Peace of art: mafia boss's home turned into gallery in battle against Camorra

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/mafia-boss-art-gallery-camorra

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The notorious Camorra mafia boss Egidio Coppola – who used to go by the name of “Brutus” and is now living behind bars – could never have guessed that his villa on the outskirts of Naples would someday become a monument to the victims of organised crime.

It was even less likely that his kitschy home – which, like many belonging to the top brass of the Camorra’s Casalesi clan, was inspired by the Hollywood film Scarface – would be used to display great works of art on loan from the Uffizi gallery in Florence.

But that scenario will become a reality next month thanks to a chance conversation between Renato Natale, the crusading anti-mafia mayor of Casal di Principe, the small town that acts as the Casalesi’s power centre, and Antonio Natali, the director of the world-renowned Uffizi art gallery.

Today, construction crews are busy turning the Coppola residence – seized by the Italian state following his arrest in 2012 – into the area’s first museum.

A temporary exhibit called The Light Wins Over the Shadow, which takes its inspiration from Caravaggio, will open on 22 June and will include works of art from the Uffizi and other galleries. The exhibit will be dedicated to the memory of Peppe Diana, a local priest who was shot in the head by Camorra members in 1994 as he prepared for mass.

“Only through the promotion of civil society can we build a community that will always be ready to protect itself from this kind of infiltration,” Natale told the Guardian, as he participated in a memorial ceremony in nearby Castel Volturno for a local businessman killed seven years ago for resisting the Camorra.

According to Natali, the opening of the museum is “one of the main aspirations of the Uffizi”. The prestigious Florentine gallery also found itself the target of an attack by the Cosa Nostra mafia of Sicily in 1993, an act of domestic terrorism that killed five people and cost $1m (£650,000) in damages.

Natale, who was himself the target of a failed assassination plot – “they were not good enough”, he says with a chuckle – is convinced that his region has finally been “liberated” from the clutches of the infamous Neapolitan mafia.

“We as a people are kind of like a stammerer who has had a deep, deep trauma as a child. Here we had a trauma, that was Camorra, for everybody. So like a stammerer we still find it difficult to pronounce a word like meraviglia (wonder),” he said.

The creation of the museum and special exhibit, which Natale hopes to eventually transform into a permanent museum to commemorate the “resistance” against the Camorra, is just one of positive signs that organised crime in this region of Italy is in retreat, for now.

The mayor of Castel Volturno, another anti-mafia campaigner called Dimitri Russo, is also optimistic: he has hung a sign over his town hall declaring that the area has been “decomorrizzato” – or de-Cammorised.

But there are also worrying developments, including a slate of candidates in next Sunday’s regional elections in Campania who are thought to have ties to the Camorra.

“It’s a mixed message,” says Federico Varese, a criminologist at Oxford University and an expert in organised crime. While Varese sees some positive developments, he says the biographies of some of the candidates, which include adult children of one-time crime bosses, are raising concerns.

“I don’t want to sound unappreciative. But you have to remember that there have been people before that have done these wonderful things on the ground, and that it has not solved the problem in the long run,” he added.

Tano Grasso, another anti-racketeering campaigner, agrees that it is too early to hail the end of the Camorra, even though the recent arrests of many top crime bosses has brought an end to the bloodshed in the Naples area.

“Changes cannot be assessed based on number of people arrested. This doesn’t mean things have changed,” he told the Guardian.

Change can only be assessed, he said, when “businessmen” – who ultimately represent the lifeblood of the Camorra – break their ties with organised crime.

“This is the real problem. We have to work on it. This is a very complicated thing to really tackle,” he said.

“A businessman who wants to be free must operate legally, even in small things – even in the use of legal shopping bags,” he said, referencing a new initiative by the sons of two businessmen slain by the Camorra. They now produce biodegradable shopping bags as a way of hitting back against one of the Camorra’s big businesses, waste management.

A few miles away, land that was once used to raise horses by the late Michele Zaza, another crime boss who was known as O Pazzo (the crazy one) is now being run by a cooperative that produces organic buffalo mozzarella.

The project is run by agronomist Roberto Fiorillo and his partners, who are try to use sustainable businesses to right some of the damage inflicted on the environment by the mafia. A small shop within the property sells organic tomato sauce from other farms and organic pasta, as well as T-shirts bearing the phrase: “He who has fear dies everyday. He who does not fear dies just once”.

Asked if he has ever felt the weight of the Camorra personally, Fiorillo said its presence only affected him through relatively small annoyances, such as in dealings with bureaucrats.

In the course of the conversation, Fiorillo discovers that the shop’s bags, which purport to be biodegradable, are fakes. He puts them in a box, tapes it up and marks the box with an X.

“I want to denounce the company that sold them to me,” he says.