The Godmother, page 2
He was a classic Camorra underboss—wealthy, well dressed, and ruthless. He commanded respect through the usual tenets of the criminal underworld: extortion, coercion, and casual murder. Before Pupetta came into his life, Pasqualone was called the presidente dei prezzi, “president of prices.” He lorded over the Camorra’s vegetable and greengrocery racket in the heart of the bountiful Neapolitan farmland, which at the time produced about a quarter of a million dollars in annual profits (around US $2.2 million in today’s money), from tomatoes, zucchini, potatoes, peaches, and lemons.
That was long before the Camorra destroyed the trade by burying toxic waste on the flanks of Mount Vesuvius, causing dioxin levels to spike and making the tomatoes unfit for export, though they were still eaten locally. To this day, the levels soar every few years and the buffalo milk that has made the local mozzarella so famous becomes too toxic to export. The triangle of land around the volcano, which has come to be referred to as the terra dei fuochi, “land of fires,” [2] due to the number of rogue blazes set by the Camorra to burn toxic waste in the mid-2000s, is emblematic of the ways in which crime has so deeply destroyed so much of this otherwise exceptional country. On a reporting trip to cover the toxic fires just a few years after I arrived in Rome, I was taken aback by the grime stuck to my car. Only days later when I started coughing up black phlegm did I stop to think that in covering a story about thick black smoke, I would have to breathe it myself.
We journalists in general tend to think of ourselves as being immune, heading toward the flames of the latest disaster like naive moths assuming we won’t get burned. From earthquakes to murder scenes, our gallows humor forms a sort of shield against thinking too much about the reality of what we know we will never unsee. In Italy, journalists like Roberto Saviano and Federica Angeli live with round-the-clock police protection for writing about the mafia. Saviano’s bestselling book Gomorrah won him a life sentence for writing about the Camorra where he grew up near Naples, and Angeli lives under constant threat for her work uncovering the Roman Casamonica mafia. Countless other journalists who cover mafia crimes are at risk just investigating stories and going to crime scenes, where they could be seen as a threat or get caught in cross fire. Journalists who name names or untangle intricate ties between businesses and crime groups are especially vulnerable. Many are just threatened at first, with a bullet sent to their house or some other unmistakable sign, like their pets being killed or a note left inside their apartment. The message is clear: this time is a warning, next time we’ll kill you unless you stop.
The Italian environmental group Legambiente has for years warned of an environmental apocalypse in the terra dei fuochi, which, coupled with the endemic corruption often driven by organized crime that has crippled the health care system, makes the damage done here especially daunting. Childhood cancer levels are the highest in the European Union. More than 100,000 tons of toxic waste, much of it shipped in from all over Europe, have been dumped, buried, and burned on the slopes of the still very active volcano, thanks to the Camorra’s enterprising garbage division that charges far less than legitimate companies to dispose of toxic waste. Authorities were able to trace the use of 400,000 semitrucks that ferried the waste from 443 companies across Europe, many of which were later sanctioned, though not enough to stop the practice.
After the bombs of World War II ravaged much of southern Italy, farmers had no choice but to pay protection money and adhere to prices set by underbosses like Pasqualone if they wanted to eke out a living. If they didn’t? At best, they would watch their barns burn down. At worst, they would be buried alive beneath their crops. Outside producers who tried to break into the market to buy directly from the farmers were met with hefty fees—also levied by the various underbosses like Pasqualone. Or they were chased away—often with gunfire—which kept farmers dependent on the mob if they wanted to sell their crops.
After the war, many southern Italians struggled to lift themselves out of debilitating poverty, which made easy work for organized-crime groups that hid behind a Robin Hood–style facade. History is repeating itself following Italy’s plunge into recession as a result of the COVID pandemic. This was especially true during the second wave, which brought the area around Naples to its knees and pushed people who had until then resisted the mob’s help to realize the state had failed and they couldn’t survive without the Camorra.
Just as after the war, many small businesses in this part of Italy didn’t qualify for government aid—for the most part because they evaded taxes and underreported their incomes to such an extent the government aid to replace their legal income came nowhere near their real turnover. And without enough legally recognized collateral for bank loans, they had no choice but to turn to organized-crime syndicates to rescue them. That’s how the various mafias survive. People like Pasqualone and those following in his footsteps act as “goodwill” ambassadors who help “the little guy” when the state fails them, as it often does, and keep the criminal cycle—and the local population—alive.
Pasqualone bolstered the local farmers during those tough years, solving people’s problems in exchange for any number of paybacks, including complicity in his criminal enterprise. He doled out favors to anyone who might have something to offer in return, from an empty outbuilding to store stolen goods to an alibi if he might one day need it. He famously helped the errantly pregnant daughter of a foot soldier in his organization after her boyfriend refused to commit. Pasqualone told him that he had around $100,000 that the young punk could choose how to spend: on his wedding or on his funeral.[3]
Pasqualone also dabbled in the lucrative contraband cigarette distribution enterprise that grew out of postwar rationing. US and British soldiers stationed in Naples had fed a booming black market in American smokes. When the war ended and the Allies went home, the cigarette supply stopped coming in, but by then the Italians were hooked. The state stepped in to ration foreign-made cigarettes entering the country through southern Italian ports, which opened up an obvious business opportunity for any crime boss who could smuggle in enough to feed the demand.
For a Camorra guappo like Pasqualone, working around the state’s rules and bringing the contraband in directly from overseas made for easy money despite the intense competition to control the trade. Dominance in organized crime is often achieved through bloodshed and, in 1952, Pasqualone was sentenced to eight years in prison for the attempted murder of Alfredo Maisto, an associate-turned-rival who had started edging into his cigarette territory.
As soon as Pasqualone was behind bars, another close associate, Antonio Esposito, known as Totonno ’e Pomigliano, or Big Tony, took over his share of the vegetable price racket, promising Pasqualone a cut while he was in the can. At first, he funneled some of the profits to Pasqualone behind bars, but within a few months he was keeping everything for himself.
In 1954, just two years into his eight-year sentence, Pasqualone was suddenly released from prison after new evidence emerged in the attempted murder charge—or, more likely, after a judge was threatened or paid off. Naturally, he wanted his old turf back and soon he picked up right where he’d left off. Just as predictably, Big Tony had no intention of giving up the new territory. But Pasqualone was too preoccupied with other matters to notice the tension brewing.
If two years in jail had taught Pasqualone anything, it was that he didn’t want to be alone. He watched how his fellow inmates’ wives and lovers enriched their idle time, and he wanted someone to dote on him as well. He had met Pupetta shortly before he went into prison. She caught his eye after she won a local beauty pageant and he decided she would be his bride.
He was as equally impressed by her beauty as her criminal pedigree from the Lampetielli clan’s line of work. Once in prison, he encouraged her love letters with lofty responses and promises of a life together. Within days of his release, Pasqualone started courting her seriously, and Pupetta’s brothers—who had previously prohibited her from dating any other clansmen—stepped out of the way and quickly approved of her new suitor, knowing that someone of Pasqualone’s ranking would boost their own.
Pupetta and Pasqualone were married on April 27, 1955, when she was just seventeen years old. More than five hundred guests filled the church for the lavish Catholic wedding, including the influential dons of the Camorra clans who showered them with jewelry and envelopes stuffed with cash.[4] Even those with whom Pasqualone had sparred over territory, like Big Tony, and a gun-for-hire named Gaetano Orlando, whose nickname was Tanino ’e Bastimento, attended to celebrate the union of two important criminal lineages. Everything was perfect, and though their life together would never be easy, it seemed destined for blissful longevity.
They set about making their new home, and Pupetta said she was determined after they got married that they would leave their life of crime and do something less risky. It is questionable whether that was ever possible, and of course in retrospect it is an easy claim to make. The reality is that it would have been too hard for them to leave that life. They had no employable skills, and criminal associations and reputations that would have made any potential employer nervous. And anyway, those born into such strong criminal families rarely leave that world alive.
Just months after their future together seemed sealed, on a blistering humid day in mid-July, Pasqualone lay slowly bleeding to death from gunshots to the gut following an attack carried out in Naples’ steamy central market square during the busiest time of the morning. Pasqualone was at the market to collect protection money and distribute favors among the farmers under his control. He was shot while peeling an orange handed to him by one of them, which has caused some speculation that the offer of fruit was meant as a distraction and that the shooter did not act alone.
The square, lined with basilicas that include the ornate Santa Croce e Purgatorio, where elderly women still gather every day to pray for the souls of the dead who are stuck in purgatory, was packed when the shots were fired. But the only person who ever said they saw who pulled the trigger was Pasqualone himself.
A newly pregnant Pupetta was called to the emergency room and wept at his bedside for the nearly twelve hours he lingered until he died at dawn, sending her shattered dreams to his grave with him. Between his last breaths, Pasqualone told his young wife that the shooter was Gaetano Orlando, one of their wedding attendees. He also told her Orlando was sent by Big Tony, the rival who tried to cut him out of the vegetable-market racket while he was in prison.
A few days later, Pupetta buried her beloved, whom she referred to as her Prince Charming or Principe Azzurro until the day she died. She vowed upon his grave to avenge his death, even though it was unheard of at the time for a woman to make such a claim. “Those days were long and lonely,” she told me as she paged through the faded black-and-white photographs and newspaper society-page clippings plastered in her crumbling wedding album. “I was at a point where I could just fade away or make things right. I decided I had no choice but to make things right.”
Pupetta always blamed the police, saying they left her no choice but to take justice into her own hands. Even as an eighteen-year-old pregnant mob widow and clansman’s daughter, she’d had enough faith in the rule of law to believe the authorities would help her. But the clear lack of urgency by the police to hold someone accountable for her husband’s broad-daylight murder forced her to rely on her own methods over the state’s.
Pupetta said she told police that Big Tony ordered the hit on Pasqualone and that Orlando pulled the trigger. Orlando was eventually arrested and sent to prison, but prosecutors chose not to act on Big Tony’s role. “I gave his name to the police but they said they needed proof to arrest him,” she told me, though the police records from that time tell a slightly different story in that she gave a different name than Big Tony’s, clearly hoping they would arrest someone else as a warning that he would be next. “What they really meant was that they didn’t have the balls to get involved or that they owed him protection.”
Big Tony was keenly aware that the death of such an up-and-coming guappo like Pasqualone would be avenged. So he threatened Pupetta, playing manipulative games like leaving messages in places where he knew she would be to catch her off guard. It was his attempt to scare her—warning her that if she did anything, she and her unborn baby would disappear without a trace. Still, Big Tony knew well the rules under which they all lived, especially the most important: leaving a murder such as Pasqualone’s unavenged was out of the question. But his biggest mistake was underestimating the young widow and discounting the possibility that she would carry out the act of revenge herself.
Pupetta remembered vividly the day of Pasqualone’s funeral. It was that day when she decided that she would be no fool or vehicle to elevate Big Tony’s position in the ranks. “I took Pasqualone’s gun from his nightstand and carried it with me from the day I buried him until the day I used it,” she says. She never once doubted that she could do it. As the children of a clansman, she and her brothers had all learned how to shoot a gun to defend themselves. Their father made sure of it. “He taught me to shoot and made sure that I could hit any target between the eyes,” she explained, recounting the story of her loving father teaching her to shoot in the same way someone else might recall a parent helping their child learn to play a musical instrument or swing a baseball bat. “I was a good shot from the first time I picked up a piece, and I made him proud.”
Nearly three months after Pasqualone was laid to rest, Pupetta, by then bulging in her final trimester of pregnancy, finally got to use the weapon. When I asked her to describe Pasqualone’s gun, she pretended to point the imaginary firearm vaguely toward my forehead. “It was a petite gun,” she said, pulling the air trigger as she made a clicking sound with her tongue. “It was the kind you carry in a little clutch purse like you’d take out to a nice dinner.”
On the day that would set the course of Pupetta’s life, she had asked her thirteen-year-old brother, Ciro, to come with her to the cemetery to lay flowers on Pasqualone’s tomb, as remains the custom for new widows in this part of Italy for a year after a husband’s death. Their driver, Nicola Vistocco, was also going to stop by the market square where Pasqualone was killed so Pupetta could pick up some produce, which was given to her for free.
On the way to the market, she spotted Big Tony coming out of a busy coffee bar on the Corso Novara, not far from the square where her husband was shot. She asked Nicola to pull her Fiat over, and he slouched low behind the steering wheel while Pupetta waited. Once Big Tony was walking down the Corso Novara, she asked Nicola to drive up to him. Nicola stopped the car and Pupetta jumped out and started shooting, a gunfight ensued and Pupetta, protected by the car, easily escaped any harm. The driver didn’t see a thing, he told police. He and Ciro were both later tried and convicted for acting as accessories to murder.
Pupetta initially claimed that he had tried to open the car door[5] and she pulled her gun only in self-defense. She claims not to remember pelting Big Tony with what police claim were twenty-nine bullets, insisting that it was just “one or two shots” from the back of the car delivered out of fear. But the evidence used to convict her—including gruesome autopsy photos—showed she used Pasqualone’s Smith & Wesson with precision, and then used the revolver carried by her little brother to make sure he was properly dead. Five of the bullets went straight into her husband’s assassin’s skull. Some reports suggest that four guns were used, which would help explain the astonishing number of bullets. It would also imply greater Camorra involvement and an organized vendetta. When I asked, Pupetta brushed that off and insisted that the reports don’t take into account that the area where the murder took place was already littered with shell casings and the walls were scarred from previous gun battles.
The two siblings fled the scene, leaving the crimson chrysanthemums meant for Pasqualone’s grave in the back seat. When Pupetta died, I bought chrysanthemums in the same color as she described to place on the family tomb where she was interred, though police wouldn’t allow me to do so, as any nonfamily celebration of her life was prohibited. After a few weeks in hiding, Pupetta was ratted out and arrested for Big Tony’s murder. It seemed especially telling to her that she was so easily brought to justice after all she went through to try to get the police to find anyone responsible for her husband’s murder. The fact that they did not turn the same blind eye to Big Tony’s killing convinced her that either his clan controlled the local investigators or that he was an informant.
During her murder trial, she showed no remorse at all, instead telling the court that she would “do it again” if she had the chance. It was her duty to avenge her husband’s death in the absence of the law, she said, screaming during one hearing, “I killed for love!” before collapsing in the courtroom.[6] Local newspapers covered the trial like it was a social event. Headlines screamed about Pupetta’s many outbursts in court,[7] often paying the same attention to detail in describing how the youthful defendant dressed and batted her long eyelashes as newspapers normally paid to starlets of her generation like Sophia Loren, a contemporary who also grew up in the area.
The prosecutor in the case said that by acting to avenge her husband’s death—essentially playing judge, jury, and executioner for a crime never tried in court—she was participating in what they called an “episode of gang warfare”[8] and argued for a life sentence. Her lawyer argued first that it was a crime of self-defense, an argument that Pupetta had promptly undermined on the very first day she testified with her outburst about killing for love. He then changed tack to try to defend the case as a diletto per amore, or an “honor crime,” which covered a broad category of offenses that could somehow be justified by heartbreak. Crimes to defend one’s honor were so common in Italy they were even considered an extenuating circumstance in sentencing until the 1990s, when it finally became more difficult, though even today not impossible, for a cuckolded husband to kill a cheating wife[9] or a mafioso avenging murder to get a pass.
