The only thing missing from the Camorra’s gallery of horrors was this: children exploited as real “human shields” to avoid reprisals from the enemy clan. Instead, now we know that it really happened, that the story is not the product of the imagination of some “Gomorrah” scriptwriter.
The events reconstructed by an investigation by the carabinieri coordinated by the Naples District Anti-Mafia Directorate, which describes the picture of an increasingly despicable and ruthless organized crime. Nine people arrested.
The episodes
The facts. We are in the eastern area of Naples, in that neighborhood Little bridges transformed by a series of internal feuds between the clans into a living hell. Raids, murders, shootings and even bombs exploded: in this no-holds-barred war there were those who – in order to ensure their safety – did not hesitate to exploit the presence of innocent children, thus exposing them to a more than real risk to their lives.
The military of the provincial command of Naples thus discovered that it was happening in a parking lot the “handover” of the granddaughter between the maternal and paternal grandparents, considered to be the head of the clan From Martin: the latter, moreover, showed up on board a car on which other children had been loaded and made to travel, all small, used practically as “shields” against possible armed raids.
Cowardly Camorra. But that’s not all: because that car was also escorted by a group of affiliates, bodyguards armed to the teeth riding motorcycles and scooters, with pistols and machine guns in plain sight.
Threats and violence
The circumstance emerged from the investigations carried out by the Carabinieri of the police station Search. But there is more. It was also discovered that the defendants had resorted to impositions, which had progressively become more intimidating and oppressive, in order to ensure that they were entrusted – in the total absence of any judicial regulation – with a girl born from the relationship of a woman with the imprisoned scion of a family historically at the top of one of the Camorra factions competing for criminal hegemony in the area of the Neapolitan neighborhood of Ponticelli.
The mamma of the little girl was brutally beaten if she did not accompany her daughter to her paternal grandparents’ house: when the little girl was less than a year old, the woman decided not to go to her ex’s parents because the little girl was resting, due to a stomach ache. But the De Martino scion together with his parents demanded daily attendance and when they refused, a brutal beating ensued.
Dark picture
A very dark picture, which confirms the level of violence and contempt for human life of the groups that put the control of drug squares before anything else. And that does not spare women and children.
Returning to the sad story, the problems of the little girl’s mother’s family began immediately after her birth: in the first months of her life she had to be accompanied every day, except Sunday, to her paternal grandparents’ house. And her maternal grandparents had to take care of this. When – perhaps also due to the onset of a pathology, and even the simple tiredness of the victim, or for other similar reasons, it was not possible, then threats took over: on more than one occasion the poor victim even saw death threats.
A state of total submission. Another very serious episode was also revealed: during the summer of 2022, the mother and even the grandmother were beaten with extreme violence, moreover in the presence of the little girl’s father and the grandmother who at that moment was holding her granddaughter in her arms: slaps and punches, without mercy. The beatings were followed by the order of the paternal grandfather – while he was punching the victims’ car – not to allow themselves to go to the police to report the incident. The De Martinos were offered to go to the mother’s house to see the little girl but the option was then discarded: they feared, in fact, that they could become the object of ambushes, given that the little girl’s family home was outside the clan’s stronghold. Terrified by what had happened, the maternal grandparents gave up with an excuse to take the little girl to Ponticelli. And this led again to death threats, even with a gun pointed at the mother.
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