The Camorra boss gives Italy an island – and attaches very specific hopes to it. Finland closes the last border for passenger traffic to Russia

It’s not a gangster nickname, it’s really called: Imperiale, first name Raffaele. At his best, the Camorra boss ran a global drug empire that imported 300 to 400 kilos of cocaine every month directly from the Colombian drug cartels and then sold it in bulk to buyers in half of Europe.

In Italy and Amsterdam, where he had started a ‘coffee shop’ in the 1990s, Imperiale’s ‘company’ employed about twenty people, who, if business was good, earned a thirteenth and fourteenth month at the end of the year. Imperiale invested the rest of the drug profits mainly in gold, diamonds, Bitcoins and luxury real estate in Spain and Dubai, where he had recently sought safety from Italian anti-mafia investigators.

In Dubai, the Camorra boss from Castellammare di Stabia, a run-down suburb of Naples, bought one of the many artificial islands that the very wealthy oil sheikhs had built off the coast of the Emirates about twenty years ago for twelve million dollars. Today the island is worth several times as much.

Luxury villas worth $200 million

Imperiale, who liked to think on a grand scale, commissioned Iraqi-British star architect Zaha Hadid to build ten luxury villas. Cost: About $200 million. But because Hadid died in 2016, nothing came of the project. Now Imperiale wants to bequeath the artificial island to the Italian state, as Neapolitan prosecutor Maurizio De Marco announced this week during Imperiale’s trial, to the surprise of the court.

Imperiale was arrested in Dubai in 2021 at the request of the Italian authorities, Interpol and Europol and extradited to Italy in March 2022, where he has been on trial ever since. Because he said he was ‘tired’ of hiding from the judiciary for years and because he ‘wanted to change his life’, the now 49-year-old mafioso decided to cooperate with the investigating authorities.

Public prosecutor De Marco also suspects another motive: there are heavy punishment reductions in Italy for mafiosi who come forward. The gangster now hopes the same from his gift to the state: It is “indisputable” that the transfer of the island has similar reasons to his cooperative behavior during the process, De Marco emphasized.

It is still unclear what will happen to the artificial island off the coast of Dubai. The Italian state has confiscated vast assets from the mafia over the years, including thousands of properties, but one island in the Gulf states was still missing from the collection.

Newspaper headlines with stolen Van Gogh paintings

By the way, this isn’t the first time Imperiale has made headlines with its island gift. Already in 2016, when he was still living a more or less undisturbed life in Dubai, the Camorra boss had become internationally known because the police discovered two paintings by the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in a secret hideout in his birthplace of Castellammare di Stabia. .

These were stolen from the Van Gogh Museum in 2002. Imperiale had bought the two paintings – ‘Scheveningen Beach in Stormy Weather’ and ‘Nuenen Church with Church Goers’ – when he still lived in Amsterdam. He is said to have bought the two works of art, which are now estimated to be worth more than 100 million dollars, for a paltry 350,000 dollars – directly from the two art robbers Octave Durham and Henk Bieslijn. (aargauerzeitung.ch)