What occurred to by no means going in opposition to the household?
Leaders inside the Cosa Nostra, Sicily’s mafia, have reportedly complained that mob recruits aren’t what they was once, as almost 150 individuals related to the group had been arrested this week.
“The level is low, today they arrest someone and if he becomes a turncoat they arrest another… wretched low-level,” former Cosa Nostra boss Giancarlo Romano stated in a wiretapped dialog final yr earlier than he was killed in a shootout, in keeping with BBC Information.
Romano additionally revealed that he was nostalgic for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 traditional “The Godfather,” a couple of fictional mob household in New York.
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Carabinieri officers in Sicily. (Valeria Ferraro/Anadolu through Getty Pictures)
“If you watch ‘The Godfather,’ the connections he had… he was very influential because of the power that he built at a political level,” Romano instructed his affiliate.
He continued, “But us – what can we do? We’re on our knees, guys. We think we do business, but these days it’s others who do it. We used to be number one, now it’s others… we’re just gypsies.”
The mobsters additionally appear to love actor Robert De Niro, who performed Vito Corleone in “The Godfather Part II,” and Spider-Man as different wiretaps revealed them as nicknames for one another, in keeping with The Guardian.
This week Sicilian officers performed early morning raids, serving 183 arrest warrants on these believed to be related to the Cosa Nostra for crimes starting from mafia affiliation to extortion and tried homicide. Of these, 36 had been already in custody.
Whereas raids like this week’s have weakened the Cosa Nostra, Italian officers warn they’re nonetheless a risk.
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“The investigations that led to Tuesday’s arrests demonstrate that Cosa Nostra is alive and present and communicates with completely new communication channels,” Maurizio de Lucia, chief prosecutor of Sicily’s capital of Palermo, stated at a press convention, referencing the mafia’s use of encrypted apps to speak with one another. “It is doing business and trying to rebuild its army.”
Domenico La Padula, with the Italian Carabinieri police, instructed The New York Instances this week that the Cosa Nostra “is far from dead.”
He stated they’ve been in a position to survive by discovering “new energy and new strength,” with new recruits and Twenty first-century legal ventures like on-line playing.
Palermo, Sicily’s capital. (Frank Bienewald/LightRocket through Getty Pictures)
The Cosa Nostra has remained “strongly tied to the rules of its founding fathers and its ancient rituals,” the Carabinieri instructed The Instances, including that their use of encrypted gadgets has “limited the need for traditional meetings and gatherings to the bare minimum.”
John Dickie, who wrote “Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse and Cosa Nostra, A History of the Sicilian Mafia,” instructed The Telegraph that Italian authorities have change into “fantastic” at surveilling the mafia.
“Mafia dons have been caught boasting how good their anti-bugging devices were, at the same time that they were being bugged,” he revealed.
Dickie additionally agreed that the Cosa Nostra seems to be “in decline.”
“You only have to read the phone taps where the bosses are saying ‘it’s not like it used to be,’” he stated. “This is about the fifth time that the bosses have tried to reorganise the cupola since the early 1990s. Every time they have been thwarted. The authorities were on to them.”
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He continued, “These arrests mean that Cosa Nostra has another big task to rebuild, and they show that the state is still stronger than the mafia.”
