Police have arrested more than 130 people in coordinated raids in half a dozen European countries as part of a crackdown targeting the Italian ’Ndrangheta organised crime syndicate, prosecutors and police have said.
The suspects are mostly accused of money laundering, criminal tax evasion, fraud, drug possession, production and smuggling, mafia-type criminal association and the possession and trafficking of weapons, authorities said on Wednesday.
“Today’s raids are one of the largest operations carried out so far in the fight against Italian organised crime,” the German interior minister, Nancy Faeser, said, adding they had “dealt a serious blow to the ’Ndrangheta”.
The raids were part of a three-year investigation in Italy, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Slovenia, Romania, Brazil and Panama into criminal networks trafficking drugs from South America to Europe and Australia, the EU’s police agency, Europol, said.
The investigation uncovered how the networks used ports in Ecuador, Panama and Brazil to ship Colombian drugs to northern European ports, while also trafficking in weapons. Calabria’s ’Ndrangheta has overtaken Sicily’s Cosa Nostra as Italy’s most powerful and wealthy mafia, controlling the bulk of the cocaine flow into Europe.
The proceeds were laundered through restaurants, ice-cream shops and car washes, and the money sent back to Colombian drug producers via a Chinese wire-transfer service, according to Italian officials and a Carabinieri press release.
Italian and Belgian authorities said the syndicate was suspected of smuggling nearly 25 tonnes of cocaine from South America to Europe in container ships arriving in Antwerp, Rotterdam and the Calabrian port of Gioia Tauro between October 2019 and January 2022.
More than €22m in illicit earnings from the drugs was allegedly funnelled from Calabria to Belgium, the Netherlands and South America.
A total of 108 people were arrested in Italy and other EU countries on the orders of police in the southern city of Reggio Calabria, Italian police said. Related investigations led to the arrest of 24 people in Germany, they said.
A man was also arrested in the southern Spanish city of Málaga, 13 people were detained in Belgium, and Portugal’s judiciary police said its officers had arrested a 62-year-old Italian man on charges of money laundering and drug trafficking.
Assets worth about €25m were seized in Italy, Germany, Portugal and France in the operation, codenamed Eureka, which was launched in 2019 initially to investigate drug smuggling between Calabria and the Belgian city of Genk, Italian police said.
“We think that among the arrests were several persons of a high value who played a huge role in the organisation, not only in Belgium but in other European countries,” Belgian federal prosecutor Antoon Schotsaert said.
In Germany, where more than 1,000 police searched dozens of homes, offices, and stores in several states, the raids focused on targets in North Rhine-Westphalia, Bavaria, Thuringia, Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate.
Police taskforces in each state were supported by special units from the German federal government and other states as well as officers from the customs and tax investigation departments, the DPA news agency reported.
Authorities in Bavaria said they had been investigating a woman and seven men, all Italian nationals aged between 25 and 48, since July 2020. The Munich-based group was suspected of involvement in financing cocaine smuggling and money laundering.
European authorities have been waging a long-running campaign against the ’Ndrangheta, one of the world’s richest organised crime groups, which has exploited its vast cocaine revenues to extend its reach across Europe and beyond and is believed to operate in more than 40 countries.
Belgian media reported that the trigger for the investigation was the discovery by police in 2019 that the owners of a pizzeria in Genk, with relatives in Munich, were in frequent contact with known ‘Ndrangheta cocaine dealers.
Margaritis Schinas, vice-president of the EU’s executive commission, said the operation had “delivered a lightning strike against the ’Ndrangheta syndicate … with [more than] 100 arrests”.
Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report
