Organized crime is operating in every sector of Italy’s society (including our Italian) government, That’s the grim take-away from the most recent police report by the police anti-Mafia investigation division, the DIA. The dreaded Calabrian ’Ndrangheta has spread “everywhere” in the north and is now being emulated by other clans. A gang in the southeastern province of Foggia tried to bomb a key witness in a criminal trial twice in the past month, drawing thousands of people onto the streets there in protest.
In Sicily, the Cosa Nostra is reasserting its control in the western province of Trapani, and the Palermo Mafia “has intensified its relations” with its US counterparts. The Neapolitan Camorra, meanwhile, is so well structured that it sponsors gangs of youths that “constitute a sort of Camorra Academy”. These crime syndicates have grown far beyond the traditional mob rackets of loan sharking and waste management. Public contracts are compromised at all levels, from city councils to parliament, allowing gangs “to drain resources and launder money”. This infiltration of our politics and economy, the DIA says, is “more insidious than violence”. If the Mafia can bribe their way to the top, there’s not much hope for Italy’s democracy. (Dario Del Porto, La Repubblica, Rome, Jan 2020).
No doubt the mafia corrupts Italian society, but how do they differ from the huge American corporations who spend fortunes on lobbying, wining and dining politicians, distorting elections with money, offering inducements for favorable contracts, cosy regulations and tax concessions? Why is there no talk of breaking up distorting monopolies? Epicurus might have had a Greek word for all this – he would have called It a ?????? *
* If you don’t speak Greek – a racket.
