Grapes of wrath bear fruit on Mafia boss's former property

A glass of vino a day keeps the gangsters away. That's the motto of an Italian vineyard owner who has grown grapes on confiscated Mob land and bills his newly launched wine as a vintage not for connoisseurs but those with a conscience.

Campo Libero, which means Free Field, is a lightly sparkling white wine made from Trebbiano grapes, and the brainchild of a teetotal charity worker.

Dario Campagna, whose Il Gabbiano ("The Seagull") association provides jobs for drug addicts and former prisoners, has taken advantage of an Italian law that allows property belonging to convicted gang bosses to be used for "social purposes".

The previous owner of the land was Francesco Schiavone, the Capo in the Camorra, a Mafia-like organisation based in Naples.

Il Gabbiano was given the 10 hectares of abandoned field in Cisterna di Latina in the Lazio region, some 40 miles from Rome, in 2003. But it took almost four years before the first vintage could be uncorked.

Some of the problems Mr Campagna encountered were run-of-the-mill difficulties of viticulture, but others were specific to the circumstances of its previous Camorra ownership.

"At the beginning, local farmers that we'd asked for advice kept missing appointments," Mr Campagna explained. "But then we discovered that one of Schiavone's relatives was living nearby and people were simply scared of having anything to do with us."

Then before the first harvest last year, disaster struck. Mystery saboteurs cut the metal wire holding up the vines, and the weight of the grapes brought them crashing to the ground. Almost half the crop was lost.

"Who stood to gain from this destruction? There's one obvious answer," Mr Campagna said. "If no one can make the old Camorra land work, the government gets saddled with it and in 20 years' time the law dealing with confiscated land will get overturned."

The Il Gabbiano team was unbowed. The vines were replanted. And now 10,000 bottles of vino bianco are waiting to be drunk. "I don't drink alcohol but those that have tasted Campo Libero say it's a solid wine," Mr Campagna said.

Francesco Schiavone's empire was estimated to be worth €5bn (£3.4bn). He was arrested in 1998 after five years on the run when Italian police discovered a secret apartment behind a sliding wall of granite in his Naples villa. Charged with everything from murder to arms trafficking, from robbery to bombing, he was sentenced to life in prison.

In recent months, the Camorra has been blamed for a spate of shoot-outs in old Naples as well as the choking mountains of rubbish overwhelming the city.

Mr Campagna's victory may be a small one, but it is one he relishes: "It's a symbolic resistance to the Camorra. Admittedly our wine is not one to be served at grand tables but it is a wine of justice and of principle."