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Volume 4 • Number 2 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 2
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E D I TO R I A L A S S I S TA N T S
Angela Orlando • University of California, Los Angeles Will Thomson • New York University Amiel Melnick • City University of New York http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/journals/an
Anthropology Now, a general interest peer-refereed publication, is published three times a year in April, Sep-tember, and December. Each issue contains feature articles about current anthropology research, plus surveys of new research projects, essays, interviews, photo essays, poetry, and book, film, and exhibit reviews on a wide range of topics of interest to anthropologists, students, and the interested public.
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Married to the Mob?
Uncovering the Relationship between the US Military and theMafia in Southern Italy David Vine
M
y friend Gabriella blurted out in sur-prise as we crested a hill on a lonely road, “It looks like an outlet mall!” We had been driving for quite some time past breezy fields of peaches, corn, and tobacco when we got our first sight of “Yankee City”—the massive, sprawling US military base north of Naples.Gabriella’s initial reaction was more ac-curate than she knew. A major part of the US Navy “support site” is its US-style “big box” shopping mall. Such malls are found on US bases the world over (even at Guan-tánamo Bay). On the otherwise open plain, characteristic of Italy’s south, the mall in-cludes a Naval Exchange for everything from clothes to electronics, a commissary supermarket, a movie theater, US fast food restaurants, and rows upon rows upon rows of parking.
The contrast between the base and sur-rounding countryside could not have been starker. As Gabriella (a pseudonym) and I drove somewhat nervously around the base—which was ringed by a ten-foot-high fence, security cameras, and motion detec-tors—we saw grids of roads crisscrossing the base, large swaths of manicured and
lavishly watered green grass, American foot-ball and soccer fields, tennis and basketfoot-ball courts, picnic areas and barbecues, chil-dren’s playgrounds, skate parks, pools, and rows of neat apartment blocks.
We were awed by this replica of an ide-alized American suburban gated commu-nity. The only signs of anything out of order were the trash and recycling bins, overflow-ing with garbage, piled high and spilloverflow-ing out onto the ground. That and the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop coming from the direction of town. We decided to assume it was just firecrack-ers but wondered if it might have been auto-matic gunfire.
The trash and the popping reminded us that we were on the outskirts of Gricignano d’Aversa, a small town in the countryside of Campania, the agriculturally rich and eco-nomically poor region controlled by the Neapolitan mafia, the Camorra. Less well known than the Sicilian Mafia, the Camorra has thrived out of the spotlight, inflicting heavy costs in blood and corruption. As Gabriella and I drove, I could almost hear the words of Roberto Saviano, the Italian in-vestigative journalist who has lived in
hid-“Yankee City”: Naval Support Activity, Naples Support Site with Mt. Vesuvius in background, Gricignano d’Aversa, Italy.
Photo b
ing since publishing Gomorrah, his famed exposé of the Camorra. “Never in the econ-omy of a region,” Saviano writes, “has there been such a widespread, crushing criminal presence as in Campania in the last ten years.”1(Gomorrah was reviewed by Jane
Schneider and Peter Schneider in the April 2010 issue of Anthropology Now [volume 2, number 1].) No other Italian region has as many cities under observation for mafia in-filtration. Between 1991 and 2006, out of a total of 170 decrees dissolving local govern-ments in Italy because of organized crime infiltration, almost half—75—were from Campania. In the province of Naples alone, 41 local governments were dissolved.2
The Camorra system and its clans have integrated themselves into nearly every part of the social, political, and economic life of Campania. The US military is no exception. Down the dingy, potholed road from Gricig-nano’s sibling base, the naval facility at Naples’s Capodichino airport, sits the largest open-air drug market in Europe, dominated by the clans.3To help describe
the place, Saviano turned to the words of a magazine for US military personnel: “Imag-ine 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.”4
I first visited Naples to investigate the var-ious social impacts of the Navy’s presence but was quickly intrigued and puzzled by the presence of major US military facilities in the heartland of the Camorra. I started to wonder about the relationship between these two powerful, and—it must be said—
violent, international organizations. I won-dered what to make of reports such as, for example, that the Navy has been renting apartments from the Camorra, that the builder of the Gricignano base has been strongly linked to the Camorra, that a US admiral’s suicide may have been related to scandals in Naples, or that, as some say, his death was a Camorra hit.
The Military and the Mob
As the story goes, the US military would never have made it to Naples were it not for the help of the Mafia. While the history may have been exaggerated over time, “It is,” as one historian says, “beyond doubt that the Allies occupied southern Italy with the help of the Mafia.”5
Although the Navy long tried to cover up the story,6the lynchpin of this relationship
was one of the most notorious gangsters in the New York City Mafia, Lucky Luciano (portrayed recently on the HBO series
Boardwalk Empire).
“Upon the entrance of the United States into the war,” New York Governor Thomas Dewey wrote in 1946, “Luciano’s aid was sought by the Armed Services in inducing others to provide information concerning possible enemy attack.” Dewey’s clemency letter was Luciano’s reward for helping Naval Intelligence officers concerned about protecting New York harbor and Allied ship-ping from possible labor strife and Axis spies and saboteurs in the early days of the war.7From his cell, Luciano, who had close
ties to the unions that controlled the docks, recommended fellow mafiosi to aid in the
wartime campaign and had fellow gangster Meyer Lansky introduce them to Naval In-telligence officials. (Luciano later claimed that he was responsible for the arson that triggered the military’s concern about sabo-tage. If true, it would be “classic Mafia style,” as historian Salvatore Lupo explains: “Threat and protection from the same source!”)8
Although some histories appear to inflate the roles of Luciano and the Mafia in pre -paring for the Allied invasion of Sicily, Lu-ciano and other mafiosi appear to have at least provided information about the island and local contacts to help with the 1943 landing and occupation.9What is equally
clear is that these connections only deep-ened after the invasion. Allied leaders drew on the assistance of local mafiosi—who had been violently targeted by Mussolini—and in some cases appointed them as mayors. In these positions, bosses served as brokers be-tween the Allies and locals, provided inter-pretation, and fulfilled other important jobs. Even Lupo, who thinks this “conspiracy the-sis” has been overblown, says the Allied ad-ministration was “riddled with mafiosi.”10
Once they declared themselves “anti-fas-cist,” the allies had “trusted partners . . . able to police society,” as historian Tom Be-han notes wryly, “very effectively.”11
During the occupation of Naples, con-nections with organized crime only ex-panded. As in Sicily, where the Mafia coor-dinated the distribution of gas coupons and tires for the trucks supplying the black mar-ket,12the looting and skimming of Allied
food supplies and merchandise became en-demic, perhaps approaching 60 percent of unloaded goods in a devastated port city
with hundreds of thousands homeless and hungry. An entire contraband system for food, clothing, cigarettes, appliances, and other goods became “rooted in Naples,” de-spite largely disappearing elsewhere in Italy after the war.
The infamous New York Mafia boss Vito Genovese was at the center of this develop-ing black market. The head of the Allied Military Government—and the former lieu-tenant governor of New York—Colonel Charles Poletti selected Genovese, who had been the manager of Lucky Luciano’s gam-bling and New York drug operations, as his interpreter.13Taking advantage of his
rela-tionship with Poletti, Genovese and one of the newly appointed Mafia boss mayors, Don Calogero Vizzini, used Allied military trucks to smuggle oil, sugar, and other goods off Sicily’s docks. The US Army even-tually arrested Genovese in August 1944 for his black-market activities and returned him to New York. After the poisoning death of the prosecution’s prime witness, Genovese soon became leader of the Genovese crime family.14 In turn, the vacuum created by
Genovese’s arrest was filled by his former boss Luciano, who was newly returned to Italy by Governor Dewey’s pardon and was setting up his revitalized operations in Naples.15
Genovese and . . . Don Calogero Vizzini used Allied military trucks to smuggle oil, sugar, and other goods off Sicily’s docks.
The Resurrection
The Mafia was not the only criminal organi-zation revitalized by the Allied occupation. Equally targeted by the fascists, the Camorra was, after the liberation of Naples, resur-rected thanks to the members of the Sicilian and New York mafias. Initially, bosses like Luciano employed Neapolitans in their profitable enterprises. Over time, the em-ployees came to lead the Camorra on their own.16
Older than any other Italian criminal or-ganization, the Camorra dates to at least the late 18th or early 19th century (possibly to 1825 and men imprisoned in a military base—Naples’s Castel Nuovo, or New Cas-tle).17 Whatever its exact origins, the
Camorra grew in power through most of the 19th century until a decline followed Italy’s unification in 1861.18 Another period of
growth emerged in the early 20th century before Mussolini’s rule crippled Italy’s crim-inal organizations.
However, with the opportunities pro-vided by the Allied occupation amid wide-spread misery and a resulting “culture of il-legality,” the Camorra rebounded through its involvement in the theft and black-mar-ket resale of millions of dollars of Allied troops’ supplies, corruption, and prostitu-tion.19
Occupying US forces were not just pas-sive victims of Camorra thieves. After the war, GIs frequented the Quartieri Spagnoli for black-market goods.20 Mostly, however,
the flow of goods went in the other direc-tion. As was the case around US bases across Italy and elsewhere in the world, mil-itary personnel often became a source for
cheap, desirable consumption items, like cigarettes and later blue jeans, which they sold to locals for their own use or resale.21
Even US military trucks went missing, as they were used by the Camorra to transport stolen weapons across Europe without sus-picion.22
Happily for the Camorra, US troops never left Italy after World War II. Following a temporary reduction in US and Allied forces,23 the United States began building
up its presence in and around Naples fol-lowing the 1954 signing of the Italian-Amer-ican “Bilateral Infrastructure Agreement.” At a time when the CIA was secretly backing the Christian Democracy party against pop-ular communist and socialist parties, the agreement allowed for the stationing of US forces in Italy under conditions that still re-main secret (and which are possibly in vio-lation of the Italian constitution).24 Over
time, the Navy concentrated many of its fa-cilities in the part of Naples called Agnano, before moving those facilities to the twin bases of Gricignano and Capodichino in the 1990s. US forces built other bases in nearby Gaeta, Ischia, Lago Patria, Varcaturo, Marinaro, Grazzanise, Mondragone, Monte ver -gine, Nisida, and Carney Park (an isolated and slightly surreal US-style recreation cen-ter located in the cracen-ter of an extinct vol-cano).25These strictly US bases are in
addi-tion to several NATO bases in Naples. In total, there are around 10,000 US military personnel, civilian employees, and family members in the “US military community” around Naples.26 Across Italy, there are
more than 13,000 US troops, in addition to thousands more civilians and family mem-bers. They occupy what the Pentagon
counts as at least 68 bases from Aviano and Vicenza to Pisa/Livorno and Sicily. After Germany, Japan, and South Korea, there are more US bases in Italy than anywhere else outside the United States—out of a total of more than 1,000 US bases abroad.27
Revived by its relationship with US forces, the Camorra eventually overtook the economic power and influence of the Mafia, shifting from black-market activities, small-scale extortion, and racketeering to become an “international business syndi-cate.”28The Camorra’s major advance in
scale and scope came in the 1970s when the clans found lucrative money-making op-portunities in construction, concrete, public contracts, garbage, and especially interna-tional drug trafficking. This turned the Camorra into a global economic power-house, grossing an estimated €12 billion per
year, employing 20,000 people, with affili-ates across Europe, South America, and in the United States.29
It Takes a Villaggio
Until the late 1990s, thousands of US mili-tary personnel and their families lived in the
Villaggio Coppola—Coppola Village.
Se-cluded among pine woods along the Mediterranean north of Naples, the devel-opment today feels like a scene out of Mel Gibson’s post-apocalyptic classic Mad Max. When I visited in 2010, the “road” to the beach ended in a rutted mess of broken pavement, gravel, and a pile of dumped trash. Some of the Villaggio Coppola was torn down years ago. The buildings that re-main are mostly decaying four-story hulking
USS Forrestal aircraft carrier in the port of Naples, 1959.
US Na
vy/Na
concrete blocks scarred by missing roofs and naked rebar and shadowed by shabby high-rises.
As the power and influence of the Camorra grew after the war, the clans deep-ened their relationships with local politi-cians and legal businesses. A three-way sys-tem developed between camorristi, politicians, and businessmen. As Italian aca-demic Felia Allum explains, “the three sets of actors . . . operated a cartel arrangement, with the common goal of diverting public funds and making huge profits.” The model was fairly simple: Responding to a public contract, “the Camorra provided companies for the subcontracts, supplies for the work (cement, tools, diggers, bulldozers, etc.) and provided good working conditions in return for 3 to 5 percent of the contract.”30
Built in the 1960s, “The City of Abuse” is a case in point.31Saviano says it’s like
noth-ing in Italy. “Eight hundred sixty-three thou-sand square meters of cement: the Coppola Village. They did not ask for authorization. They didn’t need to. Around here construc-tion bids and permits make producconstruc-tion costs skyrocket because there are so many bu-reaucratic 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.”32
More than half of the Villaggio was built illegally on public land; the rest was built on private land taken by one illegal means or another. The concrete, iron, wood, and labor came courtesy of the Camorra. Litiga-tion followed, but the Coppolas only had to pay a nominal fine—assessed by a judge with an apartment in the towers.33
Making their name on the Villaggio, the Coppola family and its most prominent members, brothers Cristoforo and Vincenzo, remain Campania’s “richest and most pow-erful” construction group.34The family hails
from the Camorra stronghold of Casal di Principe, which Saviano explains is “the capital of the Camorra’s entrepreneurial power.” It provides locals with “a guaran-teed respect, a sort of natural fear.” Saviano notes, “Compared to Casal di Principe, Cor-leone,” the Sicilian town made famous by the Godfather, “is Disneyland.”35
When some of the Villaggio’s towers were torn down after barely four decades of occupancy, the Coppolas profited again with Vincenzo doing the demolition.36
Iron-ically enough, Cristoforo helped found a business to revitalize the environmental and economic life of the coast around the Villag-gio. His partner was Vincenzo Schiavone, a member of the Camorra’s murderous Casa -lesi clan.37
Here, thousands of US military personnel and their families lived until the command-ing officer in Naples, Admiral Michael Bo-orda, ordered them to leave “because of the poor condition of the buildings and high crime.”38
Yankee City
To replace this and other housing, the Navy convinced Congress to build a new housing development and naval station. To whom did the military turn when it was looking for a developer? The Coppolas. Or at least to Cristoforo and four of his children, who control the Mirabella group, following a
contentious split between Cristoforo and Vincenzo.
The Navy had been working on plans for a new base since a series of 1982 earth-quakes hit Agnano, briefly blocking the one access road to the Navy base. The Navy’s initial plan, “Project Pronto”—Project Quick—moved slowly and was eventually rejected by the US Congress in 1988 be-cause of high costs. Two years later, Con-gress approved a two-pronged plan to build an operations base at the Capodichino air-port and a supair-port site for housing, a school, shopping, and other amenities at another location. The military already con-trolled 54 acres at the airport, where it once had an air base. This meant Congress didn’t have to buy the land and only had to pay to build facilities at Capodichino.
For the support site, Congress and the Navy decided to use a procedure called “lease-construction.” Rather than paying land and construction costs, the Navy would invite developers to bid to build the base to the Navy’s specifications. The devel-oper had to control the land, but the Navy would agree to lease the site for thirty years. After that, the developer would get the buildings back, with the right to rent them to the Navy or someone else. The initial costs to the US government would be nearly zero. All the construction and land acquisi-tion costs would be paid by the developer, although the developer would have the se-curity of a tenant paying a guaranteed rent. Lease-construction allowed Congress to ap-propriate no more than the costs of the Capodichino facilities or about one-third of the estimated $700 million total.
In 1993, the Navy awarded the first of
four contracts for the support site to Cristo-foro Coppola’s Mirabella. What followed is the subject of some dispute, but some say Coppola paid an Italian restaurateur in Washington, DC, with good ties to the mili-tary, to secure the deal (the restauranteur was acquitted). A letter from a US undersec-retary of defense to the chairman of Mirabella, Cristoforo’s son Francesco, sug-gests that Mirabella’s “friends,” powerful Congress members Ron Dellums and Tom Foglietta, may have helped win the contract.39What’s clear is that politicians in
Gricignano d’Aversa helped Mirabella gain access to 80 hectares of farmland. Accord-ing to a former town councilor, the land was expropriated from farmers with Cristoforo paying compensation on the basis of the land’s agricultural use—even though other uses were planned.40
In 1996, shortly after construction started, a Bronze Age archeological site was discovered. Some described it as “price-less”41 and potentially a “new Pompeii.”42
Although Cristoforo’s Mirabella hired a team of archeological consultants, “The Americans . . . were in a hurry,” as one jour-nalist explained, “and Cristoforo proceeded with construction like a tank to spend as lit-tle as possible and avoid paying millions in fines.”43
Work Stoppage
While archeological discoveries couldn’t slow Coppola’s construction, in 1999, Naples prosecutors did. Investigating multi-ple allegations of crime and corruption, some brought to light by Vincenzo Coppola,
whose company had lost the construction contract to his brother, prosecutors alleged that Mirabella gained permission to build in Gricignano by pressuring municipal offi-cials to change or ignore zoning laws. Vin-cenzo claimed his brother had won the contract illegally and that the Navy had changed its rules during the bidding. The Navy denied the charge, but prosecutors discovered Gricignano’s municipal govern-ment had set aside land by changing zoning laws for Mirabella, which they said could only have happened through criminal deal-ings. The Navy official overseeing construc-tion admitted “Mirabella developed a strat-egy (it wouldn’t have) if not for the Navy’s timetable” to begin construction as quickly as possible.44According to the Stars and
Stripes newspaper, which covers the US
military worldwide, a former Camorra boss
“hinted that organized crime did, in fact, in-fluence Gricignano town policy.”45
Meanwhile, six confessed camorristi—in-cluding two confessed murderers—said that when they failed to win the contract awarded to Mirabella, they began extorting money from Mirabella’s subcontractors, al-though none directly implicated Mirabella or Cristoforo.46 (At the time, Cristoforo and
Francesco were finishing a three-month sen-tence under house arrest for tax fraud unre-lated to the Gricignano construction.)47
Another camorrista said he began con-trolling the construction works shortly after escaping from prison. He said his clan was asked to ensure that construction would run smoothly, although he didn’t say who made the request. According to another witness, the Camorra demanded 3 percent payoffs from subcontractors, or about $10,000 per
Warning outside US Naval Support Activity Naples, Capodichino site, 2010.
Photo b
month. Stars and Stripes reported that the witness “confessed to murders and implied some were related to the construction,” while another Camorra witness testified to killing someone who collected the pay-offs.48
For its part, the Navy would not vouch for the legality of the parties involved but said Mirabella cleared the Italian govern-ment’s “mafia check.” The Navy officer over-seeing construction told Stars and Stripes, “We’re not here on behalf of the Italian gov-ernment to make sure none of these parties are shady.”49
A Naples appeals court lifted the con-struction stop within a month, and prosecu-tors appealed to the Italian Supreme Court. There, new prosecutors eventually dropped the charges, saying they lacked evidence.
But the allegations did not end there. Ital-ian journalist Riccardo Scarpa reported that US officials told him the 1996 suicide of the Navy’s then highest-ranking officer, Admiral Boorda, may have been related to his dis-covery of corruption at Gricignano.50In the
days before his death, Boorda learned that Navy investigators were ready to arrest 21 sailors in Naples, where he had been when Mirabella won the contract, on heroin and cocaine smuggling charges. The Navy and other government officials attributed Bo-orda’s suicide—by two shots to the chest— to an investigation of his improperly wear-ing two Vietnam-era medals for valor. Some rumored that Boorda’s death was a Camorra assassination.51The Navy never released an
autopsy or two reported suicide notes, cit-ing Boorda’s wife’s privacy and leavcit-ing unanswered questions to this day.52
Camorra Landlords
In November 2008, the Naples anti-mafia squad and the national Finance Police sur-prised Navy officials when they appeared at the Navy’s Housing Office, which coordi-nates on and off-base housing for military personnel. The Italian agents produced a court order for records about six homes leased by US personnel and discovered to be owned by Camorra families. It turns out the Navy—and US taxpayers—were paying the camorristi €1500–3000 per month for the homes (they were paying these rents to other landlords too, at two to three times lo-cal averages). The agents asked for access to the Navy’s entire housing database, but the Navy refused. The head of the anti-mafia force faulted the Navy “for knowingly leas-ing houses [from] suspected mob bosses.”53
Following these revelations, the Navy has for “environmental” reasons declared four areas around Gricignano off limits for new leases. While Navy studies have shown there to be high levels of pollution in these areas, it seems clear the ban is also an at-tempt to avoid some of these uncomfortable entanglements.
The tangled relationship between the US military and the Camorra is neither a coinci-dence nor an aberration. The construction project at Gricignano probably couldn’t have been better designed to ensure Camorra involvement. The Navy’s lease-construction technique allowed it to pay next to nothing initially for the construction. Instead it solicited bids from developers to build a base on land the developer con-trolled in exchange for guaranteed Navy
rent payments. From a developer’s perspec-tive, making a profit depended on keeping construction costs as low as possible to en-sure that subsequent lease payments would cover the costs and debts of construction and, of course, leave substantial profits left over. Keeping costs as low as possible, espe-cially around Naples, means acquiring land as cheaply as possible (by means legal or otherwise) and keeping building and labor costs as low as possible (by means legal or otherwise). In other words, in a place known for the Camorra’s infiltration of the construction industry, the structure of the contract encouraged cutting corners at best and illegalities at worst.
Something similar happened at the Navy’s former home in the Villaggio Cop-pola. There, the Coppolas acquired much of their land illegally—it’s cheaper that way— and without permits—which would cost money in fees, bribes, and construction de-lays. Then, they built such poorly con-structed buildings that some lasted just four decades. A similar story unfolded at the Ag-nano base, where the Navy employed much the same lease-construction technique and got poorly constructed facilities with “seri-ous maintenance problems.”54
Given the cost savings and “efficiencies” that the Camorra and Camorra-linked com-panies are able to achieve though extortion, bribes, theft, intimidation, violence, and other means, their involvement in this or any kind of contract should have been ex-pected. Indeed, it would have been surpris-ing if it had been any other way.
“Philosophical about the Situation”
Similar situations have unfolded around US bases in Sicily, which have remained closely linked to the Mafia. In the 1980s, at the now-closed Comiso base, “Mafia-controlled firms from outside the region soon won most contracts for the construction of the base, and [locals] understood that base con-struction was not effectively under the juris-diction of Italian law.”55 Many of the
sub-contracts went “to Sicilian firms, some of which had ties to criminal networks in Palermo.” Many of the temporary construc-tion workers came from Mafia-controlled firms in western Sicily.56
More recently, three major janitorial, groundskeeping, and maintenance contrac-tors at the Sigonella naval base were found to have Mafia ties. According to 1997 and 1998 court rulings, the controlling partner, Carmelo La Mastra, was part of attempts to intimidate a competitor into withdrawing a contract bid. “Probably in connection with that bid the owner of another firm . . . was killed.” La Mastra’s three companies were placed under legal receivership and La Mas-tra was indicted for his role in a “Mafia-type association” and bid-rigging.57
More recently, three major janitorial, groundskeeping, and maintenance contractors at the Sigonella naval base were found to have Mafia ties.
And yet, in 1999, the US contracting offi-cer at Sigonella awarded a contract, deter-mining that the three companies had “a sat-isfactory record of performance, integrity, and business ethics.”
Such ties between the military and the Mafia may not have been simply the result of the power of the Cosa Nostra or question-able oversight. “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 re-turn for the inevitable rake off it could ex-tract on the hundreds of millions of dollars in construction contracts for roads, housing and so on,” Flora Lewis of the New York
Times wrote at the time. “Max Raab, the US
ambassador in 1983 when the site was be-ing built, was said by aides to be philosoph-ical about the situation, holding that the corruption was a problem for the Italian, not the US, government and that in any case the dollars would help stimulate the bedraggled Sicilian economy.”58
Given the history in Sicily, the repeated connections between the Navy and the Camorra should be seen even more as an expected—rather than unexpected—conse-quence of the US military’s presence around Naples. The Navy and the Pentagon have long sought base locations with a friendly and stable political59 and economic
envi-ronment, as well as a militarily strategic lo-cation. Most often this has meant locating bases in poor and marginalized areas, like Naples. In her study of the former Navy base in Vieques, Puerto Rico, Katherine Mc-Caffrey writes, “Bases are frequently estab-lished on the political margins of national territory, on lands occupied by ethnic or
cultural minorities or otherwise disadvan-taged populations.”60In poorer areas like
Naples, US officials assume that the prom-ise of jobs and money will help secure a long-term presence. This has largely been the case as the Navy has, over more than half a century, embedded itself securely in the regional political economy. A political economy in which the Camorra is even more deeply embedded.
In the Italian government, US officials have had a consistent partner willing to agree to most military requests. US officials have also had a partner on whom they can blame anything that might go wrong, like any ties with organized crime. When the Navy was discovered to be renting homes from camorristi, for example, a Navy spokesperson said that it was the Italian government’s role, not the Navy’s, “to make sure none of these parties are shady.”
Indeed, like Ambassador Raab, it seems many US officials have been “philosophi-cal” about maintaining ties with the Camorra, the Cosa Nostra, and other mafias since World War II. Given their success in cutting costs, in avoiding bureaucratic, le-gal, and political hurdles, in providing sta-bility and protection, and in quickly getting concrete on the ground, many have been more than happy to ignore evidence of mafia involvement.
This willingness to take advantage of criminal organizations should come as no surprise either. Despite frequently invoking rhetoric about spreading democracy and maintaining security, the US government has often been equally “philosophical” about its entire network of more than 1,000 overseas military bases. “Gaining and
main-taining access to US bases,” base expert Catherine Lutz explains, “has often involved close collaboration with despotic,” corrupt, and murderous governments, including those in (at various times) Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, South Korea, Turkey, the Philippines, Spain, Portugal, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, to name a few.61 Kent
Calder, a Johns Hopkins political scientist and former State Department official, con-firms the “dictator hypothesis” that “the United States tends to support dictators in nations where it enjoys basing facilities.”
Many bases owe their very existence to the US military or compliant local govern-ments unlawfully displacing local peoples from their lands in places from Vieques and Okinawa to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.62 Once established, base
com-manders have often encouraged the estab-lishment of brothels, shady “camptowns,” and entire sex work industries outside bases’ front gates.63 Even the legal and
diplomatic foundation of most bases rests on status of forces agreements, generally providing extraterritorial legal immunity to US military personnel, or on secret agree-ments, like 1954’s Italian-American Bilat-eral Infrastructure Agreement, signed with no democratic oversight whatsoever.
Toxic Relations
As Gabriella and I drove through the Cam-pania countryside around Gricignano past peach orchards and water buffalo grazing near the highways, I couldn’t help but think about what was in those peaches, what the buffalo were grazing on, what was in their
milk and thus in their mozzarella, what was buried and hidden just below the surface of the Campania plains. Gricignano and sur-rounding areas where Navy personnel have come to live are at the center of an area where the Camorra has engaged in the ille-gal dumping of garbage and toxic waste since the 1980s. During a major period of road building north of Naples, the clans saw, as anti-Mafia magistrate Gianni Melillo pointed out, that “garbage equals gold.”64
Since then, the Camorra has solved many of the waste disposal problems for businesses in northern Italy and elsewhere. Every year, the Camorra has rid companies of millions of tons of industrial waste from textile, leather, metal, chemical, paper, and phar-maceutical manufacturing by burying waste in illegal dumps around Naples.65
Since the 1980s, studies have shown ele-vated cancer rates compared to Italian na-tional averages, with an area near Gricig-nano coined the “triangle of death” by medical researchers.66Elevated levels of
ra-diation, nitrates, fecal coliform bacteria, ar-senic, and chemicals used in cleaning sol-vents have all been found in well water, soil, and the air. Dangerous levels of car-cinogens have been found in the area’s famed buffalo mozzarella.67The Navy has
been so concerned that it has spent millions on years of studies investigating asthma; birth defects; cancer; and water, air, and soil quality.
Like the northern businesses for whom the Camorra inexpensively and expediently solves the waste disposal problem, so too the Camorra and Camorra-linked compa-nies have inexpensively and expediently solved US base problems, building and
maintaining facilities for the Navy with as little hassle and expense as possible.
That US troops in Campania are now fac-ing the same garbage-related health risks that locals face around the “triangle of death” is just one reminder of the shortsight-edness of the US military’s relationship with the Camorra—that in some cases, quite lit-erally, you reap what you sow.
Notes
A longer version of this article appeared as “Yan-kee City in the Heart of the Camorra: The U.S.
Military in Campania,” in Chiara Ingrosso and Luca Molinari, eds., “La Napoli degli Americani dalla Liberazione alle basi Nato,” Meridione:
Sud e Nord nel Mondo, no. 4 (2011): 243–264.
1. R. Saviano, Gomorrah, A Personal Journey
into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System, translation by V. Jewiss
(New York: Picador, 2007) 161.
2. D. Lane, Into the Heart of the Mafia (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002) 187.
3. Saviano, 46–47, 63–67, 120. 4. Saviano, 161.
5. T. Behan, See Naples and Die, the Camorra
and Organized Crime (London: Taurus Parke
Pa-perbacks) 53–54.
Map indicating areas in the Camorra heartland, around Gricignano d’Aversa and the “triangle of death,” where US military personnel are barred from leasing homes for “environmental” reasons.
U.S. Na
val Support
Acti
6. Ibid., vii–viii.
7. R. Campbell, The Luciano Project, The
Se-cret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy (New York: McGraw-Hill Book
Com-pany, 1977) 1–2.
8. Salvatore Lupo, History of the Mafia, trans. Anthony Shugaar (New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 2009) 187.
9. Ibid., p. vii; Behan, 50–51; T. Newark,
Lucky Luciano, the Real and the Fake Gangster
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2010) 164; Salvatore Lupo, History of the Mafia, 187; Salva-tore Lupo, “The Allies and the Mafia,” Journal of
Modern Italian Studies 2, no. 1 (1997): 21–33.
10. Lupo, “The Allies,” 29.
11. Behan, 53. See also Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs,
and the Press (London: Verso, 1998) 127–129.
12. Lupo, “The Allies,” 26. 13. Cockburn and St. Clair, 128. 14. Ibid.
15. Behan, 54–56.
16. Ibid., 56–58, 79; Felia Allum, Camorristi,
Politicians, and Businessmen: The Transformation of Organized Crime in Post-War Naples (Leeds:
Northern Universities Press, 2006) 104–5. 17. Allum, 4.
18. Los Angeles Times, “Camorra and Mafia, the Banded Rulers of South Italy for Fifty Years,” 2 April 1891, 6; Allum, 4.
19. Allum, 20–1.
20. D. Lane, Into the Heart of the Mafia (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002) 189, 192; Be-han, 46.
21. Cf., M. Gillem, America Town, Building
the Outposts of Empire (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2007) 92–93; Allum, 99– 100.
22. Saviano. 160–161.
23. The main exception being US troops sup-porting deployments in Austria and Trieste.
24. Alexander Cooley writes, “One former of-ficial of the Italian Ministry of Defense observed
that the enduring secrecy of the BIA may be a function of some of these provisions’ unconstitu-tionality.” Ibid., 199, n. 88. A subsequent treaty was signed in 1995 that adds to but does not in-validate the BIA.
25. See A. Zecca, Basi e intallazioni military in
Campania, in Napoli chiama Vicenza, disarme I territory, constuire la pace, edited by A. Romano
(Pisa: Quaderni Satyagraha, 2008) 46.
26. Naval Security Group Station, Naval Se-curity Group Station History, 13 July 2008, (http: //www.navycthistory.com/NSGStationsHistory.txt). 27. US Department of Defense, Base
Struc-ture Report, Fiscal Year 2011 Baseline (a sum-mary of DoD’s real property inventory)
(Wash-ington, DC: US Dept. of Defense, 2011). 28. Behan, 57–58.
29. J. P. Truhn, Organized Crime in Italy II,
How Organized Crime Distorts Markets and Lim-its Italy’s Growth, Cable to Secretary of State,
08NAPLES37, 6 June 2006, Wikileaks. 30. Allum, 162, xvi, 172.
31. F. Erbano, La cittá degli abusi, 9 July 2002 (http://www.regione.emilia-romagna.it/paesaggi/ news/erbani090702.htm).
32. Saviano, 168. 33. Erbano.
34. P. Spiga, Famiglia Cristiana, grandi
dy-nasty mattonare—i Coppola, La Voce della Voci,
October 2010, 21.
35. Saviano writes, “Casal di Principe, San Cipriano d’Aversa, Casapesenna. Fewer than one hundred thousand inhabitants, but twelve hun-dred of them have been sentenced for having ties to the Mafia, and a whole lot more have been ac-cused or convicted of aiding or abetting Mafia activities.” Saviano, 187–188.
36. Spiga, 21; Erbano. 37. Spiga, 21.
38. S. Palumbo, “Agnano Seamen to Stay in Barracks,” Stars and Stripes, 16 May 1997, 3.
39. U.S. Undersecretary of Defense John Mc-Govern wrote “Congressman Ron Dellums will
be the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Tom Foglietta has assumed a new role in the appropriations subcommittee on mili-tary construction, which provides funds for the projects. These two friends are in a powerful po-sition to ensure the authorization and the appro-priation of the project in Naples.” Spiga, 21.
40. F. Geremicca, “Invece di una nuova Pom-pei il villaggio della US navy,” Diario, 21/27 Sep-tember 2001 (http://dust.it/articolo-diario/invece -di-una-nuova-pompei-il-villaggio-della-us -navy/); Spiga, 21.
41. A. Cinquegrani, “Farano un deserto e lo chiameranno NATO,” La Voce della Campania, 6–9 April 2001, p. 7.
42. Ibid.; Geremicca. 43. Geremicca. 44. Ibid., 4. 45. Ibid., 4.
46. W. Sanderson, “Mafia Linked to Navy Site, Developers Accused of Conspiracy,” Stars
and Stripes, 18 July 1999, 1, 4.
47. Sanderson, 4. 48. Ibid., 4. 49. Ibid., 4 50. Ibid., s4.
51. E.g., one anonymous blog comment said, “I’ve worked in Naples, Italy for less than a year and the word about Admiral Boorda out here is he was the victim of a mafia hit by the com-morah [sic]. He helped land a contract with a suspected member of the mafia in building a mil-itary base. . . . All the Italians here claim he was murdered.” http://news4a2.blogspot.com/2005/ 05/adm-jeremy-mike-boorda-may-16-1996-pt .html.
52. New York Times, “21 U.S. Sailors Seized in Italy in Drug Inquiry,” 29 May 1996, A17; C. Stewart, “Admiral’s Suicide Pre-empts Vietnam Medal Investigation,” The Weekend Australian, 18 May 1996; Deutsche Presse-Agentur, “Top U.S. Naval Officer Dies of Self-inflicted Gunshot Wound,” 16 May 1996.
53. S. Jontz, “Official Seeks Assurance for Naples’ U.S. Renters,” Stars and Stripes, 27 No-vember 2008; L. Novak. “Italian Police Ask Navy for Records to 6 Naples Homes,” Stars and
Stripes, 17 December 2008; Cronaca, “Le mani
dei Casalesi sui fitti dele case ai marines,”
Redazione, 26 November 2008.
54. Comptroller General of the United States,
2, 16–17.
55. L. Simich, op. cit., p. 79. 67. Ibid., p. 85, 91, 82.
57. 238 F.3d 1324 (Fed. Cir. 2000), Impresa Construzioni Geom. Domenico Garufi v. United States, United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, 3 January 2001.
58. Simich, 91. 59. Cooley, 212.
60. Katherine T. McCaffrey, Military Power
and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
Univer-sity Press, 2002) 9–10.
61. Catherine Lutz, “Introduction: Bases, pire, and Global Response,” in The Bases of
Em-pire: The Global Struggle against U.S. Military Posts,” Catherine Lutz, ed. (New York: New York
University Press, 2009) 28.
62. David Vine, Island of Shame: The Secret
History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 63. See e.g., Cynthia Enloe, Bananas,
Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of In-ternational Politics (Berkeley: University of
Cali-fornia Press, 2000); Maria Höhn and Seungsook Moon, eds., Over There: Living with the U.S.
Mil-itary Empire from World War Two to the Present
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 64. Saviano, 188; Lane, 182.
65. Ibid., p. 184.
66. F. Bianchi, P. Comba, M. Martuzzi, R. Palombino, R. Pizzuti, “Italian ‘Triangle of Death,’” Lancet Oncology 12, December 2004, 710; K. Senior and A. Mazza, “Italian ‘Triangle of Death’ Linked to Waste Crisis,” Lancet Oncology
9, September 2004 (http://www.uonna.it/lancet -journal-acerra.htm); P. Comba et al., “Cancer Mortality in an Area of Campania (Italy) Charac-terized by Multiple Toxic Dumping Sites, Annals
of the New York Academy of Sciences MLXXVI,
September 2006, 449–461; M Martuzzi, et al., “Cancer Mortality and Congenital Anomalies in a Region of Italy with Intense Environmental Pressure due to Waste, Occupational
Environ-mental Medicine LXVI, 2009, 725–732.
67. Naval Facilities Engineering Command At-lantic, Final Phase I Environmental Testing
Sup-port Assessment ReSup-port Volume I, Naval SupSup-port Activity Naples, April 2009; Stars and Stripes,
“Naples Water Buffalo Herds Are Quarantined,” 22 March 2008 (http://www.stripes.com/news/ naples-water-buffalo-herds-are-quarantined-1 .76792).
David Vine is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret
His-tory of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia
(Princeton University Press, 2009). He is cur-rently completing a book about the global net-work of US overseas military bases.