Mobsters pass time settling old scores

Mafia clans have shown little patience with Italy’s tough lockdown rules this month, staging a series of kneecappings, arson attacks and bombings. While most Italians bake bread and try to keep fit at home, mobsters have been evading police checkpoints to settle scores and punish turncoats. In Ostia, near Rome, Paolo Ascani, the brother-in-law of Roberto Spada, a jailed mob boss, was shot in the leg on Tuesday outside his home. The attack may have been part of a drug war involving the Spada clan. Since a police crackdown on the Spadas in 2018, their dominance over drug-dealing in Ostia has been challenged by Marco ‘‘Little Poodle’’ Esposito – named for his undisciplined character – who is linked to the Casalesi clan, part of the Naples Camorra mafia. ‘‘This shooting may have been a message to the Spadas telling them their monopoly is over,’’ Federica Angeli, a local journalist given police protection after being threatened by the Spadas, said. In Sicily, arsonists poured petrol on the front door of another mafia chronicler, the journalist Valentino Sucato, and set fire to it. In Foggia, in the heel of Italy, a bomb was detonated outside a care home run by a man who had given evidence against the Societa Foggiana, a local mafia group. The group is known as Italy’s fourth mafia alongside Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Naples Camorra. The Camorra has reportedly spent time during lockdown distributing food parcels to locals who have lost their income, thus building up support while state cash for the unemployed has been slow to arrive. In Sicily, coronavirus gave a lucky break to one ageing don. Francesco Bonura, 78, was freed from a high security jail and put under house arrest over fears he would contract the virus in jail. –