Updated August 6, 2024 at 4:30 p.m.*
MILAN — It all starts in Spain in August 2006. Inside a villa in the Andalusian city of Marabella, on the Costa del Sol, the brothers-in-law Raffaele Amato and Cesare Pagano meet up. Pagano lives in the rented villa along with the rest of his family.
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Amato and Pagano are the bosses of the Scissionisti Camorra clan — they are also called “the Spanish” because their operational base is in Spain. The two hail from the Scampia neighborhood in the north of Naples, where a feud with an opposing clan, led by Paolo Di Lauro, recently ended, leaving more than 50 dead. In this war to control the drug markets north of Naples, a young drug and arms dealer active between Spain and Amsterdam played a key role: Raffaele Imperiale.
At the time, Imperiale was still unknown to the authorities. But he was “in extreme confidence” with both Amato and Pagano, and was a drug dealer at the same level — if not even higher — as the two bosses. When Imperiale joined them in Marabella to discuss some investments, an informant was also present at Pagano’s villa.
Almost 10 years later, the informant remembers the meeting. As Imperiale starts talking, Amato dismisses the informant and asks him to go make some coffee. He can’t hear what the three of them are discussing, but he remembers one detail: Imperiale “says that he had been to Dubai, and that it was a good place for investments.”
His intuition — which came just as Dubai allowed foreigners to purchase villas and apartments — was a turning point. So much so that Imperiale, a simple real estate investor at the time, left the Netherlands to move to Dubai in 2013. This paved the way for a golden decade during which the Camorra — as the Neapolitan mafia is called — has systematically used investments in the United Arab Emirates to launder drug money and to escape arrest.
Ahead of his time
Imperiale was not the only one investing in the UAE’s real estate sector. Though leaked information shared with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) by the non-profit organization C4ADS, IrpiMedia has revealed that several entrepreneurs accused of having ties with the Camorra are also listed as real estate owners in Dubai.
It’s true that as long as you pay in Dubai, you don’t have to worry.
Fifteen years later, the UAE is now internationally famous for the money laundering and refuge opportunities it offers criminals from all corners of the world. In 2020, some presumed members of another Italian criminal organization, the ‘Ndrangheta, discussed this in an encrypted chat found in the records of Operation Eureka, conducted by the Reggio Calabria Prosecutor’s Office. In their conversation, they are qualify the UAE as an ideal location to spend some time as fugitives:
“A lot of people are in Dubai… even the Neapolitans are there, and they can’t get them extradited,” they said. “It’s true that as long as you pay there, you don’t have to worry.”
Safe in Dubai
Imperiale set up his logistics base in Dubai, from which he managed the cocaine shipments from South America for the Camorra clans in the Neapolitan region. According to the press, his organization laundered money by buying up to 40 kilos of gold per week, purchasing cryptocurrencies and, more than anything else, investing in real estate.
Before moving to the UAE, Imperiale invested €30 million in the purchase of an artificial island representing Taiwan in The World archipelago complex, currently under construction off the UAE coast. After moving to Dubai, he also commissioned the construction of 10 villas worth €20 million.
After consulting the interrogation transcript of Corrado Genovese, defined by the Naples prosecutor’s office as Imperiale’s “manager of the overall accounting of the organization,” IrpiMedia discovered that the drug trafficker had at least two properties at his disposal in the most luxurious areas of Dubai before his arrest in August 2021.
Questioned by the public prosecutor in March, Genovese explained that he was sent by Imperiale to a villa inside the Jumeirah Golf Estate — the trafficker’s last location known to the authorities. Jumeirah Golf Estate is a complex of luxury residences and golf courses, where villas cost up to €10 million. That is where Genovese and Imperiale met for the first time, and it is also where Genovese said they planned their activities.
“In July 2020,” Genovese said during his interrogation, “Imperiale moved to another home, in a new villa in Emirates Hills, which is where he was later arrested.” Emirates Hills is one of Dubai’s most expensive districts, where villas can cost up to €40 million. Known as the “Beverly Hills of Dubai,” it is a closed community, protected from the outside by private security.
According to The Irish Times, one of the outlets that took part in the investigation, the Irish Kinahan family was among those owning property in Emirates Hills. Considered by the investigators as one of the major drug trafficking gangs in Europe, the Kinahan family was close with Imperiale, so much so that the Neapolitan drug trafficker attended the marriage of one of their members, Daniel, inside the Burj Al Arab, Dubai’s sail-shaped hotel.
Imperiale was safe inside Emirates Hills — even though his presence in Dubai was widely known — until the summer of 2021, when he was stopped with a fake passport. That led to his expulsion in February 2022. The numerous extradition requests issued by Italian authorities to the UAE since 2016 — when Imperiale was under investigation for laundering cocaine trafficking proceeds for the Scissionisti — always went unheeded. Even when Imperiale was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
From Vesuvius to Dubai
Genovese brought up other names to the Italian authorities. One of them, Ciro Arianna, a Neapolitan entrepreneur under multiple investigations led by the Naples prosecutor’s office, is also listed as an investor in the UAE in the dataset of the OCCRP’s Dubai Unlocked investigation.
Arianna, 38, comes from Ottaviano, a small municipality on the slopes of Vesuvius, a few kilometers from Naples. He moved to Dubai in 2017. Three years later, he was investigated for smuggling cigarettes — which he would get from the UAE and smuggle to Naples — before being arrested in the southern Italian city in December 2019.
According to Dubai Unlocked dat, Arianna’s name is associated with the purchase of a luxurious apartment inside the Sunrise Bay Tower, a skyscraper with a view on the Palm Jumeirah artificial island. Arianna bought the apartment straight from the constructor for €1.7 million on Nov. 10, 2022, when he was already under investigation. Today, Arianna is no longer listed as the apartment’s owner on official documents. IrpiMedia could not get in touch with him.
Genovese said that Imperiale’s accountant allegedly got in contact with the drug trafficking organization through Arianna. “I met Ciro Arianna through friends, and then I started working for him. He owned a company through which he imported coffee, pasta and other Italian products to Dubai.”
“Then we built a new company, when we opened a restaurant called Borbone By The Beach,” Genovese said. “Ciro Arianna had exclusive imports of Caffè Borbone [a Neapolitan coffee brand] in the Emirates, but also in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and others.” Contacted for comments regarding the partnership with Arianna, Caffè Borbone did not respond to IrpiMedia‘s questions.
Even though he was not formally under investigation, Arianna allegedly laundered enormous profits from the trafficking of cocaine of Imperiale’s organization. He did so by using, as reported in a 2021 European Investigative Order consulted by IrpiMedia, “a company network capable of creating justifications for the inflow of money… in the legal circuit while moving large amounts from the bank circuit of one state to another.”
Bad business
Vincenzo Pellegrino spoke about unfinished skyscrapers and undelivered apartments in Dubai to IrpiMedia. He bluntly defined his investment in the city as “bullshit.” The apartment he commissioned was supposed to be ready by 2022, but construction only finished last year and the delivery is now programmed for 2025, says Pellegrino.
On top of being an entrepreneur in the construction sector, Pellegrino is also related to Michele Zagaria, a Camorra boss currently serving a life sentence in Italy. In 2018, Pellegrino was cleared of all charges of being part of his clan. But that same year he was also put under investigation by authorities in Florence for being part of a criminal organization. He is currently facing charges of corruption, money laundering and fraud in the awarding of construction contracts in the Neapolitan area.
Pellegrino is accused along with other entrepreneurs of being at the “disposal” of the Casalesi Camorra clan, formerly led by Zagaria and rooted in the town of Casal di Principe, in the Neapolitan region. His trial is still ongoing, but — as Pellegrino explained to IrpiMedia — the aggravating charge of criminal affiliation, which in the Italian criminal code can lead to an increase of the sentence, has been dropped, a claim that IrpiMedia couldn’t verify independently.
In the majority of cases, it’s scammers who go to Dubai to hide the money.
Pellegrino told IrpiMedia that he invested in Dubai “for fun,” after going to the city for vacation. “When I went to visit the apartment the thumbnail was already there, it seemed as if they wanted you to move in that same day. It’s a sort of bubble,” he said. He confirmed having bought the apartment with some savings, paying about €230,000 through bank transfers. However, he says, six of his bank accounts have been closed right after the purchase.
In the interview, Pellegrino denied any affiliation with criminal groups, saying “I am not a Camorrista… I never gave money to the Camorra.”
The entrepreneur also spoke about the intimidations of the Casalesi clan to target entrepreneurs in the area of its activity. “Today, a company that pays a bribe is irregular. But can you imagine 30, 40 years ago, when you had powerful criminals… that would put a gun in your mouth and say ‘pay or I’ll kill you.’ I never paid them, I’m telling you the truth… It was not like this 30 years ago. The Italian state was unfortunately absent. These areas have been battered.”
Asked why Dubai is such an attractive destination for investments, he said “a lot of Italians there have committed frauds and scams and then brought the money to Dubai to hide. Then there’s a lot of good people who perhaps have a small amount saved up. But in the majority of cases, it’s scammers who go there to hide the money.”
The turning point
Despite owning villas in some of the most luxurious complexes of Dubai, Imperiale wanted to move out of the city. This is what he told a presumed member of the ‘Ndrangheta in 2020.
“Bro, my dream is to move to the countryside. Bro, I’m looking for something here, maybe they’ll give it to me in September,” Imperiale wrote through the Sky Ecc encrypted messaging service. “I’ll have some animals and some tomatoes. I found a 30,000 meter plot of land with a little house inside… it’s 200 km outside of Dubai.”
He wanted to move also for practical reasons: Moving far from the metropolis would have allowed him to see his family more often without endangering his fugitive status. In fact, Imperiale was worried because the Dutch Mocro mafia boss Ridouan Taghi. had been arrested the previous year.
They already got that Moroccan friend I told you about. Now they want me bro.
“They already got that Moroccan friend I told you about. Now they want me bro,” Imperiale wrote. Yet he felt safe in the UAE and thought that it would be hard for the local authorities to find him, unless he met with his family. The local authorities, he said, were not “as good as the Italian police.”
Imperiale had no reason to worry. Six years and three extradition requests were necessary to move him out of the UAE after an arrest warrant against him was issued. He was a fugitive, “even though it was clear where he was. The investigation… localized him in Dubai with certainty,” the Naples Prosecutor’s office wrote in 2016, the year of its first extradition request for Imperiale.
When UAE authorities finally arrested Imperiale in 2021 for using a fake passport — which led to his extradition the following year — it was on a minor charge. But it was still a turning point. Hamid Saif Al Zaabi, the head of Dubai’s anti-money laundering office, said in an interview with Italian newspaper La Repubblica that “Imperiale’s arrest and the one of other fugitives represents a clear signal from the UAE.”
His arrest was followed by the one of many other members of the Camorra, all of them somehow associated with Imperiale.
The Teenage Mafia Academy | Crimewave
Beyond Naples
The Camorra is not the only criminal group showing interest in Dubai. “All mafias exploit the critical situation observed in the country, especially in the fields of investigative and judicial cooperation with Italy,” said Vincenzo Musacchio, an expert on transnational mafias associated with the Rutgers Institute on Anti-Corruption Studies in Newark, New Jersey.
Musacchio said “the Emirates don’t have criminal organizations of their own, but they have the Italian mafia… and there are also criminal groups from Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Nigeria and Albania. All these organizations launder their dirty money and infiltrate the local economy, because the laws there are more permissive than elsewhere.”
While the judicial cooperation with Italy is by now consolidated, this is not the case for other countries, whose citizens are still hiding in the UAE.
In many ways, the UAE is a black hole to the authorities.
“It is not clear why the UAE decides to collaborate in some cases with the authorities to arrest criminals in their territory and not to do that in some others. In many ways, the UAE is a black hole to the authorities,” Jodi Vittori, professor of Global Politics and Security at Georgetown University, told the OCCRP.
Vittori noted two staggering examples. The Gupta brothers, the most wanted fugitives in South Africa, who have been hiding in Dubai for the past six years. Their extradition request issued by South Africa has been refused as the local authorities, which claimed it had some mistakes. Isabel Dos Santos, the daughter of Angola’s former president, has managed to freely travel around the world from the UAE, despite an arrest warrant issued by the Interpol for embezzlement and money laundering.
For John Christensen, an economist specialized on tax havens and co-founder of the Tax Justice Network, “the lack of efficient extradition proceedings highlights the extent to which Dubai protects criminals with high wealth.”
“On top of this,” he said, “there’s a long list of professionals, including bankers, lawyers and real estate agents, who make a mockery of international rules for the flagging of suspect transactions and the knowledge of where these money come from.”
This article is part of the investigation Dubai Unlocked. Coordinated by the Norwegian financial outlet E24 and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), with the participation of 74 partners from 58 countries, the investigation unveils how presumed criminals, scammers, sanctioned entrepreneurs, politicians and public personalities hide their wealth by purchasing real estate in the Emirate.
*Originally published July 30, 2024, this article was updated August 6.
