Gambinos and the Sicilian connection

As dragnets go, the round-up of members of the Gambino clan and their suspected associates in New York and Palermo has been spectacular. The FBI and Italian anti-Mafia police claim to have pulled in well over 100 suspected Mafiosi, accused of drug trafficking, extortion, and aiding and abetting murder.

The Gambino clan, led until his death in 2002 by John Gotti, the Teflon Don, is one of the five core families of the New York Mafia. It was the Gambinos who organised the notorious summit in 1957 between the old clans of Palermo and New York in the Grand Hotel delle Palme, turning it into one of the tourist attractions of the Sicilian capital ever since.

The meeting was held to impose order on the widening international business of the Cosa Nostra, primarily in drugs.

This week's dragnet shows the Gambinos and their squabbling peers in the Mob are still a force to be reckoned with. The breakthrough this time came with the arrest last November 5 of Salvatore Lo Piccolo (left) at a seaside resort in Sicily's gold coast, the Conca d'Oro. He was the boss of bosses, in charge of the 'Commission' of the major clans on the island, though he had many rivals, and one betrayed him.

His arrest has allowed Italy's anti-Mafia police and the FBI to start unpicking cocaine shipping networks, and break the regime of the pizzu - the name of the extortion fees paid by some 80 to 90 per cent of all businesses in Sicily.

Major corporations and the government have joined the fight with a determination not seen before. The giant cement company, Italcimento, based at Gela, has threatened to fire any managers paying off the Mob. The employers' association and the Italian government are now paying generous compensation for any damage caused by standing up to the gangsters.

The round-up of the Gambinos and associates is part of the new initiative, and the campaign is far from over. The Italian authorities have been shocked at the results of studies set up by the Prodi government into the impact of organised crime on the Italian economy. Globally the linked mafia economies are a multi-trillion-dollar operation. In Italy the various mafias move roughly the equivalent of 40 per cent of the state budget a year.

The mountains of uncollected rubbish in Naples this winter have given alarming proof of the strength of the local Mafia, the Camorra, across the region. "It's a huge business, a way of life and a mentality, which runs throughout Naples and Campania," a financial journalist observed last month, "it will take generations to remove."

The new kids on the block, the United Holy Crown (from south east Italy) and their allies in the Albanian and Balkan mafias, are, if anything, more worrying than the Camorra because they are less predictable and extremely violent. They deal in anything from drugs to human parts, nuclear waste and illegal immigrants. Through the migrant traffic they are getting a grip on seasonal agriculture across much of southern Europe, including Greece and southern France.

The biggest problem for the authorities now is forward intelligence. Judge Giovanni Falcone, one of the most successful anti-Mafia investigators, never thought he could win the fight against the Cosa Nostra with a knock-out blow. "Whenever we uncover a major Mafia operation or network, we know there are people out there who have moved on and are already opening new lines of operations which it'll take years to uncover," said Falcone before he was blown up in his car outside Palermo airport in May 1992.

Already there will be amici degli amici filling the space left by those hauled into custody, and opening up new lines of business from Kabul to Kansas, and Palermo to Poughkeepsie. ·