As a boy Maurizio was not destined to become a boss. He might have become the family’s investor, given his entrepreneurial skills. The group’s bosses were his brother Rosario and his older brother Raffaele in particular. Charismatic, unflappable, Raffaele enjoyed Paolo Di Lauro’s complete trust, more so than a blood relation. Except that the Prestieri brothers end up in a war against a district boss whom the clan had stripped of power, taking advantage of his forced stay in Tuscany: Antonio Ruocco, known as Capaceccia. One of the most vicious feuds ever seen on Italian territory. In a series of executions, dozens of men from the two bands are killed, until Ruocco shows up at the Fulmine bar in Secondigliano on 18 May 1992, with a command of eight men: with machine guns, pistols, pump-action rifles and hand grenades they kill five people. Among them is Maurizio’s older brother Raffaele, the boss, and Rosario, the other brother. Di Lauro, known as Ciruzzo o’ milionario (the millionaire), stops thinking rationally and orders the kind of execution that mafia rules prohibit: the killing of Ruocco’s mother. ‘The clans throughout Italy let us know that they had not condoned it, but Paolo Di Lauro’s response was: “This is my way of waging war.”’

So Prestieri becomes a boss:

We were able to take everything. Restaurants, bars, hotels, houses in half the world. Factories, shops, contracts. When Naples started the extension project in the area to the north, we blocked the concrete mixers to get them to award the contracts to our businesses. We would shove a .38 in the drivers’ faces, make them get out and we’d take the trucks. We stopped the in-transit mixers and the cement dried inside them. That way the company lost the cement, lost the mixer-truck, which could only be scrapped, and also lost the contract because the job was delayed. At that point the contract had to be awarded to us. Coke, contracts, politics, that’s how you control people’s lives.

Politics? ‘Politics, sure. Take good notes. These are stories that may seem unbelievable. But they’re just everyday reality … political reality.’

GRAND HOTEL CAMORRA

Italy is a country for old men, whereas the Camorra invests in young people. An older leader of a clan knows he must hand over his authority to someone else: his experience will live on, not by clinging to his own power, but by selecting the young man to whom he will transfer it. Moreover, he will save his skin if he realizes this before the younger man bumps him off and grabs that power for himself.