by John Dickie
Similar things characterised mafia life in Calabria and Sicily. In towns and villages controlled by the ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra, criminal territorial control was advertised by taking over the day set aside to celebrate the local patron saint. Barra is far from being the only place where the tradition continues to this day. In Sant’Onofrio in 2010, the ’ndrangheta reacted angrily when the local priest tried to enforce the Bishop’s order to ban mobsters from taking a leading role in an Easter parade of statues of the Madonna: the head of the confraternity that presided over the festival received a warning when two shots were fired at his front door. The festival was suspended for a week, and when it eventually took place, the Carabinieri were out in force.
So has nothing changed in Campania? Is the camorra still the force it once was? Certainly, a ‘murder map’ of underworld deaths over the last few decades would have its dots concentrated in the same broad area that has been blighted by the camorra since the nineteenth century: the city of Naples and a semicircle of roughly forty-kilometre radius extending out into the towns and villages of the hinterland. An enduring pattern is unmistakable. Yet once we zoom in on the detail of our map of camorra power, it becomes clear that the continuities are less prevalent than they first appeared. Less prevalent, certainly, than in Sicily and Calabria, where the micro-territories demarcated by mafia cosche have remained all but identical. Places like Rosarno and Platì (’ndrangheta), or Villabate and Uditore (Cosa Nostra) have been notorious for well over a century. In Campania, by contrast, the geography of the underworld has seen some important transformations recently.
CCTV footage shows a camorra killer calmly finishing off his victim, Naples, 2009.
The camorra fragmented following the war in the early 1980s between Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo and the allied clans of the Nuova Famiglia. There were an estimated thirty-two camorra organisations in 1988; that number had increased to 108 by 1992. The years of the Second Republic have seen no reversal of the fragmentation. The most recent estimates suggest that there are still around a hundred sizeable criminal organisations in Campania, where gangland has assumed a lasting but instable pattern. Camorra clans come and go, merge and break apart, go to war and make alliances. Thus most of these camorras have a very short lifespan compared to the extraordinarily persistent criminal Freemasonries, Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta. In Campania, the lines on the map of camorra power move constantly as the police make arrests, turf wars break out and clans fissure and merge. Increased violence is the inevitable consequence of this fundamental instability: the camorra continues to kill more people than either the Sicilian mafia or the ’ndrangheta. There have been several major peaks in the murder rate in recent years: there were over a hundred camorra killings each year from 1994 to 1998; and then again in 2004, and again in 2007.
Naples is a port city. That simple fact has shaped the camorra’s history ever since the 1850s and 1860s, when Salvatore De Crescenzo’s camorra smuggled imported clothes past customs and extorted money from the boatmen ferrying passengers from ship to shore. The port of Naples was where vast quantities of Allied materiel vanished onto the black market during the Second World War. In the 1950s, the travelling cloth-salesmen known as magliari, who were often little more than swindlers, would set sail to bring the sharp practices of the Neapolitan rag trade to the housewives of northern Europe. Thereafter, Naples was a point of entry for contraband cigarettes and narcotics. These days, the port is a mechanised container terminal on the model of Rotterdam or Port Elizabeth, NJ. It has assumed new importance as a gateway to Italy for the Far Eastern manufactures that are shipped into the Mediterranean through the Suez Canal. Some of those manufactures—shoes, clothes and handbags, electrical tools, mobile phones, cameras and games consoles—are forged versions of market-leading brands. The Neapolitan tradition of manufacturing counterfeits has gone global. Sometimes, the label ‘Made in Italy’ or ‘Made in Germany’ hides a different reality: ‘Faked in China’. And in place of the magliari, there are international brokers, permanently stationed abroad to find markets for bootleg products. Quite how large this sector is, and quite what proportions of it are run by camorristi as opposed to garden-variety shady entrepreneurs, is still subject to investigation.
Naples is a remarkable place for many reasons. One of them is the fact that, where historic poor neighbourhoods in many other European cities have long ago been demolished or yuppified, the centre of Naples still has many of the same concentrations of poverty that characterised it back in the eighteenth century. Forcella, the ‘kasbah’ quarter we have visited occasionally through this story, is a case in point. The camorra rose from its fetid and overcrowded alleys in the early nineteenth century. Although much is now different in Forcella, not least the sanitation, eking out a living here is still precarious, often illegal, and occasionally dangerous. No visitor can enter without the distinct sensation of being watched. In this and other neighbourhoods, the camorra’s territorial purview is still made manifest by the kids who extort money for parking places, and the cocksure teenagers perched atop their scooters who act as lookouts for drug dealers.
Despite the wholesale economic transformation of the last century and a half, in places like Forcella the camorra continues to recruit among a population made vulnerable by hardship and a widespread disregard for the law, just as it did in the nineteenth century. In 2006, it was estimated that 22 per cent of people with any kind of job in Campania worked in the so-called ‘black economy’—paid in cash, untaxed and unprotected by labour and safety laws. It seems likely that a sizeable majority of jobs in small- and medium-sized companies are off the books.
Recent economic change seems to have made the situation worse. In Campania, as in much of the South, the new economic mantra of flexible employment has often meant just a bigger black economy. Since 2008, Europe’s dire economic difficulties have increased the power of the camorra (and, for that matter, of Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta) to penetrate businesses, and lock the region into a vicious circle of economic failure. In the summer of 2009, Mario Draghi, then the president of the Bank of Italy, argued as follows:
Companies are seeing their cash flow dry up, and their assets fall in market value. Both of these developments make them easier for organised crime to attack . . . In economies where there is a strong criminal presence businesses pay higher borrowing costs, and the pollution of local politics makes for a ruinous destruction of social capital: young people emigrate more, and nearly a third of those young people are graduates moving north in search of better opportunities.
In hard times, it is not just fly-by-night businesses that are easy prey for loan sharks and extortionists, for gangsters seeking an outlet for stolen goods or a way to launder drug profits. By the nature of the narcotics business, gangsters are cash rich—and just at the moment southern Italy’s entrepreneurs are struggling even more than everyone else to get their hands on credit. When times are hard, cash is capo.
The camorra’s undiminished power to feed off the weaknesses of the Neapolitan economy has helped remould the landscape of criminal influence. Once upon a time, when Naples was an industrial city, factory workers had a tradition of labour organisation and socialist ideals that gave them an inbuilt resistance to the camorra infection. Nowadays, with the factories largely gone, the camorra has spread to quarters like Bagnoli, where the steelworks shut down in the 1990s.
Today, moreover, the urban camorra economy no longer revolves around the old slums of the city centre. The major concentrations of poverty and illegality have moved away from the Naples that tourists know. Even the camorra in Forcella has felt the force of the new. The Giuliano clan (centred on ‘Ice Eyes’ and his brothers) has been broken by murder, repentance and arrest. More importantly, the most powerful and dangerous clans now emerge from the sprawling periphery of the city, from neighbourhoods that grew anarchically in the 1970s and after the earthquake of 1980. The artisan studios of the city-centre maze cannot compete with the sw
eatshop factories of the suburbs when it comes to churning out bootleg DVDs and counterfeit branded fashions. With the modernisation of Naples’s road network and public transport, addicts now find it cheaper to source their hit from the great narcotics supermarkets operating in the brutalist apartment blocks of Secondigliano or Ponticelli, than to visit the small-time dealers of the Spanish Quarters.
The worst housing project in Europe. The camorra turned the triangular tower blocks of Le Vele (‘The Sails’) into a narcotics shopping mall in the 2000s.
The first fragment of cityscape that springs into the public mind when the word ‘camorra’ is mentioned is no longer the alleys of Forcella. Rather it is a catastrophically failed housing project in the suburb of Scampia. Known as ‘Le Vele’ (‘The Sails’), it consists of a row of massive, triangular apartment blocks built in the sixties and seventies, and designed to reproduce the tight-knit community life of the city-centre alleyways in multiple storeys. The outcome, with its ugly, dark and insecure interior spaces, feels more like a high-security prison without guards. The blocks were very badly built: lifts did not work, concrete crumbled, roofs leaked, and neighbours could hear everything that went on three doors down. These problems had already tipped Le Vele towards slum status when desperate refugees from the 1980 earthquake illegally occupied vacant apartments—some of them before they were even finished. Before long, residents felt besieged by a minority of drug-dealing camorristi. The police presence consisted of sporadic and largely symbolic tours. Residents say that some cops took bribes to leave the drug dealers unmolested. A long-running campaign to have Le Vele emptied and demolished met with a sluggish political response. At the time of writing, of the seven original apartment blocks, four are condemned but still standing—and still partially occupied.
In the 1990s and 2000s, drug distribution in Le Vele was under the control of the Di Lauro clan. Its founding boss was Paolo Di Lauro, known as ‘Ciruzzo the Millionaire’. His base was in Secondigliano, a neighbourhood next to Scampia on the northern outskirts of Naples that was originally a row of large, elegant nineteenth-century houses ranged along the road out of town, but which hosted huge new developments in the 1970s and 1980s. The Millionaire led a centralised organisation moulded around the demands of the drug business. His closest lieutenants included two of his sons and his brother-in-law. Under them were the so-called ‘delegates’, who handled the purchase and cutting of the wholesale narcotics. Everything below this top level of the clan was run on a kind of franchising system that kept the risky and messy day-to-day business of dealing at a safe distance. Twenty ‘zone chiefs’ were granted authorisation to manage sales in various areas of the Millionaire’s territory, and handle the salaried pushers, lookouts and enforcers who occupied the lowest tier of the organisation. A pusher would earn $2,600 per month, killers a mere $3,300 per hit. Around 200 people counted as formally recognised members of the clan, but many, many more were employed. At the peak of the Millionaire’s power, unverifiable estimates put the organisation’s narcotics income at $1.3 billion per year.
In 2002 the Millionaire was forced to go into hiding from the law, and day-to-day control passed to his sons, who struggled to control the ambitions of the organisation’s ‘delegates’. The result, during the winter of 2004–5, was the most violent of recent camorra wars, known as the ‘Scampia Blood Feud’.
The Di Lauro clan was one of the more hierarchically structured camorra organisations of the most recent generation. In the 1970s, camorristi learned the advantages of organising themselves as a criminal Freemasonry from members of Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta who were keen to find business partners in Campania. Following the break-up of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia in the 1980s, practices such as initiation rituals fell out of favour across Campania. Since then, camorra clans have invented their own structures according to need. Yet, despite the fading of the influence of Sicilian and Calabrian organised crime in Campania, the two fundamental principles of camorra organisation are the same as those that apply to the more formalised Families of Cosa Nostra or the ’ndrine and Locals of the ’ndrangheta. On the one hand, a camorra clan needs a tight command structure, particularly at the core, and particularly for fighting wars and defending territory. On the other hand, a clan must also be loose enough to allow its bosses to network widely, taking advantage of any criminal opportunity that presents itself at home or abroad. Within the limits set by these two principles, a variety of structures is possible. The term ‘camorra’ has come to embrace anything from the kind of street drug-dealing gangs that can be found in run-down areas of many Western cities, to major syndicates with iron bonds to the political system and the legal economy.
As was the case with the Di Lauro clan, blood ties often help bind the core members of any camorra organisation together. Camorra bosses are often brought up in a family tradition of violence and ‘criminal savoir-faire’ (to use the words of one Italian expert). Intermarriage between camorra bloodlines on adjacent territories helps consolidate authority and pass this savoir-faire down through the generations. One example is the Mazzarella clan, based around three nephews of Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza, the cigarette smuggler and member of Cosa Nostra who helped turn contraband tobacco into the ‘FIAT of the South’ in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1996, one of the Mazzarella brothers, Vincenzo, saw his family’s prestige augmented when his teenage son married the daughter of Lovigino ‘Ice Eyes’ Giuliano, the boss of Forcella.
The importance that kinship ties have within the camorra clans helps explain why women closely related to a clan’s core group can sometimes take on frontline roles. The cases of Pupetta Maresca and the Professor’s big sister Rosetta Cutolo tell us that, even before the 1990s, some camorra women were more prominent than was the case with women in the orbit of the Sicilian mafia or the ’ndrangheta. But in the last two decades women in the camorra have become enormously more visible. There are two reasons for this. The first is that the authorities have shaken off old prejudices that made them blind to women’s criminal talents. The second is that, because of increased police pressure, the clans have delegated greater power to women when their menfolk go on the run or get arrested. These trends have also made their effects felt in Sicily and Calabria, where the male-centred Masonic structure of the criminal brotherhoods tends to place more limits on women’s power. In 1998, Giusy Vitale took over day-to-day management of the Partinico Family of Cosa Nostra when her brother, the boss, was locked up. She has since turned penitent.
But it is no coincidence that it was a female camorrista, Teresa De Luca Bossa, who became the first woman in Italy to be subjected to the tough new prison regime set up in the wake of the Falcone and Borsellino murders in 1992. De Luca Bossa was both the mother and the lover of clan leaders, and showed notable military, managerial and diplomatic skill in keeping the organisation together when her menfolk were arrested.
Nor have Sicily or Calabria seen anything to compare with the vicious battle fought out between the women of the Graziano and Cava clans in 2002. On 26 May of that year, a Graziano firing party including three women chased down and rammed a car containing five women from the Cavas. In the ensuing bloodbath, four Cava women were shot dead and a fifth left paralysed. On both the victims’ and the perpetrators’ side, several generations of women were involved. The Graziano boss’s wife, Chiara Manzi, aged sixty-two, coordinated the attack by mobile phone; the shooters included her daughter-in-law (aged forty) and two of her nieces (nineteen and twenty, respectively). In tapes of their phone conversations in the run-up to the assault, these women can be heard spitting insults at their intended victims: ‘gypsies’, ‘sows’.
Uniquely among the mafias, the camorra has also allowed affiliates from minority sexualities to reach leading positions. Anna Terracciano is one of twelve sisters and brothers from the Spanish Quarters of Naples—eleven of them active in organised crime. Known as ’o Masculone (something like ‘Big Bloke’), Anna is a male-identified lesbian who
went around armed and took part in military actions on behalf of her clan. She was imprisoned in 2006. Three years later, the police arrested Ugo Gabriele, whom the authorities claim is the first transsexual camorrista on record. Known as ‘Ketty’, Gabriele is the younger sibling of one of the clan that broke off from the Millionaire’s organisation during the Scampia Blood Feud of 2004–5. According to the police, when her brother was promoted, Ketty graduated from pushing cocaine to her clients (she was a prostitute) to a more managerial role in the drug ring. As well as the camorra’s reliance on family ties, Ketty’s promotion may also owe something to Neapolitan popular culture’s traditional tolerance towards male transsexuals—the so-called femminielli.
No tour of the geography of contemporary Campanian organised crime would be complete without a visit to the vast fertile plain to the north of the city, which is sometimes called the Terra di Lavoro (the Land of Work). In a poem from 1956, writer and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini evoked its eerie beauties as seen from a train:
Now the Terra di Lavoro is near:
A few herds of buffalo, a few houses
Heaped between rows of tomato plants,
Twists of ivy, and lowly palings.
Every so often, close to the terrain,
Black as a drainpipe,
A stream escapes the clutches
Of the elms loaded with vines.
This distinctive landscape has been the backdrop to some of the most important developments in the history of Campanian organised crime over the past century and a half. In the nineteenth century, when much of the area was a marshy wilderness known as the Mazzoni, production of mozzarella cheese from buffalo milk was notorious for being controlled by violent entrepreneurs. In the drained agricultural land to the south and south-east of the marshes, gangs ran protection rackets on the farms, exploited the labourers, taxed the wholesale fruit, vegetable and meat markets, and controlled the routes by which produce made its way into the city.
