How Italy Tamed The Mafia: Part Two
Is it right to give mafia killers a deal? Or to take kids away from gangster families?
For part one, click here.
By Niko Vorobyov
When the Italian police came for the Camorra killer Genny Earthquake (or Gennaro Panzuto) in Naples he ran to sunny England. He was picked up at the airport in a Rolls Royce and immediately driven to the pub; he settled in a trailer park (caravan site) in Lancashire.
“For me, England is freedom. But it’s cold and the food is no good. No good pizza,” the Earthquake tells me. He says this as we sit in a restaurant in Naples and munch on perhaps the best pizza I've had in my life – welcome to Eataly.
Genny was sheltered in England by a dodgy businessman, a Camorra associate who exported shoes to Naples without paying the proper tax. And when his British hosts needed a favor he stepped in; a cocky businessman was refusing to pay his debts so Genny bit the deadbeat’s ear off in a parking lot.
“My partner introduced me to these people in Liverpool as dangerous,” he says. “But when I met them I immediately saw they were all bark and no bite, just bullshit with words.”
Genny would go onto become an informant against the mafia and cut a deal, becoming what is known as one of the pentiti, the penitent ones… or in American lingo, rats. The system became a key tool the Italian government used from the eighties to the noughties to dismantle the power of the mob.
In this two-part series, I look at how Italy tamed the mafia and reduced murders to go from one of the most violent countries in Europe to one of the safest. The tools included social work, and grass-roots activism to stand up to gangsters. But prosecutions were also key, and they included giving sweetheart deals to mafia thugs, which attracted controversy as America’s narco snitch system does today.
Years of Lead
The pentiti system was first introduced during the seventies, not to fight mobsters but to break up militant political groups. Known as Italy’s Years of Lead, because of the number of bullets fired, the era pitted…
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