Europe: Calabrian Mob Grows Rich and Powerful on Cocaine Profits

Italy's Calabrian mob syndicate, the 'Ndrangheta, has now displaced the Sicilian Mafia as Europe's most powerful gangsters, thanks largely to the 'Ndrangheta's domination of cocaine trafficking on the continent, researchers and prosecutors said at a Rome conference Wednesday. The Calabrian mob did almost $69 billion in criminal business last year, mainly through the cocaine trade, according to researchers.

The 'Ndrangheta's take was the equivalent of 2.9% of Italian Gross Domestic Product in 2007, according to the Rome-based think tank Eurispes. That marked a 16% increase in Calabrian mob revenues over 2006, when the group garnered some $58 billion. According to Eurispes, some 62% of 'Ndrangheta revenues were from the drug trade, most it from direct business ties with Colombian cocaine cartels.

Calabria is one of Italy's poorest and most backwards regions, and the 'Ndrangheta traditionally concerned itself with kidnappings for ransom and shaking down small town merchants. But it has now expanded into being the largest player in Europe's flourishing cocaine trade, largely by eliminating intermediaries in its dealings with the Colombians, prosecutors said.

The 'Ndrangheta emerged dramatically on the European scene last year, when six young Italians were gunned down by mob hit men in Duisberg, Germany, in August, but the group had been growing in the shadows for some time, prosecutors said. Seven 'Ndrangheta members were arrested in the killings earlier this month.

"Duisberg might capture your imagination, but it was only a symptom of a 20-year-old, ignored presence" of the 'Ndrangheta in Europe, said Vincenzo Macri, a national anti-Mafia prosecutor based in Calabria. Macri added that feuding clans within the Calabrian mob are stockpiling weapons with their profits off the drug trade. "There is a particular instability" among clans now, "which could explode to the point of wars that could last for decades," he predicted.