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.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © Copyright ANSA
