The author who chronicled the rise of the crime syndicate in his book Gomorrah says that tearing down tower blocks will not be enough to resurrect Le Vele di Scampia

In Italy, some believe that to destroy the symbols of evil or ill-fortune it is sufficient to eradicate that same evil or ill-fortune. In Italy, some think that to forge a new path, it suffices to demolish the buildings in a quarter on the outskirts of Naples known as Le Vele – the Sails – di Scampia. A neighbourhood that has for years been the largest drug-dealing hotspot in Europe, a neighbourhood towards which the state has hardly ever turned its gaze, except to arrest the foot-soldiers of its cartel and gang wars, and remove the bodies of its dead from the asphalt.

For those who have never heard of this place, I will endeavour to explain in a few simple words what Le Vele are, so-called because they were built to resemble the shape of the particular lateen sail (triangular, for aerodynamic reasons) in Scampia, on the northern outskirts of Naples. The Vele is a residential complex originally composed of seven buildings, four of which have been demolished. In the next few years, two more buildings will be torn down, and one will remain, redeveloped, so as to recall what they were – and what in part they still are.

I ask myself: do we really want to remember not only what the Vele have signified, but how the territory on which they rose was treated by a state that has ignored its story for so long, yet now drinks a toast to the rubble?

I also ask myself, and ask you: what if the Vele di Scampia had been built at Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, London?

I also ask myself, and ask you: what if the Vele di Scampia had been built at Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, London? Or had been the so-called Three Ugly Sisters – also known as the Piggeries – in Liverpool, demolished in 1987? Not to mention Grenfell Tower, due for demolition, where 72 people died. Would it be, was it and is it enough for the decent workers and families who live or lived there, as in Scampia? Of course not, because the only real cure is long-term policy, thought and investment. Before demolishing, you need to think about what you want to build next; to think about what balm might soothe the wound, heal the chasm that you left open.

Many people outside Naples who have heard of the Vele di Scampia may have done so because they feature in a book I wrote, and a film and a TV series made around it: Gomorrah, about the Camorra mafia clans in Naples which took root in Le Vele, among other places, and effectively took over the estate complex. Most of the film and TV series are set among the “sails”, in this dirty-white concrete jungle.

But, insist the authorities: “We are not Gomorrah! – we are not the mafia.” However, it is not enough to say “We are not Gomorrah”. It doesn’t work, trying to keep that distance just because 16 years have passed since the bloody mafia feuds across Scampia – part of the war between Camorra clans that made Naples a war zone at the heart of Europe.

Now, the felling of the next block, the Vela Verde or Green Sail, begins. But it does so without anyone having thought about what will happen next. TNT will not be used; it would malfunction like it did when they took down the first vela in 1997. Symbolically, on that occasion, the first charge was detonated, but the vela remained motionless. It took a powerful second charge to bring it down. The mayor at that time was Antonio Bassolino, a leftist first citizen who would later be among the founders of the Democratic party. The occasion brought the then president of the republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, to Naples. Then two more sails were pulled down, one in 2000 and the other in 2003.

Twenty-three years later, we repeat the initial exercise with the Green Sail. Now, as then, there is talk of rebirth of the neighbourhood. It’s a historic day, so they say, and, of course, it is. But the reason for that is because it proclaims the failure of policy to reform neighbourhoods such as Scampia. It is certainly no triumph.

Le Vele, which have been considered for decades the symbol of degradation, of negligence by the state and of the overwhelming power of the Camorra clans, are not responsible for the evil of Scampia. How could they be?

They were built between 1962 and 1975, designed by Franz Di Salvo, a brilliant architect animated by the architectural spirit of the time, the so-called existenzminimum (subsistence dwelling). That is, to try and reduce the interior apartment – where life would take place – to a bare minimum.

The accommodation was obtained at a limited construction cost, and depended on the “outside” as the main space for existence. Life was to take place in shared, exterior spaces, collectively.

In a way, Naples was already like that; it was a symbol of the way the city lived. Di Salvo designed Le Vele with the specific aim of reconstructing the spirit of Naples’s famously crowded but congenial alleys and courtyards in an apartment building. There would be balconies suspended in the void, up which the stairs leading to the apartments climbed; they were like modernist, suspended versions of the inner-city’s baroque courtyards and alleyways.

Was Di Salvo wrong? Well, all you have to do is admire the twin sails of Villeneuve-Loubet on the French Riviera – they are among the most coveted apartments in Europe. But of course, I hear you say: they are located in a tourist destination, with views of the Mediterranean, inhabited by rather different people. Yet still, the Villeneuve-Loubet project was launched in a degraded area, to which a lot of people had to be transplanted in an attempt to revive an abandoned stretch of land, urged to immediately feel themselves a community. And they did, and there it worked.

So what went wrong in Scampia? A lot of things. Over the decades, it has been debated whether the housing plan had been “criminogenic” – likely to cause criminal behaviour – like an accomplice of what then became of Scampia.

But you have to go step by step. Firstly, Le Vele were not built as planned. The green areas were neglected. The proposed school centres, service areas and churches were cancelled. Common spaces that should have been built every six floors were omitted. The blocks themselves were placed close beside one another, not at the expected distance, in many cases inhibiting natural light in the apartments.

But these were not the real problems that made Le Vele symbols of degradation and centre of operations for the Camorra.

There was administrative dysfunction: the municipality started allocating apartments that were not yet completed, lacking even toilets, without electricity and without gas. Then came the earthquake that hit southern Italy in 1980, after which any available housing was occupied by homeless families. The arcades of Le Vele turned into squat dwellings with overcrowded and increasingly degraded apartments. Then – and only then – came the terrible revolution in criminal strategy of Aniello La Monica, “Anielluccio o’Pazz” – Crazyboy Aniello.

This is now the early 1980s, and La Monica is a young boss, enemy of the powerful Nuova Camorra Organizzata – New Organised Camorra – headed by the Capo Raffaele Cutolo. La Monica belongs to the Fratellanza Napoletana – Neapolitan Brotherhood – which the media would come to label Nuova Famiglia, or New Family. La Monica was duly assigned Scampia – his place of origin – as a zone of influence, where the New Family’s rule would be law.

There was not much for a mafioso to do in Scampia: there were few shops (La Monica himself kept one, named after his favourite gun); the inhabitants had little money, commerce was slow. Above all there was this: Antoniello had to divide the profits of public construction with the leaders of the clan to which he belonged, for reasons of clan hierarchy. He could not keep everything to himself, even if Scampia was his territory.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marco D’Amore and Salvatore Esposito as Gomorrah’s TV gangsters. Photograph: © Beta Films

But La Monica realised that the spaces around Le Vele were not narrow alleys where the police could, with easy raids, arrest everyone. He understood the terrain: that those buildings could become his presidia; and that he could count on hungry and willing manpower to work for a few lire.

La Monica started by transforming Scampia into a department store for smuggled cigarettes (which could be sold below cost because they evaded state tobacco tax).

Then he divided the zones within the estate by assigning each of his men a territory. Then La Monica understood that the sale of drugs could be his commercial strength across this large area, with labour at almost zero cost and easy control of the territory.

These were the years of heroin, and Scampia began to import tonnes of it. La Monica was afraid, however, that overreaching himself would upset the leaders of the New Family, and restrained the ambitions of his men, urging them to act prudently.

And this is where his godson and apparently loyal underling, Paolo Di Lauro (they are only about 10 years apart, but La Monica effectively adopted Di Lauro) took over. Di Lauro and his group of his associates – impatient with La Monica’s caution – decided to rebel and take out the boss, who was murdered in 1982. Di Lauro officiated at his funeral, but has always been suspected of being its architect.

Thus began Di Lauro’s reign: for years, he organised Le Vele and beyond, by exploiting the territory. He imported cocaine and heroin from South and Central America, for sale through a vast network of dealers, with control of everything that happened in this ghetto area of ​​Naples, among the most prosperous drug markets in the western world.

Di Lauro imported cocaine and heroin from South and Central America, for sale through a vast network of dealers, with control of everything that happened in this ghetto area of ​​Naples

The extreme degradation of Le Vele was thus generating profits from drugs worth billions of lire (and then millions of euros). Not only that, but the criminal peculiarity of Scampia became that of attracting heroin consumers from all parts of Italy and wholesale drug buyers (which was practically impossible in any other part of Italy, unless one entered into a direct relationship with drug traffickers).

By the mid-1990s, reviving the Vele had become impossible given the level of devastation and abandonment to which they had been reduced. The situation worsened in the mid-2000s: in 2004 and early 2005 there was nearly a murder every day in Le Vele, when another – this time open – war broke out across the estate, between those loyal to Di Lauro and a dissident faction, the Secessionists.

There is nothing to celebrate in this felling of the buildings, like a killing that is not a victory. A victory of what? Breaking them down does not resolve the causes of the degradation. The drug-dealing plazas have moved to Melito (a neighbouring town on the outskirts of Naples). The Camorra has almost stopped shooting in that area because the cartels reached an agreement after a suicidal feud.

Within 40 days the Vele are to be pulled down, but no new path has been laid. Voluntary associations that have sprung up in the area over the years do a wonderful job; volunteers came to the rescue on many occasions, but the real change, that the arrival of companies bringing work for the people here would generate, never materialised. So knocking down the Vele is a symbolic gesture that recalls the failure of a project, or rather of several projects: the initial one being to build a new neighbourhood on a human scale, and to return these structures to the community by making them become university spaces, state buildings .

We forget what Gomorrah really is: Gomorrah is not a mere synonym with Camorra, Gomorrah is an economic system wherein everything is missing, where there are no investments, no opportunities, no education, no jobs, no resources, no businesses.

When infrastructure struggles against a constant lack of funds and resources – that is Gomorrah. To be Gomorrah is not just about toting weapons, threats and extortion, drug-dealing, killing, dumping garbage and money laundering.

And to not be Gomorrah isn’t simply being outraged and angry. To not be Gomorrah means working to find a cure, to never stop looking for the antidote to this poison.

The antidote to Gomorrah means forging a new path, which is not a vacuum, not devastation, not neglect, not rubble.

Today, as 20 years ago, politicians are frantic to associate their faces with the demolition, but the reconstruction is still far off. Scampia has certainly changed since the years of the feuds. The stigma that branded Neapolitans as victims by the negative narrative of their reality is totally false.

On the contrary: the story of our contradictions has been transformative. If Naples had been branded and muddied forever, the city would not have so many tourists and passionate visitors today.

And now there would not be all this international attention for the felling of the Vele. It has been the spotlight that enables us to start to understand the elements of the disaster, and allowed us to demonstrate the errors of decades of bad policy, no policy, mismanagement and complicity by of one of the most parasitic bourgeoisies in Italy. We’ll celebrate when there really is a reconstruction: for now it is useless to raise a glass to the ruins.

Translated from the Italian by Ed Vulliamy