“The Secondigliano clans realized that their vast international distribution and sales network was their greatest asset, even stronger than drug trafficking. Narcotics and clothing often moved along the same routes.

The System’s entrepreneurial energies were also invested in technology, however. Investigations in 2004 revealed that the clans use their commercial networks to import Chinese high-tech products for European distribution. Europe had the form—the brand, the fame, and the advertising—and China the content—the actual product, cheap labor, and inexpensive materials.

The System brought the two together, winning out all around. Aware that the economy was on the brink, the clans targeted Chinese industrial zones already manufacturing for big “Western companies; in this they followed the pattern of businesses that first invested in southern Italy’s urban sprawl and then gradually shifted to China.

They got the idea of ordering batches of high-tech products to resell on the European market, obviously with a fake brand name that would increase desirability. But they were cautious; as with a batch of cocaine, they first tested the quality of the products the Chinese factories sold them.

After confirming their market validity, they launched one of the most prosperous intercontinental dealings in criminal history. Digital cameras, video cameras, and power tools: drills, grinders, pneumatic hammers, planes, and sanders, all marketed as Bosch, Hammer, or Hilti. When the Secondigliano boss Paolo Di Lauro started doing business with China, he was “ten years ahead of the initiative of Confindustria, the Italian Manufacturers’ Association, to improve business ties with Asia.

The Di Lauro clan sold thousands of Canons and Hitachis on the East European market. Thanks to Camorra imports, items that were once the prerogative of the upper-middle class were now accessible to a broader public. To guarantee a stronger entry into the market, the clans offered practically the identical product, slapping the brand name on at the end.
The Di Lauro and Contini clans’ investment in China, which was the focus of a 2004 Naples DDA inquiry, demonstrates the entrepreneurial farsightedness of the bosses. The era of big business was finished and the criminal conglomerates had
“crumbled as a result.

The Nuova Camorra Organizzata or New Organized Camorra, established by Raffaele Cutolo in the 1980s, had been a sort of enormous company, a centralized conglomerate. It was followed by La Nuova Famiglia or New Family, which Carmine Alfieri and Antonio Bardellino operated as a federal structure of economically autonomous families united by common interests. But this too proved unwieldy.


The flexibility of today’s economy has permitted small groups of manager bosses operating in hundreds of enterprises in well-defined sectors to control the social and financial arenas. There is now a horizontal structure—much more flexible than Cosa Nostra, and much more permeable to new alliances than the Calabrians.