Italian police launch sweeping anti-mafia raids
Italian police launched sweeping raids on Friday in a vast anti-mafia operation targeting around 100 people including top organised crime bosses accused of extortion, drug trafficking and murder.
In “one of the largest operations ever carried out” in Rome, the blitz struck “a deadly blow to the mafia cell which had been operating in the capital for years,” the police said.
Amid accusations of drug trafficking, usury, extortion and control of the slot machine market, 51 people who helped lead “illegal activities” in Rome and the suburb of Ostia were served with arrest warrants, police spokesman Mario Viola said.
A second operation targeted members of the immensely powerful ‘Ndrangheta criminal organisation in the city of Catanzaro in the southern region of Calabria, Viola said.
The arrest warrants concerned 50 to 70 people, “including entrepreneurs, politicians and lawyers”, he said.
Some 500 police officers took part in the Rome raids – along with a helicopter, dog units and maritime police – which aimed in particular to root out members of the Sicilian mafia who have infiltrated the capital, buying up bars and restaurants as fronts for criminal activities.
The warrants were the result of a long investigation during which detectives uncovered “every criminal step in the mafia organisation,” police said, from the adoption of new members into the fold to dirty deals between bosses over territory.
Gangsters were also caught planning murders considered “necessary to guarantee and keep control of” profit-making activities in the area.
The mobsters involved come from “the beating heart of the Roman and Sicilian crime world,” including key members of the Fasciani and Triassi D’Agati families, “which have for years shared up criminal business, particularly along the coast,” police said.
“For practically the past 20 years, members of the Fasciani and Triassi clans have carried out their business in Rome, dividing up the territory in a sort of mafia pax, under which each was able to calmly carry out its own illegal trafficking,” the police statement said.
The blitz also flushed out one of the historic bosses of the Triassi family, Vincenzo, who was arrested along with his wife in Tenerife and incarcerated in a Spanish prison. Two other suspects were rounded up and arrested in Barcelona.
In Calabria, the heartland of the ‘Ndrangheta, arrest warrants were issued for 65 people in Lamezia Terme, in the Catanzaro region, including “businessmen, politicians and lawyers,” as well as doctors and prison employees, Viola said.
On top of mafia association, some of them are also accused of playing a role in several murders committed during a bloody mafia-on-mafia war between 2005 and 2011, as well as hundreds of acts of extortion, by which they demanded protection money from businesses.
The ‘Ndrangheta – whose name comes from the Greek word for courage or loyalty – has a tight clan structure which has made it famously difficult to penetrate, and specialises in drug and arms trafficking, prostitution, extortion and illegal construction.
It is considered by many as more dangerous and difficult to predict that the better-known Sicilian-based Cosa Nostra.
The ‘Ndrangheta runs an international crime network from its base in the southern region of Calabria and has been linked to operations across western and northern Europe and as far afield as the Americas and Australia.
