The Piranhas, The Boy Bosses of Naples Read online

  Nicolas had pulled up outside her apartment building, he hadn’t bothered to ring her buzzer. The intercom is something only mailmen, traffic cops, detectives, ambulance drivers, firemen, and people not from the quarter bother using. When you need to alert your girlfriend to your presence, or your mother, your father, a friend, your neighbor, anyone who by rights considers themselves part of your life, you just shout: everything’s wide open, as public as can be, everyone hears everything, and if they don’t it’s not a good sign, it means something must have happened. From downstairs Nicolas was yelling at the top of his lungs: “Leti’! Letizia!” Letizia’s bedroom window didn’t overlook the street, it faced onto a sort of lightless air shaft. The window overlooking the street that Nicolas was looking up at illuminated a spacious landing, a space shared by a number of apartments. The people climbing the apartment house stairs heard him yelling and knocked on Letizia’s door, without bothering to wait for her to come and answer. They’d knock and continue on their way; it was a code: “Someone’s calling you.” If Letizia answered the door and there was no one there, she knew someone had been calling her from the street below. But that day, Nicolas called her with such a powerful voice that she heard him all the way back in her bedroom. She finally stuck her face out the window and bawled in annoyance: “Just get out of here. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “Come on, get moving, come down.”

  “No, I’m not coming down.”

  That’s the way it works in the city. Everyone knows you’re fighting. They can’t help but know. Every insult, every raised voice, every high note resonates off the stones of the alleys and lanes, the vicoli of Naples, long accustomed to the sounds of lovers skirmishing.

  “What did Renatino ever do to you?”

  Nicolas asked, in a mixture of disbelief and pride: “You’ve already heard the news?”

  Deep down, all he cared about was that his girlfriend knew. The exploits of a warrior are passed by word of mouth, they become news, then legends. He looked up at Letizia in the window and knew that his deed continued to resonate, ricocheting from flaking plaster to aluminum window frames, rain gutters, roof terraces, and then up, up, up among the TV antennas and satellite dishes. And it was while he was looking up at her, as she leaned on the windowsill, with her hair even curlier after her shower, that he got a text from Agostino. An urgent, sibylline text.

  That put an end to the quarrel. Letizia watched as he climbed back on his scooter and took off, tires screeching. A minotaur: half man and half wheels. To drive, in Naples, is to seize all rights of way, yield to no one, ignore traffic barriers, one-way signs, pedestrian malls. Nicolas was on his way to join the others at the New Maharaja, the club in Posillipo. A majestic, imposing club with a vast terrace overlooking the bay. The club could have thrived as a business on that terrace alone, renting it out for weddings, first communions, and parties. Since he was a child, Nicolas had been drawn to that white building that stood in the center of a jutting rock promontory in Posillipo. What Nicolas liked about the Maharaja was its brashness. There it stood, clamped to the waterfront rocks like an impregnable fortress, every inch of it white, the door frames and window frames, the doors themselves, even the shutters. It looked out over the sea with the majesty of a Greek temple, with its immaculate columns that seemed to rise directly out of the water, buttressing on their shoulders that very same terrace, where Nicolas imagined the men he wanted to become one day strolling comfortably.

  Nicolas had grown up going past the place, gazing at the ranks of cars, motorcycles, and scooters parked out front, admiring the women, the men, the fine clothing and displays of wealth, swearing that one day he’d set foot in there, whatever the cost. That was his ambition, a dream of his that had infected his friends, who at a certain point had decided to dub him with a variant as his nickname: “’o Maraja.” To be able to walk in, head held high, not as waiters, not as a favor someone could indulge them in, as if to say, “Go on, take a look around, but then get the hell out of here”: no, he and the others wanted to be customers, ideally they wanted to be highly esteemed guests. How many years would it take, Nicolas wondered, before he’d be able to spend the evening and the night there? What would he have to give to get in?

  Time is still time when you can imagine, and maybe imagine that if you save for ten years, and you win a civil service exam, and with some luck, and putting all you have into it, maybe … But Nicolas’s father earned a high school phys ed teacher’s salary and his mother owned a small business, a pressing shop. The paths cut by people of his blood would require an unacceptably long time to get him into the New Maharaja. No. Nicolas needed to do it now. At age fifteen.

  And it had all been simple. Just as the important decisions you can’t turn back from are always the simplest ones. That’s the paradox of every generation: the reversible decisions are the ones you think through, consider carefully, weigh judiciously. The irreversible ones are made on the spur of the moment, prompted by an instinctive impulse, accepted without resistance. Nicolas did what all the others his age did: afternoons on his motor scooter in front of the school, selfies, an obsession with sneakers—to him they had always been proof you were a man with both feet planted firmly on the ground, and without those shoes he wouldn’t even have felt like a human being. Then, one day a few months ago, in late September, Agostino had talked to Copacabana, an important man in the Striano family of Forcella.

  Copacabana had approached Agostino because he was a relative: Agostino’s father was his fratocucino, that is, his first cousin.

  Agostino had hurried over to see his friends as soon as school got out. He’d arrived with a bright-red face, more or less the same vivid color as his hair. From a distance it appeared that, from the neck up, he was on fire, and it was no accident that they called him Cerino—Matchstick. Panting, he reported everything he’d been told, word for word. He’d never forget that moment as long as he lived.

  “Wait, do you even understand who he is?”

  Actually, they’d only ever heard his name mentioned in passing.

  “Co-pa-ca-ba-na!” he’d uttered, emphasizing each syllable. “The district underboss of the Striano family. He says he needs a hand, he’s looking for guaglioni. And he says he pays well.”

  No one had gotten especially excited to hear this. Neither Nicolas nor the other members of the group recognized in this criminal the hero that he’d been for the street kids of an earlier time. They didn’t care how the money was made, the important thing was to make lots of it and show it off, the important thing was to have cars, suits, watches, to be lusted after by women and envied by men.

  Only Agostino knew a little more about the history of Copacabana, a name the man had earned by purchasing a hotel on the beaches of the New World. A Brazilian wife, Brazilian children, Brazilian drugs. What really elevated him to greatness was the impression and the conviction that he was able to get practically anyone to come and stay in his hotel, from Maradona to George Clooney, from Lady Gaga to Drake, and he posted pictures of himself with them on Facebook. He could exploit the beauty of the things he owned to tempt anyone to come there. That had made him the most prominent and visible of all the members of the Striano clan, a family in dire straits. Copacabana didn’t even need to look them in the face in order to make up his mind who could work for him. For almost three years now, following the arrest of Don Feliciano Striano, Nobile, he had been the only boss in Forcella.

  He’d emerged from the trial of the Striano family in pretty good shape. Most of the charges against the organization concerned a period of time when Copacabana had been in Brazil, so he’d been able to beat the charges of Mafia conspiracy, which constituted the biggest risk for him and others like him. That was the criminal trial. Next came the appeals court, which in Italy could be pursued by the prosecution. And that meant that Copacabana was up to his neck in it and the water was rising, so he had to get started again, find new, young kids to drum up business for him, show the world
he’d taken the worst they could throw at him. His boys, his paranza, the Capelloni, were good soldiers but unpredictable. That’s the way it works when you rise too far, too fast, or at least when you think you’ve made it to the top. White, the underboss, pretty much kept them in line, but he was constantly snorting. The paranza of the Capelloni only knew how to shoot, they had no idea how to establish a market, open a piazza. For that new beginning, he needed more malleable raw material. But who? And how much were they going to cost him? How much was he going to need to keep on hand? Nobody ever sweats the details on business and the money you need to invest, but when it comes to your own personal money, that’s quite another matter. If Copacabana had sold just a portion of the hotel he owned in South America, he could have kept fifty men on a regular salary, but that was his own money. To invest in business, he needed clan money, and it was in short supply. Forcella was in the crosshairs; prosecutors, TV talk shows, and even politicians were focusing on the quarter. Not a good sign. Copacabana had to rebuild from scratch: there was no one left to carry on the business in Forcella. The organization had imploded.

  And so he’d gone to see Agostino: he’d tossed a small brick of hashish under his nose, just like that, first thing. Agostino was off school and Copacabana asked him: “A little brick, this size, how fast can you sling it?”’Nu mattoncino accussì, in quanto te lo levi? Levarsi il fumo—slinging hash—was the first step on the road to becoming a drug dealer, even though the apprenticeship to earning that title was a long one; slinging hash meant selling it to friends, family, anyone you knew. There was a skinny, skinny margin of profit, but there was practically no risk to speak of.

  Agostino had ventured: “I dunno, a month.”

  “A month? You’ll polish this off in a week.”

  Agostino was barely old enough to drive a motor scooter, but that was what interested Copacabana. “Bring me all your friends who’re interested in doing a little work. All your friends from Forcella, the ones who hang outside the club in Posillipo. They’ve been standing there with their dicks in their hands long enough, right?”

  And that’s how it had all begun. Copacabana would arrange to meet them in an apartment house at the edge of Forcella, but he was never there himself. Instead, there was always a man who was quick with words but very slow on the uptake; they all called him Alvaro because he looked like Alvaro Vitali, the actor. He was about fifty, but he looked a lot older. Practically illiterate, he’d spent more years behind bars than on the street: prison at a very young age back in the day of Cutolo and the Nuova Famiglia, prison during the gang wars between the cartels of Sanità and Forcella, between the Mocerinos and the Strianos. He was responsible for stashing weapons, he’d been a specchiettista, the one who fingers the intended victim. He lived with his mother in a basso, an airless ground-floor apartment, his career had never gone anywhere, they paid him a pittance and tossed him the occasional Slavic prostitute to bring home, forcing his mother to go over to the neighbors’ house till he was done. But he was a guy Copacabana trusted. He was reliable when it came to taking care of business: he’d drive Copacabana places, he’d hand off the bricks of hash on his behalf to Agostino and the other kids.

  Alvaro had shown him where they were supposed to stand. The apartment where they kept the hash was on the top floor. They needed to go down to the atrium. It wasn’t like in Scampia, where there were gates and barriers, none of that. Copacabana wanted a freer dope market, less fortified.

  Their assignment was simple. They’d show up on the spot a short time before the real activity began, so they could use their own knives to cut the hash up into various chunks. Alvaro joined them to chop up a few chunklets and big pieces. Ten-euro chunks, fifteen-euro chunks, fifty-euro chunks. Then they’d wrap up the hash in the usual aluminum foil and keep the pieces ready; they’d sort the grass into baggies. The customers would ride into the atrium of the apartment house on their motor scooters or else come on foot, hand over the cash, and turn to go. The mechanism was reliable because the quarter could rely on lookouts paid by Copacabana, and a vast number of people who would hang out on the street, ready to sound the alarm if they spotted cops, carabinieri, or financial police, whether in plainclothes or full regalia.

  They’d do their dealing after school, but sometimes they didn’t even bother showing up at school, since they were getting paid a percentage of what they sold. It was the fifty or a hundred euros a week that made all the difference. And that money went to just one place: Foot Locker. They took that store by storm. They’d troop in, arrayed in compact formation, as if they were ready to knock the place off and then, once they were through the front door, they’d scatter. They’d grab ten, fifteen T-shirts at a time. Tucano would put the T-shirts on one over the other. Just Do It. Adidas. Nike. One symbol would vanish only to be replaced by others in a split second. Nicolas bought three pairs of Air Jordans at the same time. High-tops, white, black, red, all he cared about was if Michael was on them, slam-dunking one-handed. Briato’, too, had gone crazy for basketball shoes; he wanted them green, with neon soles, but the minute he picked them up Lollipop had checked him, saying: “Green? What are you, a faggot?” and Briato’ had put them down immediately and hurried over to paw through the baseball jackets. Yankees and Red Sox. Five per team.

  And so all the kids who hung out in front of the New Maharaja had started slinging hashish. Dentino had done his best to stay out of it, but that had lasted only a couple of months, then he’d started peddling hash at the construction site where he worked. Lollipop was slinging hash at the gym. Briato’, too, had started working for Copacabana, he’d do anything Nicolas asked him to. The market wasn’t gigantic the way it had been in the eighties and nineties: Secondigliano had absorbed the whole market, then the business had flowed away from Naples proper, to Melito. But now it was migrating to the historic city center.

  Every week, Alvaro called around and gave them their pay: the more you sold, the more you earned. They always managed to skim a little extra off the top with some sly maneuvers outside the regular dealing, breaking off some smaller chunks or ripping off some rich and particularly dim-witted friend. But never in Forcella. There the price was the price and the quantity was preset. Nicolas didn’t do a lot of regular shifts because he sold at parties as well as to his father’s gym students, but he’d started really bringing in money only when the students had started protesting and had occupied his school, the Arts High School. He’d started dealing hash to everyone. In the classrooms where there were no teachers, in the gym, in the hallways, on the stairs, in the bathrooms. Everywhere. The prices rose as they spent more nights in the school. Only now he was getting dragged into political discussions, too. One time he’d gotten into a fistfight because, during a collective session, he’d said: “If you ask me, Mussolini was an impressive guy, because guys who know how to command respect are impressive. I like Che Guevara, too.”

  “You’d better not even dare utter Che Guevara’s name,” said one of the guys with long hair and an unbuttoned shirt. They’d chest-bumped, shoved each other, but Nicolas didn’t give a damn about the jerk from Via dei Mille, they didn’t even go to the same school. What did that guy know about respect and being impressive? If you’re from Via dei Mille, you’ve assumed everyone respects you from the day you’re born. If you’re from lower Naples, you have to go out and fight for respect. The comrade might talk about moral categories, but to Nicolas, who’d just seen a few pictures of Mussolini and a few old film clips on TV, the words moral category had no real meaning, and so he’d slammed a head butt into the guy’s nose, as if to say: here, let me explain it to you this way, you jackoff, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Just and unjust, good and bad. They’re all the same. On his Facebook wall Nicolas had lined them up: the Duce shouting out a window, the king of the Gauls bowing down to Caesar, Muhammad Ali barking at his adversary flat on his back. The strong and the weak. That’s the only real distinction. And Nicolas knew which side he was on.

/>   It was there, in that very private narcotics market of his, that he’d first met Pesce Moscio. While they were smoking big bomber joints, there was a kid who happened to know the magic word:

  “Oh, but I saw you out front of the New Maharaja!”

  “Okay, so what do you know about it?” Nicolas had replied.

  “I hang out there, too,” then he’d added: “Listen here, listen to this music.” And he’d initiated Nicolas, who up till then had only ever listened to Italian pop music, into the toughest American hip-hop, the vicious kind, the kind that vomits out an incomprehensible gush of words, every here and there jutting out a “fuck” just to keep things in order.

  Nicolas really liked that guy, he was shameless but he treated him with respect. And so, after the end of the occupation, when Pesce Moscio had also started slinging hash at his own school, despite the fact that he wasn’t from Forcella, every once in a while they’d let him work in the apartment house.

  * * *

  It was inevitable that sooner or later they would be caught. Right before Christmas there was a sweep. It was Agostino’s shift. Nicolas was just arriving to relieve him and he hadn’t noticed anything. The lookout had been caught off guard. The narcotics cops had pretended to stop a car to inspect it and then they’d come down on them just as they were trying to get rid of the hash.

  They’d called Nicolas’s father, who showed up at police headquarters and just stood there, contemplating the sight of his son with a blank expression that gradually turned into a glare of rage. Nicolas had kept his eyes on the floor for a good long while. Then, when he finally made up his mind to look up, he’d done so without a shred of humility, and his father had smacked him twice, once a straight-armed slap and the other the back of his hand, both powerful blows, longtime tennis player that he was. Nicolas hadn’t uttered a single syllable, only a pair of tears had welled up in his eyes, the product of the physical pain, not from any sorrow or grief.