http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/worl...rticle30390326/"By night, Ballaro’s mood changes. The street merchants are gone, their stalls packed up. No tourists are in sight, not one. The streets are full of African men, mostly young Algerians. They sit in bars, hang around on corners or in small shops, which seem to double up as informal living rooms after the sun sets. Absolutely everyone – the police, the state prosecutors, the Sicilians – knows that the Africans are selling illegal drugs, including marijuana, hashish, cocaine and heroin. Some are running prostitutes.
In reality, Ballaro by night is Sicily’s biggest open-air drug supermarket. The refugee crisis has hit Sicily particularly hard and one of its disturbing developments is that some of the Africans who land in Sicily and don’t flee north to Germany or Sweden are staying put and resorting to lives of crime. Some of them simply walk out of refugee camps before their status is determined and legally vanish.
So far, they have been successful not because they are ruthless, but because they are working with the Sicilian Mafia, known as the Cosa Nostra, which has controlled Ballaro and other Palermo areas for decades. “It is impossible to think that the Nigerians who deal drugs in Ballaro do so without the permission of the Sicilian Mafia,” said Leonardo Agueci, the deputy chief prosecutor in Palermo who investigates organized crime."
Interesting article on how the Mafia in Sicily is adapting to the increasing number of refugees, some good pics in there too.
