the operation, had supplied information about Don Peppino. The appeal also upheld the verdict of life imprisonment for Piacenti and Santoro. Quadrano had even recorded phone conversations with affiliates, during which he repeatedly stated that he had nothing to do with the homicide—recordings that he then turned over to the police. Quadrano understood that the order for the killing had come from De Falco, and he didn’t want it revealed that he was simply the brawn of the operation. It is highly likely that all the figures in Quadrano’s first version had shit in their pants and didn’t want to be involved in the killing in any way. At times submachine guns and pistols are not sufficient for facing an unarmed face and plain speech.

Nunzio De Falco was arrested in Albacete while on the Valencia–Madrid intercity train. He had established a powerful criminal cartel with some ‘Ndrangheta men and a few Cosa Nostra dropouts. According to Spanish police investigations, he had also attempted to organize the Gypsies in the south of Spain into a criminal group. He had built an empire. Vacation villages, gambling houses, shops, and hotels. The infrastructure of Spain’s Costa del Sol improved dramatically when the Casalese and Neapolitan clans decided to turn the area into a pearl of mass tourism.

In January 2003 De Falco received a life sentence as instigator of Don Peppino Diana’s murder. When the verdict was read out in the courtroom, I felt like laughing, but I managed to puff out my cheeks and contain myself. I couldn’t stand the absurdity of what was happening. Nunzio De Falco’s attorney was Gaetano Pecorella, simultaneously the president of the Chamber of Deputies’ Justice Commission and the counsel for the defense for one of the biggest Casalese Camorra cartel bosses. I laughed because the clans were so strong that they had even reversed the axioms of nature and fable. A wolf was being defended by a lamb.* But my delirium may have been the result of exhaustion and nervous collapse.

Nunzio De Falco’s nickname is written on his face. He really does look like a wolf. His identification photo portrays a long face covered with a thin, prickly beard, like a carpet of needles, and pointed ears. Frizzy hair, dark skin, and a triangular mouth. He looks just like one of those werewolves in a horror film. And yet a local paper—the same one that had boasted about relations between Don Peppino and the clan—dedicated the first page to his qualities as a lover, passionately desired by women and girls. The headlines on January 17, 2005, were eloquent: “Nunzio De Falco king of the womanizers.”

CASAL DI PRINCIPE (CE)

They may not be handsome, but they are attractive because they’re bosses; that’s how it is. If one had to rank the playboy bosses of the area, first place would go to two repeat convicts from Casal di Principe, men who are certainly not good-looking, unlike Don Antonio Bardellino, the most fascinating of them all. We are talking about Francesco Piacenti, alias Big Nose, and Nunzio De Falco, alias the Wolf. People say that one had five wives and the other seven. Obviously we’re not talking about actual marriages but longterm relationships that produced children. In fact Nunzio De Falco apparently has more than twelve children by various women. Another interesting detail is that not all the women in question are Italian. One is Spanish, another English, and another Portuguese. Like sailors, these men would make a new family in every place they hid … Not by chance, some of their women were called to testify during their trials, each of them beautiful and elegant. The fair sex is the cause of the decline of many a boss. They are often the ones who lead indirectly to the capture of the most dangerous bosses. Tailing the women, investigators have been led to bosses of the caliber of Francesco Schiavone Cicciariello … In other words, women are a mixed blessing even for bosses.

Don Peppino’s death was the price paid for peace between the clans. Even the verdict makes reference to this hypothesis. An agreement had to be found between the two warring groups, perhaps sealed on Don Peppino’s flesh. Like a scapegoat. Eliminating him meant resolving a problem for all the families while also distracting investigations away from their affairs.

I had heard talk of Cipriano, a childhood friend of Don Peppino’s who had written a harangue to be read at the funeral, an invective inspired by one of the priest’s speeches, but who didn’t even have the strength to move that morning. He had gone away many years before and settled near Rome, having decided never to set foot in Campania again. They told me that his grief over Don Peppino’s death kept him in bed for months. Whenever I asked one of his aunts about him, she would automatically respond in the same mournful voice, “He’s closed up. Cipriano’s closed up!”

It happens every now and then. It isn’t unusual to hear someone say such a thing around here. Every time I hear that expression, I think of Giustino Fortunato, who in the early 1900s walked the entire length of the southern Apennine Mountains. He wanted to know what life was like in the towns along the ridge, and visited every one of them, staying with farmers, listening to angry peasants, getting to know the voice and smell of the southern question. When he later became a senator, he returned to the towns and asked about the people he had met years earlier, the most combative of whom he wanted to involve in his political reform projects. But often the relatives would respond, “He’s closed up!” To close up, become silent, practically mute: a desire to escape within yourself and stop knowing, understanding, doing. To stop resisting, a decision to retreat an instant before you dissolve in the compromises of life. Cipriano had closed up too. In town they told me it started after he went on a job interview for a human resources position in a shipping company in Frosinone. The interviewer was reading his résumé out loud, but stopped at the name of his town.

“Ah, yes, I know where you’re from! The town of that famous boss … Sandokan, right?”

“No, the town of Don Peppino Diana.”