Crime Fighter

taking on the mob

businesswoman silvana fucito risks her life to help others defend themselves against the camorra

Just north of 1.5 m tall, Silvana Fucito is a towering example of how to stand up to the brutal crime syndicate that terrorizes Naples. The Neapolitan mob, the Camorra, picked on the wrong lady when it began demanding that Fucito and her husband, Gennaro Petrucci, cough up the notorious extortion payments known as the pizzo (from the Italian word for goatee, describing those who dip their beards in their neighbors’ soup) at the family paint store four years ago.

Like many, the couple first tried shooing the thugs away with excuses, free cans of paint and an occasional small “loan” that would never get repaid. But then in 2002, a pair of Camorra came into the store in the city’s rough San Giovanni neighborhood with a check to cash—for €100,000. One of the men flashed a pistol. Petrucci did his best, amid escalating threats, to try to convince the Camorra bosses that the couple didn’t have that kind of money. Then one day, Fucito decided that she would come out from behind the counter to confront the unwelcome guests. “When I stepped out—a woman—and told them to leave, they couldn’t unload on me,” she recalls. “They couldn’t threaten me. That must have made them even more angry.”

A few nights later, someone pried open the store’s metal security shutter just enough to squirt in gasoline and set the store ablaze. The fire spread quickly, completely destroying the 500-sq-m store and forcing the evacuation of more than 20 families in the apartment building above. “At first I was just enraged to see our 30 years of work, all our sacrifice, destroyed,” says the 54-year-old mother of three. “Then I thought that someone, even children, could have been killed.”

But it was the reaction of several residents—who blamed the fire on the victims for not paying the racket—that turned Fucito into a true crusader: “I realized something is wrong in the whole mentality. The pizzo is so deeply rooted here, it’s like a tax we are obliged to pay.” A few months later, she founded the San Giovanni Anti-Racket Association, and has spent every free moment since urging fellow business owners to refuse to pay the Camorra. Last year, some 2,000 extortion cases were reported to the police, up from just a few hundred before the Association was founded. Fifteen men were convicted in Fucito’s case. “Everyone talks about the politicians and the police, but it is first of all up to us, the citizens,” she says. True, she requires around-the-clock police protection, but says she wouldn’t have it any other way: “If it’s a pizzo or muggings or drugs in your neighborhood, it should make you burn with anger. It must always be the citizens first to demand respect for themselves.” When Fucito stands with others, she stands even taller. —By Jeff Israely

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