I remember that in that period I was doing my military service and he had already become a member of the group for all intents and purposes then Michelino committed a series of murders too I remember one time in particular he was in the army he was drafted a short while after I was we happened to meet one evening in Florence we were at the park of Le Cascine I was stationed at the headquarters in the Piazza Santo Spirito he was in a different barracks the Morandi barracks if I remember correctly but he was only there for a month then he obtained a transfer because he was already practically a made man practically already a clan member I had been drafted a little while before him and in that short period he had already joined the clan he had already started doing jobs for those people he’d become a muschillo and the time I saw him he was furious because he wanted to get back home he had some jobs to do and in fact he managed to get a transfer and I met him in Florence I remembered him as a nice likable kid a little shy a little weak because sometimes when we were about seventeen if he got home late his father I’m not saying he’d beat him but he’d launch into him and so we’d have to accompany him to his house because his father wouldn’t be worried if we were with him

and his father was the president of the town bank and he’s not what you’d call a courageous person he’s the kind of person who’s deathly afraid of weapons in fact they say that once there was a robbery in the bank where he was president and the minute he laid eyes on a pistol he fainted and he didn’t come to for a whole day his son had gone to teacher’s college with a class in which all the other students were girls he finally quit school entirely because he was embarrassed to spend all day with just girls they made fun of him relentlessly because he was a little shy a little weak but instead he turned into the person he became he was a member of the organization for two or three years and after that he was no longer a muschillo he rose in rank he was no longer a mere assistant apprentice he had become a full fledged professional killer and in that period of power vacuum in our town after the murder of Antonio Bardellino when some people were fleeing and others were in hiding some were killing and others were getting killed Michelino became a heavy operator after that though he was arrested I think seven or eight months ago

but when I saw him at Le Cascine he scared me because he was full of the attitude that you see back in our town in these people who have a public attitude that is they won’t ever look at you in an honest and sincere manner they always look at you with this gaze of superiority they look at you in a way that makes it clear to you that you’re nothing more than an asshole while they are people with balls and by now you’re accustomed to that kind of look that’s the look guys give you when they’re driving by and your eyes happen to meet theirs they’ll stare hard at you until you you look down and turn away it’s a kind of test of strength that they impose every time and the time that I saw Michelino at Le Cascine he had put on that very same attitude he stared at me hard and it scared me because I remembered how different he had been when he was sixteen or seventeen and anyway I had been told that he was spending too much time with his brother in law who was also called Michele and now he’s in prison too but anyway I never would have expected him to turn that way in such a short time