Italian police on Wednesday
arrested 60 people in a gangmaster probe seizing 14 farms in the
southern Italian regions of Calabria and Basilicata.
Police said hundreds of mostly African migrant farm hands
were paid a pittance to work 12-hour days by gangmasters who
called them "monkeys".
The farms seized were worth some eight million euros.
Some 300 finance guards took part in the operation, which
ruling centrist Italia Viva Senator Ernesto Magorno said had
dealt a "very hard blow" to gangmastering in the Mezzogiorno.
The commander of the tax police in Cosenza, Colonel Danilo
Nastasi, said "we have rubbed out a social scourge".
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