News Analysis: Italian mafia turns hand to legitimate economy

ROME (Xinhua) - Mafia in Italy has traditionally been engaged in a variety of criminal activities but over the past few years they have turned their hand to the power and wealth centers of the country.

"Mafias have silently arrived in Rome," Giovanni Tizian, a journalist of The Espresso group and an author of books on mafia, told Xinhua.

Big investments started between the 1990s and 2000s, he said, first targeting small shops in the outskirts and then gradually moving to luxury businesses.

Recent investigations have uncovered dozens of mafia-owned restaurants, bars and shops in the capital.

Sabrina Alfonsi, an official in Rome, has sounded the alarm bell that nearly 70 percent of bars and restaurants in the city's historic center are in the hands of the organized crime.

The worrying map of criminal infiltrations has shown that mafia has  not only in search of territorial control but especially of "vehicles for power and wealth, ways to get in touch with influential persons," Tizian noted.

The service industry, real estate and trade are currently among the legitimate sectors where mafia has invested their profits, often covered up by unlawful transactions and political connections, from Rome to Milan, where investigators said that 'Ndrangheta - regarded as the richest of Italy's mafia - has become "monopolistic."

In one of latest major operations conducted last month, police across Italy have seized tourist resorts and luxury cars worth around $575 million from 'Ndrangheta, which recent studies estimated has a turnover equal to more than 3 percent of the country's gross domestic product.

According to Libera, a renown antimafia association, thousands of businesses in Italy's largest cities are owned by mafia. At the end of 2012, the number of hotels and restaurants seized from mafia amounted to 173, or around 10 percent of Italy's food service companies.

"There is no investigation where the name of a restaurant, bar or noted gathering place is missing. For mafias, making dirty money clean inside legal and institutionalized washing machines has become a primary target," Libera's responsible in Rome Marco Genovese explained to Xinhua.

"Everything is being done in the open," Genovese pointed out. He said mafia is especially cashing in on the current economic slowdown and are often acting as "banks" for the many small- and medium-sized enterprises that were the main victims of rackets and loan sharking.

In Italy, there are several town councils being dissolved every year for mafia infiltrations, and reports of politicians from the entire political landscape arrested on charges of links with the organized crime are frequent events.

Earlier this week, police detained an undersecretary in the economy ministry from 2008-2010, Nicola Cosentino, accusing him of colluding with the mafia.

Some steps have been made to forge greater consciousness and improve legislation, Tizian went on to say.

A number of mafia properties have been confiscated by the Italian authorities and turned into clean businesses. Another move came on Thursday when the lower house approved a bill making it a crime for politicians to promise to buy or obtain mafia-rigged votes.

But mafias are still far from being defeated, Tizian highlighted, and too many citizens are still blind to the dangers for them as well as for the future of their country hidden behind the organized crime's helping hand.

Joint efforts and education are the most important means to overcome mafia, Genovese said. His association, a network of more than 1,200 groups and schools, is committed to building up synergies and promoting a culture of lawfulness.

"The real fight against mafias can be carried out only through enhancing occupation, youth policies, support for families, social assistance, and last but not least culture," he stressed.