By Cecilia Ferrara

Investigative Reporting Project Italy

Early in the morning of Dec. 2, the Carabinieri (Italian national military police) arrested 37 people and launched investigations against 100 others, a number that is expected to grow. The group includes members of a well-known criminal group along with politicians from the two main parties.

Among those arrested are the head of the National Civil Protection Department and a local police chief; the president of the anti-corruption council; the former mayor of Rome Gianni Alemanno; the former president of a major real estate development company, Eur SPA; and the former CEO of the Azienda Municipale Ambiente (AMA), the waste management company of the Municipality of Rome.

Also arrested was Massimo Carminati, known as “er Cecato” (the one-eyed), whose character was memorably depicted in Michele Placido’s 2005 movie “Romanzo Criminale” (Criminal Novel) as Il Nero, “The Black”.

The film tells the story of the Banda della Magliana, Rome’s most powerful criminal group in the 1970s and 1980s with strong connections to the Sicilian Mafia, and its links to the Italian secret services who used the mobsters for dirty jobs. Carminati was the group’s liaison to the right-wing extremist terror group Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR).

Carminati: the Boss of the Middle World

Police say Carminati was involved in political assassinations, massacres and homicides, yet escaped prosecution on the most serious charges due to lack of evidence. After serving a prison term on lesser charges, he returned to work in the ‘Mondo di Mezzo’ or Middle World, a term he used in a wiretapped conversation that became the name of the current police operation.

“It’s the theory of the Middle World,” he told Riccardo Burgia, his comrade from NAR, a former bank robber and now a militant who was also arrested Dec. 2. “There are those of the Upper World, ‘the living,’ and those of the Underworld, ‘the deads’. We are in the Middle World where anything can happen, anyone can meet anybody. I could be having dinner, for example, with (former Italian prime minister and media tycoon Silvio) Berlusconi tomorrow… understand? Which on paper is impossible, but in the Middle World could happen.”

The arrests on Dec. 2 are the results of  a four-year investigation by Prosecutor Giuseppe Pignatone and the Special Unit of Carabinieri that traced the organization and structure of what they are calling the Mafia Capitale.

The Guardia di Finanza (financial police) seized goods worth an estimated € 204 million (US$ 250 million) and hundred thousands of Euros in cash. Two days after the first round of arrests, the Carabinieri arrested Giovanni de Carlo, the “boss of bosses”, at Rome’s airport.

Is there Mafia in Rome or not?

Most of those arrested are being charged under Article 416bis of the Italian Penal Code, which deals with organized crime or Mafia.

This is significant because in Italy the common belief is that the Mafia, ’Ndrangheta and Camorra operate only in the south of the peninsula and not in Rome or Milan, where the authorities tend to deny that there is organized crime.

In Rome and Milan, they refer instead to ‘la Mala,’ local criminals that work alone or in occasional groups to commit minor crimes. As recently as  two years ago, the Prefetto of Rome (the local representative of the Ministry of Home Affair

Former Rome mayor Alemanno, who was among those arrested on Dec. 2, told the Sunday Times in 2012 that “in the south of Italy, the Mafia is the problem, in Rome it is immigration.”

“Through this police operation we tried to answer, again, the question: is there Mafia in Rome?” Pignatone said at a press conference. “In Rome there isn’t only one Mafia; the group linked to Carminati … is independent from the organizations in south Italy (Cosa Nostra, Camorra, (and) ’Ndrangheta),” although they often work together.”

According to Pignatone, Carminati’s organization succeeds in intimidating its targets due to the criminal prestige he earned in the past from his involvement with the Banda della Magliana and right-wing extremists. “Everybody knows that even now in 2014, he would be able to use violence to create subjugation, intimidation, and (enforce silence) omertà. In one word, the group behaves like Mafia, therefore it’s Mafia”.

Group Dynamics

How did the Mafia Capitale work?

“Carminati was the head; he's the one who knows all the businesses, all the people involved in every sector,” explains assistant prosecutor Michele Pristipino. “There were three levels: the underworld criminal sector, the entrepreneurial economic sector, (and) the public administration sector.”

As an example of how the group used criminal and military power to intimidate, the prosecutor cited the story of an entrepreneur from Rome, who had been approached by Carminati's group seeking to buy a plot of land from him.

When the victim refused, they started in with threats:. “If you don't sell to us, you will never do anything with that land!” The businessman confessed to a friend, “I'm done, finished. When they come after me I feel sick, I feel like I am suffocating.”

Others knew about Carminati's group and would ask him directly for ”protection” from minor criminals as well as help with the public administration. But prosecutors said Carminati did not ask for money in exchange for protection, but instead to become a hidden partner of the company.

“I wouldn't accept not even a million Euros from you,” he says in a wiretapped conversation. “I don't care about money! I want to do business together.”

Carminati, in fact, needed the companies in order to achieve his real objective: access to public tenders.

s) said that  “there is no Mafia in Rome,  only war among gangs over the drug market“.

Organized Crime in the Heart of Rome

“Carminati's group (eventually obtained) the power to select key managers in public administration,” explains prosecutor Pristipino.  “They managed to place a lawyer on the Board of Governors of the main public company of Rome,” the waste management company AMA Ltd. with a turnover of € 850 million or US$ 1 billion).

“The group chose the General Director of a company controlled by AMA Ltd. They even chose who would be the head of the Municipal Commission for Transparency, and they ran the campaign for the mayor of a small town close to Rome where Carminati had his villa, Sacrofano. And of course their candidate won.”

The Mafia Capitale won at least three extremely profitable tenders: one in the waste recycling management of Rome, one in the cleaning of public streets and another (type unknown) which is still being investigated.

Buzzi and ‘The Cooperative’

The other main actor in the Mafia Capitale is Carminati’s alter ego, Salvatore Buzzi, who was also arrested in the sweep on organized crime and corruption charges.

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