It's 9:15 a.m. on a cold February morning in the car-park of a supermarket in the rundown Barra-San Giovanni suburb of Naples. Fourteen-year-old Giovanni Gargiulo has just arrived for work as a "car-park attendant".

The inverted commas are obligatory because Giovanni is an illegal car-park attendant, a parcheggiatore abusivo, someone not appointed by the local government authority but who simply steps into the job.

Giovanni has probably received his "appointment" from the local Camorra (Mafia) boss. His wages are modest, based on whatever small tips he can pick up from supermarket shoppers too intimidated by the grim-faced youth to leave him empty-handed.

As he prepares for the dreary routine of guiding motorists into parking spaces, Giovanni fatally pays no attention to two men arriving on a motorcycle. His back is turned to them when they open fire, killing him instantly with three shots to the head. Shoppers coming out of the supermarket abandon their trolleys and run back inside screaming.

Within minutes, police are at the scene. As usual in such circumstances, none of those present can offer a detailed description of the killers. Everyone heard the gunfire but no one saw anything. An understandable fear ties the collective tongue. Within an hour of the police arriving, all that is left of Giovanni is a sawdust-strewn pool of blood and a woolly cap, stained red.

Two days earlier, at 7.15 p.m. outside Naples's Poggioreale Prison, Francesco Mazarella (76) and a "minder", Egidio Cutarelli, stand waiting at the main entrance. Francesco's son, Vincenzo Mazarella, who had been arrested 48 hours earlier on homicide charges, is, surprisingly, due to be released.

As Francesco stands around in the cold night, the damp air exacerbates his chest problems. He stands there wheezing and coughing, watched no doubt by the prison's security force. Neither he nor they can imagine what will happen next. Right there, in front of the prison door, Francesco Mazarella and his minder are gunned down, military presence notwithstanding. His killers emerge from the darkness and escape back into the night.

Alleged family links to organised crime may well have cost both the old man and the boy their lives. Francesco Mazarella's son was not only being investigated on murder charges, but investigators believe him to be an emerging godfather. Not surprisingly, within hours of his father's death he had disappeared.

Giovanni Gargiulo's killing may also have family links since it came just three days after the arrest, again on murder charges, of his elder brother, Costantino. The Naples grapevine had reported that Costantino had begun to "sing". The killing of his young brother may have been a warning. Costantino Gargiulo, however, is still believed to be collaborating with state investigators.

The killings of Giovanni Gargiulo and Francesco Mazarella inevitably aroused nationwide indignation, prompting a renewed focus on a Neapolitan crime problem which so far this year has seen 28 people gunned down, often in crowded city-centre locations.

As rival Camorra gangs fight for control of territory and the right to take their slice of £3.2 billion worth of forthcoming public contracts concerning two huge suburban developments and a highspeed railway line conversion scheme, Naples has once again earned itself the media tag of "far west Napoli".

Neapolitan investigating magistrate Paolo Mancuso takes up the cowboy simile all too willingly. "We're no longer talking about a shoot-out down at the saloon. Here they're killing one another in the sheriff's office." Those words might seem an exaggeration, but the organised-crime crisis in Naples is such that next week Italy's three major confederated trade unions will hold a regional strike with the support of the mayor of Naples, Antonio Bassolino, to protest at the Camorra and in favour of regional development.

Antonio Crispi, of the Campania branch of confederated union CIGL, explains the motivation for the strike: "At this point, there is absolutely no employment programme that is meaningful without re-establishing law and order."

At a time when Italy's centre-left government has been vigorously encouraging investment in the Italian mezzogiorno (the south), and at a time when Mayor Bassolino is vigorously trying to persuade northern industrialists that his city is really changing, the current murder rate in Naples represents distinctly unwanted publicity.

In the often economically depressed hinterland of greater Naples and the surrounding region of Campania, violence is a way of life. Italy's central anti-Mafia investigative unit, the DIA, estimates that the godfathers of Naples can call on more than 7,000 foot soldiers to do their dirty business; delivering drugs, collecting protection money, organising clandestine betting rings and, occasionally, killing an unwanted rival or state enemy. In 1995, 228 people were murdered in Campania.

The Camorra problem is complex. Overnight sensational solutions of the magic wand variety do not apply. Decades of, at best inefficient and more often corrupt, Christian Democrat-dominated local government in Naples have left the city's current administration with some intractable problems.

When the present administration took over four years ago, it faced a difficult task attempting to create a sense of civic responsibility in a city where vote-buying had generated a public service workforce of 1,500 traffic wardens and 2,000 municipal gardeners whose combined effectiveness had left the city with hopelessly congested traffic and an estimated 100 hectares of overgrown gardens.

Naples and Campania, with a 25.3 per cent unemployment figure (central and Northern Italy averages 7.8 per cent), face the classic and vicious Catch 22 of southern Italy. Without industrial development, you cannot beat the Mafia, but without beating the Mafia, you cannot attract industrial development.

To some extent, the government's allocation this week of £11.5 million for industrial development in the south and next week's regional strike are valiant attempts to defy the depressing logic of this vicious circle.

A 14-year-old like Giovanni Gargiulo is the expression of a type of urban decay and deprivation which sees 12,000 Neapolitan children of his age regularly play truant and thus, according to Antonio De Marco, magistrate at Naples's Juvenile courts, put themselves at risk.

The risk, of course, is that they will become involved in crime, at first petty but later organised criminal activity. Figures for last year indicate that 686 under-14s in Naples committed some crime, with 381 arrested and 21 of those investigated for Camorra-related crime.

Giovanni Gargiulo, the car-park attendant, came from an area where the Italian state has lost control to organised crime. His San Giovanni-Barra-Ponticelli triangle in the Neapolitan hinterland is an area where taxi-drivers usually refuse to go, where night bus drivers are wary of stopping and where local godfathers think nothing of closing off a section of Neapolitan ring-road early in the morning so that they can bring out their trotters and hold a horse race.

(Reports from those claiming to have witnessed such events say that at the Camorra's "Leopardstown" not only is the winning owner presented with a handsome cup but champagne is offered around).

All is not lost in Naples, however. When the local parishes of San Giovanni joined forces last week with the Rome-based Catholic peace group, San Egidio, to hold a protest march of schoolchildren through the Camorra-ridden quartiere, 600 schoolchildren turned out to protest, releasing balloons and brandishing their own messages.

Seven-year-old primary school Maria's message was short and to the point. "They should do away with the Camorra, otherwise we'll all die. It is not right that we children die. We are innocent."