NAPLES – In 2013 Salvatore Esposito was lured to the home of one of the three alleged murderers arrested on Thursday, and murdered and dissolved in acid for having an affair with the daughter-in-law of a ringleader, the Naples Carabinieri office said.

 This cold case dating back to 2013 was investigated by the Carabinieri of Naples who called it “a murder committed to 'protect' the honour of Giovanni Licciardi, son of the boss Gennaro of the mafia group Camorra.”

 The gunshot assassination and the destruction of the corpse took place in the area of Chiaiano quarries, an impassable and isolated area in Naples. Thursday’s arrests concern three alleged affiliates of the Licciardi clan - Paolo Abbatiello, Gianfranco Leva and Raffaele Prota - who are charged, together with Giuseppe Simioli, with the role of instigators.

 According to investigators, it was Carlo Nappi, Crescenzo Polverino, Giuseppe Ruggiero and Alessandro De Luca who killed Esposito and destroyed his corpse. All are in prison but for another murder.

 These practices of murder and then concealing corpses by dissolving them in acid are the same ones used by Cosa Nostra in 1984 to make the corpses of Vittorio and Luigi Vastarella, Gennaro Salvi, Gaetano Di Costanzo and Antonio Mauriello disappear on behalf of boss Lorenzo Nuvoletta.

 For the murders of those five people, which took place in Marano di Napoli on 19 September 1984 in the context of the Camorra war between the Gionta-Nuvoletta and Alfieri-Bardellino underworld families, the super-boss Salvatore Riina was definitively condemned as the instigator.

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