in a large bowl mix thoroughly together flour olive oil wine sugar and a well beaten egg knead the dough and roll it out on a floured surface and then cut it into two disks cover the bottom of a previously greased baking pan with a layer of dough then rinse the escarole very well and allow it to drip dry chop it fine and in a skillet sauté the garlic in olive oil as soon as it is golden brown remove the garlic and add the chopped anchovies the pitted black Gaeta olives the rinsed capers the raisins the pignoli and the finely chopped parsley add the escarole taking care to add the toughest leaves first then ten minutes later the tenderer leaves cover and cook over low flame adding salt and pepper to taste when almost done cooking it will take thirty-five to forty minutes if there is still too much liquid remove the lid raise the heat and allow the liquid to cook off then turn the braised escarole into the baking pan until the pan is full then cover with the other dough disk place in a preheated three hundred degree oven and bake for half an hour this is pizza di scarola agrodolce or sweet and sour escarole pizza the way my mother makes it you eat it hot or cold if you like it that way with a glass of a good Asprinio wine from our region
in the streets that link the various towns and villages of our area it happened that in certain periods checkpoints and roadblocks sprang up with carabinieri and local policemen stopping cars to see who was around and who wasn’t and what they might be transporting sometimes they were isolated checkpoints sometimes if there had been a major killing or attack or if there was a sweep or roundup planned the roadblocks proliferated but then in fact you couldn’t help but notice that most of the time if it was you driving by in your little beat up worn out car they would stop you maybe three or four times in a single trip and while you’re sitting there showing them your driver’s license and registration and explaining who you are and what you do and where you’re going wasting a lot of time to no good purpose you’re sitting there watching Mercedes Benzes zipping by driven by and carrying muschilli and clan members of all sorts relaxed and smiling and they were absolutely never stopped or pulled over by the carabinieri who would pretend they couldn’t see them while they were racing past right under their noses
only in the past few years due to the efforts of certain judges in Naples has there been an investigation into corruption in law enforcement and as a result of that investigation many carabinieri in our areas have been arrested and indicted for taking money from the organization some of them had salaries of as much as ten million lire per month about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year and one of these carabinieri in exchange for the services that he was performing for the organization demanded that they kill the man who had taken his wife away from him I was an eyewitness to this story because the guy who was supposed to be killed was a sort of healer who worked in a center for social assistance that was called the Centro Esopo literally the Aesop Center one of those traveling community centers that reach out to help at risk teenagers women and people like that but that also had a permanent headquarters a big building in the middle of the countryside near Castel-volturno where they were engaged in various activities and providing services and in this center for social work I had also worked as a volunteer in my spare time
and this healer happened to meet the wife of the carabiniere warrant officer of Casale di Principe and she fell head over heels in love with him and left her husband this carabiniere warrant officer was in the pay of the organization and so in addition to the regular salary he was pulling in the warrant officer asked the organization to cleanse his personal honor of the shame of his wife’s betrayal and to arrange the murder of the healer who had taken his wife and so the son of one of my father’s friends was sent to perform this mission my father’s friend is a truck driver whose nickname is il Bestione the Beast just like in the movie with Giancarlo Giannini of that name in which he becomes a godfather too and even though his son grew up in a fairly well to do family he’d decided to join the organization and so he was sent to do this murder but the kid was actually just an asshole who was more interested in showing off in town acting the part of the clan member the made man than anything else so when he goes to kill the healer he fucks up he doesn’t kill him he only wounds him in the leg and the healer recognizes him and now the little asshole has been sitting in prison for four years and nobody can even guess when he’ll get out
from listening to what his father said the stories he told various people it’s pretty clear what the general attitude of the townspeople toward the organization has been and then how that attitude has changed as the situation changed that is for instance in the period when the organization was strong and invulnerable this friend of my father named Caricalieggio boasted freely that his son was earning five million lire a month roughly sixty thousand dollars a year and every month he was driving a different brand new car without ever doing a lick of work and one time when this friend of my father came to see us on our farmland in the countryside in the summer with a group of friends who always come out every summer to pick up a crate of fruit to take home to their families and they were chatting with my dad I wasn’t there I had driven the tractor to the fruit dump this Caricalieggio was boasting that his son earned all that money without ever doing a lick of work that he got a new car every month and that he had become someone important
then after some time had gone by his son was arrested and charged with attempted murder for trying to kill the healer my father’s friend started complaining that his son was a good boy but that he’d been led astray by a group of criminals that is he completely changed his attitude because what happened is that in the period of the greatest wealth and splendor when there were thousands of clan members not all of them were forced to prove their mettle with gunplay it was sufficient for them to be clan informers and spies for them to keep an eye on the territory to run patrols and collect protection money or do other relatively undemanding errands but then when suddenly after the murder of Antonio Bardellino the wars of succession broke out between the clan of Mario Iovine and Sandokan that is the clan of the Casalesi which had seized power and the De Falco clan which was in opposition to them and the clan of the Coachman which had remained allied with the Bardellinis who were holding out to keep from being annihilated wholesale then things changed
when the real clan war broke out the ferocious and relentless slaughter and the clan members started being decimated then there started to be a shortage of experienced killers who were usually sent out armed on combat missions and when people couldn’t keep count of the dead then the young muschilli started getting dragged into the fighting they had to start using weapons everyone had to be pressed into action to shoot and to kill and this young guy the son of my father’s friend Caricalieggio suddenly wound up in the line of fire with a gun in his hand and sent out to kill designated targets and so before much time had gone by many of these kids met untimely and horrible ends some of them were forced to flee the town and hide out far away with relatives who had gone to work in the north in Modena or Carpi cities where there were long standing communities of people from my town others were arrested or they were mowed down killed like flies
I remember one scene I was working at the Bar Nazionale I saw outside the bar in the street this son of Caricalieggio with that Michelino I met once in Florence when we were both in the army and one other guy who’s a distant relative of mine nicknamed Fagiolone or Big Bean all three of them were standing outside this bar chatting about nothing in particular when the Coachman’s car comes screeching to a halt right in front of them and a burst of Kalashnikov fire misses them by inches right over their heads and then while the three of them are falling all over themselves trying to find cover the Coachman tosses the assault rifle onto the driver’s seat and gets out of the car and starts punching them and slapping all three of them around shouting boys this time it ends here but the next time I swear I’ll leave you dead on the cement so don’t get out of line don’t bust my balls and this was because the Coachman knew that the three of them had decided to ally themselves with Sandokan because Sandokan was expected to emerge victorious from the clan wars as the future capo because he was the most violent the most ferocious but it was their bad luck to run up against the Coachman as a power in our town who that evening had made it clear to them that the only reason he hadn’t murdered them then and there was that he chose not to but that if he chose to he could kill them at any moment
the war between the clans was bloody and relentless the internal war in our area was far more violent than the fight against the outside enemies had been when the clan seized power in defiance of the domination of the Cutolo clan because the clash now was between numerous well trained well armed killers who feared nothing and had no qualms about murdering anyone in any fashion and so in this new war lots of people died who were totally extraneous among them for example a young man who had married the daughter of one of the De Falcos the daughter of Enzo the Fugitive the boy was called Liliano I knew him he was the brother of a friend of mine the poor kid got married to Enzo the Fugitive’s daughter but he was a normal kid a quiet kid he wouldn’t hurt a fly the only work that his father in law had ever asked him to do was to take messages to someone or maybe some money but nothing special
in these internal wars what happens is the same thing that happens in Sicily with Mafia wars when someone can’t find a way to strike directly at the enemy then they try to hit the enemy indirectly and so at a certain point the members of Sandokan’s clan since they couldn’t lay their hands on Enzo the Fugitive decided to hit him through the person of his son in law Liliano the husband of Enzo’s daughter and they caught him in an ambush at Casale di Principe and they slaughtered him they shot him twenty times and by an odd coincidence that very same day I had gone by the newsstand that my friend Liliano’s brother ran and across from the newsstand was a big poster like the ones they post for people’s birthdays with Liliano’s smiling face and over it the phrase wanted dead or alive and I said to this friend of mine who is that because I hadn’t recognized Liliano and he said that’s my brother it’s his birthday today and then later that very same day we all found out that Liliano had been shot down on the street
in this gang war there are plenty of collateral victims for instance there was one young man who chose to ally himself with the Bardellini clan and one evening he was sitting in his car in front of a doorway waiting for his uncle he was supposed to take his uncle somewhere he’s sitting in the car the car is parked with the driver’s side toward the sidewalk and the doorway his uncle is opening the passenger side door to get into the car just then a car comes racing up the street word had been given by one of the usual muschilli patrols the young man sees the car roaring toward him opens the door and lunges for the safety of the doorway the uncle is sitting in the car now he doesn’t even know what’s happening he’s slaughtered the car opens up with pistols submachine guns it’s like a shooting gallery that same evening I had gone to a party in a nearby town and when I got home with my friends we saw the aftermath lots of police and carabinieri we stop and get out of the car to see what’s happened and we see this car just devastated riddled with bullets inside is the mutilated corpse of this poor guy he was just a tailor he had nothing to do with these people he’d always been afraid of the clans he always did his best to steer clear of them and there were lots of other innocent people just like this uncle who were shot down in the streets in the clan wars
for instance there was the story of a boy a member of the Bardellini clan who was shot with dumdum bullets while he was sitting in the barber’s chair another young man was found dead in a torched car with two friends of his who had nothing to do with it in my town there is always this risk this danger you might be friends with somebody and without you knowing it that person joins the clan you stay friends with them you only see them now and then and it can be incredibly dangerous in the car along with the one clan member were two other boys who were just in the wrong place at the wrong time the killers took them all out into the countryside and staged an abbreviated trial and found this clan member guilty and these other two guys who had nothing to do with it had to watch so they couldn’t be left alive they killed the clan member immediately with two bullets in the head but they left the other two alive they locked them in the car and then set it on fire and when they found the charred corpses in the car the police determined that the clan member had been killed before his body was burned but the other two had burned to death there were no bullets in their bodies or anything
and so after four years the bloody and implacable war of succession that had sowed death and destruction came to an end Sandokan by now held unrivaled power he was the head of the organization and because Sandokan was from Casale di Principe it was from there that he now controlled all the territory extending from lower Lazio to the entire Caserta area and to the edges of the Sannio and the foothills of Irpinia he controlled a vast number of enterprises ranging from contracts for high speed train systems to the third lane of the Naples Rome superhighway and even the immense project for the reclamation of the Regi Lagni the drainage canals dating back to the reign of the Bourbon dynasty a project financed by the CIPE the Comitato Interministeriale per la Programmazione Economica or Inter Ministerial Committee for Economic Planning to the tune of six hundred billion lire six hundred million dollars and never built all the way down to the farming cooperatives that collected and destroyed surplus farm products allowing the clans to set up the colossal fraud of the AIMA every single scam and traffic ran through his territory it was all business controlled by Sandokan and there were millions and millions in bribes paid to the clan even though his economic empire no longer had the international scope of the golden age under Antonio Bardellino it still represented one of the largest operating criminal concentrations