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

“Who?”

Cipriano got up and walked out. He ran a newsstand in Rome to support himself. I got his address from his mother, who happened to be in front of me in the checkout line at the supermarket one day. She must have alerted him to my arrival because he didn’t answer the doorbell. Maybe he knew what I wanted to talk to him about. But I waited out front for hours and was prepared to sleep on his doorstep. Cipriano finally decided to come out, but he barely said hello. We went to a small park nearby. He had me sit on a bench and opened a notebook, the kind you use in elementary school. There on the lined pages was his harangue, written out in longhand. Who knows if Don Peppino’s handwriting was also there somewhere. I didn’t dare ask. A speech they had both intended to sign, but then came the killers, death, slander, and unfathomable solitude. When Cipriano started to read, it was with the voice and gestures of Fra Dolcino, the medieval preacher who wandered the streets announcing the Apocalypse, and who was burned at the stake for heresy:

We will not allow our lands to become places of the Camorra, one giant Gomorrah to destroy! Men of the Camorra—not beasts, but men like everyone else—we will not allow you to find here an illicit energy in what is legitimate elsewhere, we will not allow you to destroy here what is built elsewhere. You create a desert around your villas, and only your absolute desire stands between what you are and what you want. Remember. And the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire; he destroyed those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew on the ground. But the wife of Lot turned to look back and she became a pillar of salt (Genesis 19:24–26). We must risk becoming salt, we must turn and look at what is happening, what is raining down on Gomorrah, the total destruction where life is added to or subtracted from your economic activities. Don’t you see that this is Gomorrah, don’t you see? Remember. When they see that the whole land is brimstone, and salt, and burning, and there will be no sowing, no sprouting, no grass growing, like after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Seboim, which the LORD overthrew in his anger and his wrath (Deuteronomy 29:22). Men die for a yes or a no, give their lives for someone’s order or decision; you spend decades in jail to achieve the power of death, you earn mountains of money that you invest in houses where you will never live, in banks you will never enter, in restaurants you do not run, in companies you do not manage; you control a deadly power in order to dominate a life you spend hidden underground, surrounded by bodyguards. You kill and are killed in a chess game, but you are not kings. The kings are those who get rich off you, making you eat one another until no one can call checkmate and only a pawn remains on the board. And it will not be you. What you devour here you will spit out elsewhere, far away, like birds that vomit food into the mouths of their chicks. But those you are feeding are not chicks but vultures, and you are not mother birds but buffalos ready to destroy yourselves in a place where blood and power are the terms of victory. It is time we stopped being a Gomorrah …

Cipriano stopped reading. It seemed as if he had imagined all the faces into which he would have liked to hurl those words. His breath was strangled, like an asthmatic’s. He closed his notebook and left without saying good-bye.

* Pecorella means “lamb” in Italian.

HOLLYWOOD

In Casal di Principe there is now a Foster Children’s Center in Don Peppino Diana’s memory. It is housed in a sumptuous, spacious villa seized from Casalesi clan affiliate Egidio Coppola. AGRORINASCE, the agency for the renewal, development, and safety of Casapessena, Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, and Villa Literno, has transformed confiscated Camorra assets into community facilities. Unless they’re put to some other use the villas continue to bear the mark of the bosses who built and lived in them. Even abandoned, they remain symbols of sovereignty. A trip across the Aversa Marshes offers a catalog of the last thirty years of architectural styles. The most imposing villas, belonging to contractors and landowners, provide the inspiration for office workers’ and shopkeepers’ houses. If the former is enthroned with four Doric columns in reinforced concrete, the latter will be adorned with two columns half their size. This imitation game has filled the area with villas competing to be the most impressive, complicated, and impregnable, mansions striving for eccentricity and uniqueness; one has a gate with the geometry of a Mondrian painting.

Camorra villas are pearls of cement tucked away on rural streets, protected by walls and video cameras. There are dozens and dozens of them. Marble and parquet, colonnades and staircases, granite fireplaces with the boss’s initials. One, the most sumptuous, is particularly famous, or perhaps it has merely generated the most legends. Everyone calls it Hollywood. Just saying the word makes you understand why. Hollywood was the home of Walter Schiavone, Sandokan’s brother, who ran the clan’s cement business for years. It’s not difficult to guess the reason for the name, easy to imagine the spaces and splendor. But that’s not the whole of it. Walter Schiavone’s villa really does have a link to Hollywood. People in Casal di Principe say the boss told his architect he wanted a villa just like Tony Montana’s, the Miami Cuban gangster in Scarface. He’d seen the film countless times and it had made a deep impression on him, to the point that he came to identify with the character played by Al Pacino. With a bit of imagination, Schiavone’s hollowed face could actually be superimposed on the actor’s. The story has all the makings of a legend. People say Schiavone even gave his architect a copy of the film; he wanted the Scarface villa, exactly as it was in the movie. It seemed like one of those stories that embellish every boss’s rise to power, of aura blending with legend, an authentic urban myth. Anytime anyone mentioned Hollywood, someone would say he’d seen it being built when he was young, a bunch of kids on bikes contemplating Tony Montana’s villa as it rose right off the screen into the middle of the neighborhood. Which is rather odd, because in Casale, villa construction starts only after high walls are built to close off the site. I never did believe in the Hollywood version. From the outside, Schiavone’s villa looks like a bunker surrounded by thick walls topped with threatening bars. Armored gates protect every access. There’s no way to tell what’s behind the walls, but they make you think it must be something extravagant.

There’s only one external sign, silently celebrated at the main entrance. The red gate, which otherwise looks like that of a country farm, is framed by Doric columns and a tympanum that clash with the disciplined sobriety of the thick walls and gate. The neo-pagan tympanum is actually the family emblem; it sends a message to anyone who already knows the place. The mere sight of it was enough to convince me that the legendary villa was actually for real. I had thought about going to see it for myself dozens of times, but it seemed impossible. Even after Hollywood was seized by the authorities, clan sentinels still guarded it. One morning, almost before I realized what I was doing, I got my courage up and went inside. I used a side entrance, safe from prying eyes that would not have appreciated my intrusion. The villa was stately and luminous, and the monumental facade awe-inspiring. Columns supported a double pediment with a cropped semicircle in the center. The front hall was an architectural delirium: two enormous staircases, like marble wings, soaring up to the second-floor balcony, which looked onto the large hall below. Just like Tony Montana’s. There was even a study off the balcony, just as in the final scene of Scarface, which ends in a torrent of bullets. The villa is a triumph of Doric columns, the interior ones in pink plaster and the external ones in aquamarine. On the sides are double colonnades with expensive wrought-iron trim. The entire property covers nearly an acre, and the three-storied villa is almost nine thousand square feet. At the end of the 1990s it was worth about $3.5 million, but now the same building would go for about $5 million. The rooms on the ground floor are huge, each with at least one bath, some large and luxurious, others small and cozy. In the children’s room, posters of singers and soccer players still hang on the walls, along with a small, blackened painting of two little angels, which probably hung at the head of the bed. A newspaper cutting: “Albanova sharpens its weapons.” Albanova was the local soccer team—a toy team for the bosses, backed by clan money—and disbanded by the Anti-Mafia Commission in 1997. Those scorched clippings clinging to the rotting plaster were all that remained of Walter’s son, who died in a car accident as a teenager. From the balcony you can see the front yard— palm trees and even an artificial lake with a wooden bridge leading to a tiny, verdant island encircled by a stone wall. When the Schiavones lived here, their dogs ran about in the yard: mastiffs, yet another display of power. In the backyard, palm trees shaded an elegant, obliquely elliptical swimming pool from the summer sun. The garden was copied from the bath of Venus, the jewel of the English Garden at the royal palace at Caserta. The statue of the goddess floats on the surface of the water with the same grace as the one designed by Luigi Vanvitelli. The villa was abandoned after the boss’s arrest, which occurred in 1996, right in these rooms. Walter did not do what his brother did; when Sandokan went into hiding, he built a large and princely hideout under his enormous Casal di Principe villa: a blockhouse devoid of doors and windows, with underground passages and natural grottoes for emergency escape routes. But there was also a thousand-square-foot, fully furnished apartment.