Camorra informants tell their stories: The invisible prison: telephones, orders, and the power behind bars.

For years, Secondigliano prison, during the hours of interviews and in the corridors of the high-security ward, was the true control room of the criminal power of the Amato-Pagano and Vanella Grassi clans.

Behind the gray walls, where silence should extinguish commands and break bonds, the voices of the bosses continued to move men, weapons, and drug dealing centers.

It is here that—according to the documents of the 2023 investigation, which uncovered the trafficking of telephones and drugs smuggled in via drones—the underground network that allowed men like Elia Cancello, Luigi Diano, known as "Cicciotto," and Enzo Notturno to continue exercising their power even while in prison took shape.

An invisible thread, made of notes, clandestine telephones and controlled conversations, connected the cells to the streets of Scampia, San Pietro a Patierno and Secondigliano.

According to reports from justice collaborator Raffaele Paone, known as “Rafaniello,” he himself had repeatedly used “department” phones to communicate with the outside world, under the supervision of other members.

Investigators documented that contact between inmates and free men was constant: "Every day, messages were passed from cell to cell," Paone recounts in the November 19, 2024, transcript, "and whoever came out for a conversation acted as a bridge. A word, a name written on a cigarette pack, was enough, and the whole clan knew what to do."

One of the most significant passages is the one in which Elia Cancello's role is reconstructed after his release from prison in 2021.

According to the collaborator's reconstruction, Cancello had maintained contact with the internal structure of the clan thanks to a constant flow of notes that came out of prison through family members and partners of other members.

One of the precautionary measures of 2024 cites a note from the ROS that clearly speaks of "a system of covert correspondence between the imprisoned leaders and the free members, based on handwritten notes in coded language and family intermediaries."

In the intercepted conversations, the tone changes: the commands are veiled, the references are coded.
A "hello to Nando" meant a drug supply; "the boy from the palaces" indicated a new contact for the Piazza dei Sette Palazzi, a fiefdom of the Cifariello family, loyal to the Amato-Pagano family.

Behind the seemingly innocuous phrases, the clan's conventional language served to coordinate traffic and enforce alliances.

But there were more than just words.

In the files of case 17901/2023, which led to Paone's arrest for attempted extortion, investigators note that the collaborator "used cell phones daily inside the Secondigliano prison, maintaining contact with free members and inmates in other wards."
Those contacts weren't just used to settle business deals or collect payments: they were the tool the clan used to redefine itself in real time, managing the transition of power and the balance between the groups after the internal crisis that followed the 2016 feud.

The notes seized during the 2024 searches tell the same story.
In one of them, attributed to the Cicciotto Diano circuit, you can read a seemingly innocuous phrase:

“Elijah’s brother has the key, but he must not open it until the Lord returns.”
According to investigators, it was an order not to reopen a drug dealing center in Lotto G, pending approval from the detained leaders.

Every order, every consent, passed through there: from prison.

The inmates were the antennas, the family members the hubs, the interviews the network.
And if an external affiliate had doubts or hesitations, a simple visit to the Secondigliano pavilion was enough to receive direct instructions.
In a conversation recorded in 2023 between two women, the wife of one inmate and the sister of another, one of them can clearly be heard saying:

"Elia said that Lotto will remain ours, but no mess. Hands off, until further notice." It was the voice of continuity, the one that no barrier had managed to silence.

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