Judge, councilor convicted for Mob ties

(ANSA) - Milan, June 17 - The Milan appeals court on Tuesday upheld convictions against a former judge and an ex-regional councilor from Calabria in a trial targeting the 'Ndrangheta mafia's infiltration of the northern Lombardy region. Former judge Vincenzo Giuseppe Giglio was sentenced to four years in prison and politician Francesco Morelli was sentenced to five years and eight months. They were among several whose convictions were upheld, including presumed 'Ndrangheta boss Giulio Lampada, sentenced to 14 years and 5 months. Giglio, a former head of the crime prevention department of the Reggio Calabria court, was arrested November 2011 on suspicion of tipping off members of the Valle-Lampada clan about police activity.
    Morelli, once a member of ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi's now-defunct People of Freedom (PdL) party, was arrested at the same time in the Calabrian town of Palmi.
    Police said Morelli, the former head of the regional budget committee, was "the link between ('Ndrangheta) clans and national political circles".
    In July 2010 a massive police operation in Lombardy and Calabria caught 'Ndrangheta's No.1, the equivalent of Cosa Nostra's 'boss of bosses', Domenico Oppedisano, 80, as well as its chief in Lombardy, Pino Neri.
    A total of 304 'Ndrangheta operatives were arrested.
    The operation, which involved 3,000 police officers, revealed that the Calabrians, already known to be more closely knit and impenetrable than Cosa Nostra, had a hierarchy similar to that of the Sicilian Mafia.
    Police said the Calabrian mafia had replicated their operational units or 'drine' in northern Italy and abroad.
    It is now the most powerful mafia in Italy thanks to its hold on the European cocaine trade.
    The 'Ndrangheta, whose name means 'valour' in a local form of ancient Greek, once dealt mainly in kidnappings and extortion and fed off the pickings of public tenders, living in the shadow of its Sicilian cousin.
    But it has since expanded to northern Italy, northern Europe and other countries, where it invests its huge drug profits.