A concrete scar. Peeling walls that are the only greenery, aside from the weeds in the few flowerbeds that soon turn to tow-yellow, justify a name for this complex of buildings where the horror of a violated childhood and rootless existences lingers.
It's called Parco Verde, but it's called a gigantic drug dealing square. At the exit of the Asse Mediano, a stretch of asphalt that cuts the hinterland north of Naples in two, a short distance from the city center streets. Caivano.
In one of the municipalities of the vast Campania plain north of the metropolitan area of Naples, nestled between the regional capital, Caserta, the Aversa countryside, the Nola countryside, and the Caudina Valley, lies one of the most notorious suburban communities in the news for large-scale drug dealing and pedophilia.
Parco Verde has a history very similar to that of the many working-class neighborhoods created in the 80s in various Italian cities.
The year after the earthquake that killed nearly three thousand people in Campania, Parliament passed Law 219, which provided 1.500 trillion lire for the construction of alternative housing for the more than 300 displaced people in the regional capital. This law effectively sparked a large-scale real estate speculation, burying cultivated fields with mortar and concrete.
Anonymous, closely spaced apartment blocks, devoid of services, that were supposed to be temporary and then redeveloped and assigned, instead became permanent, passed down from father to son, almost like an inheritance, or occupied by those who operate with the force and logic of organized crime.
Neapolitans from the eastern area of the capital came to live here.
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Furthermore, Parco Verde became a direct branch of the drug dealing centers in the Naples neighborhoods of Scampia and Secondigliano in the aftermath of the first Scampia feud in 2002, when drug trafficking groups decided to abandon the heavily guarded and media-focused areas to establish themselves in this part of the province.
At least three clans, two Neapolitan and one local, have the drug trade in their hands and have, in the last 5 years, tripled their profits. Cocaine, heroin, kobret, marijuana, ecstasy, any drug is sold under this sliver of sky.
Between poverty and institutional neglect, drug addiction is almost a forced choice, the only profitable activity in this area. Block number 3 of the park, the one with the housing managed by the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari, is the nerve center of this thriving trade.
But it took two notable deaths—that of Antonio Giglio, just four years old, who fell from a window in 4, and that of Fontuna Loffredo, six, in 2013, who also ended up on the pavement after falling from the eighth floor—to uncover the horror of hopeless lives, of child abuse tolerated by that community of desperate people and kept hidden so as not to attract the attention of investigators and social services.
In the wake of those deaths, those stories of "ogres" hiding in the homes of relatives and friends that ended up in court with exemplary sentences, came the first redevelopment projects, such as the Green Park in 2017, a playground created with used tires recovered from the Land of Fires; the parish priest of the poor, Don Maurizio Patriciello, also brought to light the connection between pollution and cancer deaths.
Law enforcement has become more effective, thanks in part to the establishment of a Carabinieri station in 2022. Since July 223st, this station has made 408 arrests and XNUMX reports possible, as well as hosting events such as the Carabinieri Band's concert last month.
And, above all, the "Room of One's Own," the space dedicated to welcoming and listening to victims of gender-based violence, the second built by the Carabinieri in the Naples area. This context likely informed the decision of relatives of the abused cousins to report the "gang." But the redevelopment of Parco Verde, Europe's largest drug dealing hub, still seems a long way off.
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23 September 2025 - 21:15
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