BERLIN (AFP) - The cold-blooded shooting of six Italians outside a German railway station has lifted the lid on the deep roots that Italian crime families have put down in Germany, experts said.
The six men found riddled with bullets in two vehicles near an Italian restaurant in the gritty western city of Duisburg on Wednesday were a long way from their roots in the southern Italian region of Calabria.
But investigators established on Thursday that members of the Vottari/Romeo/Pelle family had been living in the Duisburg area for 20 years.
Italian authorities said they believe the men were victims of a feud within the notoriously violent 'Ndrangheta clan.
Two had recently moved to Germany from Italy while four were already living in the industrial, heavily populated Rhine region.
Yet the bloodbath in Duisburg apparently exported an 'Ndrangheta vendetta beyond the borders of Italy for the first time.
Those who have studied Italian organised crime, or people with first-hand experience of it, said Germany was a favourite location for clan members.
Thousands of Italians were immigrants to Germany at the turn of the 20th century, and found work in mines and factories. Most German cities have a number of Italian restaurants, run by Italians, which could be used to launder money.
Giorgio Basile, a former Calabrian mafia man who grew up in Germany and later became a prosecution witness in major underworld trials, claimed the Rhine area was a hotbed of 'Ndrangheta activity.
"The police just never wanted to admit it," Basile, 47, said in the Cologne-based Express newspaper on Thursday.
"Germans have to understand that where there's pizza, there's mafia. Many restaurants are financed with mafia money.
"And Germany is a favourite hideaway (for the 'Ndrangheta). They all have friends and relatives here."
Basile said however that another massacre on German soil was unlikely.
"Six deaths in Germany is just not normal. Something must have gone wrong there."
The chairman of the Federation of German Detectives in North Rhine-Westphalen, Wilfried Albishausen, said authorities are growing concerned about the rise of organised crime in the country.
"There are clear signs that the mafia is on the march here," he told AFP, noting a recent rise in requests from Italian authorities for cooperation on investigations into mafia suspects living in Germany.
Juergen Roth, a mafia expert who has written books about the 'Ndrangheta, told Bild newspaper the clan had 160 "representatives" in Germany who helped invest the clan's money.
In his book "Blood Brothers", published this year in Italy, the deputy prosecutor of the city of Reggio Calabria, Nicola Gratteri, said the German foreign intelligence agency had estimated that the 'Ndrangheta had invested tens of billions of euros into hotels and even shares on the Frankfurt stock exchange.
The 'Ndrangheta's activities in Germany, Gratteri said, were just part of an empire worth a staggering 36 billion euros (48 billion dollars).