Castellammare, the "fragmentation of legality": how 'below-threshold' contracts fueled the clan's businesses.

While politics offered electoral leverage and bureaucracy handed over access passwords, Castellammare di Stabia's public spending was drained through an ingenious accounting operation. This section of the prefect's dossier is among the chapters outlining the most terrifying plot of Camorra infiltration: the transformation of municipal coffers into ATMs for companies linked to the D'Alessandro and Cesarano clans.

A perverse mechanism fueled by the pathological and systematic recourse to direct "below-threshold" assignments, combined with the total, paralyzing lack of oversight by the Municipal Police Command, which over the years has transformed itself into a mere facade, incapable of detecting even the most glaring abuses perpetrated beneath the windows of the town hall.

The fractionation algorithm: bags, cleaning and beaches for the usual suspects

In the offices of the Environment and Public Works Department at Palazzo Farnese, the watchword was simple: fragmentation. Inspectors from the Access Commission sifted through over two hundred management decisions adopted between July 2024 and September 2025, uncovering a mathematical method to circumvent public tender procedures and anti-mafia checks by the National Database (BDNA).

Services with a total value exceeding one hundred thousand euros were literally "crumbled" into four, five, or six micro-contracts of 38.000 or 39.500 euros each, surgically positioning themselves a millimeter below the 40.000 euro threshold that required operator rotation and prevention checks.

The Anti-Mafia reports

"Through the artificial subdivision of the purchasing lots, the Authority continued to provide public resources to companies lacking the anti-mafia information required for their release or already subject to a prefectural ban, as in the case of the orders for the supply of biodegradable bags for separate waste collection and the preparation of public beaches on the Corso Garibaldi shoreline," we read on page 214 of the report.

The case of the garbage bag supply is emblematic: the annual sum of approximately €120.000 was divided into three direct quarterly contracts awarded to a packaging company whose formal owner turned out to be the son-in-law of a high-ranking member of the Scanzano clan. And when the Prefecture's 007 agents asked the sector manager why a public tender hadn't been launched, his response was yet another buck-passing: "We didn't have the technical time for the tender, and the city risked being overwhelmed by waste."

“Here at the Municipality we decide who gets to work”

That sub-threshold contracts were the clans' favorite hunting ground is demonstrated not only by the Authority's financial statements, but also by the dramatic conversations intercepted by the Carabinieri Investigative Unit in the "Domino Ter" investigation. In an audio recording inside a bar on Via Roma in February 2025, longtime D'Alessandro clan member Michele Abbruzzese (aka 'o Paciariello), cousin of the late godfather Michele D'Alessandro, explained to a construction contractor how the division of small municipal maintenance works worked.

The interception of the Abbruzzese boss

Michele Abbruzzese ('o Paciariello): "You don't have to worry about the big tenders... the locals above Scanzano take care of those. You have to take on the thirty-thousand, forty-thousand-euro jobs... the sidewalks, the manholes, the painting of the schools. Our friend at the office is there who makes the direct determination. Just quote the price we give you and then you'll settle the fee."
Business owner: “But what if the Finance Police or the Police come to check?”
Abruzzese: "The traffic police? What traffic police? The traffic police in Castellammare can't see or hear. They're all asleep, they take our licenses and then they even bring them back to our homes!"

The Municipal Police Command and the "Missing Driving License Mystery"

Abbruzzese's words are shockingly and precisely confirmed in Chapter 7.3 of the Report, which is entirely devoted to the failings of the Municipal Police Command. The chapter reconstructs a grotesque and extremely serious episode: the confiscation and mysterious "friendly return" of the driving license of Giuseppe Oscurato, a close relative of former city councilor Gennaro Oscurato and known to law enforcement for his ties to organized crime.

Oscurato's license had been confiscated by a traffic police patrol during a traffic stop for a serious traffic violation. The document should have been sent to the Naples Prefecture within five days for a formal suspension order. However, the license never arrived at the Prefecture. Shortly thereafter, Oscurato was caught driving the same vehicle again, candidly displaying the license, which had been returned to him directly at the headquarters on Via San Giovanni Bosco!

The Commander's hearing and the Disciplinary Office's surrender

When questioned about the disappearance of the document, the Commander of the Municipal Police justified his claim by stating: "It was simply a misunderstanding due to the disarray of the paper archive and the lack of a computerized chronological register of the seizure reports."
The result? The City's Disciplinary Procedures Office (UPD) had to close the case without imposing any sanctions on the officers involved, precisely because of the complete lack of traceability and record keeping of the revoked licenses!

The telescope turned upside down: illegal building and commercial occupations tolerated

But the traffic police's lack of vigilance has transcended the highway code to affect economic and land control. In chapter 7.4, the prefectural inspectors highlight how, over the past 18 months, the Command has failed to forward any reports of illegal construction or unauthorized development to the Torre Annunziata Public Prosecutor's Office in the clan's stronghold neighborhoods, such as Scanzano, Ponte Persica, and Moscarella, despite dozens of illegal structures and raised floors erected in plain sight.

The same blindness was observed regarding illegal occupations of public land. Seafood stalls, permanent gazebos for restaurants run by relatives of criminal figures, and illegal parking lots along the Via Garibaldi coastline operated undisturbed for entire summer seasons without ever issuing a single fine or seizing a vehicle. The Municipal Police, instead of acting as an outpost of legality and the fight against illegal building, became an inert spectator, allowing the Camorra's rules to supersede municipal regulations.

The surrender of the controls and the condemnation of the Access Commission

The diagnosis outlined at the end of Chapter 7.4 is of unprecedented severity. The combination of the deliberate deregulation of sub-threshold contracts and the total paralysis of the urban policing apparatus has created a perfect ecosystem for organized crime to thrive.

Castellammare di Stabia suffered not only from political infiltration at the polling stations or bureaucratic weakness in its IT departments, but also from the total absence of the state's operational arm on the ground. A void that the D'Alessandro and Cesarano clans filled to the last penny and every last meter of public land, making dissolution for mafia reasons the only way out to restore the rule of law.