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Milan

With nine murders in the past nine days, the world’s most clothes-conscious city thinks it is having a bad dream.Or rather, aflashback to the mayhem the Milanese had to endure in decades past: bank robbery in the 1960s, political terrorism in the 1970s, mobsters, most from the Italian south, in the 1980s, often specializing in white-collar crime. In the 1990s the mobsters started to enroll new immigrants, often Balkan, on their books. Now these newcomers may be taking over. Across the city the rate of muggings has risen sharply.

What makes the latest crime wave different is that the violence has become so cosmopolitan. As well as local bartenders and shopkeepers, the murder victims include Albanian drug dealers, Croatian thugs, Brazilian prostitutes. The city’s exasperated mayor has blamed the killings on a virtually uncontrolled inflow of illegal immigrants, sucked in by Milan’s wealth and reputation for openness. He reckons that 300 arrive in the city every day. In the whole of last year only 277 were expelled.

An elaborate division of labour is emerging in the city’s multinational underworld. Police say their toughest challenge is from ethnic Albanians from Kosovo, who go in for drugs and prostitution and have forced local mobsters to cede a share of the market. Young Kosovar criminals whiz around the city in flashy cars. When they get put in Milan’s San Vittore prison, they tend to run the show there too. Nigerian pimps ply their trade on the ring-road, youngsters from North Africa sell drugs in squares and public gardens, children from Eastern Europe beg and hustle on street corners, and pickpockets from South America filch from tourists in the Piazza del Duomo.

How did they all get there? Presumably they sneaked in, having heard on the grapevine that once in, they are unlikely to be sent back: nothing much has changed, despite neighbouring countries’ demands for a crackdown. The authorities reckon Italy has 800,000 legal immigrants (excluding visitors from the EU); they guess it also has some 300,000 clandestini, or illegal immigrants. Of the 80,000-odd foreigners who brushed with the law in the past few years, when the crime problem was much less severe, some 63,000 proved to have no right to be in Italy. Yet expulsions are rare because the law has loopholes. Once arrested, the clandestini are usually freed and told to report again the following day – an invitation merely to hop it. Many refuse to give names and addresses, so the police do not know where to send them.

Little wonder that this year’s wave of killings has triggered a round of buck-passing between politicians and magistrates. Politicians claim the judiciary is too obsessed with tracking down home-grown sleaze to do its other job properly: Milan was the focal point of a string of scandals that destroyed the old political establishment. Magistrates retort that politicians are soft on crime and its main cause, illegal immigration. Ordinary Milanese have staged angry rallies. Some vigilantes have appeared on the streets.

Nicola Trussardi, one of the city’s leading designers, predicts that flak jackets will be the new fashion, and says he wants to corner the market. Not everybody thinks he is being funny.

(From ‘The Economist’)

Choose the correct answer.

1. The crime rate in Milan is rising because

A. immigrants join criminal groups;

B. bank robberies and political terrorism are coming back;

C. the mobsters started writing books and began giving them to immigrants.

2. What makes the latest crime wave different?

A. The victims are now people of different nationalities.

B. Criminals coming to Italy share their experience with local mobsters.

C. More crimes are committed by illegal immigrants.

3. What is the most characteristic feature of the underworld in Milan?

A. The majority of criminals are Albanians.

B. Most crimes are connected with drugs and prostitution.

C. Each national criminal group specializes in a particular type of crime.

4. Immigrants arrive in Italy because

A. they come to pick grapes;

B. they heard rumours that immigrants are not deported;

C. it is easy to cross the Italian border.

5. The word combination “of the 80,000-odd foreigners …” means

A. the foreigners are weird;

B. 80,000 foreigners come to Italy occasionally;

C. More than 80,000 foreigners … .

6. The rising crime rate has led to

A. a conflict between politicians and judiciary;

B. improper investigation of crimes;

C. a change in the attitude to crime.

7. The last paragraph of the article implies that

A. Nicola Trussardi is going to open corner shops;

B. mobsters might dominate Milan;

C. fashion is going to change.