Sister Rita Giaretta runs Casa Ruth shelter for trafficked women in Caserta. Photo courtesy of Sister Rita Giaretta.
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Nuns in the Land of Fire
“The only rule is that there are no rules.” – Sergio Nazzaro, journalist
CASERTA – Sister Rita is driving too fast, but the last thing the cops are looking for is a speeding nun. The sixty-year-old Italian can barely see over the steering wheel of her white minivan as she barrels down the pocked highway that cuts across the patchwork of mostly overgrown farmland north of Naples. She is headed from Casa Ruth, the shelter she runs for trafficked women on the main street of Caserta, to the Via Domitiana, a twenty-mile stretch of road cut in half by a backwater town called Castel Volturno that has become a veritable boot camp for Nigerian women exploited for the forced sex trade that is endemic in this part of Italy.
Squalor is everywhere. Big bags of garbage that line the thoroughfare have been ripped open by the wild dogs that roam the area. A makeshift dump in one of the bus stop alcoves is stacked with sullied mattresses, broken kitchen chairs and old sofas that have been stripped of their cushions. People waiting for the bus sit on an abandoned refrigerator that has been turned on its side. Herds of enormous water buffalo that produce milk for the area’s famous mozzarella graze in the inland fields nearby. Random statues of the Virgin Mary dot the roadway. Some of the statues are adorned with flowers left to commemorate a road accident or a murder; one is overgrown with ditch weed, the virgin’s head seeming to peek out from behind the tall grass.
On one wide corner that is especially popular for selling sex because it is an easy place for large trucks to stop, a Virgin Mary statue faces a burnt-out villa where three Nigerian women were burned to death, tied to their beds in the mid-2000s in what is believed to be a revenge killing by a madam when the women refused to sell sex. No one ever caught the perpetrators. It’s unclear if anyone ever looked. Another statue a few miles down the road shows the Virgin Mary in prayer, her face towards the sky with her eyes closed.
As Sister Rita turns onto the Domitiana, flashes of the orange setting sun are visible through the ancient pines that separate the road from the seaside. A romantic would say the slivers of light look like a kaleidoscope; a realist knows the fiery sunset is more like the gates of hell. Down the road to the south, past Naples, is the Amalfi Coast with its popular tourist enclaves of Positano and Sorrento. To the north, Rome and its decadent grandeur are just over an hour away.
It is just before the hectic Holy Week leading up to Easter, and Sister Rita and her trusty assistant Sister Assunta are taking part in a springtime ritual of their own. For nearly twenty years, they and other nuns and volunteers have gone out to the Domitiana to offer what amounts to a chance for resurrection to the girls who are forced to stand on the streets day after day.
At any given time of the day or night, every single day of the year, no matter the weather, dozens of Nigerian women, some no older than high school age, line the road in various stages of undress. In the winter, they huddle over fires burning in oil barrels. In the summer, they try to stay cool under umbrellas. At night, the red brake lights of cars stopping makes the road look like a circus. Some men stop to pick them up; others just pull over to insult them.
The Domitiana has a troubled history. The ancient Roman road starts near Lake Avernus, a volcanic crater lake near a deep cave that ancient Romans believed was one of the entrances to Hades’ vast and sinister underworld. The road also winds past the Solfatara volcanic crater and its steaming white rocks at the center of the Phlegraean Fields, which is a super volcano that extends under the bay of Naples. In 2017, Nature warned that the “volcanic unrest” was reaching a “critical state.”21 The volcano could kill millions when it eventually does erupt, as it last did forty thousand years ago, which some scientists believe contributed to the extinction of the Neanderthals.22 The super volcano is expected to blow anytime, which, considering the other more imminent threats, no one really seems to worry about.
By the late eighteenth century, the whole area around Castel Volturno had become a giant swampland. It was drained in the early 1940s under the order of Benito Mussolini as part of an experimental program to rid Italy of malaria. The experiment, during which the houses were sprayed in and out with DDT,23 was conducted under the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation, which also ran a program to eradicate the disease from the island of Sardinia and across the southern Italian coast both before and after World War II.24
Twenty years later, in the 1960s, Vincenzo and Cristoforo Coppola, two enterprising brothers from Naples, bought a parcel of land along the seaside with the idea of building a utopian society designed to mimic Miami Beach.25 Never mind that the area was a protected nature reserve, the flat beaches giving way to views of the sea were too good not to develop. The brothers’ aim was to attract American military families who were stationed in Italy after the war. Their dream was to replace the sandy dunes and umbrella pine forests with a concrete city with its own ports, restaurants, church and school. In all, the Coppola brothers used more than thirty thousand square meters of concrete to realize their dream, which was an environmental nightmare, not to mention that it was illegally built with recycled Camorra crime money.
Nevertheless, the utopia was constructed with swanky restaurants, discotheques and a cinema to service the community who lived in dozens of large apartment blocks with views of Capri and Ischia from its crescent-shaped windows. The brothers built eight high-rise towers with scant windows facing the sea, which soon earned the nickname “eco monsters” by the locals. To keep the state off their backs for skirting building restrictions and destroying protected lands, they leased the towers for a token fee to NATO and the American military, which used them for office and housing facilities well into the late 1990s. When the brothers were accused of collusion with the Camorra, it became too hard to hide the fact that the Americans were essentially paying rent to a mafia organization.
Section by section, the compound was confiscated or condemned by the state with the intent of tearing down all the illegal structures and turning the village back into a nature reserve. Eventually, when the final lease with the Americans ran out in 2000, the state sequestered the entire beachfront property, vowing to level the eight tall towers, which hardly comprised the entire compound but which were the most symbolic to destroy. The Coppola brothers were fined for the illegal building and for destroying 150 species of fauna and flora native to the area. But in this part of Italy, few people go to jail, and the same Coppola brothers who built the settlement actually owned the company that won the contract to destroy the buildings, so their loss was also their gain.
The first of the towers was dramatically blown up with dynamite in 2001 in a move that was meant to show that organized crime was being defeated. People from all over the community came to watch and local anti-Mafia investigators cheered what was seen as a rare success. The remaining towers were razed two years later, but none of the other promises to revitalize the area have been kept yet, and instead the row of lower apartment blocks has become the perfect setting for the Camorra and Nigerian gangs to operate unchecked.
Because the Coppola buildings were stripped of all utilities when they were sequestered, those who refused to leave have had to improvise. The old black plumbing pipes are now used to drain sewage directly into the sea. Running water is stored in giant illegal holding tanks on some of the abandoned buildings, installed by Camorra companies that are well equipped to work around the system. Those who live in the condemned apartment blocks have also managed to string what look like spider webs of illegal electricity cables across the alleyways, tapped from the legitimate apartment blocks nearby.
A development called the Saraceno Park on the northern end of the village was also used as off-base housing for the American Navy until the mid-1990s. After the Americans left, it fell into disarray and is now so badly run down it has been condemned yet again by the state health officials
because of rodents. Nigerians and homeless Italians now share the squalid space as squatters.
It is here, in front of these buildings that line the seafront promenade, that the nuns do battle for the souls of the girls. When the complex was built, the facades were terracotta orange to match the setting sun, but they are now pockmarked, the paint peeling in large chunks from years of neglect. Most of the half-moon windows have been stripped of glass, making them look like dark, half-open eyes squinting out at the polluted sea.
The area around Castel Volturno is easily the most lawless part of Italy. Those who live here say: “The only rule is that there are no rules.”26 Locals call it Beirut or the Bronx. Sergio Nazzaro, a local journalist who chronicles the insalubrious history of his city, refers to it as “Gotham City of the south, without Batman.” Deals are made in blood, and murder rates are the highest in Italy, often topping a dozen a month. People disappear without a trace and no one ever looks for them. Nazzaro, who was born in Switzerland but grew up in Mondragone on the north end of the Domitiana, says criminality is such an integral part of the local society that people don’t even realize what’s legal and what is not. “Everyone is guilty,” he tells me. But trying to stop the blatant criminality would open a Pandora’s box and the local authorities don’t want that. He says the area is also the Camorra’s graveyard. “You can’t imagine how many bodies are buried in fields and tied to rocks at the bottom of the river.”
One of the reasons such degradation and lawlessness go unchecked is because of where it happens, in the heart of one of Italy’s most corrupt regions. The Camorra run the crime syndicate in this area, and while Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah introduced some of the group’s underworld activities to the world back in 2006, it offered very little in the way of new information for those who live around here. The whole area around Naples is known as la terra dei fuochi (Land of Fires), now too toxic to use for agriculture after years of rogue dumping of illegal waste at the hands of the Camorra. The Land of Fires is deadly in more ways than one. The region has the highest cancer rates in all of southern Europe, almost twelve percent above Italy’s national average. Scores of people die every year from various tumors and lung diseases; eight children between the age of seven months and eleven years died of brain tumors over a twenty-day period in February 2017 alone. Stomach and liver cancer are also on the rise, no doubt from eating food still grown on the toxic land. A mobile chemotherapy unit patrols remote villages on a monthly basis to keep up with treatment for those who can’t travel to Naples for care.
In 2014, Italy’s agricultural ministry issued a report calling for a ban on the commercial sale of all products harvested from fields in a thirteen-square-mile area between Caserta, Castel Volturno and Naples.27 It sent buffalo mozzarella lovers across the world into a tailspin, though the dioxin levels were found to be far less than in 2008, when the cheese was pulled from shelves worldwide following a similar ban. The result was that farm work became scarce, and male migrant workers were quickly sucked into the underworld, either working for gangs from Nigeria and Ghana or directly for the Camorra.
African migrants first started coming to the area in large numbers in the 1980s to work in the tomato fields for cheap wages. Italy was pouring money into the poor southern regions, the Mezzogiorno, to try to boost the abandoned economy that had been crippled by organized crime for as long as anyone could remember. The end goal was to enable Italy to join the European single currency market, which it could not do without investing in its poorest regions. This led many traditional farm workers to move on to better paying factory jobs, which opened up the migrant labor job market.
The Africans were not welcome to integrate with the Italians and instead set up a peripheral society where they lived outside the law, often squatting together in illegally built or unfinished buildings. Italian authorities at the time did not pay much attention to them, but they were not ignored by the Camorra crime syndicate. Around this time, the Camorra was importing its cocaine and heroin from South America, but as anti-narcotic police in the Americas clamped down on transit routes, drugs were increasingly routed through West Africa – and who better to smuggle drugs from Africa than Africans, who soon brought in their own criminal gangs to cash in.
Mostly men came at first, but by the 1990s, women started arriving in greater numbers, too. They were rarely hired for farm work, so many of the women felt they had no choice but to prostitute themselves to survive. They were instantly popular, attracting a flurry of Italian men looking for what was considered taboo sex with black women. Their sexual services were also considerably cheaper than those offered by the Italian or Eastern European prostitutes because Italian men didn’t think they had to pay black women the same as white women. They were also in demand because many were young virgins who had not been exposed to HIV/AIDS in Africa and they were thought to be less risky than the European sex workers who were rumored to be carrying HIV. Many of those first prostitutes eventually became madams or pimps who were controlled by Nigerian gangs that needed to supplement their drug smuggling income to pay protection money to the Camorra to work on their territory.
As the demand for sex with black women grew, madams started trying to recruit more women from Nigeria to the area. When they wouldn’t come willingly they soon started using traffickers to trick them into coming, eventually expanding the trade further north to Italy’s larger cities and into Europe. The women were forced to dress in flashy costumes and parade up and down the streets, even though none of them wanted to sell sex. They were forced to get into cars and trucks with men and perform oral sex or hand jobs or have intercourse on the sides of the road. Eventually the madams used connection houses, but in the beginning most of the sex was outside and often included more than one man with one young woman.
Castel Volturno fast became a training ground where the girls were and still are being taught that if they resist, they will be gang raped or beaten. Soon many of the women brought over from Nigeria were sold to madams who had established territories further north in cities like Padova, Bologna and Turin. In Italy, Nigerian women are now forced to sell sex across the country, on busy boulevards and back roads in and around every major urban area, and many who were first forced into sex work in Italy now can be found as far away as the United Kingdom and Dubai, though most have a connection back to Castel Volturno.
It is a mistake to assume that all of these women have turned to selling their bodies because they couldn’t find legitimate jobs or because they were desperate. Some surely have, but most are here because they were tricked. Other women in other places may choose sex work for a variety of reasons, but not the majority of Nigerian women on the Domitiana. They are not here by choice, they are trapped with nowhere to go unless someone saves them. And Sister Rita and her nuns cannot possibly save them all.
The key to the cycle that keeps the girls enslaved in plain view is the disturbing yet simple fact that the women and girls are told they owe exorbitant debts to their madams who helped get them to Italy. They pay it because they promised through the JuJu curse that they would do whatever their sponsor said they should or harm might come to them or their families, and they are told in convincing terms, mostly through threats of gang rape, that the only way they can pay off the sum is by selling their bodies.
Sister Rita knows many of the women who work on the Domitiana by name. She does not make them feel guilty for staying; she knows it’s more than just a simple choice. So many of them are tied to the work due to the JuJu curse, and Sister Rita’s bead of rosaries only goes so far in fighting that demon. Instead, she has to assure them that they will be safe if they leave, which is something she can only hope but not guarantee. Life in this part of Italy is extremely dangerous for the girls who live in the shadows and Sister Rita has seen too many tragedies to peddle false hope.
No one knows for sure how the stretch of road around Castel Volturno became ground zero for such blatant sex slavery. Some say it’s proximity to Pompeii,
where ancient lupanar rooms filled with erotic graffiti were thought to be brothels where slaves were forced to give their bodies to ancient Pompeian and Roman men in exchange for favors and food. Sex, it seems, has always been at a premium here.
The first time Sister Rita and her posse of nuns and volunteers came out to the Land of Fires was on International Women’s Day on 8 March 1997, after the noticeable upswing in Nigerian sex workers started making local headlines. There had been a spate of car accidents along the Domitiana as men shopped for sex, and police were perplexed about what to do. Rather than clamp down on the trade, the local authorities constructed a series of roundabouts along the road to help manage the increased traffic.
The nuns were determined to get the women off the streets, no matter how dangerous it was for them. Sister Rita has no fear, often saying that the young girls out there in the dark waiting for perverted strange men are surely more terrified than she could ever be. The sisters had prepared little notes handwritten in English, Italian and French to give the girls, along with warm clothes and hot coffee. “Dear friend, with this gesture we want you to know that there is someone who thinks of you with love,” the notes said, along with the address and phone number for Casa Ruth in Caserta. When they first started going out, the girls were shocked, remembers Sister Rita. “We were women meeting other women,” Sister Rita said. “They were reduced to slavery. Slavery, which continues to compete with the drug and arms trade both for the turnover it produces and for the unscrupulousness of the methods and the organization that fuels it.”
Roadmap to Hell Page 5