by aleksandrored » Mon Jan 21, 2019 10:22 am
Today I'm bringing another translated article, and this is about the camorra.
The city of Italy that has the worst reputation is Naples. The neighborhood of the city with a deeper stigma is called Scampia. The most feared housing developments in Scampia are Las Velas. Arriving here, the zoom of the bad name continues to penetrate broken glass, mountains of debris, elevators that have not worked for years, stairs lined with words of love or revenge and remains of the iron fortresses built by the ferocious families of the Camorra, until hold in shadows that move through the basement with a syringe nailed to the arm.
This, and more dozens of shootings and dead, is what everyone knew through "Gomorra", first the book, then the film and now the television series inspired by the investigation of the journalist Roberto Saviano on the Neapolitan Mafia.
But when, in the midst of this landscape of despair, everything seems predestined to continuous defeat, there are footsteps rising and someone humming in Neapolitan, this beautiful version of the Italian that brings in its interior, like a black box of history, the memory the Greeks, the Normans, the Spaniards, and even the Yankees who landed in World War II and have not left yet.
It is Vincenzo, a young ex-convict who, like every day, comes to sell bread to Carmela Imparato, the mother of two small daughters, separated from her husband who does not pay her an occasional housekeeper and cleaner. The only steady job that some of her neighbors offer to Carmela is the drug profits box. "They would give me 50 euros a day if I kept the money in my house, and much more if I hid some drugs from time to time."
But Carmela, though often having to send her daughters to bed without dinner, always says no. And from his refusal, his decision and his reasons as simple as clean water, a new zoom begins that, leaving the shadows underground and crossing the atrocious memory of several decades of Mafia wars, tries to overcome with difficulty the curse of evil fame.
It's not easy. The neighborhood of Scampia is connected to the destination of Naples, and this city - the most populous city in southern Italy, with the highest unemployment rates in the country - is also the "world capital of the stereotype, so much so that when the football team will play in any other Italian city the rival crowd does not provoke the players, but the Neapolitans. "
The reflection, pronounced by way of ironic welcome, belongs to the professor of moral philosophy Giuseppe Ferraro. No one like him, whose vocation is to ignite curiosity both in classes and prisons, to explain why the neighborhood of Scampia, in addition to suffering the effects of the Mafia wars and the media consequences of Saviano's work, was transformed with the over the years in the prototype of degradation. The conversation unfolds during a walk in the alleys of the Spanish Quarter, a place where danger and beauty have been happily married for centuries.
"The first thing to take into account," explains Ferraro, "is that the buildings called Las Velas - because of their resemblance to a sailboat's profile - were built in the early 1970s to decongest other neighborhoods in the city. the interior of the blocks was a modern reproduction of the historical center with its alleys and small squares, but from the beginning it became a neighborhood of deportation.The residents who were sent there or who occupied the houses due to the 1980 earthquake and this was especially severe in a city where, for example, Neapolitan people speak in a different accent, the diversity of accents helps to situate people within a city that is the kingdom of stratification.If we enter this church, you will see that below there is an identical city, with the same alleys as on the surface, a living heritage of the Greeks, the Spaniards ... The same mixture and the same confusion from above also survive below. To be honest, when I leave town, what I miss the most is the sea ... and the confusion. "
The streets of the Spanish Quarter are setting the bar for Professor Ferraro's words. Magnificent palaces of the 17th century divided into old or non-existent rental apartments inhabited by people who never felt the need to leave the neighborhood and stroll down the street in the pajamas, among the clatter of motorcycles without exhaustion or plaque, assembled by boys without helmets. they cross in front of a niche with the statue of the Virgin adorned with plastic flowers.
"This city," says the professor to explain the rebelliousness that is evident at every corner, "has never governed itself. Ever since its Greek, Roman, Spanish history, or even in modern times, it has never had a government presided over by someone and this proved to be comfortable, because each Neapolitan has internalized that the institutions are always against, that they are the adversary, that it is necessary to fight them. "
Giuseppe Ferraro recalls that the American writer Herman Melville, as he passed through the city, marveled that the cannons of Ferdinand 2 of the Two Sicilies, King Bomba, were not pointed to the sea, but to the city: "It was the proof of which the enemy was within. " The culture of the Camorra comes from a very old structure of clans already existing in the time of the Bourbon, where each zone had a "capo" and where existed the high and the low Camorra, the aristocratic and the popular, with the same mentality although with interests many different.
It is something that, like many other things in Naples, has not changed through the centuries. Whether from outside the law or from within, the Neapolitan always sees in authority a synonym of oppression, hence his inclination - which accompanies a certain pleasure - to move against the traffic lights and the rules.
"Oh, and two other things before you go to Scampia."
"Tell me, Professor."
"The first is that it must take into account that in this city there is only the present, the past is present, and even death is included in the present.When Naples won the second 'scudetto' [the national championship of 1989-1990, with Maradona as captain], the boys went to the cemetery and hung a sign: "Dear grandmothers, you do not know what you have lost." The next day another poster appeared in the same place, which replied: "Who said?" Do not forget, this city is always on the edge of its own madness. "
"And the second thing I must not forget?"
"The terrible fact that Naples is a beautiful city," said Rilke in one of her elegies, "beauty is nothing but the beginning of the terrible." Beauty creates violence.
On the way to Scampia, Naples is stripping itself of beauty and everyday picardy - the taxi driver combines a price to turn off the taximeter and not have to pay the boss, a boy asks at the subway exit the tickets used to resell them to others travelers - to mingle in the ugliness of overflowing neighborhoods and offenses with capital letters.
Michele Spina says that Scampia is no longer what it was when he arrived in 2007 to head the police station and that, by then, had ceased to be the largest European drug supermarket. The terrible "faida" - internal war - that faced in 2004 and 2005 the powerful clan of Paolo Di Lauro with a group of dissidents led by Raffaele Amato and called "scissionisti" or "the Spaniards" - because Amato had spent a long time refugee in Spain - left more than a hundred dead in the streets of Scampia and the neighboring neighborhood of Secondigliano.
"You have to remember," Commissioner Spina said on board a patrol car on his way to Scampia, "because of the 1980 earthquake, a neighborhood that had been designed for 80,000 people was suddenly invaded by more than 100,000 people , many of them without a job and quite a few police records, but the police station was not created until 1997. The result was predictable: Scampia, and especially Las Velas, became a ghetto from the outset. years without law, the Camorra took full control of the impotence of the well-off people, much more numerous, but unable to react to the intimidating force of the organized group and the weapons.The rigid territory control system still remained intact when I entered in Las Velas for the first time.
The physiognomy of Las Velas is unmistakable. One part is due to the design of the architect Franz Di Salvo: seven gigantic buildings - three of which have already been demolished - each painted a triangular shape, so that on the outside they resembled the canopy of a boat and inside recreating the alleys of Naples, where the voices of the residents and the smells of freshly made food are confused to the point that whole neighborhoods are closing in on themselves until they become a single courtyard of coexistence.
But the reason for its incorporation into the collective imagination - its definitive landing in bad fame - is due to the television and the cinema. Las Velas served as the setting for the movie "Gomorra", directed in 2008 by Matteo Garrone, and for the current television series produced in Italy and already sold to more than 50 countries.
"My message to the boss was clear: if you want to sell drugs, hide yourself. You can not do this like a normal business." Michele Spina, Police Commissioner of Naples.
"The Mafia groups," explains Spina, already in the mythical corridors of Gomorrah, "occupied the houses in a military way, expelled their tenants and invaded them, then changed the original door and replaced it with an armor.Then they made a small hole, a kind of ticket window, so that from the outside one could not identify who was selling inside the envelopes of narcotics to the line of addicts who waited in the corridor, inside and outside the building, in the attics, in the balconies, in the entrances, the sentinels were alert to the appearance of the police or the "carabinieri." In the face of any suspicion, they gave the alarm signal with a word that was recently "vattene", a short, sonorous, immediate cry: "vattene, vattene, vattene ! '"The commissary's voice multiplies by the buildings that, even devoured by the dirt and the abandonment, continue to house about 400 families, the last shipwrecked - and some pirate - of ships that never arrives floated.
"On hearing the alarm," continues Spina, "the one who was selling the drug escaped and made the merchandise disappear, sometimes through the systems - so they continue to call them" systems "- more sophisticated or coarser, a false step on the stairs that was activated by a remote control to a fake drain placed in a house free of suspicion.The problem was that when the alarm was given and the iron gates with which the building had been shielded closed, we were out, but also the other residents, "he says.
"Only they had the key, that's why they were the owners." I remember once when, during the operation, with them locked inside and us waiting for them outside, an old lady arrived, with shopping bags in her hand. It was cold, the intercom did not work because they had burned it, just as they damaged the elevators so we could not go upstairs. "Her husband, old man, would not listen to her and could not come down to help her. The situation was locked up like a game of chess in which any move would involve the loss of a piece, but you were still standing there, passing cold. Deputy Spina - one of those Italians capable of turning the war story into something more interesting than the war itself - decided to suspend the operation so that you could rise, but vowed to return. He had to do whatever it took to break that grotesque scene, the impotent state and citizenship, we were amazed at the power of the Camorra.
"Come on, 'ragazzi' (boys) ..."
Commander Spina, a true character from Naples, is now the inventor and responsible for a project called Aracne - "from the Greek myth of Arachne, the brave girl that the goddess Minerva turned into a spider for weaving better than she" - to combat, and especially to prevent, crime throughout the city of Naples. Spina commands the "gazelles" - the patrol cars - and the "hawks" - the uniformed police uniforms with no helmet on powerful motorcycles - that have managed to reduce the statistics of robberies, robberies, robberies to banks and jewelers.
From the police station, the patrols are supported by a camera system that includes the subsoil of the city. But this morning on Saturday Dr. Spina - as he is called by all, on both sides of the law - returned to the police station in Scampia to accompany his old companions in an inspection of drug points. A helicopter flies over the area. The situation seems quiet.
"When I got here, the drug lord ranks surrounded the building," recalls the delegate. "The people who took their children to school had to go through them because many people were injecting themselves here. It is not that the problem has disappeared [the used syringes we are walking on are witnesses], but the situation has radically improved."
After that afternoon when you and the steward were planted at the door of one of the Sails, fighting the Camorra groups that controlled the area - and then led by the Abbinant clan - suffered a turning, let's say, unorthodox .
"I realized that for more operations that we did nothing put at risk the places of sale," recalls the police chief. "The example is Operation Morena, a major operation.We made a noisy eruption in one of the buildings, practiced magazines with no result and then we left making more noise than when entering.When they felt safe again, they shouted the usual word, 'taposto!', which meant 'everything in order', but we had left some of ours in there - on the ceiling of the elevators - and several cameras placed.We saw live how they sold drugs and the amount of money - 80 thousand euros per day in a single point of sale - that they were able to manipulate, so that we could film them and record their phone calls.And one morning, before dawn, we fell on them and stopped 33. "
Before leaving the neighborhood, an agent from Spina's brigade wrote on a wall a message of defiance of the clans: "-33." The next day the graffiti was still there, but someone had retouched it until it turned it into a reply message: "+88". The game continues.
"That's why I did what I did," concludes Deputy Michele Spina. "It was not a very orthodox thing to do, it was not even a police action." I began to break down the points of sale, and while my men were continuing their investigations and operations, I would introduce myself to the firemen in the buildings. and we destroyed the barricades of steel that the clans had erected.We took the armored doors, we were the grids, we kidnapped the surveillance dogs that had been released by the courtyards ... The message was clear: if you want to sell drugs, You can not do this openly, as if it were a normal business, and that was your building. "My message to the head of the clan was clear, I am not willing to tolerate that lady, or others like her, have to wait with the bags in the cold you decide to open the door. "
The appearance of Las Velas remains a showcase of hell. The four standing buildings that served as a studio for "Gomorrah" continue to accumulate garbage, broken pipes through which constant water falls, rotting walkways that threaten to plummet. The tallest apartments - empty because there is no one up there without an elevator and with increasingly dirty stairs - are a sad monument to what could have been and have not been. The apartments of more than 100 square meters, with fireplace in the living room and large terraces facing the Vesuvius, only serve as a deposit of old mattresses, scruffy clothes and debris.
On the lower floors, residents still can not get up. Rosaria and her daughter Annalisa, who is 27 years old, was born and raised here, dated here and, after a long engagement like those of old, she will give birth to her first child in two months. They did not appear in the film, nor in the series.
"We are ordinary people," Rosaria almost apologized in her clean and organized apartment, "like most of our neighbors, we live here because we can not go anywhere, we do not pay light or water, because we do not have it. , that he could rest in peace, he could pay, he paid. For years, throughout my life, we heard the shots, the police beating, the junkies fighting on the stairs. "
Rosaria and Annalisa offer a coffee, a glass of water, and they say that together on the sofa they saw the film and the series surprises, almost as delegate Spina first saw live the sale of drug through its microcameras. The violent, luxurious, thrilling life of others to which they were neither invited nor willing to join, honored extras without any payment. "What the film tells is true," Rosaria dares to say, "but not all of it."
The other truth is less photogenic, but not least. From time to time, characters as disparate as Professor Ferraro, Spina's deputy, Ivo Poggiani, the leader of an anti-Camorra collective called (R) esistenza, who works on land confiscated from the Mafia, or Vittorio Passeggio, voice of the Las Velas de Scampia Committee - whose site has a drawing of Hugo Chávez at the door - are committed that Vincenzo the baker does not fall back on the crimes that led him to prison, and that the boys who play every afternoon Luigi, Massimo, Salvatore and Angelo - do not fall into clan networks, or that Rosaria and Annalisa can follow the example of Carmela Imparato, the mother of two girls who from time to time have to close the door to owners of the drug.
"We give you 50 euros a day to save the money, much more for the drug." Carmela almost does not speak Italian, but Neapolitan has enough to explain her reasons: "It's a matter of principles. I was born here and from here I could not get out, but they educated me in dignity, and that's what I want for my daughters. "Money for my good name, because they know that the police - who also know that I am an honest person - would never seek money or drugs in my house."
The importance is in fame, good or bad. Luigi de Magistris, a former judge who has been the mayor of Naples since 2011, gives them the following reason: "I do not think so, Everyone acknowledges the merit of Roberto Saviano in denouncing the Camorra, and even when some of them objected to his being allowed to shoot the film, I denied any kind of censorship, but it is true that there is a certain sin of omission when you tell what the mobsters do and never the constant, ever-more powerful rebellion of ordinary people to move on. The truth is we can not shake off the weight of bad fame. "
Delegate Spina, back in the patrol car, with his cigar unlit in his mouth, looks at the imposing silhouettes of Las Velas: "Remember the tale of Monterroso: 'When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.'" The weight of bad reputation. The curse of Naples.
[i]Today I'm bringing another translated article, and this is about the camorra.[/i]
The city of Italy that has the worst reputation is Naples. The neighborhood of the city with a deeper stigma is called Scampia. The most feared housing developments in Scampia are Las Velas. Arriving here, the zoom of the bad name continues to penetrate broken glass, mountains of debris, elevators that have not worked for years, stairs lined with words of love or revenge and remains of the iron fortresses built by the ferocious families of the Camorra, until hold in shadows that move through the basement with a syringe nailed to the arm.
This, and more dozens of shootings and dead, is what everyone knew through "Gomorra", first the book, then the film and now the television series inspired by the investigation of the journalist Roberto Saviano on the Neapolitan Mafia.
But when, in the midst of this landscape of despair, everything seems predestined to continuous defeat, there are footsteps rising and someone humming in Neapolitan, this beautiful version of the Italian that brings in its interior, like a black box of history, the memory the Greeks, the Normans, the Spaniards, and even the Yankees who landed in World War II and have not left yet.
It is Vincenzo, a young ex-convict who, like every day, comes to sell bread to Carmela Imparato, the mother of two small daughters, separated from her husband who does not pay her an occasional housekeeper and cleaner. The only steady job that some of her neighbors offer to Carmela is the drug profits box. "They would give me 50 euros a day if I kept the money in my house, and much more if I hid some drugs from time to time."
But Carmela, though often having to send her daughters to bed without dinner, always says no. And from his refusal, his decision and his reasons as simple as clean water, a new zoom begins that, leaving the shadows underground and crossing the atrocious memory of several decades of Mafia wars, tries to overcome with difficulty the curse of evil fame.
It's not easy. The neighborhood of Scampia is connected to the destination of Naples, and this city - the most populous city in southern Italy, with the highest unemployment rates in the country - is also the "world capital of the stereotype, so much so that when the football team will play in any other Italian city the rival crowd does not provoke the players, but the Neapolitans. "
The reflection, pronounced by way of ironic welcome, belongs to the professor of moral philosophy Giuseppe Ferraro. No one like him, whose vocation is to ignite curiosity both in classes and prisons, to explain why the neighborhood of Scampia, in addition to suffering the effects of the Mafia wars and the media consequences of Saviano's work, was transformed with the over the years in the prototype of degradation. The conversation unfolds during a walk in the alleys of the Spanish Quarter, a place where danger and beauty have been happily married for centuries.
"The first thing to take into account," explains Ferraro, "is that the buildings called Las Velas - because of their resemblance to a sailboat's profile - were built in the early 1970s to decongest other neighborhoods in the city. the interior of the blocks was a modern reproduction of the historical center with its alleys and small squares, but from the beginning it became a neighborhood of deportation.The residents who were sent there or who occupied the houses due to the 1980 earthquake and this was especially severe in a city where, for example, Neapolitan people speak in a different accent, the diversity of accents helps to situate people within a city that is the kingdom of stratification.If we enter this church, you will see that below there is an identical city, with the same alleys as on the surface, a living heritage of the Greeks, the Spaniards ... The same mixture and the same confusion from above also survive below. To be honest, when I leave town, what I miss the most is the sea ... and the confusion. "
The streets of the Spanish Quarter are setting the bar for Professor Ferraro's words. Magnificent palaces of the 17th century divided into old or non-existent rental apartments inhabited by people who never felt the need to leave the neighborhood and stroll down the street in the pajamas, among the clatter of motorcycles without exhaustion or plaque, assembled by boys without helmets. they cross in front of a niche with the statue of the Virgin adorned with plastic flowers.
"This city," says the professor to explain the rebelliousness that is evident at every corner, "has never governed itself. Ever since its Greek, Roman, Spanish history, or even in modern times, it has never had a government presided over by someone and this proved to be comfortable, because each Neapolitan has internalized that the institutions are always against, that they are the adversary, that it is necessary to fight them. "
Giuseppe Ferraro recalls that the American writer Herman Melville, as he passed through the city, marveled that the cannons of Ferdinand 2 of the Two Sicilies, King Bomba, were not pointed to the sea, but to the city: "It was the proof of which the enemy was within. " The culture of the Camorra comes from a very old structure of clans already existing in the time of the Bourbon, where each zone had a "capo" and where existed the high and the low Camorra, the aristocratic and the popular, with the same mentality although with interests many different.
It is something that, like many other things in Naples, has not changed through the centuries. Whether from outside the law or from within, the Neapolitan always sees in authority a synonym of oppression, hence his inclination - which accompanies a certain pleasure - to move against the traffic lights and the rules.
"Oh, and two other things before you go to Scampia."
"Tell me, Professor."
"The first is that it must take into account that in this city there is only the present, the past is present, and even death is included in the present.When Naples won the second 'scudetto' [the national championship of 1989-1990, with Maradona as captain], the boys went to the cemetery and hung a sign: "Dear grandmothers, you do not know what you have lost." The next day another poster appeared in the same place, which replied: "Who said?" Do not forget, this city is always on the edge of its own madness. "
"And the second thing I must not forget?"
"The terrible fact that Naples is a beautiful city," said Rilke in one of her elegies, "beauty is nothing but the beginning of the terrible." Beauty creates violence.
On the way to Scampia, Naples is stripping itself of beauty and everyday picardy - the taxi driver combines a price to turn off the taximeter and not have to pay the boss, a boy asks at the subway exit the tickets used to resell them to others travelers - to mingle in the ugliness of overflowing neighborhoods and offenses with capital letters.
Michele Spina says that Scampia is no longer what it was when he arrived in 2007 to head the police station and that, by then, had ceased to be the largest European drug supermarket. The terrible "faida" - internal war - that faced in 2004 and 2005 the powerful clan of Paolo Di Lauro with a group of dissidents led by Raffaele Amato and called "scissionisti" or "the Spaniards" - because Amato had spent a long time refugee in Spain - left more than a hundred dead in the streets of Scampia and the neighboring neighborhood of Secondigliano.
"You have to remember," Commissioner Spina said on board a patrol car on his way to Scampia, "because of the 1980 earthquake, a neighborhood that had been designed for 80,000 people was suddenly invaded by more than 100,000 people , many of them without a job and quite a few police records, but the police station was not created until 1997. The result was predictable: Scampia, and especially Las Velas, became a ghetto from the outset. years without law, the Camorra took full control of the impotence of the well-off people, much more numerous, but unable to react to the intimidating force of the organized group and the weapons.The rigid territory control system still remained intact when I entered in Las Velas for the first time.
The physiognomy of Las Velas is unmistakable. One part is due to the design of the architect Franz Di Salvo: seven gigantic buildings - three of which have already been demolished - each painted a triangular shape, so that on the outside they resembled the canopy of a boat and inside recreating the alleys of Naples, where the voices of the residents and the smells of freshly made food are confused to the point that whole neighborhoods are closing in on themselves until they become a single courtyard of coexistence.
But the reason for its incorporation into the collective imagination - its definitive landing in bad fame - is due to the television and the cinema. Las Velas served as the setting for the movie "Gomorra", directed in 2008 by Matteo Garrone, and for the current television series produced in Italy and already sold to more than 50 countries.
"My message to the boss was clear: if you want to sell drugs, hide yourself. You can not do this like a normal business." Michele Spina, Police Commissioner of Naples.
"The Mafia groups," explains Spina, already in the mythical corridors of Gomorrah, "occupied the houses in a military way, expelled their tenants and invaded them, then changed the original door and replaced it with an armor.Then they made a small hole, a kind of ticket window, so that from the outside one could not identify who was selling inside the envelopes of narcotics to the line of addicts who waited in the corridor, inside and outside the building, in the attics, in the balconies, in the entrances, the sentinels were alert to the appearance of the police or the "carabinieri." In the face of any suspicion, they gave the alarm signal with a word that was recently "vattene", a short, sonorous, immediate cry: "vattene, vattene, vattene ! '"The commissary's voice multiplies by the buildings that, even devoured by the dirt and the abandonment, continue to house about 400 families, the last shipwrecked - and some pirate - of ships that never arrives floated.
"On hearing the alarm," continues Spina, "the one who was selling the drug escaped and made the merchandise disappear, sometimes through the systems - so they continue to call them" systems "- more sophisticated or coarser, a false step on the stairs that was activated by a remote control to a fake drain placed in a house free of suspicion.The problem was that when the alarm was given and the iron gates with which the building had been shielded closed, we were out, but also the other residents, "he says.
"Only they had the key, that's why they were the owners." I remember once when, during the operation, with them locked inside and us waiting for them outside, an old lady arrived, with shopping bags in her hand. It was cold, the intercom did not work because they had burned it, just as they damaged the elevators so we could not go upstairs. "Her husband, old man, would not listen to her and could not come down to help her. The situation was locked up like a game of chess in which any move would involve the loss of a piece, but you were still standing there, passing cold. Deputy Spina - one of those Italians capable of turning the war story into something more interesting than the war itself - decided to suspend the operation so that you could rise, but vowed to return. He had to do whatever it took to break that grotesque scene, the impotent state and citizenship, we were amazed at the power of the Camorra.
"Come on, 'ragazzi' (boys) ..."
Commander Spina, a true character from Naples, is now the inventor and responsible for a project called Aracne - "from the Greek myth of Arachne, the brave girl that the goddess Minerva turned into a spider for weaving better than she" - to combat, and especially to prevent, crime throughout the city of Naples. Spina commands the "gazelles" - the patrol cars - and the "hawks" - the uniformed police uniforms with no helmet on powerful motorcycles - that have managed to reduce the statistics of robberies, robberies, robberies to banks and jewelers.
From the police station, the patrols are supported by a camera system that includes the subsoil of the city. But this morning on Saturday Dr. Spina - as he is called by all, on both sides of the law - returned to the police station in Scampia to accompany his old companions in an inspection of drug points. A helicopter flies over the area. The situation seems quiet.
"When I got here, the drug lord ranks surrounded the building," recalls the delegate. "The people who took their children to school had to go through them because many people were injecting themselves here. It is not that the problem has disappeared [the used syringes we are walking on are witnesses], but the situation has radically improved."
After that afternoon when you and the steward were planted at the door of one of the Sails, fighting the Camorra groups that controlled the area - and then led by the Abbinant clan - suffered a turning, let's say, unorthodox .
"I realized that for more operations that we did nothing put at risk the places of sale," recalls the police chief. "The example is Operation Morena, a major operation.We made a noisy eruption in one of the buildings, practiced magazines with no result and then we left making more noise than when entering.When they felt safe again, they shouted the usual word, 'taposto!', which meant 'everything in order', but we had left some of ours in there - on the ceiling of the elevators - and several cameras placed.We saw live how they sold drugs and the amount of money - 80 thousand euros per day in a single point of sale - that they were able to manipulate, so that we could film them and record their phone calls.And one morning, before dawn, we fell on them and stopped 33. "
Before leaving the neighborhood, an agent from Spina's brigade wrote on a wall a message of defiance of the clans: "-33." The next day the graffiti was still there, but someone had retouched it until it turned it into a reply message: "+88". The game continues.
"That's why I did what I did," concludes Deputy Michele Spina. "It was not a very orthodox thing to do, it was not even a police action." I began to break down the points of sale, and while my men were continuing their investigations and operations, I would introduce myself to the firemen in the buildings. and we destroyed the barricades of steel that the clans had erected.We took the armored doors, we were the grids, we kidnapped the surveillance dogs that had been released by the courtyards ... The message was clear: if you want to sell drugs, You can not do this openly, as if it were a normal business, and that was your building. "My message to the head of the clan was clear, I am not willing to tolerate that lady, or others like her, have to wait with the bags in the cold you decide to open the door. "
The appearance of Las Velas remains a showcase of hell. The four standing buildings that served as a studio for "Gomorrah" continue to accumulate garbage, broken pipes through which constant water falls, rotting walkways that threaten to plummet. The tallest apartments - empty because there is no one up there without an elevator and with increasingly dirty stairs - are a sad monument to what could have been and have not been. The apartments of more than 100 square meters, with fireplace in the living room and large terraces facing the Vesuvius, only serve as a deposit of old mattresses, scruffy clothes and debris.
On the lower floors, residents still can not get up. Rosaria and her daughter Annalisa, who is 27 years old, was born and raised here, dated here and, after a long engagement like those of old, she will give birth to her first child in two months. They did not appear in the film, nor in the series.
"We are ordinary people," Rosaria almost apologized in her clean and organized apartment, "like most of our neighbors, we live here because we can not go anywhere, we do not pay light or water, because we do not have it. , that he could rest in peace, he could pay, he paid. For years, throughout my life, we heard the shots, the police beating, the junkies fighting on the stairs. "
Rosaria and Annalisa offer a coffee, a glass of water, and they say that together on the sofa they saw the film and the series surprises, almost as delegate Spina first saw live the sale of drug through its microcameras. The violent, luxurious, thrilling life of others to which they were neither invited nor willing to join, honored extras without any payment. "What the film tells is true," Rosaria dares to say, "but not all of it."
The other truth is less photogenic, but not least. From time to time, characters as disparate as Professor Ferraro, Spina's deputy, Ivo Poggiani, the leader of an anti-Camorra collective called (R) esistenza, who works on land confiscated from the Mafia, or Vittorio Passeggio, voice of the Las Velas de Scampia Committee - whose site has a drawing of Hugo Chávez at the door - are committed that Vincenzo the baker does not fall back on the crimes that led him to prison, and that the boys who play every afternoon Luigi, Massimo, Salvatore and Angelo - do not fall into clan networks, or that Rosaria and Annalisa can follow the example of Carmela Imparato, the mother of two girls who from time to time have to close the door to owners of the drug.
"We give you 50 euros a day to save the money, much more for the drug." Carmela almost does not speak Italian, but Neapolitan has enough to explain her reasons: "It's a matter of principles. I was born here and from here I could not get out, but they educated me in dignity, and that's what I want for my daughters. "Money for my good name, because they know that the police - who also know that I am an honest person - would never seek money or drugs in my house."
The importance is in fame, good or bad. Luigi de Magistris, a former judge who has been the mayor of Naples since 2011, gives them the following reason: "I do not think so, Everyone acknowledges the merit of Roberto Saviano in denouncing the Camorra, and even when some of them objected to his being allowed to shoot the film, I denied any kind of censorship, but it is true that there is a certain sin of omission when you tell what the mobsters do and never the constant, ever-more powerful rebellion of ordinary people to move on. The truth is we can not shake off the weight of bad fame. "
Delegate Spina, back in the patrol car, with his cigar unlit in his mouth, looks at the imposing silhouettes of Las Velas: "Remember the tale of Monterroso: 'When he woke up, the dinosaur was still there.'" The weight of bad reputation. The curse of Naples.