ROME — Police in southern Italy on Friday broke up a multi-million euro insurance fraud racket run by a crime syndicate that depended on the collusion of doctors, lawyers and auto repair shop owners.
Rodolfo Ruperti, a police official based in Catanzaro, a stronghold of the Calabria-based 'ndrangheta syndicate, said the bosses of the Giampa' clan used the proceeds from the reporting of fake accidents — millions of euros each year — to pay the "salaries" of rank-and-file mobsters.
A total of 65 warrants were issued, but many of those sought were already in prison for other crimes.
In a separate crackdown in the Rome seaside suburb of Ostia, police aided by search dogs and helicopter surveillance fanned out to arrest 51 people suspected of involvement in a money laundering scam that used the town's bathing establishments and other local businesses, prosecutors and police told a news conference.
The investigation, aided by information supplied by turncoats from the Sicilian Mafia, probed a series of killings, arson fires and bombings of businesses to intimidate owners into letting mobsters' infiltrate or take over the enterprises.
In another development, Italy's war on organized crime has a new anti-Mafia czar, Franco Roberti, a veteran prosecutor who has battled the Camorra crime syndicate in the Campania region. He fills the vacancy created a few months earlier when Pietro Grasso, now Senate president, quit to enter politics.
Italy's anti-mafia initiatives have relied heavily on turncoats, but some of the top imprisoned bosses have resisted.
Among those is Bernardo Provenzano, the reputed "boss of bosses" who was captured in a farmhouse near Corleone, Sicily, in 2006, after decades on the run. Imprisoned for life for the murders of more than a dozen mobsters, Provenzano has been held in strict conditions prescribed by law for convicted organized crime bosses, including infrequent visits by family members.
