tsuguliev / stock.adobe.com
The Italian authorities announced that they had carried out a raid on Tuesday against the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia, against 142 people belonging in particular to the Cosenza clans, active in drug trafficking. The suspects, 109 of whom were incarcerated, 20 placed under house arrest and 13 others subject to other restrictive measures, are suspected of various associational reasons. “ndranghetist, drug trafficking, aggravated by the head of a mafia association” and other crimes, says a police press release.
The operation was carried out at dawn by the carabinieri, police and agents specializing in economic crime, under the direction of the Catanzaro anti-mafia prosecutor’s office. Those arrested were part of the historic clans of Cosenza, in Calabria (south), the “Lanzino-Patitucci” and the “Zingari”. An official from the Guardia di finanza, the Italian customs and financial police, was also arrested during the operation.
Powerful Italian mafia
Vincenzo Capomolla, prosecutor of Catanzaro, assured the press that mafia groups “asphyxiated” the traders and entrepreneurs of Cosenza by extorting money from them, even though their main activity was drug trafficking for which they even used minors. “Drug trafficking was one of the ways for the ‘Ndrangheta to exercise control of the territory”said Capomolla. “Only people authorized by the Ndranghetist organization could manage drug trafficking, so any unauthorized activity was punished by financial sanctions but also physical punishments”added the prosecutor.
Based in Calabria, a very poor region located at the tip of the Italian Boot, the ‘Ndrangheta is the richest and the most powerful Italian mafia, thanks in particular to its near-monopoly on cocaine trafficking in Europe. Present in around forty countries, it exerts a stifling hold on its homeland, infiltrating and corrupting the administration while imposing its iron law on the population.