In Naples, Ex-Convicts Keep a Close Eye on Tourists By ELISABETTA PROVOLEDO - July 2, 2009

NAPLES, Italy — It seemed like a great idea at the time: hire ex-convicts to escort tourists through seedy Neapolitan streets. Who better to explain to the uninitiated the potential dangers lying in wait?

But after less than a month, the experiment has already run into trouble. The former convicts recently staged a wildcat strike after one worker was taken to police headquarters over a verbal altercation with a traffic officer.

The argument was about a fine issued the day before to a worker with the group, who had crossed the street just a few steps from a crosswalk. “The first jaywalking fine issued in Naples in 200 years,” Corrado Gabriele, the program’s main institutional sponsor, said dryly.

Since the program, called the Escodentro Project, began in early June, he has had to “continually respond to polemics,” said Mr. Gabriele, the regional government’s councilor for education, training and work.

This was far from the first conflict the former convicts have had with law enforcement. Some officers view them as a potential threat to their jobs, and many in the police force were already up in arms over the government’s effort to legalize citizens’ patrols.

The ex-convicts, jailed mostly for petty crimes, bristle at the treatment they have received, calling it harassment, and view it as a sign that even though they have paid their debt to society, they are not going to be given a second chance.

“They continue to see us as outsiders,” said Pietro Ioia, who represents an association of 700 former convicts. “Don’t they understand that if we get out of jail and don’t find work we’ll find the Camorra?” He was referring to the Mafia-like criminal association that is deeply rooted in Neapolitan society.

Wearing yellow safety jackets, the men are assigned to different downtown locations. Their tasks can be as simple as helping tourists cross the street and pointing out authentic Neapolitan restaurants to accompanying the stouthearted into seedier — but more authentic — neighborhoods.

At the Beverello Harbor last week, one former convict turned his left wrist in his right hand and shook his head: a warning to a tourist to take off an expensive-looking watch.

Response to the program has been tepid on the part of tourist operators and Naples City Hall. “They claim that ex-convicts are not the best calling card for the city,” Mr. Gabriele said.

But there is nothing, apart from extensive news media coverage, that identifies the yellow-vested men as former inmates.

One worker, Massimiliano Di Caprio, has two daughters and said he just wanted to make an honest living. “Tourists are in good hands, but politicians don’t really care about helping us,” he said. Others grumbled that in Italy lawmakers had just as much of a reason to be in jail as they had.

Many lawmakers were less than enamored of the notion of pairing ex-convicts with gullible tourists. While Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government is trying to offer a better image of Campania, the region that includes Naples, “we end up offering tourists an all-inclusive package that includes pickpocketing on the part of previous offenders sponsored by the region,” Maurizio Gasparri, the chief Senate whip of Mr. Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party, said last month, according to the ANSA news agency.