Rome has always been a kind of free zone for the Italian mafias, it was no one's territory and everyone could operate there, although in reality it has had its own indigenous criminal terrain for decades. Various clans divide the city, in a balance in which shootings and homicides are sporadic, especially so as not to alarm politics and law enforcement. But in recent months that has changed: there have been 13 bombs in five months, almost half last week. At night and without injuries, in stores, game rooms, dealerships, portals, warning signs. It's not normal. But it is almost less so that it is barely news, in a country used to seeing everything. Speaking with EL PAÍS this week, Roberto Saviano said that in any other European capital “a national debate would open, the mayor would resign”, but often in Italy violence is a background noise, like traffic. In the center of Rome, invaded by tourists, you can't even hear it. Now, in the east of the city, where everything happens, a million people live, and it's not the suburbs, it's middle class. But it is the Senese's land.
Michele Senese, O Pazzo (The Fool), 68 years old, has been the king of crime in Rome for four decades. Raised in the Camorra, he arrived in the eighties in the middle of the clan war in Naples, between Raffaele Cutolo's Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia. The latter sent him to Rome to take care of the rivals who were there and he stayed, because he saw a free field. He went in and out of jail several times, but he fought his way through the courts by simulating mental problems, hence his name. A nickname that also worked to scare people, he was believed capable of anything. He finally ended up in prison in 2013, although he has continued to rule from there. However, a series of arrests, sentences and investigations have decimated his organization, and it was he who guaranteed order among minor drug trafficking groups. That is why they have begun to fight among themselves, for control of the cocaine and crack sales areas and the extortion territories, the pizzo that is demanded from businessmen and merchants.
It's still all a bit confusing. In some cases it is seen that they are amateurs. Those who placed the bomb in a wine bar on October 5 parked the car in front and when it exploded their airbags went off. They had to flee on foot. That is why experts do not believe that anyone wants to take Senese's position. "For him this is tickling, it is not a challenge to his power. For that you have to leave an important corpse, you don't burst a blind," says Nello Trocchia, journalist and writer, expert on Roman crime. The other day he went to talk to the owner of one of the attacked establishments, linked to a clan: "He told me: 'This bomb is just a product of fashion. It's a dog's piss.'
But there is a swell. One of the sparks of the conflict is that last month Senese was accused by the prosecutor's office of the murder of Fabrizio Piscitelli, Diabolik, in 2019, a notorious crime in the city. He was the leader of the Lazio ultras and controlled drugs in a part of the city. Furthermore, he had grown up in Michele Senese's clan, who was even his wedding witness, and seemed untouchable. But he was shot while sitting on a park bench. The thesis is that he had climbed the vine and Senese himself ordered to liquidate him. But then such a mess arose that even an envoy from the 'Ndrangheta, the most powerful Italian mafia, called one day the telephone at Diabolik's brother's house to clarify that it had not been them: "We don't do these things, we would have shot him in the face, not in the back."
These things happen in Rome, although it doesn't seem like it in what tourists see. Trocchia, who remembers that in this city sometimes in the underworld there are express kidnappings and torture (in one case with a blowtorch), speaks bluntly: "Rome is a capital of money laundering and a center of drug trafficking. But it is not talked about because no one wants Rome to be associated with the word mafia, it is a damage to the image. Furthermore, if you raise the problem you have to face it, and no one wants to do it. It is a part of the city's illegal economy, thousands of millions, which supports the legal part. Not only restaurants and hotels, cryptocurrencies, financial companies, insurance brokers. So they prefer to downplay it. Mafia penetration is also political and enters the circuits of corruption. The most serious case is known: Andrea Delmastro, number two to Giorgia Meloni's Minister of Justice, had a restaurant with the 18-year-old daughter of a front man from Senese, who was already under investigation. In the end he had to resign last March (he admitted that it was “an unforgivable levity”).
