He drew on his cigarette as he eyed me momentarily and then pronounced with the firmness of absolute knowledge, “money laundering.”
I was in the squad room of a mobile anti-Mafia police unit in the city of Caserta in Campania, Italy’s southwest region famous for a dramatic coastline, ancient ruins, Naples, and the Camorra.
Vicious feuds inside the Camorra, one of Italy’s top three crime syndicates, over drug market shares were the focus of the internationally successful blood-drenched Italian television series “Gomorrah.”
The police chief made the pronouncement after I’d told him my second home was near the town of Viterbo, on the northern outskirts of Rome. It had always struck me that Viterbo has a suspiciously large number of banks despite a population under 50,000. The Caserta police officer clearly knew about those banks, too.
And a local real estate agent once told me that much of the funding for a recent surge of strip mall and residential construction appeared to be coming from Campania and Sicily. There has even been local talk of burly men, impeccably dressed, arriving with suitcases of cash.
I was in Caserta to discuss links between migrant trafficking and the Mafia. The Italian media has made much of the tie-up.
Europe’s migration has been a boon to organized crime groups across the continent, linking them to trafficking networks on the southern shore of the Mediterranean and stretching deep down into sub-Saharan Africa. Some European crime syndicates have been garnering higher profits from human smuggling than from narcotics and the black market arms trade, according to European police chiefs.
But not the Camorra clans. They have mainly stood aside from people trafficking, leaving it to newly arrived African mobsters, mostly Nigerians. The Camorra don’t let the Nigerians have this business for nothing, and merely extract regular tributes from the Africans for letting them run their trade from Italian turf.
I was told that Camorra profits from people smuggling aren’t big enough. And that helps put into perspective the capture earlier this month of Italy’s infamous Il Fantasma, or the Ghost, a top Camorrista nabbed in Naples. Police burst in on him as he was tucking into a plate of pasta in a cramped apartment he shared with a woman.
The 38-year-old “super fugitive” Marco Di Lauro, who’s been on the run for 15 years and was second on Italy’s most wanted list, had been hiding pretty much in plain sight, despite a Europe-wide manhunt. The apartment was a short drive away from Scampia, a shabby Neapolitan suburb, long the stronghold of the Di Lauro clan.
I can guess the reaction of my Caserta-based police chief at Il Fantasma’s arrest. He thinks, and belabored the point to me, that the media have a simplistic take on the Mafia, including the Camorra, and because of that, reporters get overexcited about the capture of this boss or another. Politicians vying for headlines are no better, he suggested.
Taking out individual bosses helps, but it will only get you so far in defeating the Mafia.
That was the point about his highlighting money laundering — that Mafia syndicates are enmeshed in business, banking, and politics. And while they still profit hugely from drug trafficking, extortion, and prostitution, they’re fully diversified and have spread far beyond their origins.
With the Camorra, diversification has taken them into massive public sector fraud, construction contracts, and waste management, better described as mismanagement. Camorra-run waste companies have for years been dumping toxic waste in the countryside between the cities of Naples and Caserta, earning the area the nickname “Death Triangle.”
Jamie Dettmer is an international correspondent and broadcaster for VOA.
