In a ruined city on the Italian coast, the Nigerian mafia is muscling in on the old mob, by Emma Alberici.
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. …
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). …
The Nigerian mafia has come to Italy with a speed and force that’s stunned even local mafia bosses, [Vincenzo Schiavone, doctor, and owner of the local hospital] 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.” …
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. …
Vincenzo Schiavone has witnessed the gruesome effects of the Nigerian mafia presence in Castel Volturno in the emergency ward of his hospital, the Pineta Grande.
“We have seen people come in with heads struck with machetes, others have been bitten,” Mr Schiavone says.
“They are terrible. They are effectively very violent. It’s a kind of primordial violence.” …
The Nigerian mafia has earnt the respect of the old mob, who he claims are “afraid that the Nigerians have the capacity to exercise the same magnitude of violence”.
What a disaster. If you cannot or will not control your borders, you won’t have a country anymore:
Philip Barton:
What a ridiculous spectacle the Western world became. Global warming cultists on world tours, national leaders who truly didn’t know there were only two sexes, tattooed nihilists, transgender activists, feral feminists, paper debt notes accepted as money and maths regarded as ‘racist’. It degraded into a carnival of the insane.
Western Civilization didn’t die in one final, mighty upheaval, it didn’t even slink off into the night. It pranced across life’s stage covered in sequins and a feather boa and fell into the orchestra pit impaling itself on a tuba.
