When anti-mafia police swooped at the Sicilian mob on Tuesday, their primary intention was once to prevent them regrouping and developing a brand new governing frame or cupola.
However what has emerged from their wide-ranging investigation is an organised crime workforce having to conform to fashionable realities and showing a nostalgia for the loftier ambitions of the previous.
They do not produce mobsters like they used to, Giancarlo Romano instructed an affiliate in a wiretapped dialog earlier than he was once shot useless a 12 months in the past.
In spite of its obvious craving for crimes of the previous, the Mafia in Sicily continues to be a power to be reckoned with, warns anti-mafia prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia: “Cosa nostra is alive and provide.”
Investigators have published that the brand new era of gang bosses have taken to the usage of encrypted cell phones and hundreds of short-life micro-sim playing cards smuggled into prisons.
This fashion they sought to keep away from being eavesdropped as they centered their actions on drug crime, money-laundering and on-line playing.
Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has even set to work with different gangs, together with the infamous and some distance greater ‘Ndrangheta in mainland Italy.
Of the 181 arrest warrants served on suspected Sicilian gangsters throughout 4 districts of the in capital Palermo, 33 have been for convicted figures already in prison.
Nationwide anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Melillo stated that, regardless of all of the crackdowns, the high-security jail gadget was once on the mercy of the mob.
The inquiry published that one gangster have been in a position to observe a beating he had ordered from within prison in actual time by means of video-link.
The Mafia changed into supremely assured concerning the encrypted messaging platform it was once the usage of, which featured text-messages, voice notes and pictures.
However a 12 months in the past a trojan horse put in in the house of 1 gangster recorded him and some other guy complaining concerning the connection happening on an encrypted chat. As they attempted to revive the hyperlink, the names of a number of Mafia figures have been discussed out loud.
Sicily’s government heard each and every phrase.
Top Minister Giorgia Meloni praised the operation through Italy’s Carabinieri army police and promised that the battle in opposition to the Mafia “has now not stopped and won’t prevent”.
Part of the ones arrested are of their 20s and 30s.
In overdue 2023, Giancarlo Romano, thought to be an up-and-coming Mafia determine within the Brancaccio house within the middle of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, was once recorded complaining concerning the decline of the mob and deficient high quality of recent recruits.
“The extent is low, these days they arrest anyone and if he turns into a turncoat they arrest some other… wretched low-level,” he was once quoted as announcing over his wiretapped telephone.
He was once overheard telling an aspiring mafioso to visit faculty, meet docs and legal professionals, and be informed classes from observing The Godfather trilogy of movies concerning the fictional Corleone gangster circle of relatives.
Nowadays’s Mafia was once happy with promoting small bars of cannabis whilst others have been now transferring in, he complained: “Again within the day, the ones individuals who sadly ended up in prison for lifestyles… they did it on account of a shipload of hash was once intended to reach.”
Romano was once killed and his affiliate wounded in February 2024, in an assault it sounds as if related to on-line playing extortion. That homicide led government to make additional arrests inside Romano’s department of the Mafia.
Cosa nostra is a shadow of the infamous organised crime mob it as soon as was once, introduced down through a wave of campaigns through government prior to now 30 years.
However regardless of the power for a extra modernised mob, lots of the outdated practices and codes stay.
“Cosa nostra is like marriage. You’re married to this spouse and also you keep together with her your whole lifestyles,” one mafioso was once overheard announcing.
The transparent implication was once there was once no leaving the Cosa nostra.
