NCJ Number
164449
Date Published
1993
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This chapter provides a brief history of the Neapolitan Camorra, a typical organized criminal structure of the Italian Campania region; it assesses the extent to which the Camorra conforms to the features by which organized crime is typically identified.
Abstract
In examining the case of the Camorra, it cannot be asserted that organized crime prospers where there is little sense of a state; on the contrary, it prospers where there is too much state, or at least where the state is present in formal bureaucratic details and routine. In many circumstances, organized crime does not need to corrupt the legal apparatus but is corrupted by it. Further, the assumption that underdevelopment will favor the growth of organized crime of the Mafia type is undermined by the Camorra's revelation that economic growth itself periodically uses the forms and structures of the Mafia to pursue innovation and further development. From "clean" money to "criminal" money and vice versa, the direction seems to be reversible. The very distinctions between capital as collective reason (legal capital) and capital as egoistic interest (criminal) lose much of their analytic rationale; the two dimensions combine and intermingle in a process of development that benefits them both; for example, during the rebuilding after the Naples earthquake, the Camorra's habit of cornering the contracts suited perfectly the building firms of Northern Italy who ran to the Campania without too much hair-splitting with the partners and middlemen with whom they had to negotiate. Thus, the Camorra is in a position to deploy productive energy and to offer work opportunities, whether in legal or illegal activity. In its relations with the more progressive lawful undertakings, the Camorra shows its high degree of flexibility when it offers nonmaterial benefits: services of mediation which, as in the case of arms deals, accelerate the circulation of goods and are a continual stimulus to markets. 48 notes