The seemingly unstoppable spread of Italy’s most powerful organised crime group has now seen it establish outposts in the UK and Ireland, according to anti-mafia judges.
The seemingly unstoppable spread of Italy’s most powerful organised crime group has now seen it establish outposts in the UK and Ireland, according to anti-mafia judges.
Fuelled by its control of a £22bn-a year cocaine business, the Ndrangheta mafia, with its roots in the southern Italian region of Calabria, has begun to colonise London and Dublin, warn the Reggio Calabria magistrates in key reports. The documents reveal the astonishing extent to which the crime cartel has established itself around Europe.
In London, the Aracri and Fazzari clans are thought to be active in money laundering, catering and drug trafficking. The level of activity in the UK and Ireland is low relative to the Continent, but few experts doubt its presence will increase.
Earlier this year, authorities in the south of France warned that the group, which sprang to public attention in 2007 following the murders of six members outside a pizza restaurant in Duisberg, Germany, was colonising the Cote d’Azur. Activity in Barcelona has also risen. “They control territory with extortion and intimidation as they do in Calabria or the urban outskirts of Milan, demanding protection money – and not only from Italian expats,” said Michele Prestipino, a prosecutor from Reggio Calabria.
“Ndrangheta is everywhere,” the super-grass Luigi Bonaventura, said yesterday in a video interview with La Repubblica.
The lack of anti-mafia laws beyond Italy makes the rest of Europe fertile ground. In Italy, convicted mobsters face long stretches in solitary confinement, and members can be jailed simply for “mafia association”.
Some observers have even noted how Germany, the biggest Ndrangheta stronghold outside Italy, has assumed its increasingly familiar role of subsidising the activity of more workshy southern Europeans. The wives of jailed Ndrangheta mobsters in Germany get state unemployment benefits of €365 a month. “And they don’t even have to pay their rent. How is that possible?” said Vito Giudicepietro, a local union representative in Singen, which saw a huge influx of southern Italians in the late 1950s.
