Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0192/01928.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 19KB | 313 lines

$Unique_ID{COW01928}
$Pretitle{382}
$Title{Italy
Chapter 5D.   Organized Crime}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Peter J. Kassander}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{mafia
br
terrorist
groups
police
political
italian
italy
neofascist
terrorism}
$Date{1985}
$Log{}
Country:     Italy
Book:        Italy, A Country Study
Author:      Peter J. Kassander
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1985

Chapter 5D.   Organized Crime

     According to police and senior magistrates, in 1984 organized crime in
Italy, as embodied in the Mafia of Sicily and the camorra of Naples,
represented a greater threat to the internal security of Italy than did
political violence. Officials of the Sicilian regional government were forced
to resign in early 1984 after the arrest of the deputy premier on charges of
corruption and the disclosure that the premier was under investigation on
similar charges. The involvement of these and other Italian government
officials in corruption cases illustrated the power and extent of organized
crime. The decisive factor in its spread was the drug trade, which operated
primarily from the Rome area, where serious crime figures exceeded the
national average.

     The Mafia was once defined as a "criminal organization with the aim of
the illegal enrichment of its own members. Using force, it operates as a
parasitic middleman between owners and workers, between producers and
consumers, between citizens and the state". The precursors of the modern Mafia
were the compagnie d'armi, small private armies that feudal landowners
employed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to enforce their authority.
In the absence of law courts, these armies dispensed primitive justice. By the
time the term Mafia came into general use in the nineteenth century, the
descendants of the compagnie d'armi had evolved into a secret, hierarchical
organization, divided into specialized sectors that controlled Siciliy's
cattle, pasturelands, slaughterhouses, fruit plantations, market gardens, and
ports. The nucleus of the "honored association", as the Mafia members
euphemistically referred to their organization, was the family, whose members
were linked by blood or marriage. The Mafia often represented a stronger
political machine than the provincial government of Sicily.

     To consolidate his dictatorship, Mussolini attempted to eradicate the
Mafia in the mid-1920s. Using draconian police methods, such as torture and
summary execution, the police succeeded in weakening the Mafia control but
were unable to prevent its eventual resurgence. After World War II the Mafia
regained its influence not only through the collection of "protection money"
for guarding property, irrigation systems, and fishing fleets but also through
greater involvement in urban economic affairs. The Mafia gained control of the
wholesale market for vegetables, meat, and fish and engaged in cigarette
smuggling as well as real estate speculation.

     By the mid-1970s the Mafia had assumed international, rather than
regional, dimensions. Mafia-sponsored kidnappings throughout Italy extorted
large ransoms from the families of the abducted. More serious, however, was
Mafia involvement in the international narcotics market. Opium derivates were
brought to Sicily, processed into heroin, and smuggled throughout Europe and
to the United States. The expansion of the Sicilian banking system was also
linked to Mafia involvement in narcotics. During the 1970s the number of
Sicilian bank branches increased by 400 percent compared with an 80 percent
increase in the rest of Italy. The Customs Police and the investigating
magistrates probed the origin of Mafia accounts and strongly suspected that
laundered money from the sale of narcotics was being invested in construction,
tourism, and the economy in general.

     In an effort to eradicate the Mafia, the Italian government had appointed
the deputy commander of the Carabinieri, General Dalla Chiesa, as prefect of
Palermo, Sicily, with responsibility for the fight against the Mafia. After
the assassination of the general in September 1982, over 100 suspected Mafia
members were arrested and charged with suspected involvement in the Dalla
Chiesa assassination. However, in 1985, the case had not yet been argued in
the Italian courts. In addition, the parliament passed specific, anti-Mafia
legislation.

     The new law specified that association with the Mafia was a criminal
offense. The law widened the powers of the police and the courts to define
criminal association and empowered magistrates to examine witnesses
privately-to break the Mafia code of omerta, or (silence)-and to order Mafia
suspects to live under police surveillance in remote areas. The law also gave
the authorities power to break banking secrecy in investigating the accounts
of Mafia suspects, their families, and associates, as well as those of
suspected firms. It also allowed the supervision of public and private work
projects, the tapping of suspects' telephones, and the confiscation of illegal
profits. Association with the Mafia was punishable by three to six years of
imprisonment, while the organization of Mafia activities was punishable by
nine years of imprisonment, or up to 15 years for activities involving arms.
"Illicit competition accompanied by violence and threats" would be punishable
by two to six years of imprisonment.

     Activities of the camorra have been primarily confined to the region of
Naples. Like the Mafia, the camorra developed as an auxiliary police under the
rule of the Bourbons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the
unification of Italy in the 1860s, the camorra become involved in smuggling
and extortion, activities that were still carried out in the 1980s. Since the
mid- 1970s the camorra has revived open gang warfare in the Naples region and
was regarded as responsible for two-thirds of all violent deaths in Naples. In
June 1982 more than 500 people were arrested on suspicion of camorra
activities and were still being held in preventive detention in 1985.

Political Violence

     Politically connected violence is rooted in Italian history. For manu
centuries defiance of foreign overlords often took a violent character.
Disorder and loss of life preceded and followed the unification of the country
in 1961. In 1869, for example, 250 people were killed and 1,000 wounded during
protests in southern Italy over a new grain tax imposed by the Piedmontese
rulers of the new country. Several times the new government was required to
undertake military operations to quell dissident disturbances in the south. A
number of casualties also resulted from political disturbances in the late
1890s. During the early 1920s street clashes between political factions were
commonplace. Mussolini's rise to power was at least partially aided by the
willingness of his supporters to use violence.

     From the end of World War II until the late 1960s Italy was preoccupied
with recovery from the war; a booming were able to promise of higher standards
of living, and authorities were able to handle the challenges to domestic
order instigated by political extremists. By the late 1960s, however, domestic
order was challenged on several fronts. In 1968 and 1969 students formed
anarchist and radical-leftist terrorist organizations that fomented disorder
at several universities and openly clashed on the streets with neofascist and
far-right groups. Amid declining economic conditions and a national political
stalemate, labor unions were engaged in strikes and disorders in the summer
and fall of 1969, as were similar groups in West Germany and France. Some of
the unionists formed anarchist and radical-leftist groups similar to those of
the students, and these labor extremist groups also engaged the neofascists in
street battles. Since December 1969, politically motivated bombings, murders,
and kidnappings have become a recurring feature of Italian life.

     Observers have estimated that over 14,000 terrorist acts we