The mafia's laws are simple: avoid killing if you can, and kill discreetly if you can't. However, laws were made to broken. And in the past few weeks they have been broken a lot.
Mob violence, once thought to be a distant bad memory in Italy, has gripped Naples, the country's grimy, crime-ridden southern city.
PHOTO: AFP
Last week thousands of heavily armed police -- backed by helicopters and sniffer dogs -- launched a series of raids aiming at rounding up the gunmen, extortionists and drug-runners responsible. But, despite the arrest of the supposed reigning capo di capi and 50 others, no one believes the bloodshed is over. Indeed, many fear it will spread.
More than 100 have died after factions of one of the mafia's most notorious families turned against one another earlier this year.
Bodies have been found in burnt-out cars, teenagers have been shot off their scooters, aspiring drug-pushers executed among hanging salamis in a delicatessen. In a touch worthy of The Godfather films, one alleged mafioso was shot as he ate dinner in a restaurant, dying face down in his pizza.
Now investigators fear that the battle could spread, dragging southern Italy into a welter of shootings and beatings.
The violence began in June, when a young and inexperienced boss -- a former hitman called Ciro di Lauro, who was running the city's rundown Scampia quarter on behalf of his fugitive father -- allegedly ordered the murder of two rebellious young lieutenants. With control of a US$21 billion a year drugs trade at stake, the killings rapidly escalated. In one particularly violent weekend, six gang members died.
The battle is fundamentally between clan members loyal to Paolo di Lauro, 51, who is on the run from a government arrest warrant after 20 years running Scampia, and an ambitious new generation of gangsters who want a larger cut of the drugs profits. It is unremittingly brutal. One elderly man was beaten to death for failing to reveal where his stepson was. The body of a 22-year-old woman, who had reportedly refused to reveal the whereabouts of her gang-member boyfriend, was found in her burnt-out Fiat.
There have been other signs of the strain the war is imposing on the population of Naples' northern suburbs. Children are missing school because their families are on the run. Homes and businesses are regularly torched. Even many of the Christmas lights hanging in shop windows are not merely decorations, but part of a sophisticated protection racket.
Public prosecutor Giuseppe Narducci warned one newspaper that the conflict could spread from the Di Lauro clan to involve other powerful crime families. "What is happening is the result of a fracture within a single group, a fratricidal war," he said. "One of the factions could seek outside support or alliances."
Technically, the mob in Naples is known as the camorra and has been active for centuries, surviving periodic waves of repression.
The government has sent 300 extra police and made 700 arrests since the autumn, including Vincenzo Mazzarella, 48, head of one of the families, who was detained at a hotel near EuroDisney outside Paris.
Amato Lamberti, a sociology professor at Naples University who has studied the camorra for 30 years, has no doubts about the reason for the violence: "Naples has become the most important drugs market in the Mediterranean. The war is to control the traffic."
Experts say the violence is a sign of weakness in the camorra, whose members prefer to don their double-breasted suits and get down to the business of making money. For years the gangsters have avoided bloodshed because of the attention it brings from the authorities.
Palermo, headquarters of the Sicilian mafia, has been quiet for decades after the well-organized central leadership of the cosa nostra banned killings. But the camorra -- split into more than 20 clans -- have always been more volatile.
Critics say the government's response has been inadequate. On Dec. 11, Marcello Dell'Utri, one of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's closest business and political allies, was sentenced to nine years for complicity with Sicily's cosa nostra. For many on the opposition benches, that fact alone explains why Berlusconi's government is unable to lead in the war against organized crime in any convincing way.
"The real problem is the camorra's roots in Neapolitan society," Lamberti said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion