Italian police arrest over 100 in anti mafia raids Italian police arrest over 100 in anti-mafia raids
Italian police on Friday arrested more than 100 people in two major anti-mafia operations in Rome and the southern region of Calabria.
Italian police arrest over 100 in anti-mafia raids
Eugenio Ferrano, centre, is one of 51 people arrested for organised crime in Ostia
By Josephine McKenna in Rome 7:03PM BST 26 Jul 2013
The Rome operation, described by police as one of the largest ever undertaken in the capital, involved 500 police officers backed by helicopters, dog squads and coastal patrols.
Heavily armed police arrested 51 criminal suspects in a series of dawn raids centred on the port of Ostia, where thousands of holidaymakers go to escape the city heat.
Police targeted members of the Fasciani, D'Agati and Triassi clans, which are allegedly linked to the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and are accused of dividing up the region for illicit activities under a "mafia peace pact".
Rome's newly elected mayor Ignazio Marino who last week pledged to clean up Ostia, said: "Mafia leaders had for years infiltrated the productive and social fabric of the capital, managing their trade on the Ostia coast with a clear division of the region and plans for operations and murders."
One the arrested is taken away by policemen (AFP)
Entire families have been arrested in the raid, including alleged leaders Carmine, Giuseppe, and Terenzio Nazarene from the Fasciani clan and Vito and Vincenzo Triassi, who was arrested by Spanish police while holidaying with his wife in Tenerife.
Police claimed the clans planned murders and kept out rival criminals as they ran gambling operations, slot machines and beachside activities.
"This operation goes to the heart of a criminal system that we have often denounced and that has now be suffered a very heavy blow," said Nicola Zingaretti, the president of the Lazio region surrounding Rome.
In a separate operation aimed at the Calabrian mafia or 'Ndrangheta, 65 people were arrested, including politicians, businessmen, lawyers, doctors and even prison police, in the city of Lamezia Terme near Catanzaro.
Senator Piero Aiello, ally of former premier Silvio Berlusconi and member of his People of Freedom Party (PdL), was being investigated for alleged vote buying in the mafia probe, while Giampaolo Bevilacqua, another PdL official who heads the entity that manages the local airport was arrested for alleged mafia association.
Around 200 million euros worth of assets were seized from five businessmen in the raids which are the result of an investigation into crimes linked to the Giampà clan of the Calabrian-based 'Ndrangheta mafia syndicate.
The Lamezia Terme council has been dissolved twice for mafia penetration and prosecutors are now investigating the involvement of those under arrest with several murders that occurred during a bloody mafia feud in the city between 2005 and 2011.
The raids occurred a day after Franco Roberti, a Salerno prosecutor with a reputation for fighting the spread of the Naples mafia, was appointed head of Italy's anti-mafia directorate in Rome.
Meanwhile the health of Cosa Nostra's former "boss of bosses" Bernardo Provenzano, who has been in a prison hospital since the beginning of June, is declining.
Provenzano, 80, was arrested in 2006 after 43 years as a fugitive.
