On the gangster-ridden streets of Naples, any word against the Camorra mafia syndicate is dangerous. The rebellion by a group of shopkeepers against extortion is unprecedented.
“The fear is huge because they threaten you, your shop, your family,” said Raffaele Ferrara, a grocer in the city center, who lives in fear after he and about 300 others decided to say no this year after decades of oppression.
“Every time someone with a suspicious face walks in, you think: ‘This is it,’ even if it is just someone buying a sandwich,” Ferrara said.
Photo: AFP
Around a busy cobbled square, businesses, including butchers, bakers and grocers, have banded together in an anti-racketeering initiative that organizers hope will dent the Camorra’s stranglehold on the port city.
“We decided we couldn’t go on,” said Salvatore Russo, another grocer. “They would come by two or three times a year and demand money. Those who didn’t pay up were shot in the legs, or beaten up, or stolen from.”
The bag men demanded up to 1,500 euros (US$1,950) three times a year — a major cost for small businesses struggling through a deep economic crisis.
The Camorra makes billions of euros a year from drug trafficking, construction contracts and arms smuggling — a vast operation described by investigative journalist Roberto Saviano in his award-winning book Gomorrah, but extortion is the ultimate face of the mafia’s power on a local level.
“They can’t do without it,” said Tano Grasso, a former member of parliament and the leader of a national anti-mafia association that has encouraged businesses in Naples to denounce their persecutors for the first time. “The great thing about the anti-racket [protest] is it’s not just one person speaking out, it’s a whole group and in a group the risk is gone.”
Grasso organizes walks through Naples and its suburbs with the Pietrasanta association to tell others about the campaign and to convince them to join.
Those who do will often have to testify in court against their harriers.
The manager of Pietrasanta, Lello Iovine, who named the organization after the first square in Naples to declare itself extortion-free, was driven to act after a man turned up in the lobby of the hotel he owns demanding 50,000 euros.
“It was a real shock. He told me I might as well pay up now to put my mind at rest. I went to the police immediately and testified against him, but I had to watch my back every time I left the house for a while,” Iovine said. “There are lots of areas of Naples that are still suffering. Until not long ago, there was a lot of social tension in this neighborhood, criminality was embedded, but now we’re fighting back and we have got a lot of support.”
A plaque went up in Pietrasanta square in July declaring it to be an “extortion-free zone.” The German consulate has also published a new tourist map showing shops, restaurants and hotels that are not paying racket money.
Antonio Scorza, who runs the local Griffin Inn pizzeria, says the decision to join the organization was not easy, but he is proud of himself.
“The older generations might not have the courage, but we’re young. It’s time to fight back,” he said.
A Molotov cocktail was thrown at the Griffin Inn hours before the celebration to mark the square’s liberation from the Camorra.
Scorza said he was not intimidated and has had no trouble since.
Since the group banded together, Russo said the extortioners have “disappeared.”
Three of them are serving nine-year sentences in prison.
There have also been big-name arrests, with police capturing fugitive boss Michele Zagaria hiding in a secret bunker near Naples earlier this month and hundreds of millions of euros in Camorra-linked assets seized, but observers say the Naples crime group is far from being in any serious danger.
A recent study found the historic port city was the most mafia-ridden in Italy — far ahead of traditional Cosa Nostra strongholds on the island of Sicily.
In a best-case scenario, Grasso said, for every one person who denounces their extortioner, there are 10 who do not.
“We’ve marked out our position, we’ve dug a moat, but it’s going to take a lot more to win the war,” Grasso 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