The transformation of the Neapolitan Camorra: families, families and more families

The Neapolitan Camorra is commonly represented as a system of criminal groups stemming from the underclass – the so-called “plebe”, the wide mass of unemployed that historically characterises the city of Naples – with clear borders and identity, reinforced by rituals, hierarchies, leaderships, military functions and portions of territory under their control. This vision is reinforced by those scholars who adopt a theoretical perspective of criminology and functionalist sociology, who consider Camorra clans as close-knit and corporate groups, based on a specific subculture with distinguishing lifestyles, values and modes of behaviour. On the contrary, we argue that Camorra clans act as an extended-family business: large kinship networks, intertwined with economic activities, often connected, through marriage strategies, to other families who play a strategic role in the same sector. Clans are mostly based on open entrepreneurial-type networks which operate on an international scale and in several economic sectors. The purpose of this contribution is to analyse Camorra clans as an emergent phenomenon within social and economic spaces, strictly related to the violent regulation of legal and illegal markets. The long life and survival of the Orlando-Nuvoletta clan from Marano, a municipality to the north of Naples, represents an emblematic case study of the historical transformation of the family-organizational forms of the Camorra from the WWII to today