BRAVE: Mark Franchetti with factory owner Pietro Russo (left) and his police guard Italy’s Bloodiest Mafia was a grim and terrifying lesson in what happens when scum explodes from the sewers and swamps a city.
The city in this case is Naples, capital of the Campania region in southern Italy, and the scum the Camorra, the most ruthless and violent of all Italian criminal organisations, which is responsible for more murders than the IRA.
Reporter Mark Franchetti, an Italian expat, ventured down the mean streets of Naples, hidden camera at the ready, with a former Camorra footsoldier as his guide.
The organisation operates on a clan structure, with individual clans controlling their own portions of the city. On tourist maps, these are marked in red as no-go areas.
Shocking CCTV footage showed an assassin from one clan knifing a rival to death outside a small shop.
The bystanders scattered as though they were being chased by a raging bull, because testifying in court is virtually a death sentence.
Franchetti’s secret footage from the so-called “drug piazzas” in working-class areas of the city painted a bleak picture.
In one of these hellholes, which can have a turnover of a couple of million euros worth of drugs in a week, heroin addicts gather in groups to shoot up under a flyover in broad daylight.
The ground is carpeted with used syringes. New ones are easy to come by; addicts can buy them in the local sweet shop.
The Camorra is also guilty of the ultimate in criminal negligence. It muscled in on legitimate waste disposal companies in the 1990s and now controls the industry, with the result that Naples is suffocating under mountains of refuse.
Rubbish is dumped by the roadside and in fields, where toxic waste seeps into farmland, killing animals and spreading disease. One sheep farmer was put out of business when he had to destroy his 2,000-strong flock.
Ordinary Neapolitans never use the word Camorra. They call it “Il Systema” (the system) and, depressingly, many believe it does a more efficient job of running the city than the government.
But there are some brave people fighting back, such as Pietro, a businessman who secretly filmed himself paying Camorra thugs monthly protection money.
His evidence put 30 gangsters behind bars but he now requires 24-hour police protection.
Antonio Pistieri is the son of a notorious Camorra leader who is serving 20 years.
At school, Antonio’s surname was enough to terrify his teachers, yet he turned his back on a life of crime to become an artist, musician and vocal opponent of the Camorra.
He and Franchetti attended a family celebration for Allessandra Clemente, who’s gained her law degree and hopes to become an anti-Camorra prosecutor.
It’s payback, she says, for the death of her mother, who was caught in the crossfire of a Camorra shootout in 1997.
Allessandra is choosing a tough path.
Top state prosecutor Simone di Monte is one of the Camorra’s most hated enemies and is accompanied, day and night, by a posse of armed police officers.
“I don’t feel in danger,” says di Monte, “because it’s not for me to decide. It’s all part of the rules of the game.”
I’ve gone from liking Glee to loathing it in a short space of time.
What was offbeat and engaging at first has turned into a cynical, cash-generating juggernaut that’s flattened the pop charts into a continuous, milky-white line of blandness.
And now there’s a tie-in American talent show, The Glee Project, which promises the winner a role in seven episodes of the series.
Glee supposedly celebrates individuality (which means an obese kid, a couple of gay kids and one in a wheelchair, who’s not even played by a disabled actor), yet all the wannabes on show here have perfect hair, clear skin and piano-key teeth, and “sing” in the same high-pitched adenoidal whine.
It’s unbearable. Time, I think, to stop believing.
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