How Italy Tamed The Mafia
Niko talks to recovering gangsters in the heartland of the Italian mob
While the U.S.-Mexico-Cartel bomb is at the point of explosion, there are other important mob stories round the planet, some with happier endings. I couldn’t claim to run a Substack on organized crime without looking at the literal original gangsters, in Italy. Niko Vorobyov, our own “Nabokov of narco journalism,” who premiered with this great story from a Bolivian prison, follows with a gripping dispatch from the old country. He got so much killer material it’s in two parts. IG
By Niko Vorobyov
Bruno Mazza was eleven when his dad died and he began rolling with a street gang in Parco Verde, a slum on the outskirts of Naples and stronghold of the Camorra mafia. It was 1991, and Italy hit a new peak of violence with 1,916 murders, most in the mafia-infested south of the country. Many businesses, especially in Sicily, had to pay “pizzo,” or protection to the mob. In 1992, the crusading anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone was assassinated. For youths like Bruno, the mafiosi appeared an unshakeable force that offered a tempting career path.
“We didn’t study, we’d steal,” Bruno tells me in his home in Parco Verde, after feeding us spaghetti and giving the left-overs to a pair of stray dogs waiting patiently outside. “Then we got suspended from school, so we came back here and stole some more. They lived in a world of rules and order. We lived in the jungle. The cops were corrupt at the time, so we’d do a robbery and then they’d demand a watch or something, and let us go.”
At one point, Bruno and his mates stole an ambulance siren from a hospital and set up a fake police checkpoint for robberies. His talents were noticed by the Ciccarelli-Russo clan, one of over a hundred clans in the Camorra, which runs crime in the Campania region.
By 1997, Bruno was placed in charge of a drug-dealing spot, responsible for deliveries of 10 to 15 kilos of coke a week. Then a gang war erupted with the Natale-Marino clan which would claim 16 lives, starting with Bruno’s boss, Vincenzo Mele.
“We had a meeting with their boss about the death of Vincenzo Mele,” Bruno remembers. “We wanted to ask why they’d killed him – we are friends, we have to talk. They were in the car with guns and they opened fire. Another time they tried to shoot me with a Kalashnikov, but I ducked behind a Vespa and they hit an old man who was walking close by. At that time I always carried a gun, every day. I’d kill someone if I was told to, unless the guy was with his wife and little daughter.”
Since the blood-soaked nineties, however, Italy has transformed. After a stint in prison, Bruno now works to keep the neighborhood kids out of trouble, teaching them to play football, make pots and repair bicycles. The level of extortion payments has plummeted. And by 2021 there were only 303 homicides across the whole of Italy, of which merely 23 were related to organized crime. It’s now among the safest countries in Europe. How did this happen?
Italy was of course never in the league of cartel violence of Mexico. But it still had a deep problem of mafia bloodshed that has turned around. Can Mexico and other countries learn from what they did?
Traveling to the mob heartlands in southern Italy, I explored the history of the mafia and talked to those who lived through the change about what worked. A mafia murderer known as Genny Earthquake describes how he flipped to become an informant and took down bosses. An anti-mafia activist details how he got people to stand up and refuse to pay extortion. A psychologist tells me about the controversial tactic of taking children away from mafia families.
They offer crucial insight as well as some bloody and colorful tales. And they give hope that change is possible.
Brotherly Love
While Parco Verde, where Bruno lives, may mean ‘Green Park’, the apartment blocks are a sickly shade of yellow…
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