He cheated on my mother with every whore in Naples –
And he beat me nearly every day of my life.
But he made me stronger.
Heburnedthe weakness out of me –
Until all that was left was pure killer.
Which is why I became our clan’s Enforcer when I was only 22.
I’d shot a dozen men by that point.
I killed two dozen more by the time I was 23.
People who knew the score in Naples were scared shitless of me.
But did Papa take advantage of that?
No.
We could’ve bulldozed through a dozen other clans – wiped them out and taken their territory –
But Papa was too much of a pussy to make it happen.
Too old.
Too muchWe gotta keep the peaceand not enoughWe take what we want.
Unfortunately, things didn’t change when he went off to San Vittore.
Papa called me and my sister Lucrezia on the prison payphone every day.
The conversation was always the same: him asking how ‘the bakery’ was doing.
‘The bakery’ was our business. Lucrezia would tell him how much money we took in, what our expenses were, if other ‘bakeries’ were horning in on our business – that sort of thing.
Most of it was boring everyday bullshit. But if Papa had any orders that were particularly rough – like whacking somebody – he sent them through the prison guards we’d bought off.
It went on like that for over a year…
Until the riot happened.
I was working out in the gym when I heard about it.
I call it a gym, but it was really a meat-packing plant our family owned. I’d watchedRockyas a kid and loved how Stallone punched hanging slabs of meat to train for his fights. So when I turned 14, I bugged Papa until he let me go down to the meat-packing plant and whale away on a side of beef for an hour every day.
Even though I wrapped my hands like a boxer, my knuckles were bleeding and raw for the first two months. Lucrezia begged me to work out on a punching bag instead, but I refused. I was going to be the toughest motherfucker in Naples, and I was going to do it the hard way.
It paid off. My knuckles got so callused that I could punch a brick wall and not even feel it.
These days, though, I didn’t work out on slabs of beef.
I practiced on morons who tried to fuck with my business.
The day I heard about the riot, my punching bag was a piece-of-shit bookie who worked for the Lugaro clan. He’d been horning in on our territory, so I had my guys pull him off the street the night before.
When I got to the packing plant, they duct-taped his mouth so he wouldn’t scream as loud.
