Many in France imagine that Italian Mafia organisations are contained within their national boundaries, a little like the claims of the French authorities in 1986 who pretended that the radioactive cloud from the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear plant had miraculously never crossed over French skies.
But as the journalist Hélène Constanty demonstrates in a book published last week (April 8th) about France’s Riviera region, Razzia sur la Riviera (‘Razzia on the Riviera’), the Italian crime syndicates are in fact very much present and active along this strip of Mediterranean coastline which forms the Côte d’Azur region, running west from the frontier with Italy.
Constanty, who is a regular contributor to Mediapart and to weekly news magazine L’Express, spent two years investigating the hidden reality behind the exotic image of the Côte d’Azur, including political corruption, the excesses of the property business, and the grand and decadent lifestyle of the rich Russians who frequent the region. But perhaps the most alarming account she delivers is contained in a chapter, extracts from which are published below, about the influx of the Italian Mafia.
Under increasing pressure from the strong anti-Mafia judicial and police services in Italy, members of the Italian crime syndicates no longer regard the Côte d’Azur simply as an occasional safe refuge. They have become deeply implanted in the region, where they pursue their criminal activities, notably the methodic money laundering of illicit gains. The phenomenon is causing considerable concern for Italian anti-Mafia investigators, not least public prosecutor Franco Roberti, who is in charge of Italy’s national network of magistrates specialized in fighting the crime syndicates. “France doesn’t measure the gravity of the problem,” he warns in an interview with Consanty, included below. “We don’t manage to obtain sufficiently active cooperation from the police and magistrates.”
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Translated extracts from Razzia sur la Riviera (‘Razzia on the Riviera’) by Hélène Constanty, published in France by Fayard:
On May 7th 2014, stepping off the gendarmerie helicopter, his head shaved, Antonio Lo Russo appeared anything but stressed. He could even be seen swapping jokes with the heavily-armed and hooded gendarmerie1 officers, who wore bullet proof vests.
That day, on the football pitch in Vintimille, the Italian Riviera border town that sits closest to France, an exchange of French and Italian prisoners was underway amid tight security and surveillance by dozens of police from both countries.
The handcuffed Lo Russo who the French were delivering to the Italians, as if a precious cargo, was arrested in the French Riviera city of Nice three weeks earlier. The subject of a Europe-wide arrest warrant, and considered to be one the most dangerous Mafia bosses in Italy, where he was listed among the 100 most-wanted fugitives, he knew that he now faced many years behind bars. In July 2012, he had been sentenced in absentia to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking and for his leadership of a criminal gang.
Lo Russo, 33, is considered by the Italian justice authorities to be one of the active members of the younger generation of the infamous Neapolitan Camorra. He succeeded the role of his father Salvatore, who since serving a jail sentence beginning in 2007 has agreed to cooperate with investigators. The Lo Russo clan, which reigns over the rundown Scampia neighbourhood of Naples, has for several years now been involved in a bloody feud with a rival group for control of local drugs trafficking. The Lo Russo’s are also implicated in protection rackets, illicit gambling activities and arms trafficking.
Lo Russo was arrested by gendarmes in Nice on April 15th 2014, the result of cooperation between the Italian and French police, as he and a cousin, Carlo lo Russo, were about to enter a car after leaving the terrace of a bar close to the city’s seafront boulevard, the Promenade des Anglais. Carlo la Russo, 23, was also wanted in Italy as a suspect in the murder of a member of a rival group to the La Russo’s, reportedly in revenge for the killing of one of their own. The two men were unarmed when they were arrested, and the gendarmerie operation went smoothly.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
While the TV images of the extradition of Antonio Lo Russo were broadcast repeatedly on Italian rolling news channels, the event was given only a brief mention in France. Yet the arrest of the Italian mobster in France was significant, and hardly an isolated case. Several Italian Mafiosi have been arrested in France over recent years, an indication that cooperation between the French and Italian authorities – while still imperfect – is at last producing results.
In 2010, two such arrests were those of Giuseppe Falsone in the Mediterranean port city of Marseille and Roberto Cima at Vallauris Golfe-Juan, on the French Riviera. Both men also figured on the Italian interior ministry’s list of Italy’s most-wanted 100 fugitives. Falsone was considered to be the second-in-command of the Sicilian Mafia, the Cosa Nostra. Cima was a leading member of the Calabrian crime syndicate, the ‘Ndrangheta.
Cima was arrested by an elite group of surveillance officers from the gendarmerie’s Marseille investigations unit (the section de recherche) while walking his dog in Vallauris Golfe-Juan, where he was living in a small and downbeat apartment. He had been on the run since 2003, when he was sentenced to 21 years in prison for a murder committed several years earlier in Vintimille during battles between rival gangs for control of the drugs trade in the Riviera border region.
Lo Russo belongs to the Camorra, Giuseppe Falsone to the Cosa Nostra, and Roberto Cima to the ‘Ndrangheta, and their arrests are proof that these three arms of Italian crime syndicates are represented on France’s Côte d’Azur region. All three believed they could live in all tranquility, sheltered from the Italian police, on the sun-soaked French Riviera.
[…]
At the end of January 2013, I travelled from the Riviera to Milan, in northern Italy, to observe a meeting organised by anti-Mafia campaigners. Despite the cold and damp weather that gripped the city, several hundred people had turned up for the event at the labour exchange building, where the atmosphere was both serious and warm. Following the screening of a film entitled La mafia uccide solo d’estate (The Mafia only kills in the summer) - a poignant account dressed with the lightheartedness and humour of Commedia all'italiana – a debate began among all those present in the room and including the film’s director, several leading anti-Mafia investigators and the sons of a journalist and a general murdered by the Mafia during the 1980s.
One of those present on the stand was Franco Roberti, a Rome-based anti-Mafia public prosecutor appointed in July 2013. He is one of the people most exposed from such activity in Italy, holding the key position of coordinator of all 26 prosecutors dedicated to anti-Mafia investigations spread across Italy’s regional jurisdictions. Despite his heavy taskload, he had taken the time to travel to the meeting that night to take part in an exchange with ordinary citizens.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Following the debate, he agreed to my request for a brief interview, under the watchful eyes of one of the two bodyguards who ensure his protection day and night. Under his pepper-and-salt hair, and his finely-frame spectacles, Roberti’s eyes were tired. He began immediately by speaking of his astonishment at the behaviour of France.
— France has an attitude that I’d call negationist.
— Meaning what?
— You refuse to see the reality in front. You’re not alone. Germany too. Europeans have not yet recognised to what degree the Mafia has taken roots outside Italy. It should be said that outside the [Italian] peninsula, it prefers to get on with its business in silence, without making itself noticed, by avoiding bloodletting.
— What difficulties do you come across in France?
— We don’t manage to obtain sufficiently active cooperation from the police and magistrates. Take the example of Giovanni Tagliamento, the Italian national who we consider to be the representative of the Camorra on the Côte d’Azur. We would like to know who he works with, where the money he makes comes from. But the French tell us that his behaviour is not reprehensible.
— Where does the blockage come from?
— France doesn’t measure the gravity of the problem. It is political and cultural problem. Also, you don’t have the same legislative tools as we do.
— Yet several arrests have been made.
— Yes, but it is regrettable that beforehand there was not more investigation into the entourages of these people, and on their activities. When Roberto Cima was arrested, for example, we saw very well that he felt protected on French soil. He was like a fish in water.
— What do you want to see changed?
— We would like to obtain much more information on the economic activities of our nationals, their investments in property and businesses. But, in France, contrary to what is happening in Italy, the possibilities for freezing Mafia-held assets are very limited. That’s a pity, because it’s a formidable tool for asphyxiating them.
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1: The gendarmerie is a police force that is separate to the Police Nationale (National Police force). Both forces have specialist investigation branches and elite commando groups. Outside of these, in a broad description of the separation of their policing duties, the gendarmerie polices largely rural zones, while the Police Nationale is most present in urban areas.
Extracts from Razzia sur la Riviera (cntd)
If prosecutor Roberti is as severe as he is with regard to foreign cooperation, it is because he knows perfectly well the size of the phenomenon Europe-wide. The Italian Mafia gangs have used globalization to develop their activities outside Italy, which represents their epicentre. They have developed all sorts of international trafficking activities - drugs, weapons, contraband, waste - along with leading people smuggling rings and the production of counterfeit currency.
Their worldwide annual turnover is estimated at 130 billion euros, relying on ‘operational colonies’ implanted in numerous countries via the diaspora networks.
The French national police force in 2009 created a unit of intelligence and strategic analysis of organised crime, called the SIRASCO. Every year it resumes its findings in a report of some 100 pages, but which is unfortunately not made public. For while in Italy every citizen can gain access to information about the Mafia, including the case files from trials and even listening to recorded phone taps, France prefers to keep the issue veiled.
[…]
“Why would you want to think that the Mafiosi halt their activities at the border?” asked Franco Roberti during our interview. Commissaire Philippe Frizon, head of the Nice branch of the French police’s serious crime squad, the police judiciaire, says he sympathises with Roberti. “I understand his anger,” said Frizon. “We must improve our cooperation concerning the fight against the Mafia, as we have done with our Spanish colleagues regarding anti-terrorism.”
But such good intentions come up against numerous obstacles. Firstly, Italian criminals present in France do their best to operate in all discretion, contrary to their behaviour in Italy’s neighbouring coastal Liguria region, which runs west from La Spezia to the border town of Vintimille. “They don’t make themselves noticed, they don’t parade around town,” commented François-Xavier Masson, head of the SIRASCO.”Contrary to their Italian practices, in France they don’t control a terrirory through intimidation and protection rackets. But they prosper without making noise. They represent a real threat, more pernicious than is believed, even if it isn’t demonstrated by violence.”
The arrests of Italian criminals carried out by French police or the gendarmerie are always in relation to well established criminal offences, notably international drugs trafficking. “In June 2013, more than a quarter of Italian nationals detained in France are held for drugs trafficking,” reported the SIRASCO. “Some investigations demonstrate the proximity the Italian Mafiosi has with traditional French circles and major criminal gangs.” One of the most wanted Italian Mafiosi fugitives in France, 75-year-old Calabrian Domenico Marasco, was discovered leading a tranquil existence in Peillon, a picturesque village perched on high rocks overlooking the valley of Paillon de l’Escarène, just a few kilometres from Nice. He was arrested there on March 14th 2011 charged with taking part in an international drugs ring, and he was finally sentenced for his trafficking role by a Marseille court, on April 30th 2013, to three years in prison.
Marasco was considered to be one of the principal coordinators in France for the ‘Ndrangheta crime syndicate. […] In 1994, the first member of the ‘Ndrangheta to agree to cooperate with the Italian justice authorities, Giovanni Gullà, described Marasco as being in charge of the ‘Ndrangheta’s arm in Nice, controlling all of its activities in south-east France.
He was caught almost by accident thanks to surveillance operations and phone taps in a vast investigation into a cannabis-smuggling ring operating between Morocco, Spain and the French Riviera, and in which several of his contacts were implicated. “Ready to play the role of a deaf and impotent grandfather, Domenico Marasco remains to all evidence nothing less than an influential member of the ‘Ndrangheta,” concluded French Judge Philippe Dorcet who led the Marseille-based investigation. Dorcet, however, would glean little information from Marasco.
What gave Marasco away were his numerous meetings with Diègue Campo, the principal suspect in the cannabis ring, at different points along the French Mediterranean coast - Valbonne, Saint-Laurent-du-Var and Antibes. Campo divided his time between a villa in Marbella, in southern Spain, and an apartment in Cannes on the French Riviera situated on the seafront boulevard, la Croisette. He ran a large-scale cannabis trafficking business, using helicopters and fast cars, and was found to have 18 mobile phones. “He’s a trader in narcotics, like others are traders of wine or shares,” observed Judge Dorset.
Domenico Marasco did not meet Campo in discreet bars with the hope of joining in his cannabis trade, but rather because he wanted to use Campo’s talents as an international drugs broker to help with two problems. Marasco had two tonnes of cocaine stuck in Senegal, West Africa and which he desperately wanted to transfer to Europe and in the meantime, he needed to find 20 kilos of cocaine for his Italian network. In the end, a deal with Campo never happened, but Marasco’s revealed involvement in the cocaine trade was enough to see him jailed.
In the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta organization, the family ‘ndrinas form the base of the pyramid. There are more than 100 ‘ndrinas in existence, above which are the cosce, or clans. French police regard the Magnoli family, of Calbian origin and who have lived in the Riviera town of Vallauris Golfe-Juan for two generations, as the perfect example of an implanted ‘ndrina.
While not all members of the family are involved in criminal activity, the Magnolis are listed by the Italian authorities as belonging to one of the ‘Ndrangheta’s most powerful clans, the Piromalli-Molè, based in Gioia Tauro, a port on the Italian Tyrrheniyan coast. The port is the busiest in Italy for container shipping, and the local Mafia is involved above all in drugs trafficking, but also in racketeering and the siphoning-off of public subsidies. Over the past few years, tonnes of cocaine have been seized by police.
On the French Riviera, some 1,400 kilometres from Gioia Tauro, Vallauris Golfe-Juan outwardly appears as a small and peaceful coastal town. Less well-known than the neighbouring towns of Cannes and Antibes, Vallauris, as it is more often referred to, is about the same size as the Italian border town of Vintimille, with a population of about 27,000. Several Calabrian families settled there in the 1960s.
At the time, a large workforce was engaged in the local pottery industry, and included Italian immigrants. The potteries have since run into decline, with most of the factories closed, and the local economy in Vallauris is now dependent on developing tourism, notably thanks to its marina.
In the centre of the town, where everyone knows the reputation of the Magnoli family, the latter are talked about in hushed voices. Seven Magnoli brothers, aged between 50 and 70, are currently serving separate jail sentences for drugs dealing in France, Italy and Spain. They specialized in storing and transporting drugs, using ‘go-fast cars’, on a large-scale.
In the second half of the 2000s, the Magnoli family fortunes changed for the worse after years of tranquil prosperity. The family boss, 61-year-old Ippolito Magnoli, was arrested in Spain in 2008 after six years on the run. A French passport-holder, he had been living in secret in a village close to Barcelona, from where he controlled networks of drug imports, including cocaine from Latin America and marijuana from Morocco.
A few months later, his brother Domenico Magnoli was arrested in Calabria in circumstances worthy of a film plot. The Magnoli brothers all acquired a certain plumpness, as photos of them taken by police illustrate - with their round faces, thick necks, large shoulders and hefty bodies. Domenico had a complex about his extra weight, and it was that which proved his undoing. Wanted by France for drugs trafficking, and thus the subject of an international arrest warrant, he was arrested in a private clinic in Calabria where, under a false name, he had booked in for liposuction treatment. He was still groggy from the anaesthetics when the Italian police pounced.
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Razzia sur la Riviera by Hélène Constanty is published in France by éditions Fayard, priced 19 euros.
- The French version of this article and extracts can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse