Word: camorra
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...most spellbinding art, architecture and cuisine should slip under the radar of all but the most committed Italophile travelers. The recent refuse crisis has done nothing to improve Naples' reputation. Now however, the streets are clean again. With a new incinerator set to open and the recent wave of Camorra arrests suggesting that the government is finally tackling the roots of the problem, the city should stay shipshape. Our suggestions for the perfect Neapolitan weekend...
...American release of “Gomorrah,” the international spotlight is on the city’s drug trafficking and gang violence. Naples has had no shortage of negative publicity in the international press, but there is one benefit: people are finally becoming aware of the Camorra. “Gomorrah”—the latest film from Italian director Matteo Garrone—observes the pervasive influence of the Camorra, or mafia clans, in the city of Naples, Italy. Released in Italy last May and winner of the Grand Prix award...
...Less a traditional crime film than an as-told-to social document, Gomorrah reveals the reach of a business that has poisoned an entire region; for Camorra is both a crime syndicate and one of the nation's largest employers - southern Italy's own stimulus package. Where else in a sluggish economy can a young man find work? (In the movie, a college graduate, lured into a job supervising the dumping of toxic waste, decides to quit the business. His padrone, disgusted, spells out what awaits him: "Go make pizzas.") When everyone in town is either a gangster...
...malefactors includes a 13-year-old boy who is shot point-blank while wearing a bulletproof vest during an initiation rite that is like a Mafia bar mitzvah ("Now you are a man"); a middle-management toughie who, like Tony Soprano, is in the waste-disposal business (the Camorra holds a monopoly in this industry); and two punks who quote the Pacino Scarface and think they've hit the jackpot when they stumble on a weapons stash. ("Let's rack up corpses," one says. "No use feeling depressed.") Above these scarred, drugged-out creatures are their bosses, wealthy mobsters...
...What sticks in the mind is the numbing information imparted at the end of the movie: that the Camorra empire earned 150 billion euros in 2007; that in addition to dealing in drugs and arms, it invests in legitimate businesses around the world, including the reconstruction of the World Trade Center; that in the past three decades, the Camorra has murdered more people than al-Qaeda has. It is these statistics, rather than the movie's viral vignettes, that hold the real power and horror of Gomorrah...