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Naples vanished into thin air. It was then that the street-wise Neapolitan children called scugnizzi (spinning tops) began their practice of buying and selling American G.I.s. One would pick up a soldier, promise him everything, and lead him into back streets. Another kid might buy the prospect for 300 lire, and he was thus passed from hand to hand until an older scugnizzo decided it was time to act. The G.I. was first made muscio (dead drunk), and once he had passed out, his clothes were literally sold off his back, beginning with shoes and ending with underwear. That normally covered the cost of purchase, and the contents of the wallet were pure profit. "Those were the days," sighed an old man. "It was one big carnival. Nobody starved in Naples."
Rooted in Neapolitan lore is the tale of the greatest coup of all, said to have taken place in 1944. As the story goes, ten U.S. Liberty ships arrived in the harbor on a Monday, and by Friday there were only nine. Neapolitans say the missing ship was stealthily sailed out of the port and run aground on the coast ten miles to the south. The cargo was removed and the ship dismantled, piece by piece. American naval officers shrug off the story as apocryphal, but, say Neapolitans, how could any government admit it? "When that news swept the city," wrote the late author Curzio Malaparte, "the laughter seemed like an earthquake."