Naples – It's a spine-chilling sequence, eleven minutes of pure terror that seems to have been lifted from the screenplay for Gomorrah, but which instead recounts the stark, dramatic reality of a Neapolitan night.
The surveillance footage that captured the "Wild West" that unfolded between December 11th and 12th in Piazza Carolina has been filed with the investigation. This chilling document has been attached by the Naples Flying Squad to the investigation file, which includes seven young men under investigation for involvement in a shooting that could have escalated into a massacre.
The frames of fear
The video leaves little to the imagination. The images clearly show the "death" scooters plowing through the crowd in Piazza Carolina, the heart of the city's nightlife, just behind the Prefecture Palace and a few meters from Piazza del Plebiscito. Terrified passersby flee in every direction, seeking shelter in doorways and behind parked cars, as the commandos spring into action.
The most disturbing scene, the one that made investigators jump, shows one of the young gunmen coldly stepping out of the vehicle. He's holding two pistols, like in an action movie, and pointing them straight at an oncoming car and scooter. By a miracle, or perhaps a twist of fate, he doesn't pull the trigger at that precise moment.
He climbs back into his saddle and the pack sets off again. The shots, however, will be fired shortly thereafter: bullets at eye level aimed at their rivals, who, by pure chance, have found no living flesh to tear apart.
“Johnny” Percich and the legacy of blood
Leading that punitive expedition, according to investigators' reconstruction, was Vincenzo Giovanni Percich, known to all as "Johnny." A name that carries a heavy weight in the alleys of the Spanish Quarter. Nineteen years old, with the face of a street urchin but already a serious criminal record, Johnny is the son of Salvatore Percich, a mafia boss currently detained on a terrible charge.
The father, in fact, has been in prison since last year (along with his other minor son) for the murder of Umberto Catanzaro, the 22-year-old amateur soccer player, an innocent victim of a vendetta. Umberto died after two months of agony at the Cardarelli hospital, shot by mistake during an ambush ordered to "clean up the shame" of an intimate video of the boss's daughter that had been shared online.
A ghost, that of Catanzaro, still hovers over the alleys, while the new generation of Percichs seems to want to reassert their control over the territory with the same ferocity.
The war between the "baby paranze"
The December raid wasn't an isolated act, but the latest chapter in a feud that's bloodied the historic center. On one side, the Spanish Quarter youths, loyal to the Percich gang; on the other, the Pallonetto di Santa Lucia gang. At stake is control of the alleys, drug dealing, and, above all, criminal honor.
The seven suspects, four of whom are minors, have all been subject to precautionary measures and have been detained since mid-January. The newly released images close the loop, holding them accountable: no longer just confusing testimonies, but visual evidence of a night in which the Camorra attempted to dictate the law among ordinary people, transforming a symbolic square in Naples into an open-air shooting range.
Source EDITORIAL TEAM
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