Until then Ciruzzo had hardly ever had lovers. He had fathered ten children over the course of a long marriage of more than thirty years. ‘Providence had sent him all males and this was another sign that he was destined to command. He was sure he had enough “princes” to result in generations of drug traffickers to come.’

Instead, that’s where the clan’s downfall began. Di Lauro’s sons were incapable of running the empire, and all the clan managers rebelled:

While the authorities were looking all over the world for him, he was hiding at Castel dell ’Ovo. Yeah, right in the middle of Naples. They looked everywhere, and he was in Naples, on a yacht of ours. He was hiding out at sea. Though even in Greece and Russia the mafia families protected him. But I knew he wanted to get out of those hideouts, to stop living like a monk, nothing but kids and cocaine. So I took him with me to Slovenia. And there Ciruzzo changes: he falls in love with a gorgeous Russian girl. And does crazy things for her: he follows her to Russia, and when she disappears and goes to Geneva, while law enforcement throughout the world is looking for him, Paolo Di Lauro risks arrest and goes to her by train, searches for her in the streets where the area’s Russians lived, stations himself below her house like a lovesick adolescent willing to do anything to win back his girl.

Those are the clan’s golden years, since by then, along with the Calabrians, it controls the coke economy in Italy and all over Europe. More and more the bosses live abroad:

Slovenia is paradise for us. There we find everything we’d want the world to be like. No rules. Casinos, women, friends from all over the planet. And you can buy everything and get anything you want. We would stay as long as nine months. I returned every two weeks to check Di Lauro’s affairs, while Ciruzzo didn’t give a fuck. He didn’t go back even for New Year’s. He forgot all about his sons. We felt so secure in Slovenia that we had people call us by our names. Finally, no phony documents, none whatsoever. After all, the institutions there are bought by various mafias: the Russians, the Serbs, us, the Calabrians, the Sicilians, the Casalesi clan, the Turks. All of them.