Soaring on cocaine, guns smoking, the Camorra hit squad sped down the Via Domitiana, the road built along the Bay of Naples during the Roman Empire. They saw African prostitutes wearing miniskirts and multicolored braids, a wild night parade of silhouettes posing, strutting, staggering in search of a few euros. The sedan passed storefront churches, neon motel signs and garbage-strewn lots.
It stopped at a low white structure housing Ob-Ob Exotic Fashions. But the gunmen opened up anyway, strafing a group of Ghanaians at the store with an AK assault rifle and semiautomatic pistols.
Then they fled to a squalid hide-out and celebrated with lobster and champagne, leaving behind six people dead, one wounded and an uproar that spread across Italy. If it was about drugs, they shot the wrong people. Most of the victims were illegal immigrant laborers, though one or two may have been low-level drug pushers, investigators say.
The fusillade of bullets was apparently an indiscriminate message from a Camorra clan aimed at terrifying its junior partners into obedience. Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. They were well-received because they were cheap and very loyal. But then the Nigerians started to rise to a new level. As older Casalesi bosses went to prison, a new generation of swaggering, hard-partying gunslingers stepped up. During the last year, they embarked on a punitive campaign against Italian turncoats and foreign rivals, killing nine people.
Those deaths were in addition to the violence on Sept. They gunned down a mob-connected Italian they suspected of protecting the African, then attacked the clothing shop in a drug-fueled frenzy, officials say. It was an ethnic warning to rebellious Africans. This is a new reality, a work in progress, and we are trying to figure it out. Since the killings, the government in Rome has cracked down, arresting suspects and deploying soldiers in the region.
