In the past, those priests who did stand up to organized crime paid the ultimate price. In 1994, Camorra thugs killed Giuseppe Diana, known as Father Peppino, with two bullets to his head at his church in Casal di Principe as he prepared for mass. Father Peppino had crossed a line, essentially questioning how the various bosses could claim to be devout Catholics when they were killing members of the local communities. He had set up a center for African migrants to try to save them from working for the Camorra, and he had testified in criminal trials against clan members.
In Gomorrah, Saviano, who grew up in Casal di Principe, described the power struggle that led to Father Peppino’s brutal murder. “In the land of the Camorra, the Christian message is not considered contradictory to Camorra activities: if the clan acts for the good of all its affiliates, the organization is seen as respecting and pursuing the Christian good,” he wrote.
Religion is a constant point of reference for the Camorra, not merely as a propitiatory gesture of a cultural relic, but a spiritual force that determines the most intimate decisions. Camorra families, especially the most charismatic bosses, often consider their own actions as Calvary, their own conscience bearing the pain and weight of sin for the well-being of the group and men they rule.
Pope Francis has been the most vocal pontiff to speak out against organized crime members personally, decreeing that they are excommunicated if they belong to the syndicates. He has also held a number of masses with Mafia victims, during which he wears Father Peppino’s purple stole. In 2015, he traveled to Scampìa outside of Naples, where the Le Vele crack houses are, and met with children of Mafia families under heavy security, telling many in the audience that if they subscribe to a life of crime, the Church has no place for them.44
The Camorra is not as sophisticated in structure as the much older Sicilian Cosa Nostra Mafia, which dates back to the late-nineteenth century and is much more famous thanks to its ties to the American Mafia, whose members are Cosa Nostra descendants that emigrated from Sicily, as well as iconic films like The Godfather. The Sicilian Mafia operates under a pyramid structure, so when the big boss or “capo” is arrested, he must be replaced. The Camorra is made up of clans and families that share the division of power on a linear scale, which means even multiple arrests won’t affect the group’s overall power and influence. Families and gangs, known as clans, are loosely connected through alliances based on territories, towns and sectors. The most powerful is the Casalesi clan, which controls the territory around the Land of Fires.
The Camorra’s haphazard structure gives way to fierce and often deadly infighting among the clans. But it also allows for individual clans to form alliances – however fragile – with groups like the Nigerian gangs who pose no direct threat to the overall power structure. The Camorra is not the biggest earner of Italy’s crime syndicates. That dubious honor goes to the ‘Ndrangheta, based in Calabria, which conquered the global heroin and cocaine markets in the nineties when it started importing cocaine directly from Columbia. The European Union’s Organized Crime Portfolio estimates that the ‘Ndrangheta drug trade accounts for around three percent of Italy’s GDP.45
Collectively, Italy’s recognized organized criminal gangs have an expansive portfolio, between the businesses they have infiltrated and those they run outright. Beyond the lucrative trades in drugs and arms trafficking, the groups also prosper from counterfeiting, construction, racketeering, gambling, money laundering, blackmail, bribery, kidnapping and toxic waste management in addition to extortion, loan sharking and other petty crimes. Essentially, anything illegal.
According to decades of research, Italy’s organized crime syndicates rarely deal directly with the sex trafficking and Nigerian sex slavery racket. They will happily take a cut from Nigerian groups that run the racket, but they rarely get into pimping. It’s too dirty and in stark contrast to their own views on women and sex. Paying for sex is not something most gangsters think real men should need to do; if a woman won’t succumb to their charm, power or money, where is the conquest? Where is the proof of valor? Many crime bosses find the whole business of dealing in the sale of sex rather beneath them, though it would be wrong to say no gangster has ever paid for sex.
There are exceptions, of course, like the well-known case of the enterprising Ukrainian prostitute working along the Domitiana who was shot in both legs in 2014. She was apparently there without a pimp and there was no way to make her pay for her spot on the sidewalk without one, so a Camorra thug shot her, reportedly as a lesson to the Nigerian madams to keep better control of the Domitiana.
There are also instances in Naples where various clans own massage parlors where sex is sold, and at least one “love park” exists in the city, where a Camorra clan member sets up plastic hanging dividers on clothes lines in an abandoned field and Eastern European prostitutes rent compartments for €5 per trick. To keep them honest, the prostitutes are given cellphones and told to send a text message to the clansman whenever they solicit a client so that he can keep an exact tab on how much the women have to pay at the end of every day. The idea of a camera was apparently too invasive, and nothing about the whole setup is apparently illegal enough to prohibit, at least in Naples.
None of that means that they don’t get their hands dirty with the exploitation of migrants and refugees. On the contrary, the Camorra and other syndicates make hefty profits from the misery and desperation of those coming to Italy from the sea.
In the summer of 2015, Italian officials found makeshift prisons in a number of southern Italian cities filled with migrants and refugees who had left the authorized camps after their asylum requests had been denied. Most of them were sub-Saharan Africans who were being held until they could be sold into forced labor or until their families at home paid hefty ransoms. One of these squalid prisons near Naples was run by a Camorra clan member and was filled with more than two hundred men and a handful of Nigerian women who hadn’t been picked up by madams for sex slavery, either because they were too old or because they had disabilities or other hindrances that would lower their earning potential. They were held in extreme heat with no running water and given only one meal a day. The handful of situations like this that are discovered mean that there are many more that remain hidden.
Italy’s ongoing battle with corruption and lawlessness is the base on which all other forms of criminality are built. When one ponders how it can be that such blatant sex trafficking of women can occur in a place like Italy, the only answer can be that the Mafia state that exists allows for it. In essence, the networks of organized crime are a perfect breeding ground for other types of criminality to prosper.
Bullet holes and shrines still mark the spot where six Africans were killed by a Camorra hitman as they tried to escape the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop on the Via Domitiana on 18 September 2008.
5
Massacres and Alliances
“Women die out there all the time. They just get rid of the bodies and no one looks back. There is no one there to protect the women, and the longer they stay, the more fear sets into their bones.” – Blessing Okoedion, a victim of sex trafficking turned advocate for victims’ rights
CASTEL VOLTURNO – The Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop would be out of place almost anywhere in Europe. But it was especially so along the Domitiana on the outskirts of Castel Volturno when it opened in the mid-2000s. A thin glass pane door with peeling white paint opened to a large room with beige floor tiles and institutional gray walls that took on a lime-green hue from the buzzing fluorescent lights above. A worn wooden table in the center of the room was piled high with carefully folded cloth, some white linen for traditional summer suits, some colorful African cloth that would soon be transformed into made-to-measure clothes sewn by the shop’s tailor, who was from Ghana. Two different sized well-worn headless tailor’s mannequins stood in the corner next to a side table with an old Singer sewing machine.
It was in the center of a strip mall along a rare curve on
the Domitiana, across the street from a large Chinese shop selling cheap clothing and housewares. The store to the left of the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop still houses a dark, narrow pet shop that smells of bird droppings and ammonia. A scrawny Italian woman with visible needle tracks in her thin arms sells cat litter at the back of the shop, past a wall with noisy songbirds she keeps in tiny rusting cages. The police keep a watch on the pet shop, which is apparently not a pet shop at all, but a cover for something else.
On the other side of what used to be Ob Ob Exotic Fashions is a small beauty parlor with tattered green velvet chairs and tarnished mirrors. It was run by a well-known madam known as Lady Ga Ga, who was said to own around a dozen Nigerian girls whom she would dispatch to parties hosted by wealthy Italians to supplement their work on the sidewalk. She left in 2009, apparently for northern Italy, where she reportedly took a number of her Nigerian women to expand her trade there. Blowjobs are worth €10 on the Domitiana but fetch €5 more in the north.
Now a plump African woman named Betty has the parlour, which is lined with beauty products catering to African women, from hair oils to make-up. The front door to the beauty parlour is made of flimsy Plexiglas, but a back room is secured by a thick security door with double locks. A side door leads to a small, fenced-in yard where a large cappuccino-colored Neapolitan Mastiff guard dog is kept on a worn rope-leash that is not tied to anything in particular.
Betty doesn’t take walk-ins in her shop, which is thought to front a connection house that is protected by the security door. A local policeman says Italian men frequently go into the beauty parlor, but rarely come back out with their hair cut. The first time I went to the beauty parlor, identifying myself as a journalist and asking about the history of the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop next door, a young girl who couldn’t have been more than five years old was sitting in one of the green velvet barber chairs, playing with a blonde Barbie doll that had been colored brown with a marker and whose synthetic hair had been braided into tiny cornrows. When I spoke to her, Betty said she had never heard of the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop, despite the fact that the bullet holes are still present on her beauty parlour wall.
When I pressed Betty for more details, a Nigerian man who seemed as wide as he was tall came out from behind the security door and asked me if I needed help. Betty looked down at the floor and the little girl ran out of the side door to play with the dog. I left out of fear and concern that he might think that I was somehow trying to help Betty, who looked afraid. I went back several weeks later. Betty met me at the door and directed me to leave before I could even walk in.
When it first opened, Ob Ob Exotic Fashions was thought to be a cover for the emerging drug trafficking trade run by the Nigerian criminal gangs who had, at that time, just started settling in the area around Castel Volturno. It was shortly after the time when the Camorra started trafficking South American drugs through West Africa to try to get around clampdowns along the traditional routes that had been used to bring the drugs straight to Europe by sea or through other South American ports. It proved much more efficient to go through West Africa because there were fewer controls, which cut down on loss and was much faster. Nigerian and Ghanaian drug traffickers were drawn to this part of Italy based on the sheer volume of drugs they were helping bring in, which seemed to suggest a competitive market.
Many of the Nigerian and Ghanaian men who worked as runners for the Camorra were growing tired of watching the Italian criminals take all the profits. Seeking to cut out the mobsters, the gangs started developing their own competitive racket, charging less than the Camorra because they could bring the drugs in from West Africa themselves.
Local anti-Mafia and anti-drug trafficking authorities across Europe and South America were watching the phenomenon evolve slowly. Then, suddenly, in 2006, the demand for South American drugs in West Africa skyrocketed, implying that the Nigerian racket was taking off.
Rather than intercept the drugs, the cops monitored the shifting movements of the drug trafficking network, trailing many African men they knew ferried the heroin and cocaine for the Camorra and other Italian criminal gangs throughout Europe and beyond. The established alliances seemed to be changing and, with ever more frequency, the drugs went directly to the Nigerian traffickers in and around Castel Volturno, essentially cutting out the Italians who had established the trade in the first place. The police, who understood how the Camorra and the other Mafias worked, were concerned.
There were sporadic arrests of the Nigerian workhorses of the network, but for the most part the intelligence gained from monitoring their activity was far more beneficial than putting two-bit pushers in jail. As it was, much of the activity operated in the open. If more arrests were made, authorities feared they would have pushed the activity further underground, which would have made it harder to monitor.
The emerging drug business in and around Castel Volturno didn’t go unnoticed by the Camorra, either. They too were watching the Nigerians develop their own racket. As has long been the case, nothing happens in a criminal syndicate’s territory without the express permission of those who control that territory, but the Nigerians hadn’t bothered following protocol. Fearful that the business would spread to threaten their long-established heroin trade in nearby Scampìa, local members of the Camorra’s Casalesi clan, who ran the territory north of Naples, started threatening the Nigerian drug pushers, demanding they pay a cut of the profits. The Nigerian gangs didn’t take them very seriously. Sometimes they paid some of the protection money. Other times they ignored the men who came to collect it.
Whether the Nigerian gang leaders underestimated the power and vengeance of the Camorra or whether they were trying to take over the local trade remains unclear, but at around 9 p.m. on 18 September 2008, on the eve of the religious celebration of the Neapolitan patron saint Gennaro, a car pulled up in front of the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop and a hit man pulled out a Kalashnikov and opened fire, killing six African men as they ran from the shop. His associate waited in the getaway car. In all, 120 bullets were spent on the massacre, which lasted only a few minutes.
Within minutes the killers were gone, leaving the dead Africans like a calling card on the sidewalk, which was covered with blood from the spray of bullets. The victims were Samuel Kwaku, twenty-six; Alaj Ababa, thirty-one; Francis Antwi, thirty-one; Eric Affum Yeboah, twenty-five; Alex Geemes, twenty-eight; and Cristopher Adams, twenty-eight. Witnesses who heard the gunfire and saw the river of blood spoke of a scene reminiscent of a war zone.46
Twenty minutes before the shooting, the same hit men had taken the life of Antonio Celiento, an Italian man believed to be a police informant who kept tabs on the illegal activity developing in the area. Celiento ran a gaming hall that catered to the growing African community. He was also related to the leader of a rival clan, who was thought to be trying to expand into Casalesi territory. The killers pumped sixty bullets into the Italian’s head and stomach before going on to kill the Africans. It was clear that whoever ordered the hit wanted to send a message that they were watching everything going on in and around Castel Volturno.
The main killer was Alfonso Cesarano, a Casalesi gun for hire who was quickly caught at his parents’ home, which happened to be next door to Celiento’s arcade. The criminal investigation revealed an interesting fact. None of the African men who were murdered were actually affiliated with the Nigerian drug trafficking gangs working to establish business in the area. Instead, they were construction workers from Ghana, Liberia and Togo who mostly did odd jobs for Camorra-controlled companies, according to the memorial obituaries written up for them and posted on the bullet-riddled walls outside the tailor shop. They had met that day at the Ob Ob Exotic Fashions tailor shop to plan an upcoming religious celebration for their families and children.
The Camorra crime syndicate doesn’t make mistakes; they could have easily murdered Africans who were directly involved in the drug trade in their coveted territory. T
he choice to kill people who were on the sidelines was seen as a combination of a warning and an invitation for collaboration. The Camorra could clearly see the benefit of working with the Nigerian gangs, so they were careful not to kill anyone who might one day be a partner. For one, the Nigerians were already able to bring the South American drugs through West Africa to Italy much more cheaply. Second, the Nigerian gangs had proven themselves to be cunning and deadly, which are traits the Camorra admires. Collaboration between the two groups, with the Camorra securely in charge, was a hypothesis first floated the year before the murders took place by Saviano in Gomorrah. His sources in the area told him that the groups either had to unite or there would be gang warfare. But even he was surprised by the violent act, telling me in an interview at the time that the worst possible scenario would be collaboration between the two groups.
In the days following the mass murder, the African community around Castel Volturno rebelled. Men and women took to the Domitiana, smashing cars with lead pipes and beating up local Italians in retaliation. Five Italians affiliated with the Camorra were eventually arrested in addition to Celiento and sentenced to more than twenty years in prison. The saga was memorialized in the award-winning docudrama shot in Castel Volturno called La-Bas: Criminal Education by Guido Lombardi.
The Italian government sent more than four hundred special paramilitary troops to the area to patrol the streets, expelling scores of people who did not have legal working papers and essentially punishing the African community for the Camorra’s crimes.
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