his brother Antonio has no need to worry about this kind of local problems now the gang war is over he has no more rivals he has become the uncontested chief of the organization he has amassed and controls an unprecedented power and wealth an international empire that outdoes the Sicilians by now he’s focused primarily on managing business in Latin America he’s constantly traveling to Brazil and Colombia he’s in charge of relations with the major producers and worldwide distributors of cocaine and he finally decides that it’ll help him to look after his business and successfully invest the profits from his activities if he moves to Santo Domingo from there he can better supervise the cocaine trafficking he can better control the drug channels and the couriers traveling to Europe and Italy he can better monitor activities of all sorts in various Latin American countries there in Santo Domingo he rapidly becomes the proprietor of numerous hotels restaurants casinos a small empire that serves him as cover as well as yet another source of profit
in Santo Domingo where many Italians live who are like him who have more or less illegal activities he is not an individual who goes unnoticed his reputation is that of a wealthy entrepreneur who has invested his capital in this island and as such he is regularly invited to the parties at the embassies and at the homes of the most prominent and wealthy citizens and so over the course of a few years we see someone who was once a penniless bricklayer the son of a farmhand a day laborer we see him transformed into a wealthy and respected businessman who even starts a second family in Santo Domingo the men in the clans always have a family they all have a wife and children either because they actually want a family or else because they want to broadcast the image of a good father and husband and Antonio Bardellino has not one but two families one back home in our town and the other in Santo Domingo where he chooses a woman who has the same first name as the wife he has back home they have children and he gives those children the same names as his children back in Italy and he shuttles back and forth between the two countries because even though he is looking after the clan’s business from Santo Domingo he still has to go back to Italy every so often to maintain his contacts with the made men and look after the family that he has here
but the immense flood of wealth that had swept over the town began to create problems and threatened to become a sort of collective tumor with toxic consequences the transition was too sharp too sudden too violent and unexpected and everybody lost their sense of perspective the town went from one day to the next from a Fiat to a Mercedes it went from summer vacations on Ischitella if there was enough money to trips to Brazil and in the unassuming homes of peasants and farmers in the town you began to see open armed statues of Jesus commanding pride of place and on the base was carved Rio de Janeiro these were people who had traveled with a clan member or else who had gone on their own so people who had never traveled were going around the world or suddenly owned a villa on Capri or on the Côte d’Azur as a result it had become practically impossible here in town to be opposed to the clan the only ones who weren’t taking advantage resisted on principle or else because they already had jobs that paid pretty well or they had other sources of income
because this is what the people in my town are like if you destroy the house of my next door neighbors with whom I have been friends for fifty years I won’t lift a finger I won’t say a thing and even if you destroy my house little by little even then I won’t lift a finger I’ll only react when you are actually trying to murder me and this is because there is no social fabric not even a minimal network of social ties that is if your neighbor is murdered harmed badly whatever they do to him you naturally assume that he must have done something wrong you think that he should have stayed in line all you can think of to say the only thing that everyone says is that he should have kept his head down stayed in line there’s not even the slightest hint of rebellion against this state of affairs not a word not a note of indignation of rejection there is only a passive acceptance and in some cases people are even enthusiastic because along with the money comes a reputation for the town so now outside the town you are feared and respected
so this was the period of the huge and lavish weddings of the bosses and the notables who by this point had joined forces in a close alliance there was even a Socialist cabinet level minister who arrived by helicopter for the wedding of a local Socialist notable a clan member of course a wedding where all the most important clan bosses were present this was the period when the most famous singers in Naples were summoned by the clan to sing at their weddings and at the town festivals and they were paid thousands of dollars it was the period when every clan member had a picture of himself next to Maradona because when Maradona came to play for the Naples soccer team he immediately started hanging out in the city’s worst criminal circles where they procured women and cocaine for him as a result the clan members not only got to go see all the soccer games they also got their pictures taken with Maradona and now there’s not a clan member’s home in Naples or anywhere across the region of Campania that lacks a photo of the owner standing with his arm around Maradona
it was a time of peace the only murders in this period were clan members who made some mistake to make a mistake with respect to the clan means for instance behaving in a way that fails to show respect or failing to get along with a capo or trying to leave the clan when that happens the response is an immediate and ferocious murder so two or three young guys were murdered on the street in broad daylight simply because they had failed to obey an order because there was the problem of young people seventeen or eighteen years old with a ravenous appetite for money they want everything right away they join the clan and don’t have any hesitation to kill to make their way to get promotions these kids are very useful to the clan but sometimes they’re a little hotheaded and they have to reined in and one of these kids was murdered because he failed to execute an order they had just told him to go to a place to collect some money protection money the kind that has to be collected on a monthly basis
he refused to do it he considered it a chickenshit job and wanted someone else to go run that errand he considered himself to be a killer someone who did much heavier work than that so basically he refused to obey the order and now that I think about it it’s obvious that the person who issued that order did it precisely because he knew that he would refuse to obey he wanted the kid to refuse to obey the order so that he could have him eliminated because he was an undisciplined individual and there were two ways of getting rid of him either by expelling him from the clan or by killing him and naturally they chose the second solution because it was quicker and cleaner this kid was twenty-three when they killed him and he’d already been very active for two or three years he was killed in the street in a ferocious manner he was walking to the little shoe store he had opened on Corso Umberto across from the church he had opened a little shoe shop for his family
he was walking down the street toward the little shoe store and as he was crossing the street suddenly a car roars up the street at high speed it pulls up next to him and screeches to a halt then two guys get out one next to him one behind him and they immediately open fire with Kalashnikovs they riddle him with bullets he fell back on the trunk of the car face up the car started off but the corpse wouldn’t fall to the ground they had to get out grab the arms and legs of the blood spattered corpse and throw it down onto the street and then they got back in and the car drove off thumping over the corpse and before the car roared off at high speed tires squealing they tossed a bomb into the little shoe store and blew it sky high so not only did they kill him but they also destroyed his shop as if to say those who challenge us those who fail to obey our orders will be eliminated along with everything that we have allowed them to earn that was the message
and in fact there is always the danger of internal clan problems because usually if someone is inducted into the clan most likely before too long that person will bring others with him his brother his cousin or a friend and while on the one hand this does lead to a healthy expansion in the clan’s forces and make it possible to control through one made man at the same time a number of other made men through their family ties it also entails a risk that a natural grouping of relatives and friends might decide to band together to set up business for themselves outside the clan which would necessarily mean clashing with the clan which although it is powerful in and of itself is still made up of a great many little groups of brothers and friends and in certain cases these groups also cut business deals of their own on the side but they have to be very careful when they do because they might clash with the higher interests of the clan and run the risk of being eliminated
the first people to understand even before the collapse of the Berlin Wall that the economy of the Eastern Bloc countries was beginning to crumble and that there might be excellent opportunities to make money were the Italians and in particular the clans from down here in the lists of companies that set up business in eastern Europe are many that have Albanova in their name but Albanova is the name that Mussolini gave to a township that included my town and two neighboring towns this one township however was split back up after the war into three separate townships and in fact there is still a train station in my town that is called Albanova and Albanova is also the name of the soccer team that the clan created during its greatest period of prosperity and expansion it was a C Series team with ambitions of making it up to B Series ranking and with that goal in mind a new stadium was built in great haste in short Albanova is the name that the clan used for its soccer team and for its business enterprises in eastern Europe perhaps because the clan was convinced that this was a name that would bring it good luck
relations with Eastern Bloc countries began as early as the mid eighties there was a certain openness to outside investment in many Socialist countries that were slowly being throttled by the lack of hard currency and dollars and who were seeking financing from capitalist countries and were therefore willing to open their borders to collaborations with Italian companies this not only attracted major industrial groups interested in cheap labor but also the clan which guessed that it could sink roots early in these countries and that they might someday become an Eldorado as in fact they did the clan made use of individuals above suspicion who began to commute between Italy and those countries they traveled to Poland Hungary and Romania especially to Romania where the clan invested the greatest portion of its money and these individuals during their travels there would acquire companies on behalf of the various Italian companies with Albanova in their names they would purchase real estate farmland unimproved land factories everything that was for sale they opened new factories the flow of money to these Eastern Bloc countries was immense because over there money from various illegal activities especially from drug trafficking could easily be laundered and ties were established with local eastern European organized crime and with the fall of the Communist regimes these local gangsters became part of the new ruling class
but the true qualitative leap would only come in a second phase when with the collapse of the Berlin Wall access opened up all areas of activity were liberalized and when that happened the organization was already in place for this new and challenging opportunity because in the meanwhile they had made a name for themselves they had already built foundations and so a number of people from my town moved there permanently to keep an eye on the business interests of the various Albanova companies in the different countries agreements were made with the local politicians the old bureaucrats who were in charge under the Communists and who now with the advent of Eastern Bloc capitalism had all become general managers chairmen of agencies for the development of foreign trade and things of that sort and a whole assortment of new companies and factories began to spring up but alongside them there were restaurants and hotels and night spots and casinos also in these countries people started selling off all sorts of weapons from Kalashnikovs to tanks to missiles and even MiGs weapons for which the clan became the main buyer at first for its own needs and later to venture very successfully into the business of arms dealing a very profitable activity especially during the war in the Balkans when weapons were being traded for drugs
they start bringing back to Italy people from the Eastern Bloc countries and not only the gift packs but also people with educations post-graduate degrees engineers and lawyers whom the clan uses in various ways in particular they let them run the farms and agricultural companies that they have taken over willy nilly just about everywhere in our region and so now these farming operations are being run by families of Romanians or Poles who lord it over the young Moroccans and other Africans who are doing the menial labor in the countryside the clan prefers to work directly with white people from eastern Europe it feels closer to them they seem better educated easier to control because it brings them to Italy with their entire families not alone and unencumbered like the Africans and the clan feels that someone who brings their family can be more easily kept in line because it’s one thing to deal with a young African who is alone in a foreign country and can cause all kinds of trouble and it’s quite another matter to deal with someone who arrives with their whole family wife and children from someplace where they weren’t even getting enough to eat and here you give them a house a good salary and they can work hard without any worries
the gift packs are trainloads of beautiful girls from eastern Europe tall blond leggy six foot tall girls from Poland Romania Albania from all the countries where the clan is investing money they are brought here and dumped for use first for their clan chiefs’ own enjoyment and then everyone else in the clan gets a shot at them but in order of rank that is the first ones to have their way with them are the capos then one after another the girls are handed all the way down the hierarchy to the muschilli after that the girls who have been good are set to work they set up in the bar of a made man or a friend and all the other girls are sent to work as streetwalkers in Naples since every two or three months a new trainload of girls arrives to take their places so that in a small town like ours a town with a population of fifteen thousand there might be twelve bars and in each of those bars at least two or three of these girls are working after being passed around by everyone in the clan and then they set them to work give them a place to live and in any case they are always at the clan’s disposal for the clan’s amusement so that if you have a buddy who’s a clan member or a sympathizer or someone who has any ties with those people you might find yourself in bed with one of these girls one evening your friend takes you to her house they give her a little coke and then you get to fuck her you and three or four others