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The son of the mafia who rebelled against his destiny

2023-03-12T10:37:21.137Z


Antonio Piccirillo, scion of a boss of the Neapolitan Camorra, encourages other young people in his situation to stay away from that environment


A stray bullet in a brawl between clans in the center of Naples had hit a four-year-old girl a few days earlier while she was having a drink on a terrace with her grandmother.

The story of Noemi, the little girl who ended up in a coma due to lung injuries caused by the war ammunition used, had gone around the world.

Antonio saw the news on the news just when he no longer knew how to channel the discomfort accumulated during a lifetime of

omertà

(silence).

The next day, May 5, 2019, he decided to go to the demonstration called against the Camorra with three friends.

No plan, just to accompany those people.

But when he heard that all the sons of gangsters were the same, he asked for the megaphone.

—My name is Antonio Piccirillo.

I am the son of Rosario Piccirillo, who in his life made many mistakes and was a troublemaker.

Always love your parents, but disassociate yourself from his lifestyle, because it leads nowhere and only causes suffering.

The bad life has always been disgusting.

Today and 150 years ago.

The people froze.

Picirillo, the capo of the clan that ruled the Torretta neighborhood in Naples for decades, the alleys smelling of saltpeter and fried pizza that crisscross between Chiaia and Santa Lucia, was a legend of organized crime.

His family had made its way in the sixties by smuggling cigarettes.

And so they always lived, without major conflicts.

Until Raffaelle Cutolo, historical leader of the Neapolitan mafia, created the New Organized Camorra at the end of the seventies: a system articulated over the territory in a methodical and hierarchical way.

The idea was to compete with the powerful Cosa Nostra.

But Cutolo wanted a piece of everything;

and he valued every carton of tobacco that moved in Naples.

It was a mistake.

Smugglers were thick-skinned people.

And Picirillo and many others did not swallow.

the law of silence

Antonio's father, nicknamed

O'biondo

(the blonde) and today in jail, is the son of that historical context and took over from a generation of mafiosi now almost extinct.

Elegant, handsome, always well dressed and discreet.

No noise, always good words.

The prototype of the old style.

He was in and out of prison for years.

He never betrayed anyone and kept the image of him.

And the last thing one expects in this type of family, where silence is the law, is for a child to publicly denounce this type of life with a megaphone in hand.

Antonio, 27 years old, blond, green eyes, is sitting on Tuesday at noon at a table in a small tavern in the Santa Lucía market.

He grew up in a Camorra family.

And that, substantially, he says right away, implies having few memories.

“My father spent many years in and out.

We would see each other for brief periods.

I hardly have photos with him.

It was a childhood, let's say, of absences.

But everything seemed normal.

We were not the typical rowdy family, at home we pretended to be normal.

So they told us lies all day to hide what was happening.

The lying mothers, as I call them.

Lies in good faith, of course, so as not to make us suffer.

They told me that my father was an architect, a lawyer… and you later tell these lies to your friends, to acquaintances”.

The story was similar to the one heard by so many other children, still children, of imprisoned capos.

The father is a builder;

and the jail —where he has to go from time to time to chat in a small room sitting on iron chairs— was one of the buildings in which he was working.

It went on like this for quite some time.

Until one day, like when kings become parents, he remembers, someone opened his eyes.

His best friend, the daughter of a family at odds with his for control of the area, brought him a newspaper.

On the cover appeared Antonio's father and the words "usury", "extortion" and "jail".

That's what your father does, she let go.

At first it was hard.

He cried and did not understand anything.

But soon he connected the dots.

“There were always people going up and down the house.

They would hide when the police rang the doorbell because my father was under house arrest and he couldn't have visitors,” she recalls.

Little by little he got used to it.

And even he began to like her.

“Old-style mobsters, like my father, arouse a certain fascination.

Sinister, but very magnetic.

Always well dressed, very polite.

They know how to talk, move... they were very attentive.

And I grew up with that idea of ​​my father.

Besides, I never had a clear idea why some people treated me so well here.

I am a very polite and respectful boy.

But he always seemed like he deserved more than my friends.

I saw that if he hit a window or a market stall with a ball, the owner didn't scold me, but my friends did.

And that impressed them.

Walking around the neighborhood with the son of the

boss

had privileges”.

That idea of ​​blood privilege dominates today the epic of the mafia story among the sons of the bosses.

Series like

Gomorra

have also marked the aesthetic ideology and the way of living their condition as relatives of troublemakers.

Cars, expensive clothes, tattoos.

And a permanent exhibition in networks.

In Naples, but also in Sicily or Calabria, where blood ties are even stronger in these organizations.

Almost everyone likes it at first.

But Antonio's decision has shown the way for others.

Like Giosuè, the eldest son of one of the 'Ndrangheta clans in the Calabrian municipality of Rosarno, who he also disowned from his family after a few first dalliances.

There, precisely, a judge began a few years ago to implement a controversial measure to keep the children of gangsters away from their parents.

Roberto Di Bella, president of the Reggio Calabria juvenile court, designed the Free to Choose

project

and began removing custody of a large number of 'Ndrangheta families.

A harsh measure, somewhat brutal and highly controversial, which produced results.

And a movie.

Antonio did not need anyone.

He just got fed up with it all.

He turned to theater, music, the sea and literature.

But the day he raised his voice in the square, silence fell around him.

In the neighborhood he had some problems.

Bad faces, threats, spitting.

He went into depression, had obsessive disorders.

A month later he went to see his father in the maximum security prison where he was staying.

He “said to me: 'If you think you've betrayed me or hurt me, you're wrong.

I suffer for you, I'm afraid you won't be able to withstand this pressure'.

Many believed that I was also a troublemaker and that I was repenting and collaborating with justice.

They put my picture in the newspaper next to Giuseppe Misso, a guy who killed a lot of people and ended up regretting it.

What do I have to regret?

Just from not having done it before."

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-12

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