because down here when somebody joins the organization it’s not like you find out about it after a month you know it immediately so even the father knew about it within a week it was enough to see who his son was spending time with but all the same no father down here ever had the courage to tell his son cut it out stop hanging out with that crowd do something else it’s not like they say go on hang out with them but on the other hand no father ever told his son don’t hang out with those people anymore and the reason for that is that the fathers have been day laborers or bricklayers for thirty years and they understand that the reason that their sons join the organization is not that they’re giving up a job that pays thirty-six thousand dollars a year with paid holidays and health insurance but just that they’re sick of temporary jobs or digging ditches or sitting home jobless

and it’s understandable where I come from it’s not like a bricklayer works from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon with a break for lunch down here a bricklayer starts work at seven am and gets off at six pm when it’s dark and in the summer he just goes on working and it’s not like he gets health insurance paid vacations or retirement that is to say he works as long as he can stand it and then he dies and that’s it and they pay you sixty or seventy dollars a day and ten years ago you got thirty or even twenty bucks a day you could barely survive and there’s no accident insurance if you fall off the scaffolding and you break a leg or die that’s it it’s not like your family gets any money or workmen’s comp or anything like that you’re just dead you no longer exist and your family has no money and they have to do what they can to get by

these Bardellinos were bricklayers their father was a day laborer who by the way worked with my grandfather and they had nothing they had fuck-all in their future just a shovel to look forward to Mario Iovine was even worse because he came from a disgraced family and so these young men with nothing in their futures but hard labor for pennies started to do what anyone would do if there was no other way out and they were hungry for money they started to do small time robberies cafés bars smoke shops gas stations and so they assembled a little gang of their own and everything started with this little gang of small town delinquents then they tried to extort protection payments from shopkeepers in neighboring towns because the shops in their town were bad jokes they couldn’t have paid the money if they wanted to but in Aversa for example there are nice big shops there’s a whole section of town that’s just shops it’s called the Seggio but as they start shaking down these shopkeepers they start to bump up against the organization that controls the whole district which is run by Cutolo