Italian police officers on Tuesday arrested 181 people believed to be affiliated with the Cosa Nostra, as the Sicilian mafia is known, dealing what officials said was an “important blow” to a criminal organization that has held the region in its grip for generations.
“Cosa Nostra is far from dead,” even after years of being targeted by prosecutors and police raids, Domenico La Padula, a lieutenant colonel with the Carabinieri police who oversaw the investigation, said in a telephone interview. The investigation, he said, showed that the group had reorganized and “had found new energy and new strength,” by enlisting new recruits and setting aside differences to instead focus on profiting from new criminal ventures, like online gambling.
The organization had been able to survive because it remained “strongly tied to the rules of its founding fathers and its ancient rituals,” even as it modernized, the Carabinieri said in a statement — for example, by using encrypted smartphones that “limited the need for traditional meetings and gatherings to the bare minimum.”.
Tuesday’s arrests were carried out in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, and neighboring towns, and involved about 1,200 Carabinieri officers. Video released by the police showed hundreds of officers waiting for orders to enter homes as helicopters patrolled the skies during overnight raids. The arrests, which came after two years of investigations, covered a range of charges, including mafia affiliation, drug trafficking, extortion and attempted murder.
Even though police and prosecutors were able to restrict the Cosa Nostra’s activities for years, the Carabinieri said in a statement, the group had not lost its grip and was still “well anchored in its territory over which it exercises constant control, significantly affecting the economic fabric through extortion and the imposition of products.” It “used force, when it saw fit,” and had an ample supply of weapons.
For decades the Cosa Nostra was dominated the so-called Corleonesi crime family — associated with the town of Corleone, a name first made famous by Mario Puzo’s book, “The Godfather” — whose affiliates included Matteo Messina Denaro, a top boss who died in 2023. But investigators said that Palermo had regained primacy within the organization, and its “clans have become central to the dynamics of Cosa Nostra,” Lt. Col. La Padula said.
The investigation also found that different clans in Palermo had opted, for now, to set aside differences to achieve a common goal: making money. The Cosa Nostra also found synergy with the ’Ndragheta, the dominant organized crime group in Calabria in southern Italy, when it came to drug trafficking.
Drug dealing also allowed the Cosa Nostra clans to have direct contacts within Sicily, “a form of control, and so, a signal of strength and power,” Mr. La Padula said. Online gambling, which replaced the raffles and lotteries once controlled by the mob, was another profitable enterprise that demonstrated the transition from the traditional to the modern, he added.
The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests involved many youths, a sign that “Cosa Nostra continues to exert its appeal in certain environments like suburbs where young people have limited life alternatives and identify with representations of power that the mafia still enjoys,” Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Maurizio De Lucia, told reporters at a news conference on Tuesday. “We have to be particularly careful” about the new recruits, because “that is the future of the mafia,” he said, according to the ANSA news agency.
The investigation also showed that Cosa Nostra still used old-time tricks — like informers inside the prosecutor’s office and lawyers — to stay ahead of investigators, officials said.
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