“It looks like an outlet mall!” my friend Sonia blurted out in surprise as we crested a hill on a quiet rural road. We had gotten lost driving through the southern Italian countryside before finally sighting “Yankee City”—the sprawling U.S. military base north of Naples, on the outskirts of a small town called Gricignano di Aversa.1
The contrast between the base and its surrounding landscape was dramatic. Amid fields of peaches, apricots, and grapes, the base was ringed by a razor-wire-topped fence, security cameras, and motion detectors. Inside, there were perfectly ordered roads, large swaths of manicured and lavishly watered grass, shaded picnic areas and barbecue pits, children’s playgrounds, skate parks, pools, neat apartment blocks, and row upon row of parking. The only signs of anything out of order at this gated community were trash bins overflowing with garbage spilling onto the ground.
The uncollected garbage reminded us that we were wending our way through Campania, the agriculturally rich and economically poor region controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra. Less well known than Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Camorra is Italy’s oldest existing criminal organization, dating to at least the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.* Out of the spotlight, the Camorra has thrived, inflicting devastating costs in blood and corruption. As Sonia and I drove toward the base, I recalled the words of Roberto Saviano, the Italian investigative journalist who has lived in hiding since publishing Gomorrah, his famed Camorra exposé. “Never in the economy of a region,” Saviano writes, “has there been such a widespread, crushing criminal presence as in Campania in the last ten years.”2 The Camorra has been responsible for more than 3,600 deaths in the last four decades—far more deaths than Italy’s other major criminal organizations (Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta, and Puglia’s Sacra Corona Unita).3 And no other Italian region has as many cities under observation for mafia infiltration. Between 1991 and 2006, out of a total of 170 judicial decrees in Italy dissolving local governments that had been infiltrated by organized crime, 75 of them—nearly half the total—were from Campania alone.4
The Camorra system (mafia members typically call their organization il sistema) and its clans have integrated themselves into nearly every part of the social, political, and economic life of Campania. The U.S. military is no exception. A short drive down the potholed road from Gricignano’s sibling base, the U.S. Navy facility at Naples International Airport, sits one of Europe’s largest open-air drug markets, dominated by the clans.5 To help describe Campania, Saviano turned to the words of a magazine for U.S. military personnel: “Imagine yourself in a Sergio Leone film. It’s like the Wild West. Somebody gives orders, there are shoot-outs and unwritten, yet unassailable laws. Don’t be alarmed … Nevertheless, leave the military compound only when necessary.”6
I first started trying to make sense of the presence of major U.S. facilities and the roughly ten thousand troops, civilians, and family members in this mafia heartland after an otherwise uneventful interview with an American official in Naples. After I turned off my audio recorder, the official (who has asked not to be named, for obvious reasons) told me the Navy has had a problem of getting “into bed” with the wrong people. And they’ve been doing it, he said, ever since the Allies arrived in Naples during World War II. Rather than work with ex-Fascist officials, the Navy found people who could get things done—the Camorra.
A ROUGH-EDGED CITY
Naples’s reputation is generally as bad as Saviano suggests. Before arriving there, I was warned to be careful. Friends living in Rome—one of whom grew up in Naples—cautioned me about walking the city’s streets, known for their skilled thieves riding two to a motorbike to snatch bags and belongings. They even briefly considered recommending I avoid the city’s most famous pizzeria, Da Michele, because of its rough neighborhood.
Aside from pizza, crime, and poverty, Naples has become synonymous with garbage. In 2007 and 2008, trash went uncollected for weeks at a time. It lined roadsides, clogged city streets, and piled into mountains surrounding communal collection areas. Six million metric tons of garbage remain scattered at dumpsites around Campania.7
While there’s no confusing Naples with the tourist havens of Florence and Venice or the grandeur of Rome, the city is remarkable precisely because of its rough edges. Scooters, cars, and pedestrians duck and weave along the city’s roads. Vespas and Asian-made motorbikes fly around the boulevards and the narrowest of stone-paved alleyways, sliding between cars, deftly adjusting their trajectories at the last possible second to avoid passersby, hitting their high-pitched horns in a nearly constant chorus of Road Runner beeps. Cars are parked and double-parked at every possible angle on the roads and sidewalks. Pedestrians make their way protected only by courage and faith that drivers will stop (which mostly they do).
Naples, which is Italy’s third-largest city after Rome and Milan, was founded by Greeks around 600 BCE as “Neapolis,” or New City. During much of Europe’s Renaissance and under Spanish rule, when southern Italy was far wealthier than the north, Naples was a center of art and culture, rivaled in size only by London and Paris. Today, its old city remains largely intact. It is full of arched passageways tagged with centuries of graffiti, apartments covered in chipped pink and peach hues, balconies overflowing with laundry lines and potted plants, tiny shops and crowded vendors’ tables. Beneath lies an underground city of Greco-Roman catacombs, caves, waterways, and temples to worship the dead.
Aboveground, the aromas of dark Neapolitan espresso, sweet cream-filled sfogliatelle, and folded sidewalk pizza designed for eating while walking compete with the odors of heavy pollution and the port. Outside the old city and surrounding areas, much of Naples now consists of an unremarkable business core and brutalist public housing blocks on the city’s periphery. The varied neighborhoods are united perhaps most of all by a passionate love for the local soccer team, SSC Napoli—and by the controlling power of the Camorra.
THE MILITARY AND THE MOB
Charles “Lucky” Luciano, one of the gangsters portrayed on the HBO television series Boardwalk Empire, is known for having transformed the mafia in the United States. What’s less well known to Americans is the role Sicilian-born Luciano played in the history of Naples and the U.S. military’s presence in the city.
One of the most notorious gangsters in the New York City mafia, Luciano—along with close associates Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—organized the American mob into a powerful and wealthy national crime syndicate boasting a corporate structure and command over drugs, prostitution, and a range of other rackets.8 Eventually Luciano ended up in prison, but he managed to gain an early release by helping Navy officers who were concerned about protecting New York harbor from Axis spies and saboteurs during World War II.9 Luciano had close ties to the unions that controlled the docks. From his cell, he recommended that fellow mafiosi aid in the wartime campaign, and he had Lansky introduce them to Naval Intelligence officials.*10
Although the Navy long tried to cover up the story, Luciano also aided preparations for the Allied invasion of Sicily. There’s debate about exactly how much help the mafia provided, but at the very least, Luciano and others supplied information about the island and local contacts to help with the landing and to ensure social order would be maintained after the Allies took control.11 It was an early example of the links between the military and the mob. Luciano’s reward for all this wartime usefulness was a 1946 letter of clemency from New York governor Thomas Dewey, and immediate deportation from New York to Italy.
After the Allies landed in Sicily, the mob connections deepened. Allied leaders drew on the assistance of local mafia bosses, who had been the targets of a brutal crackdown by Mussolini. In some cases, the Allies appointed the mafiosi as mayors. One, Calogero Vizzini, had been accused of (though not tried for) thirty-nine murders, six attempted murders, seventy-three robberies and thefts, and sixty-three cases of extortion.12 Soon, according to one mafia expert, the Allied administration was “riddled with Mafiosi.”13 Bosses were serving as brokers between the Allies and locals, providing interpretation, and fulfilling other important roles. Once the mafiosi declared themselves anti-Fascist, the historian Tom Behan notes, the Allies had “trusted partners who were able to police society very effectively.”14
After the Allies occupied Naples, connections with organized crime expanded. When Colonel Charles Poletti, head of the Allied Military Government and former lieutenant governor of New York, arrived in Naples, he selected Vito Genovese as his interpreter and counselor.15 Poletti was undoubtedly familiar with the mafia boss who had managed Lucky Luciano’s New York drug and gambling operations before fleeing to Italy to escape a murder charge.16 Soon, Genovese was at the center of the expanding underground.
Through Genovese’s influence, Poletti’s military government appointed Camorra mayors in Campania towns, which remain Camorra-dominated to this day. Within fifty miles of Naples, Genovese reigned.17 He and Vizzini used Genovese’s relationship with Colonel Poletti to smuggle oil, sugar, and other goods from the Naples docks in Allied military trucks. In Sicily and Naples, the looting and skimming of Allied food and supplies became endemic.18 In a devastated Naples where hundreds of thousands were homeless and hungry, up to 60 percent of unloaded goods may have disappeared. Up to 65 percent of locals’ income derived from underground sales.19
An entire contraband system for food, clothing, cigarettes, appliances, and other goods took root in Naples, despite largely disappearing elsewhere in Italy after the war. It became so efficient that penicillin and other medical supplies were readily available there even when there were shortages in military hospitals.20 GIs even joined the ranks of customers frequenting brothels and buying contraband in the famed and feared Quartieri Spagnoli neighborhood (originally built in the sixteenth century to house Spanish troops).21 By April 1944, the British writer Norman Lewis, then an intelligence officer, wrote of the underground market, “It is becoming generally known that it operates under the protection of certain high-placed Allied Military Government officials.”22
In August 1944, the U.S. Army was sufficiently embarrassed to arrest Genovese and return him to New York. After the prosecution’s prime witness was poisoned to death, though, Genovese went free. He eventually became the leader of Lucky Luciano’s New York crime family—which soon bore the Genovese name.23 In Naples, meanwhile, Genovese’s arrest left an opening. It was filled by Luciano himself, newly returned to Italy after Governor Dewey’s clemency.24 The bosses simply switched places.
* * *
Following a temporary reduction in U.S. and Allied forces after the war, the American presence in Italy was soon on the rise. The right-wing Christian Democracy party, which had overcome Italy’s favored communist and socialist parties in 1948 elections thanks to massive U.S. support, repaid the favor by actively advocating for U.S. and NATO bases in Italy and Italian participation in NATO. In 1954, the Christian Democrats established the foundation for the growing U.S. presence by signing the Italian-American “Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement.” (The terms of the agreement are classified to this day; a former Italian Ministry of Defense official has suggested that the secrecy is a function of some of the agreement’s violating the Italian constitution.)25 Around the same time, the CIA appears to have also supported the Sicilian Mafia as fears grew about the power of the communist and socialist parties. “Because of its anti-communist nature,” writes Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official turned critic, the Mafia was “one of the elements which the CIA use[d] to control Italy.”26
In and around Naples, U.S. forces built bases in Gaeta, Ischia, Lago Patria, Varcaturo, Marinaro, Grazzanise, Mondragone, Montevergine, Nisida, and Carney Park27—a slightly surreal amusement-park-cum-sports-center secluded in the forested crater of an extinct volcano near Lake Averno, once believed to be the entrance to the underworld.28 The Navy concentrated many of its facilities in a part of Naples called Agnano. Elsewhere in Italy, the military built or occupied bases from Aviano to Sicily, plus a large base and recreation facility on the Tuscan coast not far from Pisa. Today, the Pentagon counts fifty bases, more than twelve thousand U.S. troops, and thousands more civilians and family members stationed with them across Italy. After Germany, Japan, and South Korea, there are now more U.S. bases in Italy than anywhere else outside the United States.
Boosted by its relationships with U.S. forces and the mafias in Sicily and America, the Camorra eventually surpassed the economic power and influence of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. Growing beyond underground markets, small-scale extortion, and racketeering, the Camorra became an international business syndicate.29 The biggest expansion in scale and scope came in the 1970s, when the Camorra clans found lucrative opportunities in construction, concrete, public contracts, waste disposal, and especially international drug trafficking. This turned the Camorra into a global economic powerhouse, grossing an estimated $16 billion per year and employing twenty thousand people, with affiliates across Europe, South America, and the United States.30
Lucky Luciano, the gangster who helped the Allies connect with the Camorra in the first place, didn’t live to see it reach these heights. He passed away in 1962, officially of a heart attack. Some say it was really poison. When he died, he was sitting in the Naples International Airport, a few hundred yards from the Navy’s eventual home.31
RUBBLE IN THE PINE GROVES
After seeing the Gricignano base with Sonia, I went to visit a place where thousands of Navy sailors and their families had once lived. I found the remains of Villaggio Coppola—Coppola Village—standing along the Mediterranean coast north of Naples, secluded between a verdant pine forest and the bright blue sea.
When I arrived, I suddenly felt as if I had entered a scene out of Mel Gibson’s postapocalyptic classic Mad Max. Shabby high-rises were interspersed with abandoned, decaying four-story apartment blocks. The Villaggio’s road to the water ended in a rutted mess of broken pavement, gravel, and a pile of dumped trash. I parked near the trash heap and walked onto a beach dotted with tall patchy grass, garbage, and a rusted car wreck.
Some of the Villaggio Coppola had been torn down years ago, and several of the remaining apartments lacked walls and rooftops. Windows and shutters on many of them were gone, too. In places, twisted rebar jutted out through eroding concrete. I was surprised to see clothes flapping in the wind on a few surviving balconies. Although the apartments are officially unoccupied, I was told that if you know a Camorrista, you can find somewhere to stay.
The Villaggio, which has been called “the City of Abuse,”32 was built by the Coppola family in the 1960s, largely to house U.S. military personnel. The family, whose most prominent members are the brothers Cristoforo and Vincenzo, hails from the Camorra stronghold of Casal di Principe. “Compared to Casal di Principe,” Saviano notes, the town of Corleone—the Sicilian community made famous by the Godfather movies—“is Disneyland.”33
Of the Coppolas’ Villaggio, Saviano says it is like nothing else in Italy. “They did not ask for authorization. They didn’t need to. Around here construction bids and permits make production costs skyrocket because there are so many bureaucratic palms to grease. So the Coppolas went straight to the cement plants. One of the most beautiful maritime pine groves in the Mediterranean was replaced by tons of reinforced concrete.”34 The Camorra provided the building materials. The project helped the Coppolas become the “richest and most powerful” construction group in Campania.35
With the help of cooperative politicians, the family built more than half of the Villaggio illegally on public land. The rest was built on private land acquired by one illegal means or another. Litigation followed, but the Coppolas got away with a nominal fine—assessed by a judge with an apartment in one of the Villaggio high-rises.36 The development was a perfect illustration of the Camorra’s deepening relationships with local politicians and businesses like the Coppolas’ firm, all united by a shared goal of making huge profits from public contracts and illegal construction.37
And this is where thousands of U.S. military personnel and their families lived for decades. It was only in the 1990s that the commanding officer in Naples, Admiral Michael Boorda, finally ordered them to leave “because of the poor condition of the buildings and high crime.”38 Unfazed, Cristoforo Coppola and a member of the particularly murderous Casalesi clan cofounded a business that would bid on contracts to revitalize the environmental and economic life of the coast, which the Villaggio itself had helped destroy. When some of the Villaggio’s towers were torn down after barely four decades of occupancy, Vincenzo Coppola did the demolition work.39 For the Coppolas, it was profit upon profit upon profit—thanks in no small part to Camorra connections.
YANKEE CITY
To replace the Villaggio Coppola and other housing, the Navy convinced Congress to build a new housing development and naval station around Naples. To whom did the military turn when it was looking for a developer? To the Coppolas. Or at least to Cristoforo and four of his children, who control the Mirabella construction company following a contentious split between Cristoforo and Vincenzo.
The Navy had been working on plans for a new base ever since a series of earthquakes hit Agnano in 1982. The Navy’s initial plan, “Project Pronto”—Project Quick—moved slowly. In 1988, the U.S. Congress finally rejected it because of its high costs. Two years later, Congress approved a two-pronged plan to build an operations base at the Naples airport and the support site in Gricignano di Aversa that Sonia and I later visited, with its housing, school, shopping, and other amenities.
For the Gricignano site, Congress and the Navy decided to use a procedure called “lease-construction.” Rather than buying land and paying for construction through congressional appropriations, the Navy invited developers to build the support site to its specifications. In exchange, the Navy promised to lease the site from the developer for thirty years. After that, the developer would get the buildings back, with the right to rent them to the Navy or anyone else. The initial costs to the U.S. government would be nearly zero—the developer would pay all the construction and land acquisition costs while getting the security of guaranteed future rent. Congress, on the other hand, would be on the hook for thirty or more years of lease payments.
In 1993, the Navy awarded the first of four contracts for the support site to Cristoforo Coppola’s Mirabella. Why it did so is the subject of some dispute. A letter from a Pentagon official to the chairman of Mirabella, Cristoforo’s son Francesco, suggests that Mirabella’s “friends,” the powerful congressmembers Ron Dellums and Tom Foglietta, may have helped win the contract.40 Others say Coppola paid a politically connected Italian restaurateur in Washington with good ties to the military to secure the deal. (The restaurateur was charged but acquitted of wrongdoing.)41
After construction at Gricignano began, the discovery of Bronze Age archaeological remains described as “priceless” and potentially a “new Pompeii” slowed the building process only briefly.42 “The Americans … were in a hurry,” one Italian journalist explained. “Cristoforo proceeded with construction like a tank to spend as little as possible and avoid paying millions in fines.”43 The Navy official overseeing construction admitted that “Mirabella developed a strategy it wouldn’t have if not for the Navy’s timetable” to begin construction as quickly as possible.44
While archaeological discoveries couldn’t stop Coppola, Naples prosecutors did. In 1999, prosecutors investigated multiple allegations of crime and corruption at Gricignano. Some of the allegations came from Vincenzo Coppola, whose own company had lost the construction contract to his brother. Vincenzo claimed Cristoforo had won the contract illegally and that the Navy had changed its rules during the bidding. The Navy denied the charge. However, prosecutors also discovered that Gricignano’s municipal government helped Mirabella get two hundred acres of farmland by changing local zoning laws. Prosecutors said the changes could only have happened through criminal dealings. According to the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which covers the U.S. military worldwide, a former Camorra boss “hinted that organized crime did, in fact, influence Gricignano town policy.”45 A former town councillor said that the land was expropriated from farmers at a cut-rate price.46
Meanwhile, six known Camorristi—including two confessed murderers—said that when they failed to win the base construction contract, they began extorting money from Mirabella’s subcontractors. (None directly implicated Mirabella or Cristoforo, who at the time was finishing three months of house arrest for an unrelated tax fraud conviction.)47 According to another witness, the Camorra demanded 3 percent payoffs from subcontractors, or about $10,000 per month. Stars and Stripes reported that the witness “confessed to murders and implied some were related to the construction.” Another Camorra witness testified he killed someone who collected the payoffs.48
The Navy said it would not vouch for the legality of the parties involved in the construction, and added that Mirabella had cleared the Italian government’s mafia check. “We’re not here on behalf of the Italian government to make sure none of these parties are shady,” insisted the Navy officer overseeing construction.49 Eventually a Naples appeals court allowed construction to continue. The prosecutors appealed to the Italian Supreme Court but soon found themselves replaced on the case. The new prosecutors dropped the charges, saying they lacked evidence.
The allegations didn’t end there. In 1996, Admiral Boorda, the former Naples commander who got the Navy out of the Villaggio Coppola and later became the Navy’s highest-ranking officer, died at the Washington Navy Yard. According to the Navy and news reports, Boorda committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest with his son-in-law’s .38-caliber revolver.50 Navy and other government officials officially attributed Boorda’s suicide to a Newsweek investigation into his improperly wearing two Vietnam-era decorations for serving in combat (he had stopped wearing the medals a year before his death). Some reports say he died, unusually, of two shots to the chest, but the Navy never released an autopsy.51 Citing Boorda’s wife’s privacy, officials also never released what they said were two typed suicide notes. In the days before his death, Boorda had learned that Navy investigators were ready to arrest twenty-one sailors in Naples on heroin and cocaine smuggling charges.52 The Italian journalist Riccardo Scarpa reported that some U.S. officials told him the suicide might have been related to Boorda’s discovery of corruption at Gricignano.53 With unanswered questions and JFK-style speculation circulating to this day, some in Naples believe Boorda’s death was a Camorra hit.54
CAMORRA LANDLORDS
Gabriella, a stylish Italian woman in her twenties with two degrees and remarkable English skills, suggested we meet at an outdoor café in the fashionable Piazza Vanvitelli to talk about the Navy presence in Naples. She said she had dated two “Navy guys,” and described herself as a little “obsessed” with dating Americans. On several occasions, she said, she had spent time with her boyfriends at the Gricignano base.
“The Gricignano base is in an area that is very, very Camorra controlled,” Gabriella told me. Interestingly, she found that some Navy guys living off base actually seem to feel safer renting homes from the clans. When they look for housing off base, she explained, the Navy’s Housing Office tries to show them nice apartments and houses. And members of the Camorra own some of the nicer ones.
Once she asked some sailors if they felt safe living off base. “No,” one told her, “but our landlords are mafia, or Camorra, so we feel safe because they wouldn’t let anybody do any damage to us … Nobody would ever dare enter into my house to steal something or scratch my cars because they know that my landlord is mafia.”
“Ohh-kaay,” Gabriella said sarcastically, “if you feel safe … I try not to go there at all … because I don’t feel safe.”
Gabriella’s experience is not unusual. In October 2008, the major Italian daily Corriere della Sera published the results of an investigation by Naples antimafia officials showing that the Navy has been renting multiple properties owned by Camorra money laundering fronts. For many years, for example, Navy officers had been renting a house at number 10 Via Toti in San Cipriano d’Aversa, about seven miles from the Gricignano base. The building, a two-story villa surrounded by fortresslike walls and security cameras, had been purchased in 1986 in the name of the mother of Camorra boss Antonio Iovine with what investigators believe were his criminal earnings. Iovine is listed as one of the thirty most dangerous criminals in Italy and was one of five Camorra leaders the U.S. Treasury put on a sanctions list to combat transnational criminal organizations.55 In other words, it was as if the Navy were renting from the mother of Al Capone.
Beyond Iovine, investigators discovered that of some fifty villas seized from another Camorra clan, U.S. personnel were renting at least forty. Police suspected there were probably “hundreds more.”56 The Navy—and U.S. taxpayers—were paying the Camorristi from $2,000 to as much as $8,000 per month for the homes. (They were paying these rents to other landlords, too, at two to three times local averages.) “We know full well that many of the large villas in the Caserta area and those near military bases have dubious owners, and have often been built illegally with money originating from criminal activities,” said Sergio de Gregorio, the Italian senator responsible for relations with NATO forces. “These are princely villas with swimming pools and huge gardens surrounded by high walls.”57
“Absurd, isn’t it?” said Franco Roberti, the head of the Naples antimafia squad. “Italy contributes to NATO, and [U.S. forces belonging to NATO] are helping fill the coffers of the Camorra.”58
In November 2008, Italian authorities surprised Navy officials when they appeared at the Navy’s Housing Office. The Italian agents produced a court order for records regarding six homes leased by U.S. personnel and discovered to be owned by Camorra families. The agents also asked for access to the Navy’s entire housing database. The Navy refused, seemingly to avoid further embarrassment.59 The head of the antimafia squad faulted the Navy for knowingly renting from suspected mob bosses.60 Italian media reports in recent years suggest that the Navy and other NATO forces have continued renting from people with Camorra connections.61
“PHILOSOPHICAL ABOUT THE SITUATION”
The relationship between the U.S. military and the Camorra is neither a coincidence nor an aberration. Indeed, the construction project at Gricignano probably couldn’t have been better designed to ensure Camorra involvement.
To begin with, any construction in the Campania region was likely to attract the Camorra given its infiltration of the industry. Beyond that, the Navy’s “lease-construction” contract meant there was even more pressure than usual on the developer to keep construction costs as low as possible. The contract’s structure meant the developer wouldn’t be paid until construction was complete and the lease payments started. This meant taking on considerable debt in the meantime, as opposed to a standard contract that would have paid the developer at intervals during construction. Keeping costs—and thus debt—to a manageable amount, especially around Naples, meant acquiring land as cheaply as possible (by means legal or otherwise) and reducing construction and labor costs as much as possible (by means legal or otherwise).
In other words, in a place well known for the Camorra’s presence in the construction business, the Navy’s contract plainly encouraged cutting corners at best and illegalities at worst. A “cost reimbursement” contract, clearly specifying estimated labor and materials reimbursement rates and providing greater contracting oversight, would almost surely have been preferable.
Something similar had happened at the Navy’s former home in the Villaggio Coppola. There, the Coppolas acquired much of their land illegally (it’s cheaper that way) and without permits, which would have cost money in fees, bribes, and construction delays. Then they built such poorly constructed buildings that the Navy was moving out after just three decades. A similar story unfolded at the Agnano base, where the Navy employed much the same lease-construction technique and got poorly constructed facilities with “serious maintenance problems,” like a hospital with a leaky roof, sporadically operating air-conditioning, and an X-ray machine with a protective shield that fell from the ceiling.62 The Camorra’s Zagaria family, another target of U.S. anti–organized crime sanctions, even built NATO’s radar base in Lago Patria, outside Naples.63
U.S. bases in Sicily have also remained closely linked to the Mafia since World War II. In the 1980s, at the now closed Comiso base, firms controlled by the Cosa Nostra won most of the base construction contracts; many of the subcontracts went to Sicilian companies with Mafia ties; and many of the temporary construction workers came from Mafia-controlled firms in western Sicily. Locals quickly understood, as the anthropologist Laura Simich explains, “that base construction was not effectively under the jurisdiction of Italian law.”64
In the 1990s, three major janitorial, grounds keeping, and maintenance contractors at Sicily’s Sigonella naval base were revealed to have Mafia ties. According to court rulings, the controlling partner in the three companies, Carmelo La Mastra, was part of attempts to intimidate a competitor into withdrawing a contract bid. A U.S. court found that it was “probably in connection with that bid” that another firm’s owner was killed. La Mastra’s companies were placed under legal receivership, and he was indicted for his role in a “Mafia-type association” and bid rigging. Yet in 1999, the Navy awarded La Mastra’s three companies a major base maintenance contract, stating they had they had “a satisfactory record of performance, integrity, and business ethics.”65
Ties between the military and the Mafia may not have been simply the result of questionable oversight, but a deliberate decision. “It has even been suggested that the decision to install nuclear cruise missiles at Comiso was because the Mafia could be relied on to protect the site in return for the inevitable rake off it could extract on the hundreds of millions of dollars in construction contracts for roads, housing and so on,” the New York Times’s Flora Lewis wrote at the time. “Max Raab, the U.S. ambassador in 1983 when the site was being built, was said by aides to be philosophical about the situation, holding that the corruption was a problem for the Italian, not the U.S., government and that in any case the dollars would help stimulate the bedraggled Sicilian economy.”66
In Sicily and Naples alike, the repeated connections between the Navy and organized crime should be an expected, not a surprising, part of the U.S. military’s presence in the country. As we have seen around the world, the military has long sought base locations with a friendly and stable political and economic environment. Military officials have employed various means to achieve such stability. In places like Honduras and Bahrain, collaborating with repressive regimes has ensured long-term tenancy. In places like Germany, bringing over families and building segregated Little Americas has helped smooth and stabilize relations. In Diego Garcia and elsewhere, the military has simply gotten rid of locals.
Locating bases in poor and marginalized areas like Naples, ridden with organized crime, is part of the same pattern. U.S. officials have assumed that the promise of jobs and money will help secure a long-term presence free of protest or dissent. This has indeed largely been the case in Naples, as the Navy, over the course of more than sixty years, has embedded itself in the regional political economy. The Camorra, of course, is even more deeply embedded in the local political economy, leading the two organizations to become increasingly entwined over the years. As the Italian military analyst Antonio Mazzeo explains, the “proliferation of U.S. and NATO bases” has helped “strengthen the political and economic power of criminal organizations.”67
In the Italian government, U.S. officials have also had a partner agreeable to most military requests. What’s more, the Italian government has usually been available to take the blame for anything that might go wrong, such as uncomfortable revelations of ties with organized crime. And plenty of American officials, like Ambassador Raab, seem to have been “philosophical” about working with the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra, and other mafias. Given the crime families’ success in cutting costs, providing stability and protection, avoiding bureaucratic, legal, and political hurdles, and quickly getting concrete on the ground, many U.S. officials have been happy to ignore evidence of mafia involvement.
THE TRIANGLE OF DEATH
Before Sonia and I returned to Naples from the Gricignano support site, we stopped to buy and quickly devour something unavailable at the Gricignano base itself: freshly made buffalo mozzarella. This Campania specialty is known worldwide in its own right and is an essential component of true Neapolitan pizza. The lusciously smooth, soft cheese is strikingly different from the shredded or rubbery plastic-wrapped versions sold in American grocery stores, and even from tasty well-made cow’s milk mozzarella.
Slightly high on the rich, sweet cheese, Sonia and I drove back to Naples, passing more peach orchards, apricot trees, and some of those transcendent water buffalo grazing near the highways. We also passed heaps of trash lining the roadways and strewn around bridge overpasses. We saw trash fires in the fields clouding the air, and huge bales of compacted plastic-wrapped trash waiting for incineration in Campania’s planned but nonexistent incinerators. It was impossible not to think about what was buried and hidden just below the surface of the Campania plains. It was impossible not to wonder just what the buffalo were grazing on.
Gricignano and surrounding areas where Navy personnel live are at the center of an area where the Camorra has engaged in the illegal dumping of garbage and toxic waste since the 1980s. Garbage has become gold for the Camorristi, in what is now a $20-billion-a-year illicit industry.68 The Camorra has solved many of the waste disposal problems for businesses in northern Italy and beyond, cheaply ridding companies of manufacturing and other hazardous waste by burying the refuse in illegal dumps, pumping dangerous chemicals into hidden underground ditches, and burning trash on a nightly basis in secluded areas around Naples. A Camorra boss’s recently declassified 1997 testimony said his clan alone had buried “millions of tons” of toxic waste from the north and truckloads of nuclear waste from Germany in areas around Gricignano.69
Since the 1980s, studies have consistently shown elevated cancer rates in Campania compared to Italian national averages. Researchers publishing in the major scientific journal Lancet Oncology named an area near Gricignano the “triangle of death.”70 Elevated levels of radiation, nitrates, fecal coliform bacteria, arsenic, and chemicals used in cleaning solvents have been found in well water, air, and soil. The highly toxic industrial chemical dioxin has been found in sheep, which stagger and hobble through trash-littered fields until they expire, mangy and skeletal.71 After my visit, I learned that dangerous levels of carcinogens have been found in Campania’s water buffalo.
The Navy has become so concerned about local conditions that it has spent millions of dollars on studies investigating asthma, birth defects, cancer rates, and water, air, and soil quality. The Gricignano base now prohibits sailors from using tap water, and the base commissary carefully labels the origin of Italian produce.72 The only buffalo mozzarella for sale is from northern Italy.
The way that Camorristi solve waste disposal problems for northern Italian businesses is rather like the way the Camorra and Camorra-linked companies have cheaply and efficiently solved base construction problems for the U.S. military, building and maintaining Navy facilities with minimal hassle and expense. The moral implications of the U.S. military and U.S. taxpayer dollars supporting such a murderous criminal organization are troubling, to say the least. That U.S. troops are now facing the same garbage-related health risks that Campania locals face around the “triangle of death” is just one more reminder of the shortsightedness of the U.S. military’s relationship with the Camorra. In some cases, almost literally, you reap what you sow.
Munitions debris from some of the decades of weapons testing on Vieques, Puerto Rico.