Italian police on Thursday seized some
45 million euros' worth of assets from the powerful
transnational Calabria based 'Ndrangheta mafia in Italy and the
United States.
Agents of the Central Anti-Crime Service and of the Anti-Crime
Division of the Police Headquarters of Reggio Calabria are
executing, in the provinces of Reggio Calabria, Milan, Messina,
Bari and in Florida (United States), a seizure order of assets,
corporate assets and financial relations, for a total value of
EUR 45 million, attributable to two brothers who are
entrepreneurs active in the construction and real estate
brokerage sectors.
The tentacles of 'Ndrangheta, Italy's richest and most
multinational crime group have now stretched to Manhattan,
Italian prosecutors said at the end of last year.
Some 18 alleged members of the Calabrian Mob, which controls
much of the European cocaine trade, were arrested in late
December on suspicion of running protection rackets and
supplying cocaine to "important milieux" in the Big Apple,
prosecutors said.
The organization was based at Rocca di Neto near Crotone in
southern Calabria, police said.
During the course of the Italo-American police operation,
sources said, the FBI carried out searches and raids in New
York.
Those arrested are Italo-Americans who have lived in New York
for many years, police said.
The Corigliano-Comito group and the "locale" (branch) of
Belvedere Spinello ran the protection and drugs rackets, police
said.
Police said the New York arrests completed a police round up of
over 200 'Ndrangheta members across Italy, in Milan, Rome,
Naples, Brescia, Salerno, Perugia, Latina, Reggio Calabria,
Catania, Trapani and Catanzaro.
'Ndrangheta has spread from its Calabrian heartlands to the rest
of Italy, Europe and around the world, and is considered Italy's
richest and most powerful mafia due to its control of much of
the European cocaine trade from South America.
'Ndrangheta (from a Greek word meaning 'heroism' or 'virtue')
once lived in the twin shadow of Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the
Camorra in Naples.
While those two syndicates, notably the Sicilians, were feeding
off the transatlantic heroin trade through operations like the
infamous 'French connection', 'Ndrangheta was only just emerging
from its traditional stock-in-trade of kidnappings in the
Calabrian highlands.
It has since become a highly sophisticated global network with a
chokehold on the international drugs trade and control over
swathes of its home turf where police fear to tread, Italian
officials say.
As well as being the richest, 'Ndrangheta is also regarded as
the most impenetrable of Italy's mafias, with its close-knit
family-based organisation outdoing the Sicilian mafia in its
ability to defeat police efforts to turn members into State
witnesses.European law enforcement agency Europol has identified
'Ndrangheta as one of the "most threatening" organized
crime groups on the global level, due to its "enormous financial
might" and "immense corruptive power," with a presence in
Germany, Spain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland,
Canada, USA, Colombia and Australia, where 'Ndrangheta turf wars
have gained headlines.
In Europe, 'Ndrangheta really only came into the public eye in
2007, when six clan members were gunned down on the midsummer
Ferragosto holiday in the German city of Duisburg in a feud that
began as a wedding spat in a Calabrian coastal town, San Luca,
in 1991.
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