Jul 05 2008
Shakedown to savagery, squalor and shame
The Bishop of Aversa, Mario Milano, at the anti-Mafia headquarters.
Photo: Penny Bradfield
In the wake of a historic win against the Mafia, Paola Totaro visited the headquarters of the feared Camorra.
The shops and windows of Casal di Principe are closed, their metal security shutters sealed against the searing summer heat. Dust rises and settles in the wake of the occasional passing car, plastic shopping bags inflate with the hot wind and career down empty streets like tumbleweeds in a town of the old west.
In the main piazza of this godforsaken town at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, about 25 kilometres north-west of Naples, old men sit on white plastic chairs, smoking and sipping coffee under a dilapidated umbrella. Guarded looks are exchanged, a language spoken without words. Around the corner, at Bar Roxy on Via Dante, it is business as usual, too.
There is not a flower or a card to mark that here, just days ago, a local waste disposal businessman, Michele Orsi, 47, was gunned down in daylight. Eighteen bullets were pumped into the footpath and surrounding walls and shutters. Two exploded his abdomen and chest; a third, between the eyes, finished him off. It happened days before a 10-year investigation, codenamed Spartacus, led to the sentencing of 12 Casalese clan bosses to a total of more than 700 years’ jail. Orsi’s execution, the third in less than a month, signalled that the Camorra would not surrender without a fight.
In this town, their town, nobody else believes it is over either.
In Casal’s infamous Morza Bar (known also as Bar Elisio and the scene of a previous bloody hit), the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, dubbed into a clumsy Italian, pumps incongruous canned laughter into the palpably suspicious silence. The old man behind the bar finally asks us if we want coffee, adding pointedly: “Ma chi siete? [So, who are you?]”
“Australians. Just visiting.”
“Australiani!” he shouts joyously, flooding us with relief. “Ian Thorpe … ma quello e’ un mito, e’ una leggenda [Thorpe, he is a myth, he is a legend].”
Bullets and cement are the currency of the Camorra of Casal di Principe. Ferocious and unrelenting, the Neapolitan arm of the Mafia is believed to have claimed the lives of 3600 men and women since 1979, when the local clans headed by the Schiavone and Iovine families embarked on the quest for power over the nearby Secondigliano families. The Camorra has murdered more than the Sicilian Mafia, more than the Calabrian n’Drangheta, more than the Red Brigades of the 1970s (or the postwar Black Brigades). It has claimed more victims than the IRA and as many as September 11. As Francesco Anfossi, a writer with the high-circulation Catholic magazine Famiglia Cristiana, puts it: “Camorra is Italy’s ground zero.”
For Michele Orsi, life ended in a hail of nine-millimetre and .38 calibre bullets days before he was due to give evidence about Camorra involvement in his business. His brother and co-owner lives around the corner from the bar, too terrified to emerge and under 24-hour guard.
For others, death has come at the hands of semi-automatic fire, machine-gun volleys and the clan’s favoured Kalashnikovs.
But this modern war is not about primitive turf and familial power plays. This is a war to protect a global empire, a commercial leviathan that took 30 years to create and that Italian anti-Mafia investigators and magistrates estimate turns over €30 billion a year (about $50 billion).
The empire of the Casalese Camorra is a vast, unimaginably complex network of construction and transport businesses, of factories that make cement - not for Hollywood Mafia-style shoes - but for roads, houses, even a local prison. Its consortia of illicit waste disposal conglomerates alone are said to turn over $1 billion a year.
The Camorra has become a global player in the illicit arms trade. It presides over an international heroin and cocaine cartel with direct links to Colombia and Mexico. And it launders its millions through a dense fabric of licit businesses, from the provision of domestic labour for the manufacture of high-fashion labels to property redevelopment, from restaurants to jewellery shops. These businesses span borders and reach throughout Europe, from Germany to Britain and, more recently, into the new frontiers offered by China. Unpicking this tapestry, cutting the illegal threads from the legal, tearing out the criminal from the legal, is dangerous and painstaking - and threatens to unravel the very social and economic structures it sustains.
Italian investigators says that Mafia laundering activities have been traced as far away as Australia.
To understand the origins and the level of infiltration of the Camorra into every aspect of the south’s desperate plight, you need to return to the earthquakes of November 23, 1980. Measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale, two shocks lasting just one minute and 30 seconds turned the Irpinia and the Basilicata areas around Naples into a giant cemetery: 2735 people lost their lives, 8850 were injured and another 300,000 were left homeless.
Hindsight shows that the disaster spawned an even greater tragedy: the Camorra clans of the surrounding regions, already well entrenched in the local building industry, responded to the emergency more quickly than the state. From the dire earliest days when earthmoving and demolition equipment was needed, the clans - families well known to their stricken neighbours - moved in to do the work. They started to submit official tenders and won contracts. Just one month after the devastation, in December 1980, the mayor of Pagani, Marcello Torre, was murdered. He had refused a debris removal contract to a company controlled by the clan.
And so it began.
For five years, multimillions of state-funded lire were pumped into Naples, ostensibly to rebuild the ruins and put roofs over desperate heads. But the Camorra was there - and everywhere - making cement, building prefabricated shelters, demolishing, clearing, buying devastated land cheaply, rebuilding and redeveloping. Roads were built through hillsides to newly built ghost towns, municipal officials held hands with bosses, meetings of engineers, planners and small-town municipal officials spawned the network of what would later be dubbed the “bureaucracy of emergency”. And still Naples remained on its knees, people homeless, streets in ruins. Five years after the earthquake, Giancarlo Siano, a young journalist from the Neapolitan daily Il Mattino, began to sniff around, suspicious about the fate of millions in state funds. Siano, too, was murdered.
Pages: 1 2
