The Horrors of a Camorra murder
And how such horrors will be overcome
Here is a gruesome but revealing story reported in The Times on April 18th. I quote, in case you cannot access it via the link.
Mafia bosses in Naples have made a cash compensation offer to a couple after they allegedly mistakenly killed their son and dissolved his body in acid.
The offer of €60,000 and an apartment was made by Salvatore Cammarota and Carlo Nappi, as their trial starts for the fatal shooting in 2000 of Giulio Giaccio, a builder. His teeth were smashed with a hammer and body was dissolved in acid to cover up the crime.
Unsolved for years, the case was cracked when a turncoat from the Polverino mafia clan accused Cammarota, 56, and Nappi, 64, of ordering the murder, claiming it was a case of mistaken identity.
“They were after a man called Salvatore who was accused of having an affair with Cammarota’s niece, who had been the partner of a clan member, and they were told he would be at a certain place at a certain time,” said Alessandro Motta, a lawyer representing the victim’s family.
“Killers sent by the bosses showed up dressed as police officers and ordered the man into their car but they had got Giaccio by mistake. The last thing he said was, ‘Officer, you’ve made a mistake, I came from a good family,’ before they shot him once in the head,” he said.
“When the bloodstained body was driven to Cammarota he pulled it out of the car and kicked and punched it, before they smashed Giaccio’s teeth in case the acid they dissolved his body in didn’t dissolve his teeth,” he added. Giaccio’s remains were then dumped in an undeveloped area on the edge of Naples.
The turncoat, Roberto Perrone, told police it was “the darkest” moment of his criminal career, made worse when the clan realised they had got the wrong man and killed Giaccio, 26, who had no criminal record.
On the eve of their trial Cammarota and Nappi each offered Giaccio’s family €30,000, to which Cammarota added an apartment that he said was worth €120,000. “Under Italian law, you can get a third off your sentence if you pay compensation for a crime,” said Motta.
The offer was flatly refused by the family, he said. “They want the stiffest sentence for the protagonists of this horrible crime, above all because they never had their son’s body to cry over,” he said.
There are several things that make one sit up and take notice. The first is the sheer amateurism of the Camorra (not Mafia, please note) killers. They got the wrong man. They should have done some research. Murders need planning. And why one earth did they dissolve the body in acid? That is quite a tricky operation, and if they wanted to send a message, they would have been quite happy for the body to be found. One finds it hard to believe that they knew anything about the properties of acid if they felt it necessary to smash the teeth first. Everyone knows teeth dissolve easily. We have all heard that story of leaving a tooth in a bottle of Coke overnight.
The second thing to note is the way these two murderers were caught, thanks to information provided by a ‘turncoat’ as The Times call him, or what the Italians call a pentito, some one who has repented. There is a more than subtle difference in the two words. A turncoat has his own interests at heart; a pentito, a penitent, is someone who has undergone a moral and perhaps religious conversion.
This is really important. In Italy, unlike in Britain, the police and the state are happy to talk of morality and the role it plays in combatting crime, and they see the phenomenon of organised crime as a moral problem, even a religious problem. At the funeral Mass of her murdered husband, Vito, blown up at the age of 27, at Capaci, with the anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his widow Rosaria Costa Schifani said the following:
Rivolgendomi agli uomini della mafia, perché ci sono qua dentro (e non), ma certamente non cristiani, sappiate che anche per voi c'è possibilità di perdono: io vi perdono, però vi dovete mettere in ginocchio, se avete il coraggio di cambiare...
This translates as: ‘Turning my attention to the men of the Mafia, because some of you are present here [in Church], even though you are not Christians at all, you ought to know that for you too there is a chance of forgiveness: I forgive you, but you have got to get down on your knees, if you have the courage to change.’
These words of the widow Schifani are really at the heart of the anti-Mafia struggle. We have a lot to learn from what she says. I find these words almost inexpressibly moving, now, as I did when I first hear them on television in Italy back in May 1992. I find the smile of her murdered husband heart-breaking.
But going back to the flat-footed murderers of the Camorra and the victim of their misidentification. One notes that the supposed victim was condemned to death for having an affair with the niece of a Camorrista. This is worthy of comment. The Camorra kill out of sexual jealousy, do they? This seems extremely foolish to me, in that such murders are risky and certainly not worth the trouble. These two men were ‘bad’ criminals in that they were unable to assess the risks involved or what was to be gained by this. Above all they were not rational. A successful criminal never lets his emotions run away with him.
Finally, the killers have offered the family the sum of 60,000 euro and a flat, and an apology of sorts. The family have refused, quite rightly. They have apologised, but have they repented? Have they got down on their knees and sought forgiveness from those they have wronged and from Almighty God? That is the compensation we need: the repentance of criminals, their mortal renewal, their turning to God.