Camorra: Lucrative Criminal Enterprise

This must be my day for posts on Italy. Michael Ledeen explores the Naples’s camorra, the mob organization that is significantly larger than the Sicilian Mafia:

The traditional picture of organized crime also ignores some of their most lucrative criminal enterprises, as for example the billion-dollar clothing industry, described in detail in a recent Italian best-seller, Gomorra, written by a 28-year old Neapolitan journalist named Roberto Saviano. Camorra companies in and around Naples produce tens of thousands of high-end branded clothes, including labels like Armani and Versace. Just like the authentic products, these are hand-stitched by skilled tailors, and are in fact indistinguishable from those manufactured at the official factories. Same materials, same quality, same label. The knockoffs are sometimes added to legitimate shipments, sometimes simply delivered directly to buyers in and outside Italy. Customers have no way of knowing where the clothes were made, nor, in many cases, do the producers know where their products are going. Saviano tells a moving story about a camorra tailor whose talent was the equal of anyone in the great fashion houses. One night he was watching the Academy Awards on television, and saw Britney Spears dancing in a gown he had made.

The only real difference is that the illegal workers are paid a fraction of the salaries of those in the legal companies, thereby limiting costs to near-Chinese levels, and escalating profits way above those that can be made from the high-cost authentic stuff. As Saviano sadly observes, the only victims of this criminal activity are the workers, and they don’t complain because the alternative is unemployment. Everyone else is happy, including the brand-name companies, which benefit both from the lower costs and from the ability to use the camorra’s global distribution system (the same used to move drugs and contraband cigarettes).

Read the entire article here.