This article is published in number 19 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 10, 2022
“I didn’t have blood on my hands. I have this memory of that evening in the hospital. I looked at them and looked at them: nothing. I didn’t realize my son was riddled with bullets. Then, when I took off the sheet, I understood. I had Jenny in front of me, my youngest son. He was wearing a bloody pajama top. He was the first to run out that night. To stop his brother he took it all off … But no one, not even God, could save Carmine ».
The life of Dolores – Sorrowful at the registry office – broke down within half an hour, last October 6. She tells about it sitting at the kitchen table: a handkerchief held in one hand, while with the other she scrolls through photographs on the mobile phone. She looks up. «At midnight fifty Carmine and his fiancée go out to collect, Francesca was in the eighth month. Jenny was packing her things in the dining room. At twenty past one I hear Francesca’s screams ». She remembers almost hypnotized, as if that cry was coming out now. «You see him going out and not going in anymore. Your son”.
Carmine D’Onofrio23 years old, it was killed in an ambush in Ponticelli, on the eastern outskirts of Naples. Under the eyes of his pregnant partner – Carmine jr. will be born premature ten days after the murder. In front of the house, where Dolores continues to live with her other two children Jenny and Alyssa, “because if I left, I’d give Carmine’s killers twice”. Seven .45 caliber rounds fired point blank from behind. Two of them got off the scooter, full helmet, «thirty seconds and dumm !!! dumm !!! dumm !!! We will land him », tell the wiretapping that led the Naples Public Prosecutor’s Office – in record time – to arrest 7 people (all born between 1996 and 1998, the oldest in 1984). “Because? For who? For what? »Dolores wonders looking into her eyes. Her’s are hers like those of her son: clear blue. Carmine was a boy of impressive beauty, and his mother, 45, with an aneurysm, a tumor, and all the pain, still is.
«We grew up together, me and him … I was a beautician at home, a pastry chef at night …». Dolores had succeeded – thanks also to her large family, “we are nine children!” – to keep Carmine off the road. Carmine had studied, did theater in the parish, appeared in Gomorrah, had been in London. Until he heard the secret that his mother had kept for a lifetime. And Carmine was never the same. Carmine was not the son of the man he called a father. He was the illegitimate son of Giuseppe De Luca Bossa, brother of the chieftain Tonino known as’ O sicco, today at 41-bis. According to the magistrates, the 23-year-old was killed by the other clan of Ponticelli, the De Micco, who have been at war for years against the De Luca Bossa family. They had to respond to the bomb placed under the house of the boss Marco De Micco known as Bodo, a week before the murder of Carmine. «But they didn’t kill Peppe’s son, they killed my son. If I had wanted this life, I would have made it: I would have been “the woman of”. I chose not to be for my children. ”
Tears roll down Dolores’ face. Her voice drops. «I told him: ‘Carmine, don’t make me angry, don’t get into trouble.’ And he: “Mom, what do you think about yourself? What am I my father? “. I trusted you. But the children here do not belong to those who raise them ». Dolores had «Al mio Re» engraved on the tombstone of Carmine together with the initials «DLB» of the family of origin. “If he tattooed them on his chest, he wanted to change his surname, I was against it but …”. Blood is blood, they say in Naples. And the blood is chewed, it is not spit. Someone wrote that this city reflects a tattered universal condition. One of the most mysterious themes of the Greek tragic theater: the predestination of children to pay the sins of their fathers. More simply, in Lutheran Letters Pier Paolo Pasolini called the young people of Naples “doomed to death”. More than 60 are those killed in the years of the children’s paranza, today the numbers are more “limited”, but the age remains the same: 22, 23, 19 years. A trail of blood that flows through the historic center and climbs up to the eastern outskirts. In this land strewn with volcanoes, everything below the surface smells of death. “We must shout enough to this feud of baby killers who do not even know what they are doing, just be afraid”, reads a letter on the Facebook page of Pianura and surroundings.
It was to write it Anna, 52, with the help of his niece. In the Campi Flegrei it has lost its “gentle giant”. It was August 20: Antonio Zarra dies shot, seven caliber 9 shells join him at the wheel of his Smart. He was returning home at 2 am. In his bed, waiting for him, his little son Daniele.
«I wonder», Anna wrote in the post, «can a 26-year-old boy, from a good family, with a two-year-old son, be massacred like a boss just” for dangerous friendships “? I need to scream. For me and for the other mothers who experience my pain ». It is with this force that Anna opens the door of her house to us, a beautiful apartment in a private park with entrance controls. The Zarra are well-known entrepreneurs in Pianura. They have had a pizzeria-rotisserie for 27 years: «Antonio was practically born there», Anna says with the small eyes of someone who has cried a lot. “My head makes me go to the asylum.”
And starts crying again. “I can’t go to the cemetery, I can’t think about it. We did everything, his father had left him the business, he found him a thousand jobs … ». Anna’s husband is on the sofa, zapping with the TV. She becomes more timid: «Antonio used to hang out with these people like that, but not criminals. One day he was stopped along with a friend, someone who was selling some weed, was giving him a lift. Result: Tonino, with a clean record, gets a 10-month sentence, then suspended, for drugs. But my son did not eat this bread, otherwise I would have come to accept it. Instead they took it off me and I don’t know why ». The Zarra family has been waiting for the conclusion of the investigation for ten months. The autopsy was not filed, nor the Smart released. “I want to know who killed my son, and I want him to pay the maximum penalty.” «He died of a fool», Anna’s husband approaches, «he used to play at the Playstation with one, with the other … I said to him:“ Tonì, be careful. Don’t take coffee with anyone “. And he laughed. He lived with his girlfriend where the cancer is: within 500 meters there are four gangs ». The Perfetto-Carillo group which is opposed to that of the Calone-Esposito, according to investigators. “And what’s the point of everything we’ve done?” Well … »asks the father. “I just think, being moved, in these cases, is like falling asleep on the fire. “Our life is blocked, but silence kills us.”
Sara is the mother of Ugo Russo, the young man killed two years ago a stone’s throw from the sea of Santa Lucia, during an attempted clock robbery of a carabiniere on leave. She is in front of the house, two meters from the altar adorned with white and blue flowers where “Ugo Russo lives”, as the inscription on the votive chapel that she dedicated to her son says. You have a fixed chair next to it. She looks at the hanging lights and the blue festoons that surround the walls of the buildings. The neighborhood celebrates Ugo’s 18 years, even though he is no longer there. «They have made a collection for a banner in his memory of him, there will be the band, the fires … he was a son of all». The yellow gold chain with Ugo written stands out against the black she is wearing, the earring is the same. Sara, 42, has always been married to Enzo. «Ugo was the same as his father. It all happened in one or two months “, he says,” he had enrolled in high school, but he was disturbing in class and the teachers asked us not to send him anymore. He started working as a bartender, but they gave him 50 euros a week … he was a bricklayer, delivering tomatoes. “Mammì, I want to go to London to work”, he would tell me. When I asked the social workers to help him take a pizza course, it was already late. I know that my son made a mistake that evening. ” The word robbery is difficult for her to pronounce. Enzo, her husband, was one of the best known Rolex robbers in the Spanish Quarters: today, after Ugo’s death, he enrolled in a job placement course. “They said about my son that he was a robber, a Camorrista, they pulled out my records,” now is Enzo speaking. “He then had to pay with his life just because I was wrong? Couldn’t he have been confronted with his mistake and served a sentence without being killed? “” As far as you think you are acquitted, you are forever involved. We want truth and justice for Ugo Russo. Naples, 15 years old ”: there is no sheet metal door in the neighborhood that hasn’t stuck the sticker with Fabrizio De André’s back. Ugo’s face stands out not only on the famous mural by Leticia Mandragora, but on every gut of Montecalvario. The family, together with the boys of the Truth and Justice Committee, have been waiting for a trial for two years. They manifest every month. Enzo with megaphone in hand and Sara immediately behind, in silence. Every morning, she goes to the cemetery in Poggioreale. She cleans up, she lets in the air. As if it were another room in the house. In Naples the cemetery is called like the prison: Poggioreale. “But it’s always you who choose, in the end,” explains Sara. «When the boys look at Ugo on that wall they must be afraid of the street: life is nothing».
In a Thebes full of fumes, tears and paean of white mothers, Sophocles sets Oedipus the King. Here the chorus tells of a city that “perishes without end / and the miserable deadly progeny / on the ground lies”. The King, Oedipus, blinded, asks the coryphaeus: «Ah, why didn’t you kill me immediately, so that I would never reveal to men who I was born from? Now I discover that I am an unfortunate, born of unfortunate people ». The benign help of the gods has been lying since that day.
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Source: Vanity Fair
