From the article....
"The difference between the [BadWord]-Caruana clan and other Mafia families is that they have a key-position in the drug trade and money laundering for Cosa Nostra," says Alessandro Pansa, head of the Economic Crime Section of the Servizio centrale operativo (Sco) of the Italian National Police. (21) Pansa is one of Italy's leading experts in international criminal investigations and money laundering. Fifteen years ago, as one of the members of a newly formed crack team of investigators who became the confidants of judge Falcone, Pansa pioneered the use of computers to track the drug proceeds. In his view, the clan is the international transport service and the launderette of Cosa Nostra. It brings together the producers and distributers of narcotics. "Almost all the money of the Sicilian Mafia in North-America to purchase heroin and the resulting proceeds went through their hands." The [BadWord] and Caruanas are necessary and irreplaceable for every other Mafia family. Their services are indispensable. Consequently, "the others are allied with them." (22)
It was Pansa who discovered the clan, almost by accident. One in hundreds of tapped phone conversations alerted him. In 1982 he was investigating the Italian end of a heroin smuggling network to the United States, later known as the Pizza Connection. The Italian police was following the movements of Giuseppe Bono, the middleman between the American buyers of the Gambino and Bonanno Family and the Sicilian clans who organized the heroin traffic to the US, and had tapped his telephone. Most of the time Bono did not say much, but suddenly he became very talkative to an elderly Sicilian woman. Bono respectfully expressed his condolences with the demise of her husband. Pansa wondered why Bono, an arrogant high-ranking boss within Cosa Nostra, "became suddenly so submissive ... that woke us up."
It turned out that Bono was calling a number registered to Pasquale [BadWord] in Ostia Lido, a sea-side resort near Rome. The deceased was Liborio [BadWord], the eldest [BadWord]-brother, who had died in London, where he had settled in 1976. Pansa started to investigate this little known cluster of Mafia men from the distant, ignored south of Sicily. In the event it took him ten years before he finally arrested the [BadWord] brothers at Rome's Fiumicino airport when they were expelled from Venezuela in 1992. "They really look like Godfathers from the movie-screen, with their painted hair, gold watches and white shoes," Pansa says. But he acknowledges that, in spite of their appearance they are not be underestimated as "they are very good entrepreneurs."
