Italian police crush attempts to rebuild mafia

ITALIAN authorities said yesterday they had crushed a bid to revive the Sicilian mafia after making around 100 arrests in a series of raids, nearly three years on from the capture of the cosa nostra’s supremo.

In an operation codenamed Perseus, around 1,200 police backed by helicopters and dog handlers arrested mafia clan leaders and members in Sicily’s Palermo region and in Tuscany, in central Italy.

The sweep followed a nine-month probe, Palermo police said, adding that those detained were suspected of wanting to revive Italy’s largest crime syndicate, whose last known “boss of bosses”, Bernado Provenzano, was arrested in April 2006.

“While the 2006 operation brought cosa nostra to its knees, Perseus has prevented it from rearing its head again,” national anti- mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso told reporters.

Justice Minister Angelino Alfano, hailing the arrests, said they showed a mafia that “does not resign itself to defeat, while proving that the tough tenacity of the state... is stronger than any unhealthy attempt by the mafia and the mafiosi to get back into the game.”

The crimes targeted by the sweep include association with mafia members, extortion and arms and drugs trafficking.

According to a statement, those arrested were linked to fugitive mafia chief Matteo Messina Denaro, 46, who is accused of seeking to reconstruct the cosa nostra’s leadership.

Denaro, nicknamed “Diabolik” after an Italian cartoon character, is the high-flying playboy “boss” of Trapani in western Sicily and controversially appeared on the cover of the Italian news weekly L’Espresso with the headline: “Here is the mafia’s new boss.”

On the run since 1993, Denaro emerged as the most likely new standard- bearer for the cosa nostra after the November 2007 arrest of Salvatore Lo Piccolo, which authorities said completed the “decapitation” of the mafia.

Lo Piccolo had been sought by police for 23 years.

Sicily’s mafia rakes in more than €1 billion a year through extortion, according to a study published in January.

A 2007 study found that businesses pay an estimated €30 billion in extortion money, of which nearly one-third goes to the cosa nostra.

Another 2007 report said organised crime in Italy — including the Sicilian mafia, the Naples “mamorra”, the “ndrangheta” of Calabria and the “sacra corona unita” in the Apulia region — had a turnover of €90bn a year, or 7% of Italy’s gross domestic product.