While businesses around the world are hoping for survival, the Italian mob is thriving.
Italy’s various organized crime syndicates, known collectively as “The Mafia Inc.” are snatching up gas stations, muscling in on supermarket franchises, making loans to cash-starved businesses, taking over restaurants and acquiring buildings in swank neighborhoods in Rome and Milan, investigators say.
Mafia groups have large supplies of increasingly precious CASH & centuries-honed expertise in preying on the vulnerable, whose ranks are swelling in the current financial crisis.
It all means the mob is free to sink cash into two areas that lie at the heart of the global meltdown: real estate and credit markets.
Mafia groups are flush with billions of euros from extortion rackets, drug trafficking and booming sales in fake designer clothing made in China expressly for the Italian mob, an increasingly lucrative trade as hard-hit consumers search for bargains, prosecutors and police said in recent interviews.
For the mob bosses, the global economic meltdown “is only an advantage,” said anti-mafia prosecutor Franco Roberti, in his office in Naples, the chaotic port city that is home to the Camorra, one of the Italy’s major crime syndicates.
Italy has scored some spectacular successes in its decades-long fight against the Mafia, capturing top bosses, persuading turncoats to testify, and encouraging ordinary citizens to resist shakedowns.
But the mob keeps growing & its drive in recent years to grab chunks of legitimate business is paying off big time in the financial crisis.
WHERE CAN A BROTHA GET A RECORD DEAL???
Tags: mafia
