from listening to what his father said the stories he told various people it’s pretty clear what the general attitude of the townspeople toward the organization has been and then how that attitude has changed as the situation changed that is for instance in the period when the organization was strong and invulnerable this friend of my father named Caricalieggio boasted freely that his son was earning five million lire a month roughly sixty thousand dollars a year and every month he was driving a different brand new car without ever doing a lick of work and one time when this friend of my father came to see us on our farmland in the countryside in the summer with a group of friends who always come out every summer to pick up a crate of fruit to take home to their families and they were chatting with my dad I wasn’t there I had driven the tractor to the fruit dump this Caricalieggio was boasting that his son earned all that money without ever doing a lick of work that he got a new car every month and that he had become someone important

then after some time had gone by his son was arrested and charged with attempted murder for trying to kill the healer my father’s friend started complaining that his son was a good boy but that he’d been led astray by a group of criminals that is he completely changed his attitude because what happened is that in the period of the greatest wealth and splendor when there were thousands of clan members not all of them were forced to prove their mettle with gunplay it was sufficient for them to be clan informers and spies for them to keep an eye on the territory to run patrols and collect protection money or do other relatively undemanding errands but then when suddenly after the murder of Antonio Bardellino the wars of succession broke out between the clan of Mario Iovine and Sandokan that is the clan of the Casalesi which had seized power and the De Falco clan which was in opposition to them and the clan of the Coachman which had remained allied with the Bardellinis who were holding out to keep from being annihilated wholesale then things changed

when the real clan war broke out the ferocious and relentless slaughter and the clan members started being decimated then there started to be a shortage of experienced killers who were usually sent out armed on combat missions and when people couldn’t keep count of the dead then the young muschilli started getting dragged into the fighting they had to start using weapons everyone had to be pressed into action to shoot and to kill and this young guy the son of my father’s friend Caricalieggio suddenly wound up in the line of fire with a gun in his hand and sent out to kill designated targets and so before much time had gone by many of these kids met untimely and horrible ends some of them were forced to flee the town and hide out far away with relatives who had gone to work in the north in Modena or Carpi cities where there were long standing communities of people from my town others were arrested or they were mowed down killed like flies