Word: calabrians
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...Sicilian Mafia after having taken over much of the trafficking of South American cocaine into Europe. With billions in narcodollars, 'Ndrangheta is constantly on the lookout for ways to invest its ill-gotten cash in legitimate enterprises, explains Alberto Cisterna, a Rome-based magistrate who has long followed the Calabrian Mob. He says that high-profile urban centers are actually considered the best places for crooks to simultaneously hide their illicit wealth and evade taxes. "These criminal organizations see Rome and Milan as bona fide tax havens," says Cisterna. "Its hard for them to hide their wealth in Calabria, where...
...Wednesday, Café de Paris was back in the spotlight for different reasons: Even as sharply dressed customers and summer travelers in shorts sipped cappuccino, police seized the premises on suspicion that it had fallen into the hands of the increasingly powerful Calabrian Mob. The café was one of a dozen pieces of prime Roman real estate, with a combined worth $284 million, sequestered as part of a citywide crackdown on suspected money-laundering and tax-evasion. (See pictures of life in Italy...
...open and operating by late morning, though a state-appointed manager will manage it for the time being, while the owner is forced to prove, under a special Italian statute, that he is clean of Mob ties. Police allege that top bosses from the Alvaro-Palamara faction of the Calabrian Mafia used a barber from a small rural town in Calabria as a frontman to buy the historic café in 2005 for some $350,000 dollars, though its commercial value is estimated at $60 million. Italian authorities suspect that the difference between the official price tag and real value...
...Calabrian Mob, which began to accumulate wealth in the 1970s and 1980s through kidnapping and extortion, has grown exponentially in the past five years as it has teamed up with Colombian cocaine producers. The "Massacre of Ferragosto," the gangland killing of six young Calabrian men one August night in 2007, in Duisburg, Germany, was the bloodiest sign that the crime syndicate was spreading its influence across the continent...
Alberto Cisterna, a Calabrian anti-Mob prosecutor, says new, counterintuitive thinking is needed to overcome both the Mob and bad governance. Organized crime, like the politics of favoritism, will wither in influence, he says, when people start viewing it as a relic of the past. "The Mafia, like the old way of doing politics, is no longer able to satisfy people's primary needs," he says. "The trash in Naples is the failure of both systems...