They were cleaning the blood off Via Canalone on Monday in front of a silent crowd. Detectives collected shell casings and broken glass and a police photographer took close-ups of chips in the asphalt. It was a question of angles, said an investigator. Calculate who fired from where and things would begin to make sense, as if geometry could unlock the puzzle of Mafia savagery.
The mountain village of Lauro is too high and far from the sea breeze of the Bay of Naples to entice tourists. It is not especially pretty, there are no renaissance steeples and much of the nearby oak forests have been stripped, leaving a grim, bare landscape. Sunday night gave another reason not to visit.
It was dusk when the Audi 80 turned up Via Canalone. Traffic was light and several villagers were taking a stroll. No one heard a warning shout, or a scream, before the opening burst of gunfire from two cars that had stopped near the Audi.
The crack of pistols was followed by sustained bursts, probably from submachine guns. The Audi’s windows shattered and holes rippled through the doors. When it ended two of the five occupants were dead, one was dying and two were gravely wounded. Inside one of the other two cars three people were wounded.
There was a time when southern Italy was accustomed to such scenes, these settling of accounts between rival gangsters, but that was before the Mafia learned the value of discretion and hiding from public view to make money in peace. But this old-fashioned scene hid a shocking twist: seven of the eight casualties were women. Mothers, daughters, sisters and nieces, the relatives of gangsters, seemingly selected for assassination and hunted through the streets. The hunters, it appears, were other women.
Italy fears a new dark chapter has opened in the Mafia chronicles because middle-aged mothers and teenage girls are not supposed to wage organised crime’s turf wars.
“[Monday’s] incident shows that not only bosses and their ‘soldiers’ have the duty to eliminate members of rival families; now the women, the bosses’ wives and even the daughters participate,” the newspaper Corriere della Sera said this week.
It appears the Mafia’s glass ceiling has shattered. In recent years women have occupied important positions in several clans and directed strategy but the physical act of killing, as opposed to ordering a killing, remained a man’s job. After all the Mafia code of honour — omerta — literally means the “ability to be a man”, to be disciplined and self-controlled under pressure.
Women were traditionally expected to be be submissive, ultra-loyal homemakers, but over time the godfathers recognised their value as couriers and intermediaries.
From the early 1990s onwards the state’s success in arresting bosses opened gaps that the godfathers preferred to fill with female relatives rather than outsiders.
“Economic and financial operations, including money laundering are increasingly dominated by women,” Alison Jamieson wrote in her book, The Antimafia, but violence and intimidation, the ultimate tools of power, remained a male prerogative. In another book, Mafia Women, Clare Longrigg documents the bloodlust of certain godmothers, but very rarely –until now — did they pull the trigger.
The bloodbath at Lauro suggests that the Mafia has become an equal-opportunities employer, more egalitarian than most Italian institutions.
The violence was the climax of a quasi-Shakespearean plot of dynastic struggle, ambition and revenge, played out in the region of Irpinia, a collection of isolated villages in the mountains east of Mount Vesuvius.
On one side was the Graziano clan, which 30 years ago controlled the village of Quindici and wanted to expand into the Lauro valley by running extortion rackets and skimming public work contracts.
Starting in 1972 it vaulted successive sons, via elections, into the town hall of Quindici. Two were killed but the clan’s grip on the mayorship lasted until 1993 when the authorities froze them out, citing irregularities. It was a blow to prestige and influence.
Their rivals in Quindici were the Cava family. Equally ambitious, they built up their own network of companies, but Irpinia only had so many opportunities and tensions brewed. Last year Biagio Cava (47) struck an alliance with the Russo brothers of Nola, a nearby town, who had good contacts in Naples. For the Cavas it was a fast-track to the big time, the chance of plugging into a smuggling network in Western Europe and the United States. The Grazianis were not happy.
In February Biagio Cava was arrested by French police at Nice airport while trying to board a flight to New York. He had served time for extortion in the early 1990s, although the conviction was later quashed, but was on the run from Italian police for other alleged violent offences. He had a large amount of cash, false documents and was identified by the Italian authorities, who are currently seeking his extradition.
Back in Quindici his capture triggered a series of events that last week led to a verbal brawl, according to the local press, between the clans’ women. There are several theories about the shoot-out. One, an accidental encounter prompted a shooting spree. Two, a meeting to resolve differences went awry. Three, an ambush.
The last seems likeliest. The Cava women were travelling with scissors and knives, suggesting they sensed a threat. They were the main victims: Cava’s wife and daughter, Michelina (51) and Clarissa (16), died along with Michelina’s sister, Maria Scibelli (53). Injured alongside them were Felicia Cava (19) and her friend Italia Galeota (22).
One of the two cars that fired on them escaped but in the other, an Alfa 147, Luigi Salvatore Graziano (60) and his nieces, Stefania (22) and Chiara (21), were injured. Their car was also riddled with bullets but investigators suspect that was the Mafia version of friendly fire — poor aim from relatives in the other car that escaped.
Dozens of police officers sealed off the hospital where the wounded were treated to prevent another bloodbath after relatives from both sides arrived. Put your hand out and you could feel the tension in Irpinia.
Is the Italian Mafia about to enter a new phase of Amazonian warfare? Not necessarily. The clans clustered around Naples, collectively known as the Camorra, have always been wilder than their Cosa Nostra counterparts in Sicily. Lacking the islanders’ discipline and structure, the mainlanders have a history of allocating territory and power through chaotic violence and struggle.
The one certainty is more violence. Unlike Shakespeare, the Mafia’s tragedies never have a last act.