Neapolitans take stand against Mafia turf war

He supervises an after-school club to help students keep up with their homework. He has won government support to revamp the neighborhood school, now named after Annalisa.

Above all, Father Luigi is pushing his flock to break the "omertà," or code of silence, and report the criminals in their midst to the police. He set an example earlier this year by giving the names of 25 local Camorristi to the police.

The men are now all in jail. But as a consequence, the priest has to say mass, run after-school clubs, and make hospital visits with a 24-hour armed police escort.

"Priests aren't supposed to do that sort of thing," he says between cellphone calls from his church office. "Priests are supposed to know about everyone's sins and be trusted to keep them secret. But I have no patience for these criminals."

Until the 19th century, Naples was one of Europe's largest and richest cities, filled with lavish palaces for the royalty of the Kingdom of Naples, which stretched across the whole of southern Italy.

But Italian unification and industrialization ended the city's glory years, and in recent decades the Camorra has tightened its grip on the city, strangling every possible sector from waste collection to construction to breadmaking and stereo equipment.

Today, Naples and the Campania region have the highest unemployment and birth rates in Italy.

In the most rundown housing estates on the outskirts of the city, such as Scampia and Secondigliano, more than half the population is out of work. Drug trafficking is the only thriving job market.

Successful Camorra bosses can pocket up to 8,000 euros ($10,697 dollars) a month and their paid killers make more than a factory worker who struggles to feed his family on his 750-euro paycheck.

Eurispes, a think tank based in Rome, reports that Italy's organized-crime groups will take in as much as $160 billion this year, about 10 percent of the country's GDP.

"I remember how this place was buzzing when I was a little boy," says Giovanni. "Now it shuts down at night as if there were a curfew. The children are afraid as well as sad. But we have to turn that round."

Father Luigi is trying. He is working to provide jobs for the parents, selling "made in Forcella" products as symbols of resistance in these violent streets.

"We can keep arresting these people. But others will always take their place. As long as we don''t create jobs in this area, the Camorra will thrive," says Naples police chief Antonio de Jesu.

Several neighbors of the Durante family cooperated with the police in outrage at the death of Annalisa. The area is now heavily patrolled by police, some in plain clothes, and the criminals are lying low.

"It's time to break the climate of fear," says the priest. "And I think, people here are finally waking up to that. They are realizing things won't change unless they take a stand."

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