Arrested reputed Mafia member Mose Esposito

Police in Naples, Italy, Monday arrested reputed Mafia member Mose Esposito and said they were closing in on his boss, Giuseppe Setola.Esposito, 29, was arrested at a small villa near Casal di Principe, the base of an alleged murder squad run by the Camorra clan, reported ANSA, the Italian news agency.Esposito's step-brother, now in prison, is suspected in the September slaying of six West Africa immigrants in the town of Castel Volturno, ANSA said Monday. The slayings allegedly were organized by Setola, whose murder squad has killed an estimated 20 people since May, police allege."We are working to flush him out. The circle is closing around him," said Franco Roberti, who heads an anti-Mafia program in Naples.Setola inadvertently was released from prison last Spring on house arrest but immediately went underground and reformed his alleged murder squad, Roberti said.

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88 mafia members were arrested on Tuesday in Naples

88 mafia members were arrested on Tuesday in Naples. Police also confiscated their assets in the amount of 80 million euros. The arrested belong to the Gionta clan and are suspected of having committed several crimes, including extortion, drug smuggling and gathering into a criminal organisation, Croatia’s Vecernji list daily reported.The arrest operation was conducted by police from Naples in cooperation with police forces from Milan, Catania and Pistoia. The head of the clan, Valentino Gionta, was convicted, among other things, for the murder of a journalist of a Napoli daily “Il Matino”, Giancarlo Siani, in September 1985. He is currently in jail. His wife was among those arrested in Tuesday’s operation.Police confiscated real-estate and other property, bank accounts and company shares of those arrested, all amounting to 80 million euros. According to the Italian law, all assets confiscated from the mafia belongs to citizens.

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Map locating recent murders by the Camorra

Art students in Naples have produced a map locating recent murders by the Camorra to underscore the local Mafia's deadly presence in the southern Italian city, one of the organisers said Friday."Our aim is to denounce the grip of the Mafia on our city," Orazio Manzo said.The fold-out map pinpoints the sites of some 40 murders attributed to the Camorra Mafia between 2005 and 2007, giving the victims' names and the times and dates of their deaths."We plan to hand it out free in the streets to Neapolitans, but also to tourists to draw their attention to the fact that Naples is not only a city of beautiful monuments but also a crime capital," Manzo said.
"We'd like to give them to the tourist offices, but we're not sure they would take them," he added.Manzo acknowledged that the recent crisis in which 200,000 tonnes of rubbish piled up on the streets of Naples because of a backed-up waste disposal system had not helped the city's reputation.
That crisis was also blamed at least in part on the Camorra, which controls many of the landfills in the area.The Camorra is thought to dominate many aspects of life in Naples and the surrounding region, one of the poorest in Italy.Last December, Italian bakers handed out 20,000 free loaves of bread one Sunday in a main square in Naples to protest against the Camorra's intimidation of their profession.

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