so this was the period of the huge and lavish weddings of the bosses and the notables who by this point had joined forces in a close alliance there was even a Socialist cabinet level minister who arrived by helicopter for the wedding of a local Socialist notable a clan member of course a wedding where all the most important clan bosses were present this was the period when the most famous singers in Naples were summoned by the clan to sing at their weddings and at the town festivals and they were paid thousands of dollars it was the period when every clan member had a picture of himself next to Maradona because when Maradona came to play for the Naples soccer team he immediately started hanging out in the city’s worst criminal circles where they procured women and cocaine for him as a result the clan members not only got to go see all the soccer games they also got their pictures taken with Maradona and now there’s not a clan member’s home in Naples or anywhere across the region of Campania that lacks a photo of the owner standing with his arm around Maradona

it was a time of peace the only murders in this period were clan members who made some mistake to make a mistake with respect to the clan means for instance behaving in a way that fails to show respect or failing to get along with a capo or trying to leave the clan when that happens the response is an immediate and ferocious murder so two or three young guys were murdered on the street in broad daylight simply because they had failed to obey an order because there was the problem of young people seventeen or eighteen years old with a ravenous appetite for money they want everything right away they join the clan and don’t have any hesitation to kill to make their way to get promotions these kids are very useful to the clan but sometimes they’re a little hotheaded and they have to reined in and one of these kids was murdered because he failed to execute an order they had just told him to go to a place to collect some money protection money the kind that has to be collected on a monthly basis

he refused to do it he considered it a chickenshit job and wanted someone else to go run that errand he considered himself to be a killer someone who did much heavier work than that so basically he refused to obey the order and now that I think about it it’s obvious that the person who issued that order did it precisely because he knew that he would refuse to obey he wanted the kid to refuse to obey the order so that he could have him eliminated because he was an undisciplined individual and there were two ways of getting rid of him either by expelling him from the clan or by killing him and naturally they chose the second solution because it was quicker and cleaner this kid was twenty-three when they killed him and he’d already been very active for two or three years he was killed in the street in a ferocious manner he was walking to the little shoe store he had opened on Corso Umberto across from the church he had opened a little shoe shop for his family