The Camorras in Naples and Campania: Business, groups and families

In the last few decades globalisation has strongly encouraged the reconfiguration of mafia-type criminal organisations as large networks that go beyond their local dimension. However, organised crime groups of the Campania region have a longer tradition in the management of international traffics in the legal, illegal and irregular markets. Some cases date back to the second post-war period or even before. The Camorra groups act as a wide family business: large parental networks, intertwined with economic activities, often connected, through marriage strategies, to other families who play a strategic role in the same sector where the clan operates. The clans are mostly based on open entrepreneurial-type networks which operates on an international scale and in several economic sectors. In these contexts violence is widely available as a tool of economic and social regulation not only for mafia groups in the strict sense. Thus the Camorra cannot be reduced to a single, unified criminal configuration; it refers to a wide array of criminal groups rooted in Naples and other cities in the Campania region. Through an in-depth analysis of some empirical cases, this paper highlights the role played by violence – conceived as a tool of social and economic regulation – in the genesis of Camorra clans. We restrict our analysis to the clans historically rooted in the area surrounding Naples and Caserta (in the North of the Region). Doing this, we can consider the main distinction between suburban and urban Camorra. For the first type, we analyse the case of the De Angelis clan (which operates in the international trade of cars). For the second type, the case of the Licciardi clan (active in the counterfeit and clothing market).