Neapolitan Camorra Research Articles

How Similar Are Modern Criminal Syndicates to Traditional Mafias?

Five organizations exemplify organized crime organizations, or “mafias”: the American and Sicilian Cosa Nostras, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, Chinese triads, and Japanese yakuza. Newer syndicates have emerged that are often called organized crime organizations but most importantly differ from the exemplars. Drug trafficking syndicates in Colombia and Mexico are large, wealthy, and extraordinarily violent but have proven fragile in the face of aggressive law enforcement, do not have fully formalized internal structures or elaborate cultures, and only occasionally attempt to exercise political power or provide dispute settlement services in the criminal world. The Primeiro Comando da Capital in Sao Paulo, originally a prisoner self-protection group, comes closer. It has a formalized internal structure and an elaborate culture that permit it partly to control drug markets and provide an alternative justice system in parts of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro’s Commando Vermelho, also originally prison-based and now extensively involved in drug trafficking, has some mafia-like characteristics. Other criminal syndicates are better thought of as “candidate criminal organizations” because they are not fully consolidated (e.g., the Neapolitan camorra), are not fully criminalized (e.g., Hells Angels), or aim mainly at political subversion and have only subsidiary involvement in profit-making crimes (e.g., the Colombian FARC).

Roberto Saviano, czyli rzecz o kalaniu własnego gniazda i jego konsekwencjach

Roberto Saviano is an Italian writer and investigative journalist who has been living under strict police protection for thirteen years. He wrote Gomorrah, a bestselling book, that drew the mafia’s attention and resulted in a death sentence. Life in hiding is a price he pays for revealing the harsh truth about the activity of Neapolitan Camorra. The aim of this paper is to investigate what drives his uncompromising pursuit for truth, the strategies he uses to achieve this aim, and the response to his approach, coming from Italian politicians, intellectuals, ordinary people, and international general public.

Analyzing the Role of Women in Italian Mafias: the Case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been a growing debate about the role of women in Italian Mafias. Using a qualitative approach, this article looks at the leadership roles of women in the Neapolitan Camorra covering the period 2000–2014. It argues that despite women’s high-ranking positions within mafia clans, their professional development is best explained not as a sign of “female emancipation” of Italian or Camorra women but rather as functional exploitation by the clan when resources are limited in times of crisis. Thus, conceptualizing Camorra women as a “reserve army” can be a more useful analytical framework to explain the leadership positions of the women who come to occupy relevant positions in the traditionally men-dominated Camorra clans.

Racketeering in Campania: how clans have adapted and how the extortion phenomenon is perceived

Institutional studies on the Camorra and its illegal activities are much more limited in comparison to the Sicilian Mafia. The study of its various aspects remains marginal, even though, through the first decade after the unification of Italy, the Neapolitan Camorra, as a form of organised crime and its associates, and not the Sicilian Mafia, raised initial concerns from the emerging national State. Illegal activities of the Camorra are developed on the illegal and legal market. This paper analyses the phenomenon of racketeering because it is not possible to understand the historical transformation of the essential traits of racketeering or the persistence of it if the birth, transformation and development of the Camorra are not reconstructed. Extortion is to the Camorra what territory is to the Mafia.

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.

The Imaginary of a Sect: Literature, Politics, and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Camorra

This article reconsiders the so-called “dangerous classes” by focusing on the historical origins of the Neapolitan camorra, one of the world’s major criminal organizations. In the Bourbon Kingdom of Naples, the term camorristi referred to marginalized individuals and extortionists who operated in prisons, gambling halls, and brothels. During the turbulent period of Italian unification, such figures were increasingly seen as belonging to a legendary, omnipotent, and influential sect: the camorra, an organized secret society with its own hierarchy, customs, and jargon. This image eventually permeated Italian society. This article examines the reasons behind this evolution by focusing on the (mainly literary) texts and (essentially political) dynamics behind it, which reveal a process of criminalization and folklorization. Such a discursive transformation had a major impact on the Italian collective imagination, one that persists today.

The Roots of the Organized Criminal Underworld in Campania

The Camorra is a closed sect that acts in the shadows and does not collect and preserve documents that can later be studied by scholars or researchers. It is hard to rebuild the history of the Camorra: the picture is fragmented, a mix of half-truths and legends. The aim of this article is to make a diachronic excursus in order to find out the origins of the Neapolitan Camorra, that has had a longer history than any of the other mafias, and to explain how this secret organization has changed its main features from 1800 to the present and from the Bella Societa Riformata to Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Finally the modern clans that fight to keep the possession of their territory and operate like financial holdings in order to improve their business through legal and illegal affairs.

Terrorism, organised crime and the biopolitics of violence

Despite the lack of consensus on a broadly accepted definition of terrorism, a vast majority of scholars agree that terrorist violence is intrinsically political in contrast to organised crime, which is viewed as mainly profit-driven. This article critically examines this widely accepted distinction and contends that it rests on a narrow definition of the “political”, which circumscribes political violence to organisations seeking to overthrow the government, change the political system or alter the boundaries of a state. Drawing on a Foucauldian biopolitical understanding of the political, we argue that the pursuit of economic goals for criminal organisations cannot be disentangled from practices of governmentality which, through the production of disciplinary and regulatory norms, contribute to the construction of distinctive subjectivities and political orders. In order to advance this argument, we focus on the case of the Neapolitan Camorra as a biopolitical actor and contend that its use of violence aimed at the creation of “docile bodies” able and willing to sustain its system and reproduce its order not only challenges the distinction between “political” terrorism and “profit-driven” organised crime, but also has implications for the study of terrorism. In particular, the analysis carried out in this article suggests the need to investigate biopolitical practices beyond a narrow focus on the state by exploring the largely neglected biopolitics of violence of non-state armed groups and examining whether this focus may open new paths for the transformation of conflicts marked by terrorist violence.

Eavesdropping on the Mob: the functional diversification of Mafia activities across territories

How do Mafias operate across territories? The paper is an in-depth study of the operations of a Neapolitan Camorra group. It relies on a unique data set of contacts manually extracted from the transcripts of phone conversations wiretapped by the police. The data show that the clan is indeed involved in the production and supply of extra-legal protection, but only in its territory of origin. The expansion abroad followed the lines of a functional diversification: branches were created to carry out specific activities but no large-scale international alliances were forged. The strategies underpinning the group’s operations differ greatly across territories. Overall, the clan is still highly dependent on the territory of origin. Finally, the paper argues against the concept of ‘transnational organized crime’ and proposes a new taxonomy that better accounts for the ways in which Mafia groups choose to operate outside their territories of origin.

Organized Crime in Italy: The Neapolitan Camorra Today

Franco Roberti is an Anti-Mafia public prosecutor. Since 2005, he has been coordinating the Anti-Mafia pool in Naples (Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia) which is currently made up of 24 public prosecutors investigating all forms of organized crime in the city and region. In this article, he presents an overview of the current state of the Neapolitan Camorra based on the numerous on-going investigations.

Italian Organised Crime: Mafia Associations and Criminal Enterprises

The article reviews the different forms of organised crime in Italy. To begin with, it focuses on the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, Italy's two largest and most powerful mafia associations. With their centuries-old histories, articulated structures, sophisticated ritual and symbolic apparatuses and claim to exercise a political dominion, these associations have few parallels in the world of organised crime. In its second section, the article considers other groups and networks that are--with varying degrees of justification--also routinely described as organised crime: these range from the Neapolitan camorra to Apulian organised crime and the so-called new 'foreign mafie' and other criminal entrepreneurs. Whereas the new Italian and foreign players are likely to expand their activities on Italy's illegal markets, the future of Cosa Nostra and the 'Ndrangheta is more uncertain and largely depends on the decisions made by the public administrations.

Becoming a camorrista : criminal culture and life choices in Naples

In 1992, Pasquale Galasso, a Camorra superboss, revealed many intricate secrets about the Neapolitan Camorra. This led to revelations from other pentiti (criminals turned state witnesses), allowing an insight for the first time into the Neapolitan Camorra from the insider's point of view. Understanding why individuals join a criminal organization, the Camorra in particular, is one of the questions addressed in this article. Using primary sources and an 'interaction model' based on the interplay of agency and structure, it studies the impact of Neapolitan criminal culture on an individual's life choices in the 1950s, and compares these with the 1980s and 1990s. It concludes that while in the 1950s criminal values were emerging as an ethos and had a somewhat limited impact on individuals, by the 1980s this ethos had become a clear 'subculture', an 'ideology' which had a pervasive influence on the life choices of many young Neapolitans. Nel 1992, Pasquale Galasso, super boss della Camorra, rivelÒ parecchi segreti sulle cosche napoletanc. La sua disponibilitÀ a collaborare spinse altri pentiti a seguire il suo csempio. CiÒ consentì per la prima volta di conoscere in maniera più approfondita la Camorra tramite le rivelazioni di alcuni dei suoi membri. Pertanto, i motivi per cui si sceglie di entrare nella Camorra è una fra le questioni analizzate nel presente articolo. Attraverso l'uso di fonti primarie e di un modello interattivo caratterizzato da una combinazione tra capacitÀ decisionale e struttura organizzativa, l'articolo sviluppa una analisi comparativa sull'impatto di una cultura criminale napoletana nei confronti delle scelte di singoli individui negli anni cinquanta, ottanta e novanta. Le conclusioni di questo studio sottolineano che, sebbene negli anni cinquanta una cultura criminale stava acquisendo un valore etico, essa aveva una influenza minima sulle scelte comportamentali dei singoli soggetti; mentre dagli anni ottanta era ormai divenuta una subcultura, una ideologia che aveva prodotto un impatto notevole sulle scelte di vita di molti giovani napoletani.