A massive European police operation targeting the Calabrian mafia, the much-dreaded ‘Ndrangheta, resulted in 132 arrests, searches and seizures in ten countries, including Italy, Germany and France, on Wednesday.
It is “the hardest blow inflicted to date on the Italian criminal organization”, underlined Europol, the European Union agency for police cooperation.
The other countries concerned by this operation, baptized Eureka, are in Europe Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Romania and Belgium, and in Latin America Brazil and Panama, specified Europol, which coordinated the various polices involved.
La’Ndrangheta dominates the cocaine market on the Old Continent, where it is also implicated in cases of money laundering, corruption and violence.
The investigation has also confirmed significant flows of drugs between South America and Europe, managed in particular by the clan of San Luca in Calabria, the tip of the Italian Boot.
The families at the head of this criminal network have also been involved for decades in violence to compete for this lucrative market, which culminated in the massacre of Duisburg in Germany in 2007.
A dozen people were arrested in Belgium, twenty in Germany, and a hundred others in the peninsula for mafia association, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, tax evasion and arms laundering.
According to the Italian public prosecutor’s office, companies and real estate have also been seized for an amount of 25 million euros.
As part of these investigations, launched at European level more than three years ago, the Italian and Belgian authorities were able to attribute to the ‘Ndrangetha the import and trafficking of nearly 25 tonnes of cocaine, for the period from October 2019 to January 2022.
2700 police
The South American cocaine passed through the ports of Gioia Tauro (Calabria) and Antwerp (Belgium) but also other ports in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands (Rotterdam), thanks to the agreements established by the ‘Ndrangheta with the Colombian criminal organization Clan del Golfo and another ethnic Albanian criminal group operating in Ecuador and Europe.
Investigators also uncovered a proposal to supply a Brazilian paramilitary organization, Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), with a container full of weapons of war through Pakistani criminals in exchange for shipping huge quantities of drugs at the port of Gioia Tauro.
The money from these multiple traffics has been reinvested, among other things, in the real estate sector, hotels, restaurants and supermarkets, particularly in Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina. .
More than 2,700 police officers were mobilized on the ground for this crackdown launched Wednesday at dawn, including 1,400 for Italy alone.
In Germany, around a hundred searches were carried out, according to the authorities of the Länder of Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland.
Bavaria’s Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann called the operation a “sensitive blow to the ‘Ndrangetha”, considered the richest and most powerful mafia in Italy with ramifications in some 40 countries.
In August 2007, a bloody episode brought to light the establishment of the ‘Ndrangheta in Germany: the bodies of six Italians, aged between 16 and 39 and members of one of the two San Luca clans, were discovered riddled with bullets in two vehicles in front of the Italian restaurant “Da Bruno” in Duisburg (west).
This massacre was, according to investigators, a vendetta after the assassination at the end of 2006 of Maria Strangio, wife of Giovanni Nirta, head of the rival clan.