The Roman mobsters who made a financial killing in the exploitation of asylum seekers were tied to a scam where they allegedly bought migrants’ names from CARA Mineo in Sicily. By law, any registered center that cares for refugees and migrants receives €35 a day per person from the state. Of that sum, €2.50 is earmarked to go directly to the asylum seeker so he or she can save money and buy essentials that are not provided. Among the many ways the organized crime syndicates exploit this system is by colluding with small refugee centers who register migrants who are actually still staying inside larger centers like CARA Mineo or who have disappeared altogether.
The administrators of the larger centers get a kickback for selling the personal details of the asylum seekers, and the smaller centers pocket the daily allowances. Everyone wins, except of course the migrants and refugees. This is one of the primary ways trafficked women can leave so easily. Even if they are no longer at the centers, their names tend to stay on the lists, which benefits the centers as the money they receive to care for them can be put to other purposes. Those who suffer the most are of course the legitimate refugees who then end up living in over-crowded centers, which take on more migrants to earn revenue even though they have only emptied their beds on paper. If the system worked as it was designed, trafficked women who disappear might have a better chance at being rescued because their absence would cause concern. In the current situation, it causes merely a sense of relief.
The phenomenon of bilking the asylum system is not limited to Rome. In 2017, anti-Mafia police arrested sixty-eight people, including the local parish priest, in the Calabrian town of Isola di Capo Rizzuto, where one of the country’s largest migrant and refugee reception centers has been in operation for more than a decade. Investigators say that the criminals siphoned off tens of millions of euros in public funds that were intended to better the lives of the asylum seekers while they waited for their applications to be heard. General Giuseppe Governale, the local chief of the anti-Mafia forces, said the center was effectively an ATM for the ‘Ndrangheta Mafia. Nicola Gratteri, the prosecutor in charge of the investigation, said detectives filmed the appalling conditions inside the center. “There was never enough food and we even filmed the quality of food,” he said. “It was the kind of food we usually give to the pigs.” The group set up shell companies that were being paid to provide food services, but instead the money was used to buy apartments, land, cars and yachts.41
The fact that new criminal groups and organized scams continue to emerge certainly seems to suggest that Italy’s criminal DNA is still as strong as ever. In addition to the new Mafia Capitale in Rome, members of Italy’s historic organized crime syndicates continue to be among the most powerful people in the country. They are in government. They are in businesses. They are like cockroaches – one might get caught, but you know there are hundreds more lurking in the shadows ready to take their place.
The Sicilian Mafia (or Cosa Nostra), the Calabria ‘Ndrangheta and the Neapolitan Camorra are forever expanding and adjusting their business models based on current trends. There are criminal groups in the southern region of Puglia (the heel of Italy’s boot) as well, but the notorious Sacra Corona Unita lost power in the early 2000s after the cigarette and drug smuggling channels across the Adriatic from the Balkan states were shut down. It is a unique success story in Italy’s eternal and infernal fight against organized crime, aided in part by a successful clampdown on illegal smuggling on the Balkan side of the Adriatic Sea. Still, many more smaller groups are on the rise in Puglia, taking advantage of any number of opportunities to exploit and prosper. During the summer of 2017, four people were murdered in a vendetta shooting on a lonely highway in Puglia, which was a stark reminder that the criminal gangs are still present in the territory. In fact, anti-Mafia chief Franco Roberti said that there had been three hundred murders in Puglia in the last three decades, eighty percent of which remain unsolved, the killers never brought to justice.
The death sentence imposed on Saviano for exposing the Camorra’s crime activity to the outside world has done little to stop him. His other book, ZeroZeroZero, about the illicit cocaine trade named after the high quality of the Camorra’s powder, was also widely acclaimed for its cutting-edge investigative work.
The first time I interviewed Saviano was in 2007, after his first book, Gomorrah, had been made into a movie. We met on a rainy morning in the palatial Villa Borghese park in Rome. The whole death threat and armed police escort routine was new to him. He held an oversized black umbrella and I took notes. It wasn’t an ideal interview situation, but he hadn’t been for a walk in a park for some time by then and relished the opportunity to be outside. I, on the other hand, was terrified someone might hit me when they tried to shoot him. I kept looking back at the police escort walking about fifty feet behind us and tried to slow down our pace.
The second time I interviewed him, maybe a year later, was at Mondadori Publishing offices near the American embassy in Rome. We sat in front of large glass window in one of their fancy meeting rooms, and I took diligent notes while waiting for the sound of glass to break from a gunshot. Saviano’s calm demeanor and devil-may-care attitude towards the threats against him invites paranoia.
By the time of our third interview, two years after that, reality had sunk in for the muckraker. We drove around in the car driven by his armed guards who told lewd jokes and smoked cigarettes in the front seat. By then, he couldn’t be bothered to take any risks for an interview just to show his bravado. It suited me just fine. Now he has become somewhat of a celebrity and doesn’t give so many interviews. Instead, he writes splashy columns for La Repubblica newspaper and presents big-think events on television when he’s not going viral with pithy comments and tweets.
What has struck me about Saviano through the years is how connected he remains to the same sources who helped him report Gomorrah – proof, perhaps, that he truly is of the Land of Fires. That world is part of his DNA in ways that are at once alarming and immeasurable. Despite the fact that he is really living in what amounts to a prison, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was often back there, working undercover, interviewing clansmen and cops just like he did in the beginning.
Saviano is especially versed in the role of women and the Camorra. As he has written many times, Camorra women are not at all like those depicted in pop culture. Their role has evolved, forever changed from “that of a maternal figure and helper in times of misfortune to a serious manager who concerns herself almost exclusively with the business and financial end of things, delegating the fighting and illegal trafficking to others.”
This enhanced role for women within organized crime is light years ahead of Italian society, where only twenty-six percent of women work in professional positions and few ever reach managerial roles. The World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index consistently points out how behind Italy is on wage parity and equal opportunity, which doesn’t seem to extend to the underworld. There is no room whatsoever, though, for foreign women in organized crime. In Calabria, ‘Ndrangheta men are only allowed to have foreign women as mistresses. If they marry, it must be to an Italian, preferably one from Calabria.
Women involved in the Mafia can be found in courtrooms and prisons alongside men across the country. It wasn’t always that way, of course. In her 1997 book Mafia Women, Clare Longrigg points out that for many years, women involved in organized crime got a pass when it came to legal repercussions. She points to a 1983 court ruling in Palermo, in which a woman accused of money laundering was acquitted for the reason that “women could not be guilty of money-laundering because they are not autonomous and are anyway too stupid to take part in the difficult world of business.”
The Camorra may have evolved since then, but clearly not all women are yet on equal footing. Wives are often told less than mistresses, daughters sometimes trusted more than mothers. One thing, however, is sure: the “code of ethics” that guided even the most cold-hearted criminals not to kill women and child
ren has all but disappeared. Now, they can be targeted just as much as men.
In 2014, a three-year-old boy named Domenico was shot in the head along with his mother and her lover because she had turned state’s evidence after someone killed her Mafioso husband. The murder made headlines for the sheer audacity of the crime, but it suggested a larger trend. “These men of honor used to forbid the killing of priests, women and children,” Giacomo Di Gennaro, a Neapolitan sociologist specializing in organized crime, told Agence France-Presse at the time.42 “Their control over the territory was so strong that it was not necessary.” Today, the boundaries of territories change so quickly, all lines are crossed. That includes the treatment of sex-trafficked women, who are considered less than human.
Italy’s organized crime groups and Mafia also have a somewhat complicated relationship with the Catholic Church. Camorra men tend to be uncomfortable with Catholic nuns, especially those like Sister Rita who are not at all afraid to stand up to them. In fact, all Italian men have a funny habit of grabbing their crotches when they see a nun, apparently to ward off bad luck. Due to their association with hospitals and cemeteries, they are considered a bad omen.
While some people living in and around Naples are reluctant to file a complaint with the police against a member of the Camorra out of fear of retaliation, Sister Rita regularly marches into her local precinct to name clan members whom she knows to be colluding with the Nigerian gangs. She is also quick to recount the well-documented reports about police across Italy who force the girls to have sex for free in exchange for a pass if their documents aren’t in order. Sister Rita denounced a police officer who she says took advantage of one of the women who had escaped to Casa Ruth. According to the police report, among the many lewd acts he forced upon her were sodomy with his Billy club and making her lick the semen off his badge after he had ejaculated upon it. He was eventually detained but charges were dropped after the woman returned to Nigeria and couldn’t testify against him. He was removed from his post in the Land of Fires but is still a police officer in northern Italy.
In late 2015, three officers in Caserta (Alessandro Albano, a superintendent with the force, forty-eight; Domenico Petrillo, forty-one; and Nunziante Camarca, thirty-seven) were arrested for having sex with Nigerian girls who had come to them for help getting out of the racket. The alleged sex took place inside the police station. The men are also accused of having sex with other girls in Castel Volturno in squad cars and armored vehicles.
Not only did they not help the women escape, the women say the cops refused to pay them for sex, putting them at great risk with their madams for not earning enough even though the general rule on the Domitiana is that police don’t have to pay. The trio also allegedly delivered large orders of cocaine for one of the Camorra clans using patrol cars. When the men were arrested, Camarca had several checks worth around $3,000 in his possession, potentially to be recycled back to the Camorra. The police are currently facing charges for Mafia collusion, but none for further exploiting the sex-trafficked women.
However, beyond the shelter’s cars being stolen and the odd sophomoric acts of vandalism, the Camorra has not directly threatened the nuns at Casa Ruth. Whether it is out of respect or fear of “God’s wrath” is unclear.
I found my own car tires flattened after one of my many visits to Casa Ruth, all four punctured by something sharp. When I went to the local police and, after explaining that I was working on a project about sex trafficking, asked whether I should report the incident as a crime or a threat, they laughed at me, as if I should be lucky it was only the tires that had been slashed.
Sister Rita is undeterred. “They aren’t going to kill a nun,” she jokes. “They know I am not a real threat, and that I can never save all these girls. They know they will win in the end.”
Until recently, the Church often turned a blind eye to Mafia crimes. Mafiosi were married and buried in some of the most beautiful churches in Italy, and even in Rome there are known mobsters interred in marble tombs next to cardinals and popes.
One of the most famous examples can be found in the basilica of Saint Apollinare, an Opus Dei church on the Piazza Navona in Italy’s capital. In 2012, Italian investigators pried open the tomb of Enrico “Renatino” De Pedis, a prominent member of the infamous Magliana organized-crime gang that has since dismantled. Renatino had been ambushed and murdered by rival gang members in 1990. Investigators were hoping they might find the body of fifteen-year-old Emanuela Orlandi, thought to be interred with him.
Orlandi was the daughter of a mid-level Vatican employee who disappeared in June 1983 after leaving her parents’ Vatican apartment for a music lesson in a school adjacent to the Sant’Apollinare church. She was last seen getting into a dark green BMW and her disappearance has been one of great embarrassment for the Church and a delight for conspiracy theorists, some of whom say she is being kept as a sex slave in a monastery somewhere in the country. Her body wasn’t buried with the mobster, but the fact that he was in a marble tomb in an important Roman Church raised eyebrows in certain circles and nods of understanding and complacency in others.
It’s certainly not the last time the Church was accused of complicity in criminal activity. During the height of the 2015 summer season in Rome, the powerful Casamonica family, with criminal ties to both the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta, was able to pull off a spectacular stunt that showed that organized crime is alive and well.43 Authorities say the family rakes in an annual income of around $40 million in illegal activities, like loan sharking, racketeering and extortion, and wields considerable power in Rome.
When Vittorio, one of the patriarchs of the family, succumbed to cancer, he was given the kind of send-off generally associated with a respected city leader – what amounted to a state funeral with all the trimmings – a helicopter dropped rose petals from the sky and six black stallions pulled a gilded glass carriage carrying the mobster’s ornate coffin through the streets of Rome to the San Giovanni Bosco church in a Roman suburb that bears the Casamonica name. Police stopped traffic to let the procession pass.
Theme music from The Godfather and 2001: A Space Odyssey blared as the funeral procession passed. Giant banners were draped across the church facade with photos of the mafia don dressed in white, a giant bedazzled cross hanging from his neck as he hovered over a shot of the Roman Colosseum. One said: “King of Rome;” another: “You’ve conquered Rome, now you’ll conquer paradise.” The mayor and city councilors were all away for their summer holidays but quickly returned after the funeral drew consternation from the press. Only then did they question just how a known criminal could garner such respect.
Father Giancarlo Manieri, the priest and apparent close friend of the Casamonica family who officiated the funeral inside the Catholic Church, scoffed at the scandal, insisting that it was just a “normal” funeral. In actuality, it was a blatant and embarrassing slap in the face for Italy’s capital by a notorious crime family.
There are international cases of the Church’s complicity, too. In 1982, an Italian banker named Roberto Calvi was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge on the edge of London’s financial district with bricks and $15,000 in three different currencies in his pockets. He had earned the nickname “God’s Banker” while running Banco Ambrosiano, a major shareholder in the Vatican Bank. When Banco Ambrosiano collapsed, he was investigated and charged with white-collar crimes of mismanagement and currency manipulation, after which he fled to London on a private jet to await his final trial. His family attributed his death to the Corleone family of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra Mafia, which was allegedly laundering money through the Banco Ambrosiano and accounts within the Vatican’s own bank. Officially, his death remains a mystery.
Bernardo Provenzano, the boss of all bosses in the Sicilian Mafia, was arrested in 2006 after forty-three years of living on the lam like a pauper. He was discovered in a tiny outbuilding on a dairy farm outside Corleone, after authorities traced his wife taking folded shirts and cl
ean underwear to the farm. He was found with five Bibles, which authorities first thought spoke to his devout faith, which is especially common among Sicilian mobsters. When he asked for the Bibles in his prison cell, however, they grew suspicious. After further examination, they discovered that he had created an intricate system of codes based on Bible verses that he had noted in the margins of the holy books, which he wrote on tiny pieces of paper his minions folded up and carried between toes or other locations on the body to communicate with his underlings. Stumped, Italian anti-Mafia authorities sent the Bible codes – 164 in total – to the FBI to help decipher them, though at the time of writing no one has yet broken the Provenzano code. He died in prison in 2016 and was cremated and buried in the family tomb in Corleone, without a Catholic funeral, under orders of the local anti-Mafia police.
Provenzano, like other Mafiosi, used his faith to his advantage, relying on Catholic rituals such as confession to maintain his sense of spirituality, or perhaps to convince himself that the evil work he was doing was actually for the good of the people and, therefore, the Christian thing to do. Many mobsters are financial patrons of dioceses and even hospitals and schools run by the Catholic Church, which is as good a way as any to stay in its good graces. It is common in small towns across southern Italy for religious processions, especially at Easter, to pass by local Mafia bosses’ homes to pay homage to them. Sometimes, the nod of respect is given because the local priests and Mafia dons are long-time friends; other times, it is simply because they are afraid not to. It is also a widely held belief that the Camorra drug makers cut their bricks of hashish thirty-three times (thought to be Jesus’s age when he was crucified) and baptize their cocaine packets with holy water in the hope that they won’t kill anyone. Pope Francis urged local parishes to deviate Easter processions from mobsters’ houses in 2015, though there were reports that many small town parishes in the heart of Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta country ignored the order.
Roadmap to Hell Page 11