Casal Di Principe, Italy — The paratroopers' armored vehicles had barely taken up position in this fiefdom of the Casalesi crime clan when the mobsters decided to show who was boss.
On a sleepy Sunday, a few hundred yards from where the crack Thunderbolt brigade was deployed with automatic rifles, two gunmen drove down the town's main street and pumped bullets into a 60-year-old man at a table just inside the entrance of a card parlor.
The murder of an uncle of a crime syndicate turncoat left blood oozing across the stone sidewalk and a collective silence by potential witnesses among fellow card players, prompting a wry comment that the victim must have been playing solitaire.
After dealing blows that left Sicily's Cosa Nostra reeling and making inroads against Calabria's potent 'ndrangheta syndicate, Italy's new war against organized crime is challenging the Camorra, the Naples regional mafia depicted in a film just released in the U.S., after the mob carried out a brutal, monthslong murder spree that included gunning down six Ghanaian immigrants in one swoop.
In recent months, the government has sent 3,000 soldiers into other cities across Italy to help battle crime syndicates. Now it has poured 500 soldiers and 400 police investigators into the region northwest of Naples, with most patrolling the flat, bleak, provincial countryside that is under the sway of the Casalesi, so named for its stronghold here in the town of Casal di Principe.
The deployment is set to last until December and could be extended if violence persists. Using the military against criminals is not new - it has been done in Naples and Sicily - but the theory still stands that sending in troops can free up local police who know the territory to intensify the search for clues and suspects.
However, as shown by the brazen murder of the card player on Oct. 5, the Camorra is proving a fiercely tenacious enemy.
"They are not in decline. They are very strong economically," said magistrate Franco Roberti, who heads a team of anti-mob prosecutors in Naples.
The Camorra runs lucrative rackets ranging from numbers games to horse race betting, drugs and smuggling immigrants. The Casalesi are also involved in illegal transport and disposal of tons of toxic waste from the industrial north to the underdeveloped south, according to a report by a parliamentary anti-Mafia commission.
But the Camorra, and in particular the Casalesi, thrive mainly on extorting "protection" money from a terrorized citizenry.
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