30 tonnes of marijuana seized in the province of agrigento the largest ever in italy

https://youtu.be/0fglpFFt-DY

Secret filming puts Italy on notice for new political scandal
The footage is set to embarrass the far-right League and a web of mafia bosses

https://www.thenational.ae/world/eu...otice-for-new-political-scandal-1.783241

Very good article H ! This just proves how powerful Sicilian Mafia is , and how closely they are working with politicians Thank you for sharing

Caltanissetta flying squad chief gets bullet in post
2nd such threat in Sicilian city, 3rd in Sicily this month

(ANSA) - Palermo, October 23 - The head of the Caltanissetta flying squad, Marzia Giustolisi, received a bullet in the post on Tuesday.
The envelope containing the bullet also contained threats, police said.
It is the second such Mafia warning in Caltanissetta this month.
On October 11 a prosecutor in the central Sicilian city also got a bullet through the post.
The envelope containing the slug was sent to Caltanissetta Chief Prosecutor Amedeo Bertone.
"I will not stop, I'll go on with my work, with my whole office," Bertone told ANSA.
The magistrate is is working on various cases including the so-called "Montante system" named after the former head of Sicilian industrial federation Sicindustria, Antonello Montante, who was placed under house arrest on May 14 on charges of conspiracy to commit corruption.
He is also working on cover-ups and "deviations" in probes into the 1992 Mafia bomb slaying of anti-Mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino, as well as continued investigations into the other Mob bomb slaying that year, of Borsellino's friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone.
Tuesday's is the third such threat in Sicily this month.
On October 9 Claudio Fava, chair of Sicily's regional anti-mafia commission, received an envelope containing a 7.65-calibre bullet.
His commission is also probing the Montante system and the Borsellino cover-ups.

As text said , this is not first time something like this happens , i am really interested what family is behind warnings,or maybe even masonic lodge.

Leoluca Grizzaffi was sentenced to six months of imprisonment,. condemned for the bow before the house of Totò Riina, in Corleone.

The event dates back to May 29, 2016, during the procession of St. John the Evangelist. When the procession arrived in front of the house of the ferocious godfather of Cosa nostra, the confrate sounded the bell and everyone stopped.

For the judge a clear act of respect for the struggling capomafia who died last 17 November. The man responds to disturbance of religious functions. The prosecutor had asked for two years.

At home, as Reppubblica.it reconstructs, there was not the wife of the boss Ninetta Bagarella, but the sister of the woman of who Grizzaffi would also be a distant relative. In any case, on the willingness of the confreres to pay homage to the Riina family, there is no doubt according to the judge, and that "bow" must be punished.

The European court of human rights in Strasbourg has ruled that Italy violated the rights of the late Mafia "boss of bosses" Bernardo Provenzano by maintaining strict anti-Mafia prison conditions in his last few months alive.

https://www.wral.com/ruling-italy-violated-mafia-boss-provenzano-s-human-rights/17944631/

Leo Sutera, senior historical boss of Sambuca di Sicilia, considered the current head of Cosa nostra dell'Agrigentino, was arrested for mafia association. He is considered one of the trusted men of the fugitive Matteo Messina Denaro to whom he is linked by an old friendship and has entertained, until a few years ago, what the investigators define as 'proven contacts through the system of pizzini'. Despite the long periods of detention he would have continued to manage the mafia business.

Sicilian anti-extortion activist arrested on suspicion of extortion

Italian police have arrested a Sicilian consultant who made his living by helping victims of extortion. The man, according to authorities, embezzled public funds and threatened his clients for additional money.

The head of the Sicilian Anti-extortion Association, Salvatore C., has been arrested by Italy's financial police for allegedly committing extortion himself, officials said on Sunday.

Italy's Guardia di Finanza said the suspect was also charged with embezzlement and fraud, according to the DPA news agency.

The suspect made his reputation by helping victims of extortion and loan-sharking in the region of Italy dominated by the Mafia. The campaigner presented his activity as "a job" to his clients, pledging to help protect them and ensure they received compensation from the state.

According to investigators, however, the anti-extortion expert also demanded illegal payments from his clients. He would use intimidation tactics on victims already targeted by extortionists, and threaten to drop the case midway unless he received a 3-5 percent cut of the likely compensation money, Italian daily la Reppublica reports, citing police sources.

Italian police claim that Salvatore C. demanded bribes in at least three cases, including from a manager of a bookshop, when he said that paying him a 3 percent cut would speed up the compensation procedure. In a separate occasion, he received an envelope containing €1,500 ($1,705) from a family of a victim killed by the Mafia, after he threatened to stop his assistance as they were set to be granted additional funds from the state. Finally, a foreign national who owned bar in Sicily was forced to pay €3,000 under similar circumstances.

The authorities also believe that the head of the anti-extortion NGO embezzled some €37,000 of public grants for his personal use. In another incident which drew attention from the police, Salvatore C. allegedly advised a person to get a false diagnosis in order to get more money.

The consultant has been put under house arrest.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/worl...1KC_CzCyV5cSwl4xio6J3HO6OtdPI_p-qnRZeVfs

Andrea Lombardo, from Altavilla Milicia, collaborates with the magistrates and the carabinieri of Palermo. Man of the racket, but also a defendant of murder along with his father Francesco, considered the regent of the mafia family of Altavilla Milicia. Andrea Lombardo, 36, has worked mainly on extortion and control of contracts between Altavilla Milicia, Bagheria and Casteldaccia.

In 2017 he was arrested for the murder of Vincenzo Urso on the night of 25 October 2009. Urso, a building contractor, had parked his Volkswagen Tuareg in via Ragusa, in Altavilla Milicia. He knew he was hunted down and tried to escape. It was riddled with a rain of 7.65 caliber bullets. The Lombardos are accused of the instigators of the murder.

A man was shot dead in an ambush that took place last night in Marsala, in Trapani. The victim is AM, a 52 year old criminal.

How the mafia got to our food

Really great article,worth reading!

Giuseppe Antoci had been warned more than once. “You will end with your throat cut,” read one note, composed entirely of individual letters clipped from newspapers in ransom-note style.

In May 2016, they came. Antoci, then president of the Nebrodi National Park, a protected area in Sicily’s north-east, was returning home from a meeting accompanied by his police escort. As his armour-plated Lancia Thesis rounded a bend in the Miraglia forest, he saw the mountain road was strewn with rocks, forcing the driver to stop.

First, two hitmen fired at the vehicle’s wheels to immobilise it. Then a shootout ensued. The would-be assassins eventually fled but Antoci recalls his terror that night: “The police tried to move me to another car but, in my fear, I didn’t recognise them. I thought I was being kidnapped. I thought of my family and prayed they were safe.”

Antoci believes the attempted hit was ordered by the Sicilian Mafia in retaliation for new regulations blocking millions of euros in EU subsidies on farmland from reaching it. It was the most serious Mafia attack on a state representative since the high-profile assassinations of several Italian prosecutors in the 1990s.

Siphoning off farm subsidies does not carry the same dubious “glamour” as the racketeering or drug running usually associated with the Mafia. But it has become a highly lucrative income stream for Italy’s organised-crime syndicates. Their forays into farming do not end there: in recent years, they have infiltrated the entire food chain, according to a Rome-based think-tank, the Observatory of Crime in Agriculture and the Food Chain.

Taking advantage of the decade-long economic crisis in Italy, the Mafia has bought up cheap farmland, livestock, markets and restaurants, laundering its money through what is one of the country’s leading industries. The value of the so-called agromafia business has almost doubled from €12.5bn in 2011 to more than €22bn in 2018 (growing at an average of 10 per cent a year), according to the Observatory.

It now accounts for 15 per cent of total estimated Mafia turnover. “The reliability of the business in the crisis brought about the interest of the Mafia,” says Stefano Masini, a law professor at the Observatory. “It’s profitable and not dangerous like the drug market. They are now inserted in the industry from field to fork.”

From the terroirs of Chianti to the ancient olive groves of Puglia, Italy’s Mafia organisations have put down roots throughout the food and agriculture sector, from production to packaging, transport and distribution. Police data indicates that all of Italy’s major crime syndicates — the Neapolitan Camorra, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the ’Ndrangheta from the region of Calabria — invest in farming.

According to Professor Umberto Santino, a Mafia historian from Palermo, the Mob’s interests in the agricultural industry now extend to “human trafficking, money laundering, extortion, loan sharking, illegal breeding, backstreet butchering and baking and the burial of toxic waste on farmland. It’s an integrated cycle, a full package of systematic interactions.”


In a globalised industry, the Mafia’s reach extends beyond Italy’s borders, affecting the path of food to dinner tables around the world. Often the methods remain old-school: bribery, intimidation, counterfeiting and extortion. But the cartels have also developed white-collar expertise in infiltrating the local councils and committees that award tenders and subsidies.

Under the scheme uncovered by Antoci, Mafiosi and their affiliates leased hundreds of thousands of hectares of public land in the Nebrodi Park from the state, using intimidation to scare away rival bids. When Antoci took over in 2013 he found 80 per cent of the park’s leases were under Mafia control, including a lease to Gaetano Riina, brother of Salvatore “Toto” Riina, also known as “The Beast”, the Sicilian Mafia chief who died last year while serving life imprisonment.

According to Antoci, it was rare that this land was actually farmed. A Mafia family could claim about €1m a year in EU subsidies on 1,000 hectares, while leasing it for as little as €37,000. “With profit margins as high as 2,000 per cent, with no risk, why sell drugs or carry out robberies when you can just wait for the cheque to arrive in the post?” he says by telephone from his home in the coastal village of Santo Stefano di Camastra, where he lives under armed guard.

The 50-year-old might not seem like a typical crime-fighting hero; small in stature, and a wearer of frameless glasses, he was the regional director of a bank before he entered politics in 2013.

Yet Antoci not only identified the Mafia’s scheme but devised the solution: new rules forcing even the smallest leaseholders to pass police checks, enforced retrospectively, with numerous confiscations of land. “When you take money out of their pockets, that’s when the Mafia retaliate,” he says.

Antoci’s would-be killers have not been brought to justice and the case was shelved in September. He was removed as president of the park in a political overhaul by Sicily’s new governor earlier this year. “Many in prison will drink a toast,” Antoci said at the time. But his measures have now been rolled out across Italy. In 2016, he was given a knighthood with the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic, the highest-ranking honour in Italy, for “courageous determination in the defence of the law and against the phenomenon of the Mafia”.

Yet he says he underestimated the effect this work would have on him and his family. “I will never be the same person after that night.” With soldiers carrying machine guns on the street below, his three daughters don’t want to invite friends round any more. “This is not a life for them. I just did my duty, but in a normal country you wouldn’t have to risk your life doing so.”

Mafia syndicates in Italy have an estimated annual turnover of €150bn, according to a report by the anti-Mafia parliamentary committee in 2017. That is €40bn more than Italy’s biggest holding company Exor, which includes Fiat Chrysler and Ferrari. Their influence in the country remains vast; four in 10 Italians surveyed in October by Libera Terra, a co-operative consortium, said that where they live the Mafia “is a worrying phenomenon and its presence socially dangerous”.

In 1991 the prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, who was later murdered by the Sicilian Mafia, set up the Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate (DIA), an FBI-style multi-force agency. Today it is led by General Giuseppe Governale, an upright, mustachioed Sicilian who has had a long career fighting organised crime. At the modern, cruise-ship-shaped DIA offices on the edge of Rome, Governale, 59, narrates, with considerable relish, the history of the Mafia in Sicily.

In one way or another, he says, criminal organisations have always had their hands in the soil of southern Italy. “Until the 20th century there was a system of vassals and feudal lords, with Mafia middlemen managing the farms on behalf of the landowners.” Mafia clans have long been linked to sheep rustling and both Toto Riina and Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano, his successor as capo di tutti capi, started out as almost illiterate peasant farmers, leaving school before they finished primary education.

In the 1980s, continues Governale, the heroin business moved the Mafia’s focus to the cities. “But it is the ties to the land that bind the members of the Mafia syndicates together, even when they have spread their tentacles as far as the US, Canada and Australia. They have an extraordinary quasi-religious sense of belonging,” he says. “If they were simple organised-crime organisations, we would have beaten them.” The Italian word for Mafia clan is cosca, meaning artichoke heart, he explains. “Because the Mafia is like an artichoke. All leaves link to the heart.”

If the Mafia’s rural roots make the food industry a natural territory, the creep of crime syndicates’ influence into our supermarket trolleys and lunch boxes has been accelerated by the financial crisis. The credit crunch forced companies to turn to the cash-rich Mafia for help. “Italy is the third-biggest agricultural power in Europe,” says Professor Santino, “but the sector is vulnerable because it is very fragmented and a lot of companies are in financial difficulty. The Mafia have behind them all their illicit earnings, they lower the cost of production and they can absorb the effects of the crisis.”

I visit Santino and his wife Anna, also a Mafia scholar, in downtown Palermo, where, 40 years ago, they transformed their own home into Italy’s first anti-Mafia study centre “because people still said that the Mafia didn’t exist”. It is named after their friend Giuseppe Impastato, the nephew of a Mafia boss who was killed for anti-Mafia activism. Their home is a library, stacked floor-to-ceiling with newspapers, files, photos and original court documents. Contained in 35 blue leather-bound folders are the sentences handed out at the so-called maxi-trial in 1987 in which more than 300 Mafiosi were convicted.

Santino links the “marked increase in the exploitation of Italy’s lands” by the Mafia to lower earnings from its drugs business and a drop in public money for procurement of government works contracts. He adds that the infiltration of the food trade also reflects the organisation’s growing propensity to enter legitimate businesses, assuming the form of entrepreneurs.

“The Mafia has always been successful at exploiting the country’s vulnerability because of this capacity to adapt,” he says. They stand for local office and send their children to law school in the US. “They have become bourgeois.”

For Roberto Moncalvo, head of Italy’s largest agriculture industry association, Coldiretti: “The main reason for the increase in Mafia in the industry is the potential for large revenues.” As consumers have become more interested in the origins of our food, parts of agriculture have become exceptionally lucrative. With margins as high as 700 per cent, profits from olive oil, for example, can be higher than those from cocaine — and with far less risk.

Expansion into agribusiness is useful for another reason, says Moncalvo, because “it provides a means to launder profits from more traditional businesses such as drug trafficking”. The Calabrian ’Ndrangheta Mafia, which controls an estimated 80 per cent of Europe’s cocaine trade, has so much cash that its leaders are prepared to accept losses of up to 50 per cent by investing in the agriculture business in order to clean their money, Governale says. Italy’s number-one Mafia fugitive, Matteo Messina Denaro, who has been on the run for 25 years, is believed to have invested extensively in olives.

Palermo’s wholesale market opens at 3am and by sunrise the noise reaches a crescendo, with market stallholders coming close to blows about the price of yesterday’s kiwis, while porters expertly stack crates of melons and prickly pears. A long queue forms at a three-wheeler van selling slices of thick Sicilian pizza bread.

In August, police raided the market. Investigators said there was an “invisible control room” setting the price of the goods, transport, porterage, parking, transport and packing material. One porter, who asked to remain anonymous, said that until the raid, the Mafia was in charge. “They would come to our stall once a week and ask for money. The people here knew who they were and so they paid. But a stall nearby didn’t pay so they set it on fire and our stall burnt down anyway.”

In recent years, a growing number of Italy’s produce markets have fallen under the control of the criminal underworld. Police believe they have even formed cross-regional alliances to carve up the spoils, with the Neapolitan and Sicilian Mafias agreeing a 2016 deal to impose their own businesses as suppliers, and transporters to and from, the biggest central Italy wholesale markets.

For the consumer, counterfeiting is the main danger. “The falsification of food products is now the second-most profitable enterprise in the EU after drug trafficking,” says Europol’s Chris Vansteenkiste. “Food is where the profit is. Women buy a handbag every few months but you have to eat every day.”

Counterfeited organic food is the most profitable area. In one operation, Italian gangs were found importing wheat from Romania and labelling it as organic, which commands a price three to four times higher. Knock-offs of prestigious Italian products such as mozzarella di bufala campana and Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese have increasingly entered the market.

The DIA oversees operations against the agromafia conducted by all of Italy’s different police and law-enforcement forces. Specialist police tasters work to uncover adulterated foods, especially olive oil. Their taste buds are considered so precise that the findings are even admissible in Italian courts.

Records reveal a mind-boggling — and nausea-inducing — range of food fraud. Mozzarella has been found whitened with detergent, olive oil mixed with cheap imported north African oil, bread made with asbestos or sawdust and cheap wine repackaged as Tuscany’s Brunello di Montalcino.

In February last year, 42 members of the Piromalli clan in Calabria were arrested and 40 farms seized in connection with the export of counterfeit oil to the US, sold as extra virgin, which retails for at least €7 a litre. A number of those arrested are now in prison awaiting trial. According to police, about 50 per cent of all extra-virgin olive oil sold in Italy is adulterated with cheap, poor-quality oil. Globally the proportion is even higher.

When food is counterfeited, says Roberto Moncalvo, the consumer is “not just being defrauded, there is a risk to their health”. The undermining of the country’s most prestigious cultural export also strikes at the heart of Italy’s identity, he adds. “It is a problem of reputation. Italy is known the world over for good food.”

The Mafia’s infiltration of the food chain seems depressingly comprehensive, but there are pockets of resistance. In some areas, farmers have banded together in consortiums. In Calabria, one of the poorest regions in Europe, activist Vincenzo Linarello founded Goel, an association of 30 organic Mafia-free farms, in 2003. Its produce sells at a premium but many of its members have since been targeted by the local ’Ndrangheta.

“The Mafia want to discourage us, to stop us from showing that you can be free and disobedient,” says Linarello. “They want to send a message that in Calabria nothing is possible without the ’Ndrangheta.” He explains how the Mob tends to approach farmers: “They will ask you in exchange for a small favour, to employ someone, to buy your new tractor from so and so. In this way, little by little you lose control of your land and then you give up.”

In an idyllic location on the Ionian coast, a farm, A Lanterna, produces chillies, olives and lemons. The business has suffered seven arson attacks in seven years, one of which caused €200,000 of damage. The constant aggressions leave you “beaten down”, says owner Annalisa Fiorenza. “You begin to think, ‘Is it worth it?’ ”

The 39-year-old, who grew up in the next village and is a lawyer for the ministry of agriculture, bought the farm as a passion project with friends in 2003, when she found out it was abandoned. Attacks are never preceded by any message or demand, she says. “No one tells you who they are or what they want. They want you to seek out protection, to choose to submit.”

Since joining the Goel co-operative in 2012, Fiorenza has learnt to defend herself, using the attacks to create publicity and collect funds to restore the damage. “Then we throw a huge party to show that it’s useless to attack us,” she says. “If you strike one, you strike all. The fact that we are in it together gives us more strength.”

For anti-Mafia campaigners, a 1996 law stipulating that land and assets confiscated from the Mafia must be repurposed as community projects has been a key victory. Since then, 11,000 properties have been confiscated from the Mafia, about one-third of them farms.

In Corleone, ground zero for the Cosa Nostra and the source of the name for The Godfather’s Don Vito, Salvatore Riina’s old house is now the base for a 150-hectare organic tomato and legume farm employing former drug addicts, people with learning and behavioural problems and refugees. Through the Campi della Legalita programme, the co-operative hosts sixth-formers who volunteer for two weeks on the farm.

Its founder, Calogero Parisi, has flowing black hair and a cigarette almost permanently attached to his bottom lip. He tells me he was drawn into activism in the 1990s after taking part in the anti-Mafia caravan, a convoy of trucks that tours Sicily every summer. The Riina family farm that the co-operative took over in 2001 has faced many attacks from the Mob.

Land represents the power of the person, Parisi explains. “You can say ‘All this land is mine,’ ” he says. He recalls how first their vines were burnt, then a field of lentils. “Then,” he chuckles, as if talking about a mischievous child, “we planted a wood, but they sent their sheep to graze there all the time so the plants never grew.”

The original owner of the land was Riina’s nephew, Giovanni Grizzaffi. He was released from prison last year after more than 20 years and Parisi says it is awkward, to say the least, to see him around town. “Let’s say we are not on speaking terms.”

In April, two of the co-operative’s tractors, two trailers and a truck worth €70,000 were stolen, forcing Parisi to obtain a loan that will take five years to pay off. Since then he has been thinking more seriously about giving up. “We have to work so hard with an organic farm and we make so many sacrifices. We even sowed crops on Christmas Day. Sometimes you wonder if it is worth it.”

The final link of the food chain is restaurants and eateries, which provide the principal channel for money laundering. An estimated 5,000 restaurants in Italy are in the hands of the Mob, according to the Observatory. In Rome and Milan, clans are estimated to own one in five.

In Palermo, a group of graduates who wanted to open a pub were shocked to learn they would be expected to pay protection money, or pizzo. In defiance they founded Addiopizzo (goodbye pizzo), an organisation that supports businesses resisting extortion threats. Activist Daniele Marannano says: “We flyered a whole neighbourhood with leaflets saying ‘A people that pays pizzo is a people without dignity.’ ”

The softly spoken Marannano, 33, remembers the day in 1992 when prosecutor Paolo Borsellino was murdered by a car bomb in Palermo. “I was eight years old and coming back from the beach with my father. We saw my cousin in the street and he threw himself across the car to tell us. I will never forget it. I think, for those of us who lived through this at that age, it had more impact.”

At Addiopizzo’s headquarters, Marannano points to a map delineating the borders of Mafia families’ territory in the city. Many businesses who pay are not driven by fear but by habit and convenience, he says. “If I am a butcher and another butcher opens in my area with competitive prices, that’s annoying to me. If I’ve paid my pizzo, the Mafia will go to them and explain, ‘Amico, this is the price.’ ”

Natale Giunta, a well-known chef in Palermo, received such a visit when he opened a new restaurant in 2012. “There were three of them, including one person I knew, who made the introductions,” he recalls. “They said I had not asked permission and demanded €2,000 a month, plus double at Christmas and Easter.” Giunta refused to pay. But after the visit, he received bullets in the post. Then one of his catering vans was set on fire, causing €100,000 worth of damage. Giunta now has police protection.

Marannano says that when Addiopizzo started in 2004, those who dared to report extortion to the police could be counted on one hand: “Now I can say that people have a choice.” The bravery of those who resist, and the existence of grass-roots anti-Mafia movements that would have been unthinkable a generation ago, is heartening.

On its own, though, it is unlikely to force the clans to loosen their grip on the land. Aside from a special law brought in to protect Italian olive oil in 2013, current legislation against agricultural crimes is extraordinarily lenient, creating little risk for perpetrators.

A new law that would create several new crimes has been proposed by Elena Fattori, a Five Star Movement MP. It would seek to punish “public-health catastrophes”, the poisoning or contaminating of food or water, and “agropiracy”, the sale of counterfeit food. “In Italy, we have a lot of checks on food but no consequences,” says Fattori. “The risk is too low: the perpetrators just pay a fine and carry on. To protect public health and [protect] against the destruction of honest work we need to do much more.” The time frame for such a law is unclear: Fattori’s proposal is not part of Five Star’s agreed government programme with its rightwing coalition partners the League.

Beyond legislation, consumers can try to buy products with a transparent, ethical provenance. But Governale at the DIA believes the long-term solution is better governance. In deprived areas where the state doesn’t guarantee basic rights or services — from hospital beds, to transport for farm workers — people are more likely to turn to Mob bosses than to institutions for loans or protection, he says. “At the end, the population become almost supportive of those that suffocate them . . . 

“Since 1992, on the investigative level, we [law and order] have been at the cutting edge. But to win definitively, it’s not enough to investigate, we need to improve the level of society.” Otherwise, the Mafia becomes insidious in every sector. “In agriculture, its grip is parasitical,” he says. “The Mafia is fundamentally a weed and you need strong weed killer to kill it.”

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/73de228c...naXw-pGEDjYWHO-Bj60i8Zll-9caBsbt6F7XryW0

Mafia, 9 million euros confiscated from the boss Antonino Maranzano.

Massive Italian anti-mafia operation results in scores of arrests

Italy's anti-mafia police have struck a major blow to the Italian mob in an international sting. Rival groups were said to have worked together to make billions through online gambling.
Italy's National Anti-Mafia Directorate (DNA) arrested 68 members of organized crime families across Italy on Wednesday, with help from Eurojust — the EU's judicial agency — and police from Britain, the Netherlands, Serbia and Switzerland. Those arrested were members of the country's three major crime syndicates: Sicily's Cosa Nostra, Calabria's 'Ndrangheta and Apulia's Sacra Corona Unita (SCU).
Some 800 officers were involved in the raids, which were also aided by information given to authorities by a Sicilian mobster who feared the gangs "would never have let him quit," because of their thirst for money. The man had infiltrated the mafia's online gambling operations.

The new mob

Although previously rivals, the three families agreed to work together to embark on an online gambling scheme that authorities say netted them almost €4.5 billion ($5 billion). On Wednesday, authorities seized €1 billion in goods and cash in Albania, Austria, Britain, Germany, the Isle of Man, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Romania, Serbia, the Seychelles and Switzerland.
Federico Cafiero de Raho, the head of the Italian anti-mafia unit, explained the novelty of the new cooperation between previously rival groups: "The 'Ndrangheta and the mafias of Sicily and Puglia [Apulia] no longer exist. They are now fluid organizations that manage different businesses between them."
Cafiero de Raho told journalists: "We have an increasingly clear picture. We can see from ongoing investigations how the mafia works together in different sectors. We need to establish whether there is a fixed leadership or if the deals change depending on the territories involved."

Secluded meetings at a mountaintop sanctuary

In the course of the online gambling investigation, prosecutors in Calabria said they also uncovered a secret meeting spot favored by the 'Ndrangheta: Our Lady of the Mountain (pictured above), a secluded Catholic sanctuary nestled in the Aspromonte mountains. The sanctuary is located outside the village of San Luca, where the organization was founded.
Apulian prosecutors in Bari said they think the Sacra Corona Unita was instrumental in facilitating collaboration between the Sicilian and Calabrian families. They added that "the younger generation made a decisive contribution to the business" by using technical know-how to help the powerful Martiradonna family break into the lucrative online gambling business.

The scheme

Authorities said the groups used a number of websites to collect bets in exchange for promotion and protection. Suspects arrested in Wednesday's sting are accused of crimes such as the illicit transfer of cash, illegal online betting activities and tax evasion.
Italian state prosecutors also published pictures that some suspects had posted of themselves on social media. The photos showed the overweight mafiosi sporting Rolexes and brand new Ferraris, others featured them relaxing in bathrobes at health spas or dining in fancy restaurants.
Nicola Morra, who now heads the Italian parliament's anti-mafia commission said: "We must defeat the mafia. We must fight every illegality, every silence, as they are fertile ground for that disgusting weed that we must tear up with all our strength."

Very interesting quote.

it is an overstatement... the level of cooperation in certain ventures, which we have also seen with drug trafficking, may blur the lines but the distinctive organizations are still there

They are all uomini d'onore, while keeping their own rituals a united mafia is their ultimate goal.

All the four mafias united.. I cant imagine any other organized group being more powerful than them if this would be reality.

It isn´t far fetched all mafias have links to freemasonry.

Mafia and online betting, another 36 arrests
Twenty new betting agencies in the provinces of Catania, Siracusa, Caltanissetta and Ragusa have been seized. The survey is the result of the maxi operation carried out five days ago in various regions of Italy.

Clan Laudani 17 arrests

GIARRE. A new and very hard blow was inflicted by the District Anti-Mafia Directorate of Catania to the articulation of the Laudani clan operating in Giarre and in the neighboring municipalities. At the dawn ofthis morning, the Carabinieri of the Provincial Command of Catania have executed an order issued by the investigating magistrate Loredana Pezzino, at the request of the deputy prosecutor Assunta Musella, against 17 subjects accused for various reasons of mafia association, extortion, drug trafficking, injury, theft in homes and laundering of illicit proceeds through fictitious headers of deposits and current accounts. All crimes aggravated by the purpose of facilitating the mafia association. Among the recipients stand out the names of Alessandro Liotta, considered at the top of the criminal organization, Salvatore Nicotra, known as 'Turi da Macchia', historical exponent of the mussi of ficurinia, and Davide Indelicato, considered the new face leading the group after the arrest of Liotta, in February 2017, as part of the anti-drug operation called Bingo. The operation, called smack forever, takes its name from the design in the shape of lips, with around the inscription forever, tattooed on the body of Giuseppe Musumeci, called 'u ciceraru'.

Investigators identified another nefarious pact between the Camorra and the Mafia. Men linked to Matteo Messina Denaro and members of the Nuvoletta clan held a summit in Giugliano. 21 people were arrested two days ago.

It´s the end of the year so we will see many police operations in the coming weeks.

Exactly , every year its same.

Deputy Premier Luigi Di Maio on Friday cancelled a planned trip to Corleone after a mayoral candidate from his party there said he wanted to "open a dialogue with the relatives of mafiosi".

http://www.ansa.it/english/news/201...c38890e-1f87-47d7-a40c-c63f81886f08.html

Italian authorities seized more than €1.5 billion of assets linked to fugitive mafia boss

Italian authorities seized €1.5 billion in business assets linked to the notorious Cosa Nostra mafia.

This week, the Directorate of Anti-Mafia Investigations (DIA), seized real estate and tourism properties - resorts, golf clubs and shipping boats - belonging to the heirs of late mafia boss Carmelo Patti, who died in January 2016 at the age of 81.

The heir, Matteo Messina Denaro, 56, is the mob boss of the Sicilian mafia Cosa Nostra and has been wanted by Italian authorities since 1993 for planting bombs that killed 10 people in Florence and Milan.

This seizure "is certainly one of the most important in the Italian judicial history," said a statement from the (DIA). "It also allowed to establish links with many characters close to or belonging to the mafia family of Castelvetrano," they added.

Man this Matteo Denaro must be just as wealthy as El Chapo in my opinion? Ever year they seize assets worth billions linked to him.

i think yes
they seized about 4 billions from him so far

But how much of that is actually his. I mean they seize it from business men linked to him. I wonder if its his companies etc and he just put a name on it or if its business man that he just takes percentage from.

5 billions to be exact.