When Zhang Dayong lay in a pool of blood on a sidewalk in Rome after being shot six times, few suspected a link to Italy’s storied textile hub of Prato. But a “hanger war” is raging in the city near Florence – turning Europe’s largest apparel manufacturing centre and a pillar of Made in Italy production into a battleground for warring Chinese mafia groups.

The situation has become so urgent that Prato’s prosecutor, Luca Tescaroli, has appealed to Rome for help, calling for an anti-mafia division and reinforcements for judges and police. Tescaroli has warned that the escalation in crime has become a huge business operation and moved beyond Italy, particularly to France and Spain.

The gangs are battling to control the production of hundreds of millions of clothes hangers each year – the market is estimated to be worth 100 million euros (115 million dollars) – and the bigger prize of transporting apparel.

The Chinese mafia also “promotes the illegal immigration of workers of various nationalities” for Prato, Tescaroli told AFP. The veteran anti-mafia prosecutor said the “phenomenon has been underestimated”, allowing the mafia to expand its reach.

With one of Europe’s largest Chinese communities, the city of nearly 200,000 people has seen Chinese business owners and factory workers beaten or threatened in recent months, with cars and warehouses burned.

The ex-head of Prato’s police investigative unit, Francesco Nannucci, said the Chinese mafia run betting dens, prostitution and drugs – and provide their Italian counterparts with under-the-radar money transfers. For mafia leaders, “to be able to command in Prato means being able to lead in much of Europe,” Nannucci told AFP.

Chinese groups in the district thrive on the so-called “Prato system”, long rife with corruption and irregularities, particularly in the fast-fashion sector, such as labour and safety violations plus tax and customs fraud.

Prato’s 5,000-odd apparel and knitwear businesses, mostly small, Chinese-run subcontractors, churn out low-priced items that end up in shops across Europe. They pop up quickly and shut down just as fast, playing a cat-and-mouse game with authorities to avoid taxes or fines. Fabric is smuggled from China, evading customs duties and taxes, while profits are returned to China via illegal money transfers.

To stay competitive, the sector relies on cheap, around-the-clock labour, mostly from China and Pakistan, which Tescaroli told a Senate committee in January was “essential for its proper functioning”.

“It’s not just one or two bad apples, but a well-oiled system they use, and do very well – closing, reopening, not paying taxes,” said Riccardo Tamborrino, a Sudd Cobas union organiser leading strikes on behalf of immigrants. Investigators say the immigrants work seven days a week, 13 hours a day for about three euros (3.40 dollars) an hour.

Tamborrino said Prato’s apparel industry was “free from laws, from contracts”. “It’s no secret,” he said. “All this is well known.”

Trucks lumber day and night through the streets of Prato’s industrial zone, an endless sprawl of asphalt lined with warehouses and apparel showrooms with names like “Miss Fashion” and “Ohlala Pronto Moda”.

Open metal doors reveal loaded garment racks, rolls of fabric and stacks of boxes awaiting shipment – the final step controlled by Zhang Naizhong, whom prosecutors dub the “boss of bosses” within Italy’s Chinese mafia.

A 2017 court document described Zhang as the “leading figure in the unscrupulous circles of the Chinese community” in Europe, with a monopoly on the transport sector and operations in France, Spain, Portugal and Germany.

Zhang Dayong, the man killed in Rome alongside his girlfriend in April, was Zhang Naizhong’s deputy. The shootings followed three massive fires set at his warehouses outside Paris and Madrid in previous months.

Nannucci believes Naizhong could be in China, after his 2022 acquittal for usury in a huge ongoing Chinese mafia trial plagued by problems – including a lack of translators and missing files.

On a recent weekday, a handful of Pakistani men picketed outside the company that had employed them, after it shut down overnight having just agreed to give workers a contract under Italian law. Muhammed Akram, 44, saw his boss quietly emptying the factory of sewing machines, irons and other equipment. “Sneaky boss,” he said, in broken Italian.

Chinese garment workers, who are in the majority in Prato and often brought to Italy by the mafia, never picket, union activists say – they are too frightened to protest. Changes in apparel manufacturing, globalisation and migration have all contributed to the so-called “Prato system”. So has corruption.

In May 2024, the second-in-command within Prato’s Carabinieri police was accused of giving Italian and Chinese entrepreneurs – among them a chamber of commerce businessman – access to the police database for information, including on workers.

Police complaints from attacked workers “ended up in a drawer, never reaching the court”, Sudd Cobas organiser Francesca Ciuffi told AFP. Prato’s mayor resigned in June in a corruption investigation, accused of trading favours with the businessman for votes.

In recent months, the union has secured regular contracts under national law for workers at over 70 companies. That will not help those caught in Prato’s mafia war, however, where “bombs have exploded and warehouses have been burned down”, said Ciuffi.

“People who wake up in the morning, quietly going to work, risk getting seriously injured, if not worse, because of a war that doesn’t concern them.”