Pizza Ciro, a picturesque restaurant in the heart of Italy’s capital . . . had been in business for more than a decade before it was seized by Italian authorities last month,
along with 26 other restaurants and cafés in the heart of Rome. In a major sweep against the Mafia, police arrested 90 people and seized assets worth 250 million euros, including pizzerias allegedly owned by a crime syndicate that used them to launder proceeds from drug dealing, extortion and loan-sharking....
The Reach Of The Octopus"The raid on pizzerias unveiled an emblematic alliance between a well-established family of business owners in Rome and one of Naples’ most powerful Camorra families," Prestipino, who leads the investigation as Rome’s deputy chief prosecutor, said in an interview. The size of the Mafia presence in Rome is difficult to assess, according to Prestipino, but "for sure, there is so much wealth in Rome that is indirectly linked to criminal groups,” he said.
According to Sabrina Alfonsi, the president of Rome's central district, "
nearly 70 percent of restaurants and bars in downtown Rome are thought to be in the hands of organized crime." Figures from LUISS University in Rome put the turnover for Mafia groups from their Rome operations at more than one billion euros, or $1.35 billion, a year.
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People may not even realize that they are ordering their pizza from the mob, whose extensive reach is exemplified by the euphemism many Italians use to describe it: la piovra, the giant octopus, whose tentacles reach far and wide.
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Anti-Mafia prosecutors are focusing on the many shops and commercial activities in the city whose ownership has changed very rapidly. Many of the new buyers, mostly from southern Italy, are quick to replace staff and suppliers with people coming from their own areas. Then they hire relatives, or crime-family affiliates, who often are made to appear as legitimate owners of the business.
Fancy Mafiosi Go AbroadIn sharp contrast with the violent crimes they commit in southern Italy, mafiosi in Rome are
very careful to avoid clamor, so as not to draw attention from the authorities. Some criminal organizations are said to have agreed to a non-aggression pact in order to avoid public attention.
Departing from traditional money-laundering strategies, they no longer invests in smoky bars, cheap hotels or run-down strip clubs in the suburbs, good for stocking cash rather than generating it.
Today, the mafiosi increasingly choose prestigious locations and fashionable restaurants they expect to generate a profit. Prosecutors found the Continis indirectly owned pizzerias located right in front of the Senate, or even tauntingly close to the headquarters of the National Anti-Mafia Prosecutor’s Office. One could be forgiven for having no idea who’s really behind those places; many didn’t, even among the rich and famous who ate there and whose pictures still grace the doorway at Pizza Ciro. Among them are actresses, soccer players, even former prime minister Mario Monti and the celebrated anti-Mafia prosecutor Antonio Ingroia. ...
But unwittingly helping the Mafia launder its money doesn't necessarily have to happen in Italy. Mafia groups are among the most powerful and connected to other similar organizations globally. A report in 2012 from Confesercenti, an Italian business lobby, estimated that
the main Mafia groups had a yearly turnover of 140 billion euros ($190 billion), almost one tenth of the size of the entire Italian economy, with cash reserves of 65 billion euros and assets all over the world....
But tourists sitting in Rome’s Mafia-linked restaurants don’t know any of this. They have no clue that the cheese on top of their margherita pie may have come from a dairy farm controlled by the Camorra, or that the young man serving them may really be a crime-family enforcer moonlighting as a fake waiter. And they don’t know that the lyrics of the Neapolitan folk song blasting from the speakers at Ciro sound like a perfect, sadly ironic image of many Italians’ unwillingness to face the hard truth that organized crime is buying up their country: “Let's forget the past! We're from Naples!"
http://www.ibtimes.com/want-some-mafia- ... ts-1555674
