the fruit dump was just one of the clan’s many activities and maybe it was one of the least criminal of those activities because quite quickly the Bardellinos and their partners managed to lay their hands on much more profitable lines of business like public works contracts and on drug trafficking especially cocaine the kind of drug that best represents those years of emptiness and ostentatious wealth and they realized that this was the big multimillion dollar business that they had to get control of not merely as the group that funneled the drugs to northern Italy and the rest of Europe they had to take complete control of the traffic control of every individual step in the process from the origin from where it was produced to street peddling in other words they wanted to take control of the whole product cycle because they knew that once they controlled the network they could dominate the European drug market or at least a good portion of it
with this objective in mind they established relations with the Sicilians who for years have had close ties with the world’s largest cocaine producers the Medellín cartel in Colombia taking care however not to become competitors with the Sicilians considering that during the gang war against Cutolo who was on terrible terms with them relationships of reciprocal assistance respect and aid were established between the clan and the Sicilians or at least with certain families because even within the Sicilian structure there are wars there are rival groups who fight ferociously and in fact one of these groups at a certain point made an attempt to kill Antonio Bardellino and this was one reason that he preferred to spend most of his time in Santo Domingo but all things considered the Sicilians weren’t all that interested in knowing who they sell to who they are connected with for trafficking in other regions what they care about is whether their clients are solid and reliable
they decided to run this traffic together with the Sicilians even though compared with the Sicilians they were far hungrier far more enterprising far more capable of sniffing out every opportunity to turn a profit in all this the personality that emerged was Antonio Bardellino who was a great innovator continuously looking for new opportunities for new business new investments always looking for something bigger he already had something of a reputation and he oversaw the transition from a clan on a local scale to a clan with a regional dimension and sooner or later with a national and ultimately international dimension he was already traveling constantly in Europe and in Latin America to keep tabs on the international drug traffic while Mario Iovine his deputy remained solidly connected to our town and the surrounding area and managed the organization in the home territory and did the dirty work
and the clan grew constantly because it recruited a steady stream of young new members most of them out of work or in any case from poor families and soon it had as many as five thousand made men an enormous number considering that they all came from the same local villages and towns which have a total population of between fifty and sixty thousand and among these five thousand made men there are also prominent citizens professionals government officials and civil servants people who have connections with the political world with agencies and institutions people who are employed in all sorts of businesses while among the young there are only a very few who have to risk their lives as killers or in shootouts with the police who by the way in this period seemed to be blind and deaf because the links between the clan and the police like the agents and officers who overlooked the frauds at the fruit dump were becoming more and more intense increasingly solid
the main jobs for most of the young made men the muschilli were keeping an eye on the territory with constant patrols keeping and collecting money for the various traffics and bribes and protection extortion and fronting for more or less legal activities having property contracts real estate farmland and things of that sort put in their name that became a very convenient and easy way to make a living and it was even fun because it was like belonging to a big community that included young people from various towns and villages and they organized everywhere and in the same way secret gambling dens where people would hang out and spend the night winning and losing immense amounts of money and there were houses where you could go for sex there were always women available they would organize orgies and there was always plenty to drink and plenty to snort because cocaine circulated freely there
but it’s only inside the clan not for outsiders in fact in the towns it is absolutely forbidden to make use of drugs or to sell them it’s not very good for a young man’s health if the neighbors find out that he’s smoking joints he might be taken in hand by someone who will explain to him in very courteous terms that certain things aren’t done around here that drugs are bad for you and that it’s not nice for a young man to do certain things for instance when I was sixteen I happened to smoke a joint at school in Aversa and I came home a little stoned and then when I was talking with friends they explained to me that in the future it would be a good idea not to let that happen so here you can’t sit in a car at night with friends and chat and smoke a fattie because there’s a real risk that one of these patrols will pull up and pile out and beat you bloody what they want to do is preserve a false and hypocritical public order which is just fine with the false and hypocritical citizenry of the town as well as preventing problems with the police and so nobody’s allowed to steal a car nobody can burgle an apartment and the kids aren’t allowed to take drugs unless they work for the clan
once during one of these evenings that the clan members spent in one of these gambling dens playing cards and betting lots of nice money four kids walked in wearing ski masks generally these gambling dens are located in the back room of a café that is the front room is where the bar with the espresso machine and everything else is located but in the back there’s a private room where the gambling is done so the four young men walk in and they rob the gambling den of tens of thousands in the room there were plenty of clan made men including some important ones so the clan capi interpret what happened as more than a robbery they see it as a challenge on their own territory so they put out word to hunt down the four kids and they are quickly identified as coming from Sant’ Arpino a village on the line between the provinces of Caserta and Naples and before the month is out they’d all been tracked down and murdered in different ways and it is made unmistakable to everyone that they were killed because they dared to go against the clan and because they stole money from the clan in its own backyard
they were reckless psychopaths especially if you consider that during the robbery one of the gamblers said to them that it would better for them if they just put down their submachine guns their sawed off shotguns and went back to their town and if they did there was a remote possibility they might live when he said that one of the kids shouted in his face that they didn’t give a shit for the clan that they weren’t afraid of anyone which means that these were just a typical group of hotheads that had heard there was plenty of money there but hadn’t realized they were taking too big a risk and so they were all killed one after another and the last of the four to die was burned alive and in fact while the clan does all it can to preserve a good natured façade to seem like it always extends the hand of friendship to townspeople or friends of friends or the neighbor’s relative who needs something and if they ever need anything they can turn to the clan without worries behind this jovial façade there is a deep seated ferocity that’s on a hair trigger Mario Iovine for example if he was talking to someone and they said something that struck a nerve he was capable of strangling him choking him to death on the spot with his hands
in this period there was a continual series of intimidations of those few individuals who decided to stand up and oppose this state of affairs there was a group of young people a few years older than me who during this period founded an association called Collettivo Zero which was a left wing cultural association that in a short period of time attracted dozens of young men and women which was something nearly inconceivable for an underdeveloped and slightly backward town like ours and among the founders of the group was a friend of mine a little older than me named Angelo at the time he was very active this cultural association started doing things that irritated the clan for instance it wanted to establish a women’s counseling service for an array of problems facing women it was planning to set up a research center on organized crime in the territory it wanted to try to help young people involved with the underworld or who were at risk for criminal involvment what this association wanted to do was try to rescue what could be rescued and limit what could be limited
in this case on this occasion the clan reacted without performing any violent acts against individuals it simply intervened with intimidation doing nothing more than to fire shots into the steel roll down shutters on the association’s storefront making it clear that they were causing some irritation and then by sending people over to talk to people who were well known to be behind the association like this friend of mine Angelo who lived on the street where the Bardellino brothers were born where they lived when they were still nobody and one evening Angelo was at the Bar Nazionale which is on the Corso Umberto and two neighbors of his two clan made men took him by the arm and took him for a little ride in their car and conveyed by saying and at the same not saying that someone might get hurt that maybe one of these evenings there might be trouble maybe someone might complain about losing sleep because of the noise they make during their association meetings someone might say something offensive there might even be some violence as if to say you’d better not get too uppity better not cause trouble
and they also told him that since he was jobless fatherless penniless and a recent high school graduate and all the rest that it would be a good idea if he found a job and they even offered him a little work here’s a job they said it’s a job involving trust that is he would have to go around and collect money they tried to convince him that he would be like an accountant he’d have to stop by a number of stores to pick up the payments for a sort of insurance policy Angelo didn’t want to accept that job because he was opposed and because he realized what it meant but he couldn’t refuse because refusing a favor from these people can be a dangerous thing to do that is if you go and ask them for a favor then you’re tied to them forever an unbreakable bond but if they come to you and offer you something it’s even worse you can’t refuse if you do it’s like telling them you’re not on their side so automatically if you’re not on their side you’re against them luckily for Angelo a couple of days later that job was given to another young man who had shown that he was more compliant more flexible
in the meanwhile the newspapers and television broadcasters begin to take an interest in the strange goings on in this part of Italy television crews with reporters show up but they are greeted with a complete blackout that is once they get to town and start speaking with people no matter who they talk to no matter what they ask about the clans or even just about living conditions in town they all receive the same identical answer which is there are no clans here we’re a normal southern Italian town with certain problems that we are trying to solve we’re trying to emerge from our age-old poverty and this is what they all say from the young barista to the town hall employee and of course the mayor says it too even though he is one of the clan leaders and that was exactly when Ernesto Bardellino was planning to make the great leap forward once his brother Antonio had successfully made the leap to the international stage and had even moved to Santo Domingo now his brother Ernesto was trying to make the great leap forward but through politics Ernesto is convinced that he is a great politician he is convinced that he is a person worthy of representing our region in the Italian parliament he’s a member in good standing of the Italian Socialist Party and one day he decides to announce as a candidate for parliament
that was one of those occasions when the national mass media focused its attention on our town it all began with an article by a journalist from Il Mattino who launches into a full fledged diatribe against the Bardellino family first and foremost because they are family of underworld criminals a family guilty of the crimes it has committed and with specific reference to Ernesto Bardellino the writer expressed his astonishment at the idea that this person could have the unmitigated gall to even think of announcing for parliament considering as well that in his time as mayor he had done nothing to improve conditions in his town where there is nothing no libraries no movie theaters well there are two movie houses one across from the other on the main street but they both show nothing but pornography and then there’s another movie house a little farther up the same street and it shows porn flicks too there is no social venue no place where young people can go and spend time in the evenings and this article was picked up by other newspapers and it was discussed on local television stations and then it became a national Italian scandal people talked about it brought us to the attention finally of the police and the magistrature people expressed astonishment at the idea that a clan boss could hope to become a member of the parliament of the Italian republic
and so the secretary of the Italian Socialist Party Bettino Craxi who was in the area for a series of lectures and conferences had just finished one of these events in Aversa and he rushed over to our town on the pretext of paying a visit to the comrades in the local Socialist chapter hall and the following scene ensues Craxi walks into the headquarters of the Italian Socialist Party on Corso Umberto and he remains cloistered in conversation for a couple of hours with Ernesto Bardellino to persuade him to give up the idea of running for parliament at least in the upcoming elections because the press would unleash a ferocious attack not only against him but against the entire party in short there was some horse trading Ernesto Bardellino gave up his parliamentary ambitions but he certainly received something substantial in exchange and there was a final vignette in which cheerful and contented the pair of politicians emerge from party headquarters and walk down Corso Umberto together Craxi Bardellino and all the members of the Socialist Party and of the clan strolling down the corso together toward the Bar Nazionale located in the little piazza across from the church and along the way other people join the little procession the whole town winds up following them to the Bar Nazionale to take an espresso together and Ernesto Bardellino publicly pays for Bettino Craxi’s coffee and when he does the little crowd surrounding them bursts into an enthusiastic ovation everyone is clapping furiously shouting evviva evviva hurrah hurrah laughing happily with satisfaction and the episode ends there