More Mafia News...

Via the Telegraph:

A small-time mafia gang have been branded "idiots" after sending a donkey's head to a shopkeeper in an ill-conceived stunt apparently lifted from The Godfather.
The gang's target, a local bread shop owner who had refused to pay protection money, was so puzzled by the confused threat that he presumed it was a practical joke.
In Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film, mafia boss Don Corleone uses the "gift" of a severed horse's head to intimate film producer Jack Woltz into giving his godson a part.
Woltz woke up one morning to find the bloody head lying next to him in his bed, and immediately consented to the request made by the Don, played by Marlon Brando.
But while that threat made sense – the head was of Woltz's prized thoroughbred stallion - there was no such context for the donkey.
"The man didn't know the donkey, he didn't own the donkey, he doesn't care about donkeys. It didn't make sense. It was the work of idiots," a police spokesman in Villafranca Padovana, northern Italy, said.

What a bishop is supposed to do...

Kudos to this Italian (Sicilian) bishop for taking a stand. He's putting more than a cosy relationship with certain politicians or his personal comfort on the line:

An Italian bishop has been given an armed escort for the first time in more than 20 years after he defied the Mafia by refusing to celebrate the funeral mass of a Godfather.
Bishop Michele Pennisi, 62, stood his ground against the Cosa Nostra and said that he would not allow the funeral of one of its bosses, Daniele Emmanuello, 43, to take place in his church in Sicily.
Within days of making the ruling he was the target of a poison pen campaign and posters and flyers of him appeared overnight containing threats against him.
Emmanuello, 43, was the Godfather of his family and had been on the run for more than ten years before he was tracked down by police to an isolated country farmhouse at Villarosa near Enna two months ago.
In the shoot-out with police he was gunned down and as he lay dying officers pulled from his throat pizzini, or little notes, that he had used to pass on orders to members of his crime family.
[...]
Bishop Pennisi said: "The Lord will protect us and free us from the Mafia and from the pizzo [protection money payments].
"I have been the target of threats and insinuations from the beginning, and I did not wish to respond to and give further ammunition to these people.
"However the police have told me not to underestimate these people and as such I have been assigned protection - I understand the last religious figure to do so was the Bishop of Palermo in 1984.
"The flyers said that I was a servant of the State because I had refused to allow Emmanuello's funeral to take place in my church.
"I believe this was the right decision - my mission is against the Mafia and I have always believed that between the Mafia and Christian values there is no compatibility.
"It is the Christian duty of everyone to fight crime and make these so called men of honour become new people.
"I assured the Emmanuello family of my spiritual help but that I was not going to allow the funeral to take place in the church.''

Garbage Wars

The situation in Naples as described in the Telegraph:

The Italian army moved into Naples as tensions over the city's mounting rubbish crisis erupted in violence.
Entire districts of the city are lying submerged under more than 5,000 tons of waste. The pile is growing at the rate of 800 tons a day.
No rubbish has been collected in Naples since Dec 21, when the city's dumps reached their capacity.
While the residents are furious at the stink, and the risk of disease, there have also been protests at plans to create new dumps or reopen old ones.
Riots broke out at Pianura, the site of an enormous open-air dump that the locals say pollutes the area with deadly dioxins.
Four buses were set alight during the night and police were struck with a hail of stones as they tried to dismantle temporary roadblocks.
(snip)
Army engineers used bulldozers to clear waste from schools in the Caserta region.
The government called for the schools to be opened, but no students arrived.
Clemente Mastella, the justice minister, said the dead hand of the Camorra, or Neapolitan mafia, was behind the crisis.
"People who set fire to buses are not citizens, but usually people sent by the mafia," he said.
It is in the Camorra's interests for rubbish to build up in the city, since the clans own most of the rubbish recycling companies that would eventually win contracts to dispose of the waste.
In the past, corrupt firms have been found to be shipping waste to China, where it is buried, instead of recycling it.
Mafia families also profit from buying properties in the troubled areas, where prices have become depressed by the continuing rubbish crisis.
In addition, the Camorra is said by the police to bring lorry-loads of waste to Naples from factories in northern Italy for fees that undercut legal competitors, adding to the rubbish piles.

Also, there's a report on the practice of coffee-sharing:

Steeply rising prices for basic foods have inspired a new fad in the south of Italy: "coffee-sharing"
The trend, which started in the tiny Sicilian town of Partinico, involves two or even three people taking a sip each from the tiny cup of espresso.
"It is sociable and it has become a habit," said Alberto Guercio, a regular at Partinico's Bar del Viale.
"I usually go in with a friend anyway, so I offer him a sip. We save money, and we drink less coffee. Everyone knows that too many cups make you feel ill anyway."
Etiquette demands that the first drinker uses one side of the cup, the second person uses the other, and that the third person may drink from the middle.
"It is no longer rare to hear the Sicilian phrase 'menzu l'uno?' ('half each?')," said La Stampa newspaper.
Partinico, which lies around 19 miles from Palermo, has one of the highest rates of coffee consumption per head in the country.
Since the euro was introduced in 2001, the price of a cup has risen by around 40 per cent, to 90 cents (67p).

Naples Garbage Crisis

Via At Home in Rome, there's this sideshow of images from the Naples area where garbage simply isn't being collected. Check out this post and comments for an idea of what's going on.

Doing porridge?

From the Telegraph:

Diners are flocking to what could perhaps be termed the most exclusive restaurant in Italy - one located inside a top security prison, where the chefs and waiters are Mafiosi, robbers and murderers.
Serenaded by Bruno, a pianist doing life for murder, the clientele eat inside a deconsecrated chapel set behind the 60 ft-high walls, watch towers, searchlights and security cameras of the daunting 500-year-old Fortezza Medicea, at Volterra near Pisa.
Under the watchful eye of armed prison warders, a 20-strong team of chefs, kitchen hands and waiters prepares 120 covers for diners who have all undergone strict security checks. Tables are booked up weeks in advance.
The prison director, Maria Grazia Giampiccolo, said the inmates had developed a flair for their cooking: "I feel haute cuisine in a place like this prepares the inmates for when they are eventually released. The guests enjoy their meals and although the security seems at first very daunting and imposing, they get over it quite quickly and forget about the guards."
(snip)
In the kitchen, Egidio, a burly 50-year-old from Taranto, in southern Italy, reigns over his team of six chefs like an Italian Gordon Ramsay. "The pasta is boiling over! More salt, less garlic! Keep stirring the pasta sauce!" he shouts.
Seventeen years into his sentence, he is thinking of going into the restaurant business when they finally let him out. "Like any Italian I take my food very, very seriously. I like to be sure the diners are satisfied and they don't just enjoy the food, but enjoy it with the same passion that I prepare it."
(snip)
Diners professed themselves delighted. "When I heard about it I thought it sounded fun, so we booked a table and I have to say the food has been very good," said off-duty policeman Alessandra Ciabattini, 36.
"The fact that the dishes are prepared by murderers, armed robbers, Mafiosi or terrorists doesn't really bother me, though I might be worried if someone had been convicted of poisoning."

’Ndrangheta

I'm sometimes tempted to say that the only thing in Italy that's organised is the crime.
Anyway, today's Times has an interesting article about the ’Ndrangheta:

When the Mayor of Buccinasco voiced suspicions about the “infiltration” of the local economy by men with Calabrian accents, his car was set on fire. When he excluded Calabrian-run building companies from public contracts in his town near Milan, he received a “Happy Easter” card – with a bullet inside it.
Maurizio Carbonera says that he will not be intimidated. But his experience is far from unique. Yesterday police arrested 20 members of the ’Ndrangheta – the Calabrian Mafia – in Milan, including the notorious clan boss Salvatore Morabito, and seized 250kg (550lb) of cocaine.
Until recently the ’Ndrangheta confined its activities to kidnappings in the remote rural South. But Milan magistrates suspect that it has taken control of illegal drugs and legitimate businesses in the north with a turnover of €40 billion (£27 billion) a year – equivalent to 3.5 per cent of Italian GDP.
(snip)
“The ’Ndrangheta controls banks, restaurants, shopping centres, construction companies, betting shops, luxury boutiques, supermarkets, night-clubs, discotheques and gaming arcades thoughout Milan and Lombardy,” says Laura Barbaini, the Milan prosecutor leading an investigation into the Calabrian Mafia’s growing grip on the Italian financial and economic nerve centre.
Less well known than the Cosa Nostra (Sicilian Mafia) or the Neapolitan Camorra, the 150 family clans that make up the ’Ndrangheta – from a Greek word meaning “honour” – have discreetly established a network of accountants, lawyers and bank managers in Milan, according to Ms Barbaini. It is estimated to have 10,000 members in Italy and abroad.
(snip)
The Calabrian mafiosi, says Giacomo Amadori, an investigative reporter, have “swapped rough rural clothes and flat caps for slick city suits”. But they retain the “blood ties” that originally knitted the clans together in Calabria. To foil investigators and phone taps, they use impenetrable dialect, and even a whistled code used by shepherds in the Aspromonte mountains around their Reggio Calabria stronghold.
(snip)
Alberto Cisterna, a prosecutor in Reggio Calabria, says that the ’Ndrangheta’s drugs smuggling techniques are “endlessly inventive and ingenious”. “Pentiti”, or turncoats – common in the Sicilian Mafia – are almost unheard of in Calabria. The ’Ndrangheta also keeps a low profile, avoiding violence – although investigators say that it is stockpiling weapons in case of “turf wars” with other criminal gangs.

Jail Switch for the Tractor

From the Telegraph:

Bernardo Provenzano, the so-called godfather of godfathers, has been moved from his top security jail after warders gave him a cake for his 74th birthday.
The Mafia supremo, who was arrested last year in an isolated farmhouse after more than 40 years on the run, was secretly moved after officials decided he and the guards had become "too friendly".
He had been in solitary confinement under the strict Rule 41 prisoner regime for Mafia bosses, which means only one hour a day of exercise and limited visits and phone calls.
An investigation was launched by the Italian prison service after a tip-off that he had been given the cake in his cell at Terni prison, north of Rome, earlier this year.
(snip)
The Department of Prisons in Rome raised the matter with prison director Francesco Dell'Aria, and decided to move Provenzano as a precaution.
He was driven under police and helicopter escort 300 miles north to the maximum-security wing at Novara prison, near Turin. The measures were taken despite the insistence of prison staff that the cake was not part of any elaborate escape attempt.
(snip)
Apart from the cake - which prison sources said he did not eat - his only other request has been for a satellite television link so he can see Sicilian regional news.
The prison denied his request and asked if he would prefer a subscription to a Sicilian newspaper instead. Provenzano - who is thought to have made millions from extortion, gun running and contract-rigging - replied: "I haven't got any money."