I would go and pick them up one by one. I carried infirm old women up to the polling place in my arms so they could vote. No one had ever done that. I made sure the polls in hospitals were up and running. We paid expenses for poor families, retirees’ bills, the first month’s rent for young couples. They all had to vote for us and we bought them cheaply. I organized bus trips for people to go vote. The clans in Secondigliano pay 50 euros per vote, and often by bribing the polling place supervisor you can more or less tell if a family of ten to fifteen people was sold to someone else. We made people feel important with a free sandwich and a paid bill. If democracy means having people participate, we are a democracy because we involve everyone. Then they vote for us and we do what we like. Contracts, drug markets, cement, investments. That’s business.

Today Prestieri is almost disgusted when he talks about these things; he feels he toyed with people’s souls, something that defiles you inside. And he has absolute contempt for Italian politics, like all the Camorristi. I ask him whether he had always supported the politicians of just one party. Prestieri smiles:

We did, yes, aside from small local exceptions, like in Melito, but the Camorra divides up the territories, so it also divides up the politicians. We clashed every time with the Moccia clan who always supported the centre-left. We would celebrate the political elections when Berlusconi won and they would celebrate the municipals or regionals when Bassolino and company won. The city of Naples has always been on the left, and that was convenient for us: all those far leftists who smoked hashish and grass at Piazza Bellini or in front of the University, or who bought coke, financed us. Freedom they said, freedom from authority, from capitalism, and then they bought tons of pot and coke. True, they voted for the left, but then we used their money to support our centre-right candidates.

I ask him whether he has ever met any centre-left politicians. ‘No, never, but I’m sure that the Moccia clan together with the Licciardis endorse the centre-left, because they were our rivals and we were always talking about the division of politicians among ourselves and even with them. We were angry with them when the left won, because it meant that there was more business, more contracts, more money for them, and we had less control over what they did.’

And politicians of the centre-right, had he ever met any?