The son of a powerful Naples mafia boss who had once distanced himself from his criminal roots has been arrested along with his father for possible extortion.
In 2019, Antonio Piccirillo, 28, broke the Italian mafia’s code of silence to denounce the actions of the Camorra group, one of the largest and oldest criminal organizations in Italy of which his family has been a part of for generations.
His arrest now raises questions about whether his anti-mafia campaign was all a front, as investigators have accused Antonio and his father of demanding extortion from business owners who run rental boat moorings in Mergellina, Naples.
It is said that Antonio presented himself as his father’s emissary and demanded thousands of euros.
The investigation that led to his arrest began after Italian TikToker Rita De Crescenzo, whose husband managed a mooring, allegedly received death threats from the father-son duo and reported him.
Antonio Piccirillo (pictured), son of a powerful Naples mafia boss who had once distanced himself from his criminal roots, has been arrested along with his father for possible extortion.
His arrest now raises questions about whether his anti-mafia campaign was all a front, as investigators have accused Antonio and his father of demanding extortion from the business owners they ran.
“When you go to file a complaint, make sure you write that there are two of us who want to kill you: my father and I,” Antonio supposedly told them.
Rosario, one of the heads of the Torretta Camorra clan, was last imprisoned in 2022 for extortion and usury.
But by then, Antonio was believed to have turned his back on his father after a four-year-old boy was wounded by a stray bullet during a shooting in a Naples square in 2019.
Following the tragic incident, he attended an anti-mafia protest where he picked up a megaphone and told the crowd: ‘My name is Antonio Piccirillo. I am the son of Rosario Piccirillo, who made many mistakes in his life and was a member of the Italian Camorra mafia.
‘Always love your parents, but stay away from their lifestyle, because it leads nowhere and only causes suffering.’
After that, he began regularly attending anti-mafia protests, where he was seen denouncing the Camorra organized crime group as a “mountain of shit.”
In 2021 he even ran as a councilor in the local elections, but only received a few hundred votes.
Antonio once told a Spanish newspaper The Country that his biggest regret in life was “not having spoken out sooner.”
Antonio and his father, accused of extortion from businessmen who manage rentable boat moorings in Mergellina, Naples
The recent arrest of the 28-year-old and his father came after Camorra assassins shot dead an engineer in Naples earlier this year after he exposed the Italian mafia organisation’s construction business.
Salvatore Coppola, 66, was shot in the face by his assassins on March 12 in the parking lot of a Deco store, a few meters from Apple’s headquarters, in San Giovanni a Teduccio.
The victim reportedly had past ties to the mafia world and had been a white-collar criminal close to the Mazzarella clan, historically considered one of the Camorra’s most powerful groups.
But after leaving the criminal organization to collaborate with the justice system, police believe he was murdered for breaking the mafia’s strict code of silence.
Coppola was ambushed by Camorra assassins on March 12 before fleeing, leaving no witnesses.
The Camorra is recognized as one of the largest and oldest criminal organizations in Italy, dating back to the 7th century.
They originated in the Campania region and rose to power in the 19th century.
The organizational structure of the Camorra is divided into individual groups called “clans”, of which there are believed to be around 180.
