MAFIA SHOTGUN MURDER RAMPAGE!
Brutal Italian gang moving to control American drug trade
AVICIOUS new Mafia gang is battling to control key Italian turf by wiping out enemies with a gruesome “Ritual of Death” — blowing their faces off with point-blank shotgun blasts!
Lawmen say the brutal Gargano crime clan’s “white shotgun” reign of terror is designed to take over the $1.3 billion heroin and cocaine trade in the southern Italian villages of Foggia and Apulia, which are export hubs to America.
The murders are deliberately gruesome — a chilling message to rivals in the Foggian Mafia Society to surrender or die, says Italian prosecutor Giuseppe Gatti.
“They want to express a measure of hate that goes above and beyond the idea itself of killing. The ritual of killing can be thought of as trying to eliminate someone physically.
“But they aren’t simply trying to eliminate someone, they are really trying to cancel any memories of this person.
“Shooting someone in the face means canceling their memory and not giving their loved ones the chance to see their face for a final time.
“This is an act of extreme savagery.”
The Gargano crime group is bossed by Rocco “The Pig” Moretti, Vincenzo Pellegrino and Vito Bruno “The Hare” Lanza, who also specialize in car highjacking and protection rackets, cops say. But the Mafia family’s real interest is drugs — and making piles of American dollars.
Mobsters have pulled off six bombings in the past two months alone — two in front of a local hairdresser — to crush opposition and silence witnesses. Sources say the gang has committed more than 360 killings in the past 40 years in the port town of Gargano, the shipping point for cocaine
throughout Europe.
From 2017 to 2018, the gang averaged a robbery a day and a murder a week. Yet 80 percent of the killings have gone unsolved.
Federica Bianchi, head of the local Libera antiMafia group, calls the Garganos “one of the cruelest” using their shotgun blasts to terrorize locals into silence.
“They don’t want anything to remain of that person,” Federica notes. “It’s a strong signal that they’re not going to leave any dignity for the dead person.”
But shotgun slayings aren’t the weapon the mobsters use to rule innocent villagers.
Gatti recalls after finally getting a local bar owner to talk about the gangsters, the man “began crying and was filled with terror.”
“I asked him: ‘What’s wrong, are you still afraid of the Mafia?’ And he told me: ‘No, I’m not scared of them anymore’ and then he told me, ‘My problem is when I return to my village, people will know what I did here with you today and then no one will come to my bar any longer to drink a coffee.
“‘For me, my business is dead.’
“And that’s when I understood the power of the gangs lies in us — good people who are not able to reach out to the community for help, to stay as one, but instead be alone in solitude.”
Now law enforcement sources say the gang’s tentacles have spread to New York — where it is being treated with respect, and fear, by the traditional five Mafia families.