The ‘Ndrangheta’s truck carrying nine hundred kilos of hashish was also lost in the Genoa bridge collapse

The Calabrian mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta, has been searching for a truck lost during the 2018 Genoa bridge crash for years, the Calabrian prosecutor’s office announced on Wednesday evening. When the Morandi Bridge collapsed, many vehicles, including a yellow refrigerator truck that can be clearly seen in the footage recording the collapse of the bridge, also fell into the depths. Its wreckage, together with the wreckage of the other vehicles that fell into the abyss, was transported to an official scrap yard in Genoa.

The Morandi Bridge collapsed on August 14, 2018 in Genoa. At least thirty people lost their lives in the tragedy. Among the vehicles that fell into the abyss was a yellow refrigerated truck in which the Calabrian mafia hid 900 kilos of hashish.

Back in 2020, Calabrian prosecutors intercepted a telephone conversation in which a boss of the ‘Ndrangheta ordered one of his men to recover the vehicle, in the wall of which nine hundred kilos of hashish were hidden.

The prosecutor’s office has only now made the intercepted conversation public because it was intercepted during an undercover operation, as a result of which only 63 members of the ‘Ndrangheta were detained on Tuesday.

It was also revealed from the intercepted conversation that they wanted to transport the van from the authority premises through a car wrecking company. The mafia also waited for the authorities to transfer the vehicle from Genoa to Latina, near Rome, and from there to a site in Frosinone, as it was thus closer to the area of ??organized crime in southern Italy. Palaia also warned his man to be careful when transporting the van, because the vehicle was badly damaged and the drug could fall out of it while moving it.

According to Italian press reports, the truck was lost anyway, so the mafia may have succeeded. The story of the rise of the ‘Ndrangheta and its transformation into a global criminal organization was elaborated in a readable way by journalist Antonio Talia in his book A 106, which we published in Hungarian this year and which you can now buy at a discount in our webshop at our Christmas market.