Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [99]
Perhaps the last part of Rome where one could still expect to get stolen articles back was the popular quarter of Testaccio. A present resident of Monti who used to live there recalled that in about 1996, after she had been living in Testaccio for a short while, the local bookmaker stopped her on the street and greeted her. She asked him, "Do we know each other?" By way of response, he informed her, "I know your name, where you live, and which is your car. Nothing is going to happen [to your property]. But if something just did have to happen, just tell me." The confidence of this assurance suggests a more robust network than existed in Monti by that time.
The depersonalization of petty theft and the displacement of the local economy by the neoliberal organization of taste and consumption represent two facets of the same phenomenon: the suppression of old civilities in the name of a larger logic appearing under a variety of names including, especially, "the market" and "globalization." The gentrification of Monti, part of an encompassing commodification of the historic and the picturesque, begins within the same time frame that saw the arrival of a significant drug scene and the systematic organization of crime. Where once local bosses organized the restitution of stolen goods, today the police authorities will scarcely lift a finger to recover stolen motorbikes; crime itself has become a significant part of the Italian economy.13 Such crimes are so widespread and visible, as a young politician observed, that "this creates a kind of indifference"-a banalization of crime, not unlike the effect of mass-media representations of violence. 14 Indeed, the media here stand in, much as myth did in ages past, as a paradoxical representation of, simultaneously, the conceptual triteness of universal truth and the specious excitement of local fiction. A carabiniere told the outraged victim of an unsuccessful burglary that there was no basis for taking fingerprints at the scene even though they had quickly apprehended a suspect: "Madam, you watch too much television-[it's] not even a murder!"
The market and criminality converge most obviously in the eruption, slow at first and then rapidly accelerating as the housing market also took off, of the drug trade. It began in the middle and later 1950s with a local emigre who was sending back cocaine from South America for compara tively wealthy local users and peaked in the 198os, by which time drug use was widespread among the young people of the area. It was a key factor in the collapse of the old reciprocities in Monti; the drug market-which can be viewed as an early and illegal experiment in the liberalization of economic relations-recast the circulation of goods in the logic of supply and demand rather than of local social connections. Drugs have had the further effect of alienating people from their home communities; one bar operator, for example, was forced to shut down when he could no longer pay his electricity bills-and this was interpreted as a consequence of the effect of his habit on his financial situation. Theft, once the basis of a social hierarchy, follows the changes in the social order as much as any other pattern of social interaction; as a result, thieves now operate far away from their own districts, especially as those who steal to finance expensive narcotic addictions are completely uninterested in any kind of exchange network and only seek to satisfy their needs quickly. The new underworld is directed from outside and draws most of its income and impact from the circulation of drugs.15
In their day the old bosses were well-connected with the official world, mostly through kinship ties that also gave entire sectors of the district vertical connections. In the days before the anti-corruption drives of the 199os, it was not uncommon for the errant children of a judge or a police officer to join the local gangs. Because their parents had