The author of a book on the Camorra mob, exposing how it rules Naples by fear, is under police protection, writes Paddy Agnew
When Cosimo Di Lauro heard the police cars pull up outside his squalid little hideaway in the grimy Naples suburb of Secondigiliano, he knew the game was up. The 25-year-old, son of one of the most wanted Camorra godfathers in Naples, Paolo Di Lauro, did not even think of pulling out a gun or making a run for it.
The man who was widely held responsible for promoting and orchestrating mob warfare - which at one point claimed a life every 48 hours - opted instead to comb his black hair. When the police broke into his hideaway, they found him waiting, his hair neatly combed into a pony tail and wearing a fashionable dark raincoat over his designer jacket. In newspaper photos of his arrest the next day, he looked like a protagonist out of Pulp Fiction or The Matrix.
Within minutes of his arrest, word had gone out. From nowhere, a 400-strong crowd appeared. Women screamed abuse at the police, dustbins were set on fire, cars were turned over and Molotov cocktails were thrown at the police cars. In the end, it was only with great difficulty that the carabinieri got themselves and Di Lauro out of there.
What was going on? Is the Camorra - the Naples Mafia - some sort of Robin Hood outfit that can rely on the support of the poor? No way, says author Roberto Saviano, who, in his outstanding investigative book Gomorra gives another explanation for the "riot" prompted by the godfather's arrest.
The riot was not really intended to hinder Di Lauro's arrest, rather it was the terrified reaction of the locals, concerned to make it clear that they had not "shopped" the godfather. If the Di Lauro family thought for a minute that neighbours had blown the whistle, then some of them would be dead and some burned out of their homes by nightfall.
Naples is a violent city. Writer Saviano calculates that since his own birth in 1979, there have been 3,600 Camorra killings in Naples. By comparison, he suggests, organisations such as the Red Brigades, Eta or indeed the IRA are in the halfpenny place. In the bestselling Gomorra, Saviano boldly tries to explain the innermost workings of the Camorra, otherwise known as Il Sistema. A journalist who has worked for dailies Il Manifesto and Corriere del Mezzogiorno as well as for prestigious news weekly L'Espresso, Naples-born Saviano bases much of his analysis and reporting on first-hand evidence, gleaned as he travels around inner Naples on his Vespa scooter. Not only does he collaborate with the "Camorra Observatory" but he is out there witnessing the grisly reality of gangland.
The result is an outstanding investigative work that not only recounts the violent ways and means of various Camorra families but also indicates their burgeoning economic power and ambitions in the transport, refuse, building, clothing, footwear and other industries, not to mention their "core businesses" of drug trafficking and racketeering. This is no folklore phenomenon - this is life and (often) death.
When Cosimo Di Lauro's fugitive father, Paolo, was eventually arrested (in September 2005, nine months after the arrest of Cosimo), the Di Lauro family suspected that a certain Edoardo La Monica, from another Camorra family, had informed on them. Within fewer than 24 hours of Paolo's arrest, La Monica was dead. He had been hideously tortured. Tied to a chair, he had been clubbed to death with a baseball bat, "lined" with sharp nails. His eyes had been gouged out, his tongue and ears cut off and his arms broken. A grisly, terrifying message had been sent out. In certain parts of Naples, it is best to hear, see and say nothing.
SAVIANO'S ACCOUNT OF the Camorra is much more than a catalogue of horrors, however. He tries to explain the obvious links between Neapolitan high unemployment and Camorra recruitment: "Everybody I know is either dead or in prison. I want to become a godfather. I want to have supermarkets, shops, factories and I want women. I want to have three cars and I want that when I enter a shop, people show me respect. I want to have shops all over the world. And then I want to die, but die like a real man, someone who is really in charge. I want to die, having been taken out." The words, quoted by Saviano, are those of a Neapolitan juvenile offender, contained in a letter written from prison to a priest. The sentiment is the same as that which, within hours of Cosimo Di Lauro's arrest, saw kids in Camorra strongholds such as Torre Annunziata going around with a photo of the young godfather as their mobile phone screen saver.
Perhaps those same young folks would do well to listen to the priest who buried Emmanuele. From the ugly suburb of Parco Verde, Emmanuele was killed on the work site. He had a "regular" job, in that he would hang out at the local lovers' lane. He would watch the couples park, wait for them to cover up their windscreens and get undressed and then he would pounce.
Emmanuele would smash a windscreen and, revolver in hand, demand money. The couples, caught in flagrante, always paid up. Emmanuele, however, was not too smart. He kept pulling this trick in the same place. One night, the Carabinieri showed up.
Emmanuele flashed his revolver. The police responded by opening fire on him and killing him on the spot. Only when Emmanuele's body was recovered did anyone notice that his revolver was in fact a plastic toy.
Emmanuele was much liked in the area and his neighbours opted to honour him by building (overnight and illegally, of course) a small mausoleum to his memory. Eventually, the local authorities opted to bulldoze the illegal shrine, prompting a riot that seemed destined to get totally out of hand. Until, that is, a big black SUV drove up. A door opened and some of the rioters got in. Within an hour, the riot was over. The local Camorra family had decided that the riot was a nuisance - nothing would be gained by it.
At Emmanuele's funeral, a woman had stopped the priest who presided and asked him: "What did this boy learn in life? Nothing?" "The point is that, here, you only learn to die," replied the priest.
FOR ROBERTO SAVIANO, his investigative work has put his neck on the line. Since the publication of Gomorra last year, he has received numerous death threats. He has been forced to move out of Naples and now lives under police protection, constantly on the move. When he had the temerity to turn up for a Camorra trial recently, one of the mafiosi in the dock shouted at him, telling him to say hello to Don Peppino, a reference to a priest killed by the Camorra.
Saviano, however, continues to work and write, being much in demand these days as a Mafia "expert". For him, he says, the important thing is to move on from the cliches of "chaotic Naples, the pizza city". Naples, today, is something much more sinister: "People don't believe me. I didn't actually want to write about Naples or Campania. I wanted to write about my time, about the human condition."