Chapters (17)
Maurizio Prestieri is one of those bosses who rose up from nothing. Rione Monterosa, a district of Secondigliano, is where he came full circle:
With my first profit made from a little drug dealing, I decided to do what no one in my area had ever done: fly. I told everyone: I’m taking a plane. I would be the first in my family and the first in my neighbourhood to get on one. I went to Capodichino and bought a ticket on a domestic flight. I didn’t care about the destination, I just wanted it to be a place as far away from Naples as possible. And the place farthest from Naples for all of us was Turin. I took the plane, all excited. I landed, got off, walked around the airport and outside a bit, and went right back. When I returned, everyone in the area was there cheering. I felt like Gagarin, the first guy in space. I was the first person from Secondigliano to get on a plane. Everyone kept asking me: ‘O’ sicco, is it true that the contraption takes you above the clouds?
The poverty in the outer localities becomes a blind, dizzying engine that enables a clan structured around cocaine to take off. ‘We could have been stopped immediately by the state and instead we became rich and powerful in no time. The legal economy needs our illegal money. We had skills, put to the wrong use in society …’
Those men for whom a Naples–Turin flight seemed like a venture into outer space are as hungry to stand out as they are ignorant about the most basic things. According to Prestieri, Raffaele Abbinante, known as ‘Papele ’e Marano’, the future boss of the secessionists, didn’t even know what a cheque was when he was a kid. ‘My brother paid for a batch of hashish with a cheque and Papele dropped it like a hot potato, saying “I want real money, what is this paper?” And now, twenty years later, he talks about the stock market, oil investments, the price of gold. He became a businessman.’