Italy claims finally defeating the mafia

The Italian government says it is winning the war on organised crime. But can the mafia ever be defeated?

Giuseppe Bastone ; police burst in his hideout during a lightning raid in August.
Giuseppe Bastone, suspected mafia mobster Credit: Photo: EPA

Of all the meticulously planned police stings, it was one of the most unexpected. When suspected mafia mobster Giuseppe Bastone was arrested by Italian paramilitary Carabinieri, he had been living for six months in a tiny underground bunker.

The subterranean cell was equipped with all mod cons – a refrigerator, a television and a DVD player – as well as the means of escape: a trapdoor hidden beneath a stairway, and a 200 yard long tunnel leading to a concealed exit.

But the 28-year-old fugitive had no time to use either when police burst in his hideout during a lightning raid in August.

His arrest was one of the most high profile of a string of successful actions by Italian police and prosecutors in recent months.

In a mass bust in May, detectives arrested nearly 70 suspected members of the Naples-based Camorra mafia, including one of the country's most dangerous fugitives, Franco Letizia, 31, who had been on the run for more than a year.

In November it was the turn of three brothers – Pasquale, Carmine and Salvatore Russo – to be captured after they were found hiding in anonymous properties near Naples.

All in all, a rogue's gallery of 21 out of Italy's 30 most wanted gangsters have been detained, among them convicted multiple murderers who had been on the run for years.

Now the authorities' success has emboldened the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, to boast that it is scoring unprecedented blows against organised crime.

"If there is a government that, more than any other, has made fighting the mafia one of its clearest and coherent goals, it is my government," he said recently.

His interior minister, Roberto Maroni, has gone further, declaring that the government has declared "total war" against the mafia.

"We have shown that the state is present in Italy and that it has unleashed a total war against the mafia to regain control of national territory.

"The government has worked with Italy's security forces to create a climate in which the fight against the mafia has found new vigour."

In a country where an estimated 130 billion euros a year – nine per cent of GDP – is earned by the mafia from arms and drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution, embezzled EU funds and illegal waste dumping, it is small wonder that the government would want to clamp down. Apart from the notoriety that organised crime brings to Italy, it also costs billions of euros in lost revenue to the state.

But many Italians are wondering why their leaders are risking such extravagant, headline-grabbing claims when most believe that the likelihood of delivering a mortal blow to the mafia's organisation power is so slim.

Police, prosecutors and organised crime experts say the government can have delivered only a temporary setback. Arresting a few godfathers is like cutting the head off a Hydra, they say – others will simply take their place.

"Just because you arrest some top people doesn't mean the mafia goes away," said Felia Allum, a mafia expert and political scientist at Bath University. "They still maintain social and political control of territory in places like Naples and Palermo and Calabria."

In fact, the global economic crisis may even have helped Italy's four distinct mafia groups – Sicily's Cosa Nostra, the Camorra from Campania, the 'Ndragheta of Calabria and the lesser known Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia – to grow in strength, according to some mafia-watchers.

They have taken advantage of the credit crisis to expand their loan-sharking operations and buy legitimate businesses cheaply from owners who have gone broke.

Flush with revenue from drugs, prostitution and extortion, they have ploughed money into everything from supermarkets to car dealerships, offering liquidity at a time when many enterprises are cash-strapped – and apparently making new inroads into cities such as Milan which had been thought relatively free of their influence.

The answer may be that presenting himself as a fearless anti-mafia crusader is a natural vote winner among those who want to believe it, having grown tired of the mafia's apparent invincibility.

It may distract attention from the sex scandals in which he has been caught up during the last year, including claims that he slept with a prostitute at his residence in Rome and that call girls were paid to attend his private parties.

But Mr Berlusconi's government may also want to distract attention from recent allegations that the prime minister himself colluded with the mob.

Last month a jailed mafia hitman claimed in a Turin court that Mr Berlusconi struck a deal with Cosa Nostra just before winning his first term as prime minister in 1994. Gaspare Spatuzza, a mafia pentito or turncoat, said that a clan boss had boasted to him that Mr Berlusconi and his business partner, Marcello Dell'Utri, had "practically placed the country in our hands".

Mr Dell'Utri, one of the prime minister's closest collaborators and a senator in his People of Freedom party, was sentenced in 2004 to nine years in prison for his mafia connections, but is appealing against the verdict. Mr Berlusconi dismissed the claims made by the supergrass as "vile" nonsense.

But allegations that he is closer to the mafia than he would ever like to admit will not go away.

One of his political favourites, Nicola Cosentino, a junior finance minister and a senior official in Mr Berlusconi's People of Freedom movement, has been forced to deny claims that he received money from the feared Casalese clan of the Camorra.

Investigating magistrates demanded the MP's arrest on charges of mafia collusion, but last month the application was voted down by parliament, where Mr Berlusconi's governing bloc has a majority.

The greatest risk, however, is that the much-trumpeted clampdown will provoke a high-profile mafia backlash that makes the government of Italy appear even less competent at controlling organised crime than it is. The mafia cannot afford for those who pay it protection money to begin to doubt its grip.

Last weekend came a clear sign that the mafia was beginning to strike back when a powerful home-made bomb, consisting of dynamite lashed to a gas canister, exploded outside a court in the city of Reggio Calabria, on the tip of the "toe" of Italy's boot-shaped peninsula, causing damage to the building but no injuries.

The audacious attack was interpreted as a warning by the 'Ndrangheta to police and prosecutors to scale back their recently stepped-up campaign against the organised crime syndicate, arresting mobsters and seizing cash, cars and property. It was a violent means of "reasserting their supremacy in the area," said a senior prosecutor, Giuseppe Pignatone.

In response to the bombing, Mr Maroni ordered an extra 120 paramilitary Carabinieri and other police to Reggio Calabria to protect judges and safeguard against more attacks.

But it will take more than that to rein in the 'Ndragheta, which in recent years is thought to have overtaken its better-known counterparts in Sicily and Naples. Now regarded as the strongest and most impenetrable of Italy's mafia groups, it is believed to control a billion-pound trade in smuggling cocaine from cartels in Colombia into Europe.

The bombing was a sign of the 'Ndrangheta flexing its muscles, said mafia expert and investigative journalist Roberto Saviano, whose book on the Camorra so enraged Neapolitan godfathers that he now needs 24 hour police protection.

"If they had wanted to, the clans could have blown up all of Reggio Calabria," Mr Saviano told La Repubblica newspaper. "The 'Ndrangheta possesses C3 and C4 (plastic) explosives and dozens of bazookas."

The reality, for all Mr Berlusconi's boastfulness, is that no government is likely to make headway in the fight against organised crime with mere arrests and court cases unless it first tackles the social conditions which are the mafia's recruiting sergeants across Italy's poorer south – unemployment, poverty and lack of economic growth.

That, at least, is the view of academics like Miss Allum. "There needs to be a concerted effort to improve levels of education and remedy the lack of job opportunities in the South, but that's not happening," she said. "The mafia is a virus in society and in the body politic. The question is, how do you get it out?"

Not, it would seem, by making quite such extravagant claims about it.