Apr 24, 2014. ROME — The small businesses were sprinkled throughout the Italian capital: One restaurant was only a few blocks from the Senate. A cafe was at the edge of the upscale diplomatic district, while a gelato shop was near the Pantheon. There was even a hotel not far from the hilltop statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Italy’s unification.
In a city where government and tourism are engines of the local economy, these storefront businesses seemed typical until a police crackdown exposed them as money-laundering fronts for mob organizations based in southern Italy. During January and February alone, Italian officials seized 51 million euros, or about $70 million, in mob properties and other assets in Rome, providing a small glimpse of the legal business interests that southern clans control in the capital.
The crackdown in Rome exposed just a small corner of what officials describe as a mob economy that has rapidly expanded across Europe. In an era of austerity, with Italy awash in debt and struggling to recover, organized crime groups are sitting on mountains of cash. They have taken advantage of the economic crisis to accelerate their infiltration of legitimate businesses outside their southern Italian strongholds and now control commercial interests in Rome and Milan, as well as in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain and beyond.
“For the last 20 years, they have a lot of liquidity,” said Michele Prestipino, the prosecutor who oversaw the recent crackdown and seizures in Rome. “This is a problem today. They have too much money. They can’t invest it all. It is the opposite of what happens to regular entrepreneurs.”
If Europe once thought of organized crime families as largely an Italian problem — and if many Italians thought the problem was mostly confined to the south — the breadth of their assets across the Continent is forcing a reappraisal. In February, the European Parliament passed a new directive making it easier for national authorities to confiscate criminal assets, in response to evidence that organized crime groups have gobbled up properties and companies across Europe.
Experts say Europe must introduce tough organized crime laws, like those that already exist in Italy, and expand law enforcement efforts. Some say the same focus that is applied to fighting terrorism should be applied to confronting organized crime. Besides Italian mob groups, experts say, other criminal organizations, including ones from Albania, China and Russia, are also moving into legal business sectors in Europe.
“Democracies underestimate the fight against the Mafia,” said Giuseppe Lumia, a senator and member of Italy’s Anti-Mafia Commission. “Mafias have become global. They do business, and do money laundering, between countries. But the anti-Mafia agencies are national and local.”
Determining how much cash Italy’s mob organizations turn over in a single year from illegal activities is extremely difficult, with estimates varying widely, from about €10 billion, or about $14 billion, to as high as €220 billion, or about $304 billion. One of Italy’s largest business associations, Confesercenti, has estimated that organized crime accounts for roughly €130 billion, or about $180 billion, in annual turnover — about 7 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product. Confesercenti also estimated that the organized crime groups had roughly €65 billion, or about $90 billion, in cash reserves.
“They have amounts of money that are incredible,” said David Ellero, a specialist in Italian organized crime at Europol, the European law enforcement agency. “In some investigations, the flows of cash were so conspicuous that rather than counting it, it was being weighed on scales.”
The richest organized crime family is believed to be the ’Ndrangheta, (pronounced n-DRANG-gay-tah) a group from the Calabria region that now controls much of Europe’s cocaine trade. Analysts say the ’Ndrangheta is active in Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Switzerland. The other two main organizations are the Camorra, the clans based in the Naples area, which are especially powerful in southern Spain; and the Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mob families depicted in “The Godfather,” which are active across Europe.
In their home regions, Italy’s organized crime groups often operate as shadow states, infiltrating local politics while controlling territory through intimidation and violence. Analysts say this local dominance explains why the organizations are heavily involved in sectors such as construction, mining, waste management and transportation, where their political influence allows them to steer government contracts to their favored firms.
In northern Italy and in other European countries, mob groups operate far less conspicuously, analysts say, especially since they lack the same level of political or territorial influence. But a report presented recently to European Union officials concluded that mob tentacles were nearly everywhere: hotels, nightclubs, real estate, gambling, construction, retail gasoline sales, wholesaling of clothing and jewelry, food processing, health care, renewable energy and more.
“They have specific preferences for certain sectors,” said Michele Riccardi, a researcher at Transcrime, the research institute in Milan that compiled the report presented to the European Union. “These are the sectors that seem more vulnerable and the regulations are looser.”
Italy has Europe’s toughest anti-mob statutes, which is one reason many organized crime families have pushed into other European countries. Germany has become an especially prominent case.
Italian migrants began pouring into Germany in the 1950s, including many from Calabria, home of the ’Ndrangheta. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, analysts say wiretaps detected a mob boss in Italy ordering a lieutenant to get into East Germany immediately and “buy everything.”
This month, the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel wrote about a trial in Cologne in which investigators have accused mobsters linked to the Cosa Nostra of bilking the state of millions of euros by issuing fake invoices from shell construction companies. German officials say the presence of organized crime poses a threat to the country’s building sector.
The magazine cited a confidential overview by the Federal Criminal Police Office that criticized the German government for failing to detect the assets of organized crime groups. The overview found that Italian crime groups had earned about €123 million, roughly $170 million, in Germany during the past decade, yet prosecutors had confiscated just €8 million, or about $11 million, from them.
The police report found that while the Cosa Nostra had infiltrated the construction sector, the Camorra was peddling counterfeit consumer goods and the ’Ndrangheta was selling adulterated olive oil and other foodstuffs. Mobsters controlled at least 300 pizzerias in Germany, it said, and were using these businesses to enter the legitimate economy.
While Germany and other European Union countries once denied the existence of a problem, awareness has begun to rise. In February, the Italian and German authorities carried out a joint operation against the Cosa Nostra and arrested more than a dozen suspects in both countries who are accused of stealing millions of euros in European Union farm subsidies. This month, the Italian and French police collaborated in the arrest of a Camorra boss in Nice, France.
Two years ago, the European Union set up an anti-Mafia commission, while Europol recognized in 2011 that it had an “intelligence gap” about mob activities. It commissioned a broad survey, released last year, which noted that mob groups were particularly threatening in legal business sectors because they “can afford to operate ‘at a loss,’ creating in the long run a situation of quasi-monopoly that undermines the basic principles of free market.”
Even within Italy, however, many people continue to regard organized crime as a southern problem. When the writer Roberto Saviano, known for his work exposing the activities of organized crime groups, used a 2010 television program to speak out about mob infiltration in the north, the Milan-based newspaper Il Giornale responded with an online petition drive against him titled, “Dear Saviano, the North is not Mafioso.”
“Criminal organizations are all in Rome and up north,” Mr. Saviano said in a recent interview. “In the south, their presence is like a military presence. In Rome and the north, it is economic presence.”
Mob groups have long been a quiet presence in Rome, with shopkeepers complaining of having to pay extortion money, known as pizzo, but the recent crackdown showed how organized crime groups are now directly investing in city businesses. Among the 23 restaurants and pizzerias seized in January was Pizza Ciro, part of one of the most popular pizza chains in the city.
“It has nothing to do with cash being in the register at the end of the day,” said Enrico Fontana, director of Libera, an umbrella group of anti-mob associations around Italy. “It is for money laundering.”
Mr. Prestipino, the prosecutor, agreed that money laundering was important but added that the crime bosses are also looking for ways to create channels of access to political leaders. He said no politician can meet directly with a mob boss, but by investing in businesses, organized crime groups can cultivate a network of white-collar entrepreneurs in Rome who can deal openly with politicians and civil servants.
“It is a system that has all advantages,” Mr. Prestipino said. “The businessman gets the economic advantages. The Mafioso doesn’t have to come to Rome. And the politician doesn’t have to get his hands dirty.”
The Intelligencer 
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