Restivo was known to have powerful allies. His father was a prominent member of Potenza high society and much respected by the town’s leading denizens. Apart from Restivo, the police also had to consider the possibility of involvement by a criminal organisation.
To appreciate how the hunt for a missing schoolgirl could be hindered by the criminal fraternity, it is essential to understand the influence that organised crime has on daily life in southern Italy. There is a saying in Italy that the Pope’s blessing is second in importance only to that of the Mafia. As blasphemous as that may be, it is not without a certain credence.
The Italian and Sicilian authorities want the world to believe that they have broken the back of the Mafia and that it is a spent force, nothing more than something sinisterly romantic for the movies and museums. Believe that propaganda at your peril; it is the PR of countries whose lifeblood in the new European economy is tourism. The atrocities of 9/11 scared away the tourists in their millions from New York for a decade; London fared almost as badly in the aftermath of 7/7 and, years earlier, the entire UK suffered from the sabotage of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1998, a mass murder that deterred many Americans from flying to Britain.
Crime in Rome and Italy’s northern cities was little different from that of their counterparts in other Western countries; it was ever-present but random, disparate. But in Naples and the smaller towns of southern Italy, including the rural areas, organised crime impacted on everyday life; from buying bread to drinking wine, the Men in Suits took their cut and set the rules. There were two layers of government – the official and the unofficial. Through hard and very harsh lessons over centuries, the general public had come to fear and obey the latter, while not respecting either.
Although primarily Naples-based, the Camorra’s tentacles reach into every nook and cranny of southern Italy and for years has left an indelible footprint on the USA crime scene. The semantics over whether the Camorra and the Mafia are one and the same is purely academic – the job description of the two organisations is identical: they murder, they kidnap and demand ransoms, they blackmail, they traffic illegal drugs, smuggle desperate people, trade in slave labour, run the world’s largest counterfeiting scams, control toxic waste disposal, groom and manage prostitutes, sell weapons – including nuclear – to rogue states, monopolise loan-sharking, launder ill-gotten money through their gaming outlets, and bribe politicians and law-enforcement agencies.
The Camorra has always operated separately from the Sicilian Mafia, although their activities overlap, often bloodily. In the USA, the Mafia has become Americanised, although a Sicilian import. Now the American Cosa Nostra (Mafia) and the Sicilian and Italian gangsters are as much at war with one another as with the authorities.
The Camorra, like the Sicilian Mafia, is as conservative and traditionalist as any reactionary political party. It is wary of change. Orderliness and discipline are the overriding priorities of such organisations, so anything that might disrupt those principles is actively sought out and eradicated.
In the 1980s, there was an attempt to unify all the Camorra families into the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO). In one region, it had total control of all meat and fish industries, the supply and distribution of coffee, and owned 2,500 of one city’s bakeries. And if a prostitute tried to go solo, trespassing on a patch worked by girls from the Camorra stable, then a ‘soldier’ would be detailed to disfigure her – frequently by chopping off her nipples.
There was a spate of drive-by shootings and the number of clans had soared from 26 to 120 by 2010. Camorra ‘soldiers’ committed 12 murders in one 10-day period. The following year, there were 120 slayings by the clans. Beatings and disfigurements ran into thousands. ‘Unfriendly’ mayors and ‘hostile’ law enforcement officers were top targets.
This is the point – if the Camorra said, ‘Lay off, turn a blind eye,’ you had to be a very brave or foolhardy individual to defy such an edict, especially back in the 1990s. To a large population of southern Italy, most especially in and around Naples, the word of the Camorra was law. The Camorra was the unofficial government, the chief law enforcement agency, the military … the Camorra was king. That kind of historical entrenchment is not changed with a few inspirational words of bold intent. Defeating the Camorra would be no easier than winning the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan or Al-Qaeda worldwide.
One man who knew more about the Mafia profile than anybody was Leonardo Messina, a descendant of a family whose Men of Honour went back seven generations. Giving evidence to the Anti-Mafia Commission, he said, ‘The people you call “Camorristi” belong to the Cosa Nostra. The summit of the Camorra is Cosa Nostra …’
This testimony was supported by Tommaso Buscetta, one of the first Mafia defectors to defy the sworn blood-oath of omerta. ‘Forget about the Camorra …’ he told the Commission. ‘They don’t exist. The Mafia exists. Cosa Nostra exists.’
The Camorra clans undoubtedly disagreed, but there was no disputing the criminal interplay. Messina had been second-in-command to the boss who ranked next in power only to the most fearsome ‘capo di tutti capi’ (boss of all bosses) to rule Sicily’s Cosa Nostra for almost a century.
Restivo was a resident of Potenza at the time of Elisa Claps’s disappearance, he was born in the Sicilian town of Erice, right in the heartland of Mafia country. Erice, a walled town built on the side of a mountain overlooking the Tyrrhenian coast to the west of the gangsters’ paradise, boasts two castles and narrow, stone streets. Except in summer, it is perpetually shrouded in fog, provoking a ghostly feel, reminiscent of Victorian London and the alleys of Whitechapel, the haunts of Jack the Ripper.
Although Erice is often characterised as being locked in a Middle Ages time-warp, its history actually goes back much further. There is a temple to a Phoenicean fertility goddess and even Hercules is associated with ancient Erice, of relevance when trying to understand its male population. All men born in Erice are reared to believe in their Herculean heritage and inherent dominant nature, to which all women should be deferential, if not submissive.
Restivo, unmarried then of course, and apparently not living with anyone, was again asked to account for his movements on the Sunday that Elisa vanished.
‘I spent all afternoon walking through the town,’ he said.
‘Where specifically?’ he was asked.
‘Oh, all over,’ he replied.
‘Did you stop for a drink, for a coffee?’
‘I might have done,’ he said vaguely. ‘I really can’t remember.’
‘You must be able to remember if you went into a café; it was only a couple of days ago,’ the officer remonstrated with him.
‘I was just wandering, killing time.’
‘Before what?’ he was asked.
‘Before catching a bus to Naples.’
This interested the police that he should have been leaving town for Naples. Had he gone to Naples?
Yes, he said that he had. He had things to do there, people to see and arrangements to be made about sitting an exam. He was contemplating a career in dentistry.
Naturally, he was asked to provide the names of people who would be able to verify his movements that Sunday. He declined, emphasising that he did not want to involve other people in his problems. He would be embarrassed, he said, for people who knew him to become aware that there was a police investigation to which he was central, albeit as an innocent party. ‘It would look bad for me,’ he explained.
‘Why?’ he was asked.
‘Because people would think the worst,’ he replied. ‘People always do. It’s human nature.’
His story of catching a bus to Naples seemed to check out. The driver remembered him. Other passengers were asked to come forward. None did.
The main focus of the police was finding Elisa, but there was still no evidence of a crime having been committed. So when the Potenza police quizzed bus drivers and passengers who travelled the Naples route, they were really trying to establish if Elisa had been with Restivo. Showing a photograph of Elisa, the police asked, ‘Have you seen this young woman? Do you recall seeing her with this man?’
In the aftermath of Sunday, 12 September, it seemed that Elisa Claps had become a runaway. The unknown quantity, in the view of the police, was over the extent and nature of Restivo’s role. Had he helped her to leave home? Had he given her money? Did he know where she had gone? Were they lovers, despite Restivo’s denial? Had they rented a secret meeting place or apartment together? Did they ride the bus together to Naples or maybe they went separately to reduce the chance of their being remembered? Was Elisa staying with mutual friends in Naples until Restivo joined her? Were they planning to elope together, perhaps making their way into another country? Did Elisa have a passport and, if so, did she have it with her?
Elisa’s mother was adamant that her daughter had not taken anything with her to the church; no change of clothes, only small change lire for the offertory, no baggage of any kind, and certainly no passport. None of Elisa’s belongings was missing from her room.
‘She has not gone anywhere of her own free will,’ Gildo insisted. ‘Wherever she is, she’s been taken by force. We shall never rest until we have her home.’
During that period, strange reports were being logged by the police all over the province of Basilicata, building up a picture of apparently inconsequential incidents that no one imagined at the time could possibly have anything to do with Elisa Claps.
The police took down the details, but knew that there was little they could do. And to be fair, the trivial nature of these ‘crimes’ was almost laughable – women were complaining of having had their hair clipped from behind by a stranger while travelling on public transport.