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The Camorra Never Sleeps (2012)

One of the Neapolitan underworld’s most powerful bosses, Paolo Di Lauro was invisible to the Italian police for most of his career. But since his 2005 capture, William Langewiesche reports, some wonder if Di Lauro was the only man capable of controlling Naples’s meanest streets. Photographs by Massimo Vitali.

It carries addicts and pickpockets in a standing-room crush of ordinary citizens, and runs from the train station deep into the parallel world of the Camorra—skirting the narrow streets of the old city center, where the police don’t go, grinding uphill past the airport, with all of its associated rackets, stopping by a popular drug market in an alley of Secondigliano, and ending in a slum called Scampia, a district of dispersed apartment blocks where the Camorra holds sway and someone has spray-painted a declaration in giant graffiti on a building’s side. The logistical details vary, depending on location and customer base, but the largest operations run day and night, and deploy dozens of lookouts to cover the approaches—some sitting astride motor scooters on the streets, some watching the driveways and parking areas from upper-floor windows, others standing in groups at the allowed entry points to the courtyards and buildings. He is being held there under a prison regime called 41-bis—a program of severe and indefinite isolation by which Mafia leaders can be kept under 24-hour surveillance, cut off from contact even with guards, denied access to national or regional news, and allowed visits only from their lawyers and, for one hour a month—behind plate glass, by monitored phone—a designated member of their immediate family accompanied only by those children who are minors.

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