Police investigations into mafia groups in Italy have led to the arrest of 49 individuals, including, for the first time in the region of Lombardy, five women.
Italian police were able to make a series of arrests after intercepting messages that helped shine the light on how the ‘Ndrangheta clan had managed to reconstruct its operations in the North of the country. These messages that were intercepted were often gruesome in their nature, including one in which a mafia member threatened someone saying “I’ll come to your house and I’ll beat you to death”.
Stemming from the investigation, the police have charged people related to the mafia with crimes ranging from mafia-type criminal association, drug trafficking, extortion, arson and illegal carrying of weapons. According to police sources, the investigations have helped to reveal how the ‘Ndrangheta have now managed to copy much of the organisational structure from Southern Italy in Northern Italy as well. They say that the group have “abandoned the military aspect – in favour of more sophisticated criminal strategies”.
Furthermore, prosecutors have explained that in some cases, female leaders of the clan can be “more ruthless than men”. This is according to the Milanese prosecutor Alessandra Ceretti, who explained that “one of the new elements [revealed by the investigation] is the role of women – we have five women among the arrested and one of them has been identified as one of the heads and promoters of the mafia association”. Ceretti added that it was the first that in Lombardy the authorities had such detailed information on the operational and organisational role of a woman in the mafia.
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