Via Calabria, via Piedmont and via Liguria were once the epicenter of Chinese “ready fashion” in Europe. Now on those streets of the industrial area of Prato there seems to be a lead lid. There are no longer the races of the vans loaded with goods, no workers with the hands marked by the seams. Only broken glass, faded signs in Chinese characters and ghost warehouses. Yet, behind this unreal calm, a war hatched.
“The war of the hangers”, the local press renamed it in a hasty waybecause the affairs that are most on the surface concern the triangular medical hangers from a few cents to piece. But it’s something more. It is an earthquake in the powerful Chinese mafia, the triad, an ancient organization, a secret society that dates back to the times of the Ming resistance in the seventeenth century. The boom of Fast Fashion had spread a veil above all: above the old feuds, above the hatreds imported from deep China. A lot of money, so much that the clans of the Zhejiang regions and those of Fujian had stopped slaughtering. They had squeezed a mafia pax made of unwritten agreements and divided territories, such as spring rolls on a table. But now that the crisis has dried up the river of money, the veil has torn up. And underneath the fierce face of the struggle for power is reviewed.
To hold that system, according to the accusations made by the anti -mafia prosecutor of Florence, there was a name that still makes it tremble: Zhang Naizhong, “the boss’s boss”. Zhejiang man, land of hard and ingenious people, had built his domain as an invisible cathedral: brick after brick, deal after deal. Next to him, to act as a guarantor of the balance with Fujian he had put Lin Guochun, the deputy perhaps chosen only for political necessity. Their kingdom seems based on two bearing columns: Europeatrans and go, the companies that moved goods from one bank to the other of the world, without clamor but with the precision of a Swiss watch. Now that kingdom creaks. Less goods, less money, more controls, and the clans have taken up faceing.
In Prato the beatings outside the restaurants, the fires of the shops and the factories are multiplying, the threats left as business cards in the trembling hands of the undecided transporters. Ambushes. And the murders. The Number One, a night club frequented above all by Asian, seems to have transformed into a polygon. In July last year, a commando of six people tried to kill Chang Meng Zhang, a Chinese businessman’s businessman, with a condemnation on his shoulders for the murder of a compatriot. Among the hit men is Nengyin Fang, a former Chinese army soldier who arrived in Italy just to eliminate Zhang. The investigators tracked him back to Padua. Four other accomplices hid in Calabria. One in Catania, a fundamental junction for triad logistics in Italy. Here local reporters still remember the ferocity with which Ren Jinxing was assassinated, owner of a wholesale of clothing in Agrigento and riddled with blows in Catania in 2004.
The four killers identified came from the Chinese communities of Prato and San Giuseppe Vesuviano, In the province of Naples, another strategic city in the checkerboard of the Dragone Mala. Just a few days ago, however, in the same place in Prato, it was a woman, always Chinese, employee of the Number One, seized for extortion purposes. And 24 hours after another Chinese ends up in the emergency room with two bullets in the shoulder and in one arm. The crime scene is once again in Number One. There are 15 violent episodes since last June. And disturbing coincidences also lead the investigators to the fire of a shed in Madrid and a double murder in Rome. In the Pigneto district. Here a killer waited for the victims on the landing, knowing the address and times. The ambush seems to have been studied in detail – and performed – with coldness: six pistol shots, two in the head. For investigators it is a mafia execution of Chinese matrix. The victims are Zhang Dayong, already charged by attempted extortion in the process in which Naizhong is involved (of which, to read the judicial documents, the victim would have been one of the lieutenants), and his wife Gong Xiaoqing, with a precedent for gambling. The Italian investigators, who appear disoriented in a labyrinth made of silence, for now collect the shards.
They imagine that the war, the real one, is at the gates. But Prato is only a fragment. To understand where the poison comes from, in fact, you have to go to the south, at the foot of Vesuvius, in the dark belly of San Giuseppe Vesuviano. Here, long before the exploded lawn system, the blood had already been poured. It is necessary to go back to May 2006: in the deceptive quiet of Villa Paradiso, a restaurant-hotel managed by a Chinese young man, the violence exploded like a bomb. An armed group broke into, tortured four Chinese boys coming, coincidence, from Prato. One of them, Zhi Jian su, torn by the Mannaia blows, did not leave alive from that night. The others ended up in the hospital, between life and death. The carabinieri dug between silence and half words, but collided with the granite wall of the Chinese community: where the accounts regulate inside.
It was not an isolated episode. The investigators reconstructed the murder: he had been ordered by Naizhong “as part of the struggle for supremacy between Chinese transport companies”. The boss, however, was condemned only for having provided the killers with the means to escape from Italy. And only at first instance. He was acquitted by the Court of Assizes of Appeal of Naples. The thread of blood, however, carried away, beyond the Alps, up to Paris, where invisibility is art and profession. In January 2010, the French police arrested a “ghost”: Feng Lin, 27 years old, more nicknames than years lived. They blocked him as he left his apartment in the X Arrondissement, among the viuzze dense of foreign languages.
Lin had chosen Paris because in Belville’s Chinatown the clans are confused between restaurants, money transfer and night markets. It was then discovered that he had been able to count on the economic help of people in direct contact with the Naizhong group. And always in Paris, a city that is red -hot returned for the newspapers of the Chinese signature, the only repentant of the triad was killed who had dared to empty the sack in Italy. Zhang Zhen had revealed all the dark mechanisms of Chinese crime rooted in Tuscany: the routes of illegal immigrants, the rackets, the kidnappings, the rapes, the murders. He had been the key collaborator of the “Gladioli Rossi” investigation (the flowers sent as death messages to those who rushed), the first who, in 1999, had led an Italian court to recognize the existence of a Chinese mafia organization operating in Italy. Fifteen sentences, all confirmed in the Cassation. Zhen, who arrived in Tuscany in 1991, was a “soldier” of the clans: a debt of the game debts, conveyor of illegal immigrants, trafficker. He had entered the radar of justice after a shooting in Sesto Fiorentino. A Chinese worker, a former policeman in his country, had shot him first. And he had asked for protection. But nothing was done. So he had tried to reconstruct a life between Pisa and Paris. Then, the end. On November 3, 2001, Zhen was found dead in his Parisian apartment, killed by a gunshot.
A surgical execution. A message to all the others: whoever betrays the triad, has no escape. But everything returns to Prato. Always there. Like a lung that continues to pump poison in all Europe. It was Giuseppe Creazzo, as a prosecutor of Florence, to say it clearly after the arrests of the “China Truck” investigation: “The branches towards the entire continent start from Prato”. Now the Prato prosecutor Luca Tescaroli confirms this. Not only sheds and clothes, but drugs, extortion, traffic of humans. Naizhong was suspected of being the invisible summit of this system. It was not just a boss: it was a criminal diplomat. While in Italy, as Panorama revealed in 2018, he organized the visits of the big pieces of his country with the unsuspecting exponents of the Italian government, when the bands of Paris slaughtered, it was he, according to the investigators, to fly to France, who sat in the heads of the triads, making his authority weigh. Before entering the negotiation room, intercepted, he said to his men: “In front of everyone, you must call me” head “”. And from that summit a new order of things came out: every deal would have gone from him, from Prato.
