Italy’s mafia mobsters pounce on businesses brought to their knees by coronavirus pandemic

An Italian police officer in Palermo, Sicily, in front of street art lauding a fugitive Cosa Nostra boss, Matteo Messina Denaro

Credit: AP

As Italy edges towards a second national lockdown, the country’s mafia mobsters have never had it so good, one of the country’s leading prosecutors says.

With tens of thousands of businesses in trouble as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, Italy’s powerful mafia organisations are moving in, snapping up ailing enterprises or offering credit to businesses that struggle to secure loans from banks.

They are then able to launder the tens of millions of euros they earn from drug-dealing, protection rackets and other criminal activities.

“It is in difficult moments like this that the mafia prospers,” said Nicola Gratteri, a prosecutor who is on the front-line of the battle against the ‘Ndrangheta mafia, which is based in Calabria in the far south of Italy.

“They are less bureaucratic than the State. They know the local area and they are ever present, in contrast to some politicians who only turn up when there is an election looming,” he told La Stampa newspaper.

With furlough money from the government arriving months late or not at all, and lines of credit hard to find from the banks, Italy’s mafia groups have swept into fill the void left by legitimate institutions.

A waiter stands outside an empty restaurant in  Rome

Credit: AP

“The mafia’s money has for some time now been like oxygen for the legal economy,” said Mr Gratteri, who has written a book about battling the mafia, Illegal Oxygen, which will be published on Tuesday.

“Even in this very difficult situation, they are managing to adapt, to transform even this crisis into an opportunity.”

Mafia networks like the Camorra in Naples and Cosa Nostra in Sicily are active from street level, where they distribute food to struggling families, to the boardroom.

They launder their profits through an ever-more sophisticated range of investments, from cryptocurrencies to renewable energy, said the prosecutor.

The fight against organised crime requires more than just police officers, wiretapping and informants.

“For too long we have considered them just a law and order problem, to be tackled with handcuffs and prison sentences. But the fight against the mafia is also a cultural problem. To defeat them you need to liberate people of poverty and fear,” he said.

Although based in Italy’s south, the various mafia groups have long been active in the rest of the country, as far north as Milan and Turin.

The owner of an historic trattoria in Rome told The Telegraph recently of his fears that the recession caused by the pandemic and the shortcomings of the State offer an opening to mafia networks like the ‘Ndrangheta and the Camorra.

“It’s a real danger. Organised crime groups can make loans and offer help where the State has shown itself to be absent,” said Mauro Crisciotti, owner of La Matriciana, a restaurant near Rome’s opera house that was founded in 1870.

Italy currently has a three-tier system of restrictions for its 20 regions, depending on the severity of infection rates.

Six regions and one province are now red zones, from Lombardy and Tuscany to Calabria, while others are either orange – with moderate restrictions – or yellow, with the most lenient measures.