Naples 1343

A fresh perspective on the early mafia as a means of resistance against invasion, this gripping history illustrates the previously unknown extent of these families’ power in the 14th century. 1343: there is famine in;Naples. After nightfall, a Genoese ship loaded with wheat is attacked by members of two local clans who brutally kill several sailors and their captain. The attackers returned to the city, greeted by the cheers of their countrymen, and the blind eye of the authorities. The Republic of Genoa presented the Kingdom of;Naples;with a formal protest against the incident. But, in a historical document of great importance today, King Charles I of Anjou admitted he did not control his own city, that the true rulers of;Naples;were the “family.” The purpose of this book is not to retrace the birth of the Camorra through the traditional roads of ethnology, anthropology, sociology, or even folklore for the umpteenth time. Amedeo Feniello takes a new route through a number of previously unstudied elements and makes;a unique observation: that these “families” of;Naples;were in power at the time of the birth of the Angevin Kingdom of;Naples--one of the first European nation states. They would have been leaders of the new state, actively participating in the business of the royal family and serving as a new class of directors, officers, and bureaucrats.

Auteur

Amedeo Feniello

Échantillon de lecture
I

THE NIGHT OF 1343

My Night

The night, my personal night, began on January 31, 2005. It was on that night that three young men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty were murdered right in front of the school where I worked as a teacher in Casavatore, in the province of Naples. I can still summon up a number of pictures in my mind that concern both the murders themselves and my own direct involvement. Concerning the event, one need only review the newspaper accounts from that time to get a clear idea of three aspects that caught my attention immediately. First of all, of course, the savagery of the crime. Three young men: not crime bosses, not leaders, not criminals in charge of narcotics marketplaces. No, nothing more than simple foot soldiers. Perhaps not even that. Murdered in an especially brutal fashion: they’d been captured, each handcuffed to the other, led to the gate in front of the school, ordered to kneel, and then shot to death, each with a bullet to the head. Then there was another element: the level of organization. The death squad that carried out the massacre was ready for anything that might crop up. They enjoyed uncontested control of the territory, where they could move freely, practically undisturbed, whatever they might choose to do. Disciplined in their dispensation of violence. And cunning. Tactically clever. Professional killers who operated in disguise, dressed as carabinieri, meaning policemen . . . and in those uniforms, they’d had absolutely no difficulty detaining the three young men. Stopping them and handcuffing them. And then leading them off to the slaughter.
Last, the third point, perhaps the most horrifying of them all. The murderers had operated with virtually complete impunity. It was as if the dead men had been submerged in a bottomless pool of silence even before they were killed. In a pool of silence: apartment buildings, televisions playing—themselves a form of silence—bowls of pasta set out for the evening meal. Hush, everyone, those corpses seemed to whisper. A single order was issued . . . and everyone fell silent. Except for a young girl who—a few days later, or perhaps it was a few months—wrote a short essay, a very short, unassuming essay, that told the story—with just enough detail—of exactly what she and her family and her neighbors had glimpsed that evening from the windows of their homes overlooking the school. The cars coming to a halt, the men getting out, the handcuffed victims shouting, shoving, realizing it was all over, and begging for mercy. The gunshots. The cars driving away.
That is all that need be said about the three crucial acts that characterized the core elements of this slaughter. To that I must add my own personal involvement. Because two things happened that surface frequently in my mind and that I’ve told others about perhaps ten thousand times, in all sorts of different settings, places, locales, and contexts. First of all: the principal of the school, the educational director, decided that it would be important to send a clear signal immediately after the murders. She said so clearly, as was her wont: an institutional signal. A signal that would cause a loud noise in the midst of all that nothingness, all that silence. She started talking about town council sessions to be held right there, outside the gates of that school. That school, on the outskirts of the outskirts of Naples. A message about calling radio stations, newspapers, television news crews. Demonstrations that could serve to involve the city’s civil society, trade unions, political alliances. And even—why not?—local intellectuals . . . She never tired of saying that those three deaths were a burden, something significant, even though the gang war now raging between the Di Lauro clan and the breakaway renegades had by then resulted in many, many deaths indeed. But after the initial uproar and the first excellent resolutions, that woman, who was powerfully committed to her civil engagement, began to see herself and her school as increasingly lonely and abandoned. No one seemed to care anymore about those three dead men. Dragged down into the riptide of the vast number of other dead men—dead bodies that meanwhile continued to drop to the pavement.
And so we did what we thought most needed doing: we went together, she and I, right to the office of the regional government’s commissioner for social policy, to explain to her that however you looked at it, three dead men are nothing to overlook—they weren’t just some overwhelming, inconvenient burden, pressing on the gates of a public school. It had been no easy matter to arrange for that meeting. We had to reach out to friends, rely on a network of personal contacts. That was our only hope for wangling an audience, even at such a tragic juncture, when you would normally have expected all doors to swing open to us, wide open. Already, this was an unsettling indicator . . . But in the fullness of time, the commissioner welcomed us into her office. For ten minutes. She spent more time glancing at her watch than listening to us, however. We didn’t know exactly what to do, and my colleague, the principal, had no choice but to talk excruciatingly quickly. Like a machine-gun burst: five intense minutes in which she spewed out thousands of words. Each slamming into the next. Perfect those words were, though, in their specific content of anguished grief. Still, they counted for little if anything. At last, the meeting came to an end. We were entrusted to a secretary who promised us a future agenda abounding with initiatives, interventions, alliances, decisive actions, and official measures. But it was all smoke and mirrors. A soap bubble. We never heard another word from either the commissioner or her secretary.
The second thing I can’t help but remember, even now, is something far more subtle, because it had nothing to do with the central focus of political initiative, but instead my everyday life. The surrounding territory, the school. I can’t say now whether this happened a few days after our meeting with the commissioner or practically simultaneously with it, perhaps even the very same day—but I am quite sure, and I insist on pointing this out: there was absolutely no connection between the two things. It happened in the afternoon. At school. Dur…