Italian police intercept cocaine worth £228 million hidden in containers of coffee and meat

Containers in the port of Gioia Tauro in Calabria in southern Italy

Credit: Reuters

Cocaine with a street value of €260 million (£228 million), hidden in consignments of frozen beef, coffee and fruit from South America, has been intercepted by Italian police.

The 1.3 tonnes of cocaine was discovered in the port of Gioia Tauro in the southern region of Calabria.

The port has for years has been used by the local ‘Ndrangheta mafia to bring in drugs from Latin America, which are then distributed across Europe.

The cocaine was hidden in containers full of exotic fruit from Ecuador and coffee and frozen meat from Brazil.

It was detected by sophisticated scanners operated by customs agents in three separate operations over the past week.

The specially-built courtroom where the mass mafia trial is being held in Calabria

Credit: AFP

"The seized drugs, of the purest quality, could have been cut up to four times by drug traffickers before being put on the market, earning €260 million for the ‘Ndrangheta," police said in a statement.

The means by which the mafia tried to smuggle consignments of drugs through the port was “always evolving”, requiring a commensurate shift in ways of detecting the narcotics, police said.

The ‘Ndrangheta has grown rich from its virtual monopoly on smuggling cocaine into Europe and is also involved in money-laundering and extortion.

Nicola Gratteri (R), the chief prosecutor in the mass mafia trial

Credit: AFP

Italian police and judges say the network has surpassed Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and the Camorra mafia of Naples in wealth and power.

Last month, more than 350 alleged members of the ‘Ndrangheta went on trial in Italy’s biggest mafia trial for decades in the Calabrian town of Lamezia Terme.

They are charged with crimes ranging from murder to drug trafficking, money laundering and extortion.

The trial has been dubbed Rinascita-Scott; rinascita in Italian means rebirth, while Scott is a tribute to Scott W Sieben, an agent from the US Drug Enforcement Agency who worked with the Italian authorities when he was based in Rome. He died in 2015 in a motorbike accident.

More than 900 prosecution witnesses will be called in a trial that will involve 400 lawyers and is expected to last at least two years.

The ‘Ndrangheta are known for their brutality – it was claimed recently that a woman from Calabria was murdered and fed to pigs in 2016 after refusing to sell her land to a man with mob connections.