Gangsters the world over have long looked up to Tony Montana, the fictional Cuban drug dealer in the 1983 film Scarface, who dies in a hail of bullets in his kitsch, neo-classical Miami villa.
One Naples mobster, Walter Schiavone, was so enamored of the character played by Al Pacino he built a 2 million euro (US$2.7 million) replica of the villa, complete with the curved double staircase from which Montana takes his death dive.
But instead of meeting the glorious fate of his hero, Schiavone was arrested on murder charges in 1999 while trying to escape over his garden wall, and now Naples authorities have decided to rub his nose in it further by turning the villa into a physiotherapy center for disabled people.
"The best way for us to fight the mafia and win over the community here is to take the Mafia's symbols of power and make them serve the community," said Enrico Tedesco, an official at the regional authority of Campania.
The brother of the boss of the feared Casalesi clan, Schiavone commissioned his villa by handing a video of Scarface to a local architect and telling him to build what he saw.
Known simply as "Hollywood" by locals, the villa boasts views over a huge garden and pool from a balcony sandwiched between two tiers of classical pediment mounted on double sets of columns -- similar to the balcony from which Pacino's character sprays machine-gun fire before his demise.
Today the luxury fittings inside the house are gone. After the official seizure of the house, Schiavone's men slipped in to strip the marble, parquet, antique furniture and even the bathroom tiles before filling the rooms with car tires and setting fire to them.
"The villa needs work before we open in 2008, but we definitely wanted to keep the existing structure in place for its symbolic value," Tedesco said.
The villa joins a series of converted Mafia properties around Naples, including a Medici villa now used as a youth center and a villa seized from the Zaza clan in Pomigliano D'Arco, which is now the local police station.
Naples mobsters continue to mimic Hollywood gangsters, according to author Roberto Saviano, who wrote in his best-selling Camorra chronicle Gomorra, that hitmen were missing their targets because they insisted on holding their guns tilted like the characters in Quentin Tarantino films.
By attempting to flee police, Schiavone may have failed to make life imitate art, but as he serves out his sentence he may be grateful that art is imitating him.
Gomorra, which documents the exploits of the Casalesi clan, is now being made into a film.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese
HYPOCRISY? The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs yesterday asked whether Biden was talking about China or the US when he used the word ‘xenophobic’ US President Joe Biden on Wednesday called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing Beijing of cheating as he spoke at a campaign event in Pennsylvania. Biden accused China of xenophobia, too, in a speech to union members in Pittsburgh. “They’re not competing, they’re cheating. They’re cheating and we’ve seen the damage here in America,” Biden said. Chinese steel companies “don’t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidizing them so heavily,” he said. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminum if Beijing was