Blood Brotherhoods (116 page)

In the 1990s and 2000s, drug distribution in Le Vele was under the control of the Di Lauro clan. Its founding boss was Paolo Di Lauro, known as ‘Ciruzzo the Millionaire’. His base was in Secondigliano, a neighbourhood next to Scampia on the northern outskirts of Naples that was originally a row of large, elegant nineteenth-century houses ranged along the road out of town, but which hosted huge new developments in the 1970s and 1980s. The Millionaire led a centralised organisation moulded around the demands of the drug business. His closest lieutenants included two of his sons and his brother-in-law. Under them were the so-called ‘delegates’, who handled the purchase and cutting of the wholesale narcotics. Everything below this top level of the clan was run on a kind of franchising system that kept the risky and messy day-to-day business of dealing at a safe distance. Twenty ‘zone chiefs’ were granted authorisation to manage sales in various areas of the Millionaire’s territory, and handle the salaried pushers, lookouts and enforcers who occupied the lowest tier of the organisation. A pusher would earn $2,600 per month, killers a mere $3,300 per hit. Around 200 people counted as formally recognised members of the clan, but many, many more were employed. At the peak of the Millionaire’s power, unverifiable estimates put the organisation’s narcotics income at $1.3 billion per year.

In 2002 the Millionaire was forced to go into hiding from the law, and day-to-day control passed to his sons, who struggled to control the ambitions of the organisation’s ‘delegates’. The result, during the winter of 2004–5, was the most violent of recent camorra wars, known as the ‘Scampia Blood Feud’.

The Di Lauro clan was one of the more hierarchically structured camorra organisations of the most recent generation. In the 1970s,
camorristi
learned the advantages of organising themselves as a criminal Freemasonry from members of Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta who were keen to find business partners in Campania. Following the break-up of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia in the 1980s, practices such as initiation rituals fell out of favour across Campania. Since then, camorra clans have invented their own structures according to need. Yet, despite the fading of the influence of Sicilian and Calabrian organised crime in Campania, the
two fundamental principles of camorra organisation are the same as those that apply to the more formalised Families of Cosa Nostra or the ’
ndrine
and Locals of the ’ndrangheta. On the one hand, a camorra clan needs a tight command structure, particularly at the core, and particularly for fighting wars and defending territory. On the other hand, a clan must also be loose enough to allow its bosses to network widely, taking advantage of any criminal opportunity that presents itself at home or abroad. Within the limits set by these two principles, a variety of structures is possible. The term ‘camorra’ has come to embrace anything from the kind of street drug-dealing gangs that can be found in run-down areas of many Western cities, to major syndicates with iron bonds to the political system and the legal economy.

As was the case with the Di Lauro clan, blood ties often help bind the core members of any camorra organisation together. Camorra bosses are often brought up in a family tradition of violence and ‘criminal
savoir-faire
’ (to use the words of one Italian expert). Intermarriage between camorra bloodlines on adjacent territories helps consolidate authority and pass this
savoir-faire
down through the generations. One example is the Mazzarella clan, based around three nephews of Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza, the cigarette smuggler and member of Cosa Nostra who helped turn contraband tobacco into the ‘FIAT of the South’ in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1996, one of the Mazzarella brothers, Vincenzo, saw his family’s prestige augmented when his teenage son married the daughter of Lovigino ‘Ice Eyes’ Giuliano, the boss of Forcella.

The importance that kinship ties have within the camorra clans helps explain why women closely related to a clan’s core group can sometimes take on frontline roles. The cases of Pupetta Maresca and the Professor’s big sister Rosetta Cutolo tell us that, even before the 1990s, some camorra women were more prominent than was the case with women in the orbit of the Sicilian mafia or the ’ndrangheta. But in the last two decades women in the camorra have become enormously more visible. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the authorities have shaken off old prejudices that made them blind to women’s criminal talents. The second is that, because of increased police pressure, the clans have delegated greater power to women when their menfolk go on the run or get arrested. These trends have also made their effects felt in Sicily and Calabria, where the male-centred Masonic structure of the criminal brotherhoods tends to place more limits on women’s power. In 1998, Giusy Vitale took over day-to-day management of the Partinico Family of Cosa Nostra when her brother, the boss, was locked up. She has since turned penitent.

But it is no coincidence that it was a female
camorrista
, Teresa De Luca Bossa, who became the first woman in Italy to be subjected to the tough new prison regime set up in the wake of the Falcone and Borsellino murders
in 1992. De Luca Bossa was both the mother and the lover of clan leaders, and showed notable military, managerial and diplomatic skill in keeping the organisation together when her menfolk were arrested.

Nor have Sicily or Calabria seen anything to compare with the vicious battle fought out between the women of the Graziano and Cava clans in 2002. On 26 May of that year, a Graziano firing party including three women chased down and rammed a car containing five women from the Cavas. In the ensuing bloodbath, four Cava women were shot dead and a fifth left paralysed. On both the victims’ and the perpetrators’ side, several generations of women were involved. The Graziano boss’s wife, Chiara Manzi, aged sixty-two, coordinated the attack by mobile phone; the shooters included her daughter-in-law (aged forty) and two of her nieces (nineteen and twenty, respectively). In tapes of their phone conversations in the run-up to the assault, these women can be heard spitting insults at their intended victims: ‘gypsies’, ‘sows’.

Uniquely among the mafias, the camorra has also allowed affiliates from minority sexualities to reach leading positions. Anna Terracciano is one of twelve sisters and brothers from the Spanish Quarters of Naples—eleven of them active in organised crime. Known as
’o Masculone
(something like ‘Big Bloke’), Anna is a male-identified lesbian who went around armed and took part in military actions on behalf of her clan. She was imprisoned in 2006. Three years later, the police arrested Ugo Gabriele, whom the authorities claim is the first transsexual
camorrista
on record. Known as ‘Ketty’, Gabriele is the younger sibling of one of the clan that broke off from the Millionaire’s organisation during the Scampia Blood Feud of 2004–5. According to the police, when her brother was promoted, Ketty graduated from pushing cocaine to her clients (she was a prostitute) to a more managerial role in the drug ring. As well as the camorra’s reliance on family ties, Ketty’s promotion may also owe something to Neapolitan popular culture’s traditional tolerance towards male transsexuals—the so-called
femminielli
.

No tour of the geography of contemporary Campanian organised crime would be complete without a visit to the vast fertile plain to the north of the city, which is sometimes called the Terra di Lavoro (the Land of Work). In a poem from 1956, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini evoked its eerie beauties as seen from a train:

Now the Terra di Lavoro is near:

A few herds of buffalo, a few houses

Heaped between rows of tomato plants,

Twists of ivy, and lowly palings.

Every so often, close to the terrain,

Black as a drainpipe,

A stream escapes the clutches

Of the elms loaded with vines.

This distinctive landscape has been the backdrop to some of the most important developments in the history of Campanian organised crime over the past century and a half. In the nineteenth century, when much of the area was a marshy wilderness known as the Mazzoni, production of mozzarella cheese from buffalo milk was notorious for being controlled by violent entrepreneurs. In the drained agricultural land to the south and south-east of the marshes, gangs ran protection rackets on the farms, exploited the labourers, taxed the wholesale fruit, vegetable and meat markets, and controlled the routes by which produce made its way into the city.

If Pasolini were alive and able to journey through Terra di Lavoro today, he would see a landscape radically transformed by the arrival of factories in the 1960s, and by industrial decline and the post-earthquake building boom in the 1980s. But perhaps more than these visible changes, Pasolini would be struck by a new smell. In many parts of the land north of Naples, the stench of rubbish fills the air—rubbish that has become the contemporary camorra’s most important new source of wealth.

 
73 

C
AMORRA
: An Italian Chernobyl

W
HEN THE
S
ECOND
R
EPUBLIC WAS BORN
, N
APLES AND THE
C
AMPANIA REGION WERE
in the midst of a garbage crisis. No scheme to recycle the waste from homes and shops had yet got off the ground. Dumps were full to overflowing. Worrying signs of health problems among the population near the dumps were beginning to emerge.

Early in 1994, the government declared an emergency and appointed a ‘Commissariat’ to manage the day-to-day collection and disposal while the regional government prepared a long-term solution. But no long-term solution emerged: it was the usual story of political stasis and confusion. At that point, in 1996, the Commissariat was given the task of planning Campania’s way out of the emergency, and the power to override normal planning restrictions and local government controls in order to put the plan into place.

The resulting scheme seemed sleek. Municipal trash was to be sorted and disposed of in stages. First, recyclables would be creamed off at the point of collection. Then there was to be a further, centralised sifting to extract both biodegradable matter and any dangerous substances. The next stage involved mashing and compacting what was left into so-called ‘ecobales’ that could be used as fuel. And finally those ecobales would be burned to generate clean electricity. Seven plants to produce ecobales would need to be built, and two new incinerator-generators. Once they were up and running, it was claimed, Campania would have a perfect cycle of environmentally friendly refuse collection and reuse. No one heeded the waste-management experts who said that the scheme was unrealistic and based on principles that had already failed elsewhere.

The solution to Campania’s rubbish emergency rapidly turned into an environmental disaster. The rubbish-collection cycle was dysfunctional at every stage.

Eighteen consortia were set up in the 1990s to manage collection and recycling in different parts of the region. But for a variety of reasons they did not do their job: trash entered the waste-management system in an undifferentiated state.

At that point in the cycle the most serious problems started. An alliance of four companies, known as FIBE, won the contract to build the ecobale plants and the incinerator-generators. The main reasons FIBE won were the low cost and high speed of their proposals: this was an emergency, after all. FIBE was offered a contract with the Campania regional government that contained inadequate penalty clauses.

FIBE companies promised they would have the incinerator-generators up and running by the end of 2000. But by that date, they had not even obtained planning permission. Only one of the incinerator-generators had been completed by the end of 2007. Plans for the second incinerator-generator were finally cancelled in 2012.

FIBE companies were also given pretty much a free rein in choosing where to build their plants. The first incinerator-generator was built in Acerra, in northern Campania, just a few hundred metres away from a large children’s hospital. The second was originally to be sited only twenty kilometres away from the first. This was a part of the country famous for being the centre of buffalo-milk mozzarella production. But even before the first incinerator-generator was built, the area already hosted more than its fair share of legal and illegal dumps, and dioxin poisoning had been discovered in farm animals and crops. The incinerator-generator that was actually built was quickly shown to be working badly, spreading gases over a ten-kilometre radius.

The seven ecobale plants were even worse: a parliamentary report found that the ecobales they produced were just large plastic-wrapped cubes of unsifted rubbish that were too damp and too filled with poisons to incinerate, even if the incinerators had been working. Nothing could be done except stockpile them. Across Campania, grey and white ziggurats of ecobales began to climb skywards. The regional rubbish Commissar told parliament in 2004 that
every month
40,000 square metres of land was being used up to store ecobales.