Rome Mayor Ignazio Marino says that the Italian capital city has been "badly hurt" by the mafia crimes now being uncovered, and that changes are needed to attitudes and perceptions.
"We need to change a city that certainly is emerging, on one side as a victim of organized crime, but also as a place of more petty crime - the mentality of favours," that often wins out over ability, he said during a Friday meeting with bloggers.
"And, at the same time, we need to drive out the 'bad guys' from our city". Earlier in the day, Marino signed a petition for city council to be registered as an injured party in the major probe into allegations that local politicians and officials colluded with mobsters to enable a mafia organisation to muscle in on millions of euros in city contracts.
Meanwhile, lawyers for the man accused of being the ringleader of the mafia infiltration of Rome city hall, Massimo Carminati, said they would appeal his detention order.
Another of the key figures accused in the case, Salvatore Buzzi, who headed several cooperatives implicated in the probe, was transferred Friday to a high-security prison in Sardinia and held under Italian laws for high-risk mafia suspects. One day earlier, Rome Chief Prosector Giuseppe Pignatone told the parliamentary anti-mafia commission that more operations are in the works in his Rome mob probe, which has already led to dozens of arrests.
"More operations will follow shortly," he told MPs, adding that the city has frozen a 25-million-euro public housing tender offer "because it may have gone to firms owned by Buzzi".
The syndicate does not have a rigid structure, Pignatone said.
Ex-right-wing terrorist and gangster Carminati is the leader, Riccardo Brugia was in charge of what he called the "military" aspects of the organization and Buzzi managed the civil service contacts, Pignatone explained.
The organization used mafia methods including "violence to reach licit and illicit goals, and intimidation of its interlocutors," the prosecutor said.
Prosecutors also said Friday that they would include in the Rome probe the case of an attack last April on a finance police sergeant who was investigating a company linked to Buzzi and located in the town of Latina near Rome.
Meanwhile, the New York Times newspaper, in its international edition, said that the case showed no corner of Italy remained untouched by the mafia.
It added that "even Italians were stunned" by the alleged extent of mafia infiltration into the national capital city.
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