The first time Emanuele Sibillo was arrested he was 15: The police raided his house in Naples’ Forcella neighborhood while he was trying to get rid of two guns.
Sibillo was in and out of prison over the following few years. Among the young inmates, he stood out for his ability to command respect, and for reading books and newspapers.
When he turned 18 in 2013, he prepared for the next big step: rebelling against the old Camorra clans of the Neapolitan mafia to take over the whole city.
Since the early 2000s, Italian authorities have arrested hundreds of Camorra bosses and, with the old mobsters either murdered or behind bars, children and young adults like Sibillo have begun taking their place.
The phenomenon was the subject of La Paranza Dei Bambini, a 2016 novel by Italian author Roberto Saviano, whose bestselling non-fiction work Gomorrah, published a decade earlier, shone a light on the Camorra and resulted in him getting permanent police protection.
Paranza translates as a small fishing boat but, in Camorra lingo, it refers to a criminal group led by youngsters or small fish. Saviano refers to such children — many of whom carry 9mm revolvers by the age of 15 or 16 — as piranhas.
“Crime [in neighborhoods such as Rione Sanita] becomes the only way to make it, the only way to get money, power, respect,” Saviano said. “It’s not about being unable to wait for your moment. These guys know their moment will never come [otherwise].”
In Naples, the trend is all the more alarming because the Camorra’s structure is horizontal, not hierarchical like Italy’s other main mafia outfits, the Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta. The result is a never-ending state of war among Camorra clans for territorial control, a war now taken over by the paranze.
With generational change has come a change in style. Whereas the older mafia bosses often operated out of the limelight, observing omerta — the code of silence — today’s criminals broadcast their exploits on social media, where they pose in designer clothes, clutching 200 euro bottles of champagne.
They wear hipster-style beards and race through the alleyways of Naples on scooters like packs of wild dogs. And they shoot.
One man was shot in 2014 simply because he asked for a cigarette. An Indian man took a bullet in the chest in 2013 when two boys were “testing their gun.” One young mafia member placed under surveillance was overheard on a wiretap screaming with joy about a new gun.
“I have a chrome 357 Magnum with a rubber grip, just like Al Capone’s,” he said.
Last summer, the Naples Court of Appeals sentenced 42 members of two paranze from the Forcella and Decumani neighborhoods to a combined 500 years in prison
“Let’s not forget, these are just teenagers,” Giovannesi said.
Naples Chief Prosecutor Giovanni Melillo said that gangs are widespread in the city, where young people are recruited based on their ability for violence.
“The clans delegate to them the business of drug dealing and racketeering — a worrying phenomenon, but marginal compared to the [traditional] clan operations of infiltrating public administrations and financial markets,” Melillo said. “But when the paranze go overboard with raids, the [remaining] older bosses intervene in order to keep the peace.”
In 2014, Sibillo was 18 and considered the baby godfather of the Forcella neighborhood. A year later, he was dead, the victim of an attack by members of a rival clan.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
RSS