This excerpt always caught my eye too....

“The Casalesi cartel’s strength has always been its ability to handle large drug lots without needing to feed an internal market. They are “present on Rome’s vast drug market, but more significant is their role in the sale of huge consignments.

The 2006 acts of the Anti-Mafia Commission indicate that the Casalesi were supplying the Palermo families with drugs.

( This, I believe is or was true, because of what we saw with Old Bridge in 2008. Sicilian Mafiosi traveling across the Atlantic to meet with high level Gambinos, who were large scale Narcotics traffickers since at least the 70s, maybe more like the 50s. All of them with connections to the Cupola in Sicily. They likely were tired of going through Camorra middlemen. The Gambinos had interest in Venuezuela, I've recently read the Piromallis are there too, probably in partnership with those old school Gambinos and the Caruana Clan...)

Alliances with Nigerian and Albanian clans meant they no longer had to be involved in direct peddling and narcotrafficking operations. Pacts with clans in Lagos and Benin City, alliances with Mafia families in Priŝtina and Tirana, and agreements with Ukrainian Mafiosi in Lviv and Kiev liberated the Casalesi from bottom-rung criminal activities. At the same time the Casalesi received privileged treatment in investments in Eastern Europe and in the purchase of cocaine from Nigeria-based international traffickers.....

So, yeah I think for a time they were stronger than the mafia as far as their ability to generate liquidity. By their own account, they don't share the same philosophy with the Sicilians. It seems to me the politicians have less power in Naples than in Sicily. Naples has always been about the black markets, like moving product, more than extortion in collusion with corrupt politicians.

Put it this way, to my eyes the Sicilian mafia has been the strongest when it operated like the Naples gangs, family controlled narcotics syndicates.( Both the French and Pizza connections seem to be like Golden Ages during those time periods. Hell, throw the Calabrian coke avalanche in there too. The only other comparable times to me were the sack of Palermo, all that concrete money. And the old Citrus wars between the Grecos). It seems that's when they make the most money.

How would you rate the counterfeit business vs the extortion business? Equal? More for extortion? Very curious.....