Italian law enforcement officials on Tuesday arrested 181 folks believed to be affiliated with the Cosa Nostra, because the Sicilian mafia is understood, dealing what officers mentioned was an “vital blow” to a legal group that has held the area in its grip for generations.
“Cosa Nostra is way from useless,” even after years of being focused by prosecutors and police raids, Domenico La Padula, a lieutenant colonel with the Carabinieri police who oversaw the investigation, mentioned in a phone interview. The investigation, he mentioned, confirmed that the group had reorganized and “had discovered new power and new energy,” by enlisting new recruits and setting apart variations to as a substitute deal with cashing in on new legal ventures, like on-line playing.
The group had been in a position to survive as a result of it remained “strongly tied to the principles of its founding fathers and its historic rituals,” even because it modernized, the Carabinieri mentioned in an announcement — for instance, through the use of encrypted smartphones that “restricted the necessity for conventional conferences and gatherings to the naked minimal.”.
Tuesday’s arrests have been carried out in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and neighboring cities, and concerned about 1,200 Carabinieri officers. Video launched by the police confirmed a whole bunch of officers ready for orders to enter properties as helicopters patrolled the skies throughout in a single day raids. The arrests, which got here after two years of investigations, lined a variety of costs, together with mafia affiliation, drug trafficking, extortion and tried homicide.
Although police and prosecutors have been in a position to limit the Cosa Nostra’s actions for years, the Carabinieri mentioned in an announcement, the group had not misplaced its grip and was nonetheless “nicely anchored in its territory over which it workout routines fixed management, considerably affecting the financial material via extortion and the imposition of merchandise.” It “used pressure, when it noticed match,” and had an ample provide of weapons.
For many years the Cosa Nostra was dominated the so-called Corleonesi crime household — related to the city of Corleone, a reputation first made well-known by Mario Puzo’s e book, “The Godfather” — whose associates included Matteo Messina Denaro, a high boss who died in 2023. However investigators mentioned that Palermo had regained primacy inside the group, and its “clans have turn into central to the dynamics of Cosa Nostra,” Lt. Col. La Padula mentioned.
The investigation additionally discovered that completely different clans in Palermo had opted, for now, to put aside variations to attain a standard purpose: earning money. The Cosa Nostra additionally discovered synergy with the ’Ndragheta, the dominant organized crime group in Calabria in southern Italy, when it got here to drug trafficking.
Drug dealing additionally allowed the Cosa Nostra clans to have direct contacts inside Sicily, “a type of management, and so, a sign of energy and energy,” Mr. La Padula mentioned. On-line playing, which changed the raffles and lotteries as soon as managed by the mob, was one other worthwhile enterprise that demonstrated the transition from the normal to the fashionable, he added.
The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests concerned many youths, an indication that “Cosa Nostra continues to exert its enchantment in sure environments like suburbs the place younger folks have restricted life options and determine with representations of energy that the mafia nonetheless enjoys,” Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, instructed reporters at a information convention on Tuesday. “We’ve got to be significantly cautious” in regards to the new recruits, as a result of “that’s the way forward for the mafia,” he mentioned, based on the ANSA information company.
The investigation additionally confirmed that Cosa Nostra nonetheless used old-time methods — like informers contained in the prosecutor’s workplace and legal professionals — to remain forward of investigators, officers mentioned.