Antonio Landieri - Camorra victim

Family fought for 12 years to establish son’s innocence

Antonio Landieri's disability meant he was unable
to escape as Camorra gunmen opened fire

A 12-year-fight to clear the name of an innocent victim of a Camorra clan war began on this day in 2004 when 25-year-old Antonio Landieri, a disabled resident of the notorious Vele di Scampia housing complex in Naples, was shot dead outside a recreation club where he had been playing table football with some friends.

Antonio and his friends were leaving the club, at the side of a square known to be frequented by drug dealers, when a car pulled up a short distance away from them in Via Labriola. A group of armed men emerged from the car and began shooting at them.

His friends instinctively ran away but Antonio, who could walk but only with severely restricted mobility - the consequence of complications at birth that left him partially paralysed - could not keep up and was hit several times in the back. He died in the arms of his mother, who had heard the shots being fired and ran down 11 flights of stairs from the family’s apartment in the run-down complex, fearful for her son’s safety.

The shooting made headlines in the local papers, who reported it as the latest event in a rapidly evolving war between rival Camorra gangs that would leave 70 dead in six months.  The dead man, they said, was associated with the Di Lauro clan which controlled much of Scampia; the attackers were from the Amato-Pagano clan from neighbouring Secondigliano.

Antonio Lampieri’s family insisted this was not the case but few people other than relatives and close friends believed them. The police refused to allow Antonio a public funeral on the grounds that it could lead to more criminality. 

The Vele di Scampia apartment blocks acquired
their name because their shape resembled sails

As far as the authorities, the press and most of the city’s population were concerned, Antonio had been an international drug dealer who often travelled between Italy and Colombia. 

His family’s bid to convince people otherwise was not helped by the reputation of the Vele, also known as the Sette Palazzi - the Seven Palaces.

A large urban housing project built between 1962 and 1975, the Vele di Scampia consisted of seven massive apartment blocks, constructed to house between 40,000 to 70,000 people. The blocks were dubbed vele (sails) for their triangular shape.

The complex was inspired by modernist housing developments pioneered by French-Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier.  

The architect in charge, Francesco Di Salvo, was a specialist in low-cost housing and the Vele di Scampia buildings were designed to provide only subsistence-level dwellings. Although they were deliberately minimal, they were to have many shared exterior spaces. Di Salvo believed he could construct apartment blocks that recreated the spirit of the alleys and courtyards of historic Naples, crowded but congenial.

But costs soon exceeded the city’s budget for the project, with funds frequently stolen, and the green spaces, schools, common areas and playgrounds that were meant to become the pulsating heart of a thriving community never materialised. 

The promised public transport links with central Naples were never built and the Sette Palazzi turned into a hotspot for organised crime. Prostitution and drug-dealing took place openly. The police only occasionally took any notice and Scampia, which like Secondigliano had been a rural village before Naples began to expand, became a symbol for urban decline.

Naples mayor Luigi De Magistris
commended the Landieri family

Three of the seven blocks were demolished in 1997, 2000 and 2003. Yet 40,000 residents, some of whom had been displaced by the earthquake that hit the Naples area in 1980, remained squeezed into the four remaining blocks. Many outsiders believed that no one would choose to stay in the Vele unless they were involved in crime.

Antonio’s parents, Enzo and Raffaella, never gave up their fight to achieve justice for their son, despite being offered money by the family of one of the gunmen as compensation in return for giving up their quest for the truth.

They were helped in their cause by numerous groups and associations set up to campaign on their behalf, by a tenacious anti-mafia prosecutor, Maurizio De Marco, and ultimately by evidence given by eight different Camorra pentiti - informants who had struck deals with prosecutors to reduce their own sentences.

The process took 12 years but it was finally established that the intended victims were the Meola brothers, Vittorio and Salvatore, who were Di Lauro affiliates.  Antonio Landieri had been mistaken for a Meola associate known to have difficulty walking.  

In 2017, Landieri’s parents at last learned that their son was to be given official state recognition as an innocent victim of the Camorra. The mayor of Naples, Luigi De Magistris, commended the family for “never giving up in the search for truth and in the pursuit of justice".

The five individuals named as the perpetrators of the killing were sentenced to life imprisonment. Others involved had died before the case came to trial.

Landieri has been honoured in a number of ways in Scampia, with a tree planted in his name near Piazza Giovanni Paolo II, an annual poetry competition held for the Antonio Landieri prize and the local football stadium renamed Stadio Antonio Landieri.

A book dedicated to him - entitled Al di là della neve, storie di Scampia (Beyond the Snow, Stories of Scampia) - written by his cousin, Rosario Esposito La Rossa, won the 2008 Siani Prize.

Roberto Saviano's book put
Scampia in the spotlight

Travel tip: 

Though hardly a tourist attraction in the conventional sense, Scampia attracts some visitors, particularly because of the notoriety of the Vele. The area was immortalised by the author and investigative journalist Roberto Saviano in his book, Gomorrah, which documented Saviano's infiltration and investigation of a number areas of business and daily life controlled or affected by the Camorra.  Scenes from both the film and TV series based on the book were filmed in the neighbourhood, some inside the actual Vele complex. It was seen in a better light, however, when US actor Stanley Tucci’s culinary series, Searching for Italy, ventured into the area to feature a bistrot run by local volunteers. The intention to demolish the complex’s remaining blocks was announced in 2016 and residents began moving out in 2019 but it was later announced that one block was to be preserved and repurposed as offices. 

The Piazza del Plebiscito is the largest
public square in the city of Naples

Travel tip:

Scampia, which is just a 10-minute drive from Naples’s Capodichino international airport, is less than 10km (six miles) from the centre of the city, which many tourists do visit. They are drawn by such attractions as Teatro di San Carlo, the oldest continuously active venue for public opera in the world; the large open space of the Piazza del Plebiscito, which adjoins the Palazzo Reale; the Capodimonte Royal Palace and Museum, which houses works by Caravaggio, Raphael and Botticelli; the Santa Chiara religious complex; the elegant, glass-domed Galleria Umberto I, a 19th century shopping arcade; and the 12th century Castel dell'Ovo, located on a promontory and offering beautiful views of the harbour and Mount Vesuvius, the volcano - officially still active, although dormant since 1944 - that overlooks the city.

Also on this day:

1835: The birth of criminologist Cesare Lombroso

1891: The birth of entrepreneur Giovanni Buitoni

2007: The death of author and journalist Enzo Biagi

Vino Novello goes on sale

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Paolo Di Lauro - Camorra boss

Capture of mobster struck at heart of Naples underworld

Paolo di Lauro's prison mug shot.  Before his arrest, the
Camorra boss was rarely seen in public

Italy's war against organised crime achieved one of its biggest victories on this day in 2005 when the powerful Camorra boss Paolo Di Lauro was arrested. 

In a 6am raid, Carabinieri officers surrounded a building in the notorious Secondigliano district of Naples and entered the modest apartment in which Di Lauro was living with a female companion.  The 52-year-old gang boss did not resist arrest, possibly believing any charges against him would not be made to stick.

However, at a subsequent trial he was convicted and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for drug trafficking and other crimes and remains in jail.

Di Lauro's conviction was significant because it removed the man who had been at the head of one of the most lucrative criminal networks in all of Italy for more than 20 years and yet managed to maintain such a low profile that police at times suspected he was dead.

At its peak, the Di Lauro clan presided over an organisation that imported and distributed cocaine and heroin said to be worth around €200 million per year.  The clan essentially controlled the run-down northern suburbs of Naples, making money also from real estate, counterfeit high-end fashion and prostitution.

Police raids are a regular feature of life in the
run-down Secondigliano district of Naples

Although born and brought up in the depressingly poor neighbourhood in which he was ultimately located and seized, there are few clues in Di Lauro's early life that he would become such a powerful figure.

An orphan adopted by a labourer and his wife, he dropped out of school when barely into his teens and worked as a shop assistant before moving to northern Italy, where he sold bed sheets and underwear to poor migrants from the south.

By the time he returned to Naples, where he settled and married a local girl, he had become more interested in making money from gambling than crime, having become adept at card games.  However, his success did not escape the notice of the Camorra, in particular the boss who then controlled Secondigliano and the surrounding neighbourhoods, Aniello La Monica.

La Monica noted Di Lauro's sharp, mathematical brain and in 1975 invited him to work for his organisation as book-keeper.

Di Lauro began to appreciate the money that bosses such as La Monica were making from organised crime but soon realised he could be making more. An old-fashioned Camorrista, La Monica was happy to reap the proceeds of black market cigarettes, the corrupt construction industry and protection rackets but shied away from the growing drugs market.

A narrow street in the Spanish
quarter of Naples

From time to time, Di Lauro would urge his boss to move into heroin and cocaine, where he could make much bigger profits.  Eventually his patience ran out and, in 1982, with La Monica still refusing to be persuaded, he set about removing him from power.

Not a man inclined to employ violent tactics as a first resort, Di Lauro hoped he could turn La Motta's supporters against him by spreading stories among clan members that he had been cheating them out of their rightful share of profits.

But La Monica learned about his treachery and hired two professional killers to track him down.  Di Lauro escaped and his retaliation revealed his own cold, ruthless side.  He lured La Monica into an ambush by arranging for him to step out on to the street outside his house, supposedly to meet an associate with some stolen diamonds.  There was no associate, but before La Monica realised it was a trap a car drew up from which four men emerged, firing pistols.  He was left face down in the street, dying from his wounds.

Di Lauro joined a large gathering of mourners at La Monica's funeral, although it was revealed later that he had probably been one of the gunmen in the car.

Thereafter, Di Lauro took control, impressing upon prominent clan members that they should at all times follow his code and remain as inconspicuous as possible, living modestly, dressing modestly, driving an ordinary car, never using drugs themselves and, if they wanted to do anything ostentatious, doing it only on faraway holidays.

Vesuvius looms above the sprawling port city with
its beautiful bay and panoramic views

He disappeared from public view himself so effectively that the police lost track of him completely in about 1997, at which point they assumed he was dead.  However, in 2004 he returned to Secondigliano in the hope of stamping out a feud developing between rival groups within the Di Lauro clan.

He was not successful and in the ensuing months a breakaway group tried to seize control.  The so-called Scampia Feud claimed more than 60 lives, with shootings often taking place in busy public areas.  It led to demonstrations on the streets and calls for a police crackdown.

It was this that brought so many Carabinieri into the area, many working undercover.  Di Paulo was tracked down after intelligence officers made a connection between the mobster and a woman they noticed making daily visits to a fish stall in the area they suspected he was living. Di Paulo was known to be partial to sea bream and salmon, which were the two fish the woman always bought.  It was by following her movements that they identified Di Paulo's apartment.

Travel tip:

Naples has some wonderful historic buildings, such as the Duomo di San Gennaro, the lavish Royal Palace and the 13th-century Castel Nuovo. But it is also rewarding just to wander the streets of the historic centre, particularly the chaotic Spanish Quarter and the ancient street known as Spaccanapoli, a narrow, straight thoroughfare largely closed to traffic that bisects the old party of the city.

The ancient Roman city of Herculaneum is much
better preserved than its neighbour Pompeii

Travel tip:

Tourists flock to the ruins of Pompeii to appreciate the damage wreaked by Vesuvius but a better preserved example of a Roman town or city can be found at Ercolano, a settlement built over the ruins of Herculaneum, that like Pompeii was completely buried by the 79AD eruption.  Unlike Pompeii, Herculaneum did not suffer catastrophic fires and many of the buildings remain intact.

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