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

continuously moving platform. The work was concentratedin a few hours, and the choice of merchandise was not accidental. I happened to be unloading during the first days of July. The pay is good, but it’s hard work if you aren’t used to it. It was hot and humid, but no one dared ask about air-conditioning. No one. And not out of fear of punishment or because of cultural norms of obedience and submission. The people unloading came from every corner of the globe: Ghana, Ivory Coast, China, and Albania, as well as Naples, Calabria, and Lucania. No one asked because everyone understood that since merchandise doesn’t suffer from the heat, there was no reason to waste money on air-conditioning.
    We stacked boxes of jackets, raincoats, Windbreakers, cotton sweaters, and umbrellas. It seemed a strange choice in the height of summer to be stocking up on fall clothing instead of bathing suits, sundresses, and flip-flops. Unlike the warehouses for stockpiling merchandise, these storage apartments were for items that would be put on the market right away. And the Chinese businessmen had forecast a cloudy August. I’ve never forgotten John Maynard Keynes’s lesson on the concept of marginal value: how, for example, the price of a bottle of water varies depending on whether it is in the desert or near a waterfall. That summer Italian enterprises were offering bottles by the falls while Chinese entrepreneurs were building fountains in the desert.
    A few days after I’d started working, Xian spent the night at the apartment. He spoke perfect Italian, with a soft
r
that sounded more like a v. Like the impoverished aristocrats Totò imitates in his films. Xian Zhu had been rebaptized Nino. In Naples, nearly all the Chinese who have dealings with locals take Neapolitan names. It’s now such common practice that it’s no longer surprising to hear a Chinese introduce himself as Tonino, Nino, Pino, or Pasquale. Nino Xian didn’t sleep; instead, he spent the night sitting at the kitchen table making phone calls, one eye on the TV. I’d lain down on my bed, but I couldn’t get to sleep. Xian’s voice never let up, his tongue like a machine gun, firing through his teeth. He spoke without inhaling, an asphyxiationof words. His bodyguards’ flatulence saturated the house with a sickly sweet smell and permeated my room as well. It wasn’t just the stench that disgusted me, but the images it evoked. Spring rolls putrefying in their stomachs and Cantonese rice steeped in gastric juices. The other tenants were used to it. Once their doors were closed the only thing that existed for them was sleep. But for me nothing existed except what was going on outside my door. So I went and sat in the kitchen. Communal space. And therefore also partly mine; at least in theory. Xian stopped talking and started cooking. Fried chicken. All sorts of questions came to mind, clichés I wanted to peel away. I started talking about the Triad, the Chinese Mafia. Xian kept on frying. I wanted to ask him for details, even if only symbolic ones—I certainly didn’t expect a confession about his affiliation. Presuming that the criminal investigations were an accurate reflection of the reality, I revealed my familiarity with the Chinese underworld. Xian put his fried chicken on the table, sat down, and said nothing. I don’t know if he thought what I was saying was interesting. I never did find out if he belonged to the Triad. He took a few sips of beer, then lifted one buttock off his chair, took his wallet out of his pants pocket, flipped through it, and pulled out three bills. He spread them out on the table and placed a glass on top of them.
    “Euro, dollar, yuan. Here’s my triad.”
    Xian seemed sincere. No other ideology, no symbols or hierarchical passion. Profit, business, capital. Nothing else. One tends to think that the power determining certain dynamics is obscure, and so must issue from an obscure entity: the Chinese Mafia. A synthesis that