Camorra in New York

Camorra in New York

The Navy Street Gang, one of the Camorra groups in Brooklyn
Founding location	Brooklyn, New York City
Years active	1900s-1918
Territory	Brooklyn and East Harlem
Ethnicity	Neapolitan American
Criminal activities	Various criminal rackets, mainly extortion, policy game, and wholesale fruit and vegetable markets.

The Brooklyn Camorra or New York Camorra is a term for a loose grouping of early-20th century organized crime groups that formed among Italian immigrants originating in Naples and the surrounding Campania region living in Greater New York, particularly in Brooklyn. In the early 20th century the criminal underworld of New York City consisted mainly of East Harlem-based Sicilians and groups of Neapolitans from Brooklyn, sometimes referred to as the Brooklyn Camorra, as Neapolitan organized crime was called the Camorra.

The substantial population of the New York Italian community offered plentiful economic opportunities. At the turn of the century, some 500,000 Italians, mainly originating from the impoverished southern regions of Italy, lived in New York City and had to survive in difficult social and economic circumstances.

Italian immigration “made fortunes for speculators and landlords, but it also transformed the neighborhood into a kind of human ant heap in which suffering, crime, ignorance and filth were the dominant elements,” according to historian Arrigo Petacco. According to sociologist Humbert S. Nelli: “New York’s Italian community offered a lucrative market for illicit activities, particularly gambling and prostitution. It also provided a huge market for products from the homeland and from the West Coast, such as artichokes and olive oil, the distribution of which the criminal elements attempted to control.”

The cheap labour needed for the expansion of capitalism of that time was made available by the scores of poor Italian immigrants. Like earlier immigrant generations a few Sicilians and Neapolitans engaged in criminal activities to succeed, employing the crime traditions from their original Italian home regions. One of the prominent crime bosses was Enrico Alfano, who became one of the principal underworld targets of police sergeant Joseph Petrosino, the head of the Italian Squad of the New York City Police Department. Another prominent criminal boss around 1910-15 was Giosue Gallucci, the undisputed King of Little Italy born in Naples, who employed Neapolitan and Sicilian street gangs as his enforcers for the Italian lottery or numbers game and enjoyed functional immunity from law enforcement through his political contacts.