NAPLES. Like on June 7, 2016, when two hit men broke into a recreational club in a district forgotten by the state and killed a Camorra boss “on the run”. Today, like yesterday, the order was not to be mistaken. Do not make survivors. Only then, under the barrage of killers, an innocent man also ended up.
This afternoon in Naples the Camorra returned to settle its accounts in one of those recreational clubs that were best remedied in the “lower” areas of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. And he did it to kill. Salvatore Astuto, 47, was playing cards when a rain of lead hit him. About twenty gunshots were fired. Many, many. To testify to the fact that whoever acted did it to kill.
Not only that: who pulled the trigger was probably also an expert killer, who was not alone in the club in vico Fico al Mercato Astuto and the error, given the large number of bullets exploded, was around the corner. As happened on the afternoon of 7 June 2016, when on the other side of the city, in Lot 0 in Ponticelli, two hitmen from the Rinaldi-Minichini group opened fire to kill the ras of the “barbudos” Raffaele Cepparulo (who had fled from his neighborhood, la Sanità, where a feud was underway between his group and the Vastarella clan) and also broke the life of Ciro Colonna, a 19-year-old respectable who lived in that unfortunate neighborhood where souls are mixed with concrete and who had entertained himself to play with friends.
Salvatore Astuto is the only victim of this afternoon’s ambush. And in the sights of the assassins he ended up with his kinship to the Mazzarella, a historic criminal family that has roots in various areas of the city: his daughter married Alberto Mazzarella, at the top of the “branch” of the family based in the Market. A relationship that made Astuto a prominent figure in the clan, even if looking at his legal background there is no trace of a significant precedent.
And it is precisely in Astuto’s “private” that the carabinieri of the Stella company are digging to frame a crime with a dynamic yet to be defined: a few hours after the raid, it is not yet clear whether the 20 gunshots were fired for more weapons or long gun. Nor is it clear the number of killers who have gone into action. But it is a matter of hours before the carabinieri manage to get a more or less complete picture.
As for the motive, among the most accredited leads – even if in cases like these nothing is excluded a priori – there is the eternal feud between the Mazzarella and the Rinaldis, the same two families protagonists of the ambush that five years ago cost the life of Ciro Colonna and the boss Cepparulo. The same two families who on April 9, 2019 wrote another particularly impactful ambush: in the district of San Giovanni a Teduccio, a few steps from the entrance to a kindergarten, a commando went into action and shot, killing him , to Luigi Mignano, brother-in-law of the inmate Ciro Rinaldi.
With Mignano there was the 3-year-old grandson, who only luckily was not injured: the little one was still in the car when the assassins acted. Emblematic of the danger escaped by the child and the atrocity of the action is the photo of the crime scene that he immortalized, leaning against a flower bed and a few centimeters from the corpse, the backpack of Spiderman that Mignano held in his hand before being surprised by the assassins of the D’Amico-Mazzarella group.