When you cut a kilo of pure coke, you get about two kilos if you want the best quality, three, even four if you want low quality. A kilo of coke, including the cost of transport, reaches Secondigliano priced at 10–12,000 euros. 50–60,000 euros wholesale equates to around 150,000 euros retail: a net gain of approximately 100,000 euros. If you figure that there are outlets where up to two kilos a day are sold, working 24/7, tell me, how much do you think can be earned in a day?

The calculation is simple. If you consider that a district group can manage to handle as many as fifteen outlets, you can take in three million euros every twenty-four hours just from coke alone. I ask him about supplies. ‘We would get the coke in Asturias,’ Prestieri says, ‘we had contacts with the Basques.’ I remind him that it stirred up a hornet’s nest when I reported in Spain that the Basque separatist group ETA had ties with the Camorra:

I know, they all want to make peace with the ETA, so they can’t admit it. With a political organization you can sit down and negotiate, but with one mixed up in drug trafficking, what do you do? Anyway, we would buy from the Basques, Basque drug-dealers authorized and supported by the ETA. Then we stopped going there because Raffaele Amato, ‘Lello o’ spagnolo’, our contact in Spain, began dealing directly with the South Americans. He had a great relationship with the guys in Cali, the Colombians who had won the war against Pablo Escobar. Here’s how it works: You pay half the money for each load of coke, you remain with the Colombians as a hostage and if the other half doesn’t come, they kill you. But Lello was very well treated during the period he was, let’s say, sequestered. Hotels, casinos, women.

In ten years Maurizio Prestieri becomes one of the richest men in the territory and one of the most respected bosses. His family’s portfolio in the periods of greatest expansion handles as much as five million euros per month. Gambling and luxury cars become his obsession. He loves Ferraris, ‘but it bothered me going around Naples in my Ferrarino. Everyone looking at you, all crowding around you. It was crass. I only drove around Monte Carlo in the Ferrari.’ Prestieri, unlike Paolo Di Lauro, had a talent for life. ‘I knew how to live, life for me meant living each day to the fullest. Travelling, meeting people, making money, fuck those who have it in for you. I drank in all I could of life. All the time never letting my family lack for anything and keeping them insulated from any concerns.’ He floods Italy with coke but has no idea how it tastes and what sensations it produces: