ITALY: A Few Missing Millions

“The city of thieves,” other Italians have been known to call Naples (pop. 1,000,000), and almost everyone has a story about what happened to him there. In World War II, trucks that entered Naples loaded, came out the other side of the city stripped bare. Legend has it that Neapolitans stole an entire ship, plate by plate, out of the harbor. A favorite street game is for a big boy to beat up a crying youngster within sight of a horrified American tourist. The American breaks up the fight and leaves full of virtue—minus his wallet.

But this is treatment which Neapolitans thought was reserved for strangers. Naples was shocked to the core last week to hear that Neapolitans had been doing something like this to each other—and in city hall, at that. On a muggy 99° evening, thousands swarmed about the 700-year-old hall shouting, “Clean up the mess!” Cops broke it up by arresting 30 of the demonstrators. Inside, Mayor Achille Lauro, millionaire shipowner and leader of the Popular Monarchist Party, insisted, “Our hands are clean, because we don’t have to soil ourselves by stealing public money.” No one accused Lauro of pocketing any money personally. But the Ministry of the Interior in Rome declared that its inquiry into Naples graft had turned up “stupefying incompetence, unpardonable abuses, illegitimate profiteering,” which was part of the reason Lauro’s administration is $50 million in the red this year.

Charges:

¶ Lauro assigned 77 city cars to his cronies for personal use, ordered the city to pay the license fees, taxes and even the repair bills, allowed the cronies to fill up their private cars at city gas pumps. Estimated cost of the largesse: several hundred thousand dollars yearly. ¶ Lauro required every city contractor to kick back up to 10% to his “Welfare and Feast Fund,” supposedly for poor Neapolitans, who thought their Christmas packages and spaghetti handouts had come from Lauro’s own pocket. ¶Dandified Senator Gaetano Fiorentino, Lauro’s No. 1 helper who now drives a $6,000 Mercedes-Benz, padded the public-assistance fund, which he administers, with 5,000 extra names. The fund’s budget for the entire year is already almost gone.

Monarchist Lauro, who rushed back from his favorite spa of Fiuggi, labeled the whole affair a “political maneuver” by the Christian Democratic government to cut into his political strength in southern Italy. He accused the government of “throwing mud at the fair city of Naples,” scoffed at the possibility of a “few missing millions,” and cried: “Rome is trying to make an assault landing in the territorial waters of Naples.” Said a Lauro aide: “Every real Neapolitan can only admire the way we operate.”