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 CesarePagano meet up. Pagano lives in the rented villa along with the rest of his family.

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.

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.

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 OperationEureka, 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 CorradoGenovese, 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 Unlockedinvestigation.

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.