‘You can’t die over a sneaker’: Armed teenagers terrorize Naples

He shot him because he had stained his €500 Versace sneakers. That is what the 17-year-old boy said after he killed another teenager, 19-year-old Santo Romano, on November 1 in San Sebastiano al Vesuvio, near Naples. And the victim had only gone to make peace; it was not even him who caused the supposed slight. When the hearse arrived at the funeral on Wednesday, in a church in the Casoria district on the outskirts of the city, Romano’s friends from class and from his soccer team gathered around the white coffin, almost not knowing how to hold it, with a paralyzing respect, because of the impression of touching death so soon, so young. “You can’t die over a sneaker,” was repeated among the mourners, a crowd so large that it blocked traffic.

The photos of Santo Romano, on posters and on the T-shirts worn by dozens of adolescents who hugged each other and sobbed, show a bravo ragazzo, a good kid, with a good-natured face, like many other teenagers killed in Naples in an absurd manner at the hands of other minors. In just 15 days there were three. A week earlier, another 15-year-old, Emanuele Tufano, was killed in the centre of Naples, this time in a shoot-out between groups of minors. The infamous “baby gangs,” or paranze, which are sometimes, but not always, linked to a Camorra clan, are youth gangs that go around with guns. Last Saturday morning an 18-year-old, Arcangelo Correra, with no criminal record, was killed by a gunshot to the forehead, again in the center of the city, on the Via dei Tribunali. It was not ruled out that the gun had gone off while it was being played with.

The funerals with white coffins are repeated with similar rituals that the kids have been forced to invent over the years. Balloons rising in the air, colorful smoke canisters, T-shirts with a photo of the deceased, murals on the walls. Santo Romano was accompanied by a convoy of dozens of mopeds, honking in unison in the chaos of traffic, which followed the hearse at dusk in an atmosphere of despair.

But there are other parallel rituals among the shooters: photos on social media, posing like gangsters with guns, chains around their necks and expensive clothes. Messages of admiration and support are sent, even when someone is arrested. They don’t necessarily belong to a clan, but it is the Camorra that sets the trends, the models of behavior and success. They all think they are characters from the series Gomorrah. Hours after the shooting, the 17-year-old who was later detained for the death of Santo Romano published photos of himself armed and mimicking a pistol with his hand. After his arrest, he received messages of solidarity.

Something has gotten out of control in Naples with teenagers and guns, but it goes back a long way. In 2023, crimes committed by minors went up 17% and this year there are fears that they will rise even more. Santo Romano’s death makes as little sense as another one last year, on March 20, 2023, when exactly the same thing happened to 19-year-old Francesco Pio Maimone: he was killed over a pair of sneakers that got stained, this time €1,000 Louis Vuittons. In this case he had nothing to do with the argument; he was passing by and was hit by a stray bullet. The shooter was another 20-year-old.

The stories behind these kids usually explain quite a few things; in some way they are all victims of a deeply ailing system. Naples is experiencing an effervescent boom in tourism and tourist apartments are opening in streets where before people wouldn’t dare to go, but the underlying evil is still there and sometimes comes to the surface violently. The young man holding the gun a year ago had the same name as the boy he killed, Francesco Pio, because he was born by a miracle. His mother made a vow to Padre Pio, a highly revered friar in Italy, after she was seriously injured when she was seven months pregnant: her husband stabbed her. He was a member of a Camorra clan, who was later killed when the child was 10 years old.

In the case of Santo Romano, his father has been in prison for five years, and he found out about his son’s death while watching TV. He fainted. For her part, the mother of the arrested boy made public a letter addressed to the family of the deceased, to ask for forgiveness, handwritten on a piece of notebook paper: “Our son has destroyed your family, but also ours. We are a humble family. My husband works, he has a sandwich truck.” Then, a clarification: “I have no criminal record, I am not affiliated with any clan. We are a normal family.” She explains that two years ago her son “became unmanageable” and she had to resort to social services. He had just left the juvenile prison in Nisida, for drug trafficking. A photo of him appeared on social networks with a leader of the Aprea clan from the Barra neighborhood, as if he were with a famous soccer player. They are pictured with a magnum bottle of champagne and another young man. In a sinister coincidence, it is Francesco Pio, the other boy who a year ago fired shots over another sneaker.

One of the priests who is fighting the Camorra, Maurizio Patriciello, who is very well known, attended Santo Romano’s funeral last Wednesday. “Everything about the kids asks questions of the adults. Who gave them the guns? Where were the adults when all this was going on?” he asked. In this case, the detainee has said that he bought the weapon for €500. “It is time for a reflection. These guys are fierce, they are scary. The line of demarcation between good and evil, between life and death, has become very blurred, as has the line between minority and majority. The 17 years these boys have do not correspond to their existential age. I understand those who ask for harsher penalties, but education comes first; we have to go to these kids and educate them.”

The system is failing from the bottom up. School absenteeism in the Naples metropolitan area is one of the highest in Italy. In the last school year, 3,340 reports of children who stopped attending reached the prefecture, and 21% of the cases have reached the courts. Sixteen percent of young people in the region, Campania, drop out of school at the age of 14. “Here we fight with the basics. Some come with nothing, no schoolbag, no pen. We tell their parents and they shrug their shoulders because for them school is not a priority. I have had girls with real talent, but their father wants them to work in a bar, the quickest way,” says Mariarosaria Stanziano, the principal of the high school where Santo Romano studied. It is located in a neighborhood at the foot of Vesuvius, in the endless succession of working-class areas, industrial estates and ruins on the outskirts of Naples. In the territory of the clans, school is a lonely trench.

The day after Santo Romano’s funeral, his classmates held a memorial service in front of the school. Some 300 teenagers, all dressed in black. A generation shaken by the murder of a classmate. A banner hung over the entrance: “Holy like Abel, at the hands of Cain.” One of the boys read a message asking everyone to lay down their weapons. “It’s because here we sometimes find brass knuckles, knives… These 17-year-old boys feel completely alone, without any control, without rules,” says Stanziano. “Do you know what happens? Families often ask us to take over because they are unable to impose discipline; they ask us to do it, to help them. They are fragile generations, including the parents, who are afraid. They are afraid of those closed doors, of those children who lock themselves in their rooms.”

Stanziano admits that she sometimes feels alone under the weight of responsibility, but she is one of those incredible Italians who, with personal commitment, make up for the shortcomings of a failed system: “We have to believe in what we do. I have been doing this for 47 years. I have always worked in difficult contexts and the greatest satisfaction comes from here. If I manage to get even one drowning child onto my boat, I have already won.” Rosa Praticò, who runs the Officina delle Idee association in the neighbourhood, thinks the same. She works with the children at the school making films, short films, and providing dance classes: “You help them imagine a different life.” They truly believe in the saving, transformative power of a book, a play, art.

Schools are doing what they can, but they lack canteens, extracurricular activities, psychologists and social workers; they are also asking for more police on the streets, and more cameras. When night falls, these neighborhoods seem like a no-man’s land. Last year, Giorgia Meloni’s government approved the so-called Caivano decree, named after a town near Naples where minors committed a terrible gang rape. This controversial decree has toughened the laws to send children to prison and also punish their parents. But many experts, such as the writer Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah, warn that mere police severity and filling overcrowded prisons will not help.

In her office at the Naples juvenile court, prosecutor Maria de Luzenberger, who has been in the business for over 18 years and has seen it all, admits that she is waging a personal war against truancy. She sees kids who can barely speak or write Italian; they use dialect. Where do these kids with guns come from? “They are generally families with problems. Kids who have not attended school very often, there is a direct link to that. Children of parents who have not gone to school either.” She explains that skipping school is the first sign of being outside the law, of belonging to families who live outside the system. “Then you look and there are always family disasters behind it: violence, parents in prison, kids left alone, broken families, parents who are too young... And there should be more prevention of early pregnancies.”

By the age of 14, many kids no longer want to go to school; they don’t think it’s useful. “They don’t consider culture to be a social elevator, but selling drugs is. The problem of violence is obviously a cultural problem, and this is where the Camorra comes in, because it dominates some neighborhoods, and some figures become idols for the kids. In many cases the bosses are in prison and the age of those in charge has dropped, many boys and also women have joined. The Camorra has always used children, always,” reflects the prosecutor. The Prosecutor’s Office sometimes enters this ecosystem to issue orders to keep a child away from the Camorra family itself. Sometimes, arrest saves some minors and they go on to have a good educational career, “but then they return to their neighborhood and everything starts again; you end up meeting them again in court.”

Two floors down, the court bar is called Caffè Sospeso (suspended). This Neapolitan expression encapsulates the city’s entire philosophy: it means leaving a paid coffee for someone who might come by later and need it. It is run by young men who have served sentences from an association called Scugnizzi (street children, in Neapolitan). A sign on the door explains: “Suspended like every child in this beautiful and cursed city. Like a tightrope walker between life and death. Every child of Naples has the right to be rescued and to be considered not only for the mistakes they have made, but for the times they have fallen and managed to get up.” There are hundreds of such associations in Naples, which try to reach where the state cannot, to plug its holes. They work miracles.

One of these miracle-workers is Carmela Manca, who is 71 and has spent 41 of them dedicated to helping children. She runs the Figli in Famiglia association in the San Giovanni-Barra neighborhood, the place where the two boys who killed over a stained sneaker grew up. She takes the kids off the streets, gives them a place to go after school to do their homework, play soccer, swim, do theater, paint, work out. She has seen thousands pass through since 1983. She sighs when she says that she has only “lost” two young people along the way in all these years. One who died, about whom she does not give any more details, and another who is now a boss of the local clan. “He greets me from afar, he has a form of respect and shame towards me, he knows he has made mistakes, but I think it is also to protect me because if he was seen with me he knows it would cause me problems,” she says.

The association is in a warehouse, an old tin can factory. It has been here since 1998, and is still paying the mortgage. Manca is sitting at the computer, struggling with bills. Because she herself feels abandoned by the state, like the last stronghold in hostile territory. “I open at 8 a.m. and this is a procession. People come to look for work, to eat, to ask for help… And then I pay more than €13,000 a year in trash collection fees!” she laments. It is the last network of resistance, informally coordinated with authorities, social services, and schools. While she is talking, a woman arrives to collect a package because this is also a collection point for couriers. “We get 20 cents per delivery, every little bit helps,” Manca explains.

Children start arriving at 3 p.m. More than 70 of them. “They stay until eight in the evening and we have to kick them out, they prefer to be here than at home. We give them rules to follow, they feel safe with us. These children are the children of a great malaise, of years of neglect, of a great responsibility of the political class, of society,” she explains. She lowers her voice: “These children drink milk and the Camorra from the bottle, they see the forces of law and order as enemies. It takes a lot of courage, especially when you are born into certain families, to get out of there.”

She admits that it is difficult to fight against an almost ancestral mentality. The other day, one of the boys posted a photo on social media with another boy. At 14 years old, he was holding a gun, hugging his friend, with the phrase: “I will always be behind you.” “I scolded them, but he didn’t understand; he told me it was a good thing, that he wanted to protect him. But it’s just that the language he speaks is what he hears around him, the law of the strongest. It is the only way to say: ‘I exist.’ It is normal to be violent. If you want to be important, you have to be violent. They have the problems that their parents, their grandparents had, multiplied by social networks. This is a sick chain that has to be broken.”

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