PRATO, Italy—The first thing the firefighters saw was the arm sticking out of the barred window on the second floor of the factory. Flames reached through the partially collapsed roof and a high column of smoke darkened the winter sky. This fire had been burning for some time.
The fire station is two minutes from the Teresa Moda garment factory, on the edge of the main industrial zone of Prato, a town outside Florence. The zone was developed for Italian textile manufacturers in the 1980s but now is predominantly Chinese.
The first squad arrived around 7 a.m. Priority No. 1 was the arm in the window. A firefighter raced up a ladder, cut through the bars and pulled out the slight, smoke-black body of a man. The operation took less than five minutes.
Each second mattered.
It was near dawn on a Sunday morning, but firefighters knew they would find more people inside. There were always people inside the Chinese factories.
The fire that destroyed the Teresa Moda factory on Dec. 1, 2013, was the deadliest in living memory in Prato. It exposed the true cost of cheap clothes, laying bare the consequences of years of failed law enforcement and the pursuit of profit over safety.
Prato is the epicenter of a thriving, illicit Chinese economy that has grown in the wake of Chinese immigration. More than 40,000 Chinese live in the city — some 15,000 of them illegally. Many migrants have replicated the habits of home and created a kind of outsourcing. Merchandise isn’t exported; China itself is.
Thousands of people have been smuggled into Italy, finding work at factories that ignore basic safety standards, while billions of euros are smuggled back to China, police investigations show. The savings on tax and labor costs have given businesses that don’t follow the law a crushing competitive advantage.
Many say illegal factories such as Teresa Moda are part of larger criminal networks in China and Italy. Police and prosecutors said they lack the tools to fully tackle the flow of migrants and money that fuel Prato’s black economy. The two countries do not cooperate closely in criminal investigations.
Fire chief Vincenzo Bennardo, a stocky, bald man whose phone ring mimics a siren, arrived after the body from the window was brought to the ground and was covered. He found two Chinese women outside the factory, crying, but untouched by smoke.
The younger one spoke some Italian and acted as translator. Prato has one of the highest concentrations of Chinese in Europe, but not a single Chinese firefighter.
The fire was eating through the building fast. Bennardo needed to know how many more people were inside and where to look for them.
“Are there other people?” he asked the women. “Do you know how many?”
They kept gesturing, agitated, at the factory, but said little. Bennardo tried a different tack. He asked if they knew the dead man. They said yes. Then they hedged. They told Bennardo they were neighbors and thought the man worked in the factory.
Maybe the women needed to see the dead man’s face. A paramedic pulled back the sheet. The man looked like he had been cooked.
“Who is this? Do you know him or not?” Bennardo said.
The women cried harder now. They wrote down the dead man’s name.
“Do you know exactly how many people were inside?” Bennardo pressed. How many people did his men need to find?
This time younger woman answered: “There’s a little boy.”
