On the Shores of the Mediterranean (3 page)

Altogether, on that day alone, in the last week of August, those arrested in and around Naples included the uncle of Luigi Giugliano of Forcella, a high-ranking member of the Nuova Famiglia who had been instantly deported to Frosinone; three traffickers in hard drugs; two pairs of brothers, all between twelve and seventeen years of age, who between them had broken into twenty different apartments in the districts of Vomero and Colli
Aminei, two of them being armed; a man who had assaulted the police while they were chasing two thieves; Vicenzo Scognamiglo, aged forty-nine, who had stolen a wallet from an Iranian; Bruno and Gennaro Pastore, for snatching a handbag from an American tourist; and Salvatore Imparata, aged fifty-six, and Giovanni Lazzaro, twenty, both of whom were found to be carrying guns.

That same night, Francesco Iannucci, otherwise known as Ciccio 800 (Ciccio being a diminutive of Francesco), a thirty-seven-year-old Camorrista of the Nuova Famiglia, succeeded in jumping from a prison train and getting away, although the following day he was sighted from a Carabinieri helicopter and recaptured, after having been shot in the knee. In 1975 he had been condemned to twenty-four years’ imprisonment for the murder of Andrea Gargiulo, otherwise known as ’O Curto (the Short One), head of a rival band of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata who specialized in extortion in Iannucci’s native suburb of Torre Annunziata, on the shores of the Bay below the southern flanks of Vesuvius, not far from Pompeii.

But by far the biggest coup of the day had been the arrest, by Carabinieri of the Special Operations Group, Napoli I, of Carmela Provenzano, aged thirty-three, at her home in Secondigliano, on the northern outskirts of the city. She had been committed to the earthquake-ridden women’s prison at Pozzuoli in which the occupants were now refusing, with some reason, to be locked in their cells. Carmela was the wife of Pasquale d’Amico, better known as ’O Cartunaro (literally the gatherer of cardboard boxes, for reconditioning), who besides being a scavenger was also one of the strategic planning staff in the upper echelons of the NCO.

Carmela had acted as principal courier for the NCO, maintaining a regular communication service between those of its members who were outside with those who were inside. One of her most important calls had been at the Supercarcere, the
maximum security prison, at Nuoro in Sardinia, itself a town in a region that is one of the great epicentres of violent, organized crime on the island. There, in August 1981, she delivered the death sentence, pronounced by Raffaele Cutolo, otherwise known as Il Professore, head of the NCO, on Francis Turatello, otherwise known as Faccia d’Angelo (Angel Face). Turatello was one of the inmates, and, if not commander-in-chief of the Nuova Famiglia, was certainly boss of all illicit activity in the Po Valley, as far north as Milan, as well as being a protégé of the Mafia.

Turatello died on 17 August, during the open-air exercise period, having been stabbed sixty times. That same day, the Carabinieri of Napoli I also arrested Maria Auletta, aged eighteen, wife of the Mafioso Salvatori Imperatrici, one of the
sicari
(cutthroats) who had stabbed Turatello to death. She was what is known as a
fiancheggiatrice
, a helper or flanker of the NCO.

Carmela Provenzano was arrested in Secondigliano, Maria Auletta in Arzano. Both are small places adjacent to one another in what is known as Il Triangolo della Morte, or Il Triangolo della Camorra, both of which have the same significance for those who have the misfortune to live in them and are not themselves members of either the Camorra or the Mafia. Inside Il Triangolo, which is made up of three main areas, Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra, live more than half a million people, a large proportion of whom are unemployed and without any apparent hope of finding employment. Everything within Il Triangolo is inadequate: schools, water supply, housing and recreational facilities, which are practically non-existent.

Of the eight
comuni
, municipalities, that make up Caivano-Fratta, five do not even have a single police or Carabinieri post which might afford some protection to the inhabitants. Afragola-Casoria, with 200,000 people living in it, does not even have a hospital. In Acerra, which has the largest concentration of industry
– Aeritalia, Alfasud, Montefibre – the three
comuni
of Acerra, Pomigliano and Casalnuovo, which together have a population of 100,000, have more than 20,000 unemployed, of whom 8000 are what is known as
cassa integrati
, that is paid not to work.
¹
At Acerra large numbers of earthquake victims are accommodated in metal containers of the sort carried on lorries. In the last week of this August, because of the heat, a four-year-old child died of asphyxiation inside one, the third child to die in this fashion in four months. Of the eight communes that make up Caivano-Fratta, which has about 200,000 inhabitants, the one with the largest number of unemployed is the one which has been industrialized. In fact, the setting up of industrial complexes in the Triangle has obliterated enormous tracts of agricultural land without providing alternative employment for the inhabitants.

It is not surprising that the Triangle is used as a battlefield by the warring clans of the Camorra; there were fifty murders there in the first eight months of 1983. The most dangerous area is Acerra, where, by the time we arrived in Naples, there had been twenty-two murders in eighteen months. Everywhere robbers, many of them no more than children, had organized themselves in bands anything up to twenty strong. Banks were constantly under attack. The only faint ray of hope in what was otherwise a prospect of unrelieved gloom and horror was that students and working men living in the Triangle had joined together to set up an organization of vigilantes, headed by a bishop. We decided to give Afragola-Casoria, Caivano-Fratta and Acerra a miss.

In view of all this general unpleasantness, it was therefore with a certain trepidation that we set off, as we did each night, to walk back to our macabre bedroom in the Pensione Canada on the waterfront facing Porto Sannazzaro, through streets that were now
rapidly emptying of people, but not traffic, which continued to circulate until the early hours of the morning unabated. This room was twelve feet high, twelve feet square, lit by a very old circular fluorescent tube that when it was warming up resembled a crimson worm and was furnished with a bidet hidden by a tall bamboo screen, like a bidet in a jungle. It was also furnished, which was unusual for a bedroom, with an upright piano belonging to the brother of the proprietor. The only picture on the walls was a colour photograph of the Mobilificio Petti, a furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA), with the telephone numbers – there were two lines, 723730 and 723751–printed underneath it, in case one wanted to order up more furniture during one’s stay.

Fortunately there were other things besides shootings, of which one soon tires, going on in Piazza Sannazzaro. Night after night we had sat in it watching a succession of events unfold themselves, always with the same protagonists, until we had come to realize that what we were looking at was an unvarying ritual. Even the order in which they took place and the participants appeared and disappeared was governed by immutable laws. It was only on this particular evening, when the Camorra had demonstrated its existence, coming up from the depths and showing a small part of itself, like some immense fish of which only the smallest part breaks the surface, that there had been any interruption.

First to open up, and the only one who remained on site throughout the entire evening, was a young man who sold raw tripe and pigs’ trotters from a shiny, brand new, stainless steel stall with the owner’s name and what he dealt in painted around the top of it –
TRIPPE OPERE E’O MUSSO
– in black letters, illuminated on a pink background.

The grey pieces of tripe were displayed on a sort of miniature
stainless steel staircase which was decorated with vine leaves and lemons stuck on metal spikes, with a centrepiece which consisted of what looked like an urn made entirely of rolled tripe, with the pinkish pigs’ trotters laid out attractively at the foot of it. Down this staircase tumbled an endless cascade of water, making the whole thing a sort of hanging garden of tripe and pigs’ trotters; it was surprising how attractive looking it was, considering how unpromising were the basic materials.

Next to appear on the scene, after
E’O MUSSO
, was a very poor, very fragile, faintly genteel old lady, who looked as if a puff of wind might whisk her away to eternity. She moved among the tables never asking for money but nevertheless receiving it, for the Neapolitans recognize and respect true poverty. A surprising amount of what she received was in the form of 500 and even 1000 lire notes. This old lady rarely, if ever, made the circuit of all the tables. When she had collected what she presumably considered enough for her immediate needs, after taking into account whatever payments she might have to make to the Camorra in a way of
dovuti
, dues, or what she considered the market could stand each night without spoiling it, she would give up and totter off round the corner and up the hill called the Salita Piedigrotta which leads to the Mergellina railway station and the church of Santa Maria Piedigrotta. There, by day, during opening hours, she used to sit outside the main door, at the receipt of alms. Santa Maria Piedigrotta is the church which is the scene of one of the great Neapolitan religious festivals, that of the Virgin of Piedigrotta, which takes place, to the accompaniment of scenes of wild and pagan enthusiasm, on the night of 7–8 September.

The old lady was followed by an even older, even more decrepit couple, presumably husband and wife, each of whom carried a couple of very large plastic bags. They moved from table to table asking for bread, and because they didn’t miss any out, they got a lot of it.

What did they do with all this bread?

One night, feeling mean about doing so, I followed them out of the Piazza, round the corner and up the Rampa Sant’Antonio a Posillipo, built in 1743 by Charles of Bourbon’s Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Ramiro de Guzman, Duque Medina de Las Torres, which is one of the ways of reaching Virgil’s tomb and a pillar indicating the whereabouts of the remains of the poet Leopardi. There, from a distance, I saw them eating bread as hard as they could. It was a harrowing sight. But what happened to the bread they couldn’t eat? There was so much of it, and more arriving every evening. Did they sell it to other old people too infirm or too proud to go into the streets and beg? Or did they sell it to a pig farmer for swill? It was yet another Neapolitan mystery.

The old man and the old woman were followed by a
venditore di volanti
, literally a seller of flyings, in this case balloons, who always did good business with the owners of children who had long since got tired of sitting at the tables with their parents and were now zooming about all over the place.

Next came a poor, sickly, probably tubercular, humble-looking young man like someone out of a Victorian novel, who handed out colour prints, as pallid as he was, of Santa Lucia, the Virgin martyred by the Emperor Diocletian, shown holding a palm frond and, as patroness of the blind, a dish with a pair of eyes apparently swimming in it, all against a Neapolitan background of umbrella pines.

He was followed by a more vigorous-looking man carrying a sort of wooden framework, a bit like those that were once used to carry hawks into the hunting field, supported by straps from his shoulders but loaded with toy musical instruments, selling at 1000 lire a time, that looked like ice-cream cornets and which, when he blew into a demonstration model, produced a hideous noise. Soon the air was filled with the sounds of dozens of these
instruments being blown by children and adults which mingled with the terrible howlings emitted by the sirens of the police cars and ambulances tearing through the streets, just as they do in every other city in the civilized world.

Then came another, older man, pushing an old-fashioned perambulator with a piece of board on top of it which he used as a mobile stand. He was a
torronaro
, selling
torronne
, nougat. On both sides of the pram he had painted the words QUESTO ESERCIZIO RIMANE CHIUSO IL LUNEDI (THIS ESTABLISHMENT REMAINS CLOSED ON MONDAYS), which was why we hadn’t seen him on the evening we arrived. Below that he had added his telephone number, just like the owner of the furniture warehouse at Nocera Sopra Camerelle (SA) in case someone had a sudden, overwhelming desire to eat nougat.

Last of all, a four-man band came marching into the Piazza. Three of them were middle-aged with little black moustaches, wearing the sort of red caps with gold-embroidered peaks worn by Italian station masters when seeing a train off from their stations, bright green shirts and yellow knickerbockers with silver braided side seams. Two of them were beating drums, and the third one played the harmonica. They were led by a drum-major dressed in a white tunic with gold-embroidered epaulettes, bright yellow trousers the same shade as the bandsmen’s knickerbockers and what looked like a colonial governor’s hat decked with white plumes. He was whirling a baton with a Negro’s head on top of it in one hand and, with the other, making various obscene gestures. Each night when we gave the drum-major his due – he was well over seventy years of age – which was not always easy at this late hour, as besides being breadless by this time, we were also running short of the kind of money we were prepared to give him, he used to hand Wanda a quantity of visiting cards, so that if she had stayed on for another week in Naples she
would have had enough cards to play poker with. The print on them read:

BOTTONE SALVATORE
ORGANIZZATORE-PAZARIELLO
PROPAGANDA: PER NAPOLI E PROVINCIA
AFRAGOLA (NA)         TEL: 8697539
                                                                    DALLE ORE 2 ALLE ORE 24