REPORT SHOWS ALARMING INCREASE IN ORGANIZED CRIME IN NAPLES

UNCLAS NAPLES 000102 SENSITIVE SIPDIS DEPARTMENT ALSO FOR DS; ROME ALSO FOR RSO E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PGOV KCRM ASEC CASC SNAR IT SUBJECT: REPORT SHOWS ALARMING INCREASE IN ORGANIZED CRIME IN NAPLES REF: 08 NAPLES 36, 37 AND 38 Sensitive but unclassified - handle accordingly. ¶1. (U) A report issued on September 30 by the Rome-based research institute Censis, and funded by the Italian Parliament's Anti-Mafia Committee, concludes that organized crime is on the rise throughout Italy but constitutes "a true national emergency" in the greater Naples area. The report is based on statistics (mostly from 2007, the most recent available) compiled by the Italian Interior Ministry, prosecutors' offices and other law enforcement entities. In the province of Naples (which includes Naples city and some surrounding suburbs),95 percent of the population co-exists with active organized crime gangs, the highest percentage of any province in the country. In the last three years, 25 municipal governments have been dissolved due to Mafia infiltration, eight of them in Naples province. In 2007, 119 homicides nation-wide were attributed to organized crime; of these, 85 occurred in the region of Campania, with 80 of them in Naples province. Naples's overall murder rate was more thirteen times the national average: 2.6 per 100 residents in Naples, as compared to 0.2 for the country as a whole. (For comparison, the homicide rate for Detroit, which had the highest rate for big cities in the United States for the same period, was 0.46 per 100 residents.) Naples also has the highest rates of extortion, arson and loan sharking, according to the number of arrests and complaints to the police. ¶2. (U) The Censis report describes the situation in Naples and its suburbs as "a true emergency... [in which there has been] an increase in all organized crime-related felonies, especially the most violent and heinous." In fact, over the last four years, the region of Campania has registered a whopping upsurge of 61.3 percent in Mafia-related crimes. The region also leads the nation in drug-related offenses, both in absolute and per capita terms. Although a small number of victims denounce extortion (1230, or 21.2 per 100,000 inhabitants),the extorters are more than capable of exacting revenge; arson in Campania is up a whopping 322.8 percent and in some provinces over 700 percent. ¶3. (U) On September 28, workers protesting layoffs from waste removal firms with now-expired municipal contracts unfurled a banner in the city's main square that exclaimed, "Long Live The Casalesi" (in reference to one of the Naples area's most powerful Camorra clans). A spokesman for the workers intimated that if their jobs were not renewed, the Casalesi clan could again disrupt the precarious waste disposal system and provoke yet another garbage crisis in the city. Politicians and journalists denounced the act as an attempt to intimidate and blackmail Naples into paying for thousands of jobs whose occupants will be indebted to the local Mafia bosses. ¶4. (SBU) Comment: Reports of violent and brazen crimes fill the local newspapers each day. Our prosecutor contacts tell us that the economic crisis has strengthened Camorra clans, as the liquid revenues they take in from the drug trade allow them to offer jobs and credit to those who can find neither legitimately. The prospect of another trash crisis may be looming, as garbage and construction waste have begun to reappear on sidewalks and streets around the city as well as in suburban areas; only one of four planned incinerators has actually been built. No one doubts that the Camorra could shut down the disposal process and plunge Naples into another crisis. In the meantime, the central government's decision in August 2008 to deploy army troops to help police tackle crime in Campania appears to have had little impact on the Camorra's grip on the region or on the growing crime rates. With thousands of U.S. Navy personnel and family members living and working in the provinces of Naples and Caserta, and the Consulate and its personnel located in Naples, this is no longer a threat that official Americans can ignore. TRUHN