https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03...ers-for-nigerian-mafia-in-italy/12033684In a ruined city on the Italian coast, the Nigerian mafia is muscling in on the old mob
Foreign Correspondent
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By Emma Alberici and Giulia Sirignani in Italy
Posted MonMonday 16 MarMarch 2020 at 7:47pm, updated WedWednesday 11 NovNovember 2020 at 4:29am
"This is a beautiful place. Or at least, it was a beautiful place."
Vincenzo Schiavone stands on the shoreline of Castel Volturno, gesturing over sparkling Mediterranean waters to the resort towns of the Amalfi coast. Just offshore are the islands of Procida and Vivara, and then Ischia: "Very beautiful … the thermal spas, the gardens, the lushness."
The contrast with Castel Volturno could not be more stark. Just metres away are open sewers where mangy dogs poke at rancid piles of garbage strewn across the main street. Along the coast, 12,000 waterfront homes are crumbling into the sea. Broken slabs of concrete are piled up on the sand, their tangled steel reinforcement protruding like rusty bones.
Castel Volturno, on the ancient coastal road between Rome and Naples, was once a seaside playground for the southern Italian elite. Now it is a lawless wasteland abandoned by the state.
According to Italy's anti-mafia agency, it is the European headquarters of the Nigerian mafia.
The seaside village's plunge into chaos has allowed this new mafia to take root amid the decay. Having disguised themselves among the migrants and refugees crowding boats from Libya, Nigerian crime lords have carved out a lucrative trade in people smuggling, drug running and prostitution. Even the local mafia fear them.
'An African city in Europe'
Flanked by his state-appointed police escorts, Mr Schiavone is clear about who is to blame for Castel Volturno's dire state: the Camorra, one of Italy's old mafia clans with its power base in nearby Naples.
"They were the beginning of the deterioration," he says. "For this, you have to give them credit."
In the 1970s, he moved here with his wife as a young surgeon, drawn to the beauty of what was then a beachside paradise. Mr Schiavone now owns the local hospital and is spending $130 million upgrading the site. When the Camorra found out, they wanted a cut.
The last time he refused their demands, they blew up his garage with his car inside it. For the last 12 years he has lived under constant police guard, fearing the vengeance of the Camorra.
Until the 1960s, Castel Volturno was known mostly for its tomatoes and buffalo mozzarella. Then the Camorra put it on the map for all the wrong reasons. Almost overnight, the mafia razed a coastal pine forest along the water's edge and built an 800,000-square-metre development without official authorisation.
Prosecutors eventually seized thousands of illegal homes and members of the Camorra went to jail for breaching planning and environmental laws.
For a time the buildings were left standing, unoccupied and increasingly decrepit. Then, in 1980, an earthquake outside Naples left 250,000 people homeless. The government bussed them to Castel Volturno to live in the vacant homes.
Many local residents fled and when the earthquake victims eventually left too, the state chose not to invest in the rehabilitation of Castel Volturno. The illegal buildings were knocked down and, shockingly, the organised crime family behind the original, illegal development was awarded the contract to rebuild.
Today, the town stands as a testament to perpetual neglect. Real estate windows spruik absolute beachfront properties for less than 15,000 euros ($27,000).
"You can't tell people a place like this exists in Italy," says Roberto Saviano. "No-one would believe it … a whole city that's been constructed illegally."
Mr Saviano has been studying the changes in Castel Volturno with the same forensic obsession that saw him forced into hiding in 2007 after the publication of his global bestseller, Gomorrah. He's one of 20 Italian writers who are now under 24-hour police guard thanks to their mafia exposes.
The Nigerian mafia has come to Italy with a speed and force that's stunned even local mafia bosses, he says. Castel Volturno, where Mr Saviano once holidayed as a child, is now "an African city in Europe … culturally African". Half of the 50,000 residents are African, many of them undocumented. They find a place to hide here, but without official documentation or rights, many are easy prey for ruthless Nigerian mafia bosses.
"They immediately risk falling into the mobster net," he says. "The crime boss maybe says, 'If you don't have a house, I'll give you one for a little favour'. Then it's something more, something more."
This nominally remains a Camorra territory, but the old mob has learnt it pays to work with the Nigerians.
In 2008, the Camorra waged a bloody turf war on their upstart rivals, killing six Africans in a hail of bullets. After that showdown, they struck a truce. The Nigerian mafia is allowed to ply its illicit trade with the Camorra's permission while giving them a cut of the takings.
"That area was handed over by the Italian networks to the Nigerians to manage," says Mr Saviano. "It was an admission first and foremost that it was no longer useful for the Camorra Casalesi clan to command street to street in Castel Volturno, because there's an enormous African community that could be better managed by the Nigerian mafia."
It's an arrangement the Nigerian mafia have worked out with the homegrown mob in other parts of Italy too.
A 2017 investigation published by the Cambridge Centre for Applied Research into human trafficking reported a faction of the Nigerian mafia, known as Black Axe, had "negotiated a deal with Cosa Nostra bosses in Sicily, buying the rights to operate in designated areas on the island".
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