CASTEL VOLTURNO, ITALY — Soaring on cocaine, guns smoking, the Camorra hit squad sped down the Via Domitiana, the road built along the Bay of Naples during the Roman Empire.
The gangsters had just killed an arcade owner. Now they were hunting an African drug dealer.
Bulky in bulletproof vests, they scanned the dim main drag of this no man's land by the sea, a 16-mile strip of a town where Naples blends with Nigeria. They saw African prostitutes wearing miniskirts and multicolored braids, a wild night parade of silhouettes posing, strutting, staggering in search of a few euros. The sedan passed storefront churches, neon motel signs and garbage-strewn lots. It stopped at a low white structure housing Ob-Ob Exotic Fashions.
The drug dealer wasn't there. But the gunmen opened up anyway, strafing a group of Ghanaians at the store with an AK-47 assault rifle and semiautomatic pistols. Then they fled to a squalid hide-out and celebrated with lobster and champagne, leaving behind six people dead, one wounded and an uproar that spread across Italy.
The killings in September, recounted in interviews by senior antimafia officials, were gory evidence of conflict between the Neapolitan mafia, known as the Camorra, and Nigerian gangsters who play a growing role in Italy's drug and prostitution rackets.
This landscape of change and fear has been shaped by a singular juxtaposition: One of Europe's biggest concentrations of African immigrants has risen in the heart of Camorra turf.
"After the shooting, my wife said: 'Let's pack and leave this place,' " said Nsangu "Sammi" Kagutta, a Tanzanian father of three who owns a nearby Internet center. "They were just poor people trying to get their daily bread. If it was about drugs, they shot the wrong people."
Most of the victims were illegal immigrant laborers, though one or two may have been low-level drug pushers, investigators say. The fusillade of 130 bullets was apparently an indiscriminate message from a Camorra clan aimed at terrifying its junior partners into obedience.
"It was not about racism at all," said Jean-Rene Bilongo, a community mediator from Cameroon who speaks French, English and Italian with the broad Neapolitan accent. "It was about business."
Nigerian gangsters have made Castel Volturno a European headquarters. In the 1990s, demand boomed here for African prostitutes -- prosecutors call it "the Naomi Campbell phenomenon." Camorra clans "rented" turf to Nigerian pimps, a line of work that Neapolitan gangsters disdain.
