'Ndrangheta tentacles stretch to Manhattan
Calabrian Mob ran protection, drugs rackets in New York

(ANSA) - ROME, DEC 20 - The tentacles of Italy's richest and most multinational crime group, Calabria's 'Ndrangheta, have now stretched to Manhattan, Italian prosecutors said this week.
Some 18 alleged members of the Calabrian Mob, which controls much of the European cocaine trade, were arrested Monday on suspicion of running protection rackets and supplying cocaine to "important milieux" in the Big Apple, prosecutors said.
The organization was based at Rocca di Neto near Crotone in southern Calabria, police said.
During the course of the Italo-American police operation, sources said, the FBI carried out searches and raids in New York.
Those arrested are Italo-Americans who have lived in New York for many years, police said.
The Corigliano-Comito group and the "locale" (branch) of Belvedere Spinello ran the protection and drugs rackets, police said.
Police said the New York arrests completed a police round up of over 200 'Ndrangheta members across Italy, in Milan, Rome, Naples, Brescia, Salerno, Perugia, Latina, Reggio Calabria, Catania, Trapani and Catanzaro.
'Ndrangheta has spread from its Calabrian heartlands to the rest of Italy, Europe and around the world, and is considered Italy's richest and most powerful mafia due to its control of much of the European cocaine trade from South America.
'Ndrangheta (from a Greek word meaning 'heroism' or 'virtue') once lived in the twin shadow of Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the Camorra in Naples.
While those two syndicates, notably the Sicilians, were feeding off the transatlantic heroin trade through operations like the infamous 'French connection', 'Ndrangheta was only just emerging from its traditional stock-in-trade of kidnappings in the Calabrian highlands.
It has since become a highly sophisticated global network with a chokehold on the international drugs trade and control over swathes of its home turf where police fear to tread, Italian officials say. (ANSA).