Italy's Scourge

We in the North of Europe often forget how pervasive the Mafia grip on parts of Italy really is ...

Enrico Alfano Was One Of The First
Publicly Known Mafia Figures In Italy.

 ...  we sort of assume that its a minor presence on the Italian state.

However we are wrong. Its a struggle that the Italian government has to fight daily, weekly and annually. A brief search of the Italian press uncovers some quite shocking examples of Mafia activities just in the area of Naples alone.

Now, I guess that I should give an explanation of the names used:

• The Mafia - aka The Sicilian Mafia, or La Cosa Nostra: A family or clan based crime group. partially recruited by ties of blood and family loyalty. They are no longer a player in international drug-trafficking and buy drugs for their local market from the Neapolitan Camorra.
• Camorra - a brand of Mafia peculiar to Naples and the local provinces.
• 'Ndrangheta - An organised crime association based in the peninsular and mountainous region of Calabria and dating back to the late 18th century. They are considered to be one of the most powerful and dangerous organized crime groups in the world and their activities account for possibly 3 per cent of Italy's GDP.

In June 2019, local and national special police forces arrested a total of 126 alleged members of a Camorra federation, which has allegedly been controlling the city of Naples and its criminal activities, since the late 1990s. The judiciary’s arrest warrants focused on the groups criminal activities between 2011 and 2016, seizing real estate and goods with a net worth of €130m. Amongst the assets seized were 80 cars, 81 motorbikes, diamonds, and luxury watches, as well as whole restaurants, bars, supermarkets, shops, car parks, and garages.

The scale of the arrests illustrates how the Camorra clans are able to dominate the economic activities and the daily lives of the city, and how many people are involved. One of the principle methods is via loan sharking, and then seizure of peoples assets to 'repay' the debts. Even small debts of just a few hundred Euro's have driven people to suicide to try and free their family from the debt. Others have been forced to hand over assets, such as a family chapel in a cemetery (which they then had to vacate family members from), in order to repay the monies.

Sicilian Bandits Were Early Mafioso

It has also been reported that the hospital of San Giovanni Bosco in Naples, had been taken over by the Camorra and used as a base of operations .... The Secondigliano Alliance (Contini, Mallardo, and Licciardi clans), allegedly used the hospital as its safe social headquarters and a meeting place for Camorra summits, and as a location for the exchange of extortion money and loan repayments.

They also pressured doctors into issuing medical certificates for insurance scams, and into treating clan members in a fast stream that bypassed the usual paperwork. The cleaning contract was awarded to their own company won with its members as employees, and the hospital canteen was also being run by a Camorra company. They even used the private company that managed the ambulances to make a healthy profit, by charging charging €400-500 per journey cash in hand for people to have their deceased relatives taken home.

The Contini clan even took a share of the money that a Neapolitan hotelier received from the Campania Region to host refugees from an earthquake in 2017. They had also infiltrated the Office of the Court of Naples, and so received tip-offs about any possible actions against them, by officers of the judiciary and law enforcement agencies, including who was being investigated and any proposed seizures.

In the last 30 or so years, the Italian authorities have uncovered more than 400 'Ndrangheta mafia underground bunkers in Calabria, which were described by investigators as “works of superior engineering”. The bunkers are a maze like underworld, of sliding staircases, hidden trapdoors and manholes, all linked by numerous tunnels that merge and separate, leading to escape routes among the sewer system or among the brambles of a local riverbank.

The wealth (and dubious tastes) of the bosses of these various groups is almost legendary. When police raided the villa of the powerful Camorra boss Pasquale Galasso, they found that his house and grounds had football pitches, saunas and a warehouse where he kept his collection of Ferraris and Porsches. 

This warehouse also held his personal art museum, where stolen works of art from around Italy were housed. Among the paintings, Louis XIV antiques and ancient statues, investigators found a solid gold throne. The throne, it later emerged, had once belonged to Francis II of the Bourbon dynasty, the last King of Naples (according to a Guardian newspaper report ... I only found one other source with this fact, and that simply stated it was the 'throne of the bourbon King Francis I' ). Another boss, Neapolitan Pasquale Fucito, nicknamed “the Martian”, had fitted out his home with porcelain lions, gold door handles, Swarovski crystal doorknobs, and towel racks studded with precious stones .... tacky.

In a country where according to polls, only three out of 10 citizens, and only four out of 10 businesses, have faith in the justice system, the mafia are often called upon for services that the state should provide. In Sicily 2019, in Pagliarelli (a central district in the Sicilian capital Palermo), the owner of a chain of seven shops selling domestic goods was twice robbed by thieves. He is heard by the police bugging the local mafia, calling the deputy boss of the Pagliarelli family asking him to come round.

The businessman then show the Mafia man the CCTV images of the thieves, and gives him all the information he would normally have given the police. Within a week the Pagliarelli Mafiosi finds the culprits, and severely beats and tortures them, and forces them to return all the stolen goods. The businessman was present at the tortures and beatings to see 'justice' being served.

The police investigators said that there was no sign that the Mafia had control of the thieves, who were apparently freelancers. So this was not a case of the Mafia offering protection against a danger they themselves had created. 

Rather its just another indication of how entrenched these gangs are in Italian civic society, especially in the south of the country.