Italy starts the largest mob trial in decades
Italy opened a massive trial Wednesday of 325 defendants linked to the powerful ’ndrangheta crime syndicate on charges ranging from murder and drug trafficking to corruption and money laundering, in the southern region of Calabria.
The trial, conducted in a courtroom converted from a call center in the town of Lamezia Terme, with video links to defendants being held in facilities up and down the country as a coronavirus prevention measure, is the most sweeping legal action against the mafia in Italy in three decades.
On trial are alleged leaders and foot soldiers of the ’ndrangheta, as well as national and local politicians, civil servants and whitecollar professionals believed to be working with the Calabrian criminal organization.
It is the most far-reaching action against a criminal organization in Italy since the trials of the Sicilian mafia in the 1980s that led to its decline. That effort opened up space for the Calabrian mobsters to expand their small-time local activities and become the leading drug importers into Europe and one of the world’s richest criminal organizations, according to the Italian authorities.
“This is a cornerstone in the wall that we are building to counter the ’ndrangheta,” Nicola Gratteri, the chief prosecutor in the case and a longtime opponent of the Calabrian mafia, said in an interview with a regional broadcaster Wednesday. “And to make more livable a region that has been martyrized for over a century.”
Gratteri’s investigation, which mobilized 3,000 police officers to arrest hundreds of people in Bulgaria, Italy, Germany and Switzerland in 2019, led to the cap- ture of the top rank soft he Mancuso family that runs the ’ndrangheta from the Calabrian city of Vibo Valentia. That included Luigi Mancuso, who is believed to be the head of the clan.
The Mancusos infiltrated the local political administration and the economy, and also controlled the western coast of Calabria, the large port of Gioia Tauro, and politicians at the national level, investigators said. They also had ties with criminal organizations in South America and the United States, they said.
“They are one of the most powerful clans in Italy and in the world,” said Giuseppe De Pace, a lawyer for the family of Matteo Vinci, who was killed in a car bomb after refusing to sell his land to the Mancuso clan in 2018.