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The Italian police have arrested 160 members of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, after Driving Laws revealed movements of Mafia families to recruit a new generation of footoldiers and to recreate their once powerful prevailing council.
The performance came after draining the recently liberated Cosa Nostra bosses also intercepted their complaints that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni did not allow them to communicate with some of them still recorded colleagues.
“Organized crime is in trouble – the fight against the Mafia has not stopped and will not stop”, Meloni written In a post on X, who greeted the overnight arrests as “a very hard blow to Cosa Nostra”.
Meloni had previously written that the intercepted complaints against her government ‘for not relaxing the hard prison [conditions] Because the mobsters’ was the proof that Italy was’ on the right track ‘in his fight against organized crime.
John Dickie, professor at University College London and author of various books on the Mafia, said that the investigation had unveiled the impressive capacity of Cosa Nostra to regenerate and the permanent attraction that organized crime was still held for some younger Sicilians.
“These old boys don’t stop,” said Dickie. “People are generally surprised about this extraordinary resilience of the organization. The prison clearly does not work to reform these people. They come out. . . And get straight again.
“They are a living memory of the old days of great Mafia and people come to them a bit,” he added and called it “incredible” that aging mafiosis wanted to restart the old prevailing council of Cosa Nostra – the dome -To coordinate their activities and force Mafia rules. “It’s really in their DNA.”
Although Mobsters Sicily decades in the nineties and early 2000s and early 2000s have terrorized the Cosa Nostra in the nineties and early 2000s, the Cosa Nostra relaxed seriously, with many of its top bosses dead or caught and the once tight grip on the Sicilian Relax society.
After decades on the run the most sought after fugitive “godfather” of the group, Matteo Messina Denaro, who was sitting on the dome and was convicted in the absence of orchestrate a medical clinic in Palermo. He died months later in prison.
The Calabria, which has developed ‘Ndrangheta, who has developed powerful global networks, has become the most powerful organized crime group in Europe.
But with various Cosa Nostra bosses who were recently released after completing long prison sentences, public prosecutors said that the Sicilian Mafia had increased the pace of his criminal activities.
“The Mafia is absolutely active – and tries to create the army of the past again,” said Maurizio de Lucia, main prosecutor of Palermo, at a press conference on Tuesday. “There are many young people who are influenced by the old bosses who return.”
Giovanni Melillo, head of the Italian anti-mafia directorate, said that Cosa Nostra is getting closer ties with the ‘ndrangheta, because it tried to regain his influence in global drug trafficking, including in North America.
“Cosa Nostra tries to breathe new life into his fortunes by trying to enter much wider systems of relationships,” he said. “The relationships with” ndrangheta are more and more close. “
![Giorgia Meloni](https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%3A%2F%2Fd1e00ek4ebabms.cloudfront.net%2Fproduction%2Fffe4d7e1-41cd-439b-b0cb-3110935831da.jpg?source=next-article&fit=scale-down&quality=highest&width=700&dpr=1)
Franco Bonura, an 82-year-old Mafia boss who spent years behind the bars, was taken back in custody last month, because she reportedly worked to rejuvenate old Mafia relationships and start new business deals.
“One thing is clear: the subjects that are in prison as soon as they come out, they will do what they have always done,” said the Lucia.
The police operation on Monday evening included more than 1,200 officers in Palermo and the suburbs, and was the highlight of almost two years of investigation, including extensive taps.
A total of 163 people were arrested or re-arrested on suspicion of a litany of criminal charges, including Mafia-Type Association, attempted murder, extortion, drug trafficking and the execution of illegal gambling networks, including online.
The Lucia said that Mafia communication, which once consisted of passing handwritten coded nuts, were now much more technologically advanced, often dependent on high-tech-encrypted telephones zowel in as outside prison
And although some caught bosses were not allowed to contact the outside world, public prosecutors said a lot of imprisoned mafiosi Still communicated using small smuggled phones and thousands of different SIM cards.
“The difference between inside and outside prison is weak,” said the Lucia, who stated that “high safety prisons are far from insensitive to communication from the outside world. The availability of mobile devices is a serious problem.”