They forced the Savoia football management to pay to continue playingbut during the investigation it also emerged a loan ring run by the clan. For this reason, the Carabinieri of Torre Annunziata arrested five people in the province of Naples “seriously suspected, in various capacities, of the crimes of extortion and usury aggravated by the mafia method and the aim of facilitating the Camorra clan Gionta of Torre Annunziata”.
From what emerges from the investigations, the sporting director of Savoia football would have been summoned to the home of the regent of the Gionta clan, detained under house arrest, to impose protection money on him. According to the reconstruction of the prosecution, the suspects forced the management to hand over a sum of money of around three thousand euros to allow them to continue their sporting activity.
Two suspects are accused of extortion against the football team, three others are accused of usury. They ended up in prison Felice Savino65 years old; Ciro Scognamiglio44 years old; Salvatore Ferraro60 years old; Filomena Bove58 years old, and Giuseppe Ferraro, 33 years old. It would have been Savino, a leading member of the clan, who received the then sporting director Carmine Palumbo at his home in August 2022, accompanied by Scognamiglio. Two months later, Palumbo resigned from his post. Detained under house arrest, Savino offered “his protection and support… for anything” to Savoia football.
Among the accusations made against the other suspects, there is also that of having imposed usury on a fish entrepreneur in financial difficulty: for a loan of just over 20 thousand euros he ended up having to repay almost 45 thousand euros with an interest rate of 162%. And to force him to pay, the victim would have been strongly threatened by the three suspects.
Savoia football: “No extortion from the new club”
All this would have happened a few months before the historic Torre Annunziata football club passed to the Casa Reale Holding of which the prince is honorary president Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy. “The current club – Savoia 1908 FC specifies in a press release – has never received any extortion request”. “We will not allow – we read in the statement – anyone to be able to get close to our company and that episodes of this kind can be repeated which, if they were ascertained because they are still in the investigation phase from what we read, would be very serious. Our company has been working since December 2022 to restore the right image to Savoia and ensure that this association with the Camorra which, unfortunately, has devastated this city is eliminated. We will continue in our work to carry forward the project of clean football, taking kids off the streets with our Academy which already has over 250 kids and making sure that certain things never happen again.”
