COLUMN ONE : In Italy, Gangsters Reach Out : The recruits of the big three organized crime cartels are ever younger. So are many of their victims.

The bishop of Acerra is a spare, courageous and endangered man who lives in a neighborhood where festering scars from a 1980 earthquake mirror the degradation of his flock.

Two churches face one another across Acerra’s main piazza. One is a fissured ruin. The other, the cathedral, is protected by a fence. Between them, grimy street kids play soccer. Many are illiterate, and some are already accomplished criminals.

“The boys talk admiringly about gang leaders the way we might talk about John Kennedy--how many bodyguards he’s got, how many machine guns,” said Bishop Antonio Riboldi.

In a poor and desperate part of Italy that one senior official from Rome has publicly termed “an unlivable monster,” Riboldi said it is past time to stop the rot. “Fear is no longer a good enough excuse. Whoever does not denounce lawlessness becomes its accomplice.”

Acerra, a slum of 50,000, lies in the decayed hinterland of Naples, spawning ground--and killing ground--of La Camorra, one of the three branches of the organized crime cartel that loots a nation unable to control it.

While Italy celebrates a robust First World economy and the current presidency of the European Community, its children are bleeding, victims of an atavistic underworld that transcends frontiers of time and morality.

In the aftermath of accelerating gangland savagery here in the Italian south, the bishop’s pain is echoed in a national outcry: Basta --Enough! There are new anti-crime programs and promises aplenty. But, as ever, the bad guys are winning.

For many Italians, the crisis is not simply one of crime, or even of violence. On trial, they say, are the rule of law, and national values.

Designer-dressed Italy has never been richer or more democratic, but in some parts of its south the state’s writ ends abruptly at the borders of shoot-first gangland fiefdoms. Fully one-quarter of the children of Acerra are not enrolled in school, and nearly half of all young people can find no honest work, their bishop says.

“It is clear that there are places in Italy where the presence, or at least the functioning, of state institutions has become enfeebled,” laments President Francesco Cossiga.

La Camorra, like its outlaw kin, the Mafia in Sicily and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, is ruthless and relentless, but even Neapolitans inured to its predations are stunned by a current anarchic struggle for power in which gangland recruits, like their prey, are ever younger.

“Baby killers,” the Italian press calls them, using the English words. A 15-year-old murdered a 12-year-old witness to a Camorra execution attempt one day last month. One shot to the back of the neck killed Andrea Esposito.

Less than 24 hours later, 8-year-old Paolo Longobardi, who happened to be home when Camorra killers came for his father, also died of bullet wounds.

“They are beasts, no more than wild animals,” said Naples Police Chief Vito Mattera.

The Mafia and the ‘Ndrangheta have been settling accounts as well this fall: an anti-Mafia judge murdered in Agrigento, Sicily; broad swaths of Calabria terrorized by one-a-day ‘Ndrangheta killers. In Calabria, 9-year-old Elisabetta Gagliardi died instantly last month, an incidental casualty of her mother’s assassination.

By tradition, Italy is not a violent country: There will be fewer homicides among the 60 million Italians this year than in the 14 1/2 million of New York City. In the world of organized crime, though, violence is an appalling staple. Of 1,055 homicides in Italy through the first eight months of this year, there were 250 in Sicily, 213 in Calabria, and 209 in the Campania region headed by Naples.

“That there are zones of Italy presided over by the Camorra, the ‘Ndrangheta and the Mafia is true, but it is also true that there are police there as well, good police. But we alone are not the state,” said Matteo Cinque, chief of criminal police for the Campania region.

Counterattacking, the government of Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti promises more money, more police, a toughened and streamlined justice system, more and better-protected judges, stricter gun laws and tighter fiscal control on municipalities where gangland infiltration is suspected.

But Italians such as Calabrian farmer Carlo de Biaso, whose orchard was decimated by vandals after he refused to pay protection money, have heard it all before.

In the belt of despair around Naples, where 2 million people live amid some of Italy’s most grinding poverty, there is a pathetic procession of slum towns where elected officials are beholden to the Camorra. Nominal members of Italian political parties, they are in fact elected on the Camorra ticket.

In Calabria, seven women judges, impartial outsiders, were named with great fanfare last March to help fight crime in the besieged town of Locri. One never went, and four of the remaining six are asking for transfers back north.

Locri is no fun: Somebody blew up the town hall not long ago, and last month an outdoor platform mysteriously burned down before a scheduled anti-crime rally. One senior police official was murdered, and the present carabinieri commander can’t find baby sitters for his young children--too dangerous, say local girls.

Specializing in kidnaping and extortion, the ‘Ndrangheta is a network of clans based on large families, 152 by recent police count, with 5,200 members and 15,000 “friends.” About 80% of all crimes of violence in the Calabria region over the last 18 months have occurred in Locri and the 105 other towns in Reggio Calabria province. In the more than 200 ‘Ndrangheta murders in Calabria this year, there has not been a single arrest.

In Sicily, where the centrally controlled Cosa Nostra is Italy’s largest, richest and best-known criminal enterprise, investigators seemed to be making headway in 1987 when testimony from renegade members helped bring hundreds of Mafia bosses and soldiers to trial.

Since then, though, justice has stumbled badly. Judges began to fight among themselves. Killings were unanswered by arrests. Momentum shifted back to the Mafia, richly astride a vast, multinational empire of legal and illegal businesses. Flush with profits from heroin, the Mafia kills and intimidates selectively in Sicily.

Last month, Mafia killers assassinated Magistrate Rosario Livantino, 38, in Agrigento, and parked a car with 120 pounds of explosives outside the police headquarters in Catania where there had been a series of annoying arrests. More polished than its colleagues in Calabria or Campania, the Sicilian mob delivered its message not by exploding the car but by calling a television station to warn of its cargo.

“Mafia culture is worse than Hitler’s doctrine,” said Agrigento Archbishop Carmelo Ferraro in the funeral oration for the slain magistrate. “They call it honor, but it is clothed in contempt, ferocity, betrayal. By the fruits you shall know the tree. It’s time to remind ourselves that there is no room for compromise and delay. Society and democracy cannot be supported by arrogant tyranny.”

Once, “men of honor,” as gang members like to be known, made a point of keeping women, children and bystanders well away from their fights with one another and the lagging law. That has changed, just as in current Italian parlance, the term “Mafia” that was once reserved for the Sicilian mob is now also used generically to describe Italian organized crime in all of its violent and increasingly intertwined guises.

In Rome, Mafia specialist Pino Arlacchi said there is considerable interconnection among the three, once largely self-contained regional crime enterprises. “It’s all just organized crime now--the Mafia,” he said.

Arlacchi and other observers blame Italy’s swelling violence on the changing nature of organized crime. In less hectic times, clans or families were static, operating in established and respected territories. Everybody knew who was who and who was where.

“Now,” said Arlacchi, “the clans compete actively for new business, rubbing up against one another in the marketplace as they jostle for contracts, rackets and new territory. The violence is a function of the new nature of their business. What is new is the number of women and children victims. They are a function of the growing level of violence.”

In Campania now, as many as 80 different Camorra clans are battling for space and prominence, as fierce as rats vying for bits of cheese.

The most diffuse and least organized of Italy’s criminal big three, La Camorra lives off cocaine, contraband, numbers and extortion. After a prosperous decade in which billions of dollars in largely ineffective Italian government earthquake aid wound up in criminal pockets, times are leaner now in Campania. Lacking any overall, Sicilian-style leadership, rival Camorra clans that got rich when the going was good are now slugging it out.

“The (Sicilian) Mafia shoots high, the Camorra shoots low,” said Police Chief Cinque, meaning that in Sicily, Mafia victims are often carefully targeted officials.

Around Naples, Camorra clans war from city hall to neighborhood soccer fields. Police at first thought Andrea Esposito, the 12-year-old working in a bar, had been killed because he happened to witness a Camorra murder there. Only later did it become clear that he was the intended victim of a blood feud between clans.

About one-third of the children of the Campania region fail to finish primary school, according to Marcello d’Orta, a teacher who has written a best-seller about the violent fears and dreams of Naples’ children.

The street kids are abundant and eager kindling for Camorra recruiters. Judge Melita Cavallo says the defendants in her Naples juvenile court keep getting younger. Not long ago, she said, an 8-year-old was brought to court who had long and savvy experience as a lookout during robberies committed by his mother’s lover.

For the children, crime means freedom, money and respect. For the Camorra, children are perfect foils. They are easy to impress, they work cheap, their blood is hot and, under Italy’s liberal laws, it is almost impossible to incarcerate them. An adult cocaine courier might go to jail, but a child courier is certain to go home. D’Orta recalls one 14-year-old gunman arrested on three different occasions with three different pistols--and driven home by police each time.

“Ten years ago, I could send a child to a reformatory for one year for a purse snatching. Then it was three months. Now it is a suspended sentence and send them home,” said Cavallo.

Riboldi, an outspoken prelate who has been threatened more than once by the Camorra, has seen the transformation of children into hardened criminals within a few years. They start by carrying messages for criminal bosses who distrust the phones. Then they move upward, one step at a time: numbers running, muggings, robberies, holdups, drug trafficking, and even killing.

“I have met 12-year-olds as tough as Camorra bosses,” said the bishop of Acerra.

By now, it is no secret to anyone in Italy that the Camorra’s adopted children have been failed by their families, their schools and their national government.

“If we don’t put some pressure on families and on schools, the Mafia will never be conquered,” said President Cossiga while Naples teachers complained of a shortage of benches and books, blackboards and schools.

Indeed, for concerned Italians in the front line, such lofty musings sound like another chorus of an old song, too long whistled on the wind.

“At the public level there is no will and no capacity to confront the problem,” said Judge Cavallo, who left court one day recently anguished by the case of a 16-year-old caught trying to steal a motorbike with a toy pistol in a trembling hand. It seems the boy’s mother had worked an extra job and forsworn vacation to buy her son a motorbike. Three times she bought one. All three were stolen by the Camorra’s children.