Roadmap to Hell

by Barbie Latza Nadeau

  Though it’s hard to believe now, the Boomerang Hotel was once a popular weekend getaway, where middle-class Romans and Neapolitans could bring their mistresses. It was closed for good in the mid-2000s, confiscated as part of a crackdown on the Camorra’s illegal land grab.

  Now, the abandoned structure is a popular crack house. At least once a year, police conduct raids and routinely find the stiff bodies of dead drug addicts in rooms that used to be the upstairs suites. Sometimes the squatters call the cops and then disappear while they come to collect the corpses. Other times, when the rotting smell becomes overwhelming, they drag the bodies out into the forest. Once, a man with the syringe still stuck in his vein under a tourniquet was carried out to sea with the tide. He washed back up a few miles down the beach, and though the authorities assumed he came from the Boomerang, he could equally have died at any of the similar crack houses along the beachfront.

  In 2014, a raid of the hotel netted twenty-one Nigerian men who were thought to be local drug bosses working out of the Boomerang. The cops condemned the old hotel once again, boarding up the open doors and windows with plywood and cement blocks. Within a week, however, the new drug bosses had knocked through the boards with a sledgehammer and it was back open for business.

  Piles of plastic syringes and empty Coke bottles float on the dark green algae in the abandoned swimming pool, now fed by winter rains. Overgrown yucca trees bend and twist across the hotel’s main entrance. Dazed men walk around the structure like zombies, maintaining a mind-bending high with regular trips to the lower levels, where the drugs are sold in one-hit doses.51

  Outside, the used plastic syringes crunch like frozen snow under foot. A thick carpet of used clothing and food wrappers covers the cement floors. Stacks of bricks have been assembled to form makeshift toilets in the former upstairs bathrooms in an abandoned wing of the hotel. Every now and then someone scoops up the odorous feces with a stained shovel that leans against the wall and throws it out of the window into the garden below.

  Drying laundry, some of it so old it is covered in mold, hangs on rudimentary clotheslines strung along the fences outside and across some of the now glassless windows upstairs. The once-manicured gardens have been invaded by plastic bottles, empty tinfoil rolls and human and dog excrement. Pieces of torn up foam mattress are scattered everywhere like confetti. The stench of urine, unwashed bodies and rotting food is almost overwhelming, but none of the regular residents seem to notice. Stray dogs and cats with matted fur wander in and out of the building, nibbling on crumbs left for them by the addicts.

  Most days, an older Nigerian woman named Sally brings in rice dishes and other meals she sells for a few euro a plate. Some of the Domitiana girls have a permanent presence in the former concierge rooms where mattresses are spread out on the floors to cater to the addicts who want more than just drugs. Most of these women are addicts, too, essentially spending what’s left after they’ve paid their madams with the pushers who operate on the lower floors. It is an uneasy place to visit, even with an undercover police officer, made more so by the fact that no one is sober or aware enough really to notice us.

  As many as fifty people sleep at the Boomerang most nights, many of whom also work as drug mules for the Nigerian gangs by day. The Boomerang is in the part of Castel Volturno known as the “Volturno Destra” on the right side of a river that divides the town in half and spills into the sea. It is the epicenter of the degradation and Nigerian-led lawlessness that Italians try to avoid.52 Police keep an eye on what’s going on, but don’t do much to stop it because it’s more useful to them to use the Nigerian criminals to keep an eye on the Camorra’s drug-trafficking activities.

  The Camorra drug trade easily prospers in this part of the Land of Fires with the help of the Nigerian gangs, running a monthly profit of well over $10 million, according to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Their business model is based on catering to addicts, selling heroin and a very pure crack cocaine that is known on the street as “zero zero zero” (000), the European bakers’ term for the finest grade of flour available on the market.

  The UNODC monitors both small and large-scale shipments of South American drugs into Europe, which they say are now mainly transported by way of West Africa, where the Nigerians based in and around Castel Volturno originated. Most of the trafficking is done by private aircraft from Columbia and Venezuela straight to Nigeria, Ghana and other West African nations.53 From there the drugs are smuggled into Italy and Spain by land, air or sea. Authorities say that the Camorra and Italy’s other crime gangs increasingly rely on their Nigerian collaborators to facilitate the smuggling. Once on the European continent, the drugs are trafficked by Italians and some Eastern Europeans working for the Camorra to the United Kingdom, France and Germany – which, along with Italy and Spain, account for seventy-five percent of the European market.

  Larger quantities of the drugs are creatively hidden in containers on cargo ships that dock at ports in southern Italy, Spain and Gibraltar.54 Authorities don’t rule out the movement of smaller quantities of drugs across the Sahara, which has been a merchant route for illicit goods and migrating people since record-keeping began. Trafficked women have also admitted to carrying moderate stashes of cocaine across the desert. Those who do it say they were told it would pay for their transit, although the credit never seems to be applied to their final debts.

  Still, the UNODC says no large-scale seizure of drugs or other contraband has ever occurred in the Sahara Desert, although that is likely due to a lack of vigilance rather than the absence of smuggling. Patrolling the desert routes for drugs would also help stop the trafficking of women to Europe, though such initiatives are never even mentioned when authorities meet to discuss what can be done to combat the problem.

  The growing presence of ISIS militants in Libya makes the desert transit risky for drug traffickers as well, since the group has been known to overlook their own prohibition of drug use and steal the drugs to sell in the areas they control to fund their fight against the West, though they generally leave the trafficked Nigerian women alone.55 The United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which follows several different drug trafficking routes, says that ISIS militants often “tax” the shipments that cross through their territory, claiming that, in 2016, seven percent of ISIS revenue in Libya came directly from the production, taxation or trafficking of drugs. Other militia groups operating in Libya hold the drug shipments hostage, demanding handsome ransoms. Everyone, it seems, has found an opportunity to make money on the trade in one way or another.

  Since Libya has turned into a failed state under the control of a handful of militia groups, drugs are also believed increasingly to be flown straight into Libyan airports on small aircraft from West African nations. Sometimes the drugs are then moved by complicit fishermen and luxury yacht operators who can easily navigate between North African and Italian and Spanish ports without raising suspicion. These types of drug smugglers are often paid in cocaine, which deters theft and essentially makes them business partners. It also means they will take the fall alone if they get caught.

  Not all drug shipments go through West Africa and Libya to get to Europe, however. In early 2017, Italian authorities, who had been tracking a freighter suspected of carrying drugs directly to Italy from Brazil, confiscated $84 million worth of pure cocaine bundled into seventeen waterproof bags. The crew had tossed the cargo into the sea south of Naples, near the notorious port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria. The waterproof parcels were attached to buoys and had GPS trackers. Officials implicated the ‘Ndrangheta Mafia based in Calabria, which came into the drug market late, but has quickly become the worldwide leader in cocaine trafficking, followed by the Camorra, according to the Italian police’s annual report on the global drug trade.

  Part of the ‘Ndrangheta’s success comes from a business model that relies on emigrating mobsters into Latin America. By sending the Mafiosi there to help set up the networks and guide the traf
ficking, they have been able to reach an astonishing level of financial success, bringing in around $66 billion in drug revenue a year and controlling more than eighty percent of Europe’s drug trade, according to UNODC – not bad for a group of gangsters who started as small-time thugs kidnapping businessmen from rich families for ransom money. The ‘Ndrangheta is not yet known to have made an alliance with Nigerian gangs, and the presence of trafficked women is rare in the deep southern regions of Calabria. On one hand, there is a distinct lack of clientele there, and on the other, ‘Ndrangheta men are very particular about women, and are staunchly against paying for sex out of basic masculine pride.

  Once the drugs arrive in Italy, the distribution networks are well-oiled machines. Nowhere is that more apparent than in and around Naples. For years, the Camorra ran their operations out of a pyramid-shaped housing complex called Le Vele (“The Sails”) in the rundown suburb of Scampìa, north of Naples.

  I visited Le Vele in 2008 for a story for Newsweek magazine just after Matteo Garrone’s film Gomorrah, based on Saviano’s book, came out.56 I was at once struck by the open criminality I witnessed there; so arrogant no one even tried to hide it from the cameras. There was no fear of getting caught, no sense that what was going on was particularly wrong. Many of the corridors and walkways through the complex had heavy gates that could swing and lock automatically in seconds, installed by the Camorra to keep out the cops.

  I went with a Neapolitan photographer recommended to me by Saviano, who said he could get me in and out. I paid €87 in protection money to Lorenzo Lipurali, a chubby man in a Napoli soccer team sweatshirt who acted as our tour guide.

  While we were there, a television crew from France was held up at knifepoint in another part of the complex. They apparently refused to pay any protection money, so the Camorra thugs collected it their own way.

  The whole complex, condemned for destruction, was impeccably clean despite the bullet-ridden windows and mice that scurried freely through the corridors. Those who live there are squatters who have rigged up electrical systems, heating and sewage along the lines of what is set up in the Coppola ruins in Castel Volturno, in a practice that is common in the poorest parts of southern Italy. Mr. Lipurali’s apartment smelled like ammonia and pine cleaner, and his impeccably groomed fourteen-year-old daughter Anna served us coffee out of tiny plastic cups that were later discarded out of the windows. In a surreal moment, Mr. Lipurali pulled out a bootlegged copy of Garrone’s film and slipped it into a DVD player attached to a massive flat-screen television in his living room. Suddenly, the same scene I could see from outside his window was playing on the TV. He fast-forwarded to the part where he played himself as a resident helping neighbors move a giant sofa down several floors with a rope.

  Later that day, I bought my own bootlegged copy of Gomorrah from an African vendor on the Via Roma in Naples for three euro, a sort of souvenir from a strange assignment I was quite relieved to have survived unscathed.

  Saviano, by then, was under police escort with a Camorra death sentence hanging over his head, but the truth of the matter was that everyone I met around that area sort of liked the infamy that his account of their miserable lives gave them. Mr. Lipurali’s fifteen seconds of fame were a defining moment for him, a lifetime achievement of sorts, despite the irony of playing himself as a lowlife thug.

  Mr. Lipurali took us down to the basement where the heroin shots were sold to those waiting in expensive SUVs, scooters and beat-up Fiats double-parked outside. There was a fold-up table where a clearly stoned woman sold Coca Cola, chocolate bars and syringes for one euro each. Kids who live in the complex came down to buy the soda and chocolate, often waiting in line behind the staggering drug addicts there for the heroin.

  In 2012, anti-drug police conducted a series of raids of the basements of Le Vele, arresting scores of pushers and their clients and vowing to level the complex, although at the time of writing in 2017 it is still standing. The arrests only served to push the open-market drug trade to the nearby village of Afragola under a similar setup, in the process giving more business to the Nigerians in Castel Volturno.

  The Nigerians sell cocaine and heroin in Castel Volturno for slightly cheaper prices than the Camorra, even though they give a cut of the profits in the form of protection money or pizzo to the Camorra. Aside from the fact that no one would expect to pay the Nigerians the same price they pay Italians, which is a theory held in the sex trade as well, a reason for this discrepancy in price is the direct connections to the sources in South America they have through contacts in West Africa. Another reason is that they are said to cut the drug with “fillers,” which decreases the quality and the production costs. Nigerian cocaine does not share the Camorra’s “000” ranking.

  The customers who prefer the Nigerian drug market often combine the drugs with sex, taking advantage of the availability of sex slaves along the Domitiana. It is common for connection houses to work with drug dealers and vice versa to make it easy for customers to do one-stop shopping. The Nigerians also supply other pushers, African and otherwise, who buy large and medium quantities to distribute across Italy and Europe.

  Italy’s organized crime groups are fierce competitors with one another, but they all take advantage of the same weak links in Italy’s corrupt systems. They all exploit the incoming migrants by siphoning funds off the shelters and they all work around Italy’s weak tax structure that makes it easy to launder money and avoid taxes. The reason these powerful syndicates are allowed to exist is because the country’s leaders don’t have the resolve to stop them either out of fear or affiliation.

  The whole drug-selling set-up is a perfect example of how easy it is to operate outside the law in southern Italy. It is well documented by a wide range of authorities, which can’t effectively stop it because its roots are buried too deeply in the Neapolitan and Italian DNA. The drug trade, just like the sex trafficking racket, is too vast to root out easily. Most of the drugs are stored in small parcels in houses owned by local people who aren’t even part of the Camorra but who rent out their basements and storage rooms for extra cash. It’s not easy to say no to the Camorra, so few do. The sense of obligation and omertà is too strong to fracture. More than that, fear of death tends to keep people quiet and cooperative.

  Little goes on in Castel Volturno without the police knowing. Sex trafficking is of course against the law, but since prostitution is legal, police more often than not turn a blind eye to the sordid details about how the women get there, even though they know blatant exploitation is ruining scores of lives. Nazzaro, the journalist and Five-Star spokesman who grew up in the area, points out that it takes at least three people to save a Nigerian from her pimp: a translator, a lawyer and an immigration specialist who can determine if the woman should be deported due to false documents or taken to a shelter like Casa Ruth. Police, instead, tend to deal with more acute problems, like murders, which can happen at a rate of around ten a month at the hands of the Camorra.

  Arms

  A bigger priority for authorities than the illicit drugs and sex trades is the fast-growing illegal arms trade that police say is tied to terrorist groups sympathetic to ISIS.57 Police have found scores of caches of weapons and munitions buried in the Camorra hinterland, ready for pick-up by mercenaries they believe are headed north to Germany, France, Belgium and the UK to carry out attacks. It is no great coincidence that Italy’s anti-terrorism and anti-Mafia investigators are one and the same. It would be redundant to separate the two investigative arms.

  Italians like to use the word malaffare, which translates to “malfeasance,” or “wrongdoing,” in English, and they often use it to describe illegal activity linked to the accepted cultural norms, such as corruption in the public and private sector as well as all that is tied to organized crime in southern Italy. Enzo Di Ciaccio is a veteran Italian journalist who has spent his long career chronicling the malaffare of the criminal world in the Land of Fires. He is lucky to be alive and he knows i
t. He is effectively embedded with the various clans of the Camorra, and as such is able to operate much like a war correspondent who becomes trusted as he follows the same battalions in conflict. They don’t always like what he writes, but he’s still alive, which is a show of respect of sorts.

  He calls Castel Volturno the “ideal refuge for the desperate of the southern hemisphere,” describing it as a perfect training ground for “terrorists and aspiring jihadists, where black prevails over white, where one lives without rules, and where the Italian state has abdicated any kind of presence.” He is quick to point out that nowhere else in Italy is there a community in which the majority of its population consists of documented or undocumented Africans. That, he says, combined with such a strong criminal presence like the Camorra, makes it an anomaly that authorities find almost impossible to control, in part because they just don’t know how. They have no power over either group.

  He and others have pointed to faulty legislation that makes arms smuggling relatively easy and risk-free. Italy is a major producer of weapons – the seventh largest exporter in the world in 2016 – which means all kinds of weapons are readily available, though they can’t easily be sold on the black market because those produced legally are well documented. To facilitate the importation of certain components needed to build these arms for export without tedious customs forms and permission requests, Italian customs don’t prohibit bringing in the individual pieces of weapons of war, so long as they come into the country deconstructed. On his blog, Lettura 43, Ciaccio mocks the existing laws. “Just pack up pieces of pistols, rifles, machine guns and Kalashnikovs because they are considered harmless metallic carpentry and escape any serious controls.”