Maurizio Prestieri soon became Paolo Di Lauro’s chosen one: he became the Secondigliano boss’s favourite because he was the brother of Raffaele, Di Lauro’s best friend, who’d been killed. And because he was sharp, determined, skilful. Paolo Di Lauro had never wept, or at least never in front of anyone. Once in Barcelona, a place where all the world’s clans made investments and purchased coke, they were strolling along, watching a sunset, when Paolo Di Lauro said to Prestieri: ‘Raffaele would have loved this sunset …’ And he burst into tears.

The boss capable of ordering the execution of the elderly mother of one of his enemies, of not seeing his children for years in order to better manage his trafficking, wept for forty minutes straight at the sight of a sunset and the thought of a friend who had died young. Today, when I meet Prestieri in a place protected by my own security detail and the one he’s had for the past three years, since he began cooperating with the law, he recalls: ‘I had never seen Ciruzzo ’o milionario like that.’

Their relationship becomes very close. Prestieri’s standing soon becomes clear to all. Once, when Maurizio has a high fever that won’t come down, Di Lauro goes to his house. Worried, the boss shows up unexpectedly, knocks on the door, goes in and lies down next to him. As they talk, the boss falls asleep right there in the bed beside his friend Maurizio Prestieri. When the other guys in the clan hear about it, they begin to envy Maurizio more than anyone else: he’s had the privilege of sleeping with the boss. ‘And that scared me. In Naples a man can die from envy. I think we must be the most envious people in Italy. To be okay with it, Neapolitans always have to feel it’s luck that allows you to obtain a thing: not commitment or ability. I was afraid of envy.’

The boss and his heir apparent were as close as father and son. Having lost his father very early on, and then his brothers, Maurizio grew up with Paolo Di Lauro. Di Lauro raised him, believed in him, trusted him, and considered him the real brains of the group. Even today when Prestieri talks about Di Lauro, you hear a clear note of respect in his voice. ‘I love him. Now he despises me. As well he should.’ But back then Paolo Di Lauro puts him on a pedestal: when the boss begins to tire of his fugitive life, always hiding, always isolated from the action, he begins to give more power to Prestieri, to delegate responsibility. For a Camorra boss you are a man if you have a family; you don’t divorce, but you have a lot of women. If you divorce, you are not a man. If you don’t have mistresses, you are not a man.