Mafia boss’s poolside villa seized in €21m police raid

SICILIAN police confiscated an array of assets including 65 properties and 19 cars from a notorious Mafia boss as authorities underlined the new Italian government’s pledge to crack down on organised crime.

Police published pictures of a villa with a vast swimming pool and views overlooking Palermo, one of a handful of assets worth as much as €21million (£18.5million) seized from Pietro Formoso.

Formoso was a prominent mobster from the Misilmeri clan of Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian Mafia, who made his money from international drug smuggling and forcing Sicilian supermarkets to use meat supplied by criminal gangs.

General Giancarlo Trotta, the commanding officer of the finance police who seized the assets, said: “This is a new blow against Mafia infiltration of the legal economy and against the Mafia that damages companies who respect the rules.”

It will go some way in underlining the new populist government’s claim to be spearheading a crackdown on organised crime.

Formoso, who was brought down with the help of several Mafia “supergrasses”, was arrested before the coalition of the League and the Five Star Movement took office.

Matteo Salvini, the interior minister and leader of the hard-right League party, earlier this month called television crews to film him swimming in another gangster’s confiscated pool in Tuscany to highlight his determination to fight crime gangs – though that villa had been seized seven years ago. In Caserta, north of Naples, in a separate operation last week, police seized assets worth €45million from Gaetano Balivo, 54, and his brother Silvestro, 64. They confiscated five construction and medical companies, accounts in 14 banks, 13 cars and more than 100 houses and pieces of land from the Camorra crime gang mobsters.

After the arrests, Mr Salvini tweeted: “The Mafia disgusts me.”