Organized crime in Italy
Organized crime in Italy and its criminal organizations have been prevalent in Italy, especially Southern Italy, for centuries and have affected the social and economic life of many Italian regions since at least the 19th century.
There are five major native mafia-like organizations currently operating and heavily active in Italy. Among the oldest and most powerful of these organizations, having started to develop between 1500 and 1800, include: Cosa Nostra of Sicily; 'Ndrangheta of Calabria ; and Camorra of Naples. In addition to the historic organizations, there are also others founded in the 20th century: the Stidda of Sicily and Sacra Corona Unita of Apulia.
Four other Italian organized crime groups, the Banda della Magliana of Rome, Mala del Brenta of Veneto, and Banda della Comasina and Turatello Crew of Milan, held considerable influence at the height of their power but are now weakened or even defunct or inactive. The latest creation of Italian organized crime, Mafia Capitale, was disbanded by the police.
More recently, another criminal organization was discovered, known to the media as the Società foggiana, which is an split of the Sacra Corona Unita, and is strongly active in the Province of Foggia. According to the media, it is considered as one of the most brutal and bloody of all the organized crime groups in Italy.
The best-known Italian organized crime group is the Mafia or Sicilian Mafia. As the original "Mafia", the Sicilian Mafia is the basis for the current colloquial usage of the term "mafia" to refer to organized crime groups.
The Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta are active throughout Italy, having presence also in other countries.
Sicilian Mafia (Cosa Nostra)
Based primarily in Sicily, the Sicilian Mafia formed in the 19th century by clans which sprang out of groups of bandits; these groups gained local power and influence. In Sicily, the word mafia tends to mean "manly" and a Mafioso considers himself a "Man of Honour." However, the organization is known as "Cosa Nostra"—Our Thing—or Our Affair. The Sicilian Mafia originally engaged in such lower-level activities as extortion, cattle theft and, upon Sicily becoming part of a democratic Italy, election slugging in addition to other kinds of relatively low-level theft and fraud.In the 1950s, Sicily experienced a substantial construction boom. Taking advantage of the opportunity, the Sicilian Mafia gained control of the building contracts and made millions of dollars. It participated in the growing business of large-scale heroin trafficking, both in Italy and Europe and in US-connected trafficking; a famous example of this are the French Connection smuggling with Corsican criminals and the Italian-American Mafia.
The Sicilian Mafia has evolved into an international organized crime group. The Sicilian Mafia specializes in heroin trafficking, political corruption and military arms trafficking and is the most powerful and most active Italian Organized Crime Group in the United States with estimates of more than 2,500 Sicilian Mafia affiliates located there. The Sicilian Mafia is also known to engage in arson, frauds, counterfeiting, and other racketeering crimes. It is estimated to have 3,500–4,000 core members with 100 clans, with around 50 in the city of Palermo alone.
The Sicilian Mafia has had influence in 'legitimate' power, particularly under the corrupt Christian Democratic governments from the 1950s to the early 1990s. It has had influence with lawyers, financiers, and professionals; also it has had power and resources by bribing or pressuring politicians, judges and administrators. It has less of these now than previously on the heels of the Maxi-Trials, the campaign by magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino and other actions against corrupt politicians and judges; however it retains some influence.
The Sicilian Mafia became infamous for aggressive assaults on Italian law enforcement officials during the reign of Salvatore Riina, also known as Toto Riina. In Sicily the term "Excellent Cadaver" is used to distinguish the assassination of prominent government officials from the common criminals and ordinary citizens killed by the Mafia. Some of their high ranking victims include police commissioners, mayors, judges, police colonels and generals, and Parliament members.
On May 23, 1992, the Sicilian Mafia struck Italian law enforcement. At approximately 18h00, Italian Magistrate Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three police body guards were killed by a massive bomb. Falcone, Director of Prosecutions and for the court of Palermo and head of the special anti-Mafia investigative squad, had become the organization's most formidable enemy. His team was moving to prepare cases against most of the Mafia leadership. The bomb made a crater 10 metres in diameter in the road Falcone's caravan was traveling.
This became known as the Capaci Massacre. Less than two months later, on 19 July 1992, the Mafia struck Falcone's replacement, Judge Paolo Borsellino, also in Palermo, Sicily. Borsellino and five bodyguards were killed outside the apartment of Borsellino's mother when a car packed with explosives was detonated by remote control as the judge approached the front door of his mother's apartment.
In 1993 the authorities arrested Salvatore "Totó" Riina, believed at the time to be the Capo di tutti capi and responsible directly or indirectly for scores if not hundreds of killings, after years of investigation which some believe was delayed by Mafia influence within the police and Carabinieri. After Riina's arrest control of the organization fell to Bernardo Provenzano who had come to reject Riina's strategy of war against the authorities in favor of a strategy of bribery, corruption and influence-peddling. As a consequence the rate of Mafia killings fell sharply but Mafia influence not only in the international drug and slave trades but locally in construction and public contracts in Sicily continued. Provenzano was himself captured in 2006 after being wanted for 43 years.
In July, 2013, the Italian police conducted sweeping raids targeting top mafia crime bosses. In Ostia, a coastal community near the capital, police arrested 51 suspects for alleged crimes connected with Italy's Sicilian Mafia. Allegations included extortion, murder, international drug trafficking and illegal control of the slot machine market.
Stidda or La Stidda
La Stidda is the name given to the Sicilian organization founded by criminals Giuseppe Croce Benvento and Salvatore Calafato, both of Palma di Montechiaro, Agrigento province of Sicily. The Stidda's power bases are centered in the cities of Gela and Favara, Caltanissetta and Agrigento provinces. The organization's groups and activities have flourished in the cities of Agrigento, Catania, Syracuse and Enna in the provinces of the same name, Niscemi and Riesi of Caltanissetta province and Vittoria of Ragusa province, located mainly on the Southern and Eastern coasts of Sicily.The Stidda has extended its power and influence into the mainland Italy provinces of Milan, Genoa and Turin. The members of the organization are called stiddari in Caltanissetta province and stiddaroli in Agrigento province. Stidda members can be identified and sometimes introduced to each other by a tattoo of five greenish marks arranged in a circle, forming a star called "i punti della malavita" or "the points of the criminal life."
The Cosa Nostra wars of the late 1970s and early 1980s that brought the Corleonesi Clan and its vicious and ruthless leaders Luciano Leggio, Salvatore "Toto" Riina and Bernardo Provenzano sometimes referred to as "Cosa Nuova" into power caused disorganization and disenchantment inside the traditional Cosa Nostra power base and values system, leaving the growing Stidda organization to counter Cosa Nostra's power, influence and expansion in Southern and Eastern Sicily. The Stidda membership was reinforced by Cosa Nostra men of honor such as those loyal to slain Capo Giuseppe Di Cristina of Riesi who had defected from Cosa Nostra's ranks due to the bloodthirsty reign of the Corleonesi clan.
The organization also looked to enlarge its membership by absorbing local thugs and criminals who were at the margins of organized crime to gain more power and credibility in the Italian underworld.
From 1978 to 1990, former Corleonesi clan leader and pretender to the Cosa Nostra's "Capo di Tutti Capi" title, Salvatore Riina, waged a war within Cosa Nostra and against the Stidda spreading death and terror among mafiosi and the public in his quest for a crime dictatorship, leaving over 500 in Cosa Nostra and over 1,000 in La Stidda dead, including Stidda Capos Calogero Lauria and Vincenzo Spina.
With the 1993 capture and imprisonment of Salvatore Riina, along with the jailing of Bernardo Provenzano's, "pax mafia," following a new, less violent and low-key approach to criminal activities the Stidda has gained power, influence and credibility among the longer established criminal organizations within Italy and around the world, making itself an underworld player. The Stidda is sometimes called the "Fifth Mafia" in the Italian media and press.
Camorra or Campanian Mafia
The origins of the Camorra are unclear. It may date to the 17th century, however the first official use of camorra as a word dates from 1735, when a royal decree authorised the establishment of eight gambling houses in Naples. The Camorra's main businesses are drug trafficking, racketeering, counterfeiting and money laundering. It is also not unusual for Camorra clans to infiltrate in the politics of their respective areas.The Camorra also specializes in cigarette smuggling and receives payoffs from other criminal groups for any cigarette traffic through Italy. In the 1970s, the Sicilian Mafia convinced the Camorra to convert the cigarette smuggling routes into drug smuggling routes with the Sicilian Mafia's assistance but not all Camorra leaders agreed. This brought about the Camorra Wars between two factions and almost 400 men were murdered. Those opposed to drug trafficking lost the war.
The Camorra controls the drug trade in Europe and is organized by management principles. In the early 2000s, the Di Lauro clan ran the then largest open-air market in Europe, based in Secondigliano. The former leader of the clan, Paolo Di Lauro, who designed the system has been imprisoned since 2005, his organization produced about €200 million annually only in the drug trafficking business. The Di Lauro clan war against the Scissionisti di Secondigliano inspired the current Italian television series Gomorrah.
Outside Italy the Camorra has a strong presence in Spain, where the organization stablished its massive businesses revolving around drug trafficking and money laundering, reinvesting its money in the creation of hotels, nightclubs, restaurants and companies around the country.
It is believed that nearly 200 Camorra affiliates reside in the United States. Many came to the US during the Camorra Wars ever since the 19th century, as proved by an old organization best known as Black Hand. The Camorra conducts money laundering, extortion, alien smuggling, robbery, blackmail, kidnapping, political corruption, and counterfeiting.
'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia
Derived from the Greek word andragathía meaning courage or loyalty, the 'Ndrangheta formed in the 1890s in Calabria. The 'Ndrangheta consists of 160 cells and approximately 6,000 members, worldwide some estimate there to be as many as 10,000 core members and specializes in political corruption and cocaine trafficking.The 'Ndrangheta cells are loosely connected family groups based on blood relationships and marriages.
Since the 1950s, the organization has spread towards Northern Italy and worldwide. According to a 2013 "Threat Assessment on Italian Organised Crime" of Europol and the Guardia di Finanza, the 'Ndrangheta is among the richest and most powerful organised crime groups in the world.
The 'Ndrangheta is also known to engage in cocaine and heroin trafficking, murder, bombings, counterfeiting, illegal gambling, frauds, thefts, labor racketeering, loan sharking, illegal immigration, and rarely some kidnapping.
Basilischi (Basilicatan Mafia)
The Basilischi was a mafia organization founded in 1994 in Potenza. It's sometimes called Italy's fifth mafia After the maxi-trial in 1999 which caused the capture of many high-ranking members, the Basilischi's turf was assumed by the 'Ndrangheta.Sacra Corona Unita (Apulian Mafia)
The Sacra Corona Unita, or United Sacred Crown, is a Mafia-like criminal organization from the region of Apulia in Southern Italy, and is especially active in the areas of Brindisi and Lecce and not, as people tend to believe, in the region as a whole. The SCU was founded in the late 1970s as the Nuova Grande Camorra Pugliese, based in Foggia, by the Camorra member Raffaele Cutolo, who wanted to expand his operations into Apulia. It has also been suggested that elements of this group originated from the 'Ndrangheta, but it is not known if they were breakaways from it or the result of indirect co-operation with clans of the 'Ndrangheta.A few years after the creation of the SCU, following the downfall of Cutolo, the organization began to operate independently from the Camorra under the leadership of Giuseppe Rogoli. Under his leadership the SCU mixed its Apulian interests and opportunities with 'Ndrangheta and Camorra traditions. Originally preying on the region's substantial wine and olive oil industries, the group moved into fraud, gunrunning, and drug trafficking, and made alliances with international criminal organizations such as the Russian and Albanian mafias, the Colombian drug cartels, and some Asian organizations. The Sacra Corona Unita consists of about 50 Clans with approximately 2,000 Core members and specializes in smuggling cigarettes, drugs, arms, and people.
Very few SCU members have been identified in the United States, however there are some links to individuals in Illinois, Florida, and possibly New York. The Sacra Corona Unita is also reported to be involved in money laundering, extortion, and political corruption and collects payoffs from other criminal groups for landing rights on the southeast coast of Italy. This territory is a natural gateway for smuggling to and from post-Communist countries like Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania.
With the decreasing importance of the Adriatic corridor as a smuggling route and a series of successful police and judicial operations against it in recent years, the Sacra Corona Unita has been considered, if not actually defeated, to be reduced to a fraction of its former power, which peaked around the mid-1990s.
Local Rivals
The internal difficulties of the SCU aided the birth of antagonistic criminal groups such as:
- Remo Lecce Libera: formed by some leading criminal figures from Lecce, who claim to be independent from any criminal group other than the 'Ndrangheta. The term Remo indicates Remo Morello, a criminal from the Salento area, killed by criminals from the Campania region because he opposed any external interference;
- Nuova Famiglia Salentina: formed in 1986 by De Matteis Pantaleo, from Lecce and stemming from the Famiglia Salentina Libera born in the early 1980s as an autonomous criminal movement in the Salento area with no links with extra-regional Mafia expressions
- Rosa dei Venti: formed in 1990 by De Tommasi in the Lecce prison, following an internal division in the SCU.
Società foggiana (Foggian mafia)
The most powerful clans inside the Società Foggiana are:
- Trisciuoglio clan
- Sinesi-Francavilla clan
- Moretti-Pellegrino-Lanza clan
Mala del Brenta
There is a debate if this organization shall be considered a mafia-like organization, even if, according to Article 416-bis cp, introduced into Italy in 1982, it falls into the category of mafia-type organization displaying some of the characteristics described therein. This is in spite of its origins in the Northern Italian region of the Veneto, and its North Italian membership base. Having originally spawned from the Southern Italian organized crime syndicates, who had operated and infiltrated the Veneto region during the 1970s, their vision of unifying Veneto banditry into a mafia-style syndicate was first realised under the leadership of Felice "Angel Face" Maniero throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
These original Sicilian mafiosi, controlled much of the mafia activity in the Veneto, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and included most notably: Salvatore "Totuccio" Contorno, Gaetano Fidanzati, Antonino Duca, Salvatore and Gaetano Badalamenti, and Giuseppe Madonia. Veneti malavitosi, or underworld figures and bandits, learned from these Sicilians the necessary means for organizing themselves and taking the reins of control from the successive two decades.
Sometimes referred to as the fifth and smallest of the Mafia organizations across Italy during its existence, it operated under the sanction of the Corleonesi clan from Sicily and had strong links with other mafia families, such as Cosa Nostra, 'Ndrangheta, Camorra and Sacra Corona Unita.
Banda della Magliana
The Banda della Magliana was an Italian criminal organization based in Rome and active mostly throughout the late 1970s until the early 1990s. The gang's name refers to the neighborhood in Rome, the Magliana, from which most of its members came. The Banda della Magliana was involved in criminal activities during the Italian "years of lead". The organization was tied to other Italian criminal organizations such as the Cosa Nostra, Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta, but it was also notably connected to neofascist paramilitary and terrorist organizations, including the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, the neofascist group responsible for the 1980 Bologna massacre. In addition to their involvement in traditional organized crime rackets, the Banda della Magliana is also believed to have worked for Italian political figures such as Licio Gelli, grand-master of the illegal and underground freemason lodge known as Propaganda Due, which was purportedly connected to neofascist and far-right militant paramilitary groups.Mafia Capitale
The Mafia Capitale was an Italian Mafia-type, crime syndicate, or secret society, that originated in the region of Lazio and its capital Rome.Founded in early 2000s by Massimo Carminati on the ashes of the Banda della Magliana.
Banda della Comasina and the Turatello Crew
The Banda della Comasina was an organized crime group active mainly in Milan, the Milan metropolitan area, and Lombardia in the 1970s and 1980s, or anni di piombo. Their name is derived from the Milan neighborhood of Comasina, the founding location of the organization. The group was led by the Milan crime boss Renato Vallanzasca, a powerful figure in the Milanese underworld in the 1970s. The group began as a smaller robbery and kidnapping gang, and continued to specialize in armed robbery, kidnapping, carjacking, and truck hijacking even as they grew in power and expanded into other subtler areas of organized crime. The gang became notorious for brazenly setting up roadblocks and robbing members of the Milan police force. As the Banda della Comasina rose in power, they expanded into other areas of organized crime, such as arms trafficking, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, contract killing, extortion, racketeering, bootlegging, and corruption.The group's downfall was partially brought about by its brazen disregard for both subtlety and authority and its continued reliance on kidnapping and armed robbery to make money. The gang's leader, Renato Vallanzasca, repeatedly escaped from police custody and continued to commit robberies and kidnappings of wealthy and powerful people even while living as fugitive. In 1976, the group committed approximately 70 robberies and multiple kidnappings, including the kidnapping of a prominent Bergamo businessman, and several of the robberies resulted in the murder of the robbery victims and responding officers, including four policemen, a doctor and a bank employee. That same year, Vallanzasca and the gang kidnapped 16-year-old Emanuela Trapani, the daughter of a Milanese businessman, and held her captive for over a month and a half, from December 1976 to January 1977, only releasing the girl upon the payment of a ransom of one billion in Italian currency. Soon after, the gang was responsible for the killing of two highway police officers who had stopped a car containing Vallanzasca and other members of the gang. Two other members of the Banda della Comasina, Carlo Carluccio and Antonio Furiato, were killed in separate gun battles with policemen, in Piazza Vetra in Milan and on the Autostrada A4 motorway respectively.
Vallanzasca was eventually captured, and, while in prison, he developed an alliance and friendship with his former rival, Francis Turatello, another recently incarcerated and powerful crime boss in Milan with strong connections to the Sicilian Mafia, Camorra, and Italian-American Gambino crime family. As the leader of the so-called Turatello Crew, Francis Turatello was a protege of the Sicilian Mafia and an important ally in Milan for both the Sicilian Mafia and Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The Turatello Crew controlled various illegal rackets in the Milan underworld with the backing of the Sicilian Mafia and Camorra, controlling prostitution in Milan and, like the Banda della Comasina, participating in robbery and kidnapping. The Turatello Crew and Banda della Comasina had in fact been in the middle of a gang war with each other when both of their leaders, Vallanzasca and Turatello, were incarcerated in the same prison, at which point the two crime figures reconciled and bonded. The newly forged alliance between the Banda della Comasina and the Mafia- and Camorra-backed Turatello Crew only increased the Banda della Comasina's influence and power in the Milan underworld, and the two groups cooperated in controlling much of Milanese organized crime while their leaders remained incarcerated and controlling the illegals operations from within prison. However, while in prison in 1981, Turatello was assassinated by orders of Camorra boss Raffaele Cutolo, and the Turatello Crew collapsed while the Banda della Comasina lost an important new ally. Soon after Turatello's assassination, Vallanzasca, still imprisoned, organized and participated in a prison revolt in which two pentiti, or former gangsters that had collaborated with the Italian government, were brutally killed. Despite repeated escape attempts, Vallanzasca remains in prison serving four consecutive life sentences and an additional 290 years, and the Banda della Comisina soon collapsed and disbanded in the early 1980s in Vallanzasca's absence.
Italian criminal groups in other countries
Italian organized crime groups, in particular the Sicilian mafia and the Camorra, have been involved in heroin trafficking for decades. Two major investigations that targeted their drug trafficking schemes in the 1980s are known as the "French Connection" and "Pizza Connection." These and other investigations have documented their cooperation in drug trafficking with other major drug trafficking organizations. Italian crime groups are also involved in illegal gambling, political corruption, extortion, kidnapping, frauds, counterfeiting, infiltration of legitimate businesses, murders, bombings, and weapons trafficking. Industry experts in Italy estimate that their worldwide criminal activity is worth more than US$100 billion annually.The Italian crime groups have also connections with the Corsican gangs. This collaboration were mostly important during the French Connection era. During the 1990s the links between the Corsican Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia permitted an establishment of some Sicilian gangsters in the Lavezzi Islands.
Those currently active in the United States are the Sicilian Mafia, Camorra or Campanian Mafia, 'Ndrangheta or Calabrian Mafia, and Sacra Corona Unita or "United Sacred Crown". The Federal Bureau of Investigation refers to them as "Italian Organized Crime". These Italian crime groups frequently collaborate with the Italian-American Mafia, which is itself an offshoot of the Sicilian Mafia.
Outside of Italy and the United States, the Sicilian mafia and the 'Ndrangheta have also established strongholds in Canada ; Australia ; and Germany. In the UK, in particular the 'Ndrangheta and the Camorra consider the country an area of interest for laundering money, using financial companies and business activities, having large investments in London.
Outside Italy, the Camorra is particularly present in countries such as Spain, the Netherlands and France. The presence of the organization in the countries is mostly related to the international drug trafficking and to money laundering.
The 'Ndrangheta carved out turf or formed close ties with local organized crime group in Latin American countries such as Colombia, Brazil and Argentina. The Camorra also maintained important drug routes from South America since the 1980s. And the Sicilian mafia had its presence in Venezuela, where the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan in particular had a significant presence.