Notorious as a stronghold of the Camorra – one of Italy’s big three Mafia organisations – not long ago, Naples was largely avoided by British tourists. Yet this edgy Mediterranean port city is enjoying a huge tourism boom.
Attracted by low-cost flights and cruises, and chic but affordable new hotels and Airbnb rooms, visitors take day trips to Mount Vesuvius and the Pompeii ruins, and at supper time flock to the Spanish Quarter, whose fine eateries include the world’s oldest pizza parlour, dating back to 1780.
However, the narrowness of the cobbled streets – and the necessity to dodge recklessly speeding motorbikes that buzz through the crowds – makes it difficult for pedestrians to avoid bumping into one another.
It means this crowded warren, where holidaymakers and the Mafiosi literally rub shoulders, is a dangerous place. Because, simply for treading on the wrong person’s foot, in Naples these days, you could fly home in a coffin.
Following a government blitz, a few years ago, most of the Camorra’s old clan bosses are now behind bars.
Yet the vacuum has been filled by a new breed of Gen Z mobster whose stone-hearted ruthlessness makes their fathers and grandfathers seem benign by comparison, and with violent youth crime up by almost 20 per cent, the streets of Naples are again running with blood.
For these so-called paranza (Italian for ‘small fish’), the old Mafia codes that largely forbade the killing of innocent ‘civilians’ no longer applies. Even a trainer accidentally dirtied by the stray foot of a well-intentioned passer-by is motive enough for murder.
The narrowness of Naples’ cobbled streets – and the necessity to dodge recklessly speeding motorbikes – makes it difficult for pedestrians to avoid bumping into one another
Brutalised beyond shock by decades of Camorra-related violence, Neapolitan citizens are in despair after two recent ‘sneaker slayings’. The first of these senseless murders saw a blameless young man fatally wounded by a stray bullet fired by 21-year-old gangster Francesco Pio Valda. He was aiming at a rival who stood on his expensive sports shoe.
The second case reached its conclusion a few days ago, when a baby-faced Camorra wannabe, identifiable only as Luigi because, at 17, he is a minor in Italian law, appeared before a Naples juvenile tribunal.
He admitted murdering Santo Romano, 19, a ‘gentle giant’ amateur football goalkeeper, whose vocal friends and family members gathered to protest outside the courthouse, wearing T-shirts displaying his handsome face.
Among them was his girlfriend, Simona Capone, aged 17, who was by his side when he was cut down by the Mafia boy’s bullet, on a night out with friends last November.
‘We’d been together since I was 12 and planned to be married and have twins, like me,’ she told me, her Latin features etched with grief. ‘Santo was a wonderful person who helped everyone. At first, I had no idea he had been shot. I thought the bang was a firework. How could he die for a sneaker?’
Seventeen-year-old Luigi murdered Santo Romano, after he accused the 19-year-old amateur goalkeeper, of treading on his £425 black Versace trainers
Santo’s friends and family members, including his great-aunt, Arca Vaccaro, centre, protested outside the courthouse, wearing T-shirts displaying his handsome face
How indeed. As we awaited the court verdict, Santo’s best-friend and soccer teammate, Alessandro Marrazzo, 18, told me what happened when his group of friends had the misfortune to cross an aspiring Camorrista.
They were out celebrating Alessandro’s ‘naming day’, a special Italian occasion, and were in good spirits when they passed the swaggering Luigi, a street-food vendor’s son whose way of life is evident from social media posts showing him brandishing a pistol and partying extravagantly on the profits of his crimes.
According to his mother, in a public apology letter to Santo’s family, the teeny-mobster became ‘unmanageable’ two years ago after being detained for drug-dealing and sent to Nisida – a juvenile detention centre on an island off Naples said to have become a ‘training academy’ for Mafia recruits.
Though initial Italian media reports said Luigi had accused Santo of treading on his £425 black Versace trainers, Alessandro says it was actually he whom the boy gangster blamed for the sleight.
Furthermore, Alessandro tells me (shaking his head at the ludicrousness of all this) the real transgressor in this pointless spat was Luigi, who, having stamped on Alessandro’s trainer – he was wearing £800 Louboutins – blamed him and demanded an apology.
‘You could see from the look in his eyes that he wanted trouble, and I knew what kind of boy he was from his clothes – a Versace T-shirt, fake gold jewellery,’ Alessandro told me.
‘In Naples, everybody my age knows how things are. Whenever there’s this kind of problem it’s always Camorra. Even if they’re not real members, they’re trying to join.
‘So, although I’d done nothing wrong, I said I was sorry. But that wasn’t enough for him. He went to his car and got his gun [which Luigi later claimed to have bought for euros500 from Roma gypsies].’
Alessandro adds that Santo, who stood over 6ft and was powerfully built, could easily have beaten the short, slight-framed Luigi in a fair fight. But he was not being aggressive, just trying to smooth things over.
The amateur goalie was shot in the chest at close range and died on the spot. As his friends vainly drove him to hospital, his killer screeched away and hid in a Camorra dosshouse.
Had he been an old-school Mafiosi, he would have gone to ground and stayed schtum. But this new breed flaunt their supposed bravura on TikTok and Instagram, and vanity was his downfall.
Scouring these sites to identify the culprit the following day, Santo’s pals recognised the wispy-moustached Luigi holding his pistol. Another photo showed him posing with Francesco Pio Valda, the ‘baby gangster’ who had committed the first sneaker murder and was evidently an underworld associate.
Last Tuesday he was sentenced to 18 years and eight months – a term promptly cut by three years because he agreed not to appeal.
The verdict so incensed Santo’s mother, Filomena de Mare, that she shouted claims of ‘corruption’ in court and railed at a system which, she says, places the rights of these new Mafia murderers over those of their victims.
It was a claim she repeated when I met her later that evening, at a wake for Santo beside his huge mural, painted on a wall near his home. ‘As long as they can kill nice boys like Santo and get off lightly nothing will change,’ she said.
As Naples reels under a wave of baby gangster murders, it is a view shared by others who have lost their children – often burying them in white coffins to symbolise the purity that marks them out from their assassins.
Prominent among them is Daniela Di Maggio, 55, whose 24-year-old son Giovanbattista, known as ‘Giogio’ – a brilliant classical music composer and French horn player – was snuffed out in another pathetically pointless spat, this time over the parking of a motorbike.
On a birthday night out, Giogio’s friend left the bike outside a nightclub, unwittingly close to that of a 17-year-old whose father heads a Mafia gang specialising in Rolex robbery.
Daniela Di Maggio’s 24-year-old son Giovanbattista, a brilliant French horn player, was murdered in another pathetically pointless spat, this time over the parking of a motorbike
After meeting Daniela, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni scrapped the law allowing juveniles convicted of gun crimes to undergo rehabilitation programmes rather than being jailed
The mobster’s son sought to settle the ensuing ‘beef’ by hitting the musician’s friend over the head with a mayonnaise bottle, then shot Giogio three times as he pleaded for the attack to stop. The murderer spent the rest of the night playing poker with his crew.
Coming just a few months after Italy had been scandalised by another Mafia-related atrocity, in which two girls aged 11 and 12 were repeatedly gang-raped and filmed by teenage boys from Camorra families on a crime-blighted Naples estate, it seemed at first that Giogio’s murder would be the catalyst for effective government action.
After meeting Daniela, who now campaigns fearlessly for a crackdown on young Mafiosi, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni scrapped the law allowing juveniles convicted of gun crimes to undergo rehabilitation programmes rather than being jailed.
As the new wave of mobsters glamorise their lifestyle in social media posts to impress gullible young would-be recruits, the Italian government is also considering extending the ‘apologia’ law – drawn up after the fall of Mussolini to prohibit the promotion of fascism – to cover the Mafia.
Daniela pressed for this move after the eight-year-old brother of her son’s murderer appeared on Instagram, pointing his fingers like a gun, and his aunt took screen shots during a video call with him in prison then posted them online, urging him to ‘keep fighting’ and calling him ‘a lion’.
‘It was like they were killing my son all over again,’ Daniela told me. ‘But Giogio died for a good cause. Before, nobody mentioned these baby gangs, and the laws didn’t work. ‘Now everybody is talking about them and things are changing.’
While loath to contradict this brave woman, I have seen little here to warrant her optimism.
Last month brought a fresh wave of shootouts; and they happened not in the blighted ghettoes where the old Camorra clan bosses vied for territorial control but in the city centre, near popular tourist attractions such as the National Museum of Archaeology, with its prized Pompeian relics.
As his girlfriend cowered in the passenger seat, two young hit-boys drew their motorbike alongside 20-year-old Emanuele Durante’s car and brutally ended his suspected role in the latest internecine Camorra clan feud.
Eager to show off the supposed efficacy of Meloni’s solution to the crisis – an iron fist in a velvet glove – I was taken last week to see her model for a Mafia-free society in Parco Verde, Caivano, the Naples satellite town where the two little girls were horrifically abused.
A depressing cluster of yellowish prefab blocks built for refugees from the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, which claimed almost 2,500 lives and left 250,000 people homeless, it was colonised by the Camorra who used its flats as stash-houses for drugs and weaponry and made it a no-go zone for outsiders.
After the rapes were exposed, however, Meloni launched a reclaiming operation. To root out suspected Camorra infiltration, the mayor and his officials were removed from office.
Filomena De Mare, Santo’s mother, stands in front of a mural dedicated to her son, showing a football stadium and his goalkeeper gloves
Brutalised by decades of Camorra-related violence, Neapolitan citizens protested outside the court house during Luigi’s trial
Hundreds of armed carabinieri blocked off the Parco Verde estate and evicted suspected Mafia members from the flats, then boarded them up, leaving scores of families homeless and without social services help.
Meanwhile, the Right-wing government pumped millions into renovation. I was shown around a once-derelict Mafia drugs haunt that has been turned into a fine new sports centre.
Children who would have been prisoners in their flats only a few months ago were having swimming and boxing lessons while their mothers socialised. Other buildings will be used by Naples’s universities; there is a pleasant new park.
Unless Caivano is dynamited and totally rebuilt, however, I left with the sense that it was all window-dressing, and that in the long run nothing here will change.
As with the Mafia clans of Sicily and Calabria, the Camorra is rooted in a centuries-old loathing for the establishment that has passed down the generations and these draconian measures have served only to cement it.
At a pizza restaurant opposite the neglected local school, I met Angela D’Amico, a tattooed mother of three with painted-on eyebrows. She and her children, aged 15, 14, and ten, were evicted in the anti-Mafia raid.
‘Yes, people living in our flats sold drugs and were involved with…’ her voice trailed off because, in these parts, it is unwise even to say the word Camorra. ‘But I wasn’t one of them, I just refused to name the guilty ones.
‘Now we sleep at my father’s house. There’s no work here and the jobs they promised at the new sports centre have been taken by outsiders, so the kids still have no prospects. If they want to stop them turning to crime, they should do something that really turns their lives around.’
As she spoke, she was eyed suspiciously by a group of teenage boys loitering around the restaurant, whose owner, Francesco, had somehow managed to acquire the business – with a gleaming new pizza oven – at 18 years old.
‘It’s changed round here now,’ he told me airily. ‘The old guys are all abroad or in prison. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have been standing here talking to me.’
Returning to the Piazza Nazionale area, whose blue-collar residents are also in thrall to young Mafiosi, I found an oasis of genuine positivity.
Bizarrely, the ‘Little Kids Voice’, a respite centre for the children of crime families, is situated in a villa once owned by the local Camorra boss nicknamed Bambu, who kept a lion in the garden to scare off rivals.
Its founder, Catholic priest Luigi Merola, tells me that 90 per cent of the boys and girls who come here after school, to play and learn vocational crafts, have parents in prison. Brainwashed from birth to follow the same path, however, their determination to escape their destiny was uplifting.
In 2019, the father of Andrea, aged 12, was involved in what he naively calls ‘an ambush’ – in truth a terrifying shootout in the busy piazza that left a four-year-old girl with life-changing injuries.
While he clearly adores his drug-dealer daddy and visits him in prison, this bright lad says he plans to be ‘an entrepreneur’ of a very different kind when he grows up.
Small rays of hope. In the city that is breeding the successors to Scarface – terrifying teenagers who will fill you with lead for treading on their shoes – they were never more needed.
- Additional reporting by CRISTINA CENNAMO
