When she was twelve years old and Tito had just turned thirteen, and the clans were recruiting for lookouts and sellers and couriers, everyone in Tito’s gang talked incessantly about joining. It was tempting: Boys who worked for the System were paid in cash and given motorbikes. They talked big and swaggered, and carried guns—attracting respect and fear and favors, taking what they wanted.
Nikki lived in grim military housing with her brother Gianni and her parents—something she considered a hardship until she met Tito and his group, and saw where they came from. Theirs was a poverty she’d never imagined, and she could understand the intoxicating appeal of sudden riches. In their dares and games, they sometimes snuck into the expensive hotels and restaurants and resorts, marveling at the effortless elegance of the wealthy. They relieved patrons of their wallets and, pockets stuffed with hundreds of thousands of lire, considered themselves kings.
One day, an older boy of sixteen, Armo, approached them, and asked if they were interested in joining his group. All the boys wanted to say yes, but they waited for Tito to decide. He vanished for a few days while he thought it through—and nobody dared act without him.
When he’d made his decision, they gathered together for a discussion in the ugly back room of a mattress shop owned by the family of one of the boys. Mattresses sealed in thick cellophane were leaned against the wall. Others were stacked nearly to the ceiling.
They wrestled a couple to the ground so they could sit, the creak of springs and the rustle of plastic as Tito spoke.
“They’ll pay us,” Tito said. “But we’re young, so they won’t think we’re worth much. There will always be a lot of boys who want to work for scraps.”
Those boys were zanzare—mosquitos—he told them. They would take the attention of the police, sting and torment, give them something to chase, and take all the risk, while the real players got away.
The gang understood what it meant to shoulder risk. They had brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins in Poggioreale, and yet others whose photos bleached and faded in the glass-fronted street shrines. Disreputable lives sanctified by violent deaths.
“Are we just mosquitos?” he asked them. “Is that all you want to be?”
There was an uncomfortable silence as everyone considered whether this might be such a terrible fate. One or two of the boys shouted, “Yes!”
“If you want to do it, then go,” Tito said. “But if you decide to join them, then you’re done here. No hard feelings, but you can’t come back.”
He looked so fierce, eyes like dark stones. There was muttering as everyone discussed this.
“What do you suggest?” asked Nikki.
She was personally relieved by Tito’s pronouncement. She somehow understood that the offer to the group wasn’t meant to include her, the only girl. She’d spent the past three years earning the respect of the gang, loved being a part of them, and hated the ominous feeling of change. She didn’t want to be left behind. Moreover, she was gaining an understanding of what the System was. With her father and Adriano in the carabinieri, Nikki understood that if Tito decided to bring his gang to join one of the clans, she would be forced to choose between her family and her friends.
“We need to be more than mosquitos,” Tito replied. “We need to have something valuable to sell them—so that we can work for ourselves and make them pay us more.”
But he didn’t know what that valuable thing was. Not yet.
Two of the boys, Loris and Brizio, left Tito and started working for the clans. Loris was a hothead and had always pushed against Tito’s leadership, so it wasn’t a surprise when he left. But Brizio was Tito’s intimate, and the betrayal clearly stung.
In the weeks that followed, some of the other boys started muttering behind Tito’s back. Nobody said the wordcoward, although it was clear that was what they meant. Nikki, who had seen Tito stand up to the hulking rage of his violent father, knew he wasn’t a coward. She trusted him to come up with an answer. She didn’t need money as desperately as her friends, but she knew that Tito’s reputation and leadership depended on his ability to guide them all to wealth.
—
It was around this time Gianni was arrested for dealing drugs.
“It wasn’t my fault,” he whined to Nikki. “The lookouts didn’t warn me in time.”
Gianni was fourteen, and the case was heard in the juvenile courts. The investigating magistrate was initially inclined to jail him in detention, and Beatrice agreed, saying that Gianni needed to feel the impact of his actions. But Raoul didn’t want his son’s future tainted. He testified, promising to be responsible for him. The charges were knocked down to possession, and Gianni was released on probation into his parents’ custody.
Tito seemed intensely interested in the details of Gianni’s arrest, and questioned Nikki about it. The following week, he presented his idea to the group.
“If you’re dealing, it’s stupid to rely only on a lookout,” he said. “Maybe the lookout is an idiot. Or maybe he gets distracted. Maybe he’s busy taking a shit when the patrols come by. And, even if he does warn you, by then it’s too late. You might still get caught.”
There were other stupid risks, too, he explained. If you chose a clan, then you would be targeted when the clans fought one another. Also, he reminded them, their gang—about fifteen boys plus Nikki—wasn’t from just one neighborhood. They couldn’t simply join the Sanitagang, because it would leave out everyone from the Forcella neighborhood.
What Tito suggested was a new business model. “We won’t work for just one clan. We’ll sell something everybody needs: information.”
Tito’s idea was to map out the rhythms and patterns of local police patrols—to learn the names and behaviors of the officers who worked in certain districts, to predict where they would be and what they would do. This wasn’t too different from the spy games they already played. But now there would be a real purpose for it, real stakes, and a real payoff.
Their first client was a woman who stood outside a community center in Forcella, selling contraband cigarettes from under a blanket. Their information was so accurate, so effective in keeping down arrests and fines, that their reputation spread. After a few months, the gang had nearly two dozen clients—from street dealers to shop owners. The money was beginning to pour in.
They could have continued like this indefinitely, slowly growing their wealth and importance.
But Brizio came back to visit Tito one day. Nikki saw them and snuck close to eavesdrop.
