Italian police detained 130 people on Feb. 11 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 police—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 such as “The Godfather”—terrorized Sicily for years and at the height of its power, in 1992, killed 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 Feb. 11 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.”
Speaking on Feb. 11, Italy’s national anti-mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Melillo, said the investigation mirrored findings in other regions, “namely, that the high security prison circuit is a circuit that is subject to the domination of criminal organizations in which detained mobsters enjoy an intact ability to communicate and to spread criminal directives.”
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.
“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,“ de Lucia said. ”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.”
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, writing on social media platform X, said the arrests had inflicted “a very hard blow to Cosa Nostra,” and were giving a clear signal that “the fight against the mafia has not stopped and will not stop.”
The Feb. 11 raids were predominantly in the Palermo neighborhoods of Pagliarelli, Porta Nuova, Tommaso Natale-San Lorenzo, Bagheria, and the Santa Maria del Gesù.
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.
In 2018, Settimo Mineo, an 80-year-old jeweler, was arrested along with 46 others, and accused of succeeding Riina as the head of the Sicilian mafia. He was later convicted of various criminal charges in 2020.
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 Feb. 11: “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.”
“Despite being perceived as a declining force within the Italian mafia landscape, Cosa Nostra maintains a significant role, particularly in the drug trade,” she wrote.
But Sergi told The Epoch Times in an email that Mineo was not the leader of the Cosa Nostra and added, “There is no known boss.”
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
