than on draught when it is usually too gassy, or wine, or Coca Cola. Here, in the Piazza, beer drinkers outnumbered wine drinkers.
One of the sources of drink in Piazza Sannazzaro was a dark little hole in the wall with VINI inscribed over it on a stone slab, from which this and the various other beverages were dispensed by a rather grumpy-looking old woman in the black weeds of age or widowhood or both, who spoke nothing but the Neapolitan dialect. This dispensary formed in part an eating place called the Antica Pizzeria da Pasqualino which offered four different varieties – gusti specialità – of pizza: polpo (with octopus) al sugo, capricciosa, frutta di mare and capponato, presumably filled with capon. These pizzas are good. They make anything bought outside Italy, and some pizzas made in Italy and even in Naples by those who are not interested in making them properly – a bit of underbaked dough smeared with salsa di pomodoro, tomato sauce, and adorned with a few olives and fragments of anchovy – seem like an old tobacco pouch with these items inside it. The sort of pizza that the English traveller Augustus Hare was offered when in Naples in 1883, the one he described as ‘a horrible condiment made of dough baked with garlic, rancid bacon and strong cheese … esteemed a feast’.
What he should have been eating is something of which the foundation is a round of light, leavened dough which has been endlessly and expertly kneaded, on to which have been spread, in its simplest form, olive oil, the cheese called mozzarella, anchovies, marjoram and salsa di pomodoro, and baked in a wood-fuelled oven.
Amongst all the Napoletani there were very few foreigners to be seen. This was because there is relatively little accommodation in Mergellina – a couple of small hotels and three pensioni – and very few visitors to Naples, once they find out what can happen to them in the city, unless they are young and active and travelling together in a band, are at night prepared to go far from the area where they are actually sleeping.
Our evening in Piazza Sannazzaro had been almost too full of incident. Just after nine o’clock, a boy had ridden up on a Vespa and stopped outside the Trattoria Agostino, a place very similar to the one we were in and about fifty yards away on the corner of Via Mergellina, at its junction with the Salita Piedigrotta. There, at point-blank range, without dismounting, he had fired five shots in rapid succession, from what sounded to me more like a peashooter than a pistol, at a man sitting at a table outside the establishment, apparently trying to gambizzare, blow his kneecaps off, all of which missed, except one which grazed his bottom.
The man at the table was Mario dello Russo, aged thirty-four. He had a criminal record as a member of the Camorra, a fully fledged member of the Nuova Famiglia, the principal rivals of the now-ascendant Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) with whom they were currently engaged in a fight to the death, or until some other satisfactory arrangement could be arrived at.
This battle, which was taking place under our eyes, was for the ultimate control of almost everything criminal: robbery, kidnapping, intimidation of shopkeepers, all sorts of smuggling including drugs, male and female prostitution and illegal property development not only in Naples and the offshore islands of Ischia and Capri but in the whole of Italy from Apulia and Calabria in the deep south as far north as Milan.
After five minutes, three cars loaded with members of the Squadra Mobile arrived, together with an ambulance, and dello Russo was carted off. The boy who actually fired the shots was, in fact, a person of no consequence, what is known in the Camorra, an organization with unchanging, traditional ways of doing things, rather like Pop at Eton, as a Picciotto di Onore, a Lad of Honour, an unpaid apprentice to the Camorra, anxious to prove his worth and loyalty to the cause. The next step up the ladder was to become what used to be called a Picciotto di Sgarroe. This needed a far greater degree of self-sacrifice and abnegation, the postulant often being required to take the responsibility for crimes committed by fully fledged Camorristi and to accept whatever sentence was meted out to him by law, even if it meant spending years in prison.
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,
