Italian police arrested dozens of members of various mafia groups today in a vast operation that netted large caches of weapons smuggled from Bosnia.
Anti-Mafia Police said the raids where carried out in several areas of southern Italy against members of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Naples-area Camorra seeking to wrest control of the fruit and vegetable trade in southern Italy.
Police issued more than 70 arrest warrants and confiscated millions of euros worth of real estate, weapons and vehicles.
One of the arrested, Paolo Schiavone (27), a rising boss of the Casalesi clan of the Camorra around the southern city of Caserta, was nabbed on a luxury cruise ship as he was returning from a honeymoon, police said.
Video footage distributed by police showed that the caches of weapons included hand-held rocket launchers, military rifles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and grenades.
They said most of the weapons were smuggled in from Bosnia to fill the arsenals of the crime clans.
General Antonio Girone, head of the Naples area Anti-Mafia Police, said the discovery of the pact between the various groups, which traditionally have worked for the most part separately in their own territories, was worrying.
"In any situation where there is an alliance among military groups, it will be more difficult to dismantle," he told Italian television.
The operation broke up a plan by the crime groups to wrest control the lucrative fruit and vegetable trade in all of southern Italy from Rome to Sicily.
Coldiretti, a farmers' group, said the infiltration of organised crime in the trade, including control of transport by truck, bloated prices from production to retail by 200 per cent.
The prices were inflated as a direct result of the extortion imposed on the crime groups on growers, truckers and retails, who were forced to pass on the costs to consumers.
Reuters