the very next thing that Mario Iovine did was make a phone call to the office of the lawyer Aldo Scalzone where Enzo De Falco was waiting and passed the word to massacre all the Bardellinos and their clans made men naturally the murder of Antonio Bardellino threw all his family members and relatives into a state of panic especially his nephew Antonio Salzillo who found himself next in line to take his uncle’s place as chief of the Bardellino clan since neither Ernesto nor the other brothers who were notorious bumblers and weaklings had the courage to do so and in fact as expected immediately after Antonio Bardellino’s murder the rival clans sent their men out to hunt down Antonio Salzillo who managed to elude his pursuers and go into hiding but they did capture his brother Paride and they took him to a house where the victors awaited him he was forced to sit in a chair and Sandokan strangled him with his hands while the others held down his arms and legs then his corpse was dissolved in acid

Antonio Salzillo realized that the territory was too hot for him to stay and decided to leave town as quickly as possible and to leave Italy as well but since his passport had been confiscated he needed a false identity document and to get one he turned to the person who had procured a fake ID for his uncle Antonio Bardellino but then Antonio Bardellino had been arrested in Spain probably ratted out by a rival clan carrying a counterfeit identity document but he managed to bribe the magistrates he was set free on bail pending trial but the identity card was made out to the son of the deputy mayor of Casale di Principe who had clan ties and so it was possible to track down the person who had made the counterfeit ID it was the father of a kid I went to school with the father was named Gaetano Piscitelli at the time he was a clerk in the Casale town hall this man had an insane passion for gambling whether it was cards or horse racing or dog racing whatever the bet and that meant he worked mornings at the town hall and spent his afternoons and evenings frequenting the various gambling dens and in my town and neighboring towns there are dozens and dozens

at practically every café bar or pool hall after a certain hour in the evening they pull down the metal security blind and set up a secret gambling den and in fact there’s a special signal for anyone who gets there late so if you knock on the security blind because you saw the lights on behind it and you don’t give the recognition code if you don’t know the signal because you’re not a trusted member of the circle they’ll never open up and let you in Gaetano Piscitelli was a member of every gambling circle there was he spent his afternoons and his evenings and his nights gambling he went to Naples to bet on horses and to the cinodromo or dog track in Naples he’d go to play cards for stakes wherever there was a game and all this of course meant he had an incessant and voracious need for money and he did everything he could think of to get it one time a printer who was a friend of my father’s had to do a job for the town government of Casale di Principe where Gaetano Piscitelli worked and Piscitelli secretly told him to pad the invoice to the town government a little and they’d split the difference between them clearly his constant thirst for cash made him willing to do anything even commit crimes