what we fought for - part 3
Hibari’s gone in the morning, which isn’t surprising. But even the ones who stay or who only come to talk never mention their midnight visits outside the doors of Tsuna’s rooms. It seems…strange. So strange that Tsuna sometimes wonders if everything that happens in his rooms at night is just a dream.
Not as idle a worry as it might be, considering Mukuro lives down the hall.
If it is an illusion, Tsuna wonders what it says about Mukuro, that he shows Tsuna a parade of broken dreams. But if it’s not an illusion, then Tsuna has to wonder what all of this says about him.
Fear of learning who he should be worrying about is what keeps him from talking about it. It also keeps him from trying to see the reality past any possible illusions, even though Hibari did, uncharacteristically, take the time to teach him how.
He stretches and feels various aches that don’t prove anything. Illusions feel just like the real thing as long as you believe in them.
* * *
“Your monthly payments fund clan operations, but they also earn you economic protection with the banks, punctual deliveries, and respect for your sales representatives. Extortion as an imposed acquisition of services.”
* * *
Another morning, another meeting. Bianchi, Basil, and Hibari have, between them, managed to compile what they think is a complete map of all the waste dumping in Campania, Basilicata, and Puglia. They’re doing Calabria next, and plan to give Gokudera a map of the entire south in another month.
A glaring lack of toxic waste in Chiavarone territory, Tsuna notices, pleased. Favors, indeed.
The Vongola have not been so lucky. And Tsuna let this happen.
Toxic waste disposal is sometimes as blatant as dumping waste into abandoned quarries, but, based on what Basil and Bianchi have found, it more often isn’t. Thanks to the stakeholders (bright young college-educated things who’ve memorized the EU’s List of Wastes), it’s usually well hidden. Mixed into cement. Diluted just enough with non-toxic trash. Turned into fertilizer and sold.
“Looks like another trip to Italy soon,” Tsuna says softly, bracing himself for the opposition. “Next month, I think.”
Yamamoto and Gokudera both go into high alert, and Tsuna bites his lip. “Why, Tenth?” Gokudera asks, trying to hide his panic.
“Hibari-san’s looking for responsible bosses in Basilicata. It isn’t as badly off as the rest of the south, so we thought it’d be easiest to start there. I’d like to talk to those bosses, and I ought to check in with our allies, anyway. We owe Dino a visit, and I should talk to Nico. I should talk to a lot of people.”
“Most bosses don’t talk to anybody but their immediate family,” Gokudera argues hopelessly. They’ve had this discussion a hundred times before. “Nobody knows what they look like, Tenth. It’s better that way.”
Tsuna smiles, and Gokudera sighs and rubs his face, more or less resigned. “Hibari’s in Italy?” he asks shortly, reaching for cigarettes. It makes him unhappy not to know where the whole family is, and Hibari is constantly thwarting him.
“He left two days ago for Matera.” Tsuna’s been missing him ever since, which is officially the most ridiculous thing he’s done this year.
“This isn’t a great time for you to be in Italy, Tsuna,” Yamamoto puts in. Gokudera gives him an approving nod, then turns, wide-eyed, to Tsuna, as if to say, See? Even the baseball idiot thinks it’s a bad idea.
“Colonello and I could go instead,” Lal Mirch offers, which means she doesn’t want Tsuna in Italy either. Everyone’s ganging up on him. “We’ve done more interrogations than you brats have.”
“Thank you,” Tsuna says carefully, not bothering to point out that ‘interrogation’ and ‘talk’ aren’t quite the same thing. “But sometimes people like to see my face. And I like to see them, especially if I’m trying to get them on our side.”
Lal gives an annoyed shrug and turns away, as dismissive of Tsuna’s logic as ever.
Tsuna doesn’t know what effect toxic waste would have on the Arcobaleno, and he isn’t going to find out the hard way. The curse is supposed to be broken, but there’s still something not quite right about the way they age; they can’t be called normal. And Uni can’t die for them again. He’s not sending any of them to Italy if he can keep them away.
A few days after that meeting, as if Tsuna doesn’t have enough to worry about, he discovers that Gokudera has, for some reason, made printouts of the pictures and maps of waste dumps and pasted them around his office where he’s forced to stare at them all day long. Sometimes Gokudera appears to be doing everything he can to sabotage his own sanity.
“It seems like this is personal for you,” Tsuna says one night, voicing a thought that’s been in the back of his mind since that first trip to Naples, years ago. “The trash. It bothers you more than anything else. More than the construction, the murder, the drugs.”
He leaves it there, giving Gokudera the option of ignoring the implied question.
They’re alone in what is half-jokingly referred to as the family room. Tsuna’s in a wing-backed chair with Hibari’s latest stack of non-reports (several of them offering to bite sundry Basilicata bosses to death and spare Tsuna the trouble, which is sort of touching). Gokudera is on the couch opposite, face lit by the glow of his laptop, buried in charts and graphs related to Tsuna-knows-not-what. He’s playing something from his apparently limitless collection of music with lyrics about disillusionment, madness, and overthrowing the government. This is not a terrible sign. It’s true that when he’s happy, everything he plays is instrumental. But when he’s devastated, he plays love songs.
The room is a comfortable one, quiet, dark, and soft. No one but immediate family uses it; not even Dino knows it exists. It’s also generally understood that things said in this room will never be mentioned again once the conversation is over.
The room was Bianchi’s idea, which is not as strange as it should be.
“That’s true,” Gokudera agrees quietly, something just above a whisper. Out of place coming from the terrifying Right Hand of the Vongola. But none of them are quite what they pretend to be.
A long pause, and then, “My mother died of leukemia.”
Tsuna sits up. “I thought-”
“That my father killed her?” Bizarrely, Gokudera smiles at him. “So did I. But it turns out she was dying anyway. They say she passed out while she was driving. Maybe she did. I had Giannini hack into her medical records-she really was dying, that much was true. She grew up in Qualiano. There’s no way to prove anything, but…”
But Qualiano is one of Hibari’s worst toxic sites, just outside of Naples, bright red on all the maps.
“Oh,” Tsuna breathes.
“She could have moved somewhere else,” Gokudera says, sounding lost. “She had the money, I….” He pauses. “No. It was already too late.”
Tsuna stands and crosses over to the couch, shuffling paperwork aside so he can sit. He meets Gokudera’s surprised eyes with an even gaze he likes to think Reborn would approve of. “What are you working on?” he asks.
“What…what am I working on?”
“Pretend I don’t know anything,” Tsuna says comfortably, slumping until they’re shoulder-to-shoulder. An old joke, if a private one. Pretend, indeed.
It works, though; it always does. Gokudera explains. For over an hour, he explains, desperately at first, but more calmly as he goes along, his body slowly relaxing until his shoulder’s actually comfortable to lean against. And if ninety percent of the explanation sails completely over Tsuna’s head, well. That’s hardly the point.
* * *
“Ethics are the limit of the loser, the protection of the defeated, the moral justification for those who haven’t managed to gamble everything and win it all.”
* * *
Tsuna arrives in Italy, luckily or otherwise, just in time for Hibari to catch his first responsible Basilicata boss.
Talking to the average fifteen-year-old capo can’t be described as a fun experience, and this one is threatening to be special. For one thing, he was dragged into Tsuna’s new office in Matera by the Varia, to whom Hibari had apparently passed him off. Specifically, Squalo dragged him in by the ear. Tsuna then had to kick all of the Varia out before the kid-the baby capo-would speak at all.
Tsuna doesn’t want to do this. It’s not as if it’s worth the effort, bargaining with boy bosses. The talking dead. They turn over so quickly there’s hardly time to learn their names, let alone strike deals with them. Still, if you need something in their territories, it has to be done. Every few months, if necessary.
What makes these meetings especially surreal is that Tsuna was, technically speaking, a baby capo himself. Like them, he fought his way to the head of a family before his voice had completely broken. Like them, he’d been attacked, gone into hiding, killed men, all before he was old enough to vote. He and the children who head their own families ought to have a lot of common ground.
They have nothing in common.
This one is Marco Di Chiara, called ’o pulcino, the baby chicken. Tsuna hopes the nickname doesn’t reflect as badly on the boy’s probable longevity as it seems to.
“It’s my place,” Marco says. “My territory.”
He’s talking about the nothing land between Matera and Grassano, a modest claim if ever there was one. Modest or not, though, the moment he started dumping toner in the fields, Hibari started considering it his territory instead. Tsuna almost always supports Hibari.
“I disagree,” Tsuna tells Marco, but politely, because there’s nothing more useless than a baby capo who thinks you aren’t treating him with respect. “I hope we won’t have to argue about this.”
Marco’s eyes wander past Tsuna. Judging from the quickly-suppressed flash of panic in his eyes, Tsuna imagines that Yamamoto is smiling and Gokudera is not. An unsettling sight, in the right circumstances. Though not as unsettling as when they switch.
“Everybody knows you don’t care about territory!”
False bravado. Defiance. Pride overcoming common sense. Tsuna’s seen it over and over again. He’s been guilty of it himself. “That’s right,” he says. “I’ve got no ambition. But the thing is, I can’t stand the idea of any of my family being hurt. Sometimes that makes me a little crazy, Marco. I will do anything to keep them from being hurt.”
The memory of Fuuta’s body overlapping with that of a scorched, bloody field. And the memory of a burned-out car: the worst thing Tsuna’s ever done. Not the act itself, but the fact that he did it without thinking. Murder as reflex.
“Anything,” he repeats in a murmur, and notes that Marco's gone a little pale. He won’t survive a month as boss if his face keeps showing every emotion that way. Even Lambo is less transparent, and Lambo isn’t high profile. Ninety percent of being a boss is putting on a good show.
All of us are terrified, Marco.
“You can’t just walk all over me,” says the baby chicken, trying for that good show. “I belong to the System!”
So very proud of being a cog in the machine.
“I’m not trying to walk all over you,” Tsuna points out. “I was hoping we could agree. I don’t want to take something away and give nothing back. A trade.”
“What do you have that I want?” Marco sneers.
Tsuna shudders to think how many things he has that someone like Marco might want. He’s tried to pick the most harmless of all of them. He turns to Shouichi and nods.
It’s just a toy, Spanner says. Basic box weapon technology stripped of anything that might be useful, impossible to reverse engineer for someone unfamiliar with Mist flames. And everyone ought to be unfamiliar with Mist flames, at this point.
It’s the ought to, Tsuna thinks, that’s making it hard to breathe as he passes this impossible-to-reverse-engineer toy over to a baby capo. “Open it,” he says.
Marco does. And he disappears, nothing to track him by but the sound of his gasp. Gokudera and Yamamoto both go tense, but Tsuna isn’t worried. They shouldn’t be, either. They all know that Chrome is in the room, watching.
“Close it when you’re ready,” Tsuna says.
Marco reappears, eyes wide and face pale. “What do you want?”
“All of your waste disposal contracts.”
“You can have them!”
All for a toy. A toy.
“He didn’t think that through,” Chrome says with quiet disapproval after Marco has left and Squalo’s wandered back in. “Didn’t he wonder why we want those contracts?”
“He’s fifteen,” Tsuna points out.
“And what else do you expect from the fucking southerners?” Squalo drawls, ignoring Gokudera’s glare. “They don’t believe the long-term exists. You’re a stupid asshole for thinking you can do anything with ‘em, Sawada. You should just let us burn Naples to the ground. That’d sort ‘em out.”
At this point, Gokudera, with no thought to rings, boxes, or bombs, flies across the room and tackles Squalo. Chrome looks disappointed, but not surprised. Yamamoto laughs.
Tsuna sighs and leans back in his chair, rubbing his eyes, and leaves them to it. A little property damage is worth it; they need this. A clean fight, once in a while, is good for lowering the tension. For morale, God help them. Even if they do feel compelled to have this fight in his office.
It’s a shame Ryouhei isn’t here. He always likes the extreme meetings best.
* * *
“The children of bosses often fall into a sort of delirium of omnipotence, believing that entire cities and their inhabitants are at their disposal.”
* * *
Gokudera drags Tsuna back to Namimori at the earliest possible opportunity. Tsuna doesn’t mind. He needs a little space to brood over what he’s learned.
Burning Naples to the ground wouldn’t be a viable option even if Tsuna did have the stomach for it (which he doesn’t). It wouldn’t do any good, not even if they took out all the surrounding towns, too. No. It would only make things worse.
The problem of the South. A catch phrase, so old it’s almost a joke. Tsuna does have a plan, though. He tries to tell himself that it isn’t, in its way, just as terrible as burning cities.
The door crashes open and Tsuna has his gloves on before he’s registered who’s there.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, scum?”
Ah. Xanxus. Tsuna sighs and considers taking the gloves off. Decides against it. Apparently Squalo managed to talk his boss into paying Tsuna a visit after all. That might have been nice to know before Xanxus showed up in his office, but Tsuna has no one to blame but himself. He’d told everyone to let Xanxus through without question if he actually showed up.
Tsuna hasn’t seen him in person for, oh, at least three years. That’s partly because Xanxus hates the sight of him, but mainly because Xanxus is a wild thing, and Tsuna is a boss. Bosses have to live in cages if they don’t want to die young.
Most of them die young anyway.
“Answer me before I burn this piece of shit room to ash. The fuck are you doing?”
This isn’t the first time Tsuna’s wondered how highly edited Squalo’s reports to Xanxus are.
“I’m destroying the mafia.”
“What? What!? What the fuck?”
“I hate the mafia. I’ve always hated it.”
“You’re the fucking Vongola boss. And you hate the mafia.”
“I hate the mafia.”
Xanxus snarls out of pure bafflement. Tsuna’s sort of having fun. “And what’re we gonna do for a living, moron, if you swing this? Not that you are, because it’s fucking ridiculous. Biggest bunch of bullshit I ever-”
“A lot of people are going to be really unhappy with us if I make this work, Xanxus, so I think the Varia will be busy for a long time. Until we’re all dead, probably. Don’t worry-we’ll be able to keep paying you.”
“I don’t need you scum,” Xanxus insists.
“We need you, though.” Tsuna tips his head to the side and waits for Xanxus to conclude that there’s really no way to take that as an insult.
“What do you want?” Xanxus eventually asks with belligerent reluctance.
“Antonio Iovine,” Tsuna says.
Xanxus’s mouth drops open. “You want me to kill ’o ninno?”
“No, but I want you to kill the people closest to him. Anyone who might notice if he starts acting…funny. And then I’d like to see him.”
“The fuck is wrong with you!? The Casalesi’ll come after you, the entire fucking System will come after you! Not that I give a shit about you trash, but they’re gonna come after me first. And what good’ll it do, moron!?”
Apparently Tsuna’s really been missing out, not having Xanxus around. Has he changed over the years? Surely Tsuna would have remembered if he’d always been this entertaining. “Five years ago, it might not have done any good,” Tsuna allows. “But Iovine’s been around a long time. One of the strengths of the System is that no one boss lasts long enough to become indispensable. Iovine is different.”
Iovine is a Casalesi boss. Gokudera hates the Casalesi. Xanxus wouldn’t respect that as a reason, though, so Tsuna doesn’t mention it.
“You think you can control him? You can’t control a guy like that!”
Tsuna tries to imitate Kyoko’s patient smile. Xanxus snarls at him.
“What the fuck ever, scum. It’s your funeral. You want Iovine? You can have him. I hope I’m there when he rips your heart out with his bare hands.”
Exit Xanxus, in high temper. Tsuna’s going to have to come up with reasons to bring him to Japan more often.
He’s right, of course. Tsuna won’t be able to control Iovine. But Mukuro will. Mukuro will enjoy it.
Tsuna knows this is worse than ripping Iovine’s heart out, but it’s probably still the least horrible option. Controlling Iovine is a big first step to controlling the Camorra, or so Reborn would have him believe. And if they control the Camorra, then the Secondigliano clans won’t attack the Vongola. Iovine will be one sacrifice to prevent hundreds of deaths.
This is the most practical solution.
He’d prefer to turn Iovine over to Chrome. She’s more subtle, less cruel. But she’s already volunteered for another important job. It can’t be helped.
Tsuna’s made his decision. There’s a certain bleak peace in that.
* * *
“Traffickers increasingly fill ship holds with waste, then simulate an accident, letting the ship sink. They make money twice: the insurance covers the accident and the waste is entombed in the deep.”
* * *
Yamamoto comes back from Campania with a fresh scar on the wrong side of his chin.
Gokudera spends most of the night sitting on Tsuna’s bed playing Quanti Amori on loop, panicking over what misplaced scars might mean. Tsuna whispers comfort, tries to look extremely alive, points out how different this world is otherwise.
And oh, it is different. No box weapons, no rings, and a completely different list of dead and wounded.
Tsuna has watched his guardians bleed and burn and break for years, and ever since that first horrible time (Yamamoto, surgery, blood everywhere), he’s known it’s his fault. Not just because he’s the boss, not just because of the mafia he still hasn’t fixed or destroyed, but because he changed the future and the past. Because he messed with things he didn’t understand.
All his life, he’s been messing with things he doesn’t understand, and sooner or later, he knows he’s going to pay. Gokudera is afraid that Yamamoto’s scar means Tsuna’s going to die, that a scar in the wrong place might turn a faked death into a real one. Tsuna doesn’t think that would be all bad.
He doesn’t say that. Of course he doesn’t say it.
“You would tell me,” Gokudera insists to Tsuna, to himself. “You wouldn’t sneak off and do something crazy like fake your own death without telling me, not this time. Right?”
Tsuna murmurs something wordless and soothing. He doesn’t know the answer to that question at all.
Gokudera leaves at around four in the morning to go to his piano, to play until his fingers bleed. Tsuna lets him go.
At eight o’clock the next morning, when Yamamoto and Gokudera walk into his office, Gokudera’s eyes are just as wild as they were the night before. He has big, dark circles to go with them, and his fingers are wrapped in bandages. So last night was no illusion.
Tsuna nods to Yamamoto. Yamamoto nods back, looking as worried as he knows how, his hand tightening on Gokudera’s shoulder. Gokudera’s leaning into it a little; he must be about to fall down.
“A late night,” Tsuna explains to Yamamoto. “We were talking about parallel worlds.”
Yamamoto’s eyes close in understanding, his free hand briefly touching his new scar. “Never did figure those out,” he says.
“Because you’re an idiot,” Gokudera retorts. “Let me go. Get away.” He makes a half-hearted escape attempt.
“Haha, Shouichi tried to explain chaos theory to me once, too,” Yamamoto goes on, undeterred. “Crazy stuff. It’s like one little thing changes, and you’re back to not knowing anything. Right?”
Gokudera stops trying to squirm out of Yamamoto’s grip. Tsuna holds his breath.
“There’s more to it than that,” Gokudera says after a moment.
“Is there? Haha, I guess I didn’t understand. He said it was like the weather-like you get one little unexpected thing, and the whole pattern changes, maybe a lot, maybe hardly at all. And nobody can tell what’s gonna happen.”
Gokudera turns that over for an almost unbearably long time.
“You would be the type to think ignorance is bliss, wouldn’t you?” he mutters at last, scowling and crossing his arms, but leaning his hip comfortably against Tsuna’s desk. “Moron.”
Tsuna and Yamamoto exchange smiles.
Gokudera’s phone rings. He fishes it out and irritably flips it open. “What?” he snaps.
Normally, Gokudera is disappointingly blank on the phone. It’s hard to tell whether it’s even good news or bad news, watching him. This time, though, Gokudera’s eyes fly wide, and instead of his usual wordless disapproving sounds, he says things like, “Already!?” and “No shit!”
He eventually closes the phone and grins at Tsuna and Yamamoto’s incredulous faces. “That was Bel,” he says. “The Varia have Iovine.”
* * *
“The System at least grants the illusion that commitment will be recognized, that it’s possible to make a career.”
* * *
“Sawada Tsunayoshi,” Mukuro says with amused tolerance. “I know you’re not offering me control of one of the strongest bosses in Campania out of philanthropy. What do you want?”
“I have a request.” And just like that, Tsuna upsets the equilibrium they’ve maintained for years.
Tsuna helped Chrome and Ken and Chikusa free Mukuro. He gave them a home and protection. In exchange for that, Mukuro hasn’t turned on the Vongola. He’s even done small, quiet favors for the family, now and again.
It’s a little like keeping a venomous pet snake, in that it’s a bit much to expect that the snake will not only not attack you, but also do tricks.
Still, Tsuna reasons, he’ll never know if he doesn’t try. And people do survive snake bites. Sometimes. Depending on the snake.
“Still so naïve,” Mukuro murmurs. “Charming, really. After all you’ve seen. And done.”
Wandering around in people’s dreams, Tsuna feels, is a really dirty kind of cheating.
“Only a little naïve,” he says evenly. “Right now, there’s no advantage for you in taking over my body or fighting me. I’m already doing exactly what you want me to do, and I’m giving you Iovine. It would be a waste of effort.”
Mukuro tips his head to the side and studies Tsuna with mismatched eyes. Once upon a time, it would have made Tsuna uncomfortable. Happily, he’s been utterly terrified for most of his life and can’t muster the energy anymore.
“Until we disagree, then,” Mukuro says eventually with a quirky smile. “Boss.”
Tsuna nods. More of a concession than he’d expected. “You could be a lot of help in the south.”
“Yes, the clans.” Mukuro smiles. “I’ll make them a nightmare.”
Tsuna thinks they feed on nightmares.
Mukuro is supposed to be able to remember his past lives. In view of that, Tsuna wonders how it is that he seems not to have learned anything from them. Unless developing the most twisted sense of humor known to man counts as “learning.”
“They’re already afraid,” Tsuna tells him. “They’ve been afraid all along. Making them more afraid isn’t going to change them, it’s just going to push them into being even more the way they are. I think.”
He tries to judge whether this is having any impact at all. Mukuro is still smiling, which means less than nothing.
“Make them a dream,” Tsuna says.
Mukuro throws his head back and laughs until he can’t breathe.
* * *
It’s a question of possibility. Of choices and the lack of them. When there are already far too few choices, it doesn’t help to eliminate any. Not even the terrible ones.
They need to create more choices. Which is easier said than done, of course. Creating jobs isn’t easy, especially not when you have to do everything in secret, and changing tradition is even harder. Tradition really favors the north, when it comes to industrial development. But Tsuna thinks they’re starting to make progress.
It’s a combination of things. Hiring people at unusually good wages for Vongola construction jobs. Seizing immigrants the moment they enter the country and finding them work before they get sucked down into the clans. Making stakeholding a more dangerous and therefore less attractive profession for young college grads.
Mukuro’s Iovine is doing his best to bankrupt the clans with unprecedented generosity toward the public, while simultaneously kicking off endless infighting among the bosses. Mukuro is enjoying himself more than seems quite fair.
The Vongola are buying up waste disposal contracts with Gokudera-induced fervor while Hibari investigates and Ryouhei wanders around Campania with a Geiger counter and extreme persistence. (Ryouhei is apparently beyond popular with the local kids.)
Hana is patenting and Haru is marketing Spanner’s inventions at fever-pitch efficiency, while simultaneously trying to bribe northern companies to move south. They say the Vongola are already teetering on the brink of going into the red. Tsuna’s not worried; he knows they’ll find a way. He’s wise enough not to share this thought with them, though.
Tsuna keeps a collection of photographs of various Italian politicians, all of them pushing policies the Vongola want pushed. In every one of those pictures, just visible on the edge of the crowd, is a dark-haired woman in huge, face-concealing sunglasses. Chrome volunteered for the duty; Reborn, Iemitsu, Bianchi, Kyoko, and Shouichi volunteered to be her advisors. And Hibari’s appointed himself her bodyguard. Tsuna’s not sure Chrome realizes that.
Gokudera estimates that in another decade they’ll have rendered themselves obsolete, at which point Haru hopes to have enough legitimate businesses up and running to keep all of the Vongola allies fed, if not exactly wealthy. Gokudera says this is going to work because it’s the first time the whole country’s moved in the same direction. It doesn’t seem to bother him that it’s moving in the same direction because of mind control.
Bianchi says it will only work if their one direction is actually the right one. She says Italian history is a study in the Law of Unintended Consequences. She says they’ll be lucky if they haven’t made everything worse in ten years, assuming that any of them are still alive at that point.
Reborn says Giotto would be proud. Tsuna hopes it’s true. He hopes that someday he’ll have the courage to ask.
Mukuro calls it Tsunayoshi’s Renaissance.
* * *
“Hello?”
“Hello.”
“The war’s over, now what are we supposed to do?”
“Don’t worry, there’ll be another one.”
Reference Notes
Regional Map of Italy
Map of Naples and the surrounding area
*
Relevant books:
Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano
Machiavelli’s Children by Richard J. Samuels
Christ Stopped at Eboli by Carlo Levi
The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones
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Cosimo Di Lauro, in addition to being hot, was apparently the instigator of the decentralization of power among the Camorra that has led to them being so disturbingly uncrushable. He’s in jail now, but you never saw a man being led to prison with so much style. Or maybe indifference is the word I’m looking for…why is this on YouTube? Good job, Cosimino.
Cosimo and his father Paulo were the leaders of the Di Lauro clan during the 2004 Secondigliano War.
*
That fashion industry thing? If you substitute Camorra for Vongola, I did not make any of that up.
*
The 2008 waste crisis. Here is a good article about the lead-up. In late 2007, waste disposal workers went on strike, refusing to pick up any trash (as I recall, their argument was that the landfills were overfull and randomly toxic and they didn’t want to die, which seems reasonable.) The government responded by doing…nothing?
And this was not a new problem. Naples’ waste disposal system was declared an emergency situation in 1994, and that may have been before the mafia discovered what a goldmine waste ‘disposal’ was. (Or maybe not. Organized crime is often quicker on the uptake than government. Oh hi, Japan.) By 2004, The Lancet Oncology had named the area east of Naples the “triangle of death” because of all of its cancer-causing pollutants (article). 2008 was just when trash ended up piled several feet deep on the streets of Naples and no one could pretend it away.
Then-Prime Minister Romano Prodi failed to do anything except irritate the hell out of all of Campania and cause a few protests verging on riots. He eventually resigned amidst total political chaos.
…Is it time for more Silvio Berlusconi? It is always time for more Silvio Berlusconi.
Berlusconi made visible progress! During summer 2008, landfills were opened, incinerators were built (and if they were burning toxic waste and releasing toxic gas, well, it couldn’t be helped), and lots of trash was certainly shipped off somewhere. This was all organized by Berlusconi’s appointed waste commissioner, Guido Bertolaso (who is now apparently under investigation for illegal waste trafficking. It is interesting that just about everyone who was working for Bertolaso has been arrested, and yet he himself has not been arrested. One wonders.)
And then Berlusconi did declare, “È finita l'emergenza rifiuti.” The waste crisis is over.
HA HA, yeaaaaah. Mission accomplished. Forza Italia! È finita l'emergenza rifiuti. Well, the waste crisis was partially shipped to Germany, anyway (possibly to Hamburg, possibly to Großpösna in east Germany, disturbingly I have seen both and question whether anyone actually knows), under the shady auspices of, among other people, some minion of Bertolaso’s called Lorenzo Miracle (who has subsequently been arrested for evil or criminal incompetence or both, along with some 25 other people) (Article). So thanks for that, Berlusconi. Anyway, the trash may be mostly out of Naples, but it’s apparently still all over the place in the outlying towns/suburbs. But who cares, right? Tourists don’t go there much, so no one has to know except the poor bastards who live there. That awkward interlude with the toxic mozzarella? It’s a thing of the past.
So finita after all! Except not. That was September 2009, work of the ’Ndrangheta, one presumes. God, I love it. If people had read that book Saviano risked his life to write back in 2006, THIS WOULDN’T BE A SURPRISE.
*headdesk*
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Dante Passarelli was a businessman who rather abruptly made a lot of money-seemingly through legitimate means. The problem is not how he made more money from his initial capital. The problem is where he got the initial capital.
Passarelli’s hometown was Casal di Principe-where the really scary bastards come from. “You can become a Camorrista, but you’re born a Casalese.” Basically, it is difficult for people to believe that you are not somehow involved with the mafia if you’re from Casal di Principe, which is why Casalesi who aren’t mafiosi make a habit of lying about where they’re from.
There was a judicial investigation. Evidence was gathered against Passarelli, more and more of his assets were confiscated by the state, it was all looking very bad for him, and then suddenly he…mysteriously died. Mysteriously. He fell to his death from a height. I’M SURE IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.
According to Roberto Saviano, Passarelli was guilty beyond question, and was killed just then so that his assets would return to his family (his family being more in reach of the Camorra than the state, see). Passarelli’s family loudly disagrees and is suing Saviano for libel, but good luck with that, guys. Last I heard, civil trials in Italy take eight freaking years.
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Quanti Amori is a 2004 album by Gigi D’Alessio. D’Alessio was born in Naples, and he began his musical career working for the Camorra, so he has that in common with, um, pretty much every other musician from Naples. (See Neomelodic music). The difference between D’Alessio and most other Neapolitan musicians is that he’s so famous now that the Camorra can’t touch him-they don’t like to kill public figures because that makes a splash and attracts attention, do not want. He escaped, which makes him rare like a unicorn.
He’s taken advantage of his safety from the Camorra to say bad things about them at every opportunity. In any interview with Gigi D’Alessio, for sure there will be a “by the way, I fucking hate the Camorra” statement. Apparently he used to do like 15 performances a day on pain of death. “Sing at my nephew’s baptism or I’ll cut your throat,” that kind of thing. You can see how he got so bitter.
I picture Gokudera listening to Gigi D’Alessio in the spirit of self-flagellation.
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Antonio Iovine is, how shall we say, a very very scary man. As aforementioned, Casalesi have a terrifying reputation in general, and Iovine is a Casalesi clan boss. He’s called ’o ninno because…well, explanations vary, but according to Saviano, it’s because he became a clan boss when he was still a kid. Unlike most other boy bosses, he’s survived to his 40s and isn’t even in jail (well, he’s on the run, but still). His brother, Giuseppe, was with the police until they fired him for mafia connections (heh), but firing him doesn’t seem to have accomplished much. (Amusing(?) Guardian article.) Iovine is making a fortune off of trash and construction, he laughs in the face of the law, he’s been known to rent out property to NATO (oops). Some homicidal maniacs have all the luck.
back to Part 1