Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano Page A

pusher. Suddenly a truck appeared. Dozens of them had been pulling out of the warehouses all morning. It stopped near me and a voice called my name. It was Pasquale. He opened the door and had me jump in. Not a guardian angel who saves his favorite charge—more like two rats running in the same sewer, pulling each other by the tail.
    Pasquale looked at me with the severity of a father who’d foreseen everything. That sarcastic smile said it all; no need to waste time scolding me. I stared at his hands instead. Even redder, more chapped, knuckles cracked, palms anemic. Fingers accustomed to silk and velvet have trouble adjusting to ten hours at the steering wheel. Pasquale was talking, but I couldn’t get the Visitors out of my head. Monkeys. Less than monkeys. Guinea pigs, testing the cut of a drug that will be distributed all over Europe—the clans can’t take the chance it might kill someone. Human guinea pigs, so that people in Rome, Naples, Abruzzo, Lucania, and Bologna won’t end up dead,blood dripping from their nose and foaming at the mouth. A dead Visitor in Secondigliano is only one more wretch whose demise will go uninvestigated. It’s already a lot if he’s picked up off the ground, his face wiped clean of vomit and piss, and buried. Elsewhere there’d be an autopsy, an investigation, conjectures about his death. Here there’s just one word: overdose.
    Pasquale took the road that links the northern suburbs of Naples. Sheds, warehouses, rubbish dumps, rusting junk strewn around, trash tossed everywhere. No industrial complexes here. There’s the stink of factory smoke but no factories. Houses scattered along streets, piazzas defined by the presence of a bar. A confused and complicated desert. Pasquale realized I wasn’t listening so he braked suddenly. Without coming to a full stop, just a little whiplash—just enough to shake me up. Then he looked at me and said, “Things are going to get rough in Secondigliano … ‘a
vicchiarella
is in Spain with everybody’s money. You’ve got to quit coming around here. I can feel the tension everywhere. Even the asphalt would peel off the ground if it could get out of here.”
    I decided to follow what was going to happen in Secondigliano. The more Pasquale insisted it would be dangerous, the more I became convinced that it was impossible not to try to understand the elements of the disaster. And understanding meant being part of it somehow. I had no choice; as far as I’m concerned, it’s the only way to understand things. Neutrality and objective distance are places I’ve never been able to find. Raffaele Amato—‘a
vicchiarella,
the old woman—a second-tier clan executive in charge of the Spanish drug markets, had fled to Barcelona with the Di Lauro cash box. At least that’s what was being said. In truth he had failed to turn his quota over to the clan, a way of demonstrating that he no longer felt the least obligation to the people who wanted to keep him on a salary. The schism was official. For the moment it involved only Spain,which had always been controlled by the clans: Andalusia by the Casalesi of Caserta, the islands by the Nuvolettas of Marano, and Barcelona by the “secessionists.” That’s the name the first crime reporters on the story gave to the Di Lauro men who broke away. But everyone in Secondigliano calls them the Spaniards. With their leader in Spain, they took the lead not only in peddling but in narcotraffic as well, Madrid being a crucial junction for cocaine coming from Colombia and Peru. According to investigations, Amato’s men had long employed a brilliant stratagem for moving huge amounts of drugs: garbage trucks. Trash on the top, drugs underneath. An infallible method for escaping controls. No one would stop a garbage truck in the middle of the night.
    According to the inquiries, Cosimo Di Lauro sensed that his managers were turning less and less capital over to the clan. Profit was supposed to be reinvested in