ABSTRACT

Roberto Saviano made the following comment about the Neapolitan Camorra:

After the fall of the Berlin wall, Pietro Licciardi transferred the majority of his own investments, legal and illegal, to Prague and Brno. Criminal activity in the Czech Republic was completely controlled by the Secondigliano clan, which applied the logic of the productive outskirts and set out to corner the German market. Pietro Licciardi had a manager’s profile, and his business associates called him ‘the Roman Emperor’ because of his authoritarian attitude and arrogant belief that the entire world was an extension of Secondigliano. He’d opened a clothing store in China – a commercial pied-à-terre in Taiwan – to take advantage of cheap labour and move in on the internal Chinese market. He was arrested in Prague in June 1999.

(Saviano 2006: 48) His words show quite incisively how organized crime is spreading around the world and how globalization has made its activities an issue of concern for us all. It follows that cooperation in the fight against transnational organized crime (TOC) is fundamental as is the need for those responsible for law enforcement to try and counter its pervasiveness. In this chapter, we analyse Italy’s fight against organized and transnational organized crime to see whether any lessons can be learnt.