Police made the surprise arrest early Sunday, arriving at a cottage in Sperone, about 30 kilometres (20 miles) east of Naples, where Pasquale Russo was holed up with his brother, Carmine, 47, also a fugitive from the law since 2007. On Saturday another brother, Salvatore Russo, 51, was arrested at a farm on the outskirts of Naples. The Russo clan controlled "all the illicit activities in a vast area" comprising some 40 towns in the Naples region, police said on Saturday. The Russo brothers had reorganised the structure of Naples' Camorra mafia in the early 1990s after the boss of the region, Carmine Alfieri, turned and cooperated with the authorities, and the Russos "exercised absolute control over their territory", police said.
On Saturday another brother, Salvatore Russo, 51, was arrested at a farm on the outskirts of Naples.
The Russo clan controlled "all the illicit activities in a vast area" comprising some 40 towns in the Naples region, police said on Saturday.
The Russo brothers had reorganised the structure of Naples' Camorra mafia in the early 1990s after the boss of the region, Carmine Alfieri, turned and cooperated with the authorities, and the Russos "exercised absolute control over their territory", police said.
CCTV footage of this killing carried out in the street in broad daylight was posted on the Internet by Naples police in the hope that someone would step forward and help identify the murderer."As you can see from the images, there's a fair degree of indifference among the passers-by" Innocenzo Datri, a lawyer, works as a pro bono counsellor for a Naples neighbourhood town hall.
CCTV footage of this killing carried out in the street in broad daylight was posted on the Internet by Naples police in the hope that someone would step forward and help identify the murderer.
"As you can see from the images, there's a fair degree of indifference among the passers-by"
Innocenzo Datri, a lawyer, works as a pro bono counsellor for a Naples neighbourhood town hall.
The full video version may be seen here. There is also a version with commentary by Roberto Saviano in Italian.
Saviano also wrote an editorial on the affair. Both his audio and written commentary stress the absolute "normality" of everyone's reactions- and how distant a real execution is from film stereotypes.
Professor MAHZARIN BANAJI: Sometimes it's easy to think about helping an individual person, even though a group tragedy may not affect us. And again, the bystander problem poses a dilemma because this is about an individual human being and that person's suffering. And so, of course, there are now, we know, many, many experiments done on something called the bystander non-intervention effect, and it was done in the late '60s, following the murder of Kitty Genovese. And exactly as you say, Neal, the initial response from psychiatrists and psychologists was: Who were these horrible people who stood around watching the murder of this woman and didn't call the police? And that led to a stunning set of experiments. And the reason I say that the experiments here are so important is that because in any given case, we don't know exactly what the pressures on the situation were, and we don't know exactly what those folks experienced. And that's why when we bring complex phenomena like this into the laboratory and we put them to the test there, we can say with far greater precision what it is that's going on. And the results of two psychologists by the name of Latane and Darley stand out here because they reenacted certain situations in the laboratory, a person having a seizure, a bunch of smoke just flowing into a room, and all they varied was the number of people present. And the data show over and over again that if there was one person in the room, the likelihood of helping is around 75 percent. But as the number goes to two and three and four and five and six, the number of people who jump up to help drops to 10 percent, right? So there's something about the size of the group that, although it should lead us to be more likely to help, actually produces the counterintuitive reverse effect.
Professor MAHZARIN BANAJI: Sometimes it's easy to think about helping an individual person, even though a group tragedy may not affect us. And again, the bystander problem poses a dilemma because this is about an individual human being and that person's suffering. And so, of course, there are now, we know, many, many experiments done on something called the bystander non-intervention effect, and it was done in the late '60s, following the murder of Kitty Genovese. And exactly as you say, Neal, the initial response from psychiatrists and psychologists was: Who were these horrible people who stood around watching the murder of this woman and didn't call the police? And that led to a stunning set of experiments.
And the reason I say that the experiments here are so important is that because in any given case, we don't know exactly what the pressures on the situation were, and we don't know exactly what those folks experienced. And that's why when we bring complex phenomena like this into the laboratory and we put them to the test there, we can say with far greater precision what it is that's going on. And the results of two psychologists by the name of Latane and Darley stand out here because they reenacted certain situations in the laboratory, a person having a seizure, a bunch of smoke just flowing into a room, and all they varied was the number of people present.
And the data show over and over again that if there was one person in the room, the likelihood of helping is around 75 percent. But as the number goes to two and three and four and five and six, the number of people who jump up to help drops to 10 percent, right?
So there's something about the size of the group that, although it should lead us to be more likely to help, actually produces the counterintuitive reverse effect.
