Free Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System by Roberto Saviano

barbers and tanning centers the new cocaine retailers. They used straw men to reinvest narcotraffic profits in apartments, hotels, stock in service companies, private schools, even art galleries.
    The person accused of handling the majority of Nuvoletta assetswas Pietro Nocera. One of the most powerful managers in the area, he preferred to travel by Ferrari or private jet. In 2005 the Naples Court ordered the seizure of properties and companies worth more than 30 million euros, a mere 5 percent of his economic empire. Salvatore Speranza, who turned state’s witness, disclosed that Nocera administered all the Nuvoletta clan money and was responsible for “the organization’s investments in lands and the building trade in general.” The Nuvolettas invest in Emilia Romagna, Veneto, Marche, and Lazio through Enea, a production and labor cooperative that Nocera managed even in hiding. Enea obtained public contracts for millions of euros in Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Modena, Venice, Ascoli Piceno, and Frosinone, all with extraordinary turnover. Nuvoletta business spread to Spain years ago. Nocera went to Tenerife to argue with a clan leader over construction costs for an imposing building complex. Nocera accused him of spending too much on expensive materials. I only ever saw the complex on the Internet: an eloquent website, an enormous complex of swimming pools and cement that the Nuvolettas built to get in on the tourism industry in Spain.
    Paolo Di Lauro is a product of the Marano school; he began his criminal career as a Nuvoletta lieutenant. But he gradually took his distance and in the 1990s became the right-hand man of Michele D’Alessandro, the boss of Castellammare, representing him when he went into hiding. Di Lauro’s plan was to coordinate the open-air drug markets using the same logic with which he’d managed store chains and jacket factories. Di Lauro realized that, after Gennaro Licciardi’s death in prison, northern Naples could become the largest open-air drug market Italy or Europe had ever seen, and completely controlled by his men. Paolo Di Lauro had always acted silently and was more skilled at finances than fighting; he never openly invaded other bosses’ territories and never allowed himself to be traced in inquiries or searches.
    Among the first to disclose the organization’s flowchart was theCamorra informant Gaetano Conte. An informant with a particularly interesting story: a carabiniere who served as Francesco Cossiga’s bodyguard in Rome. The qualities that led to his escorting the president of the Italian Republic also promoted him to friendship with Di Lauro. After being involved in clan extortions and drug trafficking, Conte decided to collaborate with the authorities, offering a wealth of information and details only a carabiniere would know how to provide.
    Paolo Di Lauro is known as
Ciruzzo ‘o milionario,
Ciruzzo the millionaire. A ridiculous nickname, but such labels have a precise logic, a calibrated sedimentation. I’ve always heard System people called by their nicknames, to the point where first and last names are often diluted or forgotten. No one chooses his own nickname; it emerges suddenly out of somewhere, for some reason, and someone picks up on it. Camorra nicknames are determined by destiny. Paolo Di Lauro was rebaptized
Ciruzzo ‘o milionario
by Luigi Giuliano, who once saw Di Lauro take his place at the poker table as dozens of hundred-thousand-lire bills fell out of his pockets. “Who’s this,” Giuliano exclaimed,
“Ciruzzo ‘o milionario?”
A name born on a drunken evening, a flash, the perfect wisecrack.
    The anthology of nicknames is infinite. The Nuova Famiglia boss Carmine Alfieri got his name
‘o ‘ntufato,
the angry one, thanks to the dissatisfied sneer he wears constantly. Then there are ancestral nicknames that stick to the heirs; Mario Fabbrocino, the Vesuvius-area boss who colonized Argentina with Camorra money, is known as
‘o graunar
—the coal