Italian cops on Tuesday arrested 181 folks believed to be affiliated with the Cosa Nostra, because the Sicilian mafia is understood, dealing what officers stated was an “essential blow” to a felony group that has held the area in its grip for generations.
“Cosa Nostra is much 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, stated in a phone interview. The investigation, he stated, confirmed that the group had reorganized and “had discovered new power and new power,” by enlisting new recruits and setting apart variations to as a substitute deal with making the most of new felony 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 historical rituals,” even because it modernized, the Carabinieri stated in a press release — for instance, by utilizing 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 lots of 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 fees, together with mafia affiliation, drug trafficking, extortion and tried homicide.
Despite the fact that police and prosecutors have been in a position to limit the Cosa Nostra’s actions for years, the Carabinieri stated in a press release, the group had not misplaced its grip and was nonetheless “effectively anchored in its territory over which it workout routines fixed management, considerably affecting the financial material by extortion and the imposition of merchandise.” It “used power, 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 stated that Palermo had regained primacy inside the group, and its “clans have grow to be central to the dynamics of Cosa Nostra,” Lt. Col. La Padula stated.
The investigation additionally discovered that completely different clans in Palermo had opted, for now, to put aside variations to realize a typical aim: getting cash. 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 power and energy,” Mr. La Padula stated. 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 attraction in sure environments like suburbs the place younger folks have restricted life options and establish 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 to be notably cautious” in regards to the new recruits, as a result of “that’s the way forward for the mafia,” he stated, in response to 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 attorneys — to remain forward of investigators, officers stated.
