the frauds that the clan ran at the fruit dump were only a small portion of the clan’s many activities after the massacre the clan made alliances with the other local clans that decided to break with Cutolo who was widely seen as as a loser meanwhile the fight to the finish the war of extermination continued against the Cutolo clan a war that could only end when the last of the made men and the last sympathizer with that now clearly defeated clan were eliminated it could end only with their deaths which might be inflicted in any of a number of ways they were hunted down and murdered everywhere with rifles pistols all sorts of weapons but it wasn’t uncommon for them to be caught and strangled dissolved in acid and tossed into a dump or maybe even a fruit dump also as the clans took advantage of the contracts for public works that they were beginning to win by corrupting anyone who seemed approachable and throwing a scare into anyone who could be intimidated so taking advantage of these contracts and the river of cement that started to pour like water they used the cement as a convenient burial ground their enemies wound up in giant blocks of cement and there’s a joke that someday a major earthquake will come like the one that hit Perugia and Assisi and the superhighway that runs through our region will collapse and the cement will give up more dead than the day of the last judgment

X EXPANSION

the fruit dump was just one of the clan’s many activities and maybe it was one of the least criminal of those activities because quite quickly the Bardellinos and their partners managed to lay their hands on much more profitable lines of business like public works contracts and on drug trafficking especially cocaine the kind of drug that best represents those years of emptiness and ostentatious wealth and they realized that this was the big multimillion dollar business that they had to get control of not merely as the group that funneled the drugs to northern Italy and the rest of Europe they had to take complete control of the traffic control of every individual step in the process from the origin from where it was produced to street peddling in other words they wanted to take control of the whole product cycle because they knew that once they controlled the network they could dominate the European drug market or at least a good portion of it

with this objective in mind they established relations with the Sicilians who for years have had close ties with the world’s largest cocaine producers the Medellín cartel in Colombia taking care however not to become competitors with the Sicilians considering that during the gang war against Cutolo who was on terrible terms with them relationships of reciprocal assistance respect and aid were established between the clan and the Sicilians or at least with certain families because even within the Sicilian structure there are wars there are rival groups who fight ferociously and in fact one of these groups at a certain point made an attempt to kill Antonio Bardellino and this was one reason that he preferred to spend most of his time in Santo Domingo but all things considered the Sicilians weren’t all that interested in knowing who they sell to who they are connected with for trafficking in other regions what they care about is whether their clients are solid and reliable