Analysis: Naples, a city in the grip of the Camorra

If you want to know why Romano Prodi, the Italian Prime Minister, is considering sending in troops to Naples just ask Roberto Saviano, a 28 year old Neapolitan writer whose best selling novel Gomorra, came out in May. "Gomorra" is a play on the word "Camorra", the Naples network of Mafia clans, and the book pulls no punches in revealing how they operate — and naming names. As a result Signor Saviano is in fear of his life, and has been given round-the-clock police protection. His plight confirms what everyone in Naples already knows: that although the city is ostensibly run by the local authorities, the parallel power structure of the Camorra is all pervasive.

Even before he went into hiding with an armed guard Signor Saviano began to realise he had antagonised a deadly enemy with tentacles throughout the city when local shopkeepers and bar owners turned him away rather than risk punishment from local Mafia bosses by serving him. The Camorra, he says, has murdered "about 3,600 people" since he was born. Some run down housing estates in the suburbs, such as Scampia, are Mafia fiefdoms where the police hardly dare enter.

When I went to Scampia earlier this year after a particularly horrific series of murders — one Mafia victim was decapitated with a tile cutter and then burned in his car — my taxi driver refused to linger, saying he would pick me up later, "if you are still here". The Camorra offers its own social network, a sense of community, however perverted, and jobs of a kind for the unemployed young, mostly related to cigarette smuggling, drugs or petty crime.

Women are also part of this powerful hidden structure: whenever police try to arrest a Mafia boss in Naples, it is the women who obstruct them (and who in some cases take over the clans from their imprisoned husbands or brothers).

Much of the Camorra's power stems from drugs, above all heroine and cocaine. In Scampia, junkies openly inject themselves in the rubbish strewn underpasses. Most of the turf wars between the Mafia families revolve around the struggle to control the highly lucrative drugs market.

But the violence has seeped into the historic centre as well. This week a known mafioso was shot dead in full view of passers by near the Cathedral as he was coming out of bar. In the summer a Canadian tourist was shot in the leg by a stray bullet during a Mafia shootout, and an American tourist who gave chase to two muggers was set on by local people who sympathised with the criminals rather than the victim. Hotels have taken to handing guests plastic watches so they can leave their Rolexes in the hotel safe.

Naples remains a colourful, warm-hearted and vibrant city, with gems such as the San Carlo Opera and Capodimonte Museum. Its pizza (invented in Naples) is unsurpassed, and the views over the Bay of Naples are breathtaking.

Under Antonio Bassolino, the former mayor in the 1990s, the central Piazza del Plebiscito was cleared of cars to make a pedestrian area opposite the Royal Palace, crimes such as bag snatching were reduced, and historic buildings were restored. But even Signor Bassolino, now President of the Campania region, admits that the Mafia has re-established its grip and the city is sliding towards chaos, with piles of rotting rubbish in the streets and daily murders and muggings. "The Camorra, street crime and violence risk robbing us of our future and our children's future" he says.

Bringing in the army recalls the emergency in Sicily in 1992-98, when 150,000 soldiers were sent in to deal with Mob crimes. Signor Bassolino however would prefer more police on the streets rather than troops. A thousand extra police are to be deployed in a plan devised by Giuliano Amato, the Interior Minister, and Signor Prodi will travel to the city tomorrow for a summit with local leaders on the current "crime emergency". In the end, as Rosa Russo Jervolino, the current mayor, rightly says, "the roots of the problem are social and cultural... We must be able to offer our youngsters values, education and above all work opportunities which can give them a good quality of life".

The question is whether the Prodi government, already hard pressed to find cash to reduce Italy's huge budget deficit, can find the resources to underwrite long term reforms to give Naples jobs and hope while simultaneously taking immediate emergency measures to halt the wave of violence. "We must radically and permanently revisit the way we defend the safety of our citizens," Signor Amato said. "We want a true change of direction — for the first time we are betting everything on permanent measures, not temporary ones."

President Giorgio Napolitano, who is from Naples himself, expressed his "anguish", saying Naples was facing "a social and cultural emergency" as well as a criminal one. The Italian South is suffering however from a chronic lack of investment under successive governments of both Left and Right, despite numerous high minded projects for development of the Mezzogiorno. Meanwhile the situation on the ground spirals out of control: the latest deaths have taken the number of those killed in Naples and the surrounding province since the start of the year to 72, of which 50 are Camorra-linked .

Four thousand known mafiosi are active in and around Naples, and businesses pay an estimated €30 billion to the Camorra every year, with the situation aggravated by a controversial prisoner amnesty this summer in which 7,800 inmates were released from Naples' jails, many of them — obviously — mafiosi. Perhaps the authorities should have asked Roberto Saviano first if this was a wise move.

Timesonlie.co.uk
01-11-06