Camorra

• 1. A Hydra With No Head

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  The Camorra is a Mafia-type criminal society from the Italian region of Campania, and it ranks among the oldest and largest in Italy. One of its own clan leaders, Pasquale Galasso, once told a court: "Campania can get worse because you could cut into a Camorra group, but another ten could emerge from it." That sentence explains why the organization has outlasted centuries of hangings, trials and manhunts. Where did it come from, and why does it have no single head? Why does its code of silence make killings so hard to solve? What made household rubbish a business worth bribing officials for? And how did an underworld rooted in Naples end up trading with cartels, rival mafias and even a terrorist group?

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• 2. A Street Game

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  The word camorra most likely began as c' 'a-morra, Neapolitan for "with the morra," the name of a street game. Scholars favour this explanation and place the word's birth in Campania around the 16th-17th century. Its first official appearance came in 1735, when a royal decree authorised eight gambling houses in Naples.

  The organization had forerunners called compagniani. They moved in groups of four and lived off prostitutes, control of gambling, and robbery. Every Neapolitan neighborhood had its own band, and at least one nobleman belonged to such a group. The compagniani met at the del Crispano tavern, near the spot where Napoli Centrale station stands today.

  They also had powerful friends. Canon Giulio Genoino, the inspirer of Masaniello's revolt, enjoyed their protection. Around them worked the cappiatori, who were street thieves, and the campeatori, robbers who carried knives. The names of two compagniani chiefs survive: Fucillo Micone in the 16th century, and Cesare Riccardi, nicknamed abate Cesare, in the 17th.

  The authorities answered with the gallows. By the close of the 17th century, Naples had recorded 1338 hanged, 17 executed leaders, 57 beheaded and 913 condemned to prison. None of that produced a disciplined organization with written rules. That came only after the old order collapsed.

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• 3. The Honoured Society

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  Between 1799 and 1815, Naples lived through a power vacuum. The Parthenopean Republic was proclaimed on the wave of the French Revolution, and then the Bourbons returned. In that disorder the group emerged under the name Bella Società Riformata.

  Police records from 1820 describe a disciplinary meeting of a tribunal called the Gran Mamma. That same year, investigators found the first written statute, known as the frieno. A second statute, discovered in 1842, dealt with initiation rites and with money set aside for the families of imprisoned members.

  The members called themselves the Società della Umirtà, or Annurata Suggità, meaning the Honoured Society. Their honour was omertà, the criminal code of silence. It obliged them never to discuss the group's internal affairs with the police. With a fixed structure and a hierarchy, they were no longer street gangs living off theft and extortion.

  A stranger bargain followed the failure of the 1848 revolution. Liberal opponents of the king needed popular support, so they turned to the Camorra and paid it, because camorristi led the city's poor. The new police chief, Liborio Romano, asked the Camorra's head, Salvatore De Crescenzo, to keep order. He then made De Crescenzo head of the municipal guard.

  In 1869, the twelve district heads, called capintriti, elected Ciccio Cappuccio as capintesta, the head-in-chief. He took over from De Crescenzo after a short gap. Nicknamed "o rre 'e Napole," the king of Naples, he died in 1892.

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• 4. High Camorra, Low Camorra

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  After Italian unification in 1861, the new government tried to suppress the Camorra. From 1882 it carried out a series of manhunts. Then came the Saredo Inquiry of 1900-1901, set up to examine corruption and bad governance in Naples.

  The inquiry split the phenomenon in two. The original low camorra ruled over the poor. Above it rose a high camorra of cunning, audacious middle-class figures who fed on trade, public works contracts and government bureaucracy. The report said this high camorra saw the state as "a field it has to harvest and exploit."

  The two worlds met through the faccendiere, the intermediary. The report listed who needed one: an industrialist wanting a clear road into politics, a shopowner hoping for lower taxes, a worker seeking a factory job, even someone planning to emigrate to America. Scholars still dispute whether the high Camorra was truly part of the Camorra proper. The inquiry proved no specific collusion with politicians, but it exposed the patronage that fed municipal corruption. In 1901, every Camorra-backed candidate lost the Naples election.

  A harder blow came with the Cuocolo Trial of 1911-1912. It began as a prosecution for the murder, on the 6th of June 1906, of the boss Gennaro Cuocolo and his wife, who were suspected of being police spies. Carabinieri Captain Carlo Fabbroni turned it into a trial of the whole Camorra. Newspapers in Italy and the United States followed it, as did Pathé's Gazette.

  Fabbroni told the court: "The Camorrist has no political ideals. He exploits the elections and the elected for gain." After 17 months of tumultuous hearings, the verdict came on the 8th of July 1912. Twenty-seven leading bosses received sentences totalling 354 years. Enrico Alfano, the main defendant and nominal head of the Camorra, was given 30 years.

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• 5. Clans and Contraband

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  From the 1950s until the 1980s, the Camorra played a central part in cigarette smuggling, and Naples became the hub of the trade. Networks stretched across Italy and beyond. The trade offered relief in a post-war economy struggling with hardship, and for many Neapolitans it became a means of survival. Fast boats called scafi blu carried the contraband past the authorities. Pio Vittorio Giuliano and Michele Zaza grew rich on it and used the money to expand their empires. Fights over smuggling routes pushed rival clans into more violence.

  The Camorra has never been a centralised body. It is a loose confederation of independent clans, each tied together by kinship and tied to its own territory. Each clan runs its own business and guards its ground. Some try to grow at a neighbour's expense, with only minimal coordination to avoid collisions. Compared with the pyramid of the Sicilian Mafia, this horizontal layout makes feuds likelier. It also makes the Camorra resilient, because new clans emerge from the remnants of old ones.

  In the 1970s and 1980s, Raffaele Cutolo tried to unify the families on the Sicilian model by forming the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. He failed. Meanwhile, the numbers grew. Italian law enforcement counted about a dozen clans in 1983-26 in 1987 and 32 the following year. The journalist Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorra, argues that this sprawl now dwarfs the Sicilian Mafia and the 'Ndrangheta in numbers, wealth and ruthlessness.

  The main businesses are drug trafficking, racketeering, counterfeiting and money laundering. Clans also infiltrate local politics, acting as go-betweens for politicians and officials and delivering votes in return for favours. A 2007 report by Confesercenti, a large Italian trade organisation, said the Camorra controlled the milk and fish industries, the coffee trade, and over 2,500 bakeries in Naples.

  The feuding is bloody. In 2004 and 2005, the Di Lauro clan fought the Scissionisti di Secondigliano in what the Italian press called the Scampia feud. More than 100 people were killed in the streets. At the end of October 2006-20 competing clans killed 12 people in 10 days. Interior Minister Giuliano Amato sent over 1,000 extra police and carabinieri to Naples. The next year still brought over 120 murders.

  Silence protects the killers. In 2001, the Caserta businessman Domenico Noviello testified against a Camorra extortionist and received police protection. In 2008 he declined further protection. He was killed one week later.

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• 6. The Waste Business

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  "The rubbish is gold." Nunzio Perella said this after his arrest in 1992, when he began collaborating with the authorities. Since the 1980s, the Camorra has taken over waste disposal in Campania. By December 1999, every regional landfill was full. Reports in 2008 blamed the crisis at least partly on the Camorra, with the worst of it in the area called the triangle of death.

  With help from industrial companies, heavy metals, industrial waste, chemicals and household refuse were mixed together. The mixture was dumped beside roads and burned so nobody would notice. The result was severe pollution of soil and air. The researcher Giacomo D'Alisa and his colleagues describe four methods. Trucks carried hazardous waste to the countryside. Illegal quarries and holes took more. Toxic waste was blended with textiles and burned to prevent explosions. And toxic waste was mixed with urban waste for landfills and incinerators.

  The corruption reached officials. Gaetano Vassallo, boss of the Casalesi clan, admitted he worked systematically for 20 years to bribe local politicians and officials into letting the dumping continue. A government attempt to require recycling and waste management failed, which left more openings for illegal operators.

  In November 2013, tens of thousands of people marched through Naples to protest the pollution. Over a twenty-year period, an alleged ten million tonnes of industrial waste had been illegally dumped. Cancers linked to the pollution were said to have risen by 40-47%.

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• 7. Across Borders

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  Spain is, in Roberto Saviano's words, the country most entwined with the Camorra after Italy. The clans arrived in the 1980s and built businesses around drug trafficking and real estate money laundering. The Polverino clan is the strongest there, with influence in Alicante, Tarragona, Málaga and Cádiz. Italian antimafia police say clans in Spain have accumulated €700 million. On the Costa del Sol, bosses call the area Costa Nostra, meaning Our Coast. Raffaele Amato, nicknamed Lo Spagnolo, was arrested as he left a Barcelona casino in 2005.

  In the Netherlands, Raffaele Imperiale bought a coffee shop called Rockland Coffee in Amsterdam in 1996. In 2016, two Van Gogh paintings stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002 turned up in a villa near Naples linked to him. He was sentenced to 18 years in absentia. DEA documents later placed him at meetings in Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel in 2017, alongside Ridouan Taghi, Daniel Kinahan and Edin G. The DEA regarded the group as one of the fifty largest drug cartels in the world.

  In Peru, Umberto Ammaturo built a virtual monopoly on cocaine shipments to Italy in the 1980s. The US DEA called him one of the chief financiers of the Shining Path guerrillas. In Morocco, Giuseppe Polverino was dubbed the hashish king for his hold on imports from the Ketama region. In Switzerland, Ciro Mazzarella settled in Lugano in 1992 after losing a Naples war. In the United Kingdom, Antonio Righi laundered money in London for the Contini and Mazzarella clans, even though they were historic rivals. In Aberdeen, Antonio La Torre served as the local boss until his extradition in 2006.

  The Camorra also worked in New York between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries, where it rivalled the Morello crime family. The FBI now believes nearly 200 affiliates operate in the United States. In 2012, the Obama administration imposed sanctions on the Camorra as one of four key transnational criminal groups, alongside Russia's Brothers' Circle, Japan's Yamaguchi-gumi and Mexico's Los Zetas.

  The partnerships are stranger still. In 1995 the Camorra worked with the Russian Mafia to bleach US$1 bills and reprint them as $100s. In March 2019, an Austrian arms ring that sold the Camorra over 800 pistols, 50 Kalashnikovs and 10 Scorpion sub-machine guns was dismantled. A 2017 scheme with Chinese gangs shipped industrial waste from Prato to Hong Kong. Nigerian gangs gained permission to run sex trafficking in Camorra territory in return for a share of the earnings. And on the 1st of July 2020, Italian police seized 14 tonnes of amphetamines made in Syria by the Islamic State, worth over €1 billion. Media reports suggest Camorra clans helped distribute them.

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• 8. The Long Pursuit

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  In 1998, police found Francesco Schiavone hiding in a secret apartment near Naples, behind a sliding wall of granite. Naples mayor Antonio Bassolino likened the capture to the 1993 arrest of Sicilian Mafia chief Salvatore Riina. Schiavone now serves a life sentence. Michele Zagaria, a senior Casalesi figure, was found in a bunker in Casapesenna in 2011, after eluding police for 16 years.

  2019 was a heavy year for the clans. In March, Marco Di Lauro, the second most wanted man in Italy, was arrested after 14 years on the run. In November he received a life sentence as the mastermind of an ambush in January 2005 that killed Attilio Romanò, an innocent man mistaken for a rival's nephew. In June, police arrested more than 120 members of the Secondigliano Alliance and confiscated €130 million. The historical female boss Maria Licciardi escaped and became a fugitive. In 2023, Naples prosecutor Giovanni Melillo told the Antimafia Commission that the Mazzarella clan and this alliance are the Camorra's most powerful groups.

  Arrests alone have not been enough. In Campania, with high unemployment and few opportunities, the Camorra offers young people community and jobs. The lasting solution lies in values, education and work for the next generation. The government has struggled to find the money for such reforms, and it relies on limited policing in a place with a long tolerance of crime. Italian police coordinate with Europol and Interpol. Prefect Gennaro Monaco cites impressive results, yet the Camorra continues to grow in power.

  With so many old bosses dead or jailed, young gangs called paranze are trying to take over. Where the old bosses stayed out of the limelight, these youths post their exploits on social media, in designer clothes and with €200 bottles of champagne. In 2015, Emanuele Sibillo, aged 19 and one of the first leaders of this generation, was shot dead by a rival baby gang. Most of these young criminals are the children of Camorra members now in jail.

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