Yeah sure, I was an activist in Forza Italia and then the Popolo della Libertà for years and years. I met one of the most important figures of the PdL in Campania. I can’t say his name because of the confidentiality of legal proceedings, but I remember that in March 2001, a few months before the election, this individual, followed by hordes of people, stopped at Piazza della Libertà just below my house. I was out on the balcony, enjoying the spectacle of the crowd that was following him (all our doing, since we had urged people to enthusiastically cheer him), and this politician, unconcerned about the police forces who were escorting him, started openly blowing kisses my way. I went down to meet him, and we hugged and kissed like family, while the crowd applauded the scene. I liked this because it meant that he wasn’t ashamed to come to the house of a boss to ask for votes and that he regarded me as a man of power with whom he should talk. He knew very well who I was and what I did. I had already been to prison and I’d had two brothers killed in a bloodbath. He was in my neighbourhood, anyone from Naples knew whom he was dealing with when he dealt with me. At that time, however, a well-known gynaecologist came to my office, one of the luminaries of artificial insemination in Italy. When he wanted to run for mayor, he came and offered me 150 million liras in exchange for support. I couldn’t accept because the clan had already picked another ‘horse’.

Politicians know how to reciprocate. The strategies depend on the degree of involvement there is with the clan. If there is a direct connection, no contract will be awarded except to affiliated contractors. If instead the clan has only given ‘external support’, the politician will reciprocate with councilmen in key positions. Then there are the politicians who must keep their distance and are therefore limited to avoiding differences, to creating duty-free zones or generating endless construction sites to subsidize the clan and throw it a sop. ‘I have always felt I was an ally of Neapolitan centre-right politics. For more than ten years I even had a disabled permit, obtained because I was an active supporter of the PdL. In the jargon of the Camorra, those passes are called il mongoloide (the Mongoloid). With that I parked wherever I wanted to, on car-free ecological Sundays I could drive around a deserted Naples. Fantastic!’