US:Police in the United States and Italy arrested 77 suspected members of the Mafia yesterday, including some of its most wanted leaders, for an array of crimes going back more than 30 years.
The three-year joint investigation sought to prevent organised crime in New York and Sicily from reuniting their drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, officials in both countries said.
US authorities rounded up 58 suspects with the help of an informant deep inside the Gambino crime family. Police said the source helped nail the three top Gambino members not already in jail.
A US grand jury indicted 62 suspects with charges including murder, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling, cocaine and marijuana distribution, money laundering, bribing labour officials and embezzling union funds.
"Organised crime still exists," New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo told a news conference. "We like to think it's a vestige of the past. It's not. It is as unrelenting as weeds that continue to sprout in the cracks in society." The US investigation focused on the Gambino family once run by the late John Gotti. The indictment charges one Gambino family soldier, Charles Carneglia, with at least five murders dating to 1976.
Associates of the Genovese and Bonanno families were also arrested. More than 300 Italian police were mobilised, mostly in Sicily, in an operation code-named "Old Bridge", arresting 19 suspects and filing new allegations against four others already detained for separate crimes.
Italian prosecutors said the operation sought to block the re-establishment of the New York-Palermo axis, which ran drug trafficking in the 1980s.
"There was an attempt to rekindle ties between Cosa Nostra in Palermo and New York because the Sicilian Mafia wanted to get back into drug trafficking in a big way," said top anti-Mafia prosecutor Francesco Messineo in Rome.
The joint inquiry focused on the Inzerillo family, which was forced to leave Sicily in the 1980s after a Mafia turf war and which re-based in the US. There was a split in the Sicilian Mafia over whether its members, known as "the runaways", should be allowed to return.
Among those arrested were suspects linked to Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was arrested on November 5th in Sicily. He had become the new "boss of bosses" after the arrest in 2006 of Bernardo Provenzano, who had been on the run for 43 years.