Italian cops on Tuesday arrested 181 other folks believed to be affiliated with the Cosa Nostra, because the Sicilian mafia is understood, dealing what officers mentioned was once an “essential blow” to a legal group that has held the area in its grip for generations.
“Cosa Nostra is a long way from lifeless,” even after years of being focused by way of prosecutors and police raids, Domenico Los angeles Padula, a lieutenant colonel with the Carabinieri police who oversaw the investigation, mentioned in a phone interview. The investigation, he mentioned, confirmed that the crowd had reorganized and “had discovered new power and new energy,” by way of enlisting new recruits and surroundings apart variations to as a substitute focal point on taking advantage of new legal ventures, like on-line playing.
The group have been in a position to live to tell the tale as it remained “strongly tied to the principles of its founding fathers and its historical rituals,” even because it modernized, the Carabinieri mentioned in a commentary — as an example, by way of the usage of encrypted smartphones that “restricted the desire for standard conferences and gatherings to the naked minimal.”
Tuesday’s arrests had been performed in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and neighboring cities, and concerned about 1,200 Carabinieri officials. Video launched by way of the police confirmed loads of officials looking ahead to orders to go into properties as helicopters patrolled the skies all the way through in a single day raids. The arrests, which got here after two years of investigations, lined a variety of fees, together with mafia association, drug trafficking, extortion and tried homicide.
Although police and prosecutors had been in a position to limit the Cosa Nostra’s actions for years, the Carabinieri mentioned in a commentary, the crowd had no longer misplaced its grip and was once nonetheless “neatly anchored in its territory over which it workouts consistent keep watch over, considerably affecting the commercial material via extortion and the imposition of goods.” It “used drive, when it noticed have compatibility,” and had an considerable provide of guns.
For many years the Cosa Nostra was once ruled the so-called Corleonesi crime circle of relatives — related to the city of Corleone, a reputation first made well-known by way of Mario Puzo’s ebook, “The Godfather” — whose associates incorporated Matteo Messina Denaro, a best boss who died in 2023. However investigators mentioned that Palermo had regained primacy throughout the group, and its “clans have change into central to the dynamics of Cosa Nostra,” Lt. Col. Los angeles Padula mentioned.
The investigation additionally discovered that other clans in Palermo had opted, for now, to put aside variations to reach a commonplace function: earning profits. The Cosa Nostra additionally discovered synergy with the ’Ndragheta, the dominant arranged crime team 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 keep watch over, and so, a sign of energy and gear,” Mr. Los angeles Padula mentioned. On-line playing, which changed the raffles and lotteries as soon as managed by way of the mob, was once any other winning endeavor that demonstrated the transition from the normal to the fashionable, he added.
The investigations that resulted in Tuesday’s arrests concerned many youths, an indication that “Cosa Nostra continues to exert its enchantment in sure environments like suburbs the place younger other folks have restricted lifestyles possible choices and determine with representations of energy that the mafia nonetheless enjoys,” Palermo’s leader prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, advised journalists at a information convention on Tuesday. “We need to be in particular cautious” in regards to the new recruits, as a result of “this is the way forward for the mafia,” he mentioned, in step with the ANSA information company.
The investigation additionally confirmed that Cosa Nostra nonetheless used old-time methods — like informers throughout the prosecutor’s place of work and attorneys — to stick forward of investigators, officers mentioned.