Italian police detained 130 people on Tuesday in an operation against the Sicilian mafia in Palermo, and the country’s top anti-mafia prosecutor said the evidence suggested bosses in high security prisons were still passing on “criminal directives” to those on the outside.
The carabinieri—Italy’s national gendermerie—said the anti-mafia operation led to the issuing of restrictive measures for 183 people, 36 of whom were already in prison.
It was the biggest crackdown on the Sicilian mafia, known as La Cosa Nostra, since the 1990s.
The Cosa Nostra—made famous by movies like The Godfather—terrorized Sicily for years and at the height of its power, in 1992, blew up two top prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, after they used informers known as “pentito” to prosecute and put in jail hundreds of mafiosi.
Since the 1990s the Sicilian mafia has been overtaken as Italy’s most powerful organized crime group by the ‘Ndrangheta, who are based in Calabria on the Italian mainland.
The carabinieri said those arrested on Tuesday were accused of, “criminal association of a mafia nature, attempted murder, extortion aggravated by the mafia method, and association for the purpose of drug trafficking.”
Jailed Mafiosi Video Calls
The chief prosecutor of Palermo, Maurizio de Lucia, said that mobile communications devices in prisons—including video calls—undermined crime prevention to the point that “being inside the prison or being outside the prison makes no difference.”He specifically mentioned the mafia were using encrypted cellphones, which were often smuggled into jails.
De Lucia said, “Two things are important: one is that the organization knows that in order to become strong again it needs a central direction, a commission, and it can’t achieve this. The other is that it has adapted to this difficulty by connecting the mandamenti [areas controlled by a mafia family or its affiliates] through the technological tools we’ve talked about.”
Tuesday’s raids were predominantly in the Palermo neighborhoods of Pagliarelli, Porta Nuova, Tommaso Natale-San Lorenzo, Bagheria and Santa Maria del Gesu.
The carabinieri said families in Palermo had regained their authority after decades of being dominated by a faction from Corleone, a town outside Palermo that was the birthplace of notorious bosses Toto Riina and Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano.
Riina, who was captured in 1993, died in prison in 2017, aged 87, and his successor, Provenzano, was arrested in 2006 and died, aged 83, in jail in 2016.
Cosa Nostra ‘Never Truly Vanished’
Anna Sergi, a professor of criminology and organized crime studies at the University of Essex in England, wrote on her Substack on Tuesday, “Cosa Nostra may have faced crises, yet it has never truly vanished. Its subcultural norms are remarkably elastic, allowing the organization to navigate periods of suppression.”She wrote, “Despite being perceived as a declining force within the Italian mafia landscape, Cosa Nostra maintains a significant role, particularly in the drug trade.”
But Sergi told The Epoch Times, in an email, Mineo was not the leader of the Cosa Nostra and added, “There is no known boss.”
