(Reuters) – Italian police targeting historic mafia families arrested 95 people on Monday for extortion, drug trafficking and money laundering, and in the process they may also have solved the century-old mob murder of a New York detective.
After two years of investigations, the arrests went after members of two mafia groups that have long operated in the western part of Palermo, the island’s capital and largest city, court documents showed.
“There hasn’t been a dragnet on this scale in many years,” finance police Colonel Calogero Scibetta told Reuters. “These arrests have wiped out two entire mob families.”
In recent years police and prosecutors have dealt severe blows to the Sicilian mafia, historically Italy’s most powerful criminal group, while its sister organisation, the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria at the southern end of the Italian mainland, has grown in strength by becoming a big importer of cocaine.
To a Sicilian mob decimated by arrests and seeking to rebuild, criminal pedigree is important, as the investigation demonstrated when it wiretapped a 2013 conversation between two suspected young mobsters talking in their car.
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