Chapters (17)
According to the indictment, Maurizio Prestieri, Paolo Di Lauro’s right-hand man, ordered about thirty killings. But primarily he is part of the story of organized crime that has made the Italian cosche (clans) the prime investors in the cocaine market. They thought transforming an elite drug into a mass-market drug was the future. When Prestieri is arrested in June 2003, he is a wealthy boss. He is in Marbella with his family, in the country that is a second, if not the first, home for all the European criminal organizations: Spain. After four years in prison he unexpectedly decides to cooperate, and to this day his statements in all the trials have been considered credible and truthful. His story has even been made into a book. One of the Neapolitan anti-mafia prosecutors who handles his collaboration is Luigi Alberto Cannavale: with writer Giacomo Gensini, Cannavale co-authored a passionate narrative, I Milionari, inspired by the affairs of the Secondigliano clan and in particular Prestieri, who in the novel based on a true story is renamed Cavani. The book describes his rapid rise and slow, painful fall in a stark, matter-of-fact style. A story that many readers will prefer to believe is false, invented, pure fiction. Because if you are a person who lives and breathes indignation, knowing that these stories are true makes you lose sleep at night.
Maurizio Prestieri is – was – a boss. He comes from one of the families defeated in the Secondigliano feud of 2004–6, though at the time he begins collaborating the Prestieri are still strong and have a solid economic structure. After the first confessions, the clan offers him a million euros for every single declaration he will recant. A ton of money to put an end to his cooperation with the law. But Prestieri doesn’t stop. In fact, he also denounces this attempt at bribery. He doesn’t feel like being a boss anymore. ‘I’ll always be who I am. What I did can’t be erased. But I can act differently now.’ We meet several times in a barracks. A secret place. An approximate time. You can arrive much earlier or much later. At each meeting, Maurizio Prestieri is always elegant and tanned. Grey or black pinstripe suit, ankle boots, expensive watch. No sign of the negligence that usually happens to people who have lost their power and live in hiding, like rats.
‘Do you remember me?’ he asks. ‘I told you to go to hell, once … but now I’ve changed.’ I have no idea what he’s referring to. But ‘O’ sicco’, the ‘scarecrow’ as they call him in Naples, remembers. ‘You were at a trial, my mother was blowing me kisses, but you thought that little old lady was sending them to Paolo Di Lauro. So you gestured as if to say, “Who is that woman, what does she want?” And I told you to go to hell …’