NEWSLETTER

INTERVIEW BY TIM SMALL

What about the famous honor code?

OK, that exists, but it’s fake. There are falsely “noble” codes. They say they don’t kill children, but they always kill children. They say they don’t touch women, but they’ve always massacred women. They have always dealt in drugs, even if it was initially forbidden. They have always had people among their ranks whose mothers were prostitutes, even if it is theoretically unacceptable. These “codes” only exist as a form of self-regulation. Take drugs, for example. In theory, you aren’t allowed to deal drugs in your own territories, because it’s bad, but actually it’s just because drugs are the quickest wealth accelerator, so if one of your affiliates does well with drugs, within six months he can become your competition. If, instead, he deals in construction or contraband, it takes him six years to become competition, and you can monitor him. Of course, there are some unbendable rules. In my area, Secondigliano, it’s impossible to conceive of a homosexual Camorrista. In Naples it’s more accepted. Once word came out that a member of the Casalese clan had been involved with a North African boy in jail. They killed him for that. Strangled him. Their cultural references are very macho. There was a famous boss in the 80s who went all over Italy, looking for his new wife’s first boyfriend, so he could hang him. Another story is the one of the 40-year-old who was courting his boss’s 18-year-old niece. They took him to the beach, tied him to a chair, and killed him by forcing him to eat sand, so that with every bite of mud, he could think of the mistake he’d made.

These violent crimes all have the fringe benefit of increasing their street cred.

Yes. Call it their PR department. If they want people to know, they act accordingly—like when they decapitated a man by using a metal grinder. It’s like their villas: They all live in giant, snazzy homes that they never enjoy. They always have marble columns or piranhas or lions in them. They are just symbols of their power. Think of Walter Schiavone, a Camorrista who had a huge villa built outside Naples that was the exact replica of Tony Montana’s home in Scarface.

How did you actually write your book?

The book is a hybrid between a novel and a nonfiction investigation. I wanted to follow Capote’s footsteps. In reference to In Cold Blood, he once said that he wanted to “produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.” Once, I was asked by the police what I thought made the Camorra so angry at me that I would need a 24-hour police escort. I said, “Literature,” and they thought I was pulling their leg. But I actually think that’s true. I mean, literature made unreadable stories readable. Five hundred pages of pure nonfiction, read by 3,000 people, and reviewed in the back sections of small magazines—they wouldn’t have cared about that. But if you make it into a story it becomes interesting to a much larger number of readers.

And this put you in danger.

I think that I’m in danger not because of what I wrote, per se, but because I reached so many readers. The New York Times called me “the Italian Rushdie,” but I think it’s a very different situation. Rushdie was persecuted because he wrote a book, much like the Soviet writers were. The Mafia allows you to write. You can say what you want about them. They just don’t want the information to reach a large enough audience so that it affects their business. Only stupid dictatorships ban books without understanding that you just give it publicity by doing so. Real democracies censor you by ignoring you.

Was there a particular incident when it dawned on you that you were going from first-time author to living in hiding with a 24-hour police escort?

The book came out in the May of 2006, but until September of 2006 I was fine. I wasn’t a challenge for them at the beginning. They see writers as effeminate, useless faggots—and they’re often correct. When my book sold 100,000 copies, I started to panic. On the 13th of October 2006, my life changed. I went to a public meeting in Casal di Principe, the hometown of the Casalesi families, and I announced, “Schiavone, Iovine, Zagaria, you are worthless.” Those are the names of three major bosses. Silence came over the meeting, and since that moment, I have lived with a constant police escort. Now they give me three policemen and a bulletproof car.

How do you live your life? Do you still get to see your friends, your family?

No, but for different reasons. Where I come from, being my friend is a big problem. This makes human relationships impossible. But there are hundreds of us living like this. I think of those who had it worse than me. Like Federico Del Prete, the trade unionist who was murdered in 2004. Phone interceptions show that he was killed after a poll. They first asked around about how famous he was. “Do the papers talk about him?” they asked. “Only local papers” was the answer. And they executed him.

Would you say your fame protects you?

Yes, but only as long it lasts. A Camorrista-turned-witness famously said, about me, “They’re waiting for this to pass.” It’s always like this. They know that sooner or later, the media storm will pass. Then they’ll get me.

Looking back, would you do it again?

The writer in me wants to say yes, a hundred times over. But I would be lying. I wake up almost every morning thinking, “If only I could go back...” There is a part of me, you see, that just wanted to write a book. I didn’t want my entire life to be swallowed by that book. But what can you do? It was my choice. The most difficult thing is forgiving myself for the problems I created for my loved ones. You feel really brave, but when you see how your family is forced to live, you feel like a worm. Honestly, I wouldn’t recommend doing what I did. But I also want to say that the more people who deal with these problems, the better. If so many Italian writers stopped navel-gazing, maybe we’d all be better off.


CONTINUED
TAKING ON THE ITALIAN MAFIA | 1 | 2 | 3 |

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