On Monday an Italian court convicted more than 200 mobsters and collaborators after a nearly three-year trial against Calabria’s notorious ‘Ndrangheta mafia.
The court in southern Vibo Valentia issued sentences, which ranged from 30 years to a few months.
Prosecutors asked for sentences totalling nearly 5 000 years for 322 accused mafia members and their collaborators.
The court convicted 207 defendants, with four senior members each sentenced to 30 years in jail. The three-judge panel acquitted 131 defendants.
One of the trial’s most high-profile defendants was 70-year-old former parliamentarian and defence lawyer Giancarlo Pittelli, accused of being a fixer for the mafia. He received 11 years; prosecutors had requested 17 years.
This was Italy’s largest mafia trial in decades and marks the most significant blow to the ‘Ndragheta.
The ‘Ndrangheta’s roots are in the poor region of Calabria, at the toe of Italy’s boot. It now exercises a near-monopoly over the European cocaine trade with a presence in more than 40 countries.
Former mafia operatives detailed the ‘Ndrangheta’s brutality and methodology: violent ambushes, shaking down business owners, rigging public tenders, stockpiling weapons, collecting votes, or passing kickbacks to the powerful.
Historically, defendants included police and public servants.
Weapons were hidden in cemetery chapels, drugs were transported in ambulances, and municipal water supplies were diverted for marijuana crops.
Opponents found dead puppies, dolphins, or goat heads dumped on their doorsteps, sledgehammers taken to storefronts, or cars torched. People were also beaten, fired at and killed.
Originally livestock thieves, the ‘Ndrangheta flourished while authorities concentrated on Sicily’s Cosa Nostra in the legendary trial of 1986-1987 in Palermo.
Experts estimate that the ‘Ndrangheta consists of about 150 Calabrian families, brings in more than 50 billion euros annually from drug trafficking, usury, syphoning public funds and extortion.