Mafia gangsters, corrupt politicians and a one-eyed former terrorist made millions in Rome by exploiting migrants and gipsies
By Nick Squires, Rome
A toxic mix of mafia gangsters, corrupt politicians and a one-eyed former terrorist made millions in Rome by exploiting migrants and gipsies, it emerged on Wednesday, in a scandal that has seriously shaken the capital's faith in its leaders.
Mobsters operating in the capital boasted that they made more out of rigging contracts and embezzling money intended for refugee and migrant centres than they did from the drug trade.
Even for a country inured to corruption scandals and the pervasive influence of organised crime, the extent of the alleged collaboration between criminals, politicians and even members of the secret services is shocking.
"Rome, Mafia capital" was the headline in one newspaper, while another publication spoke of a "political-judicial earthquake" rippling through the city.
Police on Tuesday arrested 37 people, charging them with extortion, corruption, fraud, money laundering and embezzlement.
They placed under investigation another 100 prominent politicians and businessmen, including Gianni Alemanno, a former mayor of Rome with far-Right political leanings.
Mr Alemanno, a former political ally of Silvio Berlusconi and mayor of Rome until last year, stepped down on Wednesday from his various posts within the Brothers of Italy political party, which traces its origins to the fascist regime of Mussolini. His home was searched by police looking for evidence of alleged rigging of public contracts.
The city's anti-corruption tsar, Italo Walter, was also named in the investigation.
Prosecutors said they suspected that "elements of the forces of order and the secret services" were caught up in the scandal as well.
Of those arrested, the most high-profile was Massimo Carminati, 56, who lost an eye during a shoot-out with police in the early 1980s.
Dubbed "the last king of Rome" by fellow criminals, he was given a ten-year prison term in 1998 for his involvement with the Magliana Gang, the capital's most notorious and ruthless criminal network, which was at its most powerful in the 1970s and 1980s.
Carminati is a former member of the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, a far-Right group that was involved in the bombing of Bologna railway station in 1980, in which 85 people died.
While regarded as a ruthless thug by the authorities, Carminati also has an artistic side - when police raided his home, they found art works by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol adorning the walls and confiscated tens of millions of euros' worth of assets.
In previous wire taps, he boasted of reigning over a "demi-world", a shadowy realm where corrupt members of the establishment encounter criminals, with himself as arbitrator and facilitator. "It's like there are the living above, and the dead below," he said.
In another intercepted conversation, members of his alleged gang discussed the effectiveness of intimidating opponents with their firearm of choice, the Russian-made, semi-automatic Makarov pistol, equipped with a silencer.
On Wednesday the scope of the investigation widened, with prosecutors releasing wire-tapped conversations which suggested that criminal bosses and corrupt politicians conspired to embezzle state money that was supposed to be used to run facilities for immigrants and refugee centres.
"Do you have any idea how much I make on these immigrants?" Salvatore Buzzi, Carminati's right-hand man, was heard saying when police intercepted his phone calls. "Drug trafficking is less profitable".
"We closed this year with turnover of 40 million but ... our profits all came from the gipsies, on the housing emergency and on the immigrants," he said.
Giuseppe Pignatone, the chief prosecutor in the capital, said: "With this operation we have answered the question of whether the mafia exists in Rome. The answer is that it certainly does."
He said the gangsters caught up in the investigation did not belong to Italy's established mafias, such as Cosa Nostra in Sicily or the Camorra around Naples, but rather to a different, Rome-based criminal underworld.
The scale of the corruption and the cynical exploitation of vulnerable people such as refugees and Roma gipsies was condemned across Italy.
"The investigation into Rome as the mafia capital reveals a disgusting, horrifying situation which goes beyond even the darkest hypothesis," Federconsumatori, a consumers' rights group, said in a statement.