When anti-mafia police swooped on the Sicilian mob on Tuesday, their main aim was to stop them regrouping and creating a new governing body or cupola.
But what has emerged from their wide-ranging investigation is an organised crime group having to adapt to modern realities and displaying a nostalgia for the loftier ambitions of the past.
They don’t produce mobsters like they used to, Giancarlo Romano told an associate in a wiretapped conversation before he was shot dead a year ago.
Despite its evident yearning for crimes of the past, the Mafia in Sicily is still a force to be reckoned with, warns anti-mafia prosecutor Maurizio de Lucia: “Cosa nostra is alive and present.”
Investigators have revealed that the new generation of gang bosses have taken to using encrypted mobile phones and thousands of short-life micro-sim cards smuggled into prisons.
This way they sought to avoid being eavesdropped as they focused their activities on drug crime, money-laundering and online gambling.
Sicily’s Cosa Nostra has even started working with other gangs, including the notorious and far larger ‘Ndrangheta in mainland Italy.
Of the 181 arrest warrants served on suspected Sicilian gangsters across four districts of the capital Palermo, 33 were for convicted figures already in jail.
National anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Melillo said that, despite all the crackdowns, the high-security prison system was at the mercy of the mob.
The inquiry revealed that one gangster had been able to watch a beating he had ordered from inside jail in real time via video-link.
The Mafia became supremely confident about the encrypted messaging platform it was using, which featured text-messages, voice notes and images.
But a year ago a bug installed in the home of one gangster recorded him and another man complaining about the connection going down on an encrypted chat. As they tried to restore the link, the names of several Mafia figures were mentioned out loud.
Sicily’s authorities heard every word.
