In a city where government and tourism are engines of the local economy, these storefront businesses seemed typical until a police crackdown exposed them as money-laundering fronts for mob organizations based in southern Italy. During January and February alone, Italian officials seized 51 million euros, or about $70 million, in mob properties and other assets in Rome, providing a small glimpse of the legal business interests that southern clans control in the capital.

The crackdown in Rome exposed just a small corner of what officials describe as a mob economy that has rapidly expanded across Europe. In an era of austerity, with Italy awash in debt and struggling to recover, organized crime groups are sitting on mountains of cash. They have taken advantage of the economic crisis to accelerate their infiltration of legitimate businesses outside their southern Italian strongholds and now control commercial interests in Rome and Milan, as well as in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain and beyond.

For the last 20 years, they have a lot of liquidity,” said Michele Prestipino, the prosecutor who oversaw the recent crackdown and seizures in Rome. “This is a problem today. They have too much money. They can’t invest it all. It is the opposite of what happens to regular entrepreneurs.”

If Europe once thought of organized crime families as largely an Italian problem — and if many Italians thought the problem was mostly confined to the south — the breadth of their assets across the Continent is forcing a reappraisal. In February, the European Parliament passed a new directive making it easier for national authorities to confiscate criminal assets, in response to evidence that organized crime groups have gobbled up properties and companies across Europe...

Besides Italian mob groups, experts say, other criminal organizations, including ones from Albania, China and Russia, are also moving into legal business sectors in Europe..