Navy officials nabbed in Rome mob probe

(ANSA) - Rome, December 15 - The investigation into an alleged Mafia ring looting the Eternal City widened Monday as six people including three Navy officers were arrested on charges of bilking 7 million euros from the Navy using a "ghost ship" that was sunk in 2013.
    As many as 100 people are now under investigation in the so-called Mafia Capitale probe, including former center-right mayor Gianni Alemanno.
    The six arrested Monday included Navy Lieutenant Mario Leto, petty officers Sebastiano Distefano and Salvatore Mazzone, and three members of a company that provided black-market petrol to gasoline stations controlled by the mob.
    The six allegedly defrauded the senior service of seven million euros' worth of ship fuel that was supposedly delivered to the Navy at its deposit at the Sicilian port of Augusta. Investigators determined the 11 million litres of fuel oil never was delivered and that a tanker vessel that supposedly made the delivery, the Victory I, in fact had been sunk in the Atlantic in September 2013.
    Meanwhile mobsters also planned to set up a contraband fuel oil scam to be based at the port of Fiumicino, investigators said.
    The magistrates decided to open a new line of inquiry after crime boss Ernesto Diotallevi was recorded telling his sons Leonardo and Mario on the telephone that "if we throw ourselves into smuggling...you could go at it for two years like a...
    bulldozer".
    Officers from the Carabinieri paramilitary police's ROS special anti-mafia unit said the phone taps showed that Diotallevi senior, aged 70, wanted "to acquire a petrol pump to install at the naval docks (at Fiumicino) with which to carry out fraud on flows of fuel together with his sons Mario and Leonardo and with the participation of Mario Gonelli (former centre-right candidate to be mayor of Fiumicino) and (Finance police sergeant) Giuseppe Volpe".
    "The operation was aimed at re-selling fuel on the black market," the ROS report said.
    Also on Monday, Interior Minister Angelino Alfano announced that Rome Prefect Giuseppe Pecoraro, the representative of the central government responsible for law and order, has nominated a three-member commission of inquiry into the mafia corruption scandal.