Northern complacency is fast giving way to fear, however. Southern crime syndicates, and in particular the murderous Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, which has displaced Sicily’s Cosa Nostra as Italy’s biggest organised crime group, has the country’s rich industrial cities firmly in their sights.
And the biggest prize of all, Milan, Europe’s capital of design, fashion and football, may have already succumbed.
Milan’s chief anti-Mafia judge, Alberto Nobili, has revealed in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph that 1,000 ‘Ndrangheta operatives and their collaborators are already in and around the city, flooding the streets with cocaine, muscling in on public works contracts, and investing some of the proceeds in the city’s famous fashion business.
“They’re already here,’ said Mr Nobili, “and we’ve got fight on our hands.” What was more, he added, the Mob’s biggest prize was yet to come. It has set its sights on the €15 billion government investment fund designed to upgrade Milan’s infrastructure as it prepares to host the Expo World Fair in 2015.i
Given the Calabrian gangsters’ renowned skill at creaming off vest amounts from public sector programmes, it could prove the biggest financial killing the Mob has ever seen.
‘Ndrangheta, pronounced “en-drang-ay-ta”, and translated as “honour” or “loyalty”, comes from the Calabrian dialect that is as impenetrable at the crime group’s nefarious activities and methods. The group is based in the boot of Italy, in a region often described as the country’s wild west.
‘Ndrangheta has remained relatively obscure for a major crime syndicate with an eye-popping turnover of £30 billion, and one that is thought to supply Europe with 80 per cent of its cocaine.
Its low profile has helped it avoid the fate of the dons of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra, whose power has wilted under intensive police pressure ever since it over-reached itself by killing two prominent anti-Mafia magistrates in 1992.
But the ‘Ndrangheta’s propensity for violence and its international purview was dramatically illustrated in the German town of Duisburg in 2007, when an internal feud saw six members of the Nirta-Strangio family gunned down by the rival Pelle-Romeo clan in front of a pizza restaurant.
On a balmy midsummer evening last week in Milan’s canal district, young people gathered around mobile cafes selling snacks and canned drinks as the clubs and bars closed. And circling them like the mosquitoes that fill the warm, damp air are the spacciatori – the dealers. read more from Michael Day in Milan
