World Notes ITALY

In Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, the 1963 film starring Sophia Loren, postwar Naples was awash with contraband cigarettes. Today the Italian city is afflicted with a more serious criminal commodity: heroin. Addiction among the young is so widespread that parents have begun to hire private eyes to keep a drug watch on their children.

Mauro Centracchio, the best known of the investigators, has been retained by nearly 100 anxious parents, who pay him $2,900 each to have their offspring shadowed and photographed. Pictures of children buying drugs or shooting up are quickly dispatched to the parents. The former carabiniere calls his detective agency Magnum P.I., but the joke ends there. "Drugs are a part of everyday life here," says Centracchio. While only a handful of Italian detective agencies engage in such familial sleuthing, the practice is spreading along with the plague of drug addiction.