Italian police arrested Tuesday 181 people who would be affiliated with Cosa Nostra, because the Sicilian mafia is known, which the officials said they were an “important blow” for a criminal organization that held the region to its generations.
“Cosa Nostra is far from dead”, even after years of target by the police prosecutors and raids, Domenico la Padula, lieutenant-colonel of the carabinieri police who supervised the investigation, during a Telephone interview. The investigation, he said, showed that the group had reorganized and “had found new energy and new strength”, recruits new recruits and putting aside the differences to focus rather on profit New criminal companies, such as online game.
The organization had been able to survive because it remained “strongly linked to the rules of its founding fathers and its former rituals”, even if it has modernized, the Carabinieri said in a press release – for example, using Encrypted smartphones which “limited the need for the need for traditional meetings and gatherings to the bare minimum. »»
Tuesday’s arrests were carried out in Palermo, the Sicilian capital and neighboring cities, and involved around 1,200 Carabinieri officers. The video published by the police showed that hundreds of officers were waiting for orders to enter homes while helicopters patrolled the sky during night raids. The arrests, which intervened after two years of surveys, have covered a range of accusations, including affiliation to the mafia, drug trafficking, extortion and attempted murder.
Even if the police and the prosecutors were able to restrict the activities of the Cosa Nostra for years, the Carabinieri said in a press release, the group had not lost its grip and was still “well anchored in its territory on which it exercises a Constant control, considerably affecting the fabric economy by extortion and the imposition of products. “He” used strength, when he judged good “, and had a sufficient supply of weapons.
For decades, Cosa Nostra was dominated by the so -called Family Corleonesi Crime – associated with the city of Corleone, a name made famous for the first time by the book by Mario Puzo, “The Godfather” – which the affiliates understood Matteo Messina Denaro, a high -level boss who died who died in 2023. But the investigators said that Palermo had found primacy within the organization, and his “clans have become at the heart of Cosa’s dynamics “Said Lieutenant-Colonel La Padula.
The investigation also revealed that different Palermo clans had currently opted aside the differences to achieve a common goal: to earn money. Cosa Nostra also found a synergy with the ‘NdranghetaThe group of organized dominant crime in Calabria in southern Italy, with regard to drug trafficking.
The drug trafficking has also enabled the Cosa clans to have direct contacts in Sicily, “a form of control, and therefore a signal of strength and power,” said Padula. The online game, which replaced the tombolas and lottery formerly controlled by the crowd, was another profitable company that demonstrated the transition from traditional to modern, he added.
The surveys that led to Tuesday arrests involved many young people, a sign that “Cosa Nostra continues to exercise its appeal in certain environments such as the suburbs where young people have alternatives of limited life and identify with representations of power which Still the mafia ”, the chief prosecutor of Palermo, Maurizio de Lucia, told journalists on Tuesday at a press conference. “We must be particularly cautious” for new recruits, because “it is the future of the mafia,” he said, according to the Ansa news agency.
The survey also showed that Cosa Nostra still used old tips – as informants inside the prosecutor’s office and lawyers – to stay ahead of the investigators, officials said.
