but it’s only inside the clan not for outsiders in fact in the towns it is absolutely forbidden to make use of drugs or to sell them it’s not very good for a young man’s health if the neighbors find out that he’s smoking joints he might be taken in hand by someone who will explain to him in very courteous terms that certain things aren’t done around here that drugs are bad for you and that it’s not nice for a young man to do certain things for instance when I was sixteen I happened to smoke a joint at school in Aversa and I came home a little stoned and then when I was talking with friends they explained to me that in the future it would be a good idea not to let that happen so here you can’t sit in a car at night with friends and chat and smoke a fattie because there’s a real risk that one of these patrols will pull up and pile out and beat you bloody what they want to do is preserve a false and hypocritical public order which is just fine with the false and hypocritical citizenry of the town as well as preventing problems with the police and so nobody’s allowed to steal a car nobody can burgle an apartment and the kids aren’t allowed to take drugs unless they work for the clan

once during one of these evenings that the clan members spent in one of these gambling dens playing cards and betting lots of nice money four kids walked in wearing ski masks generally these gambling dens are located in the back room of a café that is the front room is where the bar with the espresso machine and everything else is located but in the back there’s a private room where the gambling is done so the four young men walk in and they rob the gambling den of tens of thousands in the room there were plenty of clan made men including some important ones so the clan capi interpret what happened as more than a robbery they see it as a challenge on their own territory so they put out word to hunt down the four kids and they are quickly identified as coming from Sant’ Arpino a village on the line between the provinces of Caserta and Naples and before the month is out they’d all been tracked down and murdered in different ways and it is made unmistakable to everyone that they were killed because they dared to go against the clan and because they stole money from the clan in its own backyard

they were reckless psychopaths especially if you consider that during the robbery one of the gamblers said to them that it would better for them if they just put down their submachine guns their sawed off shotguns and went back to their town and if they did there was a remote possibility they might live when he said that one of the kids shouted in his face that they didn’t give a shit for the clan that they weren’t afraid of anyone which means that these were just a typical group of hotheads that had heard there was plenty of money there but hadn’t realized they were taking too big a risk and so they were all killed one after another and the last of the four to die was burned alive and in fact while the clan does all it can to preserve a good natured façade to seem like it always extends the hand of friendship to townspeople or friends of friends or the neighbor’s relative who needs something and if they ever need anything they can turn to the clan without worries behind this jovial façade there is a deep seated ferocity that’s on a hair trigger Mario Iovine for example if he was talking to someone and they said something that struck a nerve he was capable of strangling him choking him to death on the spot with his hands