More than 80 reputed mobsters were today in jail or on the run in New York and Sicily after what was being hailed as the biggest transatlantic strike against Cosa Nostra in almost a quarter of a century.
US law enforcement officials seized 54 suspects, including three said to be high-ranking members of New York’s Gambino crime family. An initially unspecified number of further arrests were made on Sicily where prosecutors in the capital, Palermo, signed a joint warrant for the arrest of 29 others.
After capturing the "boss of bosses" of the Sicilian mafia two years ago, and arresting his would-be successor in 2007, investigators were claiming the most recent operation – codenamed Old Bridge — had broken up an attempt to re-forge links between the island’s mobsters and US organized crime.
The mass arrest warrant issued in Palermo referred vaguely to "illegal trafficking", but there were hints elsewhere in the document that a faction of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, allied to dons in America, had been trying to muscle its way back into the international narcotics business.
Some Italian commentators suggested this could have been part of a broader plan to fill the vacuum at the top of the island’s mafia left by the 2006 arrest of the "capo di tutti i capi", Bernardo Provenzano.
His capture set off a chain of investigations and operations, culminating in yesterday’s co-ordinated raids by the FBI and Italian police, that have dealt crushing blows to the world’s most fabled crime syndicate.
Those arrested in the US, mostly in the New York area, faced accusations including murder, racketeering, extortion, loan-sharking and pension fund embezzlement, an official said. They allegedly included the three highest-ranking members of the Gambino clan not already in prison.
According to Italian reports, one was Francesco "Frankie Boy" Cali, identified by prosecutors as the link man between the two branches of the Cosa Nostra. In an intercepted telephone call, a reputed Sicilian hoodlum was heard to say: "Frank is our friend. He’s everything over there."
The speaker, Gianni Nicchi, still only in his 20s, is described by investigators as one of Cosa Nostra’s fastest-rising "stars". The warrant records that he acted as a go-between, flying across the Atlantic to meetings with some of the top US godfathers.
Other leading dons earmarked for arrest belonged to the losing faction in the so-called Second Mafia war of the 1980s. Some of the few who escaped death fled to the US where they were given protection by the Gambino family.
Since about 2000, several have quietly returned to Sicily. They include 36 year-old Giovanni Inzerillo, the son of Salvatore "Totuccio" Inzerillo, whose murder in 1981 sparked the conflict.
Leave Your Comments