It’s cold enough for the waitress serving outside to be bundled up in a puffer jacket. However, the customers, tourists seasoned by the northern winters, seem to taste the dishes without flinching. A most bland scene. Except that it is after 10 at night and the restaurant is located in the Quartieri Spagnoli, a grid of alleys in the historic center of Naples where until recently outsiders who entered did so at their own risk. And in that area, pickpockets, robbers and bag thieves regularly carried out activities authorized and exploited by a clan of the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia.
The opening of the Quartieri and other traditionally crime-ridden neighborhoods is a symptom of profound changes in the crime landscape of the city and surrounding province. In 2023, there were ten gang murders, down from 34 in the 12 months prior to mid-2013. In the same period, attempted murders attributed to the Camorra fell from 17 to just four.
In part, that is due to the success of policing. Most of the older bosses have been imprisoned. And on March 29, it was learned that one of the most powerful, Francesco Schiavone, alias Sandokan, head of the clan that inspired Roberto Saviano’s best-seller Gomorrah, had decided to collaborate with justice.
However, according to the police interforce detachment that fights organized crime at the national level, Naples continues to have, together with nearby Caserta, the highest density of mafia penetration in the country. Rosa Volpe, chief prosecutor of the district in charge of fighting the mafia, warns that we should not pay too much attention to these figures. “In Naples, organized crime has not decreased,” she says. “It has evolved.”
According to police data, there are 46 clans in the city itself and another 24 in the surrounding province. Some have made huge profits; above all, with the importation and sale of cocaine. The most credible estimate of the Camorra’s annual turnover dates back to 2014, when it was estimated at around €3.3 billion ($3.6 billion). Some drug traffickers have become extraordinarily rich. Raffaele Imperiale, whose trial is scheduled to end this month, owned two stolen Van Goghs and an island off Dubai. Following his arrest in 2021, it was discovered that he had spent almost €7 million in the first quarter of the previous year.
Volpe divides Camorra members into three overlapping categories. Those who belong to groups that still control defined areas of the city make their money from extortion, drug trafficking and other criminal activities. In the last 20 years they have been gradually weakened thanks to the imprisonment of many of their former bosses. Secondly, there are the so-called “baby gangs”: gangs of very young street criminals, children in many cases of imprisoned brawlers whose territory they are in charge of securing. The third group is made up of those who have so far escaped arrest and whose objective is to invest and launder the profits of drug trafficking. Many are no longer in Italy.
A special team has been created to detect large-scale money laundering. However, according to a businessman who has family ties to the Camorra, much of the investment has been made in small businesses (bars, restaurants and apartments for short tourist stays) that offer risk diversification. “If you buy a hotel and it gets repossessed, you lose everything,” he says. “If you buy ten bars and two are repossessed, you still have eight.” That also helps explain the notable changes in downtown Naples: street crime is bad for business, and there are more and more businesses where the camorristi are found; although, as Volpe insists, many are still active in drug trafficking.
Those with personal experience of the world of the Camorra maintain that the gangsters who launder their wealth have a great interest in doing business legally. That might seem, in some ways, good news. Volpe isn’t so sure about that. “There is a risk of contamination of the city’s legitimate business system,” she says.
© 2024 The Economist Newspaper Limited. All rights reserved
Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
